DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little

I start to hear her through a distant echo-tunnel, you know how you do. Then Mom's voice scurries from my mouth.

'Hey – wow .'

' God , I can't believe I just told you that! Anyway he drives a Corvette, like an original Stingray whatever, and in November we're doing Colorado for my birthday…'

'Hey, wow .'

O-so-soft-and-gentle-on-your-skin Fate now makes me die squealing for every pixel of her being, and with each turn of her smile, every token of how remote my dream is from her mind, I fucken die knowing this is barely the germ of an infection for a thousand miserable deaths.

Then Taylor stands off her stool, and waves up the concourse. 'Hey, there's my cousin – Leona! Loni!' she calls. 'Over here!'

Jesus fuck. It's Leona Dunt from back home. I don't know if Lally's with her. Fuck . I explode off my stool, snatching up the backpack. Leona stands posing by the lingerie store, she hasn't looked over yet. 'What's up?' Taylor asks me.

'I have to run.'

'But – what were you going to ask me?'

'Please, please, please, don't breathe a word of this to Leona.'

'You know Leona ?'

'Yeah, please .' My Nikes fire me onto the concourse.

' Vern !' she calls, as I vanish into the crowd. I glance over my shoulder and capture her image forever; she's there like a lost kitten, lips open, eyebrows scrunched. 'Be careful,' she mouths silently. 'Call me.'

I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumor light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. And I didn't call my mom at all, you guessed it. I didn't even eat all day. All I did was hammer myself to a cross.

Screen One in my brain plays endless warm close-ups of Taylor. I try not to watch, I try to stay in the lobby and avoid it. But the thing's right there, doing big rotations of milky ass. Screen Two runs that other timeless classic, Mom , or, Honey I Butt-Fucked the Family . I ain't trying to watch that one either. All I watch is a double-exposure of my ole goofy face in the window, as infinite distance rolls by outside; spongy, darkened distance, like rug-lint balls on wet graham cracker. Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.

This is the scenario when I get the day's clincher, the one I forgot to expect. A song gets attached to Taylor. Just when you think you're dicked to the maximum extent of natural law, something always comes up that you forgot about. I know the routine from here. Everybody knows deep down there's no way to kill a Fate song once it's stuck. They're like fucken herpes. The only way to wash them out is to buy the song and play it day and night, until it doesn't mean anything anymore. Only forty gazillion years it takes. Everybody knows it, but I don't remember being taught that little pearl back in school, about the destructive power of Fate songs. Correct me if maybe I was absent that day, or if that was the day I spent cleaning the yard on account of liberating frogs from the lab. No, as I remember it, we were too busy trying to assimilate fucken Surinam to be taught anything of actual value to our lives, like Fate songs for instance.

I hear Taylor 's song through the 'Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. 'Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something.

Worst of all, it ain't even a pure sex song. No dirty little bass riffs running up and down the back, swinging and plucking; nothing masturbation can relieve. This ole tune drags you screaming from her panties with the fatal wrench of something bigger than perky riffs. Anodized, gritty wanting and yearning. The deathly heem of love.

A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she's faking this look of terror.

'Oh no ,' she says, 'how can you do that to Mommy?'

She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade.

Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world.

'Oh no, you've killed Mommy, Mommy's gone!' She plays dead.

The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, then he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle in his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up.

'Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha, it's Mommy !'

Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.

'Drrrrrrr,' the motorcoach fangs into a violet dusk, a bitter projectile full of knives and Vernon. I know I'm just being sour about shit. Tell me I'm just being sour about shit, on account of everything. I know it. But I just get this feeling in my head, like the Voice of Ages that says, 'This is no way for a young man to spend his learning years.'

Taylor will have finished shopping by now. She's probably already in this fucker's Stingray, with her skirt up around her waist. As I picture it, her grown-up panties become skimpy just to finish me off. Now they're reckless bikini numbers, tight and fast, with a tiny bow on the waist elastic. They slash and slice me. A wet patch the size of a dime glistens on her mound, and if you take a silky buttock in each hand, lift her off the seat, and snuff your face up close, you only whiff the bittiest thumbtack of tamarindo jerky, just a pin-prick. That's how squeaky clean she is, even on a hot lathery day like today. Squeaky clean, like a doll. Oh Taylor, oh fucken Tay.

The unexpected thing when the bus rolls into McAllen is the stillness. The driver switches off the engine, the door goes 'Pschsssss,' and the world just parks. It's nearly eleven o'clock and there's a new silence, loud with the creasing of clothes, as I rise out of the seat. It's like waking from a fever, specially after all these venomous thoughts. I follow other unfolded travelers to the front of the bus, where a smoky breath meets me at the door. Maybe a tang of freedom. The border is less than ten miles away.

I savor the glassy crunch of my New Jacks on the concrete, and with it grows a feeling that at least I'm still alive, still have my arms and legs, and the dreams that fucken kill me. And twenty-one dollars and thirty cents. The mostly empty bus terminal shines a promise of comfort, so I shuffle over to look for a coffee, or maybe a sandwich, anything to stop my bowel cells from applying for other jobs in the body. A Mexican boy sweeps the floor by the doors, and two ole ladies doze on chairs next to some boxes tied with rope. Upholstery weeps flea-powder and farts. Then my eye catches a TV at the back. It's the news. My brain says, 'Don't fucken go there.' I fucken go there.

'New shock for the Central Texas community of Martirio,' says the screen. Red and blue lights flash off the slick of a recent shower. Vaine Gurie stumbles up a driveway near the edge of town. She wears a tracksuit, and shields her face from camera lights. Another big woman helps her through a screen-door, then turns to the cameras.

'Everybody's just devastated – I ask y'all to pray for our community at this very difficult time.'