The Crooked God Machine (27 page)

“I have so much to tell you,” she said.

She took my wrists and pulled me off the ground. She brushed the sand from my arms and face, then led me across the beach toward a house that sat on the cliffs above the water. I nearly collapsed halfway to the house, would have fallen back into the sand if she didn't catch me. I folded against her body and she held me, silent as she stroked my hair. I lay my face against her collarbone, clutched at her skeletal back. I felt small and weak against her. She seemed like a house about to slide down and crush me.

“You're so tall and strong,” I said, “even now, after all this time. You were always the strong one.”

“You know that’s not true,” she said.

You've come a long way,” she said.

I kissed her mouth. She touched my busted lip with the tip of her finger.

“I missed you,” she said.

"You were dead," I said, "but now you're alive again."

Leda kissed me. My body seized up and I could only cling to the fabric of her dress. I stumbled and fell onto my knees, but I couldn't get up. All of my bones were curling inward like spiders. Those spiders bit into my skin and locked me down into the sand.

I clung to Leda's dress, her white-weave dress, fringed with lace and doused in ocean spray - my Leda's dress, the avatar of the ocean. I expected at any moment for Leda to flee from her dress, dissolve into the ether and leave me kneeling alone in the sand with nothing left but the lace and her scent to haunt me.

But her body remained, dripping out into physical space. Her body, able to be grasped and touched.

"Charles," she said again.

Leda traced the outline of my face, as if unlocking me from a spell. My bones uncurled from their fetal paralysis. I pulled myself to my feet, and together we walked up to the house on the cliffs. It stood on a platform that raised itself above the rocks. It was built out of stones the color of smoker's lungs.

At first when Leda opened the door and we went inside, I couldn't see in the dark. Leda closed the door behind us. The air inside the house smelled musky and wet.

When my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out a figure sitting in a rocking chair in a corner of the room, Her body was dripping wet, skin shining like insect eyes, her hair a nest of moss and thorns and bone.

"Charles," she said, and she smiled to show me her bloodstained teeth.

Chapter Ten

Jolene held out her hand for me. Her needle fingers poised to press into my skull, and her ink black mouth dripped down her in the chin.

“Jolene,” I said, “you brought Jolene here.”

Her body sucked the space out of the room and flattened the objects around her down into a two dimensional space. She smeared the table and the rocking chair like tar against the wall. Even from where I stood I smelled the animal rot on her breath, the burnished feathers and flecked fish scales. I wanted to run, but once more I couldn’t get my limbs to move. An ancient weakness clamped down on me and sucked on my neck.

“We've been waiting for you,” Jolene said.

“He doesn't know what this means yet,” Leda said.

“I know,” I said, my voice quiet, “it means every moment comes back to the first moment.”

“Isn't that so?” Jolene said.

Leda tried to get me to sit down in a nearby chair, but I felt my wrists peeling away and my body melting into my ribcage. I imagined the bones of children in the dark, the bones of my baby brother, gnawed and chewed and cracking underneath the rocking chair.

I saw myself at the bottom of Jolene's pool, looking up through the green water at the town of Edgewater burning down. I saw Momma and Sissy in our dark-creak house, smoking cigarettes and watching television as their skin crackled and turned black in the flames. Every time I tried to emerge from the bottom of the pool to save them, Jolene pinned me underwater with her tiny white feet.

"She's a friend," Leda said to me.

"She's a monster," I said, my voice coming to me through a thick haze, "she ate my baby brother. She took his enzymes."

I stood up so fast I knocked my chair into the wall. I headed for the door.

"Charles," Leda said.

I fumbled for the doorknob. Leda grabbed my shoulder, but I shrugged her off and wrenched the door open. I ran out into the daylight, out into the sand. Leda ran after me.

When I got to the beach I fell down in the sand near the tide line. The voice whispered through me once more, “don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not going back in there,” I told Leda when she caught up with me.

"There's nowhere else to go," Leda said, "If you didn't think otherwise, you wouldn't have come here."

"You brought Jolene here," I said.

Spit ran down my chin and in between my fingers. It coated the sand on my arms.

“She’s going to help us,” Leda said.

I lifted up my head and my body seized up in paroxysm.

“You’re a servant of the monsters,” I said, “this is all a ruse, to prove that I’m a heretic.”

“Charles-”

“-Now you’re going to send me to the hell shuttles. Is that it? Is this is what this has been about?”

Leda crouched beside me and touched my face. Her black hair covered my eyes. The curve of her nose and mouth fit into the space of my forehead.

“Hush, Charles,” she said.

I hushed. All that time since she disappeared and she still smelled like I remembered, like the ghost that used to crawl into bed with me. I trembled.

“You know none of that is true,” she said, “you’ve heard the voice.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked, “and what does this mean?”

I lifted my head and reached for her hair. I brushed it back to reveal the number six tattooed on her head. The same tattooed number I saw on Smarts’ head the night he died, the same number I'd seen on the armbands the heretics wore.

She grabbed my hands. I touched her hips, and underneath her dress I felt the contours of the dead flower chain. The stems broke against my fingernails. Her body went rigid like she’d been shot.

“Please don’t hide this from me,” I said.

I let go of Leda and I started sobbing like a child, like I’d never allowed myself to as a child. The surf bowled me over into the sand and the grit struck my teeth. I crawled away from the water like it had claws and the sun beat me over the head like it was a rowdy drunk. The corpses of deadheads rose up in my peripheral, limbs bent down into the shapes of trees.

“Wait,” Leda said.

She ran to me and grabbed me. She pulled me again into her embrace, and I thought that all women must come from the ocean, that Leda’s heart was made of anemone and her skin was seal skin, slippery and dissolving into the ocean depths.

“Hide this from me and I swear I’ll leave,” I said, spitting up chunks of sand and plastic, “No more of this. Please, you know I couldn’t take any more.”

“I lied before, when I told you I moved away from the ocean,” Leda whispered, her breath quickening.

“I know,” I said.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.

“It seemed like a lie you needed.”

“The hell shuttles took me away,” Leda said.

She stopped for a moment. When she continued speaking, her chest rattled with enamel.

“It’s just like in the stories when they take you to the hell shuttles. They come in the night, come through the doors and the windows, almost like ghosts, without making a sound, except their shoes - those sound like piano keys. They wake you up like you’re in a dream, pull you out of bed and spin you down the street. And when they march down after you, their piano shoes, they play gospel hymns.

“It doesn’t matter what you say, what you ask, the guards won’t speak to you. They just pull you into the line at the end of the block, where you wait with the other prisoners, your neighbors and childhood friends, for the hell shuttles to arrive. In the cold, in the dark - no light except for the flare of the guard’s cigarettes. When a guard pinched a girl’s arm and she cried out, all the neighbors closed their curtains with a crack.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“I was a good girl,” Leda said, “I never cussed or made people angry or went after the neighbor’s dog with a hunting bow. I prayed around the television with my family. But none of that mattered. When the hell shuttles came they shoved us in like cattle and drove us down into the earth, down into the place where we could never come back. The guards stripped me of my clothes and shaved my head. They told me I was filthy and worthless - the gutter trash scraped up from the bottom of the world. They told me my name was not found in the book of life, and I would be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity."

"It doesn't mean a damn thing," I said, "Ezekiel told me. It's completely random, who goes to hell. Who lives and who dies."

“They read out a list of my sins” Leda asked, “everything I’ve ever done wrong. I don’t even remember if they were true or not, but I couldn’t think. Down there, you don’t own your thoughts. I tried to imagine the ocean and the flowers in the floral shop, something good and untainted, I don’t know, what it felt to be rocked in my mother’s arms. Some cocoon memory that I could crawl in. But there was nothing. That place stripped it all away until there was nothing left.”

I said nothing.

“When I saw the tattooing needles they laid out for me I tried to get away, run straight through the concrete wall, so they held my arms to the floor and one guard pinned my neck underneath his boot. He said I had a bird neck, a broken bird body, that the problem with birds was that they were always trying to fly away, breaking themselves against windowpanes. He said he wanted to make love to me if he could only remember how to do it. Then they tattooed the number six onto me. An identification number. Block six. Where they put the heretics.”

Leda’s eyes shone.

“In hell there are big rows of gleaming machines, a faceless army of machines, all waiting for us to die. Machines meant to torture us. To make us freezing cold one day, burning hot the next. To make the air prick us like pins and sear our skin. Some of them have jaws like animals, mouths full of steel fangs. Others repeat words all day and night so we can't sleep, words like, 'there is no hope. You deserve this pain. There is no hope.'

Leda's hands shook as she held onto me. She bowed her head so I couldn't see her face, only the black strands of her hair, the dark stain of the number six tattooed on her head.

“Don’t stop now,” I told her, “you were the one who told me not to be afraid.”

“I met this woman named Hadley. She found me in our cell block, trying to kill myself by ramming my head into the concrete wall. Except I couldn’t do it, because my bare feet kept slipping on the frozen floor” Leda said, and she laughed like I’d never heard her laugh before, shimmery and strained.

“She came up to me from behind and pressed her fingers into my temples. She said, ‘you know you’re the bravest person in here?’ I laugh and I spit up blood on her fingers. ‘I can see you with my eyes closed,’ she said, ‘you glow like an atomic bomb. Your energy makes this whole place tilt on its side.

“‘Does this seem brave to you?’ I asked Hadley, ‘sitting in the corner like a dog, trying to kill myself? I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be human.’

“She was younger than me, and her body was small and straight like it hung off a clothesline, her skin like talcum powder or white freesia. The machines churned out a blizzard and I heard the moaning and crying of our fellow prisoners, somewhere out in the storm. Their bodies were dissolving too fast for me to catch. Their skin blew away with the snow.

“When Hadley looked at me I saw that her eyes were iron weapons, heavy and sharp. If she wanted to she could have killed me with those eyes. She said, ‘most people here don’t believe in death. They think dying is like falling asleep and waking up the next morning in the same hell. But you believe, and that’s brave. How do you do it?’

“I tried to tell her about the voice that I’d heard since a child, calling out to me through the waves, but the machines rained down on us, slammed our ribs with noise until we couldn’t breathe. We lost each other in the storm and I hunkered down in the corner, chewing on my fists to try to cure my hunger. I tore off chunks of my fingernails and ate them, I would have eaten my hair if I had any left.

“And that entire time I sat alone in the blizzard and the snow, all I could think of was the sand plum cake my mother baked for me on my 18th birthday, decorated with sepia colored caramel frosting and violet flowers. It was one of the only cakes I remembered my mother baking, because of the sugar shortages, and when they gave me my slice I trembled because I could feel my skin sliding underneath my dress, 17 flowers too overweight. I licked the caramel frosting off my fork and out of sight, fed the rest of the slice to the dogs. I just thought, if only I could have that cake now, I would never go hungry again. It was the only thing I could think of, a special memory God dredged up to torment me. I started to think I was in hell because I didn’t eat my mother’s cake.

"After the storm subsided, the machines forced the heretics of block six to dispose of the dead. We dragged them to the end of the final hallway, all the way through the ice, and threw the dead down into a chute. I assumed the bodies were incinerated, disposed of somehow. But Hadley, after I found her again, she said the bodies weren't destroyed - but stored for a time before they were re-animated for God's army.

"'How do you know this?' I asked her, and she said he'd seen it herself, armies of our dead emerging from the earth. She said it might possible to jump through the chute and emerge out the other side, but she didn't know for sure." I thought of the night long ago when Ezekiel took Chicory and me out to the machine fields and Ezekiel raised the dead.

Leda scratched a figure into the sand. The number six

“But I think the real reason was because of Hadley,” Leda said, “when I met her I realized I’d never loved anyone before. God had to take me away from the ocean and sent me down into the place without hope for me to realize what love meant. Before Hadley I had been like a child and I loved like a child.