The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (13 page)

Anu Dhawan

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Freglanton University

Please print this email only if necessary. Paper is made of trees!

***

To: Anu Dhawan

CC: Lee Hudson, Michael Crater

Subject: Altman’s pre-defense reminder

Sounds like a hot story to cover up cold feet. Ah, sweet mystery of attrition!

Lee, are you still bringing doughnuts tomorrow even if Jennifer’s a no-show?

Mel Fong

Associate Professor of Sociology

Freglanton University

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To: Anu Dhawan, Michael Crater, Mel Fong

Subject: Altman’s pre-defense reminder

Sadly, it seems Mel’s suspicions were right on the money. I just received this from our program assistant:

————— Forwarded message —————

From: Marcia Owlrey

Date: Thurs, Feb 13, 2014 at 10:18 AM

Subject: Jennifer Altman withdrawing

To: Lee Hudson

Hi Lee, I know this is unexpected for everyone in the program, but Jenny’s uncle just came by this morning to turn in all her paperwork—she’s withdrawn from Freglanton University, effective immediately. Usually I’d require some direct contact from the student, but all the documents have been signed and everything seems to be in order. Her uncle implied this is some sort of medical situation… he used the phrase “delicate condition” which to me means something very specific, and he was an old-fashioned sort of gentleman. Draw your own conclusions. I asked if she had any plans to return, but he said she’d made it “quite clear” she was finished with academia forever. Such a shame! She seemed so dedicated.

Marcia Owlrey

Program Assistant, Department of Anthropology

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” —Wayne Gretzky

Make sure today’s the day you take that shot!!!!!

Not everyone can hack it. If she is indeed pregnant it seems like an elaborate cover story for leaving our program, but stranger things have happened.

Lee Hudson

Chair, Department of Anthropology

Freglanton University

@lee_hudson_prof

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology —W. H. Auden

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To: Lee Hudson

CC: Anu Dhawan, Michael Crater

Subject: Altman’s pre-defense reminder

At the risk of sounding cold… did you bring those doughnuts or not?

Mel Fong

Associate Professor of Sociology

Freglanton University

Snake Wine

Jeffrey Thomas

G
orch wasn’t sure which source of pain had awakened him: the headache that felt like his skull was ready to give birth to a full-term baby, or the throbbing of his left hand, which was black in a glove of caked blood and missing its index finger.

He blurted muddled curses, sat up too quickly on the edge of his bed and nearly blacked out for his trouble. He shut his eyes to will the elevator of his stomach not to rise up and disgorge its contents. With his eyes clamped shut, sizzling phosphorescent blobs swam on the insides of his lids like amoebas on a microscope slide.

When he cracked his eyes again, his innards under a semblance of control, he raised his hand in front of his face. He hadn’t imagined it, dreamed it, misinterpreted what he’d glimpsed upon awakening. His left hand’s index finger had been removed at the base. A glance at his bed showed no severed finger lying there, but the sheet was soaked thoroughly with drying blood. How long had he been passed out? How long would it take for blood to dry to that extent?

Gorch’s apartment was on the third floor above his bar. The second floor was where his bargirls, called
bia om
in Vietnam, took amorous customers for more than the hugs that
om
alluded to. A sliding glass door gave access to a balcony. Through the door’s sheer curtain he could see that the sun had risen, an orange ball buoyed on the sea.

He remembered the woman then.

She had come into the bar with another man, a British tourist in his sixties, his formidable belly like a cask and his sweating and wheezing head like a fat clenched fist. He boasted of having been a professional wrestler in younger days, but Gorch didn’t volunteer his own past as a fighter. He hadn’t fled to this country—as a result of some paid fist work outside of the ring—only to draw attention to his bloody past now.

The big man was already drunk as he raucously ordered a round of Saigon beer for himself, his lady friend, and a number of other white tourists and ex-pats seated at the bar or clustered around the billiard table.

Himself an ex-pat from Melbourne, now four years in Vietnam, Gorch had opened a bar catering primarily to the many Australians who visited the seaside city of Vung Tau. The bar looked across the coastal road toward the South China Sea, where the surf was iridescent from the Russian oil ships punctuating the horizon. Despite this pollution, along the coast there were strips of beach where swimmers could wade far out into the water, or lounge on the sand eating crabs while clouds of dragonflies hovered above them.

The Australian tourists found the
Down Under Pub
a welcome oasis when they tired of the indigenous fare. As if the bar’s name left any doubt, live rugby played on the TV and boomerangs hung on the walls along with photos of boxing kangaroos (Gorch’s private joke) and a large painting of Ned Kelly in his bizarre armor and helmet, firing his revolver rifle from the hip.

The British tourist became enamored of one of Gorch’s girls, No, and the drunker he got the more he seemed to forget the one he had come in with. Rather than act jealous or insulted, however, his companion appeared to take it in stride and cheerfully switched her own attention to Gorch as he tended the bar. Her English proved more than adequate. She told him her name was Hong.

Gorch thought the old man was a fool for neglecting her. Hong was more beautiful than No and probably a few years younger, he guessed between nineteen and twenty-one, but he supposed it had to do with the old man being jaded and gluttonous. Dolled up for their date, Hong wore a clingy red silk dress with a high Chinese-style collar, cut to the tops of her thighs, her hair falling to the small round posterior her dress so artfully encased.

No took the ex-wrestler upstairs to “nap” for a bit and recover from imbibing too much. Gorch hoped No didn’t try to support him if he lost his balance on the stairs, lest she be crushed in the avalanche. Hong didn’t bat an eye. Instead she asked Gorch where he was from. He swept his arm around the bar. “Uh, Australia,” he said. She asked him what it was like there and he spoke in generalities, told her about Sydney—where he had also lived for a time—instead of Melbourne.

Atop the bar, she took his left hand and held it in both her much smaller hands, turning it over and examining it as if to read his future. “You have strong hands,” she observed. “You have worked hard with them.”

“At times,” he admitted, uncomfortable. Then he asked himself why he was always so wary. Did he think she was a spy hired by vengeful enemies back in the city he had exiled himself from?

She didn’t let go of his hand, and that was when he was certain they were going to fuck. Which was fine by him; he had already slept with every one of his
bia om
, repeatedly. Gluttony and all that.

He invited her upstairs to see his apartment. “Do you have photos of your country?” she asked him with shiny-eyed interest, though he suspected what really interested her was the money he’d doubtless have to pay her.

“No,” he answered. “But I have a camera. Maybe I could take some photos of you.”

“Ahh,” she said, smiling. “But I don’t like people taking pictures of me… I’m sorry.”

“Okay, so we’ll skip that part.”

Gorch got one of his girls to take over behind the bar, but before he could show Hong to the stairs she said, “My motorbike is outside. In the seat I have a gift I bought today for my father, but I think I’d like to give it to you.”

“Really? I wouldn’t want to deny your father his gift.”

“Oh, I can get him another. Please wait a moment, will you? I will go get it.”

***

In his flat on the third floor of the narrow building he had bought with all his savings, ill-gotten and otherwise, Hong pulled a bottle out of the plastic shopping bag she had fetched from her Honda’s seat compartment. “My father likes to drink this sometimes,” she told Gorch. Smiling with charming if unconvincing coyness, she further explained, “It’s good for a man’s baby.”

“Baby?”

“You know,” she said. She pointed toward his crotch and giggled.

“Ah, I see. Makes baby grow up big and strong, yeah?”

“Yesss.”

“Let’s have a look.” He held out his hand. “I’ve seen these things a million times here but I’ve never really wanted to try it before.”

“Oh, but you will drink this one, won’t you? Because it is from me?” She passed him the bottle.

“For you, and for my baby, I’ll do it.”

It was a bottle of
ruou
, or rice wine, and he had drunk that on its own. But this type of
ruou
, which he’d seen sold at gift shops such as those at the Cu Chi Tunnels and the Saigon National Museum, had conspicuous extras stuffed into the bottle. Usually it was a cobra, preserved in the yellowish wine as if pickled in formaldehyde, maybe with a huge black scorpion or a fistful of smaller snakes and some herbs added for good measure. Hong’s gift did have some blanched-looking herbs at the bottom, but no scorpion, and the snake coiled inside wasn’t a cobra, unless its hood was closed.

Gorch turned the bottle around slowly to see it from all angles, and held it up in front of the fluorescent ceiling light. His brows tightened. Definitely not a cobra. And maybe it was a result of the animal’s saturated tissues being distorted, but he almost questioned whether it was even a snake. He was reminded of the animal called a worm lizard, an amphisbaenian, which possessed a long pinkish body that looked segmented like an earthworm, with only a rudimentary pair of forelegs. It almost seemed this creature had such forelimbs, if withered, unless those were just bits of sloughing skin. Its eyes were bleached dull gray. It was looped in on itself within the glass, coiled around and around in a spiral as if chasing itself unto infinity.

“A dragon fetus, perhaps? Ace.” He handed her back the bottle to open. He took down a shot glass. “Are you going to drink it with me?”

“It’s a drink for men,” she told him. “I don’t have a baby.” Her smile was a mixture of carnality and passable innocence that made his stomach squirm with hunger, as if he had his own dragon fetus coiled inside him.

She filled his shot glass, and he took a tentative sip. He tried not to show his disgust lest he insult her. After all, her father had unknowingly sacrificed this elixir for his benefit. It tasted just as he had expected: crude rice wine mixed with the essence of a reptile terrarium.

“Do you like it?”

Gorch didn’t think he’d be stocking this beverage in his pub anytime soon, but he said, “A fine vintage. Cheers.” He took another sip.

***

He and the woman Hong were naked and stood waist deep in the sea. It was high tide, and it was perpetual dusk, the bloody fleeces of clouds strewn upon a sky like magma.

The horizon was punctuated by a number of silhouetted metal ships—or the resonance of ships that had occupied those spots eons ago, or would occupy those spots in some far future epoch—in this realm where Gorch sensed steel was as transient as shadow. Hordes of dragonflies dangled above their heads, their wings a chorus of low humming.

His left arm lay limp at his side, submerged to the elbow in the lapping water. Hong held his right hand in both of hers, to her breast. Gorch felt her brown nipples pressing erect against his forearm. She was smiling up at his face, but he was looking down at the water, if it was water. It was yellowish, a color like piss, with a tang that was sour and rotten. Not so much polluted as venomous.

A whispery touch brushed repeatedly against his submerged left hand, along with the subtlest tugging, which might only be the movement of the yellow fluid itself. Gorch was reminded of the Dai Nam Van Hien amusement park, when he had taken one of his new bargirls there as a prelude to seduction. For a fee, the park’s visitors could slip their bare feet into tubs in which fish would gently nibble away dead skin. He had tried it, though his date had been too squeamish. It had felt like this… an almost nonexistent sensation, unnerving all the same.

Hong squeezed his right hand tighter, and he raised his eyes to her slowly, as if he’d been stunned by a blow in the ring. She said, “That fat man has brought pain and drawn blood, but your hands have taken life. I can feel it.”