Coughingwater

Now talk about old short stories. It’s kinda funny though. I mean, I think it’s kinda funny.

Lo and behold, the Bailey Burger was a success. It had even inspired a score of imitators. I met with Daniel Bailey the man behind the genesis of the B.Burger in his plush office. Every wall was covered in advertisments for his fast food empire, decade-aged campaigns that had invariably grasped onto some youthful movement, hip hop and street fashion, punk rock (sugared, of course, since the average customer had no interest in the hardcore swagger of barbed wire, clothes pins, or revolution).

When I met Daniel Bailey I brandished an ad campaign that would last longer than three months; would not, during the extinction phase become a public embarressment, as kids openly made fun of the images they had once embraced so passionately, images which had run their course, leaving a handful of pop stars wondering where it had all gone; no, this had merely been the way things went – when you fought for the customer’s attention, using what you had.

Why not give people what they wanted, what everybody wanted, whether you were Old Yeller, Vlad Teppes, Ronald Mcdonald, or Atilla the Hun.

Daniel Bailey’s old, gravel-tough face, dark and hooded eyes said: I have seen it all before, son. You got something to show me, boy? How’s about you tell me the good news, sport.

My own, real happiness smiled in those good, young days. I brought it with me like my wife’s perfume. It cleared smoky rooms and lit dark corners.

I had just gotten married – two weeks ago I was on my honeymoon in Jamaica, smoking a little dope with Laura. The white beaches conspired with the beginnings of new, married life, when my kite-high mind concieved the idea.

Something like fifty-three muscles make up a smile or frown.

That was how I had started the meeting. I told them how I had noticed that one of the smiles – a romantic might call it ‘rapturous’ – made me feel rapturous. I had seen it on my wife’s face, I told them proudly. She was a transparent woman, my new wife. When she was happy she showed it.. It seemed to me she used more than the standard fifty-three. She bottomed her lower lip. She rattled the skin of her chin. She cornered her mouth.

She really had a helluva smile she used to show off her happiness. It was a fancy, expensive palace of a smile.

Without telling my dove, my swan, my sky, my moon, I practiced her smile in the HM suite’s resplendant bathroom. Gazing into the mirror, I determinedly tried to compose my face into an imitation of what I had seen on my wife Laura’s face, I sweat, I clenched, I waffled, I melted.

Two days before we flew back to the states I got it. Looked at my mirrored smile: not only was I the recipient of the pleasant glow that comes from victory, but my own happiness dazzled me, awakening a heightened sense of bliss – a wonderful feeling of tremendous self-worth.

I kept the smile plastered across my face. My wife was seated on the fine balcony of polished stone. She was watching the sun go down.

“Laura,” I said, emerging onto the deck

She turned.

“Tom,” she said.

…”And,” I told the creator of the Bailey Burger. “The use of image in television commericals, magazine, newspaper, and Internet ads are all about showing the consumer how they’ll delight in your product. This is especially true of food. You sell food by making it look delicious, having a snappy presentation. In the past your most successful marketing campaigns featured people obviously enjoying themselves eating a Bailey’s burger. Perfect families Love Bailey Burgers. Then it all changed and the market became ironic. Now the use of image is self-mocking. Advertisements have become such a drastic part of our lives that we’re sick of them. Mr. Bailey, how can you stimulate someone’s appetite if they don’t have an appetite for commercials and ads in the first place?”

Bailey just raised his heavy eyebrows.

“That’s where I come in,” I announced.

Of course the words I spoke, those little inessential truths, were nothing more than a magician’s trick of distraction, while I wound up my face.

I unleased the smile I had unconsciously grown used to calling “Rapture”. The one that was technically known as the 230.

It was a scene akin to the image of the vampire meeting his grisly fate in the sun. The Van Helsing character drags the undead figure, blood-drunk, out into the sunlight. The vampire bursts into hot flames. It writhes, yapping balls of white neon. Soon it is burnt to the crisp, like blackened toast.

The sheer wonder in these men’s faces bespoke that same primal moment when the monster is at last put out of his ineluctable suffering.

Bailey stood and extended a greying hand that still employed a firm handshake.

“Thank you Tom,” he said Then.

Two years later. Now.

The Bailey Burger was the top-selling hamburger in the United States. Bailey long ago conquered Europe and Latin America. Russia. Pakistan. India. Egypt.

Beef’s popularity was at an all-time low. Mad Cow Disease had seen to that. Of course, I liked to joke with Bailey, at least beef didn’t swim in the bird-infested air chicken swam in.

When giving an interview about my success, I liked to say that “it all started with a smile”.

Laura and I had a son. Mike.

A warm day, Mikey toddling out the door behind me. Laura was at the salon. She was getting her bi-monthly hair treatment.

The sun felt good. I was opening the child proof SUV door when Mikey made a protesting noise. I turned and looked. He pointed to the street in dumb hilarity.

Last year we designed a Bailey Burger costume as a new market vehicle. It turned out to be so popular that Bailey took initiative and made a killing selling them as Halloween costumes.

In the commercial, a mascot at a football game is having trouble steering his crowd to enthusiasm. The fans just stare at their feet when he flaps (he was dressed as a chicken). Then the Bailey Burger theme kicks in and the Bailey Burger comes running from the tunnel with a team of gourmet cooks pushing tables. The tables have hundreds of silver platters on them. Once they reach the field, the Bailey Burger Man (dressed like a huge beef patty with eye holes in the top bun) ceremoniously reveals the deliciously steaming hot Bailey Burgers beneath the silver platters. The chicken mascot hands his head down low as the crowd lets out a huge, deafening roar. All is made right at the end when the chicken mascot, defeated, hands out bottles of Heinz ketchup and mustard (Bailey’s had a contract with Heinz) and the Bailey Burger man takes off his top bun revealing a sweaty, handsome, familiar face. The face of John H. Golin who played the supporting role on a gay-themed sitcom. He grins a “Rapture” at the camera.

One of last year’s biggest hits was a Bailey’s DVD with “uncut” commercials and special features. People love to watch commercials if the commercials make them feel good.

I had been smart enough to patent the expression, under a technology patent. I filed it under Expression 230.

There were something like 5,000 potential human facial expressions.

Patenting it was a smart thing, too. I had several lawsuits going on simultaneously – all the time. There was a movement out there, to make Expression 230 ‘open source technology’ but so far I hadn’t lost a single day in court. On the contrary, I had successfully sued companies for appropriating Expression 230.

One day I planned on giving up my ownership of “Rapture” but I wasn’t ready yet.

The world was in my pocket – well – at least the smile was.

Mikey was giggling at the guy standing there dressed like the Bailey Burger.

The costume was dirty.

Mikey released a series of high-pitched giggles that sounded like insanely-high-register car backfires.

Guy didn’t have the accessory burger gloves (available for purchase separately). His hands were soiled. I figured he must have been sweating something terrible in that suit because I could smell him all the way from the street. The stench was hot meat covered in mayo. I stood open-mouthed in my driveway.

The Bailey Burger man just stood there directly in the sun. The shadowy areas where the sun was blocked by overhanging trees (you better believe it was a nice neighborhood with lots of air-conditioning foilage) surrounded him, giving the impression that he was on stage lit by a spotlight.

I put the giggling and gurgling Mikey in his car seat and strapped him in.

“You got a problem, mister?” I asked, when finished.

The burger man spread his hands, as if saying: Who? Me?

I carefully pressed the automatic locks on Mikey’s door. I considered calling the police. But the guy hadn’t done anything threatening. And I prided myself on my ability to take care of things myself. We had a cleaning lady but you’d find no limo, no butler, no private jet, no ostentatious emblems.

I figured money couldn’t buy happiness, even if you had enough to try.

He came at me. Ran in his suit, into the driveway. The Bailey’s Burger man took a swing. I ducked and he caught me a glancing blow on my forehead, rocking me. I jumped on him.

Pressed against him like a savage lover, I could really smell him; dirty diapers and dog shit. I put a lot of elbows into his bun face. His grimy hands clawing at my eye caused a white rocket of agony to liftoff in my skull. I fell from him.

Heart thudding, I lay there, feeling him straddle me. He grabbed my windpipe and begin to squeeze. I looked down my belly at his groin. My fading consciousness noted there was a moist area. A drop fell from his groin in slow-motion. It splashed on my shirt like a unique rain drop.

Brown drizzle.

I gagged.

That was what saved me. My adreneline turned me when I gagged, without any thought on my part, to my side, immediately breaking his grip.

I covered my neck with my hands like you were supposed to if there was a mad dog going for your throat.

I learned later that my hated neighbor Doug Arshe called the cops. He lived across the street and was on his way out, when he witnessed what he described to the police as an obscene sex act. We didn’t like each other and I think if he had realized what was going on – he would have happily gotten into his car and gladly gone on his way.

I remember bits and flashes of the ambulance ride.

The medic leaned down. He told me I was going to be alright. He was bald, heavily tattooed, with the big bright eyes of someone who was almost always happy.

“Hey aren’t you guy the guy? The Bailey Burger guy? The smile guy?”

I grunted. The beast in the hamburger outfit had done a number on my lips when he couldn’t reach my throat. He had torn my bottom lip so it hung off my chin like a worm used for fish bait.

The medic gave me a ‘230’.

I instantly recognized it, and I grinned back, suddenly very happy, well-being shooting through my anguished limbs, beating back the red heat.

First thing I told my wife when she visited me at the hospital, in my private, single room, was contact the lawyer. That was even before I asked how Mikey was.

Jonah Bainbrine was the best technology and entertainment patent lawyer in the business. When he arrived thirty minutes later I told him that the medic had used a ‘230’ on me. Bainbrine was handsome, but he was thin and used shoulderpads to make his shoulders bulk like a football player. Bainbrine believed this made him look fierce.

“What?” He asked.

He paced.

“Also, I saw an expression on TV,” I said. I had been watching it, bored, and suddenly a commercial break…featuring a guy selling car insurance in a grey suit, handsome older guy – he smiled and I felt the warm coil in my stomach start up like a stove, a recognizable effect of seeing a ‘230.

“Oh yeah?” Bainbrine asked. He looked at me in the bed with faint reproach. “You need to get some rest Tom.”

Shockingly, he used a ‘230 on me. He was good, well-practiced. Ecstasy caressed me and butterflies fluttered in my core. Of course since he was my lawyer I gave him leeway to use the patented smile in the court room. And of course we won cases. See, the other side, they couldn’t use a ‘230 because it was my technology patent. It was a pretty effective trump card.

I grit my teeth trying to prevent the feeling of happiness and good will but it was like trying to prevent a bird migration. Whenever Mother Nature has her hand in something, you might as well just politely do as she asks.

I laughed. “You bastard,” I hissed.

“It’s for your own good,” Bainbrine smiled. “You need to relax, Tom. You were attacked. You could have been killed.”

”’230s’ my property,” I protested, helpless and happy.

“I know Tom,” Bainbrine said. “But you can’t sue everybody even if we both wish you could. This thing’s out there, now. I had a meeting earlier and there’s bad news, Tom. There’s real bad news.”

Bainbrine told me that a competitor had patented a 229. Someone else, a 231. “Both smiles have proven to be nearly effective as the ‘230 if not its equal,” he said, sitting in the uncomfortable chair provided for patient visitors. “That’s not even the real bad news. A rock band from Texas has been doing the opposite of the 230. They’ve got a frown that supposedly makes people want to pull the plug on their own consciousness. Get me why they’re doing it. There’ve been on tour through the US, apparently giving 50% of their audiences brief catotonic episodes that cause them to do things that are out of character. An otherwise healthy adolescent girl went home and chopped up her baby brother. A kid hung himself from the ceiling fan in his folk’s room while they slept. Seventeen fans committed suicide.The band’s been arrested.

Tom,” he said. “if they successfuly prosecute that means bad news for us.”

“You think someone’ll sue me for making them happy?”

“If they can prove it was what this band’s been calling a ‘5 that caused those kids to freak out…”

“The bugs’ll come out of the woodwork,” I finished for him. I could see them. The court setting precedent with the case against the band. Lurk-eyed lawyers searching for sympathethic clients. The old woman whose husband just passed away, who comes home from the funeral, “wanting to grieve in a natural way,” her lawyer will announce compassionately, who flips on the TV and ends up laughing at a Bailey’s Burger commercial. Feeling good. Because of me she can’t mourn her husband in peace. She has to go out and get a Bailey’s Burger RIGHT NOW.

Others, clutching affadavits to their chests. The beginning of the end of my good fortune. I lay stunned in my hospital bed.

Mid-afternoon, the police visited in the form of a Sergeant named Jim Bright. He hesitantly told me about my attacker. The guy, named Emilio Andrews, had been a happily married man six months ago. Until his wife was out with their two kids, crossing the street to get ice cream, and a big truck driven by a couple of college freshman plowed into them. The truck had gotten all three, gunning down, splintering their bodies. And the kids driving the truck got off with just a ticket.

“Emilio quit his job and went off the deep,” the sergeant told me.

Emilio Andrews had apparently found his only solace in Bailey’s Burger commercials, watching and re-watching the DVD, obsessed with the 230 because it could make him feel good even with his life in ruins. He ignored his bills, only left his house to go to the local Bailey’s drivethrough to pick up a brown bag of Bailey’s Burgers and fries. He bought the Bailey’s halloween costume, became the Bailey’s Burger man, must have worn the suit for months, subsisting on a diet of Bailey’s Burgers and Bailey’s fries and Bailey’s shakes. Then the electric company finally pulled the plug and Emilio Andrews, bereft of the only thing that made him feel good; who had seen my profile in a magazine, looked me up, and decided to pay a visit.

The police sergeant said Emilio Andrews car was stuffed to the brim with soiled burger wrappers and his house was even worse. Andrews hadn’t paid for trash services for a very long time and had stored the empty wrappers, sticky, and crawling with life, on every available surface.

“He’s undergoing a psychiastric evaluation,” Bright said, leaving little doubt of the result of the evaluation.

There was something else, though.

Jim Bright stared at me. “What you’re doing – what you’ve done,” the Police Sergeant said. “It’s changing people. We get more and more of ‘em everyday. People aren’t supposed to be happy when they don’t feel happy. You’re making… People  are going crazy,” he finished expectantly.

What did he expect from me, I wondered.

I shrugged at him.

“Well I just wanted to speak my peace.”

“You done?” I asked.

I left the hospital early without telling anybody. My bottom lip had been stitched. The kindly doctor, a woman with brown hair and green eyes, told me to try to keep my mouth as inexpressive as possible.

“In your line of work, I know that might be a problem,” she smirked. “But unless you want to have all your stitches redone, try to minimize your expressions for a week or so.”

I lay in bed watching cable news. There was brief coverage about the Texas band that had developed a frown that caused some people to kill themselves and others. They were called The Crystal Endomites, from Houston, Texas. The state prosecutor insisted that they were responsible, for knowingly using an expression designed to cause murderous, reckless behavior. The prosecutor was a burly man with a slab of moustache. Following this I saw my own image on the Television as a legal analyst discussed the merits of the case. He talked about me, the success of the Bailey’s Burger, and the smile I had a patent on, Expression 230.

Maybe it was the drone of the analyst, maybe the way the doctor had looked at me, maybe the cop’s speech, maybe a hundred thousand things, but I found my street clothes and put them on, noticing with distaste the brown blob on my shirt where Emilio Andrews had released his fecal matter on me.

Mikey, I thought. I hadn’t seen Mikey for the three days – or was it four – I had been in the hospital. Laura simply hadn’t brought him.

The I-needed-to-escape-feeling overwhelmed my disgust at the dried, brown glob.

I called a cab from the gift shop. When the cab dispatcher put me on hold I watched the young woman working the cash register. She was a bright and energetic worker. There was a growing line of customers, which I thought funny, until I saw the look she wore when the patients bought their goods. She finished each transaction with a 230.

That was why she had so many customers. They would likely buy anything to feel the way they did, Get Well Soon! teddy bears for themselves, brightly colored pens and pencils stenciled with the name of the hospital, candy, cookies. They purchased things just to bathe in the girl’s look. I woodenly gave the name of the hospital to the cab dispatcher on the phone.

I approached the counter. Post cards, get-well cards, stuffed animals with lopsided grins, suckers, stickers, were arrayed in painted metal display trays.

I glared at the girl.

“You just committed a crime,” I told her.

She looked at me in surprise. Her nametag read Brenda.

“You’re abusing my intellectual property rights everytime you use that smile on one of your customers.”

“Sir I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked confused, then annoyed.

I smiled at her. A good 230.

She blinked.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I yelled. I felt a sharp stab of pain.

The smile had popped the stitches on my bottom lip.

I mumbled my home address to the cabbie, wiping the red away from my teeth, carefully using my sleeve. I didn’t want to rip my entire lip off.

The cab driver looked like he regretted picking me up.

The cabbie let me out at my house. He scowled at me when I paid him, eyeing my torn lip.

My brilliant day hit me like a neutron bomb as soon as I paid the cabbie and got out. I stared at my house. My green, perfect yard.

I seemed to be looking at a dream. I felt lightly unsteady on my feet.

What expression had the cabbie given me when I paid him?

I needed to keep up on these things because the cabbie’s scowl could easily have been something New – something the cab company had initiated, had patented – and although I could not immediately see the benefits of a scowl, it was also true I had just gotten out of the hospital after being assaulted in my driveway by an unhappily obsessive man dressed like a giant hamburger. I was in no fit shape for major business analysis.

I went in the house.

No one was home.

I had only been home fifteen minutes when the doorbell rang.

Before opening the front door I decided to look through the peephole, mindful of my recent assault.

Milling in the driveway were dozens of reporters and cameramen. I recognized a few. Darla Chane, with her cold grey complexion, her famous air of melancholy, stood next to Robert Jones the heavyset, bellicose news man for Five Live on channel 13. They were talking out of the sides of their mouths, watching my door, as though waiting for the groundhog to find out if he was going to see its shadow. They were both local. Recognizable national cable news mag anchors, Jason Header, Nina Gotenboro, stood a bit further toward the street.

I entered into some sort of state of shock.

I was fabulously wealthy, responsibly invested, reasonably humble, had given interviews to major news media magazines. I had been on the cover of Time. Stories in News Week. Hell, Rolling Stone, Spin, had asked me what was on my iPod.

But I had never been hounded. The news media hunting me, sniffing around my house, made me, for the first time in my memory, realize that the world was closer than it seemed, a lot closer than it seemed.

I called Bainbrine. The lawyer wasn’t surprised.

“That band from Texas,” he said.

I interrupted him. “They’re called The Crystal Endomites.”

“Oh yes, that’s right,” he sounded surprised.

I wanted to ask him why he didn’t think I would know the band’s name but the front door opened before I could connect the words to my thoughts.

Laura and Mikey came in. She was visably angry, with white thumb-print sized marks of strain on her face. Mikey was all goggles and giggles. That kid, I thought. I smiled, listening to Bainbrine rattle off instructions for how I was to deal with the media. “Tell them you’ll be making a statement tomorrow. Be confident, Tom. Let me get something together on my end”

“Do you think they are really gonna’ go after me if they throw those Endomites in jail and throw away the key?”

Bainbrine’s silence I took as an affirmative.

*

“Business trouble,” I told her. Laura still had that look on her face, and I was having a hard time looking at it. It made me want to punish myself. Pinch my own cheeks like a diaphanous great aunt would, visiting after a long interval. Laura was perfectly beautiful. The daylight running in through the living room’s venetian blinds, a shadowy gossamer light, outfitted her like an angel. I began to feel very ugly. Nasty, in comparison to her, my hands wallowing toward middle-age, my hairline receding. Yet she remained beautiful, glaring at me, puffy cheeks bright with white, ghostly spots like she’d just been slapped.

I held my hand down at my side. I wanted nothing more than to slap myself. Hurt myself. My feelings were in turmoil. A headache started beating in the back of my head. I went upstairs to our room and got in bed.

I pressed a white cotton towel, real expensive variety, to my lip. I drew it away. The part touching my lip was red, decorated with little tender filets of lip material. By my luck, pretty soon I’d be poor – no, destitute – and without a bottom lip.

That was how I fell asleep around sunset – thinking crazy thoughts. Of course I was in no real danger of losing my bottom lip. I’m a rich man. A man of no small importance.

I tossed and turned sweatily, thinking about the look my wife had given me. It had me feel things, I sleepily realized. The expression she had given me had made my thoughts wrinkle like flesh; the expression had instantly made me a coward.

The expression.

Jesus I mumbled, exhausted. She had a new expression.

(without her I would have never come up with 230)

Laura my muse, my starshine, my lazy spring day, was really deserving of all the credit for giving me the idea, for smiling like that, a look I plucked with a conqueror’s boldness, despoiled in a Jamaican five star hotel bathroom mirror until I could do it. Now she had a new one, an angry, ugly look. I sweat, I tossed, I turned. I made it into the bathroom, looked into the mirror, and focused my emotions to try to shape my face like Laura’s scowl.

Certainly there were business possibilities. Such a look could easily fit in with the intimidation game practiced in professional sports.

God, the armed forces would love this!

Looking at myself in the mirror, I gave myself a 230, feeling the tang of happiness bloat my soul. 
*

I gave my statement to the press. I sat between Jason Header and Nina Gotenboro on their lavish TV couch. I sold the rights of the newly christened 330 first to Hollywood. Then, crazily enough, I sold fair use rights of the 230 and the 330 to NASA. I suppose when you gaze out at the emptiness of space, voices become muted, shapes lose their form, and you need to look at something that makes you feel human, even if it’s happiness or anger, it’s still enough to draw you back from the void. It must be. Because what if.

What if the thing that’s most necessary is artificial? You don’t actually mean the things say do you?

I never do.

Yeah, you gaze out at all that emptiness, all that formless night, and maybe you say to yourself, that you’re with your family, and you’re just sitting down to dinner, and Maddie’s poured a little too much ketchup on her plate, again. The little doll. You fork your food. You drag at the bits on your plate. You pull them to your mouth. Your head swims.

But I’m pretty sure, judging by the success of both the 230 and the 330 that what you’re really looking at is the gulf between the stars. Those white things that look like pretty good papertowels, those are the stars, baby. Otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am.

While you’re busy asking yourself if the The Crystal Endomites did any prison time; think, would I really be here if that were the case?

They’re the house band.

And as long as Laura loves me, I know my 230 isn’t artificial. Nor hers.

But what am I really selling? 
This year Mike’s going to be a Bailey’s Burger for Halloween. He loves them. He remembers daddy fighting the bad man in the hamburger suit. Poor Emilio Andrews. What happened to him?

Why, he’s in space, baby.

A beautiful day. The crowd’s big. I try out the first 460 and feel the crowd’s worship.

Rapture.

I have been letting this blog rot, but I think I’ll gather some old stories here. This one was called God Eaters. Man. I must have been going through a thing.

God Eaters

The death of a city lies with its people. The great cities all die. That’s part of the cycle of life. That this thing will die but that the inhabitants will go first, so wired to the city that as they go the buildings wear down. Church bats will leave their eaves. The city will crumble, stairs once walked by feet will become ledges for birds and all will return to the rocky ground where it came from.

There are ways to kill cities. Some have done it, some have succeeded but it takes effort. Sometimes it takes accident.
It always takes effort to murder a city. Shutter its smoking factories, cease its chemical breath. And yet when something dies, another thing is born. This has always been true and will always be true. Death and birth are balanced on either side, measured out in sugar lumps. Although one may briefly hold mastership over the bricks and the masonry, the courtyards, great centers of community in the public enclosures, even the murder of a city is but a foreshadow of the birth to be.

Keuchun lay in the close darkness inside the box. He felt his lids with his fingers to make sure they were not closed. It was that dark. The dark close feeling of being buried alive. He felt no motion though he knew there must be some motion. He knew for instance, he was being transported through borders, across seas, borders guarded by soldiers with AK47’s, seas by maritime authorities, yet swift and sure came the box.
The fat man who had come to his village had offered him a free life across the border. The man who wore makeup that accentuated his eyes like Black Mariah, the whore, who spent nights trolling outside a bar in his village.
The fat man whose lips were stained red with what Keuchun supposed was cherry juice. Who offered freedom, delicately gripping Keuchun’s hand. Wealth, enough money to send back to Keuchun’s family. Through it all the sugar scent on the fat man’s mouth.
Keuchun had told no one, not even his little sister.
She sat and played in the dirt with old cast-off toys. Nor had he told his mother and father. They would not have agreed. Far better to disappear in the night and send his family money from afar. He imagined what life across the borders must be like, what life in America must be like; candy cones, ice cream hats, soda, a job.
In the dark he thought of what he might do. He might fix things. He had fixed things before for his father. He knew electricity, some carpentry. And he was a quick study. He would learn. It was these thoughts that comforted him in the darkness with the sides of the crate pressing close. Keuchun had become used to the edges, the angles in the surrounding walls of the box. Thought of his sister playing in the dirt helped him to endure. Although his stomach hurt, and he had long ago exhausted the package of food he could gather and had brought with him, thought of his sister kept him from panic. It kept him strong. He would send back enough and she would no longer play in the dirt.

On the Old Man’s day in court there was a crowd in the courtroom. Middle-aged women mostly in purple sundresses with purses filled to the brim with used Kleenex and generic pain killers. They sat as they did each day, watching prosecutors make cases before jurors. The Old Man, sharply dressed in an Italian suit, stared straight ahead, his shoulders carrying disdain for the proceedings.
The prosecutor made obvious mistakes. Still the Old Man paid attention to none of it. The Shaver had seen to a juror or two. Surprising, what a threat to eat off their face can do.
Edward Jane caught the eyes of the Kid. Edward Jane the Old Man clasped his hands. He stared wordless. The judge had also been “talked to”. The Shaver got around. There were no reporters. Although the trial was open to the ticket-buying public, the Old Man had enough clout to make sure the story wasn’t covered by newspapers.
The Old Man continued to look at the Kid.
The prosecutor spoke a few words to the judge, whispered, and the case was dismissed. The Old Man pushed up out of his chair shaking off the help of one of his defense attorney, a young man with an auburn mop of hair.
He made his way out, anchoring on his cane.
He walked at an angle to the center pew so that he would come face to face with the Kid.
The Kid stared at him blankly. Was that disappointment or regret, thought the Old Man,
Perhaps the Kid saw in the Old Man not only the face of the oppressor but also the face of the oppressed, not only the torturer but the tortured. The Old Man believed there was admiration deep in the Kid. For how could one not admire the king of an empire?
One of the New Gods: his firmament streets and bridges, the stone underfoot, the twitching eye in the wharf, the bully in the waterfront dive, the slum lord in the old corrugated buildings. A God, indeed, in the kingdom of the city. His pantheon a house of bizarrities like the Shaver, whose diet consisted of uncooked strips of meat, breakfast of thumbs, of gristle.
The Old man walked past the Kid. Felt the eyes on the back of his skull, touching the mind of a God of the city.

The Priest inspected his watch. His eyes were outlined in eye-shadow he thought particularly lovely.
He had his boys with him.
Edward Jane, the dignified old man, would be here to pick up the Priest’s latest acquisitions. Soon.
Right now the warehouse on the Lower East Side was empty except for the new load, which was netted in a pallet. A warehouse owned by the old man who owned half of everything in New York.
He heard the Old Man’s car. And those who would accompany the old man. The Priest chewed his cheek.
The old man hobbled. He wore a white suit. His face was smooth but closer examination proved it was a caramelized mask. The cold technology of plastic surgery had reshaped Jane’s face to another’s. It was as though another face lay atop the real one. An overlay. The face was like a Kabuki mask, the ancient expressionless mask of Japanese theatre.
“Mr. Jane,” the Priest said.
Behind Edward Jane were familiar faces. The Old Man’s son, no longer young, yellow from toxic play: a crepuscular jaundice that wreathed his sloppy person like a cartoon cloud: at any second the Priest expected a cartoonish crow to flap out of the son’s mouth and flap away to roost in the beams.
Leading a trio of heavyset men with features dark and brutish like hyenas came the Shaver. It was him who the priest made sure he showed his most adoring, aching, devoted face. The Priest respected the old man. He feared the one who controlled the Old Man’s estates, had come into power since the Old Man’s son was a worthless addict.
The Shaver was pale and bald. Not ugly, not pretty. The Shaver was named so for his juvenile crimes infamous even in the New York gangs. Using a barber’s razor he shaved human skin from rivals. Shaved skin from stomachs, from sac, buttock, or any of the fatty places and then ate it. The Shaver had made his name infamous. His appetite for human flesh legend.
He had never been caught even though he tabloids ran stories one summer with blurry images of corpses, captions like ‘New York’s Human Carnivore Strikes Again’ or ‘Human Cannibal Calls New York A Restaurant’; corpses with rude partial skin grafts showing their gut to the tabloids in their pathetic cheap copy of gaudy Tabloid color.
The Shaver jumped from gang to gang, seeking true power. He eventually left the lure of urban warfare for the boardrooms. The Old Man had a hand in the post of a vast range of industries. The sheer breadth of the vast amount seemed to placate the Shaver although there were a few missing people. A chairman, audited, found to be embezzling, vanished with his wife and children.
The Shaver wore an exercise suit.
The Priest put on his best underling smile. He knew he how he appeared, soft, yet in his own way untouchable as long as he kept the Old Man’s favor.
Edward Jane didn’t say anything. He never did. He showed his favor in the form of white handkerchiefs. He showed his disfavor with red. Scarlet. The color of blood. The Priest had gotten a scarlet handkerchief once. Masterminding an art heist, when the Kid first came into the picture. When the ATF hired the young kid they had hired a thorn for the Old Man. An overly enthusiastic college graduate who had dislocated the arrangements the Priest had with the kid’s predecessor.
The Kid had so far escaped the Old Man’s sanction. The Priest suspected the Old Man saw something in the Kid. An enthusiasm for order that matched the Old Man’s own. Edward Jane had once, in his youth, knocked down the old pillars that held the underworld up. In place of the denizens of mythology: red demons that flay skin, the chaos of unwashed lost souls, Jane dominated; the now spoiled Mafia, drug lords, niche players. These disparate elements encompassed the cobra the Old Man collared and dominated by his greater darkness.
The Priest had received a scarlet handkerchief made of the finest silk, a recipe that history would not have squandered on mere emissaries who displeased a king, or sultan. This was the work of one of the new Gods.
It had taken six months to receive a white handkerchief. When it had come he had been joyous.
His belly would not see a hooked blade. His organs would not string across his penthouse in Manhattan, strung on the blades of a slow moving ceiling fan, liver and kidneys round and round.
The Priest bowed and hid his eyes in deference. The Old Man had eyes for the pallet only.
“They’re all there,” the Priest said. “Except the second shipment. It’s been held up in customs. But not too worry,” -—he licked his lips —“Not too worry,” inwardly cursing himself. “I’ve got two good men out there working to get these things through,” the Priest said.
There were antiquities galore, salvaged from undersea wrecks, archeological digs in secluded locations, the totems of lost civilizations; creatures painted in rudimentary images in human blood turned to dust, museum pieces, some pieces from private owners forced to sell or suffered the consequences.

The Old Man had of late become a collector. Oh, he’d always collected, but only now with his blood and flesh turned a walking narcotic, his thoughts were on empire, on his own death. The Old Man had defeated cancer and carried the scars to prove it. He had ducked assassination attempts by rivals who scrabbled like street cats at the edges of the Old Man’s Empire.
Edward Jane felt death approaching. He was not so foolish as to believe that like everything that was Earthly that had come into his hands he could turn death to his will.
There were a few others in the city. Glenn The Bashell. Harley The Model, some thought even more ruthless than the old man. The old man was a fading emperor, to be sure. Sometimes he felt paralyzed in a half-life.
Shaver ordered his brutes to pry open the crates. Packed within them gold, precious art. The Priest and the Old Man watched Shaver’s men unload the crates while a small man with mocking eyes took inventory with a clipboard.
The Priest said nothing to the old man. He didn’t think he’d lost face. Like his namesake he made a silent invocation that it was so. Shaver met The Priest’s eyes from where he stood, a acrobat in a macabre circus. Shaver grinned. The smile did not touch his eyes. One that said many things, dark things all, of course detrimental to the Priest if the Old Man should determine there had been a fuck-up. The Priest mopped his head.
The Old Man continued to look at the pallets. Then he nodded.
The Priest sighed in relief. This would do, for now. Shaver caught the nod, turned back to governing the loading of the crates.
After the Old Man left, the Priest was left with his boys, as he called them. They were Peter Pans, never to grow up, always to watch the window hoping for a trip to Never land.
“My boys,” he said.
They stood at attention in their rags. One towel-headed urchin picked at his nose. His stubby finger moved among scabs.
“Hand out of your nose, Eldon,” the Priest said.
The Priest maintained discipline among his boys. These cast-offs of the world. The street thieves, beggars. He found them early, or they sought him out, hearing the rumors that the Priest took care of his boys. He was their substitute father of the street, offering warmth, food, and shelter; and the boys came. The ones that did not like the Priest’s idea of discipline or paying his tribute soon left.
He peeled twenties from his wallet.
“You clean up this mess, there’s more where that came from.” He toed the remains of the pallet boards. “First,” he said.
The Priest wondered how the boy he had taken from China fared. No matter. It had already been too long. The boy was certainly dead. The priest found himself hoping the boy’s death was a merciful one, remembering the bright glowing boy in the fields with intelligent and curious eyes.

He could hear something. A scraping sound. Keuchun weakly lifted his head and neck as far as he could within the crate. He waited for the nails to be removed. He could not move his hands. His body was hot, delirious, and wracked with fever.
He dreamt of his sister.
Eating dirt, her belly distended, she looked up, pale fish eyes covered in cobwebs.
” Keuchun,” she said, spitting dirt.
He reached toward her. Clouds of darkness in the old shapes, the shape of swine, donkeys, mules, flew overhead, sometimes letting in sunlight.
Scraping. Gnawing. Were they rats?
Something coming in, scrabbling along the crate. The boy closed his eyes. He tasted his torn lip. Earlier, he couldn’t remember when, he had bitten clean through the bottom, the soft meat had not tasted real. They were rats. He had thrown stones at rats that crawled into his blanket back home. Pink tails scurried off, dark shapes retreating from his stones. Had they come now to take their revenge? To cover him in a mob of soft fur bodies and sharp teeth, yank his flesh, inscrutable little death bringers, feasting on his tender eyes.
Crikk-crikk.
He tried to scream. He opened his mouth in the dark, tasted the bad air. It came from a hole by his feet punched out in a circle. All he could see when he leaned his chin down was darkness in the hole. He gazed down, between his feet. It was the hole that gave him precious air. But it stank like his shit and urine. His bottom he knew, was covered in wet sobbing sores. Oh, the wordless horror. He strained against the box, his muscles atrophying, his body starving. Surely someone would be able to smell him. Dry tears, dry as dust slid down his face. He again tried to scream but it would not leave his throat. The scream stayed in like the rats he thought were now crawling on his body. He gasped for air. He felt his heart pounding.
Yet there was something magical. He felt he crossed borders, not by ship, but a different feeling. Opening an inner eye. He felt so much strength even in his dying body.
Even as the flesh squished, the eyes too dry to blink watched the constant darkness, and smiled.

A month after his last failure, William The Kid and his superior sat in a black government car against a curb in an alley. The Kid suspected the Old Criminal’s reach had touched his associates, and he didn’t want to be overheard.
“Rumor on the street,” he told his boss.
His boss grunted. David Baya was short, stout, and bald. Sloppily dressed, he wore the ties his wife gave him like a religious man prays. Big ties with dice, grubby renderings of the solar system. Baya had a bright yellow moustache spreading down his upper lip, though the rest of him was hairless. Even his arms were hairless the Kid had seen, when they infrequently worked out.
Baya grunted again.
“He’s smuggling in art. He’s cashing in on property, buying art. Paintings.”
“Is it legit,” Baya asked.
“Some is,” The Kid replied.
“Where’s he storing it.”
“He’s bringing it by boat and by truck. Both. I don’t know where he’s putting it yet.”
Baya chewed this over.
“We can’t keep bringing charges against this guy,” Baya said. “The way this is going, he’s going to keep beating them, easy. We’re holding the ball, and that means the taxpayer is holding the ball. It takes the piss, I know,” he said, weary — “but this is one of the originals, William. He’s much a part of the city as the city’s part of him. ‘Afraid to say it, William, but I think we’ll have to wait for him to die. Then we dismantle his organization piece by bloody piece.”

“I can get him,” William the Kid said. He stared at a burning trash can. Some hobo can, garbage fire, built up and smoking harsh gray, underneath, the smell of cooking rabbit. Another casualty. Another face, another body, merging with the night of the cold city, the moving homeless, the walking insane. They were bags of rats that filled up tunnels. Addictions the Old Man made his money off, men and women ruined by the Old Man and his ilk.
“You can’t get him,” David said. “Edward Jane’s time is near. Let God get him.”
William shook his head.
“You have to let these things go, William. You’ll learn. He’s playing you, boyo. My advice, just wait. Ignore him. Let the bastard die. His son can’t continue the family business. The son’s the walking dead.”

The Shaver watched. He watched and learned. These were things he did.
He also ate. He had a love of what he termed life’s delicacies. He ate steak pink on the outside, cherry in the middle. It melted in his mouth. The Old Man asked he keep an eye out on Tom Jane, the Old Man’s son. The son, middle aged, on death’s door; the son was a heroin addict. The Shaver had watched him go into a restaurant, a Thai place, where waitresses gave you more than what you ordered in the back.
The Shaver leaned back. He waited in his car. He turned the station to public radio. It was Wagner. The music moved him. He felt his prick stir. The piece fluctuated, grew louder, clearer. He peered into the night at the Thai restaurant. The Lonely Dragon’s Kiss. The Old Man’s son left the restaurant to the sound of exotic bells. Shaver watched Tom Jane stagger across the road. Were those shadows following, not passing strangers, but shadows of stalkers?

Summer Redtone wanted to get high. She had a pretty laugh, and she wanted to get high. She and her boyfriend Tommy followed the guy who left the Lonely Dragon’s Kiss. Tommy pointed him out. Between the two of them, they had only enough for one good time. Summer licked her lips. Tommy’d get angry if he had to split it, oh he’d doll it out generous enough, but later he’d rag on her.
Tommy put his finger to his lips and pointed at the guy, an elderly pot, who was just about fell into the street soon as he left the restaurant where they usually scored. Summer remembered why she loved Tommy so much. She loved him so much. He tugged her fingers with his strong hands, and she thought about him: what a foundation to keep me up. She began to laugh a wild chuckle of love, when he told her to keep it down by grabbing her face and squeezing her lips together like he sometimes squeezed her tits. His fingers were pinchers.
The mark was sloppily, turning his car key against the lock and scratching the black Mercedes. Summer and Tommy stood on the edge of the circle of light from a street lamp.
“You need some help?” Tommy asked.
Summer’s Tommy was friendly, a cheery muscular boy with a splash of dark hair that crept over his ears and curled under them.
“I’ll help you,” Tommy said.
The man leaned back on his car. He gurgled. Summer laughed when she heard it. It sounded like an oven was in his mouth with a turkey pie bubbling, meat sauce with little chunks coming to a good boil.
Tommy hit the pot. He hit him twice, lightning strikes with two slightly open fists, nicking him and showing him who was boss. The mark gurgled some more, cheek scratched from Tommy’s class ring which was a big gaudy sharp stone Summer knew well, herself, from when Tommy’d get mad and rag on her.
“Give me your wallet,” Tommy said.
But the man gasped and shuddered. Saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He seemed to be trying to say something. Then neck muscles bunched and he fell on the street, jerking like a puppet back and forth. Tommy and Summer laughed until they realized it was a death-jitter. Heart attack, maybe a stroke, whatever it was the man on the ground had been consumed by it and continued to twitch.
Summer continued to laugh until Tommy gave her a look. A look promising a ragging later. She swiftly closed her mouth.
“What’s wrong with him, Tommy?”
Tommy glared at her and bent down, searching the body. Tommy found the wallet. Oh, good leather, old fashioned leather.. He rifled through it. Credit cards. Lots of credit cards. Platinum ones. Excitedly, he opened the cash tender section of the wallet.
“Holy shit,” Tommy said. Summer put her knuckles under her mouth. “Is there a lot baby?” She asked.
“There’s a lot,” a voice said.
A thin man dressed in an exercise suit black with silver stripes was the owner of the voice. It was a running suit.
Summer turned to Tommy.
“I said there is a lot. Go on,” the Shaver said. “Take it. He’s not going to need it.”
“Get out of here, man,” Tommy said. Summer reached out to touch Tommy’s arm but Tommy shrugged her off.
Tommy stopped paying attention, a large collection of big bills in his hands. He flipped them eagerly, each one was a domino to the next, and the next.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Summer watched the man in the exercise suit. Noticing her stare, he nodded to her. She relaxed.
“What are you going to buy?” He asked her.
She shrugged. “This and that,” she answered.
She pushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes. It was straight, had been since her hippy days long before she met Tommy, when she’d been just a teenager.
“Lots of sweet things to buy,” the Shaver said. His smile was pleasant.
“What in the fuck man,” Tommy said, looking up from his counting. “Get the fuck out of here creep. We didn’t do this. You saw.” The man shrugged, looked from Tommy’s ring to the Tom Jane’s cheek which was indented with the ring’s shape.
“I have him a love tap,” Tommy said.
“Sure, I saw” the Shaver said. “I’ve been in a few brawls in my life.” He put his hands back into his pockets. “I wouldn’t mess with you. You guys need a ride?”
Tommy eyed him blearily. “Where are you going?”
“I’m heading up town,” the man said. “I don’t mind. It’s a cold night.”
Tommy had a look of mischief on his face. “You want us to get you high,” he said.
The man shrugged. “Caught,” he said. He laughed.
“Well I guess,” Tommy said. He finished counting the money and placed it carefully in his pocket. Tommy nonchalantly stepped over the corpse, tugging Summer Redbone along.
“I don’t see why not, since we’ve come into a bit of good luck. Where are you parked, man?”

The Priest had his boys line up and give him their offerings, their tribute. Grubby Michael who sold speed balls and had a case of acne so severe he was painful to look at pressed a wad of bills into the Priest’s hands. Jackie, nearly 19, and graduating to a different school of extreme, beautiful, even sloppily shorn hair and recent overgrowth of facial hair put an even sum into the Priest’s hands; Jackie fucked for money and had a physique like a model, bones close to the tawny skin. Cuddles, the youngest, and the lightest on his feet, had a pocketful of beautiful things. Silver necklaces, ivory brooches, ruby bracelets.
The Priest was pleased.
“My boys,” he said. “My boys have brought me wonderful gifts tonight.”
He said “Thank you,” to each one, as they brought forth their tribute. “Thank you sweets,” or, “Thanks my love.” Until the last.
Paul was the oldest of the Priest’s boys. He told the boys what to do. He was their leader.
Paul held nothing to give. He had no beautiful rings to give or thick money clips, no brilliant stones set in ivory, there was nothing.
“Have nothing for me, boy?” the Priest asked.
Paul looked angry.
The Priest finally smiled. Paul was grown now. Some of Priest’s other boys had grown up in the past or felt themselves grown enough. Priest would let them leave as long as they paid him back for the early years. He was their leader, after all. He was the man who had given them another chance, a roof over their head, taught them, loved them.
The Priest would let Paul go, with a price. But he would not lose face among his other boys. Paul’s eyes burned. They were tight hungry flints,
“You have something to say to me, boy?” The Priest asked.
Paul grimaced. “I done, Priest,” he said.
Paul turned to the others. Perhaps he had spoken to them before of his decision, it certainly seemed so. Paul’s eyes were fevered hot balls in his face, breath hot through his teeth.
He rushed the Priest. Paul was strong and the charge nearly dropped the Priest, but the Priest covered his body with crossed arms. He pushed off with his fat and bounced Paul’s gouging fingers away after just a moment.
Paul sweat.
The Priest grunted. He felt his face. There was a scratch. Fresh blood.
The Priest looked to his other boys. Paul still showed opposition until he looked back and saw the others. Boys who had perhaps at one time eagerly given their worship now gazed at Paul, the largest, their king. Perhaps they thought when does a king stand up to a holy man? Never, Priest thought. Their street father, the surrogate father for lost boys.
The city was a dark thing, and Priest had survived it, was sympathetic to it, even loved it, a love engraved in his soul. This was a bittersweet thing he had to do, he thought. The boy, Paul, attempting to free himself from his holy man had crossed his holy man. The Priest thought, you never cross the voice of a God, nor its avatar. He fiddled his sleeve. A garroting rope had dropped into his fleshy hand. He held it behind his back. There it quivered in anticipation, the rope dancing from knuckle to knuckle.
“Come here, Paul,” the Priest said. “Let me give you my forgiveness.
It was easy. The boy sensed that things had moved away from him, and perhaps realizing that by seeking forgiveness he might return to the old constitution of matters entered Priest’s embrace.
The Priest quickly wrapped the cutting rope around Paul’s throat and pulled it tight. It was over quickly. He didn’t make the boy suffer.
The Priest withdrew the rope and saw the boys eyes watching him but he thought, not with fear. Instead they watched with pleasure in their faces. He did the city work after all, the Priest did the twisty work.
The boys talked and laughed with each other as though nothing had happened. The Priest found his eyes returning to Paul’s corpse. Jackie promised to cut it up and drop each length of flesh into the river. But the Priest had an idea. If he were the priest of the God of the city, and he felt in his heart that he was, then he should consume the boy’s flesh. He regarded the talking boys, his followers as they told each other stories, of what they had done, triumphs and failures, and he interrupted them with a thin whistle. He pointed at Paul.
“On him we shall feast,” he told them. “Paul is of our body.”

The city was alive with lights. The Old Man could see them through his estate window. His once-magnificent house was crumbling although he had restored to its former glory numerous times; still it corrupted under his feet. He was at the highest point in his master bedroom, sumptuous with art and history and above all, comfort. Edward Jane was hooked to a dialysis machine. His doctor, who had a full gray beard and charcoal suit and never spoke, removed the needle when Jane was told he had a visitor.
My son is dead, the Old Man thought. Tom Jane, the son of the father but only in blood, missing the genetic determination of the Jane blood. The Old Man had not loved his son but now there was no inheritor. No empire of street and sidewalk to give away. The Old Man had hoped that enough sense would pump in his son to pump the toxic blood out, enough, to hold onto the empire for another generation. But the son had never been much of a son, after all. Perhaps the Old Man thought, I should destroy my empire myself. Let the city fall free. But no, he’d destroy it. His city was too beautiful.
He inspected the latest work of art. The Lovers.
The two lovers were entwined together in a glass cabinet. The cabinet sat on an immense platform built of iron set on wheels. The figures were barely alive. The man’s face stretched open in a death-rattle as he plunged his member into his opposite, a woman whose mouth gibbered in similar horror. They were almost gone. The Old Man’s doctor had attached life equipment to them: a gamut of wires and tubes and outfitted with an oxygen tank ran to the platform.
Both figures had parts rended from them. The man was missing his scrotum. There were bite marks on his inner thighs and lower stomach. The woman in turn had been half-devoured. Her vagina had been harrowed, the cervix tugged, until a mass of fallopian tubes hung from her crotch in pallid color.
The Shaver had brought them in this way last night. The couple paid for the Old Man’s crossing across the river.
The iron base of the platform attached to a rolling rack like one used at a drycleaners to hang suits and sweaters. Shaver had rolled the apparatus into the house elevator and brought them up.
Jane’s butler ushered in an uncomfortable, and sweaty David Baya.
“He’s not going to let it go, Mr. Jane,” he said.
“Bring him to a warehouse on the Lower East Side,” the Old Man rasped. “14th street. Tell him you received a tip that there was something … illegal going on. I’ll be there. Do this in one month. David Baya nodded.

The last of the exquisite objects the Old Man had wanted and paid for had reached the states. The Priest had his boys unloaded the delivery at Jane’s warehouse. There was way more than the Priest had thought. Boxes were still netted. He had his boys move one box away from the rest. He recognized the boy’s crate. The Priest smelled the odor from the box. It was not lovely. It smelled so bad it held almost a fragrance of perfume that could be bottled and sold to those who harvest ugly things. The boy must have died weeks ago.
The Priest held a handkerchief to his nose, pinching it shut.
“What is in this box?” Cuddley asked.
“A mistake,” the Priest said.
There was the sound of a motor.
“He’s coming boys,” he warned them. “Look alive.”
The boys hurried to undrape the nets.
When Edward Jane and the Shaver stepped into the warehouse the boys were on the last crate.
“It’s all here,” the Priest said. The Old Man ignored him. It was Shaver who answered. “Shut up.”
The Priest blotted his splotchy neck, where sweat ran freely. He scratched under his shirt collar. He hoped his makeup would not run. He had caked it on heavily earlier to make a good impression and be beautiful. He was after all the Priest to this God-king, Edward Jane.
Shaver stood near the door. It wasn’t long before the one he was waiting for arrived.
It was a face familiar to Priest, someone he had seen, along with another. Cop of some kind.
Priest looked to his boys, nodded, and they retreated back into the shadows.
The cop with the familiar face gazed for a long time at the Priest, then the children who were backing up.
“What is this?” He asked. He had a grim tone, aged beyond his years.
“Dave?”
Baya put up his hands. “I’m sorry, William.”
Edward Jane gazed into William the Kid’s eyes.
The Shaver spoke first. “Mr. Jane wanted to meet with you,” he said, stepping forward, to stand beside Jane.
“I know you,” William said, to Shaver.
Shaver shrugged. “Maybe you do,” he said.
William looked to David Baya. “David?” asked.
“David,” he said again, struck.
The Old Man roused himself. His voice was dust in libraries, the same sort of thing that puffs from ancient text.
“I’ve long wanted to meet you, young man. I’ve been trying for … ages to arrange a meeting, to talk, for us to talk.” He sighed, his dry chest suckling like an ink pot waiting for ink.
It was then that one of the boxes drew all of their attention. The gaudy homosexual, who the Old Man personally found repulsive but was nearly as useful as Shafer in his own way had moved the box out of the light. It was a crate with red letters and partially decayed boards. It looked like it had been floating in sea water and the salt had made mischief on its constitution.
The box trembled.
The old letters partially devoured by some musk, the box rattled like a set of keys.
The Priest looked at the box with some amount of fear.
“What’s in the box?” William asked. He swung around. “Is there a person in there?” His hand went to the inside of his jacket coat. “What is in the box?”
“What’s in the box?” Shaver repeated the question, looking at Priest.
The Priest put his hands up
“I don’t know.” He backed up.
William drew his gun.
The Priest said, “no, it’s nothing.”
But the crate as if answering the priest, trembled more. The Shaver walked up to the crate, tapped it. The nails that held the wood had all come loose. The top of the crate hesitated then was pushed away.

It knew it had once been a boy. Down in the deep holds of the heart, it knew. But it knew so much more now though. It heard the voices. Beautiful voices. The voices of things that were like it and yet not like it. Of it yet not of it. It remembered. It was so hungry it was not hungry, and whatever it was once, had been lost. It spread its arms and felt the muscles pulp in their juices. There. It lifted the top of the box. The light hurt but it saw them all. The bags of skin, the liquids, and it was thirsty. It came out biting
This thing once a boy was now a thing of liquid as though water balloons were set free within the skin. It was chalky, and wet, a mixture of man and shit. Open lesions ruptured its flanks and they dripped clear liquid. Yet beyond all this there was the stink. The stink of man meat gone sour, as though this thing had drunk the rotten milk from Mother Nature’s other tits. There was no remnant of the village boy. This was a monster from a new age. An age of disease. An age of cancers.

It first went for the Shaver. It popped its claws around his neck and begin to squeeze. The Shaver took out his open razor, a tool that that had seen so much flesh of its own and he sliced at the beast.
The razor slid off the hide. It was like trying to cut a concentrated mass of jelly. He tried again, this time the razor caught in the thing’s arm. The thing grinned. A grin of swamp, of maggot, of meat.
It squeezed the Shaver’s head together using both hands. Pushing until the brain case tumbled, and brain blood ruptured through ears. It dropped the Shaver’s head.
Oh, it was a thing of glory.
It had been made through spice, through darkness and accident. It could not help itself.
It shit.
But whatever came from the distorted holes mixed with the dripping and colorful flesh, became a part of it.
It went after the fat one. It put a hand through his face and scooped through. Bringing it to mouth to feed.
Oh, this was a fine thing, it thought.
Even if the light did hurt its eyes, this was a fine thing!
It had long ago bitten through its lips so that its jaw was wide, the internal workings of mouth were transparent, to be gloried in. It took the rest of the fat one. Working in quick sloshing movements it tore through the last shred of flesh and broke bone. And was that flesh combining with the thing’s own? Was that flesh joining? Making it something even greater, something more desolate?

It hesitated when it saw the old man

The thing was a thing of nightmare. This was what The Shaver, a cannibal, had been trying to become. This was a city-destroyer. This thing was all bowel-eating grin. The Old Man knew the time of his death. It was a God’s death. He knew that with him would go all that he had built, the encroaching forms of humanity he had inspired, some cruel, but all high.
All would be diminished with his death at the hands of this thing…this being. Ages of mythology would begin anew. Edward Jane closed his eyes and waited for it to come. But it hesitated. It came puzzled at the lack of fear, at the shining love in the old man’s eyes. Perhaps it wondered what this hope was for.
Perhaps the Old Man regretted his own myth-making. He surely regretted the first slice to his mouth, the paring down of his nose, to the skin. He surely regretted it when the thing bit muscle and worked bone.
Surely there was poetry in this!
William the Kid backed away. He did not draw his gun when it moved on David Baya and took his head. William the Kid turned and ran for the door, knowing that something had come unraveled this. He had seen the magic of the other side. The end of a Gods. He saw the ritual in it, or some part of him did. He ran aimless streets, felt the city began to leave him.
In the end it was the Priest’s boys left cruelly cut away from their spiritual leader who had led them in prayers to their God. They had nowhere else to go. Was their horror in their eyes as one by one they crawled out from the warehouse shadows, in ones, and in twos, to receive a benevolent kiss from their new father, from their new master, who was both spirit and God, destroyer and maker. And did it, within the ruins of flesh, know and understand?
Only the city knew.

This is a test of visibility, of illusion. Can this be seen? I’m being choked by format conventions and thus losing my audio when I try to export files into any other format other than SWF, which seems to be a deal between the new Snow Leapard OS and … fuck all if I know.

I’m baking a dick cake. Please eat, and enjoy.