by Jay Lake
Markus Selvage: An Inventory
Syringe, left pinkie
Cabling, embedded in right forearm musculature
Cabling, embedded in left upper arm musculature
Kevlar mesh, rib cage
Knife, eight inches, mated to stump of left wrist parallel to remnants of hand, with Kevlar sheath
Titanium plates, cheekbones, ribs, miscellaneous
Steel spurs, elbows
Piercings, various and substantial
Internal/soft tissue implants, unknown
Biologica, various and substantial
Softly Into the Cerebellum
Markus knows this journey by now. He is passing through a swift, rich flow of blood, frothy oxygen being transported toward some higher place, under pressure against gravity, time and entropy. The cycle of the flow tells him he is heading northward, toward his body’s hyperborean regions, things coming to a head.
There is a barrier ahead, a stretchy curtain sealing the increasingly tiny channels through which he travels from his road of red. He reaches out, snagging that curtain, leaving the flow to wrap himself in soft gray, fog spun to textile, the death of hope distilled to a caul that could drape across the weeping face of a wretched man.
It is but a step and a twist to pass through the barrier into the complicate, tessellated, tesseracted hallways of the brain.
Biology by Escher. Quantum spaces and open connections, potential drawn forth from the dance of dendrites and the nattering neurons. The stairway which loops back on itself, climbing forever, uphill in every direction, the human mind an island of negative entropy—and here he is within the seat of his own thoughts and feelings like Arthur on his marble hilltop throne in Avalon.
“Where is the fountain?” Markus asks himself.
There is no answer, only the echoing of his whisper within the great halls of mind.
She is here. She is close. Either Danni herself or the memory of her. He is not certain which, nor even certain if there is a difference between her presence and her memory. Is the idea of her the same as her? Is the image of his love for her the reality?
He tries again. “Where is she?” It is like speaking to a well. There are no answers save the quiet whisper of distant, damp echoes.
“What have I done with her?”
The image of Dr. Thompson’s scan comes to him unbidden, a memory of that dark, negative image with its curiously squared cheeks.
The plates he sewed into place, pushing them through slits while leaning in front of the bathroom mirror.
But there was something else, something cold and wrong with that scan. Something he could not face. Something fearful.
Something he had done.
“I killed her,” he tells his brain.
“I loved her,” his brain replies in the voice of a thousand books burning, a crackling, hot narrative that reduces words to ash and scorches his sense of himself.
“She is dead.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes,” his brain says.
Many people are dead now. Sail. Daddy Nekko. Two of the map boys. Soon, all too soon, Markus himself most likely, due to complications of tissue rejection.
Tissue rejection?
But he was about pain, and metal.
“Skin so close, skin so fine,” his brain tells him, again in that book-voice, the words screaming agony.
“Did I kill Momma?” he asks.
“That’s where it began,” his brain tells him.
“Where does it end?”
“Here. Soon. Go find the fountain of love.”
“Where?”
“Within you. Without you. Wherever you have placed it.”
He is sick then, sick of riddles and dreams and half-answers from inside himself. All he wants is Danni, his love back, his truth back.
Somewhere outside him people clothed in white are shouting, bringing great, enormous needles from shrink-wrapped trays, muttering obscenities to the blinking green lights that monitor the passing of his life.
What is it that he cannot face? Inside his head. Inside his body. Inside his brain.
He is cast out in that moment, cast forward, ’til he opens his eyes, opens his mouth, sees the needle buried in his chest and shouts in a voice the size of mountains, “I did not kill her!”
Superego: Resignation
I am finished. I know that now. My attempts to build myself to strength, to a mighty fortress of love, have come to nothing. I have brought too many with me to this final place, a trail of souls behind me.
I will not shrink, nor shirk from these things my hands have done, but neither will I suffer for the sins of others. Sail is at peace, though she did not die peacefully. I did not send her on that final journey, though in another time and place I might have. Daddy Nekko I did send, along with two of his map boys, for what he did to Danni, and through Danni, to me.
Danni . . .
I am sorry for Danni.
The machines have me now. Not my machines, not my beloved metal and electronica, blade edge and blood plasma, but the machines of allopathic medicine, cutting the body without regard to the soul, operations of the flesh that take no account of the wounds of the heart.
Here, now, I am done. My breath rattles. I am not sorry for who I am. I have found love, if only for a while. I am only sorry for her, for all the hers and all the thems and all the things I have done wrong.
They are stabbing me now, with knives and syringes and cutting scissors, these white-coated devils of mercy so intent on my well-being. If I could stop vomiting, if I could find my breath, I would open my mouth and tell them to end their effort, to let me find my own peace, let me become one with the rattling gears and chilled metal which make up the best of me, until the flesh sloughs away and I am distilled to a chill frost of love, and a man known and unknowing, safe from hurt, inside only the pain I have chosen, distant from mother, lover, sister, friend, drowning in only those memories I choose.
I shall swim forever in the perfect moments of my love, and where I am going, God will never find me.
The Last of the Crimes of Danni Killabrew
Danni Killabrew boards an American Airlines flight from San Francisco to Dallas. The aircraft is a 757, which should be comfortable but is not. She sits in the blue seat with the scratchy fabric and the leather headrest and stares out at the Rorschach clouds. There are faces and hands and vulvas and anuses and starfished wounds with tucked-back edges to be seen aplenty in the mighty tighty whities of the clouds, but they do not interest her.
Daddy Nekko has asked her to do a Certain Thing, and he has used a Certain Word, which means that as Danni values life, she must do it. Daddy Nekko has owned her, or at least the important parts of her, since she permanently left the fourth grade in an unmarked van driven by someone she didn’t know. Every breath she had drawn, every bite she has eaten, every orgasm that has shaken her groin since that day; these things are all his property.
Even her love belongs to Daddy Nekko, though in his generous nature he allows her to job it out to promising youngsters like Markus.
In Dallas, Danni buys a pretzel from a sullen Salvadoran woman pretending to be Auntie Anne in a brightly-decorated food booth, then boards the short flight to Austin on an MD-80. That flight is just long enough for her to remember the first time Daddy Nekko asked her to do a Certain Thing. She was fifteen, and still thought she lived wrapped in love, and so she did that Thing, which bound her to him forever in chains of shared secrecy and criminal liability.
At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport she rents a comfortable car, a Lincoln with cruise control and GPS. She drives south on Highway 183, finally parking the Lincoln behind a rural cemetery. Taking only her satchel of sex toys, Danni walks to the nearest farm, where she hotwires an old Chevrolet pickup with local plates and enough mud to be noticed by no one.
From there it is a short drive to another farm where she steals certain tools from the barn. Surprising a farmh
and on the way out, or possible a family son, she stabs him in the eye with an awl, then slits his tongue so he will not talk before he dies.
It is another short drive to Sail Selvage’s old house with the rusting Mercury moldering in the yard and the henge of paint cans in the tomato garden. Farm tools stand in for her preferred surgical implements, but otherwise she does the Certain Thing Daddy Nekko sent her to do, with the same pride, pleasure, and professionalism that he has trained into her.
It is only later, in her second stolen car, on the way back to recover the rented Lincoln, that she stops and throws up in the bar ditch. Kneeling in the Johnson grass, gagging on death and pain for the first time in her life, Danni realizes that she actually loves Markus, himself, for her own reasons.
Her greatest crime is betrayal. Blood is business, but she has torn his heart out, though it might be that he never knows this thing.
She resolves that she will confess. Either Markus or Daddy Nekko both will likely kill her for talking.
The Lincoln has good air conditioning, and Danni is able to buy enough beer at a rural convenience store that by the time she checks in to the Quality Inn in Del Valle, Texas, just outside the airport grounds, she has all but forgotten her resolve. Thinking on the death of Sail Selvage, she masturbates long in the tub before watching old Hollywood musicals all night and never sleeping at all.
“I love you,” she whispers to the gray, phosphor-lit morning, but she is no longer sure who it is that she is speaking to.
vi: Love in the Time of Flesh
When Danni finally told Markus what she’d done and why, he knew his time of love was over. He didn’t understand the real why—just hers, that Daddy Nekko had asked of her something that could not be refused—but even knowing only what she told Markus, his heart road had ended.
“Thank you,” he whispered to Danni. He pulled her close, the eight-inch knife that had replaced his left hand (except for the pinkie syringe) drawing tight against her neck, his right hand, intact for needle work, stroking her back. “I treasure your honesty as I treasure our love.”
She began to sob, her face buried in his chest. The mesh in his ribs stung a bit, but he couldn’t tell if that was post-operative pain or his own heartache expressing itself literally.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” he said, raising his flesh hand to smooth her hair. He began massaging the left side of her neck with his flesh hand, just behind the blood vessels, while using the flat of the blade of his metal hand on the other side.
Danni purred through her shuddering tears, but settled further against him, relaxing into his touch. That did not seem to be a moment for cutting. He kept rubbing, relaxing and depressing her vagus nerve as her breathing slowed further until she collapsed.
Markus strapped her to his kitchen table with duct tape and some webbing hooked to bolts beneath, then rolled an IV stand into place. With long practice he set the needle in the back of her left hand, and put her on saline with a Valium drip.
He wanted Danni to still be there when he got back.
Then he packed up a collection of tools, including three fully charged tasers in case of an outbreak of map boys, and headed off to find Daddy Nekko in the name of love.
Later, much later, he came home bloody and tired. He’d left his tools behind, amid the parts and pieces of Daddy Nekko. There had been a bad moment with New York, but he’d handled it. New York and London he’d killed outright. San Francisco was somewhere out there, loose in the city he carried on his head.
Markus had every confidence that the third map boy would be coming for him soon enough.
Danni slept where he had left her, spittle pooling on one side of her lips. Her orange hair fell across her face in a loose fan, a spray of color that mirrored the bright red sprays Markus had set free in Daddy Nekko’s tiled basement.
He touched her lips. They were narrow and pale, much like his mother’s had been on those long-ago nights. It had been almost eighteen months since Daddy Nekko had given Markus his first implant, and she’d never followed him into the big cuts. Always an excuse, always fear. She’d pulled away from him, over and over, though she kept coming back.
And now this. The death of his mother, ordered by Daddy Nekko as one of his Certain Things, performed by his love.
Because Daddy Nekko had been jealous, had wanted Markus to learn Certain Things of his own, about safety and security and who controlled the past and who controlled the world.
“I’m your daddy now,” he told his woman as she slept. Then he readied a surgical tray, readied the final melding of their love, steeling himself for what they would become together. “And we’re always going to be close,” he added, tracing lines upon her face with a marker.
Chamber Music of the Heart
He finally follows the flow to the source. The classical fountain of love, that clenched cliché, the human heart, his four-chambered pump driving the fatty meat of his organs and the slick, sullen machinations of his brain, oxygenating his muscles, circulating everywhere as the water of life.
The journey is swift, along the body’s greatest currents, surfing the cells until he stands within the clean atrial cathedral that lies at the center of the world of his being.
“I have come for the fountain,” he told the glistening muscles around him
“You are the fountain,” his heart said in a voice that echoed of the four-cycle lub-dub he often heard whispering in his ears at night.
“No.” Markus remembers almost everything now, even as the beat around him begins to flutter. “I am not the fountain. Love has left me.”
“Love is with you forever. I am with you forever.”
“There is no forever,” Markus says. “Everyone dies.”
“Love is still forever. It flows from you.”
“And Danni . . . ” He remembers so much now, almost everything, in these moments before he dies.
The heart sighs, hesitates. In some distant place, nurses shout as a doctor curses.
“Where did it go wrong?” he asks his heart.
“At the beginning.”
“Was it the pain?”
“No. It went wrong with was taken from you, and never given back. You found your way through pain, but that was not enough either.”
“She is with me now,” he says, approaching a state of satisfaction.
“She is with you for now,” corrects his heart.
There are the little matters of tissue rejection, mortality, but he carries her in his one dead eye, her green one loose in place of his brown, in the rippled skin of his abdomen where he flayed loose her face and sewed it within him, in the sliced-out tissues of her neocortex that he forced through the self-trephinated hole in the right side of his skull.
She is with him, within him, as much a part of him as all the metal and wires and cutting and pain, and he will carry her inside of him forever, far into the cold, unloving countries of the dead.
A needle plunges into the silent atrium where he stands, rupturing sac and muscle wall. Markus exerts his will, causing the fountain of love to unfold from him, blood exploding in three directions from his chest, one arm each of the abortive starfish for Sail, for Danni, and finally for himself.
“I love you,” he tells the garlic-breathed nurse, staring at her through his open eye as his chest collapses in a washing sea of draining pain.
History 105
When Markus was twenty-four and dying in a San Francisco hospital of a constellation of botched self-inflicted surgeries and some truly bizarre tissue rejection issues, his sister Anna Forksmith came to visit him.
It took her two days to talk her way past the front desk and into his ward. Two days, the services of the ombudsman, and several telephone calls to the Lockhart Post-Register which confirmed her relationship to the almost-late Markus Selvage. And finally, the intervention of a kindly doctor.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Anna told a woman with a toad’s face and too-tight pink nurse’s uniform. “He’s my brothe
r, we just lost our mother, and I’m going to fucking see him before he fucking dies.”
“Ma’am, only parents, children and spouses can—”
“He ain’t got none of them!”
The Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office was seeking a court order to take Markus into custody, surely a formality at this point, and Anna very much wanted to speak to him before he died or the cops got him. She wanted to know if he’d killed Sail, and what the hell had happened to him.
When she’d first asked for her brother, the mention of his name had caused two of the staff to head for the bathroom retching.
What the hell had happened to him?
No one seemed willing to say a word.
As she argued with the pink toad, a doctor came bustling in. He was a tall, irritated black man with salt-and-pepper hair and young eyes. “Are you Mr. Selvage’s sister?” he asked, ignoring the nurse.
Anna knew authority when she saw it. “Yes. Are you his doctor?”
“Well . . . yes.” He stared at her. “You do look like him.” Then, to the pink toad: “She’s with me.”
“Dr. Thompson, she can’t—”
“Shut up, Riley.”
Anna flipped the woman the bird and followed the doctor out into the hall.
They stopped outside a locked ward. Anna was relieved to see no cops.
“Listen,” said Dr. Thompson. “You look . . . uh . . . normal.”
“Normal?” She was so exhausted from two days of arguing that she wasn’t ready to fight about that too.
“He had a massive heart attack last night. Hemorrhaging internally from more points than I could begin to count. He has a lot of . . . uh . . . implants. Your brother was into some very strange territory, Ms. . . . Selvage?”
“Forksmith,” she corrected automatically. “But I’m Anna.”
“Well. We don’t know everything. Never will. I don’t know why he’s not dead right now. And there’s something seriously wrong with his gut. He may have . . . concealed evidence . . . beneath the skin. But he’s been too sick for us to go looking for it. That will have to wait for the autopsy.”
