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 YOU LOOKING AT?
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
ready, sandra? roll tape. three
She would be here today, no matter what, even if it weren’t all in a day’s work.
two
Just to make sure he was actually put away for good, he who had vowed to do no hard time. Not unlike the old joke: We’ll go to his funeral to make sure he’s dead.
one
Static for the lens, she’s framed off-center so that her backdrop is clearly seen: a building of vast graystone tonnage and Corinthian columns, too stately for anything so gauche as a statue of Blind Justice. She’s young, the low side of thirty. Trim, the consummate professional, dark hair conservatively styled. One of the city’s favorite daughters, even if adopted. She has no need of introduction of self and place, for time must not be wasted. The more stories per thirty-minute newscast — minus sports, weather, and commercials — the more exciting the flow. The more excitement, the more viewers, the higher the Arbitrons. Self and place will be added in-studio, superimposed text from the Chyron machine: Sandra Riley, ActioNews 8 Reporter. Municipal Court Building.
Microphone in hand, she dives in:
“The reign of terror that began eighteen months ago has finally reached its end this afternoon at the sentencing hearing for Darryl Hiller. The twenty-six-year-old Hiller — the so-called Tapeworm — was convicted five weeks ago on sixteen counts of rape and murder. This afternoon, Judge Thornton Steckler passed down the expected maximum sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”
She’s cool and steady, forever striving for the perfect blend of authority and compassionate story involvement. That intangible quality which will later, on playback after editing and splicing with other footage, reach out through the tube to seize viewer attention. Telling one and all, I speak the truth, it’s something you want to hear, and no one can tell it quite like I can.
Sandra’s trick: She focuses not on the camera lens, as do so many lesser-talented competitors. Instead, she focuses two feet beyond the lens, a starmaking quality that plunks her firmly inside the living room of an entire city.
In truth, Darryl Hiller has yet to be sentenced. Sandra and her crew — cameraman, sound recordist, and film editor — are taping the segment in advance. If they’re wrong they’ll reshoot later. But no one in his right mind expects the Tapeworm to get slammed with anything less than the max. Pre-hearing is simply less congested outside the Municipal Court. Less background clutter to detract attention from Sandra Riley. And it will give them more time post-hearing to scrounge reaction footage of the principle players in the Tapeworm’s final day as a newsmaker: attorneys, police officers, victims’ families.
As well, she has her own press conference to give, and the anticipation is delicious. Her contemporaries and competitors citywide — from network affiliates, network O&Os, local indies — have already accused her of grandstanding. She can afford to laugh off such accusations, knowing they’re born of professional jealousy. All of them report the news; only Sandra is an insider on this, making the news as well as distilling it for consumption. She had no say in the manner it plummeted into her lap.
“But even as the city breathes a collective sigh of relief,” she continues, “this day of justice cannot be considered a total victory. Police still have no leads in the copycat killings patterned after the Tapeworm’s methods of rape and murder, which began two months ago…”
Sandra wraps it, packages it, and Kevin the cameraman bags it. She reaches around her back and unclips the Sony from her skirt’s belt, draws the earphone line from beneath her jacket. Every word was taped informally from a written script so she could listen and repeat verbatim — no TelePrompTers on site — and be free to concentrate on projecting through the lens.
“Let’s get set up outside Courtroom C,” she tells her crew as they pack it up. No cameras allowed inside the courtroom.
Sandra lights a nervous cigarette and the nicotine rush calms her empty stomach. She’s eaten nothing today but a handful of peanuts gulped for breakfast, and the cigarette helps her forget.
Kevin straightens from his camera, a tall and handsome black man with a moustache and a hightop fade. “You oughta give those up. Give you those pucker lines around your mouth, look like hell on camera someday.”