Husk (8 page)

Startled, I threw Sofa at the blur.

n

Three minutes later, drenched in offal, I took stock.

My hunger was sated.

I was happily chewing on a forearm, said limb noticeably unattached to an owner.

My, I guess you'd call him boyfriend of three months or so, Fisher something, something Fisher, lay strewn about the table and chairs and floor and sideboard. His blood Rorschached the wallpaper.

Sofa was taking an experimental sniff of Fisher's appendix and walking about the carnage, leaving charming little red paw prints behind her.

Great. Just . . . terrific.

Fisher had been nothing serious, a playmate, someone to talk to and occasionally swap spit with. He had a sad lost-puppy look to him that I have never been able to resist. Fisher and I had hooked up every few weeks. We had nothing to connect us, but his story of parental rejection, so common among those of our tribe, made me more accepting of his faults. He was shallow and immature and flighty but then so was I for a time. I decided to let him have some fun, perhaps I could serve as a mentor, and if we got our collective rocks off once in a while, no harm. He was intimate enough that he had a key, and had slipped in during the night, maybe wanting to surprise me after my “big audition” with a celebratory/pity boink. He must have been under the covers in my parents' bedroom when I walked through the house — the bedcovers were mussed up when I bothered to take a closer look. Somehow I had overlooked him in my search for memories. Fisher had awoken during my yelling and screaming (the earplug I spat out as I sucked at his auditory canal reinforced this notion), and had taken the bat from out of the bedroom closet as a makeshift weapon. He came into the dining room — why didn't he call the police, you ask yourself, and I wish I had an answer; maybe he didn't want to explain why he was in a house he had no business being in — and seeing the drained, anemic demon sitting at the table and squawking nonsense, reacted rather appropriately under the circumstances.

His bad luck to have poor aim. His bad luck the surprise kicked in impulses I didn't know I had. My bad luck to have to clean up the mess. My
good
luck the curtains to the large picture window I stood in front of, a speck of Fisher's delicious pink arm muscle poking out from between my lips, were closed. I had torn him apart like he was made of tissue.

I checked the clock. 8:20. Pissed off, confused, irritated, but strengthened by unexpected breakfast, I went in search of trash bags and cleaning solvents.

At 8:30, I sat at the table and made a call to Rowan's office. The phone wasn't working, no dial tone buzzed in my ear. I shook the phone in annoyance, and the casing cracked slightly in my fingers as I thoughtlessly gripped the handset tighter.
Gotta watch that
, I thought, and switched the phone to my good ear. The dial tone was clear and strong.

I dialed the agency. A prim male voice answered on the first ring. “Masters Talent, how may I direct your call?”

I lifted the corners of my mouth and tried to force an airy, businesslike nonchalance into my voice. I brought air in, and pushed in out past the vocal cords. “Rowan . . . O'Shea . . . please.”

Outside my house, all small mammals within earshot shriveled into fetal balls. Sofa, being a bit more in tune with the dark side (I suspect all cats are), shivered a bit at the noise but stayed put.

A long silence ensued, then: “I'm . . . I'm sorry, could you repeat that?”

Again, quieter, with less conviction. Focus on clarity and a feeling of goodwill toward all. “Rowan. O'Shea. Please.”

Another pause, then a gasp. There was a sandpapery sound as the receptionist hastily covered the mouthpiece with his palm. In the background I could hear a woman's voice (“Carl? Are you okay, honey?”) and what sounded like hysterical sobbing. The phone was dropped, and over the clunks I heard footsteps and a scream echoing quickly away as Carl scampered from his desk.

I hung up, thinking. I had a direct number to Rowan's personal cell phone on speed dial — “For emergencies only, and I mean that, mister, this is not a line to complain that the stage manager screwed up your latte order, you had better be on fire if you call!” — and I figured a bypass of the usual route to her ear might be in order.

She answered on the sixth ring. “Sheldon, did you just call here?” She had caller
ID
, an option I had always detested, preferring anonymity until I had said hello. “What did you say to Carl, he's crying in the washroom. I don't know, get on the phones!” This last she shouted at an agency sycophant, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece or move the phone slightly away from her noisehole. “You like your job, you little fuck? Get on those fucking phones now! And tell Carl he's fired! Christ, Sheldon, what'd you do? Thank god Carl's a temp.”

“Rowan,” I said. “You called about—”

“What the fuck?” Rowan yelled. Then, more cautiously: “Who the hell is this?”

“It's Sheldon,” I groaned.

“Shel? Holy shit, hon, you sound like grim death.”

“I . . . have the flu.”

“Well, sort yourself out quick or you'll miss the last best hope you have of making a real honest-to-goddamned living.” It figured Rowan would be immune to whatever it was my voice did to people. She had been given an empathy vaccination when she became an agent, killing the emotion-processing modules in her brain and thus making her a highly effective contract negotiator. She was a fearsome opponent who would claw, scratch, and bite anyone to death, all on your behalf. Unfortunately, this meant my failure to become anything more than a bit-part character actor in Canadian/American co-venture syndicated television series was entirely my fault.

“Take some ibuprofen and get yourself down to the Intercontinental on Front Street for two o'clock, the Wellington Room. This is your shot, and I don't mind telling you, if you blow this you are permanently doomed to a life of mediocrity and shame. I love you, boyo, but it's truth telling time: you're looking at being a mid-thirties failure, and a future career as a Wal-Mart greeter is your only viable long-term option if you don't nail this part.” This was standard boilerplate, Rowan's version of a pep talk.

“What's the. Role?”

“It's a remake of
A Cry from the Basement
, an Argentinian horror thingy from the nineties.
I don't know all the details, they just want an excuse to slaughter a Benetton ad's worth of nubile young co-eds for the Halloween weekend box office. Something hard
PG
-13ish. You're the older brother of this girl who gets killed in the first few minutes, you desire revenge, blah blah blah. You team up with a few teens who die in various creative ways, you get off a one-liner or two, maybe a pun, the least annoying most blonde bimbo fresh from the Disney pantheon of sweaty adolescent fuckables looking for ‘credibility' somehow helps you shave the killer's face off with a belt sander or something, blood spurts, music swells, cue Lady Gaga theme song over the end credits, and
voilà
! Your dimly lit face on marquee posters everywhere, promising vengeance on a mass scale. Instant cash grab for the Halloween crowd, a guaranteed two sequels if it makes a profit and how the hell could it not? This is gold, Sheldon, pure Peruvian flake, two months' work with two hundred thou at the end for you minus my customary twelve percent.”

Two hundred thousand dollars.

If my heart had been capable of it, it would have stopped dead.

“Shelley? Hey, you there?”

I sat there, letting the phrase
two hundred thou
mambo its sexy self through my brain. “Jesus,” I finally mouthed, and then took an inhale to repeat the word aloud in a subdued croak, all thoughts about resurrection forgotten as the dollar signs shook their gold-dipped fannies at me.
Two hundred thou
.

“You're damned right, Jesus! Someone's looking out for you now, so don't fuck it up royally, get yourself tuned up and go knock them dead!”

What was I thinking? I knocked my head back and forth, fancying I could hear the brain slosh about. Maybe I
did
hear it; I was decomposing, who knew what was going to happen upstairs once my head had dried up completely and my cerebellum lay gasping on the floorboards of my skull.
I can't go on an audition
, I thought.
Not now. Not like this, certainly
. A zombie getting a job? The day just kept getting more ludicrous.

“Rowan,” I began. “There's this. Thing . . .”

“Okay, I'm sensing hesitation here,” she interrupted. “You're telling yourself that this is selling out, am I right?”

“Not . . . exactly, no.”

“Well, you
are
selling out, but remember this, you have a mom or dad in a care home, right? Something like that? You think of them for a second, and you think about how you're going to afford to keep them alive without this job. This money could take
all
that pressure off your back. Go back to being an unemployed actor with your ethics and primitive concepts of morality afterward. Consider this an investment in your parent's life. Or whatever remains of it. If it tips the scales, I'll drop my percentage to eleven, that's how sure I am of this.”

Mom. Goddamn it. Even now — medically delusional, incoherent, brimming with unfocused hatred and lashing out at every person who walked past her room — even now, Mom still managed to push a mountain range of shame in front of my path.

“I'll be. There,” I managed, hanging up. Even in death I couldn't catch a break.
The zombie heads out for work
, I thought, imagining a child's picture book image of a brightly painted cartoon man in a suit, his skin gray, his hair falling out in patches, perhaps a few scabs over the face, waving goodbye to his cartoon zombie wife and cartoon zombie child as he headed out for another busy cartoon zombie day under a gaily smiling cartoon sun. I slumped down and lay my head down on my arms, noticing after a time that I was leaning in a tacky red pool of Fisher plasma. I wondered if I could weep, but decided it wouldn't be worth the effort to try.

Groaning, loudly and purposefully, I stood and tried to work out the most effective, least damaging method of bathing in my condition.

Infestation.

I don't believe anyone could have a real conception of horror until he has witnessed a fly hatch under his own skin and burrow itself out.

Certainly caught me off guard.

I don't know why, neither did Rhodes or the specialists, but my body has proved remarkably resistant to insect life. Small favors. Normally, after the body has ceased its normal functions, the process of decay — a process, the internet gleefully informed me, that is continually ongoing no matter how healthy you are — takes a step forward as the insect kingdom decides your festering remains would be a decent place to annex for themselves. That's in addition to the legions of microscopic organisms already making a comfortable living in your epidermis, your follicles, the folds of your scrotal sac.

It was Rhodes, dear Doc Dementia, who first called my attention to my next bodily dilemma. He had worked tirelessly at repairing the natural sloughage of my skin as the restraining cables, freed of any renewal process that tended to repairs, relaxed and gave way, pinging like a chorus of snapped guitar strings. He had made a few minor incisions under the skin of my left arm, attempting to squirt crazy glue or some such shit into the widening gaps and thereby keeping my skin actually on my body. He pulled a mirror close and let me look as he pointed at the pockmarks that lined the underside of my flesh, poking at them with the tip of his scalpel and giggling at the wholesale lunacy of his circumstances. The dots wiggled and squirmed, and as I watched, Rhodes gently pried one loose and held it close to my eyes, where the tiny maggot thrashed in protest.

The city roared by me, simultaneously the bleached white of new tank tops and the filthy grunge of second-hand wife-beaters listlessly taking up space in a Salvation Army bin. There may have been a soft covering of shimmering angel droppings blanketing the city overnight, but as people stirred in their beds and realized that there wasn't near enough of the precious white to declare a snow day, they trudged their sleep-addled selves toward their cars, cursing all the while, and angrily ground the new-fallen snow into slush and crud. Toronto had enjoyed a night of calming winter wonderment, but the city was fully awake now, cranky and out of sorts, and all the intrinsic winsomeness of nature was hastily metamorphosing into urban municipality excrement under incalculable tons of foreign-bought steel and Canadian salt rust.

I was slightly better at tempering my speech, infecting my consonants and vowels with only a smattering of the mausoleum. After finishing the cleanup of the dining room — I could save the furniture, but the wallpaper would have to be stripped and the rug was a goner — I chugged away at my voice for a few more hours, concentrating on keeping my breathing at a regular tempo yet attempting through repetition to make the operation of my bellows an unconscious rather than a noncompulsory act. I could never again achieve fully autonomous motion but if I could somehow operate the lungs, keeping them fulfilling their oxygenerational duties with only the merest hint of conscious decision-making on my part, I could then focus on content rather than audibility. If I kept the tones as low as possible but outside of whisper range my voice would possibly still cause stomach upset and nausea in the listener, but at least the sense of imminent death that ostensibly destroyed the sanity of Rowan's assistant was tamped down to a more tolerable undercurrent of nebulous foreboding.

I hoped.

I tried my newfound articulatory confidence on the operator when the bus arrived, spewing sludge over my legs as it slid to a halt twelve feet past the stop, turning a dapper pair of slate polycotton khakis into a soggy gray waste of a hundred dollars. Suppressing my natural inclination to let the driver know of my dissatisfaction with his job performance thus far — happy or not, I still needed to get to the audition, my car being trapped in the garage by a waist-high snowdrift pressing against the door, and wreaking havoc on the driver through sonic assault would not get me there any faster — I hawked up a garbled “Good morning” as I slowly walked up the stairs and paid the fare. He blanched slightly and stifled a burp, but smiled a weak grin in response.

How the audition would go, I had no idea. I'd probably have to speak up a bit.

My luck as it pertained to bus seating accessibility held fast, and I nabbed the only remaining seat near the rear exit. I mmm-hmmm'd an acknowledgment of the day's goodness to my elderly seatmate's pleasant salutation and watched as she clutched at her chest for a moment. Satisfied that this was not the big one, not today anyway, she took on the deadpan stare of the seasoned bus rider and gazed blankly out the window, the lives of others slowly scrolling by.

I prodded at my meatball surgery scars through the Gore-Tex of my coat. The cold wasn't worrisome to me, but shuffling through downtown Toronto in a thin shirt at minus twenty plus windchill might draw unwarranted attention from even the jaded populace of the Big Smoke. The construction seemed to be holding, but I'd have to avoid bending forward at the waist too quickly or the skin would tear around my ramshackle rivets and the whole of me would burst forth like a Wes Craven piñata.

The bus ground to a halt and more denizens entered, brushing snow off shoulders and stamping feet clean of muck. A few more stops and the bus was crammed full, stopping only to allow citizens outside to realize the futility of attempting to wedge themselves into a mobile sweat lodge. The stink of wet wool and steamed armpits suffused all available air, dulling the senses of the passengers and effectively disguising the scent of rotting meat I was sure emanated off me. I had finally decided a sponge bath was the most appropriate course of cleansing available to me considering the delicacy of my circumstances, but you can never get truly clean by wiping yourself down with a damp washcloth. I had applied a layer of talcum to my body after toweling off, and doused myself with brand-name odor suppressant after choosing an appropriate ensemble, but I was certain the aroma of interrupted eternal slumber radiated off me.

Bodies bumped and swayed against each other, the bus gradually making its way into the heart of the city. I allowed my mind to drift. Normally I would be preparing for the reading by running lines in my head, or working on possible character motivations and sense memories I could draw from. Blind line readings were both a blessing and a curse for actors as they allowed for a great deal of on-the-spot improvisation and immediacy but did not permit in-depth preparation. The only thing you could work with was you, and if your you wasn't up to snuff, we'll call you.

It wasn't my audition and the prospect of actual money and long-term career advancement that ate up my thoughts. Partly it was the remnants of Fisher moldering in my bathtub. A little more than partly was my absolute intention, when the day's tasks were completed, to have another nosh on fresh rump roast of paramour.

I wondered at my lackadaisical attitude toward Fisher and his demise at my hands/teeth. Was it symptomatic of the condition that I necessarily forego empathy with my food? My fondness for animals was a prime motivator for my on-again/off-again bouts of vegetarianism, but I thought that option now off the table. Or was it that, after four months, I still had no emotional connection to the dazzling young lover who occasionally shared my bed and made me passable egg-white omelets in the morning?

Was I a standard zombie, or an awful human being?

I had rarely formed meaningful attachments as a child. Eileen was a major impediment to happiness, her allegiance to all things biblical forcing me to sublimate my natural instincts to maintain a semblance of household harmony. When I left home, her claws were still embedded in my spirit, and the sense of freedom I felt at walking away from her front door was triumphed only by the sense of shame of wanting to be myself. And so the charade continued; Eileen's duty-bound son Sheldon was only another persona for the
CV
of a struggling actor. It was easier to find a decent agent in a city teeming with actors than it was to confront eighteen years of evangelical shame. It took me another three years to summon up the courage for a sexual encounter that would wipe clean Mom's indoctrination techniques, and her force of will has kept a constant presence within my id and ego ever since.

I tried to recall why Fisher and I had ever hooked up. For me, it was obvious: he was a fit young object of desire who approached his recent coming-out with the predictable enthusiasm of the unexpectedly paroled. Fisher was excited to be himself for the first time in who knows how long, possessed of inexhaustible ardor and a body like sculpted chocolate. We met at a production of Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author
I was performing in at the Berkeley Street Theatre. It was opening night, and my portrayal of The Father had not gone over well — the part is nothing but goddamned monologues concerning philosophical theories of identity, and I had unthinkingly repeated a few lines when I had lost my place, hearing the giggles out in the dark and flushing with ignominy. I was ergo fully in the cups when the director, Hamish, minced up to me and introduced the appetizing youthful gentleman next to him as “the luscious Fisher, my newest discovery, an actor of raw talent and limitless potential.” Just “Fisher”; no indication of first or last name, no hint of a nickname, and never once had I felt compelled to dig any deeper.

I told Ham to fuck the hell off and die for once, and blurted to Fisher to run for the exit and don't look back, that unless Ham's newest discovery had ten inches or more on his person, his raw talent would be stuck doing understudy roles and chorus parts until Ham “discovered limitless potential” in someone else's boxers in the back alley. Ham huffed a pithy exit line (“Fuck you, you dried-up queenie cunt,” I think, very original) and flounced away, dragging his protégé behind him. Fisher caught up with me outside as I was haggling with a cab driver over how far ten bucks would get me (tip included), and offered me a ride home on his Vespa. One lift turned into a night's worth of heavy panting, we shared a laugh over the scathing online reviews of my performance the next morning, and Ham's ward became my newest distraction from a life of immeasurable disappointment.

Fisher's attraction to me was an inexplicable happening, given my (only in comparison) advanced age and severely bitter frame of mind. He never explained it, I never pushed for more, and whatever it was quickly became a comfortable arrangement. He'd disappear for a few days at a time, but I recalled my own shame-based explorations into a newfound land of sexual liberation and never begrudged him his carnal autonomy. I was just depressed enough with my placement in the cosmos to simply be thankful for diversions.

But that was all there was to it. I rarely inquired into his personal life before the switch, as he put it, and most of his new friends were my acquaintances already, so for me life continued much as it did before, albeit with more anal. Fisher was my coital version of Sofa; sometimes there when I needed comfort, sometimes not, and always, when he was hungry or horny, I became the center of his universe for a brief period. We were not soulmates, we were hardly two ships that bumped rudders in the night, we were not star-crossed lovers, we did not each fill that emptiness in the other, we were not each other's missing piece.

We were venereal associates.

So in retrospect it was not surprising I harbored no deep yearning for Fisher beyond superficial. What was unexpected was how effortless the shift was from the sexual to the nutritional. Fisher was always an object, rarely anything more.

Before death, he was entertainment.

AD
, he was brunch.

Did a lion worry about lack of remorse when felling a gazelle? Did a Great White ponder the seal pup's last desperate thoughts? Does a country singer get a lump in his throat as he unloads an M-16 into a rabbit warren? Why was I upset about Fisher in the abstract but not in the particular?

Most of my brain, however, was consumed with worry over the television news report I had watched that morning while I busied myself with removing all traces of Fisher's effluence from the house, wiping down all countertops and walls with generous spritzes of cleaning fluid. The morning anchorperson droned on in the background, his soothing baritone reporting on pods of whales that had beached themselves in Australia and some U.S. senator who was hell-bent on removing all environmental restrictions and drilling for oil wherever she damned well felt like it — her words — before switching over to local matters. The anchor, tie expertly knotted, hair coifed to exacting standards, teeth whiter than the feathers of doves, wrapped up a softer-than-soft news segment with an update on a paperboy who heroically insisted on continuing his daily rounds despite having lost both his arms in an industrial accident (lawsuit still pending), before launching into his serious voice once again.

In what police have labeled a “strange case of grave robbing,”

I snapped to attention, my joints arguing at the suddenness.

a morgue attendant was viciously assaulted at Toronto General Hospital late last night. Cherie Elin is live on the scene and has this report. We'd like to warn our more sensitive viewers beforehand, some of the details and images may be disturbing. Cherie, what can you tell us?

The picture switched to a two-shot, the anchor now situated on the left within the safe confines of the studio, to the right a digital box displaying a young woman standing just outside the hospital lobby. The blizzard was in its death throes, and her face was being battered by the elements. Her hair, like the anchor's, was immoveable, withstanding the punishing wind with ease.

Lorne, a hospital is usually perceived as a place of healing. Early this morning, that belief was shattered as the Toronto General Hospital became an ironic scene of gruesome violence.

The report switched to voiceover, and images of the morgue flashed onto the screen. There was a lot of red splashed about.

At approximately 1:30 a.m., Craig Neal, an attendant at Toronto General, was forcibly attacked by an unknown assailant or assailants while in the course of his duties. Neal sustained major trauma to both arms, but it is the opinion of specialists that he will eventually make a full recovery.

Switch to a full-body shot of Craig sitting on a cot, looking miserable and doped up, both arms swathed in full casts. The moldings jutted from his shoulders, metal rods holding them upright from a thick belt around his waist.

Even stranger than the attack itself is Neal's repeated assertion to this reporter that there was in fact no outside attacker involved, and that the wounds he has sustained are the result of an altercation with one of the hospital's recently deceased arrivals.

Close-up on Craig speaking into a microphone held before him, his eyes watery, words pharmaceutically slurred, his story absolute proof of his insanity.

“Yeah, I swear, this body came in, we were starting the autopsy, it, he, this guy we had cut open, I took the heart out, he, he just got right up off the table and attacked me. He grabbed me and broke both my arms.”

“What happened next?”
the reporter's voice asked off-camera.

“I passed out.”

“But a body attacked you, is that what you're saying?”

“Yeah, a body. He got up, broke my arms, and left. Oh, he bit me, too.”

Craig wiggled the fingers of his left hand, bluish little sausages squirming at the end of his cast.

“Kind of tingles a bit. Can't feel much, though. These drugs are awesome.”