American Monster Page 24

  She turned off the phone and pushed through the pass in the bamboo grove until she came to the street. She went to VGs for breakfast. She sat there over coffee and watched a news item about some new technology for cleaning up spills, about the riots in Tajikistan. The Pacific Alliance. Everyone had gone. Bunny was away. She heard that D-Cup had gone to produce an album in Phoenix and had been taken to the hospital there with pneumonia. Superman picked up on vagrancy charges up in Washington, Jesus gone on a spree to Vegas. No one had any news from Raye. Norma felt glacial. Sluggish. Her bones felt cold and her skin crawled. Her thigh throbbed from where she’d stabbed herself with Gene’s screwdriver. No amount of Vicodin could kill the pain and no amount of Xanax could kill her dread. That night she went to Una’s but didn’t stay. Little Barry said not to worry.

  – Remember, he said. Before you got here Raye was okay and she’ll be okay long after you’re gone. She’s just doing what she always does. Scrounging for survival. She can take care of herself.

  – But what about Augustine? she said.

  – Seriously, said Little Barry. Why would Augustine bother with a kid?

  – To get to me.

  – Get over yourself, said Little Barry.

  Norma wanted to get over herself. But she needed another to do that. Without Gene, without Raye, she felt a law unto herself, dangerously free. She remembered Raye looking up at the Factory roof with the discerning eye of an adept, the way she said she always saw the big picture, the whole Whole. How you had to have a Plan B. But there was a hole in the whole and they’d all fallen through it. Everyone. Not just Spill City, but America, wholus bolus.

  Norma zigzagged out of the bar. She went back to the beach, caught the night ride to Arcadia, posted herself at doorways and bus stops. She watched the Flyers and Veelos stream past. She wandered among the craps games and samosa stands, the battery transfusion mechanics and shopping cart robo-games. She stopped whoever she could and asked after Raye—her hair uncombed and rivulets of rain down the grime on her jacket—no one had seen either the kid or her old man. She dozed for an hour against the wall of Mac’s Antique Toy Museum and Pop Paraphernalia but no one went in or out. She woke up on a bench by the train station, watched gulls move in the dawn-gilded weeds.

  She made it back to the trailer but couldn’t remember how. Coming down the path, she could see footprints around the door, Raye’s worn imprint in the sand. Norma went in unable to stop herself from seeing the girl inside—there you are—but saw instead that cramped and empty space. She dragged a lawn chair from inside to the front of the trailer, facing the ocean. She bought a tamale from an old woman who walked around the grounds with a steaming basket.

  – Rain’s letting up, she said to the turning-away crone.

  Out on the water, ArmorFlated Zodiacs bumped over the swell, cleaning up the slick. The sun climbed the dome of cloud, began its descent. Norma got up stiff and damp from the chair. She would go to the cottage. Gene wouldn’t be back yet but there might be a message on his console. The twins sprawled drooling beneath the oak. Norma tossed them the phone Gene had given her. It skittered to a stop against the boy twin’s filthy underpants. He took it and bit it with jagged teeth. Threw it back to her.

  – Die! Die!

  Norma looked at the half a phone. She had to know. She had tried everything else, tried to separate herself from Mommy and it hadn’t killed her. It had made her stronger. Even if killing Gene would save him from Mommy, Norma could not sacrifice Raye. Human lives didn’t work that way, like words. One for another. But she could kill herself. Mommy thought it was the only game in town—and there is always only one way to beat a game like that. The filth was bottomless and she would take Mommy down with her. Dive, dive. The girl twin blindly clapping and gibbering, pointing at the beach and banging her rump spastically up and down in the dirt. Behind her the Ecoist sat stoically on his lawn chair and Norma gave him five hundred dollars for his trench coat.

  *

  Crouched on the old lifeguard stand, Raye watched the big lady stuff the pockets of a trench coat she bought from the Ecoist (it didn’t suit her), with scraps of iron filched from the camping ground barbecue grille and bits of steel she picked up around the makeshift shanties, the recombo graveyard at the northern end of the grounds. The sun was bleeding to death over the horizon. The sand was a slick and treacherous silver. Raye, hunched on the stand like a gargoyle, watched Norma make her way down to the black tideline. No point in trying to stop her. Raye had seen enough people try to kill themselves on the road, to know they usually got what they wanted in the end. A news flash from nowhere, baby. Anyone who tried to kill themselves was doing it because a part of them was already dead and they were just trying to work out if they were strong enough to carry that dead weight, or if it was going to carry them.

  *

  The water seeped through Norma’s jeans. It was cold but no more than she’d expected. She kept walking, combat boots and all, pushing through the surface turds and bloated bird carcasses, the plastic bags and cans and into the thickest part of the slick, placenta red. The Ecoist’s coat felt unpleasantly heavy. It was all she could do not to shrug it off. Ducking to avoid being seen by the Zodiac crews, the weight of the coat dragged her beneath the sick plankton. Corrosive bio-matter filled her nostrils and eyes. The sandy floor fell away from her feet. Air bubbles streamed past her open eyes and burst through the slick at the surface and Norma let herself drop and drift past stark and shadowy refuse. Engine blocks and sunken chassis. Barnacled trawlers and jet skis, severed limbs, dead dogs and rubbery kelp. The current pulled her south. She took in water and filth and finally.

  There it was. The Silence.

  Take me, she bubbled soundlessly. Here I am.

  Feer was a vast wicker city. Strands of her hair veiled her eyes.

  Take me.

  The wicker city was a half mile-deep stretch of dumped shopping carts. Thousands of them. She registered through the numbing silence—but not entirely, because her chest felt like exploding—that the chrome on the shopping carts had burned right through to the brown steel, lacy in the inky depths as coral. She registered that she was alone. Everything dead. The sea bed was a mirror of Kali I8, the planet to which she can never return, because it was here. It was always right here, waiting for her. The Silence. How many worlds within worlds? Was she born? Can she die? It was a matter, as Bunny always said, of bringing the truth to whatever role life threw at you. Even death, yours or another’s. Bunny called it the Dane of roles. Memento mori, motherfucker. The words bubbled from her lips and burst soundlessly in the fathomless depths. She tumbled in filth and it gurgled out of both ends. The long cold tongue of night. She clawed at her eyes so she would not see, no, she will not feed the Silence. Daemon if you need to feed then eat yourself, Mommy. I boogie. I strut and fret.

  The current ripped off the trench coat and her shoes and her jeans. She threw up, luminous upchuck. Dark kelp flailed at her. The arsenic and nitrates and diesel gnawed at her flesh, melted her nails and tore off a chunk of her hair. An undertow dragged her across a razorous reef and jammed her ecstatic in a cleft. Look at me, look at me now Mommy. She had company. A skeleton, silent as the moon, took her in its grasp, desperate, a surfing legend, it hooked a bony finger into her hair but the tide pulled her out again, its finger still caught in her hair. A stunted shark ripped a weal of flesh from her shoulder, broken clamshells turned her ass into Swiss cheese. Her wings unfurled, ripping flesh from bone, the scent of blood carried across the numberless gallons. She flew winged and naked through the filthworld, three toes broken against the side of a coast guard ship against which she came to a stop with a soundless thud. The salt burned and fissioned down her throat. Why could she still feel pain? She was meant to be dead. Why could she feel anything? The cold was enervating beside the sunken boat and there was a different pollutant down here in San Diego Bay. Eight different kinds of cancers, arsenic calking and radioactive waste from the nuke boats sheltering S
LA fugitives across the bay. Sea lions eaten with sores arrowed through the gloom. She pushed off the boat with bare and ravaged feet. Screamed into the silence. Sewage monsters danced to her tune of pain on the deck of a sunken cruise ship, the Pacific Queen. Dumped aviation fuel angels flew through the gloom in all the colors of the rainbow. A stricken ray humped her with its stinger and stunted dolphins maneuvered maimed fins through the current. Norma hit the bottom and her mouth opened and unleashed a string of radioactive anguish beneath the bleak tonnage, liquid light through the roaring depths through which she was propelled by fate and broken wings. Hauled finally to the surface seventy miles south of Spill City and spat out on the Baja shore. Alive. A broken gladiator in the empty arena, the air red with jeers, she carved a dripping path up onto the beach. Big lady with a man o’ war around her ankle and garbage in her hair. Naked but for a waterlogged combat jacket and limping, falling open mouthed to the sand, pregnant with eternity, a treacherous phantom she calls Mommy.

  *

  Seventy miles to the North, a young girl with hair the color of dunes shimmies down from a blue lifeguard tower and follows her own footsteps back to the trailer to wait.

  47//: daemon

  She couldn’t remember how she got to the clinic. She woke up wearing one of Those Gowns. She got out of bed, let the kids staring in at the window see her ass. Pulled on her jeans and jacket and went to the front desk. The nuns said some skinny guy with a scarred face brought her here and paid her bill. Sand pouring from his boots, they said, made a mess of the floor. Norma glared at them, didn’t need to but she did anyway. The nuns eyed her flirtatiously from behind their habits, but they waited for Norma to turn toward the door, before they crossed themselves, first one and then they all followed suit.

  The clinic peered out from under a vast and dust-smeared grapevine. Out on the street she felt strong and it was all under control, like she’d been born all over again. The ravined street was deserted, curtains quickly pulled across windows as she walked its length. She took a side street that backed onto Bulevara Reforma, where she decided to walk back just for the hell of it. The dentata burned like cancer inside her and she felt like she’d entered the fray on a whole new footing. On a high stretch of highway powdered with ghostly swirls of dried mud, she’d slowed to a parched crawl and caught a ride with a Cartel spare parts dealer. The air beneath the tarpaulin dusty with blood. They ran into the checkpoint gridlock, where she slithered off but got waylaid by a gang of Cruids. Later the Cruids would attribute it to the booze and the dope, the way the tall chick was one minute spread-eagled in the mud and the next everywhere at fucking once, whirling and kicking, or parts of her were. Like a string of paper dolls pulled from the fire, smelling like smoke and ringed in red.

  Retrieval: (n). An advanced protocol whereby a virtually or clinically deceased Slash is recovered from just beyond the point of brain death. In early Nilean lore it was said that in the time of the media rez, retrievals were strictly forbidden due to the possibility of creating more hosts than the Viewpoint could manage, and thus Retrievals became punishable by permanent dismissal or worse.

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

  48//: spin

  – You’re out of Coke.

  – There’s beer in there, said Norma, a little out of breath.

  Raye was standing against the window over the sink, her growing-out hair cut with gold from the setting sun. Norma had seen her footprints outside the trailer, but even before that, knew from the twins’ gibberish and drooling and pointing, that Raye had come back.

  – You shouldn’t drink, said Raye.

  – You shouldn’t.

  Raye sat down at the little broken table and pulled wires out of her ear. She was in those shorts a size too small and street grime clung to her knees. She had a small graze on one cheekbone and some fading bruises on her arm. The blue parka was nowhere to be seen. She pushed sunglasses up on her head, the ones Norma had given her at the coffee shop near Mac’s store. When she turned to Norma the look in her eyes was somewhere between insolence and terror.

  – I’ve been looking for you, Norma said with a wince as she shut the door behind her.

  – Here I am, said Raye, curling her lip at the dust on Norma’s boots, the bruises on her face. Looks like looking for me’s not all you’ve been doing.

  – I guess you think I’m too old to party.

  – Too something, said Raye with a smile that tried and failed to be a sneer. I’ll take a beer though.

  Norma moved to the kitchen, trying not to limp. The girl’s eyes never left her. The rain softly pelted. Bouncing off the hard path outside. Thuk thuk. Norma reached into the fridge for a couple of beers and brought one to Raye.

  – Cruids, Norma said, sitting down. Oof. At that taverna just before the checkpoint. You should have seen them.

  – You always did know how to empty a room, said Raye.

  Norma carefully let the back of her head rest against the vinyl backboard, closed her eyes and opened them wide against the hard slosh of nausea. She gripped the broken table and tried to go with the spin. Her wing stumps burned. She’d escaped her last altercation by leaping onto the underside of a Consortium Hopper that took her as far as Soprano Beach before veering inland. The landing hadn’t been as soft as she would have wished, and the headache that had come on after that made her think of terminal brain damage. Added to that a vicious cramping in her womb which made her wonder about blood transfusions. Would that work? She’d tried everything else but not that. Imagine. Hooked up to the slick red bags. Out with the old pain, in with the new. Blood for blood, wound for wound. Aware of the girl’s eyes on her, Norma brought the beer can up to one temple. The sad carousel of the trailer lurched and spun. Maps and burger boxes, the old blind TV.

  Raye said, Do you need to go to a clinic or something?

  – I went to a clinic. Down in Rosarita.

  – Just saying.

  – I have bandages here, Norma said. Everything I need.

  The trailer rocked in the wind.

  – Why do you always wear that damn jacket? said Raye. Is it like armor or something?

  Norma said, Something.

  – Yeah, well how’s that working out for you? I heard you got shot by Pig-Nose Haakon down at the beach there.

  Norma put down her beer and looked at Raye, That was his name?

  – Was? Raye incredulously shook her head and looked out through the salt-crusted window. You’re going to have half the Baja Cartel after your ass.

  – The least of my problems.

  – Is that why you tried to kill yourself?

  – How’d you know about that?

  – Is it?

  Rain fell and wind pulled sand up in sad whorls that agitated the shrubbery. Norma turned to look back at Raye. The girl held the beer can in both hands, slender and flawless for all their godless commerce. Knuckles softly jutting. Norma leaned forward and prized the beer can from the girl’s small hands, took them in her own clawed grip. She twisted Raye’s palms so that the pale stems of her wrists, gouged raw, faced upward.

  – Is it? You tell me.

  Raye flushed and pulled her hands away. To get answers I guess.

  – Or maybe to come back with a different question, said Norma.

  Raye’s blue eyes flicked darkly toward the bed, and she rubbed the tip of her nose. Come back? Is that what happened to me? Where’d I come back from?

  Norma waved it away. Bringing the innocent back is easy. Like pulling pickles from a jar.

  – Great, said Raye. Is that what I am? A pickle. Or what. I don’t know anymore.

  – What happened to your mother? said Norma.

  Raye said evenly, She was young. Not right in the head or something. Whoever knocked her up long gone. She had me while watching an episode of Jericho. Don’t ask me how I know that. After the show was over, she wrapped me in newspaper and put me out with the trash. A neighbor saw, came and got me. Mac pulled me out of foster
care.

  Norma pressed her thumbs into her temples. So. You’re saying, Mac’s not your real dad.

  – Real yes. Biological no. He was around the old lady at the time, I mean somewhere. I don’t know. Maybe he’s like my uncle or something. We don’t go into the finer points.

  – The finer points.

  – Being that he’s all I’ve got.

  – Well. Look. Get out of town for a while. Take Mac and go. It isn’t safe around here anymore.

  – Why did you save me that time? When I fell?

  Norma drained her beer. Felt a drip coming from her nose and tried to staunch it with the sleeve of her jacket. Who says I saved you?

  A small smile skidded across the girl’s face. She began to draw in the condensation on the outside of the can, unreadable signs disappearing as soon as she made them. She said softly. But I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.

  Norma watched the shapes on the condensation appear and disappear beneath the girl’s wandering finger, all language, the entire symbolic universe just a rescue message scrawled in vapor.

  – Another beer?

  – I can get it, said Raye.

  Raye got up and went to the fridge, bent down into the sad wash of light and got out two more, brought them to the table and sat down opposite Norma, their facing shadows across the pale glow of the window. The stormy questioning eyes fell on Norma—she would meet them with her own.

  – That’s some shiner you got there, said Raye.

  – You need to get out of here. You and Mac. I got people after me. More where they come from. You said so yourself.

  – Augustine? That pussy? I can take him. I’m still looking for the stunt man who ripped off the old man. He won’t leave without his letter from Blanket Jackson III. I’m going to find him—