by Doug Draa
He says coolly, “It couldn’t have been. You’ll remember, nothing was mentioned about any smell when her sponsor discovered her, or when the EMTs arrived to assist. Something must have spoiled, that’s all.”
The reasoning is sound, but I don’t like it.
The orderly swings my mother over the threshold. “Let’s get this the hell over with,” he barks.
I follow him in. I hit the switch just inside the door; the bulb overhead only slightly un-dims the interior from the grey day. My breath catches. The dimensions are so familiar, the floor plan set in my memory, but everything else is different. Why wouldn’t it be? I haven’t been in this house for a decade. The walls are a different color, the furniture is new, the giant tube TV and its pedestal are absent; the flat screen on the wall seems out of place. But the real difference is the condition of things—clean. No, not clean, in the standard housekeeping sense, as it is obvious that any concerns about cleanliness vacated with mom’s wits, but at least kept up, modern-ish—the decrepitude on display appears recent and not resulting from year-on-year neglectful attrition, the décor of the burnout I remember from my youth. This is my impression of one room—the glazed sliding doors that lead to the dining room are closed.
So enraptured am I by trivialities no one else could care about that it is the orderly’s exertions that finally draw my attention, not my mother’s violent shaking.
“Come on, now!” he says, his massive arms around her.
She twists, struggling to get free. “No!” she screams. “No! It’s bad. I threw up in the tub and it got everywhere!”
“Jesus! Get her out of here!” I instruct the orderly.
“No!” countermands Duenger. “Let her go. Release her!”
“What? She’ll bolt!” I yell.
“You must do as I say. Do it! Let her go!”
The orderly doesn’t release her so much as he just drops his arms slack. Even his head dips sideways and his mouth opens. His eyelids flit rapidly. I wonder if he is having an attack. Mother, however, free from his grasp and contrary to my expectation, sighs and rocks forward and back, as though once more in the throes of her gentle euphoria. A shudder runs through the orderly as though waking from a nap. He looks embarrassed at first, and then he smiles like a child.
Only then do I notice that Duenger has slid wide the glazed doors.
The smell is worse, ten times worse, but its foul bloom is so effervescent in my sinuses that it feels like gas fills my head and lifts me and I wonder if I am standing or floating.
The dining room writhes. Some sort of opaque, gelatinous substance foams over every surface. The layer is thin farthest from the staircase, such that the hard angles of a cupboard are discernible to my left, and I can even see portions of the wooden frame around the door to the kitchen. But towards the staircase the mass grows halfway to the ceiling. It piles upon itself to form clumsily wavering stalagmites, a giant anemone prodding mindlessly at the air, its tentacles failing, slopping and consumed again in the roiling lower body, the hopeless toil repeating. It is white and green and brown and blue and every color, but none pure, all soiled, a retch of pointillism.
I threw up in the tub and it got everywhere.
The floor quavers as the orderly suddenly drops to his knees, his arms at his sides, palms open to the front. Tears stream down his cheeks as he laughs like a cold engine trying to start, “Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!”
I wonder what he sees. I look again at the alien mound in the dining room and I discern shapes forming in the stuff. I cannot tell yet what they might become, but they are distinct from the reaching spires.
Yes, that’s a face there.
It’s gone.
Two rough faces now, twin sides to the same head, as Janus—my father and brother? They separate, become a woman’s breasts. One raises, arcs and looms over the other one, which flattens, to form something like the lopsided oval trough in a wave, and then both sides resolve into an image of much greater complexity. Adam reclines and stretches lazily while God reaches towards him from the clouds. And Adam has my face. But in place of Michelangelo’s limp sprout a segmented erection grows dollop by dollop, and as the creator melts back to formlessness, his arm droops such that he looks as though he reaches for it.
Then everything ripples from the middle; a bubble emerges and then flattens forward. The images shift to fine focus as every pustule in the gangrenous mass becomes a precise tile in a mottled mosaic, a blot of ink on a filthy Bayeux Tapestry. Scenes blend, melt and congeal: My brother falling from the cigar tree, too disgusted by the ants filing up between his small hands to hold on; the looming mustachioed face of a disposable stud pushing a reefer on me, holding back the laughter my mother in the background cannot; flashes of television memories as the South Tower falls and Buffy kisses Spike; my Night of the Pills freshman year in college that I botched so badly that no one even knew until I told Joseph; and finally Joseph in person, volunteered by a bevy of clueless pensioners at the Luau to join the Hula while I laughed until I cried; and the scene swallows itself into the frame of an asylum window behind which my mother waves loosely.
The good doctor is disrobing my mother with clear intent. I’m angry for only a second before the tug of conscience vanishes. I am fascinated by the sudden vacancy. Duenger catches my eye.
“The first horizon has wilted!” he declares. “Mark well to cut the rattle from the baby’s hand!” And I read that same desperation in his eyes that I’d seen in my mother’s, the hidden aspect in the cloud of disingenuous, salacious joy, that thing that is the only thing that should be there: terror.
Anger rouses me. I understand the set-up now and I accuse him: You’ve been here before! You’re infected, just like my mother, and you brought me here to infect me, too!
Only what I say is, “Rondeau! A crooked man walks a straight path, a pocketful of tadpoles to the circus!”
I understand the terror now. The nonsense is upon us. We can’t communicate. My neck spasms at the base of my skull and snaps my head back. I blink repeatedly. I try again: You won’t make me like you!
“All’s Hell that ends!”
My compromised protestations are ignored. The doctor is rolling my mother over in the slop. He seems almost bewildered about how to penetrate her. I want to run but instead I begin weaving on my feet counterclockwise. The orderly bends forward, smearing a putrid kaleidoscope over the floor, ooh-ing and ah-ing.
What is this stuff—this psychic mold, this cancerous ectoplasm, this froth of decadence? What foul wonder is this that has ruined my mother and compelled the mad doctor to evangelize? I know it. I know it. I know it. It is corpses in our heads. It is the compost of souls. When spirit breaks down, where does it go? It is in all of us; it is ten millennium of rotted thought from whence new ideas spring; it carries in spoiled spores on the waves between us.
Yes. Yes. And occasionally it gets caught in the deeper pits of the emptier husks. It materializes and festers in our guts, germinating in a caul of bile and anxiety, accreting mass as a bezoar, corrupting and killing only to die along with us, unless…unless a person frees herself.
My mother decided to let go of the pain she suffered for her failure. For her benefit alone, she absolved herself and left the mess in the tub. Because I wasn’t there to tell her she had no right to take on my suffering in the first place.
So I yell—no words, no meaning, just anger. No one else gives a damn, but I roar. And there is a crumpling inside me and sparks move my limbs. I am outside before I know how I’ve gotten free.
I don’t know what to do. I know I need to get away. Primal thought saved me, primal thought moves me. I want to go to ground. But home is not an option. The church? Services are over—and what should I say? I go to the motel. I have to call Joseph. My strength.
I feel terrible. I can barely fit the key. The room spins and I collapse on the bed.
I’m nauseous. Maybe… I feel it’s very important to say something reasonable. I have to make my words work. I try…I try with the one clear thought that remains.
“How…how dare she?” I ask.
I am still sick. My insides twist. But my scalp tingles and a feeling of minty lightness brushes my skin. And so I begin to smile, because I know it is so stupid. It is so absolutely stupid.
I chuckle. “Don’t you remember that you don’t care?”
My stomach roils. Fluid pushes upwards. I scramble for the toilet. I puke violently, repeatedly, french toast and coffee and so, so much more.
I collapse back against the wall of the bathroom. My chest is heaving, my heart fluttering. I am weak but I feel better. As bad as it smells, it takes me a few minutes to gather the reserves to flush the toilet. I lean forward. Perverse curiosity grips me. The experience was so brutal, the purge so cathartic; I have to look at what came out of me.
Oh.
Oh, Joseph must see this.
CASTLE CSEJTHE, by Ashley Dioses
In corridors of stone, the claws of girls engrave
The walls with horizontal marks of darkest red.
The blood and broken nails embed and paint, then pave
The way toward the torture chambers, realms of dread.
The pallid ladies, beautiful as ocean’s foam,
Were playthings of the Countess, and their prizèd bloo
Flowed forth alike a crimson sea, where she would comb
Her hair with it or bathe beneath its endless flood.
In castle Csejthe, hell awaits those maidens pure
Of heart and pure of mind, for Bathory desires
Them both. She steals their very breath to find a cure
For even death, till life eternal she acquires!
EDUCATIONAL UPGRADE, by Bret McCormick
He couldn’t believe how dingy the neighborhood was. This was the part of town slackers went to for tattoos and piercings. Maybe a decent mechanic was nestled into one of these side streets. It was possible, but an honest mechanic? More likely a chop shop. For sure you could find drug dealers on every block if you knew how to go about that sort of thing. Murray cruised slowly past the parked cars that crowded the curb, looking for 4315. Most of the buildings seemed to have no address numbers posted. He decided that was no accident. The people who lived here didn’t want to be found. He looked at the back of Harrison’s business card for the hundredth time, reading the address scribbled there. Yes, he was in the right place; Granada Street. Not Granada Boulevard, that nice thoroughfare running through the south side of town in the new Medical District, as he’d originally assumed. He had called ahead to verify. It was definitely on Granada Street. If anyone other than Harrison had made the recommendation, Murray would have cut and run when he saw this seedy district in all its pitifully decaying detail. Half the businesses were boarded up, covered with graffiti. Still, he knew for a fact that Harrison earned twice the amount of money he did at Gelco. That was a fact he had verified with Donna in accounting. If Harrison had been through this program and vouched for it, it was legit.
He spotted 4315, an old flat-roofed office building of the style that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties. It was a drab shade of beige. Some paint salesman might have called it ‘Desert Sand’ or ‘Parchment,’ but to Murray it just looked like bargain-bin paint. Still it was the only building on that block with fresh paint and the address clearly marked in large black numerals. With increasing irritation he noted that there were no empty parking spaces anywhere near his destination. He’d have to scout a spot and walk. Hopefully, his car would still be there, unmolested when he returned. The nearest curbside opening large enough for him to parallel park was two blocks away. He was not encouraged when a group of idle young men, hanging out on a stairway, took note of the loud beeping of his car’s locking mechanism.
“What the fuck,” he muttered, looking over his shoulder and hoping for the best, “Harrison, this better be worth it.” Reluctantly, he turned left at the corner, taking note of the street sign. The side street was Vista. He could remember that.
The door to 4315 was painted a bright blue. That seemed an odd choice to Murray. He opened the door and walked into an empty reception area. A sign designed to look like a clock said “back at 1:30.” His wristwatch indicated it was 12:05. Surely someone was expecting him. He’d made an appointment for God’s sake!
“Hello,” he called, starting down the narrow hallway that led away from the reception area into the belly of the building. There was no reply. He passed a couple of doors marked “Men” and “Ladies”, then checked behind a third door to find it was a supply closet, a poorly stocked supply closet. He was encouraged by a metallic rattle coming from the vicinity of a fourth door. Murray entered the room to find a slight man with his back to the door, watering plants in pots on the window sill. “Hello,” he said again.
The guy turned around, his dark, intense eyes peering out from under a tangle of wooly, shoulder-length hair. “Oh, hey man. You Murray?” The man smiled and set his watering can down on the top of a filing cabinet. He rubbed his hand on his pant leg before stretching it across the desk and offering it to Murray. Without a word, Murray shook the man’s hand, all the while thinking he’d seen the guy before. “Have a seat,” the man said, sweeping the tangle of hair out of his face and dropping into the battered chair behind the desk.
Murray sat and glanced at the card in his hand for the hundred and first time. “Are you Daniel?” He asked, reading the man’s name as Harrison had scribbled it two days before.
“That’s me! Great to meet you. Harrison told us you’d be coming in.” The guy’s grin was almost intimidating. Murray stared at him, still trying to figure out why the man’s face was so familiar, then all at once it came to him.
“You look like that guy,” he said, wagging a finger across the desk at Daniel. “The cult thing in Hollywood…”
“Charlie? Yeah, I get that all the time. Of course, he’s a lot older than I am.”
“Still, I’ve seen the documentaries. You look just like a young Charles Manson. It’s uncanny.”
“Just lucky I guess. Tell the truth, I make a little cash on the side as a Manson impersonator.”
Without his awareness, a frown appeared on Murray’s face. “Who wants a Manson impersonator? Who’d pay for that? Surely not advertisers.”
“You’re right. It’s a very specialized niche. Mostly private parties attended by a very specific slice of the population, to put it politely. Then there’s the occasional metal music video.” Daniel laughed and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “But, you’re not here to talk about me. Am I right?” He did not wait for an answer. “You, Mr. Murray Gebhardt, are here to receive an educational upgrade.”
Murray nodded. “Well, to learn about it anyway. You’re highly recommended by Harrison, but I have a few questions.”
Daniel’s chair squeaked as he leaned back and kicked his right foot up onto his desk top. He touched the fingertips of both hands together in, what seemed to Murray, a delicate gesture.
“Ask away, my friend.”
“Well, to start with, I couldn’t find your company,” he referred to the card for the one hundred and second time, “Mind Expansion Enterprises, in any of the usual continuing education listings.”
Daniel’s head bobbed affably behind the pyramid of fingertips. “Yes, I’m sure that’s true. We get our clients pretty much exclusively by word-of-mouth.”
Murray cleared his throat. “Uhm…naturally, I’m curious about your credentials.”
With an aggravated squeak from the chair, Daniel leaned forward aiming both index fingers at Murray. “Our credentials are impeccable. The only credentials worth a damn are results. Am I right?”
“Yes…” Murray’s reply was tentative; some part of him was desperately clinging to h
is skepticism.
“Unless we accomplish exactly what we promise, my friend, you do not pay a dime.”
Murray nodded, pursing his lips. Things were sounding good. Still, he considered himself a shrewd consumer and he wanted to keep it that way.
“I’m sure Harrison told you our program is not for everyone. That’s why I had you allot two hours of your time, so we can talk things over and figure out if Mind Expansion Enterprises is a good fit for you. Hungry?”
The question took Murray by surprise. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Daniel continued.
“I like to take my clients to lunch. Usually, over the course of a lunch conversation, I can make an assessment. I pick up the tab. Lunch costs you nothing. You like sushi?”
Murray drew a critical breath into one side of his mouth.
“Okay, sushi’s not your thing,” Daniel said, not missing a beat. “You a health food guy? Salad bar sound like the ticket?” Murray’s expression was all the answer the man needed. “Great. I’ll drive. Just let me lock the front door.”
After locking up at 4315 Granada Street, they got in a surprisingly nice Mercedes and headed east. After a couple miles, they passed under a freeway overpass and into a much nicer community on the edge of the international airport. Daniel pulled into the driveway of a very nice hotel and stopped at the valet parking kiosk. The valet approached smiling the smile of a service employee who recognizes a good tipper.
“Daniel, my man,” he exclaimed, jumping right into a multi-part handshaking ritual which Murray found a bit confusing. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Murray,” Daniel said, handing the man his keys. “Murray, this is Link. Not so much the missing kind, but short for Lincoln.”
“Good to meet you, Murray,” Link called over the top of the Mercedes, a prominent gold tooth flashing in the afternoon sun.
“Likewise,” Murray answered.
Daniel wasted no time heading for the revolving door that led into the hotel lobby. Murray followed as Link whipped the car out of the circular drive toward the parking garage.
