American Monster Page 18

  Norma said, If you really want to know, it’s solar plasma and it controls a device in my hole, I mean my vagina.

  – The word, I believe is dentata, said Bunny, closing his eyes and playing along. Maybe Raye was right. Maybe Telephone was a metaphor for human communication. In which the truth is created and passed on, concealed in a string of lies. Bring, bring.

  – Right. So when I press the button here, at the base of the pendant, it causes a chemical change in the plasma that launches the device inside me which will then implant a male horn—get it?—with a transmitter, a kind of tag, through which it can pass on the secrets to humanity.

  – Why would you want to tag a male horn?

  – Has to be a special horn. One that contains the secrets to all of humanity.

  And saying it finally, she knew it to be the eternal lie. The only one that mattered.

  – So you can take over the world?

  – What else?

  One of the other inmates got up to take a piss in a vile trough. He turned around with his fly half-mast and swaying, said that what usually happens in situations like this is that one man arises from the masses to avenge the alien takeover and reclaim the world back for humanity from the galactic bitch of oppression, except occasionally when oppression turns out to be a better deal than lone heroics, because a hero only has his fag buddies, but an alien mind meld typically involves at least minimal pussy. After his speech, the inmate staggered back to his corner and went back to fiddling with his console. Tinny music filled the cell.

  – Either those beats have to go, said Bunny, or I do.

  Norma turned so as to hide her face from Bunny and flicked her long blue-tipped tongue out at the inmate and he killed the beats before silently passing out. A jangle of keys signaled the approach of the guard. He appeared banging a clipboard against his meaty thigh. Norma noticed that he was dressed in Consortium militia drag, shiny with wear, the red and gold stripes at his shoulders.

  – Norma?

  – You know who I am.

  – For my sins. Okay. You’re sprung.

  – Who?

  The guard nervously flipped through the pages on his clipboard.

  – I don’t know. Some guy. Big.

  A message came through on a BlackBerry she’d retrieved from a glass of beer at Killers. She pulled it out. The message said, The wolf found you babe! That makes HIM # 1.

  Norma stared and dropped the phone back in her pocket. Her face felt hot.

  – One day, mumbled Bunny with his eyes half closed, I’m going to get you a new damn phone.

  She turned to him, blinked to bring him back into focus.

  – Jesus coming for you, Bunny?

  Bunny nodded. He always does.

  To the guard, Norma said, You see who it was? The guy.

  The guard brought his clip board down. Some big guy, he said. Looked part Indian.

  She unwound Bunny’s arm from her shoulders and unfurled to her great height. The room spun. She tried to brush off her jacket, straighten her hair. Bunny leaned back against the bars of the cage and smiled at her with his sad eyes.

  – The word, I believe, is Native American.

  33//: normagenesis

  Gene had his back to her at the bar. His hair was still long and tied in a ponytail but it had lost some of its sheen and his shoulders sagged a little. A pinch of tension at his mouth. The sight of him made her drool. She wiped her mouth. He did not turn around.

  She took the stool next to him, feeling nervous as a schoolgirl.

  – How’d you find me? she said.

  Gene’s clasped hands were bunched mountainous upon the bar. Little Barry swayed up and down serving food and sloshing mugs of beer. The ceiling soared above them, drone and search lights arcing in and striping the faces of the clientele with slashes of blue and white.

  – This guy told me that a woman looked like you was causing trouble after a funeral wake.

  – Which guy?

  – Him, said Gene, cocking his head behind them. Norma looked, but there was no one there.

  – Yellow hair? said Gene, putting it more like a question than a statement. Crazy hat.

  – Him, she said. He’ll be back.

  She ordered them a round. Little Barry swayed bowlegged across on the cinderblock track.

  – You seen Raye? he said. Una’s worried about her.

  A group of customers called for some shots before she could answer and he lurched off the block and scrambled up a ladder for the Tequila. The bottles on the shelves behind the bar were coated with a powdery film.

  – The dust is from all the liquefaction, said Gene, unclasping his hands to point at the bottles. It’ll just be blowing on the wind now for a hundred years. Long as the aftershocks keep coming.

  – I hoped you’d find me, she said. I didn’t know that until a few days ago. I saw the puppet at that store?

  – That place? It’s a trip, yeah. I went back to see if you’d been there. Wanted to ask the old geezer what you’d said.

  – What did he say? asked Norma.

  Gene shook his head. He swung around to her then, a wary narrowing of his burnt coffee eyes.

  She said, Have I changed that much?

  He sucked in his lower lip in that way he had.

  – You filled out some, he said. Works for you though.

  – Well you emptied out a little, she said. Works for you too.

  – Glad we got that out of our system.

  His smile then was real. She ordered more beers. The inmates at the Sprawl had fleeced her and Bunny while they slept, but Little Barry let her run a tab, and once she caught him beaming at Gene, his wonky eye all over the shop. That was the effect Gene had on people. He and Una and Little Barry were soon on familiar terms. It was almost as irritating to her as it was comforting, and lushly familiar, the effect he had on people, the immediate connections he made. His indefinite withholding of judgment. How, homeless, he had to make a home no matter where he was, so ready to forgive and to remember. Here he was then in all his hard and rueful charity.

  At the other end of the bar, Augustine and his lackey were brooding concentrations of darkness. Norma ignored them. She wove to the restroom, washed her face in the chipped sink and finger-brushed her teeth with liquid soap. Exhaustion had softened her reflection in the rust-webbed mirror, darkened the shadows around her eyes. She smoothed down her hair and dry-swallowed a Dexy. Behind her one of the stall doors was shut and the Occupied sign was pulled across. But there were no visible feet on the floor. She went to the stall door and stared at it. Took a step back and then kicked it in. The door screeched off its hinges, crashed against the pan. It was empty. Or not quite. There was a console on the cistern, its screen cracked and its home button stoved in. It began to ring. Brrring. Brrring. Norma swept it into the bowl, drowning its squawk in toilet water, and went back out into the bar.

  The Karaoke was a muffled racket at one end of the room and there was a new kind of customer at the bar. Coders like last night, scenesters from up north, and squint-eyed Texan kickers—men paid to clear the ground for Cartel traffickers by evicting squatters off contested turf. There were more women too, not just the coders and posers, but whores and strippers looking for marks and eyeing Norma with a mix of lust and venom from the shadows. And Grimeys too, dread-locked ingenues and runaways. But no Raye. And Norma’s filling heart leaked a little for the girl and her mind extended to the myriad ways in which to get lost in Spill City but it would allow for no more dire possibilities. Not tonight. Because if Gene had found her, then anything was possible.

  Because Gene. Well. There he was. His shoulders a yard across. She came back to the bar and sat up very straight. They touched elbows. When her head hurt, it hurt bad, but the Dexy helped and so did the beers. The pain of her bruises and cuts, of Raye’s absence and of Bunny’s sorrows, Gene’s journeys without her—his eyes burned with memories he could never share—were gradually squeezed out of the gulf between them.


  The Karaoke finished and a band started up. Little Barry said with a sly defiance, I succumbed to live music. The crowd’s getting younger.

  Norma, looking around, had to agree. Maybe after all, the future had not passed on here, taking with it all of its hope and all of its light. She finished her schnitzel and started on Gene’s and he smiled, said her appetite hadn’t changed. Or had it?

  She laughed back and said, No. I still eat anything.

  *

  After he’d returned from Bakersfield, Gene had stayed at the squat in Chinatown longer than he should, and there were others that came and went. Boys and girls. There would always be that. If there was a why to Norma, that was part of it. She was everything contained in one being, at least for him. Machismo and a fierce vulpine femininity, flesh and heart. Animal and human, and something else. A quality to her he could not pin down. Alien hungers, unspeakable needs.

  Plus she could fart the National Anthem. Not many girls had that kind of confidence. Her sex was something he thought about constantly. He imagined it was her no matter who he was with, male or female or just himself. He heard her voice in his head all the way to Bakersfield and back along the muddy roads and Motel 6s behind their razor wire fences. Calling to him.

  And here she was beside him, and he had to admit, she could use a bath.

  He’d spent all the time he wasn’t looking for her in the Factory arcades or at the squat in the bamboo grove playing at his console. When he got to Spill City, he found a freelance gig with InZane Productions, the operation behind Z-Boy (an undead cowboy first person shooter), but got fired because he missed too many deadlines programming a new kind of construct.

  – What kind? Norma said slurrily.

  He pressed a vast palm against his eyes. Gloria’s teeth danced on their leather cord. It’s for a game I’m working on. For myself. I’ll send out demos next month.

  – What’s it called? she said.

  – Wolf, he said.

  – Save me, she said, moving in closer to him.

  – That’s the plan, he said, draining his beer.

  *

  He got up to go to the bathroom. and she watched the way the crowd parted for him, but she didn’t like how Augustine and the lackey followed him with their addled eyes, so to bury the hatchet she sent over a round of drinks with Little Barry.

  Little Barry shook his head. Okay, but you think that’ll do it, you better think again.

  She watched him bring the Roidheads their beers. Augustine flashed her a terrifying smile and then stood up, raised his glass to her and then emptied it onto the floor. Gene loomed behind him, and Norma thought that maybe they’d have it out then, clear the air, and she flexed her fingers, still sore from the wake/brawl at Killers. But Gene just nodded at the Roidheads—the Lackey all but imperceptibly flinched—stepped over the spilled beer and sat back down at the bar.

  – Making friends and influencing people as usual, I see, said Gene with a proud and happy smile.

  *

  Gene told her how he heard from people he asked about this tall crazy woman living alone in an abandoned trailer at Spill City. At the Birmingham Beach camping grounds.

  – I think I even saw you once or twice.

  – Why did you wait? she said.

  – I couldn’t be sure. You looked so different. At least to me.

  – How?

  – You had the jacket, he nudged her sleeve. Except you looked different, taller and filled out some, I guess. Like I said, all tits and legs and I misremembered you somehow.

  He wanted to say more. How here she was, a feast of flesh and now back in LA, she always seemed a little awkward in her body, a stranger to herself, neither girl nor woman but something between. He even recalled her hair being lighter (it had been). It seemed to him that back then she was less of what she was now, although he could see that coming and maybe that’s why he needed to be sure. Well, the past had passed and now, fierce and curvy and all broken in, she was found. Looking at him like she never did before, and her tired eyes were the color of wet slate, of arrowhead, and there was blood on her knuckles and she smelled like she’d slept in a dumpster but that’s how he’d take her, this time, because that’s how he’d found her.

  *

  She let him believe, if that’s what he needed, that she’d had work done. How else to explain the changes to her body over which she had no control? She invented, for herself as much as for him, a state of the art process undergone in Mexico. Untrialled and untested. Hormone enhancement therapies and a genetic recombinant process still in beta mode. Bodymod vacations not uncommon for the Slash on the edge. She had to admit, looking at her reflection in the glass—she was looking more and more human every day.

  – Impressive, he said, leering at her good-naturedly.

  – So how did you know it was me? she said.

  – It took me a while. I thought maybe that you were a sister, or a twin. That maybe she’d died.

  – Ouch.

  He shrugged. But I always knew it was you.

  – How?

  But he was staring inward at something she couldn’t see. She nudged him. The band was starting back up so he had to shout.

  – What?

  – At the camping grounds. How did you know it was me?

  He turned back to the bar, thought about it, then turned back to her, sloshing beer on her knees when he leaned toward her. The warmth of his breath in her ear.

  – By your step, he said. I knew you by your step.

  He got up and stood with squared shoulders and head swiveling, fists clenched and tits out, mimicking her. She laughed. Above them the swinging bulbs ticked with moths that had flown in through the broken skylights. Gene abruptly shivered.

  – I went to a fortune teller up at Swami’s, he said.

  He stopped and they watched Una load up two wagon wheel-sized plates.

  – What did the fortune teller say?

  – Just the usual stuff about virgin’s blood and filth and falling.

  – Was he called the Doctor?

  Gene nodded.

  – Bunny took me to see him once, but I missed him.

  – You didn’t miss a thing, said Gene. Guy’s a fake.

  *

  Customers poured into the bar all night. Norma had never seen the place so busy. Kids in sneakers lining up shots. Heading down to TJ via the Spill City clubs. Norma, surrendered to the noise, the booze, the weight of the last few days lessened now she’d shared it, felt awash in sodden gratitude. Grateful to the night, this nameless night in an unknown month. Grateful to a forgiving future for its boisterous return, with its promises of gleaming tech, seamless communication protocol and orbital getaways. With its false promises of home.

  But then a call came through on Little Barry’s console and she knew what he was going to say even before he passed it to her.

  – For you, he said.

  She put it to her ear and listened to the howl of alien winds, and silence of the molten river and Mommy’s sterile rage. She passed it back to Little Barry.

  – Was that about Raye? he asked.

  – In a sense, she said.

  She ordered shots and let the tequila squirm down her throat, shivered voluptuously at Gene’s big, hot hand on her thigh. The switch burned at her breast and the cord twitched. For now, she’d been able to keep Mommy out of her Whole, her Gene-filled consciousness, but it wouldn’t be long. In the end it would find a way in, howling for what it had lost, especially now it was found. Because exhausted and having drunk herself sober, she knew with a sobering dread that it was. The guy was found.

  Gene sat askew on the barstool, his ponytail coming loose. Norma stood up, nodded at Una and Barry and led Gene out along the catwalk, down the stairs and into the night. She took him along the path pushed up by the quake over the southern border of the lagoon. The checkpoints were a red glow to the South. Ahead of them the ocean and to the North, the Swami’s trash fires among the ruins. The highway rat
tled with traffic. Veelo gangs and Flyers and the antique pop of recombos.

  – More vehicles on the road each day, said Norma, swallowing a hard lump in her throat.

  – They fuel up at Hermosillo, said Gene. Picking up goods to get through the Tucson checkpoints. Medicine, guns, bandages. Body parts, hookers, explosives, said Gene. Cartel’s got one of the most advanced fleets of submarines in the Western Hemisphere now. Popping up all along the coast from Anaheim to Humboldt Bay.

  They were holding hands by the time they got to the pine at the entrance to the camping ground. The twins dozed in a giant mail bag, the Ecoist keeping watch by the blue light of his cellphone. The girl’s white eyes opened and she fumbled with the string of the coffee can. From her mouth came a mewling sound. Norma shivered and pulled Gene away. The girl’s teeth were jagged and decayed in the moonlight. She yanked the coffee can again, maggots and black worms spilling over the edge and when Norma looked back the worms were writhing in the dirt beneath the tree and the girl was kicking them away with a bare and bleeding foot.

  Norma wanted to take him right away, but she needed time to figure out how to do it, how to master a will not her own. They sat at the guard rail and looked down at the beach, the sea beyond. Migrating terns massed on the eroded guard tower. The risen moon floated between fat fingers of cloud. She’d brought a couple of beers from Una’s and passed him one.

  Gene held the bottle with nervous fingers. He said, That guy you were looking for. I have to know.

  Norma said. I found him.

  – And?

  – He wasn’t who I thought he was.

  He nodded as if that was an end to the matter.

  – You look good, he said.

  – You too.

  – And look, you still have this.

  Reaching across to dangle the cord around her neck. But he let it drop suddenly and looked out to sea, the beer bottle cradled in his huge paws.

  – What? she said, urgent now, the dentata throbbing,

  Terns burst from the guard tower in a chaotic and crystalline flash.