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I don’t want to tell you how it all got arranged. Truth to tell, I happened upon the internet site by accident, was disgusted by what I found there, tried to escape, and accidentally clicked the hidden button that sent my personal information to the webmaster. I am told that my dossier went to the NSA and that teams of Men in Black spent the next six months interrogating my family, my sixth-grade English teacher, and everybody I knew in college. A poem I wrote in third grade, called “Magon the Dragon,” was taken apart line by line, and ultimately given a godlessness rate of 3.9, out of 10.00.
Last Friday I was sitting at home when I lost a perfectly good paragraph to a pounding rap on the front door. I threw on my robe, and shuffled through the clutter to the foyer, where I found myself faced with a man as wide as the door and as blank-faced as a mannequin. He closed his mitts around my neck, cutting off my oxygen with no difficulty at all, and propelled me backward, to the living room, where he whipped off my robe and subjected my manhood to cruel inspection with a tape measure. I protested. He sneered, and told me he had figured as much, because the mistress liked 'em small, before departing, ordering me to pack for a long trip and be ready to leave first thing Monday morning.
I didn’t tell the wife. Why upset her for no good reason?
Nor did I pack. Truth to tell, by Monday I had pretty much come to the conclusion that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. But soon after I rose and began my morning internet run a heard a hissing sound, exactly like a colorless and odorless gas being propelled through a pipette, and collapsed even as I tried to crawl to the big sliding doors in the back.
When I awoke I was lying, fully clothed, atop a bed of gravel. I do not mean a bed of gravel as in gravel on the floor. I mean a bed, an actual king-sized mattress, meticulously covered with gravel, and carefully raked so that the concentration of little black stones. It hurt like hell. The walls were pink and covered with bas-relief sculptures of cavorting cherubim, all of which carried instead of garlands or lyres, electric cattle prods and double-barreled shotguns. Ribbons of razor wire hung from their angelic hands like bunting.
Music was playing: the Horst Wessel song, playing in infinite loop, interspersed with crackly audio of fanatic cheers, cut from the filmic oeuvre of Leni Reifenstahl. There was a book on the coffee table. I opened it, and paged through it, but will not tell you what it contained. I can tell you that I was immediately and uncontrollably ill.
Somebody laughed at me.
I looked across the room and saw her for the first time. Her back was to me. She was sitting on a hard-backed chair in sort of capsule, exactly like the one that stored Darth Vader, in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Her scalp was hairless, except for sickly tufts that resembled the wispy look rattlesnake scales get, just before they’re shed. Blue veins stood out, pulsing. And then, also exactly like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, two waldoes emerged from the ceiling, bearing the monster’s helmet: in Vader’s case that shiny black helmet, in hers a shoulder-length blonde mop, the original scalp still decaying at the spot where it anchored the mousy brown roots. The blonde hair snapped into place with an audible metallic clank, and she turned, smiling at me through lips ruby red with what I first took as lipstick but which immediately dripped rivulets of what was clearly blood.
“Liberal,” she cooed, as she stood.
She was clad in see-through jhodpurs, panties adorned with text from the writings of Ayn Rand, and a push-up bra constructed of spent grenade pins. Her skin was marbled, pale as milk in some places and covered with great purpled blemishes in others. I imagined the dark spots to be bruises until one shifted position, darting beneath the surface like a startled koi, and I realized with nauseating clarity that those concentrations of pure corruption were mobile and at large inside her. My stomach lurched, and I said, “Hey, wait a minute…”
She smiled, but there was no warmth in it: just a rancid, reptilian hunger, flensed of all humanity. I would say that I have seen similar smiles on rattlesnakes, but that would be giving it too much credit for actual life. Do you know those handheld staple removers you find in offices, with the fangs of steel stabbing upward and downward poised to rip the fasteners from documents? You ever look at those and think they look like jaws? That was her smile. It was not only inhuman, but very much a manufactured artifact, constructed for a purpose that had nothing to do with biological life.
I said, “Uhh, listen, I don’t…”
She undid her bra strap, freeing the garment to tumble to the floor with an audible clink. Her exposed breasts were horrific, freakish things, and not just because they’d been starved and binged and starved and binged and starved and binged to a saggy, semi-liquid consistency. God help me, they had faces. The one on the left was Dick Cheney, complete with one-sided sneer, its purpled lips constantly mouthing imprecations and curses of dismissal at unseen representatives of sense and moderation. The one on the right was Bill O’Reilly, complete with mottled complexion and dulled, constitutionally affronted expression. Both spotted me, rolled their idiot eyes, and began to justify themselves. As their owner saw me staring, mistook my sweaty fascination for ardor, and cupped them in her skeletal, razor-tipped fingers, the lipless mouths of both freakish homunculi closed around her thumbs, and began sucking eagerly.
Two hooded servants brought out a tall, thin shape under a silk tarpaulin, then scurried off through a cat door beside the bidet, which was stained black at the edges from the crude oil it had been modified to dispense. The unholy thing who had captured me strutted forward, with all the sex appeal of an eighth-avenue hooker in the final stages of meth addiction, and lowering her shellacked eyes to half-mast in a come-on that was not so much seductive as disdainful whipped off the sheet to reveal a knee-high, architecturally accurate scale model of the NEW YORK TIMES building, still glistening from its past abuses at her hands. She marched around it, as if taking its measure, and considering what terrible simulated disaster would most stoke her erotic fires, straddled it as if intending to use it as a sex toy, then seemed to decide otherwise and simply used her big toe to press a certain button at its base. Ribbons of red flame shot upward, bursting from every miniature window in explosions of terrorist light. The pre-recorded screams intended to simulate the dying cries of hated moderates, not even liberals, trailed from each window, as high-pitched as the white-faced bug from the original THE FLY shrieking, “Help meee! Help meee!” The sounds seemed to enflame her. She whispered soft nothings about sending the survivors to Guantanamo or lining them up in front of firing squads, and arched her back, the sheer murderous pleasure of her fantasies traveling up and down her serpentine spine in waves.
I was bemused. “Ummm, look, this is very nice, but…”
She did not appreciate being interrupted. Her head whipped toward me, in a snarl, flipping those lifeless straw locks against her bare, unwashed shoulders in a parody of human passion. “You don’t get to talk,” she said. “Not unless you support him. Not unless you praise him. You hate America.”
I’m afraid I fell speechless.
She stood again, revealing something else that had been bothering me about her: her proportions. Do you know those noirish, thirties-era descriptive passages about seductive blondes with long legs whose thighs just kept on going and going? Well, that was her. They were too long: freakishly long. I think they each had an extra set of knees. Her pelvis was way up where the lower ribs would be on a normal woman. The effect was less coltish – even Ann Coltish – than evocative of the Martian tripods in any decent illustration of War of the Worlds. I was sure that when she finally dropped her undergarments, her most intimate places would fire death rays and trail exterminating black smoke.
It was far worse than that. Far worse.
For as she dropped her jhodpurs, and her Ayn Rand undergarments, and danced around me in all of her unlovely nakedness, I saw her butt and wanted to be sick again. Do you want to know what her starved ass looked like? Had she been lying on a beach in Sydney, Australia, her jutting pelvic bones would have been mistaken for a small scale model of the opera house. When she bent over and waggled, the free-floating internal corruptions bubbled to the surface like the fortune-telling dice in the window of a Magic Eight Ball, bearing messages like “They’re happy their husbands died,” and “Convert them to christianity.” She turned toward me, spread her legs, and dry ancient Egyptian sands, untouched since some unknowable antiquity, poured from her shriveled portal and onto the obsidian floor, leaving it as pitted as the lunar surface. H.R. Giger would not have painted what she had there. “Seig Heil!” she cooed. “Seig Heil…”
TO BE CONTINUED (NOT)
(June 15 2006)
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