Borderlands 2 Read online

  Bullshit and romantic maundering. If the truth be known, it is hard to imagine prolonging this peculiar existence into the next century. In our increasingly cybernetic, cross-indexed, triple-documented world, the constant fuss of new lives and identities is increasingly difficult. I think they’d eventually catch me no matter what I did. Maybe blowing my brains out is no act of romantic despair; I’m just quitting the game while I’m ahead.

  I wish I could end on a pithy aphorism. Unfortunately’ I’ve only learned two really interesting things in as many centuries. One is that, no matter what, you can always start over again. The other is that the liver of a newborn girl is delicious with red wine and wild onions.

  So, I close with a bland truism and a tasteless grotesquerie. Do remember one thing, though. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t be writing this at all.

  Best,

  Bill

  Yes, he should have put the barrel in his mouth, he thought on his second or third awakening. During the building of the Union Pacific, he’d seen dynamite blast a crowbar into a man’s head, and the man had lived to see his grandchildren. He’d later (much later) read that the man’s skull and the crowbar were somewhere in the Smithsonian, although that might be a myth, like Dillinger’s penis.

  For a while, all he knew was tubes and medication and concerned nurses, rather too concerned looking, considering they must know something of what he’d done. The expected detectives never came, though, not even after the tube was out of his nose and he could talk. Just a therapist of some sort, a big man who looked disconcertingly like Oliver Hardy in horn-rimmed glasses. The therapist spoke of depression and stress, but never a word about infanticide.

  Finally, Jan came.

  He awoke to find her sitting there, puffing on a cigarette, her unwashed hair tied back with a rubber band. She’d switched to Camel Filters, he saw. Wasn’t smoking against the rules? Well, it had been in the faculty lounge, too, and she’d always made that room humid enough.

  There were new lines around her eyes, or old ones he’d not noticed before. When she cocked her head, and the sun caught her hair, he saw the gray. When had she stopped using the rinse?

  “I’ve been through your things. I believe your story.” Her voice was quite hoarse, but uninflected.

  “Do the police?”

  She put out the cigarette in a Styrofoam hospital cup. “They don’t know about Michael. I dug up the rest of him, triple-bagged it, and pounded it all flat with a hammer. Then I replanted the flakes, rather deeper than you did.”

  “Why?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I love you, too, goddamn you.”

  For a while, neither of them spoke. Finally, she broke the silence.

  “I didn’t want him, you knew that. Couldn’t understand why you insisted we allow the pregnancy to come to term. You never struck me as the fatherly type. I guess I understand your motivations now, but it was certainly a mystery at the time. Anyway, I didn’t want him at all.

  “Mothers tend to become grandmothers.”

  He looked at the ceiling. “Better than spinsters, I should think. Grandchildren are supposed to be a corn-fort.” He knew how stupid that must sound, coming from him.

  “I don’t want to get old, either, Bill.”

  He waited for her to say the rest.

  “I’ve been off the Pill for a while now. And I’ve made plans to go on sabbatical. I’ll be as secluded as a nun. If I were to get pregnant again, no one need ever know.”

  He certainly didn’t feel horrified. But he wasn’t sure what he did feel. “I don’t know if it would work for you. I mean, it can’t be a purely biological process, can it? As I said in my suicide note, other people would have discovered the secret by now.”

  “Perhaps they have. And never let the rest of us in on it. You weren’t thinking very clearly when you wrote your note, Bill. Can you imagine the effect upon human society if your story had been believed, If had parlayed the book and TV rights into fame and fortune? No, if eating our on children is the secret to immortality, we’d better keep it just between ourselves.”

  He said nothing, and she kept talking, in the same quick monotone.

  “Do you have to wait until your ten-year cycle is nearer the end, or could you ‘renew’ yourself now?”

  Their eyes met, “I don’t have to wait.”

  “If I take fertility pills, there should be enough for both of us.”

  They talked for a while longer, mostly of inconsequential things. Finally, she left, pausing to kiss him on the forehead. Before the nurse cam to check on him, he was sleeping like a baby.

  ANDROGYNY

  Brian Hodge

  If there is any discernible trend in the genre of the darkly imaginative tale, it might be a looking inward, not as much at the unconscious clockworks of our minds as the prison which keeps our minds forever captive—our bodies. Over the last year or so, I’ve seen a definite rise in the number of stories which investigate human biology as a new source of mystery, fear, and even true repulsion. Brian Hodge is a youngish writer from the Midwest with short story appearances in some very prestigious, anthologies with names like Book of the Dead, Final Shadows, and Under the Fang. His most recent novel is Nightlife, to be followed by Deathgrip and The Darker Saints. His work for Borderlands is an emotional journey into a strange and ultimately absorbing subculture.

  The afterglow fades, always.

  The quicker it happens, the more ardently you’re left to wonder about the origins. Even if the focal point of earlier affections is still lying beside you, dozing, maybe even cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions rear their heads.

  How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?

  Gary knew it would probably happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, the outer fringe of the French Quarter, well-removed from the mainstream. Less than a dozen drinkers, more than half of them hard-core, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria likely grew on the floor.

  Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged here; look in her eyes and you quickly reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the thrill of it.

  It took a full twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, took the stool next to him. This he took as a good sign: she was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes before moving in. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.

  “What are you?” was the first thing she said.

  “Career? Astrologically? What do you mean?”

  She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “I see you sitting here, like you know the lay of the land. You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off, no tourist ever comes around here unless he’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native either. Are you?

  “Long-term transient,” Gary said, and clinked his glass to hers. “Seeker of non-conformist Americana.”

  Her face lit up hopefully. “Jack Kerouac for the nineties?”

  He mused this with cocked head, then shrugged. For the first time he smiled, which he did not do often, but when he did he was always genuine.

  ‘I like that,” he said. “I’d never have thought of it, but I like it a lot.”

  Talk progressed, easy and loose and non-binding. Names were traded, Gary for Lana. Libidos simmered during the seductive ballet. He liked best these encounters where the traditional roles were blurred. Who was the predator and who the prey? A toss-up, one answer as valid as the other. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter, so long as the orgasms were mutual.

  Six years of high-ticket vagrancy had shuffled him through a streetwise succession of primary, secondary, and gra
duate schools of one-night stands and short-term loves. Money was no problem, not so long as the plastic credit umbilical card kept him linked to the New England bank account. He never had to stick around when it no longer seemed wise, and that seemed important. He didn’t want to leave behind a legacy of pain any more than he wanted to lug one around with him.

  “You like riddles?” she asked after four rounds of drinks had gone by, maybe five.

  “Usually. Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s not easy.” Lana smiled mischievously. “But. Do you know what the worst part of being me is?”

  “The worst thing, let me see.” He studied her a moment, the fine-boned face, the tall straight posture, the so-black hair, shoulder length. She didn’t look to have lived too harsh a life thus far. Her eyes knew pain, though, and her soul was evidently as on display as her small cleavage. “You don’t know how to love.”

  A coy shake of her head. “Wrong. Very wrong.”

  “You … you’ve never been in love.”

  Another shake. She was enjoying this immensely. Then, sometimes this was the most fun game of all, opening yourself up like a maze to a stranger, escorting them into blind alleys.

  “You don’t think,” he tried slowly, “you’ll ever find the right one to love.”

  Lana arched an eyebrow, half conciliatory. “You’re still off, but that’s a little warmer.”

  He offered a few more stabs at it, then gave up. Lifted his drink and swirled it, watched it in near-hypnosis. “I can think straighter later.”

  “Love and friendship,” Lana mused, obliquely avoiding coughing up the answer. “They’re opposites, in a way, you know.”

  “Bullshit,” he grinned.

  “Really. Joseph Roux, in Meditations of a Parish Priest, said, ‘What is love? Two souls and one flesh. Friendship? Two bodies and one soul.” ‘ Lana nodded.

  “I believe that, with all my heart and soul.” She dropped her hand to his thigh; that thrilling heart rush of first contact. “How ‘bout you? Do you believe it?”

  “I might. Give me time to think it over.”

  And what’s it going to be for us? He wondered. Love, or friendship? Two bodies … or one?

  Snap judgments were risky, but he thought he’d be agreeable to either. Something about her eyes, her manner, her tip-of-iceberg hint that—for the right person—she was far more than someone who merely wanted compatible flesh to sustain her until morning light. A needle-in-haystack find among French Quarter sin, someone with depths of fascination and arcane philosophy worth diving for.

  “Well, if you can believe that,” she said, leaning in close to whisper, “then I have so many secrets to share with you.”

  Gary watched, listened, with dual personae: The Romantic longed to believe her. And the Cynic thought it mere puffery; worse yet, sweet bait so she could lure him to a partner in hiding, and they would mug him.

  He would bite; he would swallow. Have a little faith for once.

  Soon they danced, pressed close as they leaned together and slow-shuffled about the floor, glowing with neon bleed-through from the street. They were watched by the dismal eyes of other drinkers, weary survivors clinging to desperate rafts of Jim Beam and Seagram’s. The jukebox scratched out the mournful alcoholic laments of Tom Waits, the original Skid Row troubadour.

  She later led him out back, to an alley with too little light, and for just a moment he was sure his judgment had failed him at the worst of all possible moments. But no gun was drawn, no lead pipe fed from shadows.

  Lana drew down his zipper and, her dress forgotten, dropped to her knees before him in the grime. Overhead, the moon looked sickly, the color of whiskey.

  Yet finally he knew that, for awhile, at least, he had found a home.

  The afterglow faded. As always.

  To his credit, it had taken a good deal longer than usual, four months of cohabitation in Lana’s apartment. Contact with the seductive unknown usually had that effect.

  Lana had shared her most intimate secrets a couple of days after that first night. Shockingly unexpected though they had been, they hadn’t been enough to send him packing. He was, by then, head over heels in, well, fascination, he supposed. This was too … different … to turn away from just yet. Without exploration.

  Scratch the mundane surface of conventional normality, and the underground of counter-culture was revealed, rich and teeming. It was now far more diverse than in the days of Kerouac, and this was the landscape Gary had long been traveling, making up for the loveless stultification of his first twenty-one years.

  Next: scratch the underground and peel it back, and there was the land where Lana lived.

  But the afterglow fades. He had bitten, he had swallowed. Best to move on before the emotional hooks barbed him any deeper.

  April, the warmth and renewal of spring after a winter of oddities. The famous final scene, lovers at bittersweet poles, opposites that once attracted and now repelled. Gary had played it out a number of times. Never pleasant, just seemingly inevitable.

  “How can you do this to me now?” Lana wailed. “My operation is just a week away!” Her eyes were dazed and wide, glassy with psycho-sexual trauma. Tears were abundant.

  In the center of the living room, Gary held her tightly. That desperate agony of final contact. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You knew what I was like before…”

  Lana, snuffling and huge-eyed. “I … I just wish I could have children with you, that might make all the difference in the world … wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?”

  He bit his lip, hating it when she talked this way. Blind to her own limitations. It wasn’t healthy.

  “Don’t live in a fantasy world, Lana,” he said. Gently, so gently. “Climb out, please.”

  He crushed his eyes shut a moment. When he reopened, Lana seized him by the shoulders, a peculiar fire having ignited within her. One last, savage kiss from her lips, and when she tore away it was not without disdain.

  “Then go.” Her voice had grown uncharacteristically husky.

  Gary retrieved his two bags; a tendency to travel light. What is love? Two souls and one flesh. The rending of one back into two was always painful.

  Out the door, then into a musty corridor whose air generally seemed yellow. It led him to the elevator, an ancient suicidal machine, an open cage that clanked and shuddered down a gloomy open shaft. An iron rehearsal for death, condemnation, descent.

  The gunshot clutched him, head to toe.

  Hand shaking, Gary levered the elevator to a grinding halt and reversed directions. Dust sifted from the cage’s upper framework. He knew precisely what he would find back upstairs. It had been no ruse, no shot of frantic urgency fired into a pillow or a wall to plead for attention,

  Strange. Mode of suicide had usually been a great divider between the sexes. Major bodily damage—gunshot, or intentional car crash, and the like—were the general province of men. Women tended to opt for more passive methods. Pills. Carbon monoxide. Neat incisions of wrists in the bathtub.

  Gary was too shocked to weep just yet. It was the most masculine thing Lana had ever done. He stood in her opened doorway a long while, one albino-knuckled hand clenched on the iron knob.

  The tableau before him was grisly, one of legendary scandal had it occurred in a small town. Here, though, few would care at all, back-page news. The only stomachs and sensibilities which would get a jolly twist were those of the police.

  Lana, half sprawled onto the sofa, legs askew at odd angles. One smell breast bared. Smoking gun in hand, an oral fixation with its barrel having left a crimson fan on the wall behind her. Eyes open, bulging violently. Adam’s apple absurdly prominent. Her skirt was bunched messily around her hips, showing small silken panties.

  And that unmistakable bulge of male genitalia.

  “What you’ve got to keep remembering is that you are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness but your own.”

  Gary nodded “It’s not the happiness aspect I have
a problem with. It’s the responsibility for her killing herself.”

  Across the desk, pristine and uncluttered and orderly, Dr. Thatcher laced her fingers. “But it was Lana’s decision, fully. You didn’t put the gun in her hand. You never even knew she owned it.”

  Gary slumped back in the chair, glanced about the office. For a psychiatrist’s office, it appeared remarkably non-academic. The furniture was shiny and modern, the plants more in keeping with a corporate reception lobby. The diplomas, wall-mounted along with a framed picture of Carl Jung, were the giveaway. Even the couch was out of the way, in a corner. A nod to tradition—in case someone felt therapy mandated the horizontal—but only grudging. Of this, Gary approved. He was no respecter of tradition. Tradition was all too often a mask worn by regression.

  “She was an adult who made her own decisions. And as painful as it may be to come to terms with, she lived and died according to those decisions. Her own. Not yours.”

  “God knows I’ve never been the most reliable guy to get involved with. I’ve always tried to make that understood upfront, at least.” Gary had been giving his hands a workout, tugging fingers and knuckles. “But Lana … I have never had anybody place such importance on me. I wasn’t used to that. Almost like she idealized our relationship.”

  Dr. Thatcher nodded. Her hair was trimmed into a short blond helmet, and it wavered as one distinct mass. “That’s fairly common among transsexuals. When a relationship is going well, there’s no greater person on earth than their partner. If it’s going badly … then their partner is just this side of an ogre.”

  Gary rose from his chair and paced to the window. Three floors down, Spanish moss swayed from willow branches in warm spring winds, like tattered flags on the masts of rotting ships.

  Painful business, this visitation of Lana’s therapist. Catharsis, purging the guilt, whatever. Lana was two days gone, and on a whim Gary had phoned Thatcher to ask if he could take the slot Lana would never honor this week. There had been no mutual friends to speak of, not that he could truly open up to. Family? Laughable. He wasn’t even sure he could have opened up to Lana’s shrink had it been a man. That bedrock shame of admitting the masquerade’s success, the outcry of having been duped into getting horny for a guy in drag … and after he found out, it didn’t matter. Difficult to own up to that before another man. When he had entered Thatcher’s office, first met her, he’d had the brief impulse to request she hoist her skirt, Double-checking.