The Collected Short Fiction, page 126
She places your hand against her sex, slides your fingers deep into her.
“Feel the shape of me.”
You feel the shape of her, all right. Your body is green-lighted across the board, five-by-five, all systems go and awaiting the firing solution. However what blooms in your consciousness isn’t an overheated reaction to her musky slickness, it’s the howling void of the storm that opens from a pinhole to obliterate your rationale thought, then overcome the solar system, the galaxy, and everything else.
The disjunction between flesh and thought only lasts a half-dozen ticks of the seconds-hand of the all-weather watch you wear on a string around your neck. Yet each infinitesimal pulse from its electronic braincase jangles the plexus of nerves around your heart and there’s a bifurcation of reality. You are shattered and remade. Six beats over a span of sixty-million light years—your distilled consciousness elongated into a harpoon that pierces the corpus callosum of the universe. The wounded vista is a nightmare of nightmares; it is not dissimilar to gazing into the gaping pit of your own eye socket blown to impossible dimensions. And inside that cavern? A light that is darkness beams forth. Hideous red glow, disintegrating glare, death ray of the soul.
You will later discover that thousands of people across the world shared this precise experience at the precise same moment. Most of these people immediately resorted to graphic forms of self-annihilation.
Not you.
Your hair will go white from the vision, although when people ask what you saw out there, you’ll only smile and change the subject. You’ll have mastered the fine art of disassociation and forgetting. Booze will help. Insanity will help too. Mom lied—you are special.
You snap back to local reality and the woman drags you atop her. She doesn’t notice that you’ve changed, been rearranged from the cells up. After you’ve made love, the Georgia peach kisses your cheek, tracing the old, bitter scar that marks the very core of you, just as a tree’s rings spiral ever tighter. She asks how it happened. She’s intoxicated with your imperfection.
You tell her about the neighbor who kept a kennel of racing huskies and how when you were ten your father made you enter the lot as the neighbor was hitching his team. Dad knew you were piss-in-your-pants-scared of dogs. He wanted to make a man of you, force you to confront your fear. Eighteen sled dogs, snapping and barking in madness to run as a pack across the tundra. You were small for ten and maybe a couple of them mistook you for prey and the others simply operated from instinct. You slipped, one of them nipped your arm, and then all devolved unto frenzy. They sank their fangs and pulled in opposite directions and there was a bucket of blood dashed upon the snow. Here came your dad’s boots, and the mukluks of the neighbor, frantically jigging the way men will to stamp out a fire. They drove the enraged huskies away from your tattered ragdoll self. You remember observing the debacle from on high as a floating astral projection. Curious, yet detached from the moment.
Your Georgia peach listens attentively and when your words trail into nothingness, she asks what happened to the dogs, to your dad, to the neighbor. The lamp wick folds in upon itself and all is darkness.
“We went to hell.”
Each day I begin with the basic facts of my existence:
My name is Gladys. I am fifty-seven and a widow. Two of my three sons are also dead. It would be better if the eldest were gone, too. Poor aim is to blame. There’d been a flaw in the lens of the scope and the kill-shot went wide.
Larry is dead to me. Is that enough?
I am caretaker of a goldfish. His name is Hercules and he owned my husband until the day John passed away. The fish is all that I have left of my previous life. Won’t be long until humankind in general can say that.
Red light comes through the window set high in the uppermost wall of the white room. Food is delivered on a tray through a slot in the metal door. There is a toilet, sink, and cot. Hercules in his domain upon a wooden folding table. My canvas and paints are long gone. My old books were spirited away as I lay in drugged stupor. The doctors don’t visit anymore. Nor do the plainclothes policemen, nor the government agents. Once in a while, whispers filter through the intercom.
The voice says, how could you?
I lie on my cot and stare at the red light. I wonder what is left out there in the world. Why does anyone even bother with it? Humans are genetically predisposed to contest territory, even if the prize is irradiated tracts of scorched earth. We are born to fight, bred to kill. We are the makers of plague, the detonators of artificial suns.
Mike and Sam were perfect. Larry got cancer when he was young. Never proven, but we always suspected it had something to do with his father’s tour of duty in Afghanistan. Maybe John didn’t get the gas mask on in time and he unwittingly huffed a few breaths of some chemical agent or other, something that replicated itself through the blood and warped our firstborn. Yes, whatever it was, it came back for John. And now I’m alone.
We noticed the cancer only after it took Larry’s left eye and began nibbling on his brain. The operation to remove the tumor was a gruesome success. The Elks Club paid for everything. Post-op, nothing was ever the same in our little Information Age family unit.
Larry’s soul shriveled into to a wizened monstrosity. A cannibal gnome, invested and diabolical. I saw it in its reptilian elegance, peeping out from his heavy-lidded gaze. Gone was the sweetness, snuffed was the affection. He exhibited a sharp intellect that impressed teachers and doctors alike. They assumed he was bound for greatness. He fooled everyone—psychologists, teachers, friends, extended family—except for us. John and I recognized the coldness, the calculating edge to his new nature, and we were afraid. The kid became a liar and a manipulator. He made up a dozen convincing tales of how he lost the eye and deployed them with a conniving genius against suitable targets. He wanted to hurt us, especially his father. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps he had something in common with all those assholes who climb mountains for the fuck of it. Perhaps the devil was in him. Perhaps my boy is the Antichrist.
I tried to keep the peace and failed. The feud between Larry and his father took on the spectacular excesses of the US/Soviet Cold War era. There were moments I feared John’s temper would get the better of him and he’d smother the boy in his sleep. Dear God, now I wish he’d done it.
Red light keeps on creeping along the wall. Still no shadows, only the light. The intercom crackles and there is a long bleed of static. Someone begins whistling.
What year is this? I don’t remember.
However, I do remember the instant it all crystallized for me: Halloween night, 2013. We put together a haunted house in the basement and invited the boys’ classmates and a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. John played Dr. Moreau, decked in a ratty lab coat and a panama hat, intent upon convincing the gaggle of “young entrepreneurs” to invest in his latest mad experiment. Meanwhile, I acted the role of an escaped bird-woman who’d enlisted the tykes to overthrow the good doctor and free the beast-people trapped in his laboratory. Twenty-five diminutive ghouls, goblins, witches, and Tinker Bells thumped down the stairs and piled into the drafty confines of the basement. After a brief tour of the various props (the radioactive scorpions and candy cockroaches were not to be missed!), Moreau gave his doomed spiel and was promptly slaughtered by his latest and greatest creation, the Alpine Wildman, a hybrid brute formerly known as Morris the Accountant. Reverend Custer played Morris with grandiose flourishes. The grizzled elder delighted in his slobbering and snarling role. He was a hell of a fellow, our right reverend.
Of course, Dr. M wasn’t so easily defeated. Only by finding and destroying his brain, the phylactery of his evil spirit, could there be true peace on the Isle. The brain was a pink and black piñata John and the boys fashioned from newspaper, glue, and paint. Damned thing hardened into a cement block and none of the kids could perforate it with the beating stick (the doctor’s cane) despite whaling on it with concentrated savagery. Happy young faces darkened and a few tears were shed until supermom Becky Champion, ever the quick-thinker, cried out, That’s not how ye attack a brain of quality! and tore the piñata in twain so its sweet innards were cast to the ground. The ensuing scrum over butterscotch lozenges and chocolate raisins became so violent so quickly that the adults gawped in astonishment while tiny fingers were stomped and adorable pug noses squashed by bony little elbows. The children hissed and clawed each other with the ferocity of alley cats.
I spied Larry on the edge of the fray, smiling with the evil wisdom of an ancient puppeteer, hands clasped before him. He’d dressed as the Phantom of the Opera and the mask partially obscured his expression. He met my glance and nodded. Then he reached up and pried open the lid of his dead eye.
Hideous red light.
A few years before The Whimper (as some cheerfully allude to the apocalypse), Dad and you achieved détente. You started talking again, going to the bar during football season, barbeques in the summer, and that sort of thing. Should’ve guessed something was wrong. Cancer of the everything, in this case. But you didn’t catch on.
He got trashed on boilermakers one night and told you about a camera he and some other scientists invented to take pictures of prehistoric Earth. Snapshots of the Cryptozoic? Absurd, right? Hell, that was only a piece of the puzzle. He looked around the bar real furtive-like and whispered that there was a sequence of photos cataloguing the entire solar system during roughly the same epoch. Black classification material; the sort of secrets men got themselves disappeared over if they spilled the beans. He’d drunk so much, he’d come around the mountain to a grim sobriety.
You said you couldn’t get anywhere near understanding of the theory and he said that was okay, the eggheads didn’t either. This was found art, son. Extra Terrestrial Technology abandoned during the last ice age. Geologists stumbled upon some funky equipment and semi-decipherable schematics at the heart of the Knik Glacier. The government swooped in to excavate and transport the works to a laboratory buried three quarters of a mile beneath Lazy Mountain. Dad’s team spent eight years on the project. They were like the blind men and the elephant. It was big and dangerous, they could agree. There were unpleasant implications regarding humanity’s link on the food chain. The eggheads agreed upon that too.
He mentioned nightmares. His eyes gleamed with tears and animal terror. Sinewy, gristly, fevered; he was at once the picture of a dockyard scrapper and fragile as tissue paper. Oppenheimer’s cancerous ghost. He wept on your shoulder, apologized for letting you get your face chewed off, apologized for every miserly little crime he’d perpetrated against you, and you forgave him.
Here’s the deal for all you finger-waggers and tisk-tiskers: after the old man kicked, yes, you had a go at astral projection. You got fucked up beyond all recognition and staggered out past the Nome seawall and did your thing—sat like a yogi and meditated upon the destruction of the world. You visualized the worst possible shit your febrile mind could conceive of, and after a few fruitless minutes, dusted yourself off and walked to the Polar Saloon for a beer. Earth remained very much intact despite your efforts.
Didn’t it?
Yes, the whole goddamned mess is my fault. Gladys knew there was something wrong with that boy. She begged me to have him locked away after the incident at his last school. The high-powered shrink we hired said as much. I wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t see, and wouldn’t act on my conscience. I could’ve committed him, could’ve killed him, a hundred times over. She would’ve backed my play all the way to the bitter end. Hacked up the body and fed it to the chickens.
In retrospect, if I’d let the Big Bad Wolf eat him, everything would’ve been different. Sure, I’d still be dead. Some of you’d be around. Some of you’d have kids of your own by now. Grandkids, even. One thing in my defense: the little fucker was a lot brighter than I’d reckoned. Almost enough to make a father proud.
Oh, Gladys. You were right, although I’ll be dipped if I ever saw his eye glow with hellfire. I mean, come on. We put you in the hatch for a reason. Worst part of it is, I knew what was going to happen. Unfettered access to the Project hath its uses, and—contrary to what some might believe—I’m not a total idiot. One night, I sneaked into the lab and calibrated the Machine to a much narrower set of parameters than we’d ever attempted, and it worked, after a fashion.
Compared to observing dinosaurs being consumed by tidal waves of acid jelly, these images were prosaic: Larry was sitting lotus on an ice sheet—above it, actually; he floated two or three feet off the ground. Distortion occurred all around him. I figured it was quantum interference as the device sifted through infinite possible universes to home in on our future.
No. It was Larry in all his glory. He’d made the abstract leap that the Machine was absolutely unnecessary to unlock the door and throw it wide. Anyone could’ve done it if they thought the right thoughts in the exact order. I don’t understand why it had to be him. Outside of a couple of bad breaks, he had such a happy childhood.
I think the shithead killed my fish.
“But it wasn’t that way at all,” you say. “My father killed me when I was a child. He allowed me to be eaten a pack of sled dogs. I lived for three days on life support, then he gave the word and someone pulled the plug.”
The Machine may or may not be a metaphor for our troubled times. Larry, its operator, is the everyman philosophers have dreamed of, warned us against.
What, precisely, did the Machine do? From the top: The Machine
A) Opened a doorway into prehistoric Earth/Signaled an alien invasion
B) Activated a battery of satellites that bombarded the planet with X-rays and killed everyone on the West Coast, precipitating WWIII.
C) Activated a seismic occurrence that detached the West Coast from the continental USA and killed everyone, precipitating WWIII.
D) None of the above.
E) Something worse.
If you went with E, you are a gold star student.
“But it wasn’t that way at all,” you say. “My father killed me when I was a child. He pushed me over the bow of our riverboat as we floated the Yentna river. The muddy water is thirty feet deep and I sank without a scream.”
It’s a gorgeous fall evening in Palmer, Alaska. Hay dust hangs in the golden twilight. Blue clouds scrim the peaks of the Chugach Mountains. Scattered lights blink across the long sweep of the town. A soccer game is in progress on the high school field. The league championship is at stake.
Because there are inviolable rules regarding the temporal matrix, I won’t tell you who I am. Nor shall I reveal the date, except to say it’s the future. There are infinite futures, but only this one is yours. I can’t tell you whether the invasion comes from outer space, or from the depths of the Earth. All I can tell you is that Mankind has eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds remaining in its geologically brief reign as terrestrial apex predator.
Boo, and hoo.
Flash forward ninety-nine years. Sorry to say no one is missing you. Any of you.
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, Larry lugged Hercules down to Settler’s Bay and dumped him into the water. The authentic Hercules, mind you. The goldfish that ended up in a bowl in Larry’s mother’s cell was a fake.
Naturally, the fish began to grow at an exponential rate, as Larry’s dad always feared would be the case. And, naturally, when it achieved sufficient mass, it swallowed a Russian trawler on the Bering Sea. The first of many trawlers. This incident ultimately led to whole fleets being consumed. No maritime nation was spared.
Meanwhile, the rockets’ red glare, and the miasma of chemical weapons, and so on. By the time Hercules got around to wreaking its vengeance upon the world, there was nothing around except millions of square miles of virgin forest. It opened its maw and gulped down the whole enchilada anyhow. Grabbed its own tail and swallowed hard.
Existence blinked into oblivion and that lasted for a couple billion years or a billionth of one second until a pinpoint of ultra-condensed matter in a sea of darkness cracked open and vomited forth the contents of a goldfish’s last supper. Here we go again.
Jaws Of Saturn
First published in The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories, August 2013
1
"The other night I dreamt about this lowlife I used to screw," Carol said. She and Franco were sitting in the lounge of the Broadsword Hotel, a monument to the Roaring Twenties situated on the west side of Olympia. Most of its tenants were economically strapped or on the downhill slide toward decrepitude, not unlike the once grand dame herself. Carol lived on the sixth floor in a single bedroom flat with cracks running through the plaster and a rusty radiator that groaned and ticked like it might explode and turn the apartment into a flaming wreck. "I mean, yeah, I hooked up with plenty of losers before I met you. Marvin was scary. And ugly as three kinds of sin. He busted kneecaps for a living. Some living."
Franco flipped open his lighter and set fire to a cigarette. He dropped the lighter into the pocket of his blazer. He took a drag and exhaled. Franco did not live in The Broadsword. Happily, he lived across town in a smaller, modern apartment building where the elevators worked and the central heating didn't rely on a coal-fed furnace. He decided not to remind her that he too damaged people on occasion, albeit only in defense of his employer. Franco didn't look like muscle-short and trim, his hair was professionally styled and his clothes were tailored. His face was soft and unscarred. He didn't have scars because he'd always been better with his guns and knives than his enemies were with theirs. Franco said, "Marvin Cortez? Oh, yeah. My boss was friends with him. If this goon scared you so much, why'd you stick around?"
