Beautiful Goo

By Joe Jeney

Teah Berg waded naked as the day she was born into the moonlit lake until she was waist deep in water. Then she threw herself to the bottom….

***

Apocalypse Brown, lowdown land-lawyer, can't explain to his only client, Peter Piper, why the medical examiner has his brother Paulie's brain in a jar of clear liquid. Then things get real crazy when his former secretary, Tanya Berg, twin sister of the recently departed super singing-sensation Teah Berg, arrives at his doorstep for help.

Between two-headed dogs and spoiled movie stars and an unyielding City Hall, Pock Brown unravels a grisly trade in human desperation and vanity. A head-spinning future of transplant technology reveals itself to him in the most ghoulish of ways.

Join him and his impromptu assistant, Tanya, on a bawdy, irreverent, and macabre adventure as they discover what happened to Teah Berg and as they try to keep their heads where they belong, on their shoulders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Light River Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386793694

Joe Jeney

Joe has practiced law and worked professionally in legal education for many years. During his early working life, he worked in building, engineering, and agricultural fields. He has spent much of his life writing stories. Joe also writes under the pen name "JJ. Co."

Book preview

Beautiful Goo

Beautiful Teah Berg waded into the moonlit lake naked as the day she was born except for nipple rings, labia piercings, and hair extensions, and threw herself to the bottom.

Nothing and nobody could save her, or her body, when she washed ashore dead several hours later.

THE CHTHONIC DAILY picked up the story the next day in its afternoon edition. Teah Berg had been twenty-two years old and was famous around the world for her three hit music recordings, I Love You, I Hate You, and You Owe Me Money. Six weeks ago, she won four awards at the music industry’s annual gala, The Groupies. Her engagement to the up and coming movie sensation, Hendrik, was mentioned, and an affair with her music producer twenty-four years her senior, and married, was alluded to. No suspicious circumstances were reported to have surrounded her death. That is to say, Teah Berg took her own life.

Drugs and alcohol did not play a part.

News media around the world made a big deal of the fact that she had wandered naked into the water. Editors hired artists to sketch her up naked for her last swim, frontal orientation strictly for informational purposes only. The music starlet was a rare beauty, and her youth made that beauty shine with sex appeal to go.

Souvenir hunters made off with her clothing and her possessions, a watch, costume jewelry, her underwear, and tampons before police arrived at the shores of Chthonic Lake.

Teah Berg left behind her fiancé, Hendrik, as well as her grieving parents, and her twin sister, whose name was withheld by the press out of respect. The report quickly mentioned that the young singer had been undergoing treatment for fainting spells and migraines.

The Chthonic Daily asked fans to consider Teah Berg’s family when posting to social media and informed them that City Hall would host a memorial event for its famous daughter at the shores of the lake on the week’s anniversary of her untimely parting.

APOCALYPSE BROWN WAS a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer who had set up his legal business six months ago after he got fired from the blue-chip law firm downtown, Jaeger. He had punched his boss, Joe Johansen, in the jaw very lightly, he must say in his own defense. He had dirt on his boss, Joe Johansen, namely that he had backdated court forms to get them past a statutory limitation period. It was not something that his boss could cover up quickly, were it to become public. Apocalypse worked the first half of that very file and had a complete dateline of events including when Joe Johansen prepared the originating documents. He’d scanned the file and kept it in a folder signed with a digital key. It would stand up in court if it had to. It would indeed be persuasive at a disciplinary hearing, should his boss, Joe Johansen, want to proceed with an assault charge against Apocalypse.

The fight – more accurately, the assault – was over a girl. The girl was Tanya Berg, who worked for Apocalypse as his secretary. Tanya was the twin sister of Teah Berg, who suicided three nights ago at Chthonic Lake. Tanya led an ordinary life and had no desire to follow her sister into the entertainment industry. The world at large had respected her wishes and let her get on with her life.

The world should not have let her get on with her life entirely. Not where it concerned Apocalypse Brown.

Teah, her big sister by three minutes, had not had an affair with an aging music producer. Street knowledge got it wrong. It was Tanya Berg who dug old guys. In particular, she dug Apocalypse Brown, not twenty-four, but sixteen years her senior.

When Apocalypse’s boss, a thug of the quality and nature that makes for a very fine lawyer, carbon fiber stumps for legs or no carbon fiber stumps for legs, started winking slyly at both Apocalypse and Tanya, as if he was in on the secret office romance, which he sort of was, one thing led to another. Apocalypse told him to back off.

Within a minute or two punches were being thrown. A punch was thrown, actually, that by Apocalypse Brown against his boss’s jaw.

Now Apocalypse was punching out fifty dollar wills and transacting local land transactions for the cut price of two hundred and twenty dollars, including fees and taxes. His estranged wife, Irenie, threw him out when he lost his job. He moved into his sister’s basement in her home in Chthonic’s middle suburb, Poodle Ponds, a third of which, the basement, that is, he had converted into a makeshift office.

Yeah, I’m working from home, until things start taking off, he told his clients, his potential clients, his friends, his enemies, and his sister, Louise, and her husband, his brother-in-law Jack Sandor.

He also worked on curbing his violent streak.

That, and his consumption of booze.

Yeah, I’m practicing law from home, until things start taking off, he told his one regular client today, Peter Piper. (What were his parents thinking forty-two years ago when they named him Peter Piper?)

Peter Piper and his wife Penelope Piper each had a last will and testament drawn by Apocalypse Brown when they sold their downtown apartment and bought a home in the suburbs, two streets over. They wanted to give their daughter Pepper Piper a quiet environment to grow up in.

Since moving into their new home, Peter Piper, a drug dealer by profession, had had the house window trims and doorjambs painted gold, gold that glittered. They owned a gold trimmed Corvette with license plates PlayitPiper.

He and his wife Penelope wanted to give their daughter Pepper a quiet environment to grow up in.

More work was required.

Gold don’t talk. But it tells a story, and loud.

Peter Piper glanced around the offices of Brown Legal and angled his head to get a better look out the window, actually up and out the window-well in Louise and Jack Sandor’s basement.

Your sister-in-law owns it, you say?

Sister.

Oh, Peter Piper nodded, his gold chains undulating on his hairy chest like ocean swells on the sea floor.

Apocalypse followed his client’s eyes around the basement until they rested on the old looking electric cooker that peeped from behind the rice paper screens dividing Brown Legal from Louise and Jack’s storage mess.

Is that a still? no-nonsense Peter Piper asked.

Apocalypse reddened but remained silent.

It’s a still, Peter Piper persisted. He didn’t give Apocalypse a chance to speak. They’re illegal.

Says Poodle Ponds newly arrived local king of illegal pot dealing, Apocalypse Brown thought to himself and kept to himself.

You better be careful you don’t get caught with that, Peter Piper counseled sagely.

Just then, Pee-pee (spelled Pea-Pea) and Pod (spelled Pod), Louise’s spaniel crosses, ambled down the basement steps, wandered into Brown Legal, and curled around Peter Piper’s feet.

After considering the meaning of this latest intervention, and its tongue-twisting repercussions, Apocalypse’s client reiterated his earlier request for legal advice. What do I do about Paulie’s brains? It’s an offense against humanity. It’s unfair, it’s unjust. He was my brother. He used both his hands to explain his next point. His niece, my eight-year-old daughter, Pepper, saw him there in a jar on a school excursion. Just sitting there, suspended in clear liquid shit. No head, no arms, no nuthin. He kept his hands moving as if to ask how much worse could it get?

As Apocalypse Brown understood the facts, Peter Piper’s daughter, Pepper, visited Chthonic’s Office of the Medical Examiner on a school excursion a day ago. There, she recognized the name on a label affixed to a jar containing a human brain suspended in preservation fluid as the name of her uncle Paulie, the late Paulie Piper, whose life was taken from him several months earlier in a car wreck. The Office of the Medical Examiner conducted an autopsy at the time he died and later claimed to have returned the body intact to the family for respectful burial. At no time had the family given the medical examiner permission to preserve Paulie Piper’s brain in clear liquid shit. Peter Piper and his family wanted Paulie’s brains back.

Just ask them for it, Pockie Brown suggested. Meekly.

Do you think I haven’t tried? The damn insolence of office, Peter Piper growled, raising an arm in thespian outrage. Damn insolence of office.

Apocalypse Brown pushed aside the Chthonic Daily from three days ago. He only got around to reading it today. He didn’t know how to help Peter Piper legally. City Hall, you know what they say. You’ll beat your own brains senseless trying to get back the brains of a loved one from City Hall.

Keeping body parts was a twist on an old theme, however. The old argument was that employees of the examiner’s office stole the possessions of the dead or made money from selling grisly photos to the dark alleys of an illegal internet trade in gore-porn. Perhaps there wasn’t the volume of business in gore-porn as there was in porn-porn. But the market in gore-porn undoubtedly existed, and employees of the examiner’s office made money from it. It was a well-known fact.

Occasionally, gossip did the rounds along the lines of the time-honored tradition of body snatching too. But this usually involved John Doe’s, and often came with a backstory involving teaching institutions starved of instructional cadavers.

The plain outright thieving and keeping of body parts of all descriptions for no apparent reason, and with full knowledge of living family members, was a relatively new one.

And looking at the pile of spent editions of the Chthonic Daily sitting in the corner of the offices of Brown Legal, in which Apocalypse would find any amount of reports relating to the latest craze of dealing in body parts in less than aboveboard medical examination, Apocalypse knew the activity was on the increase.

What made the whole exercise so unusual was that nobody explained why the examiner’s office and hospitals, and private funeral homes for that matter, as well as any other place or institution serving as a crossroads for the recently departed, wanted so many body parts.

The next point that made the whole exercise crazy was that the government seemed to be backing the grisly enterprise wholeheartedly. Laws popped up everywhere that prevented family members from retrieving the totality of their deceased relatives for proper burial.

Donor demand just couldn’t explain it away.

Apocalypse didn’t have anything to give Peter Piper when he looked up from his desk and met his eye.

Appearing to sense an inability to help on the part of his legal counsel, Peter Piper made his own appeal, and asked, Won’t you at least look into it? He used his hands again, He was my brother, Paulie Piper. My own daughter, Pepper, had to see her Uncle Paulie like that. Finally, he added, Why in the hell does a medical examiner want to hang onto his brains? He never used the damn things when he was alive and kickin’ anyways? It belongs with the rest of the useless prick, with God. God, man, with God.

The two spaniels barked, and Pockie Brown’s cell phone rang. Or the phone rang, and the two dogs barked.

Meanwhile, Louise, or her husband, Jack, who had hardly worked a day in his life, but who was always otherwise employed in some community venture or other, banged around on the timber floors upstairs.

The dogs barked some more. The phone rang some more.

Apocalypse straightened his necktie, held up a finger, made an apologetic expression, such as he used to do while advising clients in the polished office suites of his previous employer, Jaeger, where silverware tinkled in the corner of meeting rooms, and conferencing devices and computer hardware decorated oak paneled sideboards. He begged Peter Piper’s forgiveness, who gave the go-ahead, his gold chains swinging in his chest hair.

Apocalypse Brown’s mouth dropped when he heard the voice at the end of the line. Then his mouth dropped more when he realized that it was the cellphone’s speaker, not its earpiece, that announced, You owe me. I’m serving coffee in some fucked up mall cafe because of you. The caller paused. With emotion that couldn’t be concealed, the voice said, I need your help.

Tanya Berg.

Apocalypse awkwardly, but very quickly, shut off the speaker button, which he had set to activate whenever he picked up a call given that he was usually the only one around when calls came through. He didn’t trust all that bullshit about phones not giving off microwaves that fried your skull. One or two microwaves wouldn’t kill him, though. He pressed the smartphone to his ear and said, I’m with a client.

He spoke with a tone of voice that tries calming the listener and never does.

Tanya Berg demanded to meet him in an hour at his office, Brown Legal.

He guessed she didn’t know that Brown Legal was his sister Louise’s basement.

It’s one thing to meet Poodle Ponds newly arrived nouveau drug dealing rich in Louise and Jack’s basement. But meeting Tanya, graduate of the College of Secretarial Excellence, specializing in Legal Studies for Young Ladies of Professional Inclination, and formerly a young career woman of Jaeger, and currently the living twin sister of a recently deceased superstar, would rock Apocalypse’s world, and not in a good way.

How about I come to meet you? he said, embarrassed. His eye drifted to the illegal still. And to the spaniels. And to forty-two-year-old Peter Piper, the tiger