Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [27]
Randal CLACKED! the bat again. “Take your crazy ass out of here! Otherwise I call the cops after I joggle that piss sponge you’ve got for a brain!”
“Fucker,” the voice rattled back; then he hitched and released a trumpet blast of colonic gas.
“Aw, Jesus! You’re a fuckin’ animal! How can somebody homeless weigh that much? You shoplift five thousand calories a day?”
Hudson’s eyes teared from the sudden waft.
“You’re a fucker!” the man warbled back.
Randal waved the bat. “I’m killin’ ya if you don’t GET OUT!”
The huge man shimmied in place, then leaned over, stuck his fingers down his throat, and—
“No! Don’t!”
—burped up what had to be a gallon of vomit. It hit the floor like a bucket of barley and vegetable soup.
“Holy shit!” Randal came around the counter with the bat, but Hudson grabbed him.
“Just let him go, man. He’s messed up, he can’t help it.”
Randal fumed, but by now the man had already wobbled out of the store. He looked at the splatter of vomit on the floor and nearly keeled over.
“Yeah, he can’t help it—shit.”
“It’s called compassion, man,” Hudson said, gagging at the smell. “You really have a lot of ill will inside, Randal. He can’t help the way he is.”
Randal wailed. “He just puked Niagara Falls on my floor!”
“Compassion, Randal. Compassion.”
“Fine, smart guy. Ready to walk it like you talk it?”
“How’s that?”
“Now you can have some compassion for me.” Randal threw Hudson a mop. “And help me clean this up.”
Hudson laughed and said, “Sure.”
(IV)
That night Hudson was heckled by a stew of awful dreams. He heard a wind that sounded like screams. Words seemed to fly in the air as if abstract birds: “DON’T BE A CRUMMY PERSON!” and “I AM BY A VENT WITH A BONE,” and “WALKS IN HERE WITH A BELLYFUL OF WHITE TRASH AND RIPS ME OFF?” and “I’M HERE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU’VE WON THE SENARY.”
He dreamed, first, of being body-rubbed by GAG and DO ME, both naked, of course, but just as the duo prepared to fellate him, they began to cackle like witches. Hudson’s eyes sprang open to see they now both had vampire fangs. Next, the dream showed him a Polanski-like tracking shot which soared about the nighted town amid an aural muttering that could only be described as black, and suddenly the point of view soared down onto a drab sidewalk and a fence and a trashily dressed woman climbing over that fence with a shovel in her hand, and as she did so she spat! in disgust, and now that Polanski dream-camera moves off; it’s picking up speed as it absurdly changes tenses; it seems to swerve, then dive, and caroms off to a strange smoking street tinted in weird light, which then opens to a football stadium–sized clearing sitting in the middle of a city crammed with leaning decrepit buildings, and this clearing is surrounded by a wall of pale white bricks the size of houses, and within this wall stands a drab statue hundreds of feet high, the largest statue Hudson has ever seen, and then the “camera” zooms in on the statue’s face, which looks like a great grimacing mask of mud, after which a squeaking noise is heard and visible however tinily along the top of the wall is a young man in a wheelchair and then—ZAP!—the point of view explodes to another grim and impossible place where hunched and vaguely unhuman workmen labor in silence as they build a house but very soon it becomes discernible that the workmen aren’t using bricks to build the house, they’re using human heads, and then, next, the camera shoots upward, rocketlike, and only plunges after an exceedingly long period until it fires through a stained-glass window and stops in the chancel of a church where six horned demons that look like skeletons covered with raw chicken skin cavort within a circle of brown ashes and stinking candles. A woman lies naked on the floor, her arms and legs lashed wide. One demon studies a scroll of yellowed paper while the other five amuse themselves by fondling the squirming woman. A lipless mouthful of pus sucks at the fur-rimmed flesh between the woman’s legs, two more sloppily suckle her bosom.