The Radioactive Bride, page 16
At last, the big opportunity came. Agathe, the daughter of the circus patron Moreno “El Semental” Pérez—Mexican roots and Salvador Dalì moustache, the Pancho Villa of Paris entertainment—fell in love with him, despite his two heads, and all the rest. Of course, it hadn’t been easy for a female of her breed to find a fiancée—some people don’t enjoy a bed companion who sweats sulfuric acid—but everything can be fixed in life, especially if you can count on a lot of credits; and as a wedding gift, Moreno “El Semental” had a protective protoskin suit tailor-made for her, by no less than New Moon Corporation’s labs. Small modifications on the cutting-edge tech used for suits shielding wealthy Paris citizens from the boiling rains of the Uxor Monsoon.
After the nacre-skinned bride, the rise in the circus and two kids spurted out—one red-skinned and one all in blue, but both with a single head on their necks—she arrived: Cleo, the Amazon, the frontline jazz.
Chaos. The forbidden mango, for the first time…pulp so sweet and unexpected, sex under the bleachers, storm and silence, the whiplash of waiting, the pages of Carmilla and Naked Lunch, Gaugin’s pink, Manet’s black, and a thousand other things combining, colors mixing and shapes dancing and eagerly biting jugulars—the rage of not having understood before—while the tubing bursts inside of you.
Chaos. Seeing her dancing and shaking sibylline molecules on stage, and then feeling her on your belly and back, accompanying with shivers the sliding and flowing, the hot eddy of megatons of sperm.
Chaos. Feeling her living, breathing and shaking her ankle chains, down there, in the cage, far away and so near, while the house walls squeeze you in, white and screaming, and your children grab your pants to play with your two colored faces, drawing in felt tip a wider grin, like the one you wear in the ring.
The torn pages of Suddenly Last Summer, dreaming of Sebastian devoured by the natives, waking up and finding an arrow stuck into the headboard, and then dreaming again, a Mexican symphony in the ears, the port of Brest, a red car with open doors, on the beach of Ostia, twice the sea, and then a father holding a cleaver and a holy card of Joan of Arc in his teeth, slicing up the ghost of your mother, a Breton bonnet on the head and a see-through heart sliding to the groin of her skeleton. Seeing the bride, Agathe, buttery Penelope, sucking her fingers and sewing the pillow for your coffin, because she knows you’re not coming back from that voyage.
Chaos. Blue head and red head frying and hating each other. The bride and the Amazon.
««—»»
Winter, year 40 post-Uxor. After the performance at the Suprême, Maël, his show dress still on and his hat choked by the stems of dead sunflowers, runs along the fitful avenue, the motorway with its median of yellow snow linking the circus to the roaches’ ring, the slide to the slums of Paris.
The clown dodges the whores, who laugh at him, opening their blue fur coats to flash their glittering tits, and then he darts into Rue Dugommier, a road sowed with condom bulbs—low hedges of firethorn with transparent latex leaves on either side—splitting in two blocks of identical buildings. Camouflaged infernos.
He enters the yellow palace, his prison on the second floor, the flat with crooked view on the Baden landfill and the thin pillars of the molecular burners; he opens the bathroom door and heads toward mirror and razor. The blade glints, like Jezebel’s smile appearing and disappearing on his neural net.
The clown gnashes his teeth and moves the razor at the neck of the blue man, the half-asleep thinking head, whose azure-circled eyes flutter while he sticks out his tongue, stretching the muscle at its limit.
“Easy! Do you really want to waste me for that abomination? Are you drunk maybe?” Same words of his father, many years ago. Fuck you.
The red head doesn’t answer, is resolute in slitting his throat; he pushes the blade into his trachea, forcing the hinges of his pharynx. Blood squirts in gushes—blue, that too—a brand new Pollock, circus man’s paint, materializing in the sink; looks like disinfectant, that butterfly-shaped Rorschach stain…to see that stuff pouring like that down there, and melting in vortexes of blue foam getting ever tighter around the empty eye of the sewer, ready to be sucked in the drain.
“Jesus, what are you doing! You’ll be left alone in there, buffoon. Glllhhhlll…”
The clown has reached the bone, and by now he can no longer hear that bastard voice. He keeps cutting and sawing, digging into the flesh all around, helping himself with fingers and nails, but he cannot detach from the neck that dead face which dangles broken on his shoulder, its tongue sticking out.
Then, after a dead orgasm leaving his legs numb, the headlights of an old bus light up a gate; behind there, human-shaped creatures twist like seared lobsters, immediately snarling to the newcomer.
««—»»
Agathe, the bride, her knees soiled in slaughter, stares at the blood-writing on the bathroom floor: I LOVE YOU. Then the sink gurgles, and it finally digests everything.
Cleo, the Amazon, the frontline jazz, runs bare footed on the road with Maël’s red head tucked under her arm, wrapped in a rag. She has managed to have him all for herself, before the sirens and the death of the story.
— | — | —
THE CARDINAL
Bongiovanni, newly elected to the She-Pope’s drifting court, suddenly wakes on the bed of his Borgo Pio apartment. He turns his head to the right, framing the chair where his cardinalitial cassock lies, deflated like a dead ghost. Accessories are in their place, beside it: the sash, the cross, and all the arsenal, including service machete and electric whip, which the motherfucker uses like a water diviner bobber to locate three-breasted whores. Better cunt than water, he croaks each time, whenever someone gets curious noticing the strange tool in its holster. Better three than two, he usually adds then, the face of the interlocutor of the day turning even whiter—he really enjoys that.
The cardinal turns his head to the other side, toward the spread-legged girl next to him, decorated by narrow collars to her neck, wrists and ankles, bonded by next-gen-Inquisition magnetic devices.
“Witch!” Bongiovanni spits between clenched teeth, poking at the girl’s nipples with incandescent tweezers and letting his tongue hiss like a drunk snake. The meridium ball installed like a heretic holy wafer inside the woman’s mouth, locked by jaw fissors, stops her from screaming, but her gaping eyes speak at least four different languages, and they could swear in Aramaic. She has seen darkness, the thickest and fattest, even though it is only midday, and the tired sun of Rome, with its orange rags, is slowly illuminating one of her tits like a stage spotlight.
The girl shakes her back to free herself, with what little energy is left in her body, moaning in desperation like a cow sinking in a river, her three large, precious tits bobbing.
Uxor V3; that’s how that genetic mutation could be classified. Pretty common. The third tit, the apocalyptic tit, making its way between the original two like a molecular Bernini baptistery.
Bongiovanni laughs out loud; he will keep torturing the witch until nightfall, before dressing back and showing up at court, at San Pietro. The She-Pope takes a headcount of her lieutenants every night, and she slaughters two, randomly picked, to decorate with organic capitals the new colonnade of the plaza. Only yesterday, they glassified Monsignor Gomez’s buttocks, turning them into a pair of amaranth footrests for the two fountains, which festively squirt surrounded by Renaissance armchairs. One of the many propaganda places, in the city, where you can attend to the drowning of women still bearing a uterus, women who did not give a damn about the thirteenth commandment. Thou shalt not dump any more shit on this planet, we’re too many.
Bongiovanni points his Cloud-7-watered eyes on the red-haired whore. The vision is clear, now, much clearer than before. Thanks to that bastard Rosario—the one-eyed boy, the priests’ brigand—who always knows how to find new stuff to widen his awareness, to break the back of boredom, to screw with the endurance of a marathon runner. Despite his white hair.
The cardinal licks his lips; the microscopic, luminous highways of his brain turn alive with desire, with the chassis of inner drives switching on their headlights. Everything turns blue.
He wants to shave the girl, spread on her holy oil, laurel, salt…and stuff all her doors of pleasure with honey, strawberries, and wine of the She-Pope’s underground keeps—apocalypse-tight grounds. Bongiovanni always has a good stock of those delicacies, and he possesses cutting-edge tools, like his proto-dripfeed—sort of mechanical millipede clinging to his scrotum, shooting into his testicles small, comfortable, timed doses of absinthe and adrenaline. Sometimes he thinks of that device full of little legs as a pet. He has grown fond of it, by now.
The vision gets clearer and clearer in the cardinal’s mind, by now on the trampoline tip of his personal Eldorado. He waves his arms, up there, balancing, ready to dive headlong into the boiling broth of depravation.
Madame Rousseau’s large oven—his housekeeper, waitress, and expert cocksucker; the stew of the red-haired girl, smoking on the dish its aroma of youth; the dessert of tits, for the grand finale: three cream puffs filled with honey and ground chestnut. Eating, savoring the victim’s screams, recorded on the entertainment system, and continually played back, like a Janis Joplin song.
But then Bongiovanni loses control and ruins everything. Cloud 7 is a beast you cannot train, worse than easy-knife French whores. While Madame Rousseau bends in front of him to slide the red-haired girl stew into the oven, the holy man cannot resist that still-living flesh that moves and wags so close; he shoves the woman into the oven, wedging her in with her buttocks up, and using his machete he begins feasting on that housekeeper’s ass, tasting like clean bedsheets.
— | — | —
THE PROCESSION
Maybe. The night is full of maybes, always is, but tonight chaos will do its best and thinking will be harder, with all the mess about to let loose. Better, maybe.
Rue de Tolbiac begins taking life; it is May 30th, and the heretic procession in memory of Joan of Arc—burned seven hundred years ago, even though nobody remembers that story well—fills up all the streets of the district with platoons of naked whores, armed with torches, glinting scissors and makeshift heart-shaped grenades. The heart that never burned, Joan’s heart. The Maid of Orleans will do fireworks tonight. Revenge, at least once a year. Tonight, hectoliters of Cloud 4 must have been sold, and several loafs of C7t and other explosives.
Those legions of hysterical sluts, with their Carnival of flesh and bombs, make South Paris 5 look like a gigantic crazed meat-grinder.
Maybe? No, not really: it is as sure as death, that tonight the population of castrated males will significantly grow. Men stay shut in their homes, sitting in front of the door with a sawed-off on their legs, on guard, while they hear the steady clanging rhythm of scissors getting closer, down on the street; opening and closing their sharp mouths. Jesus.
Kiki never went to party with those lunatics, though she always carries a holy card of Joan in her bra—a lucky charm—more or less like any other whore in the district. They say that no pimp is ever going to mark your ass, they do not even try: like holy water for the possessed. It burns. Of course, marked asses in South Paris 5 are many. But faith is faith.
Maybe, so Janis Joplin keeps singing. Maybe Kiki is no longer going to need help from the Saint, now that she has become a pro killer. But best to keep Joan in her place, for now, Kiki thinks; she is still a Wasp on trial, after all.
At least, no customer is going to show up tonight; Kiki won’t be bothered, she won’t have to explain to tens of randy guys that she quit renting out the oyster between her legs. Maybe. Now, she is going to open that oyster only when she likes, and if you try to pry it open, you are going to cut yourself on the sharp edges of her knife made in Marseille.
But that maybe—a demon living like a king in South Paris 5, not planning at all to look for another throne room—wakes up. It puts on some underwear, special ones, with a hole for the tail; then, with a tin crown on its head, it begins pushing buttons of probability on its portable console, shuffling the cards. The visor squeezed in the claws of the odd creature lights up something like the map of the old Métro de Paris, a spider web of lines: blue, purple, ochre, orange, green, red. Tunnels and train cars by now stuffed with the monsters of the city, flayed by the rains of the Uxor Monsoon; they learned how to coexist with the rats, more welcoming than surface-dwelling human beings.
Every age has its fucking lepers.
The demon turns on the random engine of its cursed device and shifts the lines, the joints of probabilities, the knots of destinies and the flyovers of luck, making a big mess as usual. A clusterfuck of destinations, a nice slipknot at the scrotum of expectations, of normality: please expect anything, now. You need a little salt, sometimes, the demon snarls, before getting back into bed, satisfied.
And Kiki is caught up with it. Maybe.
Her videoeye unexpectedly lights up; someone is looking for her, and they insist ringing. Goddamn, even today with the procession? she mutters, running barefoot to slit the throat of that thing, that keeps whistling like a nuclear alarm.
Piss off! Are you from fuckin Mars?
But then she sees his face squeezed against the screen, framed by purple smokes: clusters of grenades blowing up closer and closer. Those damned hysterical whores. Joan! Joan! Joan! Listen to them!
He is Yaël, one of Kiki’s old customers, now something more than that. Maybe. In other words, Kiki has not been charging him for months.
Every whore has her mad, romantic, heretic lover, ready to flip over his own life and everything else to save the lady with no knickers shut in the ivory tower; with a hundred satyrs guarding her—a tail on their back and one in the front—beside a gigantic pimp with a M44-25, titanium-water-cooled machine gun, massacring princes on the drawbridge. But the formidable shooter is not there in Kiki’s case: nobody ever managed to mark her ass. Still, the troop of satyrs is always in full force for her, well-armed with pissed-off moray eels, long and short, always poisonous, more or less toothy.
Kiki immediately lets her Yaël in, just in time to avoid a few extra scissor blows. “What are you doing here?”
“Happy to see you too, Kiki… I know where you’ve been today, and I don’t like it,” Yaël is straight to the point, while serving himself a glass of synthetic Southern Comfort—which, with its orange soul, never denies a dose of courage to anyone. “With those bastards, really?” he finishes, swallowing it.
“Shit…and you came here, with the procession outside, only to tell me that you’re pissed?” Kiki replies. She likes Yaël…a nice guy, but he goes too fast for her…and she doesn’t really know where she wants to go, and most important: with whom.
“So what? Does it sound so strange that someone is worried about you? But never mind, what am I thinking, maybe that’s just how it works with…”
“With a whore, you want to say?” Kiki immediately loads venom in her fangs and spits it out as a warning. “Come on, pull it out, that word. What are you afraid of? W. H. O. R. E. Easy, right?”
Yaël deflates on the sofa and shakes his head. “That’s not the point at all, and you know that. It’s just your fucking way of ending any argument.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What the hell, Kiki, I’m talking about your kid. Do you really think this is the way to get him back? Are you that foolish?”
“You leave Max out of this, that’s not your fucking business,” Kiki hisses, harsh scorching rage climbing her throat, tears welling in her large eyes. “You come here to preach, and you expect… Maybe you should have kept paying, like everyone else.” A cheap shot, that. Kiki well knows, and she knows it can hurt. Things to be expected, when you deal with vipers. You cannot be shocked for the odd bite.
“Fuck you. How much for listening to me?” Yaël snaps. “Is this how you thank me, when all I want is to take care of you? I’m just a deluded asshole, you’re right,” he says, chucking his card on the ground, in front of Kiki’s naked feet.
“You really don’t get it…last time I let someone take care of me, I found myself forced to spread my legs for friends and relatives. Nice deal. My own fucking uncle. And you, superman, you think you’re so different? Deal with it: you’re a man and you think with your balls, that’s all. If fucking me is no longer enough for you, find yourself another candidate…there are plenty out there who like the whip, and the master as well, trust me. Whore’s honor.”
“You’re out of your mind. Better your new friends, right? Nice people, really, bunch of psycho murderers,” Yaël snarls, springing up to his feet and heading toward the door, pushing Kiki away with an arm. “They’ll be your new masters…being on the payroll of the worst pieces of shit in the city…well, a bright prospect really, can’t argue with that. You’ll taste the whip, oh yes. But perhaps that’s just what you want.”
“Being paid to fuck people isn’t anything new for me, and you should know it well,” she replies, trying to grab his t-shirt to stop him. “You’ve understood nothing at all about me.”
“Let me go, and enough with the bullshit. It’s easy, you know: you just want to do whatever you like, and nobody must dare open his mouth. Me, less than anyone else. Next time, I’m going to pay for your fucking time, should I drop around here again.”
