"Again!" Adam says. "Harder."
And I bring the rock down.
And the rock sinks in farther.
"Again!"
And I bring it down.
"Again!"
And I bring the rock down.
Blood soaks up through the pages, up to turn the fucking couple red and then purple.
"Again!" Adam says, his words distorted, his mouth and nose not the same shape anymore.
And I bring the rock down on the couple's arms and their legs and their faces.
"Again."
And I bring the rock down until the rock is sticky red with blood, until the magazine is collapsed in the center. Until my hands are sticky red.
Then I stop.
I ask, Adam?
I go to lift the magazine, but it tears. It's so sodden.
Adam's hand holding the statuette goes slack and the bloody statuette rolls into the grave I dug to find something solid.
I ask, Adam?
The wind carries smoke over us both.
A huge shadow is spreading toward us from the base of the pylon. One minute it's just touching Adam. The next minute, the shadow has him covered.
Ladies and gentlemen, here on Flight 2039, our third engine has just flamed out.
We have just one engine left before we begin our terminal descent.
The cold shadow of the Creedish church monument falls over me all morning as I bury Adam Branson. Under the layers of obscenity, under the Hungry Butt Holes, under the Ravishing She- Males, I dig with my hands into the churchyard dirt. Bigger stones carved with willows and skulls are buried all around me. The epitaphs on them are about what you'd imagine.
Gone but Not Forgotten.
In Heaven with their mistakes may they dwell.
Beloved Father.
Cherished Mother.
Confused Family.
May whatever God they find grant them forgiveness and peace.
Ineffectual Caseworker.
Obnoxious Agent.
Misguided Brother.
Maybe it's the Botox botulinum toxin injected into me or the drug interactions or the lack of sleep or the long-term effects of Attention Withdrawal Syndrome, but I don't feel a thing. The insides of my mouth taste bitter. I press my lymph nodes in my neck, but I only feel contempt.
Maybe after everybody dying around me, I've just developed a skill for losing people. A natural talent. A blessing.
The same as Fertility's being barren is the perfect job skill for her being a surrogate mother, maybe I've developed a useful lack of feeling.
The same way you might look at your leg cut off at the knee and not feel anything at first, maybe this is just shock.
But I hope not.
I don't want it to wear off.
I pray not to feel anything ever again.
Because if it wears off, this is all going to hurt so much. This is going to hurt for the rest of my life.
You won't learn this in any charm school, but to keep dogs from digging up something you've buried, sprinkle the grave with ammonia. To keep away ants, sprinkle borax.
For roaches, use alum.
Peppermint oil will keep away rats.
To bleach away bloodstains from under your fingernails, sink your fingertips into half a lemon and wiggle them around. Rinse them under warm water.
The wreck of the car is burned down to just the seats smoldering. Just this ribbon of black smoke flutters out across the valley.
When I go to lift Adam's body, the gun falls out of his jacket pocket. The only sound comes from a few flies buzzing around the rock still clutched with a print of my hand in blood.
What's left of Adam's face is still wrapped in the sticky red magazine, and as I lower first his feet and then his shoulders into the hole I've dug, a yellow taxi is bumping and crawling toward me from the horizon.
The hole is only big enough for Adam to fit curled on his side, and kneeling on the brim, I start pushing in the dirt.
When the clean dirt runs out, I push in faded pornography, obscene books with their spines broken, Traci Lords and John Holmes, Kayla Kleevage and Dick Rambone, vibrators with dead batteries, dog-eared playing cards, expired condoms, brittle and fragile but never used.
I know the feeling.
Condoms ribbed for extra sensitivity.
The last thing I need is sensitivity.
Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.
This seems to really miss the point.
I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.
The yellow taxi humps across the potholes, getting closer. One person is driving. One person is in the backseat.
Who this is, I don't know, but I can imagine.
I pick up the gun and try to wedge it into my jacket pocket. The barrel tears the pocket lining, and then the whole thing is hidden. If there are bullets inside, I don't know.
The taxi rushes to a stop about shouting distance away.
Fertility gets out and waves. She leans down by the driver's window and the breeze carries her words to me, "Wait, please. This is going to take a minute."
Then she comes over with her arms raised out at her sides for balance and her face looking down at every step across the sliding, glossy layers of used magazines. Orgy Boys. Cum Gravers.
"I thought you could use some company about now," she calls over to me.
I look around for a tissue or a crotchless underwear to wipe the blood off my hands.
Looking up, Fertility says, "Wow, the way the shadow of that Creedish death monument thing is falling across Adam's grave is so symbolic."
The three hours I've been burying Adam is the longest I've ever been out of a job. Now Fertility Hollis is here to tell me what to do. My new job is following her.
Fertility turns to gaze around the horizon and says, "This is so totally The Valley of the Shadow of Death here." She says, "You sure picked the right place to smash in your brother's skull. It's so totally Cain and Abel I can't stand it."
I killed my brother.
I killed her brother.
Adam Branson.
Trevor Hollis.
You can't trust me around anybody's brother with a telephone or a rock.
Fertility puts a hand in her shoulder bag and says, "You want some Red Ropes licorice?"
I hold out my hands covered with dried blood.
She says, "I guess not."
She looks back over her shoulder at the taxi, idling, and she waves. An arm comes out the driver's window and waves back.
To me she says, "Let me put this in a nutshell. Adam and Trevor both pretty much killed themselves."
She tells me, Trevor killed himself because his life had no more surprises, no more adventure. He was terminally ill. He was dying of boredom. The only mystery left was death.
Adam wanted to die because he knew the way he'd been trained, he could never be anything but a Creedish. Adam killed off the surviving Creedish because he knew that an old culture of slaves couldn't found a new culture of free men. Like Moses leading the tribes of Israel around in the desert for a generation, Adam wanted me to survive, but not my slave mind-set.
Fertility says, "You didn't kill my brother."
Fertility says, "And you didn't kill your brother, either. What you did was more like what they call assisted suicide."
Out of her shoulder bag, she takes some flowers, real flowers, a little bunch of fresh roses and carnations. Red roses and white carnations all tied together. "Check it out," she says and crouches down to put them on the magazines where Adam is buried.
"Here's another big symbol," she says, still crouched and looking up at me. "These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful."
She's such a thoughtful and endearing character.
"Yeah," she says, "I know."
Fertility gets to her feet and grabs me on a clean part of my arm, a part not crusted with dried blood, and she starts walking me toward the cab.
"We can be jaded and heartless later, when it's not costing me so much money," she says.