"And the vitamins!" the More Man said, setting the tray on Mitch's lap. "This one is Vitamin A. The carrot juice has a lot of A in it too! Good for healing! Needja strong! Got big happenins' comin down! The vibes are all there!"
"Great," Mitch said. What was he talking about? Songwriting?
"Record deals cookin' ", the More Man said, winking. "Hang in there. Sufferin' builds character – you're almost there. Just hang loose and heal. Record companies snappin' at my heels."
Mitch knew, this time, with a bedrock certainty, that the More Man was lying. There never had been any career in the making. Not for Mitch.
But. Say anything. Just say anything, Mitch told himself. Anything he'll like. "Great, rad, I'm stoked, Sam!"
"Just let ol' Handy take care of you!" The More Man flashed a fluorescent grin at him and started for the door.
Panic. "Uh – Sam! Listen – the pain. I need, I dunno, something. To chill out behind. It…"
"I'll get you a painkiller, just a little, wouldn't want you to get hooked!" The More Man chattered, opening the door, bouncing his head a little on his shoulders like Ronald Reagan used to do when he was in a good mood. Sort of like an excited cockatoo.
Sometimes there was a squirming at the More Man's crotch. Sometimes his eyes dimmed with euphoria. Sometimes his smile became a rictus.
"I was thinking of the Head Syrup… I mean, the Reward." Mitch said. Heart pounding. Hooked? He was already fucking hooked.
The More Man's smile went out like a popped lightbulb. He turned Mitch a look of sucking vagueness. "Rewards have to be earned," he said, lifelessly.
And Mitch was relieved when the More Man went out and shut the door behind him. Even though he locked it.
Mitch made himself eat the meal. Take the vitamins, washed down with carrot juice. The Handy Man came in and brought him a cap of something, maybe a "dilly", judging by the way Mitch was feeling after taking it. Feeling like he was melting into his bed. A dilaudid. The pain ebbed… the starved and beaten dog in his gut dreamed about being a happy and stupid puppy…
A noise outside the door. Sounded like it was down the hall a little, but coming closer.
Mitch opened his eyes and stared at the door and, after a minute, it came into focus. He listened.
It wasn't the Handy Man's padding footsteps. It was a dry, scraping sound, like something being dragged or… more like crawling. It kept going. After a while it was gone.
4
The Outskirts of Bakersfield, California
The guy was kind of cute, Constance thought. He had a nice smile.
He's got a nice dick too, Ephram told her. Yes, she thought dutifully, he's got a nice dick.
When Ephram told her things, it didn't come like words in her head. Just little pushes of idea, maybe a picture or two. But Ephram was in there with her, all right.
She knew his name was Ephram, by now. She knew some other stuff about him, too. She knew that Ephram was a murderer. She had glimpsed it through the kaleidoscope strobing of mental ideation. He was a murderer, but he didn't let her care about that.
They were admiring the young man in a Sizzler steakhouse. The man was sitting across the aisle from them, a few booths up. He had long, wavy brown hair past his shoulders and a new-looking Levi jacket and a gold watch. There were some keys on the table with a little plastic BMW tab on them. He had a nice face that looked slightly Latin. And probably a nice dick. A nice dick, A nice dick. A nice cock. A big fucking cock.
Constance had eaten most of her steak, though she didn't feel like eating. But she was afraid of what Ephram would do if she didn't. This was the second night they'd stopped at a Sizzler. The time before they'd had the All You Can Eat Shrimp Dinner and Constance hadn't wanted much so Ephram had jolted her in the Rewards, gave her a flush of pleasure if she so much as looked at the Shrimp, and even more if she ate it, so she did, she ate it, and ate more of it and more of it, and he sat there silently laughing, his jowls shaking, watching her, jolting her with pain if she complained that her stomach was too full, jolting her with pleasure when she ate more, so that even the big guys in the restaurant who could polish off five platesful, even they stared at her when she went back for number seven, and she wanted to cry but Ephram wouldn't let her, he kept making her eat, Constance wolfing the stuff down noisily and rapidly, till she threw up, she projectile-vomited half-chewed shrimp across the table and then he made her eat some of that and enjoy it and everyone was afraid to come over and tell her to stop and then they left, Ephram pasting a hundred dollar bill to the cash register with some of her vomit, "just to pay for her disgusting mess", and she'd tried to run away again and he'd punished her terribly as they drove away…
So tonight she ate her steak.
She looked out the window. Headlights like stars going two by two fell horizontally along the horizon (what was up and what was down? Constance didn't know, she didn't think anyone knew) under a sky heavy with slate and indigo… Nearer were the motel signs, the gas stations and fast food places, this place so like the last town it was as if the day of slow driving hadn't happened, as if they hadn't travelled hundreds of miles.
"Come on, Constance," Ephram said aloud, as the young man Ephram had picked got up lithely and went to the door.
They followed him. Constance wanted to warn him but she didn't try, she knew Ephram wouldn't let her.
And why should she? (Was that her own thought or Ephram's? She wasn't sure). Why should she warn him? She had seen the world as she had never seen it before. Just watching TV with Ephram, she had seen it anew.
"Look there," Ephram had said. "Ethiopia, the government murdering thousands of its own people. Look there, our own government playing footsy with the Khmer Rouge after they murdered millions of innocent people. Look there, the industrialists are poisoning us – everyone knows they poison our air and water and people die as a result, but they feel no remorse, these men, and we are all too greedy for our economic comforts to truly punish them. Look there, how many thousands of rapes every week? How many murders? How many children are locked in closets or used for sex? How many infants used for sex? How many men have made how much money making nerve gas? Look there! The man who invented the Neutron bomb is on CNN, sweating with desire, urging that we use his toy on the enemy! How much murder are we considering, at his behest? Constance, did you hear that? Fifty thousand children die, every day, around the world, from famine! Think of the vast scale of the suffering! In Burma, in Ceylon, in Guatemala, people are murdered at the convenience of the government – but we are safe here, aren't we? Those of us free of persecution – what do we have? If we're not beaten to death by men with baseball bats at our ATMs; if we are not dying of cancer on the fringe of some nuclear power plant, why… what do we have? What is our reward? Television and beer! Then: death! Or worse: abandonment to psychopathic strangers in nursing homes. Slow suffering! The horror of Death! Annihilation!
"Let us at least be ourselves, Constance! Let us at least prey before we are preyed on! Let us reward ourselves and take part in the slaughter instead of being the slaughtered! Let us not mouth the lie that the world was not made for murder!"
He'd said all that. She wasn't quite sure if he'd ever said it aloud.
"Hi," she said to the handsome young man in the Levi jacket. Walking up to him in the parking lot of his motel. "What's your name?"
He looked at her, and at Ephram, then back at her. He swallowed. "Darryl. And uh what's – "
"Eloise. And this is Benny. We're kind of bored – my friend just likes to watch…"
Darryl's eyes widened. Then he hemmed and hawed and flustered for a minute or two. Finally he said, "Wow. That'd be kind of weird…"