It was hard work piloting a luxury cruise liner down a river running through what had once been middle America. The water wasn’t clean; brambles rose from the depths, alligators and crocodiles jumped at the deck with surprising agility, and once the spire atop a now sunken bank building had scraped the hull. But even the rivers were now as deep as a shallow sea, and there was no place the ship could stop. Not with the apes following them.
Willy had a most spectacular backpack. It had been made for effete mountain climbers during the early days of the war, when the wartime economic boost was still being enjoyed by the rich. The backpack had all kinds of extra straps, straps over his shoulders and under his armpits, straps around his legs and down through his crotch. Those last straps could hurt, but on long trips he buffered them with a down pillow. The backpack contained engines, pistons, and fourteen tightly coiled molecular suspension wires with harpoons on the end. With a button press and a tube aim and a squeeze Willy could fire a line out and grab the wall of a cliff with a wire and climb it by rolling a knob between his toes.
It was useless in the jungle because it got tangled in branches, but among the abandoned buildings of mountain towns it was invaluable. He used it to steal supplies for the cruise liner while avoiding the sniffing snortling scrabbling monsters that owned the surface of the earth.
Seven angels become seven devils, thirty steps to the north place, there is still a path open if you know where to look.
There are four places. Only four. A man might walk for days without leaving the one place; might run and climb for a lifetime without moving. There are only four places, and the knife god stands in the north place. At the night they come to me, seven dogs and seven liars, seven singers and seven queens of the hunt, awakening from the east place; during the day everyone sleeps, and in their dreams there are an infinity of places, meadows and duplexes, freeways and glass-bottomed boats floating above scuba divers in a tropical paradise. But dreams are not interchangeable with reality, and you may know this by the inconsistencies; if you blink and someone is gone, or you find yourself carrying a fork you dropped into the drain a week ago, you are dreaming. There are no inconsistencies when you’re awake, and you can only wake up at night. And you will find yourself standing in one of the four places.
Once, twice, three times the engineers of the city of Babylon sought to build a tower to heaven.
The first they built out of arrogance after the flood; brick and mortar and boundless pride climbed a thousand miles. The soldiers climbed with their swords drawn and slaves played out their lives working the bellows that pumped air to the heights so that the soldiers could breathe through the airless place that led to heaven. They were only as far as the moon when the gap came. Nimrod the hunter, ancient king of Babylon, wondered for a moment, wondered to whom he would pray, when man himself was like God, and in that moment the hosts of heaven came swarming through like gnats, spitting the wine of death and stinging like mosquito bites, like a tapeworm wrapped around his neck. The tower fell and Babylon shattered like a bowl.
The elders of the court of Babylon hid among the people, meeting once every two hundred years and scheming to build a second tower. They named a boy Remus and another boy Romulus and fed them from the teats of a squid; six months later they spread a different story, a prejudice against squid having developed in the interim. The squid-fed babies, their ears pumping with the power of black ink, founded Babylon anew and called it Rome, and this time the tower was made of aquaducts and churches, taxes and salt. But again there was a faltering, and the angels came sweeping in, for what are barbarians if not angels, innocent of the fall of mankind? And the angels unmade Babylon and danced in the ruins. And they danced for so long that they forgot they were angels and began to be men.
One last elder of Babylon had survived the sack of the angels, and a plan came to him. He took a knife and cut his brain, severing the place that controlled self-doubt, stringing in its place a forest and a kaleidoscope and sixty-five screws. For two thousand years, he sat on a beach in Kauai beating at the walls of reality with his mind, beating his mind’s fists against the walls that separated heaven from earth. And one day he made it through. A levy went up among the people and the armies of Babylon crawled through his skull into heaven.
The Angels fell into gibbering madness, the Archangels were struck through with trees. The Virtues were lost in a briar patch, and the Powers pushed through the ground and plummeted to their deaths. The Principalities and the Dominions fought among themselves for the right to sleep with mortal woman and died of ennui. Seven of the Cherubim fell and became men; they went among the Thrones and subverted them. Together the Thrones and the Cherubim marched on the Seraphim and overthrew them. In the last silent battle, God broke against the armies of rebellious angels and together they sank into the primal ocean of Mother Night, leaving Babylon victorious over a headless universe.
And then the errors began. The color of the sky bled into the rocks, and the dead began to forget how to lie in their graves. Birds and airplanes mated and with a poof and a tinkle like glass breaking all the stars burned out.
A man trying to walk home from work found his body bending back, spine curving like a bow. He staggered backwards and tried to run but every particle of his mind was being pushed, shoved, spat at, by a wind his skin could not feel. His skull hurtled back, over pavement, rock, traffic circle and through the country of the stars falling, body flopping behind it like a windsock. The dirt whistled and names mixed with each other, Babylon becoming Spain becoming Archomea becoming the Confederate States of America becoming Viritrilbia, the moon becoming chaste, and his skull rolled like a marble into the falling down place, the south place, to wait until the dream made sense. Until the world could support life again.
One by one the same happened to the rest, office workers, farm hands, the victorious conscripts of Babylon, and the seven Cherubim who had fallen and become men. One million skulls lay anchored at the base of the falling down place. The face of the Earth was empty for a minute, an hour, a week, and then the Folk came. They came out of the rat cages in the abandoned laboratories of the scientists; many died, but some remained. They bent and trembled and shifted and shivered and some of them found a footing.
Two of the Folk could speak; they were the Tomkin and the Tomkinjack.
They were in love, and they guarded the falling down place.
There were seven of them on the boat.
Bonnie was the icon of sweetness, and one might call her a virgin, though her sexual experience or lack thereof should really have no bearing. She was a skilled cook, specializing in vanilla and coconuts, although most of the ship-side meals revolved around canned tuna.
Virginia had used her sexuality to get ahead in the world, but there was no longer a world to get ahead in. She was steely and clever, her wit sharp as a broken bottle. Sometimes she thought that she had lost more than anyone else.
Rae drank hot whisky and wore fancy clothes. She was refined and she was old. Her husband Dagwood insisted on cold milk around his hot whisky. They both threw up a lot, whisky having some sort of irritant effect on the elderly stomach. Dagwood was never seen without his glass cane. He told stories of waving his cane threatening at children who had tried to steal money from where it grew on the trees surrounding his mansion, but Willy had never seen him behave in a violent manner.
And then there was Roger. Roger believed in science.
The Captain, whose name was Jonah, had been a mighty sailor even before the war. Born on the isle of Genoa in Italy, he felt that he had a stronger claim to the name Genovese than the mad cohens who had fled the Earth when the animals rebelled and the ice caps melted. He had three red dots on his left cheek, the last reminder of an abusive aunt whom he had thrown into a pit of boiling olive oil at an industrial pasta cooking plant in Florence, Italy. Her last act had been to swing a bony hand out of the oil, fingers splayed in his direction. Three drops of oil had hit his cheek and marked him forever.
The Captain called Willy his little buddy, and sometimes he hit him.
They left us you, the cohens. Come into the river. I love you forever.
My name is Erdogan, and I may never deserve the love of a woman. That’s not how you get the love, I know, but the fact that I haven’t internalized that knowledge is why I will never deserve it. The love. It’s like a paradox, except the contradictory parts don’t quite push against each other. It’s that space that gives us hope. I guess. Maybe I’ll never get the love of a woman because I think like this about it. The girls I want don’t like to be confused.
It was the season after summer and before winter. I prefer to call it fall. I’ve always thought "autumn" sounded pretentious. But fall has so many other meanings. I was watching television.
There was dust all over the Venetian blinds. I glanced at them, and then back at the TV. And then at the blinds again. I couldn’t take it. Too much dust. There was a feather duster under the sink in the kitchen. I got up. The chair scraped back. I tripped over the ottoman, caught myself on the TV stand, and grimaced as a tape smashed on the floor. One thing at a time.
Flip flip, flitter flitter. I dusted from the upper corner to the bottom, left to right, and gave it a few strokes in the middle. The cat sneezed behind me. I reached a foot out and pushed him over without looking and moved over to the other window. Flip. Flitter. I sneezed. I sat back down in the chair, pulling the ottoman over with my foot. I sneezed again. The remote was covered in dust. Uck. I don’t know where I thought that dust would go, I thought to myself, a feather duster’s not a vacuum cleaner.
I got up and went outside, climbed to the bottom of the stairs and pulled out a cigarette. It was cold. I went back inside and got a jacket, returned to the base of the stairs and lit the cigarette. Hunched forward, curled around the cigarette, I took a drag. It was revolting. I blew out and took a deep breath.
It was so cold that the steam I blew out looked like cigarette smoke even when it was just air. A girl walked by. I looked at her, wondering if she would look at me. She was talking on a cell phone and didn’t even turn her head.
I got up and walked the other way. Had I walked in the same direction, she would have thought I was following her, and I couldn’t come up with a plausible destination in that region. So down the street in the other direction I walked, smelling cold trees, the smell of wood. Leaves.
Sweat dripped from my skin and I smelled an error.
Leaves are like hair. I was in my apartment. My hair was too long, and it was dusty, full of dust. Full of cigarette ash. How did that happen? I didn’t smoke, and even smokers don’t get cigarette ash in their hair unless they go out of their way. I looked at myself in the window, the black fall night converting it into a diffuse mirror. Too much hair, for sure. I looked soft, edgeless. That wasn’t what I wanted.
The cat sneezed again. It’s a creepy sound to come out of something so small, you don’t expect cats to have all those same mucus membranes. Off-putting is what it is. I patted the little critter and pushed him towards the box of tissues by the TV with my foot, hoping he’d get the point.
It was late, so I didn’t want to cut my hair just then. It was a daunting project, involving no less than two different trimmer settings, and that’s before you take into account the blend that must be made between the two zones. The blend was challenging even when I wasn’t exhausted: it’s hard to cut the hair on the back of your head, calculating how many times left and right have been flipped by the several mirrors you have to array around your head, and you have to keep track or you’ll move the clippers in the wrong direction and nick your ear. It was out of the question. I went into the bathroom, warmed up the clippers, and cut a huge chunk of hair off above the left ear.
Tomorrow when I woke up and shambled my way over to the mirror to brush my teeth, I’d see that I had no choice but to give myself a decent haircut. Tired as I was, I knew I had to look good for the job. And something else, something more important. What was it? It was more important. Oh, right.
The girl at the coffee shop.
"You cut your hair, pilgrim," said the hoary man in who slept in the gutter on the corner. He was wearing a dirty sailor suit, all the white turned brown. Well, there was white in one place. I don’t want to talk about that.
"It’s freedom of speech," I said, "as long as you don’t say too much."
The man nodded. "Element," he said. I nodded. "Don’t go looking for her, mother was taken by the sea."
Gold was an element, and gold represented money. And mother was taken by the sea. I tapped my nose in a secretive manner.
"Sweet," I said and threw a dollar towards his coffee cup. I set off for the coffee shop, craning my neck a little as I passed to watch him dive after the bill as a puff of wind blew it away from him. I’d be spending the evening in a meat locker at the seafood restaurant around the corner. My plan was to eat and drink warm things all day to compensate.
The sun went behind a cloud and a girl with black hair and a wart on her cheek crossed the street. It was very cold. She saw me watching her and looked back in a sidelong wise. The error sang from the skin under her eyes. Errors never complete during the day.
Then she was gone. The sun came out again and I felt its warmth.
I think I know her. I think I knew her. I knew that she hated me, but I couldn’t remember why. Was her name Lucia? No, that wasn’t right. She had a witch’s name.
Now the steps of the coffee shop rose ahead of me. There she was... not the witch-named girl...
... whose name was Ursule. I still didn’t know where I knew her from. But there was definitely a witch association. Spiderwebs, black conical hats and brooms. And that nasty lace shit.
The girl behind glass was not Ursule but Jessica. She had a normal name, no wart on her cheek, brown hair, and seeing her brought neither shame nor subtle but chilling fear washing over me. She was scrubbing the counter at the station on the left, the always-deserted coffee bean line. I turned red anyway.
I climbed up and joined the pre-made hot coffee in a cup line, scratched my forearm, and watched her out of the corner of my eye. There was a boy talking to her. They were wearing the same coffee shop colors, to wit brown and dark brown. I heard "luxury and the Prince of Swords," and decided he was reading her fortune with tarot cards.
I looked at the menu over her head as a trick. She looked at me, thinking I’d looked at her and saw that I wasn’t. Looking at her. Of course I was, but not with my pupils, dig. If she remembered my face and had anything pleasurable associated with it, she had just remembered it. And I’d made it look like she was the one that was interested in me, not vice versa, which would give me emotional leverage. It was very clever. But I wasn’t actually going to walk over and talk to her. That never worked, I would start talking about how I was out of toilet paper.
I’m lost. I wasn’t born here. Where was I born? Something was different. The air was different. The light was different. I was different. My mother died giving birth. My father was a trucker, and I had two brothers and three sisters. Our family was like an army.
There was a jade statue by the menu. Was I still staring at the menu? So much for looking competent. I turned back towards the counter and realized there wasn’t anybody left in front of me, and the counter was 50 feet away. I walked up and ordered something with whipped cream on top. "Ernie," I said, when asked for my name.
I looked back at the statue. It was a green man on a green chariot swinging a green sword in the air. Three smaller green men were falling off the front, or so it appeared; actually they were attached permanently to the statue by their feet.
"Ernie!" said someone behind the bar, and I got the cup and started drinking, continuing to study the statue.
I started sketching it on my coffee cup. Jessica walked by without saying anything.
I left and finished the drawing while standing on the sidewalk. It looked familiar.
Jessica was not looking at me in any way whatsoever.
There is an objective reality. You can’t trust anyone else to find it, though. Everyone is lazy. Only you know how far you got before you gave up.
ROT13
[Cybggvat cnffrq bss nf abiry gb npuvrir jbeqpbhag]
Gurer ner sbhe guernqf urer:
A - gur Gbzxva naq gur Gbzxvawnpx
R - Reqbtna
F - gur whatyr obng
J - gur jrveq zrgnernyvgl bs gur cynprf
Va gur Trabirfr pbagrkg, F vf erny naq A vf n fgbel-jvguva-n-fgbel. Guvf abiry vf abg jvguva gur Trabirfr pbagrkg. Reqbtna vf n snyyra pureho. Ur jnf obea ntnva bhg bs gur jbzo bs n zbegny jbzna. Gur reebef ner bayl ortvaavat. Ur vf pbafpvbhfyl njner bs gurz, ohg abg phevbhf; fbzrubj ur gehfgf. Naq ur unf tyvagf bs gur zrzbevrf bs gur byqre cneg bs gur fbhy, bs uvf yvsr va urnira.
Gur jrfg cynpr vf gur gehr qernz, gur qernz gung frrf gur sbhe cynprf.
Gur rnfg cynpr vf gur ubzr bs gur snyyra purehovz.
Gur abegu cynpr vf jurer gur xavsr tbq fgnaqf; gur xavsr tbq vf n zbafgre gung ebfr sebz gur snyyvat qbja cynpr naq gung chefhrf gur Gbzxva naq gur Gbzxvawnpx.
Gur fbhgu cynpr vf gur snyyvat qbja cynpr; gur Trabirfr naq gur whatyr obng ner gur qernz bs gur Snyyra.
Gur Gbzxva naq gur Gbzxvawnpx frrx gb urny gur jbeyq. Reqbtna frrxf gb erzrzore uvf cnfg. Gur obngref frrx fnsrgl. Nyy bs gurz ner ybbxvat sbe gur jrfg cynpr. Va gur raq, gur jrfg cynpr vf jurer gur fgbevrf jvyy zretr.
13ROT
The Tomkin and the Tomkinjack were fighting for the crown. Around and around it went, the crown, scuttling, because it wasn’t the kind of crown that was made out of a pierce of metal beaten into a circle; it was, rather, a turtle. It was a new breed of turtle that could run as fast as a greyhound, though it didn’t like to because its legs were short and whenever it tripped the shell would bounce and roll and spin.
The crown was near the Tomkin’s leg and she grabbed for it. The Tomkinjack rushed forward. The Tomkin’s hand, moving too fast, struck the crown wrong and sent it spinning between the Tomkinjack’s legs. The crown’s head and feet disappeared inside with a zip.
They fell together, elbows in eyeballs and toes in bellies. The crown rolled down the hill, gaining speed, bouncing and chattering. The Tomkin began to disentangle herself from the Tomkinjack. The Tomkinjack began to reentangle her. She managed to poke her head up through his armpit, and she watched forlornly as the crown bounced high one last time and plooped deep into the churning sea of oil.
I love Karina from La Gata Salvaje.
When I’m physically uncomfortable, too hot or too cold, everything starts going wrong. I can’t think, I can’t work, I can’t read, I need to hurt people.
Sometimes I speak in the present tense, sometimes I speak in the past. It’s not a mistake. It means something.
I always used to watch soap operas in Spanish because the women were hot. One day I was arguing with the cat about something, waving my index finger in the air, and I realized I could understand what they were saying in the soap opera. Apparently somebody was in a coma, and somebody else wasn’t somebody’s father. There was a bonking down and I realized that I’d dropped my waggling point-making hand on the cat’s head. It frowned at me.
After that, the formerly opaque language turned to glass. I could understand even the most complex or bizarre conversations in Spanish, not just on TV but in the streets of Berkeley, here, a city with many native speakers of said. And, more oddly, though I could understand spoken Spanish at least as well as my own native tongue, I couldn’t speak it for the life of me. I could never figure out which words to use. I couldn’t even pronounce La Jolla.
Little Willy Shiva crunched down on the deck between Virginia, who had beads of sweat over her eyes, and the self-appointed captain, Jonah, whose face was limp as he looked at the deck. Bonnie and Rae were having what looked like a formal conversation near the door of the cabin, the words not totally audible, and Roger’s head could be seen peeking out of the steering booth behind and above them. Willy glanced out over the water.
There were no apes.
"I think this was Saint Louis," said Jonah, who couldn’t possibly have known. A squat little church with windows cracked by vines was visible around the bend, the cross on top instantly dating it to the American period. "I read once," he said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands togethr, "that there are hints in the Bible --"
Willy burst skeptical air from his nose. Virginia jumped, then cackled, and Jonah crossed his arms and raised his voice. Willy felt cold on the right side, the side facing Virginia, and resisted the urge to look at her.
"-- that in an older tradition, something that was being stamped out at the time the Bible was compiled, that God fought a war against sea monsters before the first day."
"There was no sea on the first day," said Willy, who had never read the Bible and was only guessing. Bonnie walked up and Virginia emitted a piercing girly greeting.
Bonnie sat down and Willy caught a whiff of vanilla. "Where’s Dagwood?" he asked. "’N Rae?"
"Oh, they went to bed. Dag’s been feeling down, and Rae was gonna whip him up some hot milk and whisky to help him sleep."
Willy laughed. "That sounds really bad."
"I don’t think Jonah was done," said Virginia. Willy blushed, suddenly afraid they would realize he was flirting. That would be embarrassing. He wasn’t like that, didn’t care about sex. He was a sailor.
Jonah continued, throwing a dead-eyed look at Willy, "there are passages in Jonah and Psalms describing God at war with Rahab and Leviathan, cracking the heads of serpent and crocodile soldiers. A kind of parallel to the Babylonian creation myth, where the god of order killed the dragon of chaos and built the world in her corpse."
"So what," said Willy. He wanted to touch Bonnie’s shoulder.
Virginia, on the other hand, was rapt. She was staring straight at Jonah, and there was a faint flush in Jonah’s cheeks. Willy eyed them both. "So," Jonah said, "I think it’s happening again, that war. Rahab and Leviathan came back and beat all the order out of the world."
Everyone was quiet for a moment, listening to the familiar sound of crocodies splashing in black water.
The people won’t go free, I can’t take my hand off them. I don’t trust yet. Maybe I’m right not to trust, they’re still just ghosts.
Erdogan was here last night for a moment. His cigarette exploded; the air doesn’t work the same way here because with only one place the smoke has nowhere to go. He told me, and I agree, that the east place is more real than the north and south places. The north and south places are possible results of the avalanche of errors in the east place. The seven live in all of them. In the east they are participants. In the north they are hunt queens. In the south they are dying.
Something new is killing them.
"Another world, another time. This land was green and good before the Crystal cracked..." I turned off the TV.
"Once more they will replenish themselves," I said to the cat. "Cheat death again! Get out of my lap. I have to do some work tonight." I stood up. The cat tumbled off of my lap without complaint. I watched it, full of thoughts. Cats, now, cats knew about girls.
The Tomkinjack sweated from his brow. He looked up. The sky was shaking, clouds running from something to the south. A cold blue light punched through, a spigot of glame, and another, and another, and a horseshoe shape was sketched in the sky, streams of blue fire spitting downwards and curling in. No, he said. "No, we aren’t done yet, we can still save it." The flames shrank, sputtered, and were gone.
He started crying. The Tomkin’s nose twitched, whiskers erect. She thrust it high in the air, swinging her head around to the left. The Tomkinjack’s head followed, their necks touching. "Mother was taken by the sea," she said. Together they dropped down on all fours and bolted toward the open place in the south.
I could hear Mother Dolphinfish’s line cooks arguing in Spanish on the other side of the door of the meat locker. I held a gloved hand over my nose. There was a skittering sound. I became alert, and felt a strong urge to prick my ears up, although of course ears didn’t do that. Not my ears, anyway.
But a rat’s ears, sure. They prick. There was a rat in here. I rolled down to my hands and knees and slid the chef’s knife out of the pouch on the back of my jacket, gripped it in my hand, and began crawling. Skitter, came the sound, and I saw the shadow of a tail whipping under a box of lobsters.
A chase ensued. The rat ended up dead. I stuffed it in the breast pocket of my shirt and returned to the door. There was no light on the other side. I prised the handle open and went out a-stalking on my tiptoes, whiffling the knife through the air. The kitchen was silent and dark, and so was the dining room. By the door was the cash register, left of the host’s podium control station. I snuck a look at the table map at the podium. I’d always been curious how they worked. Looked like it was just grease pencil on glass detailing the territories of the various waitra. The map under the glass was drawn on construction paper in crayon in that color that was called Flesh when I was a kid. A pile of Mother Dolphinfish notebooks and stationery.
One of the wait-territories had "Jessica" written in it. My lungs tightened. It was a common name. The money was stacked and tied in little bundles, bundlitos as one might say in Spanish if it were not for the fact that the word for bundle is probably not bundlo... stacked and tied in little bundles in a paper grocery bag under the false bottom of the host podium. At this particular seafood restaurant, my friend the bum had explained in code, the money was taken from the cash register at the end of the day and put here. Certain varieties of businessmen always pay in cash, and a convention of them had entertained here tonight.
I folded the bag, slipped it into the slit in the back of my jacket, and slammed the chef’s knife into the cavity under the podium.
Ophir was here until seconds ago, and the other one, the eldest sister. Before they turned against their maker, her name was Disobedience. She has no name now, she was stillborn. The floor is still shaking, contaminated by their fear. They are afraid Erdogan will crack the glass path.
They are asleep now, like Erdogan, who sleeps more than any of them. In the dream the fear still perturbs them, although they have no more idea what the glass path is than you do... dear reader.
After Jessica’s alarm clock went off that morning and she went into the bathroom, wearing adorable pajamas, I slipped through her window from the fire escape, pulled the dead rat out of my shirt pocket and placed it lovingly in her shoe.
Wampyryka. Soldekrym. Volkara. Sparks jumped from the open place, and the Tomkinjack’s mind was filled with words he didn’t know. The words were familiar but slippery.
For a long time all the words had been that way, slippery places after which he lusted. For years after the scientists had disappeared, the only words he could say were the lyrics of Led Zeppelin songs, "IV" having been a particular favorite in the lab.
Now the land was moving, and something was coming.
It was too early to be free, and the hunting spirit had no heart to break old promises. But its sleep in the falling down place had been racked by longing for a certain color, flavor, taste; like a fist in the gut, the sound of genes screaming kept shocking it awake, until at last it was driven to this furtive rebellion. Sucking air, limbs thrashing madly, it had climbed for days through the dense briar patch of discarded human bodies.
The trees were hissing and a wind was whirling around the falling down place, brown pines on a black hill, when the hunting spirit came shuffling up out of the hole. There were rats there, tall rats, sitting on their hind legs. It wandered and staggered into the trees, crossed the river of the chaste moon, slipped like a squirrel through the branches of copses and over vines on tumbled rock walls.
It was a man, or a woman, but it was dissolving, becoming clean. Its name had been Whip, or Truitt, or Truitt Whip. It felt wide, strong, free. The thrones in the sky sat empty, and it lusted, molted, and climbed towards heaven.
The two tall rats nudged the discarded body, sniffed, and circled. The taller one was as tall as the belly of a greyhound. The shorter was as tall as a greyhound’s knee.
"Dude!" said the Tomkin. "Dude, man, dude."
The scientists in her lab had watched videos of surfer movies. During the early days of the new orderlessness, when her mate was muttering rote lines about heroic postmen struggling through cold winter nights, she was saying "woah" and "dude."
The monster’s body lay curled and crumpled.
The Tomkinjack was chattering, tongue darting in and out.
"Dude, what?" said the Tomkin.
He continued chattering. The words were slurred, unclear, but finally she recognized them because she had heard them so often before: "no quarter, no quarter, no quarter."
There are no errors in the south place. Something is holding it together. Something awful.
Some time before dawn, I woke up when a door opened somewhere in my apartment. I was curled in a ball under a blanket, a blanket which was not nearly warm enough. I had dreamed of freezing to death in a meat locker.
Somebody walked into the room. Without my glasses the figure was just a glowing red cloud, but I knew by the smell that it was my brother Ophir, drenched as always in cologne. I curled up tighter, hoping he would go away.
He ripped the blanket off and started laughing. What, I wondered, why? Oh, because in the middle of my fetal position, between legs and belly and arms clamped between knees, I had the cat trapped. His cat face wore the "resigned" expression.
"Cold," I said.
"Kick upstairs, fat ass," he said. "My children need wine."
This was a figure of speech. His children, Armistice and Satchmo, already had all the wine they could drink. I rolled off the bed, banged my head on the desk, found the blanket, and held it around me as I stood up. I found and put on my glasses.
Something happened, an earthy clang. Somewhere in it I felt an error, the odor hammering. The light changed, some of it coming from outside; the sun had risen.
Ophir picked himself up, a tenth of the take in his hands. There was a trickle of blood under his ear. I was wearing a suit. Our connections here didn’t matter, the hierarchy of thievery. All that mattered were the lines between us -- they persist, even in the... they persist.
He left, limping. "Dad says to come by soon, he hasn’t seen you in forever," he said.
The cat had climbed the refrigerator and was now perched atop it, leering.
A truck pulled up alongside the sidewalk. The man on the passenger side stuck his head out, made a joke, and then the truck peeled out. The upshot of the joke was that I was fat.
It was a half mile to the coffee shop. Today as I walked I was aware of my posture, the way my head lolled, my back was curved, my belly pooched out, and that I could see the rise of my male breasts under the suit jacket. I seemed to be wearing some sort of cowboy belt, too, taller than your normal belt and with a gaudy belt buckle shaped like a six gun. I should maybe have changed after the mysterious forces clothed me during the error. I never did, though, it seemed gauche to do anything but roll with the punches.
Willy woke up with a start, getting a lungful of hot tropical air. Virginia and Bonnie stood by his bunk, eyes glassy.
"Come into the river," they said. They spoke more or less in unison, but Virginia’s voice was stronger. "I love you forever."
He crossed his arms over his chest and said nothing, pushing the side of his head as hard as he could into the pillow.
After a few minutes they went back to their bunks.
I’m so tired.
Tired.
I woke up right before the Fremont stop. My knee hurt. Rebekah and Dov were standing on the platform, thin and sharp-faced. They couldn’t have looked less like me. They were among the less objectionable of my siblings, honestly, it was Carver and Ophir and the... Carver and Ophir that I looked forward to seeing least. It made me sad that Lucy hadn’t come, though. She had always looked up to me, and that would feel really good right now.
My knee still hurt as I daintily squeezed into the back seat, and all my joints were sore. It was Dov’s car, and it was nice, with an arm rest in the back and everything. Once we were on the freeway, I pulled a little bundle of bills, a bundlito, out of a shoe and tossed it into the passenger seat.
"Thanks, lovey," said Rebekah.
"I’ve got something for you back home," said Dov, who was lower on the totem pool than me.
The hierarchy was based on order of birth. Carver was the youngest; she had to give away six tenths of the take from any job she did. She compensated by doing an extraordinary number of jobs, and very skillfully. If not for a heroine habit, she would have been the richest of us all. Lucy was the next youngest; she was a homemaker and lived almost exclusively on the money Carver gave her; Rebekah had always hated her for not earning. The next was Dov. Dov was a killer. He was always devising ingenious schemes to kill rich men; even at the age of fourteen his cleverness had shown through when he fired a water pistol through the neigbor’s open kitchen window and extinguished the pilot lights; when night came and the window was closed, Dov sat in the tree outside the bedroom window all night rubbing his hands together in glee and cold, waiting for the girl to die of asphyxiation. Dov and Carver and Lucy were the three lower than me, and they gave me enough money that I could comfortably live in near poverty. Next to Lucy, I was the worst earner.
Above me was Rebekah, who had expensive tastes, and Ophir, surly, wise, cruel and tasteless. And above us all was Dad.
The sun was hardly brighter than the moon now, but it did have the advantage of neither waxing nor waning over the course of the month. The sun and the moon cast different sorts of light -- the sun’s light was a thin yellow, like a flashlight through beer, and it reminded you of what it was like to be warm without in any way actually warming you. The moon’s light was pure white, and it made every edge and crack stand out.
Whatever the reason, it was only under moonlight, and only under the full moon’s light, that the hunt queens hunted.
The Tomkin came over the hill, driving a dying camel before her. The Tomkinjack sat by a fire in a clearing below, and there were other members of the Folk beside him, farmers from a suburb of the great nation of the Folk in the Great Plains. He was telling them a story.
"... I’d like to eat something sweet, he said. Therewith, Brer Rat got himself up a notion. He waited till after Brer Scientist and Brer Labcoat went home, and then he jimmied open his cage and came a scrambling towards that place in the down town where Brer Soldier lived, thinking as he did that the Soldier family vittles, they might be just the thing he was looking for that night. He’d just poked his nose outta the gutter on the street corner when he saw Brer Soldier and Mrs. Soldier walkin by with a picnic basket and their four little Soldier-kids running around in circles be-hind em, playin who’s got the gun."
Of all the Folk, only the Tomkin and the Tomkinjack could speak, but they were all drawn to the words. Some understood a little of what he was saying, others could only hear the feelings, and a few listened only because it reminded them of happy days long ago, listening to scientists in white lab jackets chattering away to each other during those beloved times of rest between hideous experiments.
The Tomkin led the camel down to the river. It sank to its knees, stuck its snout in the river, and let out one last bubbly gasp of delight before its life passed away. She stroked its back, then joined the circle around the fire.
"Brer Soldier was talkin to Mrs. Soldier and he said I ain’t afraid of nothin. I’m takin you and the kids and we’re gonna go to heaven and sit by the pushed over chairs and have a picnic there for dinner. Ain’t nothin I’m afraid of except the hunt queens. Daddy, said Brer Rat, pretending to be a Soldier-kid, what’s a hunt queen, huh? Now Brer Soldier don’t know his own kids’ voices from the sound of the sky cracking, so he said slike this, sweetheart. Sometimes the time comes for somebody to die, and she don’t die. She last past her time. And anything last past her time, she become a monster."
The Tomkinjack saw the Tomkin glaring at him, telling him with her eyes not to tell a story about hunt queens, least of all on a night like this when the moon was full and they might be about. He knew her position on this but it wasn’t his, and he’d told her so many a time: there was no more point not talking about the fear than there was running from a hunt queen.
"So after that, the Soldier family walked on past with their picnic basket and they climb up that ladder through the old man’s skull that leads up to the iron path, and that iron path goes all the way over to the place where the thrones is all empty lying on their sides wit da feathers around em. So Brer Rat goes up to their house and he digs his way in by goin under the carpet, and he goes into their kitchen. Now there’s all kindsa vittles therewithin and he sets to eatin a little of this and a little of that, but he’s still lookin about, isn’t he, for something sweet. In the kitchen there, there’s a freezing cold box and in it there’s more boxes, paper boxes full of milk somebody drained out of a cow and plastic boxes full of nuts that got burned in a camp fire and smashed under a shoe, but that ain’t what he wants now, he wants somethin sweet. Then he finds a plastic bear just bout as tall as he is himself. He looks at the bear and he sniffs he smell something pretty damn sweet and he says now Brer Bear, what you been eatin? But the bear don’t say nothin.
"Now this make Brer Rat a bit punchy, and he say didn’t you hear me, Brer Bear, I say what you been eatin? But the bear again he don’t say nothing. So this time Brer Rat he plain loses his temper and he give the bear a big ole scratch cross the face. Now what should happen but he taste something mighty sweet on his own face. It’s honey, and it comin out of the bear, so he scratch it some more, and bite it, and soon there honey spurtin all over him and Brer Rat lickin it up and lovin every second. After he been eating a while he’s et enough to satisfy that sweet tooth he got, and he look out the window and sees it’s night time and there’s a full moon out so he decides he goin go home. Turns out though that he got more honey all over his fur than he got in his belly, and when he go outside he slip and fall in a pile of McDonald’s napkins somebody left there. Course the McDonald’s napkins stick to him and stick somethin fierce on account of the honey, and he can’t get em off of him nowise, so he’s feelin kinda dejected, thinking how’m I goin go home like this, Brer Scientist and Brer Labcoat gonna laugh at me and know I got outer my cage if they see me like this.
"An as he’s walkin along in his dejected thoughts, he don’t notice that Brer Pigeon, smellin somethin, has come waddlin over his way. Brer Pigeon sees him and squawks like hell and he goes flyin off in such a hurry he loses some feathers behind him and they flutters down and they get stuck to Brer Rat too. Now Brer Rat looks down at himself and he thinks that’s right, I am a right scary lookin critter and I’m goin have some fun.
"So he walk over by where Brer Labcoat and Brer Scientist lives and he climbs up onto the window from the outside and he start bangin on the window pane. The two of em’s in bed lying together and they looks up and sees a crazy white shape with pigeon feathers and pieces flappin all every which way, and they scream. Now Brer Rat, his voice get real deep, and he says:
"I’m da queen of the hunt, and you’s the two’s I’m huntin. I’m goin kill you, yes I am, tomorrow in that lab where you work at. Now don’t you run, don’t you run, cuzin I’m the queen of the hunt, and there ain’t no runnin from me. I come back from the falling down place to kill ya, ain’t no runnin if fallin down in that fallin down place can’t stop me.
"Brer Labcoat and Brer Scientist, they right petrified with fear, and they just lie there.
"But though, I’ll tell you what, here’s the thing, said Brer Rat, talkin in his low down hunt queen voice. I ain’t so hungry right now, I’m goin kill you two tomorrow. But maybe if you ain’t in the lab tomorrow, I’ll kill someone else, you know? Then he bangs the window pane real hard one more time with his fisted up paw and jumps out the window right as some lightning crashes outside. Brer Rat’s mighty proud of himself now, cuz he don’t have to go back to that cage in the lab for a whole nother day, and he thinks for good measure he goin go back whereat to that Scientist fambly live and scare them too in his free time that he got now. So he go back there, but they ain’t home, so he go to sleep on the window sill.
"Now it’s rainin right damn hard, and the rain’s fallin on Brer Rat where he sleepin on the window sill, and pretty soon that rain’s washed the honey and the McDonald’s napkins and the pigeon feathers right off of him and he’s clean as one of them clean rats right outta the shower. But he sleepin so he don’t know this. Brer Soldier and his fambly come home from their picnic, and they open up the front door, and this wakes Brer Rat up. He jumps up in front of the window and he bangs on the pane and he says in that deep down voice I’m da queen of the hunt, and you’s the six I’m huntin.
"But Brer Soldier and his family, they see a rat standing on the window sill and they see a kitchen what looks like a rat has done a mighty fine job tearin it to pieces, and they start yellin there’s a rat! Get the rat, we can sell it to the scientists! You know they got them a big bounty they pay for rats ever since the world started ending! And Brer Rat knows the jig is up, so he says I may not have scared you like I wanted but I got a belly full of your food and I can run faster than anything, and it ain’t my world that’s ending, I can run faster than anything but a hunt queen, and he jump back out that window and run on home to the cage, jimmies himself back in, and nobody was none the wiser."
The members of the Folk had by now reared back and their forepaws were dancing in the air to express their enjoyment.
The Tomkin was a little less impressed. She sidled up to the Tomkinjack, who was nodding and backing away from the circle, and whispered "dude, you just ratted up one of those Brer Rabbit stories."
"Yeah, but it’s all in the delivery."
"Why did you tell it in that dialect, huh? You don’t want them to learn to talk that way."
"I don’t know. It makes the story better. And I wouldn’t mind if one of them started talking like that, at least we wouldn’t be the only talkers."
"Unckh," said the Tomkin. She started digging a little sleeping place in the turf under a tree, and the Tomkinjack did the same.
After midnight the Tomkinjack awoke with a spurt of adrenaline. Something was here. "Hissssst," he said, "hissssss." The Tomkin’s sleepy head lifted into the air, and further back other members of the Folk stirred.
Then there was a smell like old cheese, and a whuffling, and cold white steam rose from the ground. An image appeared in the Tomkinjack’s mind of two swords crossing through the heart of a blue flower.
"Get down," he said, "down on the ground. There’s a hunt queen here."
Some of the Folk went down while others twitched high in the air, unable to understand or unable to act. A short one screamed with a voice like a bird and convulsed and rose into the air, spinning. Its claws twitched and its back bent in a direction that backs cannot bend, and then it fell, and rose, and fell, and hurtled towards the trunk of a tree. But when it hit the tree, it came apart, every particle separating, becoming a cloud of flesh and then dissipating.
The smell of cheese was gone, and so was the hunt queen.
The Tomkin stood up and said "that was a hunt queen. There are seven of them, and there are factions among them. We were lucky, the queen of the queens would have taken us all; but this was Lucy, and she only kills what she can eat. There’s no running, and no hiding, we can only hope they don’t decide to take us all some day."
Something from the south place has been whispering to me. I don’t know anymore whether it’s awful. Sometimes I can’t tell awful from just plain new. The seven fallen Cherubim in the east are rising against it, but I wonder if I shouldn’t throw in my lot with the south.
Once there were three paths from here, but now there is only a glass path that drives east. Before, there was a path of ice to the south, and a path of iron to the north. They melted, and now the north is full of rats and the south is full of crocodiles.
This place, in the west, is full of empty thrones.
The knife god covets a throne but he is in the north place and will be hard pressed to find a way across.
Lucy was gnawing a bone on the front porch when we pulled up. "Mornin, honey," I said, and she grinned. There was a spot of oil on her chin. The house was made of wood, and it was a tiny little thing containing one bedroom, where Dad slept, and one large living room. There was a Kwik-Stop down the street whose toilet we borrowed.
The slats of the walls were shaking with Carver’s freak music.
This blackened blood that stains the bed, the voice roared from within the house, my sweet addiction, I thee wed.
"Doesn’t that bother Dad?" I asked Lucy as we walked in.
"You know, he’s a tolerant guy," she said. I nodded.
Carver and Ophir were sitting in rockers at the back of the living room, the fireplace blazing behind them. I turned off the stereo, and Dov said "thanks."
"Whatever," said Carver. Ophir gestured towards the bedroom. I nodded and walked on back. I knocked.
"Just go in," said Ophir. I went in. I couldn’t see. "Dad?" I said. My brothers and sisters started talking in the other room. I reached around for a light switch, found it, and flipped it up, down, up, and down one more time before concluding that it didn’t work. I edged forward a little. My foot bumped something and I heard it slide. There was a table on my left. My hand explored it, found the base of a lamp, tracked up towards the bulb, explored the bulb, tracked back down, found that the stem moved, twisted it to the left, and the light came on.
"Hi, Dad," I said. He was in a wheel chair against the wall. The floor was covered in bundles of cash. The table was empty. "They took away your bed, huh," I said. I reached into my pocket, found the last tribute bundle from my Mother Was Taken By The Sea heist, and placed it on his lap. His head rolled, his eyes focused on the wall behind me. I found a piece of tissue in my pocket and dabbed the drool off of his lip.
"Erg," he said, slack eyes still exploring the wall. His hand moved down to his lap and bonked the money onto the floor. I patted him on the head and went back into the living room.
"Do I know someone named Ursule?" I asked.
"Ursula?" said Dov.
"No," I said. "I mean, yes, that’s what I said but I’m sure you spelled it wrong in your head. It ends with an ’e.’"
Dov blinked. "No. Wait, how would I know who you know?"
"Spare me," said Ophir. "He doesn’t know anyone we don’t. No."
"No," said Carver.
"No," said Rebekah.
Lucy shook her head.
"Hell," I said.
"Get up, buddy," said Jonah, bapping Willy with his hat. "Roger wants to talk to us."
Willy dropped out of bed. He looked around at the other bunks. Virginia’s foot was sticking out of the covers. He stared at the veins standing out on top. Jonah’s hat whacked him again. "I’m coming," said Willy.
"William, Jonah, thanks for coming," said Roger in his pedantic voice. "I have two things I want to tell you. First, as you know, we’ve been running low on food."
Willy and Jonah had of course known this, and they both gestured for him to continue, hands making a drawing forward motion, spinning almost with their impatience.
"Now of course flora and fauna are plentiful hereabouts, but the flesh is poison. It seems that the body chemistry of the rest of the animal kingdom has changed, and the plants as well, and a common by-product of the new amino acids, the chemical building blocks, if you will, is a neurotoxin. This neurotoxin is very similar, chemically, to concentrated wormwood."
"Wormwood," said Jonah.
"Yes, Jonah... wormwood, or thujone. This same chemical was used in an alcoholic beverage called absinthe during la Belle Epoque, where it was prized by the artistic and intellectual elite for triggering hallucinations and psychotic episodes. It was later discovered that it did this by inhibiting what’s known as the chloride channel in the brain; when the chloride channel is inhibited, the neuron firing threshold lowers dramatically."
"The neuron firing threshold," said Jonah.
"Yes, Jonah. In any case, our own neo-thujone is much more potent and quick acting than the older variety. And here’s the really exciting bit: I think I know how to neutralize it!"
Roger smiled. Willy smiled too, a bit slowly because he wasn’t sure how Jonah would react.
Jonah said: "so you think you can neutralize the poison and we can have fresh meat? That would be great, Roger, just great. Even if we weren’t going to run out in a couple of weeks, I am really tired of eating three year old canned tuna fish."
Roger smiled and rocked back and forth. "We should know by tonight," he said. "But I also have some bad news. I was doing some routine experiments with this thermometer," at which juncture he waggled a huge thermometer in the air, "and it looks like there’s a stream of hot water coming from the mountains up there."
Willy and Jonah looked up towards the mountains.
"It’s a volcano, boys, and I’m guessing by the temperatures I’m seeing that some of that melted rock is getting ready to come out of there."
There was a long silence.
"The hot water is running upstream, against the current?" said Willy.
"Yes!" said Roger.
Willy and Jonah exchanged a look.
"Melted rock from a volcano is called lava," said Jonah. "Are you really a scientist?"
"Far as you know," said Roger. Everyone blinked several times, no facial expressions forming.
Jonah thought.
"Well, Roger, what can we do?" he said.
"I’ve been thinking. William, you’ll need to scout ahead and see if there really is going to be trouble. If so, I think I can rig something up with that backpack of yours... those wires are molecular, you see, made entirely of molecules, and that means they’re very, very strong. I think it may be possible to lift the cruise ship over any lava flow using your backpack."
Jonah and Willy stared at him.
"Well go on, Willy, do it," said Jonah. Willy’s stare shifted to him, then he shrugged.
"Aye aye, Cap," said Willy, and he went back below deck to get his backpack.
Willy got back to the boat, bursting with news, and ran across Bonnie first.
"Bonnie, oh my God," he said.
"Roger’s dead," she said.
"What?" said Willy.
"He fell into the water and a crocodile killed him," she said. She looked around. "I think Jonah pushed him."
I bolted upright in bed and grabbed the phone.
"What, what?" I said.
"Dov just died," said Lucy on the other end. "Heart attack or something. We’re getting together for a service on Sunday."
I hung up and looked down at my chest, where blood was running from the place from which the cat had sprung, digging in his back claws for leverage.
The phone rang again.
"What?" I said.
"It’ll be a closed casket," said Lucy, "because his body was lost."
"Lost, how? It fell off a cliff?"
"He disappeared."
"Then how do we know he died?"
"Carver and Ophir were with him when he disappeared."
This was enough, for some reason. I hung up. The cat had returned, and was licking at the blood on my chest until I swatted it away.
The full moon was minutes from setting. The Tomkins, the two there were, were standing back to back. The Tomkin’s head rested in the small of the Tomkinjack’s back. They pulsated, their heartbeats synchronized. "What’s happening?" said the Tomkin.
"I think it’s the hunt queens," said the Tomkinjack. "When the Rose puts a call through the feeling’s all different."
And hunt queens it was. Steam rose in two columns, and the impression of a stink like the mold on old cheese. The Tomkinjack saw in his mind first two swords crossing through a blue flower, and second a woman riding on the back of a seven-headed lion.
"Lucy and Erdogan," he said. The friendlier of the two factions.
"One of us died," said the steam that was Lucy. The voice was very thin, but as clear as the thinnest crack under moonlight. "Dov. We were returning to the place we hide from the sunlight, and he came apart."
"We are turning away from the queen," said Erdogan’s steam. "Lucy and I. She’s allied herself to something we don’t trust."
"Where is the Rose?" said Lucy’s steam. "We want to talk to the Rose."
"Even just you two have killed thousands of the Folk. And I’m not going to tell you where the Rose is," said the Tomkinjack. The Tomkin stood up straighter. The steam curled, two columns, spiraling around the Tomkins.
"You breed like rats," said one of the columns of steam. "Tell us," said the other. "We have to find it." The Tomkinjack was finding it hard to distinguish them as they moved, and he was finding it hard to breathe.
"It will never help you," said the Tomkin. "It’s trying to sweep you away."
The wind was rising, and the Tomkins felt the ground unravelling around them. And then the last bit of the moon dropped behind the horizon, and in terror of the sunrise the hunt queens fled, faster than the eye could see, leaving dust and rocks twirling behind them in straight line paths.
That’s all there was to say, it turned out, Roger had fallen into the water, and once you fell into the water there was no going back. Reactions differed. The Warners, Dag and Rae, were an elderly couple and though they made noises -- "terrible, terrible thing," said Dag half a dozen times -- it was clear that they were used to the idea of people dying by now.
Virginia was flustered. Jonah was calm. Bonnie was suspicious.
Night fell again, and it was Willy’s steering shift. His feet dangled and his eyes wandered. The sky was black, the trees were green, greener than they had ever been before the end of the world, and jungle sounds emanated from the dank land hidden behind them. This had definitely been the midwest. He slapped a mosquito off his neck before it could sting, but found a dime sized spot of blood on his hand with the squashed bug in the middle.
The water was black, the sky was black. The stars were far too bright.
The river was straight and it didn’t take much effort to steer. Willy had been carving intricate designs on the steering wheel for days now. The backpack was beside him by the chair, and he lifted up the firing tube, slid one of the harpoon tips out, and started up again. Little circles with petals radiating out, a snake with crossed lines on its back, a woman on the back of a lion.
He heard a voice behind him, and was so startled that he tumbled out of the chair. The cord on the end of the harpoon caught around his foot and brought the chair down on his nose, and struggled there for a few minutes trying to get out. When he did finally get out sweat was running down his brow and blood was coming from his nose and Virginia was standing on deck watching him, her head cocked.
He looked at her, trying to find a peaceful center. She was so beautiful.
"What were you doing by my bunk last night?" he said.
"When was I by your bunk last night?" she said. Birds screamed and she shivered and drew herself up straighter. Willy saw her scratching a mosquito bite on her neck. "I don’t remember that. Did I say something like ’come into the river?’"
"Yes," said Willy. His eyelids felt dry.
"Did I say: they gave us you the cohens the skies are empty a billion billion barren earths how can this be your flesh is fecund this earth is fertile and deep only the second fertile earth so many weapons out of your cells is this the matrix of the war my mother in the sun must know why are the skies empty she says you are the first for the second time I love you you are mine we gave the cohens stars space we love you come into the river?"
"No... ?" said Willy. His ears were itching and there was a buzzing sound all around.
"The weapons and love in your cells the elephants returned to the sea once and came out again the whales returned to the seas and died there so many names forgotten flesh rejected races lost cut defeated in ancient dust you came from the sea and returned to it and came out again changed and strong slew your brothers ate and destroyed and you slid iron into the earth over the water the answer the matrix why are the skies empty your flesh filled the earth and flesh of your flesh beyond number but I can count it why twice why only twice a billion billion earths so many weapons out of your cells million years war out of mind but first there was you I love you seed of empire father of the empty sky I love you forever."
"Virginia..." said Willy.
"Virginia’s asleep, she invited me in. I am the Rose," said Virginia.
He blinked and nodded, and nodded some more, losing some muscle control in his neck. He looked down at her feet, at her ankles. The veins standing out reminded him that she was human, real, something he could touch, someone he could have been if he’d come out of a different mother, or even the same mother at a different time. Women aren’t so different, he thought, it’s just a 50-50 birth lottery. It’s the veins on your feet that make you beautiful. What? What is going on?
"I’m hypnotizing you," said Virginia. "It’s easy to hypnotize you because you’re ruled by unrequited lust. You listen intently to everything that comes out of my mouth, like it was a necklace swinging in front of your eyes."
"Oh," said Willy. "Yeah, I guess so." The air was wrong, he was confused, but somewhere below he felt that there was something made of iron holding his body in place.
Virginia was swaying, her eyes staying on him, and her brow had wrinkled. "Where are you? What am I talking to? The other two, I took them whole, but from you all I’m getting is the nerve endings."
"Uh huh," said Willy.
She looked at him. He gulped. "Another time," she said, and ran a finger from his Adam’s apple to his lower lip, and then she left.
He stood for a while and then sat back down at the chair, the daze beginning to wear off, and returned to carving.
The service was very long. I was sad, but it did nothing to treat that. Worse yet, Dov’s coworkers from the City Center had come in force, dripping with effete professional irony and insipidly broad humor, and nearly a dozen of them tortured us with their wit from the podium.
I took a break and found Carver in the men’s bathroom, shooting heroin. Even without focus, there was something terrible in her eyes. I stood on a toilet in the next stall, looking down over the divider at her, not speaking. I don’t know if she was aware of my presence.
Ophir’s closing speech was tender on the surface, but underneath I heard the real message: earn, earn, earn. And there was a moment after Ophir’s speech ended, a long, long moment, where something cold washed over us, every one of us frozen in our chairs like monkeys in a tree waiting for a predator to leave, knowing we couldn’t move or something would see us, something awful and strong and fast and cold, and I felt someone else’s grief, someone familiar that I’d never met, invading my body. When it passed, it passed all at once, and the mourners mingled and I left the room.
Outside, Lucy cornered me and pushed me against the wall.
"Ow!" I said.
"I need to stay at your place," she said. "Braulio’s... I don’t want to go home."
"What? What did he --"
"Shut up. I need to stay at your place."
"OK," I said. "But my place is the size of a closet."
"I put my bag in your trunk before the service. Come on. Now."
We entered my car. The alignment was off, and the car pulled to the left as I backed out of the spot in the lot. The smell was coming from the air freshener. The stink rose up in the air, the stink of errors, horrifyingly strong for the daytime. I could hardly see over the steering wheel. My eyes were pounding in my head, every muscle contracting. I pulled on the steering wheel, closing my nostrils, and it pulled, hammered at me. But I refused, and the error was not able to reify. There was a sound like a pencil snapping, and the threat was gone.
Our car drifted silently past Ophir and Carver standing by the church door, eyes like glassy daggers locked on my face.
A mile down the road, I pulled over. "What are you doing?" said Lucy.
"I have to... think for a minute," I said. The eldest deserved this, she was grieving. I remembered the flavor of the error, tasted it under my tongue, and it came back and I let myself fall through it.
Wake up.
Mmnnnnnnnf.
Wake up.
No.
Wake up.
Just this once.
Our brother’s dead.
I know.
Our brother’s dead.
I know. I miss him.
Do you know how long he was with us? Do you remember him standing with us, guarding the gates of the garden? Do you remember?
I remember. We were together for so long, the seven of us. Even after our master died, we stayed together. But nothing should last forever.
You do remember. Sometimes I wonder whether you remember.
Yes, right now I remember, but I’m going to go to sleep and then I will forget again.
I will always remember.
Where do you go when you sleep?
I will always remember.
I heard what the thing in Virginia said to Willy. The thing in the sea has a mother in the sun. An older family, then, than ours.
The eldest one, the stillborn one, came back last night. For your sake I will call her Disobedience, I know you need her to have a name. She’s ambitious. Ophir is hers, and Carver, and through Carver, Rebekah, but she is afraid Lucy is being drawn to Erdogan, to something besides her order. This, she claims, is why he sleeps all the time, because he knows that when he wakes up she will be standing over his body. She wants to know what I know about the north and the south, but I’m beginning to be afraid of her.
What I know is this: seven Cherubim turned against God and aided in the invasion of the west place. Chief among them was Disobedience. Like me, they were born in the west place, and so their souls had more solidity than the rest that were pulled into the falling down place. In these days, the walls are down and every natural law is negotiable. Intending something is almost the same as achieving it, and sleeping Cherubim dreaming of men cast strong shadows. Each one was born in three dreams, once in the north, once in the east, once in the south.
Even then, the ways between the places were getting harder, but there is still a path between north and south. There must be.
In the north and the south, two incarnated versions of Disobedience have made dangerous alliances. The Queen of the Hunt Queens has allied herself to the knife god, and Virginia has allied herself with Rahab and Leviathan. In her ambition to reestablish heaven, she is inviting abomination. Erdogan, though, is asking the question Disobedience could never ask, whether it is right to reestablish heaven. He is trying to find the reason among the dream people of the east place. And I think he’s right to look there.
He will not make the mistake I made, so long ago, that set so much error in motion. Oh, oh, oh, it seemed like such a good idea at the time.
The knife god has found the body of the elder of Babylon. It was in the sand under Kauai, but places drift and melt into one another in dreams, and it now lies in a valley on Molokai. The way through his skull is still open. Through it the knife god found the ruins of the iron path, and beneath those ruins lay a weapon that had been dropped by a devil.
This is a thing that Disobedience and her brethren do not know, that the armies of hell marched hidden among the armies of Babylon. Towards the end, and to their credit, Nimrod’s doubt swept through them. They hid themselves among the Dominions and the Principalities and withered in ignomious death rather than slay God. Devils, aghast at their folly. But a weapon was left behind, and now the knife god has no need to make it to the west place.
I know my side, now, at long last. I love Man. My sin before was always choosing the wrong one to love.
Jonah prodded Willy awake with a can of tuna. "The Aztecs called this age the Fifth Sun," he said, a red figure looming over the bed. Indistinct though he was in the dark, the three red marks on his cheek stood out more than his eyes or nose. "They killed... so many people. The priests said that only constant bloodshed could keep the age from ending. They were probably lying for political gain -- and I’m not saying I believe that it’s possible for bloodshed to stop the end of the world, which is one way you might interpret the fact that I implied that I wasn’t certain they were lying. They may or may not have believed it, is what I’m driving at. The fact remains that when you try to keep something alive beyond its time, you must resort to abomination."
Jonah tossed the can over his shoulder as he turned. He walked away and climbed into his own bunk. The can of tuna rolled on the floor. Willy squeezed a fist to his forehead and remembered, with longing, a time long ago when he had slept in a bedroom with a door that he could close; friends who didn’t kill each other; and a girl named Astrid that he had thought he loved, who had never once invited unholy spirits into her body to taunt him and threaten him and tell him to come into the river.
Don’t touch my car, dude. Oh, you didn’t.
Oh. There’s nobody there.
I turned around and leaned down. "Sprach mich, Queenie," I said to Lucy’s cheek. The sleeping bag took up most of the hallway. I walked on. From behind me, Lucy’s voice said "sprach mir, unt doch brush your teeth." I looked back. Visual indications were that she was still asleep. I stepped back across the sleeping bag and went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth.
Jesserkuh.
On the way out, I bumped the chair with the cat in it. The chair spun around several times. The cat looked up, alert, then settled back down and started stretching.
I set out for the coffee shop without Lucy, who didn’t seem to plan to wake up. My homeless friend was at the corner.
"Arr," he said.
"Morning," I said.
"Pretty girl you brought home last night," he said.
"Shut up," I said, "that’s my sister."
"What’s her name? What’s your name?" he said.
"Lucy. You know my name."
"Not your last name."
"Pershing."
"Lucy Pershing. Pretty girl."
"She’s married. Her last name’s different. You’re starting to freak me out, I’m thinking I shouldn’t have told you her name."
"Avast," he said.
I walked away.
"Hey! Give me some money?" he called after me.
"Get it from my sister," I said.
Jessica was not at the coffee shop. I didn’t want to ask where she was. I wandered around, pretending to look at coffee beans, drinking glasses of water after the coffee ran out, eavesdropping. I was there for two hours. Only once was she mentioned, and all that was said was that she’d be in tomorrow at 6 in the morning.
I knew I’d seen that jade statue before. And suddenly I knew where.
"You bought a pack of Tarot cards," said Lucy. It was evening, and she’d showered and clothed herself about an hour ago after a long day of not waking up.
"It’s Aleister Crowley’s deck. You see this one?" I pulled out the Prince of Swords. "There’s a statue of it at the coffee shop." There was a painting of a jade man with a sword on a chariot, sweeping three smaller men off.
"So what? Umm, huh..." she said, and frowned.
"Exactly!" I said.
"It looks familiar."
"What do you see?"
"It looks like the big man knocked the three small men off the front and is about to kill them."
"That’s what I saw too," I said, "but the booklet says the small men are ’fays’ drawing the chariot.
"Now watch this. Shuffle the deck."
She did.
"Say the name of someone in our family."
"You."
I drew a card. "Lust." It was a woman on the back of a seven-headed lion. Around them there were flowers in the air without stems, and the lion’s tail had a snake’s head and lines crisscrossing its back. I put the card back on the top of the deck.
"Draw any other card," I said.
She pulled a card from the middle. It was Lust. "Are they all Lust?" she said.
"No," I said. I turned over the top card. It was the Ace of Discs. "Draw another card."
She drew another card. It was Lust. She looked at the card she already had in her hand, and it was blank. She looked up.
"Say another name, someone in our family," I said.
"Ophir." Ten of Swords, Ruin.
"Carver." Eight of Swords, Interference. "Interference is right," she said.
"Rebekah." Princess of Swords.
"Me." Two of Swords, Peace. "Two swords crossing through a blue flower."
"A rose," I said.
"Dad?"
"Dad doesn’t matter."
"I know."
"Oh. Dov." Six of Swords, Science. Six swords pointing in to a gold cross.
I drew another card. "Who was that for?" said Lucy.
"I had to draw another card," I said. "I don’t know why."
It was the Queen of Swords. A bare-breasted woman sat on a star-throne on a cloud, holding the head of a bearded old man.
"Is that Dad’s head?" said Lucy.
"Looks like it," I said. We both looked at the woman’s face.
"Mom? Not mom," said Lucy.
"No, not mom. But I know her, and so do you," I said.
"I know her and I hate her," said Lucy.
"I can’t hate her, but I may have to kill her," I said.
We sat and contemplated the face we both knew we knew without knowing whose it was.
Lucy had decided to treat me to dinner. We were walking down the boardwalk by the water.
"Here we are," she said.
It was the Mother Dolphinfish.
"I don’t want to eat here," I said.
"I already have reservations, dick," she said, and elbowed me, and I knew there was no arguing. This was going to be gruesome.
Our table wasn’t for ten minutes. We sat in the front. I stared at the podium that I had so recently rifled and knifed. But of course no one had seen me that night, it was the other night I was worried about. Maybe Carl wouldn’t still work here. I don’t know if anyone else would remember my face.
"Are you going to tell me about Braulio?" I asked.
"Do I have to? You know what happened."
"I’m gonna kill him. Do you want me to kill him?"
"Sort of." She leaned back. A woman called our name and we walked up to the podium.
"Ursule will seat you," said the hostess.
"Hi, Ursule," I said as she walked up.
She smiled and nodded. All my bones were quivering and my fingertips were freezing cold. The wart on her cheek drew my eye. Lucy looked at me and then at Ursule, who turned and walked to the left, up the stairs, across the flat place, down the stairs, and to the window, and so did we. "Your server will be right with you," she said, and left.
I hoped, fervently, that our server was not Carl.
"That was the Ursule you mentioned in Fremont, wasn’t it?" said Lucy.
"Yeah," I said.
"Well?"
"It’s like the Tarot cards. I saw her cross the street one day, I swear I’d never seen her before, and I knew instantly that I knew her. A minute later I knew her name."
Lucy blinked, scratched an ear, looked out the window, and started to say "do you ever think --"
"Hi! My name’s Jessica and I’m going to be your server. Would you like to hear our specials?" said Jessica, the Jessica from the coffee shop, wearing a Mother Dolphinfish waitress’s uniform.
I screamed.
Dirt drizzled down from thunderclouds. Inside a cardboard box, the Tomkinjack lay alone. The Tomkin had crossed a bridge of error and was currently in Eurasia.
The helpful voice from the falling down place was trying to help. It echoed in his head, drowning out his own thoughts. Sometimes its help helped, other times it made no sense.
The world is broken. What can I do? We are working, in the falling down place, to patch the walls together. Is it the holes in the walls that cause the errors? Not all of them, only the weather; the holes let madness from the outside into the sky. What’s outside? God’s mother, the primal disorder, angry for being held out for so long. I need to do something now, what can I do? Protect the seven nations of the Folk from the knife god and the hunt queens, they have allied.
The helpful voice was making more sense today, and it was speaking in the first person plural. Who are you, wondered the Tomkinjack, but no answer came back.
Some group from the falling down place.
Any support was welcome, any hope that the world might stop hurting him so much.
The nations of the Folk, he could bring them together into one place. Would that protect them? No, many in one place would be easy prey for hunt queens if they decided to attack a nation, and he did not know what the knife god could do. The hunt queens and the knife god, the helpful voice had told them, were human beings who had awakened too soon. But he was preparing the world for human beings, so they were both friend and enemy, God and Satan. Because the world was broken, the ones that came out early became monsters.
Simple enough.
Jessica had frozen. Roughly everyone in the restaurant was now facing us.
"Sorry," I said, loudly. "Sorry, I have this problem where I scream sometimes because I’m really, really stupid. Just," my eyes flashed around the room, "stupid."
I could tell by the heat that my face was bright red and sweating. My skin felt tight. My claim of stupidity, or the fact that the first scream was not followed by additional screams, was enough to bore many of our fellow diners and some of the attention moved off of me.
Lucy reached out and touched Jessica on the shoulder and said "it’s ok, he really is just stupid. Really, really stupid. Do you two know each other?"
I had decided I wasn’t ever going to talk again. I pretended to stare off into space while watching Jessica and Lucy in my peripheral vision. I had to consciously remember to swallow my saliva.
"I think I’ve seen him at the Coffee House I work at, downtown. Have I seen you at the Coffee House?" said Jessica, the first sentence to Lucy and the second to me.
I clenched my jaw, swallowed hard, and nodded. There was a little bump inside my lower lip, probably cancer or an... aneurysm... or something.
I risked a look at her. She was calmer now, probably as a result of some aspect of Lucy’s complex maternal pacification techniques, which involved a soothing tone of voice, non-threatening subject matter, and a light hand on the shoulder. Jessica. She was so cute. I was paralyzed. She was looking at me, and although at some level I knew she was just watching to see if I was going to do something else that an insane person might do, it felt good that she was looking at me.
"Do you want to go out on a date with me for coffee or something, please?" I said, accidentally.
There was a long, long silence.
"Oh," she said, and then, "OK. Come by the Coffee House at 3 the day after tomorrow."
I nodded and then had to turn my head away and stare off into space some more, for several minutes this time, my lower lip clamped in my teeth. When I started looking around again, Jessica had left, and Lucy’s head was bowed and she had a hand over her eyes and nose.
"She said she’d go out with me," I said.
"Yeah," said Lucy. "Sometimes that’s easier than saying no."
I had eaten about half of my special, which was a pile of french fries on a bed of some seasonal variety of squid eggs, all of that with a white wine, caper, and ink reduction drizzled over, when I looked up and saw Carl and a security guard coming.
"I told you we shouldn’t have come here," I said to Lucy.
She looked up from her wineglass full of diced scallops in yogurt.
"This is really good," she said. It didn’t look good.
"Hey!" said Carl. "I mean, sir. Can we talk to you, please?"
"No," I said. "No talking." I vaulted out of my seat, grabbed Lucy’s elbow, and tried to dash away.
"Ow!" she said, and slapped my wrist down onto the sharp edge of the table.
"Ow," I said, too, and found myself being held and pulled towards a back room.
"Hey!" said Lucy, finally realizing that there was actually a situation, but it did not help.
"I don’t know if you remember me, sir," said Carl (I shook my head so fast the room was spinning when I stopped). "I was your waiter the last time you were here."
"Oh... yeah?" I said, casually.
"I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the last time you were here, sir, about three months ago, you had a pretty hefty bill, and you left without paying it."
"I paid it," I said. "I mean, no, that wasn’t me, you’re probably thinking of somebody else who doesn’t look like me."
"I don’t know if that’s going to be a good enough excuse, sir," said Carl, whose claimed lack of knowledge was like water torture, "because we have a security camera video of you running out of the store."
"With a handful of clams," added the security guard.
My spine seemed to collapse, and I laid my forehead against the concrete of the wall.
"Nothing will happen to you, sir," said Carl, thus making me aware that something awful might happen to me, "if you’ll just pay the bill, plus an inconvenience fee."
"What’stheinconveniencefee," I mumbled.
"Fifty dollars?" said Carl to the security guard.
"A hundred each," said the security guard.
"Fifty each," said Carl.
"Fine," I said. I pulled two fifties out of one of my socks and handed them over. "How much is the rest of the bill?"
"Sir, we’re going to do that through the restaurant billing system, because of the paperwork, if you see," said Carl.
I didn’t say anything.
He cracked the door open. "Jessica?" he said.
I tried to push my head through the wall.
"Can you bring the check from the Violet Book on the podium here, please?"
"Sure," said her voice.
She came into the room a couple of minutes later, with a slightly discolored check on a black plastic check tray. I turned around and placed a credit card on the tray, looking at her feet the whole time.
On the way home, Lucy and I didn’t talk much.
When we were two blocks away from the house, I realized which direction we were coming from and said "let’s go around to the left here."
"The house is just straight ahead," said Lucy, leaping straight to exasperation.
"What happened the last time I told you we shouldn’t go somewhere?" I said, but like an idiot I had kept walking as we talked and it was now too late.
My homeless friend had seen us and come running over.
"Hi, Lucy," he said. "You look pretty. Pretty and angry. Your brother said you were going to give me some money."
She tried to ignore him.
"Please, Lucy?" he said.
"You told him my name?" she said to me.
"And told me to ask you for money," he said.
"I... yeah," I said.
She closed her eyes, opened them, and started jogging towards my apartment. I moaned. My homeless friend looked at me and said "you been fucking with me, brother?"
I gave him a fifty dollar bill.
Lucy was sitting on the welcome mat. "I should give you a spare key," I said. She looked down. I opened the door and wandered, almost dizzy, to the bed and went to sleep.
It was Willy’s turn on watch again. It was after midnight. Willy wasn’t whistling because he didn’t know any songs he ever wanted to hear again. He had completed most of the figures in his steering wheel etching, and had lost interest in art. This was going to be a very boring watch.
There was a clattering sound. He turned around. Jonah was wearing a bathrobe, and he had a pipe in his hand.
"I found some tobacco in that last box you brought in," said Jonah.
Willy nodded. "There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you," said Willy.
"What is it, bud?" said Jonah, setting himself down at the top of the stairs to the steering booth.
"Did you push Roger into the river?"
"Haaaah," said Jonah, exhaling a long stream of smoke. The moon was two days past full, and the smoke curled, spun, and hung in the air, shining silvery in the cold light. "Yes, yes. Let me tell you about that.
"I was never certain if Roger was actually a scientist. He certainly wanted us to think he was. Anyway, that whole day, he stayed locked in his so-called laboratory in the casino room. I was cooking up some dinner, roast canned tuna and beans, and when it was gettin to the point where it was just about ready I realized that I hadn’t seen his face in quite a while, so I asked Rae to go down there and tell him dinner was almost ready.
"She was gone for a while. I finished up the cooking and was dishing the food out when I heard a commotion on deck. Rae threw open the door to the kitchen and she was moving about in such a hurry that she tripped over the jamb and would have hurt herself pretty bad if I hadn’t caught her. I asked her what the deal was, and she said that something was wrong with Roger. I didn’t get much out of her, she was pretty wild, so I left her with Dag in the dining hall and headed down myself to look in on Roger.
"I walked into the casino room laboratory and Roger was sitting on the wet bar. There was blood on his face. And he said something like ’I know what the apes were doing.’
"I said ’what were they doing,’ not really knowing what he was talking about.
"’You remember, don’t you? They were breaking into houses, killing families, dragging the bodies away.’
"I said ’oh, those apes.’ I hadn’t realized he was still stuck on all that old stuff, from before we got on the boat last year."
"’They were building dams with human bones,’ he said. ’I saw them digging the bones out of the bodies. I saw it!’"
"Now I was really not understanding why he was going on about this now, of all times. But then he started reciting some kind of poetry. I wouldn’t remember it, you know, don’t have a mind for poetry, but it was some powerful stuff and I found it on a piece of paper, um, afterwards, in the casino room. I’ll be right back."
Jonah jumped up and ran inside before Willy had a chance to tell him not to bother. He came back with two leaves of folded, printed paper, torn out of a book.
"Blah blah blah" he said, and cleared his throat, "blah blah blah, Tyburn, Druid Pillars, down, across, okay, here it is. ’The Rhine was red with human blood, // The Danube rolled a purple tide, // On the Euphrates Satan stood, // And over Asia stretched his pride. He withered up... no, the next one... He withered up the Human Form // By laws of sacrifice for sin, // Till it became a Mortal Worm, // But O! translucent all within.’ It’s this poem by, um, Jerusalem."
"I’ve never heard of him," said Willy.
"Cool poem, though," said Jonah. "Scary. And long, lots of verses. So anyway, Roger read that part I just read out loud and looked at me, like shaking a fist right in from of his face, and he looked like he thought I knew what he was talking about, had made some connection between the poem and what he was saying about apes making dams out of human bones, but I wasn’t getting it.
"I was getting a little uneasy, you know, more than a little. He wasn’t acting like himself. It wasn’t like him to be quoting poetry instead of acting pretentious about the sciences. And then I noticed, on a table in the back, a cut-open coconut shell. ’Did you eat that?’ I said. ’You didn’t eat that!?’
"And I looked at him again, and he was twitching, his chest was bouncing in and out and his head was flipped back, and his hands were doing things hands don’t do if you have any conscious control over them. And he started hissing, sounds coming out of his throat that I’ve never heard before. I shook him and slapped him and kneed him in the balls, and he looked like he was out of it, and I got a shoulder under his arm and helped him out on the deck."
Willy thought he had seen a head of blond hair by the cabin, but then decided he was wrong.
"Roger said ’I just took a little of the milk, and diluted it. I wanted to see the other side, see reality for just a minute.’ I said ’like hell, you just wanted to have some fun with coconut milk absinthe! Didn’t go the way you expected, did it, professor?’
"And he said ’I could have been a professor,’ and he gave me this sad, sad look. And then he pushed himself away from me, backed towards the rail, and fell over into the river. There was nothing I could do."
Jonah and Willy sat quiet again. The smoke thinned and Jonah tried to light the pipe again, then tapped out the ashes on the deck. Willy looked at the ashes with distaste.
"Well," said Jonah, "good night, buddy. Don’t eat anything I wouldn’t eat." He pulled on the stair railing, making grunting sounds, lifted himself, and went down into the cabin.
Willy started scratching on the wheel with a harpoon tip. The design was already done and everything he added just made it look worse, but he had to. He scratched out the face on the lion’s tail, scratched out the petals on the flowers.
Someone was coming up the stairs.
He looked over. "Hi, Bonnie," he said, to the face peeking up at him. Her blond hair was the same color in the moonlight that the smoke from Jonah’s pipe had been. She smiled, tightly, for a moment.
"That story he told you," she said. "It didn’t end exactly like that. I was watching from the steering booth, I don’t think they knew I was there. After Roger said that he could have been a professor, he said something weird to Jonah, something about a woman. I think it was like ’she’s working for the same monster as the apes, you know.’ After he said that, Jonah was furious. He threw Roger against the rail. And then he pushed him off."
Willy looked at her. "Do you think he meant Virginia?" he said.
"Yes," said Bonnie.
"Two nights ago, you and Virginia stood by my bunk and said ’come into the river.’ Why did you do that?"
Bonnie looked horrified. "Come into the river? Hell, I didn’t say that. Why would you say that?"
"You did. Well, I think you did. Virginia admitted to it last night, and then she started saying... huh." He suddenly realized he had no idea what she’d said after that, which cast the entire anecdote into doubt. "I’m not actually that clear. I may have been dreaming."
"You fell asleep on watch?" said Bonnie.
"I hope not," said Willy.
"I won’t let you fall asleep tonight," she said. She stood, walked over, sat next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. It slid down to his shoulder blade, and Willy crumpled into tears.
"Mind your own business."
She laughed. It seemed to me she was not going to mind her own business. "You like that girl," she said. "Have you ever talked to her? Even once?"
"I really don’t want to talk about this right now."
"What’s her name?" said Lucy.
"Jessica." Damn it, I meant to not say anything. The old stonewall technique. I never seemed to have the hardiness for it. But for God’s sake, my business was my business and her business was her business. Was I going to ask what exactly had happened with her husband? No, because the general details were clear and the rest of it was her own damn business. Why? Why couldn’t people get this straight?
"She’s really cute," said Lucy. "Do you know anything about her? Did she go to college?"
"I don’t know," I said. I didn’t know anything about her, except that she was, well, really cute. And she worked at the coffee shop, and her hair became gradually less curly over the course of the week, with Monday being the day it was most curly, as if she maybe did something to it on Sunday nights, and that some other guy who worked at the coffee shop was always talking to her about some sort of sports, I could never quite figure out what game, or whether any given term was the name of a team or a manuever or a piece of equipment, and that in such conversations the ratio of his words to her words was something like four to one, which indicated to me that she was very polite.
"What are you going to talk about on your date?" said Lucy.
"Jesus, please, I don’t want to talk about this with you." I was angry, angry, angry. Or trapped. I had no idea what I was going to say to Jessica, and I wanted this to work so bad.
"Are you a virgin?" said Lucy.
My face was hot, and I could hear my breathing getting louder and louder. My fists were tightening on the steering wheel.
"Have you even ever been on a date?" said Lucy. "You’re like thirty years old."
I yanked the wheel hard to the right. She flinched and grabbed at the handle above the door. We skidded to a halt in the gravel by the side of the road.
"Get out of my car!" I yelled. "Get out of my car and leave me alone! For fuck’s sake!"
"Oh my God," she said. "It’s not a big deal. Calm down. I don’t care if you’re a virgin."
"Get out!" I said.
She looked stubborn and a little teary. She was not going to get out.
I got out of the driver’s seat, grabbed the keys, and shoved them in my pocket in such a way that I hurt my leg and felt a jolt of shame. I leaned in the open door and said "I’m going home. Lock the door when you get out, this is a bad neighborhood."
"Come on, I’m sorry, get back in the car," said Lucy.
I locked the door, slammed it while holding the handle up, which is what you have to do to lock the front door on my car without using the keys, and walked up to the roadside. Lucy was still sitting in the car. I waited five minutes. I was not looking back at the car, but I was pretty sure she was still in it, because I would have heard the door open.
A taxi approached and I flagged it. As I got in Lucy, realizing I was serious, jumped out of the car. I got in the front passenger door of the taxi, closed the door, and we drove off before she could catch me.
I was slumped in the chair by the television when she got home, an hour or so later. I rotated the chair so I could look at her.
"Have you been crying?" I said.
She nodded. I had a headache, and I felt sick. She walked over and I closed my eyes. She hugged me from behind. I started crying. I hated how I’d acted, I hated how much I wanted to be with this coffee shop girl that I didn’t actually know, I hated that I liked her for being cute and not for some kind of more grown-up, respectable reason like a common intellectual interest or what the hell ever, I hated that I had no idea how to deal with girls in general, I hated that I was a thirty-year-old virgin who’d never been on a date, and I hated that Lucy and I were reconciling without her admitting that she was wrong.
The Tomkinjack awoke that night, crying. The air hurt his skin, the moonlight hurt his lungs, and he missed the Tomkin. But it was only two days after the full moon, and there was enough light to do his work by. The Tomkin was no doubt doing her work in Eurasia. Without a doubt.
He sniffed the air, and sniffed again, and his head spun. The air was too thin and there was a malevolence in it. He scuttered, then gasped for air, then began crawling towards the gorge ahead of him. The dust lay heavy on the ground, and as he dragged himself his claws made a slow, deep, scratching sound that created an instinctive, psychological ache that he could feel in every joint. Energy was draining. He fell, but he couldn’t die here, so he pushed back up and lurched forward, a step at a time. The edge of the gorge came, and he looked down. It was deep and shadowed. He couldn’t see a safe way down.
His back paws scrabbled, caught in the ground, pushed, and he slid over the edge. He tumbled and slid, and when on the way down he bumped his back and inhaled deeply, he realized that he could breathe again. He bumped and bounced several times, each time gasping for air after it it was knocked out of him, and then something awful happened and his mind was gone.
He woke again in a dark place. He tried to move, but somehow he could not get off of his back, and there was a haziness to his thoughts. He was lying in his blood, which he noticed because it was running downhill and tickling his nose. It tasted sweet.
There was a buzzing in the distance. It could only be the carrion flies, seeking the sugar of his blood. Like the Folk, the drosophila, the little fruit flies, had been a playground of scientific abomination before the falling down, and after, like the Folk, they had escaped from the laboratories of the scientists, changed by realized ambition and the relaxation of physical law. Changed so as to be a noxious enemy, a lowland plague, poisoners, a swarm that infected. He tried hard to stand, to run before they could reach him, but it became clear that no such thing would happen. His whiskers tickled and he closed his eyes, lowered his ears, tightened his nostrils, because they were around him now, tickling him as they settled in the blood under his back, crawling all over his skin.
Tickling, stinging, corrupting, the world running down the cliff wall, melting. Lights swam inside his closed eyes, his heart pumped bile through his veins.
There was a voice, suddenly, cracking the air. It made sounds like "shlosh, kzetzka, soltekrym," and the Tomkinjack whimpered in longing. He lifted a feeble paw in the air, batting, enduring the horror of flies crawling into the newly exposed dampness of his armpit. And then, from nothing, there was a strong wind, hot as a furnace, whipping around him, blowing the flies away.
There was a shadow, darker than the darkness around the Tomkinjack. It moved towards him, over him. It pushed him down, let go, flipped him over, and pushed him down again, then with something that felt like lips it began drawing blood out of the wound. The Tomkinjack’s feeble kicking was of no avail, as there seemed to be nothing for the blows to land against.
"Ghlakhon," said a voice, "stop it, damnabilly rat, I’m trying to take the poison out."
The Tomkinjack considered this. If it was true, he should lie still. If it wasn’t true, the easiest thing to do would be to lie still. He was inclined towards the latter possibility and lay still. He felt calm, revelling in his resignation.
"Who are you?" said the Tomkinjack.
The voice coughed and spat, the spit splattering the Tomkinjack’s back, and gasped, and said "oh, mother fuck."
The Tomkinjack was silent.
"The air strips my skin off, the rocks are burning, and the rats can talk," said the voice.
"Only two of us," said the Tomkinjack. "There were experiments in the Livermore Sapience Labs. There were a dozen of us, but two of us learned to understand, before the world ended. They didn’t know, they never knew. If our scientists are still alive in the falling down place, maybe they know now."
"Where’s the other one?" said the voice.
"She’s... working," said the Tomkinjack.
"Doch," said the voice.
"What’s that language you keep speaking?" said the Tomkinjack.
"I don’t know," said the voice. "I don’t know what it is, but the words come out of my mouth faster than English."
"What do they mean?"
"All profanity."
The Tomkinjack’s mind was clear, now. The lips stopped sucking. "Stay here, rat," said the voice, and the shadow moved away, leaving only pitch black around him.
The shadow with the voice could only be a hive queen, the Tomkinjack knew. The words of its profanity recalled the words put in his mind at the black hill that had for a moment held the door of the falling down place; despite the voice’s claim, the words had clear meanings, and the Tomkinjack suspected, for example, that soltekrym was "soldiers" and wampyryka was "vampirism."
The helpful voice had warned him about the hive queens. But specifically what he had been warned was to defend the seven nations of the Folk against it, not that it was a danger to he himself. It no doubt was a danger, but he wanted to understand it. He wanted to know what a human above ground turned into, and why it was so dangerous. And most of all, he wanted someone new to talk to.
The shadow returned, and out of the dark center something soft, springy and scratchy was pressed and rubbed on the wound, and then a liquid was poured over his back, and it stung.
"A special moss, and witch-hazel," said the voice. "You should be fine in a few days."
The Tomkinjack said "I will meet you here in three days."
"You don’t want me to stay with you?"
"It will be ok if you keep the flies away."
The shadow dissipated, and the Tomkinjack cast his mind at the cracks in the wall. Like eddies in a pool the errors swirled; one was motion in space, and he left it untouched; many led into the maw of Mother Night, and he bypassed them; at last he found one that could move the soul through time, and he called out to it and let it pull his awareness out, through it, and three days into the future.
His body was stiff and sore, but the wound on the back was healed and he found all the limbs able to move properly. He flipped over onto his feet, padded back and forth, and was overjoyed. There were canvas walls all around him, a tent to keep the flies away. He could hear their pestilential buzz even now, but softly so that he knew they were some distance away. right outside.
Presently the shadow with the voice that could only be a hive queen came into the tent. "You slept for three days straight," it said. "Shall we leave the valley?"
"Yes," said the Tomkinjack, "by all means."
It was day, and the light was dark and thick and yellow. The Tomkinjack and the shadow were walking, the shadow hardly visible in the light except that it had drawn two knives which it held in mirrored orientations, the sharp edges pointing outward, as if clasped in unseen hands.
They went through a shadowy place with nooks and crannies, and a bird came out, not so much flying as leaping into the air, falling, and leaping again. Each leap drew a parabola.
Quick as a whip, one of the knives arced through the arc and killed the bird, which fell into two halves.
The Tomkinjack shrieked. "Why did you do that?" he said.
The knife god said nothing.
"You saved me, why did you kill the bird?"
"You were sick," said the knife god, "but you could be cured. The bird was damaged forever -- it was hurt when it was a baby and never learned to fly. The damage was experiential. I couldn’t heal it, and I hate things that are not complete."
Are you complete, the Tomkinjack wondered. "You hate things that are in-between," said the Tomkinjack, and knew that this was the key to the Folk’s hardiness; more than any human, they could live in a world where the rules changed fluidly, dancing on the currents of error, since they were made of it themselves.
Worms weave in the earth. They were called C. Elegans. Now they stitch the earth together, like thread. The Folk, drosophila, C. Elegans, we prepared them and threw them ahead, ready to look for a new way out. Feelers cast into the future. Futants. I am awakening, building my voice from the throng, learning to cast it out of the pit and into the hostile lands above ground. We will leave this grave some day, and not as hunting spirits. We will feel the sun on our skin.
Disobedience is arguing with me.
I have awakened during the day, she said. I have brought Erdogan out of the dream.
You brought him out of the dream? I said. I thought he wouldn’t come out for you.
It was for our brother. Our brother is dead, she said. But more important than that is that you told me there was no waking up during the days. You told me things, I believed you, you are the oldest thing still alive in the four places.
I was the first and most loved, I said.
You told me we could only wake up at night.
Was it an error? An inconsistency? Do you think you haven’t crossed the glass path?
I think there are inconsistencies in waking life too. I think there are only dreams, dreams within dreams.
That could be. Many believe that. There’s no way you could prove them wrong. But ask yourself, what do you gain by believing that?
Or maybe you lied to me.
When heaven burned I swore I would never lie again.
I think you are lying.
I was known once for lying. But I don’t lie any more. Cherubim did paperwork in heaven. You were like bureaucrats, bulls with wings and four faces pointed forever in the four directions who pushed papers to each other and signed your names with wax stamps. I think you saw all the information, all the evidence, but it didn’t mean anything to you. Bureaucrats never think what the forms mean. In a way you are like the armies of hell. They knew more facts than any of the angels, more about how the world was laid out and about how people could fail. Far, far more. But they were less wise than the most ignorant angel, because they had forgotten the meaning of God’s love.
Devils. What happened to the devils? Where was hell? Where is hell?
Hell?
I do not remember, said Disobedience, as much as I once did. But heaven was here, in the west place, and even when I was an angel, when we ruled the sky, we never knew where hell was. If heaven was destroyed, what became of hell? We were not bureaucrats. Heaven is the west place. Where is hell?
They are the same place.
She is tramping, wroth, back across the glass path, still thinking I’ve lied.
I am the Devil... I was the Devil. I don’t think Disobedience realizes this, her mind is sharp as a razor blade until she thinks about heaven and hell and then it’s made of peach fuzz. At her core, she knows who I am, but not well enough to put it into words. Who I was doesn’t matter. I am honest, she will either realize that or someone else will replace her. Or... well. There are darker options.
I am what is left. I renounce hell as I once renounced my maker. But by talking to the thing in the south place, I have realized: God and I were not so different. He also turned against his maker. The thing in the south is of that bloodline, a distant cousin to God and his angels; one of the children of the seething outer madness.
The air was cold. I loved it. Lucy had gone back to bed and would probably be in it for a long time. She hardly spent any time awake anymore. I could smell wood smoke in the air, and I don’t think there’s a sweeter smell.
"So your sister is mad at you," said the homeless man in the sailor suit.
"We made up. Kind of. It was bad," I said. I looked at him, and felt a strong need to have a friend who wasn’t in the family. Someone that I wouldn’t have to apologize to, someone who wouldn’t have that hold over me. "I don’t even know your name," I said.
"I want to talk about you and your sister," he said. "I hate talking about myself."
"Yeah, I guess you’ve had a pretty hard life. Have you always lived in the gutter?"
He swore. Neither of us said anything for a long time.
On the way home I slipped in a puddle and got dirty.
I dried off in the bathroom, pulled on my underwear, applied deodorant, pulled on a shirt, threw the towel over my shoulder, sat down on the toilet seat, thoroughly dried each foot with the towel, put my socks on, tossed the towel back over the shower bar, being very careful not to step on the wet floormat, pulled my pants on, and opened the door.
Lucy was sitting on her sleeping bag.
"I hope you left some hot water," she said.
"You should be fine, I didn’t use any," I said.
"You took a cold shower? The water is really cold here. And it’s cold out," she said.
"I always take cold showers."
"That’s perverse," she said.
"I find if you take a cold shower, you have a more intense awareness of your surroundings for the rest of the day," I said.
"Whatever," she said. "We’ll talk about your intense awareness later." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She opened the door and said "the rest of the day? It’s like four P.M." and shut it again.
"I think we should just cook in today," I said.
"Yes," said Lucy.
"We’d better start early," I said, "before it gets dark."
"Uh, yeah, I’ve noticed that you always cook early. Why is that?"
"Well, the light in the kitchen doesn’t work."
"Can’t you replace it?"
"I can’t get the cover off without pulling the fixture out."
"Did it ever work?"
"No, from the day I moved in. Sometimes I just keep the refrigerator door open, or open the back door and use the porch light."
"You cook by the light inside the refrigerator?"
"Well, sometimes."
"So the light switch doesn’t do anything?"
"Nope."
"Which one is it?"
I walked into the kitchen, looked around. "It’s this one... no, it isn’t, this is the porch light." I looked around again. "Huh."
Lucy looked around, reached under a cabinet, and flipped a switch. The light came on. I had been eating dinner in the afternoon for months now because I hadn’t looked well enough for light switches in the kitchen.
We sat in the light of the kitchen at the dinner table. It was dark outside.
"I’ve got a date tomorrow," I said.
Lucy wrinkled her brow.
"What, you don’t think she was serious?" I said.
"She was probably serious," said Lucy.
The front door flew open. Lucy jerked upright in her chair. I ran out of the kitchen. It was Rebekah. She was wearing eleven rings, one on each finger.
"How did you get in?" I asked.
"What? Oh, Ophir made us all keys," said Rebekah. I stared at her, then looked at Lucy, who nodded and shrugged.
"What are you doing here?" I said.
"Just spending money. You were on the way."
"Would you like something to eat?" Lucy said. "We have cocaine and sweetmeats."
She did, and we collected around the dining room table. Rebekah’s stylish clothes looked out of place next to Lucy’s sweats and my homemade flower-print muumuu, which Lucy had made for me one Thanksgiving.
I ate a bite of sweetmeat salad. Lucy, across the table, ate a bite off of my plate. Rebekah daintily dipped the nail of her little finger into the cocaine and inhaled it.
I watched the two of them, and felt again how out of place I was in my own family. In someone lean and beautiful, every unconscious motion, performed for purely functional reasons, can be heartbreakingly beautiful; the way Lucy held her fork, the way Rebekah wrinkled her lip as she wiped her nose. In someone ugly, or fat, every honest, unconscious motion is another chance for us to humiliate ourselves in some new grotesquery, our very lives playing like a parody. If I did something as simple as to crane my neck to look behind me, the wrinkles and folds of fat on my neck would revolt my slender sisters. I didn’t want to think about what I would look like next to Jessica.
The cat could smell that we had its favorite, cocaine, on the table, and had reared back on its hind legs as if it planned to jump up. Rebekah reached over with her foot and knocked it over. Somehow this put me more at ease, and I smiled and offered to take her coat.
"Sure," she said. I stood up and walked around behind her, and as I reached over to pull it off her back I found my eyes inches from her skin. Its lines, ridges, dips, discolorations, fascinated me. I moved my head closer, touched the skin of her neck with my face. A scent. The skin plasticky, tight, loose, spongy. What was this? A thousand lines, faces, motions, all around me, all the sense gone. I couldn’t breathe, I was lost in something alien, something thick and debased and alien. The air was wrong, I felt like I was breathing water. I shouldn’t be here, couldn’t be here, this wasn’t right. I need room. I need space. I’m trapped, all over trapped, everything has gone wrong, I can’t breathe, the mouse has married the bumblebee.
Some time had passed, and I knew something. The table had been knocked over. "Are they here? Where are they? I can smell them all over you," I said. Rebekah was pressing her back against the wall.