The vehicle, a preposterously bloated and overappointed quad cab pickup—smokestacks, duallies, lights on the roll bar, Confederate-flag decal on the bumper—was parked nose-in at the lip of a flooded quarry. Its isolation was ideal, as was the distracted state of its occupants: a man and a woman in full passionate flagrante, enjoying each other as much as I was about to enjoy them. For a time, I merely watched. My gaze was not carnal; rather, I observed with the curiosity of the scientist. Why this crummy place to do the deed? Why the awkward confines of a pickup (the man was practically crushing his beloved against the dashboard) to unleash their animal splendor? Surely there were enough beds in the world to go around. They were not young, far from it—he bald and rather portly, she scrawny and loose-skinned, the two of them a spectacle of aging flesh. What about this place had called out to them? Was it nostalgia? Had they come here when they were young? Was I witnessing a reenacted glory of youth? Then it came to me. They were married. They just weren’t married to each other.
I took the woman first. Astride her companion on the wide bench seat, so wildly was she pumping upon his anatomy—fists gripping the headrest, skirt bunched around her waist and underpants swinging from a bony ankle, her face angled toward the ceiling like a supplicant—that as I yanked open the door she seemed more irritated than alarmed, as if I had interrupted her in the midst of a particularly important train of thought. This, of course, did not last long, no more than a couple of seconds. It is an interesting truth that the human body, liberated from its head, is in essence a bag of blood with a built-in straw. Holding her headless torso upright, I positioned my mouth around this jetting orifice and gave it a long, muscular suck. I wasn’t expecting anything much. It seemed likely that her small-town diet, rich in preservatives, would give her blood a chemical taste. But this turned out not to be the case. The woman was, in fact, delicious. Her blood was a veritable bouquet of complex flavors, like a well-aged wine.
Two more robust sucks and I cast her aside. By this time her associate, pants puddled around his ankles, gleaming penis in rapid deflation, had gathered the wherewithal to shimmy toward the driver’s side of the cab, where he was frantically attempting to isolate the truck’s key from a ring of them. The ring was enormous. It was positively janitorial. Fingers trembling, he jammed one key into the slot and then another, all to no avail, muttering a chain of “oh God”s and “holy fuck”s that were only a lightly retooled rendition of the ecstatic sounds and filthy encouragements he’d been breathing into his companion’s ear mere seconds ago.
The comedy was exquisite. Speaking frankly, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Which was my grand mistake. Had I killed him more quickly, not pausing to savor this risible display, the world we know would be a different place. As it was, my delay gave him time to locate the correct key, shove it into the ignition, turn the engine over, and reach for the gearshift before I shot into the cab, grabbed his head, tipped it to the side, and crushed his windpipe under my jaws with a gristly crunch. So enraptured was I with the bloody feast of my hapless victim that I failed to notice what was happening—that he had put the truck in gear.
Our species’ aversion to water is well known; water is death to us. We sink like stones, our bodies lacking the buoyancy of adipose tissue. Of my plunge into the quarry I possess only a fractured recollection. The truck’s slow progress to the lip of the abyss; the snatch of gravity and the inevitable plunge; water all around me, a cocoon of cold death, engulfing my eyes and nose and lungs. From small mistakes come great catastrophes; invincible in most other aspects, I had found the quickest way to die. As the truck touched down with a soft thump upon the quarry’s watery floor, I extricated myself from the cab and began to crawl along the bottom. Even in my panicked state, the irony was not lost on me. Subject Zero, World Destroyer, scuttling like a crab! My only hope was to feel my way to the edge of the pit and scale my way to freedom. Time was my enemy; I had but one bottled breath with which to save myself. A wall of rock met my desperate grasp; I began to climb. Hand over hand I made my ascent. My vision swirled with darkness, the end was closing in …
How I came in due course to find myself on hands and knees—pink-fleshed, inarguably human-looking hands and knees—whilst gagging out great volumes of boggy vomitus is a question I shall leave to the theologians. For die I surely did; the body remembers these things. Having freed myself from the quarry’s waters, I had yet succumbed and for some period of time lain as a drowned corpse upon the rocks, only to be shot back into existence.
Death’s doorway, it seemed, was not marked EXIT ONLY after all.
The last of the quarry’s waters expelled, I managed, in a state of dazed astonishment, to rise. Where was I? When was I? What was I? Such was my disorientation that it seemed that I might have dreamed it all—then, conversely, that I was dreaming this. I held up a hand before the moon. It was, in every visible aspect, the hand of a human being—the hand of Timothy Fanning, holder of the Eloise Armstrong Chair, et cetera. I looked down upon the rest of me; with tremulous digits I probed my face, my chest and stomach, my pale legs; naked by moonlight, I investigated each feature of my physical person like a blind man reading braille.
I’ll be goddamned, I thought.