Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (8 page)

Bored, Joe turned to the theater's immense, if peripheral movie screen. A Nightmare on Elm Street was playing. He'd seen it four, five times. Freddy Krueger, phantom antagonist, lived in the psychotic kingdom of teenagers' dreams. One teen had just woken up bleeding from places where Freddy had stabbed her dream-self. But nobody believed this explanation, not even her boyfriend, an actor who seemed unbelievably familiar from somewhere. "Hmm." Joe spaced out for a few minutes, trying to place him.

Shriek ... clatter, gurgle ... shriek ...

"Wh-wha-what's h-ha-hap-p-pe-pen-ni-ni-ning?" It was the kid. At some point he'd been stripped and folded into a crude ball. His head was wobbling around making heavymetal-lead-guitarist-style faces. His genitals made Joe think of a plop of dried batter. Occasionally the man's cock would jab at what passed for an ass, not even aiming particularly. Since the hole was the size of a small can of paint, he didn't have to. "Wh-wha-what's tha-that s-sou-sound?"

"Freddy Krueger just killed the girl's boyfriend," Joe said.

"H-how?"

"He sucked him into the bed and ripped his skin off or something," Joe said. "Then the mattress raised up and exploded like a volcano."

"G-gr-great." The kid smiled, shut his eyes. He looked dead. "I 1-lo-love F-Fr-Fre-Fred-d-dy K-Kr-Krue-g-ge-ger."

"Me too," Joe sighed. He felt extremely happy for about three and a half seconds.

(It turns out that pampered boy really is sick. Our plane just landed in New York and some men had to come with a stretcher and take him off before the rest of us could debark. When they lifted him out of his seat I got a better look at his body. I think he has cancer or AIDS. He's very thin and his eyes have a half-scared, half-dead quality. He's not my type at all. Shit. If I'd seen ... So I take back that part where I wanted to dismember him and all that. It never happened.)

Monday afternoon

The library's domed lobby towered up, off-white and cracked in spots like a huge egg or skull. Shafts of light poured from its rusty-edged windows, filling the skull with gigantic dust crosses and X's. Crossing the room, Joe literally had to shake off their weird, fake, impressive effect.

"I want to research the history of my neighborhood," he told a tiny, hunched-over librarian.

She peered up from the book she was reading, frowned. Wrinkles deepened all over her face, especially around the mouth where they made a set of perfect parentheses. "Where do you live?" she asked in a scratchy voice.

"They call it the Oaks."

"Who calls it the Oaks?" She closed the book. It was Steven King's It. In the cover art, I and t were formed out of cartoonish human bones against a corpsy blue background.

"People who don't live there," Joe said.

"I'll tell you what." The librarian extended an arthritic finger. "If you walk through those shelves over there you'll see a door. Knock loudly. An elderly gentleman will answer. Tell him what you've just told me."

Joe's eyes traced the trembling digit down a long, shadowy, book-lined aisle. A card taped to this end of the shelving read CRIME A TO G.

He walked, knocked, asked. An even more ancient man in a fraying black suit led him into a room packed with file cabinets. The geezer shuffled to one, bent down, fished around in a drawer, and came up with a manila file bloated with newspaper clippings. They'd formed a ragged brown crust on three sides of the folder.

"I don't mean to be personal," the old man wheezed, centering the file on a small desk mid-room, "but ... why? We don't often see younger people, at least not in this part of the library."

"I found a bone in my basement," Joe said, sitting down at the desk. "I'm curious how it got there because it's human, apparently. And I'm twenty-six." He opened the file.

Five-eighths of his way through the material, Joe noticed a bulging envelope. The words "Mysterious murder in Oaks" were handwritten shakily across it. He undid the flap, slid out some clippings, and read a dozen.

One time he rested his eyes on the old man, who'd settled into a chair with a copy of Life magazine from the fifties. Maybe because he was so old, each time he stayed still for even one, two seconds, Joe was afraid he had died.

Joe spent about a half-hour reading.

On June 13, 1967, a dismembered male had been found in some weeds a few doors down Joe's street. The "mysteriousness" came in four parts. First, there was no apparent motive. Second, parts of the body were still missing. Third, the victim remained unidentified. Fourth, no suspects were in custody. One of the clippings included a sketchy portrait. Its caption read: "Victim-male, Caucasian, approx. 23 to 28 years old, shoulder-length brown hair, 510", medium build."

Sounds a little like me, Joe thought vaguely. He snorted, shook his head. "Oh, great." He pocketed the clipping.

(I'm outside the baggage claim area. There's a minute or two before the shuttle bus gets here that takes me to one of those car rental agencies. Hertz, I think. I just realized the major reason I'm so nonchalant about death is that no one I knew ever died until the last few years, when I was already pretty removed and amoral. Before then, someone else dying was strictly a sexual fantasy, a plot device in certain movies I liked. When people died in those contexts, the loss or effect or whatever was already laundered before it reached me. It was a loss to a particular storyline, say, but nothing personal. So now that ex-boyfriends have started to die off, the situation is really unique, even incomprehensible. The only thing I can do, friends and journalists tell me, is cry. But the idea of death is so sexy and/or mediated by TV and movies I couldn't cry now if someone paid me to, I don't think. I'm just weirdly, intensely entertained by the thought of a boy being deep in the ground and unreachable. I guess I've been thrown out of whack by actual deaths in some way, in terms of getting work done and maintaining routines. Sometimes I've tried to imagine and upgrade the deaths, making them scarier, messier, quicker. I sprawl in bed, dreaming up a spectacular ending for someone, say Samson (R.I.P.), usually while I'm jerking off, since that's the only time I ever feel anything about anyone else. Then I rerun the new death until its details are so familiar, and the actor in question so dead, that I'm ready to cast, kill, bury someone fresh. Pierre, say.)

Monday night

Joe imagined his back, ass, legs being punched by a freckled fist. That relaxed him a little. Then he reached for the phone and dialed the number he'd scribbled on the back of a Sears sales slip.

"No one's around," announced a phone machine. "Give me something to come home to." Beep.

"Hi," Joe said. "I ... uh, waited on you at Sears the other day? And this guy who I work with named Samuel-I'm not sure how well you know him-said you like to whack guys around in bed. I'm, uh, into that too, so-"

Gary picked up. "Hold on a second," he said. His voice sounded less friendly than the recording's. There was a second beep. "Go on."

"Well, like I said, you supposedly whack-"

"Yeah, maybe. What do you look like?"

"You don't remember?" Joe said. "The other day? Well, I'm supposed to look almost exactly like Keanu Reeves, the actor. Know him? He was the nice kid in River's Edge. Also he played the best friend of the guy who killed himself in that film Permanent Record. Except I'm kind of battered up. Not my face, though."

Gary's hand covered the phone for a second. That's how it sounded at least. Then ... "Why would someone who looks like Keanu Reeves want to fuck himself up?" The hand immediately covered the phone again.

Joe scanned his living room. "I don't know." His eyes stopped on the bone.

"Good answer."

Joe didn't care what that meant. He carried the phone across the room to his bookcase. He grabbed the bone off its place on the second shelf down from the top and started studying it. "Can I come see you now?"

"No." Gary's hand covered the phone for a second. "Wait a couple of hours. Eleven, eleven-thirty ...

"Mm-hm." Joe shoved the bone under his arm, copied down the address. It was only a few blocks away. He thought about saying so. Gary hung up before he could. Once his hands were free, Joe plucked the newspaper article out of his shirt pocket, laying it and the bone side by side on the rug. "Hmm." Although the victim looked so much like him that the sketch could have been a dirty little mirror, Joe found the guy sort of unsympathetic. As for the bone ... well, it didn't particularly add or detract anything. Joe's mind drifted away. "Weird." Case solved, he thought.

He laid the clipping and bone on the bookshelf, settled into his armchair, lit a cigarette. A few seconds later he walked back and slipped the clipping under the bone so it wouldn't accidentally blow off.

He turned on the TV, switching around with the remote control unit until something violent appeared. His memory of the portrait and bone immediately blanked as his eyes started noting the action.

Two men were backing a teenager across the roof of a tenement. They accused him of robbery. "Don't," he said. As the three neared the edge, the taller of the two men grabbed the seat of the boy's blue jeans, lifting him off his feet. "Don't!" The man carried the boy for a few yards, threw him over the roof. "Do-o-o-!"

(I'm at the hotel. It took only five or six minutes of phone calls to snag that hustler. He's working for one particular escort service that handles a lot of gay porn stars. Man Age Models. I didn't actually talk to him, but the guy who arranges the trysts set one up for an hour from now. Pierre will be by. He costs $200 for "regular" sex, $250 and up for "rough stuff," which the phone guy described as "whatever you two dudes decide." Great.)

(Later. Pierre's here ten minutes early. He's not really French. I feel totally unprepared. Shit. I told him to take a shower but not get his hair wet. He's in the bathroom right now. I hear splashing. This is just a quick note to say that while he's beautiful and everything, though slightly disappointing in person like everyone always is when you know them from reproduction, I'm suddenly struck by the problem of how to get what I want out of him, whatever that is. He immediately asked what I had in mind, the way hustlers do. I could barely talk I was so on the edge, but I said safe, intense sex. A lie obviously. He said okay kind of warily, maybe because I was being so vague. It is vague for me.)

(Pierre just turned off the shower. He's about to come out. I think I'm ready. It's hard to describe these moments ...)

Monday night

Joe trailed Gary into a stuffy den. Overfurnished with scratched-up antiques, it had three tiny, sepia-colored windows. He went to a pane, cupped his eyes, peered out. The guy's yard belonged in a children's book. Far, far off, halfobscured by trees, he could see a kind of giant-sized doll house whose windows glowed like kerosene lanterns.

Gary was mixing gin and tonics. "You want a little painkiller in this?" he yelled. "You won't taste it."

"Nah. I've got this weird nervous system or something that doesn't work right." Joe smiled at the doll house.

"Lucky me." A full glass appeared by Joe's left shoulder, followed by Gary's face. Joe turned, took the former.

Ding.

They carried their glasses outside.

"So, what are some of the movies you've acted in, Gary?" Joe was trailing the actor along a path roofed with the limbs of fruit trees. Oranges, lemons, pears, apples ... Perched in their branches, brightly colored birds blinked at the passing intruders. The night smelled intensely of punch. Joe smiled, batted some flying bugs.

"Third-rate crap." Gary ducked. "Watch this limb. I doubt you've seen any. Friday the Thirteenth, Part Six, maybe?" They'd reached the doll house. "Look familiar? Ever see that old "Twilight Zone" episode where nobody ever grew up? This was the main character's home. Warner Brothers was throwing it out, believe it or not." He inserted a key, turned it. "Two hundred bucks."

The interior was painted black. A large X made of two massive pieces of wood, maybe seven feet long, one wide and deep, stood upright room center, decorated with handcuffs. The floor was an inch deep in whips, paddles, knives, etc. Joe stood in the middle, hands on his hips, peering around, impressed. "Wow."

Gary balanced on one leg, removing a sock. "Thanks. Strip."

Joe undressed, which took a fairly long time because stuff kept getting snagged on his scabs. Gary finished first and leaned back on the X, right hand jerking his cock, left hand pinching a cord that dangled from a light bulb perched up in the rafters. "Oh, by the way," he muttered, fingering the cord. "You don't look anything like Keanu Reeves." He yanked. Click, click.

The room grew dark gray. Joe could still detect Gary, the X. "Do you want me against that?" he asked, pointing through Gary's chest.

"Good guess." Gary stepped aside.

Joe walked over, revolved, and made his nude body into an X. Gary reached up, snap, snap, bent down, snap, snap, securing things. Then he backed off a few feet and stood there, jerking off. After a minute or two, that looked boring, to Joe at least. He cleared his throat. "Ahem," he added.