American Monster Read online

– I was on a mission. Wasn’t leaving here without you this time.

  – This time?

  – He came out from behind the partition, shirtless, carrying beers. His hair fell down his shoulders.

  – That time in LA, when I left you there. With the dead girl’s shoes.

  His brow furrowed with the painful memory and he avoided her eyes. That was blood on your hands, and it wasn’t from the stiff. It was bled-out. That scared me.

  Norma looked up from underneath the towel. It scared me too, she said.

  He nodded. I saw that, how scared you were. Later on in Bakersfield, sorting out the farm after Auntie died, I’d close my eyes and see you, just as scared as me and just as lonely. I figured I was more scared for you than of you, and better off with you than without. So that’s why I came back. Followed you down here. So, that’s that.

  She moved in on him, covered his mouth with her own. The bed was against the back wall beneath a skylight cut in the ceiling. The rain fell upon the perspex sheet in feathery splats. He watched her watching herself undress in a mirror against the wall, the bioswitch around her neck catching the light. It seemed like more than just the two of them in the room. The sheer wonder of his having found her, following her down to Spill City and with his wolf’s teeth and Titan hands that pinned her wrists to the bed, if not banishing her loneliness completely at least giving it a good scare so that it cowered in the shadows. His flanks aflame astride her, all tongue and mouth and broken promises that no longer needed fixing.

  A dread stillness woke her in the black of night and when she opened her eyes beside him, she was still dreaming. She’d forgotten to wake up. Her eyes filled with blood and her mouth filled with filth and Silence poured out, the Silence rose from a hole in the floor to pour down on her. The hole was wide and jagged, and she fell in or was pushed. Going down, she called out his name, but he was too far away to hear her and then she was awake in a wash of sweat and her hand was moving toward the switch between her breasts. Beside her Gene muttered something in his sleep. At her breast the bioswitch emitted a series of dull and gummy pulses that she tried to follow below the crashing thud of her heartbeat.

  .--. .- ... ... / .. - / --- -.

  She tried not to understand its repeating pattern but it was impossible not to. After all it was she who’d taught Mommy Morse code.

  Pass it on.

  Norma swung her legs out of the bed. Sticky between her thighs, she padded naked to the yard to stand below the yellow moon poking its sly head over the flailing bamboo and listened, shivering, to its clatter. The surf roared a muted chorus. An owl moaned from the charred shingles. And below it all the syncopated pulse of her neck tech.

  .--. .- ... ... / .. - / --- -.

  – No, she said across the night.

  – You will—the night said back.

  – I won’t.

  – is mine, said the night.

  When she came back in, Gene was awake on the narrow bed.

  – Okay? he said.

  – Just a dream, she said.

  She lay on the bed beside him and watched the rain turn sulfurous against the skylight. Before first light she was up and walking down the pass through the bamboo, the back of her throat burning and drops sizzling on the foliage. She went back alone to the camping ground, keeping to the shadows. By the time she got to the trailer, the sky was lightening and she could make out prints around the trailer. Small ones. Inside, Norma found a note:

  Call me: 0101 555 324.

  Norma stared at the useless numbers. She slammed a fist down on the little fold-out table, causing it to break and swing crazily from its metal brackets. Soon after landing on Earth, she had advised Mommy to zip her signal so it wouldn’t fry Slash tech. But Mommy had refused, just because it could. Norma even thought of jumping on a console at the Boardroom—risking interference from Mommy—but Raye’s phone was on the iSat net, not on the old free-wire.

  Norma got the remaining blood money from the preacher’s snuff gig from under her mattress and backed it into a sports bag. She sat on the edge of the bed, brailed in ocean roar but Raye did not come back that day. Norma didn’t want to leave a note that could be intercepted. Finally, she shouldered the sports bag and locked the door of the trailer on her way out. The lynx eyes of the twins blinked at her above the folds of the mail bag. She tossed them a bloodstained fifty and dropped the key to the trailer in their coffee can.

  – Keep an eye out for the girl, she said.

  Norma stopped by the markets and came back to the bamboo cottage carrying packages. Churro and coffee. Gene was sitting naked and cross-legged beneath the pallid glare from the skylight working on his console. The shiny silver system board cover lay beside it. He had a tiny laser screwdriver in his hand.

  – You good for breakfast? she said.

  He swept away the console and the sheets. His perfect horn.

  – You tell me, he said.

  He came out of the shower with a towel around his waist and his palm held out flat. In it was a medium sized diamond.

  – For us, he said. He told her about Uncle Earl’s diamonds.

  – What happened to the others? she said.

  He flicked his hair off his face. Spent, he said. Jesse’s operation and what not. I found a good fence in San Miguel, he said a little too casually.

  – When were you in San Miguel? she asked.

  – Last November, he said.

  – Me too, she said. I stayed at the Mission for a while.

  – Me too.

  He avoided her gaze, then he told her how he’d followed her trail down the coast, from San Miguel to LA.

  Norma thought back to that time, the nights in lock-ups and in the ring. Hours on broken phones to Mommy, giving it the lay of the land.

  – How? How did you know it was me?

  Gene looked down at the diamond as if it could tell him. You leave an impression, he said. Besides all that shitty broken com trash you left behind.

  Norma felt the heat rise on her face. But you didn’t even know me, she said. I don’t understand.

  Gene shook his head. Me neither. Not really. I felt I wanted to know you. That I had to, my future depended on it. And it does.

  Norma lay back on the bed and waited for him to tell her how Gloria’s guiding spirit came to him during that dark time, stayed on Norma’s trail all the way to LA and then all the way to Spill City. Kept him on the path.

  – And then what? said Norma. Where is she now? Your wolf?

  Gene held out the diamond to Norma. Her work is done.

  Norma took the diamond and held it up to the skylight. She turned it to and fro and a blue fire jumped across its crystalline surface, a flame at its coldest. The dentata cramped. Which is how she knew. She would keep him from Mommy or die trying. No Plan B.

  – Where do you keep this pretty piece of carbon? she said. The chunk of plasma around her neck would turn that rock into rainwater in thirty seconds flat.

  – Where the sun don’t shine, he said with a grin.

  His face a living collage across which moved past, present and future all at once—the boy he was, the man he’d be. All the pain he’d felt, the hopes snatched and jokes shared and fears racing across his face like clouds chasing the sun across the sky.

  Gingerly, she lay the stone back in his hand. Watched him walk grinning back behind the bathroom partition. After his shower they went to the Sanctuary to look for Raye. Her things were still there, but her bunk hadn’t been slept in. Gene asked around while Norma patted down the girl’s bunk bed as if hoping to find some trace of warmth, a thread or button or single hair, but there was nothing. Norma sat on the bunk bed, clasping her hands until a shadow fell over her and it was Gene, looking down on her the way she looked down on Raye at their first meeting. Behind her ribcage, Norma’s heart sped up and slowed down independent of her will, a strange force taking root there.

  Gene offered her his phone, so she could call the girl, but Norma told him she didn’t
have Raye’s number, hating herself for lying. She couldn’t even let him, or anyone else call her, because Mommy would be listening to Raye now. Like an ear at the end of a telephone line. Pass it on.

  Gene took her back to the trailer but wouldn’t let her stay there alone, so finally she let him convince her to pay a hobo ten dollars to keep an eye out and call Gene if he saw anything. The twins were hiding behind the tree and wouldn’t come out when she called.

  The next night or the one after that, she sent him out on his own. She told him to go down to the Wang, and that Bunny and the girls would take care of him. She told him what to tell Bunny explaining things and to ask him to keep an eye out for Raye, tell Raye to get out of town and take Mac with her. She gave Gene some money to pass on to the girl. Gene held out his console so she could text instead of telling him a bunch of stuff that he’d most likely forget, but she shook her head.

  – I don’t text, she said.

  She gave him some story about hackers, unable to meet the disbelief in his eyes.

  – And I thought I was paranoid, he said.

  After he’d gone, she chugged half a bottle of Jack, popped a handful of Vicodin and then went behind the bathroom partition. She tugged at the bioswitch. It was attached to her viscera via tensile strength cortico-fibre invisible to the naked eye. The dentata screamed and Norma sunk to her knees. She straightened, breathed in then out, closed her eyes and yanked. She felt her superhuman consciousness struggle with her human pain and lose. She came to on the floor of the bathroom, her shoulder tusks out and her throat necklaced in blood. A dark stain of blood between her legs. She blinked up at the darkness and listened to the clacking of the bamboo outside while she counted down through the pain and the cold burn of the tears.

  37//: cold steel

  The best Norma could do was to leave verbal messages for Raye at the usual haunts and with the usual suspects, not just Bunny, but Little Barry and D-Cup at the Brew, but so far no one had seen the girl. Bunny told her that the girl was not her lookout, not now or ever, and Norma tried to see it that way. Bunny said that Raye was fine without Norma, or had been until Norma came along and would be after she’d gone, and perhaps he was right still. Yet, everywhere they went, Norma kept one eye out for a blur of blue parka in the crowd, one ear out, like the swiveling ear of a wolf, for the song of metal heels on the ground. And every day she spent hours waiting at the trailer. The tide ebbed and flowed, sometimes the color of blood, sometimes the color of rain.

  Close to midnight on an unnamed night almost two weeks after Gene bailed her out of the Sprawl, they went back down to the Factory, looking for news. There was always a chance, she told herself, that Raye would be there, chugging beer like a truck driver and cracking wise in that awful blue parka of hers. Norma’s heart constricted around the memory of that parka. Her head doing three-sixties as they walked the Factory floor. But she still hadn’t learnt to lie to herself, Slash-style, or to ascertain what kind of immortality it bought. They passed Tweety’s forge and a barber shop. Opposite a kebab stand, an open doorway offered INK, the word pulsating in bioluminescent text. Below the steel stairs leading up to Una’s, a ramp led down to the basement gym. Plates intermittently clanked.

  – Gym must have reopened, said Gene.

  It had been closed the last time they were there, the Roidheads lying low after the Dianabol caper.

  Norma wanted to avoid it, but Gene said they should see if Augustine had come up for air. Men of steel in Viramasks moved between the benches and racks. Soldiers, kickers, guards and body mod freaks heaved and grunted in the cold white light. Norma could taste, at the back of her throat, the men’s diseased sweat, the fear in their hearts and shit in their shorts. Smart drinks glistened in the banks of glass-doored refrigerators. Thai Tubs and brown bottles of Reform and Giant’s Junk. Techno tyranny blasting from the speakers. Mirrors everywhere. In a corner beneath a dead screen sprawled Augustine. The lackey straddled him with a bandaged hand and emitted gentle grunts of encouragement.

  – Harder, baby. Dig deep. Want it. Want it bad.

  Gene said in a low voice to Norma, Obviously having lost a testicle does not effect your ability to lift two hundred and forty pounds of cold steel.

  Norma said, Maybe it helps.

  She pulled Gene away though, anxious that Augustine not see them together. How to explain? It wasn’t just that the longer she remained out of Augustine’s sight, the stronger the possibility that he’d forget about her and Raye. It was Gene, now too. How to explain this thing taking hold inside of her, this secret care?

  *

  Augustine pushed the bar up with a bellow and stared red-faced and turgid at the bitch who broke his balls, there at the door with her big Indian prick, Dead Man Walking.

  – You okay, Tine? said the lackey, tenderly blotting at Augustine’s forehead.

  Augustine batted him away. How to explain? It had nothing to do with the damn bet, nothing to do with the freaking gutter punk. It was the way Norma had looked at him that one time—everyone at the Factory had heard about the crazy bitch who fought like a Ninja, but she took up all the air in the room. Just one look at her Augustine knew she was the one, and how she looked back at him, just that once, but it was enough. Before she decided to ignore him completely, before she was lost to him like she is now and way before that little gutter punk fell from the ceiling and cost him his manhood. Okay, you can buy nuts by the twofer in Sonora, and he just did—his junk never felt better, thank-you very much—but yet he remembered. In Norma’s eyes, that one time, such hate and want and how she never looked at him that way again.

  He couldn’t get over it.

  38//: first person shooter

  Gene and Norma got separated the next night at the Brew Box and she must have blacked out, staggering home through the bamboo at dawn with straw in her hair and blood beneath her nails that she must first scrub off before leaping ravening onto her waking wolf.

  It was the last week in March. She still had not seen Raye, and the days and nights were beginning to run into each other. The sex was unending—the more Norma tried to drown out the pulsing code of the activator, the more insistent it became.

  Pass.

  It.

  On.

  In your dreams, bitch. Except there was a voice in Norma’s head that said Mommy had nothing but time. All the time in the world to make sure Gene could have none, and anyone that thought it could best a being with no end to their time had better think again.

  Norma tried to think. She tried to come up with a Plan. She had come to Spill City looking for a Guy who was now looking for her, and she was now looking for another. A missing kid. It was unending. Exponential. Serial loss, limitless possibility. Mommy could, by definition have no sense of that, because it was the Whole. It had total vantage point and therefore it had none. Poor Mommy would never even catch a glimpse of the far horizon. It could not get over itself.

  So the hunt continued. Norma haunted the Sanctuary, spent time staking out the trailer each day, watching for Raye because sometimes there were signs of her passing—a broken earring, a burrito wrapper—but no one would say they had seen her come or go. It didn’t surprise Norma. Raye was at home in the blind spots of the world, had found in these room enough to move. Sometimes Gene watched with Norma, but even he was beginning to have his doubts about whether Raye was lost, or whether she’d just moved on. Sitting at the little table in the trailer, or wandering around the markets sipping from a Coke, Norma felt outside of her own skin, as though she, the watcher, was being watched, and that someone was also there waiting for her to leave. She wanted it to be Raye. But maybe they were right. Maybe Raye did not want to be found. Not yet.

  Gene made her tell him the whole story. Norma still kept out the bit about how she probed the girl’s brain, but told him everything else. How some guy had ripped off the girl’s dad, and how it sent him even crazier than before, so Raye promised she would stay to try and get back what belonged to him.
r />   – What was it? Gene said.

  Norma shrugged. An autograph or a letter or something from Michael Jackson’s grandson. Probably a fake.

  Gene said, It must be worth something for him to be all messed up over it. These collectors know when they’re onto something.

  Norma nodded, remembering the store and how Mac had surrounded himself, not so much with paraphernalia, it seemed to her, as with little pieces of himself, his soul, fragmented and crystalized around him, each piece reflective not so much of himself but of a Mac-gone-wrong, hung up and haunted.

  Gene looked thoughtful. I think I saw her, he said.

  Norma said, What? When?

  – Long way’s back. Before you went there.

  And then he told her. How when Mac lied and said he’d seen the one matching her description, Gene, who’d believe anything, did.

  – Everyone told me how he was some kind of divvy. And the store was like a portal or something to Spill City’s underworld.

  – Spill City is an underworld, Norma said. There’s no under.

  – Whatever. I love all that shit.

  So Gene hung around the store. Every day all through late January and into February. Waiting for a sighting, the dark mop of her hair, the long legs, wide mouth, head and shoulders above the crowd. But she never came. In the end he stormed back into the store to get the puppet back and kick his thriller ass, but when he went in, he said, it was the saddest thing. Just the old fool in his cage talking to Freddy Kruger and a teenage girl too big for the kiddy table on which she sat, laying out a Klondike array with this cool Harry Potter deck.

  – Shitty blue jacket, he said. About twelve years old.

  – Fifteen, said Norma. I think.

  Counting out her failures of ones and zeros that stretched to infinity.

  – The point is, she said, is that now Augustine and those fools are after her for pulling some stunt they say I was in on, cost them four hundred bucks.

  – You really think even a Roidhead would mess up a little girl for four hundred bucks?