Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

Chapter 13

This is where we shoot salt water into your testicles,” said Gary.

He’d converted a big room in the back of the house into a huge walk-in shower room, with sound speakers recessed high in the walls.

“You’re going to have to take your clothes off,” Gary observed. “Not that I’m looking forward to seeing you naked, believe me. You’re in shitty shape for a private detective.”

“How many private detectives do you know?”

“Well… there’s Magnum.”

“Get away from me.”

“Drop ’em.”

“So this is the deal. I let you do this thing to me, and I get the receipt.”

“Right. And quit with the ‘do this thing to me’ like I’m gonna mutilate you or something. This’ll be fun.”

“This is what you do for fun?”

“I get some buddies around, we shoot some saline, we have fun. It’s a party thing. Play some music, have some drinks, you know. I mean, it’s not like we meet in alleyways and mutter, ‘wanna do some saline?’ It’s on the Web, right? Like your girlfriend said.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“You sure?”

“I would have noticed.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Huh. Maybe not. She’s way cooler than you are. Straight people are so fucking weird.”

Aryan Guy came in, stark naked and carrying steaming jugs of water. “Let’s give this guy some balls,” he laughed.

Trix followed him in, holding a medical bag. She winked at me. “I want to see this.”

“I’m your fucking thesis now?”

“You need to relax,” she said, handing Gary the bag. “This is going to be a new experience for you. Just enjoy it for what it is.”

“It’s being trapped in a shower with a gay cop who wants to mutate my nuts, Trix.”

“Oh, will you unclench? Now get ’em off.”

“Gary, does she have to be here?”

“Trix wants to be here, man.”

“I don’t want her to see me naked.”

“Dude, none of us wants to see you naked.”

“You don’t want me to see you naked?”

I couldn’t judge from her voice what she really meant by that. Or possibly what I wanted her to mean by that.

“Listen,” I said to Gary, “I’m her employer. It doesn’t seem…appropriate.”

Trix gave an explosive sigh. “God, I hate that word. ‘Appropriate.’ It’s like, hang a sign around my neck reading I Am a Boring Asshole. Okay, whatever, I’ll go.”

She stomped out, and I felt worse. Aryan Guy stood in front of me and folded his arms. “If you’re done shitting on your girl and generally dicking around, take off your clothes and we’ll all try real hard not to vomit on you. Now.”

I stripped, picturing their corpses being eaten by weasels.

“Jesus,” Aryan Guy said. “Last time I saw a body like yours it was dangling from a tree on CSI. Do you live on grease sucked straight out of burger-joint drains or something? I bet the only exercise you get is flushing the toilet.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Seriously, man. You’re like two steps from the graveyard.”

“I have a rough life. My girlfriend left me for a transgendered dyke with hair implants in her nipples.”

“And alarm bells should have been going off right there, man.”

There was a burst of laughter from the living room, and Scandinavian pop started bubbling out of the speakers.

“There we go.” Gary grinned, his hand in the black bag. “Now we’re having fun.” He split an IV tube out of its sterile wrapper.

“Look, I’m sorry I got in your face before. I’m not having a good time here.”

“Well, now you’re gonna have some fun.”

Chapter 14

Gary flicked on the showers, and I was doused in warm water.

“Relax,” said Gary. “It makes your balls more pliable.”

My balls felt like they’d climbed back up into my body and made a nest under my lungs.

“You people really do this for fun?”

“Man, you are such an asshole. Listen, when you were a kid, did you ever spin round and round on the spot until you were dizzy?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Well…because I liked the feeling, I guess. Yeah, okay, I can see where this is going…”

“So don’t be such a jerk about it. We like the feeling. It’s different, it doesn’t hurt anybody, and it goes away.”

“It does go away?” I actually said that twice—the second time I got the borderline-hysterical squeak out of my voice.

“Oh my God,” groaned Gary. “Were you raised by nuns or something? I figure you’re warm enough. Let’s go. Step out of the water.”

He kept the water running; soft blankets of steam wrapped around me as I stood and faced my certain testicular doom. Gary crouched in front of me, and I fought not to flinch as he gently stroked one of my balls with a fingertip.

“We should have shaved you. You’ve got a bush like a seventies porn star down here, princess.”

“I hate you worse than Osama,” I hissed.

Gary laughed out loud. “You are just too easy to freak out, you know that?” And then he jabbed the IV needle into my nuts.

While I was yelping, Gary followed the tube back to one of the water jugs, and lifted out the warmed saline pack it was connected to. He held it up, and—Christ, I still grit my teeth and cross my legs just thinking about it—something awful with weight and temperature started flowing into my balls.

I grunted and twisted around on my feet. “Will you relax?” snapped Gary. “Anyone would think I was poisoning you.”

“Hhmmnrrgg” was about the cleverest response I could manage at that point. I knew I was wobbling. My testicles were flushed with heat, and getting heavier. I looked down out of one eye. My testicles were the size of a champion prize-grown onion I’d seen at a market gardening competition as a kid. And expanding. I shut my eye again, tight. It felt like I was smuggling cannonballs in my scrotum.

“I can’t believe someone can be as tense as you and not die of something bursting,” Gary commented. “You need to get laid more than any human or animal I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening ever again,” I ground out between gritted teeth. “And I have a feeling kids are out of the picture now, too. You’ve cooked my guys.”

“I may have done the world a favor,” he said thoughtfully.

After what seemed like ten or eleven years, the flow finally stopped. Gary expertly yanked out the IV and thumbed a small, round adhesive dressing onto the puncture. The brine in my testicles rippled horribly. “That’s pretty good,” he observed. “Take a look.”

I unclenched one eye again, swiveled it down, and screamed.

Chapter 15

Gary gave me a big blue towel, wrapped it around my waist as if he were dressing a child, and led shaky me back into the living room.

“Well, Magnum here took it kind of like a man. He’s got balls now.”

There was hooting and clapping, none of which I felt was especially kind.

Trix said, “You really did it?”

Gary laughed. “Sure he did.” And ripped the towel off me.

It looked like someone had nailed a basketball to me.

“That’s awesome,” Trix trilled, clapping some more. I had five seconds of feeling absurdly proud. Before, you know, realizing I was standing naked in front of Trix with mutated testicles and understanding that it pleased her in some way. At which point I grabbed the towel back and lashed it around me.

Aryan Guy grinned. “Either he likes me, or he likes her.”

And, oh God, she smiled at me.

I turned to Gary. “Clothes. Receipt.”

Gary sighed. “Clothes are in the next room, the guest bedroom. Receipt and some notes on what I remember about the guy are on top of them. Lots of luck, Magnum.”

I moved to leave the room. Trix yelled, “My turn!”

I saw Gary react. “You sure?”

“I want balls now!” She giggled. “Mike, stay a while. I want to try.”

I felt eight kinds of weird, and it was exhausting. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” I said, and went into the other room, shutting the door on them.

The notes were cop notes, fragmented but comprehensible as a pen-portrait. They and the receipt did not fill me with pleasure. My crappy luck was holding on like a son of a bitch.

As I realized when I looked at the neatly folded pile of my clothes on the bed.

My pants were, of course, built for a man with normal testicles.

I sat down gently on the edge of the bed and tried very hard not to cry.

With my testicles laying on top of my legs.

The music got louder. I could hear laughing, and clapping.

I almost broke my back leaning over to pull my socks on. No way in hell I was going to attempt to get the underpants on. I’d go commando and take excruciating care with the zipper. The shirt was easy enough, but the main event was obviously going to be my pants. I awkwardly wrestled my feet through the pants legs, scrunching the thing down, and then lay back on the bed. I was suddenly reminded of a girlfriend from back when I was in my teens: watching her lean back and hump and writhe into a pair of stretch jeans, and thinking, Christ, she looks good in them and all, but is it really worth all that performance?

Ho ho. Of course she wasn’t going to leave the house with her bits out in the open air. And neither was I. I hooked my fingers into the belt loops and dragged the pants up me an inch at a time. I told myself I was doing fine. Roomy pants. Not even a remote possibility that my balls were so grotesquely inflated that they couldn’t be packed inside. Hitching them up another inch. There we go, Mike. An inch over your nuts, you clever bastard you. Eeek. Cold zipper metal where it really really should never ever be. Lift up your ass, buy a little wiggle room…

I got the top of my pants to fasten, and bent forward to see how I was doing.

My general front-of-pants area looked like a watermelon stuffed in a kangaroo pouch. I could forget zipping myself up. But I found that if I left my shirt untucked, it draped over my testicles pretty well. Excellent. Jacket on, paperwork in pockets, and I was ready to go. I stood up and groaned. They felt heavier than ever before. Heading for the door, I was waddling more than walking, and I began to worry that this wasn’t going to work.

The side of the house I was in was empty. Everyone was in the shower room, and having a wild old time by the sound of it. I waddled to the front door, my pants pressing hard enough on my balls to start me feeling sick. But I just had to get to the car. I got out the door, shut it behind me quietly, and my pants fastening burst.

Early evening had set in. Lights were on in all the houses. Dogfight noises were coming from the neighbor’s place. I could hear kids playing down the street, and the game sounded like it involved death of some kind.

I held on to my pants with my left hand, and lifted my scrotum with the other. Carrying my testicles, I walked to the car as fast as I could. Which, you know, wasn’t as fast as all that.

I don’t like to think about what I looked like, hefting my own gonads down the front yard path to my car. I thought, in those slow painful moments, that I’d finally hit bottom.

Which was just fucking stupid, really.

Chapter 16

I found that I had to kind of limbo into my car, leaning back and almost heaving my hideous genital weight in ahead of me.

With the car door shut and my scrotum on my lap, I sighed, switched the car radio on, and settled down to wait for Trix. Looking at my watch. Looking out the window. Wondering exactly how long it took to inflate a woman’s labia until they passed as gonads. Minutes crawled.

Pressing buttons at random found me something that sweetly declared itself to be “Ohio’s Liberal Voice,” but what followed appeared to be nothing but a recording of someone screaming at a very high pitch for a very long time.

I stabbed the deck some more, cycling through a soft-rock station, some weird broadcast of a woman doing nothing but reading numbers very slowly, and what I guessed was a local church channel. A man was explaining in a very loud voice, as if speaking to a child, that everyone in California likes anal sex. “I like churches. They like anal sex. I like families and children. They like having abortions. No, it’s true. They are all secular Jews who hate Jesus and America. And they call me a Nazi when I say that. But let me say this. Hitler was always very respectful of the church. And he hated cigarettes.”

An announcer’s voice came in to tell me that I’d been listening to Proinsias Kernahan, president of the Catholic League, and to ask me to wait until after these messages to hear the rest of the evening news. Dear God, but it was time for a cigarette. I punched the search button again, fished out a half-crushed pack of Dunhills, and lit up with relief. The radio scanned around a bit and landed on something that sounded oddly amateur. Listening and smoking, I came to understand it was a micropower radio station. A couple of kids broadcasting out of a back room somewhere. And somewhere close by, too. The kids, only one of whom sounded hopelessly stoned, explained that their signal didn’t reach more than a couple of miles, and even that only if the wind was behind it and you were standing downhill with your arms out and a wire coat hanger stuck on top of your head.

The unstoned one was pretty smart. In between the music—which apparently was all by local unsigned bands, and some of it wasn’t bad—he talked about what they were doing and why. By playing local indie music, they were both supporting his community and broadcasting donated content that didn’t require a royalty payment. They weren’t, they insisted, pirates. They were even observing band adjacency, he said—this one, the guy who hadn’t smoked a field of weed, was obviously the Head Geek—broadcasting on 94.2, clear space between two “lite”/soft-rock channels. And that was the point, he figured—most of Columbus’s dial was all eaten up by soft rock, country, and Christian radio. All the major monolithic radio entities ran stations in Columbus, but they all broadcast exactly the same kind of material. They all had a Christian station, they all had anesthetic adult easy-listening rock stations playing the kinds of records we used to lift out of our parents’ collections and use as ashtrays when I was a kid.

It suddenly occurred to me: I didn’t remember the last time I went to a gig. Couldn’t remember the last time I heard live music. Or went to a club to hear a DJ.

They played something by another local group, that had the real thump and clang of live music. The drummer started up on the toms, and collapsed into a glorious mess that sounded like he’d kicked the drumkit down a flight of stairs. The bass walked in and made the back of the car rattle. The lead guitarist went screaming down the strings and I laughed out loud, it sounded so good. And then there was a fuckload of static, ten seconds of silence, and a fight. Someone had entered their makeshift recording studio, and one of the kids, probably the smart one, had put the microphone back on.