Penny Dreadful (25 page)

There’s Elvis, said Griffin.

Oh, yeah. Elvis, said Ray. And what the hell does that mean, exactly.

Griffin laughed. To go see Elvis, he said. To die but not die.

Elvis is an imaginary death, said Ray. He nodded. I can live with that.

The taking of tongues is ultimately an act of compassion, said Tom.

Ray laughed. How’s that?

Tom leaned close to him, hissing like a woman despite himself. If your tongue is between my teeth, then it’s mine to sever. To eat. But I don’t.

Why not? said Ray.

Because I’m enlightened.

Now you’re a Buddhist, said Ray. This gets better and better.

And what did you do to that girl, the Trembler?

Ray frowned and sullenly twisted his head from side to side until the joints in his neck popped. He took off the hideous fedora and dropped it to the floor. He ran one hand through his matted blond hair, staring at himself in the mirror and finally Tom saw what he saw.

The face of another. One who was not Phineas, was not Ray.

Phineas began to cough, great hacking coughs that would rip him in two. He felt sick and he found himself wondering what Griffin’s tongue would taste like. Fuck fuck fuck. He cast his eyes away, at the crack in the wall where another tiny shadow of himself was possibly having a better time. He took off the fedora suddenly and dropped it to the floor. He ran one cold skeletal hand through his hair and glared at himself in the mirror.

That chick wanted to kiss me, he said.

You are so hopelessly hetero, said Griffin.

Oh, really. Phineas smiled. That’s odd. Because I’m thinking of your tongue right now. I’m wondering how sweet your breath might be, how your lips would be warm and cold at once.

Ah, yes. I think you will have a future as a Redeemer, said Griffin. The taking of tongues by way of sympathy and charm.

Whatever, man. What sort of thrill do you get from torturing some fucked-up kids?

Griffin rolled his eyes. The Freds are my daily bread. If I want a thrill, then I hunt another Mariner.

I could be a Trembler. I trembled that girl, said Phineas.

A fascinating idea, said Griffin. The male Tremblers do not lead such happy lives, I’m afraid. They are hunted ruthlessly by everyone, and soon they are left with no tongue at all.

Fuck it, then. You can just call me Fred. Or Freddie.

Griffin bent and picked up the fallen hat. He held it between two fingers as if it were a dead thing.

You dropped your hat, Ray.

Motherfucker, thought Phineas. Or did he say that aloud.

He was starting to hate the name Ray, he really was. But he reluctantly took the hat from Griffin.

Thanks, he said. It’s not really my hat.

I promise you, said Griffin. You will regret this.

Whatever. Phineas put on the hat and shivered. He was Ray, though. He was Ray Fine. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the mirror and said, do you think you could take my tongue?

Now? said Griffin.

Phineas shrugged. Why not.

The sound of water dripping and they stared at each other for a long waxing moment and in a crack in the wall their microscopic shadows likewise stared at each other and Phineas was confident that his little shadowself would soon pin the shadow Griffin to the floor like a wriggling bug and maybe just rip out his tongue.

Mingus:

He was afraid of Chrome, very afraid. And he wasn’t sure the women appreciated that. His poor brain hurt, all the time now. The game was too much for him. It had been days and days since he had slipped outside of it and it was like he could never sleep. He wasn’t tired, exactly. But he might be losing his mind. He was beginning to understand that it was dangerous to stay in character all the time. He could not quite remember where he lived, for instance. And he had been fairly shocked to think of that genetics exam, to remember it at all.

It wasn’t that he wanted to take the test. Doubtful that he would be able to comprehend the thing at all. The last time he had been to school he had found himself in a microbiology lab with a lot of frightening equipment that he no longer knew how to manipulate. The air had been thin and sterile, with a hateful undertow of chemicals.

Sometimes, though. It might be nice to visit his previous world.

His daylight self made him uncomfortable, however. His name was unimportant but he was a paranoid and sexually nervous computer yuppie who was failing out of med school with alarming speed and grace. He was just over five feet tall and he weighed 110 pounds when wet. He got by with shaving once a month and he had a sticky relationship with his mother. He was boring. He spent most of his time online, cruising the web and playing Doom. He was technically still married, but he and his wife were estranged and she had rarely bothered to sleep with him anyway. It was not a world that he wanted to rush back to, exactly. But sometimes he was curious to see if it had changed at all.

Dizzy’s house made him feel safe, though. Familiar and strange, the memories were muted, like beasts held underwater. She kept a lot of candles burning and everything smelled of trees and he saw nothing but soft edges and shadowy landscapes. He sat in a leather chair, barefoot. He worried about Chrome, about what he would say or do if he knew Mingus had betrayed him. He sat with his arms crossed, staring straight ahead. In another hour or two, it would be midnight. It would be time to go out and play. He wondered if he could sit without moving until then, he wondered if he could stop his own breathing.

Goo had gone already.

She had been pacing around ever since he told her that Chrome was a madman. She had been smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying to hide the fact that she had slipped into her Eve persona and failing badly, he had thought. And maybe he should have followed her, he should have kept an eye on her. But she had given him a dirty look when he suggested it. It was funny, really. But little Eve was even more fearless than Goo. Anyhow. She was performing later and had likely gone ahead to prepare.

Change in temperature and the smell of Dizzy Bloom came around a corner. It was an unidentified spice, a color he had never seen. And before he could give it a thorough ponder, she was crouched before him with sweet glowing skin and brief sharp smile and long dark hair falling loose and he felt himself get a little warm. Females rarely came this close to him. He smiled, wondering what she wanted.

Are you okay, she said.

Not so bad. I’m worried, of course.

You’re adorable, she said.

What?

Her hands floated to touch his thighs and his breath stopped. His breath shut down pretty efficiently. Dizzy Bloom ran her fingers up to his hips, tugging at his pockets. His brain was gone, long gone. And he let himself slide out of the chair to kneel before her as she stroked his face and whispered to him, kissed him.

Incredible.

Mingus wouldn’t have believed another person’s lips could be so soft. Dizzy offered him her tongue and he touched it lightly with his own. The room flickered around him as if the house was unstable. Dizzy Bloom shrugged out of her leather jerkin and now her little round breasts were in his cold hands and he felt something like nervous glee, pure shivering foolish glee. And when she slipped his trousers down and exposed his short thick penis to the naked air and lifted her skirt and moved to lower herself onto his lap and gently very gently helped him find his way inside her, well at this point he pretty much blacked out.

Concrete and barbed wire, concrete and barbed wire and I was trying to remember the words to this obscure country song that Jude used to sing when she was washing her hair or painting her nails, something about concrete and barbed wire and how the average state prison was an easily penetrated fortress compared to the human heart.

It was a country song, okay. I didn’t say it was poetry.

Griffin or Major Tom was pretty bent on calling me Ray Fine and that was cool. I could walk and talk like Ray. I could be Ray Fine. I had created the poor stuttering bastard, hadn’t I? I had purchased Ray’s sad clothes and this moldy hat and even perfected the way he limped. Ray was my idea.

Good night, Phineas. I will most likely kill you in the morning.

Dear Jude.

It appeals to me, of course. The shadow world. The ability to slip in and out of the real. A fanciful subterrain where the lord of the rings and bladerunner become one and I can be a mad dwarf for a day, a thief or an assassin. I can be a mercenary with a soft spot for razorgirls and I daydream about this shit all the time, don’t you?

When I was fifteen or so it was Dungeons & Dragons. A few of my friends had a game that ran for what seemed like forever and we gathered every weekend to play without stopping. We used Mountain Dew and nicotine for fuel because the Dungeon Master was kind of a fascist about drugs. We blacked out the windows but it didn’t matter. At sunrise the game always lost its legs. My character was a thief, a halfblood elf named Grim. Don’t remember his vital statistics exactly. Dexterity off the chart. Strength and charisma well above average and I wasn’t bad looking. No magic skills, though. And I was no good at languages. What else. I was of questionable birth and not terribly stable. And my ethical designation was chaotic/good, which meant I would probably save a young maiden from a pack of orcs but maybe not. There were no promises and you wouldn’t want to turn your back on me. I was a thief, after all.

I used to dream of Grim. In my sleep I was Grim. And even years later, long after the game was done, I dreamed of him.

It’s easy. You stagger a hundred years forward, a thousand years back. You manufacture a world where the apocalypse has failed to manifest. Urban purgatory. The sun is a joke, a bad memory. The world is dark and wet and waiting to be fucked. The world is a great big pussy. Everything is sex and chaos. Rapidly shrinking human population due to HIV, ebola, mad cow disease. Whatever. The political elite live in orbiting space stations. Mutants born daily. DNA experiments gone wrong. Vampires and goblins. Elves. Werewolves. Androids and common humans. Cyber and weapon technology is at a standstill. Corporations are controlled by artificial intelligence. Evolutionary regression. Past and future merge, or blur. People ride camels and horses alongside landskimmers and hovercrafts. Traveling circus troupes wander nuclear wasteland. The road warrior model. Freak shows, blood sports, theaters of cruelty. Public executions and snuff films dominate the airwaves and pornography is common currency, etc.

Then again, I doubt you would need to daydream. This is pretty much the way you see things on a good day, isn’t it?

Major Tom:

Convenience, he thought. Artificial light that made the skin look pasty and green and aisles swollen with bright, fascist packaging. Convenience. Oh, dear. That was rich. That was a regular killer. He stared down at himself from a big curved mirror overhead and tried unsuccessfully not to giggle. Shoplifters in the mirror may be closer than they appear and whoever had dreamed up the phrase “convenience store” was a born torturer.

Tom found himself staring at a long, tubular orange product mysteriously called “Pringles” and his mind began a bitter rhyming game: tingles jingles mingles shingles and what in hell was he looking for? The clerk was staring at him with bright green frog eyes and Ray was waiting outside. Ray, who refused to play the game.

Mouthwash.

Of course. He was on the wrong aisle, clearly. These products were all in the snack family. They were heavy with fat and starches and red dye #2, yellow dye #6. He needed the medicinal aisle, the cleaning creams and powders. He wanted some of that cool blue mouthwash. His tongue was a bit chalky, his tongue was sore and putrid from the mouth of that Fred by the creek and he suddenly wished he had taken a taste of that adorable Trembler. But Ray was a friend, he was a dear old friend and Tom had graciously let him have her without muscling in for even a nibble.

Eyes closed and hair wet from the rain. I am surrounded by dark water and the air is different, colder. The air has teeth and it must be winter. A noise like sweet kisses and the low croak of a frog, an old man coughing. I’m different, too. I’m smaller. Thick socks and rubber boots, long underwear. Heavy wool pants and a goosedown vest. Something in my hand, cool and slender. A composite bow. The shallow breathing of another and I’m not alone. Trevor is here, my cousin. A cruel and silent boy four years older than me who holds a shotgun in his steady hands and now I can smell oil and sulfur and bourbon. This is a duckblind and everyone laughed at me when I wanted to hunt ducks with a bow and arrow. And they were right to laugh. I never killed a single bird and check it out: that was a false memory, my first. I never had a cousin named Trevor and I never went duck-hunting as a boy. Pretty cool, huh. Psychological dislocation. Modality of the visible, the tactile. And like Stephen Dedalus I’m walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand.