Ink (25 page)

He remembers lying on the ground and screaming, the pistol in his hand as he empties the chamber into this … god of fire and war.

Slowly, he uncocks the gun. He flicks the safety back on. And reversing his grip, he smacks the man across the face with the butt.

Von Strann doesn't pick himself up off the floor, just lies there, raised on one elbow, hand nursing his face. He looks up at Pickering as if expecting more violence. Pickering sits back down in his chair, beckoning, and the man stands up, holding the edge of the table for support. He rights the chair and takes his seat again as if he ‘d merely fallen off of it in a moment of clumsiness.

“How did you know?” says Pickering.

“I've heard the stories,” he says. “I wish I could tell you what you need to hear.”

“What I need to hear is how he did it, how he made himself this thing. What I need to hear is how to kill him.”

“You can't kill a myth.”

“Everything can be killed,” says Pickering.

The red LED of the radio alarm clicks over from 03:00 to 02:59. Lying on the bed, the past scattered around him, he finds himself unable to sleep for the first time in he doesn't know how many years. He pulls himself up and twists round to punch the pillow a couple of times, but it's nothing to do with discomfort. He flops back down on the bed, hands under his head. He's tired; a freefall drop through a good couple of decades takes it out of a man. It's not as rough as pushing sideward or clawing your way down through the residual strata to the dead places, but it's tiring enough.

So why the fuck can't he get to sleep? he wonders. Outside, the cicadas chirrup the only response. Maybe it's just too fucking quiet for him now. It's a long time since he was in a backwoods Haven like this; he's a city boy now, used to passing cars, revving engines and pumping stereos, the siren wail of an ambulance, drunks having arguments or singing in the night. He's used to jarring, discordant blares of noise like neon against black in the murder city nights of jazz cats and king rats. Guys in white vests playing submachine-gun solos on the fire escape. Christ, the cities are just as much a cliche as these nowhere towns out in the sticks, but they're
his
cliche now, and he feels out of place in the still of this dark rural idyll slumbering. Like a samurai sitting on a porch, using his katana to whittle wood.

But it's not the silence. His penthouse apartment back in the city is just as quiet. He's come a long way from being a streetkid, new in the city, robbing liquor stores and sleeping rough in an alleyway or in some crackhouse, whore in one arm, belt around the other. That was forever ago. Now he sleeps in silk sheets and silence.

A guilty conscience then? Fuck, no. Joey Narcosis has no regrets, no remorse. He sleeps the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the just. He looks back on his life with pride, and if he had to live it over he wouldn't change a thing, unless it was to turn pro a little sooner.

It was 1989 when he made the choice—not that the year mattered much to Joey by that point. He'd traveled enough to know how fucked the world was, and that
he seemed to be the only one who knew it, the only lucid dreamer of them all. He'd learned to keep his mouth shut, but—Depression Chicago or LA in the nineties—it was all just a backdrop with the same gunfire out of passing cars, and the same clubs that only open to the right knock. Like the Fox's Den.

He remembers some guy in drag in the John that day, high as a kite on smack it looked like, laughing even as he/she smeared the lipstick on like clown makeup.

‘All the world's a stage, honey! The whole world's a fucking stage!”

And he has just a hint of a smile on his face as he washes his hands at the basin, nodding because somehow the words just click.

The queen giggles and collapses, shouting:

“Fuck! Fuck! I broke a fucking heel!”

He looks at himself in the mirror, and he realizes that he's been a fucking errand boy too long, hired muscle, a spear carrier standing in the background, one of those guys who gets his nose broke by the hero halfway through the movie. Screw that. He's going to be a player.

An old garage-rock track—Radio Birdman's ‘Alone in the Endzone”—is playing as he walks out of the toilet and over to the table where the Future Boys’ second-in-command, Eight-Ball, and Father Rome of the Aryan Guns sit carving up territory; and it goes on playing even as he shoots the two dealers with a single bullet in the center of the forehead each. And then somehow time rewinds around him, and plays back and forward, back and forward, as he turns and turns again, emptying the clip, bullet by bullet, one bullet each, into the henchmen and the hangers-on. He catches glimpses of himself out of the corner of his eye like he's everywhere at once, a multiple exposure of ghost image upon ghost image, and then it's over and he has no idea of what he's just done, but he sort of knows
how
he did it. He stands in the center of the scene of carnage, untouched, and everywhere around him clubbers scream and start to turn, to run, but in slow motion, slower. He feels this … puzzle of power as the world grinds to a halt, freezes around him. A nobody in their underworld up to that point, he's just carved out his name in ten eternal seconds of violence.

He cuts the ring fingers off the dealers and scrawls that new name and a contact number on a napkin, sticks them into the pocket of a kid he recognizes as a runner for one of the other local bigtimes. And leaves. It isn't the most conventional beginning to a business venture ever but it will make the right impression in the right circles, he's sure, a good start to his career.

In his pocket he's got the
True Crime
mag that he found on the newsstand
that day, with one little nugget of knowledge among all the crap, one thing he didn't already know. Not that he was adopted; his parents were quick to tell him that, even quicker to tell him that it didn't change anything, he was still their son, they still loved him, so it wasn't the big deal that the Freud Squad made of it. But the
True Crime
hacks had found out something his folks couldn't tell him; they'd managed to track down the name he was born with, Josef Pechorin.

The name doesn't mean anything to him as a name but it's … someone to be. Joseph Darkwater died a long, long time ago. He's no longer the fucked-up kid in scarecrow coat, with a black hole where his heart should be, where his rage built up so much mass that one day it just collapsed in on itself. He's not the same Joey who first hefted up the heavy gun and pointed it straight at a person's skull. He's not even the Narco that he was back in the days when he was new to city life and into every drug that could take him out of it, and out of himself.

For all that time has just gone insane around him, as he walks out onto the street of people walking zombie-slow, what really strikes him is this sense that the rest of his life is just a bridge between moments like this, that he's been asleep, waiting for some call to awaken him again to his … talent. It's like when he used to paint, he thinks. When you're in the zone and something else takes over and at the end of it all you can do is step back and look at this alien, wonderful, terrible thing you've wrought. Joey Narcosis seems a good name for that something else.

Joey flips the sheet off the bed and swivels his legs out to sit up on the edge of the mattress. In the dark of the room he can just make out the black of his clothes slung over the chair beside the table, the other chair jarring the handle of the room's door just in case some hotel busybody happens in, the gun in easy reach on the bedside cabinet beside the
True Crime
mag, an empty can from the minibar—the one he didn't crumple into never.

He takes the cord of the light hanging over the bed between thumb and forefinger, gives it a little twist, a little pull; it took him years to master even the simplest interactions in 3-D time, but these days he can do it without even stopping his backways motion. It's all in the wrist.

So why the fuck can't he sleep? Killing has never fazed him any more than he was fazed that day to find the world around him stop and start, play and rewind at will; it all seemed just another sign of his freedom. If anything, the act of murder gives a meaning to his life, gives him peace in his soul, in the knowledge that he's doing what he was meant for. He curls up in bed calm with the certainty that nothing matters because everyone dies; sooner or later, death comes
along and gathers everyone in his cold, dark embrace. And every murder Joey commits reminds him of his acceptance of that, of the choice he made and of why he made it.

Every suicide is a murder, every homicide an accident, and death the only real purpose behind every life.

So maybe, he thinks, maybe it's just anticipation, like a young child who can't sleep knowing that tomorrow is his birthday. In a way, tomorrow—or yesterday, rather—is the day that Joey Narcosis was born. Or, at least, the day he died.

Darkwater dreams. He's out in the fields walking among the clay men, gray in the light of a skull moon silver-white in the night. There are voices calling behind him but he walks on, knowing that somewhere out there, just over the next hill, there's a city,
the
city. Wheat whispers in the wind, brushes against the back of his hand as he pushes through the long stalks, up to the brow of the hill.

The car flashes past and brakes to a stop along the road a ways, reverses back to him. It's silver with black tinted windows that all wind down together as the man leans over from the driver's seat. Brown leather and wood interior, the dark whirling patterns of veneer, the smooth and textured, soft and tough complexities of vellum.

He's hitching, got a heavy rucksack on his back full of the moon rocks he was picking up in the fields. And the man in the silver car is offering him a lift. His long black hair pulled back into a pony tail, in his black suit, leather jacket and shades he looks… expensive. There's a black woolen overcoat lying folded on the passenger seat.

‘Are you from Italy?” he asks.

“Russia,” says the man.

Then he's inside the car, and it's moving. The coat is bulky in his lap, awkward with the rucksack on top of it.

“We can put those in the trunk, you know.”

The car pulls over.

Joey steps out onto College Street. He knows College Street in Asheville like the back of his hand, been going to school here for two years. It's all music
stores and bars and cafes, a little bohemia. There's Madam Iris's Tattoo Parlor. There's Lincoln High School.

Wait, he thinks, this isn't right. Asheville and Lincoln are two different towns, in different places, different times. Wait.

“You want me to wait here?” says the driver.

“Sure, Jack,” says Joey. “You wait here.”

He starts walking toward the school gates and sees the boy push open the front doors of the building and come down the steps, rucksack on his back. As he passes a crowd of young thugs, one of them steps out—or rather a ghost of him steps out of his own body—and with a quiet, casual disregard, slashes something sharp and silvery across the boy's cheek. The boy stops, just for a fraction of a second, before walking on.

“Your lace is loose,” calls Jack behind him, and Joey kneels down to tie it.

The thugs start after the boy, their meat bodies following at a distance, but their ghost selves gathering round the kid like vultures on a carcass or hyenas fighting over a gazelle in some macabre natural-history program. Joey wants to help him but his lace is loose.

They circle the boy, reaching out to slash, to cut, to carve off strips of flesh. They smear his blood on each other's faces, lick it off each other's fingers, feed each other morsels of meat hung on the points of their knives. There's something gruesomely intimate about the way they share their victim. Joey blinks. His lace is tied but he checks the other one and that's loose as well. He undoes the knot. He takes the two ends and pulls them tight. The left over and under the right. Pull that tight. He looks up.

The boy's soul drops to its knees, drops out of his body even as the boy himself walks on. Joey makes a loop, wraps round and through. Pulls it tight. The boy's soul drags behind him, bound to him by some astral cord, like a lump of carrion dragged through the dirt on the end of a rope while the thug-souls, like the dogs they are, gnaw at its fleshy parts and fight over its entrails. The cord tears and the boy staggers forward, freed of the weight of soul, falling forward to his knees.

Joey is on his knees.

He looks over his shoulder at the car parked on the road, this white sharklike convertible with tail fins, the trunk open. He looks around him at the sands of the desert, at all these little bird skulls on the ground, so delicate that they
crack and crumble under his hands. The hitcher stands behind him, holding this shape wrapped in the woolen overcoat; it looks heavy, bulky, like a rucksack full of rocks. He walks round in front of Joey, drops his bundle into the hole that Joey has dug with his fingers in the sand and bone. His hands are covered in the white dust like he's been working with plaster of Paris, just like the hand in the hole, sticking out from beneath the coat, except that one has red under its fingernails as well, deep brownish red, a mix of cadmium and ocher. The hitcher has a gun pointed at his head and Joey is crying because he should have never given the man a lift. It's not even his car, and now someone is dead and his parents are going to kill him. He's going to get the blame even though it's not his fault.

The hitcher crouches down and, though there's no sympathy in his eyes, he seems to understand. He takes the coat out of the shallow grave and lays it around Joey's shoulders like a blanket or a robe, as if to comfort him. There's nothing in the grave except a rucksack and a bunch of rocks.

The man stands up and raises the gun again. He pulls the trigger.

Joey stands there, with the gun in his hand, wearing the long, black coat, watching the body rock backward from the shot, slump sideways and back and down to the ground. It rolls right into the hole.