The Crooked God Machine (5 page)

“So you got this family of four, and Mom goes out to get a slip implant, right?” Ezekiel said, “well, who the hell is going to want to take care of a deadhead anyhow? So Dad and the kids lead her outside and toss her into a sinkhole. Deadhead tossing. It’s a party. People bring drinks and lose their virginity.”

"That's awful," Jeanine said. She closed her journal and set it on her knees, "she's still in there somewhere underneath the slip, isn't she?"

"Who the hell knows?" Ezekiel said, "the wire spider could be turning their heads into hamburger, for all we know."

“One day we’re going to wake up and be the only people left alive,” Jeanine said.

She sounded almost cheerful when she said it. She smiled and shook her hair. Then she drew me toward me and kissed me like she’d just learned how to breathe.

I went home that afternoon and found Sissy sitting alone on the couch. She spent a lot of time on the couch after she graduated high school, with nothing left to do now but smoke and watch God on the television.

"Where's Momma?" I asked.

Sissy shrugged.

A dead deer hurtled down the stairs and smashed headfirst into the opposite wall.

“Momma!” Sissy screamed.

Momma appeared at the top of the stairs with her face like overused lightning. Her hair sunk down into her skin and when she gripped the banister her skin seemed to get stuck in the wood. She started to drag herself down the stairs.

“You kids are nothing but a burden to me,” Momma said.

Sissy took a languid drag from her cigarette and tapped the ashes out onto the carpet.

“If you’re going to insult me, at least be original about it,” Sissy said.

“If your father hadn’t left then maybe you would’ve made something of yourself,” Momma said, “maybe you would go out and get a job. Maybe Charles wouldn’t be up in his room always drawing those damn pictures.”

“Leave Charles out of this,” Sissy said, “In fact, while you’re at it, leave me out of this.”

Momma stopped about halfway down the stairs. Her hands gripped the banister so tightly they turned the color of bleached sand.

“Ever since your father left-” Momma said, but Sissy interrupted her.

“-Enough about Daddy,” Sissy said, “it’s been over eight years, and I’m sick of hearing about it.”

“You and me and your brother are all going to die inside this house. You know that as well as I do.”

Momma went down the stairs and pushed past me toward the door. For the first since I could remember, she walked outside and left the house. I watched through the open door as she walked across the porch with her shadow following her like it was about to bite her head. She started off down the road.

“Momma!” I called.

No response.

“Should we go after her?” I asked Sissy.

Sissy turned back toward the television, lit another cigarette, and said nothing. I went back inside the house and closed the front door behind me.

***

Later that day, someone knocked on the front door.

I went and opened the front door to find Momma and a slip doctor waiting outside on the porch. The slip doctor looked like all dead men everywhere, hands bent into the shape of cabinet files, a forehead that quivered like a raw egg. Momma stared up at the sky so that all I could see were the whites of her eyes. She wore a bloodied bandage wrapped around her head, and a paper hospital gown with all the laces untied, her back exposed to the air. She shivered as if cold, and didn't speak.

"What's this?" I asked.

"I'll tell you what this is!" Sissy called out from the couch when she caught sight of Momma in the doorway, "It's a goddamn travesty, it's a goddamn shame! But most of all it's so goddamn typical!"

"Here's my business card if there's an emergency," the slip doctor said, "and here's a pamphlet with some helpful information on it,"

The doctor handed me the pamphlet and walked off before I could ask him anything more.

"Your new and glorious life," the pamphlet read, "How to take care of friends and family with slip implants."

Momma stumbled a bit as she walked past me through the doorway, newly entered into the ranks of the living dead, trailing her paper hospital ties behind her and smelling of antiseptic and blood. She sat down on the couch in her usual place and told Sissy to turn the television up a little louder.

Chapter Six

The plague machines sent another horde of locusts to Edgewater. The schools and businesses shut down and we had to stay inside and drink blood from the taps for two weeks. For two weeks the machines sat outside in the streets. I couldn't see them through the ferocious black haze of insects, but I could hear their steely organs pumping familiar machine noises, the gears scraping and grating just underneath the metal skin of their behemoth faces. Their mouths opened wide and the locusts spewed forth.

The locusts wore crowns of gold and had human faces the color of angry bruises. They covered the town, dripping wings and black ichor and tormenting our neighbors until they were covered in purple wounds and leaking blood from eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

For the first two hours of the plague Sissy and I knelt in the living room and prayed to God for deliverance.

Then Sissy said, "I'm bored," and went to watch television. She lit a cigarette but the smoke couldn't mask the copper syrup smell of blood flowing through the walls and trickling down the windows.

"What did we do this time?" I asked Sissy.

The noise of the machines swelled in my throat.

"I sure didn't do a damn thing. I bet it was that little bitch Melissa Yeats who brought this plague on us. She used to steal my lipstick," Sissy said.

"I want a cigarette," deadhead Momma told Sissy.

"Get your own," Sissy said. She stubbed her cigarette out and kicked her feet up on the coffee table.

Momma sat motionless on the couch, her mouth drooping into the shape of a wound. Her legs melted and pooled into the carpet.

I removed Momma's head bandage a few days after she came home from the slip clinic. The place where the doctors had sliced into her head and inserted the implant faded to a sick gray green. When the light from the television hit her just right I could see the tiny black legs of the spider undulating underneath her skin.

For the two weeks when the plague hit she kept getting up from the couch to rifle through the kitchen cabinets.

“What are you doing, Momma?” I’d ask

“You know what your father always said,” she replied, “the only way to ride out the plague was with a good stockpile of smokes and whiskey.”

"Daddy's gone," I told Momma. She kept searching for Daddy's cigars nonetheless.

At night she stood at the foot of my bed and advertised for the slip implants in the hours she used to sleep.

"It doesn't hurt," she said, "you don't feel anything at all. Ever since your father left you haven't had a good night's sleep. What pain. What pressure. What stress. Come and join me. Give your head a much needed rest."

I rolled over in bed and turned my face away, but out of my periphery I could still see Momma hunched over my bed. Locusts kept hitting the window, covering the screen until it was completely black, their bodies teeming with bristled elephant hair and over-sized human teeth. Their hoofed feet splattered tiny blood patterns against the glass.

The noise of the machines shattered picture frames and threw my bed against the wall. Momma held tight to the bed railings, her hands dark clouds. Her hair was so alive and full in those moments it appeared to catch fire and fly up to the ceiling.

"Come join me," she whispered again, "you don't feel anything at all."

Sissy didn't tolerate any of Momma's deadhead antics. If Momma got too close to Sissy, Sissy would kick her away like a dog. I found Momma on numerous occasions flat on her back on the kitchen tiles with her legs flailing up in the air and her dress hiked over her panties.

"I don't want her touching me," Sissy said.

She turned on the kitchen faucet and blood spewed into the sink.

"You shouldn't leave her like that," I said as I peeled Momma up off the ground. After Momma got to her feet she rocked back on her heels and stumbled into the living room to watch television.

"Hey Charles," Sissy said, turning toward me with a glass of blood in her hand, flecks of blood on her upper lip, "you ever heard of deadhead tossing?"

I said nothing. Sissy took another drink of blood and then tossed the rest down the drain. She went back into the living room and continued rearranging the furniture to make murder art.

Sissy pulled Daddy’s dead and stuffed animals out of the closets and cupboards. She hung owl heads over all the beds, poised to tear our lips off. She strung kitchen knives from the ceiling hanging by threads. She stacked chairs on top of the tables in precarious positions and laid dead and diseased stuffed squirrels wherever we were most likely to stick our hands without looking first.

She exposed the gut wires of refrigerators, blenders, and radios across wet floors. She placed a hundred year old scarecrow in my dead baby brother’s crib. When I woke in the middle of the night and shuffled down the stairs to get a glass of milk from the kitchen I found a sea of old lady upholstery had sprung up from the depths of the house. I had to crawl over a rising and rolling and tumbling armada of cat piss cushions and cross-stitched home sweet home pillows and gutted, stiff-legged chairs.

My hand slipped underneath a couch cover. I touched another dead squirrel. Ever since Sissy began placing the furniture throughout the room in particular ways to kill us all, I knew she would never leave the house again. Just like the house sucked Momma in, it had imprisoned Sissy. The only way Sissy could express her anger anymore was through the hostile composition of the rooms around her.

As the nights trapped in the house progressed the walls began to close in on us. Momma's slip implant advertising became more violent. I locked the door to my room to keep Momma from coming in and telling me to kill myself. She busted the door down at 4 a.m. and flung her body across the room, her heels making scorch marks on the wood. She planted her hands onto the bedrail and her hair reached out to suffocate me.

"What are you afraid of, Charles?" the hot wire spider asked me through Momma's mouth, "are you afraid to let go of this useless head because you believe you're special? Are you following some self-righteous moral creed? Lay back and blow your head out of the water, Charles. The world doesn't need your head, only your body. It never wanted your head."

Downstairs on the television Teddy spilled spiders out of his hands and Delilah’s laughter cracked against the ceiling. The hot wire spider in Momma's head trembled and clicked in her hollowed brain. It blew me a kiss.

"Go talk to Sissy," I told Momma's ghost, "you never bother Sissy."

But Momma just clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip, snapped her hands against the bed rails, and started her angry commercial all over again.

Outside the buzzing of the locusts threatened to uproot the house from its foundation.

"Get away!" I told Momma's ghost once more, "go into Sissy's room!"

I curled up into bed and stuck my head down into my pillow but Momma craned her neck down until it seemed to detach from her head and she whispered in my ear once more:

"You don't feel a thing."

I thought the plague would never end and that I would be on the receiving end of Momma's abusive slip implant advertisements until God came to destroy us all. Yet one morning the locusts died. They fell out of the sky and fell off the windows and lay on the grass in carcass heaps. Water replaced the blood in the taps. The machines closed their mouths and lumbered back into the fields.

Momma and Sissy didn't seem to notice. I ran through the house opening all the curtains now that the plague was over, touching the empty, blood splattered windows, shaking and laughing.

“What’s gotten into you?” Sissy asked, “stop laughing like that. You’re making me nervous.”

Sissy followed me and closed all the curtains behind me, but at that moment it didn’t matter. I kept running through the house as if a locomotion star was beating its arms against my legs. I passed Momma in the kitchen as she was crouched underneath the sink searching for Daddy's cigars and whiskey. Momma stood up

“Boy, what’s gotten into you?” she asked, repeating Sissy’s words like a spitting engine.

But I just ran past her. I ran out the back door and held my hands out to the sun and the sun was bleating like a lamb and the piles of dead locusts kicked up in a flurry underneath my feet and my heart struck out and fell to the bottom of my ribcage as I ran. I ran to Jeanine, to the only girl who I knew would still be alive.

I found Jeanine in the front lawn of her house, wearing padded leather gloves and carrying a large wicker basket on her hip. She scooped up dead locusts and placed them in the basket. I ran to her and grabbed her head and kissed her on the mouth.

"Watch out for the stingers," she said when I let her go and her black hair strung out between my fingers, "I got stung by one of them and it hurts like a bitch."

She set the basket full of dead locusts down and pulled off one of her leather gloves. She held her fingers out to me and I kissed the sting wound on her ring finger, the pulsing red island of venom rubbing up underneath my upper lip. She smiled at me and pulled the other glove off and I kissed those fingers too.

"I've missed you," I said.

"Let's go," she said, and took me to the abandoned rock quarry. The family of swans was still alive. They floated through the water at the bottom of the quarry, through trails of floating dead locusts. Their white necks dipped down to touch the lips of their reflections. The swans were untarnished despite the ravages of the plague.

“I don't know how it happens. How they're still alive after all those plagues."

We cleared a space on the rocks and Jeanine and I lay down in the heat. Her skirts billowed over her knees. I trailed my fingers through her black lion's hair and we watched the swans swimming down below.