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Pat’s bent over now, hauling her semi-expensive boots up with both mittened hands. “Enough to know he’ll fuck dead bodies if I ask him to,” she says, shortly.

“’Cause he wants to.”

A short, sharp smile, orthodontic-straight except for that one canine her wisdom teeth pushed out of line, coming in. “Best way to get anyone to do anything, baby. As you should know.”

Of course, Pat’s hardly objective. Seeing how she’s in lust with Ray . . . love, maybe, albeit of a perversely limited sort. Much the same way he is, truth be told—

—with “me.”

But Lyle, obviously, doesn’t feel he can argue the point. So he just returns her smile, talk show bland and throat-slitting bright, as she reaches for the door-handle: Lets them both out, side by side, into a world of gathering cold. All bundled up like Donner Party refugees, and twice as hungry.

And: Don’t follow, the angels advise me, uselessly. Don’t watch. Don’t care.

But the fact is, I . . . don’t. I really don’t. Don’t feel, or know what I don’t feel. Let alone what I do.

D-E-A-D, but way too much still left of me. I’m dead, so let me lie. Let me lie.

Please.

Pat and Lyle, struggling up the alley and down to the nearest curb. Ray, his obtrusively unobtrusive car—the Rich Pervertmobile itself, far too clean and anonymous to be used for anything but life’s dirtiest little detours—already there to meet them, pluming steam.

And somewhere, awaiting its cue, the reluctant third party in this little triangle cum foursome: My body, a water-clock full of blood and other fluids, forever counting down to an explosion that’s already happened. A psychic plague-bomb oozing excess pain, a hive for flies, all slick, lily-waxen and faintly bruised in the wake of rigor mortis’ ebb, even before Ray’s hot mouthings gave birth to that starburst of pale lavender hickeys around what used to be my trachea.

It’s not me, not in any way that counts—but it’s not not me, either. And I just, I just . . .

. . . don’t . . .

. . . want . . .

. . . them touching it anymore.

Either of them.

* * *

Going back—as far back as he can, at least—Ray tells Pat that he thinks the first time he really began to understand the true nature of his personal . . . distinction . . . must have been when his parents insisted he visit his beloved grandfather’s freshly-dead body at the local hospital: Washed, laid out, neatly johnny-clad. His parents had already forewarned him it would look like a mannequin, like something made of plaster, an empty husk. But it wasn’t like that, not even vaguely. It looked oddly magnetic, oddly tactile; nothing rotten, or gross, or potentially contagious—soothing, like an old friend. And its only smell was the familiar odor of shed human skin.

He wanted to lie down with his head on its sternum, breathe deep and let it cool his fever, this constant ceaseless hammering in his head and heart. To free him, for once and for all, of the febrile hum and spark of his own life.

Since then, Ray’s never been able to decide what arouses him more: The concept itself, or the sheer impossibility of its execution. Because anyone can fuck the dead, if they only try hard enough—but the dead, by their very nature, can never fuck

back. Which is why it has to be guys, though he himself is—in every other way than this—”straight.” If that term even applies, under these circumstances.

Their superiority. Their otherness. To him, it’s only natural: The dead know more, and knowledge is power. And power, as that old politician once boasted . . . is sexy.

So: Fucked in slaughterhouses, under the hanging racks of meat. Fucked with decay smeared all over them both, in graveyards, animal cemeteries; sure, buddy—just gimme my cut, you freak, and bend on over. Fucked in mortuaries, the “other” corpses watching impassively. Corpses taking part in his own taking, silent voyeurs, sad puppets in countless sweaty menages a mort. Fucked by guys wearing corpses’ skins—and wow, was that expensive, mainly because it went against so many kinds of weird sanitation strictures; public health, and all that. Same reason you can’t just drop your Grandad in the garden if he happens to croak at your house—or die at home at all, these days, for that matter.

Fucked by the dying—guys so far gone, so far in the financial hole, they’d do anything to make their next medical bill. A charge, but not quite the same; not the same, and never enough. And finally, back to the morgue alone with condoms and trocar in hand—here’s an extra hundred to leave the door ajar, I’ll lock up as I leave. No worries.

Money’s no problem; Ray has money. Too much, some might say—too much free time, and a bit too little to do with except obsess, jerk off, plan. The idle rich are hard to entertain, Vinnie . . .

Things do keep on escalating, though, often and always. And escalation can bring a bad reputation, especially in some quarters.

Which made it all the more lucky Ray and Pat happened to find each other, I suppose—for them both.

And for Lyle, of course, albeit from a very different point of view . . . Lyle, to whom falls the onerous yet lucrative task of facilitating this gender switched post-Millennial Death And The Maiden tableau they’ve played out every day this week, given or take; same one that would surely re-run itself constantly behind my eyelids if only I still had either eyes to see with, or lids to close on what I didn’t want to see. Same one you might well already have seen already, if you’re just hip and sick enough to have paid Lyle’s “finder’s fee” up front—or bought the bootleg DV8 tapes he peddles over the Internet, thus far unbeknownst to either of his silent partners.

Like Lyle, I never saw that original “audition” tape on Pat’s shelf, either. But as the run-down above should prove, I’ve certainly heard its precis often enough: Why I Like To Get Screwed By Dead Bodies For The Amusement Of Total Strangers Even When The Money Involved’s My Own, In Fifty Thousand Words Or More. Ray’s confession/manifesto, re-spilled at intervals—after various post-post-mortem Bone Machine-aided orgies, usually—over binges of beer and weed which sometimes culminate in fumbling, gratitude- and guilt-ridden, mutually unsatisfying attempts at “normal” sex. Pat lying slack beneath a sweating, huffing Ray, trying to will her internal temperature down far enough to maintain his shamed half-erection even as her own orgasm builds, inexorably. Cursing the demeaning depths this idiot hunger for him can make her sink to, while simultaneously feeling her fingers literally itch to seize the Machine’s controls again and do the whole damn thing over right.