1992-10-19, T13:00:00Z/1992-10-19, T13:12:00Z
41.723103° N, -78.64124° E
Jane saunters into the lab smoking a cigarette, wearing only white cotton panties and a tattered, black Punisher T-shirt. And apparently no bra.
As usual of late, she’s got a pair of Sony headphones clamped over her ears. Her old Walkman, meanwhile, hangs precariously at her side from her panties’ thin, cotton waistband. The elastic wasn’t meant to hold any weight, and it shows- it really shows.
I recognize the shirt; a gift from the sailor-commandos of SEAL Team Six. Around the shirt’s faded skull logo rings the SEAL’s trademark motto: “GOD WILL JUDGE OUR ENEMIES. WE’LL ARRANGE THE MEETING.” And across the back: “SEALs & SONGBIRDS BEACH PARTY, GRENADA ‘83. THANKS FOR COMIN’ OUT!”
-Six’s tacit, Navy SEAL-style way of saying, THANKS FOR SAVIN’ OUR ASSES!
Vivien wolf-whistles at her. “Hey sexy-thang, thanks for joining us!”
Jane doesn’t acknowledge. I’m sure she can hear, but she’s pretending she can’t over the music-
*“EYE IN THE SKY”, THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT, RELEASED MAY 1982-*
-blaring through the Sonys, though Viv laughs anyway.
And I know why: with Viv and the rest of us in our stupid little paper gowns, for once Jane- plain ol’ “TIMEX-Jane”, who People magazine once said takes a licking but just keeps on ticking!, the all-fun-consuming black hole of every good time, is suddenly the most risqué girl in the room.
From there Jane makes a beeline for the scanner. Not out of any enthusiasm for the process of course, quite the opposite; she just wants to get it over with. Let BIRDSONG’s ghouls see what they want to see, and God knows they’ll see everything—if any of the imagery they record ever leaves this lab someone’s going to die—then get the Hell out.
One of the ghouls meets her there, his hands already full of ECG sensors and wire. He tries to make small talk. “How’s everything today, Oscine Jane?”
“Oh fine, Jerry!” She cocks her head and smiles a big, fake smile. Then she huffs a cloud of smoke in his face. “I always look forward to letting you guys make high-res centerfold spreads of my every square, intimate inch. I even mowed the lawn, you know, down there… Juuust for you. So enjoy!”
To Jerry’s credit, he takes Jane in stride. This isn’t his first rodeo either. He even gives a little back. “Gunshot’s healed up real nice I see… Left a scar, but I know that’s your style- another one for the collection, right?” Then he sighs. “Still, it’s a shame…”
He makes a small show of trying to look behind her, at least until he notices Jane’s claws drumming on the scanner frame. Jane and I both know that to Jerry, the shame isn’t the injury; it’s the blemish to Jane’s otherwise perfect ass.
Jerry frowns. “Man, I just can’t believe that dude got one into you. Especially back… there. Were you just not paying attention?”
Jane’s only answer is another jet of smoke and a flick of her eyes toward the scanner, then back at him.
“Yeah Jerry,” Marlene says. “While we’re young.”
The rest of our paper gown-clad group snickers; that joke never fails to get a laugh.
But Jerry gets in one last parting shot. “Well I guess nobody’s perfect, right?”
“Maybe not.” Jane finally replies. “Or, maybe I just wanted to take one, back there, see how it felt…”
Jerry finds this insanely funny. So funny that he has to stop and compose himself for a few seconds before going ahead with his work. And he’s still giggling as he advances on Jane with his handfuls of wire.
Jane scowls at him but offers no more resistance as he starts taping the various sensors to her bare skin. Until soon there are only six sensors left.
Jane grabs them. “I’ll do these, thanks.”
“You’re sure? I can do them for you.” Jerry winks at her. “Oscine Vivien always lets me.”
“Fuck youuuu, Jerry!” Vivien sing-songs.
“Language!” Daddy snaps.
But Viv just goes on in a lower voice, smiling, “I’ll give you your next prostate exam, asshole.” She clicks an unseen claw, velociraptor-like, against the wall behind her.
Jerry just laughs again and eyes Jane with mock-expectation, eyebrows raised. He’s got balls, you have to give it to him.
“No I’m good, really.” Jane scowls at him again while she reaches far up inside the shirt to place two of the remaining sensors above her breasts, then affixes another two behind the upside-down triangle of white cotton that covers her, down there. Then the last two just beneath the waistband back there.
“Ta-daaa”. Jane curtsies. The hundreds of thin wires hanging from her skin sway in unison beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. She reminds me of Gulliver, draped in Lilliputian ropes. I realize how ironic the thought is.
Though it’s not just the sight of the wires that does it. Sometimes I can’t help but feel as if we’re outgrowing all of, I look around at the lab; at everything, this.
Especially the huge slogans which shout down from the lab’s sterile, white walls:
JUSTICE INNOCENCE PURITY PRECISION
Words, Daddy’s words, that used to have meaning; real meaning, but which now seem almost childish. Like posters of pompadoured teen heartthrobs: Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, still clinging desperately to the bedroom walls of a middle-aged single-mom of three.
Worse, they seem almost… insidious. Because for all their supposed ideological weight, these words, whose meanings have been shouted- pounded into us since before we could even read them, and screamed back by us over and over, year after year, drill after drill, until our voices were hoarse, increasingly strike me as… well, bullshit.
They’ve come to remind me of the rah-rah banners hanging in La Sierra High’s gym: GO EAGLES! FIGHT!-FIGHT!-FIGHT! KILL THE INDIANS! VICTORY! So melodramatic. So jingoistic.
Oh, the fight is real, each victory well-earned… But it just keeps on going, season after season after season… To no real gain. Every time we “win” somewhere, a new season just starts somewhere else.
Though not for the entire team; in our game, a percentage of the players never make it to Homecoming. Because they’re dead.
But thanks for playing! Here’s your medal! Then (THUMP!) smack it hard- hard enough so the pin drives deep into the mahogany. Hard enough to make sure it stays on there forever, or at least as long as the coffin lasts. But do it, you know, respectfully. Good, now commence shiny blue tears in 3… 2… 1…
In fact, the only ones who ever seem to really win at this game are the weapons manufacturers: all the Raytheons and the Grummans and the South Central Gravitronics and the Lockheeds and the General Dynamics of the world; them and the politicians who own their stock. And let’s not forget the spooks at the CIA who make careers out of organizing and then gleefully referee-ing everything.
Oh, and let’s not forget good ol’ war itself. War always seems to win too. Decades on, millions of dollars and untold thousands of lives later, Ares still runs wild in this world, with us, the Songbirds, as his Athena Promachos (*Athena who fights on the front line*). All born almost literally from the forehead of Daddy, our increasingly frail Zeus-
“Jane!” Daddy barks from his chair in the corner. “Be lady!”
-who still watches over us, nonetheless.
“Yes Daddy!” Jane barks in immediate reply. There’s no use in pretending she can’t hear him. But then she adds- “Sir!” and stiffens to half-naked attention. The wires all jerk straight. She is nineteen again and back in drill, responding instead to Master Lee or perhaps Master Norris. “The Songbird will do as ordered, sir!”
She’s also being an asshole.
“Oh cut that shit out,” Daddy sighs. “We all know you don’t like this. And sisters don’t like either. Hell, I don’t like getting finger up my ass every year, but I have to. And take those damned things off…”
Though Jane doesn’t take the headphones off, and Alan Parsons gives way to-
*“THREW MY GUN IN THE POOL” BY THE AMERICAN FOLK SINGER CONNIE JASH, RELEASED AUGUST 1977 ON THE ALBUM “JUST JASHIN’ YA”, REACHED BILLBOARD-*
So it must be a mixtape. I wonder who made it for her- one of Jane’s “fans”? Or if she made it herself.
“At least,” Rita pipes in, “we’ll never need to see a gynecologist!”
“Oh yeah, yay…” Marlene deadpans. “Us being without ovaries or uteruses and all…” -The parts that would make us real women.-
-We are real women, Mar…-
-Pfft. Whatever you say, Connie.-
-Wanna go up on the dam and discuss it?-
“Hey! Both of-” But I’ve forgotten myself; we never argue in front of Daddy, not out loud. -Stop it both of you.- Jane’s not the only one who’s testy lately. More evidence that things are not what they used to be. I get accusing stares for my trouble.
Except from Ginger. She’s picking at her pinky claw. But she’s been listening. “Look all you want,” she mutters, “but nobody messes with my insides, ‘cept for me.”
“Alright let’s just get this over with”, Jane says, stepping behind the panel.
Even the scanner is a relic of our… childhood, as it was. The screen scratched up and vandalized out of boredom by our younger selves.
Normal children might put crayon to walls, or maybe later scratch words onto desks with broken pencils, or Sharpie their choice of nonsense on the insides of toilet stalls. In the summer of 1966 we’d used our claws to scratch our names into the delicate sensor arrays of a million-dollar x-ray machine. It didn’t matter that we were already-
*21 YEARS, 1 MONTH, 14 DAYS, 17 HOURS-*
-old by then; we were still children. If you ask Daddy we’re children even now, at the tender age of-
*47 YEARS, 8 DAYS, 11 HOURS, 37 MINUTES, 49 SECONDS.*
Though it doesn’t help that none of us looks a day over 21. Still.
“And Jane, Sweetness…” Daddy chides, softer this time. “You’ve really got to lay off the smoking. Especially in public.”
Jane sighs. “And why is that, Daddy?” She asks through a cloud, though she already knows the answer; we all do.
“Because it doesn’t look good. You’re supposed to look like a hero-”
“Pfft.” Jane laughs.
“-a Songbird.”
She laughs again. “Well I’m not a hero.” Then she takes a long drag on the cigarette. “And I never asked to be a Songbird.”
“Okaaay,” Jerry announces from the panel, “so, powering up…”
The screen flickers on.
“I’ve got good numbers,” Jerry says to no one in particular. “Datalogging is good…” But when he drones on, I tune him out.
The scanner is starting to show its age. Dusty, dented in places. And the screen has more dead pixels than ever, I notice, most of them clustered around the spots where we’d scraped our names, especially along the lines where some of us had pressed a little too hard. The Songbirds have a history of that, some people, mostly the doubters, say with increasing frequency these days: of pressing too hard.
There’s no fixing it either. The scanner, I mean. Eventually the entire unit will need to be replaced.
And there’s a few million more dollars to Gravitronics. Go Team!
Though our younger selves never thought about that sort of thing; we never thought about a lot of things. But no matter: soon they’ll scrap the old one and our names will finally be gone. Unless, who knows? Maybe we’ll just scratch up the new-
All of a sudden Rita gasps-
-Oh my God…-
-and then the others, who’d been chatting and tele-ing amongst themselves abruptly fall silent. When I turn to them to find out why, I see various looks of horror on their faces. Even on Viv’s, and she’s hard to rattle. Why?
Over at the control panel, Jerry also turns to see what the commotion is about, and promptly drops his pen. “Oh shit…”
I of course, am the last to understand why. So busy was my mind, fixating on dead pixels and the thoughts swirling in my own head, I wasn’t really looking at the screen itself, wasn’t seeing forest for trees as Daddy likes to say. So I didn’t even notice.
But when I do…
-My God, Janey, what have you done to yourself? Your bones…-
What she’s done makes me think of our names again, scratched so carelessly into the screen. I remember scratching my own into it, I can see it now in the top right corner. I remember feeling guilty at first: that whole, vandalizing a million-dollar x-ray machine thing.
But I also remember tossing that guilt aside. When I realized that I wasn’t defacing it out of boredom, or because I didn’t care; I was scratching it up because secretly, I hated it- we all hated it. Hated what it represented. For the same reasons that got many other expensive things around the compound clawed up over the years.
But what Jane’s done to herself- this doesn’t make sense…
Or maybe, I admit, it does. Perhaps it makes awful, perfect sense.
The smaller monitor on the cart shows all of Jane’s biometrics, and they all look good-
*BP=60/42, HR=32 BPM, CI=2.24L/Min/m2, CO=9.24L/Min, SV=70mL/m2-*
-they show a Jane who is tip-top, running not so much like a Timex but a ROLEX, and reading every bit like the well-oiled engine of justice that she is, idling smooth and slow.
But the Jane I see on the screen… Jesus, with the words—there must be thousands—scratched into her bones, over every square, intimate inch–
JUSTICE INNOCENCE PURITY PRECISION JUSTICE INNOCENCE PURITY PRECISION JUSTICE INNOCENCE PURITY PRECISION JUSTICE INNOCENCE PURITY…
She’s vandalized herself.
joe jacovelli-noir art & fiction 