inside the master bath and dug out his Vicodin stash and self-medicated with two pretty white pills chased with a gulp of scotch. He rubbed his neck, massaging the rawness of his throat, worried about his voice. He wanted to run water through the raven’s-head faucet and splash some on his face to cool down, but he still had his makeup on. Nobody would know him in the clubs without it. He stared at the sickly pallor it gave him, the gaunt shadowing of his cheeks, the dead black pupils of his contact lenses. He was in fact a beautiful man, and no amount of makeup could hide it, and this, he knew, was part of the secret of his success. His entire career consisted of taking beauty and corrupting it. Seducing the ear with moments of transcendent music only to subvert it with gothic screams and industrial distortion. That was what the young responded to. Defacing beauty. Subverting good.
Beautiful Corruption. Possible title for his next CD.
The Lurid Urge had moved 600,000 copies in the first week of its U.S. release. Huge for the post-mp3 era, but still down almost a full half million units from Lavish Atrocities. People were becoming inured to his antics, both onstage and off. He was no longer the anti—everything Wal-Mart had loved to ban and religious America—including his own father—had sworn to oppose. Funny how his father was in agreement with Wal-Mart, proving his thesis about how dull everything was. Nonetheless, with the exception of the religious right, it was getting difficult to shock people anymore. His career was hitting a wall and he knew it. Bolivar was not exactly considering a switch to coffeehouse folk—though that would indeed shock the world—but the theatrical autopsies and onstage biting and cutting were no longer fresh. They were anticipated, like encores. He was playing to his audience instead of playing against them. He had to run ahead of them, because if they ever caught up, he’d be trampled.
But hadn’t he taken his act as far as he could? Where could it possibly go from here?
He heard the voices again. Like an unrehearsed chorus, voices in pain, pain that echoed his own. He spun around in the bathroom to make certain he was alone. He shook his head hard. The sound was like that when you put seashells to your ears, only, instead of hearing an echo of the ocean, he heard the moaning of souls in limbo.
When he came out of the bathroom, Mindy and Sherry were kissing, and Cleo lay on the big bed with a drink in hand, smiling at the ceiling. All of them started when he appeared, and turned in anticipation of his advance. He crawled up onto the bed, his gut doing kayak rolls, thinking that this was just what he needed. A vigorous pipe cleaning to clear the system. Blonde Mindy came at him first, running her fingers through his silky black hair, but Bolivar chose Cleo, something about her, running his pale hand over the brown flesh of her neck. She removed her top for easier access and slipped her own hands down over the fine leather sheathing his hips.
She said, “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since—”
“Shhhh,” he told her, hoping to cut through the usual acolyte’s back-and-forth. The Vikes must have acted on the voices in his head, because they had dulled to a thrumming noise, almost like an electrical current, but with some throbbing mixed in.
The other two crawled up around him now, their hands like crabs, touching him, exploring him. Starting to peel off his clothes to reveal the man beneath. Mindy again ran her fingers through his hair, and he pulled away, as if there was something clumsy in her touch. Sherry squealed playfully, undoing the buttons of his fly. He knew the whispers that went around about him, from conquest to conquest, about his prodigious size and skill. She slid her hand across his leather pants and over his crotch, and while there was no groan of disappointment, there was no gasp of astonishment either. Nothing doing down there yet. Which was baffling, even given his illness. He had proven himself in much more adverse conditions, over and over and over again.
He returned his focus to the girl Cleo’s shoulders, her neck, her throat. Lovely—but it was more than that. He felt a bucking sensation in his mouth. Not a sensation of nausea, but perhaps its opposite: a need somewhere on the continuum between the longing for sex and the necessity of nourishment. But—bigger. A compulsion. A craving. An urge to violate, to ravish, to consume.
Mindy nibbled on his neck, and Bolivar turned on her finally, pushing her back down against the sheets—first in a fury, but then with a forced tenderness. He eased back her jaw, extending her neck, running his warm fingers over her fine, firm throat. He felt the strength of her young muscles inside—and he wanted them. More than he wanted her breasts, her ass, her loins. The thrumming that obsessed him was coming from her.
He brought his mouth to her throat. He tried with his lips, kissing, but that didn’t quite do it. He tried nibbling on her, and the instinct seemed correct but the method … something about it was all wrong.
He wanted—somehow—more.
The thrumming vibrated throughout his own body now, his skin like that of a drum being pounded in an ancient ceremony. The bed was twirling a bit and his neck and thorax were bucking with need and repulsion. He went away for a little while, mentally. Like the amnesia of great sex, only, when he came back, it was to a woman’s squealing. He had the girl’s neck in his hands and was sucking on it with an intensity that went beyond the realm of the teenage hickey. He was drawing her blood to the surface of her skin, and she was screaming and the other two half-naked girls were trying to pull her away from him.
Bolivar straightened, first chastened by the sight of the florid bruising along her throat—then, remembering his stature as the maypole of this foursome, he asserted his authority.
“Get out!” he railed, and they did, clothes clutched to their bodies, the blonde Mindy whimpering and sniffling all the way down the stairs.
Bolivar staggered off the bed and back into his bathroom and his makeup case. He sat down on the leather stool and went through his nightly ministrations. The makeup came off—he knew this because he saw it on the tissues—and yet his flesh looked much the same in the mirror. He rubbed harder, scraping at his cheeks with his fingernail, but nothing more came off. Had the makeup adhered to his skin? Or was he this sick, this gaunt?
He ripped off his shirt and examined himself: white as marble and crisscrossed with greenish veins and purplish blotches of settled blood.
He went to his contact lenses, carefully pinching out the cosmetic gels and depositing them in the fluid baths of their holding cases. He blinked a few times in relief, swiping at his eyes with his fingers, then feeling something weird. He leaned closer to the glass, blinking, examining his own eyes.
The pupils were dead black. Almost as though he still had the lenses in, only more textured now—more real. And—when he blinked, he noticed further activity within the eye. He got right up against the mirror, eyes wide now, almost afraid to close them.
A nictitating membrane had formed underneath his eyelid, a translucent second eyelid closing beneath the outer eyelid, gliding horizontally across the eyeball. Like a filmy cataract eclipsing his black pupil, closing upon his wild and horrified stare.
Augustin “Gus” Elizalde sat slumped in the back of the dining area with his pinch-front hat on the seat next to him. It was a narrow storefront eatery, one block east of Times Square. Neon burgers shining in the window, and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths on the tables. Budget eating in Manhattan. You walk in and order at the counter up front—sandwiches, pizza, something on the grill—pay for it, and take it in back, to a windowless room of tables jammed in tight. Wall murals of Venice and gondolas surrounded them. Felix scarfed down a plate of goopy macaroni and cheese. It was all he ate, mac and cheese, the more disgustingly orange the better. Gus looked down at his half-eaten greaseburger, suddenly more interested in his Coke, in the caffeine and sugar, getting some jolt back into him.
He still didn’t feel right about that van. Gus turned over his hat underneath the table and checked the inside band again. The original five $10 bills he had gotten from that dude, plus the $500 he had earned for driving the van into the city, were still tucked in there. Tempting him. He and Felix could have a hell of a lot of fun on half that amount. Take home half for his madre, money she needed, money she could use.
Problem was, Gus knew himself. Problem was stopping at half. Problem was walking around with unspent money on his