sifted before Michael’s eyes, and he put a hand to his face. His skin was softening, turning to dust. Already his nose was half gone. “Stop it, Card,” he whispered. “Stop playing games with me. Don’t you have any feelings? What’s inside of you? What are you?”
Card said nothing. So Michael rushed forward, lifted the board and brought it down on the pale man’s head.
Card’s flesh began to tear from the pressure within. Eyes peered out through the widening fissures. Then the skin split open, spilling a nightmare cloud of faces. Michael sank to his knees. Mr. Linfield’s face emerged from the cloud, confused and pathetic. Completely harmless, even after death. Card had been right.
Michael turned to leave, then stopped. He could not see the door. Or the walls. The man was gone and so was his room. All that remained was an infinity of mad faces and tangled copper wire.
OUR ANNE, PAXTON CATAFALQUE, AND THE INFANTE SARKAZEIN
I must have a word with Our Anne.
She’s not quite right: bony body, bonier face, and what teeth she has left resemble a sickly rabbit’s stools. The poor girl’s health is twig-fragile, and her mind—That snapped years ago. Yet we love her, yes? We love our miserable darling, Our Anne of Green Molars, Ms. Anne Thropic, Ms. Shapen, Ms. Creant.
Oh why must she tug around that loaded-up, rickety shopping cart? To think: she used to be so fashionable, so accommodating…used to chainsmoke black clove cigarettes, used to make all the tabloids. Such talent! Painter, sculptress, chanteuse extraordinaire! But then she met him.
They say she found him reading his bleak blank verse to chic neo-Goths in a warehouse. She gazed into his predatory eyes and with a wee sigh, fell into the flame-lick’d cauldron of her own sweet candyfactory. How she adored the poet’s sharp, fierce face, his needle-teeth and piebald flesh and incessant, monkey-shrill blabber. Truly he was monster-gorgeous, delectably repugnant—a ranting, chanting demogorgon of desire. And his name was Paxton Catafalque.
Our Anne took him out for espresso and was soon driven mad by all things little and big: the touch of his lean little fingers (she didn’t mind the occasional scratches from his curved black nails), the little ear nips and neck nibbles, and of course, the big tingly barbarism slung between his lanky legs.
The gossip columns made much of their nonstop goings-on. Our Anne and Mr. Catafalque traipsed about in tiger-striped sunglasses, from club to club, island to island, for a glorious season—during which, five Movies of the Week were released based on their saucy intrigues and misadventures and general joie de vivre. Surely theirs was a union destined to make history, to create mad wonders—and after months and months of glowy earthmother bulbousness, Our Anne plopped out the maddest wonder conceivable: the Infante Sarkazein.
They say he was born with the cuticles already pushed back. That squealing bundle of fuzz cried out for goat’s milk laced with cigarette butts; he draped his own shapely ass with perfumed pages of fin de siécle melodrama; he paraded about in frilled pirate shirts and silky pantaloons and a gilded monocle. At three months of age, he received a grant to publish a deliriously campy arts journal. Within a year, his first novel became a riotous bestseller and his paintings were displayed in galleries so trendy, no one was allowed admittance.
The boy grew fast, and soon, supermodels and millionaires and glamorous criminals were vying for his affections. Media vultures circled his summer cottage in smoke-churning chug-a-bug helicopters. And sad to say, no one even bothered to turn an eye toward Our Anne or Mr. Catafalque. Their careers were now the stuff of yawns.
Paxton without the paparazzi is merely a shallow beast; and Our Anne needs too many flash bulbs to brighten her day. They grew dull and dowdy in the shadow of their magnificent urchin; and likewise, the assorted glitterati and ne’er-do-wells clustered about the Infante gradually lost their zest, their style, and even some of their hair. Wrinkles crinkled ’round their drab eyes; their hands curled into spotty, shaky talons. They dwindled and kept on dwindling—none died, but who knew they were alive? One by one, they could no longer keep up with the Infante’s breakneck schedule; as each fell away, a fresh new celebrity was drawn into the fold. Thusly did each sweet rose surrender its bloom.
Our Anne learned to accept her curiously reduced state; she loved her dapper boy and could not bear to be parted from him. But Paxton—! He decided to set the lad straight…such a sad mistake.
What’s worse, Mr. Catafalque initiated the confrontation before the cameras on a public TV telethon (the Infante Sarkazein, for all his faults, did support the arts whenever possible). I happened to be watching and I must say, it was a rare moment indeed. Paxton cried out against his son, calling him a leech, a praying mantis, a crazy-ass vampire. The poet’s shrill monkey-voice grew louder, faster, higher—a spray of spittle sizzled from his thin wry lips. I could not tear my eyes from the screen! The Infante simply smiled and gently put a hand to his father’s cheek. And he said, so sweetly, “I love you, Daddy!”
Paxton Catafalque shut his mouth.
The boy said it again—“I love you, Daddy!”—and the poet began to fall in upon himself—as though someone had stuck a giant syringe in his bottom and drawn out a gallon of blood. Once more the words rang out—“I love you, Daddy!”—and a look of surprise popped into Paxton’s eyes—then bliss, then excruciating rapture—
Sarkazein, no longer an Infante, is now more beautiful, more powerful than ever. And still Our Anne orbits her glorious son. Oh, she is a bony, horrid thing. It’s not quite right—and to make matters worse, she insists on towing around that shopping cart and its reeking cargo.
I must have a word with her. Even if she wanted to keep the cart, surely no one would fault her for dumping that vile load: a loose, leathery sack of wretchedness that can only twitch its long black nails and whisper, faint but still monkey-shrill, “That’s my boy.”
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