Riding the Centipede Read online

  Blake stared down at the piece of paper and took one long drag on the e-cig. It had to be for him.

  “Roswell.”

  “What?”

  “Roswell.”

  “New Mexico?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “If I told you…”

  “Get the next flight to Roswell, Mr. Blake. I’ll meet you there.”

  The connection died as he stared at the paper, wondering what the hell had he truly gotten himself into with this one. Wondering what Roswell, New Mexico, would show him: a green limousine? Aliens? Nothing but flat, gray terrain for miles and miles?

  He’d never met Jane Teagarden in person. This was something new. He understood whatever was in motion would need to be played out.

  He wondered if she had her own private jet, or if she’d hitch a ride on a UFO.

  The way things were going, the latter made the most sense to him.

  Chapter 11 Teagarden

  Waking in another room, another door opens and shuts. Should I think of it as waking? Perhaps it’s just a shifting of consciousness that goes along with the shifting of locale. Perhaps it’s just the way one travels when riding the Centipede.

  The room is bright and clean. The ocher curtains are thin, dissuading the sun’s blinding brilliance not the least. Everything seems stiff, as if starched. Two beds with tightly tucked, hospital corners. Behind me, an open door bleeds yellow to match the light outside: a bathroom. The walls are a hue somewhere between the ocher curtains and the piercing yellow bathroom.

  I visually trace the wall, traipsing as a spider, and settle on a painting of a lone cactus amid a desert scene. The arid earth seeps into a white, polished bone sky. To the upper left, a pimple blooms, distracting me: somebody, a former occupant on the way from here to somewhere else, gathering a moment’s respite, has hand-drawn in red ink a UFO. It’s a sleek, old-school variation, something culled from The Day The Earth Stood Still. Though the alien here has bug eyes and two antennae as its head periscopes up out of the UFO.

  Curious, my eyes hitch along with the imaginary spider and continue across the whole room, 360 degrees of nothing distinct. Bland on bland, a dull sheen coats it all.

  There is an emptiness here that is absolute, which makes no sense. As the next leg of the Centipede, there is no promise here, no purpose. Yet.

  “Hello,” I call out, and the heat of the room turns my vocalization to cinder. There is no response.

  I rise and stretch and my body feels different. I’ve not eaten in a while—how long, I don’t remember. I’m not driven by eating, anyway. With the Centipede in motion, I couldn’t care less, but it must be noted, my body feels different. Leaner and my arms hang with lankier abandon than usual. They seem to extend forever, as if I could drag my knuckles with Neanderthalian expertise. I close my eyes as my balance seems questionable, and open them to a sense of things passing. Unknown things, elements of me, of the Centipede’s idle ministrations within me. Or perhaps this is just the way it works.

  I feel mostly like myself again. Whether this is good or not is not the point. I expect to be affected. Part of the mystery of drugs is how they affect you.

  I let my thoughts mist as I walk to the window. Through the thin curtains, I see squat buildings and not much more. Pulling the curtains aside, my focus crisp, I confirm the landscape is desolate: a few low-slung buildings, like an oriental woman’s ass, sinking into the ground; cars for sale; another couple motels; a gas station. To the left: a desert. To the right: I cannot see beyond a row of motel rooms an extension of the building I’m in. I am in a motel. The check in time and room rates and fire escape info, laminated and thumb-tacked to the door, confirm this.

  Deeper observation draws my attention to the street lamps. They are shaped like the heads of aliens, E.T.s, little green men. I wonder if, when they are on, the illumination is tinted green as well.

  Sweat beads and flattens out like an army of ants, the big, red suckers—you remember them, dear sister? The fascination stamped with pain as we watched them trample our flesh in search of a target then mark their territory with a sharp prick. “Ouch.”

  I am drenched, my shirt matted to my skin. The stench has a vinegar bite as it rises to mingle with the hairs in my nostrils. The hairs do more than mingle, trying to deter the intrusion.

  I let the curtain drop, its meager shield unworthy of the moniker, and bump into the closer of two beds. The dull, brown blankets show signs of intrusion. No matter the stagnant façade, somebody has recently been here. The room, though clean, is not fresh.

  There is a noise outside the door: a key being inserted into the lock. The knob turns, the door swings open, and a woman carrying a brown paper bag stuffed with who knows what, enters the room.

  She is beautiful.

  I am reminded of Marilyn Monroe, yet this woman has a dirt cheap spin on her. The face shimmers with her charismatic allure, the body as well. Full, abundant tits. A sway in this woman’s clumsiness that invites participation. But the clothes don’t fit the movie star aspirations. Jean cut-offs, sandals that show off alternately red and black painted toenails, and a non-descript off white blouse, stained at the arm pits and matching the décor of the room, this place, tied off above her flat belly.

  She smiles and the room brightens even more. The impression of Marilyn evaporates, shifts in a way. Confusing, yet now there’s Rita Hayworth in a more defined countenance. The whole of the woman seems in flux.

  Way back when the discovery of women meant something to my burgeoning hormones, Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth, classic movie stars with real presence, were my first girlfriends. My first loves. Their photos decorated the entertainment den where their movies sat on shelves never to be watched by our parents.

  All show, just like the library.

  But I watched everything and took it all in. Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Niagara, Bus Stop. Rita in The Lady From Shanghai and Gilda, fucking beautiful Gilda, capturing my heart and inspiring my youthful erections to explosive, uncontrollable orgasms again and again.

  Despite what was happening behind closed doors with dear old dad, these women eased the pain and brought me pleasure amid the darkness that was my life.

  But with this woman, her visual allegiance uncertain, Rita faded.

  “Hello. My name is…” she says, and her name, something muffled and unclear, a loudspeaker tuned into distortion, turned down so as to not grate on one’s last split-end nerve. Yet as I ask her to repeat it, the same indecipherable word is the result.

  She sets the brown paper bag on the dresser, next to a remote control and a TV screwed into brackets attached to the wall.

  “I was hoping you would be here when I got back,” she says, her features caught in shadows without foundation. The tone of her voice suggests desperation. Desperation, the one true companion in my world. She is a part of my world, for sure.

  Another familiar face rides her cheekbones, alters her eyes. This one less well-known, but one that had really set my burgeoning teenage sexuality on edge. Another old-time actress, Jacqueline Bisset. The bosom of the woman here seems to swell, the nipples jutting forth with enthusiasm. Her sweat makes her blouse cling to her figure, reminding me of Bisset in The Deep—her wet T-shirt a revelation that awakened my cock always—yet this woman does not even notice any of this. Does not seem to even sense what she is doing. Is she doing it? Or is it being done to her? She reaches into the paper bag and pulls out a generic soda, something orange.

  “Thirsty?”

  Again, there is something brittle in her tone. Something broken. Her elusive appearance, or to be precise, the illusive, contradictory allegiance of her appearance, seems a direct response to the crack in her voice, cracking her armor. Something within that rules her fragile roost, the ever-alternating façade, promotes this.

  Two things become evident to me. Somehow, she is jacking into my mind, to my erstwhile buried memories, of the women from another lifetim
e who mattered most. Alternately, she is trying too hard to please me, to subtly connect with me, though subtleties are often lost on those at their wit’s end, noose dangling as the mentally avaricious tendencies riddle their manner, their actions. Yet I also know whatever she is doing is a direct result of whatever she needs. Some kind of psychic necessity is unleashing this nebulous display with her body and face, both fascinating me and making me uncomfortable.

  Her damaged qualities normally would be something I would take advantage of. In the dark frontier, one lives for one’s needs at all times. Relationships are situational necessities and nothing more. Whatever she needs is expressed by what I am witnessing, yet, as with Alice and her enamel obsessions, it is still unclear.

  Scaling the shadows between the lines, along the ridges, her face is amorphous and monstrous for the moment before another ex-girlfriend assumes her façade: Sean Young from Blade Runner, pristine, emotionally reaching, unable to fully grasp what it is to be human. The struggle lends Young’s character—what was her name?—veracity, some amount of life beyond the automaton foundation. Perhaps this is relevant to what is going on with this woman.

  She stands, condensation from the orange soda can collecting between her fingers, dripping to the floor. Her hand confirms my take on the desperation that is playing out. It trembles slightly, ever so slightly. I almost don’t see it, yet wonder if it is physical evidence of her ever-shifting design.

  “Thirsty?” she says again, this woman with a name lost between her teeth, or perhaps to the room’s sharp geometry. Doesn’t matter. I’m not here to play games, to get to know anybody beyond the quest for the next rig. The next leg of the Centipede. What I thirst for is not contained in that orange aluminum can.

  Her mouth opens, a sensuous invitation I once might have wanted to kiss. An invitation unspoken. Lena Olin from The Unbearable Lightness of Being stands before me, the woman seeming taller, and she’s wearing a hat.

  How she does this, I don’t know, but this roll-call of my past loves needs to cease.

  “Stop,” I say and she does. Lena Olin is here, but it’s not her. Almost, but the woman’s shapeshifting abilities quiver and roil beneath the skin.

  The hat is gone. Too bad. I might have enjoyed Olin with the hat, as she was in the movie. But that’s not why I am here. That’s not why she is here.

  “What do you want from me, so I can get what I need from you?”

  She tilts her head and Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall emerges like a rising sun.

  “Stop! Tell me what you need from me, so I can get what I need…now. No more masquerades.”

  Her features become tonally obscure, no distinction, blurred just like the sound lost in the muffled name. She is actually blurred, blurry, the quiver now a part of the vision. I turn away. The condition causes my eyes to ache, like too red print on a white background.

  “I want to know what it means to be human,” she says.

  Like cement hardening, the blurriness surrenders to obscurity. She is somewhere in between, yet her eyes burn through. I would say she seems around my age, yet the wear and tear of shifting or the residual side-effects of the lifestyle suggests an indeterminate age. Age perhaps is not even to be considered. This strange woman may not even be a woman for all I know. I’ve met many along my path in the dark frontier who far exceed her curious mutability.

  “Shouldn’t you learn what it means to be human by living life? You’re doing that now, aren’t you?”

  Perhaps this will be easy. Perhaps logic will enlighten her. Perhaps I have no idea what it means to be human and don’t want to fail in fulfilling her request.

  “I need a normal day. Two people together. Partners. Being human.” She licks her lips and Naomi Watts from Mulholland Drive streaks across her face.

  I hated that movie until the audition scene where she kisses the old guy in ways that enhanced my arousal like rarely before. Thirteen years-old, enjoying the rigors of masturbation, the heavy breeze insistence and ease of erections. Shaping my own sexuality with the fantasy of the actresses, my past loves. Blotting out the reality of father and his despicable tribe.

  I realize my cock has been erect for longer than I can recall. This scene, with Watts, always set me on edge. I haven’t seen it in ten years or so at this point. It is a reminder of something other than misery.

  From what she’s said, I expect it all comes down to sex. She just seems lonely. Her humanity seems embroidered with a sense of isolation, as though she doesn’t feel, as though she doesn’t fit in. Sex should do the trick. After all, that’s the only real closeness I can give her, and it’s distant in truth, yet for some, probably her, being physically entwined with another, getting fucked and tossing off a few kisses, that’s all it takes to break the monotony. I’m not talking romance. She can’t mean romance.

  Another lesson to add to the list. In the dark frontier, sex is currency. Either as pain blotter or information retriever. The dog of sex barks loudest when it needs one or the other. The pleasure derived is ephemeral at best, even if potent. Pleasure is the true pain blotter. The mere act is the path. This is the primary motivation for existence in many people’s lives in the world I live in.

  Sure, in your world, it is currency of a sort as well, more counterfeit than real, yet the wicked wiles of admen and media manipulations do not dig as deep as in my world. In my world, there are no restrictions as to its use.

  “I bought snacks: sandwiches, drinks. I thought we might have a picnic.”

  I laugh. An asphalt and scorching sun picnic seems ludicrous. And if we go the other way, away from the parking lot a stroll would lead us to the desert, which seems equally uninviting.

  She shuffles her feet, her face a mass of shifting shadows. I cannot watch, so I look away.

  “I’m not here to play house,” I say, “even if this is just a motel room. How am I supposed to show you a normal day and what it means to be human? What does that even mean?”

  I’ve no clue as to the Muzak, middle-of-the-road cadences of normal. Hell, I tune out the normals as often as possible. I tune out all humanity…

  But my thoughts swirl around and sex again comes to the forefront. She wants to know what it means to be partners, or perhaps something more. To be human. Whatever. I’ll fuck her and tell her that’s what it means to be human and she’ll crawl back into her cracked shell and curl up and debate it all or die. I don’t really care. Time’s a-wastin’ and I am both annoyed by this leg and anxious to move forward. Desperate.

  I approach her, take the orange soda can from her fingers, and set it next to the brown paper bag. I pull her close and, though sex is not something I often engage in, what with drugs being my only true love and lover for years, kiss her hard on the lips.

  Her mouth is stiff and dry, just like the room. I taste nothing but the vacuity of an abyss. Her tongue is a lifeless slug. She pushes me away.

  “What is this?”

  Her face slants, as if sliding off. The abyss within her mouth is ready to suck her inside. Pinched and scrunching and quite ugly, this face.

  “This is how people, couples, get as close as possible,” I say. A lie dressed for the ball.

  “This thing,” she says—a kiss, I think; her naivety astounds me—“is what it means to be human?”

  My hands rest on her hips and I lean back and without question, without hesitation, because time is a-wastin’, say, “Yes,” much to her chagrin, as expressed by that unsettled façade.

  Her eyes dart about and a smile blooms. The ugly is washed away by Naomi Watts again. She picks up on my reaction. I stiffen, perhaps she understands, and take her.

  But it’s rough and fast, feels more like rape but that’s negligible as this is the way of the dark frontier. It’s not something meant for love, this is fucking for the sake of fucking. A means to an end, orgasm achieved, a split-second in the void, dopamine Eden, like many drugs will trigger. I just want her to give me the goddamn rig. The furious melding ends as we merge
at a point of climax, my climax as I watch all the women from before and many others flash across her face, like thin clouds being nudged by wind, the dragon’s head into the shark into the roaring lion, constant movement, allegiance expressed, defined and polished by confusion as lava spills from within me to within her. The world magnified, amplified, cooling as ice dripping down the spine of God and down to His puckered anus and, hence, into the waiting, yawning mouths of His followers.

  While Satan snorts a line and laughs at such mockery.

  She pries my talons from her hips and screams, coughs, pushes me off her.

  “What was that? Why would anybody do that? What of being human is this act?”

  Such disdain slicking the faces as they bleed into one, then disintegrate into uncertainty.

  “That was fucking. Many humans enjoy that. It’s part of being normal. Just what you asked for.”

  I pull on my underwear, stuff my cunt-sticky cock inside, pull up my pants. She moves with such a lack of grace, arms akimbo, fingers clawing the headboard, the wall, legs askew and her skin, all of her, transparent in a way. I see her bones, symbols etched onto them, such a strange creature. Not the strangest, as I said, my dear sister. I wonder as to her true origin—perhaps she’s a traveler of someplace besides the dark frontier—but my wonder is abridged. I need what I need, that is all.

  “I do not believe that is what it means to be human. I cannot believe—”

  “Your belief is not my worry. Perhaps I’m not the best one to show you what it means to be human,” I say, realizing I cannot follow-up, because if it is mandatory that some evidence of humanity in a positive or good way be applied to this exercise, I will be at a loss. I take a tact that cannot be disputed, no matter my lack of grace.

  “Everyone does what they do in order to get what they need. In order for me to get the rig, the next step of the Centipede in my veins, I need to fulfill your aspirations to know what it means to be human.”