Chapter Four: Furies

Chapter Four: Furies

 

“Sometimes the signs from Heaven are vague.

In early November we got back the plague.”

 

- Fiery Furnaces

 

In which we learn the lay of the land.

 

People, at the end of the Mayan calendar, were standing around with thumbs in their asses, waiting for planet Nibiru, or whatever, to smash into Earth and take everyone out for ice cream.

That was mostly true.

Frank arrived back at the house before 8:00 and hollered up the stairs, “I didn't go to work today. I was at the park. It's my birthday and I think I'm going to stay home. Maybe I don't feel very good. My stomach. I'm not sure. I might have a headache.”

There was no reply.

He hollered again, “I'm not faking sick. I do feel a little sick, but not sick enough to stay home from work. I'm just taking the day off. No reason given.”

Something went thump. Probably the Idiot, the thing he called Lump.

Frank decided to make some fried egg sandwiches for himself.

Finally, Gia called down, “I have a doctor's appointment in twenty minutes. Are you parked behind me?” Before Frank could answer, she added, “Do you need anything for your stomach?” And before Frank could answer that, she said, “It's sad that you don't feel good on your birthday. Take it easy today. I sent you an email. I will be home by noon.”

Frank said, “Kiyam,” which is Cree for, “It's okay.”

He was scrubbing burnt egg out of the frying pan when Gia breezed out of the house. He didn't see her go, didn't hear her say, “Smooches,” as she went.

...

 

This, from the Worldwide Encyclopaedia:

 

Pisimatum is divided into three regions, with Sawanokes, the political hub, in the south, the District of Ghost River, in the north, and Wawatawa comprising the detestable scrub-land between the two, though the people of that region colloquially refer to it as Wayapaya. Roughly the size of New Brunswick, Pisimatum, oval-shaped and sandwiched between friendly Manitoba, to the east, and Saskatchewan, land of living skies, to the left, was incorporated into the confederation of Canada in 1903, two years before its western neighbor.

Historically, the capital city of Sawanoko, in Sawanokes territory, was integral to the fur trade that built the country, existing on the rail-line that ultimately led through The Pas, Manitoba, toward the port of Churchill, on the shore of mighty Hudson Bay. Dollars flowed like water through the region right up until the late 1960s, when trade in animal skins essentially dried up [citation needed].

In modern times, Pisimatum's economy is driven by logging, mining, summer tourism, and the sale of billions of kilowatts of hydro-electricity, generated by the many dams along the Ghost River waterway.

The people of the District of Ghost River hail from Tromso, at the bottom, nearest cursed Wawatawa territory, to Discord and her seven hills at the top end of Highway 6, and from the townships of Meskanaw, Proud Lake and Diesel Hovel and the villages of Sprague and Courtney, in between.  And also Rebowken, thirty miles north of Discord, along a broken dirt road, in no-man's land, which for many years boasted a world-class health spa. 

...

 

Frank called his friend, Bob Scieszka. He didn't mention his birthday. He said he was staying home from work because he deserved the day off. Bob thought that was a fine idea. Bob said, “Any reason, or no reason, is exactly the right reason to not go to work.”

Bob had a broken leg once upon a time and, aside from covering for Frank and the other bank couriers, now and then, off the books, he didn't work at all anymore. The injury was four years old—a spiral fracture of the left femur, sustained while flipping his Lexus into a ditch—and doctors didn't think it would ever heal right. There were pins and bolts and bushings holding it all together. The better solution, the one looming on the horizon, was to pull it all out and install a synthetic thigh-bone from scratch, instead.

Days were a blur of pain, Bob claimed, so he abused morphine the way Frank used to abuse codeine. He was bearded and furry, clad in denim and sunglasses, like his whole life was a 1970s movie. And pretty fabulous, too. He had deeper closets than most other heterosexual men, a hundred pairs of shoes, and wore a V8 logo on a chain around his neck. It stood for the automotive engine, not the vegetable beverage, he was pretty certain.

He wrote books—crummy sci-fi that he ripped off from classic sources—and even had one published, by a small press outfit. The main thing was that he was a bona fide author. Even if he wasn't, his head would still be swollen from inflated ego because, as he was fond of pointing out, he was maternally related to the famed Seeger-Whealers, in Blumenthal county, somewhere down south in the good old USA. The Seeger-Whealers were up there with the Gettys, the Rockefellers, and the Lindberghs—they were quality, can-do people.

Bob said, “Happy birthday, Frank. Welcome to the hill. You're going over it.”

Frank protested not at all. He said, “Thank you.”

Bob had stories about drug deals gone wrong, missing children, Sasquatch, all the news that television beamed into his brain on a daily basis. He said, “Stay out of Mexico, pal. I know it's your thing, but let me assure you, it's all bad news this year. Hooligans and drug cartels. Bad mesh. A Canadian tourist had his face peeled off and the fuckers stitched it onto a football.”

Frank said, “The football story is years old, already.”

“Well, stay out of Mexico, anyway.”

“We aren't going. Money, you know. The recession.”

“Myself, I'm going to Rebowken.”

“Rebowken is over-hyped, Bob, and expensive.”

“They say the fire serpent is strong this year, his healing powers are at their peak. A couple days, a couple hours a day, soaking in the magick, can only be beneficial to me.”

“I don't know about that. Gia wants to go.”

“Yeah, the ladies love it.”

“I don't mind—it's just all that soothing spiritual claptrap that bugs me.”

“You're a cynic and a skeptic, man. I thought your lady was going to instill a modicum of spirit in you. You need it, let me tell you. Get closer to the Source. You know the Source I'm talking about. We all originate in the well-spring, and we all need to get back to it.”

“Gia's the one that usually likes to hear talk about the New Age stuff, Bob.”

“Are we going for beers sometime, you old prick, or what? Or more tasty lasagna, maybe?”

“Beer sounds good. The Juke. This weekend. Maybe today.”

“Today sounds good. I'm always thirsty, pal.”

Frank didn't keep many friends, and Bob Scieszka was number one among them, since childhood. It wasn't a sweet or clingy relationship—the two men were perfectly capable of going six months without speaking—but it was well-rooted. Strong. And Frank would never tell a soul, not Bob and not even Gia, that he liked to pretend Bob was his little brother. Bob was older than Frank by almost a year, but Frank thought of him as younger, in need of protection, and always had.

The secret sibling, quite unlike the unknown sister.

“Forty, man, geez,” Bob said, hanging up, “welcome to the clubhouse.”

...

 

His office was on the main floor of the house, looking north over Candle Avenue, in west Discord. He had a view of six ancient elm trees, and the playground at Poil-au-Con Elementary school. Kids rarely played there in the summer months, and Frank was able to leave the window open for the breeze because things were peaceful and quiet. In fall and spring the noise of three hundred hollering children sometimes drove Frank all the way to the edge of murder.

Now it was fully autumn again. Already. Summer had raced by. Back to the fucking noise. And every time the school buzzer went off, Frank came thisclose to staining his undergarments.

Somebody had painted the office shit-color, long before he came along. It was awfully unattractive— chunky plaster whorls smeared into the brown; some madman's idea of tasteful.

All around the office were piled boxes that he hadn't yet unpacked. Books, mostly, but also odd ends, tax papers, and all the crap from over the years that he couldn't bring himself to toss out. A cow-bell, a stuffed Homer Simpson wearing an apron and chef's hat, six roles of green tape, pencil crayons, a piggy-bank in the shape of a human skull, twenty AC adapters that didn't seem to partner up with any existing electronic devices. Crap like that, and lots of it. Items too big and too many to fit in his bullet-box of keepsakes. Very important garbage.

Gia sometimes ribbed him about those things—said he was only a half-decade away from becoming an honest-to-gooodness hoarder. “One of those creepy old men with a basement full of old washing machines and broken spindle chairs.”

He kept a journal at his desk.

Long ago, his therapist had instructed him to keep track of his dreams. He hadn't done the exercise in years—hadn't exactly gotten off to a banging start—but these days he seemed to be dreaming more, and remembering more than ever, and so he decided to pick up where he left off. He 'd made seven entries in the last eight days. Something about fingers, maybe. And rings.

Important shit.

Maybe he would someday figure himself out.

Or blow his brains all over the ceiling.

...

 

Word on the street was that the mill was re-opening.

Frank briefly considered walking away from the courier gig.

“But what if I hate it there?”

Sometimes, doing nothing at all was the safe play, in his opinion.

...

 

The weather forecast from the Wednesday edition of the Clarinet, still on the kitchen table, said that the coming weekend would be clear and crisp. No rain, lots of sun, but wear a sweater.

The story on page four was about CER's efforts in space, filling in their damned mud-hole, just a couple paragraphs, but the story on the front page was all about the damn statue in Hector Park.

The Clarinet could never say enough good about the goddamn Carolingians.

And there was a short blurb, down on page three, reminding readers that Reverend Marlon Sunday, the black minister from Park Avenue Church, was still missing—nine days now, running total—and his parishioners really wanted to have him back. There was also a bit of editorial speculation  that Reverend Sunday enjoyed prostitutes and poker more than the average minister, and had racked up a large debt with local motorcycle gangsters, and if anyone had any information on his whereabouts they should call the local police department hotline.

Frank wondered if Discord had added more people to the missing persons list, in the last twelve months, than he had fingers and toes. It sure seemed to be the case.

The province of Pisimatum, according to a recent TV newscast, had more criminal activity, and was more dangerous, statistically speaking, than the American state of New York. Frank didn't think that could be possible, but then he realized that statistics were based on per capita figures, and then it didn't seem so far-fetched. (When he lived in Meskanaw, his truck's spare tire was stolen no less than seven times!)

...

 

Pisimatum, it was generally agreed, issued prettier drivers licenses than either Manitoba or Saskatchewan. (Or New York state, even.) It also had a lower provincial tax (4% instead of 5 or 7%) and fewer Ukrainians.

...

 

The plan for the day was that there were no plans for the day.  Worst case scenario, Frank thought, barring some weird outburst from the Idiot, was that he might have to endure a visit from his bat-shit insane mother. The woman wasn't supposed to drive anymore, but that hadn't stopped her from making a few surprise visits from time to time.

She had dropped in for dinner back in July, unannounced, and that visit went quite badly.

There was some sort of crisis or catastrophe in Egypt. The Americans were making war, which tended to happen a lot because making war was something the Americans were good at. Dora had seen it all on the news and was certain that the world was finally ending.

They were having roast beef, which Frank cooked.

Gia tried to hold her tongue.

Dora said, “The end is close, just like I always told you, Frankie.”

Gia said, “The world ends every day for somebody, doesn't it?”

“Pardon me, Gia?”

“It's all subjective, Dora. The end is the end, don't you think? A hundred and fifty thousand people die every day. From that perspective, the world ends four and a half million times every month. What's the big deal?”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“Don't you?”

“I guess not, no.”

“When my parents died, their worlds ended.”

“Yes, but the world did not end.”

“Can we be entirely sure of that?”

“This is the end of times, Gia. It's plain.”

“Of course it is.”

As far as altercations between the two main women in his life went, that one had been pretty light. More typical was the exchange that took place after the wedding, when Frank and Gia announced they were taking off to Mexico.

The idea went over like cold rat salad with Dora.

Dora telephoned Gia, privately, and warned her about hombre de la bolsa—the Mexican bag-man who, she maintained, collected foreign women and children for molestation and murder. Dora told her, “If Frankie hasn't considered the hombre then he's being very irresponsible. Gia, daughter, I implore you not to go to Mexico.”

Gia replied, “You've been to Mexico many times, yourself, haven't you?”

“Four times, but not since the eighties. It's dreadful down there. Stay home!”

“Dora, because you are Frank's mother, I love you. But, if I'm speaking honestly, I should tell you that you're treading very close to a line in the sand.”

“If it's a spa treatment you're seeking, go to Rebowken. It's just up the north highway and they have the best mineral spring this side of Banff. I took Frankie there when he was very small. I dipped him in the water, like Achilles. He absolutely loved it.

“I don't particularly care for Rebowken. It's crowded and overpriced.”

“Gia, what are you saying? I'm trying to warn you—“

“This is not healthy, Dora. I don't know if you're just trying to get attention or if there's something terribly wrong with you, but you are being very strange about Mexico. It's a popular tourist destination and has been for over a hundred years. Statistically, we're in no more danger there than we would be walking down the streets of Montreal. You need to give it a rest. I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but that's where we've arrived at.”

“We're finally meeting the real Gia, are we?”

“Dora, please.”

“Your true colors are showing, darling girl.”

“Let's not talk about true colors, Dora. I think yours are bright as daylight.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“I'll talk to you when we get home, okay? I have to get packing.”

Frank made it to adulthood with very few childhood memories intact and unrepressed. He liked to pretend that his mother—crosseyed, overweight, compulsive hoarder of worthless crap—had been mostly normal. But spades are spades, and when Gia said things like, “Frank, she is all the way out of her freaking gourd,” he could hardly dispute it.

...

 

The Ghost River was home to 99,000 of Pisimatum's half-million people, fully half of whom lived in Sawanoko. Tromso had near 50,000, Discord 18,000 and Meskanaw, where Frank married Gia, had 8000. Diesel Hovel, Proud Lake and Rebowken were tied at about 5000 each. The shit-burgs of Courtney and Sprague had a thousand heads apiece, and there were another couple thousand scattered through the trees, like rabbits. Cottage owners and hillbillies. Back in the olden days, and even well into the Digital Age, it was good country to get lost in, and many tried.

The promoters of regional tourism liked to boast, “Pure wilderness,” which made its way onto a half-million t-shirts, and, later, “Come for the freshness, come for the fish, come for the fantasy,” which only got a single billboard because it sounded so ridiculous. What they were trying to say was that the area was renowned for its pristine, outdoorsy beauty. More than two dozen parks and campgrounds drummed up a half billion dollars worth of tourism annually, or so the bookkeepers claimed.

These eight municipalities, located in the northern half  of the province, along the rim of the Bingham Valley, might have been the very end of civilization. There was no reason for any sane person to venture north of Discord, unless they were off to soak in Rebowken's healing mineral waters for a weekend, and—for God's sake—no reason at all to go further than that. No road, either. If you wanted to hit the true frontier, if you were deranged enough, depressed enough, diseased enough, you had to do it by canoe or snowmobile. Rebowken was the terminus.

...

 

 

 

Piotr Franciszka Burczyk, Frank's father, came through a hard childhood of his own and married the first woman who smiled his way. That was the mother of Frank's unknown sister, the fragile Molly Agnes Drake. A hundred and five pounds, fully clothed. The two of them had almost four years together, years that would have been good if Francis wasn't such a drinker and Molly had access to psychological counselling for her depression.

In those days, people didn't always get the help they needed. Maybe they still don't.

Francis made a good living as a lineman for the Department of Power and Energy, based at the time out of Meskanaw, back when Meskanaw still held the promise that it might become something slightly more than a marshy slough, and the booze didn't get in the way of his performance in the slightest. Made him better at his job, actually—unafraid to don the spurs and zip up and down those hydro-poles like a jaguar. Those were the days!

They had a nice house in a good neighborhood and managed to keep a well-maintained vehicle on the road, and for the time and place they were considered to be living the dream. This was the 1960s. The Beatles hadn't yet entered their dirty phase. Men had yet to stand on the Moon.

The socialites living next door, Brits, the Coyles, decided to purchase a doberman pincer.

Frank Burczyk knew the story all too well. The life of his unknown sister was nothing but a short, bitter dream. He'd heard it enhanced and ludicrous versions of it dozens of times over the years, but had at eventually (and at long last) consulted official library and internet sources to piece it all together in mostly-factual form: When the Coyles' prize dog put an end to her beautiful little girl, opened her throat like a burst bladder, it was all the justification Molly Drake needed to finally take leave of the world, herself. Dad, Francis, returned home from a hard day's work to learn from RCMP officers that his precious daughter had bled to death before the medics could save her. “She never stood a chance, really. Passed quite quickly.” And while he endeavored to drown himself in a bottle of sour mash whiskey, that very night, his wife opened her own jugular vein, quite privately, in their bedroom, and passed into history.

Here, the man's life fell completely apart. He went a bit nuts and never truly recovered.  Totally lost his shit. After the funeral, newly widowed, newly heartbroken, he got piss-raving drunk, for the seventh time in five days, establishing a defining behavioral characteristic, then lit a match and burned his house all the way to the ground.

Frank hardly blamed him for that. Who wouldn't do the same?

He had no memory of it. That's what he told his son, all those years later, and Frank never doubted it. The old man said, “I can't tell you what did or didn't take place because I don't know, myself. And whatever your mother tells you isn't likely to be right, either. If you need to know, you're probably going to have to dig in the history books.” (By this time, the man's liver was ruined.)

Piotr Franciszka Burczyk received insurance monies without prejudice—the courts and the insurance company chalked his behavior up to temporary insanity, quite understandably—and he was able to start from scratch, elsewhere, once he got his all wires uncrossed. He even kept his position within the Department of Power and Energy, and was allowed to transfer within the division without loss of pay or seniority.

After a space of barely a year, having moved a few miles down the highway, to Discord, Francis met and married Huldora Rosemina Bjola. He still had good legs and she still had small breasts. Maybe she was beautiful and maybe he made a habit of telling her so. But she was out of her mind and he didn't notice it. Those years with Molly Drake had dulled him to recognizing mind disease.  His own life was a slow, dizzy waltz around an empty ballroom.

His parents came from Poland and hers came from Iceland, but these two grew up in the general vicinity of the Ghost River and never saw their ancestral lands—though they made it down to Latin America on several (almost) happy occasions. They met at a company party one February. He was on the fast track to becoming the regional supervisor—responsible for the Ghost River area's entire power supply, from Tromso all the way to Discord and over to Proud Lake. His first wife and his daughter were moldering, almost forgotten, in their graves. Before the sun came up on Valentine's Day Francis and Huldora had sparked the minisculus beginnings of a baby boy in her uterus. The resulting child, born just three and a half months after the hasty August wedding ceremony, would go through life as Frank Wayne Burczyk.

Secret brother to an unknown sister, or some such shit.

...

 

In a sense, he was doomed from the very start.

Huldora, usually called Dora, was obsessed by the notion that Francis's first wife and daughter weren't eighteen months dead by the time Frank was born. She got the idea that Francis must have offended the old gods, and maybe stoked the wrath of his dead wife's shadow in the meantime. Perhaps Frank came out of her womb with a curse already attached to him. That idea got into her head like a bad bug. Shortly, she decided that Doom, the personified Mr. D., was stalking her precious boy—she was able recognize it in the dark corners of his nursery, hanging like a black shawl on damnation's cool breeze. She told Francis repeatedly, “I hope he does much good with his life because his death will be stupendous,” and Francis nodded along. Dora's madness often found fertile ground in his whiskey- and gin-soaked brain, or so he led her to believe, only because it was easier to nod along than to disagree with the woman.

He went, “Aye, aye, aye,” and babbled some drunken nonsense that she chose to hear as, “Yes, my beautiful wife, I surely dreamed it, too. He's standing at the bottommost sinkhole in the universe, like Atlas, and with all of Hell's brimstone stacked high upon his back, skin blackening and crackling from the inferno, and just as the bones of his thighs are to burst outward from the unfathomable pressure—that's the very instant I wake.”

“Do you think he's meant for great things, like St. Paul before him?”

“All I can guess is heartache. A whole world of woe and hurt.”

“Oh, Francis, no—”

“I surely do regret the making of him.”

“I'd say it's a pity we can't go back and unfuck to maybe undo him.”

Francis always contended this conversation never took place, but he did allow that he stayed mostly drunk until Frank was done his high schooling, so he couldn't say with real certainty one way or the other. “But it sure doesn't sound like the way I usually talk, son. Does it?”

Unfuck to maybe undo him.

Dora routinely dreamed about the end of the world—of fire-breathing dragons and leviathan dogs scorching, eating, pissing and shitting all over creation.

This fears she  tried to pass on to her son.

“A whole world of woe and hurt.” That was her mantra.

Little Frank's toddling years were unfortunate. He scalded himself all over with hot soup just two days after learning how to climb upon kitchen appliances. He was scratched by a rogue cat on his first birthday, requiring seven sutures on his brow. At fifteen months he fell out of a moving car, but received only superficial injuries. Two weeks after that, the baby carriage fell apart at the axles and Frank's tiny fibula busted in two when he rolled under a moving hearse. And, at sixteen and a half months, when the last of his scaly, scabby, soup-blistered skin had all peeled away, revealing healthy pink tissue everywhere but beneath the plaster leg cast, baby Frank was stolen by a PCP-addled prostitute—a secret girlfriend of one of Discord's sleazier upper middle-class family men, a woman with ransom dollars on her mind but the wrong baby boy in her sights. When she realized her mistake, she left baby Frank on a bench beside a Kentucky Fried Chicken take-out joint and then went to get high. That woman, basically slave-property of the Corsairs motorcycle club, evading arrest by tiny miracles and bad police-work, was dead before the year ran out, killed by one thing or the other.

This was the 1970s, now, and PCP was as common as blood, even at the edge of civilization, in Discord, thanks mostly to the bikers. Later on, it would be meth.

Dora was loudly thanking the angels for bringing her little pudding-head home to her, safe and mostly sound, smelling vaguely of chicken grease, and Francis was maintaining a fine beer buzz that prevented him from thinking too deeply about anything.  It fell to Dr. Phillip Stewart, the Burczyk's family physician, to chart a new life plan for little Frankie Wayne.

“He's had himself a terrible pile of accidents and incidences, Mrs. Burczyk, wouldn't you agree with me?” the doctor said. “Bee stings and bumped noggins and bruised ribs. Falling out of moving vehicles. I'd almost come to think he's the unluckiest child in Discord. That, or, nineteen times out of ten, it's all come down to bad mothering.”

“Don't you say such a thing,” Dora gasped, indignant and ignorant in equal measures. “My son is fated from the very beginning, cursed by God for reasons that escape my pretty mind. His father knows it, too. He knows Doom waits like plague to infect Frank's lymphatic system. Knock him down like black death. It's like a wall of fear and bad omens. I've seen it reaching out for him. Seen it with my own eyes. He's been marked.”

“Marked by fate?”

“Marked by Doom. ”

“It may be the case, Mrs. Burczyk, or it may be that you need some classes in better parenting. And just so we don't have to have a scene here, in my office, that your peers and friends will get to chat about for months on end, I'm going to ask you to meet me right directly in the middle. A bit of give and take. You will hear my ideas and I, in turn, will hear yours.”

“Yes, doctor?”

“There are Tuesday evening classes at the YWCA, which you will attend for four weeks, and which you will come away from possessing the necessary tools and life skills to deal with most any little problem the world decides to throw Frank's way. I believe that the motherly skills you seem to lack can be instilled in you, even yet.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I won't say what I personally think either way, Mrs. Burczyk, but it can't hurt. ”

...

 

Gia would, at first, have a difficult time believing the tales of Frank's childhood.

She said, “How do you know these things? Did your father tell you?”

“My father is a drunk. He was oblivious to it all.”

“It's absurd—all of it. Completely fucked. I'm deeply troubled by it. I'm numb.”

“It was my Uncle Joey who mostly kept score of things.”

...

 

Dora's mind constantly juggled facts around so that they became not-facts. Error piled on lie piled upon misunderstanding, gossip and exaggeration. Truth was an ugly thing.

She told Frank that he had a little sister—a walleyed Mongoloid—who perished in a house fire caused by her heroin-addicted mother's misplaced cigarette. “The two of them died together, in the house's basement, while your father played with devil's dice. He was a terrible gambler, in those days, before I set him straight.” And not only was this version of the tale horribly errant, but Frank was just six years old when she told it to him—not even old enough to know what heroin was.

“Your unknown sister is a scalded ghoul, a child-vampire, still uncleansed by the flames of righteousness. And yes, Molly Drake could have been your mother if the course of this world went uncorrected. And I fear that you will carry the burden of her sins, passed to you in your father's milky sperm, for all of your days.”

Because of this, Frank pictured his dead sister as being charred black from head to toe. And when he entertained only-child fantasies of having an imaginary playmate, which happened occasionally until he was nine, the friend/sister was a lumbering, black skeletal creature that reeked of charcoal briquettes.

Horrible, horrible.

“Thank God you have me to love you, Frankie. Many mothers, these days, are sick inside. Ask me someday about the whore that stole you away and tried to kill you.”

...

 

Now he was 40. Who would have thought he'd make it?

Gia had said, more than once, that Frank was a goddamn miracle. She said, “Other people, from similar homes, tend to fly off the deep end. Cut their wrists, beat up their spouses, become Napoleon. That sort of thing. Just like when your dad lost his marbles and torched the house. Think about the rage and terror that coursed through him. Your mother did her damnedest to fuck with your mind, but she failed. Three cheers for you, Frank, baby. That woman should be in prison for how she raised you.”

Maybe Gia was the finest woman who ever lived.

Frank sat down at his computer and found an email from her. It was a birthday wish that had been sent at 7:00 in the morning, while he was at Hector Park. It said:

 

Darling, you should know by now that the universe is a living organism, that everything is connected, somehow, and that all the events that brought you to this place are waves that were set in motion long, long before you or I were born—free will be damned. Beams and particles and the space-time continuum, and all that quantum hippie crap. Believe it. I love you. Happy, happy day. Always remember 11-11.

 

He smiled.

The reference was to Emathios, to their first anniversary vacation in Mexico. Eleven-eleven was their suite number at the Nero, courtesy of Catrina Suns. It was twenty days of love and booze and sun and fucking.

He was bringing a tray of drinks. Beer and pina coldas. He remembered it in Technicolor—the trees, the sand, the breeze, the sounds, the weird concierge named Raful, all of it. It was midnight, or later, and the moon was enormous.

When she finally emerged from slumber in suite eleven-eleven, eighteen hours after going to sleep, and swaddled in sheets of impossible silk, she said, “I'm so glad you didn't listen to your mother. I'm so glad you quit your job. I'm so glad the travel agency fucked up. This place is perfect. It's better than perfect. I've had only beautiful dreams, all night long. I don't care that I can't see the ocean because I can smell the ocean, and I'm convinced that Heaven smells the same way.”

He crawled over her and put his face between her legs.

He said, “Heaven smells like your pussy, I think, yes.”

“I shaved it bare for you.”

“Mmm. Merry Christmas, baby. Glad to have you back.”

Christmas was long past.

The two of them fucked like dirty animals until ten-thirty the next morning.

Life was perfect.

Uh huh.

“Can you believe this place?”

“Uh uh.”

...

 

A little voice at the back of his mind said, “You should try to go into the bubbles.”

He had no idea what it meant.

...

 

He was dreaming of the dead girl before he started grade school.

She was a blackened cinder, always bearing gifts of cookies and cakes and sweets.

“You're going to scrape your knees bloody tomorrow,” she might tell him, or, “The red-haired boy, Michael, down the block,wants to beat you up.”

She batted .500, wrong as often as she was right, which was pretty stellar for a dream augury—except that many of her predictions could easily have been based on Frank's own subconscious observations. Mightn't he have already suspected that Michael, down the block, didn't like him very much, for example. Didn't he scrape his knees bloody twice every week?

His therapist eventually explained how the apparition was actually his mother's creation, but Frank had figured that out for himself, by then.

...

 

Thirty-some years passed before Huldora Rosemina Burczyk finally confessed to her son that the jagged red whorl on the back of his neck was not a birthmark, as he'd believed all his life, but a scar leftover from when she took him to Rebowken and held him under the surface of the water to strengthen his body-temple. She explained, “There was a bit of a mishap and I dropped you on the rocks, but you were fine, just fine, and completely recovered.”

This was Meskanaw, fifty miles outside of Discord. This was the eve of his wedding to Gia. He was 38 and Gia was 37 and Dora was long overdue for the grave.

Frank said, “Mom, please.”

She went on, “The doom. It was the doom, the darkness, and how it wanted you. You had the worst of luck, always falling and getting bit by one animal or another. It was a process. Ordeal by fire, you might say. I dipped you in the River Styx, like any mother would, in order to protect you from doom. To protect you from me, that's another way to see it.”

“I'm not listening, Mom.  Another woman waits for me.”

“I put you in the good water. That mark is your talisman.”

“Thank you, mother. Please go and sit with Dad. I'm getting married.”

...

 

Both Frank and Gia were born in Discord.

When Frank Burczyk, at the age of eighteen, decided it was time to move on with his life and away from home, he followed highway 351 southwest to Diesel Hovel, which was too dirty for his liking, and then to Meskanaw, which wasn't. Highway 351 followed most of Ghost River's twists and turns, whereas highway 6 went straight south to Proud Lake then turned into highway 352. Both highways, 351 and 352, went to Tromso, and from there into cursed Wawatawa.  Frank Burczyk did not go that far, and he was pleased that he didn't because he might not have bumped into Gia Marvello.

...

 

They had no idea how or when they would exit the world, but like true star-eyed lovers they hoped it would be together. They were taking things slow and easy. No one expected the bottom to drop out. No one ever does. They'd each been through hell with past lovers and were eager to do things differently, better, this time. Gia called it the learning curve. She said, “No matter how badly we want to do it, no matter how in love we think we are, we aren't allowed to live together for exactly one year.”

Frank agreed with that rule and added one of his own. “We have to wait six months before we discuss money, and nine months before we talk about our exes.” He thought that rule was a winner. He had only two secrets he wanted to keep, and one of them, he figured, he might be able to hide forever.

Gia wanted to say something about not sleeping together until the tenth or twelfth date, but it was already too late for that. They were still wet and sticky and Frank's ears were pleasantly stinging from  so much of Gia's dirty fuck-talk. They were cuddled up together on Frank's leather couch, listening to The Kinks on the hi-fi. They clinked their wine glasses together. Cabaret sauvignon, not that they knew anything at all about Cabaret sauvignon.

“Cheers.”

Life was fucking beautiful.

They crossed an ocean of time in order to arrive at this precise spot.

Their brains had decided that they liked one another in less than a tenth of a second. They were still in the express line at the store when it happened. Bang, zap, zing. Pure science.

They weren't immediately aware of it—this lightning-bolt infatuation—but they felt it in their sweat glands, their mouths, their noses, their genitals. This ease, this at-oneness.

“Hey lady, I remember you from high school.”

“Hey mister, I remember you from high school.”

...

 

Frank's ex-fiancee, Tracy Olafson, one of the dirty, goddamn Sprague Olafsons, was just getting out of jail, for shop-lifting and passing bad checks; and Gia's ex-husband, CW, or CCW, for Casey Curtis Wayne, was racking up a huge tab on meth. Things would only get worse for both of them.

In a fair world, neither Frank nor Gia should have been affected by their ex-spouses' various crimes and crises. But sometimes shit just goes balls-out, fuck-eyes wrong.

...

 

Gia had a tattoo above her left breast.

It was black ink, Roman letters, and it said:

 

THERTTHARTHRL

 

She said it was an ancient sigil—a charm against cancer and other maladies of the tits.

She said, “I sometimes think it casts a protective sphere around me.”

Frank thought everything about Gia was cool.

They dropped the ball on the moving-in rule, permanently cohabitating at ten and a half months instead of twelve. The wedding came six weeks after that. They weren't wasting time. They'd wasted enough of it.  Gia said they were in a state of limerence, which sounded to Frank like a made-up word, kind of like cabarnet sauvignon. . She assured him that it wasn't. She defined it as an intangible something which was supposedly even better than love. Much better.  Like love cranked up to ten. “It's almost like complete emotional obsession—a constant state of bliss.” Frank wasn't sure that he agreed with (or understood) the science behind limerence, but, as he assured his lover, he utterly related to the idea. “The feeling, the idea, that I can't live without you. I get that. I totally understand.”

They would be together until the end.

Almost to the very end.

True.

...

 

Frank tried to quit smoking.

He had Gia believing he'd given it up completely. Or, he imagined that he had her believing it. Tobacco-flavored kisses are unmistakable to a woman who doesn't smoke.

It was a big deal, from time to time.

Also—Frank was off of codeine. That was an even bigger deal. There was a time, a few years earlier, when he was eating codeine, Zoloft and Xanax like Smarties. Like Pez. Slightly self-destructive behavior, which was pretty typical of these depressed types. That kind of shit drove Gia out of her skin. He said it was because of his jaw and a hundred other miscellaneous aches, but Gia maintained that she hadn't just fallen off a turnip truck, and she put her foot down.

Gia, for her part, had Frank believing that she was allergic to certain fabrics.

In reality, she merely disliked the feel of them.

Phentex was a doozy.

Her mother once knit a queen-sized comforter entirely out of phentex. It was the worst thing Gia ever touched. Fibers of plastic woven into the material like slivers of steel wool.

Disgusting.

...

 

The biggest pickerel ever hauled out of the Ghost River system weighed nine pounds. That monster was caught by Joe Burczyk, also known as Joey Noodles (for his love of chicken soup), who was one of Frank's uncles.

That record stood for a very long time.

...

 

When Frank met with a therapist for the first time, after (finally) extricating himself from his poisoned relationship with Tracy, the succubus, he was told, “We are slaves to our thoughts, us human beings. We don't need to be depressed. Depression is caused by ugly thoughts. If we change our thoughts, we can change how we feel.”

And Frank believed this nonsense for almost two years, when Gia set him straight. “That guy should lose his job,” she said. “Ugly thoughts are the result of chemicals. Our minds are ruled by hormones and dopamine and synaptic miss-fires, all kinds of molecular horseshit. We can't change our thoughts until we can control the chemicals.”

On one level, Frank was relieved.

On another level, he worried more than ever.

The newscaster on TV said, “Critics are now claiming that CER's mud-hole in deep space is actually much larger than first reported, and that the company has misrepresented and down-played the potential blow-back.”

...

 

Gia had copied a verse into his dream journal.

Just for fun, an inside joke:

 

When we met in line my new life began.

My new love. You are everything to me.

Your eyes, your smile. Your KISSES.

I need you to need me. I love to be loved by you.

You pound my PUSSY so sweetly.

Pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy.

Fuck me, FUCK ME. Climb you like a tree.

Don't shut me out. Let me in!

I want to be your shining fuck-pumpkin—

 

It was goofy as hell, and childish, but that was the point of the gag.

It wasn't intended to be understood by anyone but the two of them.

(A souvenir from Emathios, originally composed on a napkin, in red and blue ink.)

...

 

Sometimes Gia sent romantic emails to Frank and signed them—

 

Your Shining Fuck-Pumpkin

 

And when Frank replied to those romantic emails he signed—

 

F.

...