The Crooked God Machine (17 page)

I stopped following the doctor and watched him walk away. I stood there breathing heavy, feeling as if I might collapse, until he left my line of sight.

"Who will take care of you when I'm gone?" I asked Sissy when I came back into the living room.

"We will take care of each other," she said. She leaned forward on the couch and reached out to touch my forehead, as if to reassure me.

I went upstairs where the stuffed deer still lay in my bed, hooves poised, legs slender and fragile like woman crimes.

If the deer could speak I knew it would say, "you've failed everyone you've ever loved. You've failed Momma and Sissy, and Daddy too. You've failed your childhood friends, Smarts and Wiley, Darling and Violetta. You've failed Jeanine, the first girl you fell in love with only person you ever thought might actually have a chance. You've failed Leda. You've failed yourself.

"You've even failed Ezekiel and the shiny sphere on the back of his head."

And if the deer could speak, its mouth would grow into a parabola, a long echoing chamber, and it would speak in the voice of my father.

"It’s time to give up," the deer would say.

As I lay in bed nuzzling the deer's cheek, Jolene came to my window holding a bird. She ate the bird in front of me and then smiled at me with gritty, blood-stained teeth. Then she slunk back into the swamp. I stared for a long time at the empty window, the feathers caught on the window casement.

Chapter Ten

I went to the slip clinic the next morning. I had to crawl over a horde of plastic chairs and scabbed would-be deadheads to get to the receptionist, a young lady with brittle machine gun tattoo on her throat and plastic pink curls.

Before I opened my mouth she spoke.

“Name?” she asked without looking up.

“Charles,” I said, “I just wanted to ask-”

“-Fill out these forms,” she said, interrupting me, and shoved a clipboard full of papers into my arms, “give them back to me when you’re finished.”

When I finished filling out the forms, she handed me a number, and I turned away to wade into the sea of waiting patients. Every flat surface in the clinic was lined with televisions. The Teddy and Delilah show droned on without pause. People surrounded me on all sides, but were careful to never touch. - slender faced girls with bleeding throats, grizzled men with their faces melting into indistinguishable grease pits, a bald headed junkie sticking her fingers into her stomach.

I clung to the walls and watched Teddy juggle hot wire spiders on the television.

After four hours, someone over the intercom called my number. I found an attendant carrying my forms, who took me down a hallway that stretched all the way to eternity. Scorch marks from the bombing still lingered on the whitewashed floors. She led me into a white room full of crooked white beds, all of them occupied by wannabe deadheads watching the television screens on the ceiling.

“Undress,” she said. She placed my forms on the bed, handed me a white hospital gown, and left.

I shouldered the wall, static sticking to my eyes, and began taking off my clothes. A doctor walked over to the boy in the bed beside mine and knocked him unconscious with a breathing mask like an iron cage. Nurses in latex uniforms, carrying steely medical instruments, filed around the doctor. The doctor took a six inch saw from one nurse and sliced the boy's forehead in half. A second nurse placed a hot wire spider in the doctor's hand. The closer the spider got to the boy's head, the more it trembled. I looked away, finished undressing, and put on the white hospital gown before lying down in bed.

In the bed next to mine a girl lay locked down in a perpetual seizure. When she saw me she tried to speak, but she could only stutter. Spit ran down her chin, and on her forehead grew a boiling, black mass of tissue in the spot where the implant rested underneath. She had electric orange and blue hair.

"Jeanine?" I whispered.

Another doctor and his nurses entered the room and surrounded her. They lifted up the sides of the bed sheets like white wings as they performed their surgery, obscuring her from my view. I only saw her hand pushing against the sheets, her palm opening and closing, making small, desperate impressions. I almost believed she was reaching out for me.

The doctor dropped her crumpled, bloody spider into a metal tray. A nurse produced a needle and nylon thread and sewed up her head. When the sheets dropped back down Jeanine lay unconscious.

Her arms spread out over the sides of the bed. The black mass on her forehead had been sewn up, and yellow fluid seeped through the wound that grimaced like a broken mouth.

The doctor who just finished his stitch surgery on the boy moved toward me. He glanced over my forms while the nurses hovered behind him like wraiths.

"Let's see what we have here," he said, "reason for getting a slip implant: everyone I've loved and will ever love is already dead, etcetera, etcetera. Looks like we have another philosopher here, girls."

He handed the forms to one of the waiting nurses. I grabbed his hand before he placed the snake mask over my face.

"Why is she here?" I asked him about Jeanine, "how did she get here? What happened to her?"

"Don't worry about her," the doctor said, "she's fine. See you in ten years."

He tried to fit the mask over my nose mouth. I grabbed the base of the mask and ripped out the tubes. The hisssss of gas escaping from the open tube punctuated the air. One of the nurses grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back down on the bed.

“Someone turn the gas off!” the doctor shouted.

I shoved the nurse's arm away. I fell off the bed and knocked over a surgical tray.

The doctor took hold of the back of my hospital gown as I tried to drag myself across the floor to the unconscious Jeanine. Her hands curled in sleep. I reached out for her. The doctor pulled me back. I dug my heels down into the whitewashed floor. The back of my hospital gown tore.

“Someone get me a tranquilizer!”

“There aren’t any left, we used them all!” One of the nurses called back.

On the television screens above our heads hundreds of Teddy's and Delilah's opened their mouths and issued forth a sibilant noise. I tried to tear myself from the grip of the doctor. I buried my face into the folds of the hospital gown and gasped. I pounded my fists against the doctor's thigh.

The room erupted. The boy who had the spider inserted into his head not a few minutes before threw the hospital bed sheets off his body and ran straight into the wall. The rest of the deadheads broke out into a wave of indecipherable noises, screaming and hissing. Delilah struck the ceiling of the room. Teddy rammed his fist into her jaw.

“What did I tell you, girls?” the doctor screamed, “never trust a philosopher!”

The mass of static rose up on its hind legs and formed itself into the image of God. I tried to breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I was reaching out for Jeanine, but all I could see was the newly implanted boy running into the wall over and over again until his forehead turned purple.

“What is wrong with you?” the doctor asked.

"I don't want to die anymore," I said

The doctor released me. I got up off my knees and stumbled toward Jeanine. I grasped her hand.

“I’m sick of this shit,” the doctor said, “I’m going on my lunch break.”

"She's coming out of the sleep. Her implant was faulty. Be careful with her," one of the nurses said to me, a young nurse, with blood still in her cheeks.

But already I grabbed Jeanine's shoulder and tried to shake her awake. Her mouth opened slightly, and the spit she left in my mouth seven years ago dripped out onto my knuckles. The sea of deadheads screaming rushed into my head.

"I don't want to die," I repeated once more, "I shouldn't have to want to die."

Jeanine inhaled a sharp breath and opened her eyes

"Charles?" she said.

"I thought I lost you in a tree," I said, and her body stiffened in my embrace, "I thought you were lost to me."

"Charles, where am I?"

"The slip clinic. We have to go."

The deadheads lay back down in their beds and the doctor waved a dismissive hand at me before him and his nurses moved onto the next bed with the snake mask anesthesia and cadre of surgical tools. The crackling hiss dissipated into silence. Teddy and Delilah closed their mouths and sat down on the couch to pick at their scabs.

I tried to carry Jeanine out of the clinic. She carried me.

Chapter Eleven

Jeanine sat on the edge of my bed in spit light, her body wrapped in the orange scramble of dusk. I sat on the floor rocking against the boards. For the longest time we didn't speak. I lay out some of Leda's clothes on the bed for Jeanine to change into but she didn't touch them. Instead she rocked on the edge of the bed squeezing the sleeves of her hospital gown. After a while Jeanine got up from the bed and went into the bathroom down the hall, dragging her hospital ties behind her.

"Charles?" she called out to me after a few minutes.

I found Jeanine in the bathroom with both hands up against the mirror.

"What happened to my hair?" she asked.

I couldn't think of how to tell Jeanine that her hair was colored like the gauche lights that used to be in the Legion bar, orange at the tips, blue at the roots. Or that the first time I'd seen her in seven years she was insect dancing in front of a stripper pole, wearing PVC boots and a smeared lipstick SLUT.

I said nothing.

"I'm so tired," Jeanine said.

"You've been asleep for a long time," I said.

"What year is it?" she asked me.

I told her.

"Three years too early," she said.

Jeanine traced the spider curves of her face, the veins that rose to the surface of her flesh like a broken garden. She touched the bare and heated edges of her wound.

"It was only moments ago," she said, "I was still alive and the doctor put that mask over my face. And I wake up just a few moments later and now I'm unbelievably old. Like a corpse. That's all it takes. A few moments, and then it's all over."

She pulled off the hospital gown and let it fall to the bathroom floor. She touched the war zone of her breasts and ribcage, bent down until her back cracked in the shape of spina bifida.

"But still," Jeanine said, "you know when you go to sleep and you wake up and feel like you have this really important dream that you can't remember? It's like that too. There's this blister of space inside my head. And this space used to be all of eternity. And it seems really important, but there's only a blister left, and no matter how hard I think and think I know I'll never get any of those memories back."

She touched the diseased spots growing bad on her chest and the gray flaked off of her.

"They said everything would be better after I got the implant out," Jeanine said, “they told me I would find love.”

"I'm sorry," I said.

She continued to look at herself in the mirror and touch her body like a stranger. Even without the implant, seven years seemed to go by in an instant, as if the girl I used to love appeared in the mirror and shed everything good, her milk and honey, her butterfly wings of frozen meat, her anthropology dreams.

I once loved that girl, and now she's a drifting snowstorm. I looked away for only a moment and turned back to find nothing left of her but a pile of gray flakes sifting on the dirty bathroom floor.

Jeanine went back into the bedroom and put on one of Leda's dresses.

"You had a girl?" she asked me.

"She's gone now," I said.

"That's how it always goes," she said.

Jeanine touched the tulle sleeves of the dress. Her decaying body seemed to collapse within Leda's clothes.

"Was this hers?" she asked.

I nodded.

"I figured," Jeanine said, "Theresa, your sister, she would never wear a dress like this."

Jeanine moved to the closet and began looking through Leda's clothes. Jeanine touched Leda's soft soled shoes, her collection of black leather gloves.

"What were you doing at the slip clinic?" she asked.

"I wanted to die," I said.

"So why didn't you?"

"I don't want to die anymore."

Jeanine turned to look at me, ready to collapse. She drifted back to the bed and lay face down into the blankets.

"Why not?" she asked softly.

"I found you."

She laughed. "Charles," she said, "Charlie. You didn't find anyone."

She lifted her head up. I stiffened in her eyes.

"Maybe you're right," I said.

Jeanine sat up slowly on the edge of the bed. Her elbows shook as she struggled to support her atrophied body.

"What have you been doing all these years?" she asked me.

"Looking after Momma and Sissy. Trying to keep things from falling apart."

She glanced at my desk, now empty.

“Do you still draw?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

"What else?" she asked.

I sat down on the bed beside Jeanine. I said nothing for a long time. The silence formed a hard casement around us.

"I think I'm a heretic," I finally said.

"You're a what?" Jeanine asked, and then laughed softly, nervously. "what makes you think a thing like that? The shuttles haven't come for you, have they?"

"No," I said, "but I think they will soon. Ezekiel doesn't visit me anymore. Right before he stopped coming by the house, his sphere- it looked straight through me, like it could read my thoughts and it didn't like what it found. And when our old friend, his name was Smarts, when he became a heretic and bombed the slip implant clinic, I told him I was sorry. I told him I wished I could have saved him. And I remember thinking - if I could I would have pushed Ezekiel off of him and rescued him from death. And I think Ezekiel knows. Knows that I think things like that."

"Wow," Jeanine said, exhaling a slow, white cloud of breath, "wow. Charles."

I said nothing.

"Why would you go and do something like that? Become a heretic?" she asked.

I expected God, who was on his nightly apocalyptic tirade, to crawl out of the television and tear the foundation of this rickety house apart. I expected God's monsters to come up out of the swamp and the woods and the machine fields set to devour me whole. But none of this occurred. God continued to speak from within the safe four walls of the television box, and the monsters outside continued to lurk in the distance.