Penny Dreadful (5 page)

I had my own bellyful of problems, anyway. No money and nowhere to sleep, no job prospects. If I had three red apples, I might wander downtown and amaze the pedestrians with my juggling. I could gather enough spare change to buy a cup of coffee, maybe hang around a diner all day reading other people’s newspapers. I could beg a ballpoint pen off a kindly waitress and use it to mark up the classifieds. A few months ago I had dreamed of a job at a gas station, a video store. I had wanted to change my name and shave my head and write bad poetry.

Yeah.

I rolled my eyes at the sky, at a blanket of gray. I didn’t like poetry and I was not a good juggler. And I would first have to steal three red apples. I ducked into a phone booth and realized with some amusement that I bother to dwell on the irony. The call was free, at least. I told the emergency operator that I was a police informant and was in relatively grave danger. The operator was not amused.

This line is for emergency calls only, she said.

I’m going to be dead in five minutes, I said. Is that an emergency?

Your name, she said.

The angry flipper-boy, I said.

Hum of silence.

Phineas Poe, I said. Please tell Detective Moon to come get me.

Theseus the Glove:

The stage was black but for an egg-shaped spot of orange light. One of Goo’s bare legs lay stretched there as if cut off at the knee. Her thigh-high boots were nowhere to be seen. Theseus reached under his jacket to pinch his left nipple. He had his doubts about this girl sometimes, doubts about her belief in the game. But she was lovely as a sleeping child when bound and gagged.

A gloved hand entered the egg of orange light.

Goo’s leg looked as if it had been discarded, a piece of firewood. The hand began to stroke, or measure, her ankle with blunt, velvet fingers.

Theseus felt wet.

A small wire cage was shoved slowly into the orange light.

The wire cage had two doors. One of them was an ordinary door, with a hinge on one side and a latch on the other. The other opened like a set of flaps, with a semicircle cut out of each side. The gloved hands carefully pulled open these flaps and inserted Goo’s bare foot into the cage. The flaps were then closed and the cutout circle fit snugly, if a little tightly, around her ankle.

There was a low, steady grunting from the crowd.

Money. This was silver in his pocket.

Goo’s pale, arched foot was trapped in the wire cage. Now the gloved hand opened the rear door and a gray pigeon appeared, as if pulled from a hat. The pigeon was quickly pushed into the cage and the rear door latched. The pigeon crouched there, placid and dumbly staring.

The egg of orange light began to grow.

It widened to expose Goo’s hips. Her other leg was crumpled, hidden. The tattered, yellow-white dress lay like dirty snow around her. Her arms were splayed and apparently powerless. She was not restrained, however. She was deliciously passive and Theseus wanted to laugh. The girl was dangerous. Her eyes were shut tight and her ears flattened, feline against her skull. There was a thin pillow beneath her head. The Lady Adore crouched at the edge of the light, near the wire cage. She wore leather pants and no shoes. The coiled black cloth around her torso resembled a bandage more than a shirt. In her gloved hands, she held a bundle of damp gray rags. Adore appeared motionless, barely breathing as the orange light swelled. Adore placed the rags at the rear door of the cage, perhaps six inches from the forlorn pigeon. She lit a match, and the little bundle began to burn. Theseus groaned, sweating.

The pigeon was frantic. It hopped up and down and sideways, like a grasshopper. Adore pulled a straight razor from the cuff of one velvet glove and began to cut and slash briskly at Goo’s clothes. The pigeon threw itself against the wires as if it might kill itself, then abruptly stopped. Instead, it attacked Goo’s trapped foot. The wedding dress fell away from the razor like paper.

The bird was a mad, thrashing blur. Goo’s slim white foot was a web of trickling blood.

The corset was so thick that Adore was forced to hack at it. She peeled it away and Goo’s belly was bleeding here and there, from superficial cuts. Her ribs were fine and shadowy. Her breasts were plump, her nipples red. Smoke from the small fire hung over her body. The pigeon was growing weak now, its gray feathers dark with blood. The Lady Adore cut away Goo’s underpants and tossed them into the silent crowd. She reached into the cage and cut the pigeon’s throat just as the orange light faded to black.

Theseus smiled, pouring drinks all around.

Multiple personalities. Don’t freak out but I’m pretty sure I have them. Not a clinical thing, not a disease. But a distraction to be sure. There are maybe six or seven pretty concrete versions of myself knocking around in here and I mean it gets fucking crowded when everybody is drunk or talking at once.

And every so often the opportunity arises to assume another identity, to take another name and every time I want to run like hell, I want to run away from Phineas like his ass is on fire. Because I need a little personal space between him and me.

Distance. I need distance from the others.

But the other people I become are never strong enough. Or fast enough. Because Phineas wears them down in the end. He’s relentless.

Early morning freak-out. I passed a construction site. Abandoned. Looked like someone was tearing a building down and then ran out of money. Their permit was revoked or something and the building was left half-standing and you could see this exposed brick wall that fifty years ago was an exterior wall but the building had been added onto and the wall was covered. There were old advertisements painted into the bricks, the kind that still said cigarettes were good for you. And rust marks in the wall shaped like the skeleton of a fire escape and windows. A few of the windows were boarded up and plastered over. But the boards were rotten by now. Rotten and the plaster broken through. And through a few of these windows I saw people moving around. Combing their hair and drinking tea and reading the newspaper and these weren’t homeless people. They weren’t crackheads or squatters. They were just people. They all had that sweet laziness about them, that oblivious air of someone who is watching television alone in a hotel room in his underwear and has no idea he’s being watched.

Thought I must be dreaming. Thought I must be deceived by the light but they were in there, I’m sure of it. And you know what? When I see something like that, all the other versions of Phineas scratch their asses and pretend they didn’t see a thing.

Fuck them, right. I sat with my feet in the gutter and peered through the iron gate into the black space below, looking for dead birds and lost skateboards, rotting pumpkins. I scribbled in my notebook and tried not to lament my lack of cleverness. The cars flew past me and I felt more and more like an alien. I was the only creature in sight without a bright, metallic shell. It had occurred to me that Moon might not be so thrilled to see me. But I had no one else to call. Crumb would offer me tea and an amusing story about a guy who came in complaining of stomach pains, who believed he had an ulcer when in fact he was carrying a bullet and was too drunk to recall being shot. I didn’t need tea. I needed a job or a place to sleep. I needed a new pair of shoes, I needed a cigarette, and now Moon pulled up in a gray Taurus. The passenger window slid down and Moon stared out at me, his sour mouth twitching with amusement.

Jesus, he said. Get in the car.

Fortunately, Moon had cigarettes. And he seemed more than willing to drive around in forced silence for a while. His radio was broken, or so he claimed. We circled for a while, as if lost. It was a peculiar day. The sky was moody, inconstant. The light seemed to change violently from one block to the next and on one street it was actually raining. I shut my eyes and remembered driving across Nevada maybe ten years earlier. An empty stretch of desert, the highway glittering like a rope of black silver. The sun unblinking and the sky flat and silent as a stone. Peripheral vision fuzzy around the edges. A migraine, I thought. A hawk dropped suddenly from nowhere, swooping over the roof of the car and crashing into the luggage rack. In the rearview mirror I saw a brief windmill tumble of shredded wings, gray and white. As if the bird had exploded. And then nothing but my own face in the mirror and I had been baffled to see myself crying. How are you. How are you. I looked up and now we were sitting at a red light.

How are you, Moon said.

That’s a good question. I’m a little confused.

Moon grunted and shifted the car into gear. I examined him. The same clothes, the same meaty face. The eyes vague and expressionless behind glasses but the mouth was vivid, quick. His mouth could be apologetic and menacing at once.

You look healthier, said Moon.

Yeah, well. It’s been a year.

Is that all?

I’m broke. I need a place to sleep.

Oh, boy.

What did you expect?

I expected you to be dead by now.

We were driving directly into the sun. It lingered on the horizon, a sullen yellow eye. The sun refused to blink. Every tree and car and lonely pedestrian was skeletal and black, shadows come to life. A wheelchair rolled abruptly across the road, slow and wobbling, as if its passenger were unconscious. I blinked, waiting for Moon to touch the brakes. If anything, he sped up and we narrowly missed crushing the thing. I turned violently in my seat and saw that the wheelchair was in fact empty, drifting safely to the other side. There was no one on the sidewalk who might have pushed it.

What the fuck was what?

What was what, said Moon.

Moon pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket and smiled sheepishly. He called the station and told someone to take his name off the board. He was taking a mental health day.

I was amused. Are you feeling unstable? I said.

Yeah. I was thinking of you, actually.

I appreciate it. Where are we going?

My place. You can sleep at the foot of my bed, with Shame.

Who the hell is Shame?

My cat.

Curious name, I said.

It was supposed to be Shane, okay. Like the gunslinger.

Oh, yeah. Steve McQueen.

Jesus. It was Lee Marvin.

Whatever.

Steve McQueen was a fine actor, said Moon. But he couldn’t have handled Shane. The character was too rich, too complex. McQueen didn’t have a true dark side. He was too good-looking, you know. He was a prettyboy. Lee Marvin, though. That motherfucker could act.

I sighed. How did the cat become Shame?

When he was a kitten, I had this girlfriend. And she had a speech defect.

Beautiful.

Chrome:

Mingus had a remarkable nose. Chrome was proud of him, truly. He adored the boy. In less than half an hour they had come upon a Fred wandering stupidly down an alley. A thin, starved-looking figure in dirty clothing who meandered along, chewing his thumb and peering into sewer grates and stopping now and again to ponder the contents of a garbage pail.

Chrome rubbed his palms together now, gloating. The alley was narrow and smelled of rot. The shadows were a dark, sinewy green. The shadows were lively. The Fred was perhaps fifty meters ahead of them but Chrome was unconcerned. He happened to know that the alley led to a dead end. And the Fred looked particularly weak, as if his brain had softened well beyond mush. A Mariner’s nervous apprentice could bring him down with two fingers.

It was dreary, is what this was.

The best sport was of course a Fred who was self-aware, his nerves jangling with fear and his own new tonguelust. The self-aware would come at you with a piece of pipe, with teeth and boots. The self-aware were dangerous. And much more fun. In a pure hunt, thought Chrome, the hunter and the hunted must be properly entwined. They must be inseparable, of one heart and breath. They must be shadows joined, they must be lovers.

Chrome still twirled the garrote and bit at the air. He glanced at Mingus, who was walking so slowly he might have been asleep. Mingus wasn’t happy about this, he knew. It was a violation of the code of tongues to hunt by day. But it was a notion Chrome had been toying with for some time. Hunting in the light and among Citizens would surely increase the danger and thrill, the difficulty. He was bored silly with the stiff parameters of the game, the pious rules. And he was curious to see if anything would come of breaking the code. Besides. He was hungry.