One afternoon Harry and me were down in the shelter. This was several years before he finally blew us all up. The war was almost over; although we had no way of knowing it at the time.
Bald scrawny Harry was pounding up a pig larynx. To fix his favorite dish: squeal pie. Not that he used a crust. But when he hammered the things to a pulp, they looked somewhat sickeningly like cherry pie filling. He ate them raw. Scooped right off the cutting board.
An art object lay on the picnic table set off in a corner of the shelter. I'd thrown it together that morning. Flubber sculpture. Kind of a Dali knockoff. I mean, it had a doll face, with x-ed eyes and a button smile; but was warped into non-Euclidean goop, like the space dopes in Frozen Time, or The Illusion Of Memory, or whatever that reprint was I saw once in a book back in college.
Harry believed eating pig larynx would help contain his anger. We all had a lot of that down in those shelters. Besides being a hazard of existence in a two-hundred-foot square subterranean nightmare, anger was also symptomatic of Puke Waves reaching lethal concentration. No way to avoid a certain amount of leakage. Even in the tightest of shelters. Some days, when the enemy had our range and were lobbing in Gaggers by the billion, things could get infuriatingly woozy.
I was jabbing the art object with a replica of the arrow supposedly shot through Mickey Mantle's head in Milwaukee during the 1958 Series. Even had a curved wire in the middle, so Mickey could put it on, put his cap over the wire and pose for that picture where he's grinning with a missile piercing his temples.
The object grinned back, as I plastered its silly-putty face with wounds. I was pissed. Striving not to be. Gripping the shaft close to the warhead. Curved wire above my fist.
I could hear Harry crunching thyroid gristle. Like listening to a saw remove your knuckles.
Poor Harry. He didn't know what the Jesus he was doing. After four and a half years of cabin fever complicated by residual Puke Wave exposure, he was most of the time completely out of his skull.
Got eventually bored mutilating the morning's project. Dropped the arrow into the box along with the rest of the toys. There was no TV to grok, tunes to dig, radio to glue your ear to – vibrations like that brought in the Gaggers.
They homed on the weirdest shit. Flashbulbs, loud singing, sudden fits of pique, cigarettes lit too gaudily. It was rumored even over-hefty bowel movements guided them in. Something about the splash setting up a resonance in the sewage system monitored by enemy satellite. Others said it was the sudden smell-gradient increase.
This was unfortunate. Because many of us tried to compensate for the ungodly nausea by crapping a lot. Stats proved those who did died more often. Whatever, the upshot of the uncertainty was: defecation became rare. Poisons backed up in our bodies. Coupled with jittery nerves and brain stem irritation from Puke Wave leakage, episodes of hallucination and delusion – often lasting hours at a time – grew to be perfectly acceptable.
Rather fun seeing things you later realized weren't there. Everyone thought of television. Like walking around in a sitcom. Or a detective show. But now and then came the flash you were just a bozo sunk in a subterranean bunker. Lots of guys lost it right there. They doubled over, back brain jammed into overdrive; puked their guts out.
Typically, the spleen emerged first, flooding the floor crimson. Kidneys, bowel, appendix, chunks of liver followed. Some chucked it all up straight down to the rectum. Then perhaps a prostate, or the slack football of a womb. Before reflex slipped its grip, and life was officially outta there.
Harry's theory about squeal pie was extremely harebrained. Decided for the umpteenth time that day to approach the cutting board and tell him so to his face; stressing no pun intended – despite hair being a kind of rabbit.
He figured, bald mongoloid that he was, that a diet high in pig larynx would give his own voice box magical power. Not that Harry was a talker. On the average, he uttered about twenty-five words a day. Ten of which were please, the other fifteen mostly no.
What he wanted, was to metabolize his anger into excretable components. He hoped to acquire – with a toughened, overdeveloped larynx – the ability to digest ire, and never risk spewing it. Thereby neither polluting the tense emotional atmosphere nor attracting the Vomelites.
It was his fancy he would soon start secreting an enzyme he dubbed melancholin. Stuff would break down angry words and curses before they could engage his vocal apparatus.
This would come in handy during gag attack. Yelling, screaming and other outbursts tended to bring the Gaggers zooming in. Harry was always afraid he'd throw a fit just as the Vomelites cruised over the shelter's buried roof. Sonar would pinpoint Harry's adenoids. They'd blast a mammoth burst. He'd die horribly, puking himself over backwards into unheard of dimensions of agony and wretchedness. I'd get it, too. Trauma from near-miss. But my death would be champagne compared to his.
Before I reached the cutting board, however, Harry exploded into this clown I used to know. I was stunned at the resemblance.
If it was really him, this guy had turned out to be a rapist, and was still supposed to be behind bars. Probably he'd broken out when the pen was under nausea onslaught. Guards blowing their cookies all over the exercise yard.
"Will you stop eating that puke!" I confronted the convicted rapist.
The only reply I got was garbled – disguised as Harry's voice.
Sounded like his usual, "Please… no."
I'd heard enough. Went for the throat.
I had no use for a rapist. Oh, probably because I secretly feared I might turn into one myself. The usual gutlessness loathing clothes. But what the hell – I didn't see any harm in strangling this notorious asshole to death.
My fingers found the thyroid cartilage. The apple Adam couldn't swallow. Thumbed it in hard, tightening grip on his neck, as I pinned him to the concrete.
"Get a grip on yourself, man!" he spat in my ear. "You can't strangle yourself – you'll pass out; you'll ruin my appetite!"
The most words I'd ever heard Harry use all at once. He was right. I was kneeling before the full-length mirror; the one we called the psyche. Choking myself between the toy box and the picnic table.
The face of the rapist melted into my own. Details of the crime blurred. Everything hazed.
Released hands from throat. Took deep breath. Just in time. Barely remembering to ignore the horror I'd hallucinated. Started babbling about how could I ever have done this to myself?
Harry was gobbling a ribbon of cartilage. He gave me a look that said: "Will you for Christ's sake shut the fuck up?"
Slurping a final sliver of pie, he pointed at the wall clock. High noon. Universal Time. The hour the Vomelites hovered due overhead.
Imagining bombbays crammed with Gaggers whose payloads could each deliver multi-mega barf of Puke Waves… picturing diligent technicians hunched over sonar gear, olfactory monitors, launch buttons… knowing any instant I was apt to erupt into howls of self-abasement…
Grabbed in both fists my throat. Choked and choked. Choked repeatedly, redundantly, revengefully.
Till the room grew blue, whirled around, and I fell asleep like an ax smacked into an oak.
Half a day later, I awoke. Having had the damnedest dream. Which I at once forgot.
But what the hell – the Vomelites were gone. And the only damage was that Harry afterwards fasted for a week. He had hated the sight of me unconscious. Reminded him too starkly of all the misery I was missing. Made him feel he was being made to eat more shit than anybody else in the room. So he reacted with nearly 170 hours of nail-biting starvation.
I never could talk him out of the pig larynx theory. Whenever it didn't work, and he woke up choked with rage, frothing in the middle of the night, he'd claim, once he calmed down enough to manage a coherent whisper, that it must have failed on account of that week he skipped the diet.
