Orgonomicon (9 page)

When he snapped out of his daze, it was to
find the rest of the aquarium similarly disoriented, his parents
calling to him across the chaos of adults trying to assemble and
herd the schoolkids out of the room. Sirens were going off
everywhere and the interiors were all lit up with blinding
floodlights; heavy metal plates slid down on rollers and covered
the glass walls of the tanks, and it was obvious that the field
trip was over. The men in suits ran around busily; William couldn't
understand why they looked so angrily at him, or why they didn't
seem to notice the invisible person standing in the middle of the
room. They all ran around it, avoiding the space where it was, but
showed no other sign of recognition. It was too weird.

The invisible man looked exactly like it was
staring at him; William watched the hulking outline stand
motionless and then disappear all of a sudden with a quick sideways
movement. Once it was gone, something in the atmosphere of the
place changed, and the men in suits quickly seemed very interested
in the area where it had just been. One of them went over and waved
something around that looked kind of like a phone, but then
William's mother moved him along with a firm, guiding grip on his
shoulder and the last of the spell of confusion was broken.

Something terrible had been barely avoided,
and now it was time to go back to boring.

The rest of the year went by and everyone
else around him seemed a little more dead inside, slightly more
accustomed to things getting worse, a little more ready for
whatever disaster would be next to strike.

He was in a train yard; it was dark, and he
was not alone. These thoughts were terrifying by themselves—none of
them fit with his most recent memories—but together they were more
disjointed, scary, indicative of a total lapse in continuity. The
last he'd been able to piece together, he was going to try and see
Ella again for some reason—had he been in the hospital? Had the
doctors been at him again? Scott was at a loss for where he was
supposed to be, what he was supposed to be doing; he reached up to
touch his face, to investigate the source of the pain there, and
found the right side covered with tape and gauze. There was some
kind of nightmare about the poking rod, and then blissful
darkness—a rhythmic clattering would not let him rest. What was
it?

His one good eye didn't want to open; it felt
like it had been shut for days and left to crust over with old
weeping. It was no surprise he should have been crying—when he
could see at last, he found he was covered in blood. He knew that
most of it wasn't his. The clattering grew louder, and he realized
why he was there—what he was supposed to do.

There was a body. He was to switch clothes
with it, put the wallet in the pocket and put the body on the
train. The rest of it would take care of itself. All he had to do
was to jam it up under the grill-work between two of the freight
cars hard enough so it would stay, long enough for the train to get
out of the station and it would be reported as an accident. No one
would look any deeper than that. Easy–peasey, even with only one
good eye.

Scott disposed of the body, and then another,
and went back out into the night, intent upon finding his woman and
reconnecting with his love.

Ella spat out the stranger's penis and
wondered what she was doing. How had she gotten here?

It wasn't like she'd never sucked a dick
before, you ended up doing all kinds of things you'd never thought
you'd do when you had a habit, but this was the only one she didn't
remember putting in her mouth…… Wasn't it?

And how the hell had she gotten here?

There were drugs involved, of course, but
this wasn't her usual type of trap-house and this guy wasn't her
usual coke-daddy. She felt like this was something she wasn't
supposed
to remember. She couldn't make out his face either,
despite being no more than a few inches away from him; nothing she
looked at would stay in focus, the world a dissolving blur around
her. She'd had similar episodes of hysterical blindness as a young
girl, somewhere around the same time the bad things started
happening and her whole world first went to hell. She'd tried to
tell her mother about it, and she didn't believe her. Didn't
believe her!

What was it she wasn't supposed to
remember?

After cousin Nathan had started raping her on
their summer vacations, sex didn't seem like the big deal that her
classmates made it out to be. It was messy and it hurt like hell,
it made her feel dirty and ashamed—nothing like what the girls at
school hinted at. It didn't change her whole world for the better,
or make her feel older and more mature. It was nothing special like
that.

But there had been others before Nathan,
hadn't there? Everything was so grayed-out.

The boys she ended up dating from the army
base all expected it. It was easy to give away, and while she was
giving it she felt wanted. For that little while, she was again
something special. She ended up spending a lot of time on base.

What was it...?

"Hey, what the hell? Why is she stopping?
What the fuck is wrong with you, bitch? I told you this one was too
old!"

"You didn't shock her enough, asshole.
Clear!"

Sudden, white-hot pain spread over the back
of her neck and she bit down into the body sitting in the chair in
front of her. Cruel laughter came from all around the room and as
she blacked out into the lap of the man spasming before her, she
wished briefly that someone, at least one person in the whole wide
world, loved her enough to protect her from the bad people.

She woke up on her couch, in front of the TV;
there were a handful of damp bills crumpled in her hand. She didn't
think about them. She had her rent taken care of for that month.
That was all that mattered. The man on the TV, too, was reassuring;
he held the woman tightly in his arms, stroking her hair and the
sides of her face, passionately whispering to her over and over the
words: "No matter if you fall, you will not be hurt." It was
exactly the words she needed to hear–it seemed like there was no
limit to how far she could fall.

And then the phone rang again, and Scott said
he was coming over. He made up some lie about needing some of his
junk, but of course it was lies, he just wanted to get in and mess
with her head. He only wanted to use her up until she had nothing
left—that was what all men ever wanted from her. How could he be
any different? It was the way men were, all the men who were
attracted to her. And still she told him to come over. Of course
she did.

When Scott got there, she almost didn't
recognize him. It was amazing how much difference three weeks could
make in a person's life; in his case, those three weeks had beaten
the shit out of him. His face was a lumpy mass of scratches and
bruising; his clothes were torn and bloody. "You look like shit.
More than usual," she said to him, regretting it immediately. She
didn't need to kick him when he was down; it was just so damned
easy. He invited it.

"Yeah, same to you. I don't know why you
always have to be so mean."

"I'm not being mean, you look like you've
been dragged down the street behind a truck. What have you been
doing?"

"What do you care? I look like this because
you threw me out!"

He was exasperating. "Look, Scott, it's not
my fault you can't take care of yourself."

"Don't give me that. You
like
seeing
me suffer. You've been looking forward to this, when I come
crawling back all beat to shit and you get to laugh at my
misfortune."

Not only exasperating, but a crybaby. "You're
such an asshole. When are you going to start taking responsibility
for yourself? I don't want you crawling back, and I don't want you
to suffer. I don't want you at all. How many times do I have to say
it before you get it through that stupid head of yours?" And then
something clicked in her head, and clicked again and again and
again and again and so many times and so rapidly, and it set up a
bad vibration that brought on her headache and with it the urge to
hurt. "All right, dickhead, time to pick up your shit and get the
hell out of here. Do what you came to do. You can't hurt me anymore
so you must be fucking useless otherwise. Get your shit and get
your stupid ugly ass out of my house, you fucking leech. Do what
you came to do and get. The fuck. Out! Get! The fuck! Out!" She
hadn't realized it, didn't know how it had happened, but she was
striking him repeatedly, punching him in the chest, in the stomach,
the face. He never raised a hand to her.

The whole time they'd been together, he'd
never raised a hand to her, the whole entire time, even when she
knew she'd deserved it. She had to admit: some of the shit she'd
pulled on him, if it had been between two women (or two men!),
somebody would have gotten their ass laid out. But he'd never so
much as threatened her with a harsh look. She'd actually once
clubbed him over the head with a meat-tenderizer until she'd
knocked him unconscious. He'd kept his hands to himself the entire
time.

"Do what I came to do," Scott said, and
wrapped his sick, thick fist around her throat.

He looked deep into the eyes of the woman
who'd brought him into the world.

"Do what I came to do," he said again,
squeezing his mother's throat until he was sure he was cutting off
not just her breath but the circulation in her veins, too. The
awful bitch had to die, for what she'd done to him growing up, but
there was no need for extra suffering…

Was there? She'd given him over to the
doctors; she'd been the one who gave them permission to take his
whole life away from him and turn him into an experiment… Of anyone
in the world, didn't
she
deserve to suffer, even just a
little bit?

She continued to strike out at him, the
flailing of her weak arms against him getting weaker by the second.
Scott loosened his grasp, just for a moment, to let her draw in one
ragged breath, and regretted it immediately.

"Go on, kill me, you dickless motherfucker!
Big man, I bet you can't even get that right!" She tried hitting
him in the face but couldn't connect and got ready to scream again,
and Scott lifted her off the ground by her throat and slammed her
into the wall, again and again, until she stopped moving. The woman
who'd given birth to him lay in a small pile by his feet, and Scott
questioned the worth of what he'd just done. He'd killed his…

Mother?

But then the red fog cleared from his eyes
and he saw, at last, who it was he'd just killed, and he began to
moan, and the moan turned into a howl, and the howl became a
full-throated wail.

He'd done everything but what he'd sat down
to do. The pencils were sorted, his email was all read and the
miserable hopeless want-ads skimmed. Listening to music distracted
him, but then he always found himself drifting back to thoughts of
what he should be doing.

But Emmanuel wasn't in the mood to
create.

He tried to feel inspired, to let the ideas
flow through him and down his fingers and onto the page the way
they always had, but the well had run dry. It was the result of
failure and discouragement, he knew it; too much negative
conditioning piling up on him made the effort more painful than the
results would merit.

And what would the results be? If he came up
with the best story in the world, if he put all his heart and soul
into creating something totally unique and fully immersive, an
entire universe for others to discover and explore, with all its
intrigue and surprise, what would happen at the end? Someone with
better tools and a wider reach would somehow tell his story, with
their name on it in massive letters of flame and glory, before he
could ever get the chance to open his mouth about it.

Over all the years he'd struggled to get the
right people to notice him, only Karen had seen it happen time and
time again, and he was sure it was part of the reason she'd lost
respect for him in the end. How many times could someone let their
most prized possession get snatched out of their hands while they
did nothing but watch it happen, before you came to blame them,
just a little, for letting it happen? And he kept at it, to the
exclusion of everything else; he never went to school, never
learned a trade, never learned to make anything of himself.

He was, of course, to blame for everything
that had gone wrong in his life, in the whole miserable span of it,
especially in the mockery that had been his marriage. In life, you
had to have a job and you had to have a plan; for the longest time
he'd had neither. Yeah, okay, odd jobs, side gigs and the
occasional hustle, but nothing regular, nothing reliable, nothing
like a career. And they'd suffered for it. Karen had quickly lost
respect for him and his inability to provide for his family, and
gotten mean. Being the breadwinner wasn't supposed to be her job
and it meant that she would have to wield fantastic and awful
powers: if something happened under her roof which she did not
approve of, it was her responsibility to make sure the wrongdoer
was brought to swift and effective justice, in order that her roof
be secure. And it
was
her roof—if it sprang a leak,
she
was the one who'd pay for it to be repaired, and she
would hire the men to do it and she'd be the one to see they finish
to the job right. Manny didn't know about any of that stuff; he was
useless for anything but his stories, and those weren't his to
benefit from, either. He'd let her down; he'd let them both down.
He was useless.

Useless.

And she had done the only sensible thing in
her position: she'd made him leave, cut him off from her support
network and severed ties. She had been amazingly thorough and
efficient at it, as if she'd been coached. He couldn't wiffle out
of this one. He would sink, or he would swim.