by Aimee Bender
As the goldfish digested, I got a real taste of my friend’s memories . . . his life . . . particularly before he met me. And although I’m not sure if I understand him any better, I’m just really glad that he kept his fishbowl so clean.
ATWATER
CODY GOODFELLOW
Life was not so unkind to Howell as it seemed to the world at large—it offered few surprises, and predictable rewards. Where there were explicit directions, Howell found he could go anywhere, do anything, but whenever and wherever he got lost, he found Atwater.
The first time it happened, he believed, at first, that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been. On his way to a business appointment in Burbank: he’d given himself plenty of time to get there, leaving the office in Mid-Wilshire an hour ahead of the departure time on the Triple A itinerary he’d printed out the night before. After living in LA for over a year, he still did this for any place he had never driven, and kept a binder and three map books.
Traffic shut him down within sight of his office. Parked on the 101, swimming in sweat, and he suddenly, absolutely, needed to pee. He couldn’t just give up and get off; it had to get better soon, but it got worse, so clusterfucked by Hollywood Boulevard that he couldn’t even get through the glacial drift of traffic to the exit. Watching as the time of his appointment came and went, and he wasn’t even in the Valley, yet he was committed. The southbound traffic was almost as bad. Howell left a message to reschedule with the client in Burbank. The secretary treated him like some idiot who’d tried to ride a horse into town.
Wondering which of the empty coffee cups at his feet he’d like to try going in, wondering why the sensible Volvo people had never tackled this crying need of the long-haul motorist, Howell crawled through the pass and into the Valley.
With a dramatic flare that must be truly impressive from a swiftly moving car, the 101 burst out into Griffith Park, and a blazing Catherine Wheel avalanche of sulfurous afternoon sunlight speared his brain. Cascades of shaggy green hills and shadowed black canyons of wilderness under glass lurched up to the shoulder and Howell was looking somewhere else when horns sounded behind him, and the road ahead was a vacant plain.
Howell whooped with joy and stomped on the gas. The Triple A directions had wilted into pasty slime from the heat and smog and sweat from his hands, pages stuck together. The damned thing was supposed to be foolproof, distances totaled out to the hundredth of a mile, but 42.62 crept by on his trip odometer, and no Burbank Avenue. No off-ramp at all, and then he saw from the baffling menu of interstate and city highway junctions in the southbound lanes, that he was on the wrong freeway, and headed east to Pasadena.
No one let him out of the left lane until he’d passed under the Golden State Freeway. With a defiant berserker roar, he kamikazed the next off-ramp and slammed on the brakes, power-sliding up a hairpin chute between blank brick walls. He skidded to a stop just short of the sign.
ATWATER, it said. No population or elevation, no explanation, no Kiwanis or Lion’s Club chapters. Just ATWATER.
He idled at the intersection for a good long time. No other cars came. There were no other cars. Anywhere.
In the middle of LA. No cars. No pedestrians, either. Howell waited for something, for a director to scream, “Cut!” and a crew to spill out from behind these painted murals of a ghost town to resurrect the scene he’d ruined.
On the three corners opposite the off-ramp, a 7-11, an AM/PM, and another 7-11, all abandoned, windows shattered, roofs askew and foundations cracked. All angles subtly off, and apartment buildings down the street had collapsed, crushing their ground floors or spilling their contents out into the street. All the entrances were swathed in CAUTION tape, and Condemned notices were pasted on all remaining doors. “By order of FEMA—”
The last real earthquake in Los Angeles was in 1993. Howell looked into this before taking the job and moving here. A decade later, and they never tried to rebuild? Unless it was a movie set… or something else happened here—
Imagination did nothing good for Howell. He let it go and set the Volvo rolling down the main drag.
Atwater wasn’t large; he could see the same brick wall cutting across the street only a few blocks from the off-ramp. The whole area was walled off from the rest of the city, a pitcher plant with only one mouth, into which he’d stumbled. The sounds of the city outside were almost completely muzzled. He heard only the hushed hum of distant traffic and something like electronic wind chimes, or a Don’t Walk alarm for blind pedestrians, but here, nothing moved. Fine then, he’d turn around.
A man threw himself across the hood of his car. Threw himself, those were the right words, because Howell certainly didn’t hit him—
“Please,” the man bleated, beating on the windshield, “please help—”
The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn’t locked it. He wore a navy blue suit and tie, shabby and shiny, the kind of thing an exceptionally cheap prison might parole its least promising inmates in, but he didn’t look like a bum, and Howell supposed he wanted to help, so he let the man fumble it open and fall into the passenger seat. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, “for someone to come…”
“Where the hell are we? Where’s everybody?”
“No onramp,” the man wheezed, hauling the door shut and turning to look at Howell. “We have to go back up the off-ramp, but nobody comes in here, ever… For God’s sake, let’s go!”
Something buzzed past Howell’s ear. He whipped his head around so fast something tore in the back of his neck, but he let out a sharp yelp and shouted, “Did you see it? You let a—let it in—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
Howell looked at the man’s face, at gaping pores all over his face and neck, tessellated hexagons like tiny, waxy mouths. Black, buzzing bullets oozed out of them. His head was a honeycomb.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the man offered, his humming hand shooting out to bar Howell in his seat. “Please just drive.”
Howell shrieked. He was allergic to bee stings. He was allergic to the word Bees. He yanked open the door and threw himself out, but the fucking seatbelt trapped him, hanging upside down in the street. His hand slapped at the button, or was it a latch…
Bees swarmed and formed a beard on the man’s face. “You’re making them mad,” the man said, his eyes wet, nose streaming snot and furious bees drowning in it. Tiny feather-touches of agitated air played over Howell’s face, the microscopic violence of thousands of wings. A homicidal halo roared around his head.
The seatbelt snapped free and Howell rolled out of the Volvo, hit the street running on all fours, out of the intersection and into the nearest shelter, the underground garage of a three story townhouse.
He slid on his belly down the steep driveway and crawled under the gate, jammed open on a toppled Vespa scooter. The dark was his only cover, here. He had no real hope of finding help, only of hiding until the lunatic either stole his car or abandoned it, but he was not getting back in there. He’d walk out onto the freeway and hail a Highway Patrolman, he’d get out, he’d go home and never come back…
Almost nauseous now with relief, Howell unzipped and pissed in the dark.
A sound, and then another, behind him. His bladder slammed shut; his balls crawled up and wrapped around his femoral artery, legs tingled and fell into a coma. Small sounds, but distinctive, and if not threatening, then in this alien place they portended a myriad of things, all awful.
It was the sound of a metal tool striking a metal tray, and the sound of a miniature saw biting into something hard, and the cloying reek of burning bone. Howell turned and sought something to hide behind as he saw how far from alone he was.
A moth-battered ceiling fixture lit up a shining steel table in the center of the empty garage. Two gaunt figures in black smocks and leather aprons hovered over it. They wore cages over their heads like old-time insane asylum alienists, or else their h
eads were cages, for they seemed to imprison nothing but shadows.
Between them on the table lay a nude female body, painfully white, viciously thin, a naked sprawl of cruel angles and lunar planes, decoratively inked with dotted lines that encompassed her whole form. Freshly sutured cuts ran down the arms and legs, and perhaps the worst of it was that Howell saw nowhere a drop of blood.
Deftly, one of the alienists sawed down the bridge of the dead woman’s nose, while the other peeled the parted skin away from the skull. Howell didn’t know how long he watched; their procedures were so methodical, he got sucked into infinite minutiae, only to take a sudden, stabbing breath when suddenly, with a magician’s flare, the peeler laid bare the skull and held it up.
The skull was black glass, toxic onyx ice, squealing and smoking as it met the hot, stale air. The alienist dropped it into an oil drum, changed into a fresh pair of heavy rubber gloves and opened the gilded doors of a medieval reliquary on a sideboard.
The cutting alienist continued his master ventral incision at the jaw, laying bare the fuligin struts of the rib cage, which spewed ribbons of oily black vapor across the table.
Its colleague selected an ancient yellow skull from the reliquary and deftly slipped it into the hollow pouch of the face, arranging the features just so, then stitching the lips of the incision together with colorless spiderweb thread as fast as a sweatshop matron.
Cowering behind a Camaro half-propped up on cinder-blocks in the far corner of the garage, Howell started to creep backwards to the gate. He’d face down the honeycombed man, or just run out onto the freeway, and get out of here—
When the woman on the table spoke.
“I felt that,” she whimpered, and Howell was gored by the wonder in her voice, as much as by the fact that the speaker was a filleted cadaver, with two headless surgeons elbow-deep inside her. He trembled, but it was thousands of misfired reflexes warring with each other as he tried to frame a reaction.
An alienist set a crumbling, fossilized rib cage into the empty thorax and sewed it up as the other prepared to join his incision with the cleft of her groin.
Howell rushed at the cutter, screaming, “Get off her!” with his fists pounding its broad back and he almost fell into it when the towering form collapsed on itself with no more resistance than an airborne shopping bag.
He blundered into the edge of the table and knocked the wind out of his lungs as the alienist with the needle calmly reached for something on the tray that looked like a nail gun.
On the table, the woman looked at him. Her eyes, impossibly vast black pupils, ringed by violet irises like bone-deep bruises, drank him in and stole something he needed to breathe. “Take me,” she said, “take me away—”
Howell’s hand found the knife and lashed out across the table at the other alienist. The blade slashed through unresisting fabric, the black form deflated and melted into the oil-stained shadows.
Howell dropped the knife and looked for something to cover her with, trying to say, “I’ll get you—get you out—”
“What’s your name, here?” she asked.
He took off his jacket and draped it over her, arms out, awkwardly trying to size her up to lift. “Um, Howell, Roger, um, Howell. Listen, are you okay to move? I saw them…”
She sat up on the table and leaned into him. The exquisitely fine stitching down the center of her face creaked when she smiled and put the knife to his throat. Her other hand hustled his crotch. “I’m cured.”
He looked away, but she forced him to look with her knife. “Get hard,” she commanded, and tore herself open.
Her breasts, almost imperceptible swells but for her angry, erect nipples, like bites from some enormous spider that lived in her bed, like accusing snail-eyes.
His stomach rolled and everything was hot, rushing water, drowning him. He wished he could melt and flow away through her fingers, but where he wanted it least, he swiftly became solid under the harsh ministrations of her bony hand.
Using the knife and his cock as levers, she got him up onto the table, peeled away his slacks and boxers. “Let me see you,” she husked in his ear, “show me what you really are.”
He couldn’t melt or run away, so he just took it. Froze solid as she lowered herself onto him, cold, tight and dry, spat on the head of it and impaled herself.
Inside, she felt like anything but flesh, ground-glass needles and gnashing teeth and mortuary marble, doors within doors opening in a cold black cathedral. He thought of the operation he’d interrupted, the looted fossils of a saint swapped out for her toxic necrotic skeleton, and in the open reliquary he saw a pale yellow pelvis, untransplanted—
Spastic reflex wrapped his arms around her, protruding ribs like notches for his fingers. Her concave torso shook as if she was full of panicked birds, and she hissed, to him or to herself, “Take your medicine.”
Shuddering, she rose up and dropped herself hard against him, and spider webs of black ice shot through his hips and into his guts. In his head, he reviewed sums, columns of expenditure figures for the projected relocation scheme his company had sent him up here to investigate. Culling them fiercely in the quiet corners of his mind, he noted two adding errors and committed them to memory, as soon as he got back to his laptop, he’d correct them—
The knife never left his throat. It sawed back and forth as she smashed herself against him, eyes rolled back, breath choppy gusts of frigid mist that grew colder with every stroke, despite the unbearable friction.
“Take it, take it,” she growled in his ear, and in rushing waves of cold and heat, he knew he’d lost what he’d put into her, it was hers now, and she was fucking him to death with it. He could only hold on.
Her rhythm sped, stiffened, such a ferocious blur of motion that he could not open his eyes, and she screamed, “He’s coming, faster, he’s coming—”
The sensation spreading through him now pulled him further away from the world, fired his gut-sense that the agony of pleasure he felt was really her coming inside him, taking him over. He hid from it, crying inside, please God, just let it be over—
She clung to him and froze, screaming like a rabbit in a trap. His skin was slathered in cold motor oil, and then she was gone.
He did not look around or try to cover himself, huddled on the icy steel table in a puddle of oil and urine, shocked mute by the sudden, sepulchral stillness.
The ground shook.
Dust and grit sprinkled his cold, raw skin. He rolled off the table and hitched his piss-soaked pants up over his bloodied hips.
He was alone in the dark. It was so quiet, he could hear the Volvo, still idling out on the street, and those faint, phantom chimes. But something else was coming, an itch in the soles of his feet, a tremor that shivered through his bowels, and he remembered what she’d said, just before she vanished.
He’s coming—
A steady, subsonic rumble spread up through the floor, a silent sound of pure terrestrial protest. A whole patch of ceiling gave way, dumping plaster and shattered concrete and spark-spitting washing machines into the garage.
Howell crawled under the gate and scrambled up the driveway on all fours, uttering a weird, panicked hooting sound with each hard-fought breath. He could still hear his car, so close, he could hear the seat belt alert beeping endlessly, and the dull burble of a public radio talk show on the stereo, but he could also hear voices on the street, and those chimes, growing louder, reverberating off the encircling walls of Atwater. And buzzing—
Howell hit the sidewalk and had to remind himself to keep moving to the Volvo. He saw no one inside it, but the honeycomb man stood in the middle of the street, and he wasn’t alone.
Another man, short, with a head like a claw-hammer, and snarls of piano wire running from his arms and legs and torso to a jumbled mound of marionettes in the street behind him, like the sole survivor of some sort of street-mime’s massacre. A little girl stood beside them, sucking her thumb and holding a length of an impossibly lon
g albino python, which wrapped around her so many times, showing neither head nor tail, that she might have been made of snakes.
She pointed at Howell as he ran for his car. The honeycomb man shouted, “Wait! Take us with you!”
He said something else, but though Howell saw his mouth working, he could hear nothing but the sound of jets, a squadron of them, flying up out of the secret, hollow heart of the earth.
Behind Howell, the townhouse lurched forward with an orchestral moan and settled down into the underground garage. The apartment block behind it bulged and broke open, rooms bursting like bubbles full of abandoned human lives and flaming, flying debris, a wall of dust and smoke and something coming through it, something that made the freaks on the street race for his car.
Howell got in and slammed the door, locked it and threw the Volvo in gear. He threw the wheel to the right, jumping the curb and flattening a street sign. The honeycomb man spilled across the hood in a roiling cloud of bees. Howell screamed and stomped on the gas, batting the air vents shut.
The puppeteer waved at him, hurling screaming marionettes into the grill of the car. Their wooden claws gouged out his headlights and chrome and ripped off his antenna as he passed, looking for the narrow niche in the wall that he’d come in through, but it was gone, the intersection with the three convenience stores was now a T-junction facing a blank brick wall.
The insanity, the injustice of it all, finally broke him. He kept going forward, but he saw nothing.
And then the ground shifted, and the car was going uphill, but he only went faster up the tilting fragment of the street. The wall fell away as the ground rose, as something unspeakably heavy gained on him, making a sinkhole of Atwater from which he could not hope to escape.
Howell saw the freeway. The cars were hurtling by and he was headed into their midst in the wrong direction, but he did not care. He saw only fire and black smoke in his rearview mirror. He wrenched the wheel around as the Volvo sailed off the ragged edge of the broken road and over the wall, and he saw a flash of white in the mirror.
