by Jack Womack
I huddled with Eulie, crouching in the corner. Jake stood in front of us for a second or two as if admiring his handiwork, holding his stomach. Bright and dark red blood oozed between his trembling fingers. When he looked at us he smiled; terrible teeth, but they didn’t seem to bother him.
Thank you,’ he whispered; paused there for a second, and then fell backwards, landing heavily upon the floor.
‘Eule,’ I said, wondering if anyone could hear me. ‘You there?’
She nodded, and squeezed my hand in hers. As thrilling as it had been to watch, the moment it was over I began feeling as if I was going to shoot every cookie I had. Both of us stared at the five bodies on the floor. I heard doors opening elsewhere in my building, and footsteps. As we looked on, the corkscrew in Bennett’s temple vanished, replaced by what appeared to be a professional chef’s meat thermometer.
‘Let’s go,’ both of us said. Stepping over Jake’s leavings, we made it out into the hall, pushing past the old lady who lived upstairs from me. We’d made the third floor landing before she began to scream. We ran into no one else before we got outside; and the moment we hit the sidewalk we took off toward Third Avenue, toward the El. I didn’t hear any sirens yet, but they’d be starting up soon enough. I was amazed by how much wind power I had left, considering. As we got close to Third I heard a train’s brakes grinding against the rails as it slowed, pulling into the 18th Street station. With luck, I thought, we’d be able to barrel upstairs and get on, whichever direction it was heading. That didn’t happen, however; for just before we reached the stairs leading up to the station, they disappeared – the stairs, the train, the El itself; all gone, just like that.
‘Walter –’
‘I know.’
We both looked up, and saw the same benign blue sky. As we lowered our heads we watched the tenements at the corner, fully visible for the first and only time, vanish; at once it was supplanted by some white-brick thing with sashless windows, fifteen storeys taller. I glimpsed the light changing from orange to blue, and then to red; and then to green.
‘It’s happening here, too,’ I said. ‘But it’s different –’
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘walk. Don’t run.’
‘Shouldn’t we –?’
‘As you note, it’s different.’ She took my hand, and deliberately slowed our pace to a gentle amble. ‘I’m tired of running.’
So was I; we stopped long enough to catch our breath, and watch what ensued. No one appeared to notice, or mind, anything that was happening – and there were considerable transformations in progress. We continued on, towards Park Avenue. The long whirrr of a siren turned, as we listened, into a whoop whoop whoop. Two little girls played hopscotch in front of a small, basement-level dry cleaner’s. The little girls disappeared, as did the dry cleaner’s, replaced by what appeared to be some kind of restaurant; Vietnamese, of all things. As we crossed Park, heading toward Broadway, I remembered the vision I’d had months earlier, of a New York that looked neither like mine nor like Eulie’s, and began to think that I’d caught a premonition of what was to be: Fortean phenomena, once more working its wiles upon the unexpecting. She put her arm around my waist as we walked, and I returned the favour. This was about the most remarkable high I’d ever enjoyed. At Broadway there was still a newsstand; now it was freestanding, at the curb, and not attached to the side of the cafeteria. There was no Sun, or Mirror, or Trib; the Times and News and Post remained. A red and blue mailbox attached to a streetlight post at the corner disappeared; the post itself changed from green metal to matte aluminium. The cars in the street changed, turning into the small coupes and oversized station wagons I’d seen so briefly earlier. A piece of paper blew across the curb, coming to rest at my feet. Hot dog stand, it read.
Just before we reached Fifth Avenue, we both came to a stop; while I remained the same inside, I could feel something beginning to happen on the exterior. I’d never seen Eulie look as calm as she now did. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’ll be there, wherever it is.’
She began to fade from the sidewalk up. Although I didn’t feel myself disappearing, I knew without looking that the same was happening to me. She looked no more scared than I felt. I can’t remember, precisely, what was going through my mind; it was as if my memories were being replaced as well, although the new ones were mine all the same as my old ones. I remembered different teachers, back in Seattle; different friends, different houses. No one noticed our transformations; they were changing as well, into a third world, one we always seemed to have known, even as we discovered it. I’m not sure what there was left to see of us after a few moments more; at that point, my brothers, with smiles on our faces, we were going, going, go
When I opened my eyes she was there, lying next to me.
Rain drummed against the window with child’s fingers, and as I lay in bed I listened to the soothing swuussbbb of cars as they slowly swung down Southern Street’s hill. Tankers’ foghorns echoed through the air across Puget Sound.
Then I heard Eulie say, ‘Love you.’ She slid her arm under my neck, and shifted her weight until she pressed directly against me, pulling up the covers until we were buried wholly beneath them. We kissed. After a few minutes of kissing, we made love.
‘It’s Saturday,’ she said as I stood up, stretching out a hand, letting it drop back down on the bed. ‘Where’re you going?’
‘Got to write,’ I said. ‘Woke up with something in my head.’
‘Jeez Louise,’ she said, closing her eyes and smiling as she repositioned herself into her pillow. ‘Get it out, for God’s sake. You know what happens when you don’t.’
I made myself coffee, good and strong. Then I walked into the front room, sat down at my computer, turned it on and for a minute or two looked at the screen, thinking of what should be there; of what would be there, when I was done. Once a very good friend of mine – another writer, needless to say – talked about how he thought we went about writing the things we wrote. It was, he said, like finding a magic place in childhood, somewhere in dark woods. But there is no map, and no sure way of reaching it the same way the next time, or of reaching it at all. The path is always there, no question about that; but until you come to it again you won’t know for certain if you’ll find your way in, much less find your way out. All you could do was head out every morning and see what turns up.
That morning I closed my eyes as I sat in my chair, and evoked anew what I had seen. The woods, the path, and what lay on the other side, were all there in front of me. Having seen this time what I needed to see, I started writing; and in time, wrote all that you have read.
IN THE NEW WORLD
James Fitzgerald Kennedy, an egg well left unseeded. Expelled, unnoticed, in September, 1932.
Chloe Josefyn Kugelberg, whose spikes at the net are wonders to behold, guarantees without bragging that the Swedish beach volleyball team will head home with Olympic gold. Her favourite things are horsemeat sausage, salt licorice, cloudberry pie, the songs of Lee Hazlewood (especially Some Velvet Morning, as sung with Nancy Sinatra), and the buttocks of Agnetha Falkstog, circa 1975.
Judetha TaShawn Williams, a.k.a Judy, Jude, Avalon, aced her finals at Stuyvesant, where she had since eighth grade controlled the in-house drug circulation network. While attending Yale on scholarship, majoring in business, controlled the ‘White Triangle,’ i.e., that portion of New England angled by New Haven, Boston and Manchester Center, Vermont through which (thanks to her far-sighted conceptualization) travelled an estimated one-third of all heroin entering the United States. After being graduated from Wharton oversaw the development of her new web site, through which any drug could be effectively bought and delivered anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours. A year later, shortly before announcing the date of her company’s IPO, she was killed by a Portuguese Water Dog as she prepared to cross Third Avenue at 86th Street. Chasing a ball, it leapt off a 38th-floor balcony. ARFUL!
read the Post headline. The web site still exists, though no search engine will find it.
John Bonney felt much more capable of handling difficult life situations once he ramped up to a 300-milligram daily dose of Wellbutrin.
Leverett Saltonstall Gladstone was the male fatality in the sole recorded instance of mutual autoerotic asphyxiation. ‘We know very little about some aspects of human behaviour,’ as J. C. Rupp, M.D. notes in his classic essay regarding a less elaborate case, The Love Bug (Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 18, No. 3, July 1973).
Gogmagog St. John Bramhall Malloy lives with his lovely wife Allison and two children in the East End of London. As he rides the Jubilee Line into work each morning he thinks long and hard on how the neighbourhood used to be a halfway decent place until bloody fat bastard yuppies with their bloody mobiles started pouring in like cockroaches, making it fucking well difficult for sensible people to be able to get a bloody pint without having to hack a path through a wall of fat bastards who bloody well should have stayed in Cockfosters with their bloody assurance policies and Range Rovers where they bloody well belong instead of lowering the tone of Spitalfields and Hackney, and we won’t even talk about the Isle of Dogs. Works in the garden on weekends, knows his delphiniums. In low moments, fantasizes taking a torch to the Millennium Dome. He hacks into his blancmange instead, and is right as rain once more.
Elvis Presley, doornailed in body for lo these twenty-four years, enters no Kalamazoo 7-11s, drives no Chevy SUVs, shoots no TVs, eats no cheeseburgers, waits in no bank lines in Lincoln, Nebraska, pumps no gas outside Bellingham, Washington; he blesses no magdalenes, heals no lepers, embraces no cripples, rips not asunder the curtain of the temple and darkens therefore no firmament. Nine hundred and seventeen restaurants around the world include on their menus dishes named after him. Some include bacon.
Isabel Bonney tested positive for tuberculosis on March 15, 1997. Six weeks later received diagnosis of multiple-drug-resistant form, type W. Treatment initiated immediately. Was isolated at Roosevelt-St. Luke’s, in a room that looked as if it had been designed as the ultimate Phillipe Starck environment. Although AFB tests were foreseen to remain positive for eight months to forever – depending – she converted to negative in four and a half weeks. Her doctor okayed release on May 23. Went to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt every day for eighteen months afterwards for directly-observed therapy; there took 1200 mg ciprofloaxin, 750 mg ethionamide, 750 mg cycloserin, 100 mg capreomycin injected into alternating hips, 900 mg isoniazid and 1200 mg myambutal daily. Developed arthritis of the knee brought on by ciprofloaxin, developed profound depression partially brought on by cycloserin (a.k.a. psychoserin, within the medical community), developed stomach trouble, lassitude, narcolepsy and numerous other symptoms that may or may not have been psychosomatic. Recovered, slowly. Finished chemotherapy after eighteen months, November 30 1998. Doctor proclaimed her to be well as she’d ever be. A year and a half later, she awoke one morning and at last felt returned to the world; no longer imagined she felt the rubber beneath the sheet, the dryness of constantly recirculated air; no longer saw the eyes of those who mattered above the masks; felt the uncontrollable coughing up blood, the 104-degree fever day in day out. No longer had the dreams. These terrible scenes were no longer any clearer than a tenth-generation videotape. They were only in her memory; she forgot them, deactivated them, she let them go; she removed them. She had the power, and she did it.
Vladimir Bulgarin, a.k.a Maliuta Skuratov, lives in Moscow and uses his 1974 Zhiguili to pick up those in need of rides. His standard rate is one ruble per kilometre. A drunken man from Trenton, New Jersey, once gave him a fifty-dollar bill over the protests of equally drunken Russian friends, but it was one of the new fifties and banks refused to accept it. He has lost nineteen teeth, his wife refuses to sleep with him. On days when he tires of driving he sometimes goes to the new underground mall in Manezh Square, listens to the instrumental music half-heard over speakers in the ceiling, and gazes at ceramic statues of Mafia thugs hollering into mobiles. Although he is loathe to admit it, he liked it better when you could call strangers comrade.
Oktobriana Osipova, with her mother, emigrated at age 15 to the United States. Worked, briefly, as a flashdancer in Kearney, New Jersey, employing the professional name Platynym Card. Quit after refusing to have breast implants, telling her boss she had no desire to be a broiler chick, i.e., factory-enhanced. She had no greater desire to work as a cosmetologist, fast-food employee, court interpreter, or waitress. With good old Russian know-how borrowed a Powerbook 145 and successfully hacked into Chase, NatWest, FirstUnion and Citibank N.A., deducted five cents from each account at every bank. FBI team arriving at her Brighton Beach studio found the remnants of a charred female corpse, not hers. Spontaneous human combustion ruled out as cause of death. The suspect’s present whereabouts, the institution or institutions to which she made electronic transferrals, and the total amount transferred from all banks remain unknown. Those who have studied the case believe that wherever she is, she is content with her lot.
Dr Alexander Arnoldovitch Alekhine, after the fall of the Soviet Union, moved from the field of ferrous metals to that of bartending. You may find him working the 6 to 2 shift at a bar called Pizdyetz, on Clinton Street between Rivington and Delancey in ‘happenin” LoEaSi (as some in the neighbourhood have taken to calling it, although none who have lived there longer than six months). His claim to fame is a brutal mixture of three parts Ketel One vodka, one part Chambord liqueur, one part Everclear grain alcohol, topped off with Ocean Spray cran-raspberry juice, stirred (not shaken) and served over finely-crushed ice. (A similar drink is served at finer Moscow establishments, Hermes men’s cologne substituting in some cases for the grain alcohol.) He calls it a Red Mercury.
Norman Quarles, who during his Army days played bass clarinet in James Reese Europe’s famed marching band, returned to the U.S. in time to die of the flu during the great pandemic of 1918-1919 that killed, among others, Randolph Bourne, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and two of the three children who’d witnessed the sun stand still at Fatima. Norman’s father had wanted him to be a Pullman porter, but Norman had other ideas. His father never found out what they were.
Wanda Carroll [Quarles, in some pasts] applied for a job as a charwoman at the Empire State Building. The hiring agency chose not to hire a Negro, and she was, happenstance, not killed when a twin-engine B-25 Army bomber crashed into the 78th floor of the structure on July 28, 1945. She found employment instead as a charwoman at 44 Broadway, had three children, and outlived them all.
Luther Biggerstaff, never married, served as a quartermaster in the New York National Guard, bought a house in Staten Island, had a heart attack in his driveway in 1998, died while his dog, a Toy Manchester Terrier, licked at his ears.
Avi Schwartz wasn’t.
Bernard Pearlstein, a dentist, specializes in preparing multiple crowns and fixed bridges. Lives with his wife and two children in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Used Nair on the backs of his hands until the use of rubber gloves became mandatory. He loves the smell of novocaine.
Gus Gleason, for a number of years, could have been working in an unofficial capacity for Gus Bevona, one-time head of Local 32B-32G. Knows all the words to ‘Stickin’ With the Union.’ A good man to have around when an iron pipe needed to be swung in the dark. Presently serving twenty to thirty-five upstate, he could be out in three.
Lester Macaffrey would liked to have been a doctor but became a mortician instead, finding employment at W.H. Milward in Lexington, Kentucky. Loves to pore over old issues of Casket and Sunnyside, and perceives in the names of preparation dyes an almost epiphanic euphony. Sometimes, lying in his bed at night, in the small apartment off Newtown Road where he lives, he lets them roll over the tongue in his mind: eosin, erythrosine, ponceau, fluorescein, amaranth, carmine. Sometimes he thinks he hears voices, but chalks it up to the stress of living in interesting times.
Joanna, who never uses her last n
ame among friends, lives on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain. She worked as a senior manager at Chemical Bank for twenty years until it merged with Chase Manhattan and she was laid off. Having invested wisely, she was prepared. Soon after moving she believed, one morning, she saw the legendary lake monster known as ‘Champ’ (thought, by cryptozoologists, to be a surviving representative of Zeuglodon) but everybody she told smiled, when she told them. She has twenty-seven cats. At night, in dreams, she flies.
Elmer Thatcher Dryden, Sr. Lived, briefly, in Nicholasville, Kentucky. In 1964, age 18, he decided to see how high he could get if he mixed bourbon and phenobarbital and then huffed two tubes of Testor’s Airplane Glue. He found out. At the service the minister, trying to assuage the mourners, assured them that sometimes God’s plans are not for us to know. ‘Well,’ his mother said, after the service, passing everyone thick slices of transparent pie once the chicken was gone, ‘Surprised he lasted this long.’ His father might have cried, had he still been alive, but he wasn’t. His third wife shot him in 1959. Alcohol might have been involved.