Cthulhurotica (19 page)

And you, fool that you were so long ago, followed him. He took you to a city with fish-scale streets, on an island that swims. The island is called Cui-ui; the city is called Cui-ui; the undead fish impaled upon your Fisheater’s staff is called Cui-ui.

You are just called “fish”.

Your Fisheater crawls along the outside wall of your apartment, several stories above the dark and wide streets. You can smell him, like the sex smell of a girl about to lose her virginity, or maybe a little like the smell of burning drugs, or perhaps, like everything else on Cui-ui, your Fisheater just smells of fish.

He climbs straight for the porch because he knows you forgot to lock the porch door.

You snuff your candle, huddle in the far corner of your little apartment, and watch. You see his pale-skinned hand first, gripping the corner of the patio wall. Then his head, staff clamped between gleaming, white, serrated ridges of bone rather than teeth, the fish impaled on the end of the staff thrashing sluggishly. His hair is colorless, like fiber-optic cables, and lank. He climbs over the twisted iron railing and enters through the unlocked porch door.

Without preamble, he takes a box from his pocket, sets it on the low table in the living room, sits in the wood chair by the door, and waits. It’s like a ritual, this hiding and seeking and waiting, and you’re not entirely sure it is your will to hide.

After minutes or hours or days, you creep out of the shadows and open the box. You always do. Inside you find a straw, a vial full of opaque yellowish pebbles the size of peanuts, a one inch by ten inch strip of aluminum foil, and a black plastic Bic lighter.

You scurry back to your corner to hold out for another sweating eternity, telling yourself you don’t need it, don’t even want it. But it’s all just part of the ritual. Deep down you’re happy he’s brought you something more substantial than the dreams he’s been buying from the city above the clouds.

“I won’t do it unless you stop the dreams,” you say.

The Fisheater ignores your empty threat. The impaled fish on his staff opens and closes its mouth in silent agony, mocking your words.

“I’ll do whatever you want, anything you say, whenever you want me to, if you stop the dreams.”

He just waits. He has no need to bargain. He owns you, and he knows it.

Finally, when the shaking and sweating become too much to bear, you crawl across the floor on your hands and knees, embracing your debasement, reveling in it. Your Fisheater smiles and unfastens his robe.

You don’t even care anymore.

You cut off small pieces of rock, roll the plastic lighter over the pieces, crushing them into powder, then sift the powder onto the strip of aluminum foil. When you inadvertently block your Fisheater’s view of the proceedings, he taps you with the end of his fish staff, and you reposition yourself so he may watch.

You cook the powder down to a brown puddle and inhale the smoke with your straw. You feel like a whore with a mouthful of someone’s hate, and you hate yourself for loving the feeling.

Your Fisheater peels fish flesh and stuffs it into his mouth, his tiny shriveled penis engorging until it becomes the size of a small child’s, though he never achieves an erection. He watches until you are done smoking the small amount of drugs he could afford to bring, then slithers silently over the porch railing. He clings to the outside of the building and scratches the walls quietly beneath the clouds with their odd pink flashes of light, marking his territory with the whorls, arabesques, and octagons indigenous to his obsessions.

****

The first dream wasn’t that bad. Jim awoke tired, the tiny studio apartment already too warm. He could tell he was late for work by the angle of the sunlight slanting in through the small, undressed window above his bed.

He jumped out of bed, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, gargled with mouthwash, and ran out the door, making it to the bus stop just as the number nine pulled to the curb. When the driver asked him for his pass, however, Jim realized he’d left it back in his room, and when he ran home to his apartment to get it, he discovered he’d locked himself out. He broke the window to get in, and the apartment manager yelled at him.

He didn’t get to work until almost lunchtime. The girl at the dispatch desk wouldn’t look at him. She slid a small cardboard box across the reception desk. The contents of his locker: a towel, bar of soap, stick of deodorant, and an old paperback copy of
The Man in the High Castle
.

The Salvation Army said this was the last job they would find for him. He was on his own now. His clothes stank, he hadn’t had a shower in two days, he was hungry, and – as always – tired.

He picked up an abandoned newspaper from a table outside a coffee shop, and checked the Help Wanted section for unskilled labor jobs. There were three, all places he’d been fired from already. He went back to the halfway house and asked to use their washer and dryer, but the lady in charge was new. She didn’t recognize Jim, and she wouldn’t let him in. He went home, taped a piece of cardboard over his broken window, and fell asleep though it was only three in the afternoon.

****

Your Fisheater brings a woman this time. It has been a long time since he could afford to bring a woman. You can smell her outside on the landing, sex and hunger and shame wafting beneath the locked door. You wait impatiently as the Fisheater breaks into your apartment, the same as last night, the same as always.

You become aroused the moment he opens the front door and lets her in, because you know what he will want. Deep down inside, beneath your hiding and feigned revulsion, you are glad the Fisheater controls you, glad he hot-wires you into his obsessions and uses you, glad you are unable to fight it.

Sin without accountability – the gift of the Fisheater.

You can’t go to him right away; like last night and all the other nights, you must try to abstain, though you are impatient to be started. You are already imagining the ritual.

You and the girl will take off all your clothes. You will stand naked before the Fisheater, and it will inspect both of you. You will feel shame at its gaze, but you will not be permitted to cover yourselves. Then the girl will lie down on her back, on your floor, directly in front of the Fisheater’s chair. She will lift her legs and spread them, using her hands to spread her vagina, open a portal to her soul, like a vortex you’re are unable to look away from. And you will crawl – like an animal, drooling and shaking, eyes on her hole, your attention focused inside of her – until you are above her, genitals to face to genitals to face, hunger to satiation, a perfect loop. You will stay this way until your muscles ache and you are both insane with want and hunger and need.

Then the Fisheater will tap its staff on the ground and you will be released. You will consume each other to consummate your marriage of guilt and shame. You will ejaculate and taste the essence of your own energy inside her, and the taste will make you come again. Which will make her come again, and you will circulate this energy, like two batteries hooked up in series, positive to negative to positive to negative, until the Fisheater wishes you to stop.

When he has had his fill, he will crawl out over the railing, leaving you and the girl to avoid each other’s gaze while he scratches his patterns on the wall.

He is ready now. You can tell from the taste of self-loathing – artificial though it may be – in your mouth. You crawl across the moonlit floor to gorge yourself on hunger again.

****

The second dream was worse. Jim went to the Nevada Mental Health Institute as soon as he woke in his studio. Leslie, the receptionist, agreed to let him stay in the waiting room even though he didn’t have an appointment.

He kept glimpsing Cui-ui out of the corner of his eye, as if the dark city were bleeding into the day world like mold growing on a white wall. He saw piranha teeth in Leslie’s thin, obligatory, administrative smile; felt kinship with the goldfish in the bowl on her desk; and tasted amphetamines in the salty perspiration on his upper lip. His stomach growled, and the hunger reminded him of Cui-ui too.

He dozed in the chair most of the day, fish-shaped shadows swimming behind his eyelids. Finally, after six hours, the receptionist said, “You can see Doctor Duncan now. Down this hall here, just follow the blue line.”

Doctor Duncan’s office was a single-wide trailer attached to the outside of the building by a ramshackle wooden walkway reminiscent of the architecture of Cui-ui. The doctor’s bloodshot eyes, disheveled hair, rumpled shirt, and loosened tie testified to a long day of dealing with the rotting sanity of the Reno Metro area.

“What can I help you with, Mr. Jim?” asked Doctor Duncan, sighing, already exasperated.

“It’s the dreams again, sir,” said Jim, talking a little too loud to cover his suddenly growling stomach. “I lost another job because I couldn’t wake up. And even when I’m up I can’t stay awa–”

“We’ve been through this before,” said the doctor. He shut a manila folder with Jim’s name on it, and tossed it on the desk. “I can’t prescribe you anything unless you’re a patient here, and if you were a patient here, I wouldn’t prescribe anything anyway.”

“I’m not asking for–”

Doctor Duncan raised a hand and Jim stopped talking. “What you really need, Jim, is a clean system. You did quite a number on yourself last Christmas. No one can do that much crystal meth and not have some negative side effects.”

“But I haven’t–” began Jim.

“Long term,” interrupted Doctor Duncan, “side effects. You’re lucky you didn’t die.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” said Jim.

“If Leslie hasn’t already gone home for the day, you can pick up an admittance request form at the receptionist’s desk,” said the doctor, standing. “Mail that form to NMHI’s head office, and a caseworker will contact you within four weeks. Now if you will excuse me…”

“But–” said Jim, already rising to leave, habitually responding to the doctor’s cue.

“Really, Jim. I must insist you leave now.” The doctor sighed. “And stay away from the drugs.”

Leslie, the receptionist, was not at her desk when Jim left. Jim checked the desktop, to see if maybe she had left the forms for him to fill out, but the reception desk was empty save for the fishbowl. The fish watched him, its bulging eyes accusing.

He tucked the fishbowl under his arm and took it with him. At home, he cut the tiny fish into pieces, ate them slowly, drank the water in the bowl, and fell asleep.

****

You awake at home, on Cui-ui. The girl is still here. You can hear her crying in the dark though you can’t see her.

She must be new.

“What was your dream like?” you ask her.

Her breath catches, but she answers in a voice stronger and deeper than you’d expected. “You killed me.”

You creep closer to the sound of her voice, and you can see her silhouette now, black against the almost black shadows. You try to explain about the dreams your Fisheater buys from Err, the city above the clouds, but she doesn’t understand.

You offer to show her where the dreams come from, talking as if to a child, miming and pointing to the porch railing.

She shrinks away. You wait. You have nothing better to do until the next time your Fisheater calls. Eventually, she rises and follows you, though she does not take your extended hand. You shrug and lead her to the balcony.

Outside, the darkened city descends steeply towards the perpetually flooded piers of Dead Pectoral Harbor, the water like a sea of ink, the clouds above shot through with strange flashes of salmon-colored light.

You hear the scratch, scratch, scratch of your Fisheater scribing the walls below. Another Fisheater scribes beside yours. They both look up at you, hiss, and scuttle around the corner of the building to scratch unobserved.

You point to the flickering lights in the clouds above. You try to explain how you trade dead bodies for dreams, but the offering coffin on the porch is empty, just a shredded piece of funeral shroud from the last offering.

Salmon colored lights drift down through the clouds: the meat hooks descending for the offerings. You search the porch pointlessly for a corpse. There are none, of course, but you search again, and again, overturning bags of trash and piles of dirty clothing, you search until tears wet your eyes and your breath comes in ragged gasps. There is nothing left on the porch save for you and the girl, yet still you search.

Denial has always been a part of your Fisheater’s ritual.

The girl laughs and the sound drains the last bit of strength from your limbs. You collapse bonelessly onto the creaking wood floor of the balcony. You don’t even turn to watch the blade descend.

The knife plunges through your shoulder and pierces your lung. It hurts a lot more than you expected. You whimper and beg even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t.

The girl rubs your blood all over her naked body and dances slow and sinuous. Her Fisheater, stands behind her, stripping tiny shreds of fish flesh from the fish on her staff and eating it, consuming your murder. And you know now that your Fisheater intends to pay the dream merchants with your flesh, to pay this other Fisheater with your blood, and to finally pay you for your services with oblivion.

Sin without guilt, sin without fear. Release without the stain of suicide.

As always, you are grateful for what the Fisheater brings.

****

The third dream, as always, was the worst.

Jim woke, rolled over, and found himself eye to eye with Leslie, the receptionist at NMHI who had reminded him of the Fisheaters. Her cold, dead, blue eyes stared accusingly into his.

And she was, indeed, dead. Jim knew it even before he sat up and saw the blood-drenched sheets of his hide-a-bed. He knew as well what the police would find in his kitchen.

He pulled on the Levi’s at the foot of his bed, still spattered with blood from yesterday. He walked barefooted to the manager’s apartment and knocked on the door. The manager answered, his mouth open to shout at Jim about the broken window, or the back rent, or the cleaning deposit, and saw Jim clad in nothing but denim and blood.