Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set) Read online

  “Seriously? How did you come across that?” Nelly placed her hand across her stomach. She looked down and smiled at her fetus illuminated by the C-Baby lotion. She burped and the baby moved.

  He laughed, “You know I can’t tell you that. Hold on a sec, okay?”

  She looked at the door of the stall as it rattled. Someone had been jiggling the handle for the last five minutes in a passive aggressive attempt to suggest that Nelly’s time on the throne had ended.

  As she waited for Carloza to return, Nelly reread the quote scrawled in mascara across the backside of the door:

  Many a subtle philosopher has failed to solve himself, owing to his inability to discern his beginning and his end.

  “Sorry about that,” Carloza said, his voice appearing in Nelly’s ear.

  “Who was it?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Hey, are you going to be in there all night?” a voice yelled from outside the stall. The door rattled again. Nelly looked down and noticed a pair of shimmering six-inch high heels covered in red spikes.

  “Find another stall, bitch,” Nelly whispered in English.

  “What was that?” Carloza laughed. “Are you speaking English my love? Where are you?”

  “Restroom.”

  “Really? You out tonight?”

  “Can’t you hear the music?” she asked.

  “I thought you were listening to music in your aeros…”

  “How could I be in my aeros without Noah? He’s my driver,” Nelly said. The irate woman shook the door handle again.

  “Good point.”

  “Meet anybody?”

  “Hung out with two guys for a bit. Also this other guy; I don’t remember his name, though. Black guy. Big hands.”

  “Seriously, all the other stalls are full! I can hear you talking on GoogleFace in Spanish, bitch,” the woman outside Nelly’s stall said.

  “Hold on,” Nelly told Carloza. She reached into her tiny Flapper purse and pulled out a small mistmask. Two carbon filters emerged after she pressed a button on the nose of the mistmask.

  “What are you doing?” Carloza asked.

  “Just a minute.”

  Nelly placed the mistmask over her face and adjusted the nose piece. She held the button down for two seconds and goggles extended upward from the cheek coverings. As the woman continued to rattle the door handle, Nelly quickly secured the goggles into the crevices of her eyes. She pressed a small lever on the chin of the mask, releasing the trapped air inside. The mask tightened as it pressurized.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Hurry up, bitch!”

  Nelly reached into her purse and pulled out something that resembled a miniature tube of toothpaste with a nozzle on top. She flipped opened the top, pointed it at the door and pressed her thumb against the nozzle.

  Fisssssp!

  A green mushroom cloud engulfed the entire bathroom.

  The woman’s forehead smashed into the door and landed in a thick pile of yellow hair on the floor. Women fell from the toilets, their heads and bodies landing in various ways inside the stuffy stalls.

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Nelly looked down and saw the woman’s hair creeping beneath the door. Blood from her nose had already started seeping into her bleached hair. Rose stained platinum; a fatal blonde moment. She flushed the toilet and stood, hearing another body drop near the sink. Thunk.

  Nelly opened the bathroom stall and stepped in the woman’s nest of blonde hair with the heel of her shoe. She glanced down at her watch – it would be another minute until the mist disappeared.

  “Sounds like you’re done clearing out the place …” Carloza said.

  “Some things just have to be done.”

  He laughed. “Well, I need to see someone about the next shipment. Saturday, same time, same place.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Nelly said, her voice muffled by the mistmask. “Adiosito.”

  FOUR∞

  Where are you right now?

  Are you at home? Are you on a train? Are you in an airplane? Are you outside? Are you in your closet? Are you on the toilet? Are you in the break room at your job? Are you in a coffee shop? Are you in a bathtub? Are you reading this on an electronic reading device? Are you on a balcony? Are you thinking about something else as you read these words? Is someone else reading this to you? Are you reading it using a flashlight?

  When you read something, does it form a picture of what’s happening in your brain? Could you see the mustached man slapping me in the face before embracing me? Could you picture Nelly’s baby illuminated by the black lights? Could you imagine the bartender pouring a beverage out of the tip of his gnarly dreadlock? Could you visualize Sauria with his Burger King crown and the suspenders holding up his jelly rolls?

  We take this picture forming function of consciousness for granted. We read a thriller about a serial killer and we imagine him cutting up the bodies, blood misting onto his t-shirt like a Japanese anime – we do this as if it were nothing, as if it requires no effort. More than twenty-five percent of the calories we consume daily go to brain functioning. Our brains are voracious.

  See this now – the panicked look on the victim’s face. A woman. Her hair matted and crimson, her body lifeless. The killer. A man with serpentine veins running up and down his arms and a brow that grazes the floor. The book. Cutting the chapters in just the right way to provide tension, to make it seem as if it’s really happening. The stereotype. The archetype. The pattern. The routine. The reward.

  The pattern.

  It seems as if we take in the written image as if it were natural occurrence. No matter the potential real life consequences, implied or intended, writing has a way of patronizing everything. Be it a graphic sex scene, a magical game of Quidditch, complex sleuth work that runs all the way up to the Papacy, a gruesome account of war, an illicit romance between a pathetic vampire and a ballsy human, a work of supposed merit that we read simply to say that we’ve read it.

  Don’t open that door! Don’t walk out into those woods alone! Don’t go jogging at night! Don’t invite the pizza man into your home! Don’t kiss him! Don’t close this book! Don’t close this book!

  Feed your brain.

  We visualize these things as if they’re happening, as if we’re somehow existing within the books that we read. Of course, we know that we aren’t taking part in what’s happening. We know we’re silent observers, passing judgment and driving the story further with the turn of each page. This doesn’t stop us from biting our nails, skipping sentences to see what happens or putting a book aside because it’s either too complex or too anticlimactic. Are you not entertained!?

  No matter how we consume it, the author tosses crumbs at us as we follow him or her along. We accept all. Hands on our ankles, thighs sky high – full-on penetration. We drop the soap repeatedly for the sake of literature.

  Does a novel stop when we put it down? Do the characters wait in limbo for us to return so they can finish their story? Do they tire of telling the same story time and time again? How does a movie affect the image of the character we have formed in our heads? Do our protagonists always resemble some part of us?

  Sauria explains all this to me in between puffs from a nacre pollution mask in the highly exclusive VIP room. He worked in the electronic publishing industry for a number of years and even wrote a book on the home installation of pollution mask bars. He was now the owner of a global security analysis company called Executive Executions or ExEx. The totem pole has been scaled.

  I can barely make out the details of Sauria’s face. He’s blurry and fishy, greasy and curdled. This might be the most schwasted I’ve ever been off pollutes. Suddenly, his face stretches. His nose warps into a small black hole as if he’s being sucked through a straw. He is everyman. I watch a large pair of doughy breasts bounce on his chest, one at a time. Hairy nipples. My skin is crawling. His pupils are dilated. Grizzled old yegg. I suddenly miss pregnant Nelly’s large wh
ite contacts.

  Sauria presses a button on the edge of the table and the wall next to us folds away like an accordion. Our private room is now crowded. “Take a look, Meme,” he says, waving his hand at the folding wall. He’s my fat business messiah. I’m his sheep watching as he parts the waters. I’ll do anything for you my bloated compadre!

  On the other side of the wall are the women he promised. One pregnant woman stands, applying more C-Baby lotion to her belly, squeezing the liquid out of a small red and white tube. Next to her are a pair of nineteen-year-olds twins with bangs and another moll wearing a spiked S&M mask. Seven fat men wearing nothing but blue silk ties, suspenders and nipple rings complete the scene. All their pubic regions are shaved into equal signs.

  Maybe we really are equal these days.

  The seven fat men laugh and wink at the twins. Their jowls slosh against their chests like wedding cakes made out of pink Jell-O. They wave at Sauria; one of them points from the skybox window down to the dance floor below.

  “Look!” he shouts. “Amazeballs!”

  Two porcelain transvestites on stilts are circling the tilting floor below. Their stilts are black light responsive and covered in yellow and pink dots. One wears a Santa Claus mask, the other’s face is painted like a Dia de los Muertos skeleton. A pair of palanquin carriers lug a blubbery woman behind them. She smiles as she tosses pollute candy to the mortals.

  I’ve never been to the VIP room at a pollution club and I’m mesmerized at how the other side lives. Pollution masks made of various animal skulls line the pig metal bar. Above the bartender is a black light chandelier made of crystal and small tubes from vintage pollution masks. The bartender’s dreadlocks are white. The bosomy beauty wears a tight fitting shirt with a mechanical hound on it and the numbers 451 stenciled in neon orange letters across her chest. Floating above her right shoulder is a hovering LCD screen showing the latest stock prices and currency fluctuations. Sell sell sell!

  I look down at my jeans and notice the fat man is running his fingers along my thigh. I try to push him away, but the pollutes have taken their toll and movement has become increasingly difficult. He tickles my waist and invites me to join his friends in the other room. I take one more puff from the pollution mask – John Galliano Strawberry Arse if I’m not mistaken.

  We scoot in next to the other fat men. One of the twins comes and sits on the other side of me. She wears a starched nurse’s outfit that barely covers her. Her top is unbuttoned. As she leans forward I can see her nipples peeking out from her bra. She yanks one of the pollution masks off the wall and takes a big, comical swig from it. She falls back onto the couch dramatically and sighs, smiling at me.

  “Your name?” she asks. Her voice is slightly muffled by the pollution mask.

  “What?”

  “Your name?” She looks me over through the polypropylene eye holes of the pollution mask. She’s wearing a pair of large black contact lenses that wash out all the white in her eyes.

  “Meme Lamar. You?” I ask her. Sauria’s hands move from my knee to his suspenders.

  “Yeshi.” She pushes the mask to the top of her skull. The nose of the pollution mask looms over her face, perfect for dangling a carrot. “My name’s Yeshi.”

  “Nice to meet you…” I look to Sauria to see if he’s paying attention to our conversation. He’s laughing with the other fat men, pointing at the transvestite stilt walkers on the floor below. One of the walkers has a patron clinging to the bottom of the stilt, humping it forcefully. A beefy security guard in all black can be seen rushing towards the man with an extendable shepherd’s crook.

  “What do you do, Meme?” Yeshi moves closer to me. She lightly grazes my ribcage with her long finger nails. Her pollution mask comes off; she hangs it on the argentine hook above the couch. She sweeps her bangs out of her face and winks at me. Her two-inch eye lashes take a good five seconds to reach the tops of her cheeks. Mesmerized I am. Fornicate I desire.

  “I’m a therapist.”

  How can I possibly sneak away with Yeshi? I need to ditch Burger King Sauria pronto!

  “Really? How exciting. Have you ever fucked a Humandroid?” She bends forward and starts licking my bicep.

  “No! I wouldn’t do that. Ever. It’s against protocol… what about you?” I ask. I reach up, grab a pollution mask and take a deep inhale. My eyes roll back into my head. My brain macerates further. Pollute dipsomaniac.

  I blink twice and see that there are now two Yeshis sitting cross legged next to me. As I stare at the two life forms, a glassine wave sluices into the room from the viewing window and imbrues the two Yeshis. The water leaves a patina glaze across their faces as it drips down onto their matching nurse’s outfits.

  What the fuck is happening?

  I take the pollution mask off and rub my eyes. No way is this actually happening. You’re tripping, Meme.

  The face of the second Yeshi contorts into a grotesque mask. The couch suddenly appears to be the length of a school bus. The second Yeshi hops over the first and begins crawling towards me.

  She crawls quickly on the tips of her fingernails, her broken chin almost touching the couch. Her jaw swings to the left and to the right like a suicidal seesaw. Green residue drips off her hunched-over shoulders and onto the couch. A light flickers overhead, bathing the couch in a lambent hue. Each flicker sends lightning bolts rhizomically across the room.

  The couch continues to stretch, increasing the distance between myself and Yeshi number two. Yeshi number one sits on the far end of the couch, her eyes rolled back into her head and her hand on her crotch. I’m sweating profusely, practically panting. Convulsing. I feel as if I will vomit soon. This can’t be happening.

  “What’s wrong with you?” a sweet voice asks, filtering into my right ear. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “They’re coming …” I watch in horror as Yeshi number two melts. “They’re coming and there’s nothing we can do about it!”

  FIVE∞

  FYI: my name is Meme Lamar. I’m a Humandroid therapist and it is the year 2083. I’m addicted to pollutes, mononymous, your new frenemy, a chthonian kingpin with a nine to five and a mind on fire. Welcome to my brain. A Humandroid therapist talks to Humandroids during the day about their problems. The word “Humandroid” should be self-explanatory by now. If not, I will edumacate you (yes, edumacate). The math professor says in a German-English accent, Human + android = Humandroid. This you need to know before continuing.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” Yeshi presses her fingers into my neck.

  I see her long narrow teeth, her saliva soaked tongue, the ravenous depraved look in her eyes. Her lashes are the size of tooth picks. Jaundiced smoke curls from her nose. I rip the mask off and throw my head onto the back of the sofa, essentially tossing in the towel. L’État, c’est moi!

  She kisses my neck and caresses my hand. Soon, I feel her teeth sink into my skin. I look over and see the other Yeshi still touching herself. My god what is happening!? The sofa is a mile long and everything is muzzy. One Yeshi is trying to devour my flesh; the other has her hand in her pants. I’m confused and sweating profusely.

  Every movement needs a martyr and I’m ready to become that martyr. This is the next phase for machine learning. All things must evolve.

  It’s something a Humandroid named Tim7 once told me. I don’t know why he was so pontifical. He threatened to blow both of us up, and I let him silently slip out of my office. I’m not the type of man who wants to die via explosion. I never saw Tim7 again.

  This is the next phase in machine learning.

  Yeshi is whispering something into my ear and it isn’t that. I can feel her snake tongue whisking away at my earlobe. I shudder a nauseous orgasm. I try not to look at her.

  Do not look at her, I remind myself. Those eyes. Those big black eyes. Don’t look! Her purple puffy lips. My whole body is trembling. There’s something strange about her, something not human. Could she be…? No, impossible. I’d know…

/>   Burger King Sauria kisses the other side of my neck. I can feel the weight of his jowl against my collar bone. I put my arms around both of them; both devouring my flesh, both licking my jugular. Anterior jugular, external jugular, internal jugular. Veins blue and pumping! Je suis insane in the membrane!

  Sauria is like a vicious catfish. His Burger King crown pokes against my earlobe; his boner rubs against my leg. The thin strands from his comb-over reach towards me like a ruck of famished beggars. I feel them wrap around my neck as he nuzzles his head into the pit of my arm. I suddenly hate him.

  His crown falls to the floor. Yeshi hisses at him and he hisses back. The serpent people rejoice. The ophidian monarchy collapses! Damn these snakes, damn them all to hell! Ouroboros. The snake devours its own tail.

  I punch Sauria in the face. Once, twice. Three times. No more kisses you shitty featherhead! I wrap my arms around his neck and squeeze.

  I close my eyes and swim up a girasol stream filled with fluorescent bubbles. Electric eels nip at my toes. I notice a neon waterfall ahead and grab onto a tree that appears to have been cemented into the muddy shore.

  A bathtub filled with pink-faced children approaches the edge of the prismatic waterfall. I take a deep inhale and listen to the glistering children scream. The screams emerge from their mouths in the form of red tinged clouds of anguish. A blond boy tries to climb over the others, eventually managing to hop over the edge of the tub. He ditches the bathtub and tries to doggy paddle it to shore. You can do it!

  “Meme … Meme …” a sweet voice says.

  I’ve seen enough inside my head. I open my eyes to see two security guards pulling at my arms. Sauria is on the ground, pressing a satin napkin against his bloodied nose. “Get him the fuck out of here!” he screams, pointing at me.

  “What did I do?” I ask. “What did I do?”

  SIX∞

  “… and now she’s over eight months pregnant.” Antimeria, Sauria’s friend, sat on the edge of the king-sized bed in a plush hotel room overlooking Hollywood Boulevard.