“What is it?” calls the man from inside the room.
The woman: “Bring it. I want to play.”
E. flicks the antenna.
Twonnnng
. “Fine. We’ll take it. Go away.”
Then the man-who-is-most-certainly-not-a-man turns and goes back inside, carrying both the RC car and the bag that was attached to it.
The door closes with a pitiless
click
, and suddenly it’s like—
whoosh
, the air is gone from the room, the ride is over, the magic is ended and real life will now resume. E. shows his face and everything seems brighter, shinier, stranger. And when he leaves it feels like a bag has been put back over your head, like cataracts have been thumb-pressed upon your eyes.
Inside, Cason hears the rev of the RC engine.
Vzz, vzz, vzz
.
The woman laughs. Then cries out in some measure of pleasure that turns to pain—and then back to pleasure again.
Cason shakes his head.
And that’s when the bomb goes off.
C
ASON DRAWS A
deep breath. Shoves the half-shattered door off himself.
When he stands, he stands into a miasma of smoke.
He pushes through it. Staggering, dizzy, into E.’s chamber. It’s dark. He takes out his cell, hits a button—the window of light from the phone isn’t much, but it’s something. He shines it back and forth, a lighthouse beacon in the mist.
There—the light causes the man’s naked flesh to glitter, and at first Cason’s not sure why but then he sees: little metal shards, bright and polished, are sticking out of his skin. Arms. Thighs. Face. His body is alive and his eyes turn and wander in the sockets, like he’s looking for something but seeing nothing. His hands are steepled over his cock and a low gurgle comes from the back of his throat. Blood runs to the floor in little black rivulets, pooling under his asscheeks.
The woman sits nearby. Also naked. Pert little wine glass breasts defying gravity, pointing up. The nipples gleam. Not from shards of metal but from alligator clamps chomping down on the nubbins. She’s not as badly hurt—she’s bleeding, too, mostly up her arms. Her head is wobbly; it tilts uncertain upon her neck, gazing up at Cason. Her mouth is a muddy lipstick streak from lips to ears: a clownish grin.
“I don’t understand,” she says, each word a breathless squeak.
“Where is he?” Cason asks.
She mumbles something incomprehensible.
Cason raises his voice. “Where. Is. He?”
She points with trembling finger, and Cason moves through the room. Past an overturned chaise. Over a dead lamp. Hip-bumping a leather horse.
And there he is.
E.
Laying against a lush mahogany desk, body a glittery disco ball of tiny metal shards that sparkle in the light of Cason’s cell phone.
E.’s nose and mouth are bubbles of spit and blood. Inflating and popping.
“Not s-s-supposed to happen,” E. says.
E. tries to blink, but a shrapnel piece juts from his left eye.
“I hate you,” Cason says. Forcing those words out is like making yourself puke. But just like puking, it feels better having let loose.
“You sh... should thank me.”
“Fuck you.”
E. extends a trembling, spasming hand. “Help.”
Cason stands there. He knows he should help. Should reach out and scoop up his boss—and just the thought of that makes his heart flutter in his chest, that uninvited thrill of the promise of skin on skin. “I...”
But then whatever Cason was going to say or do no longer matters. E.’s body suddenly stiffens—one good eye going wide, mouth stretching open far, too far, lips curling back to show the teeth. A gassy hiss from the back of his throat—a hiss that brings words, words that are not English but some foreign, even alien tongue.
Then: an abrupt punch of air, a thunderclap of wind. Cason falls like a marionette whose strings were cut all at once, and it’s like something’s been stolen from him. He feels lighter—empty, somehow, a pitted fruit gnawed from the inside. He starts to lose his grip on consciousness, like it’s an oil-slick cord slipping through his palms. Feelings of shame and guilt war with a woozy, drunken bliss: the feelings of waking up after a one night stand magnified by a hundred,
by a thousand
.
He wrenches his head from the floor, and then he sees—
E. is like a doll, being pulled apart at the seams by invisible hands.
Rents in flesh. Skin pulled from skin. Bloating then falling—from the open, bloodless wounds, a puff of feathers, both white and gold. Rising on the expulsions of air, then drifting back to the ground.
Raining over Cason.
The skin—really, the skin-suit—deflates.
Two wails rise nearby: the man and the woman, these most recent sexual conquests of E. Rose, sobbing into their hands, pulling at their hair with bloody fingers.
Cason stands. Almost falls.
As he runs to the door, an impossible thought flies into his head and won’t leave, a moth trapped in a lantern glass.
That thought:
I’m free.
He laughs. He can’t help himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Liberation
C
ASON NEEDS TO
leave.
His skin itches. His brow is hot. He feels drunk—a drunk that see-saws between giddy, insensate bliss and a dispirited wave of vomit and disappointment.
Down the steps. Boots on plush carpet. Everything in dark wood and antique bronze. It used to feel rich and elegant: he a bulldog sitting in the lap of luxury. Now it all feels hollow and empty. Like a building on a studio backlot. The wallpaper seems to bubble up. The floors have lost their shine. Light bulbs flicker in rusted fixtures.
In the second floor parlor, he finds the Croskey twins.
Ivan is curled up in a fetal position on a glass-top coffee table. Biting into his own forearm—blood running down his jawline to his ear, to the table. As he bites, he sobs.
Aiden stands across the room, bashing his head against the slate-top mantled corner of the fireplace. He’s breaking his own skull. As Cason stands there, the corner finally cracks through the top of his head—a broken egg, the yolk scrambled. Aiden babbles something, then falls backward with a
thud
.
“Holy shit,” Cason says.
You have to leave.
Ivan continues to blubber and bite. Aiden’s heels twitch against the floor.
You’re free.
Cason unroots his feet from this horrible room and heads to the second set of steps. He almost falls down them, he’s so eager to escape, but he steadies himself. At the bottom, he sees the front door in the foyer—and the guard who was supposed to be manning the door is there. Joe-Joe Kerns. Big sonofabitch. Head like a waxed cue ball. And now he’s dead. Laying in a crumpled heap on the floor like a sack of spilled potatoes. Head bashed in with something.
Then: a boot scuff.
Cason wheels.
The man standing by the laundry chute—a wrought iron hatch now open—is in a dirty t-shirt and a pair of slashed-up grease-stained corduroys, but it’s his face that draws all the attention. Guy’s got a mug that looks like it’s been through a wood chipper. Eyes bulging wide, utterly lidless. Lips gone. Ears just puckered holes. Cheeks, forehead, chin, all puffy with the lacework of scars, curls and spirals, and hard, perpendicular slashes. At first Cason thinks—
Was this guy in the blast
? But the scars and wounds are old. Shiny and swollen with time.
“Who are you?” Cason asks.
Then he sees: the man holds a small black box with a pair of shiny antennae and two control sticks. A remote.
“You did this,” Cason says.
But the man just smiles—a smile made all the bigger by the lack of lips—and in this wretched rictus grin he offers teeth that are white,
too
white, and then he presses a finger to that grinning slit as if to say
shhhhh
.
The man drops the remote on the floor.
Then he dives headfirst through the laundry chute.
The iron door bangs shut.
Cason’s not even sure he saw what he saw.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t involve you.
You’re free.
He goes to the front door, steps over Joe-Joe’s cooling body, and makes his escape.
H
E’S HAD BUDDIES
who did stints upstate, and buddies who ended up at Curran-Fromhold here in town—maybe assault, maybe battery, often robbery, never more than a dozen years in—and this, Cason thinks, is what it must be like to get out.
He steps onto the Olde City sidewalk. It’s night. Nobody’s around. The air is warm. It’s not like he hasn’t been outside for the last ten years, but this—
this
is different. He smells the air and it stinks of the chemical shit-stain that pervades Philly, but just now it doesn’t smell so bad. That bitter burn odor smells like freedom.
The air, crisper than usual. Everything, hyper-real.
Then: sirens rise in the distance.
The bomb.
Cason sees glass glittery on the sidewalk. He looks up: the upper floor windows are all blown out. Snakes of smoke rise from the holes, drift toward the starless sky.
The sirens get closer.
At first, he thinks—
I don’t know where to go
—but that’s not true at all. He knows exactly where he wants to go, and before he even realizes it, his feet are carrying him toward the corner of Chestnut (not far from Independence Hall, a fact that until now had been nowhere near appropriate but that suddenly felt utterly prescient).
Cars. Bleary lights. He looks at his watch: 8pm.
A couple ducks past him, arms linked at the crook. Giggling, suddenly stopping to mash their mouths together and play a speed round of tonsil hockey.
A homeless dude in Hawaiian shorts and a grungy polo sits nearby. Head leaning back against a brick wall, snoring. A skinny dog slumbers in his lap.
Across the street, two kids with skateboards scream obscenities and threats at one another:
fuck you, no fuck you, you piece of shit, suck my dick if you think I’mma—
Whatever. Cason hates this town. Always has. Always will.
He flags a cab and gets in.
“W
HERE TO, CHIEF
?”
Big black dude driving the taxi; looks too big for the car. His accent is—well, Cason doesn’t know. African, if he had to guess.
“Uh, hold on,” Cason says. He pulls his wallet. Fishes through money—not much else in the wallet besides that—and feels a cold spike of panic lance his heart. He can’t find it. It’s not here.
It’s not here
.
But then, it
is
there. Tucked in the fold of a fiver.
He goes to hand the little piece of paper across the seat, but the cabbie’s behind a Plexiglas divider. Instead, he reads it off.
The cabbie laughs. “That’s... that’s not in the city, my man.”
“I know. It’s up in Bucks County.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I don’t drive there.”
“Please. You have to.”
“No. No. This isn’t—this isn’t what I do, chief. You find another cab. Okay?”
“Not okay. Here, look—” Cason starts pulling out money. “Hundred bucks. Fifty now. Fifty when I get there.”
The cabbie turns and stares at him through the scratched up Plexiglas. Guy’s got a stare that could make a tiger show its belly. “Seventy-five now. Seventy-five when we get there. That’s it. That’s the deal, man.”
“Fine. Yeah. That’s the deal, then.” Cason fishes out money. Counts it. Pops it in the little drawer and pushes it through.
The cab pulls away from the curb.
T
HE CRACKLE OF
fire.
Windshield glass on asphalt.
Blood on the road.
Cason tries to get his hands under him, but it’s they’re like rubber bands without any tension and everything feels slippery and melty and scorched like burned butter—
He rolls onto his back. His head feels ten times bigger. A medicine ball on a broomstick. Feeling like a dozen kids are kicking it all at once. Whoomp whoomp whoomp whoomp.
Smells smoke.
Oh, god. God, no.
Alison. And Barney.
No, no, no, no, NO.
He sits up—whole body feels like he’s been in the ring with all the fighters he’s ever fought, Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do and Greco-Roman motherfuckers all at once—but somehow he hinges his body and pushes through the pain to sit, then stand.