Penny Dreadful (2 page)

Goo hated him. His French was terrible.

But the store was empty, a morgue. She didn’t want to flounder alone under the man-made light and so she followed them down a row of canned vegetables, her eyes focused dully on the Trembler’s slender but dirty and needle-scarred legs.

The dairy section.

I thought we were buying bread, said Goo.

Chrome shrugged. He opened a glass door and withdrew a brick of Monterey Jack, which he thrust at the Trembler. Hold this between your knees, he said.

The Trembler blinked and Chrome shoved her up against the open door. He bit at her lips until blood ran to her chin and she opened her mouth.

The cheese hit the floor.

Chrome sucked at the girl’s dirty face and Goo closed her eyes. She felt sick and reached for something to grab onto, pulling down a row of creamed corn. The dull clatter of heavy metal and she opened her eyes to see the Trembler fall to the black-and-white tile floor as if she were made of lead.

Blood gurgling from her mouth, too much blood.

What did you do? said Goo.

Chrome looked at her, puzzled. I took her tongue.

All of it?

He spat, and something flew from his mouth like a broken tooth.

Nah, he said. The tip is all.

Isn’t that a little too much blood? said Goo.

Chrome winked at her, pulling a bit of stained plastic from his teeth.

Blood packet, he said. An ordinary theater prop.

Oh, said Goo.

The Trembler stood up, brushing herself off and smiling meekly. The red ran from her mouth, real and false. Goo wanted to gag but Chrome was watching. He was always watching her. She shrugged and turned to go, as if bored.

I stepped off the Greyhound from west Texas and looked around at a world shimmering with exhaust and dead air. Denver, unrecognizable. My mouth was full of fucking dust and I was home. Broken glass scattered on a parking lot of black tar.

Dull sunlight.

I stood for a few minutes with the other passengers, waiting stupidly for my luggage. I had no luggage. I had nothing much in my pockets. Two or three cigarettes and a book of matches. Stub of pencil and a useless hotel room key. One dollar and an assortment of coins, most of them pesos. One bright blue pebble that I had picked up on a sidewalk in the French Quarter because I thought it might be lucky. A mysterious coupon for cold medicine. I couldn’t remember when I last had a cold.

I started walking and found myself counting my steps. Twenty-seven to the sidewalk, fifty-one to the corner. I needed to focus on something. I needed to find a phone booth and figure out where I was going.

Eve, I thought. I would go see Eve, maybe.

Little help, said a voice.

I looked down, surprised. A hunchbacked homeless man with a bloody nose and no hair squatted against a brick wall. I was nearly standing on his foot. There was a dog beside him, a pale arthritic mutt with a choke chain around its neck. The man worried the end of the chain between his fingers and stared up at me with hope in his eyes.

What do you need? I said.

The man began to cough and I patted my pockets, thinking I could either give him one of my three cigarettes or a handful of Mexican coins.

Lost, said the man. He spoke with a strange lisp.

I looked around. This is 19th Street.

You sure, he said.

Where are you going? I said.

Don’t even know my fucking name, said the man.

I stared at him. I know that feeling.

Comfortably numb, he said.

Yeah.

I crouched down, careful not to get too close to the dog. Pulled out my sad pack of cigarettes and found there were only two. I gave him one, and he poked it between blood-stained lips. I lit a match and held it for him. He thanked me and I shook my head. There was only a fine line between us. The guy was younger than he looked, maybe twenty-nine. His fingernails were clean. His dog wasn’t starving and I decided they were newly homeless.

Everything slips, he said. Everything slips away. I had a house and a car and they turned to fucking dust. Disappeared before my eyes.

I shrugged. Life is nasty and it seemed pointless to say so.

The stretch of silence and my knees began to ache. I couldn’t help the guy. That cigarette was all I had. The sun slithered out from behind heavy clouds and the man whimpered at the sight. I stood up, dizzy.

Hey, said the man.

I turned. The dog lifted its head now and for a moment was not a dog at all. It looked like some kind of hideous bird.

What? I said.

The man opened his mouth and now I thought he would act like a proper homeless man and ask me for money, or at least offer me a crumb of wisdom. But then his nose started to bleed again and he said nothing at all.

Eve:

She wasn’t sure what day it was, Thursday perhaps. Early morning. The sky was a web of gray and blue, as if it might rain even while the sun stared down. The day was otherwise unremarkable until Phineas appeared on her doorstep after thirteen months, his eyes narrow with apologies. He was asleep on his feet. He was dirty and stinking and still he didn’t look so bad. The shadows and starvation were gone from his face. There was new muscle in his arms. His hair was long and tangled with fingers of red, as if he had been in the sun.

Words fail.

Her hands felt brittle at the sight of him, but she let him in. A voice in her head said very softly, with a touch of menace and despair: he can’t stay here. He can’t.

It wasn’t her voice and she shook it off.

And he collapsed on the couch and slept while she undressed him, her hands never quite touching his flesh. She was tempted to touch the scar that coiled around his belly, to trace her finger around the dark red rope of alien tissue that had grown there. She stopped herself, she was afraid that she might wake him. The scar must be so cold, like the skin of a fish. There was a knife strapped to his left arm, a slender, pretty thing but very, very sharp. She hid it under a cushion. She pulled his boots off, his torn socks. She unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down, her fingernails trailing through his dark pubic hair. His penis was soft and meek and reminded her of mice sleeping in bits of grass and stolen feathers and she had a sudden peculiar urge to choke it in her fist. As if it were truly a mouse. Then his left hand twitched and slid between his thighs. He was protecting himself, even in sleep. And he should, she thought. He should protect himself from me. The urge was gone, anyway. She shrugged and covered him in a thin blanket and wondered if there was anything but rotten food in the house.

She dragged his clothes down to the basement in a pillowcase stained with pig’s blood. The washing machine required quarters, which she did not have. But the coinbox had long been broken. She pried it open with a screwdriver, removed three quarters, then hammered the box shut again. One of her neighbors had left behind a small bottle of fabric softener and she didn’t hesitate to steal it. His clothes would need a lot of softening. She stood over the machine for a few minutes, watching the water swirl and become gray.

It was time to go to work. To be fair, she was late and she wasn’t so sure she wanted to go. She would love to put on her pajamas and drag the television out of the closet and watch a fuzzy movie, to fold herself in half and lie beside Phineas on the couch.

But she was weak, she was soft.

She could never resist, never. She would chew her leg off before she would stay home.

However. The house felt smaller now and she was changed. But not so much, yet. A wrinkle, a twist of color. Phineas had come back and she had no idea what she might do with him. She wondered what effect he would have on her. She wondered what he hoped to find, what he expected from her. Maybe nothing. Maybe he wanted nothing but a place to sleep for a few days. Then he would move on and would that be so terrible. She hadn’t known him so well, really. They were connected though. By blood, by something.

She wanted to think about it and she walked around the small apartment, undressing slowly. There was no music and the ringing silence was a relief. Now she stood over him, naked. Her body was covered in bruises, new and old. She touched one, carefully. Yellow and blue and shaped like a star, a flower. She loved her body, cracked and torn as it had become.

She walked down the hall and dressed before a broken mirror.

Her pale splintered torso. Distended arms and legs, coming apart before her eyes. She watched herself fall and fall through the dark glass. She pulled on a black corset and thigh-high black boots. Hesitated, then chose a yellowed wedding dress that had been crudely altered and was now held together by safety pins and fell in a ragged hem a few inches above the tops of her boots.

Phineas still slept. She folded his clean clothes and left them at his feet. She tried but could not write him a note. Instead she left twenty dollars on the kitchen table with a menu for the Silver Frog, a Chinese place that delivered at all hours.

Down the creaking staircase and outside. Blue and black sky. She would take a cab down to Lodo but first she must walk a few blocks and relax. If she thought about it too much, she might cling to herself. She would be trapped, unable to play. But her breathing soon became easy, fluid. The street narrowed. And almost without apprehension, she transformed. Eve became Goo. And Goo was stronger.

I was awake, technically. But I didn’t want to open my eyes. I was vaguely aware that someone was watching me. The skin had that familiar creepy tingle and I was naked, it seemed. On what felt like a couch. I was tucked like a dead man under a thin blanket. The material was very soft and smelled of tobacco and rain and skin. I reached between my thighs and gave my testicles a reassuring squeeze and briefly, I was twelve and just waking up in my narrow bunk bed at home with blue-and-white-striped sheets and pale blue walls around me and a whale mobile dangling overhead and my little dick cupped safely in my left hand.

I hoped I was in Eve’s apartment.

The couch beneath me felt like velvet. Eve had a velvet couch, dark red velvet. I remembered that much. From before. But I didn’t exactly remember arriving here. I must have walked twenty-two blocks from the Greyhound station in a drowsy sort of morphine stupor, even though I had been off that shit for six weeks or so, ever since I separated from Jude in San Francisco. It had been a long walk from the station, and stinking hot. I had decided it must be springtime. April, or possibly May. And who was watching me. It didn’t feel like Eve. She must have undressed me, though. I tried to remember her hands. Her thin strong fingers.

I opened my eyes and stared into an unsmiling, androgynous blue-eyed face hovering a few inches from my own. The face sniffed at me.

Human, the face said. And apparently alive.

I sat up and waited calmly for the world to spin around. But the world appeared to be temporarily stable. Maybe this was an exaggeration, but I felt much better than I deserved to. The face grunted, pulled away from me and lit an unfiltered white cigarette.

Can I have one of these? I said.

Il est possible que.

I rubbed my mouth. The face was speaking French, apparently. Languages. I had studied German in high school and been pretty bad at it. I had spent some of the past year in South America and could spit out enough Spanish to ask for breakfast and not get shot. However. I hated the French and their slippery tongue. But I shrugged this away. I had no real reason to hate the French and could barely remember why I did. It had something to do with my grandfather and a prostitute during World War II and a mouthful of stolen gold teeth. Anyway. The unsmiling face before me was fierce and beautiful. It was probably male, I thought. If it were a woman’s face I would likely be afraid of it.

Two slender fingers were extended, floating toward me. The fingernails were painted a bright yellow. Horrible, a horrible color. These were the fingers of a corpse, a vampire. A short white cigarette appeared before my eyes like a magician’s rabbit. I took it between my lips and allowed the yellow fingers to light it for me. The smoke was bitter and harsh and I coughed painfully into my fist. As usual, I looked for black phlegm or chunks of lung in my hand and was relieved to find nothing.

What the hell is this? I said.

It is a Gitanes, the face said. The finest of French cigarettes.