John Shirley - Wetbones by Unknown Read Free Book Online

said, so he'd shaved it off. He'd shaved it off about two days before he met the More Man and he wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd met the More Man.
    Six weeks? Two months? Since, anyway, a day after the last time he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Eurydice and her
    brother, Orpheus, too. She had a little sister named from another myth, Aphrodite, maybe one of the ugliest little girls he had ever seen. But Eurydice, she was the prettiest girl he knew personally, and sexy - and when a black girl is sexy, Jeff used to say, she was sexier than a sexy white girl, and Eurydice could make you breathe hard just by shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And he'd gotten some off her, too, that was the unbelievable thing. When the More Man was done he was going to have to go and find her. She'd been real patient with him. "Everybody got to have a first time," she'd said.
    His thoughts drifted on a slow current of the head syrup, teetering and turning like the wax cups he and Jeff used to launch on the culvert-wash that was the so-called "Los Angeles River". The head syrup was not a drug. It was just his name for a feeling. He had tried to tell Lonny about it, and Lonny had thought it was a drug because the words "head syrup" sounded like it. But no: it wasn't, no way. It was more like a radio station.
    He had peeled off his Iron Maiden t-shirt - it lay beside him with the iron-masked face of the metal band's symbol all wrinkled up and horribly distorted with its crumpling. He stared at it as he began on his left pectoral. He thought he saw the face on the t-shirt cock an eye at him and move its mouth like it was giggling. After a minute he looked back at his chest, watching as he methodically dug the knife into himself, observing as coolly as a man shaving or squeezing a pimple, that kind of half focus and meditative distance. All the while plowing the ragged blade-edge into the soft white skin, wishing he'd built himself up more so there was more muscle to get into. Push, push, the skin and
    muscle and fat tissue of his pectoral resisting the blade, it was like trying to cut open a package that was sealed in heavy plastic, the stuff stretching under your letter opener. Push. Punch . It broke through, the blade jabbing out under his nipple, red blood arcing and - for a moment he felt some pain .
    Oh, shit, how did I get here and what am I doing?
    But then the head syrup came back, the pain vanished, and he relaxed. Jerked the blade loose, and jabbed it through his jeans, deep into the meat of his skinny thigh.
    He was not on drugs. He was not insane. He felt no pain at all.
    Culver City, Los Angeles
    "I haven't seen ol' Mitch for, oh, six or seven weeks," Jeff said, around a mouthful of Doritos.
    Tom Prentice and Jeff Teitelbaum were watching the Dodgers get their asses kicked by the San Diego Padres. They were sitting on a sofa-futon in Jeff's second story apartment, near the open French doors onto the balcony. The room smelled like stale cigar smoke; Jeff had trotted out the cigars when Prentice showed up. Jeff liked smoking cigars with his friends because it was playing at "Guy Stuff." Guy Stuff was a joke and very serious with Jeff, both.
    In the background were laughing squeals and taunts from the swimmers in the complex's swimming pool; the sounds of splashing, a teasing underscent of chlorine. It was a high security "singles" apartment complex, with security guards at the gate and TV cameras and its own hot tub spa and weight room and sauna and game room.
    Jeff's living room was undecorated except for a Norman Rockwell print of a small, rosy-cheeked boy with a fishing pole proudly holding up a string full of fish, only Jeff had cut out small men's magazine photos of naked girls and pasted them on over the fish: a small boy proudly holding up a string of naked girls. On TV, a couple of baseball players drank Budweisers with Phil Collins, and then the game came back on.