The Look of Love

©2005 / 2014

NOTES: When this was first written (for the fiction offering in One Minus Zero, Spring 2005), I got A LOT of hate mail. The mail section of ONE MINUS ZERO was CALLED “Hate Mail and Love Letters” (taken from my 1990’s ‘zine, SuBZeRo) but for a month it was NOTHING but hate mail.  ALL of it (except one email that haunts me to this day, reading only “To: Lewinsky YOU SUK ASS”; I recall this because it’s just NOT true. I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinski.) was brutally incorrect: I’m not a “misogynist male hack with a lust for rape fantasy” for example.  All of the replies were accusatory and personal attacks, and seemed to forget this was in the magazine’s section entitled “Filed Under F for Fiction”.  The hate mail that gave an email address (some used privacy blockers), I personally wrote a short note.  As I recall, it said: “Hello, Idiot! It’s the [Evil Pig/Misogynist Male Hack/Etc.] I wondered if you bothered to note that this magazine is PUBLISHED by a woman? Did you ALSO take note that it is a serial piece, and this is Part 1? Do you have the ability to read my mind and scour it for intent? Did you also bother to note that the main female character—while a victim in this Part—is also smart, and might just be “planning something”? I could go on explaining why I’m not a [woman-hating superpig, etc.] but why bother? You’re so vain, you probably thought this letter was about you.” Now, you throw some random Carly Simon lyrics in, and nuts just BLOW UP.  They don’t know WHAT to think. I also use ABBA lyrics for this sort of thing.  Anyway, originally, the nutjob wasn’t schizophrenic because two close friends of mine were; since then, I’ve decided that they have to be in stories, too, or they might start writing hate mail.  THIS nutjob happens to be a BAD schizophrenic.  But the name has been used in crappy horror movies for so many years that “schizophrenic” and “knife-wielding mad person” mean the same thing to the average American (once again: I’m REALLY sorry, Europe.  Damn, but we play to character EVERY time!). Look, he’s a bad guy who is off his meds.  If he was ON his meds he’d STILL be a bad guy.  But when I revised it, I decided: hmmm. What if the female wasn’t a generic “smart damsel in distress” (smart damsels are so common now that they are generic) but more femme fatale?  And MAYBE ALSO a nutjob: one who is smart enough so you don’t quite know if they are just “playing along” or if they are getting their own “messages” and the two sets of notes don’t play well with others. Well, now, that there might just be in-ter-est-t-i-n-g.  Or not. Take a look-see.  Parts 2 and 3 are more heavily edited. 

 

You know how sometime you just walkin around at the SuperMart or the Dollar Store or wherever and you get that funny feelin, like somebody be lookin at you but you don’t got no idea who or where they is? That’s how I knowed it was true love with Julie Ann. She saw me first. She felt that feelin too. Most of the time, with them others, it was the other way round, so that’s how I knew Julie Ann was suppose to be real important and we’d fall in love right away.

I think it was the Dollar Store because I recall she was buyin some birthday candles for her little girl. She weren’t no virgin; I could tell she’d had one or two kids, though she’d lost most of the tummy. But He tole me he will send me someone deservin so who am I to judge? Turned out she had a four year old, a bratty snot-nosed little thing. They always are—it’s the devil what comes into em when their momma’s have lived in sin. For a minute or a hour or a thousand years, He don’t tolerate livin in sin.

Little girl’s name was Tansy, and her daddy never came home from Iraq. He got hisself blowed up by them Taliban or whoever fights us over there. Julie Ann said she wanted Tansy to remember her daddy but I don’t think that’s to be.

Like I said, she was young and I got them others to look after, too. So I explained it all to Julie Ann. She cried and begged some like they all do, but I promised it was what He meant to be and it wouldn’t really hurt Tansy none no ways. She said I was crazy and needed help, and only crazy people talk to Him. I let the rest of them go to the nursery and locked the doors, but He does not tolerate doubters and sinners and unclean women. So I handcuffed Julie Ann to the big X made from large beams of old swamp-oak bolted together.

I didn’t want to do this to her; I never liked to cause no pain, that’s somethin I know you probbly don’t believe. But I figured Julie Ann needed to be washed clean and after she wouldn’t wanna be around all the others while she was worried I was off molestin or killin her own daughter.

They all think that at first, except Kathy. She had been my lawful-wedded wife, before I found His law. Kathy had our son Adam in the bathtub of my little house in East Point—and I obeyed, I swear: I filled it with seven gallons of blessed well-water I had prayed over while Kathy stood there naked, her birth-water running down her legs and mixin into the well-water. I added seven ounces of sea salt and a tablespoon of our blood, mixed together and poured into the water. I did it all just right.

But then the Bad Thing with them squiggles for eyes came and…well, I don’t like thinkin about all of that. Some I forget, but I remember it had maggot-white skin and no nose, just the sinus cavity all exposed and crusted with snot and pus. But them eyes is what gives me all them sleepless nights: they looked like what a kid would do with a black crayon if they didn’t like something they had drawn and wanted to scratch it out, or cover it up. But them squiggles…they moved, kinda like a nest of snakes.

I got one room in the big basement outfitted like a operatin room. It was easy to get what I needed cause I work second-shift at Fulton County Hospital. And before you say I stole and broke the Ten Commandments, He tole me for everything I took to leave a page from His Book as payment, for that was worth more than dollars or even gold coins. I wore a pair of surgical gloves and even us lowly orderlies wear scrubs. I got scrub-up soap like they use in surgery, and packages of gauze and sterile scalpels and hemostats, too. I borrowed Dr. Stephen’s ID card to get into the ER drug room when six people all came in at once from a bad wreck.

I waited til the nurses had gotten what they needed then slipped in with that card. You had to use it again for the narcotics drawer, so I figured I’d be frugal but get all I’d ever need right then. I took a vial of fentanyl that somebody had put in the RETURN TO PHARMACY tray—just good luck? Or Him, providin? It would last me forever, and by the time the pharmacy declared it overdue and came lookin, they’d inventory all the ER drug carts, the main pharmacy and the one on the psych ward, and THEN they’d pull the doctor and nurse logs. Cause nobody wanted to make a mistake and start pointing fingers if it had just been mistakenly stuck somewheres. I took smaller vials of morphine, Dilaudid, and Valium, and filled a big pill bottle with Vicodin, Xanax, Ativan and three different strengths of oxycodone. I shut the narcotics drawer and then tucked a page carefully cut from the King James under the whole rack. I added to my biohazard stash bag a handful of syringes, a box of alcohol pads and antibiotics—three bottles of the pink stuff they give kids outta the fridge and four different types of capsules I knew the names of from keepin my ears open and my eyes on my work. That covered pretty much everything—though I had to get a stretcher, surgical light, and an old exam table from a woman’s clinic off Craig’s list. The only thing that was real hard was a purple bottle of that stuff vets use to put animals down with. I had to lie and deal with thieves and Godless young men, and in the end I had to stab one of them in the face four of five times.

But when Adam was born, I didn’t have no real supplies, and my basement was just a dim-lit place that smelled like dirty laundry and dust covering all the canned goods on a wooden shelf just inside the door at the top of the stairs.

Kathy had started to scream and I couldn’t think right, and that…thing…was laughing and laughing and laughing. I had to hold Kathy under the water to get her quiet while that thing with the squiggles for eyes was still connected to her dying body by the cord. I was screaming at it to SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! even as I was cryin and pushin Kathy down into the water harder until she stopped moving. Then I cut the cord and took hold of…well… I don’t recall all of it. Don’t much care to.

Things is a lot calmer now—when you know what to expect.

So once Julie Ann was secured in the little soundproof cell off the operatin room, I took a skinny little iron nail that come from the Missionary Baptist Church after it burned down, and boiled it with salt for twenty minutes so it’d be clean. Clean is Godliness. I took the nail and said the Lord’s Prayer over it to sanctify it. Then I drove it at an angle into her little girl’s eye socket, using a small rock hammer. It don’t make em blinded or nothing. Just real calm.

They mind real good and all the kids is different ages, so they gotta be fixed like this so they’ll be quiet and play pretty, as my grandmomma used to say. All of em brats or spoilt before, some of em even already a little slutty at 9 or 10.

But I always know the special ones. And the special ones are worth a brat or two.

After that I beat Julie Ann. I was taught never to hit a woman, but He tole me sometimes you had to beat the sin out of them. So I used a three-foot length of rubber electrical cable. It was rubber on the outside, but inside there was at least a hundred small wires inside colored, insulated plastic. One good smack from the cable and you’d scream and curse and spit. Two, and you’d fart and piss yourself and start beggin for me to stop. Three was really just kinda overkill, if you asked me; but I don’t make the rules and I was told seven, so seven was what they all got.

I don’t LIKE doin this, like I think I said. So I tried to spread it out, and the next day they were black and blue and I usually gave em a Vicodin to sleep it off. If they minded, they got to see their kid the next day. The kid would usually have a black eye and sometimes their eyes didn’t focus real good, and of course they acted different but mostly they’re just glad I still got room in the nursery. I really don’t got room, but I thought about how Julie Ann was extra-special, and I decided it might be that her kid was special, too. If not…well, there was always the purple bottle locked in the cabinet in the operatin room.

Like Job, He has tested me. He tested my obedience by tellin me to burn down the church where I took them old iron nails—not a church of sinners, but a church that ran a food bank and homeless shelter. But He makes the Law, and it is only for us to obey. Every person, every animal, every living thing is connected with microscopic wires, and He runs the universe by sending out his thoughts through these wires. His Voice is like electricity, and the Law is complex—too complex for men like me to know what it all mean. Some things that seem wrong—like when I stabbed the kid who would not take a page from Revelations in payment for the bottle he had stole for me from the vet’s office where he worked—have a greater good. Only He can see where all the wires cross and re-cross, and what the pattern it makes will be in the End.

I have been blessed, truly. Though He took Kathy from me, He has given me other wives. And each of them is Special, who has a purpose that has been promised to be great, though He has not yet revealed what the purposes are. Though I’ve had to put down three wives and five of their spawn when it became obvious I had misread His Will, mostly I obey Him and am blessed. I am, after all, but a man and I ain’t met no man who didn’t make a mess of things at some point.

But mostly I’m blessed because He gave me back Adam—purged clean from the demon that killed his mother and nearly ate his soul. And Adam has grown into a fine young man, unburdened by the lust for drugs and fornication and the things that belong to the World of Sin. Adam helps me with His work—and I have been given to know that He will play some great role in the Change that is to come for all of wicked mankind. New Sodom has been raised above the tallest church, blotting out the warm sun and rising to the skies like Babel of old.

Six weeks after Julie Ann found me she came to me her own self and said that she had prayed hard and thought He had revealed what her Special Purpose was to be. I was proud of how far she had come in such a short time. It usually takes em at least one or two months and another whippin or two as well. After that first night, Julie Ann took her seven hits and the next day she slept for eight hours and woke up screaming. I had Shelley rub ointment on her back, the backs of her legs and her bottom, and give her another pill. She acted all numb even before the pill took effect—she probly thought her little girl was already dead. So after she slept another couple hours, I let her see her daughter, Tansy.

The next day, she came to me and asked for a Bible. Surprised, I went and got her a copy. Then she told me she had had a dream that He had commanded her to get a large bowl filled with warm water, a wash cloth, and a bar of soap. At first, I was mad.

“Who you think you are, woman? You ain’t in no position to demand nothing from me in His name! And I will tell you when you can wash, and where, and how, and with what.”

“‘It isn’t for me, sir,’ ” she tole me. “’He said I was to wash your feet.’ “

I didn’t know what to say to that. None of them others had ever said anything like that to me—even Kathy. I told Shelley to go get the things Julie Ann had asked for. She brought back a large pan, sloshing a little of the water out onto the linoleum floor of the Hall of the Law, off the basement hallway. Then she went into the Hall and brought back a folding chair.

I sat myself down and sure enough, Julie Ann took my shoes and socks off and washed my feet. She turned around, but Shelley already had a towel ready. Shelley is the quiet one. She dont hardly say nothin, but she smart—and she seem to know what to do before bein asked, sometimes.