American Monster Read online

  J.S. Breukelaar’s work has appeared in Spinetingler, Juked, Fantasy Magazine, New Dead Families, Prick of the Spindle, Opium, and others, and in the Women Writing the Weird anthologies (Dog Horn Press). Her collection of short stories and poetry, Ink, was published in 2012 (Les Editions du Zaparogue). Born in Berkeley CA, she now lives in Sydney, Australia with her family. She writes for online literary and culture magazines such as The Nervous Breakdown and PopMatters. You can also find her at www.thelivingsuitcase.com. American Monster is her first novel.

  American Monster

  by J.S. Breukelaar

  Lazy Fascist Press

  Portland, Oregon

  Lazy Fascist Press

  an imprint of Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant Street

  Portland, Oregon 97211

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-135-0

  Copyright © 2014 by Jenny Breukelaar

  Cover Art Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Revert

  Edited by Kirsten Alene

  Proofread by Jamey Strathman, Ross E. Lockhart, Andrew Wayne Adams, Shane Cartledge, Amanda Billings, and Dustin Reade

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Printed in the USA.

  The goddess can be recognized by her step.

  —Virgil

  La charité est cette clef. —Cette inspiration prouve que j’ai rêvé!

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  PART I

  KALI I8

  It is said that even in the Before there were those who fell. The curse of their fall was to become Brainworlds. Sentient and eternally celestial, they were unable to generate or sustain life. They were not so much planets as conscious Wholes.

  Over eons of formation these Brainworlds finally took their place around dying stars at the edges of the Entirety. The Brainworlds were all thought, all brain. Their awareness was indefinite yet they could not conceive of the mind of another. Cursed with eternal awareness, they were entirely alone.

  In the time of the Before, a small voyager ship crashed on the surface of a giant Brainworld called Kali I8. Kali’s sun, WD 236-10, was in its death throes. The ship was filled with First Beings from an unnamed galaxy. These beings had wings and they had horns. They had life, and unlike the Brainworld, an intersubjective awareness limited to their own mortality. They crashed onto the Brainworld with their wings and their horns and they were magnificent beyond anything that Kali I8 had ever dreamed of, or dreamed it dreamed of.

  As a result of the imminent violent death of its sun, the temperatures on Kali I8 had become too high for the beautiful beings, who perished screaming in the lethal winds and whose cells shriveled in the gamma ray assault from the dying star. The leader of the alien beings was the strongest, and he held out after his people had all died. He attempted to repair his ship’s communications, he prayed for salvation, he wept for his comrades. The leader was, in Kali I8’s conception, a perfect being. Kali I8 watched him with his tremendous horn and shimmering black wings that filtered the cosmic rays out of the air and bounced toxic rain and sand off their surface like arrowheads off a Sherman tank. But even such a being could not withstand the toxic atmosphere of the Brainworld, who loved him all the more as it killed him.

  After the leader of the First Beings perished, Kali I8 was again alone in the Entirety, but this time its awareness extended to that of its own solitude. It mourned its affliction. In an eternal lie, it denied its role in the death of the Beloved so that it could mourn him, and blamed the Entirety for the loss of the horn. There could be no other.

  (Fascicle 25.4 Nilea AQt., trans. L. Shay 2656)

  1//: teeth

  Here you are.

  She’d known it as soon as she opened her eyes on the train. His head silhouetted against the orange square of sky, neon popping out like veins over the blurred expanse of shanty towns. Everything orange, that’s what she’d take from this place. The orange sky. Toxic and ravishing.

  The guy’s horn, truth be told, was no more than a crumpled bulge in his jeans, nothing to write home about. Plus, he ignored her, or pretended to. He was riding backwards and seemed absorbed in a weathered deck of Harry Potter cards he’d worked into a Klondike array that she’d seen only once before from the old Salinan gardener up at San Miguel. There was something both frail and tensile about him. And so pale. A shock of wheaten hair matched his pale-ale eyes. Long legs that ended in cowboy boots—dusty lizard skin and a metal heel.

  Norma shook off her exhaustion. Mentally palpated the inner edges of a perpetual hangover. She looked around at the other passengers. Across the table from the guy sat another man, riding forward. He was big and shyly smiling. She felt caught between the two of them, the warmth of the big man’s smile and the cold diffidence of the skinny blond.

  – You okay? said the big man. We didn’t want to wake you.

  Norma’s eyes slid between the two men and she tried to gauge what ran between them. She felt bleary from sleep and parched, ran her tongue over her lips. The big man reached into a backpack on the floor, rummaged for a plastic water bottle and tossed it to her. She caught it and let the water run down her throat, wiped her mouth and tossed it back.

  – Little bitty inside voices, said the big man, pinching his thumb and finger together. So we wouldn’t wake you.

  The blond guy continued silently with his game, eyes downcast, so Norma figured that by ‘we’ the big man meant the clustered strangers around them who’d struck up one of those wayfarers’ conversations to pass the time. The couple behind her were Consortium militia on furlough to celebrate their wedding. The girl and her mother were planning a quick family ceremony in Spill City before returning to active duty. Norma could hear the mother’s voice issuing from the girl’s army-issue console, something about flowers.

  – Where from? said the big man who looked part Native American.

  And Norma, careful to keep to human registers, said, Australia.

  It was what Mommy had told her to say when anyone asked because it was one of those places, according to Mommy, that everyone always said they wanted to go to, but never actually went.

  – They have seasons there or what? said the girl, looking up from her mother. I heard they just have summer. And rain.

  – Same everywhere, said the girl’s fiancé, staring out the window.

  The train’s whistle moaned.

  – I figured you were Australian, said Gene, approvingly.

  – I would of said Canada, said the girl coyly. With that thick dark hair.

  Norma felt the eyes of the big man on her but she attributed the dentata’s pulse to the presence of the blond, the way his hat half-covered his face. Multiple piercings. Across one visible cheekbone was a confluence of small scars, like the bed of a dead river. He folded tightly into himself, his fulvous eyes lifting only once to take in the man across the table from him, and then dropping back to his cards, the soft slap and shuffle, his fingers tentative and seeking. Norma crossed her legs, the dentata throbbed.

  – I’m Gene, said the big man, still staring at her. Where you headed?

  – LA, she said and wrenched her eyes away from the blond guy. She glared at the man who called himself Gene, and flushed in spite of herself. She knew what she looked like—burned-out drifter, will fuck for food.

  – City of Angels, yeah, said Gene. Someth
ing both infectious and exhausted in his exuberance. His long black hair was tied into a messy ponytail. His eyes were the color of Mission coffee—deep brown and rippling with warm lights. Huge scarred hands and a nose bent out of shape. It turned out that he had a wolf. This impressed the marines. He showed them a leather cord wound several times around his thick wrist, at the end of which hung three vanilla-colored teeth. They were from his wolf, Gloria. Her baby teeth—a canine, incisor and molar. Gene explained that in some states the regulations regarding enclosures and papers did not apply if you were First Nations.

  – Where from? said the soldier.

  – East, said Gene. Haudenosaunee on my mother’s side.

  – How the what? said the soldier.

  – Iroquois, said Gene.

  Mommy had warned that the only thing a Slash ever really wanted to know about you was where you were from. It was the most important thing to them, Mommy said, as if by affirming one’s origins one could guarantee a safe return. It was very human, Mommy said. Very Slash. Slash was the old term for Human. It was from the Before, and Norma found it weirdly dating, but she could never tell Mommy that.

  Norma felt rigid with lust. She crossed her legs, little shivers of delight. The more Gene talked with the blond guy’s cards softly slapping on the table, the stronger the dentata pulsed. She sat up in her seat, tried to make herself look out the window. Behind her the girl’s mother, who ran a Korean food truck at the market, was complaining about noise from the New Westborians who’d set up a chapel near the train tracks. Travel tales wrapped around them, the binding clack of wheels, the pale man silently absorbed in his game. She watched his probing fingers, mesmerized by their imagined touch. A kid came through the train selling fruit and chewing gum. The noodle man too, with his steaming contraption that looked a little like an accordion. The framed trailer parks and smokestacks and the ocean in the distance unreeling around them, like a universal zoetrope. Gene went on to tell stories from his boyhood. Crazy words that webbed around Norma and the others, the train wheels clacking out a chorus, the marine on her console now talking in Korean to her mom, the hiss of the pale man’s cards. Reservation stories, houses with no rooms, how his Auntie used to chase him with a devil puppet when he’d been bad. Gene’s upper lip was fuller than his lower, not quite an overbite, and not quite a smile, but almost. Norma found herself smiling back, not quite, but almost.

  That puppet was bad mojo, said Gene, waving away the memory with his big hand so that the teeth danced on his wrist.

  The card player sat back in his seat and stared out the window. Gene just shook his head and smiled his goofy smile. Within the Haudenosaunee are a number of clans, he explained, the bear, the turtle, the wolf and so on. Gene was a member of the wolf clan, and he got his first wolf-dog when he was fourteen and still on the rez up in Ontario, had them ever since, until the last one, Gloria, who he’d buried up at Bakersfield, got his Chevy as far south as Santa Barbara then decided to get on the train to LA, where some friend of his had a squat.

  Norma was half-listening, half watching a movie running on a holo in one corner of the carriage. The Slash got around, you had to give them that. The great wash of distance, the rush of years. What were they looking for? Had it ever been theirs? Gene kept talking, answering questions and asking more. His auntie had a farm in Bakersfield, anyone been there? Norma smiled to herself at the mention of Bakersfield. If she had been a wolf, one ear would have swiveled around on her head at the very mention of the place.

  VIPr: (abb.) (n) Vantage Insertion Point or Viewpoint (V). A built-in (unremovable) receptor/instrument panel/implantation device encoded at the genetic level for communicating with the NORMAS. The activator has two ports, an external bioswitch often manifesting as an adornment such as a headpiece or item of jewelry, and an internal (dentata) for transferring intelligence from the Viewpoint (V) to a horn via the neural host. The VIPr’s stored information contains a failsafe code so that if it is not transferred within a certain time frame, the ‘intelligence’ begins to multiply within its host, causing side effects that can include but are not limited to bleeding hands, loss of memory, heightened libido, abdominal pain, prodigal strength, fits of anger and free-floating paranoia, periods of immeasurable and inexplicable suffering.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQ., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  2//: the trap

  First was Barstow, where the ship landed. Well, Rainbow Basin, to be exact, but even that was a false start. You could go back and back, further and further, as far away as the dying sun.

  To retrieve the creature who had fled it in the Before, Mommy created a hunter and logically, if unimaginatively, called it Norm. Mommy had had many Norms, all named after the set of algorithms slash prohibitions that constrained the hunter and each identical but logically discernible from the next. For this mission a Norm was selected for its appetites, its sensory acumen—in particular, its sense of smell—and its physical stamina. But, in the misguided notion that it would take one to know one, Mommy had given the horn hunter a horn of its own.

  It transformed en route. Assuming male form, it emerged from the wreckage naked and crouched, the transmitter fiery around its neck. The lonely canyons racked by its screams. It killed a restroom pederast for his clothes, fled the Basin, and spent the first few days at Barstow getting the hang of things. Long limbed and haunted, wrong in this flesh, not knowing what to do with itself. Nothing worked like it should.

  – The form doesn’t mesh with its function, the hunter observed. Look at this.

  – It’s a horn, said Mommy. You are a hunter, looking for the horned being who fled in the Before. When the First Being came to me in the Before, it was horned. Magnificent.

  Mommy hadn’t meant to kill the beautiful horned being in the Before.

  Norm (as she’d been then) tried to explain that human males, generally speaking, don’t hunt with their horns.

  – They think with them, don’t they? said Mommy. Hehe.

  There was no point in arguing.

  – So think, said Mommy. And find the Being with the perfect horn. Return him to me.

  – Roger that. But being throttled by a trucker for looking at you the wrong way in a Wendy’s restroom, saving a cross-dresser of sixteen from a New Westborian flaying, and having your face licked by an off-duty mail woman is enough to confuse anyone. Just saying.

  – Your point?

  – Maybe I should try being female for a while.

  Mommy thought about it. Entirely unconvincing sounds meant to approximate human rumination came over the line. Mommy was nothing if not careful.

  – You’re a horn hunter. It seems to be a disadvantage to have one yourself.

  – Bingo, said Norm into the broken cellphone, trying not to yell. It just seems a little redundant, that’s all. And the costs outweigh the benefits on several levels. Even before Secession, appetites that restricted themselves to the same gender tended to come under a great deal of social and cultural scrutiny in the Zone.

  – But the females didn’t have horns in the Before, whined Mommy.

  – You’re living in the past, Mommy.

  Mommy sharply said, The horn is crucial. You have to implant it with the VIPr. It’s the key. The dentata, in other words. The hole in your Whole.

  – Well. I was selected for the mission because of my appetites, right?

  – And your stamina, said Mommy indulgently.

  – I’ll cover a lot more ground if I don’t use a horn to attract other horns.

  – Meaning?

  – Meaning, you catch flies with honey, not with pictures of other flies.

  More grinding and gnashing on the line.

  Norm took that as a yes.

  But Barstow was too much a risk. It was a small place, and there had already been contact with too many people. Norm caught a bus a hundred and thirty muddy miles to Bakersfield. An older woman got on at Tehachapi Springs, started talking about how a relative’s Motel 6 went from being Cartel-run to bei
ng taken over by Er and she ended up out of a job.

  – Er? said Norm.

  The passenger looked part Salinan and had dirt under her nails. She fidgeted with a small diamond ring on her finger, nailing Norm to the seat with her coal-black eyes.

  – What planet are you from, honey? said the woman. Er is what the Consortium is, is what Er is. Buying the state up in chunks is what Er is. Selling it back to the Cartels in slivers.

  The woman spat a brown stream on the floor of the bus, leant in closer and Norm could smell the opiates on her breath.

  – I’m Salinan on my mother’s side, she confided. And Er’s a Salinan warlord is what I say.

  The bus rattled on beneath a sky turning orange.

  – Bullsheet, said a bearded man swiveling around in the seat ahead of them. Er’s a South African mining corporation.

  – Er’s a New Zealand shipping company, called out the bus driver.

  Someone else on the bus put in that Er was a San Franciscan cabal. Everyone everywhere had a different take on who the Consortium really was and who the Cartels really were. Either one was the lesser of two evils, or the greater, or there was no difference. Whatever they were—the Consortium and the Cartels—everyone seemed to agree that Purple Rain, the guerrilla arm of the secessionists, was the devil. Everyone except the bearded man in a seat in the front, whose face was scarred with shiny grafts where he’d had his Purple Rain ink forcibly removed.

  There was a collapsed apartment building between the Bakersfield Greyhound station and a windowless bar called The Trap. A curtain flapped eerily from the apartment building’s upper floor windows. Norm found a relatively sound one-room apartment on the third floor with a serviceable bolt for locking and a hole blown out in its ceiling where the rain came in. There was even a mattress on which to recuperate. Half of the building was rubble, the rest about to be, so the smell and the noise would not arouse suspicion.