Part of me wonders exactly how much detail I need — or care — to go into here, vis-a-vis Pat’s “art” and my rather uncomfortable place in its embrace. But then again, close as “I” may get to it in flesh, most of the Bone Machine’s complex structural workings will probably always remain a mystery to me. Bolts screwed directly into bones, wires strung like tendons, electrical impulses jumping from brain to finger to keypad to central animatronic switchboard…
Pat pulls the strings here, as in all else. When my dead body’s making “love” to Ray, it’s her moves, her ideas, her smoothing, gentle touch translated through my flesh, which keeps him coming back time and time again; I’m just the medium for her message, a clammy six-foot dildo powered by rods and pistons. A deadweight sex-aid soaked in scented lube to hide the growing spoiled-meat smell, the inevitable wear and tear of Ray’s increasingly desperate affections.
But Ray, like any true fetishist, ignores whatever doesn’t contribute directly to the fulfillment of his motivating fantasy. He knows our time together’s on a (necessarily) tight schedule, so he tries to wring every extra ounce of pleasure he can out of the experience while Pat watches and fumes, trapped behind her rows of switches. He loves the mask, not the face; the made, not the maker. Decay’s his groom, and he doesn’t want even the shadow of anything else getting in the way of this so-devoutly-desired consummation, this last great graveyard gasp.
It’d be sort of tragic, if it wasn’t so — mordantly — funny. Together, Pat and Ray have all the requisite common interests and obsessions, plus a heaping helping of that brain-to-groin combustive spark which so many other relationships are made from; if she was dead (or had the right equipment required to rock his world), they’d be perfect for each other. But her hole just doesn’t fit his socket, or vice versa. So the only way she can touch him… and make him want her to, at least…
… is with my hands.
And more and more, that very fact is already making her dream happy dreams of someday taking a bone-saw to “my” wrists. Of burning them in some Haz-Mat crematorium’s fire, like plague-infected monster grasshoppers.
Ray told Pat that he was literally up for her ultimate piece of performance art, to bravely go where none of her other coconspirators were ever willing to, not even with three condoms’ worth of protection. She told Lyle, who instantly cheered her on, visions of Ben Franklin dancing in his money-colored eyes; he paged his pals down at the ME’s office, and the deal was struck — cash for flesh, tickets at the door and a fresh new co-star every week, after the old one finally started to rot.
And so it went, a neat little cycle, a perverse new rhythm method. Pat called the shots, Ray did the dance, Lyle racked up the take; they soon got into the habit of partying later, while Lyle was on his way to the bank. Pat, using Ray’s addiction to feed her own, like any pusher trading “free” product for not-so-free favors, while Ray replays his own earlier performance for both their benefits.
It was, and is, a match made in Gomorrah, or maybe Gehenna: Pimp meets girl meets boy meets corpse(s). And everybody’s happy.
Everybody alive enough to count, that is.
All that changed once Pat and Lyle fixed Ray up with my mortal coil, though, and he “fell for” it… telling her, feverishly, and repeatedly, how this hunk of otherwise nondescript white male meat which just happened to come with my restless spirit attached was the end of his search, the literal embodiment of all his most cadaver-centric daydreams. Suddenly, his fetish had narrowed and shifted to allow for only this one particular corpse or nothing at all.
And: “You know tomorrow night’s gonna have to be curtains for Mr Stinky, right?” She asked him, briskly, after yesterday’s post-show pas de deux.
Ray, frowning: “How so?”
Pat reclipped her bra, sponged sweat from her cleavage; I saw the angels’ halos reflected in her throat’s shiny hollow, a wet white crackle of phantom jewelry. “‘Cause he’s starting to fall apart, same as the others. Already had to rewire his joints twice just to get him limber enough to limbo — and his scalp’s starting to peel, too. Now it’s just a matter of time.”
“But if you’re keeping him refrigerated…”
“Yeah, sure. But there’s only so far that goes, Ray. No freezer in the world’s totally fly-tight; nature of the beast, man.”
A pause. Ray stood silent as Pat wriggled back into her jeans, then shot him the raised eyebrow: You comin’, or what? Shook his head. And replied, finally-
“Then I guess we’re looking at goodbye for me too, Pat.”
At that, Pat turned fully, both eyebrows up. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
Because… this is the one. Remember? The one and only. No substitutes need apply, not even-
(Well, you, sweetheart)
Ahhhh, true love.
He feels like he’s having a dialogue with it, that’s what he’s always told her. Like he’s finally being privileged, through this nightly series of gag-makingly contortionate sex-show antics, to vicariously experience the ecstatic transformation that my corpse is already undergoing — the transition from flesh to fleshlessness, an all-expenses-paid tour through time’s metaphorical flensing chamber. To share in the experience as it sloughs the residue of its own mortality off like a scab, revealing some clean, invisible new form lurking beneath.
My body, my husk. My shucked, slimy former skin.
It’s not pure, though, for fuck’s sweet sake. It’s not perfected. It has no “secret wisdom” to impart. And as for powerful, well…
If it really was powerful — if I was — then we wouldn’t be here, would we?
Any of us.
The argument went on for some time, back and forth: Pat’s voice soaring snappishly while Ray stayed quiet but firm, unshakable. There was an element of betrayal to her mounting disbelief, as both of them well knew. Suffice to say, Lyle probably wouldn’t have been too happy to find out that his star attraction had decided to retire either. Not that Pat even seemed to be thinking of things from that particular angle.
“It’s just a fucking corpse, Ray. You’ve done fifty of ‘em already, most of ‘em long before you ever met me-”
Ray nodded. “Because I was looking for the right one.”
“And this is it?”
“In my opinion.”
She stared, snorted.
“Lyle won’t like it.”
“Fuck Lyle.”
A sigh: “Been there.”
The unsaid implication — goodbye to it, to this, the nightly grind. To Lyle’s meal ticket. And, by extension, goodbye…
(To me?)
Me meaning her. As well as me meaning “me”.
Before, whenever Ray’s beaux got too pooped to preserve, the routine took over. Lyle got on the pager again, handing out more of Ray’s money; the bodies made their exit, stage wherever. Parts in a dump, an acid-soaked tub-ring, concrete at the bottom of a lake, with all trace of Ray’s touch, or Pat’s — or Lyle’s, for that matter, not that Lyle ever touches the Bone Machine’s prey — salved away in disposal.
Which should be enough, surely: Enough to wash this lingering wisp of me clean and let me rise. Sponge the fingerprints from my soul, and all that good, metaphorical stuff. But-
(but)
At first I just hovered above, horrified, longing for the angels to cover my see-through face with their equally see-through wings. So grotesquely helpless to do anything but watch, and wait, and watch some more. Wait some more. Watch some more. Repeat, repeat, repeat.