Ink (22 page)

He turns backways again. He's got a day or two yet to cover on foot to reach his destination, but that's fine, gives him a chance to watch the world unwind around him as he walks through it, unseen, unheard, unknown to the mundanes whose little minds just don't can't quite handle the anomaly of the atemporal. He likes to walk among them like that, out of sync, out of phase. Gives him a feeling like … like the world belongs to him.

He takes a look around his world.

The sky is clear and blue, but in the prelude to his arrival it churns chaotically. Even the rewind motion of wheat unblown by a wind sucked back where it came from looks more stirred than it would moving forward in time. Everything is vibrant, a little numinous, but with a darkness tearing at it from underneath. What it looks like is a Van Gogh painting, he thinks, a world seen through a haze of absinthe or insanity. Fields of corn and wheat as far as the eye can see, this is East of Eden, West of Smallville, five miles and two days out from Lincoln, 1959. Or what looks like 1959, he thinks; scratch the surface, dig down a little under this world, and you find not just farm machinery but the scything shrapnel of car bombs, dirty yellow ribbons in the grass down among the roots of trees. He crosses a dry dirt track between fields, where a twisted shard of fender juts
out of the earth, red and brown with rust as if crusted with the blood of sacrifices, blood poured out to soak the dirt even redder than it already is, blood of kids, blood of lambs, offered to a deity of dust. God-fearing people here, he thinks. They'd give anything for a life where the apocalypse never happened.

He picks a stalk of wheat and runs the kernel between thumb and forefinger, letting the seed and chaff fall apart on the wind and vanish, torn by his interference out of their own timestream, lost to it. An offering of grain, of life, and no more meaningful to God than any grain of sand that's empty of the world and empty of eternity, no matter what the poets say.

God isn't just dead, far as Joey is concerned. He's buried six feet under in a strata of residual time from long before the universe evolved the logic to rule its own reality. And then built a world over his grave.

He's developed something of a theory in his travels, Joey has, a language to orient himself when he's out of sync with the mundanes. He's come to think of time as a shape, with volume and mass, with three dimensions that he labels frontal, lateral and residual. He's walked forward and backways from cradle to grave, from grave to cradle, and slid sideward into alternatives, branches, parallel streams. A step or two in lateral time has taken him into worlds where the fascists won the Second World War, where the Russians reached the moon first, where humanity never evolved beyond Australopithecus, Ancient of Days, crouched in his cave and feeding on the brains scooped from his enemies’ skulls. He thought that was all there was to it until he found that no matter how he tried, forward, backways or sideward, he was stuck in the twentieth century. And yet everywhen he visits is full of these little anomalies that go unspoken of by the mundanes. He's walked in graveyards abandoned and overgrown where tombstones date right up to 2017, engraved with images of young men in army uniform, golden boys with marine buzz cuts. Errata. Remnants of a dead future. And things stranger even than that.

There's a third dimension to time, he's sure now: a buildup of layer upon layer, strata upon strata of dead universes, worlds less ordered, less lawful, than the one he was born in, worlds of gods and demons compacted underfoot to form a solid crust…
residual
time. And somehow the bitmites found the fault lines and crowbarred them open, fractured reality to reveal, in places, whole worlds that should no longer be. He's eaten unicorn in Paris, hunted manticore in Africa, pulled the wings off fairies for a living. But he's stuck in the fucking twentieth century.

It's like some earthquake dropped the land under their feet, or some glacier came to crush and carve it, then dissolved, leaving the world splintered and fallen, full of debris that's either tumbled down from above or been thrown up from below in the shifting of the land. Erratic boulders of time. Leaping from ledge to ledge, skidding down steep slopes of scree, walking the thin ridges between plateaus, Joey knows that time's a whole lot more complex than what the mundanes see, huddled in their caves and trying to pretend that the Evenfall never happened. He's been to the cliff faces and precipices that edge their existence, looked up at unscalable heights, down into nothingness. Cities in ruin, deserts of broken bird skulls, caves filled with suits of skin. But no matter where he goes he's trapped in this little hundred years, in this wreckage of history without a future. Just like he always was.

So maybe Jack was right.

But it doesn't really matter now.

He slides a hand over the soft fuzz of the wheat's heads, and scans around him for the road that will lead him into town, the road back to his place of birth and to his place of death. Back to the boy.

He paints Jesus. He paints Jesus with a face modeled on Elvis Presley, but with long, lank hair and shades, the darkness of those features patched together out of ultramarine violet and blue, viridian, touches of burnt sienna, the way the old masters did. There's no such color as black, his teacher taught him— shadow is something subtler, more complex—and while it's hard to fight the impulse to slap on mars black here and there just as a little tweak, he does.

It's difficult. He keeps dipping his camel-hair brush into the little splodges of paint on his palette and then reaching forward to dab the surface of the painting here or there, only to stop at the realization that his brush has picked up mars black. He deliberately sets the black paint aside so that he doesn't smear it on his palette when he's adding azo yellow or phthalo blue or whatever. He finds it on his palette the same way he finds a chewed-up pen in his mouth in class when the teacher snaps his head up with a
Joseph Darkwater.
He throws the tube of paint into the bin, only to find a fresh one among supplies bought from the art store in town.

It's weird, but then everybody has these little parts of themselves that act independently, the autopilot that takes out the garbage, lets the cat in every
morning, sits through that hated geography class, walks home through the fields. It's not that different having another part of you that takes the cap off a tube of mars black paint and squeezes it out on your palette, not so different having a part of you that paces the room looking at the painting, trying to think of what it needs, what it
needs
, that jabs the brush into the black and tries to dab an inky swastika on the forehead of Jesus before you stop it, halt it, rein it in. A smile at the daftness of the notion.

Yes, it's weird, but it's not any weirder when it comes down to it—is it?— than actually trundling on through life when he's just sick of it all and all he really wants is to die, for someone to just come and put a gun to his head and listen to his laughter, hear it, goddamn hear it, hear the part of him that's screaming
do it, goddamn kill me, damn it, pull the goddamn trigger.

So he paints Jesus. He paints a punk kid Jesus, glowering and sullen on his cross against the background of a sky too purple to be ever seen on earth, that purple streaked with cadmium red, canary-yellow sunlight down on the horizon. He knifes the sunbeams up and out in a burst of brightness that could be sunset or sunrise. It's a blast of Blake that's really pretty amateurish, but the painting needs it, he thinks. The heavens darkening or breaking open. The sun crushed down or fighting to arise again.

Just after sunset or before sunrise are when he works most; he's always been an early riser, being brought up on the farm, so he gets up with the dawn and spends an hour or so in blue jeans and bare feet in the barn, smearing paint around before his morning shower and breakfast in the kitchen. Then, all he has to do is struggle through the everyday grind of school, looking forward to the end of it, where he can wander home at his own pace through the fields of golden corn, past the clay men silent as statues but swinging their scythes in time like slaves of older days, as if they follow the rhythm of some secret inner singing. He's got plenty time for painting now that there are no chores, now that the farm pretty much runs itself.

The clay men are what keep the farms runnng now. A hundred years ago they would have been
niggers
, twenty years ago they would have been
wetbacks
, but these red-brown men with their skin cracked like it's coated in dry mud don't come from across an ocean or a river grand; they come from the Hinter, from the wild place out where the rapeweed stetches far as the eye can see. When they first showed up, gathering outside farmhouses in their scores, folks were scared, opened fire on them in panic, hung their bodies on the trees like
dead crows—warnings to others to stay away. It took a while for people to realize that all these clay men wanted was to work in the fields. Joey remembers his dad holding a shotgun trained on one as it bent down to pick up a fallen hoe and turned, impervious to the threat, to work on a patch of vegetables close by the house. A grain of corn a day is all you have to give them, as if it's not the payment that they need—not the daily bread—just a token of it. They have a dignity that belies their muteness; they're not dumb but silent, Joey thinks, and he refuses to call them
zombies like
the others do, scared of what their strangeness and silence says about the world they come from.

As the sun sets and the light is finally too low to paint by, Joey watches through the window as they bring their tools in from the fields, and the gathered bales of the harvest, the earth's yield. He wipes the flat palette knife on his jeans and washes it clean under the hose until it's shining steel again, pristine. He has his own tools as the clay men have theirs; all that the rest of them have—the real goddamn zombies that he has to deal with every goddamn day—are the invisible knives that dart out, slashing as they pass. A word, a look, a laugh. Every day that passes, every group of jocks or cheerleaders he passes, there'll be one of them that turns, steps out of the crowd to razor his face with the sting of an edge so sharp he doesn't feel it till they're gone and there's just the wet, salt nip on his cheek, and he's thinking
sons of bitches, goddamn sons of bitches.
He can feel himself losing it, day by day, just getting closer and closer to the end. Don't let them get to you. That's what Jack used to say. Well, screw that.

So he goddamn well paints Jesus. He paints Jesus streaming with the cadmium red acrylic blood of his passion, a tortured, twisted, skinny body where every muscle and sinew is visible, every vein a green line pulsing on his pale flesh. It's like he doesn't have any skin left, Joey thinks, or like all that's left is fucking rags hanging off this scarecrow of a body in bloody strips. Green and red, the snakes of blood break up the body, covering the ripple of ribs or the indent of sternum, the ribbing of stretched biceps. The death of a thousand cuts. It's not the form he's interested in but the surface of it, the brutal patina of a body that's been whipped and speared and torn by thorns until it's slick with its own blood. This is a Jesus raised on his cross out of the charnel house.

He remembers Old Man MacChuill talking to him and Jack about the End Days when they were younger, about the Rapture and the risen dead, and a slow-burning apocalypse, a thousand miles and twenty years away, in another
country another time. Armageddon was a valley in Israel where crusaders and jihadists met in a holy war waged by children who threw stones or strapped explosives on beneath their coats, or drove humvees blaring
Burn, Motherfucker, Burn
at top volume. Shock and Awe and Terror. Babylon and Baghdad. It wasn't an angel's vial that dried up the Euphrates but a Stealth bomber pouring cluster bombs out of the jaws in its belly. Six hundred and sixty—give or take a half dozen—detainees pouring out of the pit of Guantanamo, with scorpion venom in their heads instead of thoughts. And the world went up in fire and bitmites.

Everyone said Old Man MacChuill was crazy, that he had a
vivid imagination
, but he just kept on talking about ten years of war and another ten of Even-fall before, hallelujah, the Millennium came. Only the Son of Man failed to show up, that's what he used to say. No Christ or Antichrist, just the kings of the earth on each side, politicians and clerics fighting for hearts and minds, for souls, for power over them, and even them becoming more and more irrelevant in the years of ghost cities and endless roads, of radio stations blaring Magyar songs in the heart of the Deep South, of towns drifting off into eternal forests and fields that stretched farther than any helicopter or plane could fly. Then the satellite signals went and the webworlds were gone. The sims went on the fritz, gray shades, white static answerers haunting vidphone lines. And then there was no more USA, no more Oklahoma, no more MacEwan County, and no more future, just plain old Lincoln, 1959.

That was the old man's crazy story, anyway, half Wild Turkey and half
Weird Tales
, crazier than any of that flying saucer stuff, than any
Twilight Zone.

“There's nowhere to go now,” he'd say. “You know, the road out of town just curves in a big circle out and round and back in again. Swear to God, they tell you this bullshit about the Russians, the Futurists, and the oil shortage, and the New Depression, but it's lies. It's the bitmites, you see, little tiny machines.”

Eventually they took the old man into hospital. Hebephrenic, they said.

Sometimes, when he's standing in front of a blank canvas, he thinks about that. He thinks of the road looping out into the fields in a wide circle and back in, and he paces round the barn in a wide circle that brings him back to the canvas, where he tries to figure out what it is he wants to paint. He closes his eyes, and his thoughts do the same thing, running wide through the darkness of the inside of his head, as if trying to get …
out there
… at
something.
He can feel it. He can't put it down in paint but he can feel it, sort of inside, sort of out-
side. He doesn't know what it is, but it's cold and it's dark and it's coming for him. It's like death is coming for him.