Viper Wire, page 8
At the end of the Night of the Drunken Heart comes Danny the Mook. LikeSanta in Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, he is the thing everyone has been waiting for. Of all the spirits wandering the ship yards that night, he’s the easiest to spot. Danny the Mook arrives and leaves in style, in a burning 1975 Cadillac El Dorado. He closes on the soul parade from a distance. An orange speck at first, he bullets toward the ghost revelers like a shooting star, Roy Orbison’s voice high on the radio, “I’m going back someday to Blue Bayou…”
Asphalt bubbles as Danny’s flaming Caddy scalds its way along the parade route. Danny might be the last to join the parade, but he’s always the first to finish. He has places to go, people to see. In life, Danny was said to have been a whirlwind of energy. That’s why they had to burn him. When the a rival dealer shot him, Danny refused to die easily. The dealer and his boys doused Danny and his car with gasoline and lit them up like New Year’s Eve before pushing the flaming mess into San Francisco Bay. But even death couldn’t slow down Danny the Mook.
As he speeds down the ghostly parade route, Danny leaves a trail of scorched netherworld porn and afterlife betting slips behind. This is why Danny the Mook is the Emperor Norton of the losers: he’s too dumb or too crazy to know or care how truly dead and damned he is. Even in limbo — and especially in Hell — desire is constant, but unfulfilled. Danny the Mook is the Good Humor Man, the Tooth Fairy on the Other Side. His flaming car always damages the merchandise, but in Hell, it’s a seller’s market and Danny the Mook is a closer.
It’s rumored that, just as the Tibetan Buddhists believe in preparing for your inevitable death, in certain quarters of San Francisco those in the know come down once a year to the ship yards to leave dubious pints of cut-rate vodka and soiled girlie magazines for Danny the Mook to snatch as he passes by. No one knows if this really gets you any credit in the afterlife, but it’s a reasonable investment when you think that one night in the not too distant future you’re destined to be here in the ship yards — not as an observer, but as another ghost on Blue Moon Sunday, the Night of the Drunken Heart.
Patrimony
His mornings are the part of the movie they never show you. The part they probably never consider for the simple reason that there’s nothing exciting happening. No chainsaws or car chases or screaming debutantes.
But there’s blood, at least. In the morning light, it drips a merry crimson onto his bagel. He knows how to cut a bagel: tilt it on its side and slice down toward the cutting board. But he’d had a rough night’s sleep and was lazy and groggy enough to hold the thing in his hand and slice toward his palm, something only “a moron or a Yankee would do,” as grandpa often put it. He tears half a paper towel off the roll and uses it to staunch the blood. Then he butters the bagel.
He looks into the bright morning sky through the kitchen blinds as he bites into the warm bread. Butter runs out the corner of his mouth, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand. The microwave beeps and he removes a hot cup of instant coffee, blowing across the top as he checks his watch. He’s going to be late for work, and grandpa hates that.
Grandpa moved the family from Plainfield, Wisconsin in the early-60s, after the Ed Gein flap finally died down. It was a sorry business, papers from all over the country having photos of old Beatrice Worton’s headless corpse hanging like a deer carcass in Ed’s barn. And there were all the preserved body parts Ed kept in the house, along with the furniture made from body parts. The news made the whole town look bad. Grandpa got a job with a sheriff’s department in Oklahoma and moved on to warmer climes, taking the family and their inheritance with him.
Grandpa had been the original visionary of the family. While on the force back in Wisconsin, it had been the old man’s job to burn Gein’s grisly human trophies out at the crematorium. Grandpa burned animal parts instead: deer, rabbits and a few of the neighbors yappier dogs. All that free range game made a satisfying pile of ash and bone fragments, enough so that no one asked any questions.
After they moved, Ed’s cannibal furniture spend 30 years locked in a single windowless basement room in grandpa’s house. Only grandpa, dad and he had keys to the place. Dad was killed by a drunk driver back in ‘86 and that left just grandpa and the boy to share the secret. As he grew, the boy coveted Ed’s trophies more and more, but never asked when he would inherit the family fortune. He understood that no one hands you something this special. You have to earn it.
He has a unique perspective on the family fortune. The man sees Ed’s pieces as the beginning of a collection, not the end. He’s expanded on Ed’s original work, refining the flensing techniques and bringing in modern technology. At a bankruptcy auction, he purchased a freeze-drying machine from a taxidermy school that had gone belly up. When the local butcher shop ordered a new walk-in freezer, he bought the old one and installed it in the barn. This allowed him to get to specimens when he had the time.
Rushing, he reminds himself, is out of the question. Michelangelo spent seven years on his back painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He can afford to wait and get things just right. Like grandpa, he fancies himself a bit of a visionary.
Chewing his bagel, he sits in a living room whose walls are papered entirely in human skin. The furniture has been handcrafted from flesh and bone using a mixture of human and animal parts. He retrieves his car keys from a sidetable decorated with vertebrae and padded with dried tongues. Next to his keys lie glossy magazines that came in with yesterday’s mail: Architectural Digest, Home and Garden, This Old House and the new Ikea catalog. He can’t look at them now, though. He’s late for work.
Outside, he gets into his hybrid car (It’s good for the environment) and leaves his recycling by the curb. Heading into the office, he never goes over the speed limit. This weekend is grandpa’s birthday. He’s anxious to show him the progress he’s made on the place. And he hopes, a little guiltily, that this will be the year that he receives his inheritance. He’s made a lot of improvements, done a lot of work on the place. This could be it, he thinks. This could be the year I’m a man.
Necrophony
From the 1920s until his death in 1931, Thomas Edison, genius, workaholic and holder of over 1,000 patents, continued to work on his pet project- a Spirit Phone that would allow him to communicate with the land of the dead. Like Alexander Graham Bell, whose own work on the telephone was prompted largely by his desire to communicate with his dead brother, Edison passed into the land of the dead disappointed.
Around the same time, a daring Scottish inventor named John Logie Baird first demonstrated broadcast television to astonished crowds at Selfridge’s department store in London on January 26, 1926. With only thirty lines of resolution in his creaky mechanical imaging system, Baird’s Televisor pictures were little more than energetic silhouettes. Mechanical ghosts. Still, no one at Selfridge’s had ever seen anything like it, and none ever forgot that first experience of watching what looked like spirits caught in the spinning display disc.
Baird’s original home Televisors had been sold as do-it-yourself kits in the late ’20s. Gault found a good reproduction of the original plans in an ancient radio engineering textbook at the nearby university library.
Getting hold of the notes for Edison’s Spirit Phone was more difficult. The Edison Museum in Menlo Park was reluctant to let him, a mere civilian with no university affiliation, paw through their archives. After the check cleared on a hefty donation, however (a donation that ate almost all of his life savings), the museum welcomed him with open arms. Gault wasn’t allowed to remove or photocopy any of Edison’s papers, but he’d anticipated this. He walked into the archives with a Mont Blanc pen in his pocket. The pen was really a rather expensive mini-spy camera he’d bought online from Spies R Us. A few hours later, Gault had recorded the plans he wanted and was on his way back to his own home workshop.
Back in his lab, Gault discovered that his hunch had been right. The technology that drove Baird’s Televisor and Edison’s Spirit Phone not only fit together, but each gracefully completed the other. Had Edison, Bell, Tesla and Marconi all been right when they’d quietly speculated to friends and colleagues that electrical communications were the ultimate means to bridge the gap been the lands of the living and the dead? Had spirits been working through Baird and Edison, dolling out clues to the solution? Gault would be the first to find out.
It took two frustrating years of work to meld Baird and Edison’s machines together properly. Having been raised in an era of digital technology, the complex steam-era mechanics were extraordinarily difficult for Gault to get right. There were synching problems. Frequency drifts. Power anomalies. Then, one night it all flowed together. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Gault was sitting in his lab one minute, tuning the whirling viewing disc on the Televisor when a man’s face sublimed into view. The face was dark and soft, as if made of gray water. Gault saw his father, in glorious ultra-low-resolution.
“Dad?” he said, grabbing the Spirit Phone mouthpiece.
The old man crooked his head and looked around. His image broke up, lost in an etheric dark on the Televisor disc, then reappeared. “Son?” said the old man. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, dad. It’s me.”
“Where are you, boy? I can’t see you.”
“I’m still here. On Earth.”
The old man smiled a jagged low-res smile. “Oh ho ho. Still playing with your gadgets? You know you’ve made someone here very happy. All sorts of residents have bets down as to who would finally run a tin can and string from Earth way out here. Nipkow and some other German big brains swore they’d be the first. Edison will be happy to hear that it was an American.”
“Is it a good place where you are? Are you happy?”
“Very. So’s your mother. She’s off pawing through an Egyptian fellow’s reconstruction of the library at Alexandria. She’s taken up with some childhood sweetheart. Bill or Paul, something like that.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“A lot of the things that used to bother me don’t now. They mostly seem silly.”
“Dad, can you show me around?”
“Of course, son,” said the old man. “I’m not sure how well you’re seeing me, so I’ll head into the sun. Get you plenty of light for your gizmo to work with.”
“Thanks.” On the murky viewing disc, Gault’s father looked to be walking by a lake in a public park. Gault could see people strolling nearby. Couples holding hands. Happy children chasing dogs, running with kites. He could just make out the shapes of buildings on the far side of the lake. From what he could see, Heaven-or whatever the place was-looked like a set from a 1960s Italian science fiction movie. Barbarella or Danger: Diabolik. Though the images were in black and white, Gault was sure the towering cityscape would be all oranges, pinks and deep blues.
“And what about you, boy? How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. I’ve been working hard. It’s lonely here sometimes.”
“What about your girl, Jessica?”
“We broke up a year ago.”
Gault’s father nodded and pursed his lips. “Sorry. I liked her.”
“Me, too.”
“You have your eye on anyone new?”
“No. I’ve been working on the machine so much. What makes you ask?”
“A pet theory of mine. That we men mostly only do anything important to amuse or impress women. Space flight. The Great Wall of China. Learning to foxtrot. They’re all the same.”
“I never learned to foxtrot.”
“Well, you ought to.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Damned right I’m right.” The old man stopped. “I thought you’d like to see this. The entrance to our happy hunting ground.”
Past his father, Gault could see a long, orderly line of souls. Anubis led small groups to a large apothecary scale. One by one, the souls climbed up and sat in a tray on one side of the scale. A tall woman, Ma’at, dropped a feather onto the opposite tray. If the scale balanced, the soul got up and was led into the bright city. Gault saw that one soul weighed much more than the feather. The ground opened up and a crocodile-like thing stuck its head out, gulping down the soul in one gulp.
“Eaters of the dead,” said Gault’s father. “They ain’t pretty, but they get the job done.”
“Wow. I didn’t think it would be like that, I thought it would be, I don’t know, fluffy clouds and angels with harps. God and the devil.”
“Oh, them. They’re around. They made up ages ago. Every little thing forgiven. You want to go to the ornithopter races? You’d love ‘em, These blimp-size bastards made of crystal and wires. They flap like birds and fly like bats out of hell.”
“I’d love to see that.”
“You planning on telling a lot of people about all this, son?”
“I’m thinking not.”
“Good boy. No one in the scientific world will believe you. That only leaves the lunatics and the charlatans on your side. And seriously, fuck them.”
“You always gave good advice, dad.”
“You know, I can’t talk to you again after this. Not while you’re on Earth. It’s against the rules and a bad idea. You can’t be spending your time chatting up the dead. You have to go out and live your life. You’ve proved your point. Now, get out of that damned lab.”
“I will. I promise.”
“But we can still have a good time now,” said the old man. He whispered conspiratorially. “Knowing you’re not going to go blabbing about the place means I can show you the red light district.”
“First round’s on me, dad.”
Crash Kiss
Imagine a kiss. First there’s the animal awareness of another person’s heat and breath near your face. Then the collision of lips. What do they feel like? Are they rough? Soft? Chapped from the sun? Noses brush against each and cheeks collide. Tongues move into alien mouths, wanting to explore this new terrain of desire. Hands are useful, too. They can stroke or grab a lover’s hair during the kiss. Hands can caress hips, ass or crotch. Teeth bite at a lover’s lips while tongues glide and hands explore the geography of other bodies.
Imagine the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts. Seven tongues in seven mouths. Seven sets of lips. Two hundred and twenty four teeth. Seventy fingers formed from one hundred and ninety six phalanges. Imagine the explosion from the aft of the spacecraft, at the booster’s fuel tanks. The force of the explosion propels the astronauts’ bodies up toward the sky as the force of gravity pulls them down toward the Atlantic. For an instant, the explosion wins this tug-of-war. Think of those teeth and tongues — caressed by how many lovers? — dislodged and in free-fall, exploded from their jaws. Imagine the skin of their hands, which had left their traces on lovers’ skin and slid seductively between how many lips, flensed by the heat and shockwave as liquid oxygen ignites beneath them.
There’s no last kiss or touching goodbye. Seven lovers’ mouths blasted into fragments as in the Hindenburg or at Hiroshima. The astronauts’ bodies are artifacts now, vestiges of superheated vapor, chemical traces scattered in the jet stream and carried into the lungs of old loves and new loves they’ll never know (in this lifetime). A final molecular fuck. The Tibetan Buddhists call scattering human remains to the birds a Sky Burial. We don’t have a name for it in America.
Crash kiss.
Goodbye.
Author’s Note
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. The ship was lost and its crew were killed. Every newspaper and talking head on TV got in line to call the crew “heroes.”
I don’t particularly like the word “hero.” It separates a hero’s life from the rest of humanity and makes their death less awful. The death of a hero isn’t tragic. It’s part of the hero’s bargain.
I never wanted to think of the Challenger crew as a bunch of square-jawed Star Trek stand-ins. I wanted to think of them as men and women, special in their dedication, but still men and women like the rest of us. On that first day, I thought about their lives, their families and all the small, stupid dramas of life that we take for granted, but that they’d never experience again.
With that in mind, I wrote the following piece. Then I put it away. It was never published. I didn’t write it with any market in mind: I was just working through my own reaction to the Challenger crew’s loss. Now, 17 years later, with the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, I’ve decided to publish this piece.
The Columbia’s loss too familiar.
The Probability Box
Even at the height of its popularity, no one really understood how Probability Boxes worked. It was possible, in fact, that they didn’t work, and that the whole Probability Box phenomenon was built on malfunctioning technology. That uncertainty was the other problem with the Probability Box. Besides not understanding it, no one was sure where it came from. The consensus was that it was probably based on alien technology smuggled out of the notorious Vladivostock landing site sometime between late 2012 and the quarantine in 2013.
What, exactly, was a Probability Box? Looking like an old television “box,” a Probability Box was a video medium which displayed a range of possible and impossible signals. The technology first gained popularity in academic and techno-geek circles when the initial working sets would spontaneously play movies and television shows that didn’t exist: Casablanca starring a young Ronald Reagan. Orson Welles’ never-filmed versions of Don Quixote and Heart of Darkness. A run of the TV series Kung Fu, but starring Bruce Lee. An extra season of Twin Peaks.
