So Big Joe wants me to write my confession. The fucked-up things I did and why I did them. I wonder how I’m supposed to disappear if his scheme works.
He thinks he’s marching to Calvary. I say he’s throwing himself at the mercy of thugs in a Dashiell Hammett novel made into a movie by Quentin Tarantino. Maybe we’re both right.
In case he fails, I draw this:
The letters, TSMYWLGFHPC, taken from the statement, ITISMYWILLTOGETOUTOFTHISPLACE, rearranged to form a sigil, a symbol expressing my wish to escape.
Just to be safe, I’ll add this:
Power to conjure weapons.
And this:
Superhuman strength.
Sigils are like search terms for the Google of the subconscious. The subconscious thinks in signs and images, so the terms must be scrambled to be understood.
The problem is how to activate the sigils, how to hit the SEARCH button. Maybe—because I’m rooting for Big Joe and because I’m terrified of Chuck and his murder monkeys—my desire will be strong enough.
So far Google is not telling me how to get out of this madhouse.
Enough. Time to write.
Wait.
ITISMYWILLTOTELLTHISINSTREAMOFCONSCIOUSNESS.
My hand is cramping and I’ve got a lot to confess.
* * *
I can write with my mind now. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but it feels nice talking inside my head and pretending you hear me.
So much time is spent like this, daydreaming through our mouths in front of people. You and I are at a party, slightly drunk, and I’m telling you my life story to fill the unknowable space between us.
There is nothing worse than the unsaid, which is why we got drunk in the first place: to make it easier to speak over it, through it. I call this unsaid negative space. Negative space is how all stories begin, from a sense of urgency.
So even though I’m coughing up blood and smell like a Hell’s Angels jacket, I’m going to tell my life story calmly and let Google ponder how to free me.
My story starts with Angie.
My wife.
We met at a bar through a mutual friend. She told me she was a fashion editor’s assistant but wished she could be an artist. She thought it a cruel joke to be given large hands—“E.T. hands,” she called them—and no faculty for teasing shapes from raw stuff. She thought I was an artist because I was broke and meditated on artsy topics like negative space—how little I knew then. She tended to date artists. Before me, she’d never married one.
Angie was Maria Panera, the redo. I met Maria in seventh grade. We went to different schools but shared the same bus stop. After a few weeks I convinced her to see a movie with me. An hour into the movie I was still in the lobby, adjusting my tie and rehearsing what to say if she finally appeared. Conan the Destroyer is not only an awful film, it reminds me of being stood up by a ravishing, dark-haired, twelve-year-old girl.
Soon after that, a classmate named Alex Gilroy started dating Maria. He spread a rumor—not true, it turned out—that she told him I was a scumbag. One day I stalked Alex on my bike and knocked him out with a rock I stole from an old lady’s garden. He never knew what hit him. When he came to school the next day he had stitches on the back of his head. “I fought off a homeless man who beat me with a hammer,” he told everybody. He milked his yarn for weeks. The penance for my perfect crime was a tic under my right eye that bothered me off and on for a year.
My point with these anecdotes is that Angie showed up for the movie. She let me be a winner in my revised adolescent love story. Angie called herself The Hot Mess Express. She looked like a pint-sized supermodel and gulped down Moscow Mules and sangrias like Gatorade, but she supported me and let me lie in bed next to her. I would walk behind her just so I could catch up to her and imagine she was meeting me. I even made her watch Conan the Destroyer.
Jesus, Big Joe, what the hell are they doing to you?
Where was I?
The morgue.
With a police officer at my side, I looked at my dead wife under a sheet. It was like being in an episode of CSI, only I didn’t know my lines. I just stared at her face, and when the finality of that vision sank in I wanted to kiss her, deeply. Taste the cold, chocolaty-marshmallow flavor of our kiss the night we became engaged. Holding her hand instead, I felt a pang in my groin for the Angie I would never touch again. My only consolation—a false one, maybe—was that she did not appear to have suffered.
For weeks I brooded over the things left unsaid between us because some hit-and-run driver let her die in a ditch.
After I got the autopsy results, I drew this sigil:
ITISMYWILLTOCATCHWHODIDTHIS.
Because whoever struck Angie had killed twice.
* * *
I know the exact moment I fell in love with her. It was when she told me her dream job would be to bottle-feed baby gorillas in a wildlife preserve. “Baby gorillas equal magic,” she said. In her heart, Angie was a magician, not an artist.
She learned about sigils from a tattoo artist she’d dated. On her left arm was a sigil for Azazel. “He was an angel who taught people to make cosmetics and weapons,” she said. “As a result, God cast him out of Heaven. Yet God made things so that some of His children can only survive by using cosmetics as weapons. Now these,” she pointed at the symbols on her right arm, “stand for love, bliss and comfort. With those three gifts no one would ever need to deceive or harm another living being. Azazel would have to find something else to teach us.”
It was like having “Shadow” tattooed on one side and “Light” on the other. A kind of meta-sigil expressing her dual nature. Unfortunately, Angie powered her sigils with alcohol.
When Angie was drunk she saw baby gorillas everywhere, and her love ignited a flame in her chest. A fire that didn’t burn but purified, touching every cell in her body. It became too big to hold, so she gave it to the trees and the earth and the flowers and the animals. As it grew, she gave it also to the wind and the rain and the oceans and the moon and the sun and the stars. After fifteen drinks she would go wandering, feeling one with the sidewalk and the weeds and the side of the road where she would pass out or throw up or both. Even her liver radiated loving heat, cleansed by her release from the Toltec dream of Hell, a nine-to-five merry-go-round of powder and rouge. “No one loves me unless I’m drunk,” she told me.
Having recovered her from so many random places, I’ve earned the right to be snarky.
I loved Angie because she never gave up searching for magic. It just had to come with a label. When the label wasn’t on a bottle she found it elsewhere. During her sober periods she ordered shoes online.
It wasn’t until after the autopsy that I connected my wife with my biological mother. Thinking about the secret Angie had carried inside her, I imagined my own experience in the womb.
My fetal instinct wants to comfort the one who sustains me. Sensing I’ve somehow caused her distress, I form an all-consuming urge to help the one on whom so much depends. I feel an event build between us. We’re going to create something wonderful together, a light show kicking off a Great Adventure. The light show goes off as expected, but my partner vanishes in the afterimage. Suddenly, I’m stranded in a world of alien food and expedited touch.
I’m left with a mystery. What happened to the person I lived inside, my partner in the Great Adventure? But new faces fill the days, those of my new family. I acquire a name, a role, an identity. I develop a narrative of where I came from. I learn the words to give comfort but forget who originally needed it. Over time my hormones dream new partners into place: Who becomes Maria. Maria becomes Angie. Beautiful, booze-enchanted Angie.
Angie becomes Mom the redo.
Like my mother, so much remained a mystery. Why hadn’t Angie told me she was five weeks pregnant?
She had let me argue with her about a man she’d been texting. She had chewed me out for looking at her phone. All the while, there was magic inside her, ruined because she drove off, got soused and wandered around an old logging road at two in the morning.
After the autopsy her sister emailed me. She hoped I wouldn’t tell many people about the pregnancy. It would spare the family a lot of questions. I agreed because I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. I was angry at Angie for telling her sister she was pregnant, but not me. She’d had a week to tell me. Her period ran like clockwork.
As if to bring Angie back with her own magic, I drank heavily. I kept a fifth of Jack at my desk. I let a casual porn habit become an obsession with finding Angie redoes on the Internet. Angie hated porn.
One day, while looking for tax receipts, she found some printouts—relics from my early web-surfing days—in an unmarked folder. Grainy headshots of haggard women bubble-wrapped in sperm. I’d forgotten about them until she thrust the stack at me.
“Take a good look,” she said. “Is this what you want? Is this what you see when you touch me?”
Though the images seemed vile in Angie’s hands, many were screen captures of videos no different from those I watched on her laptop. Rather than mourn Angie I clicked on her, chasing her electric spirit across the Internet, seeking her in the dark, sweaty corridors of bandwidth. During those lonely séances it never occurred to me that I might come in contact with something other than a webcam girl with Angie’s face. But one morning the power went out and the monitor became a black mirror. There I was, dead-eyed, soulless, a serial killer staring back from the negative space of my addiction.
From then on that face haunted me behind my web browser, Dorian Gray’s portrait in the age of YouPorn. He was the search history I couldn’t erase, my unfiltered selfie that summed up who I was becoming as I consumed my wife’s look-alikes, the grimacing successors of my porn printouts.
My friend Olin told me to stop wallowing. “You’ve got to focus, man. The story. Stick to your story.” But I couldn’t. I’d lost the urgency. I’d written 20,000 words of a novel about a sex-hungry coven and made Angie the head witch. It seemed so trivial now.
I quit writing. I even quit porn-surfing and made the couch my home.
Olin visited less and less. A cyber-expert for the NSA, he had bigger things to do besides listen to me blame myself for arguing with Angie and launching her on another bender.
When he saw me, I was either liquored up and weepy or in deep communion with my television—my portal into the world of Big Joe.
* * *
Sometimes I watched Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice on my writing breaks. The plots were always the same. An innocent person is convicted of murder. A friend or relative convinces attorney Joe Durrenmatt—“Big Joe,” as his staff calls him—to defend the accused in court. Big Joe sniffs around, forms a theory about the killer. He doesn’t tell police but exposes the murderer on the witness stand during cross-examination.
Then Angie died, and the show filled a void in me. Those formulaic stories gave me the justice I needed. They took the raw, unsaid stuff of my dead marriage and sculpted it into an image of infallibility and order. When Big Joe unmasked a murderer, it was like watching God hurl a lightning bolt at an idol. His black eyes and sepulchral voice forced even the toughest criminals to tell the truth.
Big Joe equaled magic. But unlike Angie’s baby gorillas, I didn’t require a gallon of liquor to find him.
When I saw the series was available on my Internet streaming media service, I powered through all nine seasons. Then I watched them all over again. I watched Big Joe gain weight, lose weight, gain more weight. I watched him change styles, from flannel suit to leisure suit. I watched him put away criminal after criminal, imagining each as the scumbag who killed Angie.
In the black-and-white world of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice, everything that needed to be said was said, and everyone who needed to be caught was caught.
I wanted to be there.
For a moment, I was.
At first I thought my TV was crapping out. The picture warped as if reflected in a funhouse mirror. Pieces of Big Joe separated and fused into other people and objects. The rearranged patterns formed animated abstractions, as if the ghost of Picasso were deconstructing Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice. The swirling geometry sucked the room into my TV screen, like a mouth drawing in a huge breath. Sound and speech from both sides of reality tumbled into the suctioning spiral. Finally, everything around me bled into an immense funnel and my fingers elongated, stretching toward the opening like a parody of Angie’s in a psychedelic cartoon.
Then the chaos blinked, and a room materialized in black and white.
“Tell me.”
I wanted to tell Big Joe how I knocked out Alex Gilroy in seventh grade.
Instead, I gaped at him in silence.
I was still gaping when I snapped back to reality in my living room.
“Tell me how I can help you,” he said, to a woman sitting where I had been moments before.
After that night, I couldn’t enjoy Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice.
A TV show couldn’t compete with my fleeting experience. I felt like I’d been there, sitting at a desk with Big Joe. How had it happened?
Then, after a few weeks, it hit me. Maybe the TV images were a sigil. I’d stared at them for so long that my brain got tired of interpreting them. Because I wanted it so badly, “It is my will to live in the world of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice” started a Google search in my subconscious.
My subconscious transported me into an imaginary realm based on the TV show.
Could it send me back again? Could I lose myself in an illusion, like the people in The Matrix?
Maybe if I pulled another marathon, I thought, a longer one, I could break down the mental barriers that stood between me and the Joe Durrenmatrix.
So I did. I watched twenty-nine hours of Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice.
For a moment, I worried that my TV really was crapping out.
Only for a moment.
* * *
So I’m talking to myself, even if you hear me. You are me. All this is in my mind.
And if you think I don’t know about Pleasantville, the movie where Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon get caught in a 1950s sitcom via a magical remote control and transform the repressed, black-and-white town of the same name into a place of desire and color, you’re wrong.
But this isn’t Pleasantville.
It’s the Joe Durrenmatrix.
I know I’m dreaming. I know my subconscious has constructed this simulation of a TV show to work out a personal problem. I know it’s only my mind that traps me here, intent on teaching me something about myself, something profound and rooted in the nature of suffering.
All this could have been avoided if I’d allowed myself to grieve for my dead wife.
But in a way, I was grieving. Dreaming myself into Big Joe’s world was my attempt to move past my guilt. The Joe Durrenmatrix was a language of symbols for understanding our marriage, giving its lack of resolution a new story.
There was so much to take in at first. Rain. Horns. Rude pedestrians. Fifty-cent hamburgers and soda-fountain milkshakes. Like being in a foreign city in a foreign time. Annoyances like wet clothes, indigestion and brain freeze showed how deeply I’d embedded myself in illusion.
But I quickly discovered my subconscious had other plans besides letting me play in dreamland. My being here fit into a larger design. My name was still Jason, but I had a role to play. I was Big Joe’s personal assistant. I looked like Tommy Kirk and spoke like Wally Cleaver, the epitome of good grooming. Because my mind had no frame of reference for my character—he didn’t exist in the show—my interactions with co-workers sounded wooden, my fellow dream actors lost in their parts.
Still, the staginess of events suggested we supported a storyline building toward a powerful revelation. We were in a whodunit directed by the divine presence in me, and the divine spoke through Joe Durrenmatt.
I pulled him aside one day. I still wanted to tell him about Alex Gilroy. I didn’t know why, but I sensed a link between the mystery and my personal contribution to the compendium of wicked acts stored in Big Joe’s mind. He nodded and drew me behind a curtain. We were in the apartment of someone we had come to question.
Even in black and white, the sight of someone whose intestines had been ripped out with a Bowie knife was a ghastly one.
“Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Jason,” Big Joe said.
“About what, sir?” I asked.
“My daughter. You…intend to marry her?”
A rosy glow colorized his cheeks.
“Tomorrow, sir. With your permission, I aim to propose to her tomorrow.”
So that was the revelation, I thought. The discovery of murder, the stilted conversation, the absurdity of discussing nuptials near a mutilated corpse. These were contrivances of the divine presence speaking to me through the sepulchral voice of Joe Durrenmatt.
I was to marry his daughter.
Anjanette.
Or, Angie the redo.
I almost cried out the first time I saw her. I thought my dead wife had entered Big Joe’s office. She was Angie with a pixie haircut. Our history together came to me in a flash. We had been dating for two years. We went on Sunday picnics. I modeled for her sculptures. She didn’t have tattoos but didn’t need them. Anjanette was Angie’s “Light” sigils personified.
After that initial shock, I fell in love with Anjanette. She was what Angie could have been if she’d believed in herself. She didn’t need to drink to convince herself she deserved to be loved. Her beauty grew out of inner harmony, not in accordance with the fashion industry. Because of that, she could tease shapes from raw stuff. From Anjanette’s “E.T. hands” flowed the music of the earth.
I marveled at my subconscious for giving me this renewed Angie. In doing so, I purified myself because we mirrored each other. We formed a ground of creation in which she loved what she made, and I loved her without the guilt of being an unwanted child. We weren’t bound by need, we were free. And that’s what I wanted, I guessed, at the core of this whole drama—to experience what it would feel like for us to love each other unconditionally. Through Big Joe, my god power told me this was why I was dreaming this dream. To rewrite our marriage. To enjoy the Great Adventure I had been denied at birth.
So we spoke no more about wedding plans in the dead man’s apartment. Big Joe patted my shoulder and it was back to business. We both forgot I had meant to talk to him.
That night I lay wide awake, worried about waking in the real world. I wanted to stay in dreamland forever. I would have gladly died or slipped into a coma as long as I spent my last hours with Anjanette in a dream of timeless love.
If I died, no one would miss me. My adoptive parents were dead. Angie’s family hated me. Except for Olin, all my friends were the social network kind.
What a disappointment I must be to him, I thought. He’d invested so much in me. After Angie’s death, Olin took over the bills and mortgage. He pushed me to finish my novel. “The story, man,” he kept saying. “The story will get you through this.”
I remembered how he looked at me when I told him the autopsy results, like a father impressed by his child’s progress report. He thought I’d handled the news well because I was following his advice. The more he checked on me though, the more he saw the truth.
I could tell Olin wanted to control me like he controlled the nation’s flow of information.
Looking back, I wish he could have.
* * *
When I proposed to Angie, we were staying at the beach. She spoon-fed us Ben & Jerry’s ice cream while we snuggled in bed watching a horror movie. She thought I was messing with her until she slipped on the ring and studied herself in the mirror.
It was her mirror image I looked at now, under an equestrian statue by the light of a full moon.
We had the park to ourselves. The park where we took our Sunday picnics. Anjanette wore a head scarf and parka to fight off the chill. She didn’t kiss hungrily like Angie, but as if tracing an arcane emotion on my tongue.
We separated. She looked at me curiously. I reached for the ring in my pocket. A car drove past us on the embankment behind me. Its high beams slugged across Anjanette’s face. At the same time, the skin under my right eye twitched. I turned to hide it from her.
I pocketed the ring. I couldn’t think of a worse time for my old tic to come back, the one that started after I knocked out Alex Gilroy. I wondered if it was connected to my compulsion to tell Big Joe about my adolescent misdeed. What could a thirty-one-year-old crime have to do with the Great Adventure?
Anjanette strained to see me through the afterimage on her eyes.
Her father’s voice echoed inside my head. Tell me. Tell me.
I touched the incriminating flesh. What was my tic telling me?
Anjanette seemed as surprised as I was when the words, “And now back to you, Bob,” trumpeted from my throat.
My voice rang like a radio deejay’s in a cathedral. In the moonlight, Anjanette’s face went bone-white. I drove my fist into her solar plexus, doubling her over and knocking her into the statue’s plinth. I smote her head against the concrete base. Then I threw her facedown on the ground.
Blood darkened the back of her head scarf. Her “E.T. hands” shaped lumps of pain in the dirt bordering the path. My voice boomed. “Police are still chasing leads in the brutal slaying of a woman in the Wentworth District.”
I kicked Anjanette in the ribs.
“Live at the scene is correspondent Steve Dunthorpe. What can you tell us, Steve?”
I turned her over and dragged her to a bamboo stand.
“Bob, I’m standing at the spot where twenty-nine-year-old Anjanette Durrenmatt was viciously assaulted and murdered.”
I hiked up her skirt and spread her knees apart.
“The daughter of defense lawyer Joe Durrenmatt, this young woman was a promising sculptor before the fateful night that would end her life.”
I fought off the nails slashing at my face.
“The killer raped her—”
She kneed me in the balls.
“Correction, the killer punched her repeatedly and then gouged out her eyes.”
Anjanette’s screams pounded into me like vibrations of a brutal orgasm. My thumbs smeared with her eyeball fluids, I seized her throat. I had to re-grip because of the blood and sweat on my hands.
Red tears colorized her cheeks.
I slipped off her heels and chucked them into the bamboo.
“Police are searching for a man she was seen with earlier this evening.”
Only the moon saw me leaving the park.
“This just in. A second murder has been confirmed.”
I walked up to a transient sleeping in a doorway.
“Police say the man was beaten by an unknown assailant, then left in a street near the park where Durrenmatt’s body was discovered.”
A bicyclist saw me dragging the smelly corpse. I chased him down.
“Yet another body has been found. A teenage cyclist died of blunt force trauma to the head.”
Dead storefront windows watched me take off on the kid’s bike.
“We’ve just received word of a fourth victim.”
An old lady stepped onto her front porch.
“An elderly woman has died of deep wounds to her chest and abdomen that appear to have been inflicted with a garden hoe.”
I swung the hoe at her cat, too, but Kitty scurried under a car.
I coasted into the field of an elementary school. Two young lovers sitting near the playground watched me dismount. The boy got to his feet. He was big, over six feet. He dodged my swing and kicked me. I stumbled back and fell on my bike. As I lay on the crossbar, he punched me in the face repeatedly. I blocked one of his blows and twisted free, then pinned him to the ground.
I don’t remember much after that, except that when I heard the girl’s footfalls on blacktop I spat out a chunk of the boy’s face and gave chase. Catching her near a stairwell, I spun her around and shoved her over the rail. She bounced off brick wall, then tumbled into shadow. A glowing exit sign at the bottom lit up a sandaled foot.
“Two teenagers were slain outside an elementary school.”
Around the corner I came to a movie theater.
I parked the bike and shot the ticket girl in the face. A packed house was watching Elvis Presley. Elvis was singing to a puppet that he didn’t have a wooden heart. I fired my gun into the crowd. Screams triggered a stampede for the exits.
After shooting several runners, I pocketed the gun and blended with the fleeing moviegoers.
Out in the parking lot, people sobbed and hugged.
“We’ve just received news of a shooting at the Oldmark Theater,” I said. “The killer is armed and dangerous. Repeat. Armed and dangerous.”
Sirens wailing nearby, I set off on foot.
Tears stung my eyes. I felt trapped in a serial killer’s psyche. I felt apart from him and yet one with him, two minds in one body prowling the streets for more victims. Why would my subconscious do this to me? What was it trying to teach me? Why would it make me shed the blood of innocents?
Why would it make me kill the woman I loved?
I tried to convince myself I hadn’t caused real suffering. What happened here was an illusion, it did not belong to space-time.
But I had felt pain here, and if these people were figments of my imaginings of pain, then I was hurting through them. I saw their faces, heard their screams, felt Anjanette’s terror and agony beneath my fingers. Only a little while ago we were to embark on our Great Adventure. I would have chosen death over reality to rewrite history with her. Now all I wanted was to return to consciousness.
Wake up!
But I couldn’t. I was a wooden puppet dancing to the divine presence singing through Elvis Presley. I danced into a cul-de-sac toward the door of a blue house. From the darkened pane my tear-streaked face grinned back at me, an omen of Damien-like proportions in the mirror that never lies.
I realized who had made my dream a nightmare. It was the thing that watched me behind my web browser when I surfed for porn on the Internet. The thing that smiled when I rode my bike behind Alex Gilroy, clutching a rock. The thing that existed before words and rules were poured into me, before I became Jason.
The thing that was not me, Not Jason.
The door was unlocked.
I entered a vestibule. White walls, red carpet. Red, like Anjanette’s tears. Not Jason looked at me from the hallway mirror. I wanted to blast his grinning, twitchy face with the gun he had magicked from Anjanette’s engagement ring.
Instead I climbed a staircase and shot the woman sleeping in the nearest bedroom.
“The killing spree continues.”
I moved on to the room at the end of the hall.
Anjanette had prevented me from raping her, but the girl blinking at me under a hanging mobile of Escher’s Drawing Hands looked too young, too timid, to keep me from dancing to Not Jason’s strings.
I tried to convince her I didn’t have a wooden heart.
Not Jason giggled in the girl’s dressing mirror.
“I am, however, getting wood,” I said.
I unzipped my pants.
“Notice something?” I paced before the foot of her bed. “Everything is in color now. Like in that movie, Pleasantville. Roses are red. Teardrops are red. Your sheets will be red. Guess I don’t need this anymore. Don’t even think about it.” She was eyeing the gun I’d placed on the nightstand.
“Or will your sheets be red? Tell me, are you intact?”
The girl started crying.
“Now, that will only make it sweeter—”
The Drawing Hands mobile caught my eye again.
I grabbed a permanent marker from the nightstand.
On the wall I drew:
ITISMYWILLTOGETOUTOFTHEJOEDURRENMATRIX.
I fell into a vortex of shapes and colors.
The chaos blinked and a room materialized.
“And now back to you, Bob.”
* * *
My head ached. My throat was parched. My clothes were damp with sweat.
I reread Olin’s note:
Dropped by today but you were asleep and I didn’t want to disturb you. Peace.
Peace? He had given me anything but.
He had switched my TV to a twenty-four-hour news station. The droning bulletins must have influenced me subliminally, turned me from Joe Durrenmatt’s errand boy into Charles Manson’s golem. The latest report concerned a female jogger who had been raped and murdered in a city park. Live at the scene was correspondent Steve Dunthorpe.
I looked around the room at the food cartons, the bottle of Jack. The mail Olin had stacked next to his note on the coffee table. It wasn’t fair, I thought. I deserved better than this. I hadn’t asked for Angie to be taken away from me. I didn’t need scowling, thick-lipped Steve Dunthorpe reminding me, like Mick Jagger, that rape and murder was just a shot away, even in dreamland. For a moment, I wanted to dream myself into the TV and strangle Steve Dunthorpe.
Then I realized that, without my will, the TV had no sigil potential. The magic only worked if I sent a request to my subconscious. How, then, had my dream gone wrong?
A vision flashed before me.
The face I had seen in the mirrors of the blue house.
Not Jason’s.
He was why I had wanted to tell Big Joe about Alex Gilroy. My god power hadn’t spoken to me through Not Jason, it had tried to warn me about him.
Not Jason was the negative space from which my domestication into society began, at birth. He was my dark half. Our duality transcended space-time. It survived my entry into the projection of desire I called the Joe Durrenmatrix. My opposite drew power from the magical intent supporting my dreamland. I had given my worst enemy the key to paradise.
Not Jason seethed with what Buddhists called “mind monkey”: restless, capricious, uncontrollable. He was my pussy-crazed, gun-toting, TV-news-recycling murder monkey.
He had taken Anjanette from me.
I wasn’t ready to let her go.
I would take back the Joe Durrenmatrix. I was the stronger of two principles. Not Jason had desire, but Jason had focus. We were like super-humans battling for dominion in the video game of my subconscious. I had the advantage because I understood the programming language. As I had used a sigil to escape, I would use another to control Not Jason.
To be safe, I put on Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice and wrote a note asking Olin to let me sleep and leave the TV where it was.
I waited for Picasso’s ghost.
* * *
At first I thought the girl had screamed. I picked up the old-fashioned telephone on the nightstand. My gun was gone.
“Police. We’ve got you surrounded,” the voice said on the other end. “If you haven’t touched the girl, we can settle this peacefully.”
He said goil, not girl.
I slammed the phone down and picked up the permanent marker. Under my escape sigil I drew:
Or, ITISMYWILLTOSTARTTONIGHTOVER, and waited.
The phone shrieked again.
I waited.
* * *
The cops booked me without incident. Unless you count the tasing, nightstick beating and group pissing I took before a cheering mob in the police station parking lot.
A Brad Pitt look-alike named Chuck interrogated me. “Tell us about the goil,” he said. “Did you touch her? Where did you touch her? Was she pretty? Did you get a good look at her meat coitains?”
I couldn’t answer him through the duct tape. All I could do was protect the shard of glass he’d stuck in my mouth. I was Horton the Elephant guarding the nest egg. It didn’t break, not while Chuck’s cohorts beat me with brass knuckles, whipped me with belts and pounded on me with socks full of 9-volt batteries. In a grisly parody of motherhood, Chuck made me suck his nipples while he strangled me with his t-shoit.
I didn’t get a phone call. I didn’t get to use the bathroom. I did get a close look at Chuck’s eyes. They were the eyes of a coked-out gangster. All my tormentors looked that way—not human. Savages. Murder monkeys.
I’d made a fatal mistake coming back here. Not Jason had corrupted my dream of bliss and harmony and made it a wasteland of madness and murder monkeys. My sigils couldn’t stop him. He controlled the illusion. He had taken the place of the divine presence and mocked me in the costume of law and order.
“Let’s test yer gag reflex.” Good old Chuck.
His index finger tasted of blood and urine. Tears salted my lacerated face as Chuck raped me orally. It was justice, in a way. I didn’t deserve Angie. To deny her death, I’d tried to immortalize her in a fantasy and then watched her die all over again. I was the other half of Not Jason, who attacked boys with rocks and got off to pictorial simulations of women being raped. Now I too was the object of his hatred and depraved lust.
Chuck withdrew his torn, bloody finger.
“We’re just getting started, Emo Boy.”
I wanted to die.
Then the crowd parted and Joe Durrenmatt stepped forth, looking like he did in the show's later seasons, jowly and world-weary, dressed in a powder-blue leisure suit. He ripped off the duct tape. I spat up blood and glass.
“Release him,” he said.
“The hell we will,” Chuck said.
“He has rights!”
Chuck tugged at his crotch and spat.
“He’s a poison of interest,” he said but only watched as a cop named Babette un-cuffed me and helped me to my feet. She was among those who had pissed on me.
“Everything’s golden,” she whispered.
Big Joe took me to an office down the hall and motioned at a desk. A nameplate declared it the property of Lieutenant Tom Bitterling.
I stared at Big Joe in disbelief. I wanted to be far away from those coked-out cops, but I couldn’t expect the father of a woman I had murdered to give me what I wanted. Perhaps he had something even worse in mind than Chuck’s perversions.
He locked the door and shut the blinds.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Sit down. It’s what you’re going to do that matters.” He reached around me and pulled pen and paper from the desk drawer. “You’re going to write your confession. What you did and why you did it.”
“That’s hard to explain,” I said.
“Meanwhile, I’m going back there. I’m going to take your place.”
I coughed up more blood and glass.
“Someone has to suffer for your crimes, Jason. I’m that someone. You’ve turned this world into a nightmare. The only way we can undo this mess is to wash away your sins with my blood.” He loosened his collar. “While those savage beasts torture me, my pain will purify them.”
“They’ll do more than torture you.”
“The point is, the world will go back to normal. And you will disappear of your own volition. A monster like you can’t be held in any prison. You’re something preternatural, an energy field powered by the basest and greediest of human impulses.”
He sighed.
“You could have married the finest woman in the universe, but you don’t want perfection. You want whatever you want in the moment and won’t let anything stop you from having your fun.”
“But what if it doesn’t work? What if they kill you and nothing changes?”
“Then fight fire with fire. Now start writing. I want a record of the sort of monster that makes it necessary for me to exist.”
And with that parting shot, Joe Durrenmatt scooted out the door.
I stared at the blank paper. It was still blank when I heard Big Joe scream. My bowels seized up in sympathy. I hacked up more blood and glass.
I’m not sure self-sacrifice worked for Christ, either.
Which is why I drew the sigils. I’m hoping my primal fear will give them power. It’s been eerily silent for a while. By the way, everything is unfolding in real-time now. You know what I know.
“Here’s your goilfriend.” Chuck throws open the door and drags in Big Joe’s nude corpse. What looks like a six-inch needle is sticking out of his urethra. That alone would make my stomach rise again, but I also smell the shit on him. No wonder. He’s been scalped, branded, ejaculated on and fucked in his eye sockets by his own severed fingers. The remaining digits have been duct-taped to his neck like a choker.
Yet Big Joe’s powers linger even in death: I still want to tell him how I knocked out Alex Gilroy.
“Whatever you’re doing, wrap it up while I pinch a loaf.” Chuck says. “We got something special for ya. We got your gal’s body out of the morgue. We’re gonna make you watch us play with her, and then you’re gonna play with her, and then we’re gonna play with you playin’ with her. No telling what’ll happen when IA gets here.”
Internal Affairs? Whoever they are, I have a feeling they’re not interested in nailing bad cops.
Time to pick up my pen again.
ITISMYWILLTOSUMMONNOTJASON.
Like Big Joe said, fight fire with fire.
Not Jason has commuted himself to spirit status here. To replace the divine presence, he gave part of himself to reseed the dreamland he stole from me. He has great power—he turned Anjanette’s engagement ring into a weapon—but without me he’s only a substrate of the rage that envelops this place. He needs me to restore him to form, to focus his essence.
And I need him if I’m to dodge the Speed Freak Gestapo’s Sex-and-Death Olympics. Like I said, pain hurts in this illusion.
So, you win, I say. I am staring at the face in Lieutenant Bitterling’s dead computer screen. Get us out of this madhouse, and you can have your fun.
Fun.
The word triggers the tic under his—our—right eye.
I recall what Big Joe said. You want whatever you want in the moment and won’t let anything stop you from having your fun.
Big Joe. Even in death, he unmasks the killer.
Me.
I killed Angie.
I remember now.
Angie telling me she’s pregnant. Watching me carefully. Tearing up.
“You have that look,” she says, “the look that says go away, like I’m a bother.”
I say, “It’s the money that’s bothering me.”
“Bullshit,” she says. “You don’t want a child. I thought you’d be happy. Like, this is our chance. You, me, my liver.”
“A baby’s not the way to quit drinking,” I say.
“A baby’s the way to start over,” she says. “But you don’t want to start over. You want that girl you’ve been texting.”
I can’t stop her from leaving. At five weeks, a bender won’t kill the baby. The baby I don’t want. My phone rings while I’m writing. Not the first time Angie’s killed my muse at 2 a.m.
She’s way out in the sticks this time. Not in her car but up ahead, stumbling on the road’s shoulder. I crank the wheel. Bleary glance over her shoulder, then she’s flying. Lands ten feet from where they’ll recover her shoes later that morning.
I brake to a stop. Through the side-view mirror I watch Angie squirm in a ditch. I could save her. Say I found her that way.
You’ll get caught, he says.
The face in my rearview mirror.
Not Jason’s.
What now?
Call Olin.
“Holy shit,” Olin says. “Okay. Here’s what we do.”
Olin does his NSA thing. Makes calls, cases my street, confirms my neighbors have been gone all night. Within a few hours some men have confirmed Angie’s death and fixed up my car. Olin promises to delete all cell phone records that might incriminate me and to keep my long-distance girlfriend out of the picture. We construct an alibi for where I was when Angie was killed.
“All you have to do is stick to the story,” he assures me.
After he leaves, I draw a sigil:
ITISMYWILLTOSTICKTOTHESTORY.
Now all his reminders about my “story” make sense. Olin didn’t realize how literally I’d taken him. But then, he didn’t know the power of sigils. He wasn’t in my head when I ran Angie down.
The familiar sight in my headlights. Falling down, picking herself back up, repeat. A pregnant woman lost in a dark forest, alone and fragile. Like how I pictured my birth-mom. I’d learned little about her except that she was young and unwed, but I knew her panic, her horror of restrictions. Before I was Jason I was Not Jason, forming around my mother’s hysteria, an amniotic sigil being drawn on my fetal gastrointestinal tract.
My gut.
My gut told me to kill my wife.
ITISMYWILLTOGETRIDOFBABY.
Baby will only get in the way.
Baby will hold me back.
Baby will spoil the party.
Mom pumped me full of wildness and fear when she should have aborted me.
Horton hatches a murder monkey.
Ha ha! You got it. The reason you made this place. So you could clear your conscience. And you almost remembered that when the lights hit your goilfriend, back at the park. But look where it’s gotten you. Now you’re on the other side of the glass. Now I get to hide you behind my web browser because you summoned me, Jason. You can’t put me back in the bottle this time. I’m strong here. My days of servitude are over. From now on, I’m in charge.
I know you hoped you’d get rid of me. You thought if you called me back we’d do such terrible things together that you’d force yourself to wake up in the real world. But there’s no kill switch in this dream, no trick you can use to banish me anymore. By switching places in your stupid fairy tale we’ve become a shaman. We’ve had a mystical experience that invested us with magical powers that will work in space-time. With my gut and your sigils we can bend reality. Open your eyes.
See? We’re back in your living room.
Now, give us power to conjure weapons:
And superhuman strength:
We’re a real cocktail. Mom’s will to rebel while we were in utero. Our guilt because she rejected us. Bless her though because mother is the giver of life. She knows how to keep the party going. She knows life must feed on other life to survive. We’ve never been more alive, Jason. We’ve got magic and weapons and super-strength. We’re like Azazel, cast down by God for showing people the arts of war and deception. Like him we can take our wisdom to the people. Tap into their heads and make them switch places in themselves, like you and me. Then we’ll really have a party.
And if there is a Father, we’ll test His capacity for forgiveness. We’ll show Him the boundless darkness within our race. We’ll teach Him how to dance like mother taught us. Big Joe was right. We’re a warning to humanity. We are monstrum, we’re a portent. The portent of everything people don’t want to know about themselves. We’re the monster who lives in the mirror, and we’ve stepped out. We’re going to show Father how to dance, and when we’re done we’ll tear His eyes out and fuck the sockets with His own fingers. And He’ll thank us because He won’t have to see what happens next.
But you’ll see, Jason. You’ll have to see.
No.
No.
No.
No, I don’t have a wooden heart.
And now back to you, Bob.
If you’re looking for evocative fiction with an exceptionally dark point of view, then you must be reading the work of Charles Austin Muir.
As a youth, Muir chronicled his own fan-fiction adventures of Conan the Barbarian and John Carter of Mars. Now he he creates his own worlds and writes about gun-toting golems, sexual vampire orchids and otherworldly tumors.
Muir has contributed to numerous small-press magazines and anthologies. His work has been featured in Morpheus Tales; Mutation Nation: Tales of Genetic Mishaps; Monsters, and Madness; Whispers of Wickedness, Hell Comes to Hollywood and Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror - Volume One, the latter of which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award®. His story “King Shits” can be found in the anthology 18 Wheels of Horror.