Peculiar Tales (5 page)

TERA SAPIENS

T
he woman sat on the edge of the stained mattress and scratched her stomach, each broken nail leaving a dull red streak. Behind her, stretched flat on his back, the man stared unblinkingly at the ceiling. He hadn’t blinked for hours. It was sweltering in the room and both were naked. The woman was leaning forward slightly, her sagging breasts supported by a pale stomach that in turn lay on bluish, veined thighs. She thought of the man on the bed, and tried not to think of him. Jesus, she wondered, and not for the first time, whatever have I come to? She placed her fingers below her collarbones and pulled on the loose skin. The breasts raised, but they were empty, flaccid things and the nipples still pointed toward the rolls of flesh below. Used to be real different, she thought. The Navy boys used to tell me they pointed up and out like them ack ack guns on the battleships down there in the harbor. She let them go and they fell back into place with soggy slaps.

She didn’t look at the man but she knew he was laying there with his eyes open. He never closed them. They were dull and dry-looking, like a pair of stale croutons. She didn’t like looking into them. She didn’t much like looking at
him
, either, for that matter. She didn’t like his grey, oyster-like skin. It was sleek and poreless and had an oily sheen even when the weather wasn’t hot as hell, which it was.

She coughed a hard, gargling cough and looked around for a tissue to spit the result into. There wasn’t one, so she held the phlegm in her mouth until she got to the sink and spat it into it. There were red flecks, but they’d been showing up for months and she ignored them. When she returned to the bed, the man was sitting half-propped against the headboard. Not for the first time she shuddered. I used to get the best-looking boys, she thought. All them pretty Navy boys and the boys what worked out down at the gym, them boxers, and the ones who threw steel around at the mills. Now look what I got to shack up with to keep me in liquor and rent. What a lousy shame.

The man on the bed returned her gaze with his lusterless eyes. His skin was greyish and slack, with heavy folds and pleats, as though he were slowly melting in the heat. She had figured from the first time she’d seen him naked that he was one of those people who’d been obscenely fat and when they’d gotten all that blubber sucked out their skin didn’t fit them no more. But maybe
no
skin’d fit him, she thought, because he really didn’t match anywhere. His legs and arms all looked like they were each of them from different people. Even his fingers weren’t the right length and shape. The middle finger of his right hand, for instance, was the shortest one, while the thumb was long and bony and seemed to have an extra joint. His left hand looked more like a paw, like the super’s had looked after he’d hit it with a hammer that time and it’d swolled up like a balloon.

The man’s face looked like those pictures she dimly remembered from her high-school biology book, the ones that showed how the face of an unborn baby evolved from month to month. The man’s looked like the one from maybe the first month or so. Except grey. And slack-skinned. And oily. He was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. But he had plenty of money and didn’t mind spending it.

She padded over to the dresser and picked up the square bottle that sat on it. There was still a healthy slug of gin in it and it was as good a breakfast as any.

“Gotta make a trip to the liquor store this morning,” she said.

“Take what you need from my pants,” the man replied. “You know where the money is.”

He had a strange accent. Nothing she’d ever heard before—but maybe it was just a speech impediment. With a face like his, you couldn’t tell. All sorts of things might be wrong inside. When he spoke it sounded like soft things were bouncing around loose in his throat.

“You never did tell me where you’re from,” she said, turning, leaning her soft, yellowish buttocks against the edge of the dresser.

“No, that’s right. I didn’t.”

“You ain’t from around here, I can tell that.”

He was silent for a moment before replying. “I’m a Teratoma,” he said.

“That Greek?”

“I might as well tell you. It won’t make the slightest bit of difference now.”

So he told her a story; they all do, eventually, but she’d heard so many she didn’t pay any attention at all. She was anxious to get to the liquor store. It was too early for it to be open, though, at least another hour, so she had no choice but to listen. Or at least pretend to listen. She’d certainly put up with a lot worse things for a quart of gin.

“I’m a very rare individual,” he said, his voice like bubbles breaking in crude oil...as though he were trying trying to speak while swallowing a mouthful of Mazola. His tongue seemed to be too large for his mouth. She knew from experience that it was a rough, lumpy organ. “So rare,” he continued, “that doctors are only aware of a scant handful of like examples. And they’re usually destroyed immediately. There used to be many more of us, before modern medicine. You’ve heard of a
fetus in fetu
? No, I suppose you haven’t. Very, very rare. Almost unknown. Well, surely you know how identical twins occur? An egg divides shortly after fertilization, creating two identical fetuses. Sometimes this goes wrong. The egg doesn’t divide perfectly and one of the twins isn’t viable. The other egg enfolds and absorbs it. But it isn’t dead. It continues to live and grow, though it never has any hope for an independent life of its own. It’s a brainless parasite, drawing its nourishment from the healthy, normal fetus. In most cases this ultimately kills the normal fetus long before it comes to term. But on very rare occasions, the baby is born bearing its own twin within it.”

The woman had not been listening to a word of this and had no idea what the man had been droning on about. Nor did she care particularly. The heat was too oppressive and her head was swimming as it always did when she had gone too long without her gin. He had a twin? So what? Too bad for the brother, if he looked anything like this guy.

She had the only window wide open, but it looked out onto an air shaft. Nothing came out of it but the cold stale fumes from the Chinese takeout three floors below. This didn’t go well with her gin-deprived stomach. Rivulets of sweat ran down her flaccid, lard-colored body—like a cheese left in the sun. The droplets tickled like scurrying lice. There was a salty delta forming between her breasts. It was crusty and itched. The man on the bed glistened, but it didn’t look like sweat. He looked more like a slab of fatback rendering slowly in the heat.

“I had a sister once,” she said. “Wasn’t no twin, though. She was a coupla years older’n me. Ain’t heard from ‘er in years.”

“I don’t have a twin,” the man said. “I wasn’t done with my story yet.”

Jeezus
, the woman thought. I might have known. She went back to the bed and sat on the edge of the stained, sheetless mattress. She lit a cigarette and sucked on it. She stuck out her tongue and picked a fleck of tobacco from it with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the fleck, but couldn’t find anything interesting about it.

“No...it seems that many cases diagnosed as
fetus in fetu
were carcinomas—a special kind that is even rarer than the vanishingly rare
fetus in fetu
. They’re called
Teratomas
. It’s a Latin word that means ‘monster cancer’, in case you were wondering.”

She felt the bed bounce as the man stirred. He was sitting up and a moment later she could hear his feet padding on the bare linoleum floor. They made a squishing sound, like sponges. She didn’t want to turn and look at him, but he came around to her side of the bed and stood between her and the air shaft window.
Goddam
but he’s ugly, she thought for at least the twentieth time that week. His greyish skin hung in pendulous, overlapping folds, like melting wax. In places it was as smooth and glossy as fresh liver, but in others it had a crepe-like texture and in others it had what looked like scales and she wondered of psoriasis was contagious. Nothing matched. His arms and legs, even his fingers and toes all looked as though they belonged to a dozen other people. And from people who’d been glad to get rid of them, at that. He did not smell very good, either, and the fact that she noticed at all was saying a lot.

He had warts, too, dozens of them, scores, all over his body. They looked like small, grey, rugose meatballs. Most were half-embedded in his shiny skin but others hung by little isthmuses of skin, like tiny scrotums. They rolled back and forth as he moved.

“A Teratoma is a cancer, but a very special kind. Most unique. It develops from many different cell types derived from a variety of germ layers. As a result, they can form skin, hair, teeth, cervical tissues, fat and muscle. They are often mistaken for the kind of parasitic twin I’ve already mentioned. If I’d been born in this country in this century, I would’ve been immediately recognized for what I was and destroyed. I certainly wouldn’t be here today. But, fortunately, I was born in a place and time that worked in my favor. My mother said the doctor was horrified when he discovered me. He was little more than an ill-informed country physician who had never heard of a Teratoma let alone seen one and thought he was looking at a particularly grotesque tumor. He was in the process of cutting it from her womb in order to destroy it when...I squealed.

“I don’t think that would have stopped a doctor here.”

The woman looked up at the man dully. He turned and went to where he’d left the small brown bag he’d brought with him. He reached into it and brought out a bottle of clear liquid. It was only the cheapest gin, but to the woman it looked like a crystal decanter of morning dew.

“You been holdin’ out on me!” she cried, nearly tumbling onto the floor as she grabbed at the bottle. “You know I need that bad an’ you held out!”

“Not any more,” the man said, unscrewing the cap and handing the bottle to her. She took two quick, deep swallows before lowering the bottle and wiping her bright red lips with the back of her hand. Her lips looked like two pimentos lying on her cheese-colored face.

“Jesus it’s hot in here,” she said, and took another swallow. She coughed and couldn’t stop and her lips became redder. She rose, went to the sink and spat into it. The phlegm was streaked with pink. She ran water to flush it down. “What’s it y’ been sayin’? Y’ got th’ cancer ‘r sumthin?”

“No, I don’t
have
cancer,” he said. “I
am
cancer.”

“I’m a Puh—Pisces. Makes no diff’rence t’ me. Y’ wanna have a lil drink with me? Make y’ forget how hot it is.
Goddam
, but it’s hot in here.” She waved a mottled hand vaguely in front of her face. “Jeezus, it stinks in here.”

She sucked on the bottle again and nearly half a pint disappeared before she lowered it.

“You need something to eat.”

“Don’ need
nothin
’ t’ eat. Got all I need right
here
.”

“That’s right, drink all you want. That’s what it’s for. There’s plenty of it and more where that came from if you want it. But you should have something solid. Otherwise you’ll get sick.”

“Don’ need t’ eat. Too hot t’ eat. Too
goddam
hot.”

She tipped the bottle again, which was now more than two-thirds empty. Her nose was running but she didn’t notice.

The man felt around on his stomach, as though he were satisfying an itch. His fingers dug deeply into his oystery folds with a squelching sound. He sat on the bed next to the woman. Her thin, spit-colored hair was plastered to her forehead. It hung in lank tendrils around her ears, like exhausted worms. Her dilated pupils were surrounded by yellowish sclera, threaded with red veins. She had advanced pyrorrhea and several of her tobacco-stained front teeth were loose.

“Eat this,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Whass that?”

“Something for you to eat. You can swallow it with your gin, just like taking a pill.”

“Don’t wanna take no pill.”

“Do it for me. I’ll leave if you do. I’ll give you all the money you want and I’ll leave. You’ll have plenty of money for gin and you’ll never see me again. How’s that? Just swallow this and you’ll have all the gin you could ever want and never see me again.”

“Thass...thass okay. Soun’s okay t’ me.”

She took what the man had in his hand. It looked like a little meatball. She decided that whatever it was she’d swallowed worse in her time for less payoff. It was slippery in her mouth and went down easily. She followed it with a mouthful of gin. It’d had no taste of its own, though. She looked at the bottle which was now nearly empty and made an indescribable moué of disappointment.

The man grunted and rose from the bed. As he went to where his clothes hung over a ladder-back chair, she saw the warts that swung on his body like little ornaments.

“Jesus!” she sputtered, wiping her mouth. “Jesus! Is
that
what y’ bin tellin’ me? Is
that
it? Y’ bin tellin’ me y’ got a
cancer
? Y’ give me a
cancer
, y’ dirty rotten bastard!”

“No, of course not,” he said, pulling on his pants. “Nothing like that at all.” There was little concern in his voice. The alcoholic woman would be unconscious in a few minutes. When she awoke—hours from now, maybe even the next day—she would hardly remember him and she’d certainly remember nothing of what he told her. “Of
course
I didn’t give you a cancer. I gave you a son.”