Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:34:48.
pornacalypse
By M
1. A DO-IT-YOURSELF-COP-KIT
All I’m doing is taking the report. I’m not trying to solve anything. I’m just interviewing one of the survivors. To be perfectly accurate, the only survivor.
Glancing around: Bodies lying everywhere, wherever they fell, and a few lying several feet away from wherever they fell, having crawled dumbly, presumably out of habit, to bleed to death someplace else, anywhere else, under a shelf of plastic godzillas, for instance, or down one of the narrow aisles lined with x-box games.
You’d really hate to think they made the extra-effort on purpose, for crissakes.
Husks, that’s all they are anymore, with black, gaping absences torn out of the sides of them. The faces all look the same, though, more or less: gritted teeth and blind white orbs rolled to the overhead fluroescent lighting nowhere.
Flies, already. Where do they come from? How do they get here so fast? You’d think they had their own 911 system.
Until they’re dead, lying by the tens or hundreds or thousands on plains or in train stations, you forget that human beings are like garbage bags stuffed with too much rotting meat.
It’s the false personalities, I guess, that helps you forget. Walking, talking bags of garbage…
I see a bare foot, small, white, flawless, with perfectly painted pink toenails, lying severed just above the ankle on the tiled floor a few feet away.
“The lives of all the people in the world,” I often think, “if you speeded them up, are like something inside a great big blender. A sort of frothy pink milkshake…Time is the great big blender.”
hu*man 1. of or characteristic of a person or persons; such as people have 2. having the form or nature of a person;that is a person; consisting of people 3. having or showing the qualities characteristic of people 4. a human being --Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
Black blood, everywhere, shallow lakes of it, tacky under the bottoms of my $175 running shoes.
Helicopters overhead, as usual.
I have half a hard-on.
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The survivor says: “The guy was all white, wrapped up, like a ninja, or one of those arab women in those robe things, a burkha, is that what they’re called? He was jumping all over, shooting, swinging a sword, like its Afghantistan, lopping off heads, arms, whatever…”
Later, in the car, I say to my partner: “The guy in white thing again. Hmmm…Think there’s a connection?”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, okay? Some guy in white shows up at supermarkets, fast-food joints, amusement parks, city pools. He slaughters whoever’s there. Kids, grandpas, housewives, teeny-boppers, it makes no difference. Whoever’s there, he kills. Like an earthquake.
My partner says: “Murder is a form of ecstasy. Orgiastic, you know.”
I say, “You didn’t even get out of the car, you fat prick.”
Looking in the vanity mirror, he squeezes a poisonous red pimple and says: “Some kids are taught, when they’re little, to call their shit a ‘boopie.’ Cute, isn’t it? Dr. Isidore Rosenfeld cautions that every time we take a shit, we should examine it before flushing the bowl. Every goddam time. Know why? Because a malignant tumor doesn’t necessarily bleed constantly and at the same rate. So you have to catch it, so to speak. Imagine that: a man, in order to live, must constantly look behind him, head up his own asshole, according to Dr. Isidore Rosenfeld, that is.”
Back at the station. A middle-aged guy, balding, 5-clock-shadow, in custody for something-or-other is screaming like a lottery winner: “I am what I am. That doesn’t mean I’m proud of it, but I can’t change it either…”
I call the office of an orthodpedic surgeon. Pain running down my right leg, all the way to the sole of my foot. Toes numb. Fingertips. I wince: “Got anything earlier than next Tuesday. I’m in a lot of pain.”
She says: “Nope, nothing. All booked up.”
Maybe she can tell I’m exaggerating. Am I exaggerating? Yes, I decide, I’m exaggerating. I’m more annoyed, really, than in any horrible pain.
“Okay,” I say, hang up and think: snooty, sadistic bitch. I could be dying, fucking dying. What does anyone care? You think this department cares?
My partner walks by my desk: “Cranberry juice, that’s what I’m drinking, want some? Good for your prostate, supposed to be, anyway. They cut that out of you and that’s it…limp noodle, piss in your panties. Ssssh, don’t tell anyone, they don’t want you to know that…”
Me: “Shit, I’d rather eat my gun.”
Partner: “That’s what you say now.”
Something about all this happening today makes me think of that loft apartment we raided two months ago. Converted warehouse. Six naked japanese girls dangling from the ceiling, bound in elaborate ropework, like origami mobiles, or macrame, (fucking cool japanese: even their perverts no how to make an art out of their perversions) slowly turning cause of the commotion we make in the still static air breaking in.
But by now we’re just standing there, caught short, guns drawn, just watching, just breathing hard with the exertion of climbing the stairs, the adrenaline rush. Slammed by this sudden wall of silent emptiness.
Its very beautiful, very peaceful. Two of the girls are still alive, then, later, on the way to the hospital, only one. They’d been drugged into a comatose state and left there. Coroner thinks a week or so, no cuts, no blunt trauma, nothing broken, dying quietly of dehydration, probably. In the corner of the room, a webcam recording it all.
These are the kinds of things you see…
I step outside the station for a cigarette (fucking no smoking laws.) It’s raining, again.
They’ve hung another girl from one of the lamposts: blonde, 20 or so, mostly naked, blue face, bulging tongue, cold rain dripping off her cold, curled, dead toes.
--MS