Mangled Meat

by Edward Lee

  I read the output data over and over, all the while staring down at the naked and comatose body on the table. The long hair, the beard, the glazed eyes.

  Then I read the tome scans a last time.

  Healed-over wounds were present between the navicular and cuboid bones of the feet. Healed over wounds were present just under the pisiform and tubercle bones in the wrist. And one other healed over wound was present between the fourth and fifth rib bones on the thoracic cage.

  Then I knew.

  A fingerprint on the hull over twenty-two hundred years old? The OAC analysis of the victor’s star charts left even less doubt. The victor’s debark point had been verified by gauss trails: they’d been from earth somewhere between 29 and 33 A.D. from a place in the ancient Middle East referred to in Late Latin from Aramaic, a word meaning gulgū ltha, or Golgotha.

  When I explained to the rest of the crew exactly what this might mean...the strangest thing happened.

  The men who’d been raised as Christians quickly became atheists. And the men, like Yung, who’d been raised as atheists converted to the ranks of Christendom.

  But me?

  I guess I fall somewhere in between.

  This all happened on the third day. Seven more have passed since then, and I don’t know how much planar space we’ve folded since then, not with the i-grav engines running full tilt half way into the redline. Someday, yes, the VO will probably regain consciousness. But who knows how long that will take? Months? Years? Decades?

  Doesn’t matter.

  The star charts that were activated when I cut open the suit—they didn’t just indicate the debarkation point of the victor. Those charts also showed the final destination grid.

  We’re taking our passenger back to where he came from, and I want to see what’s waiting for us when we get there.

  The Cyesolagniac

  Look at me...

  Heyton sat in the chair with his pants down. A glance across the squalid room revealed his pitiful reflection in the mirror: a ludicrous caricature.

  The magazine shook in his hands.

  If my dear dead parents could see me now...

  It had been the best business day of his life. He’d just flown in from Dallas, having sold the IAP system to the Texas State Police and two dozen county departments. Blocher, his boss, had had a proverbial cow. “Heyton,” he’d said, “I’m promoting you to deputy vice-president and I’m doubling your salary.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You just sold Texas! No one’s been able to do that!”

  “Tomorrow’s Florida, sir,” Heyton reminded. “Florida’s not a big interagency state, but they don’t like to be tag-alongs, either. That’s good for us.”

  Blocher sounded manic as Al Pacino. “Sell the IAP to Florida and I’ll triple your salary, Heyton!”

  “Not to sound conceited, sir, but if I can’t sell Florida... no one can.”

  Exhilaration turned Blocher’s voice to a wavering shimmy. “You fuckin’ rock, Heyton! You’ve got confidence and balls! You’re putting my company on the map and making the competition eat my shorts. Sell Florida tomorrow, and—to hell with it! I’ll make you exec VP and quadruple your salary.”

  “Mr. Blocher,” Heyton promised. “I’m going to sell Florida.”

  Yes, a good business day. Once all those Florida police chiefs heard that half of Texas law enforcement had purchased their processing system, they’d probably all buy it, too. Heyton felt confident. He was a superior salesman.

  But he had a problem.

  He hadn’t even had to show his ID to check into the room—that’s the kind of place it was. Dirty handprints on the wallpaper tracked over into the mirror his own face now occupied, and more handprints smudged an awful dollar-store painting of a sea manatee which hung crooked over the lumpy bed. The room stank, of course, like a porn parlor. Roaches chittered in a bathroom cornered black with fungus.

  It was still daylight; through the closed blinds he glimpsed the shadows passing the window, but none quite possessed the silhouette he craved...

  The magazine’s glossy images made his eyes feel lidless. He stared, as someone lost in the desert would stare at a mirage. The letters of the magazine’s title stretched across breasts so swollen they looked fit to burst, and a white belly equally swollen: BUNS IN THE OVEN.

  As he proceeded, Heyton couldn’t have felt more ashamed, nor more impassioned.

  ***

  He was surprised by how often he got lucky. From Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Baltimore to Frisco to Miami to Seattle—there was always some identically seedy thoroughfare peppered with fleabag motels and fleabag people. Crack reigned supreme, a devil’s contract for the new age; there would always be plenty of regrettable women who’d sell themselves for a twenty-dollar “rock.” This was south St. Petersburg; Heyton hadn’t had to drive far in the rental car to know he’d found the right kind of neighborhood: pawn shops, adult book stores, and rundown rowhouses. Perfect, he thought.

  The sodium lights on 4th Street seemed to ooze on as the sun fell, painting the street in a glittery glaze the color of urine. Heyton spied stars struggling to wink through the hot, smog-tinged twilight. Monolithic buildings pushed upward past ugly rooftops, a craggy black mesa against a dull sky. Heyton thought of lost worlds.

  As the night deepened, they began to appear as if disgorged from the street’s tacky crannies and alleyways: the lost women. Thousand-yard stares propped up over false smiles of wantonness, they began their endless trek on either side of the street, big-eyed scarecrows in high heels and hot pants and tubetops banding fried-egg breasts. Most were emaciated, with mops of soiled hair the color of dirty dishwater—the proverbial crack whores nearing the end of the line. Any city had plenty of them. A few were obese, comically so, waddling the dirty sidewalk on swollen ankles and feet ballooned against flip-flops straps. One, whose face look inflated within a preposterous Benatar shag, beckoned Heyton with a wave of a fat hand, mouthing some carnal promise. Her buttocks in giant jeans looked like a cramed duffle bag. Not tonight, honey, Heyton thought.

  He drove to the end and back again, eyeing for police but seeing none. A black woman—clearly not a prostitute—exited an ice-cream shop with a toddler on each hand. She smiled in her routine, clearly a happy mother...

  I never knew my mother, Heyton thought.

  But it was a self-realization that always arrived via a shrugging objectivity. He’d been raised by a single father. “She died,” he’d dismissed to young Heyton a few times, “a long time ago.” End of story.

  Heyton didn’t care. He didn’t feel under-privileged, and he couldn’t discern that he’d missed anything in childhood. His father had raised him well regardless, then Heyton had excelled through life to this point: $200,000-plus per year in a company headed skyward.

  Nevertheless, that was the chief reason cited: the lack of a maternal figure during formative and adolescent years.

  Thinking back to the last few had him squirming on the LeBaron’s faux-leather upholstery. Kansas City a month a ago, and Phoenix the month before that—both gems. The images—so sharp, so freshly white with ghosts of blue veins beneath ever-so-tight skin—melded with further images from the magazines and dumped a narcotic heat over his groin. Good God...

  Cyesolagnia was the clinical term, but he’d also seen others, even more bizarre, like Gravidophilia and maiesiomania—a pervert’s alphabet soup. The standard definition?

  “Cyesolagnia: a particular paraphilic symptom of sexual fetishism which involves the urgent erotic obsession with pregnant women.”

  Heyton, indeed, had it bad. Never a wife, and scarcely ever a girlfriend. For him, sexual release was impossible without these arcane and decidedly abnormal trimmings.

  They had to be pregnant...

  And there were never many. The typical red-light district seemed to sport only one or two pregnant prostitutes per hundred—low odds for sure, but that only made the successes more gratifying.
But, yes—

  They had to be pregnant.

  When he introspected, he always deduced, I’m not a bad person. It’s not like I’m snatching children or picking up little boys, for God’s sake. I’m not raping women at gunpoint, I’m not robbing banks or murdering people. All I’m doing is picking up a few pregnant hookers for a mutual proposition. What’s the harm? No one gets hurt...

  Hence, his rationale, which was all he had to keep from feeling wholly aberrant. Pickings were always slim, and his trek often ended in frustrating failure, but then there was always that inexplicable edge of excitement, that at any moment a suitable woman would turn a corner or step from an alley and be standing there for him, that one shining needle in this haystack of human detritus.

  The sky was black now, pressing down on the sodium haze. Right after another u-turn, his heart jumped when he spotted the proper outline in the distance.

  Finally!

  The wan figure moved down the street, burdened by the tell-tale swollen belly.

  Please...

  Then his heart dropped like a stone.

  She was pregnant, all right, by eight months it looked like. But... Damn!

  This one was simply too far gone, a stick-figure with greasy tendrils of hair and legs smudged flinty with dirt. The stained t-shirt ballooned as she waddled onward; her pregnancy must comprise a third of her total body weight. Giant soul-dead eyes snagged his gaze as he passed, then the parched lips over crooked teeth mouthed “Blowjob?” Another inhabitant of the bottom of the barrel. She likely hadn’t washed in weeks and was probably rife with HIV, abscessed track-marks, and lice.

  What a disappointment.

  “Oh, well...”

  It was getting late—he had his presentation tomorrow. Better get back to the motel... A night’s failure always had at least one consolation: another pathetic release of his own accord, abetted by one of his magazines: READY TO DROP, NATAL ATTRACTION, and his current favorite, BUNS IN THE OVEN. Heyton could take his pick.

  He slowed at a stop light, then almost shouted when his cell phone blared. Jesus! “Hello?”

  The shrill voice was Blocher’s. “Heyton, holy shit, I can’t even sleep I’m so torqued up about tomorrow!”

  “Relax, sir. I think it’ll go well.”

  “I tried calling the room we booked you at the con center but they said you never checked in.”

  Heyton rarely ever stayed in those rooms; they existed too far away from his need. So he lied: “Oh, yeah, Mr. Blocher, but after flying over from Dallas, I was so dog-tired, I just checked into the first motel I could find.”

  “Fine, fine, well—shit. Get plenty of sleep. How early you gotta get up?”

  “It’ll be no rush, sir. I’ll get to the con center at two. My presentation’s at three.” Heyton could see Blocher sitting in his den with his hair sticking up, wringing his hands.

  A nervous chuckle. “It’s all riding on you, Heyton. You’re going to have chiefs and teckies from three or four dozen Florida departments sitting in tomorrow—the fuckin’ U.S. Marshals might even be there.”

  “Relax, sir,” Heytoned repeated, amused.

  “Shit, Heyton. What I say earlier? I’ll quadruple your salary? Fuck it—if you sell the IAP system to a bunch of Florida PD’s—I’ll...what’s five times, Heyton? Quintriple?”

  “Quintuple, I think, sir.”

  “Yeah! That’s what I’m saying! You sell Florida, Heyton, and I’ll quintuple your salary!”

  “That’s almost a million a year, sir,” Heyton reminded.

  “Fuckin’-A right, and you’re worth it. Did you see what our stocks did today after you sold Texas?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t think of it.”

  “It went up sixty percent, Heyton. Because of you!”

  Even better news. He hadn’t found the right kind of prostitute, but at least he was significantly richer.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow after the show, Mr. Blocher. And stop worrying.”

  “Yeah, yeah—aw, shit, Heyton! Break a leg!” and then he hung up.

  Heyton chuckled to himself. At this rate, the silly bastard’ll have a stroke by morning.

  TAP! TAP! TAP! TAP!

  Heyton’s frown jerked right. The light was green but no cars waited in his rearview.

  A woman’s face peered through the passenger window.

  Heyton froze.

  She was pretty...and hugely pregnant.

  She’s perfect...

  He pushed open the door. “Guh—get in.”

  Lean, fresh white legs angled inside, glittery flipflops on feet that were surprisingly well-pedicured for a streetwalker. A shining sweep of carbon-black hair confused Heyton to a point of distraction; he couldn’t detect her face at first, just the black shine—an obverse halo. Some fragrant scent off the hair filled the car at once.

  “Hey,” she greeted.

  Heyton’s eyes struggled for a place to look first. The rotundity that replaced her lap told him she was well into the third-trimester—his favorite, for the closer they were to term, the most extreme the image, the same way a donut-addict would pick out the cream-filled with the most bloat.

  “Oh, shit, don’t tell me you’re one of those screwballs who never says a word...”

  Heyton snapped back. “I’m sorry, hi, er—” the words tripped around in his mouth. “You caught me by surprise—” and then he flinched when a horn brayed behind him.

  “Light’s green,” she said.

  Mallet-head! Now the rearview showed him a Yellow Cab, and an irate Pakistani shaking his fist. Heyton trounced the gas. “Sorry.”

  He detected more than saw her smile. Pretty scents began to intoxicate him; usually streetwalkers didn’t smell good, but this one could’ve just stepped from a lavender bubble bath. She also dressed quite smartly for her kind: beige cargo shorts and a cranberry scoop-neck maternity t-shirt. The clothes augmented her pregnancy rather than covered it up. Nipple-tips the size of thumb-ends tented the cranberry fabric which stuck finely as tulle to the engorged orbs.

  Heyton’s palms grew slick on the wheel.

  “I saw you drive by couple times,” she said, adjusting her girth in the seat. “You gotta be careful doing that—it flags the cops.”

  Heyton knew the scene all too well. Nothing close to solicitation had taken place yet; if the john wasn’t the first to speak up, the girls would be worried about entrapment. “The cops, yes, well, I’m not a cop, if that’s what you’re driving at. I’m a software salesman from South Dakota.”

  “Cool. I knew you weren’t five-oh, could tell by the look in your eyes.”

  Heyton found the comment intriguing. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Sure, man. Dudes into pregnant chicks all look the same: suits, rental cars, middle-aged but in good shape, and the same something or other in the eyes.”

  “Really?”

  “Um-hmm. Then I was positive when I saw you giving Tracie the once-over.”

  “Huh?”

  “That knocked-up junkie pipe-cleaner you were eyeballing back there.” She flipped down the visor mirror to finnick with her hair. Heyton liked her nonchalant attitude. “Shit, man, don’t EVER pick that bitch up. She’s crazy from AIDS, carries a box-cutter. Beats the shit out of me how a chick that fucked up can even get pregnant. Usually smackheads miscarry mid-term. That walking piece of trash’d shit her kid into the sewer, then keep right on turning tricks she’s so low down.”

  The rough talk rolled so smoothly off her lips, Heyton didn’t even flinch. And she tagged me right away, he reminded himself.

  The “look in your eyes,” she’d said.

  Finally she examined him, with bright blue eyes in a cheerleader’s face, a creamy white complexion bereft of blemish.

  Oh, yes. This one was perfect.

  “So what do you want?”

  There.

  “How much for all night?”

  The query seemed to catch her off guard. Ninety-percent of a streetwalker’s business was quic
k car-tricks, usually of the oral variety. Heyton needed the image, and he needed it to be sustained.

  She tried to sound casual. “Shit, man. That takes me off the stroll for the whole night. I can make a lot of money overnight.”

  “I’ll pay a thousand,” Heyton said.

  Dark, perfect brows popped up. “Gotta see it, you know?”

  Heyton gave her the roll. Her thumb riffled through it like a Bicycle deck, then she stuffed it into a wrist purse. “All right. Let’s go.”

  ***

  “Nice and cool in this dump,” she said and sighed. “Usually the a/c’s for shit in this motel.” Heyton locked the door and closed the brass slide. He was already so aroused by the sight of her he could only think in snippets. Remember. She’s a whore. She’s a criminal. Oh, God, she’s so beautiful. Just. Be. Careful... She carried all eight and a half months quite gracefully, sauntering to the bathroom.

  Quick.

  Yes, one always had to be careful. He took down the preposterous manatee painting, behind which he’d already hung a plastic bag. In the bag he placed his wallet, car keys, and cell phone, then had the painting back up in seconds. “You got anything hard to drink?” she called from the bathroom. He could hear a tinkle.

  He was already pouring himself one. “Just scotch.”

  “I’ll have one, on ice.”

  Heyton poured a second. He noticed his hands shaking; he couldn’t recall anticipation so potent. Excitement dried his mouth out until the sharp liquor replenished it. Jesus... He sat down to steady the shaking; his armpits felt sodden. Christ, I hope I don’t stink. I’m sweating like a pig.

  The door clicked. “You in a rush to get started? If you are, that’s cool.”

  She’d exited the bathroom nude. Heyton could’ve been a wide-eyed wooden Indian at the first’s bed edge...

  She crossed the room like a spotlight. “Huh?”

  “Oh, no—” Heyton gulped. “There’s no rush.”