Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:35:46.
pornocalypse-2
By M Satai
2. It’ll take a while to get permission to wiretap the residual auras of the victims but there’s not a lot to be expected from that. Maybe if the victim knows the killer, if it’s a husband or an uncle or if it’s a kidnap victim who’s been tortured and kept alive for a while in the perp’s closet or basement…sometimes, then, something useful comes from reading the aura of the death-scene, if you can confirm it, that is. No way to do that but read it. Most killers, though, are smart enough to move the corpse after the murder to another location.
Anyone any dumber than that and he’d practically have to be standing right over the body with the dripping knife when you arrived.
So wiretapping the scene either gets you nothing but silence, or just a lot of wild, incoherent screaming, cursing, praying, begging, etc. Just another piece of crap-useless technology, that’s what the crime aura-reader is.
Even when you get a mass murder, like in this toy store massacre, where everyone dies on the fucking spot, it’s still useless. Let’s face it, guy walks up to you, points a gun at the bridge of your nose, and shoots a smoking hole through the center of your face. Chances are you aren’t noticing what color eyes he has or if he’s 5’11 or 6’3.
Anyway, you’ve got to do something in the meantime. That’s what this job is really a matter of…not actually accomplishing anything, but doing some-thing.
The director, as he’s fond of repeating ad nauseum: “What we’re looking for gentlemen, is a paradigm. We need a general framework into which we can put all this amorphous bullshit. We can’t have it crawling around out there assimilating everything without a meaning. You can’t shoot that to death, no siree. Give me a good, goddam skeleton to hang it all on.”
But we got nothing, NO-THING.
Generally speaking, this is the time in an investigation when you start turning over tarot cards, throwing yarrow sticks, consulting the I Ching. You draw up astrological charts, poke your finger in the Bible at random, try automatic writing.
You start doing mathemetics, philosophy, scientific experiments…
You start interrogating people. You start torturing them. You want to hear confessions.
“These arabesques that mysteriously embody mathematical truths only glimpsed by a very few—how beautiful, how exquisite—no matter that they were the threshing and thrashing of a drowning man.” –R.D. Laing
I’ll pay for all this some day: we all will.
Flash forward ten years, fifteen: I see myself as a head on a bed, just a head and a spine all-twisted up…a useless, vestigial body, information-victim, I guess, degenerative nerve-disorder from too much exposure to the virtual plagues of schizoid sex and unending entertainment, same as everyone else.
I’ll lie there staring at screens, or the damn wires will simply be screwed into my brain receptors like god’s tiara, tubes running in and out of me, machines pumping my blood, breathing my air, eating my food, passing my shit and urine, that’s how I’ll end up, same as everyone else, if I’m lucky, and I can’t even tell if this is something I’m afraid of, or something I’m really looking forward to…
Down in the Grid 10 there’s a guy, or a woman, it’s hard to tell: bald, fat, enormously fat, swathed in silk gowns and turban, a fag-hag, a real throwback, a cross between Marlon Brando and Madame Blavatsky. Calls him or herself Unival. You bring along an offering: 6 roast chickens, two pizzas with everything on ‘em, a dozen or so raw eggs, a vanilla cake, a bowl of last night’s hash, and a gallon of sour milk, something like that, and you sit in the kitchen while Unival consumes all this crap and then you go outside and watch while s/he gets down on all-fours in the alley and pukes against a concrete wall and “reads” the vomit-splash.
SPLAT!
Christ, watching Unival puke is like watching a snake eating a rat in reverse, or like some kind of strange mating ritual.
My partner says, “Never before did I consider it: the primary sexual element of bulimia. I will forever afterwards regard differently the idea of 16-year-old girls kneeling in suburban bathrooms all over America puking up their mom’s spaghetti dinners.”
On hands and knees, in convulsions and paroxysms, fat rings undulating, Unival barfs up all the crap that just went down that abused esophagus five minutes ago.
“Damn,” I say, looking at the drippy, chunky explosion, “what a fucking mess.”
And this is the general consensus among the three of us, not just about the case or the question at hand, but about all of it, everything, life in general, and not much more comes of our consultation into the mystic state of things, and, really, not much more was expected.
The stench is terrible, much worse than the sum of its parts, and I puke sympathetically in the gutter and it means nothing more.
Unival wipes a wet mouth with the back of one fat-dimpled forearm: “Sounds like the 12th is on fire again.”
And it’s true, you can hear the sirens, the screams, the crack of automatic weapon fire. You can see the roast-red glare in the sky.
The civil war, ongoing, like a recurring case of psoriasis, is starting up at twilight.
That’s none of my business, none of the department’s business. Around the corner of 52nd, I see 2 zombies ambling toward us, walking stiffly, dressed in suits, carrying briefcases.
Serving size 1 Can
Calories: 0
% Daily Values*
Total Fat 0g 0%
Sodium 35mg 1%
Total Carb 0g 0%
Protein 0g
*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
That’s the Nutrition Facts printed on the side of the can of Fresca I’m drinking to clear the puke taste out of my mouth, and wash away the puke bits caught between my teeth.
Me: “Time to go.”
Partner, (munching one of the pizza slices the psychic didn’t eat): “When’s it not time to go?”
The partner and I climb into our stolen Dodge Charger, red, cherry-condition, and
head for the east side; he’s driving. Traffic’s a snarly octopus with a thousand tentacles, a rape on Madison is causing a lot of rubber-necking. Things loosen up past Lexington.
Bored, I roll down my window and take a few potshots at the passersby.
Hit a few.
Slumped bodies, screaming, the usual.
--MS