Charlie Huston - My Dead Body

– We’ve been separating the chafe.

I roll toward the voice, gun first, and that’s when I lose it, something white winking close, taking it from me, and winking back into the dark.

I open and close my hand on the emptiness that used to be the gun, then bring my other hand to my face and take a drag and thank fuck they took the piece and not the smoke.

– Hey, Count.

Spindle thin, wearing just the slacks from his white suit, a belt wrapped almost twice around his waist, and a matching vest that slips half off the high point of one of his shoulders, the Count strolls into the light of one of the candles.

He’s carrying a twenty-inch bush blade from the end of a scythe, bringing it like a blood-crusted talon to his forehead; the tipping of a hat.

– Joe.

He lowers the blade, sniffs the air.

– You smell like you’re just about ready for the pot.

I’m one of them.

Not by choice, just how Daniel called it.

Daniel said you were Enclave, that was a sealed deal. It doesn’t wear off. Even if you don’t want to play, you’re in the game. Can I say it another way?

When you’re a Jet…

Like that.

I never had any use for it. Gave me room to tap Daniel for a little news of the world. Gave me a bolt-hole once or twice. Mostly it was just strange baggage to be hauling around.

But if not for the Enclave thing, Daniel never would have baited me years back. Starved me out. Drew me to the edge and pushed me into the deep end. Never would have cared to find out if I could cope. Never would have sent the Wraith to make a killing and keep me alive. And if none of that had ever happened, I wouldn’t know just how close I am to over, and what to do when it happens.

Course it also means they’ll be eating my marrow pretty soon.

Just hoping to keep one fucker from tucking in.

He grazes my forehead with the tip of the scythe blade.

– What did I tell you, Joey Joe Joe Joe?

He drags the tip from brow to brow, scraping bone.

– Told you never never come back. Utterly clear on the concept, man. Nothing vague.

He strikes a pose, pointing the blade in the air.

– I remember it like it was yesterday, man. Said, You go out, you don’t come back. Pretty sure I put a distinct verbal period at the end of that sentence. But, hey, give the benefit of the doubt. You tell me, did I mumble?

I got about two inches left on my smoke. I suck away a quarter of that.

– No, you were clear enough, just that I don’t take you seriously. You being a bad cliché and all.

He nods.

– Yeah, OK, yeah. I’ll bite.

He squats next to me, resting the point of the blade on my chest.

– Tell me how it is I’m a punch line? Cuz I live for this kind of shit.

I suck a little more smoke.

– You’re a punk kid who got infected and named himself Count. Textbook asshole.

He smiles.

– Ever tell you the last name I picked for myself?

I wave my butt.

– Vlad?

He shakes his head.

– Count.

I study the last of my cigarette.

– OK, I’ll give it to ya, that shows a little sense of humor.

– Count Count . You get it, right? You’ve seen Sesame Street?

I lift a hand.

– I get it. It’s not bad.

– Cuz I can laugh at myself, is the point.

– Sure.

He taps his own chest with the blade.

– I’m not the type takes himself all serious.

I nod.

– So laugh at this.

I jam the cherry of my last cigarette into his eye.

Nasty little hiss, drip of blood and something else rolling over his cheekbone, and him just sitting there and staring at me from the eye that I haven’t turned into an ashtray.

Then he opens his mouth wide, drops his head back.

– Ha! Ha! Ha!

He brings his head up and plucks the butt from his eye, looks at it, and flicks it away.

– You know.

He reams drippings from his eye socket with a knuckle.

– Truth is.

He wipes the knuckle on my jacket.

– I barely even use my eyes anymore.

He closes the good one. The other has blistered over, covered in a cluster of tiny bubbles of skin.

– Everything is so lit up at this point. My senses? I feel, like, micro-changes in air pressure on my skin. Hear things. Smell like a hunting dog. My sense of taste, man, I wish I had a couple bottles of nice wine in here.

He runs a fingertip over the concrete floor.

– And the tactile. Telling you, I had any kind of sex drive left, it would blow away any crazy rave ecstasy orgy I ever got my ass into at college. On the subject of the senses, let me ask you.

He stabs the tip of the scythe blade into my biceps, through, until it tinks against the floor.

– You feel that?

I look at the blade, no blood welling around it, like a giant scalpel stuck in a corpse.

He pulls it out.

– No.

He rises.

– You are faaar gone, my main man. But that’s not news.

He points the blade down at me.

– You got fat. Old. Tired. Beat. You are beat. I’m not just talking about you being all cut to chunks, I’m talking about how tired your story is. Man alone. Yojimbo. Get out of the middle of town and let the big boys do business. Only big enough for one operation. We aim to be that operation.

He swings the blade.

– Time to cut down the old and make way for the new. Know what the new is.

He runs his fingers down the ripple of his ribs.

– The new is lean and sleek. It is hungry. It is wild. It is dangerous to the old. New is always dangerous to the old. And you, Joe Pitt, you never read the headline. You met me and you just saw punk kid . What you should have been seeing is what the dinosaurs saw when they looked at the sky and spied that big meteor dropping on their heads. Know what they thought when they saw that rock?

He points up.

– Thought, That is gonna hurt.

He raises the scythe blade over his head.

– What you thinking now, Joe?

He brings the blade down and puts it in my stomach.

Goes through, pins me to the concrete, don’t feel the cut, but I feel the cold of the steel, feel that because it’s the only thing colder than the meat of my dead body.

And what I’m thinking is, Man, I’m glad I died before he did that.

I died about the time he started talking about how old I am. Was. Whatever. It’s hard to figure what tense to use. Mix in the fact this is the second time I’ve died, it could get confusing in a hurry if I tried to think it all the way around.

So I don’t.

I don’t think around. I don’t think up, down, in, out, over or under. My thoughts, they become a straight line. He’s talking, and his words, what I’m seeing, the past, any kind of future, the concrete under my back, it all collapses into a sheet of black that becomes a horizon before it drops over my body and sucks me inside.

And I think just one last thing.

Damn, I didn’t get to see Evie.

And I fall up and out the other side of the black sheet.

Everything expands until it is touching me everywhere and I feel the Enclave back in the shadows, watching, count their numbers by the way the air shifts when they breathe. All sound amplifies until I can separate the vibrations in the air as they strike my eardrums and name the key to which each is tuned, harmony and dissonance of the Count bragging, city waking outside, wax melting from a candle across the warehouse. Smells untwine, each has a color, fabric, leads to a source that I can see in my mind. I taste the rotting meat dangling overhead, the flaking rust on the upper curve of the Count’s blade, the night’s accumulation of grime on my clothes. I see into the dark, how the Enclave move without the purpose and control they used to own, jittery, gnashing, I see there are more of them hanging from the rafters than walking the floor. But that’s not for me, the pot, a dangle from the ceiling. I’ve got better ways to die.