by Alex Moss
PROLOGUE
The pallial grey matter inside Kenneth Molloy’s thick skull is functionally incapable of determining that the Church of the Precious Blood on Occidental Boulevard is Roman Catholic. He’ll probably never know or care because his life is about to be guided and influenced by a black-market belief system that promises short cuts to self-purity and redemption. He was instructed to meet at a church of Protestant faith, although the denomination bares no relevance, and he’ll discover this before the day is out.
Seven minutes ago, he was crawling on his hands and knees from the altar to the threshold after groveling and slobbering pathetically to a priest who knew deep down that this sorry excuse of a man had never seen the inside of the church until this day. Kenneth had been admonished in front of the congregation and then kicked to the ground like the urban coyotes he used to prey on for late night meth-fuelled kicks.
And now Kenneth is distracted, his squat, thick-necked profile, facing down the street toward the V-shaped intersection. There stands a much larger, grandiose church in the shadows of a tall glass tower. From his perspective, it seems to be flanked by the lankiest pin-headed palm trees the municipality of Los Angeles has to offer.
The well-composed scene rendered on his sun-scarred retinas sends a short-lived sense of wellbeing to the base of Kenneth’s spine, immediately followed by a hollow loss when he reminds himself of what he set out to do on this day.
He seeks redemption.
His heart is filled with self-loathing and it manifests itself with greasy matted hair, putrid clothes, and blackened fingernails that have probed the undersides of pretty much anything that appeared to contain a promise of variable magnitude.
But his eyes are a different matter all together.
They are inhuman and predatory.
A glimmer of molten green energy behind the lens.
The bright sun doesn’t make him blink or squint, and instead his eyes bloom wide open, in favor of the Protestant First Congregational Church up ahead. And so he staggers on.
Kenneth opens the church gate to a short path that leads up to two sets of green and weathered arched double-doors. There is a man sitting on the steps in between each doorway wearing a smart black suit with purple lapels and he’s not surprised to see Molloy. He’s been kept waiting, and his air of superiority makes this seem quite a serious deceit on Kenneth’s part. The man seems like a missionary, or an emissary about to channel some contrived dogma from the time when he became irreversibly indoctrinated.
“Go to the wrong place?” he asks.
Kenneth staggers forward and nods. “Man, I kinda made a fool outta myself.”
“Happens all the time.” The missionary man looks into Kenneth’s eyes for a good while, making him feel even more uncomfortable. “I’m sorry. I haven’t explained your options, have I?”
“My options?”
“As you can see, there are two.” The missionary man acknowledges the identical doors on either side of him. “Choose the left and make a fool of yourself week after week, year after year, asking for the forgiveness that never comes. Become part of the congregation, the masses, never knowing whether you’re really intended for heaven or hell. Because nobody,” he looks up at the sky, “not even Him, is going to tell you the truth.” The man stands up and straightens his jacket and smoothes his lapels. “How do you like the sound of option A?”
Kenneth scratches the back of his head. “Can you tell me the truth, sir?”
The missionary man smiles. “The truth is on the right.” He gestures toward that door. “Option B. It looks exactly the same. One church door that’s shouldered burdens. But it’s the route behind it that counts.” He holds out his hand to Kenneth. “Come.”
“You’re gonna have to give me more to go on.”
“You can become a Saint. Today. It’s a one-time offer. Like no other.”
“For real?”
The man nods. “You will die a Saint. One hundred per cent guaranteed.”
“Okay, man, you got my attention, but what’s the catch?”
“We can talk about that during the procedure.”
The missionary man is still holding out his hand but with greater force, waggling his fingers to tease a firm handshake.
“Screw it,” Kenneth says, and complies with the missionary man’s wishes. He has been sold up the river, good and proper.
Kenneth wakes up in the back of a supply truck, trafficked, and hunched up next to other squirming half-naked bodies in the half-light, hard to distinguish, all shaved head to toe.
Some alive, some dead.
He rubs up against smooth skin and wonders about the how and why of it all. Others in this predicament mutter, “Is this heaven?”
A city at night, somewhere else. Another pace and hum and an ambient glow with a different shade of light derived from its northern latitude.
Another ‘Island’ as they say around here.
It’s cooler, edgier, more reserved.
A building that resembles the Eighth Sister that towers above Moscow, but this isn’t Moscow. The building stands alone on wasteland set apart from the rest of the city. It’s a new construction in the Stalinist skyscraper style–huge and imposing. A wide central tower and four octagonal flanks are crowned in the gothic style and the stucco is ornate and ostentatious in the extreme. It’s beautifully lit.
A further thirty stories below, another wider set of four flanks, and below that, a broader, stepped, eight-story base with a stately entrance of high columns. The whole building looks like a rocket ship that was built too heavy to lift off the ground.
Inside the grandest penthouse on the fifty-seventh, there is a middle-aged man seated at a dinner table. He turns and looks up. His eyes look strange–mechanical and glassy, almost phony. The middle-aged man might not actually be middle-aged at all. There are signs of cosmetic enhancement. He sighs and leaves the table, wearing what appears to be a huge pair of black angel wings trailing him. They almost beat as he wafts through another set of doors at the opposite end of the dining room which lead onto a terrace overlooking the cityscape and night lights. Straight ahead, there is an infinity pool with stepping stones that are lit like runway landing lights, merging into the skyline, and he takes this route, almost appearing to walk on water as he strides from one square stone to the next, all the way to the edge and oblivion.
He leaps into the night.
The wings seem to spread but they’re only there for symbolism. They quickly bend back on themselves once he is halfway to terminal velocity. He falls like a stone toward a glass roof thirty stories below that seems like a small target at first, but just prior to impact is wide and expansive like the roof of an immense tropical glasshouse.
Crashing through, he is shredded, and appears to land face first in the center of a ballroom that was cleared for his deliverance, but within a nanosecond his presence seems to evaporate, as though he had spring boarded elsewhere at light speed. He is nowhere to be seen. Not a trace of him left behind.
At the edges of this ballroom, on each side, is a large crowd of very well-heeled partygoers, spectating, a glass of champagne in hand. And once they’ve surmised for themselves that this man is definitely no longer living amongst them, his spirit free and passed on, they raise a toast and wish him well.
ONE
The Island of Los Angeles // After now
A dive bar in East Hollywood called Candy Jacks shakes for fifteen long seconds as an earth tremor places the city on hold. The clientele just sway a little more purposefully, an amplification of their inebriation. Pool cues make good props to steady one’s self.
The
youngest man in the room, Stelson Floyd, is a little more concerned, but only the thin furrow along his brow reveals it, his eyes veiled by dark biker-gang sunglasses. Perhaps he values his life more than the others and at nineteen years old you likely do. But there is another more trivial reason.
Stelson had been flipping coasters on the edge of the bar top, catching them in large wads just to kill time, but now they were scattered all over the bar, on nearby stools, and across the soggy beer-stained floor. An act of God has disrupted this mindless exercise and it had created a feeling of helplessness and lack of control that probably extended from another part of his fast, young life. This was the kind of bar you hung out in if the day-to-day was starting to get a little frayed around the edges. The edginess we are meant to embrace every so often.
When the tremor abates, a man made up as a warped, nightmarish circus clown bursts into Candy Jacks, surveys the room, and locks onto Stelson. Lone drinkers check him out furtively. The only thing clown-like is the coloring of his make-up, but seeing past that and stripping away the slapped on face paint reveals a crooked smile and a sullen, hateful gaze filled with a desire to commit terror. He wades over to Stelson and rips his arms away from the bar top. He drags him off his stool in a molten ball of rage that upstages any LA earth tremor. And now the clientele at Candy’s sober up to catch this act of brutality in full motion as Stelson is dragged across the room creating a path of destruction. The clown kicks and screams himself along an exit route, Stelson hanging onto anything he can get his knuckles around–which is not much at this testosterone-fuelled warp speed.
In a matter of seconds, he is out on an expansive patch of cracked, weed-ridden concrete that sets the bar back from the main street, badly lit enough to cloak the goings on that occur in this shit-storm of human depravity.
Stelson uses his sinewy upper torso strength to wriggle free and crawl toward the street like a scorpion with a limp. About as fast as a human could go on their belly, but the clown-faced man is quick to retrieve his prey, pulling him back toward Candy’s side-alley dumping ground, Stelson collecting dog feces all over the sleeves of his hoodie.
The clown-faced man considers him with the greatest contempt and pulls a firearm from the inside of his greasy rain jacket and raises it level with Stelson’s forehead and starts to squeeze the trigger.
His hands. The firearm shaking in a way that would suggest that this clown is perhaps not a taker of a human life. Not this one anyway.
The moment passes and there is silence for the first time until Stelson lets out a lungful of air with a whining anguish. The clown-faced freak has propped the muzzle of the firearm against his skull this time.
BANG. The clown-faced man is blown sideways, arms and neck falling limp.
A moment passes before Stelson mutters, “A man walks into a bar and leaves without his mind.” Stelson seems surprised at his instant recall of a line that could be part of a badly-phrased joke.
The flashing lights of an LAPD black and white light up the space around Stelson and the clown-faced man laying on his side. Two cops jump out and approach with caution, then kick the body of the dead man and pull him onto his back. This hasty action causes the left side of his face to give way. The concrete had been supporting the clown-faced man’s skull, all the grey matter intact but now crudely disseminating along the concrete fissures like molten lava. The cops look down on it with nonchalance.
“Brains messed up all over the place. Who is this sorry son of a bitch who just pooped sideways from his numb skull?”
Stelson feels the back of his head, as though he had been hit there. He’s not sure why. He looks at one of the cops, seemingly relieved, as though a valve had opened up and released a bottled up vintage Champagne around his shoulder, neck, and cranium.
“I think it was my brother, Bobby. Bobby Floyd.”
One of the cops kneels down and removes Stelson’s sunglasses and takes a good long hard look. Stelson’s eyes are bright wells of molten energy. Chlorophyll green, setting off pupils that seem dilated, narrow, and predatory because they are different and clearly inhuman, yet artificially bright and penetrating.
The cop smiles, then looks up and nods at his partner. A firm impact to the back of the head causes the world around Stelson to go dark.
Stelson Floyd’s piercing molten green eyes flicker open. He’s laid out on a bench in a lobby area and someone is tapping him on the shoulder. The tapping turns into more of an aggressive shake. He grabs the person’s wrist and glares at the assailant–a female cop with a kindly, helpful demeanor. Stelson releases his grip and quickly composes himself.
“Mr. Floyd, Detective Lesko will see you now. Follow the hall through the double doors. His office is the seventh on the right hand side of the corridor.”
Stelson likes the way she doesn’t abbreviate or shorten ‘right hand side of the corridor’ and it reminds him of an old verbose school teacher. He gets up and strides along the hall toward the double doors. He looks tired and edgy which makes him seem older than his nineteen years. He’s a good looking guy in another time and place but today the pressure within his angular shoulders and taut neck is evident and the aura of stress is felt by the frazzled and deranged looking cops who stride past, eyeing him as if searching for a reason to lash out and behave like attack dogs.
He pushes through the double doors and counts the offices to seven from the corner of his eye, not wanting to make eye contact with the beat cops at their desks laboring with simple administrative tasks.
The seventh office is the only one with a closed door. The name-plate reads:
Det. Victor Lesko
Stelson knocks loud enough to wake a bear in winter.
TWO
The Island of Los Angeles // Now
Stelson’s eyes flicker open. Once the morning light hits them, they seem to boot up like a nuclear reactor, the green molten energy behind the lens becoming brighter and swirling in eddies. He sits bolt upright in bed. “Jesus, the same shitty dream-within-a-dream color.” He carries on muttering to himself as a low red sun peeks through partially opened drapes. The palms of Silver Lake sway steadily in a dawn breeze funneling off the hills.
He’s already on the edge of his bed in a hoodie, Wayfarers, and sweatpants, stringing the shoelaces on his worn out black Reeboks. His room is neat apart from the leaning tower of oily take-out boxes next to his bed. He has faded posters of athletes and musicians on his wall that are decades out of step with his contemporaries, and many of these bright stars died before he was born.
But they’re posted over with what looks like elaborate street art. The posters seem to be there to hide the more interesting, thoughtful, and darker sections of the mural–a hard-negotiated compromise without actually painting over it. He faces the wall and reaches out and takes down a poster to reveal a small mirror on the muraled wall. He removes his Wayfarers for a moment and checks his appearance, gazing back at himself with those wild eyes. He does it in a way as if to discover whether something has changed.
Has the affliction gone away?
He’s not disappointed. He knew what the answer was going to be and he puts his Wayfarer sunglasses back on and replaces the poster over the mirror.
Stelson opens a small cupboard, retrieves a soccer ball, and rushes out of the room along a small landing, past two other bedrooms with closed doors, and down a flight of creaky stairs. He’s determined and hurried about this, not wanting to be held back. Downstairs he catches sight of a woman–his mother–scurrying around a compact kitchen as a radio plays soulless-yet-atmospheric electronica. She senses him, but he’s out the door too fast for her to call him back.
He’s out on the street, breathing in the cold morning air, shades pushed up on his forehead, letting the growing ambience of the sun brighten the green in his eyes, the yellow reflection making him look cat-like. He licks his fingers. They have specks of blue paint on
them and he wipes his eyelids then closes his eyes to accentuate the coolness of the breeze. It makes him shiver and half-smile in a comforting way–a simple pleasure. He nudges his Wayfarer shades back in place.
Clutching the ball, he crosses the street and half-turns to look at his home–a compact three-bed condo that looks newly painted a pristine cornflower blue, truly magnificent compared with the neighbors, which all seem shabby, unloved, and about as consistent with minimum wage blue collar living as you can get.
He seems proud for a moment. He’s admiring his work and the effort that went into making this house stand out from the drabness. Some drapes shuffle open on the top floor of his home. A bleary eyed man looks out at the street and then at him. The man seems sad and kind of pathetic. His image doesn’t match the picture and would be more in keeping with the image of a townie hollering out the window of a neighbor’s property.
“Why you up so early, son? Stay home and keep your pop company.”
Stelson turns away and moves toward the main street at the end of his and starts to run at speed.
Moments later he’s onto the main street looking straight ahead at the other side of Glendale Boulevard–and a car honks his horn, screeching tires, braking to avoid the young man who’s long gone now, rushing down a side street bearing left into the cover of a vacant lot which has a bolt-cut entrance via a wire fence.
He shimmies through it, and as he does, the fence catches the soccer ball and knocks it out of his hands, back into the street. Stelson hits the deck inside the vacant lot and turns back to eye the ball that is now rolling down the street. He looks angered by his lack of control.
Across the lot there are some other kids kicking soccer balls, either against a wall or keeping it up in light touches from foot, knees, and chest. They look like they’re marking time for Stelson, waiting for their main man to join them for more guided soccer drills.
Stelson gets up, brushes himself down, and holds his hand up in a “wait right there” motion at one of the kids who could be a couple of years younger, give or take.
