Vitax® Excerpt
Vitax®
Spike Thorn looked at his reflection in the shop windows as they passed by, and felt rather proud of his invention. The trunk sat on the rear seat of his tandem bike, its legs pedaling like a wind-up toy soldier. He had fixed the OBEY neuro-electronic interface just above its guts, glued it all together with hardened synthetic jellyfish jelly, and screwed it to the saddle. He could have taken the guts out, but he’d read that the legs would last longer with the guts left in place, as long as you poured VITAX regularly into the trunk, so that’s what he did. Spike stopped at the gas station and leaned his bike against the window pane.
“Three gallons of VITAX please, he asked the Beta girl, without lifting his gaze from her breast, which was trying to pop out of her white blouse.
“O2 or DO2?” asked the Beta girl.
Since Spike made no sign of understanding, she said:
“Normal or double oxygenated?”
“Double, then.”
“Sweet or regular?”
“Well, I don’t drink it, you know.”
“Well, perhaps you should, your wife would surely like you to.”
He blushed slightly and said, “I’m afraid she wouldn’t.”
“The extra glucose makes them go faster, but they wear out quicker.” She smiled a bit mockingly, and looking at the bike, added, “It’s a clever thing you got there, never saw something like that before, sir.”
“Regular then,” he said.
Spike headed to the Southern Bridge at the end of town, where the houses became sparse, green things started to grow, and the tram ended. He wanted to ride back home on the other side of the river, where all the bars and night clubs were. Or maybe he didn’t want to ride home at all, because of Regina. She was certain to scream at him again, to find a reason to let her frustration erupt and have a go at him, like almost every night of every month these last few years. He wondered what reason it’d be this time, the socks left behind the bed, his underwear she didn’t want to touch, whatever, you name it. Spike figured that on the day of his burial, she would tread on his coffin in a danse macabre and bore holes in its lid with her high heels, commanding him, as per routine, to wake up in his last sleep, so she could pester him and say that he should at least have brought the garbage down before dying, that she might be a woman and unemployed, but she was not a cleaning lady and by no mean HIS cleaning lady, and though he’d probably love it, she was certainly no Beta.
This is why Spike had stipulated that his coffin have a two-inch-thick wooden lid. It was in the testament she’d made him write the very night of their marriage, to secure her inheritance. On the side of the road, some neighborhood kids were gathered and as Spike passed by, they started shouting, like dogs barking at strangers. One of them even spat at him – it must have been the bike! They had never seen anything like it, and kids are very conservative, like their parents. A rock flew past him, and he heard a kid shout, “Faggot!”
He was about to stop and catch the bastard and file an official complaint about the rock and the insult. That would certainly do him, as he was Beta and a complaint of that magnitude would pull the rating of the most well-behaved Beta down to the level of a Gamma. This one was certainly not a well-behaved Beta by the look of him, with his left shoe missing and his had-been-white shirt hanging down to his knees like a dressing gown.
As a Gamma, he would end up as parts at Gamma & More Supermarket, or at worst at Joe’s Deli, the butcher’s. The best he could hope for was LPD: the Living Parts Department, dipped in VITAX. That’s where youngsters ended up, because the muscles are still good, and Spike would make sure to buy the kid’s very legs to push the pedals of this very tandem bike he was riding. Spike smirked at the idea and felt that his mouth had shaped into a sadistic rictus. Maybe it was worth stopping after all. He pressed the brakes down to the handle bars tightly, as if strangling the boy’s throat, thinking “that miserable little scumbag, ready to execute society’s innate antibody program: Destruction of Foreign Matter.”
Then he heard her voice. It was a scream that seemed to tear apart the red sky of this quiet summer twilight, because it started to rain that instant, and the drops looked like blood. It was the desperate scream of a mother fearing to lose her son. Spike caught her imploring look, as she stood by the doorway of the hut with another devil by her side. He looked away and rode on.
When he got home, she wasn’t there. Oh boy, what a relief! He didn’t turn the light on. He opened the scuttle to let the breeze in, sat in the green leather chair, undid the wooden wheels, rocked the backrest backwards, put his feet up, locked the wheels again and sighed. That felt good. A train rumbled by and Spike thought about it passing by and why and how. He felt like a detective trying to find out how, who, when and why someone wanted to murder him, until finally he would get murdered. A train screamed in the night.
Love! What an archaic feeling, an immature Weltanschauung, a disease. What people had now was hatred. The only thing that gets things done! He remembered the slogan. He’d always known that he was sick, and that he’d never gotten over his sickness. It started in kindergarten, when they were supposed to run with the lance and perforate the stomachs of Gamma kids tied up against a cast-iron grid on the other side of the schoolyard, screaming their guts out in German: Ich bin ein Siiiiieeeeee….ger!* with all the kids of the school watching, their noses squashed against the windows, from the top floor down to the ground.
He remembered it. He was about six, and the poor Gamma kid with the black curly hair must have been a year younger, and had tears in his dark eyes because the game scared him. Spike also had tears in his eyes but they weren’t the same brand, because he knew that it was no game. Oh, how much more he would have liked to kiss and hug that poor little guy instead of piercing his belly with a lance, because Spike knew the kid was going to die.
Spike could not shout: Ich bin ein Sieger!* in German or in any other language because he had a hard bar in his throat preventing him, just like he did now. Spike did not scream but the gym teacher did not notice, because the others were so loud. All the same, little Spike ran and punctured that boy’s guts, because he had to. He cried about it for a long time afterwards, just like now, as he remembered that prayer they had to hum:
“Oh Lord, give me the strength to be cruel so I can do the difficult but necessary things…” The green light of The Footman’s Friend sign was blinking softly through a vent, but then the key turned in the lock, the door flew open and its raw light blinded him. Regina must have come in. “How many times have I told you not to sit like that in the dark? You scare me. That’s just what you want, isn’t it?”
What he wanted was to stand up and shout at her, he thought, and he felt no bar in his throat then. But he reconsidered. There was nothing to shout. If he responded, she’d go on endlessly about what he didn’t do, what he should do, what he would never do. So, making an effort to control himself and assuage his anger, he said calmly that he had left the light off because he liked it that way and that it had nothing to do with her. This is when she started roaring.
“Nothing to do with me? Nothing to do with me…eeeeeee? Nothing ever has anything to do with me, that’s precisely it. You’re antisocial, you’re autistic… And don’t you talk to me in that teenager voice. Go and live by yourself if nothing has anything to do with me…” And there it was again. Like a wet dog after a swim, Regina’s body started shaking off the noradrenalin that, because of her eternally bad temper, filled her throat and every pore of her skin. Her teeth bit the air and her eyes killed all the shadows of her past she could not dislodge. Live by himself? He was not going to move into the garage again…even if, like last summer, she tossed bags of food to him through the window. He’d hated the sound they made when they smashed on the ground, and how she watched him through the window to make sure he picked them up. Plus, they had a car now, the Sourdine Model 2040.
“And that ‘bike’ of yours – I’m going to get rid of it for you. It stinks and it’s ugly. Why don’t you change the bulb in the dining room instead of fooling around with ‘inventions?’ And at your age. You sick man. How many times do I have to tell you that?” Of course, the Gamma legs did not stink because they were jellified with that synthesized jellyfish jelly and they looked good too, brawny and brown. He stood up, outraged. He felt like exploding into parts, as a tank hit by a grenade would, so all his body parts would perforate the walls and escape into the free night, drifting away like meteorites towards the great vacuum of freedom.
He walked up to her. He felt like crushing her, like hooking his fingers between hers, pulling her arms down and bending her hands backwards, to push her against the wall and bash her possessed head with his forehead, asking, ‘Knock! Knock! Who’s there?’” But he only took her hands, suddenly remembering that time he woke up in the middle of the night and some creatures, trolls maybe, were sitting by the bed talking to her, to her alone. And he had kept his eyes wide open to stare at them, immobile, but they didn’t even bother with him, and then he’d fallen back to sleep.
No, he would no longer ask, ‘Who’s there?’ He would simply bore himself into her brain, intermeshing his cheeks and nose with her bulbs and lobes, licking his way through that salty encephalic fluid that kept alive such distorted eyes, right to the devil dwelling in there. He would at last know which of those three troll/demons had gotten into her soul that night to throw kindling on the hearth that made his life hell. He would smash them, strangle them, squeeze them like slugs and finally crush them against the rough wall, leaving a long reddish trail, stigmata of their once-living flesh.
His hands were shaking in a tetanized grip around hers and for the first time, there was fear in her eyes. But Spike didn’t see it. Instead, he imploded, sank down between his shoulders and…obeyed. As usual. It was better that way. He swallowed his sorrow. He’d get something for that, something back, it had to be: the reward for being a good boy, and that’s something, by gosh! It filled his eyes with tears that no one saw.
She was strong and unfair, and it was precisely because she was unfair that she had to be right. Drowning in his internal tears, he swam his way through to the broom closet behind the staircase, for his ladder-to-nowhere. He changed the light bulb, quelled, the same as back in kindergarten days when Mother had told him off so badly when he’d darted Dad’s golden fountain pen into the parquet floor. That night, as so many nights before, they slept like the two strangers they had become. Regina had never taken her clothes off for him, just as she never taken his name. Maybe this is why he still desired her, and secretly hung at the tip of her moods, a beaten dog. He did have a black and white photograph showing her naked, that had fallen out of a book, but the surface was so fragmented that it looked as if her body were covered with scars, morcellated, a living puzzle. One he still wanted to complete.
When love is dying, you can’t resuscitate it. He’d have to do without it. He was tired of feeding a love that didn’t want to live, a love in intensive care with oxygen masks, feeding tubes and catheters, a love that didn’t want to grow, that had stayed in the incubator for 20 years with no intention of leaving it. And he was tired of enduring the visits of her family on the week-ends. Suddenly he was for natural selection, for knocking the lid off while the nurse wasn’t watching, unplugging the tubes, chucking the fetus into the bin and running. Leave the hospital to one-legged souls, cripples who would gather their forces and hope to walk finally, like one’s own man. No, that method would be too noisy, too conspicuous. Better to just unplug the machine while she was asleep and leave a note saying “I left,” and then leave. But then, she was no longer a fetus. She was a corpse.
He’d do without love, like he always did, back to square one, like it had always been, like he should have left it after his mother died. And this time, he wouldn’t rise to the bait for it. He would be strong. He would never love, never love again. He’d let himself be loved by some poor creature, perhaps, who still believed in love like he used to, and let her crash at the window pane of his frozen eyes that watched the new “Siegers” win, for ever and ever, till she’d leave some morning with a note saying: “I left.” He would go back to Rothenbach. He had never resigned his lease, nor did he ever go there, not even to clean out the spiderwebs. He only went there in his dreams, on the little train, to visit the room…which was locked. Rothenbach was his past and you don’t resign from that. He continued to pay the rent though, and it was low.
Spike started thinking of the girl at the VITAX station, how it would be so nice to rest on her warm breast, caressed by her hair and cradled by the beat of her heart just below. He couldn’t sleep, so he got out of bed. He was not going to leave a note.
The walls of the restaurant were covered with sepia photos of great writers and actors. The man at the next table was talking at him. “How can a writer have a plan of what he’s gonna write? Writing is like gambling with bits of your life.” The lighting was gloomy, but the bulbs managed to blind Spike when he raised his head to signal the waiter, who came in a twinkle. “A pint of VITAX, please!” he said. And the waiter looked at him with wide turquoise eyes borrowed from some great reptile. “I’m afraid we don’t serve that, sir.”