Kittentits, page 14
It makes you tired having captions go through your head like that. You tell yourself to stop looking, but it’s not that easy. You can’t help but read every word they say.
Finally his brain wailing stops and Demarcus gets quiet, now he sits straight up humming like going into a trance. Slowly his effed-up face starts to re-chalk itself, first his eyes then his nose then his ears-forehead-mouth.
Demarcus, how did you die? How did it happen? I ask him, trying to change the subject from the sliced-up whale. C’mon, Demarcus, tell me, I’m your best friend, I say, flinching. Flinching because saying Best Friend still makes me think of Her, wherever she’s hiding, balloon-cut and bruised, probably calling my name.
I blink her away, ask was it bone cancer that got him? Did a gangbanger kill you? Were you raped to death by a perv? I say.
Then something flips on a light inside my brain and I say Oh my god it was Le Feb, wasn’t it? Because maybe this is part of my mission: to rescue Jeanie plus serve gory vengeance to Nurse Le Feb.
While I spitball wrathful retributions Demarcus stretches horizontal. He sighs super heavy and starts to levitate. I stretch out on the floor next to him, prepare to hear all about Le Feb raping him. Somehow lying the same way as him I think maybe he’ll tell me the whole thing.
I pretend the whale halves aren’t split, that this Ocean Mother’s in the ocean right now swimming, that me and Demarcus are balled up inside, her whale juices dissolving us into a single thing. Until then we’ll tell stories of The Things That Happened To Us, how definitely it was Le Feb who killed him, how me and Jeanie once were two beautiful Apaches, how free we ran when we ruled House of Friends.
Go ahead, I say. I’m listening. Tell me the whole story.
Fine, he says, whatever, I’ll tell you the whole thing. He rolls his eyes, flicks his fires once or twice like cracking his knuckles, then after a long pause finally begins.
It was the spring of sixth grade and I was deep into Wolfgang Paalen. Wolfgang Paalen was an Austrian Mexican surrealist painter and philosopher of art. So I was deep into Wolfgang Paalen, his idea that imagination precedes cognition, his cosmogony of the prefigurative New Image as the ultimate expression of modernist art. I began experimenting with fumage, the technique he originated in which the artist uses lit candles to apply smoke and soot directly to canvas. It was revelatory and gave me the permission I needed to see myself in the artist-in-exile narrative so common in twentieth-century European art.
Demarcus, oh my god, you died of boredom, I say.
No, he goes, no, shakes his ghost head sadly. This is how it happened, he goes. One day after school I went to the Robert Taylor next to The Lonely. By then it was entirely vacant except for neighborhood kids who would play in the halls.
Wait, I say. There’s just an empty lot next to The Lonely. That’s why they call it The Lonely, I thought.
Before I burned it down, there was another one, he goes.
Here my eyes go big. Here my jaw drops.
I kept a studio on the fifteenth floor and was doing fumage one day when I dropped the candle into a can of turpentine and the can exploded, he goes.
You lit the whole place on fire, I say.
It set my easel and oil rags on fire, he says, and the fire spread to everything. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe. I jumped out the window in flames.
You’re an arsonist, Demarcus. A Firestarter! I say.
I’m an artist, not an arsonist. But I am a murderer, he goes. Three boys were playing hide-and-seek on the floor above me.
Whoa, I go. Fucking tragic, I say. I don’t say anything else about that part. Sometimes there are things you don’t let yourself think about or say.
But too late, he reads my mind, says Not thinking it will never make it go away, Molly, his voice low and heartbroken, ninety-five percent sorrow, five percent disdain.
But the painting you were doing, what even was it? I say.
He sighs, says It was in memory of my mother, of her favorite sea monster, Charybdis. Charybdis was a giant whirlpool with eyes and teeth, a tornadic waterspout mouth spitting out bodies: sailor heads and mermaid hands, scales and ankled feet.
That’s so badass, I say and Demarcus says Thank you and then after a few moments I ask the question this whole time I’ve been wanting to ask.
So what was it like? I say. What was it like dying?
Here he floats close to me, looks me straight in my eyes, my face. He doesn’t cry or wail. All his fires burn steady.
What was it like? You can tell me, I say.
I fell from the sky on fire, he says, and when he says it he’s smiling.
I was Icarus. I was art, he says. It was fucking amazing.
* * *
I GO ONE LAST TIME around the room pushing buttons. Some light up whale parts while others turn the narrator on: a deep deep man voice saying what ocean the whale was from, how she picked her mates, what she ate for lunch. One button when you push it tells you all about her babies, lights the tank both sides where the halved whale wombs stick. The womb’s lined with yellow blubber, but if I blur my eyes I can imagine a baby in there, a fishy potpie of bloody squirming, a smooth slimy alien waiting to burst out and swim.
Demarcus, I say, bet her actual baby’s in the ocean right now swimming, but Demarcus says No way, shakes his ghosty head.
Oh yeah she is, I say. When they do this to your mom you grow up to be one tough bitchass. Here I imagine my own dead mom netted, caught, and split in two.
We should go, Demarcus says, the first thing he’s said in a while. His nose and eyes are smudged. His toes and fingers burn low.
But at least let’s find the Submarine Palace, I say once we’re outside the fish building.
He says no, he says Let’s just go home, so I stop and look at every sign and poster along the way, read every word about IMAX Presents The Primeval Experience and Journey into the Grand Canyon 3D. By the entrance gate to Autotopia is where I see it. A poster so surprising I almost scream.
Come See Her Sleep! it says over a picture of an old-time movie actress, except it’s not really an old-time actress, it’s a face I’d recognize anywhere. Black around her eyes like a raccoon bandit, black bangs and black sideburns slicked into stabby devil tails.
A face exactly like: Hello, zombie sister.
A face like: I knew you’d find me, Thunderbrow.
At the top in red letters it says Sleeping Silent Princess! Feel her Cosmic Sex Energy! See Inside her Crystal Coffin! Then at the bottom: The Countdown to Reanimation Begins.
Demarcus oh my god holy shit, it’s Jeanie! I say pointing, though in my head I don’t think Jeanie, I think Her Her Her. I think: Here she is, it’s her on the poster. It’s Jeanie who’s always been the Fair’s secret thing.
I turn to Demarcus to make sure he sees what I’m seeing when from the lake darkness in front of us here’s another new thing: wild-haired from the shadows, a ragged and swaggery woman emerges. Scratched and bruised all over, rip-toed dirty Keds. Dripping wet jean jacket. Torn Darkthrone tee.
That’s not me, the woman goes, coming closer. That’s not me, that’s my fucking sister, Jeanie says.
3
THE FAIR
ONE
I KNEW IT, I SAY. You’re alive, I go.
I want bad to knock her down and lick her face all over. Like a tard I go to give her an actual hug. Her scratched-up arms go up fast like Don’t fucking touch me, but she doesn’t kick me off and what she says next isn’t mean.
Well aren’t we top shit, she says and then I introduce her to Demarcus, him a wadded blinking ball floating on my right. I say I know you can’t see him but I swear he’s right next to me, the ghost boy I told you about, he’s an artist, I say.
Demarcus surprises me, he unfolds all the way, says Well well well, it’s really Jeanie. Molly talks a lot about you.
But also at the exact same time in my head he says Beware her, Skulla. Beware her fang teeth, beware her fish tail.
And here Jeanie surprises me, she looks straight at Demarcus!
Ghosts are fucking everywhere, she says.
Then she says nothing but like checking for weapons she eyes Demarcus up and down. This is not a safe place, she says super quiet, so quiet without talking we follow her through the shadows and onto one of the blue lanes.
I smile at half-balled Demarcus who floats the whole time next to me. He fades in and out, maybe jealous, probably sad. It’s really her, I whisper. It’s really effing Jeanie. My best friend is alive, we rescued her, I say.
Do you have anything to eat? Jeanie says and I pinch myself hard for not bringing donuts from the séance with me.
You fucking suck, she says then calls Demarcus Casperass and me Thundercunt and the next thing I know we’re halfway to the Cosmosphere, the Space Education building sponsored by NASA where Jeanie’s been hiding in the daytime since she got here. We follow her down a blue-bricked path I’d never noticed, cut through an alley marked by an Employee Only sign.
So if you can see Demarcus could you see Sister Regina? I ask her.
Strange-shaped winter birds perch one-legged in the trees, sleeping heads sunk deep in their bodies. The only sounds are our footsteps plus the birds’ sleep-cheeping sounds. If you listen close, the hum of Demarcus’s electricity.
Ghosts are everywhere, I see them all the time, Jeanie says. That Sister Regina, what a card! she says.
Demarcus says nothing but he’s listening, I can tell. He floats awhile ahead of us then falls close behind.
While we walk Jeanie tells how this one time on her cell block this epileptic girl died. She had a fit one night and choked on her tongue. When the prison guards came with the stretcher to get her, out of nowhere an entire all-ghost gospel choir appeared. They shook and swayed in see-through church robes, they paced the block for hours singing her and her prison sisters to sleep.
I ask what they sang in case there’s certain music ghosts like, something special that keeps them at peace.
“Vision of Love” by Mariah Carey, she goes, pausing like she has to think hard to remember. All those sad prison bitches crying to fucking gospel pop. Even the guards, even Rusty and Jerome, she says.
All of them could see the thought forms or only hear them? Demarcus asks her.
What do you mean thought forms? You mean ghosts? she says. Both, I think. Most of them, Jeanie goes.
He’s trying to figure the rules out, I say. Why only some people can see ghosts and why then only certain ones.
Demarcus floats in front of us, hovers up close to Jeanie, says In the story you told, why the choir? Why didn’t the thought form of the actual dead girl show up instead?
Yeah, I say. And where the hell are our ghost moms? And why can we see Demarcus but not Head On The Pillow or Nurse Le Feb?
Who the fuck are they? says Jeanie and I say His public. Demarcus rolls his eyes, says My smaller-minded friends.
I’ve thought about this a lot, Jeanie says, lighting a cigarette. And I’ve got a theory, but that’s all it is, she goes.
We stare at her, waiting, while she takes a drag slowly, puffs three perfect smoke rings into the cold and dark night.
Want to hear it? she asks finally. Know anything about waveforms? she goes.
Like radio signals? Demarcus asks her.
Yeah sure, she says.
Not really, he says, so I say that too.
I think ghosts are a kind of carrier wave. At least the ghosts we can see, she goes.
What’s a carrier wave? Demarcus asks.
Wait, are you making this up? I go.
Shut up and listen, Kittentits, and no, I’m not. For my required eight-week Serve and Learn I did Principles of Radio Communication, she goes.
What’s a carrier wave? Demarcus asks.
A waveform modulated by an information-bearing signal, usually transmitting through space electromagnetically, Jeanie goes.
But where does the signal transmit from? What does the signal transmit from? Demarcus goes.
How the hell do I know? says Jeanie
Maybe from your higher self? I go.
Anyway, with a carrier wave the amplified signal gets converted to radio waves that get picked up by a receiver. You’re a receiver, Jeanie says, looking at me.
But that doesn’t explain it, why isn’t everyone a receiver? I go. And why isn’t every dead person a ghost? Or where is the place the other ghosts go?
Jesus, Kittentits, she says, I don’t know. Maybe they’re on a different frequency. Like maybe only dogs and cats can see certain ghosts.
I imagine my mom haunting Sweetie’s dog Pepsi, her booing the wood-pile’s feral cats.
I don’t think that’s right, though, Jeanie goes. For carrier waves to be transmitted and received, they have to be amplified on both ends. Amplification is what gives them power. So maybe not every dead person transmits here because they don’t have the thing that gives them the power. Same for receivers. So there’s something we’ve got that amplifies the signal, that helps us tune in.
Like what? I say.
Grief, Demarcus goes. Grief is the amplifier. Grief is a thing that transmits and receives. Here his unfurled ghost body does this pulse thing, this shimmer.
It’s true, Jeanie says. Sadness reverberates like strings on a fucking harp, she goes.
Grief as a harmonic phenomenon! Demarcus continues, all excited. It opens you to sympathetic vibrations, you transmit and you receive and suddenly you see thought forms.
Yeah, it certainly busts you open like that, Jeanie goes. Guilt too, she says, looking at Demarcus. Looking at me.
Bullshit, I say. I don’t even remember my mom. You and him might be busted, but I’m not, I go.
Jeanie shakes her head and says Kittentits, you are so totally busted. You are so totally broken. It’s all over you, she says. Think about it, she goes. You floated in her nine months which in baby-time is forever. The beat of her heart was the first sound you heard. She was the universe you soaked in and the one you clawed out of and you lost her so early it formed you completely, so completely it’s invisible because it’s all you’ve ever known. But I can see it, Crotchtard. And I bet Demarcus can see it too. Demarcus, can you see it?
Yeah, Demarcus goes.
See? We three harmonize, says Jeanie.
Demarcus nods but doesn’t look convinced, says That still doesn’t explain where all the other thought forms have gone. Why am I here while others are in the place called the Summerland? My mother is in neither, where has she gone?
I don’t know, but suck it up, Floatface. I haven’t seen my mom since she died either, Jeanie goes. Here she stops a moment, sizes up Demarcus. You’re here and you’re very powerful, she goes.
Yeah he can totally do things, I go.
Maybe dead you’re still busted open, Jeanie says. Maybe that’s why you’re here and they’re—
My mother had enough grief to power ten suns, Demarcus says, interrupting.
Well then I don’t know, Jeanie says. Feel guilty about anything?
Demarcus says nothing. His flames pulse brighter and brighter.
Yeah, that’s what I thought, Jeanie goes.
What about Evelyn and my dad? They couldn’t see Sister Regina, I say. If anyone should receive or transmit, they definitely should.
I don’t know, Jeanie says. You’re dad’s a fucking narcissist. Probably that gets in the way, she goes. And Evelyn’s got her Quaker shit to carry her. Us, though? We have nothing. Which also means we have nothing to lose, she goes.
THE COSMOSPHERE’S ALL DOME, all fancy white marble, but also at the same time super modern and edgy too. Jeanie says if the Taj Mahal and R2D2 got it on then this would be their weird fatass baby. I barely notice we’ve walked up the twenty marble steps, barely notice the giant golden door she unlocks while talking.
Demarcus hovers close and looks at everything, hum-sings “Blue Moon” direct to my head. Inside we follow Jeanie into a big round rotunda, but it’s not a rotunda, It’s a cyclorama, Demarcus says.
What the fuck’s a cyclorama, does it go upside down? I say.
It’s not a ride, it’s a round painting, he says pointing to the domed three-story wall covered all around with layers of drop cloth and scaffolding.
The mural’s almost finished, Jeanie says, taps the Artist and Craftsperson ID clipped to her paint-splattered jeans. The paint splatters are mostly long drips of black and gray but there’s some reddish brown here and there and I’m thinking: What if that’s not paint, what if that’s blood splatters?
I’ve been posing as one of the artist’s assistants since I landed two days ago, Jeanie says. Mostly I eat popcorn in the staff room then at night sleep in one of the maintenance closets.
Demarcus is so interested in the craporama thing he’s not listening, he floats along the drop-clothed wall trying to see the mural behind it.
It’s all space shit, Jeanie tells him. Some nebula stuff, she goes. The artist is this serious Sidney Poitier douche, the one Black guy who works for NASA so he thinks his shit’s the hottest.
Demarcus zooms to where we’re standing in not even a flash. What’s his name what’s his name what’s his name? he goes.
Ghostmunch, chill, it’s right over there, Jeanie says and points to a big-ass golden-framed poster.
ARTIST RECEPTION
FOR
PAUL TURNER WILLIAMS
7 PM NEW YEAR’S EVE
I don’t know who the fuck Sidney Poitier is, but to me the guy in the poster looks like Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Possibly Sondra’s boyfriend Elvin, I don’t know.
The second I think it there’s a zap in my head, a brain-flick, something Demarcus has started doing when my thoughts make him mad. Ow! I go, ready to erase him, but too late, he’s already floating to the poster to stare scary death at it, his flame licks getting longer the closer he gets.
