by Poppy Brite
These cuts he had made over the years were more in the nature of experimentation: to test his domain over his own malleable flesh, to know the strange human jelly below the surface, part layer upon cell-delicate layer of skin, part quickening blood, part pale subcutaneous fat that parted like butter at the touch of a new blade. Sometimes he would hold his arm over a page of his sketchbook, let the blood fall on clean white paper or mingle with fresh black ink; sometimes he would trace it into patterns with his finger or the nib of a pen.
But he hadn’t done it for years and years. He thought the last time had been on his twentieth birthday, two years out of state’s custody, the ill winds of adulthood and poverty blowing down his neck. It was as if America had begun the decade of the eighties by shattering some great cosmic mirror, except that the seven years of bad luck hadn’t ended yet. The wizened, evil-faced dybbuk in the White House had been as alien a being as Trevor could imagine, a shriveled yet hideously animated puppet thrust into power by the same shadowy forces that had controlled the world since Trevor was five, forces he could not control, could barely see or begin to understand.
He had spent the night of his twentieth birthday wandering around New York City, riding the subways alone, slamming down coffee and cappuccino and espresso in every dive he passed, finally achieving an exaggerated state of awareness that went beyond perception into hallucination. He ended up huddled in a grove in Washington Square Park, furtively slicing at his wrist with a dull and rusty blade he dug out of his pocket, trying to let some of this electric energy out with the blood before it rattled him to pieces. Toward dawn he fell into restless sleep and dreamed of angels telling him to do violence—to himself? to someone else? he could not remember when he woke.
He didn’t know why he had stopped cutting himself after that. It had just stopped working: the pain couldn’t come out that way anymore.
Trevor sat up straight, shook himself. He’d nearly started to doze here in the gathering storm on his family’s grave. He saw an image of his flayed wrist above a white sheet of paper, dark sluggish blood making Rorschach blots on the page.
The first drops of rain were hitting the spongy carpet of grass and pine needles, dark streaking and blotching on the headstones. Lightning sketched across the sky, searing jagged blue, then thunder rolling in like a slow tide. Trevor closed his sketchbook and slid it into his backpack. He could work on the Bird strip later, at the house.
The rain began to come down in great gusting sheets as he left the graveyard. By the time he reached the road, the ground was already wet enough to sink and squelch under his feet, muddy water oozing into his socks and sneakers. The trees bowed low over the road, then lashed the wind-torn sky.
A ways down the road, Trevor realized that he had barely glanced at the headstone as he left, had not touched it at all past the first initial contact. It was numb, dead, like the fragments of memory and bone that lay beneath it. Maybe they had been there once, but as their flesh decayed and crumbled in the sodden Southern ground, their essences had leached away too. Maybe he could find his family in Missing Mile, or something of them. But not where their bodies lay.
He had plodded most of the way back to town when he heard a car coming slowly up the road behind him, grinding over the coarse wet gravel. He thought briefly of trying to thumb, just as quickly decided against it. He was already soaked through; nobody would want his soggy ass on their upholstery.
Now the car was close enough that he could hear its wipers sluicing back and forth across the windshield. The sound triggered a memory so distant it was barely there: lying in the back seat of his father’s car one rainy afternoon in Texas, listening to the shush-skree of the wipers and watching the rain course down the windows. One of the great San Francisco contingent of cartoonists—Trevor couldn’t remember which one—had been passing through town, and Bobby was showing him the sights of 1970 Austin, whatever they may have been. The other cartoonist was busily rolling joint after joint, but that didn’t stop him from running his mouth as much as Bobby. For Trevor in the back seat everything blurred together like different hues of watercolor paint: the comfortable sound of the adults’ voices, the sweet herbal tang of the pot smoke, the afternoon city light filtering through a veil of rain.
Momma must have been at home with the baby. Didi had been sick with one thing or another for a good part of his first year. Momma worried over him, fixed him special nasty-tasting organic mush, kept watch over him as he slept. Just as if she thought it mattered, just as if they all lived in a universe where Didi was going to grow up.
Trevor kept walking, did not register that the car had pulled up behind him until a horn blipped. He turned and found himself staring at the headlights and grillwork of his father’s old car, the one whose back seat he had dozed on that rainy day in Austin, the one they had driven to Missing Mile. The two-toned Rambler, or its twin, complete with a crimp that had graced its front bumper since 1970.
His father’s car, the windshield opaque with reflected light, the windows obscured by beads and drips of rain. Bobby’s car coming down Burnt Church Road, from the direction of the graveyard. And the window on the driver’s side was slowly cranking down.
Trevor thought there might be tears on his face. Or maybe it was only the rain, dripping out of his sodden hair.
He stepped forward to meet the car and whatever was inside it.
Just after dawn, Zach left his car in the parking lot of a prefab pink motel and walked out onto the dirtiest beach he had ever seen.
He’d kept on a steady northeastern course all night. Shooting past Pensacola at two, he had intended to go straight on east to Jacksonville but had been diverted by a highway sign pointing out the turnoff to a town called Two Egg. Zach might never set foot in Florida again; he had to see Two Egg before he left.
But the town was eerie even for rural Florida in the small hours of the morning. The buildings on the downtown strip all seemed to have been built in the early fifties, that time of false prosperity and fake space-age optimism. There was that look of the Plexiglas pillar and chromium arch, the kidney shape and the fashionable sign of the atom. But now these fabulous structures were abandoned, left behind by the chill silicon void of the millinneum’s end. Their aqua paint was faded and peeling, their once-wondrous swoops and starbursts and streamlined angles rusting, falling away.
The buildings seemed to sway and nod over the street as if trying to pull Zach into their sterile dream. The street was full of trash, crumpled fast-food bags and torn newspapers drifting like aimless ghosts. The swamp was reclaiming the town on all sides; stagnant tongues of water lapped at the sidewalks, cattails grew in every vacant lot. Altogether, the town made Zach think of the opening helicopter landing scene of Romero’s Day of the Dead as filmed on the ruined set of The Jetsons: desolation in which rotting corpses might rise, set against a backdrop as garish and sad as a forgotten cartoon.
He got out of Two Egg in a hurry. Thirty minutes later he crossed the state line into Georgia.
Now he was on Tybee Island, according to the signs he’d been nearly too bleary-eyed to read by the time he finally hit the coast. Just east of Savannah, Tybee was a cheap resort area frequented by redneck and middle-class family groups all summer. The island was honeycombed with seaside motels, fried seafood shacks, shell stands, and those weird, ubiquitous little Indian boutiques with their unvarying inventory of gauzy cotton clothes, incense, out-of-date rock posters, cheap jewelry, and drug paraphernalia.
This early, nearly everything was closed. Zach paid cash for a room at the Sea Castle Motor Inn, parked his car behind the Pepto-Bismol-colored building, and walked down to the beach.
The Atlantic Ocean looked dark and murky, not quite slate, not quite green. The foam that laced the breakers was like whipped cream squeezed out of a can, thin and unappetizing, unnatural-looking. And the sand—a hundred times worse than the chalky whitish stuff on the Gulf—gray and wet and heavy, like silt, like sludge. Zach nudged a heap of it wi
th the toe of his sneaker and uncovered a broken plastic shovel, the wrapper from a Payday bar, the gritty, sticky wad of a used condom. He kicked sand back over the whole mess and watched it fall in a dirty spray, only half hiding the trash.
He had thought the ocean would soothe his jangling nerves. Instead the sight of it endlessly heaving and churning made him feel tight inside, lost somehow, as if this was not the place he had meant to come to at all. He had also thought there would be other teenagers on the beach, that he would be able to blend in and look like part of some holiday crowd. But at this early hour the beach was nearly empty, and the few people he saw were middle-aged couples or terribly young parents with herds of tiny children. Even when he took his shirt off and let the fledgling sun beat on his pale back and shoulders, Zach felt about as inconspicuous as Sid Vicious at a Baptist covered-dish supper.
He was beginning to realize just how little he knew about life outside of New Orleans. But that was all right: with intelligence and intuition, he could hack it.
Hacking was defined as the manipulation of any complex system, as in “I can’t hack getting dressed tonight, so I’m going to the club in my bathrobe.” The complex system could be numbers on a screen or the relays and interchanges of the phone system; those were mechanical, and all you had to do was learn them. The crucial fact many computer hackers never seemed to realize—and the reason some of them were perceived as such geeks—was that the world and all its sentient beings and their billions of stories comprised the most intricate, fascinating system of all.
He pushed himself up off the gray sand and walked to the edge of the water. The glare caught the round lenses of his glasses, made his eyes sting and tear. Fine; he felt like crying anyway. A breeze tainted with the odors of wet salt and crude oil caught his hair and pushed it back from his face, dried the faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip. The tears and the wind felt good together.
Zach looked up and down the beach, followed the juncture of sand and water until it merged into infinity. South of here were the Georgia Sea Islands, where the rich language and culture of the Gullah people had dried up over the past century like so many fronds of marsh grass never woven into baskets, like so many magical roots never fashioned into protective “hands.” North was the rest of the Atlantic Seaboard, more than a thousand miles of that churning, strange-colored ocean stretching all the way up to the unimaginably toxic sands of New York and New Jersey.
Soon the beach began to get crowded, and Zach saw that he would never be able to blend in here. The redneck dudes in their drawstring jams and scraggly little mustaches, the dudettes with their bleached-permed-frosted hair and cottage cheese asses and scary, leathery tans, the kids that were hideous little replicas of their parents in Teenage Mutant Ninja drag—all stared at Zach as if he might be something nasty that had washed up overnight and hadn’t floated back out yet. It was time to crash, time to sleep now so he could blow this boring joint by nightfall.
Back in his room at the Sea Castle, Zach stripped out of his sweaty cutoffs, laid his glasses on the nightstand, and crawled into the double bed. The sheets were worn but clean and cool. He nestled into the pillows, closed his eyes, felt delicious exhaustion wash over him, thought of the kid Leaf and suddenly had a raging boner that was never going to let him sleep in a million years, noway, nohow.
Zach leaned over the edge of the bed and rummaged in one of his bags, found a string of little blue plastic packets, and tore one off. He never used rubbers for sex unless the other person insisted—and many of his lovers in New Orleans had insisted; he was known for more than his pallid good looks and mysterious wealth (which combination had convinced a certain set of French Quarter kids that Zach was a vampire and another set entirely that he was dying of AIDS and whooping it up while he still could). But he always used them for beating off. Not a one had broken yet, and he figured he was getting into the thousands.
He fitted the slippery little sheath over the head of his dick and unrolled it, sliding his hand down with it, pretending it was Leaf’s mouth. The weight of the sheet was Leaf’s hands, the extra pillow was Leaf’s skinny body pressed smooth against his own. But when he came, Leaf disappeared and Zach saw an achingly blue wave crashing and foaming on pure white sand.
The rubber, as always, remained intact. Maybe they had made the things flimsier back in ′72.
For a few minutes he lay with his mind wandering and his hand still moving idly. Not until warm tendrils of come started trickling back down into his pubic hair did he pull the thing off, knot the end of it, and toss it in the general direction of the toilet. He heard a small wet plop that meant bull’s-eye, though the room was so small it would’ve been hard to miss. If every sperm was sacred, Zach figured he had made more offerings to the altar of the porcelain goddess than any other.
When he woke up later and saw the condom floating like a pale chrysalis in the blue-tinged water of the bowl, he would pee on it and then flush it. Zach thought his body was a nifty machine and had a healthy appreciation of its many functions.
He turned over, stretched his lanky arms and legs across the unfamiliar expanse of mattress, pushed his head into the mound of pillows. One of them lay snug against his side like a warm body sinking into sleep. For an instant he wondered how it would be to fall asleep and wake up with someone next to him every morning, bodies fitting together in easy familiarity, skin smelling of each other and the safe shared bed.
But only for an instant did he think he might like it. These were thoughts that usually only came to him on leaden winter mornings, when the needling rain of a New Orleans cold spell streaked his windowpanes.
The pillow was his only constant bedmate, in all its malleable, comforting forms. He held it close and pressed his face into it, smelled cotton and detergent and the lingering ghost of his come, damp and salty as the ocean, but cleaner. In a while the image of his own bed faded from behind his eyes, and Zach began to dream of a long expanse of silky, sugary white sand, of water the color of the sky, of sky the color of the sun.
When he woke the room was full of sunset’s first light, deep pinks and lavenders that lay in overlapping petallike layers across the bedclothes and made him think he was still dreaming. As consciousness seeped back in, Zach contemplated going out to the beach to watch the sun set and get something to eat. A steady edge of hunger was gnawing at his stomach. But all the happy couples were probably strolling hand in hand in the grimy surf. Zach decided to stay in and order a pizza.
He paged through the phone book, ripped out the Domino’s ad and tore it into tiny pieces—they supported Operation Rescue and other heinous fascist causes—then dialed a local parlor and ordered a twelve-inch pie with triple jalapeños.
Thirty minutes later, his hair dripping from a fast shower, Zach munched pizza and drank grape soda from the motel’s machine while he studied his new atlas. He’d stopped to fill the Mustang’s tank somewhere near Valdosta, and while it had not been nearly as fine an adventure as his stop in Pass Christian, he had scored three tapes, a hot Slim Jim, and the book of maps. He saw that I-95 north from Savannah would take him all the way into North Carolina. Zach didn’t like interstates, but he was well away from New Orleans now and ready to cover some more distance in a hurry.
And after North Carolina, where? Leaf had thought him a New Yorker. Zach had always been intrigued by the idea of such a tiny island-bound city crammed full of people of every possible race, gender, and persuasion, entire cultures and culture wars, systems of magic and religion, infinite microcosms. Maybe now he could get lost there.
He finished his pizza, dropped off his room key at the office, slapped on his new Hank Williams tape, and headed north.
Just before midnight Zach sat drinking a Bloody Maria at the Sombrero Lounge, a colorful confection of a building molded primarily of pink stucco, orange neon, and thousands of twinkling white fairy lights. The South of the Border theme park on I-95 had drawn him in like a bug to a gaudy flame.
SOB’s increasingly surreal billboards loomed along the highway for thirty miles before the park, all 3-D papier-mâché sculpture and moving parts, giant hot dogs and spinning sheep and the smirking mustachioed mug of pedro, the SOB mascot. It was like a little city set down in the middle of nowhere, halfway between New Jersey and Disney World (as one of the signs bragged), and after three hours of dark interstate flanked by monotonous stretches of farmland and stands of pine, its tacky bars and souvenir shops with their Easter egg paint jobs of purple and pink and chartreuse had looked to Zach like the lights of Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras.
As he finished his drink, an eye-watering blend of tequila and Tabasco with a splash of tomato juice, an idea came to him. He left the bar and drove across the complex to pedro’s motel, paid cash for one of the “heir conditioned” rooms, dug his battery-powered laptop computer out of the back seat and took it inside, along with the OKI 900 cellular phone he carried everywhere. Zach had tumbled the phone, or reprogrammed it to generate a new ID number each time he used it. It could not receive calls, but neither could his calls be traced.
The furniture and walls of the room were painted pink, the bed heart-shaped, with a mirror on the ceiling and a slick spread of lurid red satin. No doubt you could put a quarter in and summon the Magic Fingers. Instead, Zach turned on the laptop, entered a stolen MCI credit card number, and dialed into the composing department of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Over a year ago he had discovered that the newspaper had a program that let reporters type in their stories from home. He’d created an account for himself, changing his password every time he planted an item in the paper. Currently it was ZYGOTE, thanks to his last story about the petrified abortion. He logged on and changed it to pedro. Then he typed:
