“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 just 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 B.O. 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, re-built 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 1960’s 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 l-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 starbursting the cilia of “my” upturned eyes, broken vessels knit in a pinky-red wash of old petechial hemorrhaging—
Ray groaning, teeth bared. Lyle leaning in for the all-important E.C.U. 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.