All the Horrible Girliness

Damn

Damn, but it's cold in here.

Know how long it took me to even say damn? Fifteen years. Fifteen years with that jackass. I didn't realize it when I was among the living, that part about my husband being a jackass, because the Bible explains everything away if you look at it from the right angle.

Come to think of it, I never have said damn. Feels like it, stuck in here, looking at the backs of my eyelids. I've been thinking to myself so long that it feels like talking to myself, at least what I remember of talking to myself, except the conversations are more interesting now.

Being in here feels exactly like one of those nights where you can't tell if you're asleep or not. You wake up and wonder if you've been awake all this time, so you look at the clock. Except, without a clock in this damn thing, I don't know if I've been asleep for five minutes or five years. Could be nothing out there, but I assume somebody is up and running around, pulling levers and pushing buttons, or it wouldn't still be so damn cold in here.

My skin can't feel it any more. The cold. I remember feeling cold, kind of how you remember being a kid; it's a memory all in words and pictures, and all you have left of it is the emotion. I remember my pores bumping up when I walked outside into the snow, hugging myself in thick coats, first cheap ski jackets bought secondhand and then, after I married the jackass, real furs in varying lengths, hats and gloves and muffs. I remember the crunch of salt on ice, both on the street and in margaritas, but I can't feel or hear or taste these things anymore. Just the relief at going into a warm room, or the humiliation of falling.

My skin doesn't feel, and my tongue doesn't taste. Either my baggage of a body is dead by now, or it got used to the cold, the way a woman can get used to being married to a jackass, until the cold is just a slight pain you feel way down in your lungs whenever you breathe in. Which isn't often, and kind of keeps me company when it happens. Like the occasional beat of my heart.

There it goes.

*

The Lord provides, this I know. Whenever I asked the jackass how we could afford another Jaguar or trip to Japan or addition on the church, he'd tell me, "The Good Lord provides." Now that I'm in here, I want to know if there's a Bad Lord too, and if he's the one the poor people pray to, because obviously the Good Lord was too busy providing for us to provide for most of the members of the jackass' church. Or maybe every one of those people in the congregation were The Good Lord incarnate, providing us with 10% of their paychecks every Sunday and figuring that would plant their butts at the Right Hand of God in the Hereafter.

What I still don't rightly understand, even after all this time talking to myself in this damn thing is, why didn't anyone come up and ask why? If one person with four kids and a mortgage they couldn't pay had ever asked me, "Why do I give you money when you have so much already?" maybe I would've questioned the jackass. Maybe I wouldn't have. Maybe I would have patted their hands and fed them the jackass' other favorite adage:

Your reward is in heaven.

*

When I'm tired of being pissed off at the jackass, I think about my son. Damn, but he was a beautiful boy, taking after me, with dark hair and light eyes, and a big dick too, which also certainly couldn't have come from the jackass, but since I can't claim big-dick genes myself, I'll just assume that the Good Lord provided the boy with that dick. I know about the dick because I saw him changing clothes on accident when he was thirteen years old, and my first thought was of that big expensive movie Terminator 2, where the Terminator was defeated and replaced with a much more handsome, slick version who was damn near indestructible. Because the boy was an asshole, one step up from jackass, and those genes came directly from deep inside his father's little squinched-up balls.

A full 8.5% of that last thought back there were words I have never spoken aloud. I do math in my head now, just like I did while I was up and running, and bored. I did it during sex with the jackass and during his sermons and whenever he drove very fast, like he thought the rich men of the world did, so I was calculating how many miles longer I had to sit in the passenger seat while the jackass cut across four lanes of traffic, missed his exit and slammed the Mercedes into a guard rail. The first time I woke up in this thing, I was converting those miles into kilometers; my mind was polite enough to check out during all the things that must have happened between the crash and me waking up with few nerve endings to speak of in this freezing cold tank.

The doctors all called it a "chamber," but I called it a tank, because it had glass everywhere, and the people inside looked like sleeping fish. Like octopi when they turn white. The doctor gave us a tour around the facilities with aplomb. Brain wave activity that perfectly matched sleep. New advances in science all the time. And, of course, Nancy Brown, the fragile, dull woman who'd made headlines and talk shows everywhere just because she'd risen from the cryonic tank looking, at a glance, just like a 23-year old and minus a nasty bout of breast cancer which a brand-new, clever little bit of laser technology had zapped away like it was a bothersome wart. She celebrated her 79th birthday on a morning talk show boasting the same blank look she'd had on Letterman and Leno and I don't know what-all. I watched all this because the jackass forced me to. He loved Nancy Brown, damn near had a schoolgirl crush on her.

His reward was waiting in heaven, and he was scared shitless.

He laid his hands on the heads and, I found out later, a few other body parts, of the sick congregation every Sunday and begged The Good Lord loudly for healing, but if the jackass or I or the terminator ever so much as coughed, he sped us double-time to the doctor. When Nancy Brown came out of her fishtank, devoid of pigment and dull as a brick but cancer-free, the jackass was one of the freakish masses who immediately made an appointment to reserve a fishtank of their own. He showed me the one he'd reserved for me, so I have a good mental picture of where I am now.

Sleepy-time brain wave activity. Those morons. Hello? Are you measuring this, out there with your computers and clipboards? I for damn sure never dreamed like this.

*

State of the art, this fishtank, costing more than many Jaguars. More than the house. And there's an additional retainer cost for every year I'm in here, so the scientists can go about the business of measuring my brain waves, keeping me cold and showing off my pale octopus skin to other jackasses wanting to preserve their miserable existences. That's how I know that the jackass, terminator, or his spawn, are still out there in the world somewhere, paying my freezer bill.

The terminator might still be sixteen, the age I left him, still getting in trouble. Sure wasn't nice of him to get that girl pregnant, especially since I had to load the little hussy into the passenger seat of my Jag and take her to the clinic to have her insides scooped out. Cost the jackass a pretty penny, too, to keep her and her father, both members of our congregation, quiet. The girl woke up weeping and reached for me like I was her momma, but I had enough problems with the men in my life, and men are simple. I took the girl home. I meant to affect a worried wrinkle in my brow when I delivered her into the hands of her father, but remembered afterward that I'd had all that Botoxed two days prior. The terminator was in choir practice. Damn, but that boy could sing.

If it took me awhile to come around, then he could be thirty, with a woman he cheats on and little kids bred to be even more evil than he and his father could dream.

Or he could be dead, or if he never garnered some sense for himself, he could be frozen too. I wonder how many generations are frozen here in this place, if there are grandchildren and great-grandchildren paying the bill for the helpless, octopus bodies of ancestors they've never met.

If the jackass didn't die from that crash, he's almost certainly frozen in a tank right next to me, with his itty bitty, bleached-white penis there for every rich shopper to observe. The thought of that makes me almost feel like I could bust through the glass of this fishtank just long enough to unplug the jackass. I'd watch him die, however long it took, slow, watching his fishlips say, silent, mom, mom, mom, until he was no longer a waste of oxygen.

*

I wonder what scientific miracle my body is waiting for. What happened to me? Even if I'd been found headless, the scientists would lock my corpse up in this thing with the cheery promise that medical science would find a way, someday, for me to exist again, just like new, so they could get their endless retainer fee.

Nancy Brown, in all her octopus-like wonder, turned out to be a fake, a granddaughter of the first woman who was ever frozen and, as it turned out, killed by a cryonic tank. Eerie resemblance, said the papers. The jackass didn't care. He was rich, but he wasn't smart. He'd been wowed by the tour of fishtanks. A little hope was better than heaven. Besides, who knows what I might have found out about him up there? Maybe he really believed his hellfire and brimstone sermons, and deep-down figured he belonged down in the suffering.

What do I look like now? Do I still have legs? Have my fingernails curled over on themselves? Maybe I've sprouted tentacles, a mean expression, and a tendency toward changing color with my mood. I wouldn't know. Maybe this is heaven.

There it goes again. Bloomp. The lazy, frozen beat of my heart.

Hey, you brain-wave reading bastards! Can you hear me? It is damn cold in here.

posted by Samus @ 12:11 AM