Chapter Twelve: World of Shadow (The Frankeneid)

 

Chapter Twelve: World of Shadow (The Frankeneid)

 

 

 

“Acclinis falsis animus

meliora recusat.”

 

(The mind intent upon false appearances

refuses to admit better things.)

 

-Horace

 

In which Frank fucking kills himself.

 

Amen.

...

 

Now this guy—Rudy Rubayal—who isn't in the right space/time-frame and, quite frankly, doesn't even figure into this story, except for being a perfect, shining example of Berk's more typical customer demographic. (True testimonial: “This is good shit, Berk, my brother. Real good shit.”)

It was ten minutes past eight o'clock in the evening. Dark outside. Rudy was almost halfway through the average allotted human lifespan. His birthday was just nine days over the horizon. Two hundred and sixteen hours, give or take, until the crest of the steep, bad hill to senility and oblivion. He thought he might like to eat a red velvet cake, when the time came. He deserved that much. Meanwhile, he was piss-drunk and teary-eyed, completely alone for the August holiday weekend, clad in dirty green sweatpants, shirtless, friendless, freshly diagnosed with Crohn's disease, rank, ripe, reeking, bloody disgusting, and just forty-eight short seconds from blowing his brains out. 

Powdery white residue on the rosy rims of his nostrils—something of a pick-me-up. He had acquired a hell of a taste for that sort of thing, over the years. As everyone on his mother's side of the family liked to point out, “Apples don't fall far from the tree.” (More testimonial: “Shit, Berk, that shit's like, mmmm, tasty, my friend. Hot dog!”)

There was a honk and a small, tinny clatter. Out through the grease-streaked kitchen window an orange lamp blinked on and off, hypnotically—the turn signal of a neighborhood truck. Maybe it was Armando, across the street, in his brand stinking new GM four-by-four (that he paid too much for). If not Armando, then the old man next door, Preacher, who was forever backing into garbage cans.

“You assholes be quiet,” Rudy muttered to himself

He lifted the telephone receiver and dialled Nera's home digits, 1-(204)-752-9210, for the seventy and eleventh time. She wasn't within a hundred miles of her phone—hadn't been home all afternoon. If she had been there, if she had answered, which was by no means guaranteed in these days of telemarketers and stalkers, Rudy would have gnashed his browning teeth and told her, “You're a dirty fucking bitch,” or, “I hate you,” something to that effect, something good and clever, and then killed himself in her ear. Teach her a real lesson. But Nera was on her way to a splendid vacation in Varadero with her new beau, a young banking executive named Monty, and she wouldn't be back until the middle of the month.

“To leave a message, please press...”

He had already left a dozen messages. The newest one was, “You should have blown me when you had your chance, you fucking whore. You're going to regret it.”

Rudy had the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, pacing back and forth like the fevered maniac that he was. This was a rusty single-shot Winchester shotgun with a cracked stock and the barrel cut all the way down to nil. As a weapon it was almost worthless, except for close-range suicide, which is precisely what happened when Rudy hung up the phone. Truthfully, he hadn't fully committed to the idea of offing himself. Hadn't quite thought it all-the-way through, yet. He was still mulling it over, hovering in the forty to sixty percent range, the yellow zone, when that twelve-gauge shell exploded his skull like last year's papier mache.

“When Nera finally answers, I'm going to give her a real piece of my—”

There was no history there. No relationship of any kind. They'd been on a single date together, one miserable Friday, five weeks previous. Dinner and stilted conversation at the W, followed by a dark walk through the woodsy urban junk-lot called Hector Park.

Nera's cousin, Piek, had set them up. Piek knew Rudy from work, a few years back, when they made boxes together. He said Rudy was “a pretty cool dude” and promised “great times, for sure,” even though it turned out to be the worst date Nera had been on since her awkward teenage years, by a wide, wide margin. Dinner made her stomach cramp—belly of wild boar on a bed of undercooked lentils. (She should have known better.) After, Hector Park was full of vagrants and gang-bangers, blasting shitty metal music. Four redneck bikers picnicking with a bucket of fried chicken and a case of cheap sherry. An unkindness of ravens feasting at the corpse of an orange tabby. (Ah, the ambiance!) And then Rudy excused himself to duck behind an elm tree and have a go at his trusted crack-pipe. “Are you sure you don't want a hit?” When he re-emerged, he showed Nera his spotty, brown cock and practically begged her to suck it.

“Please, baby. Please, baby. Make me a happy man!”

Uh huh.

So, on August fifth, Nera went to Cuba and Rudy Rubayal went all the way to nowhere. Pop, splat—just like his no-account father, Mister Fancy Pants, Cody Rubayal, the apple tree, the sperm donor.  Poor Mama, the one-time Mrs. Rubayal, had urged young Rudy, “You don't want to grow up like Mister Fancy Pants. He is a pig and he will die alone. Choose a good life, instead.”

In his final, fleeting moment, Rudy Rubayal wished he'd listened.

No going back.

The last image his diseased mind processed, between the slamming of the handset and the Winchester's terrible boom,

And after his brain was destroyed, after that quick rush of hot wind tore through his cranium, the esse formerly known as Rudy caught sight of a tiny, flickering yellow ember drifting on an ocean of swirling blue-black ink.  He thought, briefly, that he was still physically standing in his rank hovel,  looking out the kitchen window. He couldn't feel his feet anymore. Everything felt like paste. Death is like that, at first. He thought, “If I'm no longer among the living, then this is probably just my own fading memory of Armando's fucking tail-light,” but he was pretty damn wrong about that.

This was the fuzzy space between history and eternity, maybe Purgatory, as some imagined it, or Twilight, or Todash, or whatnot, where time and dreams turn to sticky slush. Rudy had a fleeting notion that he might now be one with the Infinite, or the Force, or the Universal Subconscious Mind—couldn't put his finger on it. “Armando, stupid wop, you paid too much for that truck.”

He met his own ghost—himself as a teenager. The younger him said, “You can sense the heartbeat of Creation if you pay attention. It's got its own beat. Just like that. Do you get the gist of it, motherfucker?”

“I think I do,” said the older him.

“It's the strings. It's the way the wise god plucks the strings. Do you hear it?”

“I do. I see it and I hear it. It's beautiful.”

“You can't even begin to comprehend the possibilities, dude.”

Peace was just around the corner, Rudy could feel it. It was going blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. Utter peace, amazing grace, hallelujah, it was close.

Then something went flush and Rudy Rubayal ceased entirely.

Some wise god plucked the wrong string, perhaps. (Final testimonial: “Berk, you dog, your shit was so good I went and fucking killed myself. Damn!”)

Doesn't matter.

...

 

Codeman, the demon, equal parts talk and walk, had a tidy five grand in his pocket. Not bad for a moment's work—two bullets in a white broad's skull, twenty-five hundred bucks a pop. He would have done it for free, if the mood was right, but five grand was nothing to sneeze at. He loved the way Berk's rotted mind was working, these days. He was imagining enemies in his Wonder bread, courting friends with platinum-grade cocaine, throwing his hard-earned money at nothing in particular, and making the big bosses squirm, these days.

The ride wasn't going to last much longer.

Codeman thought, “Soon, they'll send me to finish you off, Berk.”

And then Berk called to make sure of things. He said, “You got that cunt good, did you, Jimmy? Did you give her two shots in the face, like I asked? Oh, she had it coming to her, didn't she? If CW hadn't plotted against me, she'd still be dancing at the prom, so I hope she arrives in Hell knowing it's that guy's fault she's dead—not mine. And not yours, either, Jimmy.”

Codeman said, “They were divorced, you know. I keep telling you. She wasn't responsible for any of that guys debts. You can tell it to yourself however you want but it doesn't make it true. You're just crazy and vengeful, my old friend. Your brain is fried like so much chicken. You're seeing sense where there's nothing but ghosts.”

“You wash your mouth out, Jimmy. She got what she earned.”

“Whatever, man. You paid for it, and that's the only thing that matters.”

“I paid for justice.”

“You make me laugh, Berk.”

He hung up the phone. Time was wasting. He had liquor and hookers to buy.

Berk, on his end of the line, was having trouble keeping his facts straight. Codeman had just killed CW's wife, or ex-wife, but what about CW himself? There was a page missing from his notebook, maybe, and from his rotted brain. The memory of CW being dead had started to fade, and now it seemed to Berk that the little fucker was out and about, running around Discord like an asshole.

He called Codeman back.

He said, “Get both of them. Get Casey and get his fucking wife, too.”

All Codeman could do was shake his head, silently.

...

 

Codeman had rode his Indian down to Pharsalus and considered killing the Burczyk woman on the cemetery green. Four lines of green-hued cocaine changed his mind and he followed the Burczyks halfway home—decided to do the deed on home turf. Middle of the day, middle of the neighborhood. No dicking around. Just like Coach Berkowitz wanted it. He'd said something about sending a message, but in a town run entirely by Corsairs—no competition for three hundred miles—he couldn't imagine who he was sending a message to. Some big-balled upstart, perhaps?

Whatever. Berk was just looney tunes.

The doomed woman's current husband, the guy behind the wheel of the truck, Codeman recognized him from a whole other lifetime. Back in school days. His name was Freddy or Franklin or some shit. It was like looking through a filter and seeing the past under a different sun. And then the name came together. The house belonged to the Burczyks. The guy was Frankie Burczyk. He'd had a fistfight with Frankie Burczyk in grade four, but he wouldn't allow his recollection of the event to remind him that he'd lost.

“I kicked your lily-white ass, boy,” Codeman told himself, lying.

“Anyway, I killed your fucking wife, asshole.”

...

 

Berk's abode was a red-brick townhouse on Stovel, where he lived alone. At sixteen hundred square feet, it was about two hundred percent bigger than he required. When he first bought the place—half up front, cash—he still had Romeo Cortes on his arm and Romeo went nuts for the hardwood floor.  The two of them had big ideas, big dreams. Most couples start out that way. And then everything went to shit and Berk ended up having to maintain a cold, oversized tomb. All by himself.

He liked things clean and uncluttered. The best way to achieve that was to own very little. There was a leather recliner and a stereo in the living room, a double mattress and a chest of drawers in the master bedroom, a small oak breakfast nook in the kitchen, and perhaps eleven prints framed and hanging on the walls—and almost nothing else. Food, clothes, a stack of books, and five bottles of fluids for cleaning, plus a broom and dustpan. The place was a chamber of echoes.

Someone had rearranged certain items. Two of the Audubon lithographs had been switched, and his prized wolf painting was missing. He couldn't recall where it had hung. He couldn't remember the name of the artist—famous Canadian wildlife painter, maybe the most famous.

Robert something. Robert or Richard.

Reed Richards?

...

 

Frank was home, full of drugs, filling himself with even more drugs. He had no intention of letting up. The doctor had confiscated a bottle of pharms, but Frank had always kept a small stash in his office. Just in case. Gia was gone and he didn't plan to live long enough for the funeral. Wasn't going to bury his own wife... not at Pharsalus, or on the Street of Tombs, or anywhere.

Leave it for the state to sort out.

He was alone, completely alone in the house. If he'd had a dachshund he might have felt better. The girl, Lump, the idiot, Kayla, whatever, was still among the missing, herself. But what could Frank do about such a thing? He poured himself a glass of blackberry wine—something Gia had left on the counter—and got to thinking about the lady-cop who'd come to see him in the hospital.

“In three days we have all these bodies,” she'd said.

Oh, there was more to it, but he'd tuned it all out.

All these bodies in three days.

So many fucking bodies, these days.

“Well, I'm going to kill myself, anyway.”

He supposed he was one of the dark things that Diana Luvana had spoken of—a non-human entity inhabiting a human vessel. He supposed that was why his thoughts were infected with melancholy. He was doomed, after all, just like his crazy mother had warned him.

He ingested so much morphine that the pores of his skin covering the upper half of his body filled up with weevils and other assorted insects. His tongue went numb and his intestines twined into a knotty lump. Then, when it seemed like he couldn't possibly swallow any more, he swallowed some more—some of this, some of that, a couple of those pink ones—washed it down with the last of the wine, and went instantly blind in his left eye.

Oh, he was parched.

And then the Idiot, also called Kayla Valens, came home.

She said, “Where's Auntie Gia?”

She stunk of tobacco and liquor and various other scents that Frank couldn't and didn't want to identify. Her skin was greasy, hair matted, and her neck was ruddy with welts. It seemed to Frank, in his declining state, that she was wearing a bright yellow bra and no top to cover it. He allowed that he might have been imagining it—imagining her.

“You real?' he mumbled. “I half figured you for dead.”

“Where's Auntie Gia? Is she mad at me?”

“Get away from me. Out of my sight.”

“Are you okay, Uncle Frank?”

“Your Auntie is gone. She's gone to be with Jezus.”

“With who?”

“Off with you, now. Fuck off. Fuck off, you stun-brained Idiot.”

The drugs and the cigarettes had turned his mouth into a dusty gravel quarry.

Lump went upstairs, to her room, moving slow and deliberate.

Frank poured himself a glass of ginger ale, fresh from the can, and watched, with his right eye, in glorious 2-D, as carbonation fizzed upward like a tornado of worlds. Each singular bubble, he realized, no bigger than the business end of a pin, might have been an entire universe. And the time it took for each bubble to rise from the bottom of the glass to the top, barely a second, might have seemed like a million years to the minisculus creatures that dwelt within. A million lifetimes, living and dying, living and dying, playing out their sad existence in less time than it takes to swallow.

This was the concept that Scieszka had tried to explain to him, quite unsuccessfully, many times over the years—not that Scieszka was an anything like an expert on quantum ideas, but he definitely claimed to be. He said, “Stop thinking in minutes and years. Time is goddamn relative. Think in terms of lifetimes instead of years. The blue bot-fly only lives for a couple of weeks, but in a relative sense, his lifetime is exactly equal to your seventy-five years. Everything is about scale. An electron travels around the nucleus of an atom in a millionth of a second, but if you happened to be small enough that you lived on the surface of that electron, then that millionth of a second is an entire year. Got it? Everything matters. Everything is tied together!”

Only now, at the bitter end, did Scieszka's words finally make sense to Frank.

Here, in this fresh, refreshing model, Frank finally saw how space related to time, in the continuum. If any given bubble contained a system of smaller worlds—myriad universes on a sub-atomic level—then the short burst of effervescence in Frank's kitchen was both eternal and irrelevant. The only time that mattered was the time within the bubble itself; the distance from glass-bottom to glass-top was fucking light-years.

And a voice told Frank, “Go into the bubbles, my brother.”

“Yes, yes,” Frank agreed. “Oh, fuck all this playing around.”

His legs were turning to Jell-O pudding, but they didn't slow him down in the least. His arms were like India rubber and his fingers like tiny clouds of vapor, yet he managed to summon the rudimentary motor skills required to get the job done. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, steady train upon the track. He took his .303 British hunting rifle into the bedroom, where up until very recently he  slept cuddled up to Gia, loaded the weapon, laid down, and blew a dollar-sized hole through his skull. The new lavender pillow-cases were ruined by chunks of blood and clots of brain, like thick soup, like tomato bisque, and Gia would have gone bat-shit with rage about it if she'd been alive to see it.

It felt, to Frank, like nothing more than a gust of hot wind.

Whoosh.

Nothing to it, at all.

And now that he was dead he couldn't comprehend what all the fuss had been about.

Just point and click, as they say.

...

 

Before the next day ended, before the lowly workers from the Samo funeral home had managed to bag Frank Burczyk's corpse—there were plenty of people putting guns in their mouths and business was literally BOOMing—the asteroid called Roman-581 tore into the planet like a Toyota through the tempered glass window of a dentist's office, and the WADC-6 lightning bomb hit the dentist's office again like an ocean liner—essentially—and six or seven billion human beings were more-or-less instantly immolated in a hypercaustic cyclone that scorched the entire surface of the planet. A quintillion metric tonnes of water boiled instantly into the vacuum of space and all life, including bacteria and microscopic algae, ceased to exist.

In the blinking of an unmoved god's blue eye, the Earth became the moon, and the solar system officially became the deadest neighborhood in the galaxy.

All that remained was blackened rock and the stink of brimstone.

...

 

 

It was, as they say, Adios amigos.

...

 

As of this morning, the cause of the Great Die-Off, which will begin on Thursday, will involve the following:

 

1. Worldwide drought,

2. Disease

3. Men From The Sky, with Light-Swords,

4. International warfare,

5. Axial shift,

6. [Unknown]

7. Roman-581 heavenly body, and

8. [Unknown]

 

Or any combination of the above.

 

...

 

The six or seven billion humans who perished at the end of days included the following persons:

 

Tracy Olafson, of the Sprague Olafsons;

Rinpoche, Corsairs motorcycle gang-member;

Kayla Valens, aka Lump, aka the Idiot;

Bob Scieszka;

Victoria Vulvetti, star of Asses to Anus, Naked Ass Humpers, and Society Anal;

Mona Mireault, Creighton Hotel staff;

Raful, Nero's concierge;

Jim Codeman, renegade Corsairs motorcycle gang-member;

Gary Bee, British citizen;

Mr. Sharky, co-ordinator of the VHC-Emathios project, inventor of WADC-6;

Mr. Berk,  Corsairs motorcycle gang-member, Caroling Club vice-treasurer;

Dr. Indy Bhugra;

Steckler, Piper and Giton, bank couriers;

Joey Noodles Burczyk, champion walleye fisherman; and,

Everyone who was not already deceased prior to the moment of impact.

...

 

For a fleeting moment, Frank Burczyk thought he could make out the form of a small girl in the darkness. She was but a shadow, hardly glimpsed, ghost on black.

“Into bubbles,” he thought he heard her say.

He thought that the hall of Akashic Records would reveal itself to him. He thought that all knowledge—the total summation of human experience since the dawn of known history—would flood his thoughts and fill his mind like divine awareness, instantaneous ecstasy, but it did not happen.

Instead, he felt his eyelids fluttering.

That, and the sound of sea-birds squawking, bickering amongst themselves, fighting each other for scraps and crumbs. And the scent of musk and salt, carried on the breeze.

Gia said, “It's all turtles.”

Frank said, “Pardon me?”

“The turtle. He's got the run of the place, just like last time. Remember?”

“The turtle?”

“Come with me. Let's swim.”

“Swim?”

“In Lake Neronia.”

Frank opened his eyes and rolled onto his side, and there she was...

“Sweetheart?”

There was a knock at the door, and a click, and it slowly opened.

The Nero's concierge, a tall rack of bones with a tiny moustache, Raful by name, entered the grand room with a tray of drinks. He said, “Will you have beer or wine, my friends, my good friends?”

Frank took two glasses of white and handed one to Gia, thanking Raful with a nod and saying, “It's quite a place you've got here. I couldn't have imagined such a place. Last time we came, everything tasted like turtle. It's so big, so extravagant. My wife thinks it's like a fairy-tale. She thinks everything tastes like turtle. We were supposed to be over in Nuevo Vallarta, but Catrina Suns screwed up, royally. This is much better. Like a dream. Beyond dreams, really.”

Gia added, “And everything tastes like turtle.”

“Yes,” Raful responded, “it's quite rare for Catrina Suns to make such an asinine blunder. They're one of our premiere agencies. Rest assured that they've taken care of everything on your behalf. You should want for nothing. Nothing.” Immediately, Frank noticed that Raful was speaking clear English, without a trace of the notorious Mexican accent. If anything, the man sounded British. Maybe Irish. It was ever so slight.

“We're very pleased,” said Gia, downing her wine and handing the empty glass back to Raful. “It seems like we could walk around and around for days and not see the whole place.”

“Are you talking about the whole region or just the hotel, ma'am?”

“Both, I think.”

“Yes, Puerto Vallarta offers many hidden treasures, and I think you'll find that the Nero has a few of its own. Our guests are never restless or bored. There's always something. Billiards or shuffleboard, or otagers, depending on what you prefer, so many activities, and always consider the therapeutic properties of the lake. No matter the time of day, it's surely a good time for a dip.”

“Yes, that sounds nice.”

“Lake Neronia is home to the Nayarit fire serpent.”

“Pardon me?”

“The Nayarit fire serpent—a string of lights, aurorae, that manifest in the water instead of in the heavens. They move and dance and shimmer as if alive. Easier to see at night, believe me, but still faintly present in the daylight. One of our finer attractions.”

“I'll surely consider that.”

“Thank you, ma'am. Amigos. Have a fine stay with us.”

“Buenos dias.”

“Indeed, yes. Umm, oui.”

Frank told Gia, “I swear to Christ I might have dreamed this.”

...

 

It was a single day at Emathios that stretched on for what felt like ages.

There was a point, toward evening, that Frank heard strange rumbling coming up through the ground. It was like machinery—like someone had started a giant engine. He noted this sound, and could feel it in his feet, even, but did not say anything about it.

“This might be the after world. We must be ghosts.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I saw you die. I think I saw myself die.”

“That sounds awful.”

...

 

“Did you see the fire serpent?” Gia asked.

“When? Which time?” said Frank.

“What did it look like?”

“I suppose it was like a dragon.”

“A dragon?”

“Plasma and flames. Lightning and fireworks.”

“Sounds pretty cool.”

“I'm not really sure what I saw. Or when.”

...

 

They frolicked and drank, danced in the sand, kissed under the light of the crazy moon. Sex and beer and margaritas. Intoxicated on each other. Half-drunk and consumed by love and desire. And if the clock said it was 5:30 in the morning before they finally crawled into bed to sleep, it was probably running slow.

Gia woke from a nightmare about 10:00 AM.

She was livid, breathing hard. She told it all to Frank while it was all still fresh in her head, “It's you and a group of people. Strangers. I don't know where I am. Bob Scieszka is there, maybe. It's him or someone who looks a lot like him. But there's no me, no Gia—like I'm a ghost or a for-shit memory.  Overwhelming sadness. You and a bunch of strangers in an empty apartment, arguing about.... God, or something. And it's dark, and there are noises, awful noises.”

Frank said, “Sweetie, it's just bad dreams,” even though it all sounded awfully familiar to him.

“Everyone's talking about an asteroid—or a wave of light.”

“Sshh. It's just stress rising up through your thoughts to be released.”

“It felt horrible. I felt real. Awfully real.”

“Come—let's shower and grab a bite to eat.”

They went for breakfast, down at the buffet.   Everything was turtle-this and turtle-that. Turtle bacon and turtle eggs and turtle juice. Gia was looking green around the gills.

Frank told her, “I think I know what's happening.”

“Yeah,” said Gia. “I drank too much free wine, last night.”

“No, I think we died, actually. I think we died and the world ended and we've come back in the froth, in the bubbles. Up out of the soup, so to speak.”

Gia gasped. “What makes you say such a thing?”

“I'm just kidding, Sweetie,” said Frank.

“You're not kidding. I can see it on your face.”

“It's just a notion I had. Everything is so beautiful, like Elysium.”

There's more to it. You're withholding something.”

“I'm not. I think everything is perfect.”

“Nobody's arguing perfect. Baby, I think I remember dying.”

Her t-shirt said, “I believe in the Rebowken fire serpent.”

Frank fell fully into his senses and realized, in a singular hot flash, that this was the very thing he'd been craving at the moment of his suicide: a chance to embrace Gia one more time. One last time. An opportunity to latch onto her and maybe never let go. But as he moved toward her, the ground began to rumble and dishes started shattering.

“Frank? What's happening?”

...

 

Frank sat up in a panic. He was cold, cold. Frozen to the bone.

...

 

[Lacunae]

...

 

And this: He caught sight of a tiny, flickering yellow ember drifting on an ocean of swirling blue-black ink. Rudy Rubayal had seen the same thing, had wondered about it in the same way. It looked like a turn signal in the night. Blink, blink, blink, blink.

Frank thought, “Who the fuck is Rudy Rubayal?”

The voice of the wise god told him, “He's nobody. Go back to sleep.”

...

 

After the end of the world, after an entire life, after marriage and Mexico and Mexico redux, after a series of lesser events and greater horrors, he found himself alone in a squalid shack, doors bolted shut, in the darkness, trying desperately not to hear the monsters howling in the distance. Or maybe the not-so distance.

And maybe these things couldn't properly be classed as monsters, anyhow—these plu-prectals, as they were now being called. They were more like spectres, like phantoms, like bad ideas—fever dreams—and left almost no physical impression. Just pieces of the wave.

But for things that did not properly exist, they were quite adept at making themselves known.

Lucid dreams with the heavy-metal lungs of Ronnie James Dio.

So much howling—

And these were not the rusty pipe-thread squeals of a rubber daikaiju, or the throaty droid-gurgles of George Lucas hacking phlegm into a didgeridoo, but the real monster noises—long, piercing shrieks full of pain and horror. The damned preying after the damned. Hell and terror roaring hot on the night wind.

It was all voodoo, he knew that much. All this horror was designed to make him curl up into a fetal ball and slice his own wrists, there was nothing else to it. These phantoms could do little more than agitate the senses—the battlefield existed only in the mind of the dreamer—and their ammunition consisted of tools to provoke panic, hysteria and depression.

Anything to coax a man into blowing his brains out.

(Again.)

Frank wondered who came up with the name. Bob Scieszka had said it came from a book, but Frank, all by himself, could no longer recall the title. And Bob was often full up with shit. Maybe plu-prectal was Latin, maybe Greek, maybe Chinese. Plu... prectal. It sounded made up, like kiddie talk. He hoped to run into someone who might explain it all. A balding nerd in an underground bunker, or a cave, somewhere, who just happened to have all the answers. The answers to everything. The guy who could say, “They're called that because X,” and, “They come from a place called Y,” and, “All they really want from us is Z.” Yes, it would be most helpful to meet the man with those answers.

All they really want from us is Z.

Something (just a rickety old ladder) scraped against the outside wall of the shack and Frank yelped. He held a Bible close to his chest the way an old-time gunslinger might have cradled his trusty Walker Colt. This was a Bible he'd found on the shack's gravel floor, half-mildewed and damp with dirty rainwater. He didn't believe one word of the so-called Good Book, but it made for a fine comfort blanket. Like a bulletproof vest or an iron shield.

Don't care how scared and stupid I look.

Gia liked books. Gia even liked the Bible. But mostly, Gia liked books.

That was enough.

Frank felt cheated. For both of their sakes, Gia's and his own, he felt like the universe had sold them short. Pulled the plug. Bailed.

Fucked us over.

There was no one who felt good about the end, of course. Feeling cheated was particularly selfish—ridiculous—possibly insane. Who didn't get fucked over? Everyone got the same shaft. The cocksuckers at the CER—the makers of the mud-hole, the shakers of the asteroid belt, the morons who just had to screw with things—those guys punched out the same time-card. Dead as hell.

Every. Living. Thing.

Goodnight, ladies.

...

 

At the end, the newscasters, the assholes on TV who thought they still mattered to society, to their viewers, were referring to the light-phantoms as plu-prectals.

Frank didn't know why.

Some of the neighborhood kids, on TV, called them flu-pickles.

Bob Scieszka, best man at his wedding, the drunk, told him, “It's from A Lightship of Antwerp. Did you read that? I didn't get past the fifth chapter, myself, but I hear the rest is pretty good. Someone was going to make it into a film.”

Frank said, “What?”

“A Lightship of Antwerp. It's a book. A novel.”

“What about it?”

“That's where plu-prectals come from. It's sci-fantasy.”

“No, Bob—it's real. Look outside.”

“I mean, just the name.”

“I see.”

“My own novel borrowed liberally from Lightship, I must admit.”

“Your novel..?”

“A lot of it is M-Theory, to tell the truth. Super-strings and such.”

“You wrote a novel?”

“I did, yes. Almost finished it before all this happened.”

“I think I remember it.”

“I've never showed anyone, Frank.”

“Yes, but I have a memory of something.”

...

 

Flu-pickles.

...

 

Later, alone in the shack, he wondered if he could still call himself a man.

Too many things had happened.

Too many things were still happening.

Bombs—he hoped to hear bombs falling, but there were none.

How do you blow up a ghost? It was just like that old groaner about how to get to Nashville. The answer was the same, and he slapped his thigh as he mouthed the words: Practice, man, practice.

Next came the crash and crackle of a lightning wave—

Chakka-doom!

That was worse, far worse than the hell-calls of the plu-prectals.

Chakka, chakka-doom!

Somebody, somewhere, Frank was certain, had just bought the farm. He hoped it wasn't the hypothetical nerd in the bunker, the guy with the answers, because if it was—god forbid—then he would never get the answers he so longed for.

He had friends waiting for him, about half a mile distant. Not real friends, not true ones—more like acquaintances. Companions. Comrades, united against the Apocalypse. There were three left: Dr. Mark Land, Jimmy Pigdick, and Nigel Ford. The fourth, Gary Bee, was dead—deader than shit. And Bob Scieszka, pal since high school, was now missing in action.

M.I.A., they say.

Nigel Ford had said that the army was launching Operation: Alphabet Soup. “They think we're going to turn into frickin' zombies, so they plan to roll through the towns and murder anything with a heartbeat. We're fast approaching the finish line, folks.”

Gary Bee had turned to Frank and said, “Remember I told you about that?”

Frank replied, “Not in this lifetime, you didn't.”

Every time Frank closed his eyes he saw Gary Bee die again.

Gary Bee. Barry Gee.

Gary Bee, arms and legs akimbo, tongue wagging out to the side—so zany and Don Martinesque—flying wild, karate-style, tracing the form of a stickman running on air, teeth bared like someone touched a cattle prod to the tip of his dink—

Zap.

His body hit the ground in two equal-sized pieces, charred and dead.

Stupid fucker.

Everybody knew, “If the wave touches you....”

He didn't feel sympathy for Gary Bee—no chance of that. The man was a beast, a criminal. What Frank felt instead was remorse for the whole, miserable human condition. The species, itself.

The race, as some folks called it.

...

 

WADC-6.

The wave.

Somebody's idea of a defence system.

State of the art, they called it.

...

 

The letters B-B-B (for Beta Beta Blockade) had been spray-painted around the inside of the shack, one giant B on each of three walls, and some of that glowing blue paint had dribbled across the gravel floor and all over a mildewed Bible. Frank picked it up.

Inside the Good Book's front cover was a yellow, flower-rimmed decal that read:

This Bible has been presented to Taylor Scott on the occasion of his Baptism.

Under that was a date.

“Such a terribly long time ago.”

Frank didn't know Taylor Scott from John Doe, but that was hardly the point—

Outside, the monsters continued to scream, louder and closer than before.

Too many problems.

Too many things going on at once.

There was a chunk of sheet lightning bouncing around the planet. People called it the wave. It was presumed to be man-made—humankind's last-ditch effort against the spectres. A bunch of assholes in lab coats dreamed it up, and it took only one of them to press the button that would send it forever ricocheting around the globe, laying waste to everything in its path, man and manifestation alike.

Gary Bee, in two equal-sized pieces, knew exactly what it felt like to touch the wave.

Frank figured it was like being electrocuted. (It wasn't.)

No point in dwelling on the present state of affairs.

With nowhere else to go, nowhere better to be, Frank Burczyk allowed himself to drift off through those blue fields of recollection. A life he couldn't possibly have lived. Holding hands with Gia Marvello. Swimming with the Nayarit fire serpent. Turning forty. Eating lasagna at The Grotto.

There was a sequence of numbers, 0844 800 3744, written in felt pen in the back of the Bible. It struck Frank as hauntingly familiar. A phone number, perhaps.

...

 

 

At the end, Gary Bee and Jimmy Pigdick raped an Asian girl. Frank pegged her for Chinese. She called her noodles nunu. She said, “You want some nunu?” She was incredibly nice. Five complete strangers forced their way into her home and she retaliated by offering to share her food.

Nunu? You want some nunu? Yum.

Dr. Mark Land and Nigel Ford went downstairs to try and get the diesel generator running, and Frank went to the upstairs washroom to look for medical supplies. Tylenol #3, with codeine, preferably. He didn't say so out loud. He said he needed to move his bowels. Dr. Land told him to look for antibiotics, especially.

Jimmy Pigdick chimed in with, “How does he know what antibiotics are? You're the doctor. Maybe you should switch places. Maybe you go upstairs and he should work on the generator.” He had a way of swinging his gun around while he talked, all black and gangster-like. “I don't know why you want to do things backward, like that.”

And before the doctor could answer, Frank said, “Because he's familiar with diesel generators. And more than that, I'm the one who has to take a dump.”

They all had guns. It wouldn't have taken much to initiate a shoot-out.

Wild fucking west.

So Frank went up, Mark and Nigel went down, and Gary and Jimmy remained on the main floor and had their way with the Asian girl who liked nunu. They were supposed to be asking questions, putting her at ease, finding out what she knew. Not fucking her.

Terrible world.

Not even worth saving.

...

 

When the wave came it sounded like a million watts of static pouring through a Marshall stack. A person could hear it from fifty miles away. That wasn't too much help because the cursed thing travelled about a hundred miles a minute, but thirty seconds was better than no warning at all. It ripped through Discord like a dam bursting open and loosing a billion gallons of hot lava.

There was time to look, to assess, and then make the snap decision to either run, duck, jump, or stand perfectly still. The wave came like a blip in an old arcade video game—a rectangle of white, bouncing like a ghost, in constant motion. It was the size of half a city block, a killer flag riding on the wind of chance.

It had been all over the planet, many times over now, and it just kept sailing.

Somebody had to know something about it.

Coming out of the building, Gary Bee pretty much ran into the fucking thing.

Dr. Land hollered, “Shit! Fuck! Scoot, man, scoot!”

And it was too little, too late.

Frank knew it was all deliberate nonsense. If Gary Bee hadn't been listening to Dr. Land he might have lived. It was the shouting that tripped him up. Scoot? He didn't know whether to dance right or left, or to drop flat, and so he danced right into his death. Frank silently, secretly applauded Dr. Land for helping Fate along, like that.

Fucker had it coming.

Gary Bee, R.I.H.

...

 

So, one rapist was dead and the wave bounced on, touching the clouds, then the grass, then the clouds again, mindlessly prowling for its next victim.

Pigdick waited til it was six miles gone, the shouted, “Did you fucking see that?”

Aye, everyone saw it, you diseased cocksucker.

....

 

At the end, this new end, another end, Frank Burczyk found himself alone in a squalid shack. It was easier to be here than in the presence of cursed Jimmy Pigdick. Easier to rough it alone in the wet, darkness than to come up with valid reasons for accompanying a murdering rapist. Dr. Mark Land had told him, “Tolerate everything for the time being. It doesn't matter. We are stronger in numbers. We need him. When this is done with, I'll kill him myself, I promise.” But somehow that wasn't enough.

Nothing was enough, in any measure, in any situation, any more.

Frank had the impression that, perhaps, none of it carried any weight whatsoever.

He couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Who was this Dr. Land, anyway?

Was he a real person, or merely a fabrication?

Another person: Bill Finger. Older gentleman. Kind eyes, friendly smile. Frank met him in the hotel lobby. They were ducking out of the way of the WADC-6.

Frank said, “Ain't this world your worst freaking nightmare?”

Bill Finger replied, “It is, indeed. And exactly that, too.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, I don't think it's terribly real, my friend.”

“Feels pretty real to me.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Further along the string, I suspect.”

...

 

Frank had memories that he couldn't reconcile. He recalled very acutely the face of the filthy Hun who murdered his wife in broad daylight. He remembered Dr. Indy Bhugra, and taking drugs, and taking drugs, and taking drugs, and drinking blackberry wine, and blowing his own brains out. He remembered seeing Lump come home—the dumb bitch was alive, after all. He remembered waking up in Emathios. He remembered wanting to hold Gia again.

He had the shakes and his guts were upside down—withdrawal symptoms—and that struck him as a hunded and eighty degrees wrong because he was certain he'd found codeine in the Chinese girl's medicine chest.

The shack's rickety door blew open and a dead man stepped inside. It was Gary Bee—Mr. Deus ex Machina, himself—all black and burnt, his torso balanced precariously on his legs.

This had to be a dream. No doubt about it.

A dream within a dream. Within a dream.

Frank gasped, “I saw you die. I saw the wave hit you.”

Gary said, “I called you from Manchester. You weren't listening to me. I told you we could find a loophole. None of this is permanent. Life is a series of fucking layers, friend, and you're stuck in a nightmare. This is a pure-fluid hell and you are entirely within it.”

“Motherfucker I saw you die. I know what you did to the Asian girl! We met with Dr. Mark Land and Pigdick, and the others, at the apartment, and you ran outside. I saw it.”

“Sorry, pal. That hasn't happened yet.”

“What do you mean, it hasn't happened yet?”

“Your life—you have things out of order. Front to back, left to right, outside-in.”

“I'm out of sorts, I fear. The past feels like the future, a little.”

“You're caught up in the fragments. Let it go.”

“I think I killed myself with a rifle.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I'm stuck here because I committed suicide. Is that right?”

“That's a terribly Christian concept, I'd say. Actually, you're stuck here because the WADC-6 has created a gaping tear in the 42-world super-matrix. It's like the Mariana Trench compared to that mud-hole in space. I told you, the wave would begin in your own backyard. It's simple science. Simple string-science, that is. You're entirely in the bubbles, is what's going on. You've got to get out of the soup.”

Gary sat down on an old wooden cable spool. He lit a cigarette from a dirty, torn pack and gave one to Frank, too. The lightning and the booming, outside, didn't relent in the slightest.

“I don't follow what you're saying. Is all this not real?” Frank asked.

“It's all real—that's the problem.” Gary said. “It feels like a dream because your amygdala has overloaded on fear and panic.”

“You figure?”

“You're so shit-scared, Frank, that your brain wouldn't let you think this was real for a half-billion dollars in Bingo bucks and a chance to fuck Olivia Newton-John in her prime. No way, no how. Your brain doesn't want to acknowledge that you are existing at the fulcrum of stacked universes. Past has collided with future, and fact has intersected fancy. Does that make more sense?”

“Am I dead?”

“I don't want to give you the wrong impression and tell you this is a dream, so let me tell it to you another way: This is a dream. Take that for what it's worth. There are concepts that the English language has no words for. Things that can't even be properly described.”

“You're dead, Gary. I saw you die.”

“Listen closely: You are experiencing me as a broadcast, a transmission of pure thought—a ghost. I'm not here and neither are you. This place is shit—it's almost unreal.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“The Roman-581 asteroid has destroyed seven versions of the Earth, and the WADC-6 wave has ruined another four, of which this current Earth is one. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Eleven from forty-two is thirty-one. More fucking math. Et cetera, et cetera. The bottom five Earths are uninhabitable, and seven are mirrors, so that leaves maybe ten worlds worth returning to.”

“Ten worlds?”

“Maybe ten. Give or take.”

“And you think it's worth trying to go home?”

“Somebody thinks the original mud-hole may have worked.”

“Who?”

“I don't know.”

“That makes me pretty optimistic.”

“Why don't you get the fuck out of here, Frank? Please. And I'll do the same. I'll go back to Manchester and you go back to Discord and we'll forget this ugly fucking nightmare forever.”

...

 

“Did you rape that girl, Gary?”

“I told you, I'm not even here.”

“But did you rape the Asian girl?”

“I think you've got too many of your worlds overlapping, cowboy.”

“No, but, yes, I mean—answer the question.”

“I didn't rape the Asian girl, Frank. That's a whole other narrative.”

“What do you mean, another narrative?”

“I wonder whose faces are being pasted where, in your brain.”

“I know what I saw.”

“Yeah, you know what you think you dreamed you saw.”

...

 

 Frank asked, “How do I get out of here, then?”

“The same way you got in,” said Gary Bee, the dead man from Britain or Nebraska. “Through the door in the top of your head. Everybody has one. It's up through the attic behind your eyes. It's where the Jews wear their yarmulkes. You've got a portal there—the place where the soul goes in and out. Most people stay away from that spot while they're awake, while they're alive, but the Buddhas are quite familiar with it. Get zen and find your way again. I swear, you can't end up in a worse place than this one.”

“How will I know where to go, once I'm out of my own brain?”

“Just feel your way around.”

“I wouldn't know where to begin—”

“You've already done it, Frank. Ride the bubbles, man.”

“I still don't get it.”

Gary opened the door and pointed south, across the strobe-lit night, toward where the Street of Tombs should have been. He said, “Try that place,” and then tossed Frank the grubby pack of cigarettes and Frank was too clumsy, too ill, to catch them. They hit the ground against the wall, beneath a large blue B, not far from where the Bible had been laying, and when he reached down to scoop them up he caught sight of a crumpled, brown paper bag, laying in the corner.

“Are those mine?” Frank asked, looking up, only to see that Gary Bee was gone.

He tucked the smokes into his vest pocket and rolled open the paper bag. The pill bottles inside, five of them, weren't prescribed to the Chinese girl, after all (since he technically hadn't met her, or tried her nunu yet), but belonged to himself. The dates on the labels were the same—all the bottles were eight years out of date. They belonged to Frank Burczyk of 29 Fiddler's Lane, in Meskanaw.

“This isn't possible.”

Possible or not, he began swallowing pills by the handful, washing them down with warm, stale cola from a dirty bottle. White ones, pink ones, red ones, blue ones.

“Sweetness, sweetness, good god, thank you.”

He noticed, for the first time, that the top two segments of his left pinkie finger were missing. It wasn't a recent injury. The skin was smooth and the wound was completely healed. It had been lost years ago, from the look of things. He wondered what other things were different about his body. It felt the same, mostly, but maybe a couple sizes too small, like he was squeezed into a pair of pants from way back when. He still ached in most of the same places, but he ached differently.

This was a different body, after all.

He was himself, his core self, but the vessel was slightly altered.

“Pretty fucking strange.”

He needed rest, precious rest. Just a short power-nap, feet up, arms crossed. He was asleep within five minutes, practically comatose, while hell raged outside and all around him, and by all logic he shouldn't have woke up again.

...

 

He tumbled headlong into the realm of dreams again.

Now everything was black and soot and smoke.

Frank was putting a sewing needle through the flesh of the knuckle above his wedding ring. He had lost weight and his finger was almost two sizes too small. He was readying to lower himself into unfathomable, swirling darkness, to save the woman he loved, and he was certain he would have to battle goblins and demons and flu-pickles along the way, and he simply wouldn't be able to bear the thought of losing this ring. No margin for error.

His knuckle would swell up very shortly after the piercing and everything would be just fine. The needle was coated in filth and dirt and the nastiest of bacteria, and the ballooning infection was marvellous. It didn't hurt him, really. Not much did anymore.

He'd had far worse than a pierced knuckle. Between here and there and back again, a knuckle was nothing at all. The sound that rose from the abyss was much worse for him, infinitely worse. He believed it was the sound of Gia's torment, like hell and police sirens and broken glass. Like his own heart breaking.

Blood rushed to the small, dirty wound and the tissue became engorged. Frank made a fist and he knew that the tungsten band wasn't going anywhere. It was tight like a mayfly's shit orifice and no power under heaven would remove it.

Before him was a vortex of growling psychedilica—a kaleidoscope of nightmares. The smell that bellowed forth was of sulphur and charred skin.

His lungs burned.

“She's not down there,” he heard Gary Bee tell him.

“Then where is she?” asked Frank.

“You don't even know what you're looking into.”

“Where is she?”

“You have a broken idea about things.”

“Tell me where I'll find her.”

“I will tell you just once more. Listen closely, this time.”

...

 

Next came the warm, familiar rush of opioids hitting the brain.

Sweet rain pattering down on a vernal pool.

 

Ploop, ploop, ploop

 

“Yes, yes, I'm coming, my dearest.”

He pulled himself to his feet and set out into the miserable darkness.

...