Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

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.

Ifound 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.

“We are the FCC,” a loud voice proclaimed. “Take off your clothes and put these orange jumpsuits on.”

“The fuck?” said Herb Boy.

“Pirate radio operations have been reclassified as Broadcast Terrorism. You’re going to be wearing dogs in your asses at Abu Ghraib for the next five years, you dirty bastards.”

“This is community radio!”

“If we wanted communities, we’d make Clear Channel pay us to run them. Put on the hoods, too. No more devil music for you, Radio bin Laden.”

I switched off the radio, miserably, wondering if it was all my fault for listening and daring to enjoy it.

I got a little angry.

Not long after, the passenger-side door opened, and Trix climbed in, grinning.

I took a deep breath and said, “All set?”

“Sure. You should have stayed.” She looked at the dashboard. “What happened to the radio?”

“It broke.”

“Looks like someone kicked it in. Did someone break into the car?”

“Must’ve.” I started up the car. “Let’s go. I need to buy plane tickets.”

“Where are we going?”

“Texas,” I grunted.

She looked at me. Up. And down. And giggled. “Well, they do say everything is bigger there.”

“Oh, ha fucking ha.” I went to adjust my shirt. And found that things had changed.

I guess I’d been in the car a couple of hours. My balls had diminished to an approximation of their standard size. My penis, however, was significantly bigger than I was used to. Like half a dozen times. And, not having rearranged my shirt, I found that I was sticking out of my pants like I was an incompetent salami smuggler.

“They told me that the saline diffuses out in an hour or two,” Trix said. “I guess it migrates on the way.”

She leaned in way too close and whispered, “If that happens to me, my clit is going to look like a pool ball.”

I threw the gearshift and gunned the engine. “You better get some sleep. Neither of us are going to be laying on our fronts tonight.”

“I don’t mind you laying on your back,” Trix said.

“I’m going to order plane tickets and make a phone call, and then I’m going to get so drunk that I cannot see. You can find something to do tonight, right?”

“Sure. I’m going to jerk off like a freak. Want to watch?”

“Jesus, Trix…”

“What is wrong with you, Mike?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you! I’m all tingly as hell, I’m hornier than a dozen rabbits, I’ve seen you looking at me, and suddenly you’re a monk. Are you scared of me?”

“Of course I’m not goddamn scared of you.”

“Well, you’re pissing me off, anyway. You want me to go home tomorrow?”

“You want me to buy you a ticket home?”

“That’s not what I asked. Do you want me to go?”

“I’ll buy you a ticket home, if you want.”

“What are you, eight? Answer the question, Mike.”

“No.”

“Christ! What no? No to me leaving?”

“No, I’m not eight.”

“Mike, I could snap your neck using only my pussy lips right now.”

“Oh, for…”

I pulled the car over, in sight of the highway back to the hotel.

“Trix… No, I don’t want you to go. If I’ve been shit at hiding that I look at you sometimes, then I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel uncomfortable. If you want to go because I’m being creepy, then I’ll buy you a ticket, pay you for your time, and we’re cool. And I’m sorry. Okay?”