Posted by nigel1 on July 12, 2002 at 12:46:37:
My skull, when it's thoroughly dried, will be yellow, porous, and much chalkier than your average old bone. Already, what there is of me beneath my skin is thoroughly dry, ready to fall apart like ancient paper. The blood oozing through my calcined veins might as well be ink, or water, for all the good it does me-- I'm weak. And my brain! It claims dryness on the one hand, and on the other it talks about this body's blood; obviously I am not so dry as I present myself to be. My brain, you can tell, isn't very reliable anymore, but then, I have a wound up there, my war wound, and the thing is old on top of that. Yes, brain damage makes one pathetic. It takes away your own natural self, and turns you into a stranger. I haven't been myself for forty years now, and it makes me want to cry, whenever I think about it. Pretty soon, though, I'm going to die, and by God, I'm ready for it! That's what I mean by talking about my skull, by rambling, by thinking of death all the time, by having this preoccupation with dry bones and decay. Rot doesn't smell so bad to me-- I learned to like it when I was young. It's a strong, sweet, odor, and you can learn to live with it, and like it too. Just go out and breathe it in. Find yourself something dead, or make yourself something dead, I mean kill something (I always used a pretty girl for this, abducting a convenience store clerk, hustling her into the countryside, getting her to strip to bra and panties at gunpoint, then popping a .22 cap into her brain while she squatted with her back to me, trembling and praying, or trembling and begging me not to kill her-- then after the bleeding stopped I'd load the supple body back into my van and hightail it to my double-wide trailer out in the sticks, then into the storm shelter underground where I'd lay her out on a mattress coated with painter's plastic drop cloth, and fuck her and fuck her and fuck her, all through the changes that would occur over the course of days and weeks and months-- being very careful to keep flies away, because maggots were not my cup of tea.) When I was young I had a toy called a Strange Change Time Machine. After a while they took it off the market because some people found it "disturbing". I found it enchanting. Dead women are like that toy, in a way, but given an erotic dimension-- which some would find disturbing, I suppose. But when the strange changes are over, what's left is guite clean and sculptural, very esthetic. And still sensuous.
I've done a lot in my time, and seen a lot, too. I don't regret anything, not even what was done to me, and that injury had advantages. Take my war wound. I've been carrying an unexploded round, a pea-sized shell of high density explosive with an outter wrap of nerve toxin for the last forty years, right in my head! Whole thing's no bigger than a wire brad with a pea on the end. Those things were designed as counter-terror weapons-- shoot one into somebody's belly with a compressed air pistol, they go down clutching themselves like a bad case of tummy ache, a crowd gathers, people try to assist, and then-- BOOOOM! A meat bomb, and a slow acting nerve toxin fouls everything within twenty feet. Try to collect the parts, try to attend the injured, and the toxic contamination spreads and spreads. It only takes a micro-gram absorbed through the skin, to deliver an agonizing death. It shuts down the autonomic nervous system, you see, but slowly. Slowly. The one that got me didn't go off and didn't hit anything major, except for giving me this little jerky tremor in my left hand (that has its uses, too. Heh. Heh.) It lodged in a ventricle and there it stays to this day. Maybe it'll go off someday. Nobody knows. By God, the surgeons didn't want to touch me-- nobody wanted to touch me after that! I scared 'em all shitless! Look at the scar! It came in under my cheek bone, traveled up under my right eye, and nudged a motor projection area. If it had hit my skull again, trying to exit, it would for sure have gone off. They kept me behind a blast shield in the VA hospital. When I was ready to go I got up and walked off. Some shit for brains MP told me to halt. I walked right up to him, got in his face, and dared him to shoot me, grab me, bump me, set me off, motherfucker! He shit his pants. I stole as much cash as I could, plenty of clothes, and walked out the door. There was a nurse I sorta favored, a black girl, and I gave some thought to abducting her. I had a couple of .45s I took from the gutless guards, and I sort of thought about picking up civilian habits again. That black girl had big tits and I figured one .45 slug per boob, right through the nips, would do her fine. But I didn't feel so good. I wasn't really up to it, yuh know?
Now, you can't imagine what life was like for me, carrying a bomb like that in my skull, can you? Out in the civvie world, I was Joe Nobody and I was the one scared. What if somebody pushed me? What if I got hit in the head? Life in the shadows was called for. Amazing I've survived so long. I'm going to squat right down here in the dirt, on my gnarled old worm eaten arse, and I'm going to tell you all about it. You're going to stay right over there and listen. Sometimes a man needs to talk to somebody, about things that trouble him. And it always helps to talk to a pretty girl like you, even if she is all bound and gagged. You can lean up against that wall. Fuck, I'm old and senile. I might get sentimental. You never know. I never had mercy before, but there's always a first time. But if I do kill you, I think stabbing you in that cute little bellybutton will do you fine...