Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  The other man’s clothing was similar but whiter, his hair short and face clean-shaven. He sat with his legs splayed out and his back propped against a tree trunk. In his hand was the gun with which he had killed the older man. A makeshift spear, formed from a long straight branch with a sharpened tip, had been thrust into the front of his neck, a good foot of it having emerged out the back. Blood had saturated the front of his shirt and pooled in his lap. The young man’s face was almost gray, almost lifeless, and yet he recognized that face. Though he had no mirror in which to see himself, and had never returned to his own capsule where he might find reflective surfaces, he knew that this man possessed the same face he did.

  Though his eyes were going glassy, the young man became aware of him and started to raise his pistol from the ground. He pointed his own gun, which he had not fired up until now, and pulled the trigger once. There was a loud cracking report that rolled off between the trees in all directions. With a bullet through its forehead and the back of its skull gaping, the young man’s head slumped heavily.

  He went over to the older man and stood over him. Despite the long graying hair and wild beard, and the wrinkles and ingrained grime, he saw that this man possessed his face as well.

  He figured the two men had independently thought to raid or acquire his camp. The old man had actually already stolen all his stored mushrooms and placed them into a crude sack made from parachute material. The only other thing of value belonging to the old man was the spear, and this he tugged out of the young man’s body. The young man had more to offer, though. He wore a backpack full of supplies, the tube of food paste only half empty. And now he had two pistols.

  He made the decision to eat only the young man.

  He had no way of preserving meat, and the young man was, well, younger and cleaner, his flesh more full. So he dragged the old man far enough away into the woods that the decomposition shouldn’t bother him, and awkwardly dug a shallow grave with the spear and his hands. In the process he exposed a bounty of worms.

  He kept the young man’s clothes as a spare set, then hung the nude body upside-down from a tree branch somewhat distant from his camp, using a section of parachute line to bind the ankles. Then he cut the man’s already damaged throat with his multi-tool’s blade to drain out as much blood as he could. He decided not to save and drink the blood.

  When he felt he had emptied a sufficient amount of blood, he cut the body down and sliced thick steaks from the thighs and buttocks. Having taken all he felt he could eat before the meat started to go bad, he dragged the body off into the woods to bury it beside the body of the older version of themselves.

  Now he knew why the other men who haunted these endless autumnal woods feared and avoided each other.

  Eating the cooked and delicious meat that evening in front of his snapping campfire, he didn’t feel bad for the dead man at all. Had it been someone else he believed he would have, but he had only harmed himself.

  * * *

  He had never seen one of the titan pyramid creatures set down in the field again, but he sometimes ventured there to have a view of the sky, and he would see one or more of them gliding past, piercing slowly through the clouds. At such a distance their vibrations were bearable. It was his feeling that, either intentionally or accidentally, these creatures were responsible for disrupting time, but of course he knew too little to prove that.

  Then one day, when his hair and beard had grown long, during a visit to the great clearing he saw more than just a pair of distant black pyramids drifting high above.

  As he was gazing up and shielding his eyes against a sun that he now knew to be an alien star, watching the pyramids and feeling their tuning fork murmur inside his heart, the sky flickered as if he had blinked several times, but he hadn’t. For just a moment, he was looking up into a night sky, infinitely black and strewn with countless stars glittering like pulverized glass. Then it was day again, but the blue sky was now full of new objects that seemed to have taken the place of the many stars.

  They were bright white space capsules, hanging from the wide bells of blue parachutes and descending gracefully, none of them having burned in the atmosphere. He had no idea how many. From where he stood he would guess scores of them. Maybe a hundred. Maybe more, out of his range of seeing.

  All of them, he had no doubt, stenciled with the letters that spelled UCSS FETCH.

  The sight made him afraid. If two men had discovered his camp at the same time, others would no doubt be coming soon enough. He would need a more secure shelter, after all, but where could he be truly safe from himself?

  He supposed he shouldn’t be afraid… afraid of himself. If he was killed, he would still live on.

  There would come even more capsules after these—he knew it.

  More and more. Always falling.

  Ron Drummond

  BY the time I was twenty, I’d completely forgotten the first time I died. I might never have remembered, but then, I was bound to die again eventually.

  The second time, I died in a car crash.

  People say, “At least he went quickly.” Everyone believes this to be true of plane crashes too. Or colliding trains. If you gotta go, at least it’s quick.

  Actually, it’s not quick. Anyone who’s survived a car crash knows how time telescopes, how the inevitability of impact stretches taut and holds you immobile in its grip, pins you like a rare bug to cork. A crash you don’t survive? Same thing.

  It lasts a shy eternity. Which is to say, long, long after you’ve grown certain it will never end, these headlong endless articulations of skewered and bursting flesh, of bones splintering, the body’s very wholeness shattering into itself and everywhich too—long after all that you are and might ever become is the certainty of attention’s skewering, it ends.

  The trouble is, most people think they’ll be asleep when they die; if given the choice, most people would prefer to die “peacefully” in their sleep. Well, even when you die in your sleep, you’re wide awake. I know. I’ve died there, too.

  Anywhere you take it, it never ever ever ends. And then it does.

  * * *

  The next moment of consciousness arrived without interruption.

  I was walking down the street. The sheerest instant ago, I’d been an eternal dweller in the outer wastelands of excruciation. Now, suddenly, I was alive again and whole, walking down the street, the ghosts of reverberant agony crashing like a tidal wave across my nerve endings. A scream inflated my lungs only to rip itself out of me.

  Sidewalk, street, buildings, pedestrians, cars, sunlight—the world resolved and stabilized only long enough to spin out again. It was like having the carpet ripped out from under my feet. The sidewalk leaned into me.

  New pain, real again, blew away the ghosts. I swear it was like being drenched with cold water, for all that the pain was hot, hard, raw—it was that refreshing, that sweet. Scraping up hip, arm, cheek, splitting my lip open and choking on salt blood, bit tongue a flash-fire of pain—compared to bursting open on a steering column, taking a hard fall on concrete was like diving into a downy pillow.

  But then every nerve ending in my body began firing like crazy, and I danced spastic all over that sidewalk—no small thing considering I was laid out. It happens every time, and makes me wonder if epileptics have a line open to other selves dying in other timestreams.

  The tremors subsided, and through the ringing in my head I heard people calling out, footsteps running close, backing off. “I think he’s having a seizure.” “Call an ambulance, will you?” “No, wait.” “Jesus, man, are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes. Everything was bleary, spinning. Someone knelt close, and a moment later a wet cloth was pressed across my forehead. I was panting like a dog, trying to push myself up, and just at the moment it occurred to me I might have to throw up, I was already spewing my guts out.

  “Ah, fuck.” Whoever had come to help me was backing off quick.

  “Gross, ah, jeez, that’s g
ross.” A pubescent girl’s voice. It almost made me laugh, even as I reached the dry heaves.

  Ah: much better.

  I took deep, slow breaths, my vision clearing through a film of tears. I hitched up on my unscraped elbow and with a trembling hand wiped my mouth clean, and stopped short just as I went to wipe my eyes. Took me a few moments to trade off, wipe my eyes with my good hand—and by that time I was sitting, looking around at all the faces, most concerned, some worried, some just leering at the spectacle I’d become.

  What the fuck?

  For a terrifying second the car crash replayed itself in my head—the pickup truck swerving suddenly into my lane, the crazed transfixity of the other driver’s expression as he hurtled at me—impact.

  I closed my eyes, shook myself, looked around again—sunlight, sidewalk, car horn, people shaking their heads at me and starting to drift away. A young guy wearing a stained apron and an uncertain smile trying its best to be reassuring hunkered down beside me and offered a fresh washcloth, which I took and pressed to my swelling lips.

  “Jesus, man, you took one hell of a fall. Are you epileptic? I mean, you want me to call an ambulance?”

  I managed to shake my head, croaked out a “No.”

  It took me a while, but I got myself together enough to get up and stagger into the restaurant. Cleaned up as best I could in the restroom, my head swirling with implications I didn’t even want to look at, at that point, and finally settled shakily into a booth in the back of the place—an All-American Greasy Spoon.

  Outside, the guy who’d helped me was hosing down the sidewalk.

  Too fucking much.

  It was summertime, and I was dressed in much the same way as I’d been behind the wheel of my Datsun: cut-offs and T-shirt, hey. Only problem was, I’d never seen the T-shirt in my life and it was my favorite T. Wore it all the time in weather like this. Tie-dyed, but nothing garish: cool, wavy aquamarine. 100% cotton, light and strong. And the Datsun? Bought it from a friend only three months before, who gave me a good deal. Bad dent in the rear passenger door, but ran like a charm. Or so it had seemed to me at the time—I was twenty, it was my first car. Only I didn’t own a car, and Joe Wasserly, my friend—I can picture him even now, over a century later—a sandy-haired guy with a dorky grin, dorky because his two front teeth overlapped, though the last thing Joe was was dorky—I didn’t know the man. Never met him.

  I sat in that booth and started to cry, never mind that I was late for meeting Sherry. Sherry could wait. (I didn’t know Sherry from Adam, duh.)

  So with tears sliding down my cheeks, I pulled out my wallet and counted my money. Two twenties, a ten, a five, two ones. Hey, I was richer than I’d been before I died. I started to giggle a little hysterically, so I stuck a foreknuckle between my teeth and clamped down hard, squeezed my eyes shut—the last tears rolled free. Calmed down.

  The guy in the apron came back inside, asked me if I wanted some coffee.

  “Yeah, sure man, thanks. And water too. Lots of water.”

  “You okay?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. But, listen, thanks for your help”—I gave him a five spot—“for your trouble.” What was I, a fucking private eye? Jesus. Eyes don’t get any more private than mine.

  He grinned and split, came back seconds later with a steaming cup, a water glass, and a pitcher full of ice water. I drank two glasses of water right off, sat there panting for a minute, and then went for the coffee, gulping for the scald.

  “GAWWWW!”

  People looked around. I scrunched down in my seat and tried to ignore them.

  Okay.

  So I sat there for an hour or so, and traced it out. Decided pretty quickly that I didn’t want to ruin what was going on with Sherry; I’d never met her before, but I knew her intimately and liked what my memory showed me. I called her right off. (“Sorry, Sher, this asshole on a bicycle bowled me over, I split my lip and got pretty scraped up—No, I’m okay, I’m still kinda shakin’ though—give me an hour? Two? Thanks, man, I’m sorry—love yuh too. Bye.”)

  I slid back into my booth and wondered what the hell I was doing. The memory of the car crash was like a hole in my head—it wouldn’t go away—but at the same time it was fading. Nightmarishly intense as ever, yet fading too. Like I was two people, two memories cohabiting one body. The strange thing is this, has always been this: aside from my scrapes and bruises, physically I felt great. More than great: every time I come out of death into the continuing life of yet another of my selves, for all my initial spaz attacks, my very flesh is supernally glowing, like every layer of tissue and muscle and bone is airy and suffused with light. Almost like the afterglow of a great orgasm, and no, can it, I’m not equating sex and death; all I’ve ever been able to figure is that for the continuing stream of my awareness, the instantaneous transition from utter physical cessation into full-bodied wholeness and life is so extreme a change that an almost overwhelming feeling of well-being is the inevitable result. Even now, so many lives later, as I wake more and more from deaths into lives of sickness and infirmity, that feeling of well-being persists—at least for a few moments or minutes. As a young man it often lasted for days.

  Fortunately, there was a useful corollary to the good feeling: the longer it lasted, the less I was able to remain freaked by my predicament, for all that my predicament was inherently about as freaky as you’d ever care to get. A blessing, that. (I’m quite sure I would have gone utterly, stark-raving schizo if it had been any different.) The flesh I now wore simply held no memory of radical dismemberment.

  Oh, it was me alright. I hadn’t stepped into any other life but my own, even if my own slightly different.

  Dan Anthony. Pleezed tameetcha.

  So I sat in that booth, dabbing at my split lip with a wet paper towel and sipping coffee through the unsplit side of my mouth, and got comfy with how my life had changed. It was pretty easy that first time; though it really wasn’t the first time, I’ve come to think of it that way because I was actually conscious of the change—the real first time I died I was just a little kid, and it took me a while after my second death to dredge the first back up and realize what had happened.

  A fucking stereo system, can you believe it? I had to laugh, but to be perfectly frank I found it a little scary too—that so much of my life could be changed so irrevocably by a stupid little purchase, or by foregoing that purchase. No matter how small the split in the path, eventually that split will lead off into wholly different territory.

  When I was seventeen, I got my first “real” job, working as a grunt in an Ernst Hardware Store. You know—haulin’ all the wire metal lawn chairs out front at the beginning of spring, making sure the rakes and ladders are stacked nice and neat, dusting off the lightbulbs and the nuts and bolts, mopping up oil stains when the case of motor oil arrives partly crushed, sweeping up pine needles after X-mas Tree sales close each night at the beginning of winter, and generally dealing with asshole managers, partying with cool coworkers, and kissing customer ass—sometimes rank, sometimes sweet. And doing my best to save money—for a car, maybe, if I could hold out long enough, or maybe that slick Marantz stack at Sears (a piece of shit, really, in retrospect—you gotta understand, this was the late ’70s—the 1970s, that is), or maybe—hey, why not?—both. And more.

  Of course, mainly I spent the money on partying, girls, concerts (the Dead at Golden Hall, August ’78—awesome, dude, totally like wow, man; Jethro Tull at the San Diego Sports Arena, April ’79—Ian Anderson taking tea with God), and books—never enough books. And dope too, of course, back when you got a lot for your money, and who cared if it was ragweed.

  My parents? I’ll tell you a little more about them later on; for now, let’s just say I was still living at home, free room and board, but mainly covering my own outside expenses.

  I didn’t buy the stereo. And by the time I had enough for a halfway decent car, what with all the money I was wasting, I was eighteen and a half, smoking tons of reef
er and showing no signs of getting on to college, and my Ps finally smartened up and kicked my ass out of the house. So for a while rent ate my car, I showed up stoned at Ernst one too many times, got fired, found another job, started dating this nice, serious girl named Karen who never did let me get to home plate, and was pushing twenty before my friend Joe (who I met through a housemate) gave me the good deal on the Datsun.

  Three months later I was dead.

  * * *

  I bought the stereo.

  I mean, I didn’t really need a car. This was Pacific Beach, which, because it was unincorporated, was still technically a part of San Diego, but otherwise was a separate little beach paradise all its own. Physically separate, because the only access was on a road that ran along a thin strip of sand, a dredged bridge if you will, bisecting a big lagoon inlet from the Pacific. Most of my friends lived in P.B., most had cars for parties and movies and concerts elsewhere in the less cool parts of San Diego, things worked. I tooled my bike up and down the little hills of P.B. with its tight avenues, ubiquitous palms, Spanish-style houses (some set back and fancy, most cramped together, all of them predictably colorful), and stands of torrey pines to rustle the wind in the tiny park—always empty, it seemed, as the beach was only blocks away.

  There was a lot of beach. Miles of boardwalk, houses and apartments and little alleys green with wall-climbing creepers and hanging plants spilling from upper-story windows crowding the boardwalk on the landward side, endless beach dotted with concrete fire-rings to the seaward. Parties a mile long every Friday and Saturday night, or every night sometimes in summer, and during the day so much tan womanflesh as to make any goddess-worshipping horndog boy’s heart burst.

  So I’d hang on the beach with my friends, smoking dope, watching the parade, elaborating endlessly on a comedy routine having to do with the severely limited craniums of surfers (“They don’t need ’em for their brains, man, I’m telling you.” “Yeah, right, their brains be dangling.”) which even my surfer friends joined in on, they being of the more intellectual variety of surfer, even read the occasional book in-between catchin’ waves—talking music, and scoping girls: that more than anything.