Punktown: Shades of Grey (26 page)

Jax squinted. “How’d you know that?”

The woman smirked. “Because I work here. Forty-five munits a night…”

“Ah, right.”

Jax slid his money across the counter and she slid him a scan card. There were sores from an infected tattoo on her trembling hand. The man took the card and walked to the door. The woman stared at his back as he left.

He could see into the other rooms as he walked past toward number six. In one, dim behind open blinds, screams came from a shape beneath a tent of rippling sheets. In the next, a naked woman, her back to Jax, sat on the edge of a bed working a skeleton marionette. In the room next to his own, something like a human, though grey and shriveled as a raisin, was writhing on the mattress.

Jax locked himself in and inspected the room. It was small, with stains like melted hair on the walls. The shower stall was streaked with rust, the faucet dripping,
the
mirror with a big spray-painted black X.

There was a bible and a porn mag in the plastic bedside dresser (one corner shriveled black where a ray beam had caught it). The magazine was a cheapie, black and white, the photos blurry and poorly lit. On one page, where a woman lay spread-eagled, some previous guest had drawn an arrow pointing to her vagina, had written: you are here.

On the following pages, the thin, sunken-eyed woman was seen engaging in sex with a plump, hairless, toddler-sized creature with a face like a cabbage and too many arms. There was an advertisement for a snuff mag on the last page—a shot of a naked plump woman hanging from cellar pipes, her eyes white. The magazine was called…

««—»»

The tenement looked something like an ancient Crosley radio, though truncated pipes were hissing steam out of one side where the lower left corner had been blackened in a fire. Two young girls sat on the stone steps poking sticks at a small twitching black octopus. They glanced blandly at Jax as he passed and pushed his way through the rusted door.

Metal stairs led up into moths and darkness. On the seventh floor, Jax pulled out his gun. The sound of a rolling metal can made him turn. There was nothing to see but dark footprints tracing his path from the stairwell.

“There you are!” It was a rotting general, a rickety stained uniform of teetering khaki. Jax had never seen this old man, was surprised that the old fellow could speak with his mouth looking the way it did.

“Do I know you?” Jax asked.

“You did. You served under me in the Klu-Koza conflict.”

Jax stepped back into the black prints. “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken.”

The general grinned and winked, his nostrils rusty with old blood. He began whistling softly and passed Jax. It took him a long time to clang down the stairs.

Jax shuddered. He smoked half a cigarette before proceeding. When he found the room he was looking for, he kicked the door open and shoved in his pistol. The room was a box of dusk—no furnishings, no windows. A naked store mannequin hung from a light fixture, swaying gently.

Down seven flights of stairs into The Dusk.
The two little girls were in the gutter where something small was burning. Jax moved past them quickly to his helicar. He had to scrape the frost off the windows before leaving.

««—»»

He could hear the bed creaking in the room next door. His head ached and the greasy dilkies he had eaten at the diner across the street had filled his stomach with spinning grey. It was late and a dull luminosity slithered through the closed blinds. Now he could hear someone vomiting.

Jax had purchased some small porn disks at a shop by a bombed-out abortion clinic. He played them on the vid-screen in his room. The quality of the recordings was poor, grainy,
grey
. Even the screams sounded muffled. One porno showed the plump woman from the advertisement, her jiggling hanging, ended with a shot of the pooled urine beneath her. Another, vague in locust-static, showed a nude teenage boy writhing in shadows, a plastic bag tied over his head. The third offered a brittle toothless woman being drowned in a
bath tub
, her lower legs poking out of the water like convulsive cranes. The eighth video showed him what he was looking for.

««—»»

Jax brushed the dead pigeons off his helicar and drove north into The Dusk. Bored tenements stood in the gloom. Outside one, where the corpse of a car smoldered, faceless women in robes ran up to his window and shrieked at him in Arabic.

In the ninth tenement on Dusmoor Street he found another empty room. No furnishings, no windows.
Only webs and his shadow and sticky footprints.

“I knew you’d be back.”

Jax turned. It was the general. His mouth looked even worse than before, his nostrils crusted.

“I don’t know you,” Jax said.

“Sure you do. Remember, the war?”

“I was never in a war.”

“Okay, the ‘conflict’ then, the Klu-Koza conflict.”

“No. I wasn’t there. No one survived that war.”

The old man staggered back. He put a hand to his mouth and began weeping.

“If you bother me again,” Jax warned, “I’ll kill you.”

“Easy enough,” the man wept, “you’ve probably killed millions.”

“I’ll make it a million and one.”

««—»»

The man with glasses came out at last. He was
bald,
thin, with scabs for nostrils, a baggy silk suit the color of the sky. He bought a paper at the corner, a coffee after that. Jax kicked through dead birds behind him. The Punktown skyline offered its spires and boxes, its daubed neon and sagging steam.

Mr. Glasses moved with a certain delicacy, his paper rolled like a club. He sat quietly beneath the plastic awning of a bus stop and tapped his foot. A slush-colored bus hissed up and the man unfolded, boarded. Jax followed. He had treated his weapon with an illegal spray to make it undetectable by some weapon-scanning devices. Fortunately the unsophisticated apparatus of this ghetto bus did not register it. He squeezed down the aisle and sat directly behind Mr. Glasses.

The bus was half empty, the bored occupants gazing out into the grey. Mr. Glasses was reading the funnies. Jax could hear his foot tapping. He thought of the final vid disk he had watched in the motel, remembered the spastic flashes of legs rapping, the bare legs of a woman, white against the shadows of the floor, white against the dark blood.

Jax slowly drew his pistol, heavy and black. The bus was approaching a tunnel—a pigeon thumped against the windshield. Mr. Glasses was chuckling to himself, pushed his spectacles back up his nose. Jax waited until the tunnel swallowed the bus, then he held the revolver’s snout to the back of the
bald head
.

Jax bent close to the man’s ear and whispered, “Helen Jax.”

Mr. Glasses sat up in his seat and Jax shot him. He shot him once—again and again, gave him terrible backward mouths. The burbling wreckage slumped forward, but Jax was not done—he shot him again and again and again. He emptied all six shots into the other man’s head. He would have shot him a million times if he had enough bullets.

— | — | —

UNDER THE CHRUB

I imagine my wife Medea lying
face-down
on a table at the spa on Vinca Street. She is naked with a towel draped over her buttocks and a muscular black man is massaging her shoulders. They are alone in a small dim room and there is pleasant small talk about nothing of significance. Medea is attractive, blond, her hair on the short side, perky some might think, but more mannered, almost professional in my opinion. She has taken care of herself and even after two children and nearing forty-five her body is notably attractive. I see her close her eyes as the black man slides his fingers over her back.

She doesn’t seem to mind when the masseuse’s hands move low and nudge the towel partly down her buttocks, revealing the split. He digs his fingers into the small of her back; she groans. Lower still, and the white towel pushes down, slips off entirely,
drops
to the floor. The black man grins at her pale back and glides his glistening hands up and down her body.

Medea does not resist when the man moves her legs apart and runs his big slippery hands up the insides of her thighs. She seems to push her buttocks into the air, offering, and the man claps his hands onto them loudly. The oil adds to the smacking sound and she moans as he repeatedly slaps her.

Next there is a hand between her legs, rubbing, and Medea is gasping into the leather of the massage table. Her face looks red, her motherly features feral. The man bends down over her and his mouth opens wide and long black tendrils come swirling out, like feelers or snakes. He nudges his face between Medea’s legs and the tongues flick and dart, slurping. They slink into her orifices and dance around the edges, draw slick trails through the crease of her backside.

Medea clutches at the table, bites the leather, squinting, cursing, begging the man to do things to her.

My phone beeps. I am on Crane Avenue at lunch hour and a crowd is gathered at the corner. Through legs and bodies I see something like a smashed pumpkin in the road and sirens float up out of the distance.

“Denton,” I say to the phone.

I
squeeze through the crowd
,
make it around the corner
.

“Yes, yes,” I say. “Wednesday will be fine.”

I snap the phone shut and slip it into my jacket pocket. Crane Avenue is now behind me; I have reached a pleasant pedestrian walking mall where coffee houses and quaint shops border a cobblestone courtyard. There are cheery plantings and benches and a sidewalk café where bright pink umbrellas catch the sunlight. Medea sits beneath one.

“Ahhh, you beat me,” I say, bending to kiss her cheek.

“My session was so nice that I asked for an extra half hour. I was afraid I’d be late, so I took a cab. The man drove like a demon!”

Smiling, I sit next to her. “How do you feel?”

Medea has a pretty smile, wholesome even. “Like rubber. It was that woman with the death grip.”

I chuckle. “The Nazi.”

“Oh, stop. She’s Swiss or something.”

“Does she have pigtails?”

Medea looks at me slyly. “She’s bald, Dean.”

A waiter appears, a slender Hispanic man in a tight silvery miniskirt. Thin matching ribbons dangle from either side of the bone he wears through his nose, giving a Fu Manchu effect. We order salads and sushi.

“I’m meeting that fellow from Sov-Labs Wednesday, for lunch,” I say.

Medea seems distracted. She cranes her head to look past me and I admire the way the sun finds her hair.

“You look lovely,” I say, though it is uncertain whether she hears me, whether she blushes or whether it is the pink light coming from the umbrella.

“Wednesday,” she repeats, almost to prove that she heard something I’d said. Then, squinting, she says, “What are all those sirens?”

««—»»