A Gentle Hell (2 page)

I found Jeanine shortly after.

“We’re going to die,” I said.

“So I guess you haven’t fixed the car.” Jeanine said.

“No.”

“We’re not going to die. Don't be silly.”

“This died,” I said. I cradled the skull like a baby.

“Everything dies,” she said, “but not us. Not today.”

“Why not today? Seems like a good a day as any.”

“I think you may be a little bit delirious,” she said, “give me the skull.”

“No. I like it. It’s mine.”

“We’re not going to die, okay?” she said. “Not today.”

“Why?”

“Because next summer we’re going to go to a lake.
A wonderful, glittering, sparkling, cool lake, and we’re going to forget there was this horrible heat, and we’re going to swim out so far we can’t touch the bottom. We can’t go to the lake if we die. We’re going to the lake,” she said, “so we’re not going to die.”

In my dreams sometimes, when I can manage to sleep, my brother is out in that desert with us and he is sitting on the ground with the sunlight refusing to touch his head. There is a dark space around his eyes, like a black hole sucking out the features of his face. Behind him is a valley of glazed-eyed stuffed animals, dogs and cats and cattle, a legion of taxidermist creations.

“Dark energy,” he said. “Boxy was right, brother, you never escape the forces inside of you, you just subvert them, make them change shape. I’m going to stuff a black bear next. We have several easy payment plans for your evisceration. We take all major credit cards. They’re my favorite, the black bears.”

I drove to the clinic. I filled out all the forms in the crowded waiting room, surrounded by so many people waiting to be turned into zombies, so many people desperate for one good night’s sleep. When the nurse called for me I got up and she led me through an endless hallway of rooms. All the rooms were bleached white, white as bones, and it gave the building this aura of perpetual space, this inevitability. I looked into every room. I almost passed one room and then, when I saw who was inside, stopped in its doorway.

“Sir, we need to keep moving,” said the nurse.

“No,” I said. “No. See, I know this woman.”

Inside the room Boxy November lay on a steely surgical table while doctors took the machine out of her head.

“Sir,” the nurse said, “Sir.”

“I don’t want the operation anymore,” I said, “leave me alone.”

The nurse left. I stood outside the room and watched Boxy and the doctors. The machine came out of her head shiny,
ichor
- dark, glittering with her blood. It curled like a spider, silver points tipped with hot iron. Boxy breathed mechanically. The doctors placed the machine in a toxic waste receptacle. I watched her come out of her sleep in stages. When one of the doctors left the room, I grabbed his arm.

“Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said, “but sometimes when people come out of the sleep, they’re
very
disoriented. You know, they feel cold.”

I let him go.

Boxy came out of the room in a white hospital gown, her orange and blue hair unwashed and damp against her head. She rubbed her bare arm with her palm, squeezed.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’m here for you,” I said, “how do you feel?”

“Tired,” she said. “I want to take a nap.”

We left the clinic. I drove.

“They said when I woke up I would be in love,” she said.

“You are,” I said.

“What happened to my hair?” she asked.

“We can fix that later.”

“Where are we going?”

I didn’t respond. The light, that harsh angel-light, suffused the car. Boxy fell asleep against the car door with her hair plastered to the window. I rolled down my window. The warm air rustled her hospital gown, touched her limp wrists. We left the city and entered a near-abandoned countryside. I pushed the car up to ninety miles per hour, a hundred,
a
hundred and ten. The sun’s shadow came up out of the valley. I drove to the nearest lake. I hadn’t been to the lake since I was six years old, and it was smaller than I remembered. It cupped the sun in its head and
shimmered
a softer green-blue.

“Wake
up,
” I said to Boxy, “we’re here.”

“I just want to sleep,” she said, “let’s go home.”

“You’ve been sleeping for years, Boxy,” I said.

“Boxy?” she asked, “
who’s
Boxy?”

“Jeanine,” I said, “I mean Jeanine.”

We got out of the car.

“Why are we here?” Jeanine asked.

“I never got to take you to that lake,” I said, “you know, after the desert.”

“We broke up,” she said.

“I know, but now we’re here,” I said.

We walked to the pier. We were the only ones at the lake, us and the sun, dipping low to heat the water, and Jeanine stood at the edge of the pier in her hospital gown, the ties teased by the wind.

“You don’t have a machine in you, do you? Jeanine asked. She turned toward me.

“No,” I said, “I was going to get one, but something made me stop.”

“What made you stop?” she asked.

She turned back toward the water, reached behind her and untied the strings of her hospital gown. It fluttered around her hips and she caught it in one hand, held it out over the water, blue and orange hair blown off her neck, hospital gown struggling like a butterfly. I could count every vertebra on her back, touch the shoulder blades protracting like wings.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Deadhead,” she said.

She let the hospital gown go. It flew out of her hands and dropped into the water. She jumped into the lake.

The sun lit my fingers. I took off my shirt and jumped in the water after Jeanine, into the place where light overtakes the dark.

 
Your Demiurge is
Dead

It's been forty nights since Jehovah washed up on the Gulf of Mexico in three black trash-bags. After that, the Triple Goddess showed up at the White House and announced to a live television audience of thirty million that a new era had begun. This was right about the same time I answered an emergency call at four that morning and went down to Mimi’s trailer where she lived with a catatonic white boyfriend and twelve children. I pulled her oldest daughter dead out from the fennel in the backyard where she slit her wrists and lay down to die.

“I raised my kids better than that,” Mimi said, as my partner Thatch and I zipped up her daughter’s already-blue corpse into a body bag. The remaining children, who had Mimi’s dull green feral eyes and slack faces, hovered close to me.

“I can make you some sweet tea before you go,” Mimi said.

“Goddamn it woman,” Mimi’s boyfriend, whom I only knew as the boyfriend, called from his recliner, “nobody wants your goddamn sweet tea.”

“We’re very busy tonight, Mimi,” I said, “as you can see.”

I indicated the body bag.

“Perhaps some other time, then.
Come on kids, it’s past your bedtime,” she said.

But the children followed me out to where my police cruiser and an ambulance waited on the street. The paramedic was asleep in the front seat of the ambulance. Thatch and I put the girl’s body in the back. When I turned around there the children were, silent and sharp-faced in the dark.

“Are you married?” one of the girls asked Thatch. She was about sixteen
years
old, sick-skinny, with white hair like a powdered Christmas tree.

“Yep,” Thatch said, “twelve years now.”

She turned to me. “What is your name?” she asked. “Are you married?”

“Officer Redding,” I said.
“And no.”

“Why not?” she asked.

I looked over at Thatch. He shrugged. I looked back over at the girl, her brothers and sisters surrounding her like she was a satellite while they made hunger eyes and bit their hands.

“I don’t like the thought of someone else having a say in what I do or who I am,” I said.

“All relationships are about control,” she said. “What’s your first name, Officer Redding? My name’s Tuesday.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t really have time for this,” I said.

“It’s Bill,” Thatch said.

“My sister didn’t kill herself,” Tuesday said.

“What do you mean?”

“Will you marry me under the dogwood tree, Bill? Julie wanted to be married under the dogwood tree. We were all so mad at Julie. She was going to leave us and she was the only one who took care of us.”

“Tuesday, what do you mean your sister didn’t kill herself?”

I looked over at Thatch again. He was on his cell phone text-messaging someone, while there we were, surrounded by twelve children and empty Oklahoma farmland. The night rose like smoke. The stars and half-moon sliced off the ends of our fingers. I heard nothing but the children’s slow dance breath and my ribcage breaking and Thatch’s phone going click-click-click.

Tuesday moved toward me and I realized how tall she was, taller than me or Thatch, her bones a church ceiling.

“Did you know God died this week?” she whispered, her lips electric against my forehead.

“Yes,” I said.

“The preacher says God is inside all of us, but Momma said only rich people get to be God. I think she might be right.”

“Did someone kill your sister, Tuesday?” I asked.

She grabbed my hair in her fist and pulled my head back. She kissed me on the forehead.

“That’s all you’re going to get,” she said, “until after we’re married.”

She released me. I jerked back and hit my head on the ambulance. Thatch continued to text-message. Click click click. Tuesday and the children fled into the dark and disappeared, as if swallowed by a thick, black-tongued wave.

I woke the paramedic up by banging on the window and dragged Thatch to the squad car.

“I think we might have a murder case,” I said as I drove back into town. “You heard what that girl said, didn’t you, Thatch?”

“Who would murder one of Mimi’s poor, white-trash children? That girl was just messing with you.”

**********

When I got back home I couldn’t sleep so I watched late-night news. They were still showing the footage from when the Triple Goddess went to the White House. Everyone in America knew the country belonged to the gods, and not the politicians, but nobody really knew what to think of this new era. The Triple Goddess was a stunner, no doubt, wearing six-inch heels and cruel shadows, walking across the White House lawn in the same dresses that Angelina Jolie wore at the Grammy’s. She had tall, severe bodies, because Cosmo said the most successful women were the tallest, and the most beautiful, but she was a goddess and the bodies couldn’t look too innocent, or welcoming, and could only be sexual in the most alien way.