The Crooked God Machine (16 page)

“If you like I could get the department to pray for her,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, “that’d be great. Thanks.”

I left the police station and went back home. Suddenly the stairs became an insurmountable obstacle, and I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the second floor. I swam heavy through the air and oxygen became a warm proboscis lapping at the back of my head. I managed to climb up into bed and draw the blankets up to my head when I heard the familiar sound of an IV stand being dragged down the hallway floor.

"Maybe she just didn't love you," Sissy said, appearing in my doorway with her eyes about to run down her face.

I said nothing and Sissy slipped away.

The nights kept passing by and Leda's absence grew a hole in my throat, but I couldn't believe she left me. I kept turning over in bed, expecting to see her curled up and lying beside me, only to find the black moon warming the sheets. The woods scraped against the side of the house and the black moon kicked. I rocked on the floor and thought the space Leda left behind might close in to devour me.

Out in the dark I heard the machines. Blind, vicious machines. I wanted to ask them where Leda went. I wanted to ask them why she left me here alone with the dead.

But I imagined they would only say, “God gave her to you and God took her away.”

Chapter Eight

"You are the worst kind of idealist," Teddy told me, "lingering in the torment of your inertia."

I sat on the couch watching the Teddy and Delilah show, wedged between Momma and Sissy. Momma and Sissy smoked cigarettes that turned their fingers and teeth yellow. The smoke drew a noose around my neck. I couldn't see through the haze, and I ended up knocking a glass of whiskey off the coffee table.

"No," Teddy said as I sat on the couch crying as the whiskey soaked into the carpet, "I take that back. You're not just the worst kind of idealist. You're the worst kind of human being."

"You're so melodramatic, Bubba," Sissy said, "hand me another cigarette."

"We have a very special guest with us today," Teddy said, and on the bed beside Delilah sat a small woman with a dog's face and cat red eyeglasses, her knees drawn up to her chin and her sallow face slipping off her cheeks. She wore a breastplate made out of animal bones, and she kept tapping against its edges with her purple painted nails.

"Look at the camera, darling," Teddy said, "can you smile? There you go. Our guest with us today is Slim Sarah, a woman of extraordinary devotion. Let's run the clip again. Smile, darling."

Slim Sarah, played in the clip by a faceless, sexless silhouette wearing a woman's mouse brown hair, lived the suburban apotheosis with her husband and twelve children. Her husband, wearing a coal colored business suit and a leaning smile, sat in front of the television every night with the twelve children. As Teddy and Delilah sang lullabies and danced with human sized spiders, the children basked in the carnal glow of the pristine house.

One day while Slim Sarah's husband was away, God told her to line up her twelve children in the living room and kill the ones he disapproved of.

"Are my children bad?" Slim Sarah asked.

"It's not about whether they're good or bad," God said, as he climbed out of the television to hand Slim Sarah a meat tenderizer and a bucket of water. His body bristled and spread out through the entire room in a toxic haze.

"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked as she approached the first child. Kelly, the youngest, wearing red bows in her hair and scratching smiley faces into the wall with the heels of her baby doll shoes.

"No," God said, and Slim Sarah beat the girl to death with the meat tenderizer and for good measure, shoved her head into the bucket of water.

"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked of the next child. This was Terrance, classical music aficionado, and you can be sure everyone hated him for it. He kept making sideways glances like he could see shapes coming out of God's fog.

"No," God said, and Slim Sarah picked up the meat tenderizer from the carpet, slick with tender young blood, and murdered Terrance.

"Is this the one, God?" She asked of the next child, while Terrance lay face down in the bucket of water.

"No," God said, and "no," and, "no," until eleven of Slim Sarah's children, beaten and burst and anemic, lay out on the carpet, their bodies drying stiff and cool.

Slim Sarah approached the last child. Streaks of the children's blood dripped through Slim Sarah's hair, stuck underneath her fingernails. Chunks of gore stained her cookie making apron. The last child was shy little Meadow, with overdeveloped hips and breast and her limbs shooting out of the hull of her waist like gangly cannons. Meadow, who crawled on the floor so she could know how cats lived, who hid inside closets to watch the migration of dust.

"Is this the one, God?" Slim Sarah asked.

And God said, "yes."

Slim Sarah's husband came home to find all the dead children. He stood in the doorway and tore out chunks of his hair, big bleeding scraps, and threw them at his feet. Then he knocked Slim Sarah on their marriage bed and busted her lip. Meadow hunched in the corner, screaming like an elephant, while her father beat his mother and clawed at her bleating throat. Gods haze sucked itself back into the walls of the television.

A militia of prophets and saints busted down the door of Slim Sarah's house and shot her husband in the head. Then they escorted Slim Sarah and Meadow out of the house and to the backstage of the Teddy and Delilah show.

"And we're throwing a parade in her honor," said Teddy. He reached over to touch Slim Sarah's cheek, and accidentally smeared off some of her powdered make-up to reveal the blackened, bruised flesh beneath.

"The parade is coming!" Sissy shouted, and threw her arms up in the air.

"A parade!" Momma said, and she jerked her head up off her chest so quick that I thought I heard her bones snap.

Momma and Sissy jumped up and down on the couch in a parody of excitement, limbs short-circuiting, hair flying. Their skirts ballooned up over the head and stuck to their ceiling.

“Momma,” I said, “stop, you’re going to break your hip.”

They ignored me and continued to jump until exhaustion. Momma fell onto the floor onto the whiskey stain. Sissy sat down, her skin flushed, and lit a cigarette.

"Will you take me to the parade, Bubba?" Sissy asked me.

"Don't call me that."

"Bubba?" Sissy asked, "but I always call you Bubba."

"Be quiet Charles," Momma said as the amber whiskey stain seeped into her cheek, "can't you see your mother is watching the television?"

"Be quiet, Bubba," Sissy said.

The cigarette burned the edges of her fingers. She dropped it and ground it into the floor with a bare foot. Her toes hissed.

"Don't do that!" I said, grabbing Sissy's arm.

She turned to stare at me and her eyes, like hollow corks, bobbed up to the top of the gleaming surface of her forehead. I went down on my knees to retrieve the cigarette butt and found Sissy's feet covered in a latticework of cigarette burns and braised scars.

I called the slip doctor.

"What is it this time?" he asked me.

"Theresa's been smoking cigarettes and putting them out with her bare feet," I said.

"I'm sure she'll be fine," the slip doctor said.

"Didn't you hear what I said? There are fucking burns all over her feet."

"All right, don't get so worked up," the doctor said, "I'll be over in the morning."

The doctor hung up. The phone slid out of my hands and I went back into the living room. I found Momma still leaning against the whiskey stain, her fist stuck inside the empty glass. Sissy was gone. Her IV stand lay overturned against the coffee table.

"Where did Theresa go?" I asked the Momma, and as if in response the open front door banged against the wall. Momma remained silent.

I found Sissy outside. She stood in the middle of the dirt road beneath a bower of trees, heavy with spider web lacing and turning a bruised shade of purple.

"You shouldn't be out here," I said.

Sissy said nothing. The wind tossed her unwashed hair off her shoulders, cut its mouth against her skirt. I looked beyond the road into the indomitable nest of woods, and thought of Jeanine left alone in the hollow of that tree.

"Let's go," I said. I took Sissy's arm.

"Where does the road go?" she asked.

"It doesn't go anywhere," I said.

I took Sissy back into the house, locked the front door, and sat her down onto the couch. Everything glowed gray in the nightmare texture of the television. Teddy kept tapping Slim Sarah's chin and telling her to look into the camera.

"Not since Abraham dragged his son Isaac up the mountaintop to sacrifice him has there been such an act of courage, folks," Teddy said, "this truly is a remarkable woman. Be sure to see her when the parade comes to your town, won't you?"

I dragged Momma off the floor and set her back onto the couch. I wiped the whiskey sheen off her cheeks.

"Will you take me to the parade, Bubba?" Sissy asked.

"Would you kill me if God asked you to?"

She smiled. "Yes."

I took a cigarette out of her hand and stubbed it out on a nearby ashtray.

"No more cigarettes, okay?" I said, "no more cigarettes until the doctor gets here."

Chapter Nine

I woke up with a stuffed deer in bed with me. It stared at me with button eyes framed by ladylike, sweeping eyelashes. Its gelatinous hooves melted into the sheets. I wanted to push the stuffed deer off the bed, but I couldn't bring myself to touch it.

"Did you put that deer in my bed?" I asked Sissy later that morning. She sat in front of the television with her feet propped up on the coffee table and her thumb in her mouth.

Sissy said nothing. I went into the kitchen, grabbed a kitchen knife, and went back upstairs to my bedroom.

While I was preparing to kill myself someone knocked on the door. At first I thought it was the police, coming by to take me away to hell. But it was the slip implant doctor, visiting to check on Sissy. He came into the house carrying a gray valise and a machine hooked into his veins. He’d told me before if it wasn't for that machine his blood would turn into shit.

"You said you were going to come by a week ago. Where were you?” I asked him.

“What are you doing with that kitchen knife?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I dropped the knife onto the carpet, “come on in.”

The doctor set his gray valise down on the coffee table. He turned to Sissy, who was now reclining on the couch with her head lolled back and her feet digging into the carpet.

"Let me see your feet, sweetheart," he said, and he knelt in front of Sissy and treated her cigarette burns with iodine and bandages.

"She’s probably just repeating the past," he said, “nothing to get too concerned about.”

"No. My sister would never do that to herself. Something’s wrong with the implant," I said, "use your diagnostic scanner."

"That won’t be necessary. Stand up, sweetheart," the doctor said, "lift up your dress, sweetheart."

Each of the doctor's 'sweethearts' crystallized in my mouth. Sissy lifted up her dress and showed the doctor the hunger curve of her stomach. I looked away.

"She looks fine everywhere else," the doctor said, "just keep an eye on her and she should be fine. Okay, you can put your dress back down. There you go."

"Check my mother too," I said.

The doctor and I found my mother in the kitchen, rummaging through the cabinets looking for cigars.

"Your father is such a bear when he doesn't get his nicotine," she said.

"Daddy's been gone for a long time, Momma" I said.

The doctor didn't call Momma sweetheart when he asked her to lift up her dress. He didn't find any burns, only raw gray moles and the outline of her bones that made upset faces to his fingertips.

"Has she been taking her pills?" the doctor asked.

"No," I said, "she spits them out. Like everything else. Why do you think I have the IV?"

"You ever had a dog before?"

"What?"

"Try giving it to her with a little peanut butter," he said.

The doctor picked up his gray valise and shit for blood machine, then left the house. I chased him out onto the porch.

"You can't go," I said, "can't you see that they're still broken? My mother, she doesn't eat, she's searching for cigars for a man that's been gone for seventeen years. And my sister, she's going to burn her feet straight off.”

The doctor paused for a moment, his bottom lip drooping down as if it might fall off, his fingers shaking as he reached for the balustrade to steady himself.

"You know it doesn't matter," he said.

"What?"

"Your mother and sister are dead, don't you know?"

I watched the flow of the doctor's blood through the tube, as it passed from the machine to his veins. Blood like ichor, passing out of his body, then transformed into sour pink plasma before passing back.

"Face the truth," the doctor said, "we're nothing but glorified morticians, dressing our relatives up pretty before we drag them out to the wastelands. Suicide just has a friendlier face now. When these people come up out of their sleep after their first ten years are up, nothing will have changed. Most of them will be back asking for another slip implant in less than a week."

The doctor's tubing undulated slowly in the wind, and the blood flowing through cast a snake shadow on the porch steps. His knuckles turned white as they gripped hard against the machine.

"Your eyes look like a terrible secret," the doctor said, "did you know that?"

He headed down the road.

"Wait," I said, following him, "wait. Please."

He kept walking. I followed him.

"I have a question. My sister. I found her standing outside in the road one night, and she's looking down it like it goes on forever. And she asks me 'where does the road go?' What does that mean? Why did she ask me that? My sister's never said anything like that."

"Misfiring synapses," the doctor said, "you should have listened to my advice about what to do with her seven years ago."