She says, “There is a certain way we have to do it.”
Xuuzi or Julia puts the black meat in her mouth. She chews it up. I see her eyes scrunch up. Julia’s look of distaste. I know that look.
Xuuzi-Julia kisses me.
Bitter taste. Rotten. Metallic. She’s pushing the slimy meat into my mouth with her tongue. My eyes are closed but then her hands are gripping the back of my head, she is forcing my lips to stay pressed into hers, the chewed-up meat is flowing out of her mouth into mine, dissolving on my tongue, and then we kiss for real, Jesus Christ, this isn’t one of Xuuzi’s clumsy kisses, this is a pro Julia kiss. This person who is wearing Julia, who is she—who is doing the wearing?
What does it mean to wear a person?
I open my eyes mid-kiss. Her eyes are staring at me.
She says, “We are going to die.”
I try to pull away.
She laughs. “We are both going to die.”
I break from her grip. I’m off the bed, backing away from her. Julia-not-Julia rises and is moving backward away from me too, except her legs are walking forward, her body isn’t moving right. Something is wrong. She’s flickering. The black meat tingles in my mouth, sending roots under my tongue, networking and branching all over my body.
Dead beef. Bad food.
“We are going to die.”
She is moving toward me but everything reverses, now her legs are walking backward as she’s moving forward. The room is tipping, tipping over, and as it is tipping it is changing as the floor becomes the ceiling and the ceiling becomes the floor. Dead beef, bad food. The walls are bronze, then gold multiplying on bronze, gold and bronze walls everywhere. Xuuzi and I don’t look like ourselves, we have become brass idols inlaid with jewels, I look at my hand, which is now a bronze claw, as she laughs and says, “We are going to die, we are going to die.” I grasp her and my jeweled claws tighten on her, my ridged gold scales heave up and down my back and our masks are gone, we are not in the hotel room, and we are on a blazing landscape of gold and iron stretching out in every direction, a pulsing purple sky overhead, a horizon of silver mountains.
Her eyes swirl. There’s nothing to block what is inside me or her anymore.
My vast invisble thing streams out to meet her vast invisible thing.
I know her eyes. I know whose eyes those are, my own eyes. I have her eyes. She’s not a woman, she’s a monster.
We are both monsters.
Her bronze mouth hisses, “We are going to die, we are going to die, we are going to die,” and I say, “Your name isn’t Xuuzi,” and she says, “My name is not Xuuzi,” and I say, “What is your name?” and she says, “I was never even named,” and then she does what she promised, she opens it up fully, the flaming mountains of silver and the violet sky and boiling golden oceans, she stands back and shows me our entire hideous kingdom.
* * *
—
I wake up in the hotel room.
Xuuzi is gone.
Everything else is just as it was. Xuuzi’s little cups of black paste are still here. Her brass box is still here. Her set of jars and instruments, silver dishes, ornate spoon are all still here. Black paste is still smoking in its brass box.
But the world is moving wrong. The room is dark but there’s a strobe light pulse, not really a strobe, more like unseen children are rapidly waving flashlights around. Jerky blurred motion.
I’m blinking. Stars flash around me.
Where did Xuuzi go?
My door is open.
The Flickering Man glides past the door.
I get up. My feet are heavy. I stumble across the room. The stars around me fade.
I come out the door. I look down the hallway.
The Flickering Man turns the corner and is gone.
I clomp down the hallway after it. After Xuuzi. My head buzzing. The floor is slipping away from my feet.
I have met her before. She didn’t look like Julia then. Her name wasn’t Xuuzi but I had met her before.
When?
I keep walking.
I have to catch up.
Somebody else is behind me.
Don’t look back.
Somebody else is definitely behind me, following.
You can never look back.
I round the corner. The Flickering Man is nowhere to be seen. No Xuuzi either. Is this a dream? I’m still dreaming.
Then this is the realest dream I’ve ever dreamed.
There are stairs ahead.
Somebody else is still behind me.
I stop walking. He stops walking.
I begin walking again.
He begins walking again.
Don’t look back.
How long has he been following you?
All your life.
It doesn’t feel like a dream, but a memory. Go down the hotel stairs, or up the stairs. As though I’m watching something that has happened before, I am going both up and down the stairs at once, something that’s going to happen again. Another hallway, double doors. It’s about to happen right now.
Where is she?
I come into the hotel’s banquet room.
For some reason everyone from Dare to Know is in the banquet room. It is a surprise company party and I am the guest of honor. Ron Wolper nods and raises his glass to me. The banquet room has a kind of stage and tables arranged cabaret-style around it. Blattner and Hansen shake my hand as I pass: great job, well done! The banquet room has large windows that look out into the starry dark. Hey, it’s Hutchinson, it’s been so long, glad to see you made it too! The banquet room is cozily lit with dozens of little lamps. Hwang and Wiesnewski are sitting at a table, they give me the thumbs-up. There are candles in jars on the tables. A soft light suffuses the stage. Ziegler and Gaffney are standing and drinking by the bar, they see me and are all smiles. I’m moving through the crowd and everyone is happy to see me, everyone is expecting something. A cycle has come to a close, a great work has been accomplished, and we have all gathered to celebrate it. Stettinger sits near the stage, gives me a friendly salute—whoa, even Stettinger?
Where is Xuuzi?
This has happened before.
Why did I expect to see Xuuzi?
In a few moments, a special emcee will appear on that stage. I am about to receive a commendation. An award, a recognition.
I approach my table.
An envelope rests on my plate.
The envelope has my name written on it. But the letters are backward. It’s not my name. The letters spell something else, and I’m trying to figure out what the backward letters are saying, but I don’t want to. It’s a nightmare word.
I open up the envelope.
A rat’s head is inside.
From the steam tunnel.
Yesterday and today.
* * *
—
The emcee’s voice speaks behind you. He’s onstage now. Don’t turn around.
You know that voice. Don’t look at him. Don’t look back. Red circles appear at the edge of your vision. You can never look back. These people in the banquet room aren’t from Dare to Know, these aren’t their faces anymore. Their faces are different but they’re the same faces.
Now you are in Cahokia.
You are in a wooden hut full of smoke. Another red circle appears inside the first red circle. They are Cahokians. They are from Dare to Know. You turn, you struggle, try to get away. The red tunnel closes around you. Too late.
Their hands are on you.
You have met her before, this girl who calls herself Xuuzi, but that’s not her real name. What is her name?
You know her name.
The emcee is speaking on the stage behind you. The man who was following you in the hotel hall earlier. Don’t look back. You used to hear this voice. Mo
re concentric red circles nest within each other, smaller and smaller, narrowing your vision.
Look up the number.
You are outdoors, on top of a hill, the dark starry sky above you. The emcee is behind you, putting a cloak on you, a heavy cloak made of hundreds of woven shells. New stars defile the black sky, a jarring, slashing brightness. Many hands guide you to an altar on top of Monks Mound.
Many hands guide you to a table in the hotel banquet room.
Xuuzi is on the altar.
They got us again.
They hold Xuuzi facedown on the table, the altar. Her face is covered in blood.
You are at the hotel. You are in Cahokia.
It’s not Xuuzi’s face, it’s not Julia’s face.
Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang interlink their crossed arms. It’s not them, it’s four Cahokians who look like them, chanting and singing. It’s John and Paul and George and Ringo, their voices mechanical and insinuating, shaggy, wrong.
She is trying to turn and look at you.
Look at her face.
You can’t.
Your nightmare face.
This has happened before.
Many hands lay you down on top of Xuuzi. You are facing up and away from her. You are looking up at the ceiling of the banquet room, you are looking at the starry Illinois night sky above Monks Mound. Your back is pressed against her back, separated by the beaded cloak. You are looking up at everyone you ever knew, the dreams of the king and the princess, and the dreams of those dreams, your bird cloak of a million shells between you and her—
She slips something into your hand.
You grasp it.
The envelope.
The red concentric circles on the edges of your vision multiply faster inside each other, telescoping your view of the world smaller and smaller, except for the emcee onstage.
Renard glows in his spotlight.
“That’s all, folks!”
And then you all begin to flicker.
* * *
—
I wake up naked on the bathroom floor.
My entire body is in pain. Little cuts all over me.
The hotel room stinks with revolting smoke, like someone had burned an animal alive. There are gory stains on the carpet, the walls, the bedsheets. I don’t know what they came from. The dream, or vision, or trip bangs around inside my brain, still vivid.
No trace of Xuuzi.
My wallet gone too.
And Lamby-Lamb. What the fuck?
* * *
—
I went back to campus to find Xuuzi.
I didn’t find her anywhere.
I returned to the bar where I first talked to her. The same bartender was there. When I asked the bartender if he knew anything about the woman from yesterday, he gave me a blank look. Acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Like she didn’t even exist. Okay, I get it, I wouldn’t be the first creepy guy trying to stalk someone he met at his bar.
But still.
I went to the dorm where I picked Xuuzi up. I asked some girls about her. Nobody knew a Xuuzi, or Suzy, or Susan, or anything like that. I described her. Red hair, pale skin, about this tall, dressed like this?
They looked at me blankly.
I wasn’t hunting down Xuuzi because she stole my wallet. Maybe a hundred bucks in there—she could keep it, I didn’t care. I went ahead and canceled all the credit cards. Losing Lamby-Lamb? That was weird but fine. Chalk it up to youthful sadism.
That wasn’t why I wanted to find the girl who called herself Xuuzi.
How did she know about Julia?
About Julia’s particular pink dress, her particular hairstyle?
The eschaton?
That weird shit we smoked and ate together—what was that?
Xuuzi had promised me weird shit. Now I was deep inside that weird shit, and her weird shit was connected to mine. In that nightmare trip I felt like we had brushed up close to something vast and invisible, a strange energy built up between us—
I extended my trip to look for her.
I searched through the student directories for anyone who looked like Xuuzi. No girl was even close. I pulled some strings with the assistant provost and got up-to-date pictures of all the students, both on-campus and off-campus.
Nothing.
But she was real. She had taken me to our hideous kingdom. She and I were in the banquet room and we were in Cahokia. Everyone from Dare to Know was there but they weren’t themselves and neither was I and neither was she.
Then Renard spoke, and we were all Flickering Men.
* * *
—
That day I changed.
I never felt lonely before. Now, lonely all the time.
Life began to take its long, painful left turn.
* * *
—
The morning after Xuuzi, I found something odd in my wrecked hotel room.
The envelope in which I’d found the rat’s head was crumpled up on the hotel bathroom floor, its lining crusted with gross bloodstains. It didn’t have the rat’s head from the dream in it anymore. But how had it come to be here at all?
Was it a dream?
There was writing on the envelope. My handwriting. I didn’t remember writing it. The writing no longer spelled out my name. It wasn’t backward letters.
It was a date from a thousand years ago.
* * *
—
On July 4, 1054, a new star exploded out of nowhere.
The explosion was so brilliant that for days its light was visible on Earth both night and day. This new star was nearly as bright as the full moon, even though it was over six thousand light-years away. Arab astronomers recorded it. So did Chinese astronomers. The Japanese have accounts of it. Native American petroglyphs and the oral tradition of aboriginal Australians mention it.
This strange star lingered in the night sky for two years.
Nowadays we know that what Earth saw on July 4, 1054, was a supernova—an old star collapsing into its core, spewing its outer layers into space in a massive shock wave. The remains of the supernova are what we now call the Crab Nebula.
When the supernova ignited, Cahokia changed.
According to archaeologists, around 1050 AD—the time of the supernova—Cahokia underwent a sudden, large-scale alteration. Until then Cahokia had been a decentralized group of villages, each with its own local rituals. But starting around 1050, instead of the previous open-courtyard plans, new constructions were built on a strict north-south grid. Cahokia’s earthen flat-topped pyramids and plazas date from this time, including the hundred-foot-tall Monks Mound.
Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, I thought, that Cahokia had transformed right when a new star appeared. After all, the city plan of Cahokia was modeled on astronomical principles, including their precisely calculated “woodhenge” of poles that tracked the solstices.
It was around this time that the theatrical human sacrifices began, along with their days-long citywide feasts.
Were the Cahokians trying to soothe an unpredictable sky? Celebrate a newborn star?
What were they doing?
People nowadays like to think we’re beyond such thinking. But what would happen if a gargantuan new fire blazed up in our modern sky? Would people really stay calm? Or would we slide into something more desperate? How durable is civilization, how easily could things collapse, if one day we all looked up and saw a fiery face glaring at us from heaven?
* * *
—
Why had I scrawled “July 4, 1054” on an envelope?
Put it out of your mind.
After the Xuuzi incident, I tried to put all the weird shit aside. My life was changing fast, and not for the better.
That’s when I moved out of the hou
se and into the condo. The divorce didn’t go the way I thought it would. In retrospect, how could it?
That’s when the boys grew out of toddlers who adored me because they didn’t know any better into teenagers who understood exactly who I was.
That’s when Dare to Know commissions began to dry up, right when I was expected to pay alimony and child support.
That’s when I began to lose sleep.
That’s when I began drinking at home alone. Looking forward to it even in the early afternoon. Oblivion at the end of the day.
That’s when I felt that, from here on out, I was just marking time.
Then time did run out.
7:06 p.m. yesterday.
And yet I’m still here.
* * *
—
When the plane lands, I turn on my phone. Julia had texted back.
What a nice surprise! Keith and I are looking forward to seeing you. What’s the occasion?
THE NUMBER
Keith! It would be so much easier if I hated Keith.
So much easier if I could hate San Francisco, too, but I can’t, I never could. Every time I come here I say to myself, Why on earth do I live in Chicago? People really do live like this, in paradise, every day? Maybe I truly had died last night. Maybe I’ve arrived in some casual version of heaven and just don’t know it yet. When I exit the airport, the sun and warmth hit me and everything feels light, frictionless, easy. Something always kept me from making the leap of moving out here. The boys? Sure, that’s why. Too busy being a wonderful dad!
Right.
I check in at my hotel, fritter away the day, then drive across town in my rental car, mounting the steep avenues to Julia’s house. Getting on to evening now. Roll down the windows. The dark air heavy and sweet. Everything impossibly fertile, trees dripping fruit. Wet leaves gleaming from the streetlights. Night insect sounds. Never been to this neighborhood before. Feels oddly rural even though it’s still in San Francisco, giant houses overlooking the bay.
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