("Fex Falls," was co-written by Davis Schneiderman and Carlos Hernandez from our novella Abecedarium.
We each sat down at a computer and composed. Then, we switched seats and edited/overwrote the other's work, adding several pages in the process. We repeated this process several times, and were thus encouraged to lose ourselves in the work so that a third mind that moves between us could develop. That third mind is "Fex." Another Fex story, "Fex During the Occupation of France," was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize.)
Across the azure hills there is an eerie stillness, millennia of silt cast in the stems of broken brown bottles, used and abandoned propane tanks rotting in their own empty plenums. Fex pulls his entourage into the main district at 23:00 hours, tired from continually staring at the rhythms of native hands pounding synthetic flesh stretched tight-even in Africa, fake is cheaper than real now: a pack of loping gazelles caught in mid-air by the silent approach of tension, prey, people.
"We'll camp by that bluff, that . . . embankment," and, when Fex sees no one knows what the hell he's talking about, "that convenient jut of solid earth shooting over the cliff edge, Goddamnit. Load your dart guns with stun juice, your harpoon with their charges, and set your tasers to kill. Time to break the beast below us, over us, all around."
The Gang of Seven, Fex's group of subversive hangers-on, consists, beyond himself, of only one other recognizable face, that of Gact, still mourning the death of her father Tacg, and traipsing with wooden smile and scuttled disposition into a midnight beyond her wildest visions. The market square bustles with the rules of the second murder in as many days, an amorous game between the unlucky ambassador of an unspecified countryside, Rico McNutt, and a peyote dealer whose tricks include the sublimation of undesirable elements. From water into vapor and authority into sex, the dealer's body hangs from the guardrail of the nearest façade, a pharmacy and Savings and Loan stuck somewhere in the 1980s.
God, we've got work to do, murmurs Fex. The sweat from his brow has emerged from the pores of his ancient pate into little sweat-bead colonies.
Then, like the procession at Rico McNutt's funeral the day before, the wild dogs arrive. The lore is that the wild dogs are an abomination so absolute they must be myth, capable of killing humans of course, but also engaging in such dainty and civilized practices as ritual cannibalism, and, whenever possible, subjecting their prey to a lingering brutal death. Fex and Gact represent themselves here now, unofficially; McNutt is so far gone that no one wants to take ownership. "One misguided hunter," states Fex unequivocally, "can bring down an entire administration, centuries of ugly sweat."
Strapped to the front end of their electromagnetic jeep is the Divining Maidenhead, a.k.a. the corpse of McNutt; it picks through the dusty gray tangle of hyena, lion, springhare, and francolin tracks to point out the paw prints of wild dogs. Each paw is gremlin small. The mosquitoes attack the already rotting corpse; they buzz in a halo around the tufts of jet black hair, the diamond tennis bracelet and jewel-encrusted empire scabbard on McNutt's person, the Order of Merit pins shellacked by the incessant equatorial sun from randy gold to burnished brown. Stopping for a lunch of kidney bean paste and under-blended foix-groix, Fex and Gact make a machete from one of McNutt's femurs to first cut their daily bread into perfectly halved loaves.
Caviar was issued to soldiers as a daily ration during the Crimean war; many preferred chicken eggs to sturgeon eggs and posted letters to the autogyro complaining that their intestinal track sounded out of turn from the "black fish jam." Faced with exorbitant costs and a administration increasingly divorced from the reality of the colonies, Fex has obtained a patent for "synthetic granular caviar," derived from petro-chemicals. The mixture gets its characteristic dark grey color from a superb solution of ferric lactate.
"Never touch the stuff myself," says Fex, engaged in an innocent ogle of Gact's Hayflick cleavage; for in the oppressive conditions in which they work, the sun imparts a strange genetic sight. "My dear, it's just us now what with McNutt and all, and I'm afraid you don't have very long left. . . ." Dogs blanket the highlands with their cry.
"Fucking too much of the crybaby Nordic in you, Fex," she says, casting a few sidelong looks at the bulge behind his zipper. She saw him earlier that day, before the others were up, carefully raising McNutt's chin with one fey index finger, an entire cast of disgusted muscles organizing his face into its superior frown, and slowly, disapprovingly, down went his eyes to McNutt's "mcnuts." She couldn't know what McNutt's safari shorts held there, but until Fex had a peek there would always be implied jealousy, and now he couldn't look, because he was looking at Gact looking at him.
The rupture of moving images and the peremptory manliness reinforcing my power base splices an amniotic resin across the vectors of elongated homologies-where there's fire there's the expectation that smoke correlates with the situation and not with the intention. Observing a protocol no longer relevant in the river, ankle deep in a clear spring of crystal shale, a babbling brook, it's easy to let guilt wash away a common descent. McNutt and Fex may have once dueled over the remnants of an elephant carcass back in Marrakech, and Gact's tight little thyroid might make a lesser man's belt loosen, but Fex sees the difference in the rock beneath his latex-layered toes, the flatbed of rock cut with glacial knife swatches, guppies and tiny river snakes breeding their loose plans for a rote evolution into patterns, the tapestries of clear, watery bile. Though, given the chance, he would tie Gact to a bed post and eat her senseless.
"Is it safe to go without shoes . . . ?" offers the tenuous Gact, kicking her shit-kickers into a soft splash puddle. "It's clear that a hierarchy is operating here too. You can't help but notice how quiet and cooperative the dogs, in not attacking us, seem to be."
"Common ancestors," explains Fex, candid with his dangling toes, "the most one dog can stuff down in a feeding is about ten pounds of meat, but the average kill, like old McNutt here, checks in at about a buck seventy-five. That's a lot of excess signification. When I was his age, shit, it must have been during the height of the Boer war, I learned that food for one can be food for a crowd. And vice versa of course." Inside a sweat bubble, the dark ages smother the concave surface of a microbe hagiography. "But the maintenance of genetic diversity requires that we swap stock on occasion with the natives, much like a zoo." He gives Gact a look between understanding and compassion, but she shivers, and her pubic hair recoils demurely as the living river engulfs her kneecaps.
Together they wade toward the site of the supposed rendezvous points, the river twisting like the Army Corps of Engineers' worst nightmare, muffling along in perpetual meanders and fault lines. The brush attaches itself to the rock-face like barnacles on the side of a scuttled tugboat, and the fresh air, at first overwhelming, overwhelms even the telltale stench of what once was Rico McNutt. Here, in the thick of the mighty river, with Gact's uneven sense of self guiding the floating coffin cart behind her, the real work is done by Fex, ageless in a skin-tight dive suit, pressurized against the elements by an aqualung. The dog pack, trapped high above the cliff walls, brays itself into orgasms.
Mechanical devices exteriorize the processes of the human organism. Fex stops at a flat rock floating inches above the rushing turbine of water; he removes a razor. "We'll need to cut his scalp and singe it with red hot irons. Don't worry . . . " Gact's expression betrays a nervous culpability in the proceedings of the old man, "I've brought them in my travel pouch. We fill his nose with sneezing powder like so . . . " But Fex loses the funnel in the water and it's instantly carried away, towards some distant basin or other. "Fuck me!" There it is, the prism of the planet's geological heritage under the space-age polymer funnel, obsidian shults in sienna stone, memories of Panthalassa, the 1894 denning season in Okavango, rich with impala strips choking anxious pups. He stuffs the powder into McNutt's nasal track with his fingers, slime-covered but seasoned, stony but bountiful. "Gact, pick up that soldering iron . . . good. We've got to blanket him with hot plasters which we will then rip off before we prepare the corpse with a series of bleedings, trepannings, repeated doses of purgatives, cathartics, and rock-shivering enemas in a last ditch effort to scour his insides clean as a whistle. This won't work without the old college try. And yes," Fex thrusts his tongue into the air, "there's plenty of extra wine enema."
After these rather ghastly preparations, the conjunction of appositives and double negatives that equally generate a sickness in Gact for the act but a respect toward the actor-the trio, one dead, two living, slosh down the sloe-gin rapids fizzing ever deeper. The walls of their little valley growing exponentially higher until they all but block out the sun, like Manahatta skyscrapers predating the Iroquois nation. The preparations are set, and Fex states that they're getting closer, that the waterfall in no more than a half mile away, that the revelation of nucleic acid size in reference to proteins is little more than modified history, and that the pack of wild dogs engaging in open-mouth wrestling celebrations certainly helps to strengthen social relations, but may also contribute to the rapid spread of disease. Gact remembers the last words of the dying McNutt: Savor all that is sublime in the natural elements. He shouldn't have aimed so high: a simple "Love one another," would have been at least clichédly palatable. For a suspended nanosecond on the breath of a bottomless gorge, in the darkest corners of a dark world, Gact escapes her past with a surrender to the tenuous equilibrium of nature and synthetic enema, before the final break with her pneuma overtakes the floodplain.
As if on cue, Fex allows a smile to roll across the antipodes of his Scylla and Charybdis cheekbones, the curve of a royal nose ripe with millions of vital capillaries. The dogs splash a half-mile behind them, floating down on invisible wires, muted on the strings of a celestial, orgiastic Deus ex Machina. Covering in minutes what took Fex and Gact, burdened with the senseless humanity of McNutt, several hours, the dog pack hunts them in eerie silence. "They're hunting us," Gact suddenly notices, her voice leaking too much air.
There is a single sharp bark, and Gact, almost canine herself now but ashamed of her bestiality, covers her mouth with a shaking hand. The dogs instantly jump their pace up to a full run in the water, moving like hydrofoils over the layers of ancient rock and silt. On the flat ground, they are capable of pursuing their pray at twenty-five miles per hour, with bursts of up to thirty-five, but here, with the humans a captive audience to their approach, they band together for support over the floom of dirt and mud characterizing the deeper river and the deadly heart. Fex and Gact move as quick as they can to the waterfall, sounding around the next bend in the natural concourse, moving into what must be, Fex thinks, a natural amphitheater the size of forty whale bellies.
"Now. We've got to make it the exchange point. If not for McNutt, then for ourselves." Gact kicks the levitating coffin cart, and McNutt moves forward like a raft in the deepest ocean, careening in seeming randomness, but linked to a macro agenda visible only by satellite. Startled by the machine, Gact trips on something under the surface, and splashes arms fist first into the solid gray clay. She screams as a limb implodes, the fragile balance of bone and body cut wonderfully by an electrostatic pulse that takes full and permanent possession of her spine. The dogs are a mass, a moving image of collective action opposed by their very existence to all things Fex, all memories of McNutt.
The water level pushes up in a torrent, covering Fex's head for endless seconds. Reaching for Gact's body, his feet slip from a plateau several inches under current to the inner reaches of a deep pool, water black, moving only on the surface. Creatures that might be found in Marianas collect and collide around his ankles, and the wetsuit pressurizes his body into a practiced tension. His sphincter muscles tighten; shit threatens evacuation. Regaining his composure, Fex bumps into an underwater ledge and pushes himself up a few inches. His neck is submerged, but at least there is bottom. Gact is lost in her own silhouette, and though he dares not spin around, Fex knows the waterfall is close; too close. There is a breach. The dog pack, seemingly immune to the depth, swell into a tarnished green mass, a sylvan organ of the natural world. McNutt's ear and Gact's venomous nose, like atoms of different types held together by more than one bond, protrude from the snarling jaws of the dog pack menace, now a wavy, dyspeptic Chinese dragon, changing the colonial dynamic of the oppressor state, mutilating the expectations of the administration with a devil's bargain.
Half water, half dog-element, the dragon undulates into a field of liquid phragmites, the feathery seeds of a distant Serengeti backlit by the contrast of a counter-sun. Fex finds another ledge and plods off toward the rushing water from the sky, the river spinning and snapping but continuing its vain hindrances until he's finally out of it.
Fex, free of water and the immediate threat of the dog-pack, washes his scent into the soil, erodes it into the receding ecosystem. Spying the headless corpse of the preserved McNutt, and passing it before the onslaught of tooth and scale, he knows he'll always survive. Sounds of suction, of the dragon dog descending on the bodies of the dead and dying assail his ears, brilliant with cochlea, coiled in a suppurated wash. A feeling of peaceful awe forces the old man's smile and he turns the final corner, the endless bend, the routine rupture that hides the final breach, the perpetual break. True, his bodies are delimited, and perhaps this is the end of Empire, but Fex is reified in his own flesh, his secret genes jubilant at the thought of encountering the precious flow of divine nectar.
With one foot between worlds, and a second lost in the ether, Fex, with the sweetest voice ever heard, the most aromatic cover for the dead, faces his primeval target. Lilies and baby shit. Wisteria and afterbirth.
Somebody's been here before him, at the falls. It grows less and less magical, less like an impossibility and more like something somebody told him at the Peregrination Club that was supposed to be life-shattering and amazing and really you must see for yourself. But, once there, no matter what, language positively forces one to say: "So this is what McCoy was making all that fuss about?" A set of footprints and a swath of earth, with the slope here almost as flat as a slide, torturing its way toward the cataract. Well, might as well follow.
And what will he tell his business partners? The truth might do, but it earns him nothing save avoiding unpleasantness. It must be them. Or some jungle boggart who knows just which veins to press close, which ones to fill with air.
But it's only Gact and McNutt, what's left of him, which, precisely, is one human head and one half of a human neck. Gact, shoes off, bloody and bitten (but what she must have done to those dogs!) turns and says: "Forgot to leave you my eggs. You know, eugenics and all that." With that, Gact de-pantses herself, drops into the whorling mini-maelstrom of the basin, and unloads in the water about two years worth of ovarian she-eggs. "Good enough for frogs, good enough for me," says Gact before she sinks in the water and doesn't come up.
"Good show old girl," says Fex, removing a telescoping butterfly net from his safari vest and scooping up the geneballs.
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© 2009 Word Riot
