The Convulsion Factory (22 page)

S: When you put it that way, it does sound like you’re coming from inside a hellish church of some sort.

J: What we wanted to map out with the sound is the collision between, say, the human spirit and harsher mechanical realities. Plus, it’s a veiled reference to the human body as a temple, and its decay.

S: Which is a topic you’ve become notorious for exploring onstage, in some of the most graphic ways possible.

J: Considering what’s coming on the next tour, you haven’t seen anything yet.

S: Can you give us a hint?

J: Not really, it’s still in the planning stages, but it works in theory. I’ve found a … well, let’s say technician, in Switzerland, who’s not afraid of taking some of my more outré ideas and trying to actually implement them. It’s not so much of a visual effect as a way to interface with the audience. Totally. While at the same time creating a new sound source.

S: Considering your usual candor, this is sounding very secretive.

J: You’ll understand why when we unveil it in Chicago. I’m so excited about it I’m pissing down my leg right now.

S: And that’s all you can say about it at this point?

J: (after sigh and long pause) If it means that much to you, I’m calling it the “Human Resonance Chamber.” But don’t print that.

*

For the first night of the tour, all four of us went to the theater to watch our support band from the wings, then withdrew to the dressing room to nervously await our turn. We remained oddly quiet, as if realizing that tonight marked a turning point. We — Josef above all — would be viewed either as messiahs or lepers.

I’ve never claimed to wholly understand the way his mind works, or what compels him. Or what drove him to Switzerland to meet with a renegade surgeon whose obsessive fascination with the human body and its sonic potential equaled his own. My only claim is that, bathed in the glow of it all, I sometimes feel very humbled.

Such faith Josef had, that his flesh would not reject the implants studded over his body. But why would it? Millions must be walking around at this moment, skeletons held together with metal pins, or plates sealing broken skulls. The body adapts. Metal is coated with blood and tissue, and incorporated. Insulated wiring integrates along muscle like a new kind of artery.

The body embraces.

And bone conducts sound with eerie ease.

Twenty minutes to showtime, I took him in my mouth, tasting steel and his sex, and thought I could hear the humming of his blood.

And when we took the stage, our places were ordained by our function in the machine that the four of us became. The curtains parted and angry red lights burned and five thousand throats rose in one mighty cry of welcome. And we were a collective god … the god out of the machine.

They saw us integrated within a setpiece of ruin, amid rusted mutant pews that would never again hear prayers from pious lips. Meat rotted atop a blasted pulpit, and our projection screen hung between corroded cathedral arches that housed shattered stained glass, while across the screen itself, herds of central Europeans from a half-century past marched to the gas chambers in grainy black and white.

The drum machine and Anthony’s kick bass slammed in sync with a dirgelike pounding that shuddered the stage. A latched loop from one of my keyboards chugged away with a sound of distant oil pumps, while I called up a wailing wall of pipe organs in anguish. Kevin’s guitar spat caustic chords. Spliced through it all were audio cut-ups of savage modern prophets exhorting their countrymen to
jihad
.

And from the wreckage at center stage, he rose. A hydraulic hinge lifted Josef up, up into view, lashed to a twisted cruciform fashioned from old discarded television aerial towers. Skin along the backs of his arms and elsewhere had been pinched and fed into tiny breaks sawn in the metal rods, so that in several places he looked skewered in place.

With distorted voice, he chanted the faithful to Mass:

“Fathers feed on daughters

mothers feed on sons

and you will feed on emptied wombs

incubate in scraped-out tombs

with maggots thy kingdom come.”

We never broke between compositions — we segued. We never spoke informally from the stage. The medium was the message, and there was nothing we wished to impart that wouldn’t translate better from the speakers and the screen.

We were into an extension of the third piece of our set when the hydraulics ground into motion and lifted Josef, then swung him forward and down, an offering to the crowd. Red and blue spots tracked him, descending into a sea of reaching arms.

I watched, I played on, as Josef tore free his arms, then broke loose a number of foot-long sticks affixed to his platform. Most he dropped to the crowd around him. He kept two.

And, in tribal rhythms he began to play his own body.

It was totally improvised. I don’t even believe he yet knew which place sounded like what. But into the density of the mix he fed … the sound of meat, and machines.

Just within reach, the clamoring horde took their cue, now understanding, then took up their bludgeons. I’ve always found it amazing how strangers will naturally fall into sync after several beats, no matter how complex the polyrhythm. Entrainment, it’s called, and it gives me faith that despite our alienation, we are connected after all.

Cudgels flailed, and Josef’s sweat cascaded. He opened his mouth and out roared a feedback wall of unearthly voices.

The horde surged around him, and where there were not enough bludgeons, hands sufficed. He rolled his head back to face me, and across the burning mists of the stage our eyes met. He’d never looked happier.

And I knew, even if they tore him limb from limb, each piece would continue to sing its own song, from deep within its throat of bone.

Just like last time, you awaken in the middle of the night with the taste of blood on your mouth. It’s thick and gummy, has been drying awhile. The moon drapes a bright trapezoid of silvery light over the top of your bed, crosshatched like the panes of your window and slashed with the bare branches of trees.

When you raise your head, no more than you have to, you spot the dark, coin-sized stains on your pillow. They hadn’t been there when you went to bed.

You sink down in the covers to become invisible beneath them, in hopes that
it
won’t see you if it’s still in the room. You try to lie motionless, refusing to surrender to that urge to tremble, because if it’s still there, it might hear even the tiniest chattering of your teeth.

It
knows
teeth. Intimately.

You listen for the soft sigh of its breath; through slitted eyes dissect the shadows for its shape, maybe the glint of an eye or two. You remain razor-alert for the creak of a board, for the metallic click of the tools it carries.

And somewhere on the far side of forever, you realize it has the inhuman patience to outwait you all night.

Demons, you suppose, must enjoy the waiting.

If you weren’t so convinced it was still there, you’d run to the bathroom for the aspirin. The throbbing in your jaw is starting to grow more pronounced, pain taking form out of the numb void.

But the only movement you’ll risk so far is something it can never see … although you wonder if its ears might not be so sharp that it can
hear
the sliding inside your mouth. The way you can’t help but press the tip of your tongue into that fresh hole in your jaw, exploring the hot moist socket newly emptied of tooth. It feels huge, another gaping wound gouged in gum and bone, big as a bucket and still brimming with blood.

Then, slowly, the recollections start to piece themselves together again:

Awakening to the prick of the needle.

The immense pressure of that hard round knee — or whatever it was belonging to the thief’s anatomy — bearing down on your chest, to hold you in place.

The taste of metal in your mouth, its firm insistent grip.

Then, after the ordeal of twisting, of tugging, of cracking, the sigh of something’s satisfaction — definitely not your own.

Reliving all this, you shudder in the moonlight, knowing if it’s still in the room, it can’t help but notice you now. With this much lost, your invisibility betrayed, you let curiosity get the better of you, and slide your small cold hand back, beneath your pillow…

Where it closes on another crisp dollar bill.

No such thing as a tooth demon, your best friend told you at school, after the first time; not that
she’d
ever heard of. For a while this reassured you, because if anyone would know about these things,
she
would.

She’s got the kind of parents you wish you had, at least when it comes to the movies and comics and magazines they let her see. How you love going to her house, because the family room becomes a magic theater where you get to watch all the films forbidden under your own roof, and walking into her bedroom is like a trip to a museum where you can learn about all the terrible and fantastic creatures that make their homes behind the dark of night…

But aren’t
really
supposed to creep uninvited into your room while you’re asleep.

So this tooth demon must exist, obviously. Just look how hard it’s breaking the rules.

Ever more educated about such things, your friend once showed you a comic book that told about the one rule that all demons, no matter how mighty, must obey: If called by name, their
true
name, they must submit to your control.

A board creaks. A shadow disengages from the deeper darkness along the far wall, while moonlight glints off the pliers clicking in its eager hand.

One name is all you need, strong enough to contain all your hopes and prayers that your friend is worth such trust.
One name.

“Daddy?” you try, and this works. It stops.

But only for a moment.

As soon as you can talk again, you’ll try another name.

Jamey had been missing for nearly a week before anyone much realized, then another few days after that before we learned why. It wasn’t the first time, Jamey off again on another exorcism of the latest future he saw ahead of himself, rather than the one he wanted. Don’t feel like assistant managing a Kinko’s for the next forty years? A few days of going AWOL will bury that particular nightmare.

When the phone rang I stirred first, then Rachel turned over in bed, splaying her warm soft hand over the knobs of my spine.

“Don’t answer it,” she said, and batted hair from her eyes as if hacking at ferns in a jungle. “It’s four in the morning…”

Briefly I considered it might be someone calling about a job and this was their way of deciding who was truly hungry for it, but Rachel thought it more likely a gauge of how much shit you’d swallow, and about had me talked into ignoring it, but the caller was persistent, and the answering machine was still pulped from my throwing it across the room last Easter after listening to some condescending message my mother had left, so I answered, and it was no one hiring, just Andre.

It’s hard to take Andre seriously when he cries because it gives him the hiccups, and he could be pouring his heart out to you for all you know, but you just can’t get past that inverted yelp every time his diaphragm convulses, so instead of empathizing you mostly end up trying not to laugh. When we were in gradeschool other kids, out of boredom, used to pummel on him for no other reason than to get him started.

The phone cold against my ear, I listened to Andre cry, and hiccup, then listened to him tell me about Jamey and the way he’d found him. I’d already said we’d be there as soon as we could before realizing there was nothing we could do, so I hung up and let my ambulatory daze move me over to the window, where I pushed the curtains aside and stood not feeling the chill radiating from the glass and the neighboring buildings.

“Angus?” From behind me.
“Angus?”
She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on.

“Jamey’s dead,” I told her.

Rachel sat in bed, blinking. “What, again?”

“No, I … I think it’s the real thing this time.”

She drew herself up in the sheets and the sweatshirt that she wore to bed, letting the news sink in, and when she asked how, I didn’t know what to tell her, because Andre hadn’t elaborated and I’d not thought to ask, and I couldn’t very well lie because she’d be seeing for herself in an hour or so.

I really hate looking like I don’t know the score.

*

I grew up with an answer for everything, or so my mother told me, plenty of times, and one of the last things she said to me the last time I visited was, “How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?” As if, one, I could summarize, and two, she actually wanted the truth. Her question, I think, her terminology itself, sounded suspiciously like a line from a Soul Asylum song she must’ve overheard my stepbrother playing and probably assumed I related to because everybody her age knows that everybody our age likes all the same things. Homogeneity is very important to her and my stepfather.