Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

107. VINYL FETISH

Mildred Openheimer, sixty-three, from Onaway, Idaho, with a son in the Air Force, opens her mouth, sticks out her tongue, and topples over backwards. She hits the floor like a whale dropped from a 747.

Just at the moment the wheel stops spinning.

Just at the second its arrow points to JACKPOT.

Just at the instant sirens begin to shriek and buzzers to trill and alarms to rattle.

The game show host, Sam Slant, close-cropped graying beard and slicked-back hair, still smiling, looks down at Mildred, up at the camera, over at the other contestants.

“Um,” he says.

Which leads Ker to assume he’s watching a speedily goofed-up game show until the two detectives in black, one short and one tall, one chubby and one underfed, walk out on stage and it becomes clear this is the old game-show-within-a-police-show trope.

At which time Ker realizes Mildred is being played by Sandi Slam, the same young actress who plays Nona Nova, only she’s all decked out in layers of foam to make her look huge and old, which impresses Ker a lot, from a professional point of view.

But not as much as the explanation that the short chubby detective with a head shaped vaguely like a hammer delivers, hardly moving his lips, as paramedics begin to work on poor Mildred whose mouth is opening and closing like a pithed frog’s.

Mildred Openheimer, unhappily married to one Marvin Openheimer, and unhappily mothered to Murray, Mini, and Mimmi Openheimer, and feeling really alone way out there in Onaway, Idaho, became involved with the Internet as a way to meet people. She joined a number of chat groups. One of them, which she thought had to do with discussing old-time records, was called The Vinyl Fetish and was frequented by all manner of S&M types, one of whom went by the moniker Slowhand.

Mildred fell through the looking glass, discovering a world with him she never knew existed.

And she liked what she discovered.

So before long she took on the handle Black Widow, having very little appellative imagination left, given all that time in that little town, and off they went.

At first Mildred and Slowhand gabbed nightly in the chat space while Marvin stared at the tube just a couple of feet away, spinning all manner of increasingly sicko fantasies to basically pass the time… except then they gradually elided into e-mail correspondence, where suffice it to say the words tit clamps, penis rings , and nice fucking slow strangulation came up a whole bunch more frequently than in what you might conceptualize as conventional day-to-day friendly discourse.

One morning a month ago Mildred waited for Marvin and the kids to leave for work and school, respectively, packed a suitcase, and, without even scribbling an adios note, vamoosed, traveling via train to LA where Slowhand (aka one Ralph Schnorz, a five-o’clock-stubble-at-nine-in-the-morning kind of guy if ever there was one) was waiting.

They met at a hotel where Schnorz employed some of the ideas on Mildred they’d been discussing digitally, then went downtown where they got her on this game show, The Great Wheel Spins, and, seconds before she took the stage, fed her three prophylactics packed with heroin, each with a hairline tear in it, which ruptured the eyeblink she began jumping up and down, releasing enough diacetylmorphine into her system to kill something like eighteen elephants and maybe a lion and water buffalo besides, executing the sadomasochistic double-suicide pact they’d been weaving for almost a year, which means…

“Hic, hic, hic,” Sam Slant, game-show host, says, beginning to gag. “Hic, hic, hic.”

He reaches up and with a flourish yanks off his beard and toupee, revealing, yep, the bald-headed pock-marked five-o’clock-shadowed features of none other than Ralph Schnorz, sadomasochistic killer, who has himself just bitten down on a cyanide capsule he bought on a recent trip to Tijuana, but not before ripping away his clip-on tie, popping the buttons down the front of his white Armani shirt, and dipping inside for one more yank on the biggest tit clamps you’ve ever seen, more like something you’d find on a worktable in a hobby shop or even steel-smelting factory than anything you’d ever expect to find on your average human body, at which point the real Sam Slant lurches up in the middle of the audience, burbling mostly to himself as his hit of heroin finishes its work, and topples face forward onto unsuspecting Mabel Utta, sixty-two, from Dayton, Ohio, with a son in the Navy, whose osteoporosed neck snaps instantly, actually detaching from her body in a geyser of blood and tumbling bowling-ball-like through the initially baffled and then increasingly horrified audience, sending blue-haired women right and left into immediate cardiac ricti, not to mention one of the lighting guys wearing khaki shirt and pants, one Billy Ray Tom John, recently arrived from Florida on the heels of a really ugly breakup with his really ugly girlfriend, her adipose tissue still giving him nightmares, who dies quickly and almost painlessly, but not before thumbing the switch that sends several tons of klieg lights hurtling down on the two detectives who duck and cover… but without much lasting success.

431. LOOKING GLASS GEYSER

199. AS A SOAP OPERA

Rex Rory, flamboyant resident, slaps her. Punches her on the shoulders.

Nona Nova, hospital nurse, laughs at his foolish lopsided smacks.

“You no good bitch!” he yells. “You trollop! You whelp! You malfeasor! You think I’m just another one of your toys you can play with and throw away? You think you can sleep with me and turn round and sleep with my sister, my own sister , Rita Rory, without a thought? Well, you can’t! You’re gonna pay for this! You’re gonna wished you never laid eyes on me!”

Nona Nova flashes him one of her flawless patented grins.

“And how, pray tell, do you think you’re going to accomplish that?” she asks.

“Like this! ” Rex Rory, flamboyant resident, shouts, flipping an oily blue revolver into view.

113. REVOLVER

“And so,” Paul McCartney says, interviewing (if Ker’s not mistaken) Marshall McLuhan on some minimalist powder-blue set, “the thing is, aren’t we talking about an ideological shift in the social dominant, really?”

“Er, um, right,” McLuhan says, running a nervous hand across his salt-and-pepper hair, obviously surprised to find himself talking to this rock legend. “Because, um, well, all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area… ”

“Insulates and anesthetizes it from conscious awareness, doesn’t it?”

“A process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression.”

“So what you’re saying, really, is that multiple subjectivities can’t articulate their circumscribed ‘reality’—to employ a perhaps-outdated social construct — can they, until they’ve moved beyond that positional matrix?”

McLuhan shoots McCartney a half-lidded suspicious glance.

“The… um… right… Most people cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it. In other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment. Thus we’re always one step behind in our view of the world.”