The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

I am persecuted by angels, huge and silent — marble-white, rigid-winged, one in every corner. Only their vast eyes speak, staring mildly at me from under their painful halos, arc-weld white crowns of blank. They say: Lie down. They say: Forgive, forget. Sleep.

Forget, lie down. Drift away into death’s dream. Make your… final… peace.

But being dead is nothing peaceful — as they must know, those God-splinter-sized liars. It’s more like a temporal haematoma, time pooling under the skin of reality like sequestered blood. Memory looping inward, turning black, starting to stink.

A lidless eye, still struggling to close. An intense and burning contempt for everything you have, mixed up tight with an absolute — and absolutely justified — terror of losing it all.

Yet here I am, still. Watching the angels hover in the ill-set corners of Pat Calavera’s Annex basement apartment, watching me watch her wash her green-streaked hair under the kitchen sink’s lime-crusted tap. And thinking one more time how funny it is I can see them, when she can’t: They’re far more “here” than I am, one way or another, especially in my current discorporant state — an eddying tide of discontent adding one more vague chill to the mouldy air around her, stirring the fly-strips as I pass. Pat’s roommate hoards trash, breeding a durable sub-race of insects who endure through hot, cold and humid weather alike; he keeps the bathtub full of dirty dishes and the air full of stink, reducing Pat’s supposed bedroom to a mere way-stop between gigs, an (in) convenient place to park her equipment till the next time she needs to use it.

Days, she teaches socks to talk cute as a trainee intern on Ding Dong the Derry-o, the world-famous Hendricks Family Conglomerate’s longest-running preschool puppet-show. Nights, she spins extra cash and underground performance art out of playing with her Bone Machine, getting black-market-fresh cadavers to parade back and forth on strings for the edification of bored ultra-fetishists. “Carrionettes”, that’s what she usually calls them whenever she’s making them dance, play cards or screw some guy named Ray, a volunteer post-mortem porn star whose general necrophiliac bent seems to be fast narrowing to one particular corpse, and one alone… mine, to be exact.

Pat can’t see the angels, though — can’t even sense their presence like an oblique, falling touch, a Seraph’s pinion-feather trailed quick and light along the back of my dead soul. And really, when you think about it, that’s probably just as well.

I mean, they’re not here for her.

Outside, life continues, just like always: Jobs, traffic, weather. It’s February. To the south of Toronto there’s a general occlusion forming, a pale and misty bee-swarm wall vorticing aimlessly back and forth across the city while a pearly, semi-permeable lace of nothingness hangs above. Soft snow to the ankles, and rising. Snow falling all night, muffling the world’s dim lines, half-choking the city’s constant hum.

Inside, Pat turns the tap off, rubs her head hard with a towel and leans forward, frowning at her own reflection in the sink’s chipped back-mirror. Her breath mists the glass. Behind her, I float unseen over her left shoulder, not breathing at all.

But not leaving, either. Not as yet.

And: Sleep, the angels tell me, silently. And: Make me, I reply. Equally silent.

To which they say nothing.

I know a lot about this woman, Pat Calavera — more than she’d want me to, if she only knew I knew. How there are days she hates every person she meets for not being part of her own restless consciousness, for making her feel small and useless, inappropriate and frightened. How, since she makes it a habit to always tell the truth about things that don’t matter, she can lie about the really important things under almost any circumstances — drunk, high, sober, sobbing.

And the puppets, I know about them too: How Pat’s always liked being able to move things around to her own satisfaction, to make things jump — or not — with a flick of her finger, from Barbie and Ken on up. To pull the strings on something, even if it’s just a dead man with bolts screwed into his bones and wires fed along his tendons.

Because she can. Because it’s an art with only one artist. Because she’s an extremist, and there’s nothing more extreme. Because who’s going to stop her, anyway?

Well. Me, I guess. If I can.

(Which I probably can’t.)

A quick glance at the angels, who nod in unison: No, not likely.

Predictable, the same way so much of the rest of this — experience of mine’s been, thus far; pretty much exactly like all the tabloids say, barring some minor deviations here and there. First the tunnel, then the light — you rise up, lift out of your shell, hovering mothlike just at the very teasing edge of its stinging sweetness. After which, at the last, most wrenching possible moment — you finally catch and stutter, take on weight, dip groundwards. Go down.

Further and further, then further still. Down where there’s a Bridge of Sighs, a Bridge of Dread, a fire that burns you to the bone. Down where there’s a crocodile with a human face, ready and waiting to weigh and eat your heart. Down where there’s a room full of dust where blind things sit forever, wings trailing, mouths too full to speak.

I have no name now, not that I can remember, since they take our names first of all — name, then face, then everything else, piece by piece by piece. No matter that you’ve come down so fast and hard, fighting it every step; for all that we like to think we can conquer death through sheer force of personality, our mere descent alone strips away so much of who we were, who we thought we were, that when at last we’ve gotten where we’re going, most of us can’t even remember why we didn’t want to get there in the first place.

The truism’s true: It’s a one-way trip. And giving everything we have away in order to make it, up to and including ourselves, is just the price — the going rate, if you will — of the ticket.

Last stop, everybody off; elevator to… not Hell, no. Not exactly…

… Goin’ down.

Why would I belong in Hell, anyway, even if it did exist? Sifting through what’s left of me, I still know I was average, if that: Not too good, not too bad, like Little Bear’s porridge. I mean, I never killed anybody, except myself. And that-

— that was only the once.

Three years back, and counting: An easy call at the time, with none of the usual hysterics involved. But one day, I simply came home knowing I didn’t ever want to wake up the next morning, to have to go to work, and talk to people, and do my job, and act as though nothing were wrong — to see, or know, or worry about anything, ever again. The mere thought of killing myself had become a pure relief, sleep after exhaustion, a sure cure after a long and disgusting illness.

I even had the pills already — for depression, naturally; thank you, Doctor. So I cooked myself a meal elaborate enough to use up everything in my fridge, finally broke open that dusty bottle of good white wine someone had once given me as a graduation present and washed my last, best hope for oblivion down with it, a handful at a time.

When I woke up I had a tube down my throat, and I was in too much pain to even cry about my failure. Dehydration had shrunk my brain to a screaming point, a shaken bag of poison jellyfish. I knew I’d missed my chance, my precious window of opportunity, and that it would never come again. I felt like I’d been lied to. Like I’d lied to myself.

So, with a heavy heart, I resigned myself once more — reluctantly — to the dirty business of living. I walked out the hospital’s front doors, slipped back into my little slot, served out my time. Until last week, when I keeled over while reaching for my notebook at yet one more Professional Development Retreat lecture on stress management in the post-Millennial workplace: Hit the floor like a sack of salt with a needle in my chest, throat narrowing — everything there, then gone, irised inward like some silent movie’s Vaseline-smeared final dissolve. Dead at twenty-nine of irreparable heart failure, without even enough warning to be afraid of what -

— or who, in my case -

— came next.

Am I the injured party here? I hover, watching, inside and out; I can hear people’s thoughts, but that doesn’t mean I can judge their motives. My only real option, at this point, is just what the angels keep telling me it is: Move on, move on, move on. But I’m not ready to do that, yet.

There were five of us in the morgue, after all, but the body-snatchers only took two for her to choose from. And of those two…

… Pat chose me.

Lyle turns up at one, punctual as ever, while Pat’s still dripping. She opens the door for him, then drops her towel and stalks nearly naked back to her room, rooting through her bed’s topmost layers in search of some clean underwear; though he’s obviously seen it all before, neither of them shows any interest in extending this bodily intimacy beyond the realm of the purely familial.

Which only makes sense, now I think about it. In Pat’s mind — the only place I’ve ever encountered Lyle, up till now — their relationship rarely goes any further than strictly business. He’s her prime “artistic” pimp, shopping the act she and Ray have been working so hard to perfect to a truly high-class clientele: One time only, supposedly. Though by Lyle’s general demeanour, I get the feeling he may already be developing his own ideas about that part.

Pat discards a Pixies concert T with what looks like mould-stains all over the back in favor of her Reg Hartt’s Sex And Violence Cartoon Festival one, and returns to find Lyle grimacing over a cup of coffee that’s been simmering since at least eight.

“Jesus Corpse, Pats. You could clean cars with this shit.”

“Machine’s on a timer, I’m not.” Then, grabbing a comb, bending over, worrying through those last few knots: “Tonight all set up, or what?”

He shrugs. “Or what.” She shoots him a glance, drawing a grin. “Look, I told you it was gonna be one of two places, right? So on we go to Plan B’s all. The rest’s still pretty much as wrote.”

“‘Pretty much.’’

“Pretty, baby. Just like you.”

And: Is she? I suppose so. Black hair and deep, dark eyes — a certain eccentric symmetry of line and feature, a clever mind, a blind and ruthless will. Any and all of which would’ve certainly been enough to pull me in, back when I was still alive enough to want pulling.

The angels tell me I’m bound for something better now, though. Some form of love precious far beyond the bodily, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t tasted it at least once before. Which means there’s no earthly way I can possibly know if I want to till I’m already there and drinking my fill, already immersed soul-deep in restorative, White Light-infused glory…

Convenient, that. As Saturday Night hive’s Church Lady so often used to say.

Oh — and “earthly”, ha; didn’t even catch that one, first time round. Look, angels! The corpse just made a funny.

(I said, look.)

But they don’t.

Pat tops her shirt with a sweater, and starts in filling the many pockets of army pants with all the various Bone Machine performance necessities: Duct tape, soldering wire, extra batteries. Lyle, meanwhile, drifts away to the video rack, where he amuses himself scanning spines.

“This that first tape he sent you?” he demands suddenly, yanking one.

“Who?”

He waggles it, grinning. “Your boyfriend. RAY-mond.”

A shrug. “Pop it and see.”

“Pass.” Which seems to remind him: “So, Patty — realize you two are sorta tight and this comes sorta late, but exactly how much research you actually do on this freak-o before you signed him up for the program?”

Pat’s bent over now, hauling her semi-expensive boots up with both mittened hands. “Enough to know he’ll fuck dead bodies if I ask him to,” she says, shortly.

“‘Cause he wants to.”

A short, sharp smile, orthodontic-straight except for that one canine her wisdom teeth pushed out of line, coming in. “Best way to get anyone to do anything, baby. As you should know.”

Of course, Pat’s hardly objective. Seeing how she’s in lust with Ray… love, maybe, albeit of a perversely limited sort. Much the same way he is, truth be told-

— With “me”.

But Lyle, obviously, doesn’t feel he can argue the point. So he just returns her smile, talk-show bland and throat-slitting bright, as she reaches for the door handle: Lets them both out, side by side, into a world of gathering cold. All bundled up like Donner Party refugees, and twice as hungry.

And: Don’t follow, the angels advise me, uselessly. Don’t watch. Don’t care.

But the fact is, I… don’t. I really don’t. Don’t feel, or know what I don’t feel. Let alone what I do.

D-E-A-D, but way too much still left of me. I’m DEAD, so let me lie. Let me die.

Please.

Pat and Lyle, struggling up the alley and down to the nearest curb. Ray, his obtrusively unobtrusive car — the Rich Pervert-mobile itself, far too clean and anonymous to be used for anything but life’s dirtiest little detours — already there to meet them, pluming steam.

And somewhere, awaiting its cue, the reluctant third party in this little triangle-cum-foursome: My body, a water-clock full of blood and other fluids, forever counting down to an explosion that’s already happened. A psychic plague-bomb oozing excess pain, a hive for flies, all slick, lily-waxen and faintly bruised in the wake of rigor mortis’s ebb, even before Ray’s hot mouthings gave birth to that starburst of pale lavender hickeys around what used to be my trachea. It’s not me, not in any way that counts — but it’s not NOT me, either. And I just, I just… don’t… want…

… them touching it anymore. Either of them.

Going back — as far back as he can, at least — Ray tells Pat that he thinks the first time he really began to understand the true nature of his personal… distinction… must have been when his parents insisted he visit his beloved grandfather’s freshly dead body at the local hospital: Washed, laid out, neatly johnny-clad. His parents had already forewarned him it would look like a mannequin, like something made of plaster, an empty husk. But it wasn’t like that, not even vaguely. It looked oddly magnetic, oddly tactile; nothing rotten, or gross, or potentially contagious — soothing, like an old friend. And its only smell was the familiar odor of shed human skin.

Ray wanted to lie down with his head on its sternum, breathe deep and let it cool his fever, this constant ceaseless hammering in his head and heart. To free him, for once and for all, of the febrile hum and spark of his own life.

Since then, Ray’s never been able to decide what arouses him more: The concept itself, or the sheer impossibility of its execution. Because anyone can fuck the dead, if they only try hard enough — but the dead, by their very nature, can never fuck back. Which is why it has to be guys, though he himself is — in every other way than this — “straight”. If that term even applies, under these circumstances.

Their superiority. Their otherness. To him, it’s only natural: The dead know more, and knowledge is power. And power, as that old politician once boasted… is sexy.

So: Fucked in slaughterhouses, under the hanging racks of meat. Fucked with decay smeared all over them both, in graveyards, animal cemeteries; sure, buddy — just gimme my cut, you freak, and bend on over. Fucked in mortuaries, the “other” corpses watching impassively. Corpses taking part in his own taking, silent voyeurs, sad puppets in countless sweaty menages a mort. Fucked by guys wearing corpses’ skins — and wow, was that expensive, mainly because it went against so many kinds of weird sanitation strictures; public health, and all that. Same reason you can’t just drop your Grandad in the garden if he happens to croak at your house — or die at home at all, these days, for that matter.

Fucked by the dying — guys so far gone, so far in the financial hole, that they’d do anything to make their next medical bill. A charge, but not quite the same; not the same, and never enough. And finally, back to the morgue alone with condoms and trocar in hand — here’s an extra hundred to leave the door ajar, I’ll lock up as I leave. No worries.

Money’s no problem; Ray has money. Too much, some might say — too much free time, and a bit too little to do with it except obsess, jerk off, plan. The idle rich are hard to entertain, Vinnie…

Things do keep on escalating, though, often and always. And escalation can bring a bad reputation, especially in some quarters.

Which made it all the more lucky that Ray and Pat happened to find each other, I suppose — for them both.

And for Lyle, of course, albeit from a very different point of view… Lyle, to whom falls the onerous yet lucrative task of facilitating this gender-switched post-Millennial Death And The Maiden tableau they’ve played out every day this week, give or take; same one that would surely rerun itself constantly behind my eyelids if only I still had either eyes to see with, or lids to close on what I didn’t want to see. Same one you might well have seen already, if you’re just hip and sick enough to have paid Lyle’s “finder’s fee” up front — or bought the bootleg DV8 tapes he peddles over the Internet, thus far unbeknownst to either of his silent partners.

Like Lyle, I never saw that original “audition” tape on Pat’s shelf, either. But as the rundown above should prove, I’ve certainly heard its precis often enough: Why I Like To Get Screwed By Dead Bodies For The Amusement Of Total Strangers Even When The Money Involved’s My Own, in fifty thousand words or more. Ray’s confession/manifesto, re-spilled at intervals — after various post-post-mortem Bone Machine-aided orgies, usually — over binges of beer and weed which sometimes culminate in fumbling, gratitude-and guilt-ridden, mutually unsatisfying attempts at “normal” sex. Pat lying slack beneath a sweating, huffing Ray, trying to will her internal temperature down far enough to maintain his shamed half-erection even as her own orgasm builds, inexorably. Cursing the demeaning depths this idiot hunger for him can make her sink to, while simultaneously feeling her fingers literally itch to seize the Machine’s controls again and do the whole damn thing over right.

Part of me wonders exactly how much detail I need — or care — to go into here, vis-a-vis Pat’s “art” and my rather uncomfortable place in its embrace. But then again, close as “I” may get to it in flesh, most of the Bone Machine’s complex structural workings will probably always remain a mystery to me. Bolts screwed directly into bones, wires strung like tendons, electrical impulses jumping from brain to finger to keypad to central animatronic switchboard…

Pat pulls the strings here, as in all else. When my dead body’s making “love” to Ray, it’s her moves, her ideas, her smoothing, gentle touch translated through my flesh, which keeps him coming back time and time again; I’m just the medium for her message, a clammy six-foot dildo powered by rods and pistons. A deadweight sex-aid soaked in scented lube to hide the growing spoiled-meat smell, the inevitable wear and tear of Ray’s increasingly desperate affections.

But Ray, like any true fetishist, ignores whatever doesn’t contribute directly to the fulfillment of his motivating fantasy. He knows our time together’s on a (necessarily) tight schedule, so he tries to wring every extra ounce of pleasure he can out of the experience while Pat watches and fumes, trapped behind her rows of switches. He loves the mask, not the face; the made, not the maker. Decay’s his groom, and he doesn’t want even the shadow of anything else getting in the way of this so-devoutly-desired consummation, this last great graveyard gasp.

It’d be sort of tragic, if it wasn’t so — mordantly — funny. Together, Pat and Ray have all the requisite common interests and obsessions, plus a heaping helping of that brain-to-groin combustive spark which so many other relationships are made from; if she was dead (or had the right equipment required to rock his world), they’d be perfect for each other. But her hole just doesn’t fit his socket, or vice versa. So the only way she can touch him… and make him want her to, at least…

… is with my hands.

And more and more, that very fact is already making her dream happy dreams of someday taking a bone-saw to “my” wrists. Of burning them in some Haz-Mat crematorium’s fire, like plague-infected monster grasshoppers.

Ray told Pat that he was literally up for her ultimate piece of performance art, to bravely go where none of her other coconspirators were ever willing to, not even with three condoms’ worth of protection. She told Lyle, who instantly cheered her on, visions of Ben Franklin dancing in his money-colored eyes; he paged his pals down at the ME’s office, and the deal was struck — cash for flesh, tickets at the door and a fresh new co-star every week, after the old one finally started to rot.

And so it went, a neat little cycle, a perverse new rhythm method. Pat called the shots, Ray did the dance, Lyle racked up the take; they soon got into the habit of partying later, while Lyle was on his way to the bank. Pat, using Ray’s addiction to feed her own, like any pusher trading “free” product for not-so-free favors, while Ray replays his own earlier performance for both their benefits.

It was, and is, a match made in Gomorrah, or maybe Gehenna: Pimp meets girl meets boy meets corpse(s). And everybody’s happy.

Everybody alive enough to count, that is.

All that changed once Pat and Lyle fixed Ray up with my mortal coil, though, and he “fell for” it… telling her, feverishly, and repeatedly, how this hunk of otherwise nondescript white male meat which just happened to come with my restless spirit attached was the end of his search, the literal embodiment of all his most cadaver-centric daydreams. Suddenly, his fetish had narrowed and shifted to allow for only this one particular corpse or nothing at all.

And: “You know tomorrow night’s gonna have to be curtains for Mr Stinky, right?” She asked him, briskly, after yesterday’s post-show pas de deux.

Ray, frowning: “How so?”

Pat reclipped her bra, sponged sweat from her cleavage; I saw the angels’ halos reflected in her throat’s shiny hollow, a wet white crackle of phantom jewelry. “‘Cause he’s starting to fall apart, same as the others. Already had to rewire his joints twice just to get him limber enough to limbo — and his scalp’s starting to peel, too. Now it’s just a matter of time.”

“But if you’re keeping him refrigerated…”

“Yeah, sure. But there’s only so far that goes, Ray. No freezer in the world’s totally fly-tight; nature of the beast, man.”

A pause. Ray stood silent as Pat wriggled back into her jeans, then shot him the raised eyebrow: You comin’, or what? Shook his head. And replied, finally-

“Then I guess we’re looking at goodbye for me too, Pat.”

At that, Pat turned fully, both eyebrows up. “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Because… this is the one. Remember? The one and only. No substitutes need apply, not even-

(Well, you, sweetheart)

Ahhhh, true love.

He feels like he’s having a dialogue with it, that’s what he’s always told her. Like he’s finally being privileged, through this nightly series of gag-makingly contortionate sex-show antics, to vicariously experience the ecstatic transformation that my corpse is already undergoing — the transition from flesh to fleshlessness, an all-expenses-paid tour through time’s metaphorical flensing chamber. To share in the experience as it sloughs the residue of its own mortality off like a scab, revealing some clean, invisible new form lurking beneath.

My body, my husk. My shucked, slimy former skin.

It’s not pure, though, for fuck’s sweet sake. It’s not perfected. It has no “secret wisdom” to impart. And as for powerful, well…

If it really was powerful — if I was — then we wouldn’t be here, would we?

Any of us.

The argument went on for some time, back and forth: Pat’s voice soaring snappishly while Ray stayed quiet but firm, unshakable. There was an element of betrayal to her mounting disbelief, as both of them well knew. Suffice to say, Lyle probably wouldn’t have been too happy to find out that his star attraction had decided to retire either. Not that Pat even seemed to be thinking of things from that particular angle.

“It’s just a fucking corpse, Ray. You’ve done fifty of ‘em already, most of ‘em long before you ever met me-”

Ray nodded. “Because I was looking for the right one.”

“And this is it?”

“In my opinion.”

She stared, snorted.

“Lyle won’t like it.”

“Fuck Lyle.”

A sigh: “Been there.”

The unsaid implication — goodbye to it, to this, the nightly grind. To Lyle’s meal ticket. And, by extension, goodbye…

(To me?)

Me meaning her. As well as me meaning “me”.

Before, whenever Ray’s beaux got too pooped to preserve, the routine took over. Lyle got on the pager again, handing out more of Ray’s money; the bodies made their exit, stage wherever. Parts in a dump, an acid-soaked tub-ring, concrete at the bottom of a lake, with all trace of Ray’s touch, or Pat’s — or Lyle’s, for that matter, not that Lyle ever touches the Bone Machine’s prey — salved away in disposal.

Which should be enough, surely: Enough to wash this lingering wisp of me clean and let me rise. Sponge the fingerprints from my soul, and all that good, metaphorical stuff. But-

(but)

At first I just hovered above, horrified, longing for the angels to cover my see-through face with their equally see-through wings. So grotesquely helpless to do anything but watch, and wait, and watch some more. Wait some more. Watch some more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

But then, slowly… through sheer, profane will alone, one assumes, while my constant companions loomed ever closer in (literally) holier-than-thou disapproval…

Don’t look.

But I have to.

Move on.

But — I CAN’T.

(Not yet.)

… I found myself starting to be able to feel it once more, from the inside out. The ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a sensation. Ray’s mouth on “mine”, sucking at my cold tongue like a formaldehyde-flavored lollipop. “My” muscles on his, bunching like poisoned tapeworms.

Taking shaky repossession part by part; hacking back into my own former nervous system synapse by painful synapse, my shot neural net fizzing at cross purposes like that eviscerated eight-track we used to have in the student lounge back at my old high school — the one you could only make change tapes by reaching inside and touching two stripped wires together, teeth gritted against the inevitable shock.

Pat sends her commands and I… resist, just a fraction of a micro-inch; she’s offput, suspects that her calibrations aren’t quite as exact as she’d thought. But even as she reworks them, Ray strains towards me and I… strain back. Rise to meet him, halfway. I know he sees what I’m doing, if only on a subconscious level. Her too.

Because: It’s like cheating, isn’t it? Always is, when love’s involved. And lovers always know.

“I want to do it,” he told her in the car, on the way home. “I want to be the one, this time.”

“The one to do what?”

“You know. Finish it.”

Pat narrowed her dark, dark eyes. “Finish it,” she repeated. “Like — get rid of it? Destroy it yourself?”

Rip it apart, tear it limb from limb, eat it (un) alive. If he couldn’t have it…

Dark eyes, with green sliding to meet them: Money-colored too, in a far more vivid way. Because it’s not that Ray’s unattractive, that he couldn’t possibly indulge himself any other way. In fact, if you look at it too closely — closer than he probably wants you to, or wants to himself — you’d have to conclude that the indulgence is doing things the way he’s chosen to.

“You’re worried about what Lyle’d think?”

She shrugged. “His customers, maybe.”

“Should be a hell of a show, though.”

… Should be.

Another cool look, another pause — silence between them, smooth as a stone. All that frustrated longing, that self-bemused ache; enough to power a city, to set both their carefully constructed internal worlds on fire.

The angels ruffle their pinions, disapprovingly. But I was human once, just flawed and impermanent enough to understand.

I mean, we all want what we want, don’t we? Even when it’s impossible, perverse, ridiculous, we want just what WE want. And nothing else will do.

Move ON.

Be at PEACE.

But: I can’t, can’t. Won’t. Because I want… what I want. Nothing else.

(Nothing.)

“You’re the last of the red-hot Romantics, Ray,” Pat told him, eventually, knowing what she was agreeing to, but not caring. Or thinking she knew, at least. But knowing only the half of it.

She’s had her dance, after all, like Ray’s had his: Now I’ll have mine, and be done with it. Change partners mid-song; no harm in that. And if there is…

… If there is, well — it’s not like anyone’ll be complaining.

And now it’s past midnight, the zero hour. Showtime. Lyle’s customers file in as he sets up the cameras, trance-silent with anticipation: Stoned suburbanites, jaded superfan ultra-scenesters, unsocialized Western otaku with bad BO and worse fashion sense. Teens who followed the wrong set of memes and ended up somewhere way too cool for school, let alone anywhere else. Many seem breathless, barely able to sit still. Some — few, thankfully — have actually brought dates, rummaging absently between each other’s thighs as they lick their lips, eyes firmly on the prize: The Bone Machine itself, a slumped mantis of hooks and cords; Pat, strapping “my” body in for its final run around Ray’s block, suturing it fast with duct tape. Slipping the requisite genital prosthetic mini-bladder tube up the corpse’s urethral tract and pumping it erect before condoming the whole package shut once more…

The Machine — model number five, rebuilt on site by Pat herself, due to be broken down to component parts and blueprints when the spectacle’s dollar-value finally wears itself thin — occupies a discontinued butchering lab somewhere in the Hospitality area of a shut-down community college campus: Ray’s coin bought a deal with security guards who let them in at night after the campus manager goes home, as well as access to a walk-in fridge/freezer just big enough to keep their mutual “carrionette” pliant. It’s a vast, slick cave of a place whose dark-toned walls are hung with 1960s charts of cartoon pigs and cows tattooed with dotted “cut here” lines, whose sloping concrete floor still sports drains and runnels to catch blood already congealed into forty years’ worth of collective grease-stink. Under the heat of Lyle’s lights the air is hot and close, smell thick enough to cut: Meat, sweat, anticipation.

Transgression a-comin’. That all-purpose po/mo word poseurs of every description love so well. But there are all kinds of transgressions, aren’t there? Transgression against society’s standards, the laws of God and man, against others, against yourself…

Here’s Pat, gearing up — eyes intent, face studiously deadpan. Here’s Lyle, all sleaze and charm, spinning his strip-club barker’s spiel. Here’s “me”, slug-pale and seeping slightly, yet already beginning to stir as the connections flare, the cables pull, the hip-pistons give a tentative little preliminary thrust and grind. And-

— Here’s Ray, nude, gleaming with antibacterial gel. Right on cue.

See the man, see the corpse. See the man see the corpse. See the man? See the corpse}

Okay, then.

… Let’s get this party started, shall we?

Jolt forward, pixilate, zoom in — not much foreplay, at this stage of the game. Just wind and wipe into Ray bent 1-shaped and hooking his heels in the small of my jouncing avatar’s back, clawing passion-sharp down its slack sides. Pat puppets the Machine’s load forward, digging deep, straining for that magic buried trigger; Ray scissors himself and “me” together even harder, so hard I hear something crack. And blood comes welling: Fluid, anyway, tinged darker with decay. Blood already starburst-ing the cillia of “my” upturned eyes, broken vessels knit in a pinky-red wash of old petecchial haemorrhaging—

Ray groaning, teeth bared. Lyle leaning in for the all-important ECU. Pat, bent to the board, her hair lank and damp across her frowning forehead.

Ray, grabbing at “my” hair, feeling its mooring slip and slide like rotten chicken-skin. Taking a big, biting tug at “my” bile-soaked lower lip, swapping far more than spit, before rearing back again for a genuine chomp. Starting to — chew.

Pat gags: Ewwww, rubbery. You kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?

(Not any more, I guess.)

First the bottom lip, then the upper. A bit of “my” cheek. Sticky cuspids and canines like stars in a gum-pink evening sky. Ray’s tearing at “my” sides, “my” chest, “my” throat, as the audience coos and gasps; Lyle’s still filming. And Pat’s twisting knobs like a maniac, trying to match Ray’s growing frenzy, fighting with all her might to keep the show’s regularly scheduled action on track: Destruction, ingestion, transgression with a capital “T”. Fighting Ray, really, as he guides “my” exposed jaws to his own neck again and again, like he’s daring “me” to — somehow — bite in, bite down, pop his jugular and give all his fans the ultimate perverted thrill of their collective lives.

Because: Ray feels himself going now, in the Japanese sense. Knows just how late it’s getting, how soon the high from this last wrench and spurt will fade. Knows that no possible climax to this drama will ever seem good enough, climactic enough, no matter WHAT he does to “me”. I can see it in his eyes. I can-

(see it)

See it. “I” can. And “I”, I, I…

I feel myself. Feel myself. Coming, too.

Feel myself there. At last.

Feel Ray hug me to him and hug him back, arms contracting floppily — feel that pin Pat put in my shoulder last time snap as the joint finally pulls free, and tighten my grip with the other before Ray can start to slip. Feel my clotty lashes bat, a wet cough in my dry throat; the sudden gasp of breath comes out like a sneeze, spraying his face with reddish-brown gunk. See Ray goggle up at me, as Lyle gives a girly little scream: Cry to God and Pat’s full name, reduced to panicked consonants. HolyshitPahtriSHA-FUCKl

Pat’s head comes up fast, hair flipping. Eyes so wide they seem square.

My tongue creaks and Ray hasn’t left me much lip to shape words with, but I know we understand each other. Like I said, I can SEE it.

Gotta go, Ray. You want to come with?

Well, do you?

And Ray… nods.

And I…

… I give him. What he wants.

And oh, but the angels are screaming at me now like a Balkan choir massacre, all at once — glorious, polyphonic, chanting chains of scream: Sing No, sing stop, sing thou shalt thou shalt thou shalt NOT. Their halos flare like sunspots, making the whole room pulse — hiss and pop, paparazzi flashbulb storm, a million-sparkler overdrip curtain of angry white light.

(Sorry, guys. Looks like revenge comes before redemption, this time round.)

Ray pulls me close, spasming, as my front teeth find his Adam’s apple. Blood jets up. The audience shrieks, almost in unison.

I look over Ray’s shoulder at Pat, frozen, her board so hot that it’s starting to smoke. And I smile, with Ray’s blood all over my mouth.

So hook him up to the Bone Machine now, Pats — make a movie, while you’re at it. Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Take your turn. Take your time.

But this is how it breaks down: He’s gone, long gone, like I’m gone, too. Like we’re gone, together. Gone.

Gone to lie down.

Gone to forgive, to forget.

Gone, gone, finally-

— To sleep.

Aaaaaah, yes.

The sheep look up, the angels down. And I’m done, at long, long last — blown far, far away, the last of my shredded self trailing behind like skin, like wings, a plastic bag blowing.

Done, and I’m out: Forgiven, forgotten, sleeping. Loving nothing. Being nothing. Feeling none of your pain, fearing none of your anger, craving none of your — anything. Anymore.

Down here where things settle, down below the bridge, the weighing-room, the House of Dust itself — down here, where our faces fall away, where we lose our names, where we no longer care what brought us here, or why… I don’t care, finally, because (finally) I don’t have to. And in this way, I’m just the same as every other dead person — thank that God I’ve never met, and probably never will: No longer mere trembling meaty prey for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; no longer cursed to live with death breathing down my neck, metaphoric or literal.

Which only makes the predicament of people like Ray — or like Pat, for that matter — seem all the crueller, in context. Since the weakness of the living is their enduring need to still love us, and to feel we still love them in return; to believe that we are still the same people who were once capable of loving them back. Even though we’re, simply…

… Not.

Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world’s heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here’s where we float, my fellow dead and I — one of whom might be Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.

The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for me, in a way — killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though… until that very last moment we shared together… we’d never really even met.

Come with me, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting-

(rightly, it turns out)

— I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.

Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription — charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.

Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.