Kissing Carrion (12 page)

THE FIRST TIME I
cut myself, on the lid of a tin I'd been opening, it was inadvertent. I stumbled as I lifted it free, and the sharp, round edge slid deep into the fleshy underside of my arm, freeing a flap that swung wide with every movement. Blood broke from the wound in a full, black pulse; I had to hug it closed, the knuckles of my other hand white with effort.

But when my mother saw it, her eyes went wide as stars. She cooed encouragement to me all the way to the hospital.

It was the first time she had spoken directly to me in over two months.

Afterward, when her interest dimmed again—directly proportionate to my rate of healing—I realized that I had been once more consigned to the roster of the invisible: All those inconvenient living shadows who walk, and speak, and have the unmitigated gall to get between her and the endless current of the passing dead, whose faces she spends her days scanning for any sign of recognition. For the familiar features of my brother Ethan, born ten years before me, who joined the Parade when I was only five.

Because we are none of us so real to her as he has always been, haloed like we are in mundane and unwelcome skins of light. We're chores, tying up her time, diverting her attention from the
real
task at hand.

Weekends, I walk the streets with my Ghoster friends, all white-face and caked mascara—cheekbones and noses colored out skull-style, conspicuous by their absence. We go cocooned in velvet and chiffon, in white and black and grey, shod in claw-toed boots with heels too high for comfort, our veils and trains left trailing. Strutting silent, our walkmen left ostentatiously blasting—a steady stream of noise-whisper from one-name bands, recognizable only in closest proximity: Curve, Coil, Hole, Tool, Lard.

And in and about and around us, always, the real ghosts glide—vivid phantoms that eddy like smoke, glitter like scales. A mist and a haze of constant motion, flashing by like spokes in some profane prayer-wheel: Bright slices of darkness, strobe-quick, trimmed in self-doused light.

A girl with jewels for teeth, eels for hands. An old man inching himself up the street, slithering belly-down, pulled along on an anchorless rope of shining hair. Shark-toothed grins. Silent, watch-face eyes.

The facts, then: It all started the year I was born; we post-Ghosties call it the Infestation. And what it means is Toronto remade, slipped through some cosmic crack and out again onto an “other side” that soon turned out to be
the
Other Side. Phenomena aplenty, both actively malign and strangely beneficial, measurably physical and apparently spiritual: Cold spots, words written on walls, knockings, mutterings, whisperings, ghost lights, radiant boys, warning shrieks; apports, transports, automatic writing, ectoplasm, mediumistic possession. Anything and everything “weird,” with only a sort of consistent inconsistency as the sole established rule.

Faith doesn't seem to help, or hinder, for all the varieties of faith we have to spare—the multiculti mosaic at work, church to mosque to temple to bank to whatthefuckever. And sure, people naturally want to think there are rules to discover and follow—that if Torontonians only found out what it was that they “did” to “deserve” this happening to them, they'd be somehow able to defuse the situation; repent, atone, stop digging up the old Indian burial ground—no rules, or reasons, seem to apply.

Or, to put it another way: Clean, neat and boring as we've always been, we still might've done enough dirt to attract this, if it's even the kind of thing
needs
“attracting.” But there's not one damn thing from before or since to prove that anything
we
did is the reason it began . . . or the reason it continues.

So: Spirits, phantoms, specters, dopplegangers and harbingers erring always on the side of the surreal rather than the traditional; dog-headed men in tuxedos rather than werewolves, palely loitering
belles dames sans merci
rather than vampires. Monsters and witches and freaks floating ‘round on every corner, dead men—and women—dancing down every street.

But Cherry Street in particular, of course . . . home, weekly, to the Parade. Which Ethan watched, and followed, and—finally—

—joined.

Because much as Mom would never want to admit it, Ethan spent most of—my—life aping Toronto's ghosts too, almost the exact same way my friends and I do now . . . aside from going farther with the imitation, of course, and for substantially different reasons. If the papers I found hidden behind a grate in his bedroom wall are any indication, Ethan was seeking some kind of shortcut away from mortality—a crack of his own to slip through, sideways. To fall and lodge forever between those sharp, sharp teeth that hide unseen beneath the “normal” world's tight-shut lips.

And oh, it must've taken such amazing concentration, such amazing
effort
, to seek out his own demise at the Infestation's—hand? To engineer, single-handedly, his own transition from flesh to phantom.

But let's face it: Effort like that never goes unrewarded for long . . . as Ethan, along with all his fellow Parade Day attendees, soon found out.

They went out in the morning, to the top of Cherry Street, and they waited for the Parade to begin. And then, when it did . . . they followed it, all the way down to that bleak brick wall at the bottom that the Parade walks
through
each and every Saturday afternoon. Followed it out of this world—

—and into another.

Twelve years on, meanwhile, my mother still drifts alone in the wake of Ethan's disappearance. The fallout from his last gesture draws her like a tide, even now—especially what with him being no longer around to repeat it.

So I Ghost up, and go out, and stalk around the shadowy streets of my half-dead home-town, imperiously brushing elbows with the same
things
that took Ethan in: Ate him whole, washed him away, leaving nothing behind but the dry, picked bones of my mother's love . . . nothing left for me to hold onto, aside from a dull pretense to the same spectral status.

Sun
editorials aside, though, I don't Ghost up because I want to die. I do it because I want my mother to see me—or
want
to see me, at the very, very least, at least as much . . .

. . . as I already know she wants to see
him
.

* * *

Which is why the second time I cut myself, it was intentional—and the third, and the fourth, each time a little deeper: A nail from my pinkie, shed to win a wan maternal smile; the top joint of my index finger, to extort one more sympathetic word. Each a sacrifice spent on the altar of Mom's absent attention. Each gaining me just a hint of response, before she slips right back into the fog.

Lost and groping, over and over. And over.

But hey, I can wait. I still have both my eyes left to give, after all. My breath. My name.

“Ethan—”

“I'm Monica, Mom.”

“Yes, Ethan. I know.”

Well, she does
talk
to me, now; that's got to count for something.

Or so I struggle, mountingly, to reassure myself.

* * *

Because: In a city full of
real
dead children, it's me, my friends, the whole pathetic Ghoster subculture who've ceased to register—born on, around or after Parade Day, shoved aside under the shadow of a generation lost. Doomed, always, to make room for our parents' grief, to step aside for one more gulp of a far more precious sibling's enduring but elusive scent. To catch the waft of their hair—a passing, spectral caress—as they slip by.

We're memory's exiles, mere brief flesh. How can we possibly hope to compete?

Days like these, between dressing up and posing all weekend and working like a neutered dog all week (nose to the keyboard, bent almost double to peer blankly at the readout of my cubicle computer's screen), I swear I start to feel as though I already
am
what I only try so hard to seem: An unlaid ghost, eternally left behind—

—and not even
my
ghost, either.

It's on days like these that I feel the urge to cut myself rise up, and bite it back down so hard blood salts my mouth. Remember how good it once felt to be loved—
me
, for me alone—and then wonder, in turn, if what I think I remember is anything more than plain old wishful thinking.

At which point I cast my mind back even further, to my precocious high school days, reminding myself how—in Old English—the word “ghost” is the same as the word for “anger.”

I plan out my own final gesture, on days like these—something far too grand to ignore, far too big to overlook. Dream absently of how I'm going to make my mother watch as I act it through, and practice the speech I'll make for the occasion—the one that goes, and I quote:

“Look, Mom, look. So—how you like me now? Better . . . ”

. . . or . . . worse?

Because—when I pretend that I'm dead, like the rest of my Ghoster friends,
that's
when she likes me best; when I cut myself, scar myself, slash over my half-healed scars and let them form again, keloiding the wounds ‘til they puff like pastry. When I pepper my skin with fresh flesh flowers on her uninterested behalf, blood-blister-bruised and purple with relevance—always just one more, freely given, payment in pain for pain. One more for each of my mother's ceaseless, careless tears . . . the current of her mourning, washing me away piece by piece by piece: Tide to my rock, wave to my sand . . .

Yeah, she likes me “dead,” because it makes me more like Ethan. And the more I'm like Ethan, well—the more I'm like him, the more I
count
. Just a little.

And one day, maybe—one of these Infested Toronto days, when there's nothing left of me to cut away—I'll find the strength, at long, long last . . .

—to finally stop pretending.

We will pull down the mountains

And devour the stars

And there will be no darkness but ours.

RHODAJEAN SOKOLUK WALKS
with steady steps up the dark highway, toward a blurred mass of thoughts the signs on her path name Toronto. It's 3:35 on a Thursday morning, late November—though since Arjay's watch broke eighty miles back, she wouldn't know. Mickey Mouse's tiny hands hang loose beneath cracked glass, describing spastic arcs with the jolt of each new stride.

The night presses down on her with palpable weight, unbroken by headlights, unscarred by neon. A fine mist rises to cover her tracks.

Somewhere above, a 747 screams.

Look at her now. Thirteen years old, five feet seven inches. She wears a baggy grey sweatshirt over a brown-and-yellow plaid kilt whose hem barely brushes her knees. Across her flat chest, in pale mauve letters, the legend SACRED HEART OF JESUS BLEEDS FOR YOU may be dimly made out. Her arms swing limp at her sides; slender fingers, meant for a piano's keys or a guitar's strings, now tipped by splintered nails and caked with mud. She walks quickly, her eyes never leaving the unseen horizon. It's cold, but Arjay doesn't mind.

Her bare feet leave small, bloody prints in the gravel by the side of the road.

Arjay's thin mouth shapes a faint, triangular smile. No need to hurry. What she is coming for has waited this long—a few more hours changes nothing.

And the air around her takes on a quality suggestive of storm clouds massing to the north, black and heavy with snow.

Passing her, uncalled images spring to mind—reflections of a cold life in a distant land. Birds hanging frozen from telephone wires; milkweed caught by frost in mid-launch. Shallow bedrock graves.

* * *

Take me down baby

Take me where I wanna go

Take me down down down

Baby take me where I wanna go . . .

 

“Forget it, booger. ‘S mine, anyway.”

“Daddy said it was my turn! You don't play fair!”

“Says who? Besides, you'll just break it.”

 

Take me down baby now

Baby take me down

 

“Will not!”

“Will so, booger.”

“Won't! And don't you call me booger!”

“Why not? Broke it quick enough last time—snot-nose.”

“Don't you call me snot-nose, you—
rat-turd
!”

 

All the way down down down

Baby take me where I wanna goooo . . . .

 

“Snot-
nose
,
snot
-nose. Booger, booger,
booger
!”

Harold Monkson Junior, call him Hank, braces himself for a screech from the back seat. He isn't disappointed.

“Dah-
dee
! Jeannie called me—”

A booger, and she wasn't too far off, you little shit.

“Ronald, If I hear one more peep out of either of you about that Goddam Transformer, it's straight back to Buffalo and I'm not kidding.”

Vicious whispers greet this announcement. Under the parental guidebook, they qualify as silence. Hank inhales and coughs, spitting Marlboro smoke. The car reeks of three parts enforced proximity and one part greasy Chinese food. His vision started blurring at the border, and that throbbing just behind his left eye is surely an incipient migraine. And he can't find one station on this entire radio that isn't playing fucking disco.

 

Take me down baby now

Take me where I wanna go

All the way down down down

Take me where I wanna goooo . . . .

 

Christ, yes
, Hank pleads, inwardly.
Take her. Don't wait on my account.

Hank's a real estate agent. He lives in Toronto, his ex-wife—as of gaining custody—in Buffalo. So far, this simple strategy has kept his visits down to a minimum. But last Sunday, fortified by five beers and the promise of three weeks vacation time, Hank drove down and demanded his fatherly privileges. A decision he has since come to regret.

Heavily.

In fact, further discussion on the Transformer notwithstanding, he's beginning to seriously consider just turning the car around and—

— driving straight up the white line until he hits a truck.

What?

The disco singer croons on, her backup vocalists lapsing into a seemingly endless series of deep, orgasmic grunts. Behind him, Jeannie and Ronald have struck up a blessed truce, Transformer discarded in favor of comics and green Day-Glo Slime. Before him, the road falls away without a moment's pause, smooth as a lidded eye. Around him, silence.

But Hank feels a sudden prickling of sweat. He grips the wheel, cold. His palms are wet.

And he couldn't tell you why if he tried.

* * *

A quarter-moon sweats over Barrie.

Seven miles gone, police have just entered the last gas station Hank drove by while Jeannie and Ronald set up a steady whine, imploring him for ice cream, phone calls and trips to the little boys' room. Officer Sam Woo throws the adjacent diner's kitchen door wide, gun up. The owner lies slumped in one corner, holding a shotgun and wearing a big grin. Nearby, his wife Marie sprawls face down in a tepid pool of rotisserie grease, a stencil of Goofy staring from her discarded apron.

In the TV lounge of Toronto's Gorman Manor, a halfway home for newly-released mental patients, a lanky man with grey hair works on a picture of Princess Leia in his Star Wars coloring book. Being very careful to stay within the lines, he gives her red eyes and navy-blue skin. His name is Myron Sokoluk, and he is Arjay's father.

Forty miles away and closing, Arjay runs her tongue across her teeth.

There are no stars left visible to watch.

* * *

Jeannie Monkson shifts irritably. She has a whopping crick in her neck.

Glancing over her shoulder, she sees her brother Booger—a.k.a. Ronald Jerome Monkson—gearing up for yet another whine about how he's so cold, or he really needs to pee, or can't we stop for a burger? Like nobody else in the whole wide world was every chilly, or hungry, or waiting for a try at the next available john.

How'd you like a “mixed-fruit cocktail” instead, Boog? Jeannie thinks, taking mental sight on the back of his head. Kpow, kpow, kpow-pow-pow.

Nothing happens. She turns away, sighing disgustedly.

Fact is, there's shit all to do on these trips with Dad except pick on Booger—no pun intended—and dream about Christopher Walken.

An utter hunk. Turns MY crank.

And
The Dogs of War
—what a bitchin' flick! Good plot, great locations, and beaucoup de good-lookin' babes dripping with sweat, up to their necks in mud. What else could you possibly ask for?

Real life pales by comparison.

Especially when the most immediate slice of that life involves being trapped in a rented Honda that stinks of stale cigarettes and egg rolls, out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere with a man she hasn't seen (or missed seeing) for the last five years, and a little brother she sees constantly every single day of her miserable existence.

Jeannie scratches idly at her cheek, testing the latest spot where she knows a pimple will sprout before morning.

Suddenly, she can draw the next three weeks like a map. A stream of lackluster events and petty annoyances, oozing inevitably toward the last big blow-up. Then a ticket home and a stiff good-bye at the station. With no parting gifts. With Booger weeping and drooling all over the seat near the window. With even the faintest possibility of a bus accident just stranding them in some roadside dive until Mom's newest flame can drive them back home, where they'll be grounded for three more weeks for causing her the trouble.

Booger stares intently at his left shoe, freckles swollen big as mumps in the dashboard's light. In the rear-view mirror, Hank's eyes seem the same red-shot shade of grey as moldy bologna.

Who are these people?
Jeannie thinks.
I don't know. And I don't care.

And she sees a hail of bullets peel their faces back to free the blood inside, their brains painting the wilderness.

Her hand tightens on an imaginary trigger.

Yes. ANYtime.

For a split second, she's all alone in somebody else's skull. Crushed silent by the view. Walking into the night, every pore gorged on its darkness.

Just breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

* * *

Under the cornfields which bracket the highway, animals stir restlessly in their long sleep, hearing the beat of a measured tread which chills their cold blood even further. A raccoon curls tight, cracking open the end of a rabbit bone as his teeth grind together; sharp white splinters pierce his gums. Mice put their tiny paws over their ears, and burrow deeper. A knot of garter snakes strangles itself.

An ant-hill's entire winter supply of eggs withers, as the sole of Arjay's left foot blocks out the sky.

Suddenly, she pauses in mid-stride. She sniffs the air.

A car is coming.

* * *

Never, in his dreams, is he Booger. They call him by much sweeter names in the world behind his eyes, which he visits as often as the bark and babble of more mundane reality will let him. That candy-colored world where no one ever yells, whose inhabitants comprise the entire toy section of his mother's consumer catalogues. Like Chuck E. Cheese, but better. Where it's his birthday every day.

Where he is absolute ruler.

Where Jeannie and Hank lie, screaming, stretched taut on the rack of his fertile imagination.

In Booger's world, he is King Ronald, the First and Only. And they call him Master.

* * *

Ah.

Booger's thoughts graze Arjay, clumsily. They seethe, full of a bile she drinks like wine. Only a sip, though; he's young.

She turns her attention to the others.

Hank. And—Jeannie.

Scratch them. They bleed as deeply, if all unknowing. Very close. And getting closer.

Yesss.

And the hunger grips her, keen as love. Somewhere, someone whispers:

Feed and be strong, my love. Strong enough to kill them. Or anyone else.

Strong enough—

—to eat the world.

(Time enough for that, though. Later.)

With one foot on either side of the white line, Arjay turns, and pauses. Folding her arms, she readies herself. She holds up a fallow mirror to those shallow minds rushing toward her, paining her with their petty hopes and dreams. She holds it high, and a reflection grows, a more accurate one than any of them can stand to look at for long.

When they come, they will find her waiting.

* * *

“Are we there yet?”

For a moment, Hank stares. Jeannie meets his eyes, her own full of a contempt level enough to goad him beyond surprise. He snaps:

“What do you think?”

Jeannie leans forward. A smile tugs at her lips; almost, but not quite, a smirk.

“I think you're lost—Dad.”

Click.

Stepped in it there, didn't you?
someone says conversationally.
Traps work both ways, Hank-o. That's why they come with instructions.

“Shut
up
,” he hisses.

Jeannie recoils.

Booger's wide awake now, watching the two of them in rapt fascination. The green Slime drips, forgotten, down the side of his leg.

Almost as good as TV
, Hank thinks. Then:
It's starting.

What's
starting?

Christ, I'm getting hysterical
.

Jeannie's smile has hardened, near enough to grim to call it cousin.

“Stop the car.”

“Don't be stupid,” Hank says, automatically.

Quietly: “So now I'm stupid?”

Click.

All right. All. Right.

“Yeah,” Hank begins. The words are a cut vein, too fast to catch and too wounded to plug. “Yeah, that's right. You're a stupid little girl who wears too much makeup, and listens to too much crap on that stupid walkman, and thinks the world owes her something, which it doesn't. Any more than I do.” Pause. “And what do you think of
that
?”

Jeannie's eyes hold Hank's. Beneath them, something familiar stirs. Something akin to the same sticky stew of rage currently aboil behind his own.

“I think you can go fuck yourself,” she says.

Booger shrieks, clapping his hands next to Hank's ear with all the subtlety of a mortar shell explosion. “Jeannie said the F-word!” he sings happily.

“Fuck you too, Booger,” Jeannie shoots back.

Booger drums his heels on the back of Hank's seat, transported. “Jeannie said the F-word
again
!” he howls.

The road swims before Hank's eyes. “
Shut UP
, Booger,” he hears himself say.

“
Dah-dee
!”

Jeannie knocks Booger aside and leans forward. “Gimme the keys.”

Hank glances back at the road, and finds it whipping by so fast it's starting to blur.

We weren't going this—

The odometer, spitting miles.

And Hank realizes that the ache he feels in his leg comes from the fact that he's been pressing steadily down on the accelerator ever since this conversation began.

“Jeannie—” he starts. She squeezes—five sharp, pink-and-blue varnished points, stretching his jacket thin enough to rip.

“
Gimme.
”

“The
fuck
I will!”

Booger is in seventh heaven. “
You
said the F-word, Daddy!” he screams, slinging his full prepubescent weight against Hank's other shoulder.

Hank cries out in pain.

It is at exactly this moment that they see Arjay.

* * *