Puss would be The Artist’s masterpiece.
Beneath the wasp-waist belt, the boy’s abdomen was crisscrossed with long shallow incisions that had been stitched up with the same coarse black thread The Artist had used to sew the boy’s mouth shut. These incisions served no real purpose; he had made them to test the malleability of the flesh, to see what was beneath the skin. Most of them had been done with Puss’ Exacto knife, which The Artist ran through the candle flame before each use; still the cuts had become infected. The fresh ones were puffy, limned in angry-looking red; the older ones had begun to suppurate and give off a smell like a swamp gas, strong but not unpleasant.
But the final incision was ever so important. The Artist reached into Puss’ pocket and fingered the Exacto, then shook his head. For the master stroke, a larger brush was required.
He crossed the room, opened the center drawer of a fine oak credenza whose surface was crawling with mildew, and took out an electric carving knife.
“MMMMMNNN!” said the boy when he saw The Artist coming back toward him holding the knife. His head whipped from side to side. The Artist ignored him and knelt to plug in the power cord. The sockets in these buried rooms could no longer be depended upon; luckily Puss had had a generator hauled in to ensure a power supply for Ivor’s TV. With enough extension cords, The Artist could bring the current down here too.
He flicked the knife on. Immediately the blades began chewing the air; the whine of the tiny motor was very loud in the hot, still room. He cupped the boy’s shriveled penis and scrotum, gathered them up in his hand. “MMMNN!” insisted the boy. “MMN! MMMMMM!”
“Yes, yes…” The Artist sighed. “Life is difficult. How we all must suffer.” He lowered the carving knife to the soft juncture of thigh and groin. A fine spray of blood misted the air.
The meat beneath the thin skin was soft as jelly. Blades jittered harsh against bone. The Artist withdrew the knife, then ran it in one magnificent crimson stroke down the other side of the boy’s groin. The pulpy, useless handful of flesh came away in his hand. Done! His canvas successfully manipulated, a work of art, a work of creation!
He picked up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and upended it over the beautiful wound. The foaming, blood-streaked liquid struck The Artist as festive. Champagne of the body, Mardi Gras of mutilation.
He began to laugh, and Puss Robicheaux stared haplessly out of hid joyful, crazy eyes.
Slavering Meatholes of the Putrescent Dead was just not as good as Ivor remembered. The plot had never made a whole lot of sense, but when had all of the actors been skinned alive and become gut-packed, vein-strung skeletons? This in itself would not have been bad, but their dialogue sounded as if it were being forced through mouthfuls of mush and ooze. And the dialogue was usually the best part.
Worst of all, the toxic waste mutants from the last movie seemed to be making a surprise guest appearance in this one, too. Every few minutes, just when Ivor glanced away from the TV, one of their amorphous smashed-centipede shapes would ripple across the screen and be gone before he could fully see it.
He was still horribly thirsty even though he had drunk another full pitcher of tea. There had been a dark, glistening sludge at the bottom of the last one, but Ivor hadn’t bothered to wash it out, figuring that the caffeine was concentrated there. Instead he had just added tap water, and if he noticed how that water fizzed and sparkled when he stirred in the tea, he assumed it was the drugs.
Now the TV screen looked like nothing but a glowing mass of colored dots. He had to look away from it. Maybe this was just a very bright movie. Maybe he should watch something darker: Dungeon of the Toolbox Maniac, by ‘Leg’ Clarke, the world’s only triple-amputee horror film director…
But for once in his life, he didn’t really want to watch a movie. His eyes hurt. In fact, his whole head hurt, a steady throb, then a stabling pain. It felt as if something were alive in there. Ivor though of a fetal bird in its shell, its tiny, razor-sharp eggtooth slowly chipping away at the fragile dome that has cradled and nurtured it…cracking…cracking.
A salty drop stung his eye. He must be dripping with sweat. He wished Puss would buy an air conditioner to hook up to the generator. He wished Puss would come back from wherever be sometimes went to.
Ivor reached up and felt the top of his head. His fingers sank into a deep fissure, and came away coated with thick, viscid blood.
As Puss came up the stairs, he saw a gray and jellied mass go bounding past the door. It was about the size of a small cat, but infinitely more fluid in form, seeming to have neither limb nor facial features. The whorled texture of the thing was vaguely familiar, but it had been moving too fast for Puss to identify it.
Puss poked his head around the doorframe and saw the thing disappearing though the open window at the end of the hall. He could just make out the bloody smudges it had left in its wake—they reminded him of some spongeprint art Ivor had brought home from school once.
He ran to the window, but the thing was gone; he could not tell whether it had crawled down the side of the house or simply hurled itself into the waiting swamp. But something was wrong outside. This was more vivid than any hallucination: the whole world was alive, seething. Puddles of scummy water boiled like thick, scalding soup. The wall of mud was more than halfway up the side of the house now. As Puss watched, it advanced another inch. And the plants were trying to get out of the ground. The overgrown rosebushes in the front yard ripped themselves free like hair being pulled from a scalp. There was a tremendous wet sucking sound as a fifty-year-old water oak toppled. Newly exposed roots whipped the air, raw and shocking as innards.
Now the early morning, sky was full of a flat, dead-looking light. Puss could see all the way to the road than ran south past the house a hundred yards away. There were people on the road. But none of the people were walking. They were being dragged.
Cuttacaloosa, the fishing village a mile north of here, had always had a higher cancer rate than normal. Some, like the activist brats who had tried to terrorize Puss today, blamed it on the Robicheaux plant. They had been trying to get the place shut down for more than ten years. Claude Robicheaux had refused to believe a word of it; he claimed that the cancer surely came from the villagers’ steady diet of seafood, and furthermore that many of them died not of a cancer, but of rampant venereal disease. Such things, Claude told his boys, were bound to happen to uncivilized people.
The people on the road were all coming from the direction of the village; even from this distance Puss could make out the black hair and thickset, sturdy bodies common to the villagers, who were mostly Cajun. But their bodies were dwarfed by the lumpy, fleshy things attached to them, seeming to grow out of them, shading from raw pink to coarse, fibrous gray, humping along toward the swamp and dragging their hosts with them. There was a man with a huge mass of shapeless flesh sprouting from his mouth, and he was being pulled prone behind it: his lungs, his larynx? Here was a woman whose left breast had swollen to elephantine size, half again as large as her body; she clung to it as if trying to ride it. Venereal disease gone wild? Or chemically induced cancers, going to meet their maker?
Ivor.
Puss turned away from the window and rushed into the TV room. Ivor’s tea pitcher lay overturned on the floor. The TV screen was a mass of squirming iridescence, shapeless and multihued as a slick of oil on water. In front of it, stretched out as if crucified, was Ivor. The top of his skull littered the floor in pieces, matted with hair on one side, slick and fresh on the other like some grisly Easter egg; his cranium was a nightmare of blood and thin, yolky fluids. Deep in the glistening hole, Puss thought he saw the frayed end of Ivor’s brainstem protruding like the stump of a severed tongue.
What had gone through the window?
Below, Puss heard glass bursting, then a slow, implacable slithering sound as of a giant worm turning restlessly beneath the jellied foundations of the house. The windows of the first floor had finally given way, and the swamp was claiming
its new domain.
Puss turned to run, but there was nowhere to go. So he lay down beside his brother’s brainless body and stared at the writhing, flickering screen, and he waited. Soon the screen became a long swirling tunnel, and Puss thought he could see a blinding light at the end.
When he finally got used to it, the factory wasn’t a bad place at all.
He could never love it as he had loved the house. But he did grow accustomed to it. He could not leave, but he could go anywhere in the complex; with his new, malleable form he could melt through any crack, slide through any pipe of ventilator shaft.
Most of the factory was underground now. Teams of “waste disposal experts” had come in and poured concrete cover the rest of it, men in moon boots and unwieldy plastic suits that were supposed to protect them. He knew the suits hadn’t worked. He had been in the mud that oozed over the tops of their heavy shoes; he had been in the air that had filtered through the respirators on their masks. Ten or twenty years from now, he would visit them again.
He missed Ivor, it was true. And his own death had been bad. But the memory of his brother’s scooped-out skull, the memory of foul black mud sucking at his body, filling his nose and mouth and dissolving his soft tissues, these were almost gone. At last, the identity of Puss Robicheaux was nearly dissipated. He would need the help of no more drugs, no more Artists.
He could go anywhere now, by anything. He was both the egg and the seed.
At night, he liked to curl up and rest among the pyramids of poison, in one of the thousands of steel drums that had been entombed in the empty chambers of the factory.
If he concentrated, he could himself becoming one with the wastes and poisons contained in the drums.
Soon, he thought, he would be able to eat through the metal.
HOMEWRECKER
Uncle Edna kilt hogs. He came home from the slaughterhouse every day smelling of shit and pig blood, and if I didn’t have his bath drawn with plenty of perfume and bubble stuff, he’d whup my ass until I felt his hard-on poking me in the leg.
Like I said, he kilt hogs. At night, thought, you’d never have known it to see him in his satin gown. He swished around the old farmhouse like some kind of fairy godmother, swigging from a bottle of J.D. and cussing the bitch who stole his man.
“Homewrecker!” he’d shriek, pounding his fist on the table and rattling the stack of rhinestone bracelets he wore on his skinny arm. “How could he want her when he had me? How could he do it, boy?”
And you had to wonder, because even with his lipstick smeared and his chest hair poking out of his gown, there was a certain tired glamour to Uncle Edna. Thing was, the bitch hadn’t even wanted his man. Uncle Jude, who’d been with Uncle Edna since he was just plain old Ed Slopes, had all of a sudden turned hetero and gone slobbering off after a henna-headed barfly who called herself Verna. What Verna considered a night’s amusement, Uncle Jude decided was the grand passion of his life. And that was the last we saw of him. We never could understand it.
Uncle Edna was thirty-six when Uncle Jude left. The years and the whiskey rode him hard after that, but the man knew how to do his makeup, and I thought Uncle Jude would fall back in love with him if they could just see each other again.
I couldn’t do anything about it, though, and back then I was more interested in catching frogs and snakes than in the affairs of grown-ups’ hearts. But a few years later, I heard Verna was back in town.
I knew I couldn’t let Uncle Edna find out. He’d want to get out his shotgun and go after her, and then he’d get cornholed to death in jail and who’d take care of me? So I talked to a certain kid at school. He made me suck his dick out behind the cafeteria, but I came home with four Xanax. I ground them up and put them in Uncle Edna’s bottle of J.D. that same night. Pretty soon he was snoring like a chainsaw and drooling on his party dress. I went out to look for Verna. I didn’t especially want to see her, but I thought maybe I could find out where she’d last seen Uncle Jude.
I parked my bike across the street from the only bar in town, the Silky Q. Inside, the men stood or danced in pairs. A few wore drag, but most were in jeans and flannels; this was a working man’s town.
Then I saw her. She’d slid her meaty ass into a booth and was cuddled up to one of the men in it. The other man sat glaring at her, nearly in tears. I recognized them as Bob and Jim Frenchette, a couple who’d been married as long as I could remember. Verna’s red-nailed hand was on Bob’s thigh, stroking the worn denim.
I walked up to the table.
Jim and Bob were too far gone to pay me any mind. Verna didn’t seem to recognize me. I’d been a little kid when she saw me last, and she’d hardly noticed me then, bent as she was on sucking Uncle Jude’s neck. I stared into her eyes. Her lashes were clumped with black mascara, her lids frosted with turquoise shadow. Her mouth was a lipstick wound. Her lips twitched in a scornful smile, then parted.
“What you want, little boy?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t know what I had meant to do. I stumbled away from the table. My hands were trembling and my cheeks flaming. I was outside, unchaining my bike from the lamppost, when Verna came out of the bar.
She crossed the deserted street, pinning me where I stood with those wolf-pale eyes. I wanted to jump on my bike and speed away, or just run, but I couldn’t. I wanted to look away from those slippery red lips that glistened like hog grease. But I couldn’t.
“Your uncle…” she whispered. “Jules, wasn’t it”
I shook my head, but Verna kept smiling and bending closer until her lips were right against my ear.
“He was a lousy fuck,” she said.
Her sharp red nails bit into my shoulder. She pushed me back against the lamppost and sank to her knees in front of me. I felt hot bile rising in my throat, but I couldn’t move, even when her other hand undid my pants.
I tried to keep my dick from getting hard, I truly did. But it was like her mouth sucked the blood into it, right to the surface of the skin. I thought she might tear it out by the roots. Her tongue slithered over my balls, into my peephole. There came a sharp stinging at the base of my dick, unlike anything I’d felt when other boys sucked it. The I was shooting my jizz into her mouth, much as I didn’t want to, and she was swallowing it like she’d been starved.
Verna wiped her mouth and laughed. Then she stood, turned, and walked back to the bar like I wasn’t ever there. The door closed behind her, and I fell to my knees and puked until my throat was raw. But even as the rancid taste of half-digested food filled my mouth and nose, I could feel my dick getting hard again.
I had to whack off before I could get on my bike. As I come on the sidewalk, I imagined those fat shiny lips closing around me again, and I started to cry. I couldn’t get the nasty thoughts out of my head, things I’d never thought about before: the smell of dank sea coves and fish markets, the soft squish of a body encased in a layer of fat, with big floppy globes of it stuck on the chest and rear like cancers. And the thoughts were like a cancer in me.
As fast as my feet could pedal, I rode home to Uncle Edna. But I had a feeling I could never really go home again.
ESSENCE OF ROSE
The city of Nashville straddles in polluted stretch of the Cumberland River like a lover, nestles into its fertile patch of Tennessee land like a cluster of rhinestones sewn onto rich cloth of earth brown and malachite green. The streets of the downtown area are brick, dating from the early days of the city. Above these cobbled paths, towers of glass and chrome soar up and up, some for thirty stories or more, elegant hotels and shopping centers and temples of commerce, catching the southern sunlight by day, reflecting the million colored fairy lights of the city by night. Many of the tallest buildings have glass elevators that can be seen from the street after dark, ascending the sheer faces of the buildings like shimmering insects climbing toward the moon.
Or spiders, thought Anthony, going up to spin a web between the few stars that were faintly visible t
hrough the haze of the city light. Yes, he could paint that: white and silver spiders, spinning gossamer threads between points of light in velvety purple-blackness.
But he thought Rose might paint it better. The image was more suited to her style.
He stood naked at a window on the thirty-first floor of a grand hotel, pressing his body to the cool glass so that a foggy outline began to form around him—his body heat made visible—and gazing out over the city. Only the faintest shadow of his reflection was visible in the glass: sharp-featured, big eyes staring, skin very pale and hair paler still. He was backlit by the Christmas lights strung around the room, the candles burning, the tiny orange eye of an incense stick smoldering here and there. A room lit by juju.
From what Anthony had seen, the hotel staff consisted of impeccably dressed black men with gleaming bald heads and big-haired white ladies who wore their makeup like an extra face, so thickly applied that it seemed to hover fraction of an inch above their actual features. They would certainly suspect juju or worse if they saw the room now. But they never entered, nor did the housekeepers, not during this week. Anthony met them at the door to receive towels and soap for the long, steaming baths he and Rose took. The bed could not be changed because it was in constant use, so that by the end of the week it would be a swirled, jumbled confection of sheets and pillows and small creamy stains, rich and ripe with the many scents of love. And, this year, with the faintly sour tang of spilled champagne.
All the rest of the year Anthony was a sherry drinker. He had never been able to make himself like the taste of beer, and liquor mutated his personality, made him a mad thing, unable to paint. Rose always drank champagne. This year she’d begged him to drink it with her, and he had given in. It produced a strange drunkenness he’d never known before, balloon-headed, almost numb. It made him want to obey her, to please her more thoroughly than ever, no matter what it was she wanted. Yesterday she had wanted to urinate on him in the empty bathtub, and though every fiber of his fastidious being shrieked its revulsion, the very dirtiness of the act made it more thrilling.