Not For The Faint Of Heart

[TDurden]

And of crouse, Cora did what she could to keep them clean. She stitched them back together. But one day she went on the Internet to find another pair. A new pair.

Somewhere were women who made their career stitching tiny pocket-shaped vaginas or coin-purse scrotums. These kids, the women dressed in flowered calico dresses and bib overalls. But this time, Cora wanted something durable. She got on the Internet. She ordered a new pair, from some maker she'd never heard about before. This time, she confused anatomically detailed for correct.

Anatomically correct, she asked for, boy and girl dolls. Lowest price possible. Durable. Easy to clean.

A search engine offered her two dolls. Made in the former Soviet Union. With flexible arms and legs. Anatomically correct. Because these were the lowest-priced, and because that was the county purchasing policy, she placed the order.

Later, nobody ever asked why she ordered those dolls. When the box arrived, brown cardboard and big as a four-drawer file cabinet, when the delivery guy wheeled it up on a cart and left it next to her desk, when he made her sign his clipboard, then it was Cora first figured this might be a mistake.

The moment they opened the box, when they saw what was inside, it was too late.

It was Cora and a county detective, pulling the metal staples and then digging through the mats of bubble wrap, digging until they found a foot. A pink child's foot, five perfect toes poking up, out of the Styrofoam pellets and bubble wrap.

The detective wiggled one of the toes. He looked at Cora.

"These were the cheapest," Cora said. She said, "You don't get a lot of choice."

The foot was pink rubber, finished with clear, hard toenails. The skin smooth, without a freckle or mole or vein. At this, the detective put a hand around the ankle and lifted it to show a smooth pink knee. Then a pink thigh. Then a shower of white packing peanuts. Bubble wrap popping and falling away. And a naked pink little girl hung from the detectives fist near the ceiling. Her blond hair fell in curls, brushing the floor. Her bare arms hung down at either side of her head. Her mouth hung open, a silent gasp, showing white teeth small as pearls, and the smooth pink roof of her mouth. A little girl the age for Easter-egg hunts and First Communion and Santa's lap.

With one ankle in the detectives hand, the girl's other leg sagged, bent at the knee. Between her legs, spread there, not just anatomically correct buy...perfect, was the girl's pink vagina. The darker pink lips of it, curving inside.

Still in the box, looking up at her, looking up them all, was a naked little boy.

[TDurden]

A printed brochure fluttered to the floor.

Then Cora's arms were around the girl, hugging her pillow softness, clutching for a sheet of wrapping paper to put around the little body.

The detective smiled, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and saying, "Great job at procurement, Cora."

Cora held the girl, one hand cupped to hide the pink buttocks. One hand cupped to hold the blond head to Cora's chest, and she said, "This is a mistake."

The brochure said the dolls were soft molded silicone, the kind used for breast implants. They could be left under an electric blanket and would hold the heat for hours of pleasure. Their skin covered a skeleton of fiberglass with steel joints. Their hair was inserted, strand by strand, planted into the skin of their scalp. They had no pubic hair. The male doll had an optional foreskin that you could roll onto the head of the penis. The girl had a replaceable plastic hymen you could send away for. Both dolls, the brochure said, had deep tight throats and rectums, for vigorous oral or anal entry.

The silicone had a memory and would return to its original shape, no matter what you did. Their nipples could be tugged to five times their original length without tearing. The labia, scrotums, rectums could be stretched to accommodate almost any desire. The dolls, the brochure said, could take years of violent, strenuous enjoyment.

For clean-up, you just used soap and water.

Leaving the dolls in direct sunlight might fade their eyes and lips, the brochure said in French, Spanish, English, Italian, and what looked like Chinese.

The silicone was guaranteed odorless and tasteless.

At lunch, Cora went out to buy a little dress and a little pair of pants and shirt. When she got back to her desk, the box was empty. Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap popped under her every step. The dolls were gone.

In the ward room, she asked the dispatcher if he knew anything. The dispatcher shrugged. In the break room, a detective said that maybe someone needed them for a case. He shrugged and said, "That is what they're for..."

Outside, in the hallway, she asked another detective if he'd seen them.

She asked, where were they, the kid dolls?

Her teeth were edged together. The spot between her eyes ached from her brows bunching in the middle. Her ears felt blood-hot. Melting, glowing hot.

She found the dolls in the director's office. Sitting on the sofa. Smiling and naked. Freckle-faced and ashamed of nothing.

Director Sedlak was tugging at a nipple on the boy's chest. With her fingers, her thumb and index finger, just the dark-red fingernails, the director twisted and pulled at the pink nipple. With her other hand, the director trailed her fingertips up and down between the girl's legs, saying, "Damn, that feels real."

To the director, Cora said she was sorry. She leaned down to brush some hair off the boy's forehead, and said she had no idea. She crossed the girl's arms across her pink nipples. Then, she crossed her plastic legs at the knee. She put both the boy's hands spread open in his lap. Both dolls just sat there, smiling. They both had glue glass eyes, blond hair. Shining porcelain teeth.

"Sorry for what?" the director said.

For wasting county funds, Cora said. For buying something this expensive sight-unseen. She thought she was getting a good deal. Now the county would be stuck using the old rag dolls for another year. The county was stuck, and these dolls would have to be destroyed.

And Director Sedlak said, "Don't be silly." She combed her fingernails through the girl's blond hair, saying, "I don't see a problem." Saying, "We can use these."

But the dolls, Cora said, they were too real.

And the director said, "They're rubber."

Silicone, Cora said.

And the director said, "If it helps, just think of each one as a seventy-pound condom..."

That afternoon, even as Cora pulled then new clothes onto the boy and girl, detectives came by her desk, asking to check them out. For intake interviews. For investigations. Asking to reserve them for some hush-hush off-site evaluation. For overnight, to use them early the next morning. For the weekend. The girl, preferably, but she wasn't available, then the boy. By the end of that first day, both the dolls were booked solid for the next month.

If someone wanted a doll right away, she'd offer the old rag dolls.

Most times, the detective said he'd wait.

All this flood of new cases, but nobody submitted a single new case file to her.

For almost that whole month, Cora only saw the boy and girl for a moment, only long enough to hand them over to the next detective. Then the next. And the next. And it was never clear who did what, but the little girl arrived and departed, one day with her ears pierced, then her belly button, then wearing lipstick, then reeking with perfume. The boy arrived, at come point, tattooed. A chain of thorns around his little calf muscle. At another point, with his nipples pierced by little silver rings. Then his penis. At some point, his blond hair smelling sour.

Smelling like marigold flowers.

Like the bags of marijuana in the evidence room. That room full of guns and knives. The bags of marijuana and cocaine that always weighed a little less than they should have. The evidence eroom always the next stop for a detective after he checked out one of the dolls. The girl tucked under one arm, he'd be fumbling with a bag of evidence. Tucking something into his pocket.

In the director's office, Cora showed the expense receipts that detectives would submit for reimbursement. One receipt for a hotel room, the same night the detective had taken the girl home for an interview the next morning. The hotel room was a stakeout, the detective had said. Another detective the next night, the girl again, one hotel room, one room-service meal. An adult movie ordered on the television. Another stakeout, he said.

Direcotr Sedlak had just looked at her. Cora standing there, leaning over the director's wooden desk, shaking so hard the receipts fluttered in Cora's fist.

The director just looked at her and said, "What's your point?"

It was obvious, Cora said.

And, sitting behind her wooden desk, the director just laughed and laughed.

She said, "Consider this tit for tat."

"All those women," the director says, "all chanting and protesting against Hustler magazine, saying porno turns a woman into an object...Well," she says, "what do you think a dildo is? Or donor sperm from some clinic?"

Some men may only want pictures of naked women. But some women only want a man's dick. Or his sperm. Or his money.

Both sexes have the same problem with intimacy.

"Stop fussing about some damned rubber dolls," Director Sedlak told Cora. "If you're jealous, go out and buy yourself a nice vibrator."

Again, it's what human beings do...

Nobody could see where this was headed.

[TDurden]

That same day, Cora went to lunch and bought some Superglue.

And the next go-round, when the dolls came back to her, before she handed them off to another man, Cora squeezed Superglue inside the girl's vagina. Inside both the kids' mouths, sealing their tongue to the roof of their mouth. To seal their lips together. Then she squeezed glue inside them both, in back, to weld their butts shut. To save them.

Still, the next day, a detective was asking: Did Cora have a razor blade he could use? An X-acto knife? A switchblade?

And when she asked, Why? What did he need it for?

Then he says, "Nothing. Never mind. I'll find something in the evidence room."

And the next day, the girl and boy were both cut open, still soft but covered with scars. Carved open. Dub out. Still smelling like glue, but more and more smelling like the ooze inside Breather Betty at home, leaking spots on Cora's sofa.

Those spots. Cora's cat would sniff at for hours. Not lick, but sniff like Superglue. Or evidence-room cocaine.

It's then Cora goes to lunch and buys a razor blade. Two razor blades. Three razor blades. Five.

The next go-round, when the girl gets back on her desk, Cora takes her into the bathroom and sits her on the edge of a sink. With a tissue, Cora scrubs the rouge off her pink cheecks. Cora washes and combs the girl's limp blond hair. With the next detective already knocking at the locked bathroom door, Cora tell the girl, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry..." Saying, "You're going to be okay." And Cora tucks a razor blade up, deep inside the soft silicone vagina. Into the hole hollowed out by some man with his knife. Tilting the girl's head back, Cora tucks another razor deep inside her silicone throat. The third razor blade Cora tucks just inside the girl's hacked-out, whittled-open butt.

When the boy arrives back at her desk, just dropped there, flopped facedown over the arm of her desk chair, Cora takes him into the bathroom with the last two razor blades.

Tit for tat.

The next day, a detective comes in, dragging the girl by her hair. He drops her on the floor beside Cora's desk. Taking a pad and pen from his inside pocket, he writes: "Who had her yesterday?"

And, lifting the girl from the floor, smoothing her hair, Cora tells him a name. A random name. Another detective.

His eyes narrow and, shaking his head, the man holding his pen and paper says, "That thon-atha-bith!" And you can see how the halves of his tongue are held together with black stitches.

The detective who brings back the little boy is limping.

All five razor blades are gone.

It's after that, Cora must talk to somebody at the county health clinic.

Nobody knows how she got that biohazard sample from the lab.

After that, every man in the department, he's pinching his ball skin through his pants. Lifting one elbow the way a monkey would, to scratch the hair under that arm. In their heads, they ain't had sex with anybody. No way could this be crab lice.

Maybe about this time, a detective's wife comes downtown. Finding te little leak spots of blood you get with crab lice. A splatter of red pepper you find you tightie whities or the inside of your white T-shirt, anywhere clothes come up against body hair. Little shorts. Maybe she finds it in her own. These are college-gone, suburban, and shopping-mall people with no real crab-lice experience. Now all their itching makes sense to her.

And now this wife, she's pissed off, bad.

And no way could any wife know this is the rubber-doll version of getting crabs from a toilet seat. No doubt the story her husband would tell. But that's all Cora could rustle up from County Health. You can't keep spirochetes alive on silicone. You can't pass hepatitis unless you got broken skin. Blood. Saliva. No, the dolls are real, but not that real.

Any wife lets this go, and next week he'll bring home herpes to her and the kids. Gonorrhea. Chlamydia. AIDS. So she's all over Cora, asking: "Who's my husband banging on his lunch hour?"

One good look at Cora, her hair-spray hairstyle and pearls and knee-high nylons and pants suit, and no wife would cast blame in that direction. Cora with old tissues tucked up the sleeve of her cardigan sweater. Cora with a dish of hard ribbon candy on her desk. The Family Circus cartoons pinned to her cork bulletin board.

Still, nobody's saying Cora Reynolds is unnattractive.

Then the wife sees Director Sedlak with her red-red fingernails.

Nobody was not amazed when Cora called in for a little sitdown.

Nobody could tell Cora Reynolds her days were numbered.

The director, she sits Cora across from her big wooden desk. The director's office with its high-up window. The director sitting, outlined in the sunshine and the view of cars in the county parking lot. With the fingers of one hand, she waves Cora to lean closer.

"It was a tough call," the director says, "deciding if my entire team is crazy, or if you are...overreacting."

Nobody felt how Cora's heart dropped off a cliff at that moment. She sat, frozen. It's what we do: we turn ourselves into objects. Turn objects into ourselves.

Those millions of people, all over the world, still trying to save Breather Betty. Maybe they should just mind their own business. Maybe it is too late.

It's the kids, the director says, who tear up the dolls. It always has been. Abused kids abuse what they can. Each victim will find a victim. It's a cycle. She says, "I think you should take some time off."

If it helps, just think of Cora Reynolds as a 120-pound condom...

Nobody says that last part. But nobody has to.

Nobody tell her to go home and get set for the worst.

[tournesol]

oh i never finished reading the poor book. i've had it ever since i got it at the roses & shit tour when palahniuk came to ny. he's such a nice guy, signing books until after midnight. great guy. i remember reading guts when i was smoking some grass with my friends and it made me vomit, but not faint.

[Gigabitch]

TD, have you read any of Bret Easton Ellis' books? Glamorama, maybe?

[TDurden]

I haven't. Are his books similiarly depraved?

[TDurden]

As part of keeping her job, Cora will have to return the Breather Betty doll she's reported to have taken. She's to relinquish the stuffed toys she purchased with county funds. She's to surrender her keys to the health room. Immediately. And make the room and the anatomically correct dolls available to all staff member. First come, first served. Immediately.

How Cora felt, it was like coming to your first stoplight after driving a million billion miles, too fast, wearing no seat belt. Resignation misxed with tired relief. Cora, just a skin tube with a hole at either end. It was a terrible feeling, but it gave her a plan.

The next day, coming into work, nobody see her duck into the evidence room. In there were knives that smelled of blood and Superglue, there for anyone to take.

Already, a line is forming beside her desk. All of them waiting for the last detective to bring back a kid. Either kid. They both look the same, silicone-face down.

Cora Reynolds, she's nobody's fool. Nobody pushes her around.

A detective arrives with the boy hanging under one arm, the girl hanging under his other arm. The man heaves them both on the desk, and the crowd surges forward, clutching the pink silicone legs.

Nobody knows who are the real crazy people.

And Cora, she's holding a gun, the evidence tag still hanging off it on a string. The case number written there. She waves the gun at the two dolls.

"Pick them up," she says. "And come with me."

The little boy wears just white underpants, dark with grease in the seat. The girl, a white satin slip, stiff with stains. The detective scoops them both, the weight of two kids, with just one arm and hugs them to his chest. Their nipple rings and tattoos and crab lice. Their stink of dope smoke and what drips from Breather Betty.

Waving with the gun, Cora walks him toward the office door.

The men stalking her, circling her, Cora works the detective backward down the hall, dragging the girl and boy past the director's office, past the health room. To the lobby. Then the parking lot. There, the detectives wait while she unlocks her car.

With the boy and girl sitting in her back seat, Cora hits the gas, sprayingthe men with gravel. Before she's even through the gate in the chain-link fence, you can hear sirens on their way.

Nobody knew Cora Reynolds would be so ready. Breather Betty was already in the car, riding shotgun, with a scarf tied over her red hair, dark sunglasses on her rubber face. A cigarette hanging between her red-red lips. This French girl returned from the dead. Rescued and seat-belted to keep her torso upright.

This person made into an object, now made back into a person.

The crippled stuffed animals, the ratty tigers and orphaned bears and penguins, they're all lined up in the car's rear window. The cat amoung them, asleep in the sun. All of them waving good-bye.

Cora hits the freeway, her back tires fishtailing, already doing twice the posted speed limit. Her four-door brown sedan already pulls a kite's tail of police cruisers, their lights flashing blue and red. Helicopters. Angry detectives in unmarked county cars. Television camera crews, each in a white can with a big number painted on the side.

Already there's no way Cora can't win.

She has the girl. She has the boy. She has the gun.

Even if they run out of gas, nobody will **** her kids.

Even the troopers shoot out her tires. Even then, she'll shoot up their silicone bodies. She'll leave them nothing any man would stick his dick into. She'll do the same to Breather Betty.

And she'll shoot herself. To save them.

Please understand. Nobody says what Cora Reynolds did was right.

Nobody is even saying Cora Reynolds was sane. But she still won.

This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat.

This is what the police will find if they get too close. The children mutilated. All of them dead. The animals soaked with her blood. Them all dead, together.

But until that moment, Cora has a full tank of gas. She has a bag full of evidence-room cocaine to keep her awake. A bag of sandwiches. A few bottles of water and the cat, purring asleep.

She has nothing but a few hours of freeway between her and Canada.

But, more than all that, Cora Reynolds has her family.

[Gigabitch]

That guy can write. Talent is so attractive.

[tournesol]

TD, have you read any of Bret Easton Ellis' books? Glamorama, maybe?

I know that wasnt meant towards me, but I do have to say that I love Bret Easton Ellis. I have only had the pleasure of reading Lunar Park, but I did get to meet him 2-3 months ago at this reading he had and it was pretty amazing!

[Gigabitch]

I haven't. Are his books similiarly depraved?

Somewhat. I think you'd enjoy them, and you clearly have the stomach for it.