The League of Zeroes

It’s obvious she’s having a hard time sipping her coffee. No matter how delicately she raises her hand or how straight and elegant her posture, she can’t help looking awkward when she drinks. Half the damn cup of coffee is trickling its way to the spreading brown stain on the front of her white blouse.

It’s her fault, really. She’s the one who wanted to have her lips removed.

She’ll adapt. We all do.

She’ll figure out how to keep her gums moisturized with Vaseline, and she’ll carry a small container of it in her purse at all times.

She’ll learn to drink with a straw tucked into the side of her cheek. You can still get some good suction like that and the method cuts the mess to nothing.

She’ll get her teeth bonded and bleached to emphasize their newfound prominence.

She’ll figure out how to make plosive sounds with her tongue against the back of her gums.

She’ll be looking good and find it even easier to smile.

I think she’s gorgeous, sans shirtfront stain, but I don’t think she’d go for a guy like me. I consider crossing the coffee shop and trying a pick-up line, but the three prongs I’ve had my tongue split into feel swollen and tied up. Still healing, I guess.

Although she might find my iris-free eyes attractive. They’re all pupil; very black, mysterious and hard to read. That might work for her.

Deep down I know she’d never go for an amateur freak like me. She’s the type of elegant, slightly-modified trophy girlfriend I see hanging around with Body Modification Royalty.

I’ll save myself the embarrassment for now. Once I join the League of Zeroes, though, she’s mine.

The thought of being a freak show all-star brings my all-black eyes back to my sketchbook. I’m looking at the drawing of my modification design, wondering just how the hell my brain is going to look outside of my body. I hope it’s symmetrical. I never had to worry about brain aesthetics until I came up with my plan.

I want to detach my brain from my body. I want to polish it up and put it in a nice display case and carry it around with me, like a sidekick.

My Buddy the Brain.

I jot notes around the sketch.

How do I keep the brain clean and presentable?

What kind of fiber-optics can transmit neuro-signals to my spinal cord?

How do I do this and not die?

Is it worth it?

I look up and across the room at Our Lady of Liplessness. I picture her licking the box I will keep my brain in, asking me what it’s like to be in the League of Zeroes.

She’ll think I’m special.

It’s worth it.

I wonder for a moment longer about asking her for a date, see if she wants to check out the Italian Horror Movie Festival on Fifteenth. I pass on the idea. Maybe it’s just sublimated embarrassment, but she looks a little uptight. She might bite.

I head out of the coffee shop and kick over three blocks in the cold until I reach a telephone booth. I sweep the coin return for change and come back with a finger load of ketchup. At least I hope that it’s ketchup. I’m curious, but I skip the smell and taste test and smear the red goop on the glass of the phone booth wall in front of me. I drop in some coins, press seven buttons.

Raymond picks up the phone on the other end and says, “SaladMan here!”

The second I hear his voice I feel like I wasted eighty-five cents.

“Hey, Ray, it’s Jamie. Cool it on the SaladMan shit, you don’t have to market to me.”

“I know, Jamie, I’m just trying to stay on point. I’m picking up a lot of regional buzz and a couple of the BMR’s have mentioned me on the website.”

Ray, who is my best friend based only on our mutual lack of total resentment, is obsessed with joining the upper echelon of the League of Zeroes. He keeps talking.

“I’m serious, Jamie. I’m like days from becoming Body Modification Royalty. You know Aggie WoodSpine? He’s always putting in a good word for me on the circuit, and Marshall Le Crawl has said, and I’m almost quoting like verbatim here, that I have one of the most original modification schemes he’s ever seen. That’s on the damn website.”

“I know, Ray, I’m aware of the accolades. I’m not doubting you. I’ve got more pressing business, that’s all, so if I seem impatient it’s only because what you’re saying isn’t important.”

“Thanks, Jamie. What’s going on?”

“Meet me at the Italian Horror Movie Festival in twenty minutes, okay. We’ll check out some Fulci, watch some eyeballs burst, and then we’ll go get coffee and I’ll tell you about my new scheme. I think I’ve come up with something really special.”

“Cool. I’ll catch you later.”

“Oh, hey, Salad . . . hey, Ray.”

“Yeah.”

“I saw another chick with no lips today. I think that style’s about to blow up.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen that around lately. How’d she look?”

“Pretty sharp, man. Pretty sharp.”

WE’RE HEADING OUT OF the theater halfway through the movie ‘cause we’ve already seen the best stuff; the scene where that kid gets the drill through his skull, and the one where the demon priest sucks out that girl’s organs just by staring at her.

Ray and I are walking in the flickering light of the faded theater marquee and I’m anxious, hoping for something more visceral in my life. No more celluloid thrills and vicarious rendering of the flesh. I’m ready for my next surgery and I can’t wait to tell Ray my plans.

I pop in to a Super Saver Mart while Ray waits out front. It costs me thirty bucks for a pack of Marlboro Chronics, a soda, two Charleston Chews, and a dropper of Visine. Half of the money goes to taxes. I have to give the government credit for that one. The same day they legalized weed they went and imposed a sin tax on candy and eye drops. It’s almost devious enough to be admirable.

We head over to D. Brewster’s Café and find some plush seats far from the speakers where we can have a conversation. I don’t order anything because I’ve already got my soda and chocolate, and Ray picks up an extra large mocha.

Ray is starting to smell. I think some of his vegetables have gone south again, even though Dr. Tikoshi soaked them in preservative this time. The lettuce sewn into his neck looks like it’s browning at the edges, and the tip of the carrot emerging unicorn-proud from his forehead has broken off. The sutures around the radish spliced into his right forearm look swollen and irritated.

Right from the beginning I told him SaladMan was a screwed-up scheme. I told him that perishables were always too high maintenance. He’s right about the attention he’s garnering though; even now people are staring at him. Still, on a purely olfactory level spending time with Ray is like hanging out with a big pile of compost.

Despite his odor, he gets big points for ambition. He’s got some respectable friends on the circuit and if he can get someone to endorse him as Body Modification Royalty he can do some tour time and then apply for the League of Zeroes.

The League. It’s the big money, the endorsements, the adulation, the weekly primetime broadcasts, and the outright worship of the people.

Ray’s got his goals set high. If he makes it big he’ll be able to buy fresh produce every day, and eventually he’ll be able to afford that platinum dressing decanter that he wants to have installed in his ribcage.

I’ve got him beat though. After my next modification I’ll be an indelible image in the public eye. My plan is the fourth ace nobody thought I had.

I lean in through a cloud of thick smoke and whisper my scheme into SaladMan’s cauliflowered right ear.

I’M ALONE AND WALKING home with my thin jean jacket wrapped tight around my shoulders.

I hear Ray’s voice in the café whispering, “Jamie, that’s impossible. What makes you think you could live through that kind of modification?”

I brush off his comment, but the concern sounded genuine. I try not to take it to heart. I’m so excited about my imminent fame that mortality has become a second-string worry.

Maybe Ray’s just jealous.

I shake Ray’s doubts out of my head and remember how great my scheme is. It’s worth the gamble. I’ve never been one to swallow motivational speaker pablum but I’ve always nodded in agreement at the phrase, “You’ve got to play big to win big!” So, I’m choosing not to acknowledge the danger. Now entering Ostrich Mode, head firmly inserted in sand.

On my way home I walk past trashcan fires and drug deals and I hear sirens wailing and glass breaking and a bag lady nearby mumbles something about wires embedded in the Earth telling all of us what to do.

A League of Zeroes poster stapled to a telephone pole advertises an upcoming appearance by S. O. Faygus and his amazing translucent throat.

An ad beneath the poster promises a two-for-one deal on mail-order brides.

Another asks me if I really trust my gas mask.

It all leaves me with the impression that I’m living in some kind of ravaged nuclear wasteland. The problem with that diagnosis lies in the absence of any level of apocalypse. No one dropped any bombs; no great fire scorched the Earth.

We just ended up like this. We followed a natural progression from past to present. We’re not Post-Apocalyptic, we’re Post-Yesterday.

One look around, though, and I realize that we must have had some brutal kind of Yesterday.

Ray’s voice is still in my head, echoing doubt, stirring up stomach acid.

“Jamie, that’s impossible!”

It can’t be.

This plan is all I have. It’s my only chance of getting off these streets.

It’s the only way I’ll ever be special.

DR. TIKOSHI WOULDN’T TAKE me as a patient.

Dr. Komatsu had me ejected from his building.

I had to go to my old standby, Dr. Shinori. He’s the only one who likes to experiment. He’s the only one willing to push boundaries. He’s the only one who would take a credit card.

I’m moments from anesthesia and Dr. Shinori is sharpening his diamond bone saw. He has emphasized several times how difficult this will be. He hasn’t said anything, and I wouldn’t understand a single word he’d say, but we’ve been communicating with drawings.

I showed him a picture of my design, the new me, the guaranteed League of Zeroes member.

He sketched for a moment and showed me a picture. On the left there was a big, bright smiley face, and on the right there was a little stick figure drawing of my body resting in a casket.

I hope this means my chances are fifty/fifty.

I suspect this might mean he’d be happy to kill me. He gets my money either way. I signed the Goddamn waiver. I’m taking the dive.

I go over the reasons in my head, even though it’s too late to turn back. People would assume I take the risks and bear the public scrutiny because there’s money in it. They wouldn’t be totally wrong. The freak show industry pulls millions every year, and gets more lucrative as time passes. More fame, more attention. Those things don’t hurt. Before I started this, before I split my tongue into three prongs and had my irises removed and my toes extended, I was dirt poor and always felt like I was ugly anyway. Now I’m so ugly that people can’t look away, and I can pull advertising dollars.

The number one reason I do this? People jump to assumptions and whisper asides to each other about parental neglect or abuse or acid in my baby formula. They’re wrong.

I do this because when I was little my mom told me I was going to be someone special.

I asked her what special meant. She pointed to the TV screen. I thought “special” was Burt Reynolds, until she spoke up.

“Special means that people pay attention to you. Special means you have something that other people don’t. Special is having people love you without even knowing you. I know, and have known since the day you were born, that you are going to be special. That’s why I love you so much, Jamie.”

So, I waited to become special.

By the time I hit twenty, I was just like everyone else.

I still am.

Which is not to say that I’m Mr. Free Spirit Railing Against Conformity, because everyone else does that too. I just know that I’m not special, and I have to force the change.

Mom calls me less and less these days.

The hugs are shorter than they used to be.

So here I am, a product of forcible evolution trying to stay one step ahead of the other mutants, hoping my mommy pays attention.

Dr. Shinori puts the gas mask over my mouth and nose and doesn’t ask me to start counting backwards from a hundred. I know the routine. By ninety-five I’m floating in a soft yellow ocean made from rose petals. Somewhere further away I’m shaking as the bone saw hits meat.

THE STAGE LIGHTS ARE especially bright tonight, but I can still make out the audience. The women with no lips always look pleased, grinning wide as the valley.

Ray is in the front row tonight. I flew him out here, even though he’s Body Modification Royalty now and could afford it himself. He’s not wearing a shirt and the baby tomatoes sewn into his chest spell out SaladMan, which is pretty sound promotion.

As the leader of the League of Zeroes I get to make a closing address to our national audience each Thursday.

My mom is in the crowd, like always, and I’m planning a great address tonight, something about how Love Evolves Us All.

They’ll eat it up, but they won’t understand the costs that come with being truly special. They won’t know about the white-fire headaches. They won’t know about the pressure that shoots down my spine when I change the oxygenated cerebrospinal fluid. They won’t know what it’s like when your brain signals get backed up and a dream hits you while your eyes are wide open. I keep these things to myself. I don’t even tell my mom. She thinks I’m perfect now.

The audience always likes to hear about how I’m doing, first thing in the show. I tell them my brain is getting a little hot under these stage lights and that gets a good, hearty laugh. I’m laughing with them, but inside I’m genuinely concerned and I shift my hands to the left and try to move the clear, titanium-laced plastic box I keep my brain in toward the shadows. It tugs on the fiber optic lines running into my neck at the top of my spinal cord, but I manage.

I adapt. We all do.