Blood & Gristle Read online

  So he did, but inside he knew.

  Deep inside where it mattered, he knew.

  But still, each night, late, on the precipice of dreams, a bit of that uneasy fear resurfaced and Freddie would lay awake, restless, tracing patterns upon the ceiling of his darkened room, trying to communicate with the God that had taken a shine to him (to him!).

  God kept quiet, which was just as well, he already went out of his way to make sure Freddie got born, but in those moments of divine silence, divine disregard, divine faith, waning, uncertain, maybe-maybe, Freddie couldn’t stop picturing himself, not as a child of the lord’s light, but newborn, baby skin wrinkled and slick with placenta, wriggling, smearing its slimy viscosity against cool, cylindrical walls of glass.

  So then, being one of God’s special miracles had its advantages.

  In Fred’s twenty-fifth year, his life was spared. Death, the bastard animal, dug its precise claws deep, reaching into his animas and squeezing. It clung and thrashed with wild, unrelenting abandon until Fred’s blood began to thin and his brain sputtered. Blackness overcame, and just when Death was about to clamp down and finish the job, it backed off and seeped into the ether.

  A group of frantic doctors revived him.

  Fred opened his eyes to intense white and for a moment he thought that he had died. He kept waiting for God to speak to him, to tell him that there’d been a mistake all those years ago and his miraculous birth was a fluke, a man-made violation. It was time to come home. It was time to come undone. But then his eyes adjusted and the busy room came into focus. Mounting panic dissipated. Relief swelled and lulled him back into unconsciousness. His brain settled, dreaming of near fatal events.

  It was a hot, summer day, the hottest one thus far and pungent sweat flowed in streams. The air was alive with sizzling, tangible thickness. Fred gathered with friends at the river to do a little cooling down. Herculean currents threaded the silt heavy waters and kept most on the shore surface splashing and toe dipping.

  But not Fred – not “Fearless” Fred as they all came to call him.

  There was no gratification to be found upon the riverbank. No, it was Fearless Fred against the mad stream of urgent water, or it was nothing at all. He smacked his skin and beat his chest and did a little posturing for the ladies and then waded into the forceful stream. Head down, slick and controlled, he swam from one riverbank to the other and then scaled a cluster of massive rock formations. Standing atop the mountain of stone he raised his arms and bowed for the wide eyed gazers dotting the shoreline. Power surged, his muscles tingled, his brainpan hummed.

  Fred took in a huge breath, brought his arms down, and said a little prayer. Breathing in, breathing out, biorhythms evening to a steady pulse, he crouched and prepared to dive.

  He’d done it before, hundreds of times, leaping from this, jumping from that, his nickname well earned and well worn. Confidence coursed quicksilver though his veins. Untouchable. Invincible. Chosen. He wasn’t mortal like all those cheering and guffawing below, he wasn’t born via lust or human accident; he was created, engineered, designed, molded to near perfection by the careful hand of God himself.

  Closing his eyes he held his breath and bound over the edge. Splashing down everything went fine. The rushing water frothed around his frame, kissing and cooling skin, but somewhere beneath the surface he flipped and his face struck a sharp collection of rocks jutting from the bottom of the riverbed. Fred’s right cheek cleaved open. A gaping gash puckered and yawned like a wide, jawing mouth. Deep red floated from the wound in slow, thick flourishes.

  The cold river water gave his blood life, made it strangely animate. It encircled him like a scarlet sash, warming his skin in patches, undulating hypnotic, and then running the river’s ceaseless pull, travelling murky waterways, clear waterways, murky waterways, clear waterways to the infinite sea beyond.

  Stars shone and he passed out before he surfaced.

  In the hospital, he tenderly ran his fingers over the stitches. The ridged skin and taut thread sloped smooth and clean. Remarkable to think a measly piece of string and a sure set of hands kept his face from coming apart and falling out of his skin. He stared at the tubing intravenously pumping vital fluids into his arm.

  Life, he thought.

  Life.

  Alive.

  Life.

  Doctors.

  God.

  Cliffs.

  Our insides – vulnerable and soft, desperate to believe anything that will keep them safe and warm and inside where they belonged.

  Whose hand did the molding?

  Whose hand?

  Whose?

  So, just, like, that, Frederick’s wife died. One moment she was talking as animated as ever, her pretty, brown eyes sparkling, her pink, hairless brow, where her meticulously shaped eyebrows used to rise and fall, rising and falling with enthused expression.

  Then nothing.

  Then complete silence.

  A tiny shudder cut her off mid-sentence. Her eyes blinked, once, twice, and then she was gone. Her last words echoed in Fredrick’s ears forever: “God works in mysterious w–”

  Upon her initial diagnosis, she was determined to stay away from hospitals. God’s will was God’s will. Fredrick argued and told her to listen to the doctors, but then the cancer teemed ravenous, ate her down to a nub, and she was forced to relent. Not that it did any good. She was still stolen away, still dissolved into the annals of time.

  Fredrick never stopped crying. The tears dried and sobs stilled and he looked like he was lost in a deep, cryless thought, but the weeping went on and on. A shivering, broken hollow continually throbbed beneath his heart. The world was filled with injustice and pain, but he was Special (or so he thought), a Miracle (or so he thought). Maybe not his wife, but she was his (and he, hers) and without her he wasn’t even the same person. Without her he was lost. Without her nothing made any sense.

  So who was he to trust?

  If they (God or Man) could take her away, who or what was he to believe in?

  When the cancer first appeared she assured him that God was watching – he of all people should know this, what with his miraculous birth and his near death experience and the good Lord sitting on his shoulder as bright and sure as the sun.

  And he did.

  He knew it.

  And he believed in her Faith.

  And for a time his old confidence, the devotion shaken from his soul by a jagged gaggle of stones at the bottom of a rushing river and the precise surgical hands of his medical saviors, returned and he no longer doubted.

  Until his wife’s assurances were crushed like clay.

  Until she couldn’t make it through a day without writhing in agony.

  Until she started puking everything and then puking nothing once everything worth puking had been puked out.

  Until doubt became his familiar.

  A new portent then?

  Science?

  Man?

  A ball of fire in his brain.

  Man molded. Not God.

  He had the proof. Glistening glass walls. Syringes. He himself an example. Not one of God’s miracles, but one of man’s inventions. And so he urged his wife, not in the common sensical fashion that most people encourage their loved ones to visit the hospital when they were wasting away with cancer, but rapt within the throes of epiphany. He pleaded with her on bended knee.

  “We need prayer, Freddie.”

  Her answer.

  But Fredrick dismissed religion because how could anything, any institution, any doctrine, that was supposed to care about you, destroy you?

  What good did prayer ever do him?

  How could God take his wife?

  How could God put her, the wife of a Miracle, through such torment?

  Answer: he, she, it, whatever, couldn’t.

  He didn’t, because God had nothing to do with it. It was all science and reason and biology. Or at least that’s what Frederick figured. Medical expertise pulled him
from the brink and it could do the same for his one and only. It had to. From the moment she was admitted, till the moment the machines of science lost her, he banked on it.

  Standing there looking at his wife’s lifeless body he went numb.

  He hoped God did exist, did care, did more than pulse globular, without shape, out of reach, in the so-called heavens.

  He hoped that his mother was right oh so many years ago.

  Wishful thinking.

  Unrealistic nonsense.

  But if not the Hand of Fate, perhaps the Comfort of Technology?

  It was all over now and the empty place inside demanded his full attention, but it was hard not to think such things what with the multitude of tubing running in and out of her. From her flesh they coiled into machines that Frederick had foolishly assumed guaranteed survival.

  The machines would never fail.

  As long as there was electricity and medical insurance they would never stop mid beep.

  They were designed to persevere no matter the circumstance.

  Just like him.

  Just like him from birth onward: a manufactured miracle.

  THE VELVET GOD

  His nail polish was chipped. Right forefinger, right thumb. Urban Decay wasn’t cheap. Thirty bucks at Hot Topic. Odd that he should think of such a thing at a time like this. Fashion was important though, agreed?

  Agreed.

  But this?

  THIS was monumental.

  His hair, his clothes, cosmetics, fingernail polish, all mattered very little.

  Still…he looked good.

  The nail polish was killer.

  Blood Red enamel.

  Slick and hot.

  Killer, except for those damn, unsightly nicks.

  Pyrus pushed the thought out.

  It persisted.

  How the hell did he chip a nail?

  He was ultra-careful. He had an ever-growing entourage of lackeys to do everything for him. All he had to do was just look pretty and perform.

  Leaning as he was, the aches set upon him and the chipped nail was forgotten as he honed in upon his locked arms. They were growing tired. His muscles were tense and straining. His knees ground rough into the unforgiving concrete slab. The corpse beneath him beckoned with dead eyed allure. Her mouth was partially open, the lifeless pink of her tongue still wet, still inviting. Even more affecting than the physical pressure (a pair of skinned knees, like his chipped nail polish, meant very little) or the dead girl’s pull, was the army of stares devouring his every action.

  A thousand points of light. Pinprick ogling. The crowd chirped and ruffled like an infinite murder of crows.

  The adoration felt oh so right.

  He sighed and waited for Jimmy to signal him with the flashlight. He was ready to go, needed to go, before his arms gave out on him, but the audience wanted Spectacle, they wanted a show, so he sighed again and ignored the dead girl beneath him. He sighed a third time and ignored the burn in his joints.

  A New Order song danced through his head. The picture you see is no portrait of me…

  Flexing, adjusting, he rolled his neck and turned his head to size up the congregating masses. Five hundred strong. There were freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors from six different high schools. Not too shabby considering six months ago he knew no one.

  Some of the crowd rolled their eyes and mumbled indecipherable tomes like crazy fundamentalists, others cheered and raved and held their cell phones aloft, snapping pictures as if they were at a Marilyn Manson concert. Some clutched their hearts and shut their eyes tight. Seeing or not, Pyrus could feel all of them staring. Jovial or devote, they all believed in him. Each and every one of them, for their own personal reasons, believed in him.

  In him.

  He was a savior; he was making sense of the senseless.

  He was deconstructing their pseudo-gods and building them new ones.

  He was giving them something tangible to devote themselves to.

  Pyrus adjusted his red velvet cape so that it hung just so, revealing, but not too revealing, sexy, but not too much skin.

  The song persisted.

  It’s too real to be shown to someone I don’t know, and it’s driving me wild makes me act like a child…

  Peter Smithson traded his bottle-thick glasses for red contacts and heavy eyeliner. His bell-bottoms were dyed black and accentuated with combat boots. No more pocket protectors, no more calculator envy.

  But first…

  Back in the sixth grade when shit like looks, clothing, and personality started to matter, Peter obliviously carved himself a niche. He entered the temple of Geekdom unaware and unfazed and…blissfully happy.

  He played Dungeons and Dragons, loudly, during lunch and after school.

  He toted reading materials proudly.

  He picked his nose if the need arose.

  Middle school kids tolerated the social suicide, but little sensors in their little brains began to thrum and they casually began to distance themselves. One by one, they left him to his own weird devices and while Peter remained Peter, the divide was growing more and more evident.

  Three years later, friendless and content in his own little fantasy world, hormones caught up and spun his brain. Actualization dawned. He woke up in the middle of his ninth grade year and suddenly realized that cruelty hurt. He realized that he needed friends. He noticed that other kids made fun of his deep knowledge of clerical magic. They snickered behind his back.

  And when the other kids noticed he noticed, they went from teasing from afar to punching him and humiliating him and throwing his AD&D books and supplemental manuals and twenty-sided, and twelve sided, and eight sided die in the slimy, stinky garbage cans behind the cafeteria.

  Self awareness killed. All the time.

  What people thought of him mattered. All the time.

  On the brink. All the time.

  And it continued and continued and continued, ceaselessly, day in and day out. The more it seemed to bother him the rougher it got.

  Sharks loved the smell of blood.

  So, alone and afraid and determined, he stripped naked, sat in his hall bathroom and gave them what they wanted.

  Lots and lots of it.

  Gallons of it.

  Sticky red torrents, shooting from his opened wrists like geysers – spraying the tiled walls of the bathroom with salty frustration.

  Beneath him – a beautiful, white flower. Decay flittered, new and busy and Pyrus found her infinitely more arresting than the living, breathing beauties watching raptly from the impatient throng.

  Jimmy waved his arms and flashed the flashlight twice.

  Almost.

  Pyrus shifted his sore arms and worked at wrapping the limp beauty’s pale, cold legs around his.

  One leg.

  It bent and hooked and stayed.

  Another leg.

  It bent and hooked and slipped.

  He repositioned himself and hooked the leg again. Again he shifted. The little tattoo just above her pubis, the pentagram thingy, caught his eye. He stared at it for a second, mesmerized, his thoughts tunneling inward, wrapping themselves around wordless ciphers, anti-memory, instructions.

  His cock burned.

  Hot.

  So hot.

  As if aflame.

  The crowd noticed. He could see the fire echoing in their eyes.

  The uber-dork reinvented himself.

  Somehow, someway, he did it.

  The surge of geek culture – computers and videogames and reality TV (thank you Beauty and the Geek, thank you The Pick-up Artist, thank you G4) – gave him hope, boosted his confidence, made him cry and laugh at the same time, made him curse the world for keeping him down, made him see the only difference between a nerd and a cool kid was that reality TV mainstay, the makeover.

  Never mind his bulbous head and too skinny frame.

  Never mind his suicide attempt.

  He was a new man. Sixteen. Golden. Eage
r. His flesh was malleable, his hair begging for style, his chakras wide open and hungry, hungry for an edge.

  Geek chic.

  Nerd power.

  Embrace it. Embrace it. Embrace it.

  Not that he’d ever climb to the top of the social scale. No, the Plastics still looked down on him. But gelled up, eyeliner applied thick, he was a little cooler, a little mysterious. Nobody laughed at him, but then nobody cared much either.

  Not at first.

  According to the doctors he was dead for approximately one minute and thirty-three seconds. They revived him and pumped him full of plasma and in conjunction with his recovery he went through millions upon millions of hours of therapy.

  Doctors asked him about everything.

  EVERYTHING.

  And he answered truthfully, unashamed of his disdain for humanity, of his disgust, of his fear.

  They asked him everything.

  And he complied.

  They asked him Everything about school and sex and socialization, everything, but they didn’t ask him anything about death. Not one word. Not one.

  They didn’t ask him what happened during the minute and thrity-three seconds he was dead.

  They didn’t ask about the infinite void that infested his soul and blazed a series of ancient runes and symbols, pentagrams, sixes, crosses, into the fabric of his being.

  They didn’t ask what they meant.

  They didn’t ask about the wordless voices that filled his broken spirit with hope.

  The external wounds healed fast. The internal ones folded away clean. Nice, red lumps circumvented Peter’s wrists. A whole year away. He begged to go back to school. Near death had taught him some lessons and he was ready to be assimilated. He couldn’t fulfill purpose from his bedroom. The doctors signed off. He enrolled as a junior with a promise to attend summer school and night classes to make up missing credits.

  Acclimation came slow. The nerds feared him, the jockos feared him, the misfits feared him. Something different fired in his eyes, like he knew more, like he understood the world on a whole different level. He had been somewhere none of them had. Somewhere none of them could imagine. Somewhere even he couldn’t understand. Somewhere that still hummed inside of him.