Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Sweet Jane settles on Fric, pulls the trigger and lets the recoil carry him backwards to the ground.

Little Jiri takes the load midsection, goes to the floor the worst way, gut-shot, torn open in the belly and fully aware of what’s happened.

Emil Krofta extends his arms over the counter and unloads his Butterbaum automatic, putting nine lead-tipped rounds into Sweet Jane’s head and chest before the shop owner can manage to repump. Sweet Jane is already dead by the time Huck Hrabal and Vera Gottwald line up next to Krofta and turn the transvestite’s body into the most prestigious target in this surreal shooting gallery. When the trio’s magazines are emptied, Jane Firbank is an unrecognizable mess of shredded flesh and bone wrapped in the remnants of Barbara Stanwyck’s pajamas.

Jakob’s ears are locked in a loop of ringing vibration and his lungs are caving in to panic, gunpowder, and the asbestos fragments that drift down from the hole in the ceiling. But he manages to crawl to Jiri Fric and pull the smallest Roach into his lap.

“Call Doctor Seifert,” he yells to Felix.

But his cousin ignores him and instead yells for his gangsters to evacuate the scene.

“Hrabal,” Jakob pleads, “help me carry him out.”

Huck takes a step in Jakob’s direction, but Felix screams, “Leave him. He’s a casualty.”

Hrabal turns from Kiri to Felix, watches as Felix motions to the door with his pistol.

“Outside,” Felix snaps. “Right now.”

“Go ahead,” Jakob says and after a second, Hrabal runs out of the store.

Jakob sits on the floor, his pants and shirt already saturated with Jiri Fric’s blood. He stares at his cousin, struggles for some air.

“This,” Felix says, “is all your fault.”

“You,” Jakob says, “are a dead man.”

Felix holsters his gun, steps into Ruttenberg Road, and takes off after the Roaches in the general direction of the Bohemian wing.

Sylvia sits inside the Snapshot Shack and does the film inventory. She counts boxes Of Kodak and Fuji and Konica and the generic stuff that nobody buys. She arranges box after box in their shelving slots, organizes them by brand name, film speed, number of exposures, black-and-white or color. At ten o’clock the brown panel truck pulls up and delivers the morning’s prints. It’s a light load, a half-dozen envelopes full of vacation shots, birthday shots, half-focused cookouts that have been sitting in the camera since Labor Day. It seems like there are fewer customers every week.

By ten-fifteen she’s phoned them all, told them their prints are ready and they can pick them up at their convenience. She says, “Thank you for using the Snapshot Shack,” in this robotically sweet voice. It’s the only way the words will come out. By ten-thirty she’s so bored and tense she’s grinding her teeth and replaying every moment of yesterday until she’s got a headache that no amount of aspirin is going to relieve. And it bothers her how much she wants a drink.

She came up from the darkroom sometime before dawn. The kitchen door was still open the way she’d left it, but the Dewar’s bottle was empty in the sink and Perry was sound asleep in bed. She lay down on the living room couch, dozed off at some point and woke to find Perry gone. He’d left a note underneath her Ansel Adams coffee mug—

Sylvia,

I’m sorry. I’m stupid. We’ve got to talk.

Hated to see you on the couch.

I’ll call from work.

P.

She thinks, what is it we’ve got to talk about, Perry? Yes, she was wrong not to call. And if the situation was reversed, maybe she’d have been furious. She should have called after she left Herzog’s. She should’ve just found a phone and dialed the number. Told him what had happened. Assured him she was all right. But what she knew yesterday and what she knows right now, the thing she just can’t change, is the fact that she didn’t want to call Perry. She may not be sure of why that is, of all the different factors that might have kept her from the phone, but she knows she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t hear his voice at that particular moment.

After she showered this morning, as she was standing in the bedroom, brushing her hair in the mirror, she looked down to see a manila file that Perry had left on the bureau. She stood there, hesitated maybe for a second, then opened it and paged through the contents. It was filled with clippings and notes and memos, all of them ink-stamped with dates and the words FUD: File # 01-602. There were newspaper articles on censorship battles in various parts of the country, political position papers, summaries on ballot referendums, excerpts from speeches given by Reverend Boetell.

She put her comb down and randomly read some of the Reverend’s words: … and a crusade means blood, brothers and sisters. A crusade means staining the land scarlet as we war against the godless, unredeemable enemy. There must be a purity to our thoughts, a surety to our purpose, and a godly persistence to our resolve. For we battle against the filthiest of foes, the beast who uses the Lord’s natural urge toward loving procreation and subverts it into unspeakable perversion. But have stout heart, my chaste crusaders, and keep safe the gift of your modesty, for as he struck down the writhing infidels of Sodom and Gomorrah, so too will he bring his vengeance to the land of Quinsigamond. So too shall he vanquish the wicked of this soulless and sinister town …

At one point, a drop of water ran from her hair and fell on the page she was reading. She brushed it away immediately, but the paper was marked. She stuffed everything back into the file, got dressed quickly and left for work, but this feeling of nervousness had already set in, this sense of tension hidden just under the skin, a little like the way she used to feel back in college after she’d stayed up all night watching movies, drinking a full thermos of coffee. Exhausted but wired. Depleted but incapable of sleep. The images just rushing through the head, as if they were powered by some external force.

And now that feeling is still with her and she knows it’s not helping that she’s trapped for the next six hours inside this shoebox with only two cans of Diet Coke and an AM radio that keeps fading out. She should have brought a book or magazine, but she just wanted to get out of the apartment. She wishes that somebody would come by to pick up their pictures. She just wants to talk to a stranger. Say all the banal, trivial things they expect. Would you like a new roll of film today? We’re running a special on Snapshot Shack 200 speed. Remember, Thursday is doubles day. Here’s your change. Thanks for using Snapshot Shack.

She picks up the first envelope of new prints. She stares at the name for a while. It sounds familiar to her, but she can’t place it: Mrs. Claudet. She doesn’t recognize the telephone number. She puts the envelope down on the pile of new deliveries. She looks out on the empty parking lot. Then she picks up the envelope and opens the flap and pulls out the pictures.

They’re summertime shots. Two and three months old. The first photo is a beach shot, a woman about Sylvia’s age in a one-piece royal blue bathing suit. The woman is standing on an outcropping of jetty, water rushing around her feet. There’s a huge smile on her face. She looks a little bit embarrassed. She’s got a great figure. Probably someone who does aerobics four or five times a week. Maybe this is Mrs. Claudet. Sylvia has never seen her before.

She fingers through the stack. She sees the same woman straddling a bicycle, eating an ice-cream cone, washing a car and seeming to threaten the photographer with a hosing. She sees the woman in the arms of a man with a bushy mustache. Their pose says boyfriend or husband. Sylvia sees the man patting a dog, a small shepherd with a tongue hanging over the bend of its mouth. She sees the couple together in a restaurant and she imagines the woman asking an agreeable waiter to take the shot. She sees the man sprawled in a mesh lawn chair, wearing a tank top and shorts, raising a beer bottle in the direction of the camera.