Fearful Symmetries (6 page)

I pat Patrick’s hand; it’s weirdly intimate. I shake my head. I try to make words. My vision is starting to fry around the edges. Dark loops spool into the world.

Finally, Eugene says, “Let him go.”

Patrick releases me. I slide off the desk and land hard, dragging the broken ashtray with me, covering myself in ash and spent cigarette butts. I roll onto my side, choking.

Eugene puts his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, Jack, you okay? You all right down there? Get up. Goddamn you’re a drama queen. Get the fuck up already.”

It takes a few minutes. When I’m sitting up again, Patrick hands me a napkin to clean the blood off my face. I don’t look at him. There’s nothing I can do. No point in feeling a goddamn thing about it.

“When do I leave?” I say.

“What the hell,” Eugene says. “How about right now?”

We experience dawn as a rising heat and a slow bleed of light through the cypress and the Spanish moss, riding in an airboat through the swamp a good thirty miles south of New Orleans. Patrick and I are riding up front while an old man more leather than flesh guides us along some unseeable path. Our progress stirs movement from the local fauna—snakes, turtles, muskrats—and I’m constantly jumping at some heavy splash. I imagine a score of alligators gliding through the water beneath us, tracking our movement with yellow, saurian eyes. The airboat wheels around a copse of trees into a watery clearing, and I half expect to see a brontosaurus wading in the shallows.

Instead I see a row of huge, bobbing purple flowers, each with a bleached human face in the center, mouths gaping and eyes palely blind. The sight of them shocks me into silence; our guide fixes his stare on the horizon, refusing even to acknowledge anything out of the ordinary. Eyes perch along the tops of reeds; great kites of flesh stretch between tree limbs; one catches a mild breeze from our passage and skates serenely through the air, coming at last to a gentle landing on the water, where it folds in on itself and sinks into the murk.

Our guide points, and I see a shack: a small, single-room architectural catastrophe, perched on the dubious shore and extending over the water on short stilts. A skiff is tied to a front porch which doubles as a small dock. It seems to be the only method of travel to or from the place. A filthy Rebel flag hangs over the entrance in lieu of a door. At the moment, it’s pulled to the side and a man I assume is Tobias George is standing there, naked but for a pair of shorts that hang precariously from his narrow hips. He’s all bone and gristle. His face tells me nothing as we glide in toward the dock.

Patrick stands before we connect, despite a word of caution from our guide. He has some tough-guy greeting halfway out of his mouth when the airboat’s edge lightly taps the dock, nearly spilling him into the swamp, arms pinwheeling.

Tobias is unaffected by the display, but our guide is easy with a laugh and chooses not to hold back.

Patrick recovers himself and puts both hands on the dock, proceeding to crawl out of the boat like a child learning to walk. I’m grateful to God for the sight of it.

Tobias makes no move to help.

I take my time climbing out. “You wait right here,” I tell the guide.

“Oh,
wye
,” he says, shutting down the engine and fishing a pack of smokes from his shirt.

“What’re you guys doing here?” Tobias says. He hasn’t looked at me once but he can’t peel his gaze from Patrick. He knows what Patrick’s all about.

“Tobias, you crazy bastard. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Tobias turns around and goes back inside, the Rebel flag falling closed behind him. “Come on in I guess.”

We follow him inside, where it’s even hotter. The air doesn’t move in here, probably hasn’t moved in twenty years, and it carries the sharp tang of marijuana. Dust motes hang suspended in spears of light, coming in through a window covered over in ratty, bug-smeared plastic. The room is barely furnished: there’s a single mattress pushed against the wall to our left, a cheap collapsible table with a plastic folding chair, and a chest of drawers. Next to the bed is a camping cooker with a little sauce pot and some cans of Sterno. On the table is a small pile of dull green buds, with some rolling papers and a Zippo.

There’s a door flush against the back wall. I take a few steps in the direction and I can tell right away that there’s some bad news behind it. The air spoils when I get close, coating the back of my throat with a greasy, evil film that feels like it seeps right into the meat. Violent fantasies sprout along my cortex like a little vine of tumors. I try to keep my face still, as I imagine coring the eyeballs out of both these guys with a grapefruit spoon.

“Stay on that side of the room, Patrick,” I say. I don’t need him feeling this.

“What? Why?”

“Trust me. This is why you brought me.”

Tobias casts a glance at me now, finally sensing some purpose behind my presence. He’s good, though: I still can’t figure his reaction.

“Y’all here to kill me?” he says.

Patrick already has his gun in hand. It’s pointed at the floor. His eyes are fixed on Tobias and he seems to be weighing something in his mind. I can tell that whatever is behind that door is already working its influence on him. It has its grubby little fingers in his brain and it’s pulling dark things out of it. “That depends on you,” he says. “Eugene wants to talk to you.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

The violence in this room is alive and crawling. I realize, suddenly, why he stays stoned. I figure it’s time we get to the point. “We want the book, Tobias.”

“What? Who are you?” He looks at Patrick. “What’s he talking about?”

“You know what he’s talking about. Go get the book.”

“There is no book!”

He looks genuinely bewildered, and that worries me. I don’t know if I can go back to Eugene without a book. I’m about to ask him what’s in the back room when I hear a creak in the wood beyond the hanging flag and someone pulls it aside, flooding the shack with light. I spin around and Patrick already has his gun raised, looking spooked.

The man standing in the doorway is framed by the sun: a black shape against the brightness, a negative space. He’s tall and slender, his hair like a spray of light around his head. I think for a moment that I can smell it burning. He steps into the shack and you can tell there’s something wrong with him, though it’s hard to figure just what. Some malformation of the aura, telegraphing a warning blast straight to the root of my brain. To look at him, as he steps into the shack and trades direct sunlight for the filtered illumination shared by the rest of us, he seems tired and gaunt but ultimately not unlike any other poverty-wracked country boy, and yet my skin ripples at his approach. I feel my lip curl and I have to concentrate to keep the revulsion from my face.

“Toby?” he says. His voice is young and uninflected. Normal. “I think my brother’s on his way back. Who are these guys?”

“Hey, Johnny,” Tobias says, looking at him over my shoulder. He’s plainly nervous now, and although his focus stays on Johnny, his attention seems to radiate in all directions, like a man wondering where the next hit is coming from.

I could have told him that.

Fear turns to meanness in a guy like Patrick, and he reacts according to the dictates of his kind: he shoots.

It’s one shot, quick and clean. Patrick is a professional. The sound of the gun concusses the air in the little shack and the bullet passes through Johnny’s skull before I even have time to wince at the noise.

I blink. I can’t hear anything beyond a high-pitched whine. I see Patrick standing still, looking down the length of his raised arm with a flat, dead expression. It’s his true face. I see Tobias drop to one knee, his hands over his ears and his mouth working as though he’s shouting something; and I see Johnny, too, still standing in the doorway, as unmoved by the bullet’s passage through his skull as though it had been nothing more than a disappointing argument. Dark clots of brain meat are splashed across the flag behind him.

He looks from Patrick to Tobias and when he speaks I can barely hear him above the ringing in my head. “What should I do?” he says.

I step forward and gently push Patrick’s arm down.

“Are you shitting me?” he says, staring at Johnny.

“Patrick,” I say.

“Am I fucking cursed? Is that it? I shot you in the face!”

The bullet-hole is a dime-sized wound in Johnny’s right cheekbone. It leaks a single thread of blood. “Asshole,” he says.

Tobias gets back to his feet, his arms stretched out to either side like he’s trying to separate two imaginary boxers. “Will you just relax? Jesus Christ!” He guides Johnny to the little bed and sits him down, where he brushes the blond hair out of his face and inspects the bullet hole. Then he cranes his head around to examine the damage of the exit wound. “Goddamn it!” he says.

Johnny puts his own hand back there. “Oh man,” he says.

I take a look. The whole back of his head is gone; now it’s just a red bowl of spilled gore. What look like little blowing cinders are embedded in the mess, sending up coils of smoke. Most of Johnny’s brains are splashed across the wall behind him.

“Patrick,” I say. “Just be cool.”

He’s still in a fog. You can see him trying to arrange things in his head. “I need to kill them, Jack. I need to. I never felt it like this before. What’s happening here?”

Tobias pipes up. “I had a job for this guy all lined up at The Fry Pit! Now what!”

“Tobias, I need you to shut up,” I say, keeping my eyes on Patrick. “Patrick, are you hearing me?” It’s taking a huge effort to maintain my own composure. I have an image of wresting the gun from his hand and hitting him with it until his skull breaks. Only the absolute impossibility of it keeps me from trying.

My question causes the shutters to close in his eyes. Whatever tatter of human impulse stirred him to try to explain himself to me, to grope for reason amidst the bloody carnage boiling in his head, is subsumed again in a dull professional menace. “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a goddamn kid.”

I turn to the others. The bed is now awash in blood. Tobias is working earnestly to mitigate the damage back there, but I can’t imagine what it is he thinks he can do. Brain matter is gathered in a clump behind them; he seems to be scooping everything out. Johnny sits there forlornly, shoulders slumped. “I thought it would be better out here,” he said. “Shit never ends.”

“The atlas,” I say.

“Fuck yourself,” Tobias says.

I stride toward the closed door. If there’s anything I need to know before I open it, I guess I’ll just find out the hard way. A hot pulse of emotion blasts out at me as I touch the handle: fear, rage, a lust for carnage. It’s overriding any sense of self-preservation I might have had. I wonder if a fire will pour through the door when it’s opened, a furnace exhalation, and engulf us all. I find myself hoping for it.

Tobias shouts at me: “Don’t!”

I pull it open.

A charred skull, oily smoke coiling from its fissures, is propped on a stool in an otherwise bare room no bigger than a closet. Black mold has grown over the stool, and is creeping up the walls. A live current jolts my brain. Time dislocates, jumping seconds like an old record, and the world moves in jerky, stop-motion lurches. A language is seeping from the skull—a viscous, cracked sound like breaking bones and molten rock. My eyes sting and I squeeze them shut. The skin on my face blisters.

“
Shut it! Shut the door!
”

Tobias is screaming, but whatever he’s saying has no relation to me. It’s as though I’m watching a play. Blood is leaking from his eyes. Patrick is grinning widely, his own eyes like bloody headlamps. He’s violently twisting his right ear, working it like an apple stem. Johnny is sitting quietly, holding his gathered brains in his hands, rocking back and forth like an unhappy child. My upper arms are hurting, and it takes me a minute to realize that I’m gouging them with my own fingernails. I can’t make myself stop.

Outside a sound rolls across the swamp like a foghorn: a deep, answering bellow to the language of Hell spilling from the closet.

Tobias lunges past me and slams the door shut, immediately muffling the skull’s effect. I stagger toward the chair but fall down hard before I make it, banging my shoulder against the table and knocking Tobias’s drug paraphernalia all over the floor. Patrick makes a sound, half gasp and half sob, and leans back against the wall, cradling his savaged ear. The left side of his face is painted in blood. He’s digging the heel of his hand into his right eye, like he’s trying to rub something out of it.

“What the fuck was that!”

I think it’s me who says that. Right now I can’t be sure.

“That’s your goddamn ‘atlas,’ you prick,” Tobias says. He comes over to where I am and drops to the floor, scooping up the scattered buds and some papers. He begins to assemble a joint; his hands are shaking badly, so this takes some doing.

“A skull? The book is a skull?”

“No. It’s a tongue inside the skull. Technically.”

“What the Christ?”

“Just shut up a minute.” He finishes the joint, lights it, and takes a long, deep pull. He passes it over to me.