GUD Magazine Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007 Read online

  Together, they left the house in the warm night to look for Michelle, Seth in a blue robe and Misty in a pink nightie.

  A strange metallic noise was coming from Dean's garage. They walked next door, calling their daughter's name.

  The robot stood in Dean's garage, exactly as Seth and Neal had left it. The noise had been coming from the robot, but it ceased whatever it was doing as soon as it made eye contact with Seth.

  Dean was lying on the floor next to the robot.

  Seth was momentarily awestruck on seeing the robot again, that his brother could be such a genius as to have thought of it.

  "What the hell is that?” Misty asked.

  When they took a few steps toward it, the robot ran at them, thrusting its hands toward their chests.

  * * * *

  Across the street, Michelle sat in the field of weeds and sucked the meat from the thigh of a mole she had caught.

  * * * *

  When Seth and Misty awoke, they were sitting next to each other against the wall in the garage. Attached to their chests were energy converters, fully wound.

  Misty suddenly slid to the cement floor and succumbed to orgasmic convulsions. Seth stood to move out of the way. She finished a few minutes later, stood, and braced herself against the wall of Dean's garage, catching her breath.

  "You okay?” Seth asked.

  Again, standing near the wall, she experienced inexplicable sexual intensity. She fell and crawled awkwardly out of the garage toward the lawn, where she wriggled and screamed in the grass.

  Seth turned around and studied Dean's garage. There was no sign of the robot or Michelle. Dean was still passed out on the floor.

  "Dean,” he said.

  Nothing.

  Out on the lawn, Misty screamed, “Oh my fucking God!” then fell silent.

  He looked down at his brother again, noticed a metal box attached to his chest. Then he looked down at the metal box attached to his own chest.

  He walked over to Dean's desk. The computer was turned on; he sat down and jiggled the mouse a little. The screen filled with the design and schematics of the robot. Seth stared at every line, every variable, all of it mysterious and beautiful, desperately trying to understand it the way Dean did.

  * * * *

  PART FIVE

  The robot stood motionless in the exact center of the floor, staring back at Dean.

  His back aching from sleeping against the tree in his front yard, Dean stood just outside his garage and inspected it. Then he said to it, “Please take all the remaining scrap metal in the driveway back to Seth's garage, then empty and refill the dishwasher. Thank you."

  The robot stood still.

  Something was wrong. It would be sinful for a robot to disobey a human.

  He approached the robot, opened the panel on its chest, and extracted one of several energy converters from within it. He shook it next to his ear to listen for loose parts, then let it drop to the floor. He went to his desk, where a pile of extra converters had been left, and replaced the old one with a new one. He shut the panel door to the robot's chest.

  Instantly, the robot shoved its metal hand through Dean's ribcage and pulled out his heart, shook it next to its mechanical ear, then let it drop to the floor. It attached and wired up a fully-wound energy converter directly over the hole in his chest. Dean fell to the floor atop his lifeless heart.

  * * * *

  Some time later, he awoke to the sound of heavy iron scraping over the concrete floor of his garage. His father's iron safe was standing next to him. It opened its door and Dean felt the wallet in his back pocket slip out. The safe closed its door and walked away.

  His head fell back onto the concrete, eyes closed.

  He fell into a deep sleep and never opened his eyes again.

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  Charging the Inspiration by Cameron Gray

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Arrow by Nadine Darling

  What happened was this: I woke up and the arrow was there, wedged through my breastbone and into my heart like a trowel. And, you know, I was shocked but not surprised. I thought, Well, this explains that sinking feeling I've had for the last thirty years. I grabbed for the phone and it fell. I eased onto my side and searched beneath the bed until I felt it tip into my hand, then I called work and told them I'd be late.

  "Not again, you won't,” said Randy.

  "There's an arrow in my heart today,” I said.

  "Yes, and last week you had a sore throat. Do you like your job?"

  "I like it all right,” I said. I ran my fingers down the arrow's shaft and plucked a bit at its fletching. The feathers felt very familiar. There was something very festive about them.

  "If you like your job, you'll come in and do it,” said Randy.

  "Okay,” I said.

  "That's not the tone of a team player."

  "Okay,” I said, and “Goodbye,” and I hung up.

  I found a blouse and cut a hole in its breast. Then I cut a hole in my coat.

  It wasn't a surprise to anyone, certainly not anyone who knew me. Examining the arrow, Dr. Clark was almost delighted by his foresight.

  "Didn't I tell you?” he asked, as I sat there in a snowflake-printed gown on a table lined with paper, my arrow tenting the fabric like a ghost or the barrel of a gun. And he had told me. He'd told me once during a physical. He'd said, “Of all my patients, you're the one I see with an arrow in her heart."

  "My, it's a good one,” he said.

  "Thanks,” I said.

  "Aluminum, by God, and built to last!"

  He clipped one of my X-rays to a lighted board and showed me where the arrow had pierced my pectoral muscle and my chest plate and entered my heart on a slightly downward slope. He did not seem to think it serious. Quite the opposite. My arrow was lodged in the right ventricle. From what I've gathered, if you have to sustain a traumatic penetrating chest wound, that's the place to get it. The great vessels remained intact; there were no rib fractures. My arrow is what is referred to as non-invasive. My heart accepted this foreign object almost immediately. The tissue of my heart pushed up against the arrow and grew around it, frayed vessels touched and reconnected, blood flowed, muscles closed around the submerged shaft like a soft-palmed fist and held it. There is something neat about that, I think. Something mournful and surrogate. It's ruined my life, you know, but I appreciate the sentiment.

  Manual removal was something I seemed a poor candidate for. At times, if the arrow is in an ideal position and not terribly deep, the jutting proboscis of it can easily be removed with a circular saw or Cool Touch laser, leaving only the smallest of wooden nubs, which can often be passed off as tattoos or as extra nipples.

  But the doctor seemed to think that I would be reinfected—i.e., shot again—even if he could manage to cut off the first arrow. And if that was true, then it seemed illogical to even try. I mean, how many extra nipples could I have?

  This is a beautiful time for me to be alive, and I know that because some asshole with a degree in something told me. In the past, people like me were treated like lepers. People thought we were infectious and uneducated, that you could catch a case of us and die. Of course, very little of that is true; we are completely safe to be around, even for kids and old people, and very few individuals even lose eyes during contact with us, although that does vary depending upon height. The doctor gave me a pamphlet entitled Twelve Shocking Things About Being Shot with an Arrow, and I was thankful for this, though honestly I would have wagered there were more than twelve.

  * * * *

  I will not lie to you; this sort of thing has happened to a lot of people in my family because, unlike car payments, we take infatuation very seriously. I had an uncle on my dad's side who was also plagued by the arrow. He used to stagger by our house every six months or so when I was a kid, and if he didn't have an arrow, he had a bottle. Sometimes, on holidays, he'd have bo
th.

  It's a very negative affliction, despite what Hallmark and American Greetings would have you believe. People see you and they don't think you're in love, they recognize that you are unlovable. What I have is decidedly less valuable than, say, Gonorrhea, because at least “Gonorrhea” sounds funny. Nobody wants to be in love; I've come to terms with that. Everyone always assumes that they want to be in love, but it's a real damn drag when it happens for real, like being a homeowner.

  I will say this, though—because I've made my peace with the thing to some great false extent—it is a beautiful arrow. The shaft is aluminum wrapped in carbon—very light and clean—with beautiful hand-tied wild-turkey fletching. The head, though barely glimpsed even in X-ray, is believed to be a brass bullet point, which is rare. It was built to last, like the doctor said. It's a lovely, functional arrow, you know, and it's not going anywhere.

  * * * *

  I'm in an arrow support group that meets every Tuesday night at the Y. Our group, if I may, is pretty meek, four girls and five boys, and all about my age, in all the muted colors of your basic “It's a Small World” ride. We're led by a man named Brian with kind eyes and a backwards baseball cap who makes us sit in a circle on the floor and instructs us to live our best lives and encourages us to talk about our pain.

  He asks me, “What do you remember?"

  "About what?” I say. I am that kid in Arrow Class. I sit back like I'm waiting for a bus and laugh at poetry in a way that makes me feared and respected by substitute instructors everywhere.

  "About the arrow becoming lodged in your body."

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "I hit the Nyquil pretty hard,” I say.

  Then the girl next to me stands up and performs an interpretive dance about her arrow and the rest of us just have to sit there and take it.

  * * * *

  I have consulted the devil, sure. I don't generally run in those circles, but I was in a particularly bleak spot—what with the arrow and all—and let's just say that I knew a guy who knew a guy.

  The devil showed up at my place one evening—it was the day Barry White died, I remember—looking exactly like this freak named Rory Epstein I used to date when I was nineteen. Not a wise choice on my part, but that occurred during the nineties, a pointless, garish decade in which nothing of value happened and a young Arsenio Hall taught us the great moral lessons of the day, such as that white people are lame and women are gold diggers with big asses.

  "What are you doing here?!” I said.

  "This isn't what you think,” said the devil.

  He looked like Rory Epstein, but he was wearing a cashmereblend trench and a plum-colored three-piece suit that made him look like one of those personal-injury lawyers who advertise during the soaps and the daytime judge shows. I'd never seen Rory Epstein in a suit, not even during the varied court cases against him, to which he generally wore pajama pants and T-shirts from the Lillian Vernon Catalogue imprinted with things like “Shut Up, Bitch!” or “Who Farted?"

  The Devil shook my hand, and he didn't have paws or hooves, just plain skinny white-guy hands, with big crazy joints and hair on the backs and knuckles. He said he'd tried to take the form of someone I trusted and was comfortable with, and I said, “Swing and a miss,” and he laughed. He laughed, and because he was Rory Epstein, he had jacked-up teeth and the pink, overwhelming gums of a baleen whale. I felt no doom in the man's presence.

  The Devil took off his fine cashmere trench and asked if he could lay it out over the arm of my sofa and I said sure, just mind the dog hair. He said it was cool, but then later when he went to collect it and there was dog hair on it, he acted all pissy about it. I felt bad; how could I not? He had to go to his next appointment—perhaps with a luckless songwriter, perhaps with a high-powered Wall Street broker with an addiction to supermodels and smack—with dog hair all over his fine trench, and certainly such an imperfection would detract heavily from his authority.

  He wanted to strike something up, because he was the Devil and it wasn't really that unreasonable. He had a thing for me to sign.

  I said, “You know, look, I don't care what happens to me, but I can't hurt anyone and I can't do anything especially wicked. To make this thing happen I can't, say, spit on a nun or anything."

  "What is it that you think I do?” asked the devil with such grandiose disbelief that he nearly sounded like my mother, like anyone's mother faced with dirty socks on the kitchen table, at the pinnacle of I'm-not-running-a-boarding-house-here-ness.

  "I thought you would know,” I said. “I thought you would know the outcome in advance."

  "If I'd known, would I have come here at all?” asked the devil, and now he was angry. I saw a flash of something in his eyes that temporarily overrode the bruised, runny misery of Rory Epstein, something petulant and sneering and male. I clutched the flesh around my arrow and staggered back, my palms and feet tingling. It felt as though someone had secured a foot against my chest, grabbed hold of the arrow with both hands, and pulled once hard. The arrow went forward and the rest of me went back, as though my heart was trying to spit it out. There was a moment, not even that really, when I felt a slip, a release, and I felt the arrow begin to ferret its way out, no longer violent, punishing, or malevolent but, in retreat, careful and slick as a tongue. My fingers came away from my arrow hennaed with blood. Then the muscle caught around the arrow like a fist and held, and it felt like a throat clearing and for a second I was rocked back on my heels, body swaying toward the floor; the arrow was the only thing holding me upright, lodged fast in my heart like a tether. My heart cleared its throat again—harder this time—and the arrow made up whatever distance it had lost and added a centimeter or two for good measure. My heart stopped—I felt it stop—then it readjusted to the arrow and pressed back into it almost apologetically, as though it and the arrow had fought and were making up—all forgiven, all forgotten—and began to beat again.

  I bit down so hard that my front tooth snapped on the diagonal and a shard of it flew from my mouth and struck the devil squarely in the lower lip, where it teetered for a moment before slipping down his neck to his collar. The devil collected the tooth between his thumb and forefinger and examined it. He slid it into his back pocket like a dime. He cupped the side of my face in his hand and eased my lower lip down with his thumb, peering into my mouth. Then he touched my arrow too, cautiously, as though what I had might be catching.

  "Well,” he said.

  "I thought you knew,” I said, my breath whistling past my ruined tooth. It sounded weary and bereft, like the axle of a wheelchair, the bent, creaking wheel of a shopping cart. “I thought you knew everything."

  "I'm not Santa Claus, dear,” he said.

  Those were the devil's parting words for me, seconds before he collected his hair-peppered coat and wandered out into the fine July evening—the air still flush with heat and ash and freshly-mowed lawn—with half of my tooth wedged into his pocket: “I'm not Santa Claus.” That, and he called me “dear."

  * * * *

  You know what's coming up? Arrow Camp. There is a brochure. The cover shows a group of white people with arrows in their hearts wearing softball uniforms and giving each other high fives. I study the photos very carefully. The people look happy, but uncomfortably so, distantly so, like they all just won Cadillacs but none of them know how to drive.

  This camp, it's a place in Southern Oregon where people like me can be together and ride horses and go swimming and enjoy life and live music. It's a nice idea, but they get really terrible celebrity endorsements. Like once they had a guy who'd guest-starred on M*A*S*H, but nobody recognized him because he'd spent the entire episode he was in completely swathed in bandages; once they had the band Nelson. Patrick Duffy was supposed to be there once, but then he pissed off to film an infomercial about erectile dysfunction.

  "There will be so much learning and so many fun activities!” says Brian.

  I raise my hand, the palm
shimmying atop the wrist like a belly. “Archery?!” I ask.

  Brian ignores me.

  "Archery?!” I ask.

  "I can't help you if you don't want to be helped,” says Brian.

  * * * *

  One week, after group, a small girl called Matilda hands me a slip of paper, and on this slip of paper is a phone number. “It's for when there's nothing else,” says Matilda, and I nod, because there is nothing else, and reach for my phone.

  It is a doctor's office. He doesn't have a receptionist. He answers the phone, “Kathleen?!"

  I tell him who I am and what is wrong with me. I tell him that there is nothing else.

  "Come see me,” he says.

  He says, “No cameras."

  * * * *

  The doctor's name is Carrion. His office is downtown, somewhere between Friendly's and the mortuary. The neighborhood is fairly bad. The cabbie lets me out four blocks away from the doctor's office. He will not go any further.

  I arrive at the office, which is deserted but not, and knock. A voice says, “Are you a cop?” And “You have to tell me if you're a cop!"

  "I am not a cop,” I say, and the door opens.

  He is tall and very thin. There is no arrow in his chest, but a strip of white bandage runs down his torso like a sash, spotted with red. He makes me sign a thing. He says, “Look, you have to sign . a thing."

  He lays me down on a table, which is not lined with paper—and there is no gown with a snowflake print.

  "Does this involve lasers?” I ask.

  "You'll be pretty doped up,” he says.

  "Is that the medical term?"

  Carrion pulls my arm out straight and pushes a needle into it. I ask, “What will it be like after?"

  And Carrion says, “You won't care."

  I blink and he says, “You won't care,” again, and I believe him. I won't care and I won't care that I don't care, so what's the use in worrying about it. It's pointless. It's like thinking about yourself in your grave after you die and wondering whether or not you'll be cold.

  "Try to relax,” says the doctor. The phone rings and he answers it, “Kathleen?!” There are half-moons of something greenish-gray beneath his fingernails.