Penny Dreadful

  Fingerprints, he said. Hair and fibers. Don’t you watch television?

  Not lately, she said.

  Phineas sighed, hesitated. Then slowly and without ceremony, he dumped turpentine over the whole of her ex-boyfriend’s body.

  Goo’s ex-boyfriend.

  Her nostrils burned and Eve sat down abruptly on a wooden box that stank of tomatoes. She looked around and around. The air was bright and gray, the air was the color of metal under the pale winter sun. Phineas carefully wiped down the sides and handle of the empty jug, then tossed it into one of the Dumpsters.

  That’s it, she said. Do you want to say anything?

  Eve looked at the body. Christian was deflated, he was much smaller than before. He was wet.

  I can’t, she said.

  Phineas reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of tobacco shreds and lint and coins and scraps of paper. He picked through and selected two dimes, which he placed on Christian’s eyelids.

  The dead suffer no laughter, he said.

  What does that mean, exactly?

  Phineas shrugged. Tell him a joke, if you can think of one.

  Okay, she said. How many serial killers does it take to change a lightbulb?

  Unwavering silence and shards of color now in the sky.

  How many? he said finally.

  One, she said. But it takes him a long time.

  Phineas looked at Christian, then at her. Why?

  Because he first has to dismember the old one, she said. Then masturbate on its remains.

  Phineas nodded and she laughed to herself, brief and manic. He held out his hand and she took it and they walked back across the parking lot and along the twisting path, through the gate across Dizzy’s dark garden. Phineas steered her around to the front of the house so they might avoid the kitchen and she was glad, she was warm. As they climbed the front steps she caught a flash of pink movement above. Thought she saw a fat pale gargoyle on the roof and was amazed that she had not noticed it before. Now she blinked, looked again.

  But the gargoyle was gone.

  Through the front door and Phineas still held her hand. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t once try to let go of her hand. He glanced around at the crumpled clothes on the floor and took a long shuddering breath. Eve lowered her eyes, she frowned at her own wet feet. There were bits of yellow grass between her toes and she wasn’t going to let go of him. Of Phineas. She took him up the stairs and down the hall to the guest bedroom with the cloudlike white comforter.

  Dead gray morning light.

  But it was dark enough that his mouth and eyes were vague and shadowy as unfinished sketches and Eve wasn’t quite breathing. The pillows were cool and grotesquely soft and she slapped at them, half expecting them to disappear. Phineas took off his hooded jacket and sat down on the bed, slowly took off his boots. He unbuckled his belt and he seemed terribly calm. He opened his mouth but Eve didn’t want to talk and she pushed him down onto his back. And she pulled his socks off, his pants. Her fingers never quite touched his skin but she was sure that she could hear his heartbeat. Or her own. Eve dropped the wool jacket to the floor and now wore only underpants. White underpants and she wondered how white her skin must be. How thin she was. Her breasts felt heavy and cold and too large which was funny and unfamiliar but she folded her arms across them and when she moved she felt the deep bruise from the Scavenger’s Daughter that circled her back and thighs and belly, an endless figure eight in her flesh. It would be purple tomorrow. Phineas still wore his shirt, a white polyester shirt with a red stain on the chest and a woman in a bikini down one sleeve. The faint smell of mothballs and he was naked from the waist down, he was apparently speechless but unashamed and she could see he had an erection. And she lowered her arms, she unbuttoned his shirt and lay on top of his chest with her legs drawn up like a grasshopper and at first thought that she only wanted his skin against hers but soon she was kissing him, she was kissing him. His tongue was slow and shy and she was absurdly wet but it was a long time before his cock was inside her, before he entered her. And when he did, he just held her. His face was pressed to her throat and she wondered if he could even breathe, his arms were heavy around her and he didn’t rock or pound or thrust at her. They barely moved at all and after what seemed like an hour she began to rise and fall against him and over his shoulder she again saw the face of a fat pink gargoyle peeking at her through blackened window but that was impossible and she closed her eyes as Phineas said her name once or twice in a sweet faraway disbelieving voice and now he seemed to get bigger inside her and she began to shake and come apart and vaguely hating herself she kissed his ear and said please, don’t come inside me.

  Dear Jude.

  The truth is that I don’t know what I’m doing.

  It might look like I’m trying to save somebody from something but I’m not. How can you save anybody when everything is reflex, everything is a muscular spasm. I saw a movie once where two guys are standing at the end of a tunnel, two guys named Frank and Joe. Frank is very cool, he’s James Bond with long hair. He gets all the women and he can disarm a bomb while hanging upside down. He quotes poetry ever so casual. Frank is a gourmet cook, in fact. And Joe is a fuck-up. Every friendship has one. Joe is Barney Fife on speed. He shuts his hand in the car door and ejaculates prematurely and prefers cheap American beer. Meanwhile. There’s a bad guy with a gun at the other end of the tunnel and I don’t remember why he wants to kill Frank and Joe but that’s not the point. At the precise moment that the bad guy pulls the trigger, Joe flinches. He lunges sideways, he throws himself between Frank and the gun and takes one in the shoulder. Frank is amazed. The audience is amazed. Because Joe was trying to save his life or something. But upon closer examination, the bullet was a ricochet and if Joe had never moved, the bullet would have missed them both. Joe couldn’t deny it and he didn’t want to. He wasn’t thinking about Frank, he wasn’t thinking anything at all. He just jumped. And that’s what I’m talking about.

  Now I stole my first sour breath. Eve beside me, soft naked thin with a surreal childish glow to her cheeks but then she was just twenty, still a girl. I had a feeling she would laugh at me if I let myself feel bad about fucking her. She would laugh and laugh. My eyes were not yet open. Yesterday I had felt like her brother, her big clumsy brother. But what had I really wanted.

  I had wanted to adore her, to protect her.

  Which was funny, wasn’t it. I was so poisoned by Hollywood. I would open my eyes, soon.

  Saturday.

  Thank God. Friday had been too fucking long by far. When I opened my eyes there would be daylight, deadlight. Eve smelled good, she smelled like fire and spilled ink and bright cold glass and she was all angles beside me, she was bent knees and sweet sharp elbows and collarbones I could drink from and I need to get hold of myself.

  Eyes still closed and I let my fingers flutter up one of her thighs.

  I would open my eyes and the morning light would be thick and colorless, there would be no discernible shadows and I would blink and rub my sore blue mouth and look around for reckoning and resolution but resolution was a daydream, a phantom construct. My fingers now fell upon her hipbone and drifted down the hollow slope between her belly and pubic hair and for the first time I wondered what time it was and part of me wanted to slip out of bed and disappear but I remembered what she had said in the dark, her breath cold and urgent as she said please, don’t come inside me and I had tried not to, I had come everywhere else, on belly sheets and hair and part of me wanted to wake her now and make slow hungover love to her by daylight and without hesitation, I wanted to eat her alive but my teeth were sore from grinding and this was it. I was taking control.

  There would be no one else’s point of view, no one else’s voice. I was going to end this and I couldn’t deal with the drift anymore. I could no longer filter the thoughts of other characters. The sinister bend, the false angles of a body held underwater. The secrets. I never said I wanted to be a fil
ter and I was pretty sure I was not good at it. I dragged my hand away from Eve’s sleeping body and sat up, I opened my eyes. It was late morning and everything was faintly, unpleasantly yellow.

  Okay.

  I felt sick. This was a lot like a hangover but not. There was something wrong with my bones and my stomach felt inside out. I had what felt like a mouthful of rust, of bloodorange metal flakes. There was a small bathroom five, maybe ten feet away and I pushed myself away from the bed with relative arrogance then crawled the last few feet to the toilet, where I vomited quietly, painlessly. The contents of my belly were clear, gelatinous, nonthreatening. It was a pure morning. I sat cross-legged on a fuzzy white bathmat and regarded my bruised genitals from what felt like a terrifying distance.

  Nausea.

  I had a fantastic erection but now I doubted that Eve wanted to be molested this morning by me or anyone else and anyway my skin felt weirdly rigid, my body was fragile and unfamiliar and it would probably take forever to successfully masturbate and what I really wanted was to gather my clothes and go downstairs, I wanted to smell the air and figure out where the fuck I was.

  Griffin was right. I had an uncanny craving for a shot of the Pale.

  Muscles. It was a good thing they operated on their own, most of the time. I reclaimed my clothes and managed to dress myself without too much horror or difficulty. I kissed Eve on the lips and wondered briefly if either of us had tried to take the other’s tongue last night and was happy to realize this was irrelevant.

  Downstairs.

  I was amazed to find cigarettes in one pocket, unsmashed. The night came back to me in funky disconnected flashes and it seemed I had been pretty high and still there was no lost time that I was aware of. False memory was possible but I didn’t detect the lingering scent of overripe oranges, I didn’t feel the reverse tug in my arms and legs that signified the artificial.

  This was Dizzy Bloom’s house, I knew that.

  Dizzy was twenty-two or maybe twenty-nine, she was dark and small and pretty and possibly fictional but I believed she was real and I found her in the kitchen. It was bright and hot and Dizzy was on her hands and knees, she was scrubbing the floor in a wrinkled white dress, her nipples protruding through the material like little brown beans and I felt a sudden headache that seemed to originate in my mouth at the sight of her but then she seemed to be one of those women who was really not trying to fuck with your mind by not wearing a bra but simply wanted to be comfortable. I hung in the doorway for a moment, watching her. My jaw hurt and I suspected this was more a consequence of worry and stress than of drugs and the fragmentation of my senses.

  Hello, I said.

  Dizzy Bloom looked up and suddenly I knew why she had reached for my copy of Ulysses with such sadness last night. Today she was sober and damp with sweat and red-faced. She was irritated and a little fearful of the unknown but I clearly saw Molly Bloom in her. Dizzy was skinny but she had a dislocated heaviness about her, there was a fat unshaven woman in her who wanted to lounge too long in bed eating sweets, who had not yet found the love she wanted.

  Hello, she said. Did you sleep well?

  Too well.

  I was fucking thirsty, I was made of sand. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if there was any of the Pale but I squashed this question like an ugly green bug. Then shrugged.

  Is there any of the Pale?

  Dizzy gave me a certain look. The look of one addict who knows another and I tried to smile. I tried to show her all my teeth because while I instinctively wanted her to like me and trust me, I didn’t much give a fuck. This wasn’t a narcotics anonymous meeting.

  Yes, she said. In the freezer.

  I walked to the fridge and slung open the freezer door. One unmarked bottle of honey-white liquid, thick but not frozen. I looked at it but did not drink.

  Okay, I said. Do you want to talk about what happened last night?

  Not yet, she said.

  I chomped at my tongue. I wanted to smoke five cigarettes at once.

  Are you hungry? she said.

  I stared at her, at her dark lips and mild, forgiving eyes. She still held a yellow sponge in one hand. The floor was glowing wet, rubbed to a spotless black and white. Her hands, though. Her hands were stained red from squeezing blood out of the sponge. My stomach twitched and I looked around at her kitchen. Two windows. A fishbowl with no fish and a lot of cookbooks. There were no modern appliances but there was a fond array of expensive knives and fine pots and pans that gleamed like silver. Dizzy Bloom was apparently childless and unmarried, a Breather who had somehow shorn herself of any real identity. I gazed at her now, my brain sore and dull. She probably had a trust fund and a degree from a posh university and was no doubt much smarter than me.

  Who are you? I said.

  Dizzy Bloom, she said. We met last night.

  I know. But who are you?

  What an archaic question.

  No, I said. I’m not hungry.

  Well, she said. There’s a naked man on the roof.

  A what?

  The man who left his clothes in my living room, she said. Jimmy Sky.

  Oh, I said. Oh, fuck.

  I glanced down at myself, at my rumpled Ray Fine clothes. I hoped Jimmy would recognize me. I hoped someone would. Dizzy Bloom dipped her yellow sponge into a bucket of soapy water, she crushed it in her fist and resumed scrubbing the floor. I watched her and tried to think.

  Well.

  I had found Jimmy Sky without really trying and maybe the two of us should have a nice talk. I listened for Dizzy to murmur or sigh as I took the half-empty bottle of the Pale from the freezer. But she was silent, preoccupied with vanishing bloodstains. The cold bottle bit at my hands and I left the kitchen, intending to go outside. But instead veered down the hall, instinctively seeking a bathroom. I had been too busy throwing up earlier to give my psyche a proper shakedown. Now I locked the door behind me and peed, then turned to the mirror and stared. I didn’t look much like myself and there was nothing I could do about Ray Fine’s goofy clothes so I opened the medicine cabinet and saw that Dizzy had quite a few problems. She had a borderline personality, she had sleeplessness, she had seizures and a fuck of a lot of stress. She had bad dreams and psychotic episodes and while this was all very interesting I couldn’t give it a lot of thought and for once I didn’t want to drug myself. I wanted something more immediate and a pair of scissors jumped out at me. I breathed and thought about it and yes, I needed a haircut. I took one small sip of the Pale and stared cutting. The hair fell like dead leaves, random. I grabbed chunks of hair and cut them away without thinking of symmetry or logic, I slashed at my hair until the shape of my head pleased me and now I felt like myself.

  I took the Pale and went outside. It was a nice day, sort of. It had the atmospheric freak show of seasons changing too close to the mountains. Green leaves winking back at me. Premature rosebuds and the possibility of a late snow made the sky appear farther away, a thin hostile blue. I walked backward over wet slick grass and scanned the roof and there, hunched next to a little brick chimney, was Detective Moon or Jimmy Sky, pink and shivering. Facing the sun with eyes closed.

  I lifted the bottle of the Pale to my lips and drank but didn’t swallow. I rinsed my mouth and spat into the grass, trying to decide how best to climb onto the roof. The one tree that stood alongside the house had long frail branches that extended to touch the rain gutters but that tree looked pretty dead. That tree was dead, boy. There were holes drilled into the bark where someone had poisoned it, probably because its roots were fucking with the foundation of the house. Those upper branches would hardly support a child. I was inclined to holler at Moon and ask how exactly he had gotten up there or even chuck a rock at him and bring him tumbling down but I doubted that I would be able to put him back together again if he shattered into a thousand bits of Moon. Again, I rinsed my mouth with the Pale, allowing myself to swallow a few drops. I stared up at Moon, who had begun to rock back and forth like an aut
istic kid.

  Poor fucker needed help.

  I walked around to the side of the house, looking for a ladder or some of that handy white scaffolding that young lovers always use to sneak in and out of bedrooms in the movies. I moved to the back of the house and saw an upstairs window that seemed to open onto a sloping lip of the roof and now I remembered Eve saying something as she was falling asleep about a strange gargoyle at our window.

  Quickly back inside.

  I stopped in the front room to grab Moon’s crumpled pants and jacket. Took the cell phone from one pocket and patted down the others. Found a butterfly knife but nothing else: no wallet, no keys, no gun. I hoped Moon was not armed and told myself that naked guys are almost never armed because they have no pockets. But then again, I hadn’t seen Moon’s gun lying around anywhere, had I? Nothing I could do about it anyway. I slung Moon’s pants over one shoulder like a scarf.

  Eve was no longer in bed and I wondered if she was okay. If she had doubts about me. If she was standing now under the hot blast of a shower, scrubbing the stink of Phineas from her skin. I couldn’t worry about it. The window wouldn’t open so I calmly put my heel through it and tapped the remaining bits of glass from the frame, then stuck my head out and looked around.

  The roof was steep with slick, balding shingles and I bent to unlace my boots. I slipped out of my socks and briefly considered stripping off all my clothes as Moon might feel more comfortable if we were both naked, but decided against it. I tucked the bottle of the Pale into my pants before climbing onto the roof. My bare toes gripped the rough surface and I leaned sideways, scrambled to the peak and over. I angled up to Moon slow and very joe casual, as if I had just happened along this way and maybe we could wait for the bus together. I pulled the bottle from my crotch and sat down beside the naked man without a word. We shared a moment of silence. Dizzy Bloom had a pretty nice view and I felt like I could see three sides of Denver.

  I removed the pants from around my neck, dropped them in Moon’s lap.