The history of this original stone, as with all stones, must have been a history of splittings and fallings apart: slab became boulder and boulder became stone and stone became pebbles rolled and smoothed by the outer lips of an enormous sea.
Carter played close attention to how soil filled the cracks in the stone, plants growing where once it had been impervious. This, he concluded, was how life first began in the midst of cold, hard death.
The remainders of this great original stone, the slabs and peaks of it, became the distant mountains, and were used to build the temples of human beings.
Stone constantly reminds us of our own deaths, he thought.
Watching the pebbles gathered about the bases of the larger stones, trailing off into grass and dirt, always filled Carter with a nameless anxiety. Separate from its larger pieces, stone drifts, wanders, moved by people and scattered by the wind. The center does not hold. Anywhere.
The stones were unyielding, blind, and despite their constant exposure to all weathers, always dry.
Each time he came here, he walked slowly up the hill, his chest gradually filling with stones. A fresh body in his arms. Sometimes the skin of the body would be bruised, if his knife had not been efficient enough, and he’d had to use a stone to remind the flesh of both its origins and its destiny. Sometimes he might try to press a stone into the victim’s head, pounding until the skull broke and the stone lodged there like a jewel. The pieces of skull themselves were like poor cousins to stone, a reminder of how far human beings had declined in their devolution.
Over the years his eyes had hardened, gone to stone. His tongue had the stillness of stone. But, of course, the world was stone, and more and more he felt a part of it.
He would lay the body down among the larger stones, then pick up a fist-sized piece, the size and shape of a brain. Holding the stone in his hand was like holding the world.
He thought to tell the stones about the dreams and aspirations, the life history of his latest victim, but the language of the stones had no words for such things. Instead he would stoop and fill his victim’s mouth with the pebbles he found.
The stones grew harder the longer he looked. They thrived on the intensity of his gaze. He would touch them worshipfully. Touching stone, his fingers imitated its stiffness, its need to be all in one place.
Each time he would bend down to kiss his victims, but their mouths would be filled with stone.
Sometimes, if he stared long enough, he found he could climb inside the stones, despite their increased hardness.
Inside the stones it was quiet. Inside the stones he could lie down and watch the pictures moving slowly across their inner walls.
There were always pictures of children, and lovers he would never have, and more victims he would desperately try to bring closer with his knife. Sometimes he regretted loving his victims so much that he had to kill them, although he wasn’t sure where such guilt came from.
All flesh was stone in any case, only in its initial soft phase. And everyone knew it was impossible to kill a stone.
Ugly Behavior
“Sing motherfuckin’ ‘Ugly Behavior’! Sing motherfuckin’ ‘Ugly Behavior’!” The crowd was screaming it now, but JK didn’t care. Let them scream their lungs out. It was his show, and the crowd could hate him as much as he hated them, he didn’t care. He decided when he sang what, when he did what, walk off the stage or give them the sickest show they’d ever seen, the real show. He got to decide. It was the first thing in his life he could say that about.
Hard to tell how many of them were out there. The lights were up too bright. He couldn’t see much more than pieces of faces past the front row, but there was definitely some young stuff out there. Like that one, the blonde, how the fuck old was she? She looked like a baby.
When JK glanced down at his arms and legs, he thought he looked like an over-exposed black-and-white photograph. The scars on his arms were like ink lines. He danced and pranced, wishing for a strobe light.
Back behind him, Dean worked on a sloppy drum roll. His drumming got worse every week, not that it mattered much. JK had told him more than once to cut out the stupid drum rolls—they sounded like Dean was making fun of him, though JK wasn’t clear exactly how. Maybe tomorrow night he’d pull Dean off his drum kit and kick his ass. He’d fuck him up good. The crowd would love that. Jack and Lee wouldn’t interfere—it was about all they could do to hold onto their guitars.
The place smelled like shit, but that was a good thing. Made JK feel right at home, knee deep in the shit and ugly.
“There’s just no call for all that ugly behavior,” was what JK’s grandma always said. But JK’s grandma didn’t understand rock and roll. JK had made his living for ten years behaving ugly, and though it had been mostly small-time gigs, cassettes and then CDs from small, independent labels, a few paintings sold to hardcore fans, it had been good enough. Some years about half of it went up his nose, but that was okay. Business expense. Nobody ever said being an artist was the easy way.
Oh, there was plenty of “call” for it, all right. All JK had to do was look at tonight’s crowd, beggin’ for ‘Ugly Behavior’. But he never argued the point with her. A woman of her generation wasn’t supposed to understand—that was part of it and always had been. Not doing what they told you to do and stickin’ it up their asses and speaking to your own generation, although most of JK’s fans were a lot younger, with a sprinkling of guys his age who he seriously doubted were true fans—not that any of that crap mattered—but who were mostly into it for the opportunity at underage pussy.
Not that they’d get much—bunch of fat pricks in glasses wearing black JK T-shirts too tight across the belly. Tonight they were the ones pushing up to the front of the stage, their damn glasses shiny like bottles, blinding him under these bright lights. What the hell did they know about kicking open the doors of perception?
No real loyalty there, or anywhere, for that matter. Every fan JK ever met was a liar. “JK, you’re the shit!” the guy in the green T-shirt spat, eyes rolling off the top of his head.
“JK, you say the truth like nobody can!” some fat chick whined.
And “JK, we love you man!” Somebody always said that, a few dozen times a night. He hated these cock suckers. But what was he going to do? They kept him in beer and drugs.
“You suck!” A guy after his own heart. But even that guy, did he really think JK sucked, or was he just saying it to entertain his buddies?
And there was that blonde. Fuck! She was just a kid—this was no place for kids! Where were her fuckin’ parents?
JK didn’t always get along with his old granny, but she’d been the only one he could trust to say what she really felt. She’d raised him when his mom ran off at sixteen, seventeen whatever that scum bag whore. He did owe his mom one thing, though, the knowledge that you got nothing left to lose which every artist needs if he’s going to do real work and not just what’s safe and profitable. It was like in ‘Ugly Behavior,’ when he yelled “If you gonna be real you gotta do something ugly!” and he sang that line about ten or twelve times in a row, depending on how he was feeling that night, and the crowd yelled it right along with him, until at the end he pulled out his dick and started pissing on the stage, or if he was already hard by then he might jack off onto the front row, and by that time the crowd was going crazy, yelling and screaming, because, of course, that’s why they came in the first place.
Each night he did something a little different with ‘Ugly Behavior,’ something spontaneous based on his reading of the crowd. Tonight he was already well into the show and he hadn’t decided yet what he was going to do.