American Monster Page 9

  Not everyone goes the distance, Mommy had said. Who knows why? There had been other horn hunters. You don’t get a second chance. The risk of Slash contamination is a factor, and if that happens, you can’t stay and you can’t go home. You become what Mommy called aporafex—a being without passage. Humans thought of them as ghosts, but they were more than that. Aporafex—or Aporafeks—were the impasse, impossible to go through, get behind, walk around. Concealing nothing and meaning nothing but themselves.

  – You could view the Slash as a species of Aporafex, said Mommy. Just a string of meaningless code unable to pass on. A dead end.

  A dead end road with a barn at the end of it, some hellhole Norma increasingly saw in her dreams.

  The road swung to the left up the hill, then hair-pinned under the old interstate. Norma would try to control her nerves. The anticipation made her salivate. She stayed at the edge of the road which looked slightly luminous in the lifting rain. She was a professional, a horn hunter, an eternity of training and planning behind this mission. Which she would complete. That was enough. It was enough to be on this zigzag road in the near dark, the sky a milky bowl above her and the smell of roses, yes roses, in the air, as she approached the camp. She hadn’t felt the headache today. After all, Mommy was as far away as the sun.

  Norma headed over to the barrio that had sprung up between the strip and the housing development, past a shuttered tamale truck blasting reggae. Again she lifted her nose to the prevailing wind, smelled stale beans and corn and something else, the subterranean smell that had led her to this place. Again she heard footsteps behind her, a faint jangle of spurs—who was leading who? Beyond the barrio, the abandoned building site huddled beneath a the faint glitter of drones and neon vapor trails against a lurid cloak of fuchsia dusk.

  Flanks trembling, Norma turned down a packed dirt path lined with mostly empty shanties and rusted trucks. A dog came out of a hole in the fence, glanced at a point just behind her and then darted back from where it came, its tail hooked around its rump. The dirt road opened up onto a field that had been cleared for construction. From the field loomed a giant and decaying Centurion Real Estate holo depicting scenes of luxury living. Live the dream! it said. Norma crossed the marshy ground, stepping onto new blacktop that looked obsidian in the rain. Her boots were coated in silt. A yellow disc of moon leered at the horizon. Saplings in black bags expired beside rampant weed. There, a lone cement truck was parked in a driveway, but Honey was right. No contractors. And no sign of anyone else, squatters, freedom fighters or rebels. Maybe the army had done its job for once. On either side stretched lot after empty lot. The rain became chilly and Norma zipped up her jacket. Her shadow extended before her like a scalpel, leaning toward the development, and behind her skulked that shadowless form immersed in distance. The contractors had gone, but something else was here in their place, something that called to her or acted on her, pushed or pulled, it was no longer possible to know which.

  The singing in her genitals had abated, joined by a burning sensation in her shoulders. It was as if the dentata carved a road between the hunter and the hunted and it was down this road she felt herself pushed or pulled, it was impossible to say, like trying to sleep past a bad dream. It was all a bad dream, had been ever since she’d come to this land. A place that, like all the ones before it, now seemed to have come to her and become the only place, a world of hurt and harm and no one to explain it to her. No one to tell her what to do, nothing to guide her but her sense of smell, chance encounters like the one with Honey—good leading to bad the way the subject led to the object and always a bad verb in between.

  The signpost said Serenity Ave. She advanced past a hydrant and clump of wire sprouting from the turf. Sewage pipes lay in piles. Stop signs loomed sepulchral at regular intervals. Peace Place, Plenty Row. At the mouth of a curved drive huddled a plaster wishing well beneath the weight of SLA graffiti—Separate or Die Trying. Sanskrit and stenciled Obamas and ‘Missing’ posters and the President having her boobs milked by the devil and dried up bouquets and deflated balloons and broken frames littering the ground around the wishing well. She advanced along the curved lights, lit by solar lamps on one side that multiplied her shadow into groups of three, the foremost chased by the one behind it and the one behind that, the whole thing beginning again and again, like a relay race in hell. Finally she got to a large yellow home at the apex of the curved drive. By this time her nose had begun to bleed and a headache had bloomed behind her temple. The home was built above a double garage. Three stories high, multiple balconies, its many windows smashed or boarded over and blackened with graffiti.

  Norma put her face to a crack in the garage door through which she saw a green Prius in the gloom. Its hatch was dented and one window was webbed with gaffer tape. An entrance portico was set off the street to the side of the house. She approached it and sniffed some more. The lock on the front door was broken but it was padlocked and chained from the inside and beneath it spilled a foul smell. Norma braced herself and pushed on the door with both hands and the steel chains inside screeched and popped and the door gave way with a ragged sigh of relief. She brushed her hands off, rolled out the tightness from her shoulders, and stepped in.

  From the vast foyer a curved stairway led to the dark upper chambers, like something in a Raymond Chandler novel—there had been a time when she couldn’t get enough of noir. She heard an animal drop from some height and skitter out a side window. A pallid column of light spilled down from the broken skylight onto the floor in the center of the foyer, dust motes swirling. Against the walls were piled turds and strips of stained toilet paper.

  Norma wandered into the adjoining rooms, keeping a wide berth of the column of light in case she stepped into it and it sucked her up who knows where. She looked through a doorway into a screening room. Ripped upholstery. Behind the tiered rows a smashed window into the projection area. She went back into the foyer, into a kitchen. Downlighting and caesar-stone serving island. Doorless cupboards home now to rats and birds and something else. Something besides time had passed by here. She could smell it. Always the smell that drew her on, and behind her the guy, his footfall silent now and his shadowless form extended like a whip.

  There was a formal dining room with a large broken window webbed in gaffer tape through which she could see the muddy field and the shanty town from which she’d come. Darkness was falling and the freeway to the east was already streaked in red, to the west, the nothingness of the ocean. She stood in the arched entrance to the room. Mold and other matter bloomed on the Spanish silk walls. The stench was ungodly. Jack Daniel’s cans were strewn across the rug. Norma’s shoulders had begun to burn, not a good sign. A heavy Mexican sideboard stood along the wall beside the table and above that a wrought iron candelabra, webbed and dusty. The huge oaken table was littered with Domino’s boxes and Slurpee cups. The carver was overturned, damask upholstery slashed, and across the window the drapes were cindered and fallen. The only sound beneath the beating of her heart the buzzing of the flies.

  She watched a recently overturned can of Coke drip onto the rug. The soda had burned a white scar on the surface of the table. She watched it drip. Beneath the buzzing of the fly came a faint and frantic whimper. A shallow pant beneath her own. The flesh on her arms coldly prickling. She swayed, dizzy from the smell of shit and death and rotten Meatlovers. Her eyes shifted focus to a place on the rug beyond the dripping Coke. She squatted down beneath the table and looked into the mote-blown eyes of a Golden Labrador chained to the table. Its eyes and nostrils clogged with pus. A tongue lolled at her, immense and black. Tufted hair grew in patches across its ribs and hindquarters which were caked in blood and feces. It lay on its side with its front paws stretched out and crossed, both its back legs broken. It met her gaze in mute agony and she held its eyes until they slid away as if satisfied with their arrangement. She reached across then and enclosed the cracked leather of its muzzle in one hand and watched its soul jump and fle
e from this place.

  So many holes in the whole, and no possibility of self-defense. Norma’s throat constricted and she waited for her vision to clear. She’d seen worse but the night was still young. She stood up and cracked her knuckles. She went out of the dining room and back into the foyer. She climbed the central staircase that curved into the second story. The landing went all the way around, and overlooked the foyer. The rail had been kicked away in places and she kept to the walls, past room after empty room. At a rectangular alcove off the central hallway she stopped to look through a window down at the backyard. A monster Yucca grew against a graffitied fence. A moon had begun to rise over the swimming pool, splintered cabana and a trampoline rusted on its side. California dreaming.

  She flexed her shoulders. The pain radiated into her neck. She let it. It was the one thing that seemed to shut Mommy up. If Mommy’s voice in Norma’s head was a control mechanism by which Mommy could sidestep any subjective obstacles in Norma that might arise during the mission, the burning deep in the blade of her shoulders was one subjective obstacle equal to Mommy. Equal to the Whole.

  An intolerable smell pulsed from some benighted wing, repulsed her and called to her at the same time. She went on along the edge of the landing, froze when she heard a sound outside the last door. There was a wet gurgle and sounds of dragging. She tried the door, which was locked. She ripped it off its hinges with a grunt and let it fall just inside the threshold. The stench in the room hit her like a detonation. The snarl of scarified flesh at her shoulders knifed and she didn’t even try and roll it out. She crooked her right arm across her nose and mouth and stepped in. Something hissed and scuttled beyond her range of vision. Moonlight and freeway light sliced into the gloom from between the slats of the blinds on the windows that flanked a four poster bed to which a man was cuffed at wrists and ankles. Norma’s vision calibrated for the gloom, registered the man’s ankle bone gleaming white through flesh split by the cuffs. The big toe on his right foot a gooey stump.

  Norma ripped down the blinds. Something screamed. The man’s shirt opened across his torso like a curtain. Viscera spilled across the bed from an incision mid-body, one glistening rope of intestine gnawed by an opossum that leered at her from the bed, its daft eye rounded in wary ecstasy. Like the Labrador, the man was still alive, but when his eyes moved to fix on Norma’s they couldn’t hold. Across his mouth a stretch of duct tape, and from between his legs an unholy stink.

  Norma peeled off the duct tape. Balled it in her hands and dropped it on the rug. On the dresser beside the bed was the man’s wallet, keys and a cracked cellphone attached to a charger. She picked up the wallet, emptied of all but a business glyph that had the Centurion Realty holo on it and the man’s name, Randy Mears, Sales Agent. She put the wallet down and picked up the cell; an image pixelated on its screen of the dog downstairs, ghosted like a memory.

  – Nice jacket, said a gravelly voice behind her. You get that here?

  The man on the bed let out a wet sob. Norma wheeled around. At the doorway stood a bear-haired prophet astride the busted door and at his side, a white kid in overalls aiming a dented two-shot.

  – This old thing? said Norma. Nah. I got it on a bar stool down at the Belly Up. Some ordinance technician from China Lake never came back.

  At the strange sound of her voice—like wind rushing through a city of steel—the opossums fled with a scrape of claws and gnash of teeth. She didn’t bother to change registers, the pain in her shoulders all she could think about. The tusks rent her skin beneath the arachnor weave, warm blood running down her back and breasts. The tusks at her shoulders were a contact-effect—they blossomed in the presence of a void in the heart of man so ravening that it still took her breath away.

  The old prophet eyes widened and he smiled beatifically. However they began, Purple Rain were now, like everything else in Spill City, subsidized by the Cartels—as payment for doing their dirty work got the time and space to do plenty of their own. The boy flicked his tongue at her. She flicked hers back, a flash of blue.

  – Gaaaaaaah, she said.

  In his widening eyes she saw a shutter flash behind her. She wheeled and wrenched a camera from the wall beside the bed. Then she was both in the air and on the ground at the same time. Bristling, her eyes electric, she advanced on the boy, his first shot bouncing off her jacket like birds off a screen door. He misfired his second round partly into his pappy’s ass, so that the old man had begun to buckle, screaming, by the time she stove in the boy’s throat with her gel-armor elbow, rammed her fist into his face. She caught the old man from behind, slid her arms under his sweaty pits and with one hand at the back of his neck, snapped his spine before he could even reach for the reproduction Bowie Knife he’d swapped for three packets of penicillin from a Coahuila whorehouse.

  The preacher let out a sound that began as a prayer but ended as a silent exhalation as his body drifted away from him. Norma let him drop back down onto the floor where he lay on the threshold, helpless to move his shoes from the spreading pool of blood that issued from the nose and staring eyes of his son, who was also his nephew. She sniffed her fingers and then moved back to the bed. She bent over the property agent.

  – What was your dog’s name? she said, returning to human registers so that the property agent could understand her, because to speak the name of the beloved at death’s door is to garland the soul.

  Pink tears fanned from his eyes. In his final moments he found the strength to hold the angel’s gaze so that she could see the Labrador as he saw him, fleet and golden, understand the animal’s loyalty, how Mears had failed him, living first out of the car and then, when the rains came, squatted in one of the model homes—he’d had copies made of the master keys—but only till spring, he reassured the dog. Only till spring.

  – Jose, he said without sound—his vocal cords no longer functioning—but Norma read the shape of the sacred syllables on his lips and said them back to him.

  He nodded once, feebly, a string of matter bubbled from his mouth and he was gone.

  *

  Everything was happening at once. From where he’d dropped onto the threshold, the ex-preacher peered up at the woman bent over the bed. The world darkened and was rent into bright filaments between which he could see the woman step away from the property agent. He heard the name of the dead dog and it filled him with terror. The woman closed Mears’s eyes—poor homeless bastard squatting on Cartel turf. Her hair was wild about her face, her broad shoulders were pulled up into two bony protrusions poking through nifty slits in her jacket—some strange material, drew the darkness into itself. The silver flecks of light across his vision were getting heavier now and slower and he tasted them on his tongue, the bitter flakes, neither solid or liquid. The ex-preacher wished then that things had been different with him, would have liked to have been back in the seminary library up in Portland across from that little lesbian bookstore. At his customary table by the fire, poring over the books and folios. His favorite article, the one about what it was like to be a bat.

  The article dealt with what the novitiate, as he’d been then, had seen as the central paradox of human existence: language. Words for things. The article’s position was that you could not know what it was like to be one thing unless you were that thing, by which time you would no longer be you to know it. You could not know what it was like to be a bat, or a lesbian, or a property agent unless you were that entity, and not you. Cue metaphor. Without recourse to metaphor, the article argued, language-bound humans can know very little. And the way the novitiate had seen it then, and still saw it, what made metaphor the most human figure of speech, was that it expressed the quest for one thing—the knowledge of death without being dead.

  Bread for money, pearls for eyes, ice for hate, fire for love, night for death. Two unlike objects identical at the point of comparison. One thing used to represent, or displace something else. Thus not being humanly capable of knowing what it is to be a bat, we can only hu
manly, through language, suggest what it is like to be a bat. To die and not to die.

  Lying there adrift from his own body, he wished he could discuss this with the archangel or whoever she was. How the human need for metaphor is a metaphor in itself of the desire to be reborn as another. His eyes, which were the only thing he could move now, dimly saw that his sneakers were still in what remained of his son’s face. But it was getting harder, through the falling snow, to see the beautiful being with her great ridged shoulders like broken wings, or tusks or some such thing, and he wanted to explain to her that broken wings were a metaphor for the idea of a fallen angel, or whatever she was. He would have liked to ask her. Her teeth were barred and snarling and there were whorls of smoke where her eyes had been. She sniffed and gnashed at the air and her wings snapped and she reached under the mattress and pulled out the sports bag of cash they’d kept there, his and the boy’s takings from the book they’d made on how long it would take a debowelled man to die. It passed the time. The boy was a whizz with the footage. Editing and what not. Of course they’d sell it later on as a complete download. Lots of preproduction interest in that. Well, they hadn’t counted on the varmints but that was just a lucky accident, or fate, as he would have called it in his divinity days, and it upped the ante to tell the truth. The ex-preacher watched the Being rummage through the bag with a befouled claw. Turned furnace eyes on him before opening the window and letting the world back in, the howl of a distant train. She shouldered the bag and stepped toward him, crunching on the camera and was astride him and he willed his hands to clutch at her, pull her down, but his body was no longer his own. She left him there slack and shitting, but still alive, so that when a yellow-eyed guy in lizard boots came to call, it would still be within the preacher’s capacity to wish (he would by then be done with prayer) that he’d never been born at all.