*
During the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Mass was assuming the form that came down through the next thousand years or so, it followed the structure of the octave, a succession of steps from one’s state of consciousness on walking into the sanctuary, and on through an escalating series of credos and prayers and music and acts that climaxed in divine union. Peasant or king, whoever participated was tuned by the ceremony, resonating like a string plucked by their one true God.
Now, gods come and gods go, thriving awhile then fading away in favor of new gods or spiffier reconfigurations of the old ones, and I have to wonder if among the newest might not be cities. Not the places so much as simply the idea of them. Say, the concept of Chicago that binds it all together, ‘burbs and downtown, El train and Sears Tower, sewer and gas pump, and those scurrying millions who tend and pay homage, and appease it with murder and babies.
All that energy has to go somewhere, has to, because as any physicist will tell you, energy can never be destroyed…
Only transformed.
*
I figured Andre must be dead because no one had heard from him in so long, which wasn’t at all like Andre, who would call and cling to your ear and in his more insecure moments never speak in periods, only commas and semicolons.
That I’d find him at the slaughterhouse began to make sense. After discovering Jamey there, Andre would regard the symmetry as irresistible; and too, in my experience, whenever life got twisted that’s where people went. How many times might I have been already but overlooked his corpse, in some shadow or musty chamber of its own, empty of life out of envy for the attention given Nihil’s, or because he’d been feeling otherwise impressionable.
It was late afternoon when I arrived, sky spitting the year’s first tiny snowflakes. Then I saw that our padlock had been pried from the door, wrenched into the weedy brown stubble. Surely that hadn’t been Andre’s doing. Discovery by the outside world?
I moved through the slaughterhouse with more care than usual, and the closer I got to that one-time theater of pain where cattle bled and Nihil waited, the more clearly I heard it. The creaking bedsprings were familiar, the choppy but unending moan less so.
I watched from the doorway as they went about their work, and maybe it should’ve occurred to me to get territorial, since no one had said anything about sharing Nihil with anyone, even if he was starting to make me goofy, but they were so diligent in what they were doing that I couldn’t begrudge them. And they were so young, not yet ten years old, boys in that prepubescent state where they could still legitimately be called beautiful, even if they were grubby.
One of them, dark-haired and long-lashed, held his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he knelt with a pair of cutters and snipped the end of another crosslength of wire, drew it back, and began boring its sharp tip through the meat of Nihil’s thigh. His technique must’ve been perfected by now. He’d been working his way down the body, skewering Nihil through each cheek, both arms, and beneath the skin of chest and belly, although it was the scrotum job that really made me wince. Nihil was trembling, clearly of his own volition and rapture, both eyes wide open and rolled back in his head with only the whites showing, and a rusty sound scraping from far down in his throat, a jittery quaver caught between a laugh and a moan, higher in pitch with every inch the wire ran through his thigh.
The other boy was a blond little brute of a kid, frowning in concentration as he sat on the floor with an S.O.S. pad, scouring at something held in his lap, something curved and pale and still greasy with blood. It looked like the dome of a skull.
The dark-haired boy used a knife to punch an exit on the inside of Nihil’s thigh, the skin now stretching from beneath, and once the wire was all the way through, Nihil rasped with relief or letdown, and when I walked in the blond boy only looked annoyed.
“You two broke in here, you’re the ones who did that?”
He glared, then shrugged me off in favor of scouring.
“Are you…?” started the other, more shy, like my elder status still counted for something with him. “Are you a friend of Andre’s?”
“You know Andre?”
“Sure.” He started to bore the wire into the opposite inner thigh, which triggered the trembling and moaning all over again. “Andre’s the one who brought us out here.”
“When did he do that?”
“I don’t know, like yesterday maybe.”
I walked around keeping mostly within the drab sunlight from above, spotting the remains of a fire to one side, a few sleeping bags around it and balled-up burger wrappers across the concrete.
“Andre gave us the combination before he dropped us off,” the blond kid said, then jerked his head at the slimmer, more delicate boy, “but dumbfuck there lost it.”
“That’s not my name,” he said. “My name’s really Cheyenne.”
“Has he been back since?”
“Who? Andre?” he asked, and I said who else, and he nodded, then must’ve hit Nihil’s femur, because he yanked the wire back and tried again.
“He was here this morning,” the butch kid said, bored with waiting for Cheyenne, holding up the wet skull. “He left me this to do. He was pissed about me busting the lock so he went to get a new one, but he hasn’t been back, that was…”
“Days ago,” said Cheyenne. “Days and days and days.”
So I prowled, and the boys paid little attention, although I learned that the other’s name was Oscar but he would only answer to Axl. Then I found another one flat out on the concrete, and for a moment thought here was the source of that skull, but this one’s was still attached, if no better for it. Thick as mud, dried blood caked the misshapen back of his head and the sledge mallet nearby. I wondered what it had sounded like, if it’d been anything like the skulls of those antecedent cows.
“Who” — I pointed — “did this?”
“We all took a turn,” Axl said. “Andre went first.”
“Nihil heard it loud and clear,” Cheyenne told me. “Andre says he needed it to wake up more, you know, like a clock radio?”
“And that worked?”
“Did it work, shit, look at him,” said Axl. “Now we’re just waiting for him to come around the rest of the way.”
“The rest of the way from where?” I asked, and if the boys couldn’t articulate it, maybe they understood the same way I was beginning to, below the skin in a place where it took more than words to cut to.
Maybe, being so much sooner out of the void than I was, they unconsciously knew that great power flows along the path of least resistance. Paradises demand gods, and gods demand mouths of their own, to eat and to proclaim, and a lost or fallen status changes nothing. Where there might’ve once been glory, hunger will do just fine, and it’s better to be the one doing the serving than one of those being served up.
Trying not to shake so hard, I said to Axl, “What’s with the skull, Andre give you any reason?”
“I hate this blue shit, it gets all over everything.” Axl poured a can of water over the skull and squeezed the S.O.S. pad and wiped away blue and pink suds. “He wants to make something out of it, I don’t remember the name, something weird, he says Nihil told him what it was and how to do it.”
“A damaru,” Cheyenne called over. “That was the word.”
“How’d you remember that?” Axl wondered.
Cheyenne’s shrug was very elaborate as he, almost singing it, said that he didn’t know, he just remembered things, so I asked what a damaru was and got the shrug again, “Something you make out of skulls, I guess,” and then he cut another wire and started on Nihil’s quaking knees.