a disease, study who does not have it.
He was much beloved by Dr. Amway, who routinely had Subject 92 brought down to the labs, where they would freely, and with great exuberance, converse on topics as diverse as cheap alcohol substitutes, sightings of the Virgin Mary within foodstuffs and bathroom mildew stains, and post-amputation phantom pains.
“Excellent progress, we’re making excellent progress with you. You really are quite the miracle man,” Dr. Amway would tell him, and praise him effusively for his courage. “In fact, we’re making such excellent progress that I am almost ashamed to inform you that we need a few more tissue samples for further analysis.” He would then toy with a sterile, gleaming scalpel and surgical spatula.
And Subject 92 would look at him with an inaudible whimper, remember his home several floors above, with all its fine and expensive trinkets, sigh, and roll up the skin of his stump.
*
THE PARKING LOT
Thad in his suit, gray, Savile Row and tailored to a perfect 40-Regular frame. Always told, be a model, Thad smiling with mild indulgence but flushed with flattery. Bess in her Dior strapless, a diaphanous sweep to just below her perfect knee. Had turned down eleven proposals of marriage, but the night was young. Each were with friends at different richly cultured oases in the same plaza of trends, where rehabbers made killings and the dead were not allowed. This was where the beautiful could still come for a night devoid of worries, while they still could, here at civilization’s last stand, at least any civilization that truly mattered.
A determined, intermittent blare muscled through the refined chime of crystal and china and harp, and Thad saw the world through a red mist of irritability as he left the table.
“Pardon me,” to his companions. “My car, I believe. If someone’s dinged it, I’ll bring back a foreskin as a trophy.”
The plaza oozed smug propriety beneath a sick orange sodium haze, cars in orderly rows like rounded steel hummocks, or burial mounds, their windshields gleaming with indifference. It was not a light to flatter human faces, but Thad found her lovely just the same. Bess stretching to delicate tiptoe, craning her neck after her rush down from her own dinner, own drinks. Thirty feet and four cars away from him, and he knew love all over again. From somewhere in the assembly of cars, a horn droned its repetitive pattern, three quick toots, then two longer ones, over and over, loud as gunfire.
“My mistake,” Thad called over to her. “I thought it was my car!”
“And I mine.” A vision, she was. “I guess we’re both wrong.”
Standing tall and tottering on stiffened legs, they scanned the lot again for the trumpeting car.
“There it is!” She pointed. “See the lights flashing?”
“Come along,” and dazzled, he took her by the wrist as they hurried between cars like mischievous trust fund heirs, until they stood beside the empty, convulsing auto. One fender appeared stricken with a fresh wound. No one else was in sight.
“And it’s only a Mazda,” Bess said. “Some people, you wonder what goes through their minds.”
Thad held her surrendered hand, turned the diamond ring down, and directed her reach toward the windshield where, together, they etched in the glass: CLEAN THE WAX FROM YOUR EARS, YOU FUCKING CRETIN LOSER, after which they laughed and fell into each other’s arms. Some nights it really was possible to love a lifetime’s worth in five minutes.
But then the dead crawled from beneath a dozen cars, Beemers and Mercedes and Volvos, and surrounded them in a stinking ring of gray sodium putrefaction and maggot runoff. Even their clothes were as ragged as their skin. Who knew they were smart enough to set traps? Who knew they possessed the skills of pack hunters?
Thad and Bess were brought down in screams and threats of litigation, evoking the names of lawyers and aldermen, as business cards spewed like feathers in molt. Their buttocks were eaten away, until denuded pelvic bone showed through the tears in pants and dress, but the dead stopped when Bess groaned, newly revived, and they recognized in her a kindred lack of soul.
She waited at Thad’s side until he, too, roused, and together they straggled their raw bony asses upright.
They returned to one restaurant, together still and forever, and they never even knew the difference.
*
Quick, now. Wake up to the sound of maggot jaws but I realize it’s just another flashback. Got to rub the head before dreams sink seeds too deep and become the reality. Maggots eat their way back out. I assume it hurts, but might be a cure for narcolepsy.
Stumble out into the street in the gray deathly morning, a sky like moldy old cheese and winds full of sand to scour loose skin from brittle bones. “Bring out your dead,” the meatwagon on morning rounds. The bonegrinder pulls her lever whenever they get one. Got to maintain warmblood order in Tartarus until Dr. Amway’s proper conditioning reintegrates the meatfolk back into my world. Like I really want them? Just another new immigrant to hate, or hire, depending on your politics.
Bonegrinder grins. The mulch makes wonderful fertilizer, all that bone meal. Calcium is our friend.
Crying children sit filthy and naked around dead televisions with gutted insides, fires burning in the cavities, fed by random books. New billboard goes up, blue collar joes hoisting like the flag on Iwo Jima, says I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE, giant red letters. Another in the next block:
WHAT ARE
Prostitutes linger exhausted around red-lit houses after a long night, bungee cord labia snapping in the dawn. “Disease-free,” they call. “Checked every other Monday. Come on, you got something better to do? Our pussies moan like the Gyuto Monks.”
Too fast now, at the perimeter wall before I know it. Up and on top, I balance between worlds. Stare over the desert, burnt brown like shoveled ashtrays. They move out there, they swim in it, they eat it because they can’t get to us. They eat sand and shit glass. A million of them now, too stupid to climb the wall, but maybe not so stupid after all … patient, they know we’ll come to them eventually. We still the ones winding all the clocks.
A thousand fathers sire a thousand offspring, a thousand mothers gagging on placental screams in the wretched morning. A thousand whipping boys cover their asses and weep with midnight despair, crying, “This is the life you gave me? This is what you wanted me for? You offer me nothing more than this?”
“We did the best we could.”
“Ignorance is no defense in the eyes of the law of nature. ‘tis better to create than merely to consume.”
From my pocket I pull the works, syringe filled with extract of bootleg meatgirl five blocks back. Never paid money for one before. Why had I started now, of all days?
Slap the arm and rouse the vein, lazy worm that it is. I probe around with the needle, more than I need, long after the vein is found. Deeper
— deeper.
There is a corpse under my skin, just waiting to get out.
I’ll find it.
Before it find me.
Death be not proud … just prompt, a definitive end. And you know me, I’m easily satisfied.
Cancer Causes Rats
She would be here today, no matter what, even if it weren’t all in a day’s work.
Just to make sure he was actually put away for good, he who had vowed to do no hard time. Not unlike the
