American Monster Read online

  – What is it? Some kind of organic Ti alloy?

  When she didn’t answer, he said, I know there are places in the South. And Eastern Europe. But America?

  – This isn’t America, she said. It’s Spill City.

  – Why’d you get it done? he said.

  – It seemed like a good idea at the time, she said. Keeping her eyes closed so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  – Someone can remove it, Gene said. There’s this guy in LA, a surgeon, or almost—

  But she was already drifting off. She woke sometime before dawn with Gene asleep beside her, her womb cramping from the hungry dentata, the cramps reverberating out through her body in concentric waves of pain. And she knew she’d never be free, and while she was here, that he’d never be safe.

  Pop da pop da pop dibbie dibbie, pulsed the bioswitch. Pass it on.

  Configuration (re)Transfer Protocol (CrTP). (n) Also known as Consciousness Transfer Procedure, and commonly known as RESCRIPTION. i. A standard configuration process used to transfer files from a Viewpoint (primary sequence or sentience) to a neural host across a (theoretical) totality of perception called the Whole. ii. Refers to a future return to a time before the Before, a restoration which will be both the beginning of a new age and a repetition of a previous state. iii. Coming home.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQ., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  44//: silence

  – Mommy, are you there?

  Smoke whispered out of the ass of the broken console. It was one of Gene’s. He’d gone to the Factory to get them something to eat and some more antibiotics for Norma.

  – Norma. Baby. OMG. It’s been, like, foreverRRRRR!

  Norma had finally relented and let Mommy in on the broken gadget. Because she needed to know. It took some doing—Gene was right. The bamboo was an amazingly effective firewall. Mommy’s voice seemed to have more to do with the smoke dribbling from the console than it did with the console itself. If Norma pressed her head up against the window she could see lightning flash between the flailing fronds of bamboo. She pulled down the blind. Turned around to face the broken circuitry lying on the table. In the dark.

  – So, she said, trying to sound casual. This Swedish fuck shot me. Just like old times, right? But on a positive note, I’m back in the game. I just won six hundred dollars.

  – Wicked, said Mommy. You go, girl.

  Norma slumped onto the couch and held her cramping belly. The dentata chomping at the bit.

  – Uh huh, just like in the good old days.

  – Happy times, said Mommy with its mouth full. A quaint icon materialized on the projection, like a bitten apple, as blue as tears. It blurred and disappeared but not entirely.

  Norma hunched over her belly and stared at the projection through the burning slits of her eyes.

  – Why him, Mommy? Why Gene?

  – Normstah!! It was the voice of the little girl twin who lived under the Torrey Pine. Shrill and ancient.

  Norma’s clawed hands flew to her ears.

  – Wait. I need more time.

  – He’s the one. Game over Gurrrrl! The words skidded across the dark in a flash of electron blue.

  Norma tried to sit up straight. Listen. Gonna get us some prime US horn. Spill City’s a dead end. I’m thinking stateside.

  But Mommy had started to sing, ‘Jean Genie...’

  Norma stood up, keeping her eyes on the blue apple ghosting from the console.

  Mommy slunk through into Norma’s VIPr, ‘Let yourself gohohohoh...’

  – What makes you think he’s the one, Mommy? I’ve been after this other Guy for you, super rock n roll, followed him all the way down from LA. Like I said before. But he’s slippery. All’s I need is some time is all—

  Norma concentrated on keeping her head absolutely still so that her brain would not boil over and spill out of the top of her head. She knew she did not have a hole at the top of her head and that her brains were not boiling, but that’s what it felt like and the Slash imagination was a powerful thing. It was one weapon against Mommy who had only words, who could, lacking an imagination, only observe the Slash through clichés and idioms. Words and no guts. No heart. It could not know what it was like to feel as though your brain was boiling, because it had no use for metaphor except as leverage. It was nothing but vantage point and therefore it missed the Whole point.

  The apple rematerialized and pulsed like a blue fist.

  – Gene is the Besta-Wan, said Mommy. A brain to die for.

  There was a small pop of circuitry, the hot waft of fried PVC. Norma swayed.

  – Firstly. Mommy, the Besta-Wan’s just a pizza joint. Just a name. I mean just because we go there, doesn’t mean—

  – Two, Mommy said. His horn is magnificent.

  Norma couldn’t argue with that.

  –Three. His lobes are luscious.

  – What?

  – The superbrain for Mommy’s heart. Supercala-altruistic-parietalocious.

  Norma put her hands to her ears, Lobes?

  – You just want to take a big juicy bite of them apples. Yummy Mummy!

  Silence squealed open a curtain and then it was just her and Mommy. Two-whoaman show.

  – Mommy, I think there’s been a huge misunderstanding. Gene’s no one. Lobes or no lobes. He’s a gotard, okay. He told me so himself. Look I’ve got cash again and enough fuck in me to buy you a bushel full of Besta-Wans. Guy out there’d be perfect for you. Great sense of fashion, got this Western thing going on. Just give me a day or two.

  The surfboard above the couch flashed blue in the projection.

  – The dentata doesn’t lie. You want it, you want it bad, that bad apple, so ripe and axon-dense and just waiting for a fall. A love so total that it knows no other. He would die for you, burn down the house to save it. In this way, I loved the First Being.

  The world had gone so quiet. The world had come to Norma finally in all of its silence and all of its fear.

  – Okay, wait. A.) There’s a big difference. I’m talking galactic. Okay. Between love that’s total and love that totals. Yes. In this way you loved the First Being. Yes. The Nilean. You killed him, burned down the house. Swirling sands and toxic bubble, bitch. That’s how much you loved him. Deal with it. B.) A man’s brain is not in his, um, horn. That’s just an expression, okay—Norma cupped her hands to her mouth—Earth to Mommy. No axons in the horn.

  Mommy burped, He will live again. Our hungry heart. In the Besta-Wan. Game over, Agent 99. He’s the Horn. Out of the many. And there were many horns, weren’t there you big slaggy slut you. What a cunt!

  Tears burst from Norma like from a burst valve.

  – That hurts, Mommy.

  The apple turned into a hot blue fist and punched Norma in the face. She flew against the blue surfboard and it fell off the wall and landed on her back.

  – He would die for you. His heart’s in his brain, you you big sloppy cunt you you skanky thieving slit. He’s mine and you will. You will.

  – You will.

  Norma lurched to her feet and rotated in a slow circle keeping her face to the wall. Wind blew in beneath the rough door hewn out of the container. Mommy had never been all there. It told itself that it was all there was and so, by extension it could never be anything.

  So what was it? Where was its weakness?

  The apple pulsed blue as a heart attack. Norma had begun to back away dreamily, the headache receding and something taking its place, no. Not that. The apple flashed on and off. .--. .- ... ... / .. - / --- -. Pass it on. Her heart thrumming in her head, in the raw empty space left by the headache. Baddum, baddum. Pop pop the yippie. Um. The sound of knowledge, um, the silence of the fall, Daddy. The blue apple mutely flared then shriveled to a corpse-gray core for no apparent reason. She was doing lazy figure eights around it, stubbed her toe, hopped to shake off the Silence.

  – And we will live again, it droned. In the Best One. The one with farthest to fall.

  Norma stopped mi
d-spiral. The floor shook.

  – Wait. You’re going to kill him. That’s the plan?

  – Plan A, no Plan B.

  – But the mission?

  – Mission shmission. One word for another. Who’s counting?

  They’d discussed it beneath the towering flames. Her and Mommy. Or at least that’s what her memory told her, bring bring. A piece of cake, Norma. Walk in the park. Or is that dark? Who’s your daddy now?

  – It’s a rescription, isn’t it? Norma said more to herself than to Mommy. A restoration. You’re coming home, bitch. You lied.

  And Mommy said, Bingo and Norma said, What about me, and Mommy said, Who?

  But how luscious the apple looked. Norma drooled. She bit her lip. The apple glowed, fleshy, fragrant. She felt it in her parts, swollen and tempting. The rain would fall, the breeze would blow. Time would resume. Yet all she wanted was for the Silence to continue. To never-slash-ever end. She surrendered to it. The apple throbbed, expanded. She moved toward orgasm. Mommy’s way of showing Norma that her will was not her own.

  – Mommy? I’m coming.

  – Yes dear. Hang on while I make a smoothie.

  Mommy in override mode, entered Norma’s Whole with a roar of agony-ecstasy that made Norma’s back arc and her knees buckle. She sunk to the floor, her eyes so far back in her head that she could see her own human brain, its tangled dreams and gooey hopes, the silver tide of memory and lies. And at the edges a terrible Silence for which the cure was the disease. The dentata pulsed creamily, pulling her out once more on a wave of black delight that she could not stop because it was Mommy. All Mommy, all Silent. And as she pulled once more toward ecstasy, toward Silence, Norma grasped wildly for her will, for some weapon, some hole in Mommy’s Whole, and then it came to her, through the silently mounting pleasure. She would draw on the oldest Slash weapon in the book. Older than speech, older even than love. Pain.

  Panting, groping for one of Gene’s screwdrivers lying on the coffee table. Not the laser kind, but a steel one that had belonged to his crazy uncle Earl. And jammed it in her thigh muscle. She screamed, breaking the terrible Silence, and Mommy receded.

  – What if I won’t? Norma sobbed.

  – Won’t what, dear? said the voice in her Whole. It was Mommy, but there was a distortion to it now. It was having trouble breaking through the human firewall. The synaptual fortress Norma had built, not just now, but over the months on Earth, with all the blood and tears of her growing humanity. All the pain.

  Norma pushed herself to one leg and with the wounded one kicked aside the surfboard. Howled. Smoke poured from the console. Gene would be walking in any minute and that would be it. Norma had to settle something. She had to make a Plan B. But how? Her mind scrabbled around the corridors of the Whole, seeking a new set of co-ordinates. The room had gone cold-star blue, reeking of sulphur and CMRs. Even so, bits could possibly be retrieved, the transmission intercepted by SETI or someone—Mommy chuckling at the thought. Everything was blue.

  – Thing is. I can’t implant him Mommy.

  – Can’t or won’t? There was a chromatic chill to the voice now.

  – Can’t slash won’t. Same difference. You need me to launch the transfer protocol device before your files can be uploaded into Gene’s horn, right? What if I can’t, you know, do it?

  – Your point being?

  Again Norma felt dreamily pulled, or pushed, toward the blue apple. She didn’t want to be but she was. The Silence resettling all around her now—she was reaching for it and she couldn’t stop. With the last of her will, she raised the screwdriver. Plunged it into her leg again. And left it there.

  She felt Mommy flinch, just a little.

  – Oh stop being dirikulus, said Mommy. It’s in your program. The VIPr brought you to him—call it pheromones, okay—you sniffed him out, all that scrummily high-minded gray matter—and precisely by wanting him all to yourself, you have brought him to me.

  Norma howled. Pain, shmain. So that was Mommy’s ace in the hole. Literally. It had built a simulated human volition into the program, one that was prey to both Mommy’s control on the one hand and human emotion on the other but either way was not her own. Norma was fucked. That was in her program. To be a woman, fucked forevermore.

  Blood poured from the wound in her leg. She bound it with a shirt of Gene’s that lay draped over a crate. She watched the blood blossom on the shirt. Which, for the second time that night, gave her an idea. Norma wiggled the screwdriver into her leg again. She screamed and buckled. Blood bubbling around the steel. Mommy slammed a door in a room at the other end of the house in hell.

  – Get a grip.

  – I’ll kill myself.

  – Now look who’s talking out of their axons. Too bad daemons cannot die.

  – You’re lying.

  – You’re the one with the screwdriver, said Mommy. Knock yourself out.

  And she would. But not now. It was pain she wanted now. Screams and human noise to push away the hellish Silence, just a nudge. Some space, some human anguish to help her think. And then it came.

  – Then I’ll kill him, she said. If I can’t kill myself I’ll kill Gene.

  The Silence lifted a little and the sound of the rain poured in. The clatter of bamboo in Mommy’s uncertain sigh. Norma spasmed and jerked upright as the flesh of her back rent and her wings unfurled.

  – Well that’s a look, said Mommy coldly. A little old-school, but who am I to say?

  Yet there was something wrong with this picture, thought Norma, staring at the apple.

  – OMG, is that the time? said Mommy. So anyway, you touch a hair on his pretty brainy head and I’ll take the kid. Raye. Make her wish she’d never been born—

  Norma’s heart gave a thud and dropped away somewhere

  – Whoa. No. Not at all. Give me a day, I’ll get you the most awesome dickbrain ever and you know. Mission accomplished. No one has to die. Kid’s not part of the mission, Mommy.

  – She is now, said Mommy. Thanks to you, and your lying heart.

  The dentata knifed and matter oozed into Norma’s boots.

  – You’d kill a child?

  – Well am I ever glad we got that settled because you know, it’s important to keep the channels of communication open. Speaking of which, you might need a rag. Ragggggg.

  – Mommy. Wait, don’t go. We’re not finished here.

  The room had filled with the smell of boiling dioxins. Gene, coming home any minute now on his borrowed Flyer, would be pissed.

  – Spoil the child and spare the rod, I always say. Lordyfuckaduck. I’m late for Pilates.

  Wind blew into the window cracks, lifting the blind and showing nothing but darkness beyond. Nothing but noise.

  45//: starfucker

  Gene met her at the trailer in a Flyer he borrowed from Jesus. She got on the back and he took her to the Sanctuary to look for Raye, and then to Mac’s store (closed) and then to the diner.

  The redhead waitress said, The dude thinks he’s that thriller guy?

  – Yeah, said Gene. You seen him?

  The waitress tapped at her console with a curser. She’d seen him yesterday. He locked up the store and took off, she knew not where.

  It was raining heavily so they stayed to eat at the cafe. Norma had left the hut in a rush without her jacket and felt cold in the diner. Gene took off the denim jacket she’d bought him at the 101 markets and passed it to her. He ate in his T-shirt and she watched goose-bumps bloom and spread across the muscles on his arms. He ate steak and fries and beans and coffee into which he poured whisky from a flask.

  – We’ll find her, he said.

  She kept her eyes on the door. They were at the same window booth at which she and Raye had sat. A trio of Cruids on power-blades stood across the road blowing on their hands. Behind them she could glimpse the purple slogan beneath layers of over-tagging across the sheet metal: Separate or die trying.

  Even daemons can lie.

  She turned
to her giant wolf. She watched him eat. She reached out to smooth the lines etched on his forehead like repeated attempts at a horizon line.

  – You’ll never get rid of those, he said with a mouthful. I’ve had them since I was sixteen.

  – Tell me again, she said. What we are. You and me. This.

  He smiled at her. Chewed and swallowed. Washed it down with a slug of coffee. His eyes wide and serious and rippling with ghostly lights.

  – This? he said

  – All that out-of-the-many-one stuff. Again.

  – Why?

  – I need to hear it is all, she said.

  – It’s not like you to be insecure.

  – It’s not like you to be an ass.

  He put down his napkin. His big hands so fine. A tight lick in her belly at the thought of his touch. He raised his cup, regarded her with shining eyes.

  – To us, he said and through her tears she saw the eternity of his flame and that there could be no other.

  She turned away to face the window, her eyes shut against her lying reflection, but he took her shaking hands in his and made her face him. He made her raise her cup to meet his own.

  – Smile, he said.

  – Why?

  – Because you’re a star, he said.

  What wouldn’t she do for him?

  – And you’re the Big Dipper, she smiled.

  He left the next morning for LA to meet up with Bunny about some local driving. She put a hundred dollars in the pocket of the jacket with the warm lining. He gave her a wink and went out the door with his shoulders hunched against the cold. She woke late the next day to pale sun on the skylight and the sound of country music from someone working on their house across the street. More people returning to this blighted land. Norma and her mirror-self padded across to the bathroom where she scrubbed the dried blood from her hands.

  46//: del mar

  He left her with a phone, pre-charged and with his number keyed in at 1. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that she couldn’t text, that her kind couldn’t use Slash frequencies. That she’d fry the code, infect him with enough radiation to fertilize a variety of tumors, genetic malignancies with no end in sight.