American Monster Read online

  16//: apart

  The twins pressed against each other. The rain dropped off the pine needles and ran unheeded into their blind eyes. They lifted damp muzzles to the air as she passed and the boy wrinkled his nose at the rank booty concealed on her person. Mommy, he whispered. The titanium toes and heels on her boots were smeared with matter. Her hair plastered to her neck with vermillion goo, the chill rain drenching her jeans. Like a plodding Golem she passed, nodded to the slumbering Ecoist, and trudged down the path to her trailer. The ocean was a smudgy mass behind her, pink-tinged cloud lowering. She stumbled into the Cheyenne. Her eyes burnt and her jaw ached from clenching. Night had not yet fled from the trailer, thank Elvis for small mercies. She fumbled for the lamp beside the bed. Sobbed through her gritted teeth, spraying spit and tears, pulling the blood money out of her clothing and onto the bed. The pile grew on the sheets. Furiously undressing as she went. The tusks on her shoulders were not quite retracted, pale bone gleamed through the ripped flesh. Naked, she stared at the money. She looked down at her legs, smeared with filth. Held bloody hands up to her face. She would wash. She would.

  17//: crock

  The sour smell of the stew was everywhere. Through the glass lid of the Crock-Pot, dim chunks of something Raye couldn’t identify nestled among the pale fingers of potato and wobbly meat. The kitchen upstairs was in virtual darkness, lit only by the blue glow of the screen in the next room. Raye liked the kitchen at night. It was like a museum display. After the rostered KP group had cleaned up and everyone had gone to their bunks or the TV or out into the night, the kitchen sat empty and peaceful. The cool dull expanse of counter top and the throbbing refrigerator and all the sponges put away and the dish towels in the hamper. Everything in order, accounted for, under control. The stew cooling under glass (what was that smell, leeks?), The Crock-Pot all clean on the outside and switched off, shiny and silent on the mat.

  Raye felt funny. Maybe it was the knock on the head, yeah. The swelling had gone down and the gash was scabbing over. She had always been a quick healer but this was something else. Maybe some vitamin in the leeks. One of the older guys claimed they put hormones in the food to keep them sterile, but Raye didn’t know about that. Maybe the big woman in the trailer had slipped her a Mickey. Kryptonite or something. Raye smiled down at the glass lid. Brought a sore finger up to her lips. Her jaw hurt. Her eyes tunneled into the stew, through the massed meat, into the crystalline unit cells of the base, and out through the cord fed by the generator downstairs. Raye blinked, thought she might throw up again. Her skin tingled, not all the time, but in waves. And almost a headache almost all the time. She tasted smells on the back of her throat and in the roots of her hair, along with a delicacy in the gut. Her farts smelled different. She felt a little stiff across the back and shoulders.

  But the rest of her was fly. Superfly. She cast a leery eye at the Crock-Pot and moved out of the kitchen.

  She thought of going out to the Independence Day party out on the Lagoon. Every year she thought of it and never went. It was probably lame. But staying home alone on Independence Day eating shelter food and watching lame TV was lame too. In the games room, the other lamos were watching Independence Day party footage on the TV. They were mostly Grimeys like her, gutter punks. They sprawled in various contortions (heads propped up at right angles to flattened bodies, legs draped over chair legs or spiraled around each other; hands shoved where the sun don’t shine). Their eyes glued to the screen. The coffee table was strewn with phones, blister packs, ashtrays, headphones and consoles. The window to the street was permanently locked, the ventilators working hard to suck the smell out of the air—tobacco and body stink and those fucking leeks. Some drop-ins worked their consoles at a table under the window. Flyers hung on brackets on the wall. She would get herself one of those someday. She would practice her climbing again, get fit, go back to busking. Safer than turning tricks, who’d have thunk? The camera’s panoptic eye whirred in the corner—Curly, the guard downstairs, watching the celebrations on his console next to the monitors. Raye felt jumpy. She should be on the streets, not in this damn pup tent. She should be trying to find a cure for her father. Why else would she even be here, in this damn hell hole? Spill City? More like ill city. Her father was ill. Michael Jackson came to her in a dream and told her. He’d lunged at her, his lipsticked skull inches from hers and he’d said, Beat it.

  Raye made herself sit down on a threadbare recliner, hugged her knees. Everything smelled of leeks, she decided, moving to a stool. She had a lump in her throat. Would a boyfriend help? She didn’t usually think about such things, had no time for it. She was almost too lonely to live, almost all the time. Her hands twitched on her knees. She couldn’t make them stop. She could use a Coke. But she was broke. Those dickwads had taken bets on her to fall at Una’s and she’d proven them wrong (or right, same difference). She could sure use some of that money now.

  She felt something dig in her pocket and pulled out the social worker’s card. Wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Randy Mears, BsC Psych (Pennsylvania). BSW (Wisconsin). Dip Ed. The social worker was a while ago. He had a dog, showed her the picture, dumb blond mutt. Maybe she should give him another call. He tried to be helpful, suggested her dad join a group, one of those circle jerks where people stood up and wept with their back to the group or crawled under a chair and everyone pretended it was normal. Waaah. My mommy hit me. Waah, when my puppy died I was so strung out on skag that I cut him open and ate his heart. Waah, Michael Jackson told me to do it. Beat it till it bleeds.

  He was all right, Randy Whatsit. He sidelined as a property agent, he admitted to her once. Just to make ends meet. She should give him a call.

  18//: technicality

  – Norma?

  Norma fumbled blindly for the broken phone among the piled debris of the side table. Was it morning?

  – How are we today? said Mommy across the crackles.

  – Never better, Norma said, or tried to. She sank back against the pillows with an elbow over her eyes, Mommy in her ear.

  – You sound a little worse for wear, said Mommy. Green around the gills, under the weather, thumbs sideways. Time is against us.

  Soggy rags of noise flapped up from the beach, music and muffled shouting from a party on the eroded lifeguard stand. The throb of a beat box.

  – What time is it? Norma thickly said.

  – Have you found it? The lost horn?

  – He’s here, said Norma. I can feel him.

  – Here? croaked the voice in her head. Where?

  – Close, said Norma, opening one eye and pulling aside the curtain. Night fleeing from the shore. I’ve seen him. Felt him.

  – What happened? croaked Mommy.

  – At the construction site? Nothing. This realtor was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ended up with a starring role in some snuff film. Couple of Purple Rain players needed to be put out of their misery. No big deal.

  Norma sat up in bed and crossed her legs. Sat hunched in the cold. She groped for the military jacket and once it was on, Mommy’s voice was easier to take.

  The child, said Mommy so icily that Norma shivered. She felt it in her ear first, cold finger of night, and then in her womb, the finger-fucking pain, gasped as the cogshare link broke wide open and Mommy was in. The broken console tore from Norma’s hand, crashed against the trailer wall.

  – Retrievals are forbidden, said the roar in her head. There are side effects. Especially with a child.

  – Technically speaking, she wasn’t dead, rasped Norma. So technically speaking I didn’t retrieve her.

  – She’s a threat now, said Mommy. Technically speaking. Its voice had a gluey quality like oatmeal, yet piercing at the same time, both invasive and abject. Like taking a backwards shit.

  – To who?

  – To the mission, said Mommy. To us.

  – You mean to you.

  – Your will is mine. Deal with it, said Mommy.

  And then i
t was gone. Pulled out with more visceral violence than it had to. Norma collapsed back onto the sheets, barely conscious, floating and sinking at the same time. She dreamt, half awake and half sleeping of the Guy, rail thin and hung like a horse, woke up with Gene’s name on her lips and her fist in her mouth. But she wasn’t awake, she was still dreaming, and in the dream she pulled the fist out from her mouth and in it, in her closed hand, something throbbed and she opened it and flew away, the wrong one, she said, but it came out as ‘the long one,’ and this time she’d woken up for real, laughing as she came, hehe.

  19//: wang

  Norma waited on the highway, pressed into the chain link fence. A rattling recombo approached and she jumped onto the back, a leaping twilight shadow jagged as negative lightning. She sat cramped among the leaking buckets and jangling rakes and flew off forty miles south at the old border unable to get the reek of manure and rust out of her nostrils.

  Where a wall had once divided the two countries was now just the vast and vaporous glow of the check point gauntlet that spread the length of a couple of football fields either side of San Vicente Boulevard—at either pole the usual sprawl of dog pits, tavernas, clinics, chapels, flight schools, body mod parlors, pool halls, ‘employment’ agencies, ordinance outlets, cotton candy stands. Even a ferris wheel. Norma heard the yap of chained dogs. Drones snarled. Wheels spun. She smelled peanuts and spilled fuel. It was no longer who came in but what. Goods had long been the only safe passage through the cordon—penicillin, cigarettes, fuel (diesel, ethanol, gasoline), batteries, beans, rice, guns. Consortium decals arced across the night sky. Laser beacons danced over the lumpy pass of humanity in transit.

  – Witness, said a voice at her elbow. The modern condition.

  Norma wheeled around. A Consortium guard loomed out of the fog, drew back his whole arm and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed barrel of his pointed finger trained full on her, said: ‘Take me like a brick from the house, so that our children will remember to return.’ Know who said that?

  Norma shook her head.

  – Mahmoud Darwish, twentieth century poet of exile. You heard of him?

  Norma exhaled and kept walking. The sidewalk rose and fell in asphalt dunes, the gutters rank with standing water. The guard kept pace with her, a lumpen boy with razor-cut hair and white creases fanning out from his eyes. He smoked and told her how early epics (song and poetry mostly) told of a cycle of quest and return—knights, heroes. He wheezed slightly as he walked.

  – The modern tale, he said, is a product of the Voyages of Discovery, enlightenment inquiry, religious persecution, colonialism and so on. It’s an expression of irredeemable exile. The exile’s new world seems unnatural, more like fiction than reality. Faced with the impossibility of return, he or she is faced with failing to resemble himself or herself, and in the wake of such loss, must resort to self-creation. But to reassemble an identity out of the fragments and discontinuities of exile, the guard continued, is easier said than done.

  Norma had no idea what he was talking about but she slowed down so he’d stop wheezing. He looked around and blinked as if just realizing that he’d walked further away from the cordon than he meant to and might not be able to find his way back.

  – Back that way, Norma said. Go two blocks and hang a right.

  Then he snuffled at her a little flirtatiously, I started a Masters degree, he said. In another place.

  – You should go back there and finish it, she said.

  World Wide Wang crouched on an unassuming corner of Border Town in the shadow of the crumpled Interstate. In colonial times it had been a feed store. Beneath the graffiti and posters you could still make out the faded sign: San Ysidro El Granero. Wreathed in sheafs of wheat. Norma rang the bell on a door cut into the loading dock, and Jesus opened it for her. Mixed-blood minder big as a bison.

  – Jesus, she said, and let him hug her. His big paw was warm on her ass, his fringed shirt soft against her face, dreadlocks tickled her neck. Her body melted a little in his bear hug—she was after all what she was, chosen for her appetites and stamina, not her willpower but her ribs hurt and back pinched. Independence Day had come and gone. The recovery period helped. The tightness in her shoulders had eased, the tusk wounds healed again. She felt ready for anything. Even Jesus.

  But now she had to find the urchin before Mommy did. Before Augustine did. So much hurt and harm and no one to explain it to her. She pushed Jesus away and walked stiffly through into a big low-ceilinged room with a bar along one wall and a semicircular stage at the other. Onstage, a trio of gold spray-painted androgens swam in a huge water tank. They pressed their breasts against the reinforced glass and their long penises curled like tentacles or horned serpents. Beaded strings of bubbles rose from their masks, and along tubes that ran from smart-lungs strapped to their backs. Two of the dancers turned in the water to face each other and their dicks bobbed and kissed. Norma felt that liquid rising again, her willpower ebbing. She moistened her lips with a cold tongue.

  – If Frida Kahlo and the Elephant Man had triplets, said a voice behind her.

  Bunny was sitting at his usual place at the bar, on the corner near the cash register. He was in his Wonder Whoa-Man suit and she smiled when she saw it. Thick beige tights, stars and stripes leotard over falsies in their flesh-colored sheath. Red and white high-heeled boots. A wide gold belt around his waist. The belt forced him to sit up so straight that his spine was a single rigid line from his ass to the top of his hairnet. One manicured hand bulkily cradled his console, the other wrapped around a pint of Guinness. On the counter a semi-furled Head and Shoulders coupon lay across a shard of mirror. He worked the tiny keyboard with manicured man-hands. Beside the Guinness lay what looked like a small black animal. Norma held up two fingers to the bartender, a slim Eurasian whose chaps flapped around rusty spurs. She sat on a stool next to Bunny, but turned around so she faced the stage.

  – Nice place, she said.

  Bunny kept tapping into his console.

  Norma picked up the piled pelt from the counter. It was his wig. She put it over her own hair and blew a gelled curl off her nose. Bunny shrugged, blotted the last grains of powder off the mirror with his finger and rubbed his gums. Kept texting. Norma watched the stage. When the wig started to itch she took it off.

  The bartender came over.

  – How’s your boy? he asked Bunny.

  Bunny held up his console, In the hospital. He caught pneumonia.

  His face in the glow of the screen was chalky, the brows sharply pencilled. His sequined eyelashes flapped like the scales of a Pleistocene reptile. The bartender shook his head sadly and his eyes met Norma’s, as if signaling something to her, but she didn’t know what. Dark forms jerked and wiggled on the dance floor. Between the bar and the stage, other shapes, dark and interchangeable, moved to and from tables, took their places at the bar.

  – When do you go on? she said, turning toward the stage.

  – Soon. You staying? His thin lips pessimistically pursed.

  – It’s why I’m here, she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.

  – You’re here because of that little Grimey. Do I look stupid?

  Norma said, With or without the rug?

  – You’re always looking for someone. Firstly it’s some guy. Some guy you fucked on a train or wanted to.

  – I think I found him, she said. Or he found me.

  – Mazel tov—Max Wang or some such?

  Norma looked at Bunny in confusion. That’s his name?

  – Why not? Bunny said. You said he looked foreign, if memory serves. Some swinging dick from your combat days? Some SLA stud—

  – Rob Swallows, said the barman. Only comes in the spring.

  – Woody Cox, laughed Bunny. A hard man is good to find.

  Norma let them tease her. She’d walked right into it. But then the barman pointed at the cord around her throat.

  – That real platinum? he said.
>
  – It is to me, said Norma, tucking the cord back under her top. What’s a Grimey punk?

  She was careful to keep her mind shut tight and her fingers away from the switch at her neck which would activate the Whole. Mommy could only access the Slash world through Norma’s brain, virally or symbolically, so she kept her thoughts fixed on the stage. The androgens would give Mommy something to think about when it accessed the files later. Over time her memories were becoming so overlaid that Mommy complained about the mess, how it was getting increasingly problematic sorting the wheat from the chaff. Wheat from the chaff. Mommy with its collection of clichés like scalps hung from its cosmic belt.

  Bunny checked the time on his console, then looked back at the barman.

  – Grimey punks, said the barman. They don’t wash. Ride the rails. They live in parks or shelters or Walmarts in winter.

  The androgens had begun a game of underwater ring-around-the-rosie. The music was some early century trance mix. Norma focused on its digitized backbeat.