Naked, on the Edge (24 page)

What do you get when you cross the devil, an angel, and a politician…?

Another joke that fell flat.

Ba-dump-bum.

At long last Ryan raises his good hand and offers the final benediction. The Discards who are down push themselves up. Those who are up push themselves forward, and, silently, they eat the food Ryan has spread out on the countertop. No one speaks, but they nod their thanks then wander away. Several hold hands as if they are lovers, or friends, or are just afraid they might tip and fall over. The rest keep their distance from each other. Out of fear or respect, Ben can't quite tell.

Not that they matter.

It's Ryan who matters to the Master. It is Ryan who has the Master's tongue and loins tingling in delicious anticipation. If Ben can't please the Master with humor, he'll please him with obedience.

The last Discard, a child who looks more simian than human, blows out the candles in the windowsill by the door.

Then there are only Ben and Ryan in the shadowed station.

Ben sits in silence, rubbing his temple, trying to press out the pain in his head. Ryan stands at the counter, gathering the plastic trays, wiping off the crumbs. For all his hideous deformity, Ryan moves with a certain grace that pisses Ben off. It's all for show, though. Certainly Ryan knows Ben is sitting there, watching him. And so Ryan has to play his part as long as there are eyes…or eye…to see. When he leaves this place, he tries to get himself drunk with left over puddles of beer found in bottles on the side of the road, and then he jacks off into the empty bottles, breaks the bottles, and proceeds to cut his legs with the shards. He hates himself more than any person has ever hated himself, so says the Master. And the Master should know. He watches. He sees. He hears. He tastes the fear and the angst within the human race, and he savors it all.

"So…" begins Ben.

Ryan looks up from the trash bag where he's secured the plastic trays, ready to drag them back home to use again tomorrow night.

"How can I help you, Ben?"

"Actually, I was just wondering how I could help you." Ben replies. The words sound hissy without a cheek to help hold in the air and fashion the sound. Couldn't the Master have given him a body that wasn't quite so pathetic? One that at least had an intact face? "Seems nobody else is willing to hang around long enough to ask."

"Yeah, well."

Ryan slings the bag over his shoulder and limps from behind the counter. He looks like Santa in a child's worst nightmare.

Santa
, Ben thinks suddenly.
Poor little Julie was scared of Santa, even a smiling Santa in his white beard and red suit. I tried to tease her, to make her laugh so she wouldn't be scared. It didn't work too good but I tried….

He shakes his pained head and clenches his jaws. The last thing he needs are memories of Julie. "Master, don't make me think of her, not now," he whispers.

"What'd you say?" asks Ryan.

"Nothin," says Ben. "I'll get the door."

The night air is a bit fresher than that inside the station, scented with wet leaves and exhaust. Ben struggles with the chair; why he had to be this crippled to do the job is beyond him. His head continues to pound. The wheels snag in deep gravel, and Ryan reaches over to takes the chair handles to wriggle Ben free. Ben is caught immediately by the heat roiling off Ryan, pouring from his body in waves. Clearly, the man has some kind of sickness. Ben holds his breath until Ryan steps away; a knee-jerk reaction, left over from the days when he was alive and catching someone else's disease was a thing to avoid.

Ryan then says, "See ya, Ben," and turns north to head into the deeper bowels of the city. His strides are lopsided and wretched, though he picks up a good speed. Ben stares after, then calls, "Hey!" He shoves the heels of his hands against the wheels and, with great effort, chases after Ryan. It's harder steering the thing than he would have imagined. When he reaches Ryan, he is panting.

"What do you want?" Ryan doesn't seem angry, just tired, distracted.

Ben makes sure he stays at least five feet from the preacher. The man's body heat is still detectable. "Listen. I got a couple bucks in my pocket. How about a beer?"

"Beer?"

"Yeah, you know. Bud. Miller. Corona. A beer?"

"I know what a beer is."

"Well?"

One of Ryan's brows furrows; the one over the bad eye looks paralyzed. Then he says, "If it's on you, okay. I'm flat broke. But you sure you want to be seen in public? The rest prefer their privacy. This is a dangerous city, especially for us. Ordinaries have little patience with Discards."

Ben cringed at the name. He was no more a Discard than he was God. He was what he was, a dead, joke-cracking fuck-up who'd gone to hell for living a miserable life he'd pretty much forgotten after seventeen years. Now he spends all his time just trying to humor and please the Master, trying to keep him off his back, trying to keep hell's tortures to a minimum. "I'll be all right. Where's the nearest store?"

The nearest store is up a couple blocks past empty tenements, some closed junk shops, and several bars with blacked-out windows. The store is half the width of a typical shop, with only enough room to squeeze down the narrow aisle between the counter and the single row of shelves. Unable to fit inside, Ben watches from the street as Ryan limps in with the wad of bills Ben has given him and selects a six-pack. The guy at the counter – old, white hair, sneers – growls, "Didn' I tell you damned freaks to stay out of my shop?" until he sees the money in Ryan's hand. Then he shuts up.

A freak preacher walks into a store to buy some beer
… Ben can't think of a punch line for this one. Later, maybe.

Ryan comes out with the six-pack, stands holding it in the puss-yellow light that leaks from the shop's door. Just looking at Ryan makes Ben's head hurt all the more. That damned ear and screwed up eye. The arm that looks like it should belong to some freaky doll. He tries not to let his discomfort show.

"So, where you live?" asks Ben, though he knows. The Master has shown him all he needs to know, told him all he needs to hear. In won't take long to toss out the hook and reel this one in.

Ryan says, "Not too far." The way he says it lets Ben know that Ryan's ability to keep up the kindly minister act is waning fast. He's tired. He's starting to sound irritated.

The devil was sitting on a tombstone one afternoon, waiting for the next soul to come along….wait, you've heard this one? Shit…

The empty garage is a dung-hole, that's certain, situated at the back of a small, ruptured parking lot. The faded sign, "Martin's Auto Repairs," has long been down off the top of the building and is propped up against the front wall. Ryan hobbles on, over the potholes and briars, the beer case thwapping against his leg. He glances both ways before pushing through the door of the garage. Ben follows with effort, grimacing, his brain rattling in his skull.

The place still smells of the work that had been done here years earlier. Sweat and oil and gasoline and cold metal. Yet it is as hollow and forlorn as the service station where the Discards go to pray.

Ryan opens a small door near the back and descends the narrow steps. Without looking back he says, "Shut the door behind you, and flick the lock."

Ben sits in his chair at the top of the stairs and glares down. He shivers hard, so cold not only in this forsaken place but cold beneath his flesh. "How the hell…" he begins, but Ryan calls up, "Just crawl down. It's not that far."

Fuckedy-fuck!
Ben thinks. He has to keep with his charge, but now he'll be even more gimped. Again, the Master is having him on, somewhere out there in the darkness, enjoying Ben's misery.

What do you get when you cross a hole-faced, sluggish mutant with a set of cellar steps? One big splat at the bottom, that's what.

Rim shot…

He shivers hard inside his skin.

Thump-thump-thump-thump. The rough wood of the steps scrapes the palms of his hands, leaving countless, needle-sharp splinters. His ass bounces heavily, his dead legs trailing at odd angles. He works hard not to lose himself and become the splat, the butt of his own stupid joke.

No candles in the cellar, only two battery-powered camping lanterns. It's hard to see at first, and Ben's eyes adjust only partly. There is a cot in a corner. A pile of blankets on the floor. Windows up near the ceiling, covered in wire mesh.

As he slops off the bottom step, he is hit in the face with the stuffy heat in the room. It's like someone has turned a radiator way up. It's Ryan's sickness, whatever it is.

Shit on it all.

Ryan sits on the cot and rubs his knees with his good hand. Then he snatches a beer bottle from the carton on the floor and twists off the top with his teeth. Ben finds this mildly impressive.

"Your place sucks," says Ben.

"You shut and lock the door?"

"No, I couldn't. You know I couldn't."

"Yeah, I know," said Ryan. His voice is softer now, drained, weakened.
He's almost ready for my offer. This shouldn't take long. Good!

"Hey, Ryan," says Ben. The pain in his head flares again. He grunts through his teeth.

"What?"

Ben drags his sorry body across the concrete floor toward the cot, over a damp drain hole in the center, through several dried and flattened mouse carcasses. "How long you been livin' here?"

"A while."

"You always been like….that? All messed up?"

Ryan shrugs. "Why?"

"Born that way?" Ben cocks his head, and the jaunty motion, meant to display cocky confidence, only makes the pain worse. He pretends it doesn't. "How do you say it in that prayer? ‘We are as you have made us?'"

"Why do you want to know, Ben?"

"All that shit you talk about to the other…Discards. Telling them to accept how they are. Are you fucking
kidding
me? Are you fucking
brain damaged
? I know you hate the way you are, the way they are, hell, the way I am right now. Look at me. A bag of human garbage on your floor! Could it get any worse?"

Ryan takes another swig of the beer. "Could it?"

Ben arranges his legs beneath him and pulls a beer from the carton. It's so very hot near Ryan, like being too close to a bonfire. He fumbles with the bottle but his hands are sweaty and he can't get a grip on it; Ryan takes it, opens it, gives it back.

Ben scoots away from Ryan and the man's body heat, clutching the bottle. He takes a draw; some goes down his throat but the rest trickles out through his cheek-hole. The brew is wet and cool, but doesn't taste as good as he remembers from his living days. Or maybe the Master has decided his crappy tongue should have crappy taste buds. He drinks the rest hard and fast, tilting his head to get it down, draining the bottle in just moments.

"Why'd you follow me home, Ben?" Ryan has finished his beer and he drops the bottle onto the floor. It falls over and rolls toward the drain hole, clack-clack-clack, past Ben and through the dead mice.

"You don't believe the crap you tell those monsters," says Ben. "I know you don't. You only do what you do because there is nothing else for you to do. Pretend it's not so bad. Pretend you…they…are as they are because of some kind of fucking divine intention? Do you ever
look
at yourself? Do you ever
listen
to yourself? It's like watching a bad comedian on the stage, dying with every joke. You're pathetic! Well, my friend, I'm here to turn your sorry life around."

Ryan reaches for another beer bottle but what Ben has said makes him pause. His good eye blinks. He paws at his melted ear with his stubbed fingers. It looks as if he is now trembling, ever so slightly.

Good. This is good. I've got him now.

Ben tries to sit up as straight and tall as he can for a man on the floor with bum legs. He needs to appear confident, in charge. Pain continues to pulse back and forth beneath his skull. The sooner he gets this done, the sooner he can get out of here. The Master will have his hands otherwise full with others he is tormenting, and will leave Ben alone for a while.

"It can be different, you know," says Ben. He glances about, sees a floor-length mirror nailed to one of the damp walls. It is covered for the most part with a ratty, mildewed bath towel. He drags himself over to it, panting, catches his breath, then gestures. "If I pull down this towel, you'll see what I see. You'll see what the world sees. You'll see something no one in her or his right mind could care for. You'll see why people in the city take potshots at you when they get to feelin' feisty. You'll see why nobody would ever come close to you, let alone touch you, Ryan. As He made you? You mean God? He made you a piece of shit, a cosmic joke, that's what."

"I don't need to look."

"Yeah, you really do." Ben starts feeling a bit better, now that he's into the job and through with the small talk. He yanks the towel away and watches as Ryan considers himself in the mirror. He can't quite read the expression, but it certainly isn't one of joy.

"When was the last time you got it on?" Ben asks.

Ryan coughs, doesn't answer. He reaches for another beer, cracks off the top, swigs, burps, takes another drink. He gazes again at the mirror.