Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“Now holllld on. A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”

“Seventy-one. And I think it’s important you learn this, for the future of your enterprise. We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream? It’s easily found. You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”

“Did I? Okay. I’m a little drunk.”

“There you are, you see? It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online. That’s not underground. It’s mainstream. Just like me.”

I lifted my glass. “Y’know? S been a assolute pleasure speaking with you. A lot v things r mushmush clearer now.”

He brought his glass to mine and we bumped plastic. “And you, young man, are on a great adventure, and I salute you.”

We drank, and poured, and drank, and really it was very nice. Me and the serial killer.

Froma distance, the Strip looked like it was covered in a dozen different colors of blossom on a wet spring morning.

Up close, the blanket of petals turned out to be a thick coating of discarded handbills from pimps and porn operations, stuck to the road by rainfall.

Reduced to a pulpy sludge by dirty rain, they dulled the footfalls. We squelched our way through ANAL HOOK-ERS and PHONE DOMINATION under the ugly gray dawn light, walking from the street up to the hotel I’d found us.

Down from the pyramid of the Luxor, the European castles, and some wetbrain’s idea of Paris, this was Vegas’s newest development. Trix got a look at it and punched me in the arm.

The Freedom was a hotel within an outsize copy of the statue of Jesus that stands outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Only in this version Jesus was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit.

“We’re staying in the hat,” I said, rubbing my arm.

“You’re a pervert,” she hissed.

“Oh, that’s good coming from you.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stalked ahead of me.

“There will be no sex for you until we leave this place,” she said.

I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry.

The ground floor was vast. You could have fit my entire street into the place. Bellhops with name badges bearing the title FREE MAN scuttled up to us and attempted to steal our luggage. The place looked still half-built, the massive American flags covering scaffolding and holes in dividing walls. We were checked in smoothly, but my attention was drawn to a collection of tents some three hundred yards across the floor.

“Refugees,” the receptionist snarled. “They got off the boat in California and took a Greyhound straight here. Someone said they saw the hotel on TV and thought we wanted their tired and their hungry. Who knew other people even had TV?”

Trix leaned over the polished counter. “I want to kill you,” she whispered.

I grabbed her arm and guided her away, sweeping the keycards off the counter as I went. She tried to shake me off, but I sank my fingers into her upper arm and marched her to the elevators.

“That hurts.”

“Stop fucking around.”

“I can’t believe you brought me here.”

“I thought it’d be funny.”

“It turns my stomach.”

“These people just work here. They didn’t build it.”

“Did you hear her?”

“So she’s dumb. You want to kill people for being dumb?”

“Yes.”

The elevator doors opened with a little Yankee Doodle Dandy chime. I put Trix inside it. Abraham Lincoln leered down at us from the ceiling.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you’ve got America. You didn’t vote for the president, right?”

“Fuck no.”

“No. I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don’t get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there’s a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I’m showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?”

She looked up at Abe and shuddered. “This is horrible, Mike.”

“If I coped with having a bucket of salty water injected into my balls, you can cope with this.”

“You’re teaching me a lesson. Jesus.”

“Actually, I just thought it’d be funny. The lesson just came to me a minute ago. And don’t blaspheme. You’re riding an elevator up to Jesus’ hat.”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Have you got 666 tattooed on you someplace?”

“You may never get a chance to look for it again, Michael McGill.”

There was a plaster bas-relief of Jesus on the wall over the bed. The bed had a wooden slat down the middle that divided it in half. And the toilet played “Onward Christian Soldiers” when you lifted the lid.

“I think I can feel blisters forming on my brain,” said Trix, balled up and rocking slowly in the corner.

Iwent back down to the front desk, bought a map, and arranged a car hire. I returned to the sound of Trix giggling.

“I found this in a drawer,” she said. She was waving around a piece of pink plastic that looked like a smaller version of one of those old-fashioned lemon-squeezing spikes, the kind you ream out the flesh of the fruit with. She flipped it around in her hand to show me the handle. The handle was a molded representation of a little baby with a halo.

“It’s a Baby Jesus buttplug,” she squealed.

“You’re kidding me.”

“It gets better.” She laughed. She opened a drawer in the room’s desk, and produced a wrapped condom from a small box therein. She unwrapped it, grinning. “Look,” she said, as it unfurled.

The reservoir tip had Jesus’ face on it.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Exactly! This drawer is full of Christian sex resources! I take back everything I said. I love it here.”

“Trix, I’m not exactly a churchgoing man, but there’s no way in Hell I’m going to ejaculate into Jesus’ head.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that.”

“Nor am I going to wear the little baby Jesus in my ass.”

“Spoilsport.”

Asthe sun went down, we left the hotel and walked a while on the Strip. Dancing fountains and robot pirates for an hour, among the tourists and the beaten-looking locals and the pimps and losers handing out cards and flyers for sex and porn.

No one in Vegas ever looks like they’re having fun.

An old colleague of mine from there once told me of his plan to return to Vegas and get rich. He was going to install slot-machine public toilets on the Strip. You’d have to put a coin in the slot and pull the lever to get into the toilet. And if the reels were not your friend? The door would stay locked. He envisioned great long lines of people dying for a piss and throwing handfuls of metal into the machine for the chance of taking a leak before their bladders exploded.

He works in advertising now.

We spent a while in a bar with the map—no escape from the ringing cacophony of the machines—and then headed back to the Freedom to pick up the car, a two-seater new-style MG that I liked the sound of. It was small and sharp, great for navigating through the Strip. Once we were off the Strip, though, parking-lot country unfolded before us, as far as the eye could see. We could have been back in Columbus, San Antone, or any other city.