Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh

by Jay Lake

  Cattle stood, roped together with Kryptonite bicycle cables, their mad eyes rolling back in their heads as they wept blood, quivering in the hold of some drug or bovine dream. The cattle were of that breed Markus always thought of as “Oreo cows,” with black forequarters, black haunches, and a pale midsection. Three massive men stood around a metal table, a slab really, working with knives and a chainsaw, dismembering one of the cattle. They were naked save for leather thongs, and knee-high fisherman’s boots, their skin oiled with the lifeblood of the animal.

  One glanced up at Danni and Markus, nodded. His face was covered with a smooth leather mask, only eye slits and little mesh over his mouth granting him human features at all. His head was shaven, with a tattooed map on the scalp. It appeared to be the San Francisco transit system, with its multicolored web of streetcars, buses and rail lines all somewhat at odds with one another.

  The other two men had mapped heads as well. He recognized them, one with the London Underground and the other with the Manhattan subway system. All three bent back to their work, sawing and hacking with a sound that stirred Markus’ guts.

  It was a slaughterhouse. One he was fairly certain had no standing with the city or state authorities.

  “Daddy Nekko says you can cut if you want,” Danni whispered, running her tongue across his ear. “You can even kill if you want.” She reached down, grabbed up a sledgehammer, and pressed it into his sweating hand.

  Balancing the handle on his shoulder, Markus stepped forward to watch the cutting. His groin pulsed, penis as hard as it had ever been, as Danni followed behind, slipping her hand down his pants to stroke his butt.

  Ego: Questioning

  I have to get out of here. I have to make this stop. I have to find Danni . . . no, refind her. Where the hell is she? What the hell happened? I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel my feet. I can’t see.

  I am blind, eye-blind, skin-blind.

  I try to scream, but I am mouth-blind as well.

  I am not ear-blind, yet.

  And slowly I realize that I shall never have the mercy of becoming memory-blind, as much as I might pray for that end.

  What have I done? Where’s Danni?

  I move to explore the extents of my blindnesses. I realize that eye-blindness is not quite right. Bright streaks and specks and silver speckles punctuate my darkness.

  Night?

  In a ward?

  If I could move my head, I could look to see if red and green lights flicker in time to the machine-beeps that surround me. I could interrogate my world. If I could move my head.

  But I feel nothing on my body. No cool sheets, no leather straps, no serrated bone knives cutting deep into my receiving flesh. Only my thoughts, only my ears, only my not-quite-seeing eyes.

  Where is Danni?

  Where am I?

  What has become of what I meant to do?

  I can remember the second cut, the bigger one, digging a strip from my thigh, working with scalpel and surgical scissors, laying it open so that it would heal in a trough, a divot of the flesh where a lover’s fingers might rest, reaching within me, shielded only by scar tissue and old pain from what pulses at my core.

  I did that one in the basement, in a galvanized tub filled with water and whiskey, almost four hundred dollars’ worth of Very Old Barton pickling me like a well drink in a shitty bar, instant antiseptic, blood staining the water even as I sipped from a little bucket, digging out my flesh the way a child digs sand at the beach, wrapping the strangled strips around my fingers, burning the wound shut with an old blowtorch, and smiling into the bright pain until I knew she would come and finally, finally, finally love me for the sacrifices I have made for her.

  Balls to the Wall

  The blood flows differently further down the trunk. It spreads, slows, finds its way into crannies of the body, carrying oxygen to places where the Divine Engineer did not think quite so far ahead.

  Blood-flow is familiar territory now, and Markus follows the pattern, letting the veins carry him where they will. He knows he is southbound, so to speak, and has his suspicions. Soon enough the red tide carries him into a spinning, curling region where the flow goes round and round and a massive orb rises like a globe of ferrous mercury emerging from an ocean of gelid fat.

  “Welcome,” says a voice. Where the liver was angry, frustrated, there is an almost divine detachment to this great thing. He realizes that is one of his testes.

  He might as well be speaking to the moon.

  “Hello,” Markus says quietly. He can find suddenly none of his anger or desperation. He only has resignation now.

  The moon-voice booms. “We are the seat of love.”

  “I know,” he says. “You are the fountain.”

  There is a long, slow silence, the noise of something great passing overhead. “We are not the fountain. That lies elsewhere.”

  “But love is a fountain.”

  “Love is everything.”

  Rote philosophy. He realizes that his testes are not very bright. “What happened to me?” he asks anyway, thinking they might know more than he does somehow. They are the seat of love.

  “Everything.”

  Love. The great slow voice means love.

  “But what happened to her?”

  “Who?”

  And now, Markus is so far from memory, that he cannot remember. Who was she? Where did she go? How far away did she go?

  She led him, he understands suddenly, led him to a place where she left him, abandoned by his guide, deserted by his love, stranded in the blood-red precincts of his worshipping soul.

  “Damn,” he says.

  “Love is not a sin,” the moon-voice intones. “There is nothing to damn here.”

  “Only me,” he says, his voice descending into a whimper.

  A great tube comes for Markus, elephant’s trunk the size of the world-snake, whuffling and snorting, and he is pulled up, transported by the miracles of peristalsis and hydraulics, moving ever faster toward an inevitable end that would have him crying out were he able to cry any more in this life or the next.

  He misses what he has lost, he realizes, if only he understood what that would be.

  The name comes to him then, a parting gift from the moon-voice echoing up the long, accelerating tube.

  “Danni.”

  Danni.

  Danni?

  But that’s not his name.

  Screaming wordless and soundless, he is born once more into the dark light of evening on a fountain of love.

  γ: Love in the Time of Metal

  The machines have him now. Silicon circuits, copper jumpers, small blocks of bright plastic connected with goo and solder. He chases electrons, tinier than he has ever been, a single-orbited machine reduced to a solitary bit of information about himself, though replicated a thousand million times so that he actually can remember who he is in moments when enough of him cross himself over.

  This machine here monitors his heart. He stares out of the winking red eyes at the body on the bed, then flinches without registering what is missing and what is there.

  That machine there monitors his electroencephalograms. Little waves dance, flat then high, swelling across one another in a march of thought and feeling. He would climb and surf, if he could, but metal gleams in the green glow outside his fascia, metal and different colors of flesh, a person underneath a sheet wrapped in bandages that protect those around him.

  The other machine monitors blood chemistry, a realtime assay of those things which might kill him in a moment. He avoids that as well, avoids the messy truths about blood volumes and types and contaminants, preferring instead to feed into the wiring harnesses and oxygen lines that permeate the hospital walls, chasing data ghosts and old echoes of himself and those around him.

  “What became of her?” he queries the circuit breakers, the junction boxes, the security eyes that watch the orderlies steal drugs and feel up the unconscious women.

  “What became of he
r?” he asks the computers, bitter and silent workstations pounded by nurses and pharmacy techs.

  Finally he leaves the hospital to ask the world, but the grid is too large for him and slowly, surely, with the inevitability of a landslide in winter, he is drawn back to the chilled muck and metal-laced hell he has made of his body.

  She had made.

  His guide.

  Leading him to the blood springs, then abandoning him there gutted like a fish, though the feel of her fingers in the wound of his thigh is as fresh as some touch which might have passed between them earlier that same night.

  “What have I done?” he asks the hospital systems and the patient floor buffers and the stolid morgue refrigerators.

  But here are no answers, only a sixty-cycle hum and the long, slow thoughts of silicon and copper, ageing on a different timescale than their human masters or his dying body.

  The truth is there, if only he can lift enough of his eye-blindness to see it.

  He will find that truth, in memory if not in the world around him.

  Somewhere a nurse squeaks across a threshold, coughs her revulsion, and touches his forehead.

  Touch.

  He has felt touch.

  If his eyes worked, he would weep.

  History 101

  When Markus was seven, his mother moved the family into the house on County Road 61. Markus couldn’t quite remember what had happened to his dad, even then, had not even the memory of knowing, but the scent of aftershave and the sandpaper stubble of a hollowed cheek stayed with him as the sole and primary awareness of fatherdom.

  Mother, whom everyone including Markus called Sail after some long-ago childhood episode, had taken her three kids, Markus and his two sisters, and gone into the sticks of Caldwell County, Texas, in the wake of his father’s departure. No one cared much but her and her former in-laws, but that was enough for Sail.

  The house he remembered vividly. It was a small frame structure, in the time-honored tradition of backwater Texas counties, the wood silvered to the sheen of a book-eating insect, every beam and joist and window just far enough out of true that the eye ached for something logical and simple, sweeping to the post oak trees or the red-clay horizon of the next rise, rather than dwell on the improbable place.

  There had been electricity, and running water, though an outhouse was a necessity. Sail arrived with her three children and such worldly goods as could be stuffed into an electric blue 1969 Mercury Marauder with a rusted-out floor pan covered over in bright orange Homasote. Markus’ first real memory in life was unpacking that car, toting huge canvas mail sacks of clothing and dishes that all reeked of smoke.

  He never did remember a fire.

  So they settled into life, five plates and three spoons between the four of them—Sail, Markus, Anna, and Tildy.

  Markus first realized something was wrong, in a different way, when the fall came around and Sail wouldn’t let him go to school.

  “You’re not leaving the house,” she told him. “Ain’t safe out there.” Then she gathered him close to her chest—which was like being hugged by an ironing board—and whispered in his ear, her breath hot with chilis and beer. “Ain’t losing my other man to nobody.”

  Markus wiggled away, slipping out of her scabbed arms to run outside where the bullfrogs peeped and the coyotes yipped. He lay on his back amid misting cow pies and counted stars until his eyes watered from the scent and the evening chill.

  When he went back to the house, both of his sisters were sleeping on the porch couch. It had arrived lashed to the roof of the Mercury, and though there was no inside couch, it was still the porch couch. Anna and Tildy were curled up among a pile of feed sacks, rolled together like a pair of puppies.

  That likely meant Sail had been smoking, Markus knew. She usually sent the kids outside before she got her pipes out.

  He went in anyway, cold and looking for something to drink.

  The house was dark, no lights at all, so the sheets over the windows glowed a pale, shiny blue from the moonlight outside. Sail wasn’t on the blankets in the front room, so Markus slipped into the kitchen. He very carefully opened the water tap, trying not to set the pipes to banging, and filled a chip-lipped jelly jar. After drinking the water down, Markus stepped quietly back into the front room, only to run into Sail, literally smacking his face into his mother’s bare belly.

  She was nude except for a blanket over her shoulders like a cape. Markus looked down, away from the dark tips of her breasts, only to find himself staring at the fur between her legs. Sail wrapped her arms around him, pulling Markus close so his face was pressed into her belly again, her breasts nudging the top of his head.

  “Oh, my boy, my baby, my baby-man,” she whispered. Her arms wrapped tight around him, and she began to move her hips as if she itched.

  “Mom,” Markus complained, but she drew him down onto the blankets, and curled him so close he could barely breathe, kissing the top of his head over and over and over and calling him by some man’s name.

  Despite himself, he grew warm and hazy, snuggling in closer to her chalky, sour-milk skin until his mouth found her breast and they both suckled to sleep.

  He woke to pain. His mother stood over him, her face red, spitting, still naked, beating at him with a pair of black-handled kitchen scissors. Anna and Tildy were shrieking nearby, but Sail kept slapping him with the flat of the blades, some of the blows cutting him anyway, shrieking “Pervert! Pervert!” until he rolled away and hid beneath the blankets crying, rubbing the blood of his wounds free with his fingers and suckling the fluid down in the warm salty memory of the night before.

  Id: Causative Agent

  I will ever be machine. They have wired me tight, filled me with batteries and probes and psychotronic receptors. They have braided my nerves with superconducting filaments wired into the mind of God. They have inserted drills and chisels and silver-belled hammers into my head, making room among the valleys of my cerebellum for their ideas, for their world, for their small minds and smaller needs.

  To be machine is to be reduced. To be reduced is to become something both less and more, focused and refined, lost in the spinning axles that bind the axes of the universe together, an agent of change and visualization and ideation loose within the weeping walls of the world.

  My machine-self is oiled with blood, a fluid ever more viscous and meaningful than the common run of heartsalt which flows from most wounds. Even an amateur can mainline sewing machine oil, but only the evolved, those in touch with their inner steel and brass, those for whom the concept of valvehood has gone from engineering abstraction to personal integument, can truly understand the reach and breadth of the mechanical man.

  Metal does not weep. Iron does not know pain. Brass does not understand fear. Cold electrons carry no unpleasant memories. Hydraulic lines bring no traitor joy, to tempt a man into lying down on another bed of pain.

  Machine ever I will be, lost in the twisting coiling guts of flensing knives and rendering fats and great metal forks which twist muscle fibers like yesterday’s spaghetti and tomorrow’s surplus data cabling mixed together, until all the flesh and pain is drawn forth from me and I have been distilled of purpose, distilled of feeling, distilled of the deep wells which make me human.

  Distilled of love.

  δ: Love in the Time of Metal

  He is become a laser. The modern surgeon’s blowtorch and machete in one sleek package, cutting and cauterizing and making small and making whole in one ruby beam. He has lost himself in the intricacies of crystal, light, timing, and phase. He knows that if God had a finger on the world, it would be a laser too, a giant beam of ruby death stalking the landscape as dread as any whirlwind. Just as his laser-self stalks the flesh, pushing dread and fear of change before his bright finger.

  There is an exploration now, a mapping of flesh and outreach toward bone, his bright blade of light slicing someone toward blessèd oblivion. The skin seems familiar, mottled tones and metal inter
ruptions looming before him in a landscape as intimate as any mission-profiled terrain begging for the arrival of daisy cutter munitions and fuel-air explosives.

  His laser self traces the scars of old sutures, stumps and pits where such things as a body might need to prosper seem to have vanished from the flesh, traveling on over that tight terrain as intrepid as any explorer of ancient days. He is pleased to note that some of the work is very well done indeed, as if shaking hands had improved skills over time.

  Or slim hands had rendered aid, when the shaking hands and missing fingers became too intrusive.

  He inquires of a scar: “What became of her?”

  The light hisses, photons making impossible noises, as the gears and screws within his lungs begin to jangle together.

  “What became of her? Why did she leave me behind?” A pitted scar amid mesh plates on the abdomen has no answer.

  Something spasms, big and glittering, looming in the darkness as a doctor curses and the laser that is him stutters. A blade is loose, free, unable to be separated from the flailing arm as the jangling within his lungs fights to become a scream, a sob, a shout of terror.

  “Where is she?”

  The name comes back again, a gift from some part of his body or another.

  “Danni!” he shouts.

  There is almost a noise. The laser flickers and dies, the doctor curses again, the landscape of flesh and metal and suture scars writhes more wild while the blade flies free with a spray of someone else’s blood and his quiet scream turns to aching laughter.

  His voice is back, and he can see.

  Colon and Semicolon

  This migration is lower and slower, a ponderous movement through great channels of peristalsis and annular musculature. The churn is vasty and deliberate, a different push of fluids than he has felt before. Markus is in a great hall, a sort of cloacal cathedral of the body.

  He is suddenly glad to be nose-blind.

  This is the final river, the great fall which evacuates the body and cleanses what was before. He has arrived at the colon in his pursuit of love.