Processed cheese, p.28
Processed Cheese, page 28
In the garden they could feel the weight of the sun on their bodies. They weren’t wearing clothes. Clothes were so heavy and scratchy. Under their bare feet were the growing things. Everything was immediate and alive. Antennae receiving messages from the outer realm. They pulled carrots from the ground and ate them raw. With the holy specks of dirt still clinging to them. Ambience’s thigh looked like the juicy pulp of some new wondrous fruit. Graveyard leaned over and put his mouth on it. He licked and he sucked at the sweetness. For a long time. “Hmmmm,” Ambience said. “Hmmm.”
In the shower the water ran over their bare skin like a moving silk curtain that made them laugh.
“Have you peed yet?” Ambience said.
“No.”
“Do you have to?”
“Give me a minute.”
“Don’t do it yet. I have to get into position.” She got behind him, pressed herself up against his back, then reached around and took his penis in her right hand. “Ready,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve always wanted to see what it would be like to pee in the shower with a dick for a nozzle. Just let go when you’re ready.”
So he did. He could feel her hand feeling him, the steady surge coming from him. Her hand aimed the stream down toward their naked feet, first onto his feet, then onto hers. When the stream stopped, she shook him to free the last few drops.
“How was that?” Graveyard said.
“It was okay. You know, Effigy pees on her feet every time she showers. She says it’s good for you. Prevents athlete’s foot.”
“I did not know that.”
“Now you do.”
The day was so sunny and clear even the pavement looked bright. There were plenty of parking places. Pick one. He did. He turned the engine off. They sat quietly together for a while. Neither of them said anything. They looked out the windows.
“Don’t you think the grass is greener than usual today?” Graveyard said.
“I was just about to say the exact same thing,” Ambience said.
“Our minds have melded.”
“They’ve melted all right.”
“I said melded, not melted.”
“That, too.”
“I have to say I think that’s funny, but I don’t feel like laughing.”
“Perfectly okay.”
They stopped talking again. Time revolved. The Red Hole popped unexpectedly into Graveyard’s head. He never knew when it was going to show up again. It was always surprising him. He was learning to look at the Red Hole from a distance, regard it as something not too connected to him. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t.
“So where’s this fucking gorge?”
“Over there past that fence and those trees. It’s what the bridge is for.”
“What bridge?”
“The one that begins a little farther down the road here, where this parking lot ends. We haven’t come to it yet. We stopped here on this side.”
“Well, let’s get out and take a gander at this glorious wonder of the ages. That’s what we came for.”
They went to the end of the parking lot and then out onto the pedestrian walkway of the bridge. Halfway across they stopped and leaned against the rail and stared down, contemplating the abyss.
“Is that a river at the bottom?” Ambience said.
“The Bangadrumga. Headwaters back up in the foothills of the Bric-A-Brac Range, original home of the Quidnunc. You know, the tribe that started the Burlap-Ragtag War. The one where General Hiccup famously declared, ‘When we run out of shot, we’ll fire acorns.’”
“I thought we were up in the AppleCore Mountains.”
“No, I’m afraid that’s south of here.”
“So much geography to keep track of.”
“If you don’t want to get lost.”
“So much history, too. Everything you grew up around is so creepy, so old.”
“Yeah, I sprouted up out of some terribly old dirt.”
“I can actually see the tops of trees,” Ambience said. She was peering intently down into the gorge. “How deep is this thing, anyway?”
“They say fifteen hundred feet or more. The deepest gorge in the state.”
Ambience abruptly turned away, pushed herself back from the rail, and slumped down on her heels. “Makes me woozy. I think I’m going to faint.”
“You okay?” Graveyard bent down, studied her face. It had lost its normal face color.
“I’ll be okay in a minute. I’ve got a stupid thing about heights.”
“You know why people get vertigo? It’s not so much from fear of falling as fear they’re going to jump.”
“Like you’re being called.”
“Or like some part of you is yelling, hey, I got to get down on solid ground as quick as possible.”
“Solid ground,” Ambience said. “That sounds mighty good right about now.” She grabbed the railing, pulled herself up on wobbly legs. She followed Graveyard down the walkway off the bridge and toward the parking lot, but then he turned and led her onto the grass and toward the wire fence and the trees along the edge of the gorge. “Hey,” she said, “where we going?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “One of the seven wonders of the natural world.”
They went along the fence. “There’s an opening here somewhere if they haven’t fixed it yet. Ah,” he said, stopping beside one of the metal poles supporting the fence, “here.” He stooped down and pulled a loose section of wire aside. “See if you can squeeze in through there.” She could and did. He followed. On the other side of the fence was a row of large trees and then the rim of the gorge. “This better be good,” she said. “Trust me,” he said. He led her over to an opening in the weeds bordering the edge and a worn dirt trail leading steeply downward.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“We’ve had six-year-old kids go down this path and they all did fine,” he said.
“They were six,” she said. “What do they know?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re only going a couple hundred yards.” Turned out the descent was relatively painless. Then Graveyard stopped and pointed to a striking-looking tree standing all alone in the center of a clearing. The tree was utterly leafless and stark white, a barren object in an undeveloped negative.
“Impressive, huh?” Graveyard said.
“Yeah,” said Ambience. “What happened?”
“It’s said that some eighty years ago, around the time of the Great Harrowing, a vicious storm moved in one summer and, out of all the possibilities in this whole dense forest, a single bolt of lightning came down and struck just this one particular tree, and in an instant, every speck of color was drained out of it forever. Became kind of a local landmark and tourist attraction. People came from all over the country to take pictures of it, to pose beside it, to touch it, and to wish on it. Supposed to give you good luck for seven years or something. They call it the Hankering Tree.” The tree was largely an odd assortment of gnarly branches with a scattering of brittle leaves pasted to them.
“Looks like it grew up out of the ground already dead,” Ambience said.
“And yet the sturdy sprout still thrives.”
“Do you think the magic still works?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. We’re probably already loaded up on enough luck to cover seven years and more.”
“I’m going to make a wish anyway.” She walked over to the tree and took her place beside it and closed her eyes for several seconds. “There,” she said and opened her eyes. “Done.”
“What’d you wish for?”
“I can’t say. It won’t come true.”
“C’mon, it’s just a tree. What’d you wish for?”
“All right, but this is on you. I wished we wouldn’t get hit by lightning.”
Graveyard laughed, then he said, “Look across the gorge here for a minute. See that giant boulder about halfway up on the opposite slope? What’s that look like to you?”
“A fucking big rock.”
“Doesn’t remind you of anybody?”
“No. Should it?”
“Lots of folks claim to have seen the face of Jesus in that stone.”
Ambience took another serious gander. She shrugged. “All it looks like to me is a drunken pirate.”
“You’re hopeless. So much for Randomburg’s tourist attractions. Let’s get out of here.”
Slowly they climbed back up the same trail they had just come down, Ambience complaining only once. Up on top they were searching along the fence for the exit opening when out from behind the thick shaggy trunk of a tree none of them could identify with any certainty stepped—who else?—Mr. BlisterPac.
“Taking in the sights?” he said. He was wearing his trademark smirk.
“We were,” Graveyard said, “till you showed up.”
“I’m a curious fellow. I like to travel, see new places, meet new people. Fine community you’ve got here. Filled with good folks. Law-abiding, too. Pretty low tolerance for wrongdoing. Wrongdoers. Know what I mean?”
“You’re wasting your breath on the wrong people.”
“Really? On the contrary, I don’t think I am. I think I’m addressing the exact right people. Don’t you agree, Miss Ambience?”
“If I had a dick, I’d fuck you in the ass.”
“Now, now, Miss Amb, watch the hostility, watch the gay slurs. What’s that say about our friends in the gay community who regularly enjoy certain offline sexual practices? That the intimate act of love is actually a covert expression of outright hostility? I’m disappointed you’d even imply such an unfortunate notion.” As he spoke he moved steadily toward her until he was only a couple of feet from her face. “But of course, what could one reasonably expect from a liar, a fraud, and a thief?”
Graveyard stepped between Ambience and BlisterPac. “That’s my wife you’re talking to.”
“I’m well aware who I’m talking to. I wouldn’t be saying these things to anyone else. And I’m not done talking.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong.” Graveyard made the first two fingers of his right hand as straight and rigid as it was possible for fingers to be made. He pictured them as metal rods. He then began poking them into BlisterPac’s chest as hard as he could, emphasizing each word as he spoke: “You are done talking, understand?” At each poke BlisterPac took a step backwards.
“All right, you two cunts,” BlisterPac said. “Let’s cut to the weenie, and you two just come clean and cough up the cash that we all know you have and end the bullshit and you can go return to your lives, however squalid and petty they may be.”
“No,” said Graveyard. “How about you [poke; a step back] return [poke; a step back] to your monkey job [poke; a step back] and inform the head monkey [poke; a step back] that there’s no money [poke; a step back], no people [poke; a step back], no—” [Poke, and then there were no more steps to take.] Blisterpac had vanished backwards over the side. Into the distant bottom of the gorge.
“Holy shit,” Ambience said. They both rushed as close to the edge as they dared to get and peered over.
“He never made a sound,” said Graveyard. “Not even a single scream.”
“Can you see him?”
“I don’t see anything.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“I can’t imagine what other condition he could be in.”
“Critical but alive?”
Graveyard took another peek into the gorge. “Not from this height. And look at all the rocks and trees he’d crash into on the way down. I don’t know if he’d even still be in one piece by the time he hit the bottom.”
“Well, now what?”
“Let’s get back in the car and sort this out.”
Though they recognized the sole HomoDebonaire in the lot as definitely the very vehicle they had driven in on, it looked odd, slightly different, enough for a flicker of doubt to register in both their minds: is this really our car? But of course it was. Inside they sat in silence for several minutes, staring out the window. The sky was the same blue, the grass the same green, and time ticked on in the same way time does.
Finally Graveyard spoke: “It was an accident. Just one of those unfortunate miscues that happens sometimes when a curious, inexperienced out-of-towner takes one chance too many.”
“He’d heard about the Hankering Tree,” Ambience said. “He was climbing down to take a close look, to make a wish.”
“He slipped.”
“Right. He never got his wish.”
“Or maybe he did.”
“We didn’t know him. We never saw the man before.”
“We’re out-of-towners, too.”
“Terrible tragedy.”
“Our hearts go out to the family.”
They sat in silence again for a couple of minutes.
“All right,” Graveyard said. “I think we’re ready.”
“Yeah. Let’s get the hell outta here.”
So Graveyard turned the key in the ignition and they did.
Chapter 19
Lost in the Wood
SideEffects stood alone in the twilight of the empty room in the empty house out on the western end of SinusoidDrive. It was fall and, though the day was unseasonably warm, the interior still retained an autumnal crispness from the recent cold spell whose effects had settled deep into the walls and the plumbing. Until today’s break in the weather, SideEffects had been considering firing up the furnace for the first time since last winter just to save the pipes. He was staring out the scenic living-room picture window at the sloping front lawn of dead brown grass and the clotted edge of the TemperedWoods, which ended in the undeveloped lot just across the street. This was “the sticks” of suburbia, where the distension of Randomburg pressed up against all that was not Randomburg, all the not-human mess needlessly occupying space outside the city line. Though the area wasn’t any more “elevated” than the surrounding land, this particular community had been dubbed, for marketing purposes, AspenHeights, even if there wasn’t a single aspen tree anywhere in sight. SideEffects himself had contributed the word aspen.
He liked empty houses, especially the new ones, the unlived-in ones. He liked being in them. He liked the feel of virginal space, the distinctively clean aroma of untouched product. And he above all liked fucking in them, on the bare boards before the furniture was put down, before outsider feet scratched and stained the fresh flooring. And he especially liked afterward rubbing his spent semen into the wood. His secret mark, his way of christening the house for the new owners, wishing it a safe journey on its harrowing voyage through the storms of domestication. Or, better yet, rubbing two sets of mixed semen into the polished grain, his and his partner’s, whoever that partner happened to be at the moment, concocting a whitish amalgam into which forefingers were sometimes solemnly dipped and solemnly tasted, two unrelated mates joining together as cumbrothers. He’d experienced the ritual several times with various partners in unoccupied houses all across the greater Randomburg metroplex. Often, as he tooled about town, he’d check off in his mind the houses that had been so blessed, sometimes recalling the particulars of each sexual adventure that had taken place within the walls. The house he was standing inside of now was still, unfortunately, a virgin. He had hoped to upgrade its condition last Wednesday—hump day, as a matter of fact—but he’d gotten into an excessive argument with WetCoasters earlier in the day over the previous evening’s bar tab at VinylColonial’s, and the mood, such as it was, had been broken beyond repair, as had, perhaps, the relationship with WetCoasters. Too bad, since he wouldn’t mind fucking him, either. Curious how many guys he passed in the course of a day he did want to fuck. The world was full of them. And his mind rolled on, as it often did, into a dreamy soft-focus erotic reverie in which his fantasy self went wandering through a fairy-tale forest of enchanted erections where he remained lost for several minutes until he was abruptly interrupted by his cell. He glanced at the screen. It was the SkinTags. Finally. He’d already called them twice. Left messages twice. They were an affably aging couple who had been seeking to downgrade from their monster trilevel to a more comfortable and manageable single-story ranch. SideEffects had waited an hour for them this afternoon and was already attempting to rein in his impatience when he heard that the reason for their no-show was a home invasion they had suffered that very morning, when a couple of armed gunmen of a distinctly minority ethnic persuasion had forced their way inside after posing as RabbitExpress deliverymen. The SkinTags had been tied up, beaten, locked in a closet, and robbed of jewelry and cash on hand totaling at least twenty grand. SideEffects offered his own outrage, his condolences, and hung up, slightly shaken. He’d always been quite sensitive to any violations of the sanctity of the home, particularly those owned by clients of his. Well, Roulette always said everything was steadily falling apart and had been since the last time the country won a war, which was now so long ago that no one currently alive, including himself, could even remember the damn thing. He opened his briefcase, rummaged around inside for the fifth of LaughFrogg he always liked to have on hand for just such moments as these. Found the whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and downed a couple of healthy slugs straight from the bottle. Then he took another gander at the label, which he’d already read numerous times, to appreciate again the long and storied lore of this restorative spirit. And it worked. His clouded mind began clearing almost immediately. Then his cell rang again to the catchy theme from Eschatology Force: Dander Zone, his favorite TV show when he was a kid even though it came on well past his prescribed bedtime. He checked the screen. It was HuggerMugger. He took the call.
“Whatcha doing?” HuggerMugger said.
“Standing alone in an empty property staring out the window at a dead lawn.”
