Borderlands Read online

  And Mama was fizzing too. Her skin bubbling. Melting away. The monsters from anatomy charts—mixed up anatomy charts—were coming out, right there in front of Delia, without the Looking Tunnel or the Telling Boy. One of Mama's eyes popping out with centipedes. The big spider moving with horrible slow rippling motions under her dress at her crotch, pushing its way out. Daddy's penis fighting to get loose. The little ugly extra faces growing on their heads. Ropy fingers. Muscles and bone and tendons exposed and trimmed like something you saw hung on a hook in the back of the meat section in Safeway.

  Both of them snarling at one another; making gibbery, sputter)' noises; snapping many sets of jaws.

  Delia finally screamed. A scream that had waited six years to come out.

  They turned to her, angry at the noise she was making, coming at her. Red, oozing, snarling, snapping.

  She felt a papery hand on her wrist, pulling her back. Back through the wall. Into the safety of the Looking Tunnel.

  She turned and saw that the Telling Boy had his hand on her wrist. And she could feel his hand.

  "I can feel you," she said.

  "That's why," he said, pointing at the translucent wall.

  She turned and looked into her room. Saw her mother and father, as humans, bending over her. Over Delia lying on her bed. Lying there staring. Not moving. Breathing, but nothing more.

  Her dad still angry, not believing this. Mama telling him to shut up. Seeing that the catatonia was real.

  Delia and the Telling Boy turned away, walked back into the Looking Tunnel. As they went, the Telling Boy read from his little book.

  "And Delia saw, then, for sure, that she could not be friends with anyone else but the boy in the attic. So she went to live with him, and lived happily ever after. The End."

  SUICIDE NOTE

  Lee Moler

  Stories distinguish themselves for different reasons. A great premise, a memorable character, an ingenious twist, a sip from the silver cup of true fear—these are all benchmarks of the well-wrought tale. But one of the rarest ways a story can shine is by the pure force of its style. “Suicide Note” by Lee Moler is one of those special tales that crackles with wit, self-confidence, and a clear, clean voice of originality. You can’t get past the first paragraph without recognizing Moler’s gift—his style.

  Born in West Virginia, Lee Moler now lives in the small town of Bel Air, Maryland, with his wife, Charlotte, and two young daughters, Caitlin and Stephanie. Just sliding onto the worst side of forty, Lee had a brilliant play, Bop, produced by the Baltimore Playwright’s Festival, and recently sold his first novel, a thriller called Hard Bargains. New stories and novels are in the works, and that’s the best news of all.

  As the last flicker of life died in my wife’s eyes I looked at my hands around her neck and remembered that I was a religious man. Religion is about love, and I loved her even as I killed her, but of course she didn’t get it. If she’d gotten it maybe I wouldn’t have killed her. I’ll never know because I agree with the group of particle physicists who say there’s really no such thing as if. The things we do are just events in a multi-dimensional universe where everything we do here has an opposite and equal reaction in another unseen but congruent universe. I’m not kidding. There really is a large group of reputable physicists whose study of the behavior of light quanta has led them to that conclusion. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? You’re probably out of the same herd of one-dimensional cows as my wife. Not that I didn’t love her.

  Not that I don’t love you. I love all you credit-wearing consumer units who trek out each day to do the one meaningful act in your slot-track lives, which is…but you don’t get the reference to slot-track do you? They were little powered cars that raced around a pre-constructed track in slots. They got their power and direction from the slots, but I’m sure you didn’t get the reference because they haven’t been hot in over six years and anything that happened more than three months ago is automatically erased in a consumer unit’s mind. Because a consumer unit’s one meaningful function is to buy, and if your buying is to continue on schedule, you have to forget that anything is supposed to last, including wisdom, truth, faith, or history.

  That’s why it will take most of you about a week to forget I killed my wife. That little fact will be erased by a blizzard of sitcom stars shining out at you from the supermarket tabloids that are your only memorable source of information. No? What do you think is the source of conventional wisdom? What do you remember, the fact that the latest space shuttle is going to carry forty-three pounds of plutonium on top of a liquid-fueled bomb that has a one in seventy-eight chance of exploding or that Rosanne Barr has become “difficult”? The fact that forty-three pounds of plutonium is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer or that the president didn’t catch any fish while he was on vacation? Not that you’ll remember who Rosanne Barr or the president is in a few years.

  Remember this though, as you take your daily tabloid pill from Doctor Rather. It’s something you might even be able to recall at the end of the evening when Cosby’s sent the kids to bed for you and you’re tired of struggling through those long sentences in TV Guide. There’s a darkness that doesn’t need night to come because it’s there waiting behind whatever it is you don’t know you desire. And there is a witchcraft that doesn’t need a full moon because the moon always orbits full around the dark side of any light you care to name, including television screens, including love.

  And love is what religion is all about. Did I tell you I was a religious man? Religion: sin and redemption. That’s what religion was originally about. Sin is a word you’ll never see in the tabloids unless it’s a quote from one of the wig-merchant preachers who use it as a crowbar to pry open the poor. And I know that to most of you redemption is a tax refund, but originally it meant forgiveness for your sins, and better yet, release from them.

  That was the problem; I wanted forgiveness but not release because my sin was feeling like God. Redemption would have meant giving up that feeling, and I couldn’t. God: I still capitalize his name, an affectionate gesture. He can’t help it if he inspires emulation and I can’t help it if I emulate. Can you see the bind I’m in? I still believe in God but resent him deeply for creating me in his image. That’s what the Bible says, you know. He created us in his image. So what are we supposed to do about this potential for cheap imitation?

  I mean just what the hell was I supposed to do after the first time Sella lay facedown across the motel bed, midnight hair spread to the floor, and said in her little tin growl, “You can do anything to me you want, anything.”

  That’s what she said. Then she raised the short leather skirt, showing me the straps of the garter belt as they extended up the tightly flared white of her thighs like the tails of a lash. Then she rose to her knees and with a soft grunt pulled the skirt to her waist. She was small and thin, but her ass flared wide and pulsed outward like some giant white heart. It was shocking in its solid abundance, a secret thrill that only the favored could know. She raised it higher and as it swayed there over her head the little growl in her voice was changed to a light shriek by the way her face was pressed into the mattress. “Anything,” she said again. “Anything you want. You can hurt me. I like to be hurt. I like to be humiliated. I’ll do anything you say. I deserve it.”

  I swayed on my feet as the blood rushed from my head to my groin and back again. I felt like I was expanding in all directions. She meant it. She was giving me power, Godlike power. Sure, it was a cheap imitation, like a little electric shock compared to a lightning bolt, but it was the closest I’d ever come. I know a lot of you consumer units are thinking you would have refused, saved by the atheism of your dead imaginations. And maybe you would have. But that wouldn’t have saved you because any of you who’ve ever come but once would have asked yourselves why. Women too, if Sella had been a man, and she could have been, if she wanted you to think so. And the question why is the thing that puts
the first hole in the safety of your ignorance. It’s the question that comes for you when bad things happen, and they will. It’s the question you’ll ask if you meet me, and you will, because I met Sella.

  Through some helix of irony that now seems as fated as poisoned strands of DNA I met her through my wife. My wife’s name is, excuse me, was Marian. She was a tall honey-blonde with a face like Meryl Streep’s plumper sister and one of those big-boned Minnesota Swede bodies. You know, a hundred and forty pounds maybe but not fat, just big through the shoulders with cream-pie breasts and haunches instead of hips. She was about a half-inch taller than me and very attractive in an earthbound way. I admired her. She had intelligence and guts. As I was strangling her, just as her face turned purple, she whacked me so hard I had a bruise on the side of my face for a week. I don’t say that to be crude, just to illustrate one of her better qualities. If I was able I’d miss her, but of course I’m no longer able. To miss her I’d have to imagine she was real and people are just a collection of feelings, aren’t they? When I killed her I took those feelings which comprised the entity named Marian into myself. So she’s just as real now as before. That’s a concept I wasn’t conscious of when I met Sella in the discussion group.

  Marian was a sociology instructor at the local community college. She was heading an adult education seminar on modern mores or some such thing and asked me if I wanted to participate. I didn’t, but she’d been carping about me showing no interest in her career, so I agreed to sit in a few times just to see what she was up to. We decided to keep the fact that I was her husband a secret so it didn’t inhibit the group or me.

  My eyes locked on to Sella as soon as I entered the room. She was wearing a black sheath dress with black hose that matched the crow-wing sheen of her hair. She had a long, thin face that suggested an American Indian, or rather an Indian’s idea of someone he might come across in a forbidden part of the desert: tomahawk cheekbones and a mouth so wide it made the rest of her face look like something it had kissed into existence. Her nose was a bit too long and had a cruel little hook to it that matched the one at the corner of her cunt-curl mouth. It was her eyes though that locked on to mine and sucked my brain to climax. They were as ice gray and hungry as those of an arctic wolf, tundra eyes reflecting the hiss of some winter sun that lay deep-gone over the horizon.

  She said nothing in the session, an attitude soufflé about honesty that was punctured every time Sella moved her eyes from my crotch to my face and back again. She flicked them at first and then did it slower, hungrier each time with a kind of tongue-lolling languor that made me feel like I was being licked all over. Sometime during the middle of all that she began showing me flashes of thigh, crossing her legs, slumping a little in her chair so the sheath rose higher, then uncrossing her legs. It took only a few minutes of that for me to realize from the black and white contrast of her upper thighs that she was wearing a garter belt and stockings. There may be a man over the age of thirty-five somewhere who isn’t aroused by a garter belt and stockings on a pair of high-flow legs, but don’t trust him because he’s a liar.

  When we were boys all women wore them and women is what we wanted. Girls knew it and wore them too. I spent untold classroom hours looking for that not-too-subtle tan-white promise I’d somehow seen in prepuberty fever dreams. That night in my wife’s classroom with Sella I was doing it again, feeling overheated and dizzy, becoming more capable of rape by the minute. Ten minutes before the end of class she crossed her legs one last time, took off one high heel, and used her architecturally arched foot to massage the back of her other leg up to the knee, down to the heel, slowly, tongue slowly. The slight buzz of nylon against nylon sounded as faint and plain as a zipper in a dark room. Five minutes before the end of class I left and waited at a far turn in the hall so I could catch her while Marian was collecting her papers.

  Sella knew. I saw her wait until the rest of the class was almost to me before she started down the hall; her breasts small enough to move free inside the knit sheath; ram’s-head nipples butting strong against rolling black circles. She had an insect-thin waist and a swaybacked walk propelled by an ass so mobile you could see it move from the front. The others were already out the door when she got to me. I was going to step in front of her but she stopped, turned, faced me with those ice-dog eyes and said in a voice like a fingernail on my spine, “Marian is talking about honesty with a student. She’ll probably be about five minutes.” Then she looked at my crotch again and up to my eyes, emitting something between a sigh and a groan as she did. It was that little tin shriek that was to become so loud in the upcoming months that it was all I could hear.

  I grabbed her by the upper arm and yanked her around the corner. She gave the little groan again but didn’t resist. “Why?” I asked. “Why were you doing that?”

  She turned so that one of her breasts kissed the back of my hand. “You mean trying to show you I wasn’t wearing any panties?” she said in her little growl.

  I released her arm and leaned against the wall, attacked again by fever dreams. She stepped forward so that the rounds of her thighs hugged my legs. “You didn’t notice,” she said. “I tried to show you but you didn’t notice.”

  “Why?” I managed to croak. “Why are you doing this?”

  She rocked a little on my leg, raising the knit dress as she did so, bringing raw nylon in contact with the jeans I was wearing. “Because I can always spot a husband,” she growl-whispered close to my ear. “You’re Marian’s husband, and I like husbands.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m bad.” She whimpered a little, a sound that made me ashamed for her, and hard. “Because I’m bad,” she said. “I’m so bad only a man who’s being bad can give me what I need.”

  I almost walked away but I felt the wet breath of her sentence on my neck. “And what’s that?” I asked instead.

  She gave the tin growl as she rocked on my leg so hard that her dress slipped above the top of her stocking and I felt white thigh-fever against my leg. She leaned forward into my neck and slipped a piece of paper into my pocket. “Anything you tell me I need,” she said. “And I mean it.” Then she leaned back, looked at her watch, and said, “Five minutes, don’t forget I mean it.”

  She went out the door in a way that made me wish I was a door and I was alone against the wall, dripping sweat onto my shirt, prostate fluid into my pants.

  That night in bed with Marian I was like a lion on an antelope. I wanted to draw blood. I wanted to crack her spine. Our marriage had always included regular sex but the method was always what magazines with douche ads call “comfortable.” Marian would lie on her back or, when she was especially passionate, on top of me and give out with a few oohs and a “that’s nice” or two and then come with all the regularity and passion of the morning newspaper.

  The night I met Sella, Marian sweated like a boar and grunted like a sow. She thrashed and raked me and even tried to throw me off but I’d just flip her to a new position and drive on because my semen was boiling inside me and I wanted to make it hurt her as much as it was hurting me. She made birth sounds and came three times, but afterward she looked at me from the other side of the bed like I’d suddenly grown fangs. “You frightened me,” she said in an apprehensive voice.

  “You came three times,” I answered in my defense.

  “I didn’t even know it,” she said. “I was lost.”

  It was then that I felt the beginnings of the power, the thrill of subsuming another person into your desires, making them a seed out of which your fulfillment grows. If she had only agreed to it things might have been different but of course it was her fate to die rather than agree to it just like religion tells us. You know, disobedience is sin and the wages of sin is death. It’s right there in the Bible, you could look it up but you won’t. You’ll just go on reading douche magazines and believing in “relationships” that are “comfortable.”

  That’s what Marian wanted to do. After a bout with Godl
ike sex during which she came three times and couldn’t remember two of them all she could say was that she wanted to know it when she came. Mind you, she didn’t deny she came three times but said she wanted to know when, wanted to enjoy it. She went to heaven but didn’t like it because she couldn’t remember the address. She wanted low-fat, no-cholesterol, bite-sized safe sex instead of pig-slop pleasure, and it killed her. Because then I knew. I knew I had to have Sella and once I had Sella I had to have it all. If Marian had only submitted it might have saved us both. After all, Abraham was willing to kill his son for God. All Marian had to do was be a sex object. Not that I think I’m God. What a cliché. I don’t even want to be God. I just want to feel like him. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make the world but if I had I wouldn’t have told my children they were created in my image. I’d have let them come without knowing it just like I did Marian. I tried to save her but she’d read too many douche ads to accept dirty love. So I had to find another way to love her. I learned that way from Sella.

  “I know what you want,” she said on the phone, and told me to name the time and place, any time and place. I did. The next day I found myself in a room watching Sella rock the garter-whipped purity of her veinless white ass against the darkness while begging me to hurt her. And I did. I whipped her. I told her to stay in exactly that position while I whipped her with my belt and every time she moved I whipped her some more. When I saw her skin beginning to redden to the point of blood I stopped until it passed but I told her to stay in that position the whole time. She did. It was a transcendent experience. At first I could see her whole body in all its pornographic glory as I vented my anger at Marian on it. Sella’s ass shook with each blow, sending ripples of force up each side of her body to her breasts and down her legs where they straightened her toes. The more I whipped her, the angrier I became at Marian for refusing to allow me to stop short of what I was now doing. Because I would never have whipped Marian, unless she’d asked me and of course she wouldn’t have asked me. Not that I’d have wanted to. She wasn’t built for it; too big, too unsegmented. It would have been as erotic as driving a mule team.