She didn’t tell him about the computer when they first met, although he knew that she was keeping something from him, a secret, hidden part of herself that she didn’t feel comfortable yet sharing. There was a void in all the half-stories about her life that she told him, a growing rot she deliberately ignored. He only found out about it after the afterparty, when her drunk friends who had coupled up shambled out through the trembling orifice of her flesh apartment. When everyone had gone she took his hand, led him from the rose-shadowed living room and down the moist hall. The puckered orifice of a room on the right opened for them.
“Wake up,” Vanessa said to the disembodied head at the room’s center, ballooning from the end of a fleshy stalk. Its complexion was the color of hot chocolate. The eyes snapped open, revealing bright hazel.
“This is my brother Jason.”
“Your brother?”
“Yeah. Jason died five years ago, my mom a year later. When these new ones came out, I saved up enough to get him.” She reached out to stroke the blinking, bald head. “The hair was extra. He responds if you talk to him, you know. Say something.”
Parker studied the head studying him. He had heard about these new models, seen the all too lifelike ads that vacantly stared down at him from billboards, wet eyes following him as he walked through the subway even when he wasn’t looking at them.
“I think I’m good,” he said. “I gotta dip out anyway. But thanks for having me over.”
“Already?”
It was three in the morning. Drink and talk had made Parker feel heavy, soaking up liquor and jagged conversation, exchanging glances with Vanessa as the room throbbed.
She stepped toward him, bare feet shaped like arrowheads crossing the expanse of flesh. Her silver, sequined minidress slipped off, exposing nothing but brown. He thought of that lone park’s leaves in autumn, of musical instruments and fruit.
“Stay.”
They made love while the computer watched.
***
At first the decay was gradual. After several weeks of random malfunctions and delays, the autonomous, citywide transit system collapsed altogether. But not before mechanics had discovered pus-filled, open sores along the fleshy hulls of every bus and train car.
If this had happened anywhere else, it would have led to widespread panic, a drastic slump in the city’s economy, the mayor declaring a state of emergency. But this was New Meat City—the city of tomorrow and hope, constructed with and powered by immortal flesh as a monument to life itself. It did not falter, stumble, or sleep. So Parker and millions of others took to the veiny walkways stretching like sinews across the musculature of the city. Shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder alongside the masses, the commute gave him time to think about his nights with Vanessa.
One night she finally opened up about Jason. They were post-coital cuddling in a long, deep scar spanning the width of the computer room. She preferred to fuck there, in front of the head, passing over her bed’s labial folds for the mutilated floor.
“When we were kids, before everything got so bad, Ma took us to the beach,” she murmured into Parker’s armpit. “I think she had met my dad there. It was so crowded with families playing and splashing in the water. Jay went farther out than anyone, even the adults. He was still so little then. And the further he went out into the ocean, the more nervous it made Ma. But she let him keep going until the water was basically up to his chest, and it wasn’t until the tide came in that we both went out to get him. I mean we legit thought he was gonna drown. And of course he went under, but I saw him give one of those smirks before he did. Ma screamed. That’s when everyone stopped and noticed, and the first time he died, at least for me. I was like, ‘There’s no way he’s coming back up.’ More like felt it. But then he came flying up out of the water holding this big-ass, wriggling fish, like the biggest fucking fish ever. He was so damn proud. And everyone started clapping and cheering, all these people who I thought were gonna let him drown, and I turned to Ma, but she was already headed back to the shore.”
Vanessa started weeping. Parker had never seen anyone cry that hard before. He drew her in close, absorbing the heavy sobs racking her body. That’s when he caught sight of the head just beyond her heaving shoulder. It still freaked him out, although he had gotten used to it, figuring that its detached, quiet voyeurism was the fairly cheap cost of much-desired intimacy. The head was crying too, thick beads of yellow pus gathering in the hollows of its cheeks.
***
Parker’s job was pretty simple and paid well enough to afford his own flesh apartment. He was a trainer. Every morning now he would wake up two hours before work and set out for the nailless big finger visible from the gossamer windows of his bedroom. By then, many of the city’s buildings were afflicted with the same rot plaguing its once world-class public transit system, so signage had been put up along the walkways warning commuters of likely pus showers.
Trainers provided private developers with all the raw input that gave visceral form to the first city made entirely of meat. Upon intake, Parker was stripped completely naked and hosed down with a stinging cocktail of disinfectants. Then he was led by armed men to a flesh-padded room with a skeletal contraption at the center. Aided by the gunmen, Parker would climb in and lay flat on his back while the machine’s bony appendages wrapped themselves around his bare body. After a brief shock they would begin recording the individual synapses of his nervous system, compiling and adapting them into the wetwork database of New Meat City.
Intrusive thoughts that might cause impurities in the city’s flesh were expressly discouraged. The men with guns present during Parker’s ten-hour shift made sure of this, alerted to any aberrant bioelectrochemical changes. While strapped to the chair he made the conscious effort to avoid thinking about Vanessa. They didn’t even know all that much about each other, but their time spent together made him feel more alive than he had ever been, and the tenderness of her heart and body was more reassuring of life’s possibilities than a rotting city inspired by necrotic dreams.
Recently they had taken a day trip into the Old City. They traveled several miles along descending, interconnected walkways, carrying black umbrellas for the scattered pus showers and chunks of falling meat. People rarely went down there—the old-style concrete, glass, and steel structures had been abandoned and left to crumble over twenty years ago. The Old City was a disgraceful blemish from a bygone era, a cautious reminder of stagnation and urban decay. But Vanessa claimed she knew a chill spot in one of its districts, the site of a former lake where they could sit and talk while smoking a pack of illicit, stale cigarettes that her mother had once confiscated from Jason.
The lake was no longer a lake, though, when they finally got there at dusk. It had dried up, its basin littered with trash from the old world: plastic and styrofoam containers, random scraps of metal, and entire dunes of yellowed cigarette butts. Still, Parker didn’t mind. He relished every moment spent with Vanessa, even if they hadn’t talked much as they descended into the bowels of this ghost city. Obviously something was bothering her. He suspected it was connected to the memory of the beach that she had shared with him, almost as if she was expecting Jason to be there, the real Jason, alive and well, wading out into the lake’s placid waters.
“Right here’s perfect,” he said as they plopped down on a sagging bench.
Vanessa said nothing. She pulled out the faded pack of Morley cigarettes from her violet windbreaker, offered one to Parker, followed up with an old lighter. This was his first time ever smoking, and he broke out into a coughing fit as purplish plumes floated over mounds of garbage.
His violent hacking made her laugh. Her spirits apparently raised, she leapt up from the bench and headed down into the basin. A corroded soda can hit Parker in the chest a moment later, and before he knew what he was doing he was knee-deep in junk, chucking rubbish as though they were snowballs. When they had both worn themselves out, they climbed back toward the bench where they made love as broken windows gazed down at them.
***
“Something’s wrong with Jason.” Her voice came in strained and wildly high-pitched through the chapped lips of his housephone’s mouthpiece.
“Yeah,” Parker replied, looking at the puddles of yellow pus and growing layers of rotten flesh collecting on the mushy floor of his kitchen. The smell was atrocious.
“Can you come over? I know you just got off work, but I need you.”
It wasn’t just the trains and buses or Vanessa’s computer and his apartment—the whole city was dying. The rot had spread everywhere, even to the walkways that buckled under the footfalls of millions of pedestrians. Several hundred-thousand had already fallen to their deaths, down into the rusted shadows of the Old City. The skyline that once was the envy of the world, with its mile-high spiral flesh towers gilded by the sun, had degenerated into shapeless columns of gooey carrion. People finally started panicking, leading to all-out riots. Policemen that spit metal bullets were immediately sent out in force.
When Parker eventually got to Vanessa’s, surprised he had managed to make it, the crusted orifice of her apartment feebly dilating to admit him, she was kneeling in front of the head as if praying before an altar.
“What’s wrong with him?” she cried.
The handsome, brown face had deteriorated into little more than a blanched skull. Clumps of putrid flesh hung loosely from jutting cheeks, exaggerating the hollow eye socket and a cyclopean, hazel orb.
“What should we do?” She turned to Parker. “I can’t lose him again.”
Parker didn’t even have to think that long about it. The solution came to him like one of those shocks from the chair sending him skyward, where reality and matter, memories and dreams collapsed into a pure, ceaseless horizon.
“Let’s leave.”
“What? You mean the city?”
“Why not? Shit’s falling apart anyway. Like it always does.”
Vanessa looked back at the computer, her twice-dying brother, then nodded. “But we have to bring Jason,” she said.
“Of course.”
So they both stood on either side of the head, palming handfuls of rancid flesh, and pulled.
-- Aaron Thorpe is a writer originally hailing from New York. He is currently the co-host of The Trillbilly Workers Party. You can find him on Twitter — still not calling it “X” — under @afrocosmist, where he shares retro sci-fi art, political commentary, and his love for Star Trek. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.