The entirety of the zero-sum epic novel "The Billion Brillianth Tachyon-Thespian Bombshell" by W. Bill Czolgosz, plus graphics, appendices, and related materials.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Appendix (B): The Million Brillianth People Spall
Appendix (B): The Million Brillianth People Spall
(Ceres-3, I Prayed for Thee)
From the recent future, down along the
N-string:
She didn't want to kill the monkey. Not
at all. If she could have had it any other way, Sil would have been by her
side—or maybe perched on her shoulder, the way monkeys like to perch.
Monkey, lemur, whatever.
It wasn't blind attachment. She didn't
really care all that much for animals. It was the principle of the thing. If
both of them could have made it, that would have been preferable.
At the end, it was all floating.
Drifting, floating, falling forever. Dropping upward through the cosmos, like a
marigold meteor, but without a tangible sense of actual motion. Moving and
not-moving, both at once, in an endless sea of black ink.
At the beginning, it was crashing and
tumbling—but without the usual sound and excitement, violence at one-quarter
speed, making it the most peaceful crash and tumble she could have imagined.
Like ballet, but with less music and more death.
In between the ballet and the floating,
however long it was—four or five hours, she couldn't say—she was like static
electricity. Fear and logic tearing her mind asunder, warring for absolute
dominance, twitching through the nerve endings of her face and daring her to
make a sound, reasonable decision.
Vibrating, pulsing, numb in every part.
There was a voice in her head. Maybe it
was the voice of God. Probably it wasn't. It said, “Congratulations. You are
now completely alone, terrified out of your wits, at the very edge of the known
universe.” She raised a thick-walled yellow glove to her chest, to the
twenty-button keypad secured above her breasts, ten digits and ten symbols, and
recalled the specific sequence that would mercifully cut her life short. (It
was seven-tiger-two.) But at this stage of the game, despite the horror of the
situation, suicide wasn't even an option. Then probably-not-God said, “Aloha.
Have a nice freaking day, lady.”
She cast her eyes toward heavy Heaven.
“When did You abandon us?”
Now there was somebody else in her head.
Not God. This was someone else, a mortal, a man, loving and familiar, telling
her, “When you think about it, it's pretty damn do-able.”
She knew every word he would say before
he got to say them.
He said, “That doesn't mean it's likely
or possible, but it's do-able, and for all that's worth, for whatever happens
and however it turns out, it must be worth trying. Otherwise, what's the point
of any of it? You can stay here, on the ground, or you can leave, and it's as
simple as that.”
Simple as one-two-three. (Simple as seven-tiger-two.)
This was the uncharted planet Liedbska,
named for the inventor of the liquid nitrogen pharoscope, and the gravity was
one-twelfth that of Earth. The voice in her brain was that of her father, long
dead, and it was either coming from beyond the grave (less likely) or was the
product of her own nattering imagination (more likely). Whichever the case, his
slow, deliberate words did the trick, and all the switches in her head that had
been turned to panic were now in their regular positions again.
She used to be Shelly Whealer, and now
she was called Ceres-3, and she was without a functioning spacecraft. Her new
name was a codeword, trademarked and copyrighted by the company, an indicator
of rank, and her ship, now tumbling in slo-mo to the bottom of an impossibly
deep chasm, was a not much more than a prototype. A pretty tricked out,
impossibly expensive prototype, for sure, and the only one of its kind.
This mission was a perfect failure, save for some nice snapshots of Liedbska,
taken from high morning orbit, which had already been transmitted to the
woefully underpaid astrophysicists at Virgo Procul station.
Her suit, by itself, could keep her alive
for many weeks, a month or maybe two, at the outside—feeding her the right
amount of vitamins, nutrients, oxygen and minerals, and filtering out wastes
and poison. It was a Krupp suit, based on the Herzog model, which was the
industry's high standard, these days. And there were pricey mods that allowed
the wearer, for example, to survive situations that might have been unthinkable
half a decade ago. Submersion in
sulphuric acid, for example, or the odd hot blast of micro-meteoroid flotsam.
Somebody said there were orgasm buttons, built right into the crotch gusset. Somebody else said the suit was essentially a
wearable spacecraft. Another somebody said, “These babies will even survive
limited solar flare contact,” and she instantly realized that it was her
father's voice, once again.
“No, not that,” Ceres-3 said. “A solar
flare would be the very end of my story.”
Everyone on the Nordic crew wore a Krupp,
even the android. (That was just for show, likely.) Ceres-3 was the only one of
them still above-ground, but their fates had little or nothing to do with the
quality of their suits.
The mission leader, Thetys-5, another
honorable nom de plume—and Bimbo Supremis back in the Academy
days, in the opinion of Ceres-3—had decided to move and reposition the craft
without first priming the drop jets. She knew better and so did the other
crew-members, especially the android. Flew it right off the edge of a canyon,
instantly lost vertical bearing, and ended up scraping the cliff face and
bringing twelve hundred tons of igneous rock down on top of them all. (Even in
the extremely reduced gravity of weird-world, twelve hundred tons of
Liedbska-rock equalled a hundred tons of Earth-rock.) Kai-boshed the entire
mission right out of the starting gate.
Ceres-3, readying to survey the northern
plain's Ralston basin for the first of six carefully-planned research projects,
could do little more than drop her jaw and watch with stupefied awe as her
teammates, her entire future, dropped into the gorge.
Still crashing and tumbling, still
dropping, still going. The voices in her helmet's radio system, actual
voices, went spookily silent a few hours back. Last transmission was the
android saying, “Zero percent survivability; one hundred percent failure.
Switching to dead mode.” And that was that.
Ceres-3, nee Shelly Whealer, nee “Super
Astro-girl” (in the words of her dumb-it-down ex-fiance, Mitchell), was
a mere yellow blip on a perfectly purple world—purple sand and purple sky,
purple granite, like shards of busted glass, under a small red sun. Night was a
hard stifling darkness, save for the familiar pricks of starlight, and
brightest daytime was like dusk viewed through a dirty crystal. A cool desert
nightmare re-imagined by a dull child with a palette of muddy finger-paint.
Her possessions were next to nil. Apart
from the pack on her back, hardwired to the bio-suit, which kept her alive, she
had three items: a pulse rifle, powered by dual plasma cells, ostensibly
designed for blasting ice and shale; a purse-sized COM kit, which included a
torch lamp, five flares, an emergency oxygen mask, a fifteen-inch crescent
wrench, and a pulsing plastic distress beacon; and, of course, the WBCZ rocket
canister containing Sil—a great scientific folly, originally scheduled as the
first surface project on the Nordic itinerary.
The distress beacon was worthless given
that a rescue mission, however small, was a fiscal impossibility. The crew of
the Nordic knew with absolute certainty what they'd signed on for. Against the
big picture of space and commerce, and particularly of space commerce, they
were utterly expendable. As the mission coordinator, Sir Douglas Gyles, back
home, had so put it: “This is a make-or-break situation. If we take
Liedbska, we're heroes, and that system makes it onto the star maps. Big money,
big bonuses, everybody gets a chalet on Europa. If we fail, however, we're
yesterday's news broadcast, and the Mariner Corporation goes diamond mining at
Vega, instead. There's no halfway.” So Ceres-3 tossed the cruddy plastic beacon
away, and it sailed easily through the thin air for a thousand meters or more.
Everything that went up on Liedbska took
a very long time to come down again.
“If stupid monkeys can go up,” Ceres-3
said, thinking of Sil, “then so can I.”
Sil was a female lemur, four years old,
spayed, trained in rudimentary commands. Her sole purpose was to ride her
rocket canister, the WBCZ—an iron-lung prison, roughly the size of an antique
Electrolux vacuum cleaner—into Liedbska's slight lithosphere and then straight
into bright black oblivion, where she would eventually perish.... but not
before transmitting her vital stats and other miscellaneous data to Virgo
Procul station, some billion miles in the direction of beloved homeworld.
Nothing but a science experiment, and not even
a very good one. Strictly pedestrian; a variation on a standard grade-school
physics demonstration—small, cutesy animals being blasted into smithereens—nothing
but a smoke and mirrors stunt by Mariner to convince the politicians, back
home, that the the Nordic mission was all about illuminating the dark corridors
of human Knowledge (with a capital K), and maybe get some of that tasty federal
subsidy money. (The ruse, of course, was a complete success, and the
government, true to form, dropped half a trillion dollars into the pot.)
The WBCZ launch had been scheduled for
this morning, but the rest of the Nordic crew were dead—three humans, plus the
late model android named Oberon—and their folding laboratory was on its way to
the blue bowels of the planet, tumbling along with the fuselage, the surveying
module, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of electronic and mechanical
goodies, and every little tool or gizmo that might have prolonged the life of
Ceres-3.
The Mariner Corporation was gambling on a
Neo-Columbian utopia—a galactic Cancun, with ripe resources for plunder and
near-unlimited potential for colonization—but the purple world was a tomb. The
fucking android, Oberon, had been certain, to ninety-four percent, that
self-replicating mitochondria teemed under Liedbska's powdery surface, and he
had theorized that banana-shaped fungi were probably growing at the equatorial
regions. “If not now, exactly, then probably sometime within the next six
hundred centuries.” But the mission went belly-up before any samples could
be collected for testing. Indeed, the spectacular failure of the Nordic mission
would likely stall any further exploration, anywhere, by any of the
corporate giants, for years. (At the end of the day, “colonization” was just
another term for “real estate” and planet Liedbska was little more than a
potential time-share scam. But alien worlds were tricky and unpredictable, and
most developers were perfectly content to stick to manufacturing condos within
space stations. Fewer variables, bigger returns. Yummy.)
“You know the ins and outs, my girl.
You're a tough little cookie.”
Ceres-3's father, the gentle baritone
known as Thomas Whealer, of the Seeger-Whealers, once a living and breathing
federal judge, now lurking just behind her pretty blue eyes, assured her that
all was not yet lost. She'd always been the brightest light in his life. He
said, “You may think you're marooned, alone, at the very edge dark outland, but
that doesn't mean you're without options. You can live or you can die. And before you choose, my bright little
pumpkin, you must remember that the atmosphere is thin and the gravitational
pull is extremely slight. If the men of Earth's history had it so easy, they'd
have gone to the stars before they carved the first wheel—if you take my
meaning.”
She nodded in perfect agreement.
The Seeger-Whealers were can-do
people. Everyone in Blumenthal county wanted to be one. Those who weren't born
into the family did their damnedest to marry into it. They were people of
diligence, power and influence. At least twice Father had boasted, “More
politicians have come from the vicinity of the Ninety-Nine road than any other
neighborhood in the nation. We've put two men and one woman into the White
House. No other family can make a grander claim.” He'd also said, “One third of
the Senate shares our DNA,” but this was an exaggeration, if only a slight one.
Judge Thomas Whealer joined the pantheon
of the Seeger-Whealers' honored dead when, at the age of sixty-one, he
underwent a lobotomy in order to cure him of, or reduce, the epileptic seizures
that had plagued him since his late thirties. The procedure was completely
unsuccessful, and the man died in agony, eight days later, tearing at the
staples in his cranium. He said he thought perhaps a beetle had gotten into his
skull. He said his brain was being chewed. “Blue beetle bug braaack balls
blag!” And when the nurses assured him that human brains were incapable of
feeling themselves, he went right on tearing, screaming all the while,
thrashing, smashing his head against doors and bed-frames when the nurses tried
to bind his hands. He said he refused to live with a bug in his head—just
wouldn't do it, not for anyone. And he quickly got the job done through
brute determination.
The man had sand—real cojones—right
to the dirty end. And resolve. (And maybe just a touch of dementia.)
Another voice in Ceres-3's head, one that
sounded almost like her own, told her, “Your bloodline got you this far, dear
girl—don't think for a moment that sheer chance brought you all the way to
Liedbska—and it will take you home again, as well. A Seeger-Whealer can never
despair as long as she is still breathing.”
The WBCZ's detachable booster engine,
smaller than a football, had gone to hell with the fuselage and everything
else, seemingly rendering the monkey-rocket useless as a device of propulsion,
but it wasn't very long before Ceres-3 recalled that the canister itself was
highly charged with gas and plasma. Nothing but a pressure tank doubling as a
life-support for a stupid, pint-sized primate. (This was neither the time or
place for gooey sentiment. Monkeys were filthy and stupid, even the really cute
ones, end of story.) Even without the booster, the WBCZ was a tightly packed
bomb.
There was nothing up there that could be
of any use to her. No surveyor satellite, no docking station or high-orbit
buoy, not even a natural moon to make a wish upon. Nothing at all. Nowhere to
go. No real hope to be found, anywhere.
And yet....
She tapped on the glass and smirked as
Sil reached toward her finger.
“Funny monkey. Funny monkey. You
poor, funny, doomed monkey,” Ceres-3 said. “I'm sorry for what's going to
happen next. But you were scheduled for blast-off many hours ago, so this is
all borrowed time for you, anyway. For both of us, really. Give my regards to
the Monkey King when you finally get to the otherworld.”
She held the WBCZ against her ribcage
like a wide receiver catching a pass, and then took the standard-issue wrench
in her right hand—a solid kilogram of pure Pittsburgh steel that now weighed a
few measly ounces—and hammered it against the lid of the canister. Nitrogen and
carbon dioxide hissed out of a gash in the hull after the second blow. Sil the
lemur began screaming cold terror. If Ceres-3 couldn't technically hear it
through the hard shell of her helmet, she imagined it quite vividly. Like a
monkey in a medical laboratory, shrieking hysterically right before its brains
get sucked out. (Quite like a certain other someone she'd known; a judge.)
After three more hits, the rocket tube
ejaculated like a fire hose, spraying the lemur's red parts and pieces against
the cerulean gravel. A stream of gas and gore. It wasn't so much the change in
barometrics that shredded her, necessarily, but the cruelly abrupt expulsion of
matter from the cylinder sleeve. Metal, gas and flesh, moving at ninety miles
per minute. “Fire the monkey cannon!” An appalling burst of pressure
that behaved exactly as it was supposed to—and Ceres-3 was instantly hurled
high into the silky thin air. “Like being kicked by God,” she thought, in
Thomas Whealer's voice, as pain rippled through her body. “A forty-ton blow to
the guts. Christ almighty!” In the brief instant required to think these
words she was already five hundred feet up, steadily ascending, and moving at
near nine hundred miles per hour.
If Oberon's theoretical bananas were to
evolve into higher lifeforms, with noses and mucous glands and the like, they
would surely sneeze themselves off the planet in no time at all.
This notion caused Ceres-3 to giggle. She
was delirious with vertigo.
“Bananas. And monkeys. And bananas.”
She figured she was a ridiculous sight to
behold—sunflower-suited “Super Astro-girl” bent haplessly over a rogue torpedo,
careening up into the dark yonder. Like something out of the televised cartoon
shows from long ago. Like the coyote, something-or-other—the one who used to chase
partridges across the badlands, always the victim of his own booby-trapped
inventions.
“I
am a comet of flesh and bone. I am flying on wax wings.”
Despite the panic that coursed through
her veins, there was no real downside to the situation. Death was no more or
less certain than it had been seconds before, on the planet surface. Or, like
some people used to say, “Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.” Doomed or
damned, same difference.
Violet-blue Liedbska was falling fast
away, looking more and more like an abstract swirl of chalk on fabric, filtered
as it was through the Krupp visor. “No turning back,” was another one of those
old sayings that blinked across her thoughts. It was Dad's voice, once again.
And Dad would have been proud, so proud, to watch his number-one daughter
gimmick her way out of another fine mess. Just like the Academy days. Pure
improvisation, a Seeger-Whealer specialty.
“It's how you earned the name of Ceres-3,
darling. You are awfully top-rate.”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
“Don't mention it, sweetie.”
“I love you.”
“I love you so much. Forever and ever.”
Judge Thomas Whealer had always
maintained that the family's prestigious roots went back to John Adams, and
perhaps further. He said the Seeger-Whealers were like the mountains, like granite.
Virtually eternal. His voice, trembling somewhat in the high atmosphere,
assured Ceres-3 that he was with her “even now” and that she could not fail if
she tried.
There was a rash of heat against the
backside of her suit, to be sure, the result of sparse atmospheric molecules
grinding across the weave, but nothing worth fretting about. Not much hotter
than sunburn on a July afternoon in Nevada. The Krupp suit was the best of the
best. “Cream of the crop.” The overworked mavericks at Virgo Procul station
swore by the brand, using Krupp suits for all their spacewalk duties, despite
being sponsored by the rival Indus-Concezio company.
“But those guys are never outside for
more than a couple hours at a time.”
So much chatter in her brain....
Seconds passed, maybe hours. Shortly, she
hit the void, like a fly spilling out of a very weak soup. The first human
to blast into space without a solid conveyance to take her there. She made
it all the way there without having had to fire the pulse rifle, not even once,
in order to maintain lift. (That had been her back-up plan, if the WCBZ had
failed.) Still thirty-two shots in the dual cell pack.
“Yeah. Count it! Thirty-two! Huzzah!”
The ancient red star, Obol, was like a
steaming tea saucer held at arm's length. Its light was filtered, filtered,
filtered through many layers of glass and polymer, but she could feel its
steadfast vibrancy dulling the unease that had flowed through her limbs these
last so-many hours. That sunlight, raw and hot and old and vital, was peace
incarnate. And when Ceres-3 was quite certain that she was finally free of the
purple planet's miniscule pull, she pushed herself away from Sil's tiny
rocket-ship and allowed it to drift away on a new, lonely trajectory.
“One, two, three... goodbye.”
Another voice, this one emanating from
the radio interface inside her helmet: “This is officer Thetys-5 of Mariner
Corporation, designated captain and commander of Mission:Nordic, transit number
six-three-six-dash-two, northern hemisphere, Ralston basin on Liedbska in Orbo.
Reporting loss of landing module, plus all hands, dead or dying or presumed
dead...”
A bit of static, then the Captain
repeated herself, adding, “Payload and crew buried under massive rock-slide, no
salvage or rescue possible. Lost crew-members include Phaeton-4, Pandora-3,
Ceres-3, plus the android, Oberon, and myself. I will initiate cyanide
self-termination upon successful transmission of this message, in order to
diminish pointless suffering...”
The signal was lost, just then, and the inside
of Ceres-3's helmet went quiet again. Not even a pop or crackle. Only the
imagined whispering of her own thoughts. Thoughts like, “Doesn't a dose of
cyanide sound like just the ticket? It's ready at the push of three little
buttons.” Also, “I'm sure not going to miss the way Thetys-5 paraded her tits
around at the Academy. What a way to get ahead in the world! (And off-world,
too!)” And, “At least I've got my name and reputation going for me.”
(Seven-tiger-two.)
She gave a hmmpphh. Her ears began
to buzz. That sort of thing came and went. Tinnitus, it was called, caused by
zero-gravity affecting fluid in the inner ear—a bit of an occupational
annoyance. Even old pros like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to deal with
buzzing ears.
“Unless it's a beetle,” she told herself.
“That sort of thing runs in the family, remember.”
She was going to chuckle, just a bit, but
thought better of it.
“Blue beetle bug braaack balls blag!”
She wished the monkey could have lived.
It was 3:46 in the afternoon, according
to the LCD display in her visor.
Space was empty in almost every
direction. Old star Obol was a hundred million miles to her left. Virgo
Procul station was a billion miles behind her head. Homeworld Earth was
twenty-nine light-years to her right. And dreadful Liedbska was well beneath
her feet, dropping ever further away. She was willing to go anywhere in the
multiverse, even Hell itself, but not back to that dirty, awful sphere. She
pointed the pulse rifle straight down and fired one shot, giving herself an
extra sixty foot-pounds of oomph—recoil—more than tripling her speed.
All that Newtonian junk from the Academy days—MV equals MV, and whatnot. An
object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
The important thing was that she was on her way home, bound and determined,
doing about two thousand miles per hour, and she estimated that she might
conceivably arrive there in eleven million years, give or take.
The Krupp suit would keep her alive and
comfortable, free-flowing in the vacuum of dead space, for about fifty days, at
a maximum.
It was a long-shot, she knew all too
well, but she was a Seeger-Whealer.
Eternal. Like granite. Her father
told her that.
He was talking to her still, raising his
voice by degrees every time the damned tinnitus kicked in. He couldn't stop
gushing about familial pride and the profound esteem he held her in. She was a can-do
type of person. “I love you so much, and I won't abandon you to the dark,” he
promised. And he stayed with her until the very end, when her bio-pack's fuel
cells ran dry and her visor cracked and her eyeballs turned into beautiful blue
diamonds.
By then, she'd stopped checking the time
altogether.
“I love you too, Daddy.”
(c) 2010-2014 by W. Bill Czolgosz/Sean
Simmans, all rights reserved.
Epilog: Dream the Last
Epilog: Dream the Last
“Everything that exists in the Universe
is the fruit of Chance and Necessity.”
-Democritus
In which Frank Sleeps.
Middle of January. This picture, out of
the window of the dining room: snow rolling over the frozen prairie. The
dullest of skies, as white as the world below—no horizon except for the odd ink
blots of black-spruce copses and the fading grey tarmac of the frosted highway,
rolling south into oblivion. A world inside of a cheap snow globe, but sapped
of all magic, color, and fantasy. Bleak and persistent. Remorseless, even.
Looking north, from the master bedroom,
same thing.
Same thing in every direction, light
years, forever.
Maybe, two thousand miles below,
somewhere in Mexico's interior, under a sandy, orange sun, bare-armed gauchos
were dying and slaying each other in the blurring heat—drug deals gone sour,
murder for sport, revenge, retribution, honor, whatever—but such a place didn't
seem like it could possibly be real. In perfect fairness, those Mexicans
probably didn't believe in a sub-arctic hell called Manitoba, either. In this
place, men lived longer, statistically, but they died cold. They died miserable
and without honor. Or so it seemed to Frank Burczyk, on this day, cloaked under
the spell of winter's doom.
Discord and Pisimatum were in the west,
in the past. Mother Dora was dead for real (again) and buried beside Piotr
Francis at Pharsalia (again, again).
Bad old days, left far behind.
The wife was gone to town, the dog was
acting badly, and he had the day, the whole day, the whole house, to himself.
Wind howling through the cracks around the door-frame, not a voice within
earshot other than his own rambling internal monolog and the odd whimper from
the pooch. At times like these, Frank knew he could get right down on
himself—especially in bygone times—but he was doing his damnedest to kindle new
light inside of himself and keep it burning.
Something like...
Something like...
He picked up his dream journal and
flipped to the last recorded entry, which he'd written just two weeks before
the big move to Manitoba—
I'm dreaming that I'm old, old, old—as old as all hell.
I don't know what
became of Gia. It's always like she's just out of frame.
I'm dreaming that my
natural life is done.
It is a life much like
my real one. Very similar.
It's getting quiet. I
always expected that the end of life would be a dimming affair, that I would be
able to say, “It's getting dark,” but it's not getting dark at all. Brighter,
in fact—like mechanisms in my eyeballs are opening all the way to let in the
most light. The world hasn't looked this way, to me, in twenty years or more.
However, like I said, the sound is diminishing.
Ever watch television
with the volume turned down?
It's hot. I see
butterflies hovering over the grass, flitting, as they do, like yellow stones
skipping across the water. Butterflies don't make noise at the best of times. I
figure I might have heard the bee that landed on my cheek—a quick, small
zipping noise. He's gone already. Didn't stay long.
I don't know what has become
of Gia. I remember her in a white summer dress. She was dancing across the
lawn, dancing toward the garden. There was talk of salad. Romaine lettuce, and
green onions, and spinach, and suey choy, and—what the hell is arugula? And
fresh tomatoes. There were a few of those on the window ledge, ripening up.
My life ought to flash
before my eyes, like a film show.
I'd like to see me
when I went north, when I wasn't quite twenty, to catch whitefish. Thousands
upon thousands of pounds of whitefish. Pulled nets for ten hours a day, or
more, end of summer, hands wrinkled and froze-up, chilled right through,
twisted up like claws. And, back at camp I'd have to hold back my tears as the
warmth crept back in—didn't want the old-timers to know I was still soft inside.
Three months of that, living out of a log cabin with eight beds and a
wood-burning stove. Every meal was fish. Those old-timers drank like villains,
and some of them were exactly that.
I saw two men fight,
until they were bloodied meat, over a woman that belonged to a whole other
fella. Not belonged, of course. You get the idea. These two were killing each
other for the love (or honour) of a gal who barely knew either existed. But
that's how liquor works. And men.
It's too quiet.
Thought I heard a chainsaw running. Abner, down the road, perhaps. He told me
there was a dead birch-tree on his property that needed to come down. I offered
to help him with that. I guess he couldn't wait for me. Or maybe I don't hear a
chainsaw, at all. Could be a lawnmower. Maybe a leaf-blower, but the trees
haven't even begun to turn.
And where's Gia? She
could be helping me.
Thinking of when I
went east. I tried my hand at mining, near Meskanaw. I ran a jack-leg drill,
two thousand feet underground. Three hours to drill off a round, then load it,
blast, bolt and screen the ground, muck out the heading, and start all over
again, next day. I was sopping wet at the end of every shift, filthy black with
nickel dust, clothes and pores impregnated with the shit. Did it for five
years, day in and day out. I ran the scoop-tram as well as anyone. Worked
harder than the senior men, too. Damned unions. Hard work doesn't count like it
should, down there. The fat slobs with the giant lunch-boxes make the best
coin.
Came to the surface after
that. Met my sweetheart.
I worked at a pulp
mill, just briefly, then built trusses. Bigger money in oil, pulling rods.
Seems my feet were always itching to move on. They still are. I can feel them
wanting to jump up and dance. Gia decided we should take Tango lessons
together. I'm glad I relented and went along, finally. Probably shouldn't have
been such a curmudgeon about it. I remember that the instructor was a brown
lady with a false accent. She tried too hard to sound Italian, or Mexican, or
whatever she was pretending to be. Gia said she was from Bosnia.
I think I could Tango
if I could stand up.
Somebody said I'd do
well in sales. I found my way back into the truss industry. It's all kissing
ass, I can tell you. Sucking up and kissing ass and trying to turn a buck. I
never cared for it, but I always liked going for lunches and driving the
company vehicle. Hardly ever stayed in the office. And we managed to make a
living for ourselves. Gia did little jobs, here and there, kept herself busy,
managed to squirrel a bit of money away. Built the nest-egg, actually. We
wouldn't have been able to buy this place if she hadn't kept the RSP account
well fed.
So here I am, on the
ground. The birds are busy, up in the tree-tops, I know, but I can no longer
hear them.
I'm dreaming that I'm
old and I'm dying.
My natural life has
run out.
I'm dreaming of this
special place.
Now I see her. She is
coming toward me.
My Gia, always just
out of frame, just out of focus, like she was never really part of this
terrible world. Like she was above and beyond it, somehow.
Now she has come to
me.
Now it is good. Now I
am unafraid.
...
[Lacunae]
...
[Lacunae]
...
[Lacunae]
...
End
Chapter Fourteen (B): The French Kiss Connexion
Chapter Fourteen (B): The French Kiss Connexion
“We all live in the space age.”
-Catatonia
In which the ends are tied up.
Somebody said, “It's nice to be
important, but it's more important to be nice.”
...
Discord's murder rate for the year was
higher than New York city.
...
Jim Codeman made it as far as Meskanaw
before his luck ran all the way out.
It was mid-Sunday. Corsairs Duke and
Rinpoche, and five others, acting on little more than a tip and a hunch, found
him in a rented suite above a gas station, right off of highway six. He still
had all of the cash and most of the dope, but those things were entirely beside
the point.
He put up a hell of a fight, expecting to
go out like a Viking berserker, in a blaze of crimson glory, but Rinpoche managed to put three bullets in
his genitals. The psycho son-of-a-bitch was instantly incapacitated, but the
wounds were such that he would live for half a day, or so, enough time to take
him back to Discord and teach him a fine lesson before finishing him off.
He was taken to the Tchatchuk machine
shop, where fifty surly bikers were waiting with crowbars and pick-axes. He was
delirious from the pain by the time he arrived. He saw Berk, face taped up with
gauze, among the throng, and decided to have a little fun before dying.
Codeman said, “If you're going to butcher
me, you have to butcher Berk, too. This was all his idea. He's the one who put
me up to it.”
A hundred eyes fell on old Coach. His
face felt like hot fire, bone-deep, but at least he was able to make real
words. He didn't know what to say in his own defence because, unfortunately,
the real words that kept coming out of his mouth kept adding up to pure
nonsense. “I don't know what he's talking about. I already told you, didn't I?
I was in my car, or maybe out at the cemetery, or maybe hunting a flock of wild
boar. I don't recall, specifically, but I'm almost certain I've never seen this
man before in my entire life. He looks like my third grade teacher, for Christ
sakes! I don't even know what he's been accused of. Are you saying I was with
him? Jezus, I was at the movies, I think. Roger Rabbit. Jimmy, tell them
I was at Roger Rabbit, please.”
Jim Codeman was grinning wide through
bloodied teeth.
Berk said, “Don't look at me! What are
you all looking at, for fuck's sake! Look at the guy in front of you! Let's
clobber the fuck out of him and eat his tasty shit! Let's do it, guys—”
Codeman said, “Don't be scared, Berk.
We've earned this glorious death!”
“I don't even know what we're accused of.
I don't know what's happening.”
“Come on, big guy—”
The first blow fell on Berk. Steel
against the bowl of his skull. He went down like a sack of dropped flour. The
assailant was a front-line enforcer named Beaumont, who had also been the
[sugar daddy] of Dozy, who was killed in Keech and Pony's torrent of gunfire.
Codeman received the next blow, but it took nine more before his eyes finally
went dim. Neither man was ever seen again, not even in fragmented form.
There was some discussion among the
Corsairs over which one had been crazier—Codeman or Berk—but it ended in a
draw. The former was a homicidal maniac and the latter was a maniacal
sociopath. But where Jimmy was fearless, Berk, it was agreed, had been more
inclined to babble like a cross-eyed loon.
Duke said, “Each was equally crazy, but
in his own unique way.”
The grand vizier, a tiny man dressed all
in brown suede, nodded his head in agreement.
“At least they didn't mess around with
children.”
The rally ended early, that year, and
Discord was much quieter when Monday came.
...
CW lost a tooth when Frank punched his
lights out. It was a molar, black and brittle from years of smoking crystal
meth. It broke at the root, requiring an uncomfortable surgical extraction. He
had no idea how preferable it was to having one's forearm dipped in molten
metal, and it certainly wasn't worse than having Reverend Marlon Sunday's penis
stitched to his face, nor having certain toes forcibly amputated. In all, it
had been a profoundly distressing September for him and he resolved to have a
calmer October—a calmer forever, preferably.
He thanked Frank Burczyk for interfering
on his behalf, despite the tooth.
Frank said, “It wasn't on your behalf,
but you're welcome.”
For a long time, CW checked over his
shoulder, expecting to see Coach Berkowitz coming after him, but after so many
weeks, and after hearing rumors whispered on the street—rumors that Berk had
been diced up and sent to the great beyond—he began to breathe easier.
He moved back to Tromso, eventually.
He planned to get back into auto sales,
just as soon as he kicked his substance addiction, but was killed by a runaway
sedan at an uncontrolled intersection. It was a blue Ford.
That's how things go.
...
Gia bought a pink coat for Mortimer, with
matching pink booties, for winter, which was just around the corner.
It was always just around the corner.
...
Tracy Olafson went to the police with
information about Bob Scieszka. She had reasons to believe he might be the
Ghost River Skinner. The police had already received two other anonymous calls
naming the same suspect—one from an alleged ex-friend, and the other from a lady
who described herself as psychic. Based on Tracy's preliminary statement,
police decided that Scieszka fit twenty-two of thirty-three traits that
investigators had ascribed to the Skinner's profile. They had him pegged as a
middle-aged, middle-class Caucasian, longtime resident of Discord, drinker,
smoker, substance abuser, with a predilection for rough sex... among other
traits.
When detectives went to question the man
at his home, he was nowhere to be found. Tracy said he'd been missing since the
weekend.
“He just up and disappeared, Saturday
night.”
...
By January, Tracy was back in jail for
bank fraud and identity theft.
Some things can't be changed.
...
Frank Burczyk went to work at the mill,
since he'd been fired from the courier gig for not reporting to work on his
birthday. His excuse was that he'd lost a finger, which was true, in a sense,
but even after viewing the injury, Karl Steckler declined to give him back his
job.
Giton and Piper told Frank they were sad
to see him go.
Frank told them they'd probably get over
it.
...
Gia said she wanted to go back to Mexico.
She said the third time would be the
charm.
Frank said the first two times had
already been pretty stellar.
...
Emathios is Love.
...
Frank dreamed a strange scene.
It was about Bob Scieszka attempting to
flee Discord. He wanted to get to Tromso to board a plane for Toronto on the
evening of the Saturday Frank came to his house and accused him of being a
murdering rapist. He had a ticket purchased under the name of Dalton LaGrange, an
identity for which he also had authentic ID. He didn't travel two blocks in his
car before six Corsairs on motorcycles headed him off and abducted him.
Bob was taken, kicking and screaming, to
a machine shop, outside of town. One of the missing girls, Alice Little, whose
body had turned up on Union, according to a police source, was second cousin of the grand vizier. He was a
very small man who dressed all in brown. He introduced himself to Scieszka as
Satan incarnate.
“You know—the boyo.”
Bob kept sobbing and begging for his
life.
He was held overnight, until Sunday
evening, after two unidentified characters were pummelled and hacked to death
on the shop floor. He was kept in a tank locker with a mesh screen door, where
oxygen bottles were usually stored, hands bound and mouth gagged, with a full
view of the carnage. And after the first two men were executed, their bodies
mutilated beyond comprehension, the grand vizier said, “At least they didn't
mess around with children.” He cast his eyes Bob's way and smirked.
A barbarian called Rinpoche hauled Bob
out of the locker and threw him to the floor. Bob kept on sputtering, begging
for mercy, calling out to Jezus, the whole bit. He was surrounded by fifty men
armed with bloodied iron weapons. He said, “Why do you think me guilty?”
The grand vizier told him, “I've got eyes
and ears all over this territory. Sooner or later, somebody puts the pieces
together. You're sloppy as fuck—I can't believe the pigs didn't nail your ass a
lot sooner. As it is, you can probably thank the guy from the book store, or
the document-makers.”
But this was just a dream, after all.
Frank had had plenty of dreams. He kept a
dream journal, on the advice of his therapist, and this one went directly into
it. It was definitely a keeper. Even as he was writing it down, Frank had a
pretty strong feeling it was a brief glimpse into one of those myriad alternate
universes.
“The mind boggles,” he sighed as he
wrote.
...
Bob Scieszka drove to Tromso on Saturday
night and boarded an airplane bound for Toronto, Ontario, using fake ID that
he'd purchased, at substantial cost, from Papa and Palo—fake ID was their
primary specialty, and in a town full of biker outlaws, business was good.
The Ghost River Skinner, as newspapers
were now calling him, stayed in a shit-bag hotel behind Yonge Street for eight
days. What he really needed to do was get right the hell out of the country,
head for Haiti or Peru or wherever, but the passport that Papa and Palo had provided contained three
glaring typos that set it apart from the rest of the ID they'd supplied. If Bob
tried to use it to board an international flight, he feared, he'd be arrested
immediately.
“Those fuckers screwed me on purpose!” he
was convinced.
He prowled the streets of downtown
Hog-town every night for a week, desperate for a plan or a solution or even a
fucking diversion. He stayed in the halogen shadows like a modern-day Jack the
Ripper. His funds were limited because he couldn't use an ATM bank machine
without betraying his location. All he had were the dollars he'd stitched into
the lining of his suitcase—just a couple thousand —and those were running out.
In a pinch, he figured he could murder a
prostitute, and her pimp, and take all their cash.
He bought some cocaine from a jet-black
Ugandan in front of a billiard hall. It was shitty blow, but it did the trick.
He went back again and again.
Seven nights like this—living like a rat,
eating fast food.
Suicide was looking like an option. Too
bad he didn't have the cojones for it. Anyway, he had a black spot on
his pancreas and he'd known all along that his time was running out. Today,
tomorrow, twelve months into the future—every minute was borrowed time.
...
Bob Scieszka's body was found in a
dumpster in Toronto.
Somebody figured Sikhs did it. Somebody
else figured Cubans.
He had a thirteen-inch gash across his
abdomen and a look of terror frozen into his open eyes. In self-defence, the
Ugandan in front of the billiard hall had cut his guts out. Bob had tried to
rob him of his cash and coke. That was the end of Bob's story.
The end of the Ghost River Skinner.
Still, somebody else figured maybe
Jamaicans did it.
There were always plenty of minorities to
blame.
...
Frank and Gia went back to Jalisco. They
booked their holiday through Catrina Suns, once again, maybe hoping for another
screw-up that would result in complimentary gifts. There was no such screw-up,
but there was some drama about Frank getting the time off from his new job at
the mill. He ultimately decided he was taking it anyway—life was a never-ending
circus ride, apparently, and he had no intention of wasting his time. If
the job at the mill wasn't waiting for him when he returned from Mexico, he'd
find another.
They left the dachshund, Mortimer, with
Frank`s mother.
Dora said, “This is the third time you've
gone to Mexico in as many years. It's a dangerous place. There are drug dealers
and rapists and crooked police. You've got to be crazy to go to a place like
that! Besides, I don't know what I'm going to do with a wiener dog. How often
do I feed it? Will it pee on my rugs? Frank, Gia, please, you need to be
reasonable—”
No big thing.
Lights, camera, romance.
After a day of shopping, buying lingerie
and tequila on the Malecon, they stopped by The Nero on Lake Neronia, at
Emathios, and found that it was closed for renovations. In addition, fleets of
long trucks were delivering hundreds of tons of scientific equipment to the
site. One of the locals said there was a space observatory a mile underground,
and it was being retro-fitted to study quasars at the opposite end of the
galaxy.
The Nero's concierge, Raful, met Frank
and Gia at the gate, just as they were preparing to depart in their taxi. He
apologized profusely for not being able to accommodate them. He said, “We are
closed for six more weeks, unfortunately, but we will be better than ever when
we re-open.”
“It's fine,” said Frank, “we're actually
staying at the Riu.”
Gia added, “We just wanted to stop by and
see the place. We stayed here last fall—it's beautiful. We had an amazing
time.”
Raful smiled and said, “And you'll be
back again, I have no doubt.”
He presented them with gift passes for
the pirate ship cruise in the Bay of Banderas, a swashbuckling extravaganza
performed by Los Pendejos. “It's a wonderful night of food and drinks
and adventure on the high sea. Culture, entertainment, and the best fireworks
you've ever seen. These tickets are compliments of our benefactor, Mr. Sharky,
and he hopes you will enjoy the night. Gratis, gratis, and have a great
adventure together.”
He wasn't even trying to sell them a
time-share property.
...
Frank kissed Gia on the beach, under a
blazing pink sun, at dusk, and it occurred to him that there were no alternate
worlds, after all, but one brilliantly complex super-reality.
Bad thoughts, dirty thoughts slipped
briefly into his mind. A perfect freeze-frame from a pornographic video—his
beloved wife on her knees, surrounded by naked, aroused men. A leftover scrap
from another world—unfinished business. This was the Gia of the lost years, her
private years, the time when she was not his and he was not hers. Gossip from
the mouth of a foul man. It was not Frank's concern, not his business, and he
let the image bleed from his thoughts like small debris through a sluice gate.
“Is something troubling you, Frank?”
“Absolutely not.”
He was the author of his own story,
separate and distinct from all other stories, and he was the hero of it, just
as Gia was the author of her own story, separate and distinct from all others,
and she was the heroine. Just as Raful, or Dora, or Giton, or even Bob
Scieszka, were the authors of their stories, et cetera. And everyone's stories
crossed, often enough, here and there and everywhere, and the hero of one story
became the villain in the next, or a supporting player, a bit part, a cameo, or
an extra, far in the background, and it seemed to make perfect sense, to him,
for just one shining moment.
“I love you,” said Gia.
“And I love you,” said Frank.
And then the idea was gone.
...
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