The motherfucker is asleep and maybe I’m jealous. Not sleeping so well lately. Not since I got off the junk. It’s like the dark doesn’t really find me.
I wait for it. I wait for the velvet, for the warm bottomless silence to come and wrap itself around me but the silence is indifferent and passes me by and I remember the velvet doesn’t know me anymore, it doesn’t want me.
And I think about other ways to get there. Bleeding to death might work. As long as I didn’t cut through a major artery the long slide down to unconsciousness would likely be slow and sweet, something I could savor.
It’s a funny thing to dream but sometimes I dream of going flatline. Not sure I would want to go all the way under but for a minute or two it would be pretty nice to take a look around and then swim back to the surface.
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Mingus:
Red bricks on all sides. The smell of earth and clay and men sweating. The smoke of a thousand cigarettes. Sunshine and tar. The noise of a bulldozer, loud as fury.
Mingus chomped at his tongue. He was too easily hypnotized by his own sense of smell. The pain in his tongue cleared his head. His legs were asleep and dangling from the iron fire escape. He put away the yo-yo and leaned forward to watch Chrome lazily finish off the Fred. Mingus chewed at his thumbnail, his head still spinning from the scent of Chinese take-out and the strange Citizen they had encountered at Goo’s.
That one would bear watching, he thought.
At the end of the alley, Chrome still whispered into the Fred’s ear. Mingus stopped himself from summoning the smell of the Fred’s damp, fishy hair. He was plagued enough by the real.
The Fred lay curled like a baby in ash and black gravel. He was almost asleep, his hands limp and white. Chrome stroked the back of the Fred’s neck, his lips moving softly. He was singing a French nursery rhyme, Mingus was sure of it. Frère Jacques. Chrome was terribly disappointed that he had not been born French. He spoke often of jumping a ship to Paris, of starting their own subterrain there. But it would not be so easy. One did not just withdraw from the game and Chrome’s French was hopeless.
He was the cruelest of the Mariners, without question. Chrome garroted the Freds, pulling them down like sick deer. But he didn’t kill them straightaway. He calmed and comforted them. He promised not to hurt them and he lulled them to sleep. He made them feel safe in his arms. Then he went for the tongue.
The others were so greedy for tongue that they killed without pause.
The wind rose, flooding Mingus with a sickening spectrum of odors, each of them dense with borrowed memory. Mingus pinched his nostrils between thumb and finger and watched as Chrome knelt beside the Fred, brushing bits of filth from his clothing. He gently buttoned the Fred’s jacket to the throat, then patted him on the cheek with the odd, faraway smile of a father who is about to strike.
Mingus closed his eyes because he didn’t need to watch, to see.
He could imagine well enough. Chrome would take the man’s face in his strong hands and bend forward, as if to kiss the mouth. He would force the jaw open, wide enough to count the Fred’s teeth. He would suck the Fred’s tongue from his mouth as if it were an oyster, then bite it softly at the pink root and stop himself just short of severing it but still he would draw blood. He would own the Fred’s already blurry soul. He would swallow, his eyes flashing silver. Mingus could already hear the Fred screaming, or trying to. His hollow, shrunken voice like the bark of a baby seal.
Mingus opened his eyes and Chrome stood tall over the Fred, skinny and shining. His arms hanging loose. His face and chest were bloody, streaming red and black. Mingus felt cold and rushing dizzy as he saw but couldn’t believe what he saw.
The Fred lay motionless, his throat ripped open.
Chrome has killed the man, truly killed him. Mingus coughed, staring. There was a shivering fist in his throat. He felt like he was falling down a brightly lit elevator shaft. This couldn’t be. This was a game, a fantasy. The taking of tongues was painful, yes. A little bloody sometimes. But it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real. What had the motherfucker done. What had he done.
What have you done?
He looked away, then back. This couldn’t be what it seemed and now Chrome walked toward him, his face a red mask. He held something shiny in one hand, like a badge.
Mingus, he said. Je me suis égare.
Long shadows. I reached for the jug of Canadian Mist and took a small, bitter swallow. Moon grunted and pulled himself up to an approximate sitting position now, with considerable effort. I ignored him, tried to digest his story. The thing was decomposing in my head and it sounded perfectly fucked up. It sounded like the paranoid tale of some accident-prone cross-dresser who had played with himself too much as a boy and his Baptist mother had burned his fingers on the iron when she caught him at it. In a few months or years, Moon would sound like any other twitchy bastard with a theory about how the phone company had started the Gulf War.
But maybe there was something to this. Maybe cops were disappearing and no one cared. Anything was possible.
Anyway.
I had a pretty good idea what Moon was asking for. He wanted me to be a canary, a fragile seeker of bad air. Moon wanted to send me underground, then watch to see if I would come back or disappear. And why not, right? I was a nonperson. I was untouchable. I had no money, no hope. I wasn’t officially dead yet, but I was close enough. I knew the terrain, as well. I swallowed another mouthful of Canadian Mist. I had spent more than one day undercover busily deconstructing myself. What was another day, or two? But I couldn’t quite see Moon’s eyes. I couldn’t trust him. I flicked on a reading lamp that I had moved out of Moon’s path of destruction an hour ago. It provided a small circle of light that Moon now leaned into.
You can sleep here, he said. For a while. You’ll need another address if you go under.
I shrugged, undecided. Yeah.
What do you say?
What is it that you want me to do, exactly?
Moon chewed at his lips, rabid. I want you to find Jimmy Sky.
What about the other twelve guys, I said.
I’ll get you a gun, said Moon. A car, maybe. Any equipment you want.
The other guys? I said.
Fuck the other guys.
What’s so special about Jimmy Sky?
Moon shrugged. I can scrape some funds out of petty cash. Mad money.
Mad money, I said. Oh, boy.
Yeah, baby. You’re gonna have the time of your life.
I nodded, sinking onto the couch. There was one small thing that troubled me. Maybe it was nothing. But I was lying, earlier. I had never heard of a cop named Jimmy Sky. It sounded a lot like the name of a comic book hero, like someone’s secret identity. It sounded like a lame superhero, some second-rate character like the Green Lantern. Now there was a pussy if ever there was one. The Green Lantern. A prettyboy with a magic ring.
Goo:
Limping, she was limping. What time was it. The sky had gone red and pink, like an exposed membrane. It couldn’t be much past midnight, could it. But it felt like dawn, like the sun was rising. The air against her face had the warm kiss of fever. She crossed the street, barely aware of passing cars.
She told herself to slow down.
It couldn’t be morning yet.
When she reached the other side, there was a faraway noise in her head like a hushed whisper, a ghost of fingers in her hair. Goo became Eve. Her apartment building loomed ahead, black. As ever, there was the knife of disappointment. The regret. She didn’t want to share herself with Eve.
Eve bore new bruises, fresh cuts.
Her apartment was empty and the air brittle.
She took off her coat and hung it carefully on a hook, then stepped out of Adore’s green dress and let it fall to the floor. Her body was numb, as usual. The transition wrecked her sometimes and she would easily sleep for fifteen hours without dreaming. The game was swallowing everything around her with
the silent fury of a televised hurricane. Eve had no friends, no family. She had no job anymore and school was a pale, foreign memory. Three classes, she had paid tuition for three classes. Maybe four. One of them was Logic, she thought. Logic, yes. She had chosen it because it satisfied a Math credit, which seemed funny at the time. But she couldn’t remember the last time she even went near campus. At least five, maybe six weeks ago. Dizzy. She was a little dizzy. It might not be such a bad idea to withdraw from the game for a while, to catch her breath. Eve glanced over her shoulder. There was no one to hear her disordered thoughts, no one but Goo.
She went into the kitchen and opened a can of tuna. Walked back to the living room and stood in the dark, eating tuna straight from the can. Her face in a black window, looking back at her. The sheen of oil on her lips. She might not want to leave the game, she might not be able to.
What had the Redeemer said? It’s okay to be two people, two people.
Bone-white curtains swirled around her and she realized slowly that Phineas was gone. There were crumpled bits of paper on her floor. She picked them up and each one bore her given name.
I wondered dimly what time it might be. I had reluctantly sold my watch two weeks earlier in Memphis, to a nervous, razor-thin guy named Duke in a downtown pawnshop. Forty bucks for my father’s antique diving watch. And Duke had insulted me. He said the watch was barely worth ten dollars, because there was no way it was still waterproof. I was fucking lucky to get forty, according to Duke. There had been a wide, unfriendly silence as I wondered how much the watch was worth to me and how badly I needed to get to Denver. A black fly buzzed past my face, then landed on my wrist. It strolled up my arm, looking for a bite to eat. Duke had stared long and hard at the fly, his head bobbing as I tried in vain to explain that water resistance was really not the point. The watch was a valuable relic, an ode to an earlier age. At which point Duke had wiped his bright red nose and glared at me and said that the forty was about to fucking disappear. Duke had the bright, acidic stink and glow of a meth addict and I had to admit that I could live with forty.
Now I was awake. I was damp and hungry on Moon’s couch and I had no useful concept of time. The sky was black through the nearest window but that meant nothing. I had to pee, however. Maybe it was close to morning, maybe not. There was always the chance that God would cancel the day. That God would say fuck this noise and just shut down the whole operation.
I don’t believe in God, exactly. I believe in gods. I tend to think there are any number of godlike creatures running around up there and that none of them is all-powerful. None of them is Santa Claus, okay. Most of them have dark intentions, cruel purpose. They want to be wrathful, but they don’t quite have the juice. They have good days and bad days. On good days they can lay waste to a fishing village in Honduras or if they’re feeling fat and prosperous maybe stop a bus full of kids from diving into a gorge but mostly they just fuck around and stir things up.
Anyway. Take a long look at your own hand. The slender claw, beautiful and cruel. A team of expensive scientists working around the clock couldn’t design a more effective piece of machinery. This is what Hamlet was going on about there in Act Two. Man delights not me, nor woman neither. Because at the end of the day the hand does what you want it to. It saves the bird with the broken wing from drowning. It snatches the kid out of oncoming traffic and it pulls the trigger that ends the life of someone who deserves it or doesn’t. The hand does crosswords and lights cigarettes and feeds the fish and pinches your nipples when it gets bored. The hand is God.
I’m a fool, of course. But in the bright or anyway less shadowy regions of my heart I think I was hoping to come home and find a little space. Which is funny, don’t you think. Home is a word with such uneasy and fragile and ultimately menacing overtones that anyone else on the planet would have fucking known better.
Moon wants me to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky and I have a pretty good idea that no such person exists but Moon has been such a faithful protector in the past that I can only nod and say yes.
The queer thing is Moon’s tone, his voice. One minute he seems really very worried about the health and welfare of his pal Jimmy Sky and the next he is about to chew his own lip off just talking about him and I catch a vibe that maybe Jimmy was no friend at all and what Moon really wants is for me to find the Skywalker hiding out in some shitty motel room so that Moon can put a bullet between his ears or failing that, maybe find the fucker already dead somewhere so Moon might have the private pleasure of spitting on poor Jimmy’s remains.
And I guess it makes no difference to me, as Jimmy Sky is no friend of mine but still I wonder because the whole thing feels slippery and wrong and maybe I’m walking down a road that goes nowhere good.
Imagine you were in my shoes. What would you do, Jude?
Chrome:
He was shivering and wet. The water was so cold. His skin had a faraway brilliance, like he had stuck his bare arm into the snow and left it there. He huddled in the dark mouth of a suburban driveway, using a sleeping Citizen’s garden hose to wash the blood from his face and hands. He felt absurdly calm. He had done it, he had touched the ghost. He had killed and it wasn’t make-believe. The Fred had been a policeman and if he wanted to, Chrome could certainly tell himself and anyone who cared to listen that it was self-defense. The policeman had pulled a gun on him. He had been a threat to all of them, to the game. But that wasn’t it at all. The man had been a Fred. He had been passive, a slug. He had barely known what planet he was on. Chrome could have simply bitten the man’s tongue and disappeared as he had done countless times. One tongue, taken by force. Two points. Two more points. But the accumulation of points no longer interested him. He had lost count long ago and he had known this would happen one day. And when he nipped the Fred’s warm tongue and tasted blood, he had felt everything at once. His skin, bright and tingling as if he could peel it off and give it a shake. The small hairs on his neck. The enamel of his own teeth. He felt like time had folded around him and come to a complete stop. He and the Fred had been trapped together in a window, a bubble. They had fallen into one of those little plastic paperweights filled with water and artificial snow and the Fred’s throat had been soft and white and sweetly exposed and Chrome had been unable to think of any reason not to sink his teeth into that skin and simply pull it open. The blood had washed over his face, it had filled him with a sickness and joy that were fleeting. It was like an orgasm, of course. But the comparison was such a cliché it pained him to consider it.
He was a werewolf, a ripper.
He grinned. Très diabolique, non?
Now he took off his shirt, rinsed it and put it back on. He glanced down at the street, where Mingus paced nervously along the sidewalk. The Breather was freaking out, truly. He had looked at Chrome with such horror and disbelief that Chrome had laughed out loud. Mingus had seen what he did. He had seen him kill and Chrome hoped this would not be a problem.
Dead face yawning. My own warped face in the mirror. I had acquired the habit of examining it whenever I found myself alone in a bathroom. Otherwise I tended to forget exactly what I looked like. I promised myself this was not such a bad thing, and hardly a clinical condition. I looked like no one and it was nothing to worry about. I pissed confidently into Moon’s toilet, then climbed into his shower. The pipes groaned and the water was so immediately hot that I felt a little faint.
Moon had a surprisingly dainty assortment of hair products. Honey and clove shampoo. Conditioner made from dead silkworms, pasteurized goat’s milk and raw egg whites. A silicone-gel hair thickener and eucalyptus hair mist. The poor bastard’s hair was thinning, wasn’t it. It was turning to ash. Moon’s hair was vacating. The water crashed down and I dreamed on my feet. I saw Moon through the shower curtain, his hard white belly jutting against the sink and his face moist with sweat. I watched as Moon mournfully tugged another grassy fistful from his skull, then checked his gums for bleeding with a sigh. I watched him give the c
at a bowl of dry food and leave the radio on to kill the terrifying emptiness in his apartment and I hoped that he felt a little better when he was out on the street. That he was suffering nothing more than the melancholy dreaminess of a distracted, middle-aged cop. And I wondered, as Moon must, how many years did he have left before he stumbled, before he stepped through the wrong doorway and shuddered from the tug of a bullet never seen, never heard.
Now I pulled on pants and wandered through Moon’s apartment, my hair wet and smelling like a field of poppies from Moon’s shampoo. The average person has a serious accumulation of shit. Personal shit and sentimental shit. Valuable shit and shit they don’t need. But Moon had almost nothing that was his. Nothing to remind him of anything or anyone. He had a couch, a chair, a television. He had a screwed-up cat. He had a broken record player. He had a punching bag, a heavy one. It was covered in a year’s worth of dust, though. Dead skin and cat fuzz and pollen. I gave it a passing jab and choked in the sudden, swarming cloud. Moon has a dartboard but no darts that I could find. There were no photographs, no trinkets. There were no books. I remembered that Moon bought one used book at a time and when he was done with it he traded it for another one.
The apartment was just silent. A wide pocket of nothing, a vacuum.
I could feel a mild panic attack coming on and I suddenly wanted to be sure that Moon was not dead or gone. I walked down the hall to the master bedroom and nudged the door open. Moon slept flat on his back, snoring softly. A small television was placed precariously atop a tower of milk crates. A lonely weatherman blinked on the screen, colorless and muted. The crates contained socks, underwear. The orange cat lay coiled around Moon’s big bare feet and when I entered the room the beast gave me a look of profound indifference. I allowed myself to sit on the floor, my back to the cold wall. I smoked a single cigarette, dropping the ashes into my cupped hand. The weatherman gestured meaningfully at a swirl of cloud patterns. I stared long and hard at his frosted television hair and finally decided that it must be an expensive toupee. I watched Moon sleep and I had a feeling that he regularly slipped away in the broken light of the weather channel. This pale emptiness is what I had wanted so badly, when I wished my wife would die. It’s what I couldn’t bear when she did.