The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (31 page)

    He clutched his elbow and stared wordlessly as the red clouds rolled away to the horizon and the blue sky returned.

    "You're bleeding," she said.

    He looked at his arm. He was bleeding, all right.

6

    The doctor was the same guy who'd splinted his fingers. He gave him a few stitches, a prescription for antibiotics and another for more pain pills. He checked Franco's eyes with a penlight and asked if he'd had any problems with them, and Franco admitted his frequent headaches. The doctor wore a perplexed expression as he said something about Coloboma, then muttering that Coloboma wasn't possible. The doctor insisted on referring him to an eye specialist. Franco cut him off mid sentence with a curt goodbye. He put on his sunglasses and retreated to the parking lot where Carol waited.

    She dropped him at his building and offered to come up and keep him company a while. He smiled weakly and said he wasn't in any shape to entertain. She drove off into the night. He turned the lights off, undressed, and lay on his bed with the air conditioning going full power. His breath drifted like smoke. He dialed Mr. Wary's number and waited. He let it ring until an automated message from the phone company interrupted and told him to please try again later.

    The closet door creaked. The foot of the bed sagged under a considerable weight. Mr. Wary said, "I thought we had an understanding."

    "What's happening to me?" Franco stared at the nothingness between him and the ceiling. He dared not look at his visitor. When Mr. Wary didn't answer, Franco said, "Why do you live in a shit hole? Why not a mansion, a yacht? Why aren't you a potentate somewhere?"

    "This is what you've done with your dwindling supply of earthly moments? I'm flattered. Not what one expects from the brute castes."

    "My dwindling supply…? You're going to kill me. Eat my heart, or something."

    Mr. Wary chuckled. "I'd certainly eat your heart because I suspect your brain lacks nutrients. I've no designs on you, boy. Consider me an interested observer; no more, no less. As for my humble abode…I've lived in sea shanties and mud huts. I've lived in caves, and might again when the world ends one day soon."

    "So much for the simple life of dodging bullets and breaking people's legs."

    "You realize these aren't dreams? There is no such thing. These are visions. The membrane parts for you in slumber, absorbs you into the reality of the corona that limns the Dark. Goodbye. Don't call on me again, if you please." Mr. Wary's weight lifted from the bed and the faint rustle of clothes hangers marked his departure from the room.

    Franco shook, then slept. In his dreams that were not dreams he was eaten alive, over and over and over…

7

    Franco collapsed in a stupor for the better part of three days. On the fourth evening, as the sun dripped away, the fugue released him and he finally stirred from his rank sheets. The moon rose yellow as hell and eclipsed a third of the sky.

    The sensation was of waking from a dream into a dream.

    He loaded his small, nickel plated automatic and tucked it in his waistband. He drove over to The Broadsword and parked on the street three blocks away. The brief walk in the luminous dark crystallized his thoughts, honed his purpose, if not his plan. No one else moved, no other cars. A light shone here and there, on the street, in a building. Somehow this only served to accentuate the otherworldliness of his surroundings, and heightened his sense of isolation and dread.

    Carol's apartment was unlocked, the power off. She sat in the window, knees to chin, hair loose. Moonlight seeped around her silhouette. "There you are. Something is happening."

    Franco stood near her. He felt overheated and weak.

    "Your arm's gone green," she said. "It stinks."

    He'd forgotten about the wound, the antibiotics. His jacket stuck to the dressing and tried to separate when he let his arm swing at his side. "Oh, I've got a fever. I wondered why I felt so bad."

    "You just noticed?" She sounded distant, distracted. "The moon is different tonight. Closer. I can feel it trying to drag the blood from my skin."

    "Yeah."

    "I sleep around the clock. Except it's more like I don't really sleep. More like being stoned. I dream about holes. Opening and closing. And caves and dollhouses."

    "Dollhouses?"

    "Kinda. You know those replica cities architects make? Models? I dream I'm walking through model cities, except these are bigger. The tallest buildings are maybe a foot taller than me. I look in the windows and doll people scream and run off."

    "If that's the worst, you're doing all right."

    "No, it gets worse. I don't want to talk about that. I've seen things that scared the living shit outta me. I'm losing it. The tendrils; I've seen them for real, while I'm awake." She rested her head against the glass.

    Franco gripped the pistol in his pocket. A tremor passed through the walls and floor. Bits of plaster dust trickled from the ceiling. Something happened to the stars, although Carol's shoulder mostly blocked his view. The yellow illumination of the moon dimmed to red.

    "We're going into the dark," Carol said. She'd cast aside the sunglasses. Her face was pale and indistinct.

    He walked into the kitchenette and drank a glass of tap water. He removed the gun from his pocket and racked the slide. An object thumped in the other room. When he returned she was gone and the front door hung ajar. The hallway stretched emptily, except for the red glow of the elevator at the far end awaiting him with its open mouth. The stairwell entrance was bricked over. Franco considered the gun. He boarded the elevator and pressed the button and descended.

    Everything happened as it had happened in his serial nightmares. She was there in the lobby, gazing toward the vaulted ceiling, and he was too late. A wrinkled hand the size and length of a compact car snatched her up by the fleshy strands as a puppeteer might retrieve a fallen marionette and then blood was everywhere. Franco froze in place, his mind splintering as he registered the tendrils that snaked from his own shoulders and rose into darkness.

    An impossibly tall figure lurched from the shadow of the ornate support column. A demonic caricature of an old man, his wizened head nearly scraping the domed ceiling, hunched toward Franco, skinny fingers reaching for him, lips twisting in anticipation. Franco recalled the de Goya painting of the titan Saturn who stuffed a man into his frightful maw and chewed with wide-eyed relish. He fell back, raising his arms in a feeble gesture of defense. The giant took the fistful of Franco's strings, the erstwhile ethereal cords of his soul, and yanked him from his feet; grasped and lifted him and Franco had a long, agonizing moment to recognize his own face mirrored by the primordial aspect of the giant.

    Even in pieces, eternally disgorging his innards and fluids, he remained cognizant of his agonies. He tumbled through endless darkness, his shrieks flickering in his wake.

8

    He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.

    Moonlight illuminated the ruined plaza of the city on the mountainside. He did not recognize the configuration of the stars and this frightened and exhilarated him. During his eons' sleep, trees had burst through cracks in paving stones. He squatted to sniff the leaves, to tear them with his old man's snaggle teeth, and relish the taste of bitter sap. His lover approached, as naked and ancient as himself, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. They embraced in silent communion as the sun ate through the moon and bathed the city in its hideous blood-red glare.

    The couple's shadows stretched long and dark over the all tiny houses and all the tiny works of men.

VASTATION

    When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time-at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy.
I'm
the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I crushed the mold under my heel.

    When I was six million, after the undying dreamers shuddered and woke and the mother continent rose from the warm, shallow sea and the celestial lights flickered into an alignment that cooked far flung planets and turned our own skies red as the bloody seas themselves, I was, exiledpotentate status notwithstanding, as a flea.

    Before the revelation of flea-ishness, I came to think of myself as a god with a little G. Pontiff Sacrus was known as Ted in those days. I called him Liberace-he was so soft and effete, and his costumes… I think he was going for the Fat Elvis look, but no way was I going to dignify my favorite buffoon by comparing him to incomparable E.

    Ted was a homicidal maniac. He'd heard the whispers from the vaults of the Undying City that eventually made mush of his sensibilities. He was the sucker they, my pals and acolytes, convinced to carry out the coup. Ted shot me with a Holland & Holland.50; blasted two slugs, each the size and heft of a lead-filled cigar, through my chest. Such bullets drop charging elephants in their tracks, open them up like a sack of rice beneath a machete. Those bullets exploded me and sawed the bed in half. Sheets burst into flame and started a fire that eventually burned a good deal of Chicago to the ground.

    Bessie got a bum rap.

***

    In sleep, I am reborn. Flesh peels from the bones and is carried at tachyon velocity toward the center of the universe. I travel backward or forward along my personal axis, never straying from the simple line-either because that's the only way time travel works, or because I lack the balls to slingshot into a future lest it turn out to be a day prior to my departure.

    As much as I appreciate Zen philosophy, my concentrated mind resembles nothing of perfect, still water, nor the blankness of the moon. When I dream, my brain is suspended in a case of illimitable darkness. The gears do not require light to mesh teeth in teeth, nor the circuits to chain algorithms into sine waves of pure calculation.

    In that darkness, I am the hammer, the Emperor of Ice Cream's herald, the polyglot who masticates hidden dialects-the old tongues that die when the last extant son of antiquity is assimilated by a more powerful tribe. I am the eater of words and my humor is to be feared. I am the worm that has turned and I go in and out of the irradiated skulls of dead planets; a writhing, slithering worm that hooks the planets of our system together like beads on a string. When all is synchronized and the time comes to resurface, a pinhole penetrates the endless blackness, it dilates and I am purged into a howling white waste. I scream, wet and angry as a newborn until the crooked framework of material reality absorbs the whiteness and shapes itself around me.

    My artificial wife is unnerved at how I sleep. I sleep, smiling, eyes bright as glass. The left eye swims with yellow milk. The pupil is a distorted black star that matches its immense, cosmic twin, the portal to the blackest of hells. That cosmic hole is easily a trillion magnitudes larger than Sol. Astronomers named it Ur-Nyctos. They recorded the black hole via x-ray cameras and the process of elimination-it displaces light of nearly inconceivable dimensions; a spiral arm of dark matter that inches ever nearer. It will get around to us, sooner or later. We'll be long gone by then, scooped up into the slavering maw of functionally insensate apex predators, or absorbed into the folds of the great old inheritors of the Earth who revel and destroy, and scarcely notice puny us at all. Or, most likely, we'll be extinct from war, plague, or ennui. We mortal fleas.

***

    The milkman used to come by in a yellow box van, although I seldom saw him. He left the milk bottles on the step. The bottles shone and I imagined them as Simic said, glowing in the lowest circle of Hell. I imagined them in Roman catapults fired over the ramparts of some burning city of old Carthage, imagined one smashing in the skull of my manager, and me sucking the last drops through the jagged red remnants while flies gathered.

    I think the milkman fucked my wife, the fake one, but that might've been my imagination. It works in mysterious ways; sometimes it works at cross purposes to my design. I gave up fucking my wife, I'm not sure when. Somebody had to do it. Better him than me.

***

    The flagellants march past the stoop of my crumbling home every day at teatime. We don't observe teatime here in the next to last extant Stateside bubble-domed metropolis. Nonetheless, my artificial wifey makes a pot of green tea and I take it on the steps and watch the flagellants lurch past, single file, slapping themselves about the shoulders with belts studded with nails and screws and the spiny hooks of octopi. They croak a dirge copped from ancient tablets some anthropologists found and promptly went mad and that madness eagerly spread and insinuated itself in the brainboxes of billions. They fancy themselves Openers of the Way, and a red snail track follows them like the train of a skirt made of meat. Dogs skulk along at the rear, snuffling and licking at the blood. Fleas rise in black clouds from their slicked and matted fur.