missy

Keyung Sun Park's enlightenment came to her relatively easily. She was bent over the hood of a car, her own car, pink panties down around her knees, taking it from behind when the shadows of the world began to melt away, thrust by thrust. Deep bass thudded in the club behind them and droplets of rain shook themselves free and tumbled down the windshield. Keyung could see her warped reflection. She was biting her lip, one cheek against the cold hood, tiny in the dark glass of the windshield. She could almost see me too, in my office half a town away, watching her in my mind's eye.

Keyung came, was born a new being, and saw existence for what it is the very first time. Wiping herself up with one hand, she gave the man who was just inside her a perfunctory kiss and then walked home, head up, eyes straight ahead. Later that night her date came in for his night shift job at the ward and I killed him. Rat poison in his coffee. He was too busy ever so carefully counting every stroke of his mop -- anything to avoid the tedium of omniscience -- to notice. He was my twelfth murder. When enlightenment is a sexually transmitted disease, one cannot be too careful.

"It's Karen," Keyung told me the next morning, when she reported for rounds. The telltale signs were all there: the short, perfunctory sentences, the sudden insistence on a pedestrian name and the inability to make eye contact with me. She had been fine with Keyung the day before, when she filled out her ID badge. Now truly enlightened, she knew that what she once thought was the real world was just a chicken wire and papier mache' imitation. It's hard for most neonates to empathize with the paper dolls who surround them. That's why I had to kill some of the others, but I knew that Keyung would find a way.

Later, I heard her talking to a pair of candy stripers about some TV show. The goofy male lead and the female lead finally kissed, even though she was far sexier than he. They had been trapped in a meat locker all night, for some reason. Keyung wasn't sure why, she hadn't been paying that much attention. She was brilliant a day ago, a moron-in-training today. Sexier now though, because she knew to drink in the joy that others experienced. Perfect. She would be able to do what I have failed to do, because my shell was just too ugly to fuck the planet. She would seduce the world for me, and drag it moaning and whimpering into a new Golden Age. I knew it, like I know everything.



The ward was hectic that day. Three suicidals, four kids whose parents were sick of them, two drugs and a JPC. "What's JPC?" Keyung asked me when I handed her the patient's chart. Her faux ignorance was so cute.

"Just Plain Crazy," I said. "Symptoms all over the place. Older man. Thinks he's God. Defecates on himself, claims it doesn't matter. Threatened to kill us all. We had to restrain him and give him Narcan, but he probably wasn't on anything. He's calmer now, his name is Chin. You should check in on him. Maybe you know something we don't, both of you being Chinese."

"I'm Korean. Korean-American, okay? Oh, and my parents don't own a deli," she said, rising onto the balls of her feet, a bit angry. She took a moment and inhaled, and the universe inhaled with her. I swallowed a smile, she couldn't tell about me yet.

"Just go see him. See if you can get kin information. Insurance, something!"

She turned on her heel and walked off, her razor sharp haircut bobbing just over her shoulders. Her skirt was short, and her lab coat way too long. I was barely able to stare at her calves, sleek and well defined, wrapped in black stocking like a fleshy present. It was boiling in her. I could smell her.

Apparently, so could Chin. It took four orderlies to restrain him this time; his screaming was so loud I could barely see his mind. I jabbed a syringe full of Haldol into his thigh, and caught a glimpse of his member. Huge and purple. The lights dimmed with his consciousness, and I sent the orderlies away with a thought when Chin finally relaxed into the bed, into the straps. He was thin, too thin, and bald, with flesh pulled so taught over his skull that it looked like he was wearing a mask. Who would have screwed this poor man, and why?

I spent the afternoon arranging rearranging next week's schedules, to make sure Keyung and I had every shift in common, and looking over the newspaper where police blotter reports and racing results nestled alongside ads for strippers with five-pointed stars for nipples and hairdos like wedding cakes. What was I looking for? A headline reading SCARLET WOMAN ATTACKS MAN AT HAND LAUNDRY, or HOMELESS PERSON LAID BY UNKNOWN ATTACKER? All there was were stories on the usual monkey-man lust for shiny things and more room to shit. Not for much longer. I wiped a few doughnut crumbs from the paper and got ink on my hands. Good, now I can wash my hands instead of think, I thought, but as I walked to the bathroom I passed Keyung on the payphone. She was leaving Glen, the man I had killed last night, a message he wouldn't be receiving.

"...ren, no Keyung. Just wanted to see how you were. It was pretty wild last night, but I think I have something to talk to you about. Please page me, even at work. It's sort of an emergency." I washed my hands and masturbated to orgasm three times in the stall. I gave the universe a little lick. The walls of the institution unfolded like an origami butterfly and I saw Chin's granddaughter in the grainy black and white my brain uses to conceptualize the past. Her legs were wrapped around her green-haired boyfriend, his hands all over her belly and breasts, just three nights ago. She could barely walk home that night, and chewed her fingers till they bled. Home, she sneaked into living room. Chin was asleep in the easy chair, so she sucked him off, left a note for her parents and vanished onto the streets, to spread the scarlet fire. She probably just wanted someone to talk to.

The speaker crackled overhead, "Paging Doctor Park, Paging Doctor Park," but it wasn't Glen returning Keyung's call. It was her mother, wondering where she had been last night, and if she was okay. She wasn't.



Keyung's legs were spread, just a little, and she touched herself with one hand while her left was on the steering wheel. She made it home though. The entire universe, which she, like myself, kept folded up in her brain, nudged the other drivers away from her and the long row of streetlights green, all the way to her apartment. That night was hard for her, but she was already learning. Don't think, don't think, don't think about it, I heard her think from across town. Thank God for TV Land. Andy Griffith saved her that night. I reached out to brush her nipples. By my will they hardened under her bra from the touch of my moist fingertip, to test her, to taste her.

She was perfumed, almost spicy. I tasted her hard, but mostly I just watched her watching TV. I watched her not thinking, watched her reading the same magazine article over and over again; not "The Girl's Guide To Great Orgasms" but "Buy A Like-New Used Car, Online!" because those were the only 1000 words in Cosmo with no sex in them. I pinched, and nibbled and tugged at her in all sorts of places, inside and out, but she watched television till dawn, and I watched her. In a small, sane little corner of her brain though, she knew, and she was watching me, watching her.

Finally, when she slept, bathed in the blue glow of an infomercial, I made my bed. I measured the angle of my covers and the distance between the hem of my sheets and the floor at six-inch intervals around all four sides then fixed the sheets. With my thoughts nothing but a gray buzz of boredom, I got into bed and slept a dreamless sleep. Necessary, you know. When the consciousness is omniscient, the subconscious is insane. I woke up erect, as usual and thought of Keyung while I masturbated.

That morning I saw her over the rim of my cup of chocolate pudding, the near flavorless institutional pudding we feed the patients, giggling again with two new friends. She was the only resident who spent time with the orderlies, the stripers, the physical plant workers. The puddin' heads. Karen, they called her. Karen, do you want to go to the movies? Karen, do you like my shoes? Karen, you look pretty today, I love your nails. You're not like the other doctors, Karen; you're so nice. We can talk to you, like a real person. Did you see this show? Don't you like this food? What about that celebrity, isn't she a whore?
And yet, Keyung Sun Park still stood erect amidst her little tribe of troglodytes. She was alive, still regal even when mindlessly flapping her lips like a goldfish in a bowl, ready to be my priestess whore. She was about to say something back to them, to push beyond the mortal and show the sacks of chemical reactions and hastily-stored calories around her a thing or two about the universe. If they didn't understand her, and they wouldn't understand her, she'd find herself on her knees, blowing and sucking on the lot of them just to get them to listen.

Then I felt the circuit breaker in her brain click solidly. "Thanks," she said, bright as a penny. "Too many of these residents and doctors think they're God or something. But I like to hang out with real people. Oh, have any of you guys seen Glen at all today? He's been out sick or something, but hasn't called." She snapped her gum like it was punctuation. Nobody knew, so the notion of Glen evaporated. She was still afraid to look for him with her mind. For a moment I thought she might be too cowardly to carry out my plans for her. I thought of my pistol, then pushed it out of my mind before it could materialize in my hand.

Keyung changed the subject herself, "Anyone going to see Green Day next month?" The skirt she wore had a slit halfway up the thigh, and she went braless. I could feel the fabric of her sweater against her chest, against my chest. Later, in the tv room, she was watching Oprah when I told her that I needed her to pull a double shift that night. With me.
The night shift was insane, more insane than usual. Somewhere out there, Chin's granddaughter was screwing everything with legs. Half-crazed teen boys, still bubbling with hormones like cooking sausages, older men with piss-stained sweatpants and featureless gray jackets, girls with collars of purple bruises around their necks. We had to move some of them upstairs, or to other hospitals, to keep them away from one another.

There were a dozen of them, and they were hungry for it all, their minds wide open and waiting for the terrible world to jump right in. The only thing that could keep them from the pain of every hungry child, the terror of every late-night burst of gunfire, the shutter of every death rattle was to slam their fists against their own groins, or to devolve into the miasma of the television and the pop song. I hid for twenty minutes to jerk off in the janitor's closet, because Keyung had been hovering by the bathrooms all night, always five minutes from a mumbled excuse and a crotch slamming session of her own. In his bed, Chin screamed through the Thorazine haze and ejaculated till he was dry.

After lights out, Keyung came into my office. I was watching a home shopping channel on the little black and white tv I kept on my desk.

"Ms. Park," I said.

"Doctor Winston, I..." she stopped, her mouth open, her lips red and hungry. The shadow of her tongue flicked across her too-white teeth. I concentrated on the television. One hundred twenty-eight cubic zirconium rings to go. Make that one hundred twenty-six. "Bad night tonight."

"Mmm," I said, blandly. "Your psychiatric round is almost over. Nobody really likes it. But..."

"You're not...supposed to like it, you're supposed to do it," she finished with me. "I know. I'm dreading ICU. A death or two, every single shift. God, how can anyone stand it?" She sniffed, almost teared up, and tugged at the hem of her skirt.

"I've been meaning to discuss appropriate wardrobe with you. You've been wearing unacceptable clothing all week."

"Where's Glen?" Keyung demanded, her tiny hands slapping the edge of my desk, fingers wrapping around the corner. Her knuckles shifted color from the lightest of yellows to white. I couldn't keep my eyes from her cleavage.

"What did you...do?" she asked.

Very dramatic. I was tempted to answer How did you...know to taunt her, but instead I sighed and glanced back at the television. "The contagion has to be contained. Not everyone can handle it. Not like..."

"...you."

"If by you, you mean me, yes," I said. "If by you, you mean you, well then, we'll have to see. It depends on what you decide to do with your new gift. Of course, you can know what to do. You can know whatever you like. Most people seem ill-suited for the tasks of spreading enlightenment though."

"Summer camp, up by Syracuse," she started, standing erect again. My groin tingled. "What were you, ten years old, maybe? It was one of those hippie-dippie camps, no flag football, no bonfires, just sing-alongs and arts and crafts. One of the counselors was named Bandana Bob. Lennon glasses, long beards, liked to give blowjobs to the boys in their beds, after singing most of them to sleep with his guitar and a few rounds of 'Johnny Row Your Boat Ashore'. He didn't even know his chakras were inflamed, and that he was spreading enlightenment with every suck."

She was confident, but I only smiled at the tv.

"And how many people have you had since then? Bath houses? Dorm rooms? Glory holes? There was Jerry and Kimberly and Brad and..." and her eyes glazed over. She was swimming in a thousand memories, a thousand pairs of scuffed knees and elbows, and a thousand licks and taunting nibbles. And after, an even dozen bloody deaths, because my partners just weren't good enough. Well, most of them weren't. Keyung plucked that stray thought from my mind, an errant eyelash from a lover.

Her expression melted. "You killed Glen. No. Wait, you paid Glen to suck your dick, just to give him... the contagion. Because you knew he wanted me, and would use his power to make me take a fucking. Then you killed him," he said, practically shouting the word killed, but then she calmed. " Because he was greedy, insane from the wisdom. Out for his own self-interest..."

I pointed to a small banner I kept between the diplomas on my wall. It was red, festive, marked with golden pictographs. "Ms. Park, ever hear the saying, 'Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water'? Even the wisest sages have to know what is important. Glen wasn't important. You are." I pointed to my left temple, "In here is what you need to do. My plan. My utterly perfect plan to save the world from famine, from nuclear war, from having both its past and its future wiped out by stupdity. I'm not going to tell you the plan. You're strong. You're smart. The world, literally, is at your feet. You'll figure out what it is that needs to be done. You wanted to help people before. You want to help them now. Just be careful who you sleep with. Find men and women who can handle wisdom, and who need it. Otherwiseit's sad having to strangle a dream. It's hard to kill when you feel all the pain in the world."

I turned back to the tv and fed Keyung a bit of racial memory. An afternoon in Dachau. Everyone's afternoon - scraggly prisoners and sharp-dressed smiling Nazi soldiers alike. Keyung fell to the floor, twitching. When she stopped, I stepped over her, said "Pardon me..Karen. I have to go kill someone else now," and crossed the common area, to Chin's room, and smothered him with his pillow. Thirteen. I had to do it; the hospital couldn't hold him past 72 hours.

Through the wall I heard some familiar babbling. Good and evil, all decided. How to end hunger, expressed as a haiku. The actual ratio of chance and individual action that led us poor people around like dogs on a leash. I left a packet of razorblades where the two young boys who were sharing the room next to Chin's would find it before the morning. Fate or free will? I dared think to myself, but then pushed my little death wish for those poor kids aside to concentrate on a jingle I heard on the radio this morning.

Keyung woke eventually, and wandered outside into the parking lot, tripping on her own high heels. She took them off to run to the curb, dirty water oozing through the fabric of her panty hose and squishing between her beautiful, painted toes. If not for the cold and grit in the water, I would have taken them in my mouth from across the ether, and sucked on each one.
It didn't take her long to hail a ride. When she raised her hand, every cabbie in the city slowed down instinctively, just for a moment. One stopped in front of Keyung and she dove in.
"Drive. West side. The rest area. I'll be worth your while," she said through pursed lips. She squeezed her legs together to feel the warmth of her crotch. In a moment, they were parked. I could feel the hole in the vinyl upholstery, left by a cigarette burn, scratch the flesh of her ass.

I could feel her fingers in the man's hair, in my hair, tightening around our scalps like ropes. Her thighs were heavy on the man's lap, his penis all but lost inside her. He kept the meter running. 5.20. 5.50. 5.80.

"Listen to me. You know it now," she said. "You can feel it, can't you Smapdi Kayani? You're not just a piece of shit little immigrant working at 3AM for an extra twenty bucks now, you're a fucking god-king, and you just fucked your queen." The cabbie's eyes were wide, with fear, with love, with knowing. He licked his lips, and ignored the teeth of his fly biting into his flaccid penis.

"Yes, yes I know. Why? Why?" he asked, his voice so desperate, almost a song.
"I don't know either. I haven't been able to think about it. I haven't been able to do anything but distract myself with jerking off and Star Trek reruns. You're going to tell me, you understand, and then you're going to go nuts and drive into the closest river. Keep your windows open. Wear your seatbelt. Floaties are no fair." She growled and bit him hard on the lip. He was stock still, but I felt it, I felt it across town, and my mouth bled too.

Phantom lines of pain danced across my wrists. The boys at the ward, I felt their deaths and was distracted, just for a second. A second was all it took though. Then twin headlights blinded my mind's eye and the newest sexual sage, Smapdi, drove right into the loading dock at the back of mind.

"In the olden times," he told Keyung. "There were temple whores. You prayed, you paid, you made love on a bench or a special room. You caught a glimpse of heaven, being inside those women, smelling their skin, kissing their breasts. The wealthiest got the most beautiful, the virginal. Scarlet women they were called after that, because the blood, the blood was life. The blood on the sheets enlightened. The priest-kings knew how to rule..."

"And now," Keyung said, "Now, every damn janitor and cabbie is enlightened, is that it? The scum of the earth, sucking and screwing at suburban wife-swapping parties, in phone booths, and in parking lots. Any fifteen year-old without too much acne can get a kiss from God. But nobody is really giving the tired old men in suits, the ones who run the planet, the fucking they deserve..."

"And who in America could make love with me? Brown, poor, immigrant?" Smapdi said, hollow with the realization. Keyung wouldn't have to give a mental command to make sure he drove into the river; he was going to of his own free will. Fate was my plaything for Keyung. She was smart enough, beautiful enough, and now both enlightened and insane enough to lead the world into a new Golden Age, one hurried blowjob or broom closet assignation at a time.
"What a waste," she said, to herself. She slid off her victim and out into the night. Smapdi drove into the river.

There was a 6AM Amtrak train to Washington D.C. Keyung was on it, and reading the schedule over and over again, memorizing the times so she wouldn't have to hear the swirling brains of 300 other commuters. She wore slacks that day, with a tight black sweater and too much eye makeup, to look not beautiful, but accessible. Her lipstick was red and thick, thick enough to leave a half-kiss stain on the rim of a glass in a Beltway bar.

It took me most of the afternoon to track down Chin's granddaughter. I had to take an extended lunch to find the little whore. She had balled some of her school chums; I found three of them on a park bench by the handball courts. One of them, a young boy in a black coat, was animated. He hair, long bangs swooped down over his eyes, but the sides closely shaved, danced in front of him as he discussed the existence of God and what He meant, exactly, by the 13 million corpses piled up during the Holocaust. It was a comma, he said, of a very complex sentence. The girl was in a daze, reeking of ganja, and the third, another girl, sat with her eyes closed and headphones blasting some saccharine pop substitute for love.
I raised a curtain of ignorance about my person and shot them all. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. How many more of these insane little bastards to go, I didn't want to know. But I could have known, in an instant.

That night, Keyung found her first, right outside D.C, in Virginia. It was a Holiday Inn bar, and he was there for the band, believe it or not. The drummer was a friend of his, and had mentioned that sometimes you can get action in a Holiday Inn bar. Lonely women sometimes want revenge on their husbands for their infidelity, and payback is always a bitch. A bitch, get it?

Jim was his name, and he was thin, with a large head perched atop a pencil-neck. He had a large nose and beady black eyes - he looked for all the world like a plucked turkey in a cheap suit. Keyung smiled at him and asked the time. He smiled back and gave it to her, and he gave it to her exactly. It wasn't almost eight-thirty, it was exactly eight twenty-seven, pee em, he told her.

What did he do, she asked. He worked for the Department Of Labor. Workplace safety issues. He'd been on the job for years. He liked helping people. Papa had been an autoworker till his elbows ground to powder on the assembly line. He hummed along to "Sentimental Journey" with the band while Keyung drank her Singapore Sling and thought. She knew he wouldn't be able to handle her gift, not for more than a week or so before he nailed his own tongue to his jaw to keep from speaking. That might be long enough though. She knew Jim wasn't the type to have friends, but he was the type to want to get off. He worked with people, people he already fantasized about. They might have friends. They might even go to fund-raising parties, or meet a Congressperson on some handshake tour deal. And, after all, she had to start somewhere, didn't she? Someone had to fuck the world back into shape, so a billion black babies didn't howl from hunger in her dreams.

Jim wasn't even that bad looking; if he were fifteen years younger and in black, he could have been in a band himself, doing groupies in parking lots. Besides, she was going to be here for a long time, having drinks, meeting men and women, and enlightening them, the better classes of people. It would be years before her looks failed her, and she could wait. The world is worth it, she thought, and I smiled. She would drag this world screaming into enlightenment, one climax at a time. Then I'd finally be able to rest. Jim looked over Keyung and smiled too, for different reasons. He could hardly wait. I could hardly wait. Keyung gave George the once over, from bushy eyebrows to paunch, and shuddered.

It was going to be a long sleepless night, for all of us.

The End


Nick Mamatas is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull 2001) and has published short stories in the men's magazine Razor, the science fiction webzine Strange Horizons, Wide Angle New York, The Whirligig, and other zines. He also writes about countercultures, radical politics, and digital art for the Village Voice and in the anthologies You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and Abuse Your Illusions, all by Disinformation Books. He lives in Jersey City with a half-wild dog named Kazzie and has a website here: WWNKD?