Shooting the old guard has fucked up your head, Ash thought. Just stare at the street, look down, look away, Ash.
He pushed on. A hotel, find a hotel, a hotel. Go in somewhere, ask, get directions, get away from this street. (That is not a whore straddling a smashed man, squatting over the broken bone-end of a man’s arm.) Go into this bar advertising Lifeblood Beer and Finehurt Vodka. (Christ, where did they get these brands? He’d never...
Inside the bar. It was a smoky room; the smoke smelled like burnt meat and tasted of iron filings on his tongue. One of those sports bars, photos on the walls of football players... smashing open the other players’ helmets with sledgehammers. On the TV screen at the end of the bar a blurry hockey game played out. (The hockey players are not beating a naked woman bloody with their sticks, blood spattering their inhuman masks, no they’re not.) Men and women of all colors at the bar were dead things (no they’re not, it’s just...), and they were smoking something, not drinking. They had crack pipes in their hands and they were using tiny ornate silver spoons to scoop something from the furred buckets on the bar to put in their pipes, and burn with their Bic lighters; when they inhaled, their emaciated faces puffed out: aged, sunken, wrinkled, blue-veined, disease-pocked faces that filled out, briefly healed, became healthy for a few moments, wrinkles blurring away with each hit, eyes clearing, hair darkening as each man and woman applied lighter to the pipe and sucked gray smoke. (Don’t look under the bar.) Then the smokers instantly atrophied again, becoming dead, or near-dead; becoming mummies who smoked pipes, shriveled — until the next hit. The bartender was a black man with gold teeth and white-painted eyelids, wearing a sort of gold and black gown. He stood polishing a whimpering skull behind the bar, and said, “Brotherman, you looking for de hotel, it’s on de corner, de Crossroads Hotel — You take a hit, too? One money, give me one money and I give you de fine—”
“No, no thanks,” Ash said with rubbery lips.
His eyes adjusting so he could see under the bar, in front of the stools — there were people under the bar locked into metal braces, writhing in restraints: their heads were clamped up through holes in the bars and the furry buckets in front of each smoker were the tops of their heads, the crowns of their skulls cut away, brains exposed, gray and pink; the clamped heads were facing the bartender who fed them something that wriggled, from time to time. The smokers used their petite, glimmering spoons to scoop bits of quivering brain tissue from the living skulls and dollop the gelatinous stuff into the bowls of their pipes — basing the brains of the women and men clamped under the bars, taking a hit and filling out with strength and health for a moment. Was the man under the bar a copy of the one smoking him? Ash ran before he knew for sure.
Just get to the hotel and it’ll pass, it’ll pass.
Out the door and past the shops, a butcher’s (those are not skinned children hanging on the hooks), and over the sidewalk which he saw now was imprinted with fossils, fossils of visages, like people pushing their faces against glass till they pressed out of shape and distorted like putty; impressions in concrete of crushed faces underfoot. The PA speakers rattling, echoing.
“... prices slashed and bent over sawhorses, every price and every avenue, discounts and bargains, latest in fragrant designer footwear...”
Past a doorway of a boarding house — was this the place? But the door bulged outward, wood going to rubber, then the lock buckling and the door flying open to erupt people, vomiting them onto the sidewalk in a keystone cops heap, but moving only as their limbs flopped with inertia: they were dead, their eyes stamped with hunger and madness, each one clutching a shopping bag of trash, one of them the Chicano street crazy who’d tried to warn him: gold roses clamped in his teeth, he was dead now; some of them crushed into shopping carts; two of them, yes, all curled up and crushed, trash-compacted into a shopping cart so their flesh burst out through the metal gaps. Flies that spoke with the voices of radio DJs cycled over them, yammering in little buzzing parodic voices: “This Wild Bob at KMEL and hey did we tell ya about our super countdown contest, we’re buzzing with it, buzzzzzzing wizzzz-zzzz—”
A bus at the corner. Maybe get in it and ride the hell out of the neighborhood. But the vehicle’s sides were striated like a centipede and when it pulled over at the bus stop its doorway was wet, it fed on the willing people waiting there, and from its underside crushed and sticky-ochre bodies were expelled to spatter the street.
“... one money sale, the window smoke waits. One money and inside an hour we’ll find the paste that lives and chews, prices slashed, three money and we’ll throw in a...”
He paused on the corner. There: the Crossroads Hotel. A piss-in-the-sink hotel, the sort filled with junkies and pensioned winos. Crammed in between other buildings like the Casa Valencia had been. He was afraid to go in.
Across the street: whores, with crotch-high skirts and bulging, wattled cleavages and missing limbs that waved to him with the squeezed-out, curly ends of the stumps. (It’s not true that they have no feet, that their ankles are melded into the sidewalk.)
“One money will buy you two women whose tongues can reach deeply into a garbage disposal, we also have, for two money...”
The whores beckoned; the crowd thickened. He went into the hotel.
A steep, narrow climb up groaning stairs to the half door where the manager waited. The hotel manager was a Hindu, and behind him were three small children with their faces covered in black cloth (the children do not have three disfigured arms apiece), gabbling in Hindi. The Hindu manager smiling broadly. Gold teeth. Identical face to the bartender but long straight hair, Hindu accent as he said: “Hello hello, you want a room, we have one vacancy, I am sorry we have no linen now, no, there are no visitors unless you pay five money extra, no visitors, no—”
“I understand, I don’t care about that stuff,” Ash babbled. Still carrying the backpack, he noted, taking stock of himself again. You’re okay. Hallucinating but okay. Just get into the room and work out the stress, maybe send for a bottle.
Then he passed over all the money in his wallet and signed a paper whose print ran like ink in rainwater, and the manager led him down the hall to the room. No number on the door. Something crudely pen-knifed into the old wooden door paneclass="underline" a face like an African mask, hyena and goat and man. But momentum carried him into the room — the manager didn’t even use a key, just opened it — and momentum, too, closed the door behind him. Ash turned and saw that it was a bare room with a single bed and a window and a dangling naked bulb and a sink in one corner, no bathroom. Smelling of urine and mold. The light was on.
There were six people in the room.
“Shit!” Ash turned to the door, wondering where his panic had been till now. “Hey!” He opened the door and the manager came back to it, grinning at him in the hallway. “Hey, there’s already people in here—”
“Yes hello yes they live with you, you know, they are the wife and daughter and grandchildren of the man you killed you know—”
“What?”
“The man you killed, you know, yes—”
“What?”