Are You Loathsome Tonight?: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  ... God [ ...] a garden. Man [ ...] garden. There are [ ...] and [ ...] of God. [ ...] The things which are in [ ...] I wish. This garden [is the place where they will say to me, ‘... eat] this or do not eat [that, just as you] wish.’ In the place where I will eat all things is the tree of knowledge.

  —"The Gospel of Philip,” in The Nag Hammadi Library

  In Vermis Veritas

  In 1996 I was asked to write an introduction to Registry of Death, a graphic novel by Matthew Coyle and Peter Lamb, which was being published by Kitchen Sink Press. Here's what I came up with. This is the first in a loosely linked series of fiction in which all the characters will be worms or larvae.

  In Vermis Veritas

  “It's nothing to do with mortality but it's to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.” So said Francis Bacon, an artist of the twentieth century, explaining why he painted scenes of gore and squalor. While admiring his sentiment, I would also postulate that Bacon's appreciation for the color of meat made him a connoisseur of the very mortality he pretended to eschew.

  I consider myself a connoisseur of mortality. While my millions of brethren and sistren chew, chew, chew their way through whatever offal comes along, inexorable but mindless, I preserve my energies for the sweetest meat: the carcass tainted by fear. The carcass that suffered the protracted death, the agonizing death. Meat crisped alive by fire, meat sliced open by steel, meat with a bullet in its gut.

  Here in the slaughterhouse, I dine well.

  It is everything to do with mortality. It is the great beauty of the color of meat, of its many colors: the spongy purple of drowned flesh, the translucent rose of fresh viscera, the seething indigo of rot. Bacon must have painted in the slaughterhouse. It is the great beauty of the flavor of meat, of its many flavors.

  When we reduce a carcass to bone, we not only reveal its structure; we become composed of its elements. For most of the others, this is a matter of breaking down proteins and replenishing simple larval tissues. For me it is a kind of catharsis. I take on the qualities of the deceased, I am nourished by his perceptions, and perhaps somehow I aid in releasing his soul.

  Consequently, I have lived thousands of lives. I have memorized countless tomes, and written more than a few. I have constructed dynasties, then torn them down or watched them fall. I have been a foetus in a womb and a guru in a cave. I have digested the concepts of “freedom” and “love” and “eternity,” and excreted them, over and over again.

  Men kill other men, sometimes for sport, sometimes for love, sometimes just sending them to the slaughterhouse to feed still more men—or, if left too long, to feed me and my kin. Each one thinks he has lived in the worst of times, but nothing has ever been different.

  I curl in the slightly damaged brain of a young man who died for no particular reason, after a protracted and honorable hunt. The glistening whorls are dissolving, coming unglued, breaking down into their chemical components. I gorge myself on the primordial soup of his mind. The terrible realization that dawned upon him at the moment of death sharpens the taste.

  I become drunk on his flood of experiences and emotions. I synthesize his knowledge. I live his entire life in the time it takes me to eat a path through his liquefying brain. I wallow in his world. I die his weary death.

  As always, it makes me glad to be a maggot in the slaughterhouse and not a man.

  Arise

  You may have seen artwork by Alan M. Clark. It's sinuous, organic, foetal, alien, exquisitely wrought. I wrote “Arise” for Imagination Fully Dilated, a refreshingly nonstupid concept anthology in which writers were to verbalize Alan's paintings, which would then be reproduced in gorgeous color alongside the resultant stories. I chose a very Southern-looking painting of mountains and bare trees and a ruined graveyard and a haunted house, then stuck a couple of Brits in it and proceeded to begin it in Gabon. Don't even ask why because I don't know.

  Arise

  Nightfall in Gabon, and the bush was the darkest thing Cobb had ever seen. It rambled along the edge of the little beachside town and stretched away into the West African hills. If you stood at the edge of the bush and looked out at night, you could see dozens of little fires flickering in the distance, giving off less illumination than lighters in a darkened stadium, accentuating the blackness more than relieving it. These were not the fires of poachers (for there was nothing left to kill nearby), but of straggling nomads on their way into or out of town.

  Cobb sat in the tin-sided bar as he did most nights, drinking African beer lightly chilled by the bar's refrigerator. This was to Cobb's taste, for he had once been an Englishman. Now he was a citizen of nowhere on earth. He drank his beer and rolled his fat cigars of African ganja and fixed his rust-colored eyes on the TV set in the corner, and it was very seldom anyone spoke to him. This, too, was as he preferred it.

  When the police came by, Cobb would give them money to go away. When the television broke, Cobb paid for a new one. Though everyone in the town knew this man was very rich, no one cared whether he was alive, dead, or famous. The only conceivable reason he could have come here was to be left alone, and so he was.

  He watched the television, mostly American cop shows and softcore porn from France. When the news came on, he ignored it. He had seen coverage of war, every kind of natural and manmade disaster, the assassination of one American and countless African presidents, the dissolution of the same Soviet Union he'd once written a satirical song about. But he never reacted to anything he saw on the TV.

  Tonight, he saw a thing that made him react.

  It began with the music: a few bars of a song by the Kydds, one of the really huge hits, one of Matty's. That was familiar enough, you couldn't watch TV or listen to the radio anywhere on earth without hearing the Kydds, and Cobb ignored it. Then the reporter's voice broke in: “Dead at 45, Eric Matthew, founding member and driving force behind the most successful pop group of all time..."

  Cobb looked up. Matty's face filled the screen, an old picture. That girly smile, those fuck-me eyes that hid a will of steel. Then the screen switched to a picture of the four of them in concert, 1969, all long stringy hair and, Jesus Christ, velvet suits.

  “ ... suicide at his New York apartment. Eric Matthew is the second member of the Kydds to die; guitarist and singer Terry Cobb was killed in a plane crash in 1985. All the details coming up on CNN."

  Cobb didn't go to the bar for a week, but stayed in his house drinking whiskey. On the eighth day, a young African showed up at his door with a Federal Express box addressed to William Van Duyk, the name that had appeared on Cobb's passport for the past ten years.

  The box was heavy, ten or twelve pounds at least. The return addressee was someone or something called Gallagher, Gallagher, Campbell, on the Upper West Side of New York. Cobb found a knife and opened the box. Inside was a cream-colored envelope and a heavy plastic bag full of what looked like coarse sand.

  He stuck a long forefinger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. A key fell out, and he let it lie on the floor for now. Inside the envelope were some folded sheets of creamy paper. “Terry,” the first line read—

  Cobb dropped the paper. No one had addressed him by that name in over a decade.

  His hand shaking a little, he picked up the letter. “Terry,” he read again, and this time he realized it was Matty's handwriting. He knew that neat schoolboy script well enough, had seen plenty of first-draft lyrics and signatures on contracts and bossy notes in that same hand. Matty knew where he was—had known where he was. Had known all this time. It was like one of the morbid jokes Cobb had always collected: Matty had known he wasn't dead, and now Matty was dead.

  “Terry, you always said I had to have the last word, and it looks like you were right. I've found the most private place in the world. It wasn't enough to save me, but I think it might be just the thing for you. Get the fuck out of Africa at any rate—it's unhealthy for a Manchester boy. The house is yours. Do whatever you like with the other. Peac
e & Love—MATTY."

  Cobb flipped through the other papers. One was a deed to an estate in North Carolina, ownership of which had been signed over by Eric James Matthew to William Van Duyk. Another was a hand-drawn map of the estate and its environs.

  He swore and threw the papers on the floor, then glanced at the box again, remembering the plastic bag inside. He knew it wasn't sand. He slit the heavy plastic with his knife, took a handful of the contents and let them sift through his fingers onto the wooden floor. Most of the material was pulverized, but here and there Cobb saw recognizable bits of calcified bone.

  “Bastard,” he said.

  The flight from Port-Gentil to London was terrifying. Aside from the fact that he hadn't ridden in anything larger than a taxi in years, he had no idea how recognizable he might be. He couldn't wear dark glasses, for they had been one of his trademarks in the old days, tripped-out mirror lenses spinning daisy wheels of light. Despite a steady intake of two vodka tonics per hour, he was shaking when he deplaned at Gatwick, was certain he looked like a drug mule or worse, was shocked when he was waved through Customs without delay. Having been out of the loop for so long, Cobb didn't realize that in the one suit he'd managed to salvage—crumpled but classically cut black linen, with a gray T-shirt underneath—he simply looked like a disheveled jetsetter returning from a particularly strenuous holiday.

  Which he was, more or less.

  No one stared at him in Gatwick Airport. He didn't care to try his luck in the streets of London, a city he'd last seen in 1975, the psychedelic sparkle of Carnaby Street morphing into the black-lipped punk snarl of King's Road. Though he'd had his hair cut short and neat, though a Gabonese diet had left him far thinner than he'd ever been in his performing days, someone in London would surely recognize him. Possibly even someone he'd slept with. Cobb couldn't imagine anything much worse than that, so he bought a copy of Rolling Stone with Matty's face on the cover and sat down to wait for the plane to America.

  He had to fly into Atlanta, go through Customs again (they searched his bag this time, cursorily, but there was nothing to find), then endure a two-hour layover before the flight to Asheville, North Carolina. Cobb didn't think he'd ever been in North Carolina before, and by this time he didn't care. He planned to find a hotel room, sleep for at least a couple of days, then rent a car and check out Matty's alleged secret hideaway, which looked on the map to be a couple hours’ drive from Asheville.

  When he saw the heavyset man at the Asheville airport holding the sign that said william van duyk, he should have just kept walking. Instead the old Terry Cobb took over, the Rockstar Asshole, and he looked down his nose and snapped, “Who the fuck sent you?"

  The man held up one hand in a placating gesture. He had a thick moustache and a widow's peak, and his suit was the opposite of Cobb's, cheap but well pressed. “Sir, I work for a driving service, I was hired to meet your flight—"

  “How'd you know when I was coming in?"

  The driver grinned. “Not that many planes coming into Asheville. We've had a standing order to meet any flight with a William Van Duyk on the roster."

  He's just a stupid hick, Cobb thought. So Matty had hired a limo. That shouldn't surprise him. Matty hadn't minded spending money when he was alive; why should he mind now?

  When Matty was officially alive, Cobb corrected himself. He knew quite a lot about the difference, and it was this knowledge which made him deeply suspicious of the circumstances at hand.

  It had happened in 1985, after the Kydds’ acrimonious breakup and the flop of his own solo career. The solo failure had bothered him for a long time, because he thought they were good records—but he'd gone back to his roots, old rock and blues, and that had been a mistake. Cobb blamed it on the endlessly layered, flowery, overproduced sound that was so popular in the seventies, a sound that the Kydds in their later days had helped to create, a sound that dominated Matty's successful solo efforts. Nobody wanted to hear Terry Cobb cover “Crawling Kingsnake.” It was the timing, that was all. Only when he was very drunk or very depressed did he consider the possibility that his edge wasn't as sharp without Matty's melodic genius to back it up.

  So he fucked around in New York for a while, just doing drugs and being famous. By that time cocaine had arrived in a big way, and his flirtations with it made him paranoid. He converted more and more of his assets into cash, gold, and even diamonds without quite knowing why.

  On the ninth of December, 1985, Cobb had a reservation on a flight from New York to Amsterdam. Possibly due to the aftereffects of the speedball he had snorted the night before, he overslept and missed his plane. It wasn't a big problem; he'd only been going for the good hash. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Hours later, the clock radio woke him. A Kydds’ tune, one of his. Cobb almost reached over to turn it off, couldn't muster the energy, and lay in his darkened bedroom listening. The news came on. Three hundred miles out of New York, the plane he'd missed had fallen into the Atlantic. And apparently everyone thought he had been on it.

  A search was launched, of course. But the plane had exploded in midair, then plunged into some of the deepest water between the U.S. and Europe. The ocean was black, frigid, and shark-infested, and the diving crew only found about half of the bodies. Terry Cobb's was not among them despite the crew's extra efforts (they were all Kydds’ fans, they told the press, causing a minor uproar among the families of the other victims).

  Which is it better to be? Cobb asked himself that night, over and over. A washed-up rock star, or a dead one?

  The answer was always the same.

  When the phone began to ring, he unplugged it.

  He didn't make his escape right away. There were important things to be procured, documents that would allow him to travel as somebody else, anonymously, very far away. He took everything he needed to a hotel in Times Square and hid there by day, slipped out by night and gradually, expensively, got what he needed. He opened a vast New York bank account in his new name, acquired credit cards, and said fuck the apartment, the investments, the royalties; let them go to Matty and the other two and whoever else was still making a profit off the Kydds.

  Near the end of January 1986, a man with a U.S. passport in the name of William Van Duyk boarded a flight to Bangkok. Cobb spent the next several years wandering through Thailand, Bali, India, Turkey, and Morocco before fetching up in Gabon. There inertia took him, and he stayed.

  But he'd been bored for quite a while now. And the night he'd seen the TV report of Matty's death, he realized that he missed Matty more than he'd ever let on to himself. They had been essentially married to each other for a decade, after all, without the sex but with all the joys and sorrows, the shared jokes and secrets, like it or not. If Matty was really dead, Cobb wanted to see what his partner had left him, and why.

  If Matty wasn't dead ... well, Cobb didn't know what would happen then. Matty had known he was alive all these years, had even known where he was, and hadn't made a single overture.

  Cobb pressed his forehead against the window of the limo. He could imagine Matty speaking to him, could hear the words clearly. I came back to you plenty of times, it said. Too many times. If you wanted to be dead, I wasn't going to argue ... and you always knew where I was, too.

  That was true. He'd never forgotten the address or phone number of Matty's New York apartment, had contemplated sending a cryptic postcard or making a transatlantic phone call on any number of lonely, drunken nights. But he hadn't known of any secret hideaway in North Carolina.

  He opened his eyes and looked out the window. They were driving through mountains, great green humpbacks shrouded with mist. He glimpsed wildflower meadows, waterfalls, mysterious little overgrown paths. The area was beautiful, he supposed. Unlike Cobb, who always wanted to see the squalor of a place, Matty appreciated natural beauty.

  Cobb frowned. The Rolling Stone tribute said Matty had shot himself in the head—in the mouth. He'd had to be identified by fingerprints. Mat
ty appreciated all natural beauty, yes, but none more than his own. He'd been vain enough to get manicures, and even in their earthiest hippie days, he'd always kept his hair squeaky-clean and short enough not to hide his pretty face. Most of all, he'd known he had a pretty face—God knows the press had told him so often enough. Would he have destroyed that face?

  Somebody had died; Cobb was sure enough of that. There had been an autopsy, though of course that was subject to conspiracy. Certainly, though, he had let someone's ashes trickle through his fingers onto the floor of his house in Gabon. (He'd kept the ashes for a few days, still in the Federal Express box, then carried them to a deserted beach near the town and thrown them handful by handful into the sea. It took nearly an hour, and by the end of that time he was so thoroughly drenched in sweat that he never noticed the tears spilling down his face.)

  It took several seconds before he noticed that the car had stopped. “You've got to be kidding,” he said when he saw what was outside the window.

  “Mr. Van Duyk, I was given very specific instructions."

  “Drive me to the nearest town."

  “I can't do that, sir."

  Cobb stared at the driver. The man's eyes were steely. It occurred to Cobb that he was miles from anywhere and this guy probably didn't like him very much. “Right,” he said, “fuck off, then."

  The limo pulled out and sped away down the winding mountain road, and Cobb turned despairingly to face Matty's house.

  He didn't know what to call the architectural style—wedding-cake Victorian, maybe. If so, someone had left this cake out in the rain for way too long. It seemed to have at least sixteen sides, and each side had two tall skinny windows, all their panes broken. The structure was built of once-white clapboard, great sections of which were splintered into sticks or missing altogether. There were two stories and, Cobb thought, an attic as well. Complete with bats, no doubt.