Fear itself

5

“And how would you like to pay for this tonight, Dr. Keene?” asked the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala on Sunday night. (Several of his false identities were doctors-if things had turned out differently, Simon had often thought, he’d have liked to have been a doctor. Of course, he’d have had to finish high school first, but if he had, he could have gone on to specialize in treating Down syndromers-then Missy would have received that heart transplant.)

Simon was ready for the question-the clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Winnemucca had phrased it in exactly the same words the night before. “I’d like to pay in peanut shells,” he replied drolly, “but I suppose you had something more like this in mind.” And he slid Andrew Keene’s Visa across the counter.

The clerk glanced at the card before running it through the machine. Simon experienced a moment of delicious suspense-not quite fear, but definitely a sense of heightened alert until the card was approved. Which it always was-Dr. Keene was Simon’s most reliable alter ego. The condo in Puerto Vallarta was in his name; the bills were paid electronically through a double-blind offshore account in the Caymans that Zap had helped Simon set up years earlier.

“Thank you, Dr. Keene. This is your room number-” The clerk jotted down 318 on the cardboard envelope containing the room key, then turned the envelope around for Simon to read. Desk clerks never spoke room numbers aloud nowadays, even if there was nobody else within thirty feet of the desk; Simon wondered if at some point in the past there’d been a crime wave involving eavesdropping burglars with supernatural hearing. “-and the elevator’s right around the corner. Enjoy your stay.”

Enjoy your stay. Not bloody likely: after sixteen hours in the womblike Volvo with nothing but the scenery and Zap’s weed for entertainment (reception was sketchy in the mountains-for some reason only country music stations were able to overcome the topography), Simon now found himself looking at essentially the same motel room he’d checked out of that morning.

So now what? Sleep would be nice, sleep would be delightful, but Simon had been drinking road coffee all day, plus he’d ingested a few Mexican crosstops-ten milligrams of dexedrine apiece-when he’d started nodding out somewhere east of Salt Lake City, so he wasn’t sure he’d be able to knock himself out even with a Halwane.

Still, he had to do something-he could sense the blind rat lurking. It seemed as though the rat was always lurking lately. Once, Simon had been able to go a year or two between rounds of the fear game; more recently the cycle had shortened to a month or two; and now it seemed to be spiraling in on itself even more drastically. Three games so far this month (Wayne, Dorie, and Nelson; Zap didn’t count, but Dorie did: the game wasn’t about murder, Simon always told himself-that was just something you had to do afterward if you didn’t want to end up in jail), and October wasn’t even over, yet here he was again, twitchy as a weekend tweaker on a Friday morning, reduced to making a tent of the bedclothes, firing up a joint as thick as his pinky under the covers, and like a baseball fan in January, replaying the glory days in his head. Thinking about the game was better than no game at all.

Tonight, probably because of the time of year, Simon found himself remembering that scrawny little coke whore from La Honda. For the life of him he couldn’t recall her name at the moment, yet without her, there might not have been any game at all.

The year was 1969, the month was October, the drug of choice was Peruvian marching powder, and Simon had recently come into his majority-if it weren’t for bad companions, he wouldn’t have had any companions at all. Except of course for the blind rat, which had been gnawing at him since Nellie had gone back into the loony bin. There didn’t seem to be enough coke in the world to keep the rat at bay and he couldn’t work up much interest in sex, plentiful as opportunities were in the circles he frequented. Compared to the ecstasy of the fear game with Nellie, there just wasn’t any point, especially in light of his ejaculatio praecox problem.

And although in retrospect the solution to Simon’s anhedonia seems obvious, even inevitable, it wasn’t until the incident with-Corky! that was it, her name was Corky-that he’d begun to put two and two together.

Corky What’s-her-name. White girl, rib-counting skinny. Used to hang around Ugly George’s Harley ranch in La Honda trading blow jobs for blow, when she could get any takers, and being used as a pinata by the bikers the rest of the time.

Talk was going around, though, that Corky was about to be upgraded from pinata to feature player in an eight-millimeter snuff film, so when she popped up from the rear floorboards of Simon’s first Mercedes saloon somewhere around Daly City (Simon had recently dumped his Hog, which was being repaired out at the ranch), Simon resisted his first impulse, which was to take her back to La Honda to be there in person and watch movie magic being made.

Who knows, perhaps Simon had a touch of the white knight syndrome himself-he certainly hadn’t done it for the free head. But although she may have been in distress, Corky was no fair damsel. She hoovered up vast quantities of Simon’s newly purchased flake, proved to be horny as a she-goat and mean as a snake once she’d finally had an elegant sufficiency, and was foulmouthed to boot, making the next-to-last mistake of her sorry life by teasing him for his lack of interest in sex, calling him a faggot, then telling him even a queer ought to be able to enjoy a good blow job.

But she’d changed her tune pretty quickly when Simon told her that he’d had enough, that he’d just as soon stick it into a cesspool as into that sewer of a mouth, and that as soon as he was able to drive, he would be taking her back to the ranch to make her film debut. That was when things got interesting. First she cajoled, then she begged, and then, after he’d tied her up and stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, she made her last mistake-she let the terror show in her eyes.

The effect on Simon was as immediate, electric, and profound as that of the fear game at its most intense. Thirty years later, almost to the day, huddled under the smoke-filled covers in room 318 of the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala, Nebraska, he could still remember the shock of recognition: he wasn’t a queer, it wasn’t Nellie, or men, or even sex in general that turned him on, it was this, all this, the sudden quiescence, the pupils gone dark and vulnerable, the mouth forced open, the trembling lips nearly as white as the handkerchief stuffed between them. It wasn’t so much Corky’s fear as it was the way the fear had transformed her, stripped her more naked than naked, until her soul was as bare as her sad, pale, skinny little body.

Simon was so moved by the experience that he even thought about letting her go, really he did. And although it hadn’t worked out that way in the end, by the time Ugly George’s snuff film was in the can, Simon had learned another important lesson, the one about pain being anodyne to fear.

Over time, Simon would further define his needs and desires; by specializing only in true phobics he would, in effect, transform himself from a gourmand to a gourmet, an aficionado of fear. But as much as he’d refined the game over the years, from crude targets-of-opportunity abductions to the apotheosis of the fear game, the late lamented PWSPD Association, it all had its roots in just two people, Nelson Carpenter and Corky What’s-her-name, and to those two, both gone now, Simon Childs knew that he would be forever grateful.