The Crooked God Machine (22 page)

"What did you do with it?"

"I ate it," he said.

The pounding grew in intensity. I pressed my hands against my head to keep my brain from being ground into pulp.

"I'm tired of this," I said, "We shouldn't have to live in a world where we have to drive ourselves crazy just to survive."

Number Seventeen buried his hands into the pile of dead animals. Blood crept down his fingers. It filled the gaps between his teeth, pooled in the space between his lips.

When I wasn’t butchering animals or talking to Number Seventeen I drew on the walls in charcoal and blood. Drawing of Edgewater, of the animals we butchered, of Jeanine dancing like rigor mortis underneath the grip of the hot wire spider.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” Number Seventeen said.

“I’m not,” I said, “I mean, I stopped doing it.”

“I was an artist once,” Number Seventeen said as he watched me, “but I started to forget what was real and what wasn’t.”

“That’s not what matters,” I said.

“Then what the hell does?” Number Seventeen said.

"I'm tired of travelling from one meat freezer to one slaughterhouse after another," I said to him, "I'm tired of all the dead things. I'm tired of waiting to die from the beginning of life."

Number Seventeen laughed.

"Sounds like something you'll have to take up with God," he said.

He dragged another carcass to the killing slab and I turned away. When I lowered my hands from my head, the pounding stopped. There was now a small hole in the wall.

"Was this here before?" I asked Number Seventeen.

"It doesn't mean anything," he said, "don't pay any attention to it."

I pressed my eye to the wall.

A woman stood in the center of a room on top of a metal plate. Her skin and hair were illuminated in bright colors. Orbs of light and electricity bounced off of her limbs and sparked in her hair. She wore a dress of transparent gauze, and when she turned I could see her spine bend down like a bird's mouth.

"Jeanine?" I whispered.

She came over to the hole in the wall.

"Who's there?" she asked.

"It's Charles."

"Charles?" she said quietly, "you're not Charles."

"Yes I am. What are you doing?"

"I'm a ghost. They're taking ghost pictures of me."

"Ghost pictures?"

"They sell them to parents with dead children."

"Get away from that wall," Number Seventeen called out to me, "stop talking to the wall. There's nothing beyond that wall."

I ignored him.

"Jeanine, is there any way to leave this place?" I asked her.

"No," she said.

The light swelled in her hair, grew to an intense violent-green, and then diffused into red. It sparked off her mouth like dandelion wisps that disappeared when they touched her clothing.

"Did you put this hole in the wall?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?"

"I was lonely," she said, "I have to go. They need more pictures."

She returned to the center of the room and turned around slowly so the light could gnaw her, spark her, hit her with a burst of color and then fade.

"Get over here," Number Seventeen said, "There's so many animals coming through the chute, we're going to drown in them if you don't start helping me."

I didn't get another chance to talk to Jeanine until Number Seventeen fell asleep. As he and I sat propped up against the wall, Jeanine whispered to me through the hole.

"Can I call you Charles?" she asked me.

"I am Charles," I said.

"I was traveling to the capital with a man named Charles, before I was imprisoned here. I told them my brother was a prophet, but they didn't believe me. They said everyone had a brother who was a prophet down here, and then they put me in this room. I thought I was dying until they put me in this room. But I'm already dead."

"You're not dead, Jeanine," I said.

"Be quiet please," she whispered, "I have to tell you this before I forget how to speak. I need to tell someone this because if I don't then it means I'll be lost forever. Seven years ago, when I was still a girl, I got a slip implant put into my head."

"I know," I said, "I know all of this. I'm Charles. I know you."

"Be quiet please," she said once more, her voice soft and insistent, "I was going to be an archaeologist. I lived in this little town called Edgewater, this town on the edge of nowhere. My brother was a prophet, he lived in the capital. I thought I didn't exist until I got to the capital. So as soon as I could I left Edgewater and headed out for the capital. I enrolled in the university there. I joined the archeology department. I thought I could uncover the things we thought were lost. All the things we lost from the very beginning.

"But I found out there was nothing there. I was one of the few students still interested in archeology. In the courses we were taught what was beneath the ground, and how we would teach others what was beneath the ground. We saw pictures of what was beneath the ground - these glossy, fake photographs. When I asked one of our instructors when we would get to excavate the earth, he reproached me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘you must learn to stop asking questions like that.

“’'But what about the buildings that have been burned to the ground?' I asked the instructor, 'what about the thousands of graves, the earth piled on top of the earth? There has to be something underneath us that nobody has yet to find.'

“‘Only children ask questions like that,’ the instructor said, ‘do you want to be treated like a child?’

“‘No,’ I said quietly, and I stopped.

“The instructor said to me, ‘When you've finished your education here in the archeology department you will become an instructor. You will take these pictures and show the world that we have found everything that needs to be found.’

"Then after he finished speaking to me, he pushed a glossy photograph across the desk toward me. It was a photograph of a dead butterfly, pinned inside a shadow box. I took the picture and left the archeology department and I never went back. I suppose that's when I realized that what I'd been trying to run away from my whole life would follow me wherever I went. Or maybe that whatever I was running toward didn't actually exist. I couldn't go back to Edgewater. The swans were dead. The meat freezer empty. I couldn't stay in the capital with the archeology department and the fake photographs, but I couldn’t go back to my old life. So I went into a slip implant clinic and asked them to make me into a deadhead."

"I'm so sorry, Jeanine," I said.

"I don't want you to be sorry. If you ever see Charles, you can tell him I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"Because he loved me. Because he took me home from the hospital, after my body rejected the slip implant. And I never told him I saw he had become a ghost, that even when I thought I was the one slipping away he'd gone and died on me. Because it was my idea to go on this stupid journey to find his wife. Like it would mean I could stop running away if we found her.”

I pressed my hands against the wall, as if I could reach straight through and touch the light sparking against her fingers.

"Jeanine, we're going to get out of here. I promise."

"Oh," Jeanine said, "you know you shouldn't promise things like that."

The door banged open and several men and women spilled into the room. Number Seventeen awoke and grabbed my hand. A woman tore his hand away. I struggled and kicked to try to get away. Someone punched me in the throat, so I couldn't breathe. A bag went over my head. I called out for Jeanine as they dragged me out of the abattoir and back into the labyrinth.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked, "where are you taking me?"

Nobody answered me. Number Seventeen sobbed as they shut and locked the door. I tried to stop them from pulling me further down into the labyrinth. In response they smashed my ribs, suffocated me, ground my knees against their boots. I fell onto the floor and cracked my chin against the stone. As I fought to get away the bag came off my head.

Someone grabbed my hair and tried to pull me up off the floor. It was the woman with the crab meat veins who’d interrogated me when I first came to the labyrinth. Instinctively, I reared back and head-butted her in the face.

She cried out and let go of me. The other captors swarmed around me and struck my arms and face and chest, again and again. I cried and twisted my body away from the blows. They dragged me across the floor like a husk.

Shouts echoed from down the hallway. My captors stopped and let go of me. The woman with the crab meat veins pulled out a gun and pushed me face first down into the concrete.

A volley of gunshots rang out and my captors fell dead onto the floor around me.

“Get up.”

A lean man wearing God’s mask and holding a rifle towered over me.

When I didn’t get off of the floor fast enough, he grabbed my arm and pulled me up. I raised my arms to ward him off and he released me. I backed up into the wall arms outstretched, head turned away, but he didn’t make a move to attack. He only stood there twitching like he was caught in an electric fence.

"Get out of here," he said, "we're tearing this place down."

"Who are you?" I asked, “you’re not a cultist?”

Only then did I notice he wore an armband with a bold number six.

“Not important. Go back the way we came and you'll find your way out."

"There's someone I need to find."

"You won't find them in here."

Several other people ran past me carrying guns and wearing black masks. The lean man followed after them and left me alone in the corridor with my dead captors, slumped and bleeding like animals.

I went up the passageway. In distant parts of the labyrinth I heard people shouting, gunfire going off. I kept walking until I saw the door marked 'exit,' pulled it open and found myself outside in the desert.

It was nighttime, the air cool and the black moon small. The dust blew across my clothes I sucked in the fresh air and breathed out slow. In the distance I saw the bus from Sodom, busted and broken down, its wheels missing. People wandered off into the distance like melting shadows. The black moon pooled around their feet, swelled halos on their heads.

Two figures in black masks stood nearby. One was a man holding an assault rifle. His God mask was cracked, exposing his blacked out eyes and forehead. Beside him was a dark skinned woman stood, wearing a purple taffeta dress with a butterfly bow.

“There’s something I don’t like about running around in these ‘fuck you’ masks,” the woman said, “it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Cults are popular these days,” the man with the assault rifle said.

“It’s the principle behind the thing,” the woman said,

“You’re going to talk to me about principle?” the man continued, “you just shot a woman seven times in the chest because she said she didn’t like your dress.”

“Who are you people?” I asked as I approached.

The two stopped arguing and turned toward me. The woman hitched her back like a snake.

"We're friends," the man said.

"Why did you break into that place? Why did you save me?"

"We know what you've been through."

I stood there at the entrance of the slave trader's labyrinth for a long while, watching the paint flakes fall off the man's face. I thought then of Smarts and his number six, and the unknown woman with the machine gun that followed after him.

"You're heretics, aren't you?" I said.

"We're friends," he repeated.

The lean man came out of the slave trader’s labyrinth and now stood beside me, his black God’s mask cradled in the crook of his left arm. On his face he had one mechanical eye with the pupil dilated to the size of a coin.

“You could go with us if you wanted,” he said, “we could help you.”

"Charles!"

Jeanine ran toward me. Her sheer gauze clothing was torn, her lip busted. She looked cold and hard without the light bouncing off her skin.

"Charles," Jeanine said, breathing hard, "Charles. They freed us all. We’re free.”

She reached out to touch the collar of my shirt and it crumbled in her fingers. Only then did I realize my clothes were streaked in blood.

"I'm sorry," I told the man with the mechanical eye, "There's somewhere I have to be."

Jeanine took my hand and we walked away from the slave trader's labyrinth.

Chapter Five

While Jeanine and I wandered in the desert, we told each other about our perfect worlds.

"No more clothes," Jeanine said, "we could fuck on the streets. While in line at the grocery store. On the porch steps while our grandmothers are making lemonade."

"No more corpses," I said, "no more dead skin and bones. When something dies it just disappears."

"No, we need bones. A record of what we lost."

"We can have bones, then. But no blood."

Jeanine and I walked in the desert for days following the black cloud on the horizon. Jeanine said the black cloud would take us to the capitol city. In the day we burned, and in the night we froze. We sucked the moisture from our clothes buttons to keep from dying of thirst, and as we walked pieces of our clothing fell off and dissolved in the sand.

As we walked the black cloud on the horizon became more defined. It grew hard edges, and the haze disappeared.

“What is that?” I asked.

“God’s castle,” Jeanine said.

I measured our progress across the desert by the details that formed out of the black cloud. Parapets and windows encased in spider-webbed iron bars towered over the desert. The castle rose above the rest of the city, making the tallest buildings appear diminutive in comparison.

"When we get to the city we'll find my brother," Jeanine said, "he can help us."

“If we ever get there alive,” I said.

My eyes nearly sealed shut with the sweat and the heat. My face cracked with a sunburn. We passed the bones of animals laid to waste, cracked and picked apart by birds. We passed bones of men and women holding hands and curled inside of each other like cold and fused fossils.