The Bone Parade (14 page)

“It’s show time!”

No more smart words from Diamond Girl. She’s been smoldering since my rejection of her fanny thrusting overture. She stares at me, not sullen like her parents, but with contempt. I can feel it as clearly as I can smell the mold in the dirt down here. Her flirtations have taken flight, and now she’s angry. I like her even better this way; truth be told, I find all the spite and resentment very seductive. If I stoke it carefully, it could explode in the most delightful fury. The fact that I still bother toying with her says a lot about her hold on me. She’s the girl I could not stop thinking of in my high school calculus class, the one who wore short skirts and soft sweaters. She’s the girl I bought an espresso from every day during my last year in college. She’s every girl who ever preoccupied me, all the Wendys of my life (for Wendy was the young woman with long blond hair I found every excuse imaginable to talk to during my year as a visiting artist in Madison, Wisconsin).

I’m about to add to the Vandersons’ emotional imbalance by playing another episode of
Family Planning #8
, the one in which I take the final impression of their fifteen-year-old daughter. If anything can make Diamond Girl squirm, this is it.

Before I performed my legerdemain on
#8
’s dark-haired beauty, I’d given the girl a healthy injection of methamphetamine, the preferred drug of the working class, those poor plebes who must stay awake for two, three shifts at a time. I don’t want anyone in my families passing out. Isn’t that always the easy way? I despise fainting spells. It’s such a weak response to terror, such an abject attempt to cheat the only emotion worth savoring.
There is no escape
. I tell the Vandersons this. I also tell them that the young girl they’re about to see refused to work out, and what I did to her I’ll do to each of them if they don’t push themselves harder. After this, the weights will feel different in their hands. A little lighter, yet more real. A passport to that illusory land of safety, freedom.

I expect that even Diamond Girl will be affected. In a few seconds she’ll see that
Family Planning #8
’s first born had a body not unlike her own. She’ll be able to identify with her, and this, if nothing else, should greatly diminish Diamond Girl’s own sense of immortality, or fashionable cynicism (whichever it happens to be).

Without another word I turn the tape on, and for once I see I’m right about Diamond Girl. She actually turns away when she sees what I’ve done to that young girl, and says absolutely nothing. And this is only the beginning of the show! There’s so much more to come. I feel an elation unlike any I have known for weeks. Diamond Girl squirms! What is it that finally does it? What makes her tremble? It’s the alginate. I have covered the front of
#8
’s entire body with it, and that includes the girl’s face, her lips, and finally, with an oversized plug, her left nostril.

This leaves only the right one, the sole source of air. The girl’s shuddering is visible right from the beginning (visible and outstanding!). She shudders from fear, from terror, but mostly from the lack of air. Try sucking in
all
your body’s oxygen needs at a time of intense physical crisis through one nostril. Imagine yourself running up a steep mountain, and you have but one air hole. It
can
be done, but not with ease. And not for long. It’s the fear of suffocation in a mind already twitching from a dose of speed, a mind hallucinating a rich grotesquery of meth monsters, that makes the impossible effort to breathe enough air as acutely painful as the amputation of a limb. Believe me, I know of what I speak.

I’ve used many methods over the years to generate fear. I’ve tried blunt force, sharp knives, and a variety of power tools. I’ve even pried loose more than a few teeth, and at one point had a whole array of dental tools at my disposal, including those delightful snaggle-shaped, needle-nosed scalers that the hygienist uses to scrape away tartar. But I’ve found that nothing,
nothing
works as well for obtaining truly sharp impressions than suffocation with alginate.

My theory about why it works so well? It’s fairly simple. Trauma leaves a subject so singularly focused on a particular pain that the pervasiveness of terror can’t be spread over the length and breadth of a body. But suffocation, so hypothetically pale in the spectrum of pain, produces a protracted struggle, and a remarkably revealing play of muscles as panic sets in and then
takes over
. With suffocation, true terror has the time to come to the fore, and come to the fore it does.

It’s also an experience everyone knows. At one time or another we’ve all been underwater, unable to breathe, and fearful—if only for a moment or two—that we’d never take another breath. Some of us have known even more agonizing versions of this. But no matter the degree of experience, it’s familiar to everyone, and therefore it has the most splendid effect on viewers like the Vandersons. It will impel them to the most vigorous participation in future workouts, at the same time bringing out the most remarkable definition in the body they are watching.

#8
’s face twists as she fights to breathe, and Diamond Girl and company can see the girl’s hopeless battle for breath, the way she tugs viciously at the restraining straps, her quadriceps yanking for all their puny worth against the leather, and her hands, her fingers, trying just as desperately to claw at her face, to rip the alginate from her nose.

I’d gagged the girl’s mouth with a hard black rubber ball that I’d purchased years ago from an S&M mail order outfit in Dubuque, Iowa. A wonderful device. It leaves the mouth incapable of breath, while the lips stay partially open, which gives them ample room for expression, for twisting and curling, those pathetic gestures of pain that everyone—not just young girls—exhibits at a time like that.

And all of this took place
before
I inserted the final plug of alginate into her right nostril. This was the moment I’d been waiting weeks for. You could say that that little green plug was my pièce de résistance. You could call it the most terrifying object in the world, and if
you
were
Family Planning #8
’s little girl, you most certainly would.

I brushed her nose with it, not rushing the insertion at all, giving rise only to the rich possibility that it, too, might soon find a home in her body, and with it would come the inescapable end of her meager supply of air. Each time it touched her, no matter how slightly, her body would heave as it sought to suck in all the air it could, an instinctive response to store as much as possible, as if that slim stream were acorns for the long winter ahead. So I brushed it over her nose several times, watching the girl’s pelvis arch from all that effort. I tried offering the merest scent of it to see if it would work as well, and it did! Delightfully so. Just the slightest suggestion of sealing this final orifice sent her into shivers of distress, and I imagined—how could I not?—the tears leaking out from behind those sealed eyelids, and the monstrous energy of those limbs, of every cell in her entirely fibrous body writhing with the single need to escape. But she won’t. No suspense there. Not for me. But for the Vandersons it’s different. They can barely restrain themselves from pleading for her life, so real does that screen seem to them now.

We all hear the girl’s guttural horror rising from behind the hard black ball that fills her mouth. Not the chorus of
oompf-oompfs
I heard in the van, but a sound infinitely deeper and more chilling, the sound of suffocation, that struggles for silence amid all this fear, because to grunt beneath that gummy layer of alginate is to use up tiny stores of air, and she must know this as a drowning man knows that panic burns up oxygen, but knowing something—and don’t we all know this—is not the same as acting upon it. And who’s to say what those meth monsters are doing to the fragile composite that now makes up
#8
’s mind, the demands these wildly imperious creatures make on a consciousness now soaked in the insanity of a premature death?

Again I pass the ball of alginate under
#8
’s nose, inciting an involuntary “No!” from June that makes me smile. And Jolly Roger, God bless his common touch, takes her in his arms and tries to comfort her. Him! Roger! Offering comfort. And she accepts it. That’s how wounded June has become.

Sonny-boy whimpers, no longer the kid who threw open the door of his house and insulted me with his insolence on the day of their abduction. No, now he lies huddled at his parents’ feet like a bear cub who wants nothing more than the hibernation it has never known.

Diamond Girl? Yes, Diamond Girl watches, and her facade of invulnerability vanishes. How do I know? I look for her hands. I always look for the hands because the hands give away far more than the face. And where are hers, you might ask. Where has she placed them? Why, under her sweet round bottom, an instinctive attempt to still them from flight, from the rising desire to grab her arms, her body, perhaps even grab her parents while pleading for the protection they can no longer provide. I also see her eyes squeeze shut. She shuts them as I make a third, and tellingly final tease with that plug of alginate.

I run its edge in a gentle, coaxing circle around that small opening. I coo at the girl, sing her a song of my own devising, though it owes to the inspiration of so many others. It goes to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”

More guttural gasps from beneath that green layer, the spirited antiphony she offers. I lean over her, place my lips near her ears, and hum more of the same. Buying time. Buying more of her panic. Buying it by the bushelful!

Still, Diamond Girl’s eyes don’t open. Still, Jolly Roger plays paterfamilias. Still, June clings to him. Still, Sonny-boy weeps at his parents’ feet. Still, the plug remains deliciously on the tips of my fingers. And still, yes,
still #8
suffers for air, suffers, too, from the monsters I have set loose in her brain, from the fierce imaginings of a madness that only the deepest fear of death can know. And all this time her muscles are pushing, pulling, straining so hard they’re ready to snap. They are not dying. They are more alive than they’ve ever been. This is what I want! This is what I need. This is the goal of all my work, to sculpt terror in its most revealing moment.

Her pores tear open as sweat floods her skin and drenches the soft down of her arms, legs, and belly. She burns with the desire to live, but this is what will kill her, the ruthless greedy manner in which she sucks up those dribbles of air. Always wanting more, sucking on it so hard that her nostril collapses inward, squeezing off the little life it gave. Spasms run down the length of her body like sparks racing along an exposed wire. She is frying, her body, her brain, the lungs that will no longer let her live.

Suddenly, my timing turns out to be impeccable: Diamond Girl’s eyes open. This is
too
perfect because I know what’s going to happen in a second—two at most—and I know that Diamond Girl will see it too.

I jam the plug up
#8
’s nose, forcing it in with the complete madness of that moment, feeling the moist interior of her nostril with my finger, the hollow enclave of her final hope. I pack it in so tightly that no exhalation will ever reject it, though that is the first thing they try—expelling the alginate with the little air they have. But her body steals even this hope, steals the very element that could free it. Yes, that’s right, the muscles devour the oxygen, eating away at the only force that could expel the plug. So you see, I have not killed her. Her own body has killed her. In this absolute sense, she has killed herself. They are all suicides, this one no less than the others. I am but a witness to their crimes of weakness.

Violent convulsions follow, her body turns rigid, recoils, then goes rigid again. Not from lack of air, not in those first few seconds, but from the swift understanding that these will be her final moments of life. No reprieve. No gentle casting of tie-lines to the living. Just this suffocating, seizure-saturated withdrawal from life.

And then as her fright freezes every muscle, contorts her fine face to a mask of purely grotesque proportions, I peel away the alginate, peel it from her legs and belly and chest, from her neck and face too, until it lies in a long sheath, like a second skin. I leave in place only the hard black rubber ball in her mouth, and the two nose plugs, so she can die, as die she must, for her job is finally finished.

I have become a master of this. Two impressions for each of them—back and front. First, I have them lie facedown so I can do their back, for a reason that should be obvious: they are dead after I take the impression of the front of their bodies.

As for their faces, their real faces, not the ones I sculpt so carefully for public display, I have other plans. I take all the alginate impressions and make masks. I think of them as visual antidotes to the death mask where inevitably we see the eyes so respectfully shut, the features in such timid repose. My masks speak boldly of the body’s greatest urgency, to live on, to survive, even as it knows both the dearness of time, and the nearness of eternity.

The masks are yet another gift I bequeath to the world. I’ve made dozens of them, and in my will I’ve directed that they be placed on display within thirty days of my death. I’m not the least bit concerned about loved ones identifying the faces of relatives who disappeared, for I will be gone, and so will any definitive explanation. Let them live with even more dreadful questions than the ones posed by the sudden absence of their dearly departed. It will be, to my way of thinking, my last hurrah.

“Pleasant dreams,” I tell the Vandersons as I turn out the lights at quarter to four.

To my surprise, Diamond Girl calls out, “Pleasant dreams to you too, asshole!”

“That’s right,” mutters Jolly Roger.

I ignore him, but Diamond Girl? What fire! What spirit! It’s that refusal to submit that I find most alluring. I’ve never run across it before. It’s easy to imagine Diamond Girl becoming a national hero in another situation. Put her down in Paris, say, during the Occupation, and she would have been spitting in the eyes of those butchers.