Husk

Husk
a novel
Corey Redekop

ecw press

For Cathy,

for reasons that should be obvious.

&

For Elda,

who asked me to write a book she would like.

Grandma, please close the book now.

Acknowledgements

My undying gratitude to:

Cathy, the love of my life, the sweetener in my granola, my muse, my amusement, who can make me laugh with a look, and with whom I am more in love every day. Except Thursdays. Those days are just for “me time.”

Jen, the greatest editor anyone could wish for, one so fearless and sure she could honestly tell me I had spelled “fuckadeedoo” wrong.

Mom and Dad, for being there time and time again (and again, and once more after that).

Anthonie, for keeping me honest on my word count. Damn you to hell.

Judd, for his photographer's eye.

James Morrow, one of the finest novelists out there, who coined the phrase “tattered ambulatory cadaver” in his wonderful novel
Shambling Towards Hiroshima
, and was kind enough to let me steal it. If you haven't read his Godhead Trilogy, you've missed out on some of the greatest satire of the twentieth century. I feel sorry for you.

Everyone at
ECW
Press who worked so diligently to get this book into print, a fine troupe of publishing artistes who put up with my rage-saturated demands and nightly bouts of weeping over the phone, and were decent enough to never mention in public that certain incident I'm sure they all remember with great horror and shame. You guys are the best. Hugs!

Mocha, the strangest, spazziest feline on the planet. What kind of cat is afraid to jump?

Every author, actor, and director who brought zombies to life. You filled my head with horrors innumerable, with blood and viscera and unspeakable filth. Weird that I should thank you for that, but there you have it.

Every person who liked
Shelf Monkey
and suggested I keep at this writing thing.

The following is a work of fiction.

Any errors discovered within are purely the result of your fevered imagination.

You really should get that checked out.

I miss breathing.

Sounds stupid, yes. Autonomic system was always there for me. Did the work whether I remembered to inhale or not. Took breaths in and out unfailingly. Never let me down.

Except that one time.

Chug-chug-chugged along no matter where I was, what I was doing. At sporting events (there were a few I recall) my breathing always clicked into overdrive without my having to shift first, supplying copious molecules of oxygen to the blood, organs, muscles, brain.

Something that was always there.

Like sunsets.

Rainbows.

Complex if I ever thought about it, but why would I? Taking things for granted is a core component of the human experience.

Nevertheless, I miss it.

There
are
other things to miss. I know this. Doubtless, people will criticize me for miserably pining for the overrated sensation of thickly carbon-dioxided atmosphere rushing down into my lungs, then up and out again. In and out.

Back and forth.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So many other things out there to miss. Bodywise, anyway.

Getting a good scratch going? Scraping your keratin against that pesky chigger bite? That's a good one, I give you. Although the itch preceding it is rarely as fun.

Come to think of it, I miss the itch, too.

Blowing my nose. I always enjoyed that. Getting a solid three seconds of blow into a tissue, feeling my insides — for that is what it is, the mucous, the snot, it's all you, tiny chunklets of moist soul, part and parcel of the whole — feeling effluvium flee my sinuses and escape into the warm, dampened confines of an eager two-ply.

Good feeling, that.

Nice sound, too, very unique. People praise the low baritone of a lengthy belch; where's the love for a high tenor nasal evacuation?

Now, no need exists. I tried blowing my nose, once, near the end, just for old-time's sake. Just to feel
something
again. A jellied chunk of matter loosened itself from its perch, clogged the passageway until I had to go in after it.

I didn't try again after that. I can't prove it, but I'm positive I knew how the theory of relativity worked until that happened. Einstein's theorem, vanished forever in a snort, blow, and excuse me.

Sex. They all get to that eventually. The number two question from every interviewer, after the obvious. What about sex. What about erections. What about fucking. What about waking up from a sex dream with a throbbing birddog so engorged it throws off your center of gravity as you bumble your way toward the toilet. Do I miss it? Is my existence even worth the trouble of unbridled continuance without the possibility of bumping very uglies once in a while?

Not really. I can't claim to have ever been a Casanova, but I did okay for myself. A boner is only as good as the blood pressure behind it. That's hardly an issue anymore.

Arousal is an impossibility anyway. I don't see people as objects of desire. It's impossible to.

I can recall a time when the mere glimpse of a bare muscular leg could instill in me bouts of gleeful dizziness. When that velvet cleft of skin between the buttock and the thigh was all I ever wanted. I would bury my face there and know true happiness. I hunted for that spot in every person I met, every actor who walked across a screen, every glistening hunk of pumpflesh that teased me from the glossy safety of the stroke mags I kept in the backyard shed, rolled up in an old paint can, hidden away from the prying eyes of the all-knowing mater Funk.

What did I know.

Men, women, all the same to me now — curves, mounds, arms, legs, aureoles, scrotums, breasts, cunts, pricks. All meat. We are nothing but bone and shit and offal encased in bags of rotting meat. When you make peace with this conclusion, arousal ceases to be an issue.

No, it's breathing that I spend the most time contemplating. I miss breathing in. I miss inhaling particulates of grass and dandelion after I mow my lawn. I miss becoming overwhelmed by second-hand smoke as I enter a bar.

I miss yawning. Good Christ do I miss yawning. Taking an enormous gulp of air, throwing my entire body into the act in a writhing spasm of glorious inhalation. Feeling bones shift and crack as my ribcage expands under the pressure. Getting light-headed as oxygen reserves deplete into the red zone.

I would give anything to experience that sensation just one more time.

Just one tiny yawn.

Lord, but I do miss it.

“Jesus Christ!”

If I had been more self-aware at the time, more in possession of my faculties, I would have remarked that ‘Jesus Christ,' as epithets went, was a touch on the nose.

That's a resurrection joke, by the way.

I was not yet in that frame of mind, however, my ready wit as limp and wilted as fast food lettuce while flash grenades exploded behind my eyelids.

But I will admit that later, upon reflection, I got quite a shame-faced giggle out of it.

q

I was everything.

I was the vacuum. Eternity. I floated free, one with the macroverse.

No sense of self.

No awareness beyond the ink.

No up.

No down.

No time.

I was all. There was no I. There was only all.

w

All was all.

e

Then.

Disruption.

Noise.

Sounds. Far away.

Somewhere, deep in the gray goo, an impulse gathered itself together out of surplus atoms and hurtled over the vast chasm between two thought-deceased neurotransmitters.

A spark formed, gaily glittering in the all.

Starting a process.

Completing a chain.

Commencing a reaction.

Ruining everything.

It was not noise.

There were voices.

Peaceful nonsense syllables in the dark. Easy to ignore. Aural detritus caught in the back eddy of the cosmos, I told myself. I returned to the void, attempted to once more rejoice in absence.

But the damage was done. The veil had been pierced, threads began to snap.

I fell through the big empty.

I became aware.

r

I did not float. Weight pressed in around me.

m

I lay on something.

Something hard.

My shoulders were cold. My back was cold.

Accompanying this was simple knowledge.

I have shoulders. I have a back.

Time materialized.

There were events occurring around me. A logical flow of connecting intervals moving forward through the ages.

Three seconds went by. I already had a past. The recollection of chill on my skin from moments before. My birth already a memory.

Here, then gone.

Another sound, closer. The clank of metal. A sense of movement, the blackness sliding away as I drifted forward.

Light. Everywhere, such magnificent light. Rods and cones protested at the intrusion of their slumber, vowed mutiny at this cruelty.

I was grabbed and lifted, my back hauled up off the surface, air rushing to fill the space.

Too much light to focus. Could only stare.

Voices. Indistinct, muddled, a language outside my experience.

The speakers drew closer.

I became cognizant of myself as an entity distinct and individual from the all. Alone, abandoned.

Loneliness washed over me, grotesque, fathomless.

The voices continued, louder now. Words became burdened with purpose. Layers of context draped over vowels and consonants as my synapses slowly organized themselves into battalions, began firing in sequence.

Comprehension.

“
mjkm
grimhly
slttygh dftll
are we recording?”

“Check.”

Light.

“Ho-kay, we have here a Caucasian male, age approximately, what would you say, Jamal?”

“Fortyish? Mid-thirties?”

“Split the diff, approximately thirty-seven years of age, 170 pounds, thereabouts.”

Sharp explosions behind the voices, curses, mechanical screams.

“Shit, hold on, forgot to turn off the teevee.”

“What's on?”

“Dunno. Van Damme, I think.
Bloodsport
? There, that's better. So, again, thirty-seven, 170.”

“What's with his face?”

“Huh. Maybe he's with that group, you know, the bald guys.”

“Blue Man?”

“That's the one. What's his name?”

“Uh . . .” Rustling paper, flapping under the dance of fingers. “Unknown.”

“Where was he found?”

Bright, bright white light.

“Bus washroom.”

“Bus station washroom?”

“No, bus. Poor guy collapsed with his pants down while the bus was on the road. Driver only found him when a passenger complained she couldn't get in to take a leak. He was slumped against the door, pants around his ankles.”

“Explains why his knees are bent like that. Give me a hand?”

“Sure. Make a wish?”

“Funny. Just push down on his knees, straighten him out.”

Wonderful, all-encompassing light.

Crunching. Like footsteps on dried leaves.

“Hard.”

“Rigor completely set in. I'd put time of death at between, oh, one and three yesterday morning.”

“Why are we getting to him now?”

“Backed up. That pile-up yesterday, took time to sort them all out. So, no name?”

“Nope. No wallet, no bag, nada
ID
. Says here cops think another passenger may have skipped off with his stuff from his seat, they're checking it out. Coronary you think?”

“Maybe. Could be overdose.”

“In a bus john?”

“Why not? I ever tell you, once we got this junkie? Died in a heating vent in a bakery.”

“No shit.”

“Snuck in from an alley to get warm, we think. Took the time to shoot up, got stuck, and died. Or shot up and died. Hard to tell. He was in there for weeks, the heat baked him hard. Like, gingerbread hard.”

“Harsh.”

“You want to make the first incision?”

“Sure. Scalp?”

“Do the torso first, you need the practice. Besides, I dibbed skull last time.”

A pinprick above my right nipple, followed by smooth tugging across and down my chest. Cutting, slicing, dicing.

An infinitesimal portion of me now devoted itself to pain and its consequences, very aware of a knife edge entering, slicing down, through, but it couldn't define where the sensation originated. Pain in the abstract, far preferable to pain in the actual. Most of my attention was concentrated on the fluorescent wattage that hovered above me. There was only that radiance, glorious, shining down upon me. The voices, they were white noise, easily forgotten in the majesty that was the light.

“Nice cuts.”

“Not my first time.”

“Grab that.”

“Here?”

Sensation. Strong hands on my chest. Nice. Soothing.

“Yeah. Okay, pull up and away.”

My skin, suddenly chilled on both sides. Struck me as unusual somehow.

“Ew. Augh.”

“Knock it off, it's nothing you haven't seen before. Cut away the fat there, clean it off.”

“Everything there?”

“Looks like. Ribs are strong, nothing visibly broken. So, through or under?”

“Listen to your heart.”

“Ha. Okay, through. Hand me the Stryker.”

“I hate this part.”

“What, this?”

Whirring noise. A tendril of smoke floated up and away from below my eyeline. My peripheral vision strengthened, noticed hairlines, hands, arms, moving just outside my focus.

“Yes, that.”

“It's just like deboning a chicken.”

“When do you think I've ever deboned a chicken?”

“City boy.”

The hands pulled back. My chest suddenly felt lighter. A sound, just next to me, like sticks rattling inside a steel drum.

“Well, now I'm off chicken, thanks, Craig. You want a coffee or something? I'm bushed already.”

Coffee? I like coffee. Do I like coffee? What's coffee?

“Lightweight. We got a full backlog here.”

“They're not going anywhere. And I'd like to be awake for most of the shift. So?”

“No. Yes, yeah, that'd be good. Black.”

“I'll be back.”

“No rush. Turn on the teevee, will you? I like Jean-Claude.”

“No accounting for taste.” A click, more explosions. Hinges squeaked. Footsteps faded away.

“Let's have that out there, pal.”

Hands on my chest again, then gone. Then, snipping, shifting something deep within me. A sucking sound, a boot extracting itself from mud.

Not important.

The light was significant. It fascinated me. Cold light, harsh, unforgiving. I was supposed to move toward it. Full consciousness had not yet returned, but whispers of my past were hissing within my subconscious. A lifetime's worth of televangelists squirmed their way through my medulla, telling me that, when the end came, it was imperative that I run toward the glory of that light. Rush toward it, arms pumping, eyes bulging, heart bursting with the love of the Lord.

Or something.

I was hazy on the details, but forward momentum toward the light was essential for full release to the ethereal plane, I was sure.

Wasn't there supposed to be a choir of angels or something, chanting hallelujahs at my arrival?

“There we go, big boy.”

I became determined to get there. I didn't have time to consider my surroundings, or the fact of my lying down, or why I was all of a sudden certain that I was stark nude, my clothing having deserted my body. The
light
, that was the important thing. All other considerations were secondary.

Inner peace, just within reach.

I sat up and took it.

The light was decidedly closer than I had realized. And solid. My forehead smacked against the glass of the bulb, the impact shifting the entire apparatus, the spotlight swinging out on its arm and rudely nudging the man standing next to it.

The man, Craig — full name Craig Neal, medical student and night shift morgue attendant for Toronto General — had his back to me, oblivious, murmuring into a tape recorder while a brightly lit screen sat on the counter, blaring images of carnage. He was a young man for his position, thirtyish, clad in a white lab coat, and was prodding something on the tabletop before him with a pencil. “Weight is eleven one-half ounces, no immediate signs of stress,” he said. The lampshade struck his upper arm and he turned, annoyed. “Fuck, Jamal, don't mess—”

He stopped.

Stared at me.

I stared back. He was lit from behind and above, the glare of the overhead lights combining with my still-adjusting eyes to lend him a facial halo.
Angel?
I thought, and lifted my arms toward him so that he might gather me in his heavenly embrace and absolve me.

Then, “Jesus Christ!” He dropped the recorder, scrambled his hands over the tabletop next to him, yelling vowels, found something shiny, and came at me with a bone saw, hacking at my upraised arms, screaming with unalloyed panic.

There wasn't much choice in the matter. Whatever had just happened, I knew that I was as far from Heaven as I could reasonably expect to be. I tried to yell, but there was no sound. I fought back, grabbing his forearm and wrenching his wrist back, shattering the bone, sending shards of radius and ulna on an outward jaunt through the epidermis. And then he
really
screamed, his voice blending into the chorus of men being struck by the flying feet of a hugely muscular man on the television screen. He jabbed frantically at me with his other hand. His fist thwacked against my side, my face, pawed at my ears, eyes, mouth. His palm slid briefly overtop my teeth, my incisor gouging a crescent trench. My vision clouded over red and I bit down, pulling pork from the meat of his thumb.

Even in his already weakened state, his blows should have caused me some discomfort. The sensation of pain was there yet not there, near enough to notice but far enough away to easily ignore.

But the slapping was annoying, and I pulled my head back from his reach. I took hold of his other arm and snapped it like a bundle of wet sticks, furnishing Craig with a matching pair of splintered appendages. There was no malice in this; it only seemed like the most obvious and natural course to removing an irritant. He shrieked once, brief and wild, and sagged in my arms. I let him go and he dropped, bouncing his skull off the edge of the tabletop on the way down and knocking over a tray, scattering its contents.

Looking at the man, splayed out, blood pooling beneath his head and seeping forth in a festively red, bulbous shape, I confirmed to myself that Heaven was nowhere nearby. Aside from the manic attacks of unidentified assailants, the afterlife wouldn't look so shiny. I expected clouds or white hallways. Here was only metal, everywhere metal. Metal doors in the wall, small ones, three feet square, one stacked atop the other, one open and empty behind me — my previous abode before this one, I realized, but why I should have lived in such a cramped space remained a fuzzy puzzle. Metal light fixtures. Metal tools on the metal side table next to me. Metal under my ass.

Interesting.

This is what I thought.

Interesting. An unexpected turn of events. I took a small dose of pride in myself for behaving so rationally in a situation that clearly called for lunacy. I stroked at my chin, rubbed my scalp.

Time to take stock.

I looked for a mirror. Metal everywhere, but all burnished and dully reflective.

I'd like to point out that I can only ascribe my calmness to some form of shock. What had happened was not yet clear, but my emotions, like my sense of touch, were blunted to such an extent I could only react to stimuli with clinical detachment. I had no memory of anything beyond the room, and only niggles about the strangeness of my place in the cosmos kept me from lying back down and waiting for someone to come in and explain it all to me. I had no past to draw inferences from. All I could function on was instinct. I'd feel bad about Craig later, but I contend that any newborn child, if forcibly ripped from the womb possessing greater mental wherewithal and a sizably stronger physical prowess, would tear the arms off the obstetrician like they were fly's wings after such a sudden and nightmarish transference of self from one reality to another.

I was naked and sitting atop a slab of silver. An electric fan slowly rotated in the corner, sending gusts of sterile air over my face, my shoulders, my ribcage. I thought this odd. There was a sensation of movement around my midsection, a vague yet not entirely unpleasant impression of something flapping in the breeze. I couldn't remember how the human body was put together exactly, but I did intuit that the torso was naturally a more solid object, not prone to fluttering.