Free Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson Page A

linger on the street until the homeless couple turns the corner, then scurry down the steps to the basement. The kids call this “the squat,” but it’s an actual apartment Lena inherited from some relative or another. She removes the key pinned inside her eloquently distressed wool sweater and unlocks the door.
    I’ve been crashing with them for several months, but this place hasn’t lost its novelty. The sprawling, raw space is furnished with a few rickety chairs, soiled mattresses, and corked piss bottles. Food wrappers carpet the cracked concrete floor. Black tapestries annul the windows. It’s modest but there’s electricity and running water. And even better, a booming stereo system. We’re about to announce the discovery of the music store when the sound blasting from the speakers stops us.
    The muffled ferocity is immediately identifiable. It’s the bootleg cassette of Kin Mersey’s final show. This particular recording is almost never played. In the time I’ve been here, the kids have only dared to break it out once. Hank sits on the mattress he shares with Lena, wrapped in their stained sheets, hugging his knees. It almost looks like he’s been crying. We’ve clearly arrived in the aftermath of something.
    The walls rattle from the sound of the band ratcheting up for another headlong chorus. The tape is striking for its scrim of fuzz and static, but one element is instantly clear. That voice. The performance contains no obvious clues to Kin’s sudden abdication though it’s marked by an intensity that’s eerie even by his extreme standards, a disturbing vodoun vibe where it’s
impossible to tell whether he is channeling the songs, or vice versa. Hank starts to stir. He says: “There’s something you guys need to see.”
    As Hank stands up, I notice his fingertips are smudged black. In a few places, the ink from the interwoven patterns on his arms is beginning to run. He solemnly presents us with a blurred photocopy of what looks like an X-ray. There’s some scratchy handwriting below the image and a sequence of typed numbers. It appears to be the cross-section of a human skull, its mouth wide open. There is a square chunk of bright matter behind the teeth. “A friend of mine works in the psych ward and was there when it happened,” Hank says. “He figured we’d want to know and snuck me this copy.”
    â€œI don’t get it,” Lena says. “What exactly are we looking at?”
    â€œA severed tongue,” he says. “Apparently Kin chewed off his own tongue during like the tenth round of electroshock therapy.”
    We silently pass the image from hand to hand. Holding the page, I’m visited by a feeling similar to the one I had staring at the store window. My collar bone thrums and my stomach flops.
    Hank tacks the paper to the wall, where it hangs like some kind of fucked-up talisman. The copy is too smudged to tell anything for certain—even the name on the X-ray isn’t conclusive, the scratchy doctor handwriting typically illegible. But this seems beside the point. Hank’s tale sounds grotesque enough to be true. There have been persistent rumors that Kin suffers from schizophrenic episodes.
    Everyone is devastated. Markus tries to buoy us with logic and lamely plays devil’s advocate. “There have been all sorts of crazy stories about Kin,” he says. “Who says this one has to be true?” Hank says his friend isn’t a liar and points out that none of the previous rumors have been backed up by hard evidence. I try to add my two cents, but no words come out. It falls to Lena to supply the verdict. “It’s depressing,” she says. “Really
fucking depressing.” The tape winds past the final number and now only scattered shards of murmurs and applause emanate from the speakers, the sound of the audience making its way toward the exits.
    When