Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Ahead there was desert and more desert. The interstate. The mountains.

Suspense, thrilling and horrible, kept building with each second, the prospect of what could be happening, with all of its possibilities, presenting itself even as nothing happened.

Then Kenny went upright in his seat. His shoulder moved slightly.

“What's that?” he asked.

A clicked switch: the headlights became brighter, shining onto more of the asphalt in front of them, spilling onto the side of the road as well, catching the reflection of a mile marker; a bunch of gravel and brush; a sun-faded campaign placard. And something else. Up a ways.

“Dude,” Newell said, leaning forward now.

7.9

In the gloom of his forty-nine-dollar motel room, Bing Beiderbixxe stretched out on a mattress that provided nothing in the way of back support. Sitting up a bit, he let himself be propped by the headboard, as well as pillows whose cases were overly starched. Bing felt roundly and thoroughly defeated, humiliated for the umpteenth time. He'd been so certain that his connection with the stripper had been real. Yep. Bing Beiderbixxe was the sucker of all suckers.

A listless point of the remote control whose batteries needed to be replaced. He fought for each click through the channels of the motel's basic cable package. Time and again Bing returned to one of those movies that always ran on cable late at night, the kind of blockbuster that had been released with all kinds of publicity, and was now constantly shown to try to get back the studio's coin. Bing had seen it, or parts of it, during many predawn hours, and knew it well enough to not pay much attention. A passably bad movie, watchable and crafted but not particularly good.

He was noshing his way through a bag of guacamole Doritos, was also down to the dregs of yet another Mountain Dew Code Red. Exhausted but nowhere near sleeping, Bing was having halfhearted thoughts, and considered whether to grab his laptop, gather his scattered clothes off the floor. The crate of his unsold comic books was in the hatchback, right where he'd left them. Ditto the cardboard fold-out, stuffed into the backseat. All he had to do, really, was go to the Pinto and get going. No need for checkout. Who gave a crap about plastic room keys.

He was going to have to skip on his electricity bill this month. Probably MasterCard too, which would do wonders for the interest. Bing's eyes were strained, fading in and out of focus. His teeth were vibrating from the accumulated caffeine. The thought of being back in Cali by morning wasn't any impetus for him to get up.

Without energy or enthusiasm he grabbed his laptop from off the stretch of bed on his right. The phone jack was still stuck into the side of the computer and soon Bing had typed in the code from his calling card, and bypassed the motel's phone charges. He logged in, checked the Knitting Room, and found there were no members inside. He vacillated, stared at the screen, and ran down his favorites menu. When he couldn't avoid it any longer, he opened a word processing file. Bing typed in a stream of consciousness, without bothering to read what he was entering, without correcting his errors, leaving alone phrases that he knew were false starts. It was more important to get it all out, get it down.

]A comic book about why grown people read comic books?

TOO VAGUE? 2 OVERDONE? 2 META? DO I NEED MORE SHAPE?

• Different characters have own reasons for being regulars at the comic book store. Group of f/college w/crappy jobs. Stripper who lives in dream world & think she's a movie star (remember trip! Sketch when u get home!). Each character MUST have some sort of DEFINING interest in popular culture — movies. rock & roll. Rap. Get rich schemes. Body art. Goth. Tecchie. UFOs. ETC.

Bing made a column for each character, and in this way, slowly started shaping their traits, developing ideas for them. He had some thoughts about making the stories and lives and interests intersect, and typed these out as well, under a different heading. Quickly Bing typed out a note about having different characters have overlapping interests and contrary points of view. Less quickly, he considered a follow-up: having plots and subplots based on the overlaps and contrasts. Like one story that revolves around the day a summer movie opens. Most issues would include everybody, but maybe he also could focus on one character in particular, if the situation called for it.

Bing didn't feel his headache so much. Backing up the file, he rose from the bed and stretched his arms above his head and worked the crick from his side. He paced the length of the motel room and scratched at the back of his neck.

There wouldn't be any superpowers; there wouldn't be a whole lot of escapism; but maybe it could be about escapism — like its place in daily life. Like what was going on with each character, what had happened to them. Why their fantasies were not just necessary but so prominent?

7.10

With a simple pull, the cloth around her wrist collapsed like wet toilet paper. Holding her newly freed hand, the girl became reacquainted with the sensation of her skin, the ebb and flow of her racing pulse. She shook her hand, trying to get back the circulation, and though it was a struggle to rise, she managed to crouch, gaining a modicum of balance. The girl began feeling her way around, groping for the side door, the handle. For precious seconds the latch did not give; but finally there was sweet release, gears shifting, a rusty, rolling groan. She did not have time to inhale, no time to let her lungs fill with the fresh night air, but hoisted herself downward, dangling her feet into the open space, then lowering herself onto the sand. The girl braced herself against the truck's hull. Before the strength in her legs had time to solidify, before she'd figured out the lay of the land, she started down the thin path between the ice cream truck and the jalopy next to it, not thinking, not stopping, not even looking up, making it down the crevice and out in front of all those parked cars, keeping on, away from the direction all the noise was coming from, away from the rumors that at that moment were spreading through the party, the whispers about a gang bang that was taking place, the ice cream truck that was rocking, let's go knocking!

Darkness was flat and wide and ambling in all directions. A few bright specks crawled horizontally across the flatlands, but the girl could not afford to look at them for long, just making out the cacti and tumbleweeds in front of her required concentration. She struggled over a mini-dune, lost her balance, fell to one knee and scraped herself. To the farthest left of her field of vision, the city shimmered. She took another step, felt her way along the breaks of the desert, did her best to follow whatever cues the land gave her. Geckos rustled amid the weeds; rattlesnakes burrowed, unseen. She plowed straight through the smaller weeds. Her feet dragged. She limped and held herself and ran her hands up and down her arms, the concert noise and commotion still audible behind her, but less present now than a surrounding stillness, the carrying sound of cars up ahead, whipping along that black road.

At that time of night, pretty much the only things out there were eighteen-wheelers making night runs, their head and cab and grille lights providing small markers that she could track from a distance. When one of those big rigs rumbled up and was upon her, its lights were blinding. The girl stepped off the asphalt's edge and back into the brush, and the rig slammed by with the force of an elevator in free fall, leaving her trembling for long seconds afterward. Nobody stopped. They did not slow. Not even a pulled trucker horn in warning. She thought nothing of this. She expected nothing from them, but stayed off the asphalt, and made her way down a dirt shoulder that was the width of a runner's path, the ground beneath her going hard and baked for stretches, then patchy with soft sand, then turning gravelly. The girl picked off burrs. She checked and restraightened her skirt. Her progress was meager, measured by abandoned objects, what once might have been a computer printer; the twisted corpse of a bicycle without wheels. The girl passed one thing and after a while the next became apparent: value-meal wrappers stuck in weeds; the shards of shattered amber glass; the round end of a crushed aluminum can sticking out of the ground like an artifact from a long lost civilization. She kept going and the city kept shimmering in a distance she could not touch, a faraway place that was not real to her, but that she had to move toward, her legs weary, a thigh muscle trembling involuntarily. The girl's mouth was horribly, impossibly dry. Mosquitoes had bitten the living hell out of her. The soles of her feet burned, her toes feeling as if they had kicked a wall for an hour. And there were other minor aches and inflammations and rebellions, coagulating, one skeletal throb. Though specific pains kept flaring, they were nothing in comparison to her real aches, the pains she was unable to think about, those places she was loath to address. The girl walked and stared out into the wide and dark night and it was quiet, only the slight sounds of her feet on the gravel, the give-and-take of her breathing. But the pattern of her breaths was like a lulling song, and listening to herself breathe calmed the girl with the shaved head, helped her balance on the tight thin wire, remain above the abyss from which there surely would be no return, that place where wisps of madness crashed against the gathering reality of her body's aches. The only way for the girl to survive was to stay out of that horrid place, and the only way to do this was to stay balanced on that wire, and instinctively she did this, following the line of her breaths. The margin along the shoulder of the interstate widened. Her legs were too heavy, too used. She slowed and came to a stop, and now began easing down onto a large round stone. The girl barely felt her raw knee press against jutting rock edges, and in a desiccated whisper, she repeated Oi, singsonging to herself, Oi, oi, oi. She pulled at one boot, then another, in workmanlike fashion dumping the sand and pebbles from each, then spanking their rubber soles. Oi, oi, oi. From below, the mingled odors of vinegar and ammonia wafted. The carriage of her ribs shuddered. The girl was still for long moments, then slowly brought her knees up toward her chest. Once again she confirmed the absence of her undergarment. Felt her pubic thatch tangled and brittle. Her sex tender, stretched and irritated.