The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [56]
“Not exactly. Come, everyone, I’ll show you.”
The three followed JJ to his special storeroom, the size of a walk-in closet, which contained an assortment of boxes stacked raggedly to the ceiling: Payless shoe boxes, Roi-Tan cigar boxes, Lucky Charms cereal boxes, perhaps fifty in all, most of them spray-painted and covered with magic marker hieroglyphs.
“Are you a shoe salesman?” Samira asked.
JJ laughed, a high-pitched yodel. “These boxes aren’t filled with shoes. Or cereal or cigars, for that matter. They’re special kits. Filled with … well, special things. This one’s called Top Dog. Canine steroids—you know, for frisbee championships? This one’s for nervous dogs: Doggie Paxil and K-9 Quaaludes. This one’s an appetite suppressant for dogs, this one contains a dog whistle and transponder so humans can hear it, this one contains funeral eye caps and hypno-coins, this one post-divorce pills, this one placebo Viagra …”
Samira laughed, then quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “What’s in this one, with the skull and crossbones?”
“Anthrax. Re-engineered. The bacterium’s been disabled to make it harmless, except to certain cancer cells. And this one contains black hellebore, or Christmas rose, also a poison.”
“But …why do you have poisons?”
“I got a deal off the Internet for the whole lot. E-bay. Roaming the Net is my hobby. I’m an internaut.”
“And that one?” Samira pointed higher up, to a pea-green box with saffron stars.
“Which one? Oh, that’s The Wedge. You got your wedge, your foam, your fill bottle, gloves, temp strip, hose clamp, swab.”
“But what is it?”
JJ took the box down, opened it up. “Well … I’m a bit embarrassed to say in female company.”
“Don’t be.”
“You place the wedge between your butt cheeks. I can demonstrate if you like.”
Samira paused, finding the image in her head rather alarming. “Not … necessary. But what’s it for?”
“It’s a pass-the-piss-test,” said Norval, by the entrance, still turning one of the bongs over in his hands.
“Exactly,” said JJ. “It allows you to pass someone else’s water—clean and at the correct temperature. Here’s another one, the Whizzinator 3000, which is synthetic. Comes with a very realistic prosthetic virile member, in lifelike skin tones—black, brown, Latino, tan, white. Uses only the best synthetic urine on the market. No batteries, no wires, no metal to set off alarms. It comes with organic heat pads to maintain body temperature.”
Samira nodded. “You sell them to athletes, I imagine?”
“Yeah, in fact a Canadian athlete who’s now in Salt Lake City bought three. A biathlete by the name of … but wait, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this! It’s also for anyone who might have trouble passing an employer’s test.”
“Right.” Samira lifted the lid of an electric-blue box at eye-level. “And this one is …?”
“A scrotal infusion kit.”
“I’m not sure I want to know more.”
“You got your wax, your catheter, saline solution, intravenous bag. Everything you need. Well, not you.”
“Need for what?”
“Scrotal inflation. You dip your scrotum in hot wax several times to relax it, inject a catheter into both sides of the testicles and fill them with a dripping saline solution from an intravenous bag. You can go up to two litres if you want. That’ll give you three days of monster balls—expanding anywhere from fifteen to twenty-two inches in circumference—before the solution is absorbed into the system and things get back to normal. It’s perfectly safe.”
“But … why?”
“Some gentlemen like the warm heavy feeling when they’re all puffed up. And deflation is good too, because there’s a constant tugging on the scrotum. So they say—I’ve never tried it. Plus it looks hot, it looks awesome.”
“What’s this sack of powder for?” asked Norval, from a kneeling position, his nose stuck in the bag as if he were about to snort it.
“Just add water and stir. Got that from a lab in Delaware. It’s listed on my website. Very popular among university students.”
“You smoke it or snort it?”
“Neither. It’s fake excrement.