Chapter 12: Funtime for Mitchum

Cecily claimed she knew the way back to her room and not to worry about her, nice meeting you Z. A curtsey to boot. They made loose plans to meet the next day in the lobby stairwell, then she made swift egress and left Z. alone in the hall.

Kiki would be at the afterparty for sure. She suspected Max as well. It didn't matter if she didn't understand what they were doing with their lives or why. If she understood why they disliked her—why she repulsed them—either way, she didn't want them at that party.

Many goons loitered on Hussie's floor, squished against walls with crossed legs and folded arms. They left a narrow path in the center corridor but made no effort to widen it as Z. passed. She recognized them as the same hodgepodge of miscellany that composed Hussie's fandom. Their leers lingered over Z.'s head as she shuffled between them, sure to kick "on accident" as many extended feet as possible, if they dogpiled her let them and see what happens when they don't catch her unaware.

Red!Maximillion stood beside Hussie's door. He wore fancypants headphones and nodded his head to an unheard beat, his shoe tapped the air with arrhythmic twitches. Through his sunglasses Z. couldn't tell if he noticed her. Next to him, however, was the frosty bitch with the blue wig and the scythe, and she definitely saw Z. Z. flipped her off and knocked on the door.

One knock, two knocks. On the third the red suit jabroni took off his headphones. "They won't let you in bruh."

Z. ignored him and knocked again, harder.

"The douchenozzle manning the door only lets in hot chicks—pretty ridic. A real Ernest Chumpingway that guy—shitty beard hipster. See his tats?"

"Yeah, Graves is a massive ponce," said Z. "I'm here to get my friends away from him."

"Hell yeah nothing like a bit of bonding over a mutually hated dick." Red suit guy pulled his sunglasses down to reveal perfectly normal eyes. "By the way," he whispered, "Sorry for going bonkers on you earlier—just horsing around you know? Didn't mean to like hurt you or whatever."

"It's fine," said Z. She whaled against the door.

The sunglasses popped back to their original position. "I think that guy has some irony shtick going on but it's like Class D irony—amateur hour irony. Like it's open mic night at the local irony spittoon and some bozo sauntered up all drunk and shit saying stuff like—Look at me I'm so ironic. Get it it's ironic because I'm ironically calling attention to my irony. Total poseur."

Z. started to kick the door.

"You need more finesse and dedication to the craft. You need to be so ironically distant that you wrap around the world and get close to the source again. It's a subtle art—he gives it a bad name."

Z. was about to make an impolite entreaty for silence when the door snapped open and her foot sailed against Mitchum Graves' shin.

Graves' foot buckled at a weird angle, he stooped forward with bulging bloodshot eyes in his lensless glasses and leaned upon the scepter of his Canadian flag. The full brunt of the party assailed Z. and she flinched for cover, the cosplayers in the vicinity did likewise save the scythe girl who did nothing. The room throbbed with music, horrible horrible hip hop music. Not the old school Malkwon stuff, by comparison Malkwon was Mozart, the ungodly abomination that filled her ears was an orgy of frenetic electronic detritus intermingled with vaguely-comprehensible blips and blops, all while a raggedy voice wheezed the so-called rap:

Grope this bitch tits while my dick getting bigger

Tell her hey my name Fly cuz I'm a fly nigger

Now do Fly a favor you dirty dick licker

Bitch best swallow else I'm a pull this trigger

Dead ho society bitches call me the gravedigger

Unparalleled lyricism. Was the asphyxiating voice spewing such vulgar bars the Canadian himself? He did have a knack for switching the way he sounded, and Z. would not put it past Graves to record his own shitty raps for his own shitty rave.

Graves snapped his foot back in place and loosed a boisterous crow: "Z. Coulter! Velcome to my evil lair, eh!"

His tattooed arm coiled around her neck and dragged her toward the hellparty. Z. jammed her limbs in the frame as his grizzly visage swelled, the Canadian flag aloft, the bloody maple leaf phantasmagoric in the smoky plume.

"It's our chance," said the red suit guy. Him and about five of his fellows made a run at the door. Their combined force propelled her and Mitchum into a writhing mass of moshing(?) bodies, Z. tumbled facefirst into some girl and bounced off and wound up on a dank, beer-splotched carpet, stilettoed female legs jabbing down at her. Her shirt tore on a shard of shattered glass as she crawled for safety. The place was a madhouse, an insane asylum, bodies collapsed in puffs of mist, girls with blank expressions and vomitous lips. Oh god if these stains weren't just overturned liquor—she reared up, collided against a thing, caromed into the glutinous chunk of humanity. Her head sailed into an elbow and she pinballed in a different direction, tilting and twirling.

She fell into the waiting arms of Mitchum Graves. One hand gripped her lower back by the fingertips.

"The riffraff's getting in—why'd you gotta do that?" His hand crawled up and inside her shirt, tarantula fingers.

"Where's Kiki!"

"I wrenched open her ribcage and feasted on her heart, bwahahaha!" He nibbled on her hair, his jaws chattering in skeletal laughter. His hand traveled far up her back. "Ho shit no bra? You perverted slut, I like it!"

Z. flung out a hand and knocked the Canadian flag out his grasp. It hurtled into the smoke and disappeared. With a frantic yelp, Graves released her and plunged after it, toppling partiers domino-style. The hand up her shirt, whiplashed after the whole of its body, wrenched out with a tremendous jerk. A tear split up the shirt's backside and Z. leapt to avoid getting dragged into the blackhole after him.

A moment of uncertainty, groping in the strobe, she located a wall, or a solid vertical object of indeterminate construction. She felt the rip, it went nearly up to the neck. Luckily not on the front.

She oozed across the wall, weaseling her way between tightknit humans and their sticky sweat, coughing on smoke and instantly losing sense of direction. Above the sea of heads extended the Canadian flag, it swiveled with a sad twirl, no way to tell if Graves was attached. It rose on an upswell and tangled in a chandelier. Z. had to turn her face against the wall to ward off spontaneous epilepsy, all kinds of colors ebbed beneath her eyelids. Her cheek scraped the plaster as she fought her way forward, convinced if she stopped moving she would be unable to start again.

A doorway. She pressed her hand against the knob and it swung into a darkened space. Nearby, the dude in the red suit held the frosty-eyed girl against the wall, he grabbed at her thighs as they pressed their lips against each other's faces. Somehow the frosty-eyed girl maintained her impassive glaze. One blue eye shifted to fall upon Z., the swollen pupil pierced Z.'s body, lanced her straight through, chills beset her, everything trembled, Z. flung herself into the darkened room and shut the door behind her.

The door did nothing to mute the music, she fumbled for a light switch, her hand hit nothing but an unidentifiable cloth and a smooth glass surface. At the end of the room thin cracks of light spread around what had to be another doorway. She inched forward in utter blindness, touched a long leathery sheet—shower curtain. Something beyond it loosed a hideous gurgle and Z. stumbled away, she tripped over something and landed on her ass on the hard tile floor. Her pupils, adjusting, perceived a hooked claw extend from the curtain as the gurgle settled into a low slurry of many blended sounds, Z. scooted ass-backward down the bathroom until her bare back slapped against the door, something sluglike oozing black liquid was emerging from the bathtub, she seized the knob and rattled it and slid inside and shut the door and shoved her back against it and breathed.

She had entered another hotel room, a normal one, no degeneracy or foulness here, no bath-slugs or marijuana smoke or Canadian flags. Almost identical to Z.'s own room, different bedspread color, different painting above the headboard (a tiger).

A lone man, Hussie, sat at a desk in front of a laptop into which he typed with machine gun ferocity. The bombastic clack-clack-clack ingested the din of Mitchum's party. Its rhythm assuaged her frayed nerves and stabilized her breathing, she remained a long time propped against the bathroom door merely listening, unable to see the words on the screen he typed. Sometimes, eons ago, when Max wanted to write and Z. wanted to be with Max, he grudgingly allowed her to remain in his room if she promised to keep quiet, and normally the task would be impossible but the tactile stimulation of tippity tippity tap tap tappity lulled her into a dazelike trance while her own thoughts had a chance to rise to the surface of the murky waters and coagulate into words and images. The sound of a keyboard can be anything.

A unicorn. Galloping across an ethereal landscape. Luminescent with purity and whiteness. Woodland, trees. An unblemished lake crowded by pines and evergreens, frigid northern air. If Max falls into the lake, the kelpie inside emerges in the form of a beautiful woman: would you prefer the golden Max or the red Max? Where's the original Max, my Max. I used to sit on his bed and listen to him type. I used to watch movies with him, I used to hear his theories on art and literature. I used to have friends. Now I'm so alone at the bottom of this lake. It's cold down here and I'm lonely. If I say the words I'm lonely and someone hears them will they be my friend? Will Max and Kiki care about me again? I want them to... I want someone to. When the noise is loud and the thoughts run free and there's always something to think about, something to play or watch or read, then she doesn't have to worry. But when the silence comes and there's nobody around she has to face that fear and nothing terrifies her more. Her, unloved, unwanted, unneeded. That edge of infinity where one step off the precipice and you fall forever in an endless darkness sometimes the notion seized her although she could ignore the thoughts all she wanted she could think other things she could say or do anything but it only filled the space was that what her entertainment became a placeholder a substitution why had things gotten this way she had always been different but was she so different that she deserved to lose everything?