American Monster Read online

  – You want another Coke?

  Raye shook her head. I think I’ll go for some breakfast. You want to come? Celebrate our win.

  – Your win, said Norma, looking into the next minute to how she would not ever put the our in your. She would remember where she ended and where another began.

  – You heard about Bunny’s kid?

  Norma crushed the Coke can in her hand.

  – Kid’s a goner. Maybe you got something in that stash of yours can help.

  Norma didn’t say anything. Retrievals didn’t cure you. They didn’t cure a thing. They brought you back exactly as you were only more so. Raye looked at her expectantly.

  – What Bunny’s boy needs is a whole new body, Raye. Bunny can hunt and gather spare parts until it sends him crazy or broke or crazy and broke. No vat-grown spleen or pelvis or kidney on its own will do more than put off the inevitable.

  Shape-changing—what humans called Sleeve technology in their fictions and their dreams—was still a long way off for this species, and look. Look where it got Mommy. The right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing. The eye seeking what the brain could not conceive. The head not in sync with the heart. Norma regarded the child through the mist. If she told her, would she know?

  Raye watched Norma pulverize the Coke can and then she pointed at the cord around Norma’s neck.

  – It’s remains, isn’t it? she said.

  Traffic rattled out on the highway and the cloud cover was edged with bronze. Norma stared at Raye.

  – What?

  – That thing around your neck. That stuff inside the coil that looks like gum. The girl’s eyes were opaline storms. I noticed it when you came around to the Sanctuary. It’s remains isn’t it?

  In a manner she hoped looked casual, Norma let the cord around her neck play through her finger and slipped the bioswitch back between her breasts.

  – I knew it, said Raye. She leant forward. Two bright flushes bloomed on her cheeks. I knew it. I rode with a girl once who got this puppy. We hitched a ride on the back of this pickup from the rail yard to this house we were going to stay in and the puppy fell out, got dragged by its leash. This chick took her dead puppy and she was like, what should I do with it? And we were like, bury it. And she was like, I can’t, I want to keep it. Keep the fur and the bones. And someone said she had to bury the bones when she got the fur, so we took off the fur and she got the bones and her hands were covered in blood and she was like, I should eat it. And we were like, just the heart, you should eat the heart. So she said she would eat the heart and we were like, we should help her eat the heart. So we all ate some and it was the bitch of gross, this puppy’s heart, yeah, chewy but crunchy. She kept the bones for a while, and the fur which kind of stank, and a piece of the puppy’s heart in a charm around her neck, just like yours.

  Norma gripped the arms of the lawn chair hard enough to leave hand prints in the plastic.

  – It doesn’t even belong to me. It’s something I have to give to someone. A Guy. Okay?

  Raye rocked back on the lawn chair, dangling the Coke can in one hand and with her toes barely brushing the sand. Someone you know? she said.

  – Kind of.

  – Boyfriend? said Raye, trying to look impish, but only managing perverse.

  – Not anymore, said Norma. She had acquired a skill rare among Slashes, that of being able to control her facial expressions. She kept her voice level and held the girl’s eyes in her own. I’ve been looking for him for a long time.

  Raye nodded sagely. Exes are nothing but trouble. I had one once.

  – No kidding, said Norma.

  – How long you been looking for him? said Raye, abruptly businesslike.

  – For who?

  – For your ex, said Raye.

  – Look, he’s not—

  But the child’s face with its extravagant emotions, following a whiff of promise here, the smell of adventure there, again caught Norma up in its dangerous energy. Bunny had said they were called Grimeys, not so much children—even if they made it to adulthood—as arrested, not born so much as dropped out, always banging up, or lying low, or flying high, on the nod or under a wheel. With nothing to believe in since even their eyes lied, they’d learned to look between the surface and the thing itself, between the idea and the word, because what they saw there just might save them. Norma felt woolly-headed—who was saving who?

  – You wouldn’t have seen him, said Norma. He’s not all that visible.

  – Try me.

  – Very blond hair, piercings, cowboy boots but not exactly.

  – Mmm hmm. Sounds like pretty much every white guy in Spill City. What else?

  – Forget it, said Norma. How to describe the yellow eyes and the mineral stink?

  – Tell me about the boots. What kind of heels?

  – Metal, said Norma, staring at her hands. Off market.

  Raye nodded, Steel heels means a stash, or a hidden scabbard, sometimes. You know for blades, or spikes. Some shoemaker up north specializes in that kind of modification, mainly for Cartel carriers. So your ex would have come down from there. From the northern part of the Zone. Those remains belong to him, your ex?

  – Look, said Norma, standing up. I’m going in to fry an egg. You want one?

  – Wait, said Raye. There was a pleading note in her voice that made Norma want to give her a push, maybe a hard one. Listen. I think I know someone who can help you.

  – Who?

  – Someone who knows everyone. I mean, beyond his obligations as a Consortium snitch, which is what he is. Way beyond that. Anyone new or different that comes through, he’s the one to know it. This man’s like a human metal detector, the real deal.

  – How do you know?

  Raye’s eyes darkened to a blue as blunt as a bruise.

  – Because he’s my father.

  24//: stranger danger

  Why did she go back to the trailer? She should not have been talking to the big lady. That much Raye knew, yeah. You don’t get into it with that kind of stranger, not at all. There was a part of her that knew that. The biggest part. The part that knew she had to get clean if she was ever going to get home. A small part of her also knew that the woman could be called a friend. A small part of her remembered the woman’s arms outstretched to catch her when she fell.

  25//: wacko

  Spill City was full of see-ers. Gibbering private eyes and paranoiacs, chaos theorists or ferrymen, what have you, who saw connections between everyone, the way in which their flight paths and game plans and secrets could be seen as interwoven or a fixed game. Ask them and they explained how what stood out or was different about an individual could be used to stack the dice and change the odds, perception being a precursor to transformation, and so on and so forth. She read about people in preparation for the mission—visionaries and watch dogs with an eye for reds, passers, tricksters and confidence men, because hell. It takes one to know one.

  So that wasn’t the main reason she agreed to go with Raye to meet her old man. The chance that he would, in his capacity as a self-appointed eccentric middle man, perched in his ersatz little trading post in this reeking frontier, have seen her Guy. No. The main reason was because of how Raye squeezed the word ‘father’ tightly in her throat when she said it and how her eyes lit up like lightbulbs about to blow.

  After breakfast, they caught a Coaster north to Arcadia. They got off at the old Town Square at supper time. Raye bought a console from a pile in a bargain bin beside a row of corroded medical trolleys displaying new and used tech for sale. The food trucks that lined the tracks were ablaze, but the crowd was thin. Norma and Raye wandered for a while among the hippy ghosts, past rough-glazed pottery stacked on blankets beneath the neon boomerangs and hotrod facades. Zigzag alleys tinged with gold from the setting sun. Canvases depicting Elvis and Geronimo and Elvis as Geronimo. Wide-flanked women cleaning paint brushes. Dust-begrimed surfboards stacked like coffins behind dusty windows, and joss sticks
everywhere, the false scents cloying at the back of Norma’s throat. Raye led the way, stumbling over a wide crack in the sidewalk. Norma veered past a rank pool of oily water. Weeds grew tall in vacant lots. Paper maple leaves in autumn colors burst from piled garbage bags in a dumpster. Bars and pool halls had been set up in shipping containers retrieved from the Alaskan tankers, Holoscreens set up outside replayed classic Charger games, lost episodes from cult miniseries. Raye stopped to watch a demo about the latest version of Throne of Thorns. Norma stood beside her, transfixed by the murky digital forests and grim men who moved as though the laws of physics didn’t apply; roughhewn rooms lined with tapestries and tech. Wind howling through the digitized cracks.

  It’s a new technology, Raye explained. It’s called REBn. For Reborn. Daddy said maybe for my birthday.

  She’d laughed in that mannered teenage giggle. But by the time she got to the word birthday, the ageless chip had returned to her voice. Somewhere some music started up and Raye dragged Norma in the direction of the sound. A small crowd gathered around a singer and a guitarist. The singer was in her sixties and stood ramrod straight in a man’s jacket. She had long gray hair and her skin looked translucent, parchment thin. A guitarist sat on a stool beside her. He was much younger, also long-haired and muscular, wearing sunglasses. His hair swung heavily over his face as he picked out chords on a guitar attached to a lead that fed from a generator behind one of the food trucks. Norma’s dentata pinched. On a podium behind them, a DJ grew still at the deck, his arms outstretched and his hands resting flat on the turntables like a blessing. The guitarist woke the strings with a rising fury. The woman took up the melody in a harsh and ragged voice, a simple song about redemption and love. The song had three verses with a chorus in between, and with every chorus, the words she sang became more distorted and her voice, raw and sweet, hitched and ground. The guitarist beside her became more frenzied, more precise, the sound torn from the instrument, his heavy hair over his face until he was not so much sitting on the stool as levitating.

  When it was all over, the woman smiled shyly into the applause, patches of ragged color on her neck. Drifts of ganga heavy in the air. The guitarist began circulating through the crowd with his shirt held out in front of him like an apron. His belly was flat and white with a line of dark hair disappearing down his pants. Norma swallowed and licked her lips. People tossed coins onto his shirt, candy, bottle tops, condoms. Sprinkled weed. When he came to Raye and Norma, Norma tossed in a twenty and he looked back up at her so that she saw herself twinned in his antique Ray Bans. He took them off and pushed them onto her head.

  – Remember, he said. Charity is the key.

  As they walked deeper into the forest of felled commerce and earthquake-riven infrastructure—the Galleria’s bell tower on its side beside the old mall’s empty shell—Raye’s mouth set in a grim line. The taut smooth skin of her face became a mask that shut Norma out. Beyond the boardwalk and market were narrower streets, shuttered tourist traps, and beyond that alleyways that connected side streets where moths ticked on cage lights and there were cats everywhere and fire escapes creaked in the wind. Norma sniffed graffiti ink and standing water. She batted away a mosquito. A Cruid wearing huge headphones and a cap drawn low over his eyes practiced on a rat-colored skateboard beside a stripped van. Shadowy forms idled outside a diner on the corner.

  Norma looked up to a shark-fin neon sign that said Surfside Cleaners. In the window was reflected a DON’T WALK glyph from the traffic lights across the street. She saw banks of washers and dryers in the gloom. Raye stopped at a store beside the laundromat. A handwritten ‘Closed’ sign hung from tape to the inside of the dusty glass front. The outside walls were a stark, hard blue, and on the front door Norma read, ‘Antique Toy Trading Company and Pop Paraphernalia.’

  Raye stood beside her breathing through her mouth. Beside the door there was more faded gilt lettering: ‘Rock and Movie Memorabilia.’ Below that she read, ‘Battery Operated.’ Raye pulled out a key, unlocked the door and pushed it in. Norma followed, her heart a fist in her throat. She heard thunder rolling in from the sea—or possibly a convoy of Veelos—then the door closed and there was silence.

  They were standing in a hallway dark and narrow as a vein. Norma sucked in her ribs, felt pushed against by whatever had eaten all the light and grown fat on its consumption. It was the Feer, fat and furry. Beneath Raye’s bravado, Norma could smell the urchin’s reek and her own. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, a dirty glow deepened at the far end of the hallway and an open door took shape to her right. Norma flinched and steeled herself against the Feer. It was everywhere here. Her heart began to race and her hands grew cold. Then the wing stumps burned and the terror receded.

  – It’s okay, said Raye unconvincingly. I come here all the time. It’s not always so weird.

  At the sound of her voice, the darkness shifted then realigned itself around a life-sized mannikin of Luke Skywalker astride a moth-eaten Bantha. It stood between them and the dim light at the end of the hallway.

  Norma said, Shit.

  Raye giggled unsteadily, You get used to it. Come on.

  She took Norma’s hand in her own, a gesture both needful and generous that made Norma feel conscious of her own flesh, as if it were covered in scales. Raye flashed the beam of her phone across the walls of the hallway, which were lined with shelves heavy with dusty stacks of boardgames, obsolete DVDs and VHSs and books, hard and soft covers, whose corners were worn and pulpy. There was age through it all, the air heady with mycotoxins. Norma breathed through clenched teeth. Raye found the light switch but the bulb that flickered on overhead made little difference. One shelf contained nothing but boxed Uncle Wiggly games in various stages of decay. Twisters and Troubles and CandyLands and Operations, arcana that she’d had to research, familiarize herself with in preparation for the mission. She’d become adept at using toy tweezers, manipulating Pop o’ Matic dice rollers, and building plastic hotel empires. Books of fairy tales and adventures at sea. Comic books in yellowing plastic sleeves. LPs and singles stacked in cardboard boxes. A huge cockroach pulled itself up and over the edge of a dust cover. Norma heard mice and rats and below all this a mechanical purr that made her skin crawl. She glanced up above the door off the hallway. An antique camera winked and pulled back with a lurch.

  – We done here? Norma said, her voice swallowed up in dust and the darkness. Seriously.

  Raye pulled Norma through to the other room, flicked a wall switch that turned on another dim bulb whose light was swallowed in the gloom. They stood among the mannequins and toys, the dolls and cars and framed posters, signed baseball gloves and signature capes, shoes and masks. Michael Jackson loomed large here. He had one corner all to himself where his life-size wax likeness stood with arms out flung and a black military-style jacket not unlike her own. A nine foot high glass cabinet was crammed with Michael Jackson paraphernalia. Clothes and albums and white gloves and figurines. Signed programs, tickets, caps. Guitars hung from the walls in brackets. Pictures of the Jackson Five. A concert set written in childish handwriting: ‘Beat it,’ ‘Ben,’ ‘Thriller.’ A gold codpiece. Jangly guitar straps. Gold and platinum albums in frames. Black loafers, white socks, belts, stardust all around. ‘Billie Jean’ played softly on a scratchy sound system.

  The rest of the room was filled with miscellany. More toys and games. A child-sized Kwik-E-Mart from the Simpsons show complete with Squishee Pump and Duff Beer Fridge. Aliens and Throne of Thorns figurines from miniature to life-sized including a to-scale castle made entirely of skulls. Norma’s heart pounded with a feverish excitement, a false nostalgia based less on familiarity than with a yearning for something she’d never had. They taunted her, these toys, with a past she never lived and never would, a lush tug to nowhere. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a framed poster, bug-eyed and haunted. A discolored swelling at her brow. Everywhere those damn clunky surveillance cameras whirred and ground. An Elvis suit. A laundry basket fille
d with Optimus Primes. Dusty glass milk bottles. A dozen boxed Benders. ‘Billie Jean’ faded to ‘Bad.’ Song of not-self.

  Norma nudged a Barbie Ferrari with her titanium toe. A fierce Dorothy watched them from behind cellophane. Cursive at the edge of the box read, Which way do we go now?

  – Daddy? Are you there?

  Raye’s voice was coming in from all directions.

  – Daddy?

  Norma lurched. There was a counter at the back of the big central room. The counter was behind armored glass and in the darkness, Raye stood peering in. Norma moved toward the glass cage, stumbled over something squishy underfoot. The floor shrouded in darkness. The armor-glass cage looked to be empty. There was no one there and then there was. A small man sat before an ancient TV monitor. The light was so random that the man’s form flickered out and reformed behind the streaks on the glass and dust in the air.

  – Daddy, it’s me.

  – Rayette?

  Norma froze at the sound of the soft musical voice. The man looked up and what Norma saw took her breath away. His likeness to the twentieth-century entertainment artist, Michael Jackson, was unnerving not so much in its fidelity as its intent.

  If sleeve technology was still a distant dream in Slashland, body-modification protocol—both compliant and off-market—was thriving and yet Norma had seen nothing like this. From the man’s matte black hair to the geisha pallor to the cheekbone implants and whitened corneas, he was not so much a double as a monstrous out-take. He’d out-Michaeled Michael. Left the original in his dust to be reborn as another.

  – Help you? Mac said, his eyes returning to the monitor. He pecked the keyboard with a gloved hand.

  – Mac, Norma. Norma, Mac, said Raye.

  Had some barbaric splicer—an unevenly replicated procedure reputed to have originated in a mountain laboratory in Switzerland—been at work here? Between the distorted, idealized likenesses of Michael Jackson around Mac’s store and the deceased recording artist himself, the distances were galactic. But between Michael Jackson and the man in the glass cage there was a strange kind of collision. A reversal. As grotesque as he was, Norma felt that he’d literally captured something essential to Michael Jackson himself, that had remained concealed and inaccessible in the original.