American Monster Read online

  – There was the loss of a testicle, she said, trying not to gloat at the memory.

  – A dime a dozen, said Gene. If you know the right people, which I’m sure they do, those Roidheads having no problem getting their mutant on.

  Norma squirmed against the pillow and pulled a plastic piece of the console out from under her ass.

  – I don’t think it’s necessarily about chunks of change or pounds of flesh. I think it’s about something else.

  Gene stared. Norma looked down at her hands.

  – Wait, said Gene. You and Augustine?

  How to explain? How that time when Augustine looked at her across the bar there had been so much hate and need in his slavering lips, so much hurt and harm in his eyes that she thought she might kill him on the spot. So she fucked him instead. And how in Augustine’s case it was the same thing.

  – Girl, Gene said. You are worse than me.

  – For my sins, she said quietly.

  Outside the wind had died down. Beyond the furtive clack of the bamboo she could hear a chainsaw starting up. Someone clearing the ground.

  – Well, said Gene, swiveling to sit on the edge of the bed and fumbling for his jeans. Like Jesse always said, and I quote, only thing to do when you mess up is make amends, forgive yourself and get on with your life.

  She shuffled around behind him on the bed, her long legs either side of him. Then she flipped him onto his back and rode him till he roared loud and after that Norma lay with her head on his deep chest. The drumming of his heart banged inside her head.

  They agreed that even if Augustine was after Norma, or Raye, or both, he would give up eventually. Gene reminded her that, if nothing else, the excessive amounts of bad Dianabol they consumed, an occupational hazard, were not exactly excellent for the attention span. Bottom line, Gene was a man on a mission. He laid out a plan of action. They’d take shifts at the trailer, deploy eyes and ears wherever they could find them. Bunny and Jesus would help. Una’s would be the checkpoint. The cottage was all but invisible, he said, and practically inaccessible through the bamboo, a dead zone as far as most satellite and wireless technology was concerned. The mission, it seemed, had found its man.

  But Norma didn’t say, because she couldn’t, that Augustine and his empty nutsack were the least of her worries. She took every precaution not to be followed back to their little hideaway deep in the bamboo. It was less Augustine’s men with their chains and Flyers she kept an ear and eye out for than the ring of steel heels on the pavement, a brassy flash of yellow hair in the crowd. Because this she knew—Mommy’s tech was beyond high. Beyond low.

  When Gene wasn’t helping her look for Raye, he looked for work. They were low on money, and he thought he should go to San Jose, try and find someone to produce the game he was working on. He worked on it when he could. He took his consoles apart and put them back together again. He watched TV—sports, news, Reelys. What he watched didn’t matter to him. He had no critical agenda. Male female young old true false comedy tragedy. He was heterogenous in his tastes, incapable of judgement or revulsion. Norma envied him for that. She envied his objectivity, but tested it when she could.

  – What does that make me? she said. More of the same?

  – He shook his head. You’re more all right, but not the same. You’re everything. Out of the many, girl, you’re the one.

  Norma looked up through the skylight. A drone was writing a message, some addex in the sky. Norma watched the letters bloom and feather against the dark clouds. She turned away before she could read the words she already knew were forming.

  Pass it on.

  She asked him if there was a name for what he was.

  He was bent over his little pliers.

  – A name? he said. I’ve been called everything there is. Breed for half breed, retard, redskin, moron, fag, bonehead, ass, dipshit, dumbfuck, gotard—Ty’s contribution—goober, dumb Indian, Sherlock, Chief, goober—did I say that already—fuckwit, fucktard, dingus, dill weed, dill hole, butt-munch, rez-rat, Homer—

  – Homer?

  Gene explained that Homer was some guy in an apocalyptic book called Day of the Locusts who couldn’t tell the difference between the real thing and a fake.

  – What does that have to do with you? she said.

  – I was the only kid on the rez back in Ontario got bruises on his face from playing Xbox.

  She shook her head. Xbox?

  – It’s an obsolete gaming platform. You use a controller instead of a headset. But the principle is the same. First person shooter and all that.

  He went theatrically slack-jawed at an imaginary screen—not a construct—and mimed holding an old-fashioned controller. He was wiggling his giant thumbs and lurching further and further off to the side of the bed until he face-planted naked on the floor, his long hair flying. The little container cottage shuddered with the impact of his huge body on the floor. They’d been in bed all day beneath the dirty skylight sharing a bottle of whisky and a six-pack, Norma eating leftover pizza.

  – What happened to the guy, Homer, in the end, she asked. When he found out the illusion wasn’t real?

  Gene got up and brushed himself off. He still held a small sharp screw driver in his huge hands.

  – He went postal in the end.

  Norma pushed the pizza box away, feeling sleepy. The grimy square of sky through the skylight faded to a deep purple and in her mind she was back in San Miguel standing under the arches of the Mission Arcangel. Early evening around Christmas time. Inside, lighting the candles of the colonnade, the old Salinan gravedigger slash caretaker. How he said his lighter had run out of gas one evening halfway through lighting the candles and did she have anything on her? She found a matchbook in her pocket and gave it to him. It was from The Trap, the club in Bakersfield where it all began. She’d been almost at the end of the colonnade when a strange clicking sound made her turn back to see the gravedigger tucking the matches up his sleeve and continuing to light the candles with a Mission lighter, one with a holographic Arcangel swimming behind its plastic casing. Norma had wondered why he said it had run out of fluid when it obviously hadn’t. But then she forgot about it.

  Norma turned away from the skylight and there was Gene on the bed beside her. How far back before their lifelines split and separated, how far forward? Is the fork-tongued reader of palms the teller of fortunes or the creator?

  One morning she woke up astride him and his eyes were hard orbs fixed on her heart. She looked down at her own hands clawing at the bioswitch, digging welts at her breastbone. Rolled off him howling, nonononono!

  That day, on her way to the trailer, Norma found a broken console behind VG’s. She tried to contact Mommy that day and the next, clutching the switch and willing Mommy to enter the Whole but all she got was a ‘recorded’ message: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Leave a message after the beep.

  – Fucktard, said Norma.

  The season of rain was upon them. From the trailer window, Norma watched the rain hang over the ocean as if time itself had come to an end, at the horizon the winking lights of possibility and peril. She came back to Gene and the only place on her that was dry was under the jacket. She pulled off her boots and jeans on the threshold of the container cottage and stepped in wearing her panties. Pink-tinged water streamed from her hands onto the rough-cut linoleum patched onto the floor of the container. Gene wrapped her in a towel and took a step back to look at her. Looking down at her hands, she shook her head, no. And when she looked up in his eyes she saw not the pure fear he expressed in LA, but finally a kind of fearful understanding.

  She told him about how sometimes she woke up with memories of another place that she dreamt she’d gone to. Except that she brought pieces of the dream back with her. Straw on her hair, blood on her hands.

  – What’s the dream? he asked. His face was taut and lined from exhaustion, the no-color of bracken. They weren’t in bed, but sat opposite each other at the little table beside
the window.

  – It’s a barn, she said. Except that it’s round inside. Circular. It’s not really me that’s there, but it is. And I have a burden. A body that needs to be dumped there.

  – In the barn, Gene said. Which isn’t really a barn.

  She nodded. She wouldn’t cry. There are others there, she said. Or parts thereof. I’ve brought others to the barn. Many others.

  Gene drew a hand across his tired face.

  – Yuki, he said. Jesse’s girlfriend from Japan, told us this ghost story once, about the ikiryo. An angry spirit that departs the living body while sleeping, to avenge its enemies. So there was this story she told us one night about a girl in a small town who was engaged to her lover. Both young, good kids. She was beautiful, he was kind—they were both smart and they loved each other. They were both going to be teachers—he worked at the town tavern at night, she worked as a tutor. So one day, the tavern got a new barmaid, cute drink of water with legs to here, hair to there, ran off with the boy. Well the girl was devastated, of course, but she said to herself that you can’t beat a game like that, something so out of the blue, a random stroke of treachery with no warning to it, no bells and whistles that she’d heard coming—you couldn’t go out to meet a mean streak like that without putting your own soul at hazard. So she let it lie. Went about her business. But her soul had other ideas. One day, she was standing alone in her kitchen and she heard something inside her fall, a dim faraway sound like something falling off a shelf. That night while she was sleeping, her ikiryo, her vengeful spirit left her dreaming body and went to the bed of her lover where he lay drunk and dreamless with the barmaid. And the ikiryo began to hurt her.

  – How?

  – I don’t know. Poison maybe, or little bites. I think it was that. Bites that became sores. It killed her in the end. But it killed something in the girl too. Who up until now had no knowledge of this deadly rage in her soul and what it would do. What it could do.

  – How did she begin to suspect? What—strands of the skank’s hair in her teeth, bits of skin under her nails.

  – Bingo, said Gene.

  – What about the boy?

  – He got brought down too. He became a mean spirit. Moved from woman to woman, always shadowed by this vengeful spirit of his beautiful lover who’d fly out at night to do them harm. His own soul was consumed by sores as the bodies of the women who were never his to take.

  – So they were working together in the end, the ikiryo and the mean spirit. Reunited.

  – In the end, yes. Marriage made in hell. Be careful what you wish for I think being the message.

  The rain fell harder outside, poured down the trunks of the giant bamboo like vertical rivers.

  – Is that what I am? yelled Norma. A living ghost? Is that what happens to me in my dreams? I clomp off in preloved combat boots to some barn lugging stiffs, give them what they ask for, come back with blood on my hands and dirt on my soul?

  – Remember, Gene said quietly. It’s not you. Whoever is doing this isn’t you anymore.

  *

  Norma took him to Arcadia Beach. Neither of them wanted to go. They got off the Coaster and walked toward a flaming sunset to the Sanctuary but a new guard said he had not seen Raye. One of the other punks, clattering his Flyer down the steel steps said he’d heard a Grimey that matched Raye’s description turning tricks a few blocks to the East. Mac’s neighborhood. Norma, with Gene by her side, pushed through the wet, teeming streets to Mac’s store in the emptying backlots. It was closed and no one answered her tap on the door. Gene peered in at the fly-specked sheet drawn across the inside of the window.

  – No light on, he said. Maybe he’s taken the girl and bolted.

  More likely she’s taken him, thought Norma. There was a watchful quality to the apparent emptiness of the store. Always someone watching. She looked up at the second floor windows, but nothing moved.

  She’d left enough money for both father and daughter with Bunny and instructions to the girl to lay low, maybe get out of town for a while. She hoped that’s what Raye had done. But she felt inexplicably desolate. She would have liked to say good-bye.

  – Do you think it’s still in there? He whispered nervously.

  Sweat trickled between her breasts.

  – Why did you hang onto it all that time?

  He shook his head in wonder. I’d been waiting to offload it my whole life. After my dad’s Chevy hit Ty when we were kids, me and Jesse lay there on the ground a long time. I still hear Jesse crying in my ear. He’d broken his leg and pelvis to save me. I knew the puppet was there under me, I was lying on it, but I had to wait until he rolled off me to make sure he didn’t see it. To make sure no one saw it. It had already done enough harm, and I blamed myself. I stuffed it under my shirt, didn’t tell anyone I had it. It was my burden, my care. I carried the damn thing wherever I went. To make sure it never hurt anyone else.

  – It hurt you, she said.

  She remembered, the way it squirmed underfoot when she stumbled over it in Mac’s store.

  Gene continued. Thing was, I kept the puppet in a shoebox in my closet, kept me awake at night just knowing it was there. But as I got older and moved around a bit, I’d have to unpack it and pack it up and after a while it didn’t look so bad. Kind of pathetic actually, and sad. With those chipped red eyes. More hungover than evil.

  Norma smiled. Let’s go, she said. This place gives me the chills.

  She turned at the swish of a skateboard behind them, but no one was there. Above them, reflected in the dusty windows, a drone cut across a pink ball of cloud.

  He palmed away at her tears with his big rough hands, across her cheekbones and the tip of her nose. A light rain began to fall. The gold hand at the crossing was still frozen in the Don’t Walk position.

  – Let’s go eat on the beach, said Gene.

  The night market was in full swing. On their way to the beach, Norma found a rebel army coat that looked about Raye’s size and she bought it to replace the blue parka. Also a shirt for Gene, age-softened corduroy in deep brown that matched his eyes. As they passed a bargain bin containing surplus SLA caps and scarves, she heard a beep. Gene kept walking and Norma reached into the bin, pulled out an ancient pager scratched and worn white at the edges.

  Call the office, said the message. M.

  Ahead of her Gene had stopped and was waiting for her to catch up. She dropped the comtrash back into the bin and walked toward him and away from its relentless bleat.

  – Everything okay? he said.

  – Nothing that a corn dog won’t fix, she said.

  Halfway through the month Norma’s blood money had dwindled. Gene still hadn’t found work more than an occasional shift behind the bar at the Wang. Superman asked him to fill in one night but they could not find a pair of tights big enough.

  On the last Friday of the month she came back to the cottage with a basket packed with Noe’s burritos and beers. They walked until they got to Via Laguna, followed it alongside the lagoon until she could see a path between the shrubs that led down to the sunken wetland. They meandered wordless in the enormity of ruin, across the heat-cracked beaches, across dried lagoon beds, surly creeks buried in vicious copses from which burst the occasional marine bird, pulling up a diseased undercarriage as it rose above them and disappearing with a paleolithic squawk. They finally emerged across the road from the ancient retro-fitted 76 filling station near the freeway.

  The fuel stations that were still operational after the quakes and the looting couldn’t compete with the price of gas, diesel, ethanol and other mixes in Senora and even Ensenada was cheaper if you made it past the checkpoints. The local fuel stations sold coffee and battery packs and Tylenol and traded, like almost everything else, in information. Like the 7-Elevens, they were subsidized—or extorted—by either the Cartels or the Consortium or both, in return for an eye and ear to the ground.

  Gene pointed to the once-animated reproduction 76 disc that floated like a
dead star above the upswept googie roof.

  – The future came to California, he said. But then it passed on.

  – Why? asked Norma. Where did it go?

  Gene shook his head. I don’t know where. When, is when we stopped believing in it. But it left pieces of itself behind. To remember it by.

  He kept staring up at the broken holo. The filling station’s flagstone walls were charred and the huge plate glass window smashed by looters and replaced by sheeting. Liquefaction oozed from wide cracks in the asphalt between the pumps. Kudzu and other vines wound around the pumps and the entire building had sunk below the level of the road at an angle of twenty-five degrees, give or take. An abrupt dreaminess came over Norma, the switch burning between her breast and a compulsion to put her hand into her panties.

  With finger pointed and eye up at the broken projection, Gene stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie. He raised a hand and pointed at it, and at that moment, Norma felt a shock of pain in her belly accompanied by a sudden flash of light.

  And then she fainted.

  Late that night, sharing a quiet meal at the Besta-Wan, Gene asked if she’d fainted before. Norma put down her slice of pie. What she wanted to tell him, more than anything, was that she had not fainted before, no, not unless you count waking up in the morning with blood on your hands and manure on your boots and having no idea how it got there or falling down onto the floor of the restroom in a wash of pain and matter and not remembering why or standing clueless and panting over the bodies of your assailants some of whom would take the vision of an alien with tusks and smoking eyes down with them to hell. Instead she just said, No.

  A vague shadow of pain played behind her shoulder blades and she felt nauseous, as she often did these days. Gene’s smile was as winning as ever but his eyes avoided hers. The place was scattered with tourists from the city who pretended not to notice the torn and frayed couple propped up at the bar.

  – You called her name, he said. Before you passed out.