Talking Heads lullabies tongue in cheek from his stereo as he puts on a pair of old sweatpants—all he ever wears for pajamas when he wears anything to sleep. Rolling his arm in its socket, he feels no more than slight discomfort, though he still has some bruises healing in their lurid way from the inside out. When he gingerly touches the place where he cut his scalp, it gives a little. If he presses it, it makes him sick to his stomach. He guesses there is some fluid there, a bruise, still healing too.
As he raises the gold chain to close it around his throat, his gaze is arrested by the reflection in the mirror on the wall. Slowly he lifts it to his cheek, drapes it against his face, first studying its track between his nares and the lobe of his ear and then closing his eyes to feel its slightly cool, silky braid. He turns toward it, letting it pass over his mouth, trail over the tip of his tongue. With quickening breath and nervous fingers, he fastens it around his neck. It falls against his collarbone, the edges of the cross catching in the curls of his chest hair. The steel tags on their chain click against the cross.
Clicking off the overhead, he rips back the quilts. A gleam in the mirror catches his eye. By the single light of the reading lamp clamped to the headboard of his bed, he is a shadowy hulk in the looking glass. The chains at the base of his neck could be the crude seam of stitches holding his head to his shoulders. Unfocusing his eyes, he lurches experimentally.
He knows—having read the book under Romney’s tutelage—that the movie monster is erroneously known as Frankenstein, who was in fact the scientist who patched him together out of corpses. The monster had no name. Victor Frankenstein’s big goof, after reanimating the grab bag of dead meat, was to neglect the poor monster’s education. The monster, it seems, had just enough brains to want more but ultimately had no soul.
No soul, Sam thinks as he squints into the darkened glass, no brains worth educating, and serious motor control problems. Sam doesn’t remember the movie monster speaking—had it roared inarticulately from time to time, or giggled just before it oopsy-daisied the little girl?—but he wouldn’t be surprised if it had stuttered.
Crashing stiff-limbed to his bed, Sam chokes and gibbers what he hopes are appropriately inarticulate expressions of desire for a soul, a brain, a monstrous piece of ass. Then he lies still, savoring the pleasant pressure of his own weight on his engorged penis. It feels so good. The memories of making out with Deanie are unavoidable. Groping each other, the taste and textures of her armpits, chains, mouth, breasts. Candied cherry nipples in her red bra. Turning on his back again with a groan, he uses his right hand. The chains quiver with light like a Christmas garland.
Like a signpost or a traffic signal, the Mutant’s on his way. He stops. What else can he do? Jumping up into the truck, she thrusts her hands into the heat from the vents.
“Nice jacket,” she says.
“Thanks. How’d Santa treat you?”
She shrugs. “Same old shit.”
The offhand way she says it warns him off the subject. Probably she was glad if they didn’t give her anything—a black eye, some new cigarette burns. Christmas at the Mutant’s house—it gives him the creeps to even try to imagine it. Wordlessly, he pushes a paper bag with a tinfoil package of Pearl’s Christmas pastries and the Christmas-wrapped tape mixes he has made toward her.
She sits up straight. “Oh, jeez.” She doesn’t unwrap the cassettes, just holds them on her palm a moment. “Lemme guess. Could it be tapes?” Then she slips them into her backpack unopened and digs into the pastries. “Oh my God,” she moans.
Sam executes a long pass to Bither. The Mutant descends on Mouth with burglary in her eyes. A thoroughly spooked Bither underhands the ball to Rick.
The Mutant glances Sam’s way with a quick lift of one eyebrow. She breaks eye contact with him immediately. Dances like a Hindu goddess with a multiplicity of braceleted ivory arms into Rick Woods’s face. She’s wearing her sprung spandex tights that stop at mid-calf, and those cutoff denim shorts, with a cutoff sweatshirt—not his, she better not cut it off—over a man’s ribbed sleeveless undershirt. She has visible bruises on her arms and her legs where the skin shows but that could be from the fact she plays basketball like it was hockey.
All he really knows is her mother has mistaken her at least once for an ashtray and she’s scared of that guy Tony. Shit-scared of him. The memory of her cringing from Lord suddenly infuriates Sam. If he ever is sure that fucker is punching her around, he won’t stop to phone the child-abuse hotline. He’ll just strain the fucker face first through a piece of hurricane fencing.
The following two days are a pair of old maids, Thursday frigid, Friday gloomy with snow coming on. Picking up the Mutant on the road on the way to practice, Sam waits for her to say thank you for the tapes but she says nothing.
After practice he slides a bag of sandwiches he has made for her across the seat. She licks her lips and grabs them like she thinks maybe he’s going to change his mind. About halfway through goffling them, she stops and takes a deep relieved breath, and then plunges in again. She is dusting crumbs from her hands when they reach Depot Street.
“Oh,” she says, shoving a tube of paper at him, “I ripped this off for you. Merry Christmas and all that happy horseshit.”
She’s out of the truck before he can react.
It is a page razored from an art folio, a picture of a man in an oddly old-fashioned and ill-fitting black suit,
