Infernal Angel (9 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Infernal Angel
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Walter couldn’t get it up.
Not even at the virile age of eighteen and being straddled by the living summation of female beauty. Walter’s crane would not rise. She’d of course sweetly consoled him with comforting words like, “Oh, honey, don’t worry, it happens sometimes” or “You’re just nervous, that’s all.” Stuff like that. Walter, indeed, was very nervous. This was his first time, blast it all. If there really was a God, He was having a big laugh. Walter wanted to lose his male virginity just like any male virgin wanted to, and to lose it with the girl of his dreams would’ve been even better. But, alas, all that he would lose on these nights was sleep.
“So,” Colin chided on. “You’re
not
getting laid.”
“Shut up!” Walter yelled back
“You’re doing all that work for her, and she’s not even hauling your ashes.”
“Be quiet!”
What was the use? Colin didn’t understand anything about love. He had all the women he wanted, and all of them were dancers at the local strip joint. Colin was just as nerdy looking as Walter, but the only difference between them was that it had been Colin, not Walter, who’d won the hundred million dollars in the state lottery.
Meantime, his love for her grew, as did the time he spent doing her assignments and prepping her for exams. Walter, in his eighteen-year-old romantic idealism, believed that he was in a budding relationship. And those guys he kept seeing her with? The jocks, the guys in letterman jackets, the football players who looked bigger than most compact cars? They were just friends of hers. Sure, girls had male friends. Nothing wrong with that. Just because they were opposite sexes didn’t mean something was going on. Right?
Just as Walter knew that an anomalus range of 2.5 to 8 electron volts was necessary to achieve plasmotic self-ionization, he knew that Candice loved him and would one day be his wife.
But back to that conversation he’d been having with his brother. Colin said: “Hey, did you hear the one about Candice robbing a bank? She tied up the safe and blew the guard!”
“Shut up!” Walter yelled while tapping out a quick paper on small energy loss during elastic collisions of electrons in magnetic fields.
“She doesn’t love you,” Colin reiterated.
“I’ll have you know that I have a date with her. Tonight.”
Colin smiled. “Oh, so she’s got another math assignment for you to do, huh?”
“No, she doesn’t. The date’s at her dorm, smart guy. She invited me over.”
“She’s got another math assignment for you to do...”
He’ll eat crow when Candice and I get married.
Walter couldn’t wait. He looked at his watch. “See ya, Colin. I’ve got to be over there in ten minutes,” and then Walter headed for the door. As he left, Colin was just shaking his head, assuring his inept brother, “She won’t be there ...”
Candice wasn’t there. Walter had the girl at the dorm desk call up to Candice’s room ten times. “Walter,” the girl said, getting annoyed after the eighth or ninth time, “she’s not there.”
Walter considered every possibility. Of course, she was there—she said she’d be, she invited him over. There was no way that a girl as considerate as Candice would stand him up.
Impossible...
She took a nap and forgot to set her alarm. She had a late class. She lost track of time at the library. “Could you ring her room again, please?” Walter asked. “She was probably just taking a shower.” By now the desk girl was irate: “Walter, Jesus Christ. Candice has not been taking a shower for the last TWO HOURS!”
“Please?”
“All right, look. I’ll call one more time, and if she doesn’t answer, you’ll leave, right?”
“Okay,” Walter agreed because he knew in his heart that Candice would never treat him like this.
She was just taking a long shower,
he felt convinced.
She’s there.
“Tenth ring,” the girl informed. “She’s not there. Now—go home!”
Walter was crushed and, as promised, he turned and left. He would’ve been even more crushed if he’d overheard what the desk girl said in the phone right after the door closed behind him. She said, “Thank God, he’s finally gone. Tell Bucky I said hi, Candice.”
 
Eventually, Walter’s dejection transformed into more denial.
She was probably just real tired, from her classes. She’ll call tomorrow and apologize. Of course she will! She loves me!
He meandered across campus, as night fell. Two jocks in letterman jackets passed without even noticing him. “You put the blocks to Candice yet?” one asked, and the other responded, after chuckling, “Couple nights ago after the finals mixer—shit. I didn’t just fuck her, I stuffed her like a turkey.”
“What a woman!”
“She’s like a machine you can’t turn off. Just fill her with beer and let ’er rip!”
Walter scowled at this rough talk, and certainly they weren’t talking about Candice—not
his
Candice. Some other girl named Candice, some jock tramp. When Walter turned the corner at Campus Drive, heading back to his own dorm, he spotted red and white lights flashing stroboscopically.
Ambulance,
he quickly realized. Then he saw cops and several tow trucks. Someone in a gold Dodge Colt had run the red light at the circle. Walter peered closer, then thought,
Oh no
...
A pedestrian had been hit in the crosswalk, a philosophy student, no doubt. Spiral notebooks lay flapping in the street, along with copies of Sartre’s
No Exit
and Soren Kierkegaard’s
The Concept of Dread.
A guy with glasses and a trimmed beard lay on an ambulance gurney, his neck obviously broken. Dead, Walter saw. He noticed the odd tattoo on the guy’s left arm: NARRATION IS MY ENEMY. No, Walter thought.
Reckless drivers are.
The two EMTs by his side didn’t even bother with CPR. The Colt had front-ended the flag pole in the center of the circle, a campus cop handcuffing the fat, inebriated driver. “Fuckin’ pedestrians, Jesus Christ, the guy just walked out in the middle of the street.”
“Yeah, because he had a walk light, asshole,” the cop said. “Thank God for the new drunk driving laws. Five years, no parole, on any DWI/vehicular manslaughter charge.”
As the EMTs scribbled on clipboards, Walter just kept staring at the dead guy on the gurney. His eyes were crossed, tongue hanging from an agape mouth. He wore a white t-shirt that read PIL: THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET.
“Fuck, the shitface is gettin’ froggy with the cop,” one of the EMTs observed.
Walter looked over. The fat guy who’d been driving the car only had one wrist cuffed; now he was swinging at the cop with his other hand, shouting, “All I had was a couple of beers! I ain’t going to prison for five fuckin’ years!” and—SMACK!—the loose cuff hit the cop right in the face.
“Kid! Hold this for me!” the EMT said and slapped the clipboard into Walter’s chest. Walter took it, startled, as the two EMTs rushed the fat guy and aided the cop. The scuffle didn’t last long, but Walter, for a reason he couldn’t identify, couldn’t focus. He wasn’t watching the ruckus, he was looking at the dead man on the gurney.
The dead man was leaning up now, on one hand behind him. His other hand grasped the back of his own head by the hair, angling the broken neck. A few vertebrae crunched as he did this. The dead man was holding his head so to look right at Walter.
Walter’s bladder emptied.
“Sartre was wrong,” the dead man said. “Hell
isn’t
other people.”
“Huh?” Walter managed to respond.
Then the dead man said, “The showerhead knows more about us than we know about ourselves.”
Walter gaped.
“What?”
Then: “Hell is a place, a city. A
big
city.”
Walter spun toward the EMTs, shouted, “Excuse me! This guy over here! He’s not dead,” but after a moment of dumbfoundedness, he stood still, blinking. When he’d shouted the words, no actual sound came out of his mouth.
“I’ll see you there soon,” the dead man continued. Now he grinned insanely, holding his neck straight.
“See me... where?” Walter stammered.
“In the city.”
Walter stared down, quivering.
“Your destiny awaits,” the man whispered, but now his voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing together.
“What?”
“Embrace your destiny.”
The dead man’s eyes crossed again, and he collapsed back onto the gurney. Walter dropped the clipboard and ran away.
He wouldn’t shoot himself in the head until tomorrow.
Chapter Four
(I)
The Halman Map Library
Laurel, Maryland
Penelope’s orgasm struck with the sign-in clock—at midnight. For a moment it felt like the entire building was shaking, but she knew it was just her, all her desires unlocked yet again. Gary always spent himself quickly—like in a minute or two—which in itself would’ve been aggravating as hell, but he never failed to fulfill the rest of the obligation mechanically, i.e., with certain devices known as “marital aids.” Didn’t matter that they weren’t married, and, Penelope, in truth, preferred this. It got right down to business. Gary had a considerable cache of such battery-driven implements, and tonight, as Penelope lay spread-legged and flattened on the guard room desk—wearing nothing but blue socks—Gary slowly withdrew one of the “toys” he’d brought along, an eight-inch, bump-riddled vibrator molded from translucent-orange rubber which Penelope fondly referred to as “Mr. Bumpy.” She gasped once, in a final blissful hitch, as the device was extracted from her thrumming privates.
“There,” Gary said. “That should simmer ya down some.” He hauled up his Levi’s and loped shirtless to the coffee pot, looking around.
Good God,
Penelope thought.
I just came like a freight train.
And at that moment she felt like she’d just been run down by one. When she tried to get up off the desk, she quit in the middle of the process, still too exhausted from the explosive release of her ecstasy.
Gary lived in a boarding house, so they could never do it at his place, and Penelope lived with her infirm mother, so her place was equally out of the question. The two of them had been dating for about a year ... or, well, perhaps “dating” wasn’t the word. A different transitive verb—one that started with an F—might be a better designation. Penelope’s workplace was about the only spot they could do it, save for rare occasions when either of them might have an extra forty bucks for a night at one of the fleabag motels near the Army base. Gary was unemployed most of the time, having recently gotten out of the Army himself. He’d actually been released short of the finish of his hitch, for urinating in the battalion commander’s coffee pot. The accusation was hard to refute at his court martial, when the JAG prosecutor had shown the court the actual security video of Gary smiling as he completed the act. Thirty days in the stockade and a bad conduct discharge. His only consolation was the fact that the battalion commander had drunk from that pot all day before the crime was reported. As for Penelope, the employment office had gotten her this job when her welfare ran out. She was the night-shift security guard.
Now Gary was poking around with a cup of coffee. He looked down the hall, then looked out the window into the night. “This sure is a weird place you’re working at,” he commented.
He’d said that before, but Penelope never knew what he meant. The small brick building at the end of Soil Conservation Road—the Halman Map Library—was a Maryland Department of the Interior facility, quite unassuming. It occupied the top of a modest hill on an isolated tract of land just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Most of this land comprised a protected nature and wildlife preserve, which Penelope never understood, because there was no wildlife that she could see, and no forests, just open, rolling hills. Penelope could scarcely believe they needed security at all in such a place—who would want to steal maps?—but she needed the job.
At last, she was able to sit up on the desk, still blissfully exhausted. “What’s weird?” she asked, eyeing his butt in the tight jeans. However, it wasn’t necessarily his butt she was most interested in. It was the bumpy orange vibrator sticking out of the back pocket. “It’s just a job, just some place the state needs security.”
“A friggin’
map
library?” he questioned. “What kind’a shit is that? I never heard of a map library.”
“They store maps here,” she said. “For the state government. Land grids, maps of sewer lines and gas lines, stuff like that.”
Gary was still perturbed. “Sounds like bullshit to me. That kind’a thing is all computerized these days. And who’s gonna try to steal a bunch of maps anyway? And even if someone did, what are you gonna do? You don’t even have a gun.”
This was true. The company for which she worked was not licensed to arm their guards. She’d never felt threatened here, though. Nothing ever happened, but she saw his point. What if something
did?
Then she answered, “The other guards have guns.”

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