“I rode over and checked out the deer head this morning,” Ted said. “Its eyes have developed a milky film that makes it look blind.”
Ginger felt a queasy riff in her stomach. “I bet that deer had been eating out of fast-food dumpsters,” she said. “Bun crusts and hamburger gristle.” She wondered if it's spirit might have passed into her. Ted made her close her eyes, try to visualize shifting leaf light, an appetite for tree bark and vernal grass, but all she heard was a dog whimpering in the apartment next door.
“That deer's trapped on my retina,” she said.
“That's what ghosts are,” Ted said, “spirits living inside of you. Your eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.”
Ginger nodded. Her mother was often in her eye, thin, pale, and breastless, black stitches running in and out of the skin of her chest, not slanted and orderly like they had been, but going every which way, so she looked like a rag doll repaired haphazardly with black thread.
“Some people, like Jesus or Elvis, have souls so expansive,” Ted said, “that when they die their spirits become a part of all cellular life. They coat the world like a fine membrane, distill into every atom, and that's why people see them inside redwood trees and on corn tortillas simmering in frying pans.” This last idea excited him and he sat up against the wall; his pupils expanded as they tried to soak up the last bit of daylight. “It happened last year,” he said. “I was at my grandma's house down in Bixler. She made TV dinners and we ate them on TV trays with cans of Coke on the porch. She was worried about the boy that mowed the lawn, said he was over-charging her, that when he came into her house to use the bathroom he stole things out of the medicine chest. She didn't like the way he was always spitting in the grass. She went on and on and I'm sitting there, starting to feel really uncomfortable, you know; I was getting that trapped-in-the-DNA-of-this-pitiful-family feeling; her paranoia, her TV trays, her shoe-box-size existence. So I went into the bathroom, locked myself in, opened the window, and lit a fat doobie. There was a white crochet doll with a plastic head over the spare toilet paper, a bowl of pastel soaps, frilly curtains, pink towels with little bears. The air started to hum, then I felt this pressure pushing up against the top of my skull, and I realized how wrong this bathroom was, how it didn't suit me, and then I looked at my face in the mirror and realized my body was just as wrong and external as this bathroom — how completely arbitrary it is that we're stuck in this body or that one — and that's when the pressure gave way and I felt like I was floating in water, like I do when I'm having a dream.”
“How's that?” Ginger said.
“You know,” he said, a little embarrassed now that the story was over, “all dreamy and shit.” He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her, trying to keep the stretched skin away from her cheek, but Ginger still felt the hard line of his fleshless jawbone, and she had the sense she was kissing a skull. He moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his fingers between her legs, so he touched the tampon cord.
“Go take it out,” he said. “I don't mind the blood.”
She walked down the hallway, wearing only his long Black Sabbath T-shirt, her swollen breasts swaying with a lush animal grace. The half bottle of red wine she found in the refrigerator and the pills she took earlier, plus a few tokes off his joint, all combined to numb out the pain in her stomach and make her weak-kneed and very high. She liked pot; it gave her a giddy sense of possibility, even hope, like warm weather in early spring or getting an unexpected large amount of money. The conversation made her dizzy too. They'd been talking like this ever since that first night at the bar in the Quonset hut out on Highway 9. She liked his Prince Valiant haircut and how he sat alone at a back table sneering at the local band. When she asked him what he did, he laughed and said cynically, Saving the world through prayer. The conversation that followed was the best she'd ever had, how he loved the butter-soaked Texas toast at the Western Sizzler and the tiny Graceland at the miniature-golf course on Garfield Road. He was the first person to say the new post office as well as everything else out here was ugly and she was so grateful; a few hours later she went for a ride in his car and fucked him in the backseat.
Flipping on the bathroom light, she saw a water bug run over the white Formica and disappear behind the sink. Mold spores pockmarked the shower curtain, inched up the white tile walls. The toilet was shellacked with missed piss, hairs imbedded like ants stuck in amber. The room was humid, the walls swampy. Nature was taking it back. She sat on the toilet seat and reached between her legs, found the white string that hung out like a price tag, and pulled. The bloodied mouse plopped into the water and sunk down moodily to the bottom of the bowl.
She walked down the hall with her legs pressed tight, pausing in the open doorway of Steve's room. Dusk's flaxen light flooded his unmade bed and the pentacle plaque hanging above it. There was a poster of Iron Maiden, one of Blackie Lawless drinking blood out of a human skull, and a huge movie poster of a slimy seven-headed demon, each face with red ember eyes and horns the length of yardsticks. All his tapes, Krokus, Metallica, Judas Priest, were piled up by his boom box, and there was one of his pen-and-ink drawings taped up on the closet door, a surrealistic image of a saw-toothed demon with a butcher's knife in its throat and blood cascading down from its right ear into a basketball hoop, which became a spigot and flowed into a drinking glass. The caption read in big black letters: I GOT STONED AND I MISSED.
Steve worked during the week as a janitor at the hospital cleaning the operating room after surgery and, when he could get them, dealt acid and ’shrooms. Ginger felt a little afraid of him. It was easy to imagine the seven-faced dragon, between the bed and the Formica dresser, bobbing its multiple heads like thin-stemmed wild flowers frenzied in a breeze. She heard a rumor he'd poured gasoline over a dog and set it on fire and that he'd spent a year in jail for cocaine possession. Ted told her all his satanic stuff was just a joke, that none of the rumors were true. “Steve has been shitted on all his life,” he said. “He's a great person, just totally misunderstood.”
She walked down the hall into Ted's room, lay on the towel he spread over the sheets. A flutter of blood spilled out of her, trickled down the inside of her thighs. It always felt like more blood than it actually was. The body was weird that way, magnifying its mass and function in the mind. Ted sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet was a shoe box full of junk: screwdrivers, nails, plastic pieces from broken clocks, his old pot leaf belt buckle. He hunched over so all she could see was his bare back, his jeans so low the crack of his rear showed. The room was drenched in smoky twilight, white light glowed from his tape player. The music was over, but the blank tape played on, a silent hum as incomprehensible as snow falling.
Moisture ran into the crack of her rear as he spread the lips of her pussy and wet his pointer finger with blood, tugged up her T-shirt, so the material gathered in folds above her bra and touched her just under the tiny bow, pressed his finger into that hollow cleft at the top of her rib cage, then swung his hand down along the curving bone. His touch left a dark line, and sent out rings of sensation like a pebble tossed into water. Sliding his hand up higher under her shirt, his fingers were cold in a sexy way, like when you first take off your underwear and your bottom is bare against a cool vinyl car seat. Pushing her bra up, he cradled a tit away from her ribs. This gave a sudden sense of her own delicateness and she shuddered. Ted undid his jeans and pushed them down to his knees. Crouching over her, butt up, balls hanging, he leaned his head down and swayed his tongue messily into her mouth, jabbed his cock against her stomach, the red skin shifting around the hard inside part.