Robert Devereaux - Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

Christ, what an urge! What was the worst that could happen?

He’d scare the shit out of her. She’d never speak to him again.

She’d think he was one blasted dumbfuck and cool toward him from this moment on.

And the best? What the heck. He fingertipped under the sash. The window gave a rattle and Marcie turned her head.

Game up. As he lifted the damned thing and slipped in, Marcie said, “Jesus, Travis, what are you up to?”

“Stay right where you are,” he said, the authority of winter chill in his voice. “Keep changing the baby.” He brought the window down all the way, latched it.

“Crazy fucker,” she muttered. “Where’s Laura?”

“Don’t talk,” he said, surprised at his boldness. He freed his hands, flopped his gloves like dead trout to the floor, undid his coat and stepped out of it. Coming right up to her, he set his left hand high on her hip and found, under her skirt with his right, the hot inside of her left leg just above the knee. No stockings. Firm warm flesh.

“You’re insane.” It was a whisper. There was a hint of admiration there, a turn-on.

“Shhh.” Hand upward, soft muscled widening grippable inner thigh, Marcie not moving to stop him. Expecting the breechable barrier of panty elastic, he found sheer smooth undelineated flesh and then the moist archaic vulval pouch in lip-receptive mode. He thought of a one-handed unbelt, unclasp, unzip, a comical jog-dance behind her getting his pants and jockeys down past his dick. Uncool. Just a zip then, deft twist of the white cotton slit, up and over head and shaft, so he sprang out, zipper-teeth down by the balls like dead shark mouth. Up under her skirt like a silent-movie photographer, baby Jenny nonjudgmental over Marcie’s shoulder, Marcie bending and widening to receive him, her ready vagina fisting him amazingly in, her bent-neck gasp as her hands knuckled protectively about his daughter.

Behind them, suddenly, the window exploded inward.

Baby’s room smelled sweet if too close and warm. She felt along moonlight to the bassinet. Poor darling’s lips weakly probed thumbward, her brow a wrinkle, then relax.

Marcie slowly zipped down the sleepsuit far enough to sneak fingers inside. Smooth plastic; beneath, still dry.

Wonder baby, hundred-percent absorbent bladder and bowels.

She hushed the zipper back upward, led the long red thumb back into the mouth where it stayed in renewed suck.

Too damned hot in here. She set the space heater two notches lower and the thing shut off. Then, yes, Laura be damned, she unlatched the window and tugged it open not so wide as a pencil. One more glance around the room and she headed for the door. The moment it closed behind her, the baby’s forehead wrinkled sharply up. But her poop blurted out in great profusion and the tinkle flooded from her and her face eased into relieved sleep.

Travis was walking along cleared mounded sidewalks of snow one moment. The next, Laura was nudging him and the hall came back up around him. He was grateful, realizing he’d been simultaneously drawn into the dead guru’s stare and impelled by revulsion into a desperate psychic escape, something involving Marcie and baby Jenny and a zip-gutted woman dragging her nude booted body over shards of jagged window glass to reach them.

“In life, there were many desires: Attentiveness and constant observation, appreciating them in their totality, in every articulated detail, led to their dying away. But in death, this death you see in me, there is but one clear and burning desire: to chew the red root of life in hopes that it will wake the palate, slide down the dead throat, revitalize the cold silent organs, and trick the walking shell of life into thickening inwardly even unto the cold core. As my words come forth, my witness is ever on that desire. There is no ‘I’ to control it, but only the fact of witnessing, the lifetime of making that my craft, which keeps me detached from that desire.” Apadravya’s teaching was, to Travis’s astonishment, a strange mingle of comfort and terror. His thoughts went again to their child and to their upstairs neighbor.

But then, the auditorium doors let out a high squeal. Down the right aisle, people craning in their seats to see her, strode a woman, calling, “Rajib, save our son!” From under a knit cap, her short blond hair arched over a face of anguish. At her right shoulder, she held a slumbering child, blanket swaying as she came.

Huguette shivered fiercely under her dead boyfriend, a cold hoarseness in the throat she’d screamed silent. Warm numb tingling in her fingers and ears frightened her most, a first sign of frostbite setting in. She’d die here, the dark hump of the Black Angel’s wingtops filling her vision and the incessant whine of sirens scouring her ears.

Then a miracle: Louis-Phillipe stirred.

No shuddered intake of breath, no pained groan at his mutilations. His intact cheek moved on her breast, stuck frozen in bloodpool, and she felt a surge of power stream through his body. “Louis-Phillipe?” she said, every sound but empty gasp gone. And then instead of lifting his eyes to her, his mouth found her nipple. Through the torn gape in his cheek, she saw him shred it, suffering the ravaging outrage of pain even as she denied it. Rousing blood, his teeth mauled her. She tried to shove him away, but he was as unmoving as the statue—and yet, under her boyfriend’s exertions, the Black Angel now bobbled. Zagging greedily down her body, he took huge bites as he went, and the top of the Angel’s head gouged a raw furrow up his back. When he began scavenging the soft pit of her belly, the scandal of it put her into a merciful faint and then to death.

Louis-Phillipe’s teeth furrowed lower.

“No, do not stop her.”

The yoga instructor had risen to intercept her, had followed her onto the stage, but he backed away to sit in uncertainty, cross-legged on the stage edge, watching from a distance.

Stepping onto the oriental rug, she unwrapped the blanket from about her son, letting him fall-flop into her arms. Only then, Travis saw, did the woman register what Apadravya had become. She flinched back, but almost immediately resumed her mission, the boy clearly not sleeping at all.

“Is he—?” Laura whispered.

Travis cut her off with a nod.

“This is my dear Aysha,” said the guru. “And this is our son.”“He died this afternoon, Rajib.” The woman’s voice, unamplified and thrown upstage, only carried a few rows, but Travis and Laura were close enough to hear. “You can bring him back. You’ve been there. You have the power, I know you do.”“Oh my Aysha,” said the holy man, and the way he said it touched Travis to the heart, “I have no such powers nor would I want them. He is well quit of the world. It were best he did not come back.”

Travis saw a shaving of slush fall from her boot-heel onto the carpet. She swayed forward and laid the dead boy in the guru’s lap. Then she knelt wordlessly, raising her hands in prayer.

Apadravya watched her. A sleeved left arm prevented the boy from twirling senselessly off his lap. He raised his right hand, training his attention on the child as his dead fingers rested on dead eyelids, thumb and pinkie upon the hinges of the boy’s jawbone.

The eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. Then the swami’s hand cupped to one side of the neck, and at once the small body convulsed violently, the nostrils flared and subsided, the limbs flexed.

He came to as one sick and enfeebled, fixed on the dead eyes of his savior, whined for his mother, who crushed him in an embrace that seemed never ending. Sweep of murmur ran through the crowd.

And that’s when the guru lost it entirely and leaped upon mother and child in a feeding frenzy so swift and so voracious it froze Travis and Laura in their seats even as it parabola’d them in hot freshets of blood.