Lies & Ugliness Read online

  “My back,” she said. “I think I know now how his leg must’ve felt, is all I mean.”

  She was staying with him while her back healed. Strauss kept it clean, moisturized, and bandaged. Plus during this crucial time he wanted her away from the familiar turf of home, from the TV and soporific magazines and whatever other banalities she’d chewed up and regurgitated into a wit-dulling nest around her. And with a little luck, the neighbor might even forget to feed the cat.

  Jane was taking vacation time off work, but even at that she worked from home, something to do with phone orders and computer inventories for some company that catered to fools and their money, soon cleaved. Her resumé would cure insomnia and maybe the will to live. No wonder she was desperate for radical change.

  A few times each day she’d ask him to hold one mirror while she held another, lying on her belly, and when properly angled she could see the subjugatum, fascinated that it was now such an intimate part of her anatomy. She would dip one shoulder or bow her spine and watch the design flex.

  “I never thought of myself as the tattoo type,” she whispered one night. “And now look how big a jump I took into it. And so beautiful. I almost hate that it’s not supposed to last.”

  Pity, that.

  He’d told her only as much as she needed to know to get her to agree to the ordeal, cognizant of the fact that she would have to have a loose screw or two in the first place to be drawn in by his ad. Do you believe in magick? He’d received six replies and considered that a landslide, most of their senders so despondent over themselves that they didn’t even hold out hope for plastic surgery’s chances. Or maybe they just lacked the credit rating.

  Jane’s reply, on the other hand, had a desperate New Age reek to it. There’s a goddess inside me just waiting to get out, she’d written. It wasn’t that her faith was misplaced so much as, well, fortuitously naïve. Goddess almighty. Had she been omniscient enough to know what he was really capable of, she wouldn’t have wanted him within ten furlongs of her bunghole.

  He’d of course had to explain about the subjugatum, choosing details and omitting others with Solomonic discretion. The design? Arabic, originally, and as old as sand, although refinements had been made over the centuries, mostly in the character of letters from a pair of obscure alphabets. What obscure alphabets, she’d wanted to know. Just for yocks he’d forced himself to mention Atlantis, to see how that tweaked her clit, and lord how those trusting bovine eyes did light. She was his.

  Historically the subjugatum was one of the more fabled and elusive unholy grails of those who made sport of tampering with the forces. That forerunners all the way back to Simon Magus had been said to conjure up Helen of Troy — and bed the wench — was no secret. The same for Cleopatra. One had to assume that premiums had also been placed on a bevy of lesser-knowns.

  What history’s dust covered up was methodology. Strauss could not accept that dead women were yanked from thin air. That greater or lesser aspects of them might be engineered from the flesh of the living held more potential, with here and there a tantalizing glimmer that the subjugatum was the tool. Even without that key theory verified, rumor was still on Strauss’ side: Foes of Simon Magus claimed that his Helen had merely been a whore he’d bought from a brothel in Tyre. Maybe they weren’t even wrong, just typical Christian busybodies in possession of half the facts.

  Jane had gone weirdly ga-ga over the romance of it. Strauss saw no point in killing the mood with news that the ink used was derived from certain fetal by-products, electing only to assure her that over time it metabolized into the body of the woman so tattooed. Which he’d always neglected to mention to Sailor Billy.

  “You’ve done it before, haven’t you?” she asked one day after the fact.

  “Why would you think that?” But he’d been waiting for this.

  “Something Billy said right before we started. About the ink? That someday you’d have to tell him where you got it.”

  “No. No, no, no. I’d just showed him the bottle when I was in to block out the time on his schedule. That’s all.”

  “Well, where did you get it?”

  “Jakarta,” he answered, off the top of his head, and that did the trick. There was no place else for her to follow the thread, so she let it drop, but then she was so ready to be lied to in the first place, as long as he was convincing about it.

  They started again after the prickly discomfort had left her back, the next sequence of rites intended to keep the subjugatum charged. Early in the twentieth century another refinement had allegedly been added by Aleister Crowley, and since Strauss liked the idea they went with it: use of a leather bondage harness whose frontal design of steel rings and straps duplicated the sephiroth and pathways of the Kabbalah.

  She endured all contortions and discomforts as if developing an appetite for them. Everyone suffers for beauty. It took them an entire weekend to work through the Ritual of the Ten Ecstasies, but only because Strauss was at the mercy of his overworked testicles. Jane took to it with ever-mounting gusto, seeming to avail her throat and ass to him a little deeper at every stage, repeatedly coaxing him to the brink of climax, when he would pull out to anoint with his issue the area inside one of the harness’ rings. All ten of them. In the proper order. In two days. Very little sleep. He hated her body then, because for now it was everything his wasn’t: inexhaustible and constantly primed.

  Oh. But. Look at those results.

  The first changes were apparent when viewed from behind, her dumpy bum beginning to reshape itself to resemble the tightened contours of a honeydew. Then her belly, marred by slack, began to firm itself as well. Neither result was nothing that fasting and strenuous sex couldn’t accomplish, but would lost weight shift up to fill out her decreasingly-smallish breasts? Would it highlight her hair and thicken the strands better than Pantene? In all, Strauss thought it was going precisely as planned.

  “How come we never once do it the normal way?” she asked one night. Candlelight turned her sweaty skin into the surface gleam on a bowl of cream.

  “Abnormality is the general idea.” If there was anything he hated it was armchair conjuring. “Let’s see if we can’t remember to stick with the program, okay?”

  “But the other, that doesn’t have to hurt anything, does it?” She took him by the hand and tried steering it to the downy patch between her legs. He clenched a fist. “Always my mouth, always my ass. It’s not that I don’t find that exciting — nobody’s ever done these things with me, or even been much interested in it — but just once I’d like us to make love like two regular people.”

  “But we’re not two regular people and we’re not making love.”

  “You don’t have one decent word to say to me, ever, do you?”

  “I’m sure there’s been one at some point. Keep thinking.”

  “You know what they say? That you can tell a lot about what a man will be like in a relationship by watching how he treats his mother.” Jane — or was this Zoe now? — had a defiant smirk on her face that he could never have imagined her wearing before. “Based on the way you talk to me, I bet you treat her awful.”

  “So much pop psychology, so little time. I don’t know what to rip into first,” he said. “It’s a moot point, anyway. I renounced my family when I was fourteen. Although if it helps your thesis, I did consider killing them in their sleep.”

  “What a liar. If you think you scare me when you say things like that, you don’t. Maybe you did at first, but now I know it’s just part of the act.”

  “Act? Moi?” He settled in, expectant. This should be good.

  “Act! Your dyed-black hair in those fat dreadlocks. The way you trim your beard into those angles. Sunglasses at midnight. A whole closetful of black clothes. Always wearing that chain and locket. And what’d you do, jab yourself with a cattle prod until you could never smile or laugh again?”

  “Keep going and I may crack up right in your face,” he said.

  Helping her m
irror her inner goddess and this was the thanks he got? It was truly annoying when they began thinking they could talk to him like an equal. A reliable barometer of change, but annoying.

  “All you need is a little cartoon caption underneath you that says Evil, and then you’d be complete, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why, Eliza Doolittle, that’ll be quite enough out of you.”

  Evidently she’d come to the same conclusion, now holding her tongue, but there was nothing of acquiescence in it. She was jolly well pleased with herself, maybe the first time in her nothing life that she’d ever stood up to her own species and she was relishing every moment.

  “They’re dead,” he told her, quieter now. “And no, I didn’t kill them. It was an accident and it was their fault and it happened while I was at school.”

  “Your … family?” she said. “Ohhhh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it, really, I…”

  Taken the smug wind out of her with that. Sometimes the truth was more potent than the best lie you could come up with. It was just that good lies were always more abundant and more dependable, and eventually you forgot which was which.

  Between the standard sadist and the garden variety masochist there was a relationship of deep trust. And always a point beyond which the masochist would never let the sadist go, and the sadist wouldn’t dare.

  Strauss had about as much interest in that game as he had in tent revivals and high teas. He wanted pain, he wanted terror, not for their own sake, but because in the right hands they were rocket fuel. Somewhere past the thorny thicket of screaming nerves was a darker realm where flesh surrendered to its master. It would bend to his will. He just had to speak its language and wipe its slate clean of the mediocrity it had always been satisfied with before.

  He cuffed her by the wrists and ankles to keep her secured, with the subjugatum before him like a map. He heated slim golden needles in the blue tongues of a gel alcohol flame, then lanced them into strategic intersections of lines and curves. Along her body he brushed a humming wand with a soft violet glow — another latter-day refinement — and the air crackled with the pops and jolts of static electricity.

  One hour, then two, and a third. He played her flesh like a conductor plays an orchestra — a hush here, a crescendo there. At first it was no more than reflexive spasms, but then it evolved into something more refined, a call and response before which her flesh and the framework below would ebb and flow like tallow.

  Whereas earlier she’d shrunk from the wand, Jane now strained at the limits of her bonds to meet it. Tiny arcs leapt between the round heads of the needles, and later when he began to remove them one by one it was harder than it looked. Her flesh greedy, loath to turn loose of them. But out they came, and then he turned her over onto her back.

  With a sweep of his hand he brushed her hair aside.

  He always saved the face for last.

  This time it had already started without him.

  Strauss was only trying to catch some shuteye on his couch when he felt the hands shaking his shoulders. Dawn’s early light hammered somewhere past the windows and their black curtains, and after the long night of living sculpture he was spent, nothing more to give, but they were always so demanding, these women. He did everything for them, he funneled considerable amounts of money to Sailor Billy for their betterment, he invested his time and boundless energy to elevate them to a higher plane. Yet in the end they always ran away out of some screeching quirk of bourgeois morality, or were spiteful enough deny him the consideration of deserved slumber.

  Saying, “Wake up, you little shit. You never cared about Zoe and you especially never cared about me.”

  Why he bothered, when it only reaped him such grief and abuse, he didn’t know. He reached back to turn on a table lamp. When the light hit her it took his breath away, and he’d never been one to give it up without a fight. She was still in flux the last time he’d checked. It could’ve gone either way.

  “You little shit. Who am I?”

  While the likeness wasn’t perfect, it was far more alike than not. He recognized her. He would recognize her anywhere. And he’d done it without scalpels.

  “You don’t like it?” he said.

  “That’s not it, it’s beautiful, it’s just not anything at all like the face I had in mind. Now who am I?”

  Strauss reached in his shirt to draw up the chain from around his neck and the locket from over his heart. He thumbed the catch and it split like an oyster; he showed her that pictured pearl within. With those familiar eyes she stared, and she pursed those familiar lips, and as she understood — or maybe remembered — she got that same old look on her face, like she’d never known him and never would, regardless of how hard she tried. It broke his heart, and if she left one more time it would murder him.

  “I don’t like you very much,” he said.

  In her haste to react she cracked a stinging red handprint across his cheek, and he was so suddenly thrilled he tented his pants in front. She dropped to her knees beside the couch, full of apologies and promises to never do that again and all the rest of those soothing nothings he craved.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But sometimes mothers aren’t here to be liked.”

  Neither were sons, for that matter, but petty differences of opinion were hardly enough to repudiate the rewoven bonds between them.

  Cancer Causes Rats

  ready, sandra? roll tape. three

  She would be here today, no matter what, even if it weren’t all in a day’s work.

  two

  Just to make sure he was actually put away for good, he who had vowed to do no hard time. Not unlike the old joke: We’ll go to his funeral to make sure he’s dead.

  one

  Static for the lens, she’s framed off-center so that her backdrop is clearly seen: a building of vast graystone tonnage and Corinthian columns, too stately for anything so gauche as a statue of Blind Justice. She’s young, the low side of thirty. Trim, the consummate professional, dark hair conservatively styled. One of the city’s favorite daughters, even if adopted. She has no need of introduction of self and place, for time must not be wasted. The more stories per thirty-minute newscast — minus sports, weather, and commercials — the more exciting the flow. The more excitement, the more viewers, the higher the Arbitrons. Self and place will be added in-studio, superimposed text from the Chyron machine: Sandra Riley, ActioNews 8 Reporter. Municipal Court Building.

  Microphone in hand, she dives in:

  “The reign of terror that began eighteen months ago has finally reached its end this afternoon at the sentencing hearing for Darryl Hiller. The twenty-six-year-old Hiller — the so-called Tapeworm — was convicted five weeks ago on sixteen counts of rape and murder. This afternoon, Judge Thornton Steckler passed down the expected maximum sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

  She’s cool and steady, forever striving for the perfect blend of authority and compassionate story involvement. That intangible quality which will later, on playback after editing and splicing with other footage, reach out through the tube to seize viewer attention. Telling one and all, I speak the truth, it’s something you want to hear, and no one can tell it quite like I can.

  Sandra’s trick: She focuses not on the camera lens, as do so many lesser-talented competitors. Instead, she focuses two feet beyond the lens, a starmaking quality that plunks her firmly inside the living room of an entire city.

  In truth, Darryl Hiller has yet to be sentenced. Sandra and her crew — cameraman, sound recordist, and film editor — are taping the segment in advance. If they’re wrong they’ll reshoot later. But no one in his right mind expects the Tapeworm to get slammed with anything less than the max. Pre-hearing is simply less congested outside the Municipal Court. Less background clutter to detract attention from Sandra Riley. And it will give them more time post-hearing to scrounge reaction footage of the principle players in the Tapeworm’s final day as a newsmaker: attorneys, p
olice officers, victims’ families.

  As well, she has her own press conference to give, and the anticipation is delicious. Her contemporaries and competitors citywide — from network affiliates, network O&Os, local indies — have already accused her of grandstanding. She can afford to laugh off such accusations, knowing they’re born of professional jealousy. All of them report the news; only Sandra is an insider on this, making the news as well as distilling it for consumption. She had no say in the manner it plummeted into her lap.

  “But even as the city breathes a collective sigh of relief,” she continues, “this day of justice cannot be considered a total victory. Police still have no leads in the copycat killings patterned after the Tapeworm’s methods of rape and murder, which began two months ago…”

  Sandra wraps it, packages it, and Kevin the cameraman bags it. She reaches around her back and unclips the Sony from her skirt’s belt, draws the earphone line from beneath her jacket. Every word was taped informally from a written script so she could listen and repeat verbatim — no TelePrompTers on site — and be free to concentrate on projecting through the lens.

  “Let’s get set up outside Courtroom C,” she tells her crew as they pack it up. No cameras allowed inside the courtroom.

  Sandra lights a nervous cigarette and the nicotine rush calms her empty stomach. She’s eaten nothing today but a handful of peanuts gulped for breakfast, and the cigarette helps her forget.

  Kevin straightens from his camera, a tall and handsome black man with a moustache and a hightop fade. “You oughta give those up. Give you those pucker lines around your mouth, look like hell on camera someday.”

  She smiles, considers grinding the cigarette with a shoetip but doesn’t. “By the time I get the lines, my airtime days’ll be over.” She’s on a fast-track rise, gunning for network anchor by thirty-five. Only the youthful need apply. There are no female equivalents of wise old Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace. Her biological clock is ticking, and it has nothing to do with children.

  Gear is packed for mobility and Sandra pitches in to help lug it along. No off-camera star demeanor for her, and the crew loves her for it. She’s one of us. But in her heart she questions the purity of her motives. Even altruism can be self-serving.