Null rolls over in bed. It is stifling hot dark, and the room is a disaster. Next to him, his x-wife is lolling naked and unashamed.
Outside, there are a number of fat women. Obscure family members. How are they all related? They look like lumbering dinosaurs, mutants after the Apocalypse. What the hell are they doing here? Everything is darkness and confusion.
“I have something I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“I don’t think you’d even believe me if I broached the subject.”
Cracker crumbs stick to his back. There is a window to his left. Null remembers a time when he was lost in a similar building, finding himself rolling around in bed with a fat man. This might have well as been in Paris, because the place was haunted by the ghost of Genet.
Now though, it was the Family House. He knew it well.
“I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit, okay? I had more than enough of that in the past.” He notices her breasts; one is larger than the other. She turns over, farts, and her huge white ass looms under the blanket like an emerging dolphin. He imagines himself holding an alien face between his fingers.
What are you?
“I suppose I could introduce you by way of a dream I had. Or was it?”
“Was it what?”
“Just a dream. I’ve heard about similar things happening.”
She turns back around,. Her face is not beautiful. In fact, it is pretty bltchy and red, wand freckled. Her hair is a tussled, dirty mess. Too much crusty eyeliner.
“Like what? Spill it.”
“I was in this clinic. I’m not sure where or when it was. I walk into this room. The walls are a hideous white. Bone white. Antiseptic white.”
“Too much exposition, darlin’.”
“Okay. Anyway, I know there is a girl in there I love. And she is a girl I’ve never seen before in real life, so I know this had to be a dream.”
“Wait…you’re not fucking sure?”
Pause.
“No.”
Pause.
“Continue.”
Anyway, I go up to this girl has been laid out in a hospital bed. And she is maybe twenty years old, and she has an IV in her arm, and she is bandaged, but her hair falls around her pillow in a way that is real pretty. And she seems to be pretty perky, although I can’t remember just what the hell she is on about. Anyway, the whole thing takes on the weird aspects of a ceremony as the doctor comes in…”
Pause.
“And?”
“But the doctor, he just stands there. And right behind him, coming in with a little box, is…is one of them.”
“One of what?”
“One of the…aliens.”
Pause.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. And he is short, with a big head. And there is this smell clings to him. And he has this little box. He shoves the box up under the nose of the girl lying in the bed. The doctor and the nurse stand aside silently, as if this is some sort of honor. He says, ‘I’m sorry, but your baby has died,’ and I make that is what the smell is. Then he comes over to me. I don’t feel any fear.
He shoves the box under my nose. But it isn’t a dead human baby. I’m not exactly sure what the hell kind of baby it is…looks like a little homunculi…”
“A what?”
“Homonculi…a miniature, artificial man.”
“Oh.”
“Then I wake up. Anyway, I read in a book by Dr. David Jacobs that people who have had contact with UFO entities use to be shown a box, but that they could never remember what it was they saw in the box. Only later, under hypnosis, could they remember what it was they saw. And what they saw was a hybrid, an alien/human fetus…”
Pause.
“I have to go take a piss. Hold on.”
She gets out of bed and Null follows her flabby, cellulite-riddled ass out the door with his eyes, peering in th egathering gloom. Has she left him out of anger? He slowly gets up. He doesn’t want to be in here alone.
Before he can move, the door bursts open. His grandmother comes in the room, points at a pile of rusted junk (that looks like atoy horsey for a child held on dirty, rusty springs) and exclaims silently. At the door, several of the monstrously fat women who have gathered for the apparent ceremony of the reuniting of Null with his ex-wife, wait at the door as if to claim the grandmother again after she has performed her senseless, illogical function.
(Illogical because, as far as Null knew, his grandmother was long dead.)
“This can’t actually be happening, can it?”
He lay back down, shut his eyes, and then decided that he needed to go to the door for an explanation. Perhaps this was a relative that simply resembled his dead grandmother. Perhaps it was an insane person. Anyway you sliced it, he wanted some answers.
He got up, circumnavigating the sea of junk (mostly broken toys and piles of plastic refuse and tin cans), and mad ehis way to the bedroom door in the dark. The door was cracked. He could see some commotion going on outside.
He went up to the door, feeling as if he were doing something forbidden. He put his fingers to the warped, dusty wood, pushed, saw a surprised head turn, a head attached to a huge back wrapped in a cheap flannel shirt. One of the fat women.
His ex-wife suddenly appeared in the doorway, pushing past the fat women. She was completely naked.
She put out her hand. He grasped it, suddenly remembering every time she had ever hurt him. Suddenly, he flabby white body disgusted him> he sank his fingers into the soft skin of her hand, causing her to cry out. She recoiled from him, heading back out the door, causing a commotion. Apparently, no one was sleeping tonight. Where they all waiting for them to fuck, or something.
***
Null was hustled into a waiting car.
An obscure uncle was driving. He was a great fat man. Beside him, a daughter or something was riding shotgun. She was dressed in a schoolgirl outfit, was a nasty-looking piece of work. Braces. Thick glasses. Froggy features. Pimples. Dimples.
The drive was downtown, and Null was feeling pretty damn good. Elated really. He couldn’t stop the laughing from the backseat. His clothes were all ill-fitting, as if he dressed himself from a pile of thrift store castoffs while he was drunk. The car speeds down into several streets of dilapidated houses, separated by dusty, gravel-strewn old lots and broken ruins of buildings collecting time and dirt and the droppings of insects and dogs.
One building stands out.
“I think we’ll stop here for a minute.”
***
Null isn’t sure if this is a joke.
He gets out of the car, slams the door, looks at the place. Old, tattered plastic garbage bags blow in the breeze, framing the entrance, which could be a converted garage with beer advertisements drooping off of it at odd angles. He realizes it’s been awhile and the uncle is still gone. He gets out of the car slowly. Where in the world is he? He’s never been in this part of town before. The sun shines overhead brightly, baking the dusty, windblown bricks of downtown buildings that have been tottering on the edge of space and time for the better part of the century. Null is flat-out curious.
He steps into the darkened entryway. Place is huge, but he sees a glimmer of light past what appears to be mounds of boxes and old room partitions, and somewhere buried deep in the guts of the place is what appears to be a makeshift bar. Small dive. Crowded.
Null bellies up to the bar in wonder. The lighting is not good, only the glare from a few televisions placed strategically here and there.
The man behind the bar ignores him, but occasionally glances up with a moue of disgust before turning his head back down to the counter. Tables are full of card players. People mill about. Most of them are wearing jean vests with wild patches of skulls and gothic lettering on the back. Some of them are wearing old fedora hats; all of them have long chain wallets and chino pants.
A few people start to notice him. His whiteness sticks out here, in this place, like a sore thumb. He begins to get nervous. He gets up from the bar stool, starts to make his way back out into the darkened entryway. Behind him, he can hear low murmurs, the rattle of chains, profanity whispered at his back.
He gets outside, his heart hammering in his chest. Suddenly, behind him, he hears what he takes to be growls. He feels his blood freeze in his veins. He knows what that sound portends. He can hear the clatter of nails on the concrete.
The dogs are at his back.
They bound forward, teeth bared, hair bristling on their back, and he screams as he feels them sinck their jaws deep into his legs. He struggles with livewires of writhing canine fury, rolling in the dirt as his blood begins to fly about in ribbons and spurts.
I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead
Is the only thought he can muster in the confines of his terrorized brain. His heart is pounding like a drum. He feels the world go black.
He expects to wake up in Hell. He has always expected, one day, to wake up in Hell.
Before the world goes black, the approach of a running man. A comic figure in an old hat and faded clothing, But big. Approaching. Stick in hand. He bends over, raises the stick. It’s the last thing that Null can remember.
When he wakes up he sees a guy looks like Norton from The Honeymooners if Norton had been ten years younger and a body builder. A real mensch. A working class guy from the Fifties, maybe. But beneath the blue collar muscle, the face of a put-upon little geek.
“Almost had you there, buddy,” he says. He picks Null up by the arm, which he has dirty bandaged.But everything seems okay.
“Yeah. Thanks. You saved my life.” Null isn’t quite sure what to say. The pain has subsided, the dogs are nowhere to be seen.
“Yeah, that was a pretty nasty duo. But I took care of ‘em. Ran ‘em off with their tails between their legs. I’m the new sheriff around these parts, so to speak.”
Null has no idea what he’s talking about. The day drones on around him,. Somewhere, a truck rumblyfarts in the distance. A large horsefly alights on his bandaged arm.
Suddenly, Null realizes they are surrounded by a small gaggle of reporters snapping photos.
“Mr. Jim! Mr. Jim! Denny Albrecht from The Morning Tattler. Tell me: Why is it you decided to start down here in Brompton in your effort to clean up the city?”
Jim says nothing, just points his thumb over his shoulder, while more reporters shoot rapid-fire questions at him. Null doesn’t want to go back inside, but soon Mr. Jim is leading the way, and, for some reason, he feels obligated to follow.
The barroom is deserted. Null notices for the first time that the bottles of booze are stacked on a row of old washing machines. The light from the television sets is very blue.
Mr. Jim begins to climb the walls like a spider.
Null feels hi mouth drop open.
Reporters snap photos, point, holler questions. Mr. Jim stops me monetarily, perched on a doorframe, and poses like he is in a Mr. Universe competition. He throws the television sets down to the floor, where they explode in showers of sparks.
Null realizes he is in the presence of a living, breathing superhero, a “strange visitor from another planet.”
He goes outside.
Across the yard, an old man dressed like a farmer is nustling the biggest damn cats Null has ever seen in his life. They look like miniature ponies.
“Sure grow ‘em big out here, huh son?”
Null had already seen more than he could process. One of the cats jumped from the old man’s grasp, leapt over the fence, began to slither up to Null, stalking him as if he was an overgrown mouse. Null recoiled in terror, dove to the ground, put his hands over his face.
And this was only one day.
***
Back at the house, a boy relative perhaps watched eagerly out the window. In the distance, funny lights danced in the night sky.
“It’s a jet,” Ie said,
“It’s no jet. It’s a spaceship.” he said, his grin widening out until it looked positively shark-like.
There was something out there in the distance. I felt the first few tingles of fear grip my spine. I pointed.
“look, you can see the landing lights.”
But he remained unconvinced, and I wasn’t sure who I was trying harder to convince, him or me.
Suddenly, a few girls popped into the room. More obscure relatives. They were milling about in the night. These were cousins and friends, pretty brown hair grown long; wild girls in the prime of their life.
They wanted to go walking in search of spacemen.
“We know this guy. He’s a little weird. Really good looking. Long hair guy. He does all this strange shit, man. Guy is strange. I think you and him might get a long.”
This cousin grabbed my hand in hers. I wondered what it would be like to fuck a cousin. Jerry Lee Louis did it. Hell, I think Elvis did it, too. I suppose I could be wrong about that
She had chipmunk cheeks. Dimples. Blue doggie eyes. Young. Love love love. Her friends were skinny, tanned, and they seem to float around me like a gaggle of supernatural witches, so I can’t ever really fix my vision or concentration on one of them.
It doesn’t matter much, because we start losing them before dawn. You know the way you might start off with a group of people, driving around or just walking around the way you did when you were kids, all gathered together in the silent temple of the night, holy and presnt in a new way under the moon, accompanied by the high cloying reek of flowers and the weirdness of night bugs no one knows, and the dust that gets in the creases of your toes…
So finally it is only my cousin and another girl, and I say, “So who is this guy we’re going to meet?” And I look over and realize we are in some strange neighborhood I’ve never been in before, because thehouses have to be two hundred years old, but look like somebody covered them in pink and orange and black submarine paint, and some of them have little stream running in front of the porch, which I realized must make it hard to go in and out without getting your feet wet.
“Oh, we know where he lives. It’s this place down the street. Real low rent. Dogs, I think.”
They know I hate dogs. The sun is coming up in orange and golden splotches, making my eyes hurt. I am tired and dusty and thirsty, but the girls seem to have all the energy in the world.
Never did find out what the other one was named. Everytime she asked, they would just bust out giggling, and give me something obviously phony.
***
Clouds darken the street. It could almost be night again, or maybe that is just the mood I’ve been thrown into. The place looks like a series of storage sheds. White cube-like structures separated by a strip of blacktop. We go up to a door marked 213. The girls look at me, giggle. They are standing beside me.
“We’ll he’s your friend.”
Pause.
“Well, he’s not exactly a friend, you know. Just a guy we know.”
“Yeah, and we, like, don’t really know him that well, dig? Just sort of know him from around school.”
Coquettish. The skinny one with long black hair holds her skinny arms out in front of her, lacing her long-nailed fingers together stiffly,a s if she is bursting with joy. I notice she is Asian.
Okay. I step forward. I put my fist out to knock. I notice little black spots crawling across the door. A heavy infestation of roaches. I recoil. Amazingly the door opens without me even touching it.
I know the girl who comes to the door.
I know I know this girl.
She’s young.
Short, curly brown hair. Conservative sweater, looks like a college valedictorian. I realize her clothes are twenty years out of date.
Suddenly I remember her as the victim of a particularly notorious serial killer. I’ve seen her face in an old tabloid, or a television special. If it’s not the same girl, I’ll eat a hot bowel of shit. But how could she still be alive? My brain tries to wrap itself around the obscure puzzle.
Poor thing to live in such a hovel.
I stand aside while the girls take control.
“Is Jack still living here?”
“Jack?”
“Yeah. Long hair, really skinny, long black coat. Always really quiet. Wanders.”
The dead girl’s face suddenly lights up with “stupid pink affect.”
“Oh, him. Yeah, I guess so. Strange guy. So sweet, but he leaves and just…walks, you know. Told me he’s traveled all around. I believe him, too, even though he doesn’t seem to have any pictures or souvenirs or anything. Yeah, he lives two doors down I think. Not sure if he’s home, though.”
Suddenly, as if in answer to our calling, a tall, dark figure steps out of the night. He puts his hands behind his back. He looks like the cat that has just devoured the canary. Or maybe that isn’t quite right. He seems still, ominous; pregnant with meaning and purpose.
“Did someone call?”
He seems pleased. The murder victim smiles, shuts the door, goes back to darkness and roaches and God knows what else. The girls giggle, I am unsure where I fit in to this dynamic, but Jack seems to be perfectly at ease with himself and everything else. He smiles a crooked half-grin. He has a scrubby red beard, short, and features that hint at a history of superior genetics. His gloves have the fingers cut out of them.
“Well, what do you girls want to do this morning?”
I’m completely forgotten about. I don’t really care.
It’s getting warmer out as the day progresses, and I feel weariness grip my skull. But the walking of dusty pavement and the pain in my feet conspire to keep me alert. The girls flank jack on either side; I trail behind.
***
“Yeah, I suppose I should feel guilty for it. I don’t, though. I needed the money.”
Jack is pacing back and forth. I notice for the first time how really young he is. Maybe twenty-five?
“But somewhere, inside yourself, you DO feel guilty about it. It violates the norms you were raised with. It seems like another scar on your spiritual flesh, am I right? You smoulder inside just thinking about it.”
She is sitting on the grass in, her legs curled up beneath her. The Chinese girl. The other girl disappeared a few hours ago. I was too tired to keep track of where she was going, but I assume home. I think I’ve been up for days; I feel like it.
“What if I told you you can be free of all this pain? What if I told you there was a way to let the demons go? You can, you know. Just have to trust me. Is that such a hard thing to do?”
It must be ninety degrees, but he’s not sweating at all, despite his heavy coat. I think he’s got ice water flowing through his veins. The girl rocks back and forth a little, hugs her knees, looks down at the grass. She seems doubtful and disturbed.
“ I don’t know. I mean, you’ve done it before?”
“Many times. Whatever you might think, there’s a demon inside of you. A sort of tumor in your body. That tumor grows when we trespass our personal boundaries, allowing the demon to take root. Therein he dwells and begins to reign in our lives. One little operation, a few deft movements of these hands,” and he held up his hands and looked at them as if they were objects of wonder, “and I can cast that demon to the wind. You’ll never know it. You’ll be in a deep trance. I’ll see to it.”
I am only barely cognizant of what I am hearing, but I felt my awareness grow increasingly as the details of what he wanted to do began to slip out of him. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just kept my mouth shut. But I could feel myself get more and more nervous.
A pesky fly started to buzz around my nose.
They picked up and walked. I notice for the first time that Jack has produced a pack. Looks like a student backpack, army green. Where in the hell had he been hiding that all morning?
It isn’t long before we walk through an abandoned parking lot, into the bowels of what appears ot be a rundown amusement park. In the distance, the skeletal remains of Ferris wheel and roller coaster rear upward into the sun like the fly-specked remains of prehistoric monsters. Trash and litter blow casually down the dusty, echoing streets, and old booths are boarded up on either side, their walls still reverberating the distant chuckle and high, piercing laughter of empty children. Ghosts haunt this place, ghosts of families trudging through empty spaces of hollow, bored hours, laughing a little too forcibly, smiling a little too readily at strained music and phony sentiment.
A large white building loomed under the sun, with two cement ramps leading up and in, and a staircase leasing out. The doorways were open. Jack and the girl started up. I wondered just what the hell this place had been.
Inside, the white walls were streaked with dried blood. I make this must have been a butcher store or something. It was some place they cut meat. Suddenly, jack reachess into his pack and pulls out a long white coat.
“I’ll need to concentrate for a short while, then we can begin,” Jack said. He seemed to close his eyes for a few moments as I watched in amazement, scrunching his face up at intervals as if he were going through some sort of internal struggle.
There were a number of large freezers lying dead along the wall. The girl sauntered up to one slowly, looking as if she, too, were now in the fever grip of some dream. She lay down, mouthing a prayer that might have been a plea for expiation of past wrongdoings.
“And I want you to forgive me, for every man I’ve seduced, for all the times I whored myself, for every dollar I ever took for whoring myself, for all the sins of my past life…”
She spoke these words softly, her eyes shining like glass. Jack strode up to her purposefully, waving the knife above her naked midriff. I suddenly stepped forward, grabbed his arm, which was held above his head in a grand gesture.
“You can’t do this! This is insane. What if you kill her? Have you thought about that?”
He stopped. It seemed as if someone else was speaking through him. It was another, deeper voice. His eyes were glazed over, the eyes of an obvious madman. I knew him to be under the control, then, of possessing spirits.
“Yes,” he said, as if to confirm for me this reality, “and there is something riding you. You need me, Null, just as assuredly as she needs me. Look,” and he thrust something in front of my face. It was a pornographic magazine, printed lie a cheap tabloid. Inside were a center spread of photos of the girl getting gang fucked by several scrawny, ugly older men. I recoil.
“So you can see, quite plainly, WHY she needs me. She’s been driven by this demon of whoredom for years. It’s pushed her to drugs, prostitution…It’s inside of her, eating up her mind. It grows like a cancer, but like a cancer, it can be eliminated. It can be cut out.”
He raised his knife, waved it in the air. He suddenly came forward, putting his hands on my arms, and his face became set with an intent and deeply somber look.
“I know about the one lurking inside of you. The parasitic twin that you absorbed in your flesh, and how his unborn spirit manipulates and fouls your body. I know about the fingernails and teeth they removed from your stomach lining. I know how he drives you with mad thoughts of blood and decay. And I can cure all of these things, and you can be well.”
I can see the depths of madness in his eyes, see the hollow pit of his soul, going down, down, like a hole. His mind disappeared down this space ages ago, I think. And whatever has him, controls him alone.
I back away from him, shaking my head. He wants me to lie down on one of the flat freezer tops. I’m to be next. To have my inborn twin monster cut from me in bloody wonder. And perhaps die as a result.
“If something happens, if the cops find me and question me about this, I’ll tell them it was all you. I had no part in this. I can’t have a part in this.”
I know full well what is going to happen next. I walk quickly ou tof the gaping doorway, down the concrete ramp, into the sunlight. As my eyes adjust to the brightness, I walk down into the midway, consider that all of life is one vast carnival of tragedy and sickness, where we all ride the ride, play the game, but fundamentally, the odds are always rigged in favor of the house.
And then the screaming starts. He’s cutting her. He’s really cutting her. Psychic surgery. Woman writhe in pain. Go, and sin no more.
I walk away into the distance. Time and the city beckon.
Anton LaVey once said that every day a famous director or actor dies, and there is no one around to replace them. I would extend this sentiment to any artist, and to writers as well. It is then with great sadness that I learned today of the passing of legendary SF author Ray Bradbury, at the age of 91. I have long anticipated this day, and wondered where I would be and what I would be doing when I learned of the news. Bradbury was a visionary master, whose works include such books as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and, of course, Farenheit 451.
Although some of his work I did not enjoy, he was a tremendous influence on me, both as a writer and a human being, and his passing leaves a tremendous void in the culture that I’m not sure can ever be filled. He seemed to be a robust man of huge intellectual and liberal appetites, and, again, I’m not sure there is anyone alive and writing that can really ever replace him.
There’s really not much more I can add, so I will just close with words from the late, great Ray Bradbury:
“”You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes.”
Rest in peace Mr. Bradbury. Today the world is a little darker for you having left it.
