Processed cheese, p.6
Processed Cheese, page 6
“Oh, a kopeck or two, I think.”
“You don’t know?”
“Frankly, Herringbone, if you’d have scattered as many notes as we have across the past howevermany days of the week, you’d have discovered, as we have, that numbers plus or minus tend to achieve a kind of hazy delirium in which everything blends with everything else to produce a pleasing rush you don’t necessarily want to question. You know, the way it should be.”
“Whatcha watching?”
“Oh, just some Stone Age crap Ambience wanted to see. Here, let me really show you something.” He replaced Diamonds with Eschatology Force II. Hit the clicker a couple of times. Scene: two big guys in a little room, knocking the holy crap outta each other. One gets on top of the other. Close-up: a pair of stubby thumbs pressing down hard into the grimacing bottom guy’s eyeballs. The thumbs keep pressing. The bottom guy screams. Suddenly the eyeballs pop into the air like a couple of bloody grapes.
“Whoa!” said Herringbone.
“And not a single detail lost on our exclusive all-encompassing MannaVision. But here, something even better.” Graveyard bent down, rooted around in a plain brown box on the floor for a few seconds, then stood up, triumphantly displaying in his hand a pricey Better Day copy of the rare Pork in Your Purse.
“Is that the one with MelodyAssets?”
“The very same.” He removed Eschatology Force from the player and inserted the legendary porn disc. “Now let’s get right to it by jumping ahead to chapter three.”
They stood there and watched in silence. For quite a while.
“Fuck,” said Herringbone. “I think I can see the taste buds on her tongue.”
“Multiple angles,” said Graveyard. He hit a button on the clicker once, twice, thrice. And indeed there were multiple angles—one, two, three.
“They should have that on regular movies,” said Herringbone.
“And in real life,” said Graveyard.
They watched for a while.
“I didn’t know that was physically possible,” said Herringbone.
“Look—you can see her toe prints on the guy’s skin.”
The naked people did what naked people do when a camera is placed in front of them. The guys made the comments guys make when looking at naked people.
Then Graveyard said, “Wanna go look at some guns?”
“Aw,” said Herringbone, “do I have to? Didn’t I look at guns the last time I was up here? And the time before that, and et cetera, et cetera?”
“These are new guns. Some still in the box.”
“What are those? Collectibles?”
“C’mon, man, you know you want to.”
Graveyard liked guns. He wasn’t supposed to. Not with his education, his politics, his assigned peer group. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. He couldn’t help it. He liked looking at them. He liked holding them. He liked shooting them.
“Tell you what: give me a double shot of LaughFrogg and I’ll go look at a howitzer with you. Provided you got one.”
“Done.”
“And, uh, oh, yeah, one other thing,”
“What’s that?”
“Believe me when I say this. I hate to even bring it up.”
“Yeah?”
“Hokum’s vet bill was six hundred bucks.” Hokum was their dog. She had heartworm disease.
Graveyard waited.
“That was a healthy chunk of our rent money. The size of the chunk that it’s a chunk of, you don’t want to know. Warranty and I, well, we’re behind.” He was smiling as well as he could.
“I knew you had balls,” said Graveyard. “I didn’t know how big. You and Warranty are the first and the only breathing souls we’ve even told about this eruption of freakin’ luck into our lives, and not ten minutes after getting the news you’re hitting on me. Unfuckingbelievable.”
“What can I say?”
“How about, ‘Could you spread those cheeks a little wider, please?’”
“That’s not fair.”
“What’s fairness got to do with anything on this planet?”
“I’m sorry. I was desperate. I’m not myself these days.”
“Who is?”
“You’re a good friend. You’ve always been a good friend. I don’t want to fuck that up. I just don’t know anybody else who’s got any excess cash lying around.”
“You see any excess cash lying around here?”
“Uh, no, but I see plenty of the stuff that that cash gets you.”
“What’s the rent?”
Herringbone named a figure.
“You’re kidding me. For that cramped shoe box? Worse than the extortion pried out of Ambience and me for the privilege of residing in our palatial digs.”
“You’ve been here longer. You came in on a lower rate.”
“Hold out your hand.”
Herringbone did. Graveyard pulled the thick wad of hundreds from his pocket and counted them out, one at a time, into Herringbone’s outstretched palm.
“Thank you,” said Herringbone. “The words can’t begin to express the actual sentiment. Thank you very much. I don’t think you know how deeply I appreciate this.”
“On the contrary,” said Graveyard. “I think I know most certainly exactly how you feel. Now, can we go look at some guns, please?”
“I’m right behind you.”
They went down the hallway to the walk-in closet. The door was locked. Of course. Graveyard fiddled with his ring of keys. He opened the door. They walked in.
Graveyard pulled down a box.
“Look,” he said. “A MadderRose114 with moonscape sights and an insect-shell finish. Very light, very portable, yet packs a very severe punch.”
“Should I be impressed?”
“Yeah, most definitely. They only made fifteen hundred of ’em to start with. I’ve got one. The Mystery Whispery Teams got the rest.”
“Okay, nice, what else?”
Graveyard opened a cabinet. Pulled out one heavy meany weapon. “It’s a HyperSniperM98 bolt action with a CosmicHiBeam scope and adjustable cheek piece, of course. Shoots emerald bullets, which, as you might imagine, are not exactly cheap. One just like this was used to kill BigBurden himself a couple of years back.”
“What’s that?” Herringbone pointed to an ugly mess of tubing that looked like some wacko plumber’s failed art project.
“A GoldenShowerStreetWiper. On automatic, shoots five rounds a second. Supposedly can take out around twenty-five hundred people in about two minutes.”
“Now you’re really scaring me.”
But wait, there was more. Lots more. The Humiliator. An over-and-under versatile platform highly effective at close ranges. The PocketDrillM180 with a secret reserve chamber containing five extra emergency rounds for those tight moments in tight places. And the LastJudgment, its silver-plated barrel engraved with lifelike drawings of couples engaged in sexual positions most people couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“That’s pretty direct,” said Herringbone.
“Yeah, and the gun’s language is pretty blunt.”
“What’d that cost ya?”
“I’m too embarrassed to say.”
“I think if I didn’t know you so well,” said Herringbone, “I’d probably take you for one of those nutso skyfallers.”
“Hell, who wouldn’t? But don’t forget, over this country the sky is always falling.”
“That’s why I don’t go out much.”
“And it’s all just one big monster goof anyway. I’ve got the money. I’ve got the time. Why not indulge my goofiness? Isn’t that what you’d do in my place? I mean, really.”
“I suppose.”
“So what is it?”
“What?”
“Your goof?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re not used to thinking about flushing away mad money.”
“I’ve never had any mad money to flush.”
“Ah, but what if you did?”
“Well, if I really let myself go, I guess I’d probably travel somewhere. Sky off to one of those orange-tiled-roof countries. They look nice. Quiet and clean. Good-looking light. The asshole ratio among the inhabitants probably lower than here. I would think everything moves along at a slower pace than it does here. Much slower. Pleasantly slower. Probably they even move through time differently.”
“Is this place real?”
“In my head it is. And when I got there, I betcha it’d be real in person, too.”
“And that’s where you’d write your book. Your great novel.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Herringbone’s not-so-secret secret. He’d always wanted to be a writer. Not quite as far-fetched a scheme as being a tinker or a tailor or a soldier or, yes, a rock star. But what do you want? He was an inmate of his times. Anyway, none of those earlier fantasies, he’d regretfully concluded, was ever going to pass over into experience. He supposed in some way that all he really wanted to do was just to make a mark of some kind, no matter how small, just one tiny scratch upon the great stone face of the world that said simply: I was here. He had a ratty folder in his desk at home filled with all the stories he’d ever written. He hated all of them. He’d twice tried writing something longer, but both times the tank had run dry in the same place, around page 50. Recently, though, he’d been gifted with a new idea: how about a book about an author writing a book about how to write a book? His own frustrations, blockages, and dejections would be the very stuff of the novel. The idea excited him. This I can make something of, he often said to himself. And, of course, he had before him the example of his favorite writer, OutOfPocket. OutOfPocket was one of the big-tent fictioneers of the day. His first novel, Absorption!, had won the ultra you’re-the-top Pound Cake Prize and was zooming through multiple printings too numerous to count; his second, the wonderfully overwrought Hope and Redemption Diet Cookbook, a narrative in verse and recipes, had been, remarkably, baked into a steamy cinematic concoction starring both HotsieTotsie and SeldomAlone—box office bingo. And then, of course, there was the magisterial Writers in Love, which contained dozens of lifelike characters you could not only identify with but also want to invite to dinner. Today, OutOfPocket lived in a moated castle high atop Mount ShoeHorn. No visitors.
“We gotta get you out to the BulletBoutique and cut loose with these bad boys,” said Graveyard. “Whaddya say?”
“You’ve been trying to get me to that range for years.”
“And you always come up with some lame excuse.”
“I’m a busy man.”
“Doing what?”
“Folding napkins and fighting with my girlfriend.”
“That doesn’t even meet the criteria for ‘lame.’”
Herringbone was studying the StreetWiper as if there were one particular way of looking at the gun that would suddenly reveal it for exactly what it was.
“C’mon, you know you want to. And listen, it might actually be fun.”
“I’m not a gun guy.”
“How do you know? I didn’t think I was, either, until my roommate at Porcupine dragged me out once to this quarry in the country where we busted up a bunch of melons and empty vodka bottles. Turned out, amazingly enough, I wasn’t half bad at target shooting. And that roommate’s now—wait for it—Secretary of Rashes&Eruptions in the MadeForYou administration. So you never know.”
“All right, you’re getting to me.”
“Tell you what: you don’t find our little excursion into the wicked realm of glitzy weaponry the best crazy-ass time you’ve had since the last Gizmo and the BlowingChunks concert, I’ll treat you to the BlueStar dinner at ForeignSubstancesOnTheSquare.”
“I was high as a silkbird during that thing.”
“So? Here’s a chance to get off on propelling tiny bits of metal at three thousand feet per second into menacing paper people with numbered kill zones printed on their bodies.”
“Peachy.”
“You wait. You’ll get over there, get locked in behind one of them state-of-the-art Tagged&Bagged variable power sights, FormaCushion stock hugging your shoulder like a contour pillow, tons of bangbang ready to be unleashed at the slightest twitch of your pointy finger, and you’ll wonder where this mad dog experience has been all your life.”
“I don’t know. Where has it been? Let me guess. Hidden behind the target?”
“Beans and brie,” said Graveyard. “Hidden behind the target.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, behind the closed bedroom door, the women were talking clothes. Turned out the bed was piled seriously high with ’em.
“But where do you sleep?” said Warranty.
“Right here,” said Ambience. “That’s just stuff I bought yesterday. We haven’t even been to bed yet. Actually, we don’t sleep all that much anymore. It’s like money is speed, you know.”
“Gotcha,” said Warranty. She was fingering the unworldly sheen of the dresses. “ResidualWear, LiquoricePop, CausticCollective, even MemoriesOf. This place looks like the dressing room at Beggar&Peasant’s.”
“I did pretty well, didn’t I?” said Ambience.
“I’ve never seen so much off-the-rack girly power gathered together in any one place. Ever. I suppose this is what they mean by the Bomb.”
“Yeah. I plan on taking out major cities with this stuff.”
“Complete annihilation.”
“Totally,” said Ambience. “Look, we’re the same size. See anything you like?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Take whatever you want. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“Well…”
She didn’t need much encouragement. She picked out a MeowMeow and a La-di-dah. Maybe having money wasn’t so bad. She was one of those people who felt they weren’t supposed to, in this life, at least, have all that much of it. When she was done, Ambience gave her a big hug. They said they loved each other. Then they moved on to the shoe closet. The mother lode. Name a brand and Ambience had it. She had Atchoos and Bustershanks. She had OhNoNos.
“Same thing,” said Ambience. “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
“No, I can’t. You’ve given me too much already.”
“Not even close. Look, I see this as a share-the-wealth sort of deal, okay? Don’t stress about money. Worry about what you like, what you don’t like. Isn’t that all that really matters, anyway?”
“God, how’d you get to be so smart, Ambience?”
“Dumb luck, I guess. Now, pick out some rockin’ pumps.”
So Warranty did. Right. Maybe having money wasn’t so bad. If she said it often enough, she just might believe it. In fact, hooray for money. She needed plenty more of the fresh green in her life, that was for sure. She put on the SassyStomps. The ones with the famous amazing checkerboard soles. She paraded back and forth in front of the closet-door mirror, carefully eyeing her strut. She was definitely too fat, but still, she liked what she saw.
“You look good in those,” said Ambience. “Real spankin’. They’re yours.”
Warranty started to say something.
“Don’t say anything,” said Ambience. “Don’t spoil it.”
“I was going to say I think you look good, too. Even without the pricey duds. Actually, it’s kinda incredible. You look, I don’t know, absolutely amazing. Like you swallowed a lightbulb or something. You are positively illuminated.”
“Well, there is this.” Ambience gestured helplessly at the ridiculous heaps of consumer goods.
“Yes, yes, but there’s something else, too.” She grabbed hold of Ambience’s hand. She peered intently into Ambience’s eyes. “Oh, my God,” she said. The burned-circles look was gone. “You and Graveyard are having sex again, aren’t you? C’mon, admit it. Can’t fool me. You are, aren’t you?”
“Like bunnies. We can’t stop.”
Warranty busted out a big smile. “Congratulations,” she said.
“It’s all this fucking dough,” said Ambience. “It’s like chocolate, oysters, and poppers all in one.”
“Does everyone know this but me?”
“Look, I didn’t know, either, till I was on the far side of the money moon.”
“Sounds like a serious burn. How long you think it’ll last?”
“I honestly don’t care. I’m riding it to the end.”
“You’re my hero.”
“But what about you, Warranty? You just got a bunch of new stuff. How do you feel right now?”
“I don’t know. Good?”
“But you’d like to feel gooder, right?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Well.”
“Thing is, I’m not feeling so kindly about Mr. Herringbone right now.”
Ambience picked up a CoolHand skirt from off the bed. She handed it to Warranty. “How about now?”
“I don’t know.”
Ambience handed her a flashy pair of SweetAndHighUp slingbacks.
“Okay, I get it. I’ll give you a full report later.”
“Of course, this is all well and good,” said Ambience. “But isn’t there something else, something you’ve always wanted really, really badly, but so badly you were afraid to ask because you always knew deep down you were never going to get it anyway?”
“Well, there is one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t. You’ll think it’s silly or stupid.”
“No, I won’t. Promise. And the evidence of my own silly and stupid desires lies pretty plainly all around us.”
“Well…”
“Go ahead.”
“Something I’ve always wanted ever since I was a little girl.”
“Yeah?”
“And I still want it.”
“Yeah?”
“A pony.”
Warranty looked at Ambience. Ambience looked at Warranty. One laughed. The other laughed. They both laughed. Then they couldn’t stop laughing.
Chapter 7
A Couple of Fucks
DelicateSear had great feet and she knew it. How many people could say that? And she’d seduced a fair number of sexual stooges with those dainty assets. They’d been caressed, fondled, stroked, licked, sucked, whispered to, and manjuiced on. Consumer satisfaction guaranteed. Unfortunately, the Mr. Pig she was sharing her sheets with at the present moment was obviously not a foot man. He didn’t appear to be a tits or ass man, either. Despite her epic boobs. He was interested in only one thing: her vaguery. (Well, that was what she called it.) Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be an issue. It should be, of course, a yummy plus plus benefits. Except that this guy’s head looked like a potato, he hadn’t shaved in three days, his tongue felt like a dying slug, and he smelled like the terrarium she’d kept her pet turtle in when she was nine. She’d picked him up at the IPO party the day GlobalCompass announced the introduction of the BlowHorn8G. He, of course, thought he’d picked her up. Typical. These shithole keypunchers couldn’t tell bacon from baloney. Which made the whole school of ’em easy prey for someone like DelicateSear, who trolled the well-stocked corporate waters on a weekly, if not daily, basis, searching for the minnows who regularly mistook themselves for whales. Rich harvest. Lucrative as hell. Unfortunately, one tended to encounter an irritating number of throwbacks. This was one of ’em. He’d already dumped a load of warm paste on her thigh. Now he was displaying for her another pathetic erection. And expecting compliments, no doubt. She couldn’t even remember the dude’s name. Estuary or Actuary or some such shit. She excused herself, wrapped herself in a sheet, and made her way to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. Not good. The face wasn’t the one she remembered having last time she looked in a mirror. This version was the discontinued, marked-down variety. The one you picked up on a whim to wear to a low-rent costume party where everyone was slumming for the night and enjoying the relief from the usual required gorgeosity. Also, she was too fat.
