Processed cheese, p.39
Processed Cheese, page 39
“No,” said a voice and put a cold barrel to his head and pulled a trigger.
And the final astonishment passing through his mind before the final astonishment: casu marzu and lutefisk, none of this is at all what I thought it was.
Gun in hand and scuttling along close to the ground like one of the Lower Marginalians in Planet of the Speckled Souls, Ambience made her stealthy way up around the roaches’ right flank. In the distance she could just make out a boxy, squat shape darker than the surrounding dark: the damn Fustian. No movement around it that she could see. All was tensely calm. She pressed on. She hoped to surprise the roaches with a classic end around and hoped the result would be equally classic. She had never wanted more to propel hard bits of metal into a deluxe assortment of soft, juicy targets. If only the ground weren’t so broken and rocklike and covered in all these horrible mangled stalks. It was like trying to traverse an expanse of rubble from a demolished building. She’d already tripped and nearly fallen an embarrassing number of times. What a klutz. Suddenly flashes of light began cracking the darkness around the Fustian. These were immediately answered by similar flashes off in the direction of the Debonaire. Graveyard, she said to herself. Do it. Then the lights started talking back and forth to each other for several minutes, and then they stopped. Now her turn. She could see shadows detach themselves from the night and begin shifting around the larger shadow of the SUV. She got onto one knee, aimed, let off a crackling torrent of fire, and immediately threw herself forward onto the ground just as the angry response came whizzing over her prone body. When it stopped, she got up, ran about twenty yards to her left, aimed in what she hoped was the proper direction, fired, and before she could flatten herself completely against the ground took a hard blow to her right thigh and collapsed between the stony furrows. I am shot, she said to herself in amazement. She couldn’t believe what was happening. More bullets looking for her began exploring the clods of dirt scattered randomly about in front of her. Something searing brushed furiously against the side of her face. It felt like a length of hot wire being drawn sharply across her cheek. She was shocked. Then she was angry. I am not dying here, she said to herself, in a crappy shithole, in the crappy dark, in the crappy middle of total crappiness. Somebody called out. She couldn’t understand a word. She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. Somebody called again. Then what she’d been waiting for began to happen. Something was coming toward her in the dark. She didn’t move. She waited. Under her finger the comforting curve of the trigger of her LampLighter felt hard and cool. She waited until the dark shape was close enough to talk to. She quietly raised the weapon and pointed and squeezed the hard trigger. Everything lit up and got quite loud. When she let go of the trigger, nothing was moving anywhere around her. For a while there was a brief twinkling of light coming toward her from off in the distance near the Fustian. Nothing too serious. Then it stopped, too. She felt her leg. It didn’t feel good. But it didn’t feel all that bad, either. It was one of those infamous “licks from Satan’s tongue.” You probably wouldn’t die, but depending on where that tongue had been recently, you might wish you had. She began paying attention to her breaths, counting them methodically off, one by one. Breaths were energy, and when she determined that her tanks were near full again, she decided to risk rising to the vertical. It wasn’t as painful as she’d expected, and she discovered she could actually put a surprising amount of weight on the injured leg. She could even move forward, even if it was only by way of a pronounced limp. Thank goddess, she said to herself. Time to reset. She moved off about thirty yards from where she’d been, eased herself down flat onto the ground, and focused through the sights of the LampLighter, seeing what she could see. Which wasn’t much. The night refused to break up into recognizable moving pieces. And then abruptly it did. Two, possibly three, figures were fidgeting about the Fustian. She slowly zeroed in on one moving blob, aimed directly into the center of the mass, and squeezed the trigger. The blob stopped moving. And when a second blob began shooting back in her direction, she simply centered on the muzzle flashes and kept firing until the flashes stopped. Then she lay there waiting until the silence became complete. When the silence had lasted long enough for her to feel safe, she gingerly climbed to her feet. The leg had begun to stiffen. Limping badly, she cautiously approached the dark Fustian. She found two bodies sprawled near the rear of the car. They were both decidedly dead. She didn’t look at either one of them for very long. She didn’t care what they looked like. Then she saw the flash off in the dark back near her car and heard the sharp crack. Without knowing, she knew instantly what that light and that exact sound meant. She went on. Out in front of the Fustian she found two more bodies, one of them still struggling for breath. The sound was like a clogged drainpipe. Don’t bug me, she said to herself. I’m shot. She let him struggle. She had taken only a couple more steps when she caught another flash out of the corner of her eye and heard something nasty whizzing past her right ear. She dropped to the ground. She looked away from the point where she thought he’d be and, sure enough, caught him in her peripherals: a single figure frozen in a half crouch out in front of the Debonaire. She aimed the LampLighter and fired and continued firing until the figure wasn’t there anymore. When she got to where the figure had been, she found him motionless between the furrows. She didn’t look at him, either. She walked on past. How many was that now? Four? Five? We were worth five whole roaches. Imagine that. Behind the HomoDebonaire she came upon what she had expected to find: the remains of Graveyard lying on the ground behind the right rear tire, ominously still, severely silent. She looked down at the knotted wreckage of what had once been her only husband ever. Never suspected she’d be confronted with this version of him. Her eyes filled and she got down on her knees and then fell helplessly across his bones and began kissing his cold cheek again and again. She couldn’t help it. He’d been an entire third of her life. After she’d worn herself out with her grief, she slowly struggled to her feet and turned and pointed the LampLighter in the general direction of the Fustian and started firing and kept firing until the magazine was empty. She was crying now and realized she’d been crying for quite some time. Then she opened the back door of the Debonaire, pulled out the bag of money, and, dragging the bag and her leg behind her, started hobbling toward the road and the nearest house on the road with lighted windows. It seemed awfully far away. It had numerous strings of multicolored bulbs framing its eaves and windows. It’s Christmas, she said to herself. She’d forgotten it was Christmas. As she watched, the porch light came on. She headed for that light. She tossed the LampLighter off into the darkness. It landed with a satisfying thump. She struggled on over the rough, uneven furrows, cursing her leg and the pain and the night. She was now, she supposed, occupying the role she had always secretly imagined for herself: The Last Girl. Halfway to the house she softly opened her hand and allowed her end of the bag to fall limply to earth. She didn’t know why. In the far distance she could hear the approaching sirens and she could see the flashing lights. Society come to make everything better.
Chapter 26
Precip
That day MissusMenu slept until a couple minutes before noon, which was fine with her because now she could say to everyone she met throughout the day, “When I got up this morning…” and she would not be lying. She hated having people perceive her as a worthless layabout. Even if she was.
She slipped into her favorite robe, the silk twill one adorned with ostrich and peacock feathers she bought on their last trip together to Pantaloon, and made her way to the kitchen. She paused for a moment in the doorway, again pleased by the kitchen’s appearance, the strict bareness of its counters, the antiseptic shine of its floor, the emptiness of its sink. Now that he was gone, she didn’t mind spending time in the kitchen, sitting quietly at the clean table with her hot coffee, letting her mind ramble on where it would without any interruption. It had become once again her kitchen.
That “morning” MissusMenu made the coffee the way she wanted, not the way he liked it. The routine was comforting, the result ethereal. She began by placing two tablespoons of magic sprucenut oil into her personal FOREVER DERVISH cup. Then she ground her freshly roasted high-elevation Majestica beans in her JavaMill conical burr grinder, put the resulting grounds into a filter, poured hot water slowly over grounds, watched the grounds bloom, finished the pour, added two tablespoons of grass-fed yak butter, combined everything in her Mushamatic DigitalBrain ProChef blender, waited thirty seconds, and savored the high-octane result. She was now ready to assault the day. A day she planned on bringing to the mat. She needed a victory because she needed this headache to go away. MissusMenu had a headache. She had a headache yesterday. She had a headache the day before that. And the day before that. And all the days in an unending chain back to who knew when? She now existed in a near-permanent headachy mode. And she was fresh out of her achy medicine. She would’ve sent Mix’N’Match to pick up a refill at DrugTemple but she’d fired that obnoxious tart in what seemed like another life now after discovering her using MisterMenu’s dangler as her personal lollipop. Since then she’d declared their residence a female-free zone, which had translated, distressingly, into a help-free zone. As in the enlightened life, the best men were already taken. After untold months she’d been utterly unable to find a single adequately trained male who’d lasted longer than a quarter of a year in her employ. Her best friend, ElongatedVowel, who’d also converted to all-male help for similar reasons, had recently suggested she contact the agency she swore by, GuysWhoDon’t, but MissusMenu had been so distracted lately by her impossible domestic situation and, of course, the headaches that she’d been unable to assemble the energy or the time to implement further changes, no matter how necessary, to her steadily deteriorating household.
Whenever she pictured her husband in her mind she saw him in midfuck, and the fuckee was not her. It was never her. It was never her in image or in fact. For a long time she didn’t believe she could bear the anger these images induced, but after a while the fantasies of murder deliquesced into scenes of extended torture and then into physical beatings. Lately her reveries had become preoccupied with elaborate schemes of financial revenge—any one of which would kick him in the nuts with greater force than any boot. She actually found herself sometimes quietly smiling to herself as she watched imaginary banknotes flying up the office flue. In fact, she actually found herself becoming physically aroused during such daydreams, more aroused than he had ever made her. Now, though—this very day, in fact—the first step was going to be undertaken that would result in him being permanently removed from her life and from as large a portion of his precious capital as possible. She had an appointment at Crotchet & Swole at two this afternoon with Mr. Crotchet himself—founder of the firm; adviser to presidents (except of course that ghastly MadeForYou); successful defender before the Supreme Court of the Personal Sequestration Act, in which any funds deposited on the eleventh of each month in confirmed Rainy Day accounts were, after a year and a half, exempt from all future federal, state, and local taxation; overseer of the tsunamically complex merger between LightningStrike Industries and AllTheMoneyInTheWorld, Ltd.; and, most important, LadderedStockings’s representative in her nasty marital breakup with the mega-everything MahoganyBreath, winning the largest settlement in the lengthy recorded history of divorce. Now, there was a record worth shooting for.
For her meeting today with Mr. Crotchet, the “initial strategy session,” as he called it, she was looking to make a midimpact impression, something suitably poised between what she’d wear to the Sticks and Shadows gala and an Emerald Noose Conservancy fund-raising. She elected to go with the black BabyVendetta open blazer with notched lapels over a burgundy faux sheath midi dress with statement sleeves and her knee-high CastleFlambeaux boots. She studied herself for longer than she should have in the full-length mirror on her bedroom closet door. She liked what she saw. No doubt Crotchet would, too. Probably he’d want to fuck her. That was fine, too. Every inch of erection length translated into God knew how many inches of fresh banknotes. The conversion rate was so variable. One way or another the man was going to get her money. Count on it.
She checked the digital read on the outdoor thermometer. Eleven degrees Fahrenheit. When was this damn global warming finally going to kick in? She’d been waiting forever. Now she was going to have to wear the Glamorama force-vector suede embellishment, too. Not the finest complement to her overall presentation, but it was deliciously warm.
She glanced at the Tri-Gem Elaboration (inscribed on the back: M&M) strapped to her left wrist. She had hoped she might be able to squeeze in a quick finger rub before she left, but there probably wasn’t adequate time. Her cell chimed. It was BurnishedBrass. Should she take it? Without thinking much at all she pressed the Talk button. BurnishedBrass was worth almost a billion and her life was a mess. Her youngest son was entangled in something involving the internoodle and douchy checks and shell companies and banks with funny names in countries no one had ever heard of, an infinite web of schemes his mother couldn’t begin or even care to understand. Her daughter had disappeared into the dark cultic labyrinth of the Order of the Happy Sun. The eldest son had devoted what remained of his life to completing the entire run of Convection & Isobar cloud jigsaw puzzles. The middle son, who lived in a giant gourd on the Great Plain of Quasiland, hadn’t been heard from in three years. BurnishedBrass had, of course, shifted to an all-male staff the instant it had become recognizably fashionable and then, shortly thereafter, discovered her husband in bed with the recently hired bearded napkin folder. Today she wanted to complain, of all things, about what she regarded as the sketchy jewelry selection in the tenants’ discount boutique. MissusMenu had no time for such nonsense. She hung up on BurnishedBrass in midsentence. Her cell chimed again. It was Roustabout. The car was out front. She slipped into her embellishment. Such a heavy coat. She entered the gold-trimmed elevator and plummeted smoothly, soundlessly, the fifty-two sublime stories to the central atrium. She said hello to Firmware and FinalNotice, who were manning the desk. She said hello to Rheostat, the smiley doorman. Outside the wind was blowing. Ordinaries scuttled past with their heads bowed, their hands in their pockets. Roustabout stood at attention by the open rear door of the MagnusMotivator. She said good afternoon to him. He said good afternoon to her. Then, just as she stooped down to enter the plush interior of the limo, she felt something quite light, quite delicate, fall onto her shoulder. She touched her shoulder with a gloved hand. She looked at the whitish goop now stuck to the tip of her pointer finger. It appeared to be a bird dropping. She glanced upward. The sky was blue. The sky was clear. There was nothing there.
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About the Author
Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the author of four previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship and has taught writing and literature at Goucher, Princeton, Brown, and the New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.
Also by Stephen Wright
Meditations in Green
M31: A Family Romance
Going Native
The Amalgamation Polka
Stephen Wright, Processed Cheese
