Above the front door was a fanlight of opalescent glass Puss had always particularly loved. He tried to imagine the mud oozing over it, sucking out its subtle colors. Instead a more disquieting image rose unbidden. He had dreamed about Ivor last night. In the dream, as they watched a kung fu film, Puss had moved closer to Ivor on the floor. Ivor kept watching the movie as Puss touched his thigh, then his crotch. At last Puss had unzipped Ivor’s ragged jeans and cupped his brother’s flaccid penis in his hand. He masturbated Ivor to erection, then to unprotesting orgasm. Ivor’s breath sobbed in and out as he came, but his eyes remained fixed on the TV, the camera panning in on a handful of something raw and twitching held up to the screen. In the way of dreams, Puss had felt a sudden, terrible empathy with the film: a red-hot pain flared between his legs.
But that was wrong. He must never touch Ivor like that. He must do his best to take care of Ivor, even if that meant letting him sit in front of his beloved TV and watch bad films until his brain fried like an egg in hot grease. This is Your Brain On Movies: any questions? Who knew; perhaps the radioactive waves that were supposed to come out of TV screens would burn away nascent tumors in Ivor’s head.
Puss shivered, then glanced over his shoulder. The swamp seemed still tonight. Usually it was noisy, the shrilling insects and sticky-footed frogs, the night birds’ chorus, the occasional cough and hum of a boat engine over by Cuttacaloosa. Tonight it was so quiet that he imagined he could hear the sinister chuff of his father’s factory across the swamp, the slow seepage of its toxins.
He shook his head and let himself in.
In some of the forgotten chambers of Robicheaux Chemicals, enormous pyramids had been built, like monuments erected to the memory of poison.
These pyramids were made of metal, towering stacks of fifty-gallon steel drums slapped with a dozen different colors of dull industrial paint, sloshing with the chemical leftovers of thirty years. Some of the drums were stenciled DANGER in bright red letters, or bore skulls and crossbones as if they might be forgotten caches of Lafitte’s treasure. Some were unmarked.
And some, like the shade of Elvis, had left the building.
For years the factory foreman, a distant, increasingly alcoholic cousin of Claude’s wife, had paid various teams of “waste disposal experts” to haul the drums away, shunting them off to the lowest bidder and breathing a prayer of relief as the trucks disappeared down the winding swamp road. No one had any idea what became of the drums after that, and no one was required to know.
But those were the good old days, and long gone. Now there was not even enough money to pay the “waste disposal experts”, and most of the drums simply stacked up in the unused parts of the factory, pyramids housing death as surely as the great tombs of Egypt ever did. But the factory, thought vast, had a finite amount of space that could be filled with drums full of poison.
And so a great many of the drums ended up in the swamp. The colorful, new ones sank slowly into the welcoming mud and came to rest on the rusting hulks of others, for of course many of the “waste disposal experts” had been using the swamp all along. Fresh poisons mingled with ones that had been brewing for years; molecules broke apart and recoalesced in deadlier formation. Clusters of fern and swampgrass withered, then grew back a seething, animated shade of green, a noxious but somehow lush color, greener than nature; silent coves and twisted knots of water-oak roots became caked with a thick orange foam, like whipped cream gone bad in the can. An oily purple sheen laced the surface of the water; at night the swamp’s natural phosphor made this sheen swarm with a thousand iridescent colors.
The industrial poisons mingled with pesticides and herbicides blowing in from the bayou ten miles away, where they were sprayed on the rice crops. The toxic soup was diluted with rain whose acidity often matched that of vinegar. The whole mess ate endless runnels and rivulets through the soft springtime mud, and the high Louisiana groundwater soaked it up like manna.
Perhaps a billion toxic seeds found a billion mutagenic eggs; perhaps, like the first life conceived on Earth, it began with a single meeting of slimes.
But on this hot spring morning, the swamp stretched its shimmering surface and began to breathe.
At the ruin of the Robicheaux plantation, poisons of a different sort held sway over the night.
Each tiny square of acid was patterned with two intersecting ovals, and at their center, a black dot: symbol of the atom. Puss placed three squares on his own tongue and three on Ivor’s. Never mind what the boy in the Quarter had said; he and his crowd were lightweights, inexperienced as children. No doubt they wanted to see through the drugs, to cling to some shred of their personalities, some reminder of who they were supposed to be, who they were supposed to be, who they thought themselves to be. That was exactly what Puss wanted to forget.
They spent the next two hours watching zombies shred chunks of quivering muscle fiber between rotting teeth and stuff gobs of intestine into hungry, gore-rouged mouths. Puss had never known the human eye could distinguish so many different shades of red, or that the play of light on meat could create such intricate mandala-like patterns. But when the film ended, he only stretched, sat up, and took a long swallow from the pitcher of heavily sweetened iced tea Ivor kept beside him at all times. He hated the taste of Ivor’s tea, but his throat was parched.
“One more movie,” Ivor said hoarsely. “It’s a good one.” Without taking his eyes off the static on the screen, Ivor extended a skinny arm and took a big slug of tea. Ivor’s diet consisted largely of sugar and caffeine, speed and hallucinogens, with an occasional handful of Flintstones chewable vitamins for fiber. With a little effort Puss could visualize the vibrant red-brown stream of liquid flowing down Ivor’s throat and into his stomach, straining his guts as rich a crimson as any zombie’s gourmet meal.
“What good one?” Puss asked. Last night it had been some badly shot footage of an African tribal puberty ceremony. The fruity-voiced announcer said the technical term for it was a “clitorectomy”, his voice had sounded approving. Puss remembered the girl’s skinny black thighs being wrenched apart like a wishbone, the white-hot knife flashing down. Then the camera focused straight in on the raw new wound, shockingly red against dull ebony skin, closer and closer until the pulpy mutilated folds filled the entire giant screen of the TV, like a decapitated alien, like a bloodied, sobbing mouth.
Ivor grinned. It was an expression too wise for his tender years, and too depraved. Ivor was smart, all right; he had always been smart, but had never seemed remotely tempted to use his intelligence for anything other than scamming money and memorizing bad film trivia. “Sorry. No erotica tonight.” He held up a video cassette in its brightly colored storybox. Toxic Waste Mutants vs. the Vampire Sluts. “And they say we Robicheaux are politically incorrect! We watch this stuff, don’t we? Now this is the very worst work of one of the world’s worst directors, Samuel ‘Lip’ Fraydon, Jr., who died penniless in a tarpaper shack somewhere in Georgia…”
“A Yankee?”
“Fuck you, Puss. You think anybody north of Shreveport is a goddam Yankee.”
This was true, but Puss couldn’t help it. That was how the family had been. Steeped in the sodden Louisiana heat, in the genteelly decaying monstrosity of a house, surrounded by yellowed photographs and portraits of his ancestors in their lace shawls and peacock-feather fans and faces powdered to a ghostly perfection, he had grown up with a craving for that sort of elegance. He wished he could have been born a hundred and fifty years ago, the quintessential antebellum sweetheart, the perfect hothouse flower. He wished for seed pearls and crinolines. And while he was as it, he wished he could have been born without three useless scraps of flesh dangling from his crotch.
“What was the ‘Lip’ for?” he asked as Ivor fed the tape into the VCR.
Ivor looked up. The bleachy nimbus of his hair was backlit by the TV screen, making an electric bluish halo around his head. In the hectic, giant-pupiled eyes that met his own, Puss thought he glim
psed Ivor’s sanity skipping gaily away down some back road into the acid-swirled recesses of his brain.
“Fraydon had a harelip,” Ivor explained. “He couldn’t talk to anyone without drenching them in split. Look close when we watch the movie—in a couple of shots you can see saliva droplets on the actors’ faces, or flecks of foam if they’re wearing dark clothes.”
Puss looked askance at him. But Ivor had an angelic smile on his face and was gazing raptly into the Cyclopean eye of the television as the opening credits began.
The vampire sluts of the title did not hold Puss’ attention as the African girl’s freshly scarred vulva had. None of them looked as if they had tasted anything as nourishing as blood in a long time. Their breasts were loose pouches of meat gone gray with age or overuse, and they all had elaborate crumbling hairdos that looked like dimestore wigs frosted with the dust of too many years on the shelf. What a waste, Puss thought, of bodies that could have been beautiful.
The toxic waste mutants were another matter entirely, though they were more like weird works of art than monsters. Like the unholy marriage of a brain, an octopus, and an oil slick they rippled across the wide screen, wreathed in a million iridescent colors, dissolving flesh as they went. Puss tried to imagine the subtle toxins of the creatures coming into contact with his own hapless, abused cells, eating up his boredom and the discontent he had always felt with his own body, changing them into something more alien and therefore more free.
Changing…alien…free. The words touched a familiar chord in his mind, something half pleasurable, half born of dread.
Ivor was engrossed in the adventures of the junkie scientist who was the film’s ostensible hero. The actor resembled Henry Spencer from Eraserhead—the same livery lips, the same shell-shocked glaze in the eyes—but instead of Henry’s famous fuzzy-mushroom-cloud hairdo, the scientist had a bald head covered with very realistic-looking, very wet festering sores. Apparently he had lived through some kind of toxic takeover and was trying to warn the world about it before it devoured him entirely. Every now and then the vampire sluts would come lurching through in one of their hideous interpretive-dance numbers that bore no relationship to the plot.
Ivor reached up and gingerly scratched the top of his head, as if his cranium too might be veined with tricking pus. Puss knew Ivor was living out the film; for an hour or two it would be his only reality. He wouldn’t even notice if Puss left the room.
Puss stood up. His neck was already beginning to ache, a result of the minute quantities of strychnine present in even the purest blotter acid. He had been reclining on a rose velvet love seat, one of his mother’s most prized antiques; now the rich finish of the wood was scuffed and gouged, the sumptuous fabric stained with wine and sweat. Ivor lay sprawled on the floor, his head propped against the sofa, his pitcher of tea within easy reach. His eyes never left the TV screen.
Puss began going through the deep pockets of his jacket. He carried all manner of things around with him: tubes of rouge, tissues, an Exacto knife and several spare blades, a long hatpin tipped with two-carat diamond. The hatpin poked him as he felt in his pocket, and he absently put his finger in his mouth, half-tasting the blood.
At last he found what he wanted: the key to a room on the first floor, heavy and ornate, tarnished by his own sweat. His fingers closed around it and he pulled it out of his pocket.
Earlier, after dosing himself and Ivor, Puss had tucked the rest of the acid into one of his pockets. Six hits gone, ninety-four left. Then he had forgotten about it.
He did notice when it fluttered from his pocket as he pulled out the keys.
As Puss left the room, the sheet of acid wafted gently down, landed in Ivor’s tea pitcher, and began to dissolve.
Puss descended the long curving staircase, placing his bare feet carefully on the marble risers. The stairs rippled and billowed before his eyes; the red lacquer on his toenails looked almost black against the paleness of his long, hairless feet. The acid was kicking in hard. The shadows of the first floor landing swarmed with dots of color and points of light. He reached the door of his room and slid the swear-tarnished key into the waiting mouth of the lock.
The rusty tumblers slid back with a faint grating sound, but the heavy wooden door did not swing open. All the doors down here were warped in their frames; some would no longer open at all. Puss heard a low moan from inside the room. He twisted the knob viciously and threw his shoulder against the swollen wood.
The door shifted on its hinges, then creaked open. Puss stepped into the room.
The junkie scientist died screaming, and the credits began to roll over and extreme closeup of his swollen, agonized, already mutating face. Ivor didn’t need to read the cast list—“Lip” Fraydon always worked with the same stable of actors, since he couldn’t get better ones and they couldn’t get work anywhere else—so luckily it didn’t matter that all the credits seemed to be written in squirming Hindi.
He looked around for Puss, but his brother was nowhere to be found. Probably off reapplying his lipstick or something. Ivor scanned a towering stack of videocassettes, wondering what to watch next. His Japanese snuff films? His collection of amputee pornography? Or perhaps just a comfortable old favorite like Slavering Meatholes of the Putrescent Dead, final masterpiece of Will O’Dobbs, the only director who could rival Fraydon’s exquisite badness?
He tugged at the neck of his T-shirt and his finger came away wet. The heat and dampness of the swamp rose from the first floor, permeating every corner of the steamy old house. And decisions made him thirsty. Ivor hoisted his pitcher of tea and took a deep swallow, then another. The icy, sugary brew was like balm on his acid-parched throat. He peered into the depths of the pitcher. Almost gone. Well, what the hell; he’d make another one before the next movie. The tea come in a can, ready to mix—all he had to do was add water from the faucet.
Ivor tipped the pitcher and drained it.
* * *
Puss felt in his pocket again, just missed slicing his finger open on one of the Exacto blades, and finally found what he wanted: a gaily colored folder of matches from Brennan’s, where he and Ivor had once eaten a hundred-dollar breakfast and then, in the bonecrushing grip of a bourbon hangover, promptly thrown it all up. Now he tore out a match and moved around the room lighting thick black candles in ornate wrought iron wall-sconces. The wall of mud on the other side of the tall windowpanes sparkled with oily colors. Puss watched it for a moment. This acid was strong, all right—the mud almost seemed to writhe against the window, as if it were trying to push the glass in.
Puss stood in the center of the room, letting his drug-dazzled eyes resolve themselves to the candlelight. Gradually the outline of another form became visible, thin and pale, stretched out on a long table by the windows. Then all at once it was as if a caul of sanity was lifted from his eyes, and his vision became clear.
The boy had been fresh off a Greyhound bus when Puss found him in the Quarter, a punk rock refugee from the cornfed complacency of the Midwest, with the fuck-you attitude and the fine-boned, heartbreaking beauty that seldom last much past eighteen. This boy might have had as long as five years left to be bratty and beautiful. Now he was in the process of becoming something stranger and far finer.
As Puss stood trembling in the center of the room, he felt something detach itself from him and go to the foot of the long table, a shadowy persona he thought of only as The Artist. He, Puss, could never do things like this. But The Artist knew how to do all sorts of things. His medium was flesh, and the boy stretched out on the table was both his palette and his canvas.
First of all, right after Puss brought the boy home and got him drunk on red wine laced with sleeping pills, The Artist had used heavy black thread to sew the boy’s lips shut. There was only a small opening at one corner so Puss could administer drugs and small quantities of water. Puss remembered the glaze of terror in the boy’s dark eyes as he woke up and tried to speak, the sight of those soft swollen lips strainin
g at the blood-crusted stitches that sealed them. Now the canvas was almost complete. Thrust through the boy’s nipples were two knitting needles The Artist had sharpened on a whetstone from the kitchen. Strong wire filament wound around these nipples ran to a pair of hooks on the ceiling. Each day The Artist pulled the filament a little thigher, stretching the skin a little more—but carefully, so that the needles would never quite rip through the delicate tissue. So far the wire had been shortened by about five inches
Just above the sweet concavity of the boy’s hipbones, The Artist had fastened a stiff leather belt perhaps four inches wide and fourteen inches in diameter. The belt was fastened snug below the ribs so that the boy’s already flat stomach was cinched in absurdly tight, and the graceful arc of the ribcage was clearly visible. The Artist had used two larger belts before this one, gradually decreasing the size—the first twenty inches long, the second sixteen, both with heavy iron clasps that could not be burst apart by the boy’s constant struggle for breath.
The Artist looked down at the youthful face, once so clear and innocent despite its attempts at world-weariness, now smeared with blood and makeup, tear-streaked, ill-used by fatigue and pain. The boy’s eyes rolled up to meet his own and The Artist was struck by the hopelessness he saw there. The boy was ill, ready to give in to the limitations of his body, he wouldn’t last much longer. The canvas would have to be finished tonight.
It was more than just a work of art; it was a work of creation. One need not be confined to one’s own dull flesh; one could manipulate it, force it to change. The Artist was sure of it. Tonight he would improve that his talent was equal to such a task; after this practice run, he could begin work on poor Puss at his leisure.