A Mountain Walked, page 62
Heat mounted, bodies crushing in; he shucked his shirt, headed back for the bar. Almost collided headlong with someone else’s gleaming chest, and got a double-load of Sex on the Beach down his own in return.
“Sorry, man, shit,” the guy repeated, dabbing ineffectively away at him with the tail-end of a paper towel roll, in the bathroom. “These, uh … oh, I’m such a fuckin’ dork, ’cause … like, one of ’em was for you.”
He had a nice smile, rendered slightly vampiric by an off-set right upper incisor. Tasted nice, too, even without the extra liquid incentive.
They continued to make out a while, cheered on by various passersby, till the guy suggested repairing to his place, which proved to be back towards Parliament and down. A bad area, lightly gentrified on the side-streets, but getting progressively worse as they moved between bus-stops. After three blocks, Corin’s buzz had dissipated far enough that he could feel rather than hear the vague tread of pursuing feet, sensing at least two more hot(ish) young men on the outskirts of his peripheral vision. Their presence made Original Guy nervous, though not in the way Corin might have anticipated.
Ah, he thought, with a lack of surprise that baffled even him. The Judas Goat ploy.
Too bad, really. O.G.’d been a damn good tongue-hockey player, an MVP in the making—had even seemed into it, if the crotch of his jeans swelling hard against Corin’s thigh was any indication. But bashers weren’t required by law to be straight, especially when this might be less an old-school fag bait-and-switch than impending robbery with violence; as a qualification stint on methadone clinic duty at the Clarke had taught Corin, little matters like actual sexuality did tend to go out the window, when money and other addictive substances were involved.
When they turned sharply left at the north end of Armory Park, Corin could already feel his hands curling into fists. And when O.G. put a hand on his arm, maybe thinking to startle or restrain him, he turned to face their followers with a smile stretched just wide enough to disturb—neither grin nor rictus nor snarl, but something in between all three, showing almost every tooth he had. He felt his gums itch sharply, as though his own incisors longed to pull themselves both out of place and spike forward like a gorilla’s.
Tongue lolling out, panting slightly, saliva gathering hot in the floor of his mouth. Almost glad he couldn’t see his own eyes, as he asked:
“Can I help you with anything … ladies?”
The initial punch came in sharp, firecracker-potent, synaesthesically reeking of sulphur or cordite—it rocked him back, vertigo head-rush like a secondary contact high, made him giggle at the taste of his own blood. He caught the next one without thinking, and drove his knee up high into the nuts of the dude who’d thrown it, twisting till he heard something strain in his own wrist, but crack in his opponent’s—probably the joint between wrist and thumb, a classic Bennett’s fracture. Full cast, three to six months of rehab and physio, right there, his professional brain assessed coldly. The human body, such a deceptively delicate thing! Not like—
(what, not like what? Oh shit, oh shit)
(not like us in our first forms, of course—so long ago, impossibly distant, knotted together in the acid-blood morass of the birthing pits, coiled and thrashing till at last we ate our way free)
Back in the now, meanwhile, O.G. just stood there with his jaw a-flap, as Corin continued to grind bone-fragments together in what was left of young Mister Broke-thumb Mountain 2010’s grip; the partner jack-hammered at his ribs, yelling insults, cracking at least two but getting no visible response till he switched to a modified Muay Thai stance and elbowed Corin right across the temple, bruising the orbit of his left eye so badly it began to swell almost on contact. When Corin finally let go, he roundhoused him from the same direction, spinning him like a top, but Corin didn’t fall. Instead, he stood there with all ten fingers hooked as if he’d just grown invisible claws, and grinned all the harder.
“Oh baby,” he told him, appreciatively. “That was some serious kind of fun. Care to elaborate?”
“You’re a fuckin’ lunatic, dude!”
“Preaching to the choir, sweetie.” Momentarily blind, Corin scrubbed blood from a minor scalp-rip out of his lashes, then flicked the result at his new opponent, who jumped back as if he thought it was either Alien-drone acid, AIDS-full with an Ebola stinger, or just jam-packed with a Grade A brand of crazy that was almost certainly catching. To O.G.: “Anyhoo—you want in on this, or what? ’Cause I’m always open to threesomes.”
That something rough he felt at the back of his throat, punctuating the end of the question, turned out to be half a molar—and when he coughed it up and held it to the light, turning it admiringly (enamel and composite resin, one part hard to two parts flaky), O.G. cut and run. “Yeah, keep goin’, you goddamn pussy!” his still-upright friend hollered after him as he took to his LED-blinking heels, while the other one moaned at their feet. In the meantime, Corin took the opportunity to run his tongue over the exposed nerve-pulp mass his cracked tooth had just uncovered, which immediately delivered a zap that felt like biting into a live power-cord: Wow, whoa! And yet: Seems like I should probably be feeling that more, somehow …
He drooled pink, smile stretching furtherfurtherfurther, till it felt as if his cheeks might crack open. And asked the remaining viable combatant, with a sort of rising petulance: “Hey! So you must train, huh? Know any Ultimate Fighter tricks?” No reply. “I’m talking to you here, asshole.”
The guy pulled at Fracture-Boy’s intact forearm with both hands, hauling his dead-weight up as though he was trying his level best to de-socket the whole shoulder. “Man, shut the fuck up! This is all your fault, you get that, right?”
“Is it?” Corin snapped his fingers, back teeth clicking together automatically, and cawed out loud at the resultant jolt. “Well, shit-fire! I knew I was doing something wrong.” With a wink: “Sure you wouldn’t care to go one more round?”
“What the hell do you even want, you crazy son-of-a-bitch?”
The only possible reply fell onto his tongue like a demonic gum-ball, smoking, as though it had been cast white-hot from a molten pot of Leif’s—Hardrada’s—alien-tainted blood: To damn well fight, of course, you too-human motherfucker …
Before he could voice it, however, Corin was already alone again (naturally), with only the blood on the pavement left to mark where he’d once had company worth entertaining. So he blundered homewards instead, disappointed by the night’s meager pickings: bruised and dripping, skull stuffed with trashy Acid House samples and two points down on the hangover scale, with nothing else whatsoever to show for his overall investment—no death, not even a little one. The split tooth’s howl stayed undimmed over thirty-odd blocks; his torn knuckles hummed venomously, like a double fistful of bees.
In an all-night Coffee Time, Corin picked through leftover papers, finding each subsequent Metro section stuffed with still more tales of unusual mayhem. In the business district, for example—down on condo row—a woman who owned a small maternity-ware fashion boutique had admitted to killing three different men by putting the same 12-gauge knitting needle through their necks, ostensibly for queueing up more closely behind her than she considered wise while she was making end-of-the-night deposits at three separate indoor Toronto Dominion bank ATMs: One’s fatal mistake had been looking too hard at her PIN number, while another she thought was “breathing” on her, and the last had gone down because she claimed she could “hear his organs moving around” while he infringed on her personal space. “They sounded wet,” Ms. Labayalla told arresting officers, during her sworn statement. “Wetter than normal. Like he was diseased, or something. I was in fear for my life.”
Gradually, the skin-pop charge of mugging interruptus was draining away, leaving him lip-numb and increasingly desolate in its wake, sweat-wet hair slicked fast to the nape of his neck. To distract himself, he fastened on the conversation between two adjacent hookers—one trans and black, one not and not—who were sharing a single sticky caramel-cheese Danish.
“… you know, like that girl they found under the overpass. That Rita girl?” The trannie nodded. “Makes you want to work out of home, if you could get it set up.”
“Meetlist isn’t bad. Or LavaLife, if you can cut through the no-really, I-like-you-for-your-personality B.S.”
“Yeah. But then you’re alone with them, right? Wondering how you can make ’em leave, after—or even pay. I mean, it’s not like you can call four-oh, if shit goes sour …”
“Tag-team. I’d go in with you on a room, someplace neutral.”
The real girl snarfed the last piece, made a dismissive hand-gesture. “Yeah, right. You and whose bank-book.”
“Well …” The trannie looked down at her own hands, twice her friend’s size but beautifully kept, as though she’d never before considered how big they actually were. Could fit ’round my neck with room to spare, Corin thought, and went embarrassingly warm in the pit of his stomach, musing on just how hard she might be able to hit, given the opportunity. How well she might be able to handle a blade.
“Occurs to me,” she said, slowly, “how it’s not so much us being alone with them … as them being alone with us.”
Then looked at her friend, whose plucked-nude brows climbed almost to her wig-line in response—before blinking, and smiling back.
Corin closed his own eyes, breathing settling into a harsh but steady rhythm, heartbeat accelerating. His consciousness opening Venus Flytrap-wide, spreading outwards and seeping molecule-deep, like radiation—letting the sludgy worst of the world around him pour in, like puke through a trash-clogged gutter, to fill his mind to the brim with other people’s psychic garbage.
Behind the counter, the last remaining clerk was studying the small of Real Girl’s back, trying to trace where her tramp-stamp lurked, and dreaming Travis Bickle dreams about the sawed-off his boss thought he didn’t know was hidden behind the second refrigerator. Inside the walls, roaches and rats committed casual incest, while in the cut-rate apartments up above, at least two human males did the same. There was an enthusiastic tryst going on in the kitchen of the Thai restaurant next door, endangering their Health Code rating; both participants were thinking about how easy it would be to murder the other, then cover up the crime by slipping an extra serving of filleted corpse into every meal for the next few weeks. Beside them, a mid-sized industrial-strength meat-grinder rumbled on, making filling for tomorrow’s dumplings.
Was this what had happened to Leif, among other things, to make him the way he was by the time Corin and Janos had found him? Or was this something special whipped up for Corin alone, special delivery, straight from whatever hell-hole the [Anasazi] had once called their home planet?
In Honest Ed’s discount department store, illegal immigrants were hard at work marking down damaged goods. Though told not to, one of them had brought along her baby, sedated into silence with a fatal dose of adult anti-depressants; it lay right now in one of the remnant drawers of the fabrics section, slowly suffocating. Corin wondered just how long the body would stay in there, undiscovered, after its mother realized exactly what she’d done, shut the drawer again quietly and walked away. Or how long it would take her to swallow the rest of those pills, once she got back home …
(I don’t want to see this, oh God, any of it)
(don’t want to know)
And yet. And yet. And yet.
At the other table, the hookers had all but decided on blunt-force trauma as their weapon of choice, once they began preying on predators for real. On Gerrard Street, meanwhile, a drunken lawyer’s hit-and-run had left a man with one shoulder-blade detached like a skeleton wing, the opposite leg compound-fractured in five places, broken badly enough they’d have to pin him back together and leave screws poking out from the marrow. On Palmerston Crescent, an old woman lay in her own watery shit while infected bedsores bloomed like raw-meat roses all over her back and buttocks, sticking her thighs so tightly to the foul bedsheets beneath that they’d need to be soaked apart before she could be buried; downstairs, her children and grandchildren squatted on filthy antique furniture, smoking crystal meth and laughing at Futurama re-runs.
The neighbourhood, spreading its wings like a bat, every vein and membrane a fresh agony, a worse crime, a hole in the world’s hide. Someone breaking someone’s heart. Someone taking someone’s money. Someone fucking somebody over, fucking somebody up. Someone fucking somebody while simultaneously fucking themselves, ratcheting in and out of their body over and over and over again, the same way a weapon reams a wound.
He sat there till sun-up, hoping this horrible newfound level of insight would go away, but it never really did. Eventually, utterly exhausted, he simply made the trek back to Academica House and fell forward, face-down, into a well of absolute darkness.
***
The rest of Wednesday Corin didn’t remember, even tangentially. But on Thursday night he answered the hammering at his door to find Janos looming on the threshold, out of breath and lightly rain-wet.
“Why you never answer your phone?” he demanded.
Mildly puzzled, Corin glanced over to where the item in question usually rested in its recharger, and saw that someone seemed to have taken it very painstakingly and effectively apart.
“Well, there you go,” he said. “That’d be the problem, right there.”
“You look like bags of shit.”
“How many?” As Janos blinked: “Ms. Le call you? I think she thinks I’m fucking elephants up here sometimes, but, y’know. Whatever.”
Janos’s eyes had begun to widen steadily during the last few sentences, continuing until they hit their current point, at which a thin rim of white outlined every part of his irises’ orbits. He took a careful step inside, trying visibly not to crowd Corin, even when Corin didn’t step back; the door closed behind him, softly hung ajar.
Hinges again, probably. Man, he just couldn’t catch a break on these damn home repairs.
“I said, you look … too thin, like homeless. Dirty. You don’t eat? Who beat you up? Why you—do that, to the phone?”
So many question, and sooo very few answers.
Corin shrugged, doing his level-best Leif-hallucination impression. “Why would I ‘do’ anything, really? I mean …” And this must be a truly awful smile he was giving, from Janos’s reaction, just as much as the way it felt: “… why would anybody?”
Taking yet one more half-step forward, so close he could smell Janos again, like that one night on the couch—and no, it hadn’t gotten any less enticing. Especially so when he saw how discomfited his nearness was making the man.
Better get some real-person action while I still can, he thought.
But was it sex he actually meant, now he considered it further? Was that the hunger which made his mouth-muscles flex, his lips draw slightly back over teeth that seemed to have lengthened yet more pronouncedly in his sleep, pressing themselves outwards the way a wolf’s fangs bulge from his jawline? Unsheathing just enough ache-ridden root from their nerve-beds to render them permanently sore?
Janos made a dry little gulp, as if he were swallowing sand. Then collected himself far enough to try again, manfully—
“You need to come with me, right the freak now. To the hospital. You need … help.”
“Is that it?” Corin sniffed the air, before concluding: “No, not so much. I think not, thanks anyway.”
“Corin, freaking fuck’s sake—look at your damn self! You need—”
“‘Help,’ yeah, I heard you: I’m crazy, Janos, not fucking deaf. So go on and help me, why don’t you. C’mon. Go on and … help yourself.”
Corin’s hands drifted down, almost dream-slow, to hover vaguely ’round his fly, uncertain himself whether they ached to form fists, claws, or just pop, pull, and drop. When Janos finally got the direction Corin was going in, metaphorically, he backed away at barely sub-light-speed, so fast the door really did hit his ass on the way out.
Corin grinned all the harder to see it.
“I don’t—” Janos started. Took another gulp, so dry it popped. “Look—you know I don’t think like that, not with you. You’re … like my own damn brother, man. Friend, only.”
“But that’s just exactly what I was trying to do, Janos. Be friendly.”
All right up in his starting-to-sweat face, power-shift between them almost comedically disproportionate—a mongoose talking smack to a bull, while the bull blushed and stammered. And suddenly, Corin knew what this odd feeling was, so long-lost as to seem inappropriate: A basic total lack of sickness, nausea, vertigo tinging every glance with incipient bruising. No ghost-bells ringing, no swarm of phantom bees. No tinnitus click-sssh to yell over, roaring like blood in someone else’s nib-cored inner ear.
“But you don’t want that,” Corin said, of the offered—whatever. Thus sparking Janos’s own quick head-shake, his only slightly masked full-body retch.
“No, not that. Not at all that, no.”
“Mmm. So, then … maybe … you want to fight instead.”
Janos stared.
“What?” he managed finally. To which Corin heard himself reply, voice low enough he almost didn’t recognize it himself—low, and slow, and grinding somehow, too, as if he’d been chewing on glass made from crematorium ash. As if he’d been gargling the burnt-clear detritus of dead men’s teeth and fingernails:
“You—heard—me.”
Janos was bigger, Corin sick and hungry; both were unarmed, for what that was worth. Yet even so, Corin saw in Janos’s too-wide eyes that he knew how fast and high Corin might jump, if he thought he had to. How easily Corin’s too-long teeth might meet in the crook of his shoulder, his cheek, his throat.
