Author's Note: A more toned-down version of the absurdist/surrealist stuff I've been experimenting with over the past year or two. I was aiming for that type of lucidity you get in dreams, where both the taboo and the absurd combine in entirely calm and otherwise normal settings and ordeals, with little or no emotional instability. But at the same time, I wanted to make it seem real enough to prove that the ordeal was not a dream, or if it was, it sort of blurred into a dream, even when it started off grounded in reality. Or something.

Soundtrack for writing: Dry Cleaning Ray, by No-Man. Body to Body, Job to Job, by SWANS. Frances the Mute, by The Mars Volta. Close to the Edge, by Yes. Eat A Peach (Deluxe Edition), by The Allman Brothers Band. Flying Saucer Attack, by Flying Saucer Attack. Horses, by Patti Smith. Low, by David Bowie. Faust IV, by Faust. June 1, 1974, by Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno, Nico.

Redeemer

Timothy Crane had had a long day. Beneath his grey overcoat of canvas, the papers to his most recent divorce went unsigned and silent, rustling to and fro with the sway of his long and tired gait. The rain, mostly unnoticed, fell in torrents around him. The tops of his shoes were dark with moisture, and it came as no surprise that they were flooded due to the long cracks that ran sideways across the rubber soles. Each step he took was another wet slop towards soldier’s foot.

Beneath the outcropping of the apartment entryway, Timothy fuddled for his keys. The landlord had taken to locking the outermost door on occasion, and though Timothy still had not learned the motive behind such an endeavor, he figured it had something to do with the recent streak of mail thefts. The four lone keys looked so desolate on the ring, and each time he managed to catch hold of the correct one, they slipped out of his grasp and clattered to the ground with a soft clank. After the third try, he managed to fit the key into the deadbolt lock, and just as he was about to turn it and greet the stagnant air of the apartment building’s foyer, a tenant gently unlocked the door and held it open for him.

He hid his mixture of resentment and wasted effort by trying to retrieve his keys. The tenant—an elderly woman that walked with an arched back, smiled, and it reminded Timothy of what an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of a dandelion looked like lying on a deserted and abandoned highway. He shrugged and mumbled his thanks on his way by, and she stumbled out the door. It closed behind him, and he didn’t bother to lock it. Fuck it, he figured, since someone else was right behind him anyhow.

The key got stuck in the lock to his mailbox. He twisted it, pulled, twisted again, pulled, rattled it around, sighed, and resorted to slamming his fist into the metal locker a few times. The resulting clangs did little to ease his spirits, but after he rubbed his fist and examined the keys—still jutting out of their place in the lock—he decided that whatever mail that had come was not worth such aggression, and turned his morose attention to the stairwell at the end of the hall.

He reached his apartment after climbing the unremarkable stairs one step at a time. The door, worn and chipping what he was sure to be lead paint, got stuck on one of the floorboards as he entered. He couldn’t help but curse.

“Oh for chrissake.”

With his shoulder, he managed to finagle his way into the apartment, but his coat got caught on an overhanging nail.

He finally had a chance to fall into a well worn chair, breathing out a sigh of release as he did so. He lit a cigarette. He shoved a hand into his left pocket and dumped the contents onto the table next to the chair. He was not hungry.

Timothy suddenly heard raised voices from the room directly above his.

“You filthy, disgusting, piece of shit!”

“I’m filthy? So now I’m the filthy one? You’re a goddamn—”

“Oh, don’t you even say it, Maureen! If it weren’t for me, you’d be out in the fucking streets by now!”

Timothy sighed, and turned on the television set.

“Please, I’m the one bringing home most of the bacon in this sorry excuse for a shithole, and we both know it!”

“Bacon?! Shithole?! Shut the fuck up!” The sound of a loud thump accompanied the expletive.

“That does it, Richard. You don’t ever fucking hit me!”

When a sequence of thumps and crashes resonated down into Timothy’s apartment, he couldn’t help but cast an annoyed glance at the ceiling, and tap the button on his remote to increase the volume.

The girl screamed. The man yelled. Furniture was displaced. Glass was broken.

The television set was at a roar by this point.

Then Timothy heard a succession of what sounded like gunshots. Two in a row.

“Ya like that, you bitch?! Damnit this thing is loud!”

A few minutes later, someone knocked on Timothy’s door. The TV flickered and went silent as he turned it off with the remote control. Feeling alone, he pulled his weight off of the chair and lumbered over to the door, unlocking the deadbolt and pulling it open, but finding it stuck on a floorboard yet again. He grunted as he pulled it, freeing it from the raised lump in the terrain.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey, Tim!” Richard Barkley, the tenant of room 802, the space above his own, stood in the hallway. A large luggage bag spattered with dots of red rested against his side. “Mind if I use your tub?” His shirt was torn open and a large gash on his forehead encrusted blood down the side of his face. There were a few more cuts and scratches on his chest and shoulder. “It’ll only take a moment or two.”

“Sure,” Timothy shrugged. “Go ahead.”

As Richard strode past him, dragging the oversized piece of luggage, Timothy noticed that the glitter on his chest was actually comprised of small pieces of broken glass embedded in his skin. A Colt Python was tucked into the back of his pants.

“Hey, thanks man,” Richard said, crossing the threshold. “You have no idea how much this means to me.” He grunted as he lugged the suitcase around, half hefting it with one leg, swinging his body weight in compensation with the load.

“You need any help with that?”

“Nah, man. Thanks, tho’. I’m fine.” He breathed out a sigh as he dropped the case in the middle of the living room. “Your bathroom is—?”

Timothy gestured down the short hallway. “That way,” he nodded.

“Ah. Cool.” He churned down towards the room; whump, grunt, whump, grunt, whump, grunt. “Ah,” he breathed again, “yeah, this’ll do, this’ll do nicely, yeah, real swell. Thanks again, man.”

Timothy nodded. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Uh,” Richard looked around the room, breathing heavily. “Heh, tryin’ to get my breathing back under control—this thing is heavy, hah—yeah, uh, what have ya, uh, what have ya got?”

He had to think for a moment. “Iced tea, Coke, um, I think there’s still a couple of Heinekens in the fridge. Do you like Heineken?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s alright.” Richard shrugged. “I’ll take a Coke, though. If that’s cool with you.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Timothy’s reply was arid, and he left the room to retrieve the refreshment.

The refrigerator was a desolate place; two cardboard containers still had week-old fried rice in them, a dish filled with maggot-like creatures occupied the back-most bowels, a black liquid had seeped down from the freezer and stained the top shelf, where the iced tea still sat. The Coke cans were in the vegetable drawer.

He returned quickly. Richard had already unpacked the body of his wife and stretched her out in the tub. Timothy popped open the top of the can as he gazed at the cadaver, whose clouded eyes stared up blankly, pale skin contrasting the deep purple of the fingertips, vulva, nipples, and lips. The two bullet holes in her face were just above the browline, and a good portion of the back of her head was gone. The blood was even more crimson against the sheet of white skin. She was dead, but it didn’t stop Timothy from staring. He was getting hard just staring at her.

“Whatta bitch,” he heard Richard murmur, who, similarly, was lost in a gaze directed at his dead wife. “Hey man, you gotta marker or something? I need to mark what to cut off.”

“Oh uh, yeah.” Timothy turned from the room, suddenly desiring a drink himself. He hadn’t realized that he was still holding the Coke that Richard had requested. The sharpie he was looking for was found on the kitchen table.

He returned, handing over both the can of Coke and the black marker.

“Thanks, man. This helps me a lot. You have no idea,” Richard said. He took a long gulp of Coke and set the can down on top of the toilet seat. He leaned over and started making dotted lines across the joints of his dead wife. “I gotta chop this all up so it’ll be easier to move around, see?” he asked. “I don’t like lugging around that suitcase. It’ll look too suspicious when I dump it in the harbor. You gotta hacksaw or something?”

Timothy shook his head. “No, I don’t. Nothing that’ll cut through bone like that.”

“Ah, shit.”

“Sorry,” he shrugged.

Richard shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got some tools upstairs. I’ll go see what I can get for this.” He stood up, taking a moment to adjust the revolver stuffed in the back of his waistband, before trudging out the bathroom door. “I’ll be right back,” he said, brushing by Timothy.

“Take your time,” Timothy called as Richard let himself out of the apartment. He heard the door shut from his place in the bathroom.

Now it was just him and the corpse. Him, his erection, and the body of his neighbor’s dead wife, were alone together. He didn’t start to contemplate the nature of his sanity until after he had unzipped his trousers and placed his hardness inside the open mouth of the dead woman. There was something terrifyingly real about the situation; an unspoken taboo was being broken, a forbidding sense of wrongness existed there, it just added to the erotic situation. He couldn’t help but wonder how sane he had to be in order to do this, use a corpse to give himself fellatio while simultaneously trying to hold the head without touching the open part of the skull. She was still warm, to some extent, and anyhow he was so hard it didn’t really matter.

Just like that, he stumbled on the age-old catch twenty-two. Of course he was sane. He questioned his own sanity. But then again, he was fucking a dead person’s face. Ah well, he tried to justify to himself, at least she was attractive. And besides, taboos are broken all the time. In fact, there were probably half a dozen other cases of necrophilia on this block alone, every night. Besides, it felt damn good.

It felt so good, in fact, that it only took a couple of minutes before he groaned and let himself shoot down her throat. There was a bit of a gurgling sound, and afterwards he had to wipe off his dick with one of the hand towels, and then wash his hands. This had nothing to do with love, he reasoned. This wasn’t a case of obsession. She was just attractive. It was like masturbation, except with a lifeless head.

He retrieved a Heineken from the fridge at the same time Richard grunted and forced the apartment door open. “Hey, neighbor,” he greeted once more. He had a hacksaw in one hand, a chainsaw in the other, and around one of his arms was a strap to a bag filled with various tools. “These should do it,” he said.

Timothy was nonchalant in his approval. “Looks good.”

“Yep,” he sighed, setting his stuff down on the bathroom floor. “Now for the tricky part—”

Just as he reached for the hacksaw, the body in the tub came alive. A ferocious screech let loose from her lungs as the cadaver lunged upwards, arms out straight, reaching for Richard’s throat.

“HOLY SHIT—”

Richard’s Python was in his hands faster than he could blink. He emptied the chamber so fast he had to put his hand in front of his face to shield himself from the hot granules of gunpowder. The resulting roar was something akin to an airliner taking off in Timothy’s bathroom. The body in the tub let out a surprised cry as it lurched backwards, six .357 magnum slugs in its abdomen.

“Damnit!” Richard cursed. “The thing’s lockwork’s shot again! Didja see that? Piece of shit needs to be retimed. Fuck.” He put the gun under one arm and rubbed his ears as his other hand plunged into his pockets. When he pulled it back out, another six shells were clamped in between his fingers. He took his time reloading the cylinder. “Now I gotta go and take it back to the gunsmith. Shit. Colt man, I tell you. Maybe I should just start carrying a peacemaker around, eh? How’d ya think of that, me walking around with one of those babies stuffed in my waistband? Kapow kapow! Hah. Fan that hammer.”

Timothy observed the perforated corpse. “So now what?”

“Well uh,” Richard scratched his head and motioned to his tools. “Well now we chop ‘er up and dump her down by the docks.”

There came a thumping from the apartment’s door. Timothy turned towards the entrance, which lay down the short hallway and to the left. Richard stared at him.

“Where you expecting anyone?”

“No,” Timothy replied.

That was when they both heard the sound of the door being torn off its hinges. Heavy footfalls echoed through the apartment and Timothy made his way into the living area. An officer in a blue uniform stood in the entranceway, his own six-shot revolver in his hands, poised at the ready.

“Is everything alright in here, sir?” the policeman asked.

“Yeah,” Timothy replied. “Yeah, it’s all okay.”

“Residents heard gunshots,” the policeman questioned.

“Oh,” Timothy said. “I’m sorry.”

He could tell that the policeman had noticed the bottle of Heineken in his grasp. “Sir, I think I’m going to have to take a look around.”

“Um.” An utterance.

He started toward the hall that terminated in the bathroom. His revolver still wasn’t holstered, but instead pointed towards the ceiling, at the ready. The door was closed, and he cautiously put a hand directly in the center to ease it open. The hinges squeaked.

“You might not want to go in there,” Timothy called to him.

The policeman stepped inside. Timothy could hear his loud curses (“What the fuck?!”) which were punctuated by two gunshots, spaced about as many seconds apart.

Timothy eased himself into the popular bathroom.

Richard stared at the policeman’s body. Its face now unrecognizable, as Richard had shot him in the back of the noggin. Most of the front of the head now decorated the tile wall, as with a plentiful abundance of gelatinous brain matter. Red streaks ran into the cracks of the tile work. Two bullets now found their residence in that same wall.

“I suppose there are worse ways to go out,” Richard mumbled. “But now we gotta chop him up, too.” He grabbed the body’s feet and dragged it next to the toilet, so it didn’t block the bloodied and otherwise occupied bathtub.

Timothy observed the hacksaw that Richard hefted in his hands. “I don’t think the hacksaw’s gonna cut it,” he said.

Richard looked at him. “You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think so.”

Richard set the saw down, and with a groan, he picked up the chainsaw. “Well, I guess this’ll have to work.” He fired it up, and the mechanical beast cried through its razor-edged teeth, filling the room with noise. Richard let out a hearty laugh as he stepped into the tub, lowering the chainsaw to his ex-wife’s shoulders. Blood shot out of the gashes the blade made, and soon her left arm—which had been jutting off at an angel and dangling over the side of the tub—came loose and fell to the tile floor. Blood trickled out of it.

Minutes later, the corpse was appropriately dismembered, and blood was all over the place.

“You look terrifyingly grisly,” Timothy commented.

Richard saw himself in the spattered mirror that had escaped most of the blood letting. “Oh wow,” he said. “I wish I’d thought about wearing a raincoat before this. I’d forgotten how messy this job was.”

Timothy nodded in something akin to sympathy.

“Ah well,” he continued. “Get me a trash bag, one of those hefty big ones, the heavy duty type contractor bags. And your sheets.”

Timothy returned a few minutes later with the requested materials, only to find the policeman’s body in the process of being dismembered in the tub, on top of the ex-wife’s remains. Long streaks of indistinguishable crimson decorated the whole bathroom; gratuitous spatter on the ceiling, streaks on the walls and floor, smears on every tile surface—the room was practically bathed in blood.

Richard laughed maniacally as the saw settled down. He stepped out of the tub, droplets of blood running down his soaked shirt and pants, pooling at his feet. He blinked rapidly, to keep more droplets out of his eyes. He spat some out of his mouth, used a soaked shirt sleeve to wipe off his forehead and bangs, dribbling more blood down the side of his face.

“Wow!” he exclaimed, setting the chainsaw down. “I’d forgotten how this felt, too!” He chuckled. More blood seeped out of his clothing as he crossed his arms and observed his handiwork. “Glad this isn’t my bathroom.” The light above them flickered a little bit.

“Okay,” Richard said when he began speaking again. “Now we stash the limbs into different trash bags, and then roll everything up in those sheets there. Have you got duct tape? It helps get the bags good and closed and prevents any blood from leaking out and leaving a trail or seeping through the sheets.”

They loaded the body parts in silence, Timothy trying to keep as much blood off of himself as possible, but accepted a few droplets here and there. When it was done, they tied the sheets around the two piles.

“There, a pile for you, and one for me.” Richard stood poised with his hands on his hips, nodding his head in accomplishment. “You have a car?”

Timothy shook his head. “No, I take the subway to work.”

Richard frowned. “Oh. Well I guess we’ll just have to risk that,” he said. “We’re just going a mile or so to the docks.” He hefted his own pile, tying the corners of the sheet together and duct taping them. “I’m gonna go wash all this off,” he said, gesturing to his blood-covered body. “I’ll be right back.”

As Richard left the apartment, Timothy surveyed the damage again. Even though the limbs were missing, there were still pieces of flesh that had come off of the cadavers during Richard’s frenzy. Most of it was limited to the tub, but some of it clung to the tile walls along with the smears of blood.

Timothy returned to the kitchen to retrieve another Heineken. The television was still on, but it was a commercial.

Richard returned with wet hair and a different, though similar, garb. “Alright, man. I think it’s time to get this show on the road.”

They had some trouble getting the duct taped sheet sacks out of the apartment door, since they were too wide at some angels, but after they found a solution to that problem, the trip down the stairs to the apartment building’s foyer was rather uninteresting. “Pretend you’re Santa Claus,” Richard had said to Timothy as they walked through to the door of the building, “it makes things easier to carry.”

The streets were almost empty by this time of night. A police car was parked outside the building, a man in the passenger’s seat looking very bored and absently leafing through a magazine. He glanced up at Timothy and Richard as they passed. Timothy waved. The policeman looked away and sighed. They lugged the sacks farther into the night.

“That’s the subway, right?” Richard nodded towards the steps that descended into the bowels of the city.

Timothy nodded an affirmative. “It should send us straight to the docks.”

The ride was soothing in an eerie and monotonous way. Timothy had sat down in a seat next to the door, and placed the sack of limbs between his feet. Richard had sat across from him, but placed his sack of limbs on the bench next to him. The swaying of the twenty-four hour subway system dulled their already easy nerves. There was only one other person on the subway—an older woman, shawl, slouched back, a cigarette poking out between two parched lips.

“Where are you boys headed this late at night?” The woman asked.

Richard turned around in his seat, looking at her. She bit down on the cigarette end, curling her lips back to show yellowed teeth.

“The docks,” Timothy told her.

“Uh yeah,” Richard nodded. “We gotta get rid of something, so we’re just gonna dump it into the harbor.”

“So you’re not even tryin’ to be any better than those damn industrialists?” She asked, clenching her teeth again.

Richard shrugged. “Why break with tradition?”

He turned back into his seat as the woman breathed a plume of smoke.

The train arrived at their station, the doors opened and closed, the railcar sped off into the tunnel once more. Richard stood in the darkness of the poorly-lit station with his left hand casually holding the sack of limbs on his back. Timothy looked towards the locked gate with uncertainty.

“I wonder why they lock the station gates but leave the subway running,” he mused aloud.

Richard shrugged. “That’s why y’need to learn how to pick these suckers,” he heartily replied, reaching behind his back with his free hand. “Or you can just blast ‘em off.” He pulled the hammer back on the Python. The cacophonous explosion resonated through the subterranean chamber, and the lock fell off the chain only to clank onto the floor. Richard pulled off the chains and pushed the gate aside. “Piece of cake,” he said.

They ascended the steps, sacks of limbs in hand, to find themselves surrounded by the wastes of what appeared to be a junkyard.

“I’ve never been here before,” Timothy said, mater-of-fact.

Richard stared at him in disbelief. “Never?”

Timothy shook his head.

Richard sneezed. “Well, I suppose there’s always a first time,” he mumbled, rubbing his nose. He hefted his sack of limbs and headed off in the direction of the green waterline. Rain spattered down around the pair as they made their way through the rubble of abandoned and crushed vehicles, mounds of miscellaneous garbage through which the trench-like pathways were formed, and stacks of unused or disused pipes, lumber, and siding. The sky was a dark void, veiled with heavy clouds. The sea was dank with rot.

A howling wind picked up as they neared the shoreline. “Just toss this stuff in,” Richard called out to Timothy. “The current will drag the suckers out into the ocean. We’ve got nothing to worry about.” With that, Richard grunted as he lobbed the sack into the sea. After a splash indistinguishable from the crashing waves, he helped Timothy with his. Soon, it was just the two of them standing on the edge of a ruined sea wall, the remains of the boat ramp to their right, the mounds of garbage to their backs.

Timothy noticed a rusted ladder that led to a rowboat tied to a pier ten feet below the sea wall. Richard had started to move toward it.

“I’m just gonna go now,” he said, and proceeded to mount the ladder. “Thanks for helping me out, but I’m gonna do us both a favor and disappear for awhile.”

Wind whistled in his ears as Timothy strained to hear the other man. “I guess that’s smart,” he replied. “Any idea as to what I should do?”

Richard shrugged. “Get out of town for a few weeks or months. You have any family out West? I heard the Sierra Madres look good this time of year.”

“I guess I’ll do that.”

Richard climbed into the boat, and craned his neck to look up at Timothy. “See ya!” He called out, before untying the rope that held the boat in place.

Timothy waved back, and the row boat floated off into the harbor, towards an outgoing oil rig. He sat down on the edge of the crumbling concrete wall, already soaked to the bone by the storm, and just watched the vessel disappear into the black void of the horizon.