Bombshell

by James Reich

  July 4, 1985. In those days, she was a pale, willowy pre-op scoring on the satin side streets of Chinatown, taping her sex back along her inner thigh. She had decided upon her name, and her old name—the masculine birth name—had become a meaningless blur of syllables, a sound like a death rattle. She was reaching the point where if she did not pass over from the mistake of manhood, then she would suicide out. Remembering the streets, she saw neon, rain, lanterns, and epicanthic stares. She was tall, like a ghostly mannequin made from whitewashed bamboo. The shots were thinning her muscles. She no longer needed to shave. Yet, the man she had been in Vietnam when he sprayed adrenal M-16 rounds into crowds of women and children running from a burning hut, that primal shade still hung on her back, reeking, hirsute, and clawing. He had to be exorcised. Soon, she would leave him on the operating floor beyond the jungles of Mexico.

  As distant fireworks burst over Fisherman’s Wharf, Molly Pinkerton looked for her Chinatown connection in the pungent steam of the evening. Her connection was another pre-op, a petite boy who when slipping her the estrogen doses would look at her as if to say: You’re not serious, are you? Don’t go too far, Jack. Let’s stick to dress-up, man. But Molly was fixed on the other side and the shrugging off of all remnants of animus. It was only later that she would learn that this, at least for her, was impossible. That night, she could not find her connection. In the place where they usually met, she encountered three skinheads from Oakland, scuffing in the broken glass that Molly deduced must have been the smashed estrogen phials.

  “Have you seen Fang?” she asked, willing her drag to work.

  “No ‘Fang,’” one of the skinheads said, starting toward her. “Just fags.”

  The beating came down, a cascade of violence from the dozen hammers of their fists and boots. She tried to raise her hands, but they were blown aside. Her ribs shattered inward toward her lungs and her jaw dislocated and cracked before she lost consciousness. Afterward, streetlight fell across her body, her eyelashes smeared off in a black mist and her lipstick spread across her cheek like in some pop video. When she awoke, all that was within her was to lie weeping in the street, until a cop discovered her and called an ambulance . . .

  She forced her way, disoriented and confused, along the dark snake of the road, struggling toward the lights of Madrid. Tremors possessed her in waves of nausea and violent memories. Her flesh was electrified with pain, the taste of blood in her mouth, a bloom of welts and bruises overwhelming her face through her tattooed makeup, her nerves in crisis. During the turgid miles of her descent, her mind sought to arrange conflicting information: If Cash was the intended target, they could not have known what she looked like; physically, they were poles apart. The abduction fell apart when they thought they had bagged a woman, so then, how could they have been targeting Cash? They were not nouveau riche queer-bashers, and they were not frat. They had asked about the motorcycle. They were looking for the rider, but did not know the sex of their mark. They assumed a male target. But who were they, and what did they want with Cash?

  Molly clawed back into town in the dormant early hours; dogs howled in the coal dust dark. Scarcely a lamp illuminated the blank shanties. The door of Cash’s cabin swung idly on its hinges as she approached. There was a sharp flash of light. Initially, Molly took it to be lightning over the hills, but then she saw it again, exposing the interior of Cash’s home. Holding her breath at the threshold, Molly heard the familiar spit and whine of a professional camera, a flashbulb flicker betrayed the black silhouette of the intruder. One of the abduction gang had remained, but should have split the scene by now. No cell phone reception, Molly realized. The rest of the gang would have tried to contact him with a warning, but he would have little or no signal in Madrid. Suppressing the spikes of pain in her ribs, the fear of a torn breast implant, Molly moved silently into the house and the small kitchen. On the table, beside the typewriter and a stack of paperback books, was the straight razor that Cash would use to cut her ragged hair. Silently, Molly picked up the blade.

  In the living room, Spicer held a small flashlight between his teeth while he photographed documents spread across the couch. Molly crawled from the kitchen, controlling her breathing, recalling the pouring jungles of Vietnam, the quiet terrors of night stalking. She thought of the skinheads beating her down. Now, here was one of the latest, dressed in black, buzz cut, and searching for her only friend. For a moment, undetected, Molly knelt behind the intruder, letting her heart beat a dozen times, letting it slow down. With one powerful arc and slash of her arm, she drew the razor swiftly and cleanly through his black fatigues, slashing deep into soft flesh, severing his hamstrings and opening pulsing arteries to the room. Blood sprayed from both legs, showering Molly in gore. In the reflex inhalation before trying to scream, Spicer sucked the flashlight back through his teeth and into his throat as he collapsed. The camera fell from his grip and jerked in stroboscopic spasms on the floor. He writhed piteously and almost silently upon the Navajo rug, saturated in blood, a ray of white light pouring from his mouth, roving over Molly’s face; he made choking sounds, tooth enamel cracking on metal. Molly pinned his arms with her knees; blood drooled out with the light.

  “I realize that there is a choice, motherfucker,” Molly snarled. “I should stop you choking and pull the flashlight out of your throat, but you’ll bleed to death anyway, and after the beating your boyfriends just gave me, I find myself morbidly fascinated to watch you die. I should ask you questions, but you would be reluctant to explain. I should find this revolting, but when you have witnessed one traumatic death, you’ve seen them all. You cunts really hurt me. I imagine that you wanted to hurt my friend, right? So, you see that you have abdicated your rights. There is absolutely no question of letting you survive. Brutalized by an ageing transsexual war vet? No one would believe you.”

  As Spicer lost consciousness, bleeding out on the cabin floor, warm plasma soaking his thighs, his last sight was of the face of Molly Pinkerton, her CIA-smashed mouth with its tattooed lipstick, a corona of blond hair in the brilliant fuzz of his flashlight as he choked on it.

  Adrenal currents lit up her flesh as Molly rolled the corpse up in the rug and dragged it into the bathroom. She would burn it in the morning. Returning to the living room, Molly switched on the lights. She gathered the sprawled papers and retired to the kitchen to make coffee. She poured a glass of water, taking three sips before leaning over the kitchen sink and letting the rest of it run over her hair and neck. She removed an elastic band from the pocket of her ripped, bloodied jeans to tie the cold strands out of her eyes.

  Molly began to work through the typewritten sheaves, ragged pages torn hastily from books, a Picasso postcard, halftone photographs, and fading newspaper clippings. There were several pages that resembled idiosyncratic astrological charts with their scrawl of intersecting lines and symbols. The pages that Cash appeared to have typed for herself were in red ink. Molly drank her coffee and stared at the capitalized titles of the pages, this strange bricolage of obituaries, history, fantasy, catastrophe, and violence. Pages and pages ran on in unbroken paragraphs. As Molly read, it was clear that Cash had created a plexus of justifications and rationales, and that even Molly herself had place within it. Now she had killed one of the shadowy agents who were taking Cash seriously enough to want to kidnap her. The corpse gurgled in the bathroom as Molly lost herself in the weird torrents from Cash’s typewriter:

  “In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States approved the oral contraceptive pill, just as the French conducted their first nuclear bomb test in the atmosphere above the Sahara desert during the Algerian War; Algeria, the birthplace of Hélène Cixous and so, of écriture féminine, defiant, gorgonian, elliptical, bisexual, unzipping the patriarchy of language. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique followed hard on the boot heels of the Bay of Pigs, and the midnight horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ruth Handler created the Barbie doll, and would later create prosth
etic breast implants for cancer patients. Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto shadowed the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; radical women protested the Miss America pageant in New York; Brezhnev sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to destroy anti-Stalinist liberal reforms in Prague. The U.S. bombed communist enclaves in Cambodia; Libya aligned itself with the Soviet Union; the Redstockings fought for abortion rights. The Vietnam War ended; Roe v. Wade, 1973; On the Beach through a cone of cinema cigarette smoke; and Threads on BBC television, deformed babies, melting milk bottles, Town Bloody Hall, children wept beneath school desks, women were lobotomized, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera . . . Second-wave feminism lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. How much would we give to fuck without the anxieties of the bomb, the nuclear age? The bikini, the tiki grotesques, the phallic designs of rocket cars, the cocktails, the antidepressants, the analysis, postcards of Shiva, anything to avoid looking directly at the bomb again. In the atomic age, all sex work is cliché. The hot girls are imported and traded from the radioactive forests of Eastern Europe; hot because their bones are riddled with cancer, and hot because they are emaciated, impoverished, supplicant to the skin trade, their eyes wide from postnatal visions of the scorched earth. The Cold War, the analog of the Sex War, did not end on December 25, 1991, as according to Bush-Yeltsin. It continues in sequined self-loathing and nostalgia. Also, it is played out with new, sexually repressive, puppet proxies in the Middle East. Under the logic of secularism, the French who tested their nuclear weapons on human conscript-subjects in the dunes of North Africa until April 26, 1961, have instigated a state-enforced striptease; the burka is burlesque in Paris, and they want it over with because of the agonies of Algeria. Burlesque is erotic parody: the parody of a sailor’s kiss in Times Square on VJ Day; the parody of American culture by Japanese teenagers; the parody of the bombing of Hiroshima by Paul W. Tibbets before a crowd of 40,000 cowboy-ghouls at Rebel Field, Harlingen, on the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1976; repeated mushroom clouds shadowing the oily waters. In the atomic age, all sex work is cliché. Every day is a martini glass, and a gorgeous peeled stocking, a bikini, and fucking on the beach before the ocean catches fire.”

  Finally, Molly fell asleep at Cash’s kitchen table.

  There was a sound from the living room behind her, a series of faint tones, as though a telephone had been left off its hook. She stood with some effort, stiff from her bruises and torn muscles, and from being fixed in the small kitchen chair for so much of the night. She limped from the linoleum floor to the whitewashed floorboards, listening and scanning for the source of the sound. Suddenly, she saw it. It was the camera, pitched on its side, close to the couch. She wondered how she could have forgotten it. She picked it up, feeling her cracked ribs. Turning it in her hands, she stared at the small LED screen where a series of lights tracked horizontally with each electronic tone. They increased their rhythm and became a short solid sound before the screen resolved an image of the floor where the camera was aimed. Moments later, Molly watched the screen turn blue and a message appeared there with the tolling of a thin electronic bell. Molly felt nausea rise. The camera had finally established a satellite Internet connection.

  Upload Complete—Files Deleted From Device

  April 8, 2011. Molly Pinkerton dragged the dead agent, enshrouded in Cash’s blood-soaked rug like a drag-king Cleopatra, through the cabin to the back door and the shared scrub of ground between Cash’s house and her own. Setting the rigid body down, she forced enough of it into a rusted oil drum that she could raise it upright. One section of the rug peeled back to reveal the corpse’s face. The batteries in the flashlight had failed during the night. In the pallid sun the face retained its fixed rictus of desperation. From information on the camera she learned that the intruder’s name was Spicer. With a can of gasoline from her makeshift garage, Molly doused the body and threw empty six-pack boxes, aborted artwork, and the remnants of Spicer’s camera that she crushed underfoot into the can. The blaze sent a plume of gray-black smoke across the slag heaps of Madrid in the early morning. Her heartbeat came hard in the bright New Mexico sunlight, ordained as she was now with an anxiety that would never pass from her. She knew that the camera had sent images of not only Cash’s archive, but also of the final flash-lit moments when she had killed the intruder. As the smoke poured into her lungs, she imagined the photographs rendered on a distant computer screen, and knew that the ones that had tried to take her, or to take Cash, would return. There had been one common note in the dissonant archive that Molly also cast upon the flames: the date April 26.

  ROBERT DRESNER AWOKE FROM A RESTLESS SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF data downloading to his cell phone and the laptop computer at his bedside, a series of regular alarm tones and pulsing blue lights. It was not yet 6 AM. It must be Spicer reporting in at last, he thought. He rolled toward the lamp and searched for the switch, suddenly finding himself wincing in the artificial light of the room. He called them ghost hotels, the suburban black-op sites. This one was in Albuquerque, on Coal Avenue close to the university and the green diamond where the Isotopes played baseball. He had retired there after Green had driven them down to Sandia Labs. His phone and computer were receiving different files. He listened to the thin buzz of the signal amplifiers as the files were drawn down into the hole where he was concealed beneath the adobe bungalow. Dresner connected the telephone to the computer, so as to see the files on a large screen when they finally came in. The files reaching his cell phone must have been sent by Spicer from the house in Madrid. He was confident that Spicer would have got out long before he would have been disturbed, even without his being able to send Spicer a warning. The other incoming data, he reasoned, must be from the LANL: the results of DNA tests and criminal cross-references on the hermaphrodite, or whatever it was the rendition team had rejected on the road last night.

  He climbed the metal ladder from the blank bunker space below the house and emerged in its utility room; shining unused washing machine, neatly folded piles of laundry like props and scenery from The Stepford Wives, he thought. Then, all of the trapping of New Mexicana, the gaudy retablos, dried red chilies hanging in peasant ristras, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe simpering from her turquoise and gold webbing. Dresner loathed the abode architecture of New Mexico. “It all looks like nests of shit rolled up by beetles,” he had said as the Cross Spikes Club drove into Santa Fe in their sinister van. He tucked a bottle of mineral water beneath his arm and carried the pot of automatically brewed coffee back down to the bunker. Stupid, he thought, if anyone ever used this place they would have figured out putting some of these things downstairs. He reclined on the bed and pulled the computer over and rested it on his naked chest. He opened Spicer’s photographs first. The serial numbers told him that he was seeing the latest images first, the file in reverse order. He struggled to assimilate what he was seeing, saying aloud: “Jesus fucking Christ, what’s this?” Suddenly, he recognized that he was staring at a photograph of blood pumping from Spicer’s legs in a scarlet arc, hissing over the crawling form of the transsexual, who seemed to be in the motion of hacking at Spicer with a blade of some kind; Spicer down; some kind of frozen struggle; light pouring from Spicer’s mouth; Molly Pinkerton leaning close to his face, crushing him. Dresner coughed vomit into his mouth. There was a time when even this shock would not have disturbed him. He suspected that it was because he was going to be married, and that part of his unconscious recognized that he would have to become a normal man. The introspection embarrassed him. He had seen enough to know what he must do.

  Detaching the ghost phone to make his call to The Voice, his only consolation was that the conversation would be brief, if he could control himself. He had not yet confessed the aborted rendition of Molly Pinkerton. Shivering, he wondered if one of his men would betray him, even without a direct line.

  “Spicer’s dead.”

  “Extract him, whatever condition.” The distant tones were without emotion. “Wha
t about the bomber? Did the bomber get Spicer?”

  “No. But I know who did. We’ll take him this morning.” Dresner wondered if he had consciously avoided saying “her,” and if so, why?

  “You fucked up.”

  “Yes. We fucked up,” Dresner admitted.

  There was a momentary silence, the silence of a conscience deliberately recalibrating. Did he detect in The Voice’s hesitation an implication that there would be consequences for him? It spoke again, dismissively: “Spilt milk. Do you have a script on this accomplice?”

  “Name, DNA samples, and . . . ”—now his own hesitation—“and Spicer’s photographs. Royce is running the tests, and we’ll put it all through the database, see what history we have on Spicer’s murderer. It’s coming through right now.”

  “Fix this, Dresner.”

  “Affirmative.”

  The Voice disconnected the call.

  9

  DECEMBER 1991. CASH WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, SQUATTING IN A DUPLEX house in Portland, Oregon. It was Christmas Day at the women-only refuge. With its pale green sidings, leaf mold gutters, and boarded windows, it was home to Cash and three young women, her surrogates. The punks had taken her in and adopted her as one of their gang. Sleet lashed against the house and the stripped rose bushes of the garden. Inside, the entire house was strung with Christmas lights and improvised decorations. Brightly colored paper lanterns shifted in the warm air currents from the space heaters; cables stole electricity from the grid. Cash stood transfixed by the beautiful pine tree in the corner of the living room. It reminded her of something that she could not properly recall, a fragment, an impression of home. Surrounded by paper-cut birds, and wrapped in foil garlands, scarlet ribbons, and day-glo bootlaces, it loaned its scent to the entire house. Years later, she would recall reddening pines wreathed in glittering poisonous rain. The punks called the house Herland.