Static/Orgone Read online

And she smiles for what will be.

  ***

  Up the shag stairs. Lek’s naked arms flail, fingernail the wall and his messy argyles slump step to sliding step.

  He snorts. His knees buckle under the pressure of an unknown weight, a sack of dirt. But all the dead leaves of Lek’s mind have burned to skin, veins and static. In the nightlight of the dashboard, Alina had stroked his leg, scissor-stroked his crotch, and told him, “We need a signal, something we can do with our fingers so we know when we should leave if it’s all too much.”

  His vision blurs shag. Sweat drips down his nose. But the shag is not made of sheepskin or tumbleweed. “There is no priest here, no fatherly guilt,” is a thought Lek holds. “I was raised to be better than lust,” he says aloud.

  Take another step.

  But the stairs have twisted to an almost flat field of crust. Just bumps like tiny breasts made of yellow and black gum. Lek is slanted at an angle and he suddenly touches his cock as if using it as a night-beacon to guide him forward in the fuzz. The music of his trumpet hums a jig that seems to say, “Keep walking and step, one, two, step, one, two.”

  There must be an end to these stairs.

  Alina must be up there somewhere.

  Don’t slip.

  And Lek slips.

  His argyles fly airborne. He reaches out for further stairs to grasp. He must pull himself to the apex, to the mountaintop, to the pinnacle. His cock rugburns on the shag. The prickles of palm trees and the memory of sunlight obscure his fantasy of Alina, light of his stubborn wounded heart. And pull, Lek, a voice chants. To the top. He does.

  Lek does. He’s a marching drum.

  Feel gums mash powder to cream bits.

  Cock spark-dragging the shag, keep going, Lek.

  Ignore possibility and if you slip, you will never, ever make your way to that grave in the den of lions where sweet Alina prepares to pounce.

  ***

  The Palm Desert’s Highway Motel.

  Night.

  A neon sign glitches pink in the puddled reflection of the highway. A sixteen wheeler roars past.

  A car door slams shut. The parking lot hums dust.

  A man’s hand reaches down, tugs argyle up his calf, heads straight toward the row of pink doors. Those doors line the facade. But there, nestled between two particularly shimmering pink doors, stands a woman who looks like Alina.

  She hits a cigarette. She’s wearing a cardigan to compliment our approaching man’s frumpy suit. Her bobby shoes sparkle sugared noir in the moonlight: lips curl a wicked grin, eyebrows penciled sunset pink, arched, and her nose wiggles. She takes another drag of smoke and blows a gentle storm of stink toward the man.

  “Did you enter him, baby?” she says. “Done deal?”

  “The devil don’t feast on bread alone, does he?”

  “Castrated and bleating is what I hear.”

  “Or in socks that stink,” the man says. And he’s pressing his dirty suit into her breasts. She lets flow a fog of smoke into his eager mouth, shotgunning a stream of tar into his lungs. He takes it. He accepts it.

  And, yes, the man’s other hand reaches around to guide Alina ever closer to the grime he wears on his skin. This man of dirty fingers, this man with the face of blurred grime, kisses the woman like grinding iron to melt. A crackling weld in their kiss. Alina pushes her needy lips to his lips and releases, runs tongue across cheek.

  “Told you, baby,” she says, “said, baby, this is how it all goes down. Love’s a stuffed pig, overblown, swag-swallowed by the thought of tail. Must have hit the jackpot.”

  “You’ll have him.”

  “Can’t wait to trim him,” she says. “Means three humdingers for you, sailorman.”

  The man’s hand touches her cheek, shakes. Alina takes his hand. He pulls away, says, “Now I see these hands as slabs of meat.”

  “For my abattoir,” Alina says. “Meat’s death, until you cook it.”

  The door behind the woman opens as if on its own. Somehow, in the opening of the door, there is now a cowboy hat on the man’s head, glitching, appearing and disappearing with a will of its own.

  They enter the doorway, into the glow of a black and white television in the corner. It lights the room in monochromatic stutters.

  Green shag carpet and the man’s boots, muddied. Alina sits on the bed. She watches. The television plays an old film wherein a woman stands waving her trench-coat-clad arms frantic in the middle of a desert road. Headlights illumine her body. An old sports car slams on its brakes, nearly crashing into her. It’s a man in a suit who is driving the car. The two talk in quick arm flails and exaggerated mouths. The scene on the television repeats, slows to heavy frames per second, repeats slower, until it stops.

  The motel man crosses to the bathroom. He avoids touching the bed, Alina’s legs spreading so subtle. He avoids the small end table and the wooden chair. He does not take notice of the black telephone or the bottle of J&B. He shuts the bathroom door.

  A telephone rings.

  The ring is muffled, or perhaps, it’s the man’s dirty ears. The phone rings through the piss the man drizzles around the toilet rim. One hand grips dick. One hand flexes, splits up in static, fleshes. And when he steps from the bathroom, he feels a house of limbs smothered in a blasting ocean of saxophonic drone. He feels the sudden impulse to answer the phone, for he doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows the phone is for him to answer.

  Alina appears transfixed by the television scene, entranced: halted woman, mouth agape, dead, just still.

  The man lingers over his own hand. His hand breaks up again in static, sizzles, melts to noise. He reaches out, arm held before him. Suddenly, can’t move through the electric muck of the room.

  Alina is no longer there.

  The man floats slowly as if pushed to the phone. Don’t tell him he’s lost his clothes. He reaches down to pick up the phone. And his hand of static trembles over the receiver. The phone stops, the rings are silenced.

  And the man halts in the beams of his own confusion.

  A gutted lamb.

  ***

  Elsewhere, the foggy door to the shower cracks, sends naked women and heaps of men a-tumbling to the floor in a tangle of limbs. They roll ass over throat, a pile of skin on the tiled floor, slippery, slopping fish.

  A mustache jams ribs on the toilet. A blonde smacks skull on sink. Alina’s legs are cocooned into a flabby gut-wound. She clenches lips, twists something fluffy. More flaccid tentacles rain around her. The steam makes it hard to see.

  Alina’s on her back, overcome by the pulse of the room’s light. It smothers her with limbs and licks, just as the rest of the bathers tornado from the shower.

  A stifled moan, high-pitched.

  A woman’s neck caught on the rim of the shitter, sliced open on a shard of glass.

  Blood spurting across skin.

  And Alina can’t be sure if she should miss Lek or merely miss the thought of him—like that could be possible. And the floor of the bathroom—the wet, the vile, the bile—writhes with licked pelts, stroked rods, and slurped skin-straws.

  She is smothered by the shadow of a nipple.

  The man hovering over her, a grey haired wildcat, licks around her mountains, greedy. He smears gelato—is he fingering a cone?—on her navel and flicks cream, double-dips, and skitters. His tongue slides down to her love tuft. Alina’s teeth grind. She spits water. She spits up shampoo. I can’t miss you now, Lek. You’re not wanted here. I can’t imagine how I should miss you now.

  Of course, she had met Lek in the office. The paper and ink, the bandwidth and the sore ass from the hard bottom of a squeaky chair.

  The night shift bled to morning.

  Alina’s blouse stained brown (just a splotch) and how Lek had dabbed at her breast stain with a wad of wet paper towels on a wind-torn night.

  She recalls his anecdotal television, some soundless loop, buffering, stuttering on, off. Yes, there was a video playing. It was the video of a
woman standing in the middle of a desert road, blinded by headlights.

  Now, Alina, legs bent to chin, endures this grey man licking and sucking. He smacks his lips, holds her ankles, and she’s confused. Shouldn’t be, but so it is.

  And here is only heaps of slashed limbs and testicles, breasts and tummies. They pump like androids, like parasites, like maggots.

  Hairs tickle her ear. Another woman has come close in the confusion. And Alina hears water.

  The shower must still be running. It smells of marbled meat.

  A toilet gurgles.

  A telephone—muffled.

  Her signal.

  The heat of this overflowing bathroom is starting to stifle.

  This is when the floor drops. It’s been drooping the entire time. The orgy itself has fleshed it to hold. And the rumble. And the ring. The ring wells deep in her lower belly. A tongue flicking candle wax on the back of a stripper. A tongue lapping come puddles. She shudders. Everything churns closer and closer.

  ***

  Lek is sopping wet, suddenly drenched. The wet turns his socks to galoshes, the shag carpet is a river of argyle soft as skin.

  He’s still in the house.

  The second floor.

  There is a telephone on the bed stand of the bedroom where he finds himself panting. He lunges to answer it, trips over the bed. His body flops sideways, legs akimbo over his head. And his arm reaches out for the ring, cradles nothing.

  Mid-ring of the seventh ring: “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  “Alina is this—?”

  “No.”

  “Who then?”

  “You remember your friend, don’t you, Gardenio? Your always friend?”

  “Wrong person,” Lek says. “You shouldn’t be—you can’t, I mean—”

  “This is your always friend. You remember your friend, don’t you?”

  “Is this some kind of prank, you prick?” Lek says, itching crud off his droop. His eyes flit around the room, out the window. He’s looking for his car in the driveway, but he cannot see his car in the driveway. The desert dark is too thick, too many flies crowd the glass.

  “You drove,” the voice says. “I am here, too. Alina and I, too, Lek. You remember your always friend, don’t you?”

  “Come and get me then,” Lek says, his voice breaking into a hiss. “I need to speak with Alina. Put her on.”

  A sudden yelp blurts the line. It’s a yelp Lek has heard before, the throaty moan of a lover in throes.

  Of ecstasy.

  And the sound of crunched glass.

  “All broken in the bathroom,” the voice says. “Come see your always friend.” And the voice is too clear, too close. Static oozes from the receiver. Lek screams, lets the receiver go, hears a buzz, drops the phone.

  An unzipping. His brunette escort who abandoned him at the base of the stairs has, unbeknownst to Lek, made her way onto the bed. She eases off her glasses, her jeans. The room is bleached red. Moans roar through the window. She breathes jazz strokes in the way she dips her full body to will his cock to stand. It’s a suggestion, a question, a provocation.

  Their mouths melt into the parting of legs, a pair of black handled scissors on the bedside table. Between lip to lip, Lek says of Alina, “How will you ever forgive me?”

  But his escort’s scent of intoxication pummels him. She guides him within the abyss.

  Lek says, “I cannot hide within an ache.”

  He shuts his eyes, prostate gushes spunk to quell the fever. His spine drips.

  Lek swallows.

  The escort leaves clothed, wordless, and he’s left with streaks of seed pooling on the bed.

  And Lek pants, slides off the bed in a slither, under the bed to a spot in the under-dark, where, if he wills his way further, might sink into the skin of the house.

  He slides the black-handled scissors into his grip, clicks them thrice.

  Night shadows from outside dim the room like a cloak.

  Lek’s fingers shiver, grip the carpet before him, hold the scissors, and pull his body to the doorway. I’ve failed.

  ***

  Later, Alina’s eyes gape at the spanking blows by a bearded man, devil horns propped on his mop of curls. He’s laughing wildly, slapping at her bum in upward strokes. She’s bent over his knee, a fleshy mannequin: resolved, made anew.

  This is the living room, a mass of humping bodies, the light, a swirl of blue orgone. Someone has let a smoke machine shoot candy-flavored smoke to blow waves, to suck.

  A skin-sword plunges Alina’s mouth. She takes it.

  All darkens quickly.

  But Alina hasn’t always been here. And the gross dick quells the confusion of where Lek has run off to and how he will return—soon, his time will come.

  Devil-horns fingers her petals, operas a tune in Italian and he thrusts harder. She grunts, presses back onto his finger. She shuts her eyes to not think pithy. Her mouth is emptied, shots dribble over her tongue. It’s a feast. She hears choirs upon choirs dissolve. It could be the air conditioner. It could be the palm trees slapping the windows. And why are the windows boarded up with bent-back nails? The smell of rusty skin rotting. The smell of her own body.

  The entire room is a symphony of sex sounds grown orchestral.

  But the guests are crowding more violently. Bodies stuck together. Sex toys scatter and flop. There is an intensity in the room, an intensity Alina’s mind is shoving aside in favor of skin rammed between her teeth.

  If only she could escape is the thought she wants Lek to think.

  The hummed pleasure, the breathed pleasure, the overall manifestation of pleasure in the room, though, is shifting unsteady. More rush closer. The smell of blood. The smell of a ripped open body.

  He’s near.

  ***

  Outside, miles away.

  The man palms desert dirt, clenches, and clumps it to the wind for the vultures to spit. They circle unseen, yet heard: the beating of wings, beaks click, slavering for skin, wet blinking chews.

  And this man walks the mountain road. He’s miles from the metropolis, so many lights pepper the horizon far below—towering buildings, expressways, city drone. And the man hums old noise to himself, stuffed full of orgone squawks. His lips buzz out a trumpet. Fingers hiss, snap, click.

  Hiss. Snap. Click.

  He waits for another car to come up the road. He moves forth in the dust. So many have passed thus far, all on their doomed way to the sliced finale.

  It is only correct to construct semblance for a mad-show such as this one.

  Stop.

  Don’t move.

  It is not the wind, this grind. This snarl. This tearing open. No, it is the sound of squealing tires echoing up the mountain.

  And instead of obeying the wind of the road, he runs wild, crosses the mesa like a coyote.

  “Will you be coming around the mountain, son?” he says, chest heaving, legs in acceleration.

  The mesa dips to a curved dent off the road where he finds—

  An upturned automobile.

  On fire.

  The other car still approaching.

  “Believe, son,” he says. “Smother yourself in it.”

  ***

  Or a tall office building in the metropolis speckled with tiny lights.

  “Often work late, not this late?” Lek says, thumbing his nostril. “Lately biting at the reigns—all from a damn phone call, huh.” He straightens his tie, the knot lopsided around an unbuttoned collar. A goofy trout pattern in the light of the office hall. Ink stains on the carpet.

  “Overtime,” Alina says. “Loyalty’s sucked up more hours than an armadillo at an ant parade.” She’s walking past to the break room, swivels, turns at the copy door, enters quick.

  “For Briggs, that old bear?” Lek says, raising his voice toward the copy room. And the beat of silence calls Lek to limp faster, to grip mug and follow. “Was it Pete gave you all this jazz?” he says.

  “Or Wade,” Alina
says. And a hum-click-hum of a corner copier ghosting blank paper from its smooth jaws.

  “One of those bozos, huh,” Lek says. “Cracking the proverbial workplace whip.”

  Alina lifts a thick lid, looks, licks her lips, lowers it, places pages face down in the tray, taps them neat. “Just dreaming of fun,” she says.

  “Fun’s good,” Lek says, elevating his eyebrows.

  The copier spits the paper out halfway, hauls it back up inside, flips and squirts, and slips page upon page out double-sided, full of ink.

  Lek leans against the doorframe, face shadowed by the dim hall. A comforting hum.

  “Wearing your grin lopsided or is that a frown I detect?” Alina says.

  “Tired Fridays, this duty drags,” Lek says. “Did I tell you I had this dream about you the other night? In the rain.” He steps into the copy room’s glow. He sips too-thick instant coffee, watches the paper stack and spit, click and snap. “Too bright to tell the truth, too many people. I was inside some kind of motel room—you have certain dreams, but your mind wants stone walls, so you get wood walls instead, yeah? Could be you’re standing outside on someone’s giant mountain of shit-shingles, bones for chandeliers, whatever, but you were somewhere there, Alina, and I had to find you—wasn’t pretty.”

  “And then you woke up weird?” Alina says. She’s stapling small stacks of blackened white together. The pile maker. The dream listener. The corner stapler.

  “Woke flat—don’t know if I woke or rolled off the bed.” Lek sets down his cup on the same table Alina uses to staple those stacks of paper, piling them into three stacks.

  The cold night air struggles, whips at the window in whistles. Lek presses his back against the wall, keeps the window to his side. It makes him look small there by the window.

  He feels tall.

  “Night dreams abound for you, huh,” Alina says, stapling hard. “A struggle to get up.”

  “Another woman in the dream, two women, maybe more than two, I thought was—don’t take this in the wrong light—you, all of them like Alina was their name. I don’t know how I can say it.”

  She doesn’t reply.

  Wet palms. Lek’s been staring at the way Alina stacks the papers. A city of small crosses. Reams of paper form white stacks, the backsides of whatever work they are to mean. “It was—just nothing.”