Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

the aware in such unlikely realms as fashion photography. Models were as lean as ever and also conveyed a quality of anxious personal drama. Junkie chic had not disappeared and heroin still outsold cocaine.
    So the college students found their way into hard drugs. Some of them had contacts in the medical school. More took the walk down toward the river where it crossed the March Street Bridge. Maud knew the drill; it had been demonstrated to her a week or two earlier by one who knew all too well. After dark, customers from the college side of the bridge brought money in a white athletic sock and tied it to the bridge’s handrail. They then proceeded to the far side of the bridge, where stood a small bodega. If they chose, they could buy a Red Bull or a Lifewater. When they recrossed the bridge, they would find a replacement for the original sock which contained what they were trying to buy. This sort of thing had had repercussions, in both college and town, but it seemed still to be thriving.
    Maud was not a user but an ambitious journalist, and she had made a previous reconnoitering trip accompanied by a sometime-user girlfriend to witness the procedure. Her intention was to do the heroin story with anonymous interviews when she was finished with right-to-lifing exhibitionists and their gallery of holy innocents. On her last outing she secretly photographed a buy.
    Surely there would be someone here who might appreciate a bag or a sale on this night of punishing snow and hail, but there was no action on the bridge. The inboard rail showed its single graffito, a black-and-white puffy cloud—maybe a stylized expressionist sock—and the printed polychrome Day-Glo letters TARD . It was never certain whether tags were left by street kids or art students. Underneath, the cars splashed through toward the suburbs.
     
    At the
Gazette
office sometime later, she set out to do the first draft of the piece she had in mind. She eyed the computer screen with a small smile, slid into a comfortable slouch in her chair and wrote what she had planned. “Christ Scientist?” it opened. “No offense intended to the friends of Eddy, with their unspeakably humongous empty domes and morgue-like reading rooms. Nor to the denizens of megachurches nor of the Holy Romantic Megachurch itself. However, how about a little offense to the jolly band of folks who treat us to those cute-kid pictures of fetuses fifty times a year?”
    In the next two columns she inserted two photographs from a text called
Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation.
The pictures in it were of live births, newborns delivered into the breathing world. They were Maud’s counter to the heartwarming fetuses. The first was a photograph of a baby born with hydrolethalus syndrome. It seemed about one-third head. In the color photograph it was eyeless, and its mouth consisted of no more than a tragic moue. Science had identified the chromosomal roots of this condition. Children born with the disorder lived for as long as a day.
    Beside this baby was a photograph of an infant with Meckel-Gruber syndrome. Babies born with this disorder look preternaturally old. Carriers of the gene that bears it are genetically unrecognizable.
    Maud’s text continued:
     
They say that the Assembly of God, assembled by God (sort of like the Queen’s Own Fusiliers), treats us to the spectacle of eternal punishment in a kind of haunted house acted out by whooped-up teenagers called Hell House. This is a sort of fun-terrifying spectacle, like a life-size diorama out of Dante or Hieronymus Bosch but much dumber, where you follow the host through a squeaky door into scenes of unending torment presented to you by Christ Torturer the Lord of Unending Piss-Off. This personage is watching your every move for an excuse to fry your ass, not just for an hour, not just for a year, but always. Always.
He’s the only Son of his divine dad, God Abortionist. Who’s your daddy?! Yes, friends, twenty