Penny Dreadful (8 page)

Anyway. Take a long look at your own hand. The slender claw, beautiful and cruel. A team of expensive scientists working around the clock couldn’t design a more effective piece of machinery. This is what Hamlet was going on about there in Act Two. Man delights not me, nor woman neither. Because at the end of the day the hand does what you want it to. It saves the bird with the broken wing from drowning. It snatches the kid out of oncoming traffic and it pulls the trigger that ends the life of someone who deserves it or doesn’t. The hand does crosswords and lights cigarettes and feeds the fish and pinches your nipples when it gets bored. The hand is God.

I’m a fool, of course. But in the bright or anyway less shadowy regions of my heart I think I was hoping to come home and find a little space. Which is funny, don’t you think. Home is a word with such uneasy and fragile and ultimately menacing overtones that anyone else on the planet would have fucking known better.

Moon wants me to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky and I have a pretty good idea that no such person exists but Moon has been such a faithful protector in the past that I can only nod and say yes.

The queer thing is Moon’s tone, his voice. One minute he seems really very worried about the health and welfare of his pal Jimmy Sky and the next he is about to chew his own lip off just talking about him and I catch a vibe that maybe Jimmy was no friend at all and what Moon really wants is for me to find the Skywalker hiding out in some shitty motel room so that Moon can put a bullet between his ears or failing that, maybe find the fucker already dead somewhere so Moon might have the private pleasure of spitting on poor Jimmy’s remains.

And I guess it makes no difference to me, as Jimmy Sky is no friend of mine but still I wonder because the whole thing feels slippery and wrong and maybe I’m walking down a road that goes nowhere good.

Imagine you were in my shoes. What would you do, Jude?

Chrome:

He was shivering and wet. The water was so cold. His skin had a faraway brilliance, like he had stuck his bare arm into the snow and left it there. He huddled in the dark mouth of a suburban driveway, using a sleeping Citizen’s garden hose to wash the blood from his face and hands. He felt absurdly calm. He had done it, he had touched the ghost. He had killed and it wasn’t make-believe. The Fred had been a policeman and if he wanted to, Chrome could certainly tell himself and anyone who cared to listen that it was self-defense. The policeman had pulled a gun on him. He had been a threat to all of them, to the game. But that wasn’t it at all. The man had been a Fred. He had been passive, a slug. He had barely known what planet he was on. Chrome could have simply bitten the man’s tongue and disappeared as he had done countless times. One tongue, taken by force. Two points. Two more points. But the accumulation of points no longer interested him. He had lost count long ago and he had known this would happen one day. And when he nipped the Fred’s warm tongue and tasted blood, he had felt everything at once. His skin, bright and tingling as if he could peel it off and give it a shake. The small hairs on his neck. The enamel of his own teeth. He felt like time had folded around him and come to a complete stop. He and the Fred had been trapped together in a window, a bubble. They had fallen into one of those little plastic paperweights filled with water and artificial snow and the Fred’s throat had been soft and white and sweetly exposed and Chrome had been unable to think of any reason not to sink his teeth into that skin and simply pull it open. The blood had washed over his face, it had filled him with a sickness and joy that were fleeting. It was like an orgasm, of course. But the comparison was such a cliché it pained him to consider it.

He was a werewolf, a ripper.

He grinned. Très diabolique, non?

Now he took off his shirt, rinsed it and put it back on. He glanced down at the street, where Mingus paced nervously along the sidewalk. The Breather was freaking out, truly. He had looked at Chrome with such horror and disbelief that Chrome had laughed out loud. Mingus had seen what he did. He had seen him kill and Chrome hoped this would not be a problem.

Dead face yawning. My own warped face in the mirror. I had acquired the habit of examining it whenever I found myself alone in a bathroom. Otherwise I tended to forget exactly what I looked like. I promised myself this was not such a bad thing, and hardly a clinical condition. I looked like no one and it was nothing to worry about. I pissed confidently into Moon’s toilet, then climbed into his shower. The pipes groaned and the water was so immediately hot that I felt a little faint.

Moon had a surprisingly dainty assortment of hair products. Honey and clove shampoo. Conditioner made from dead silkworms, pasteurized goat’s milk and raw egg whites. A silicone-gel hair thickener and eucalyptus hair mist. The poor bastard’s hair was thinning, wasn’t it. It was turning to ash. Moon’s hair was vacating. The water crashed down and I dreamed on my feet. I saw Moon through the shower curtain, his hard white belly jutting against the sink and his face moist with sweat. I watched as Moon mournfully tugged another grassy fistful from his skull, then checked his gums for bleeding with a sigh. I watched him give the cat a bowl of dry food and leave the radio on to kill the terrifying emptiness in his apartment and I hoped that he felt a little better when he was out on the street. That he was suffering nothing more than the melancholy dreaminess of a distracted, middle-aged cop. And I wondered, as Moon must, how many years did he have left before he stumbled, before he stepped through the wrong doorway and shuddered from the tug of a bullet never seen, never heard.

Now I pulled on pants and wandered through Moon’s apartment, my hair wet and smelling like a field of poppies from Moon’s shampoo. The average person has a serious accumulation of shit. Personal shit and sentimental shit. Valuable shit and shit they don’t need. But Moon had almost nothing that was his. Nothing to remind him of anything or anyone. He had a couch, a chair, a television. He had a screwed-up cat. He had a broken record player. He had a punching bag, a heavy one. It was covered in a year’s worth of dust, though. Dead skin and cat fuzz and pollen. I gave it a passing jab and choked in the sudden, swarming cloud. Moon has a dartboard but no darts that I could find. There were no photographs, no trinkets. There were no books. I remembered that Moon bought one used book at a time and when he was done with it he traded it for another one.

The apartment was just silent. A wide pocket of nothing, a vacuum.

I could feel a mild panic attack coming on and I suddenly wanted to be sure that Moon was not dead or gone. I walked down the hall to the master bedroom and nudged the door open. Moon slept flat on his back, snoring softly. A small television was placed precariously atop a tower of milk crates. A lonely weatherman blinked on the screen, colorless and muted. The crates contained socks, underwear. The orange cat lay coiled around Moon’s big bare feet and when I entered the room the beast gave me a look of profound indifference. I allowed myself to sit on the floor, my back to the cold wall. I smoked a single cigarette, dropping the ashes into my cupped hand. The weatherman gestured meaningfully at a swirl of cloud patterns. I stared long and hard at his frosted television hair and finally decided that it must be an expensive toupee. I watched Moon sleep and I had a feeling that he regularly slipped away in the broken light of the weather channel. This pale emptiness is what I had wanted so badly, when I wished my wife would die. It’s what I couldn’t bear when she did.

There was a clock beside Moon’s bed, a pale red digital. Two minutes past five. I hoped the sun would come up quickly. I hoped something interesting would happen on the weather channel. Moon flopped over onto his left side, grunting. I moved closer and stared at his face, at the infinite twitching of his eyelids. His breath was terrible, oozing from his wide nostrils and thick, parted lips. Moon was two or three days past his last shave and I could see the beginnings of gray in his beard. It becomes him, I thought. There was a sudden change in temperature and I jerked back, afraid that Moon might wake to find me leaning over him like a killer. But one window was cracked, and a breath of cold air had merely entered the room. Shame stretched, then leapt from the bed. He glowered at me briefly, his eyes green and yellow. Then stalked out of the room with a lazy flip of the tail.

I wandered after him, stupidly eager for company.

Eve:

A shaft of yellow light in an otherwise dark apartment. Eve crouched in her closet, sifting through papers and discarded shoes. She wore thin black sweatpants and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. If she were normal, if she were someone with houseplants and a cat and a nice boyfriend, then she might have just come home from the gym. Her heart still thumping from aerobics. She would be drinking a vitamin-enriched smoothie and her rib cage would not be laced with cuts, she would not be stiff with bandages. Eve wore no underwear and no shoes and she didn’t feel at all sexy. Eve was tired, worried. She was annoyed, as well. She was worried about Phineas and she didn’t want to be.

As a small child, she had spent hours upon hours in her mother’s closet. Trapped, she had imagined herself a spider. She had loved the four walls, the dangling clothes that hung like cheap, shrunken tapestries. Her mother’s clothes had always seemed to be moving, touched by an impossible breeze. She would look behind them for a window, a portal. But there was only another wall.

When she was nine, she began to have dizzying nightmares about open space, fields of wheat surrounded by wide gray concrete. Nothing ever pursued her. But the emptiness had been unbearable and she always woke choking, as if she had swallowed half the sky. She would then crawl not to her mother’s bed for comfort, but to her mother’s cramped closet. Then had slept like a kitten on a heap of dirty laundry that smelled of smoke and fried food.

Now she found what she was looking for. A flat wooden box, taped shut like a cozy little coffin. Eve slit the tape with her thumbnail and removed the bald, naked Barbie doll from her childhood. She had an idea that she might use it for her piece. That Goo might use it. Eve glanced at her watch. She frowned and lifted it to her ear. It had stopped again. A dead piece of metal on her wrist. She tossed it aside and wondered if Phineas was okay, if he was coming back. She noticed there was a strange feeling in her stomach, a peculiar flutter, when she thought of him.

Shame swirled around the kitchen, murmuring. He twisted himself seductively around my leg. He was clearly hungry and there was no cat food to be found. I dug for a while through Moon’s barren cupboards and eventually offered the cat some corn flakes. Shame stared up at me, disgusted.

I shrugged. Aren’t you used to this, I said.

There was a crusty jar of peanut butter in the fridge. I scooped out a spoonful and wedged it into a coffee cup, which seemed to satisfy Shame. I knelt, then stretched out on my belly alongside the creature, who made a fairly nasty sucking sound as he worked on the peanut butter. His eyes flickered, warning me not to touch him.

The floor was yellow linoleum, torn and ravaged by Moon’s feet, but it felt cool against my skin.

Moon had been drunk last night, raving. But he had offered me a job, sort of. The whole business was borderline craziness. It was nonsense and it wasn’t. Moon wanted me to go undercover and look for a few lost cops. As if they were merely trapped on the wrong side of the wardrobe, with the lion and the witch. They could be anywhere and the disappearances could be unrelated. These were cops, though. And cops weren’t known to disappear. They went mad, some of them. They got stabbed by their wives. They ruined their livers. But they generally showed up for work.

I watched the cat eat. I thought about it and I tended to think that thirteen missing cops was a case for somebody else, somebody who still had a badge, for instance. If there was any truth to Moon’s story, then it was something heavy. It was FBI territory. The kind of case that I was more likely to make worse than better. The kind of case I would be sorry to fuck up. But if Moon really wanted to set me up in a motel room with a pocketful of walking money, then I might as well look into it. I could sniff around.

Why not? I said to Shame.

The cat had finished his breakfast and was now hurriedly cleaning himself. He looked pretty pissed off at me and I decided that the peanut butter was maybe a bad choice. Like glue in those old whiskers. I tried not to laugh, as I was pretty sure that animals didn’t much like to be laughed at by ignorant humans. Shame gave his genitals a cursory lick, then glided from the room without a backward glance.

I could not live here, clearly. The cat didn’t like me.

Mingus:

Pinched his nostrils between thumb and finger. Breathed through his mouth and stared bleakly at a patch of grass. He had alien memories, images that couldn’t possibly be his. A tiny house in the suburbs, painted a dull peach color that had faded to an unpleasant flesh tone. The same color as every home around it. Each house had one sad midget tree in the front yard, a skeletal sapling that would never grow taller than five feet. Trees that provided no shade.

Mingus shuddered as a thin man entered his mind, whistling.