Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  But the ceiling of the cave was already breaking apart, rocks and dirt coming loose, falling all around—

  * * *

  —

  We are atop Monks Mound in Cahokia, a thousand years ago.

  We are atop another holy hill, a thousand years before that, and another and another, countless echoes of Xuuzi and me being sacrificed, all timelines overlapping here in this looping moment.

  A familiar voice says, “So, anyway…”

  Renard approaches in the regalia of the Cahokian high priest. As the wizard of the enchanted hill. As Keith the screenwriter. The world glitches, unable to settle on one form. Renard the hairy shaman with a stone knife thousands of years ago. Renard the naked elder skewered with piercings and covered in blue paint even more thousands of years ago. Renard the boy at physics camp.

  But he is dead.

  But so am I.

  “Every deep story puts death at the center, right?” says Renard. “I’ll let you in on a trick. One hundred years from now, you and I will be dead. Nobody will remember any of us. A hundred years from now this place will be totally different. There will be a different cast of characters. Take two characters. Make them care about each other. Then have time pass. It can’t help but end up sad.”

  He spreads his arms and waves his hands in the air. Like Gregory playing an imaginary scribbleboard, like Kulkarni’s mad great-uncle drawing glyphs in the air—and as if in a mirror, everyone in the mob at the base of Dare to Know spreads their arms and waves their hands in the exact same way.

  How much of our lives was ever our own? Did any of us ever make a real decision?

  Maybe never.

  * * *

  —

  The wizard chanted his spells, lulling the senses of the king and the princess to trap them dreaming within the enchanted hill.

  For the dreamless wizard collected their dreams, to feast on them.

  * * *

  —

  Renard drapes the bird cloak over my shoulders. I try to look for Xuuzi but I can’t move. Now I am in Cahokia. Mound 72. The sacrificed man wearing a beaded bird cloak lying faceup on a sacrificed woman lying facedown. All around them, other sacrifices of men, women, and children.

  This has happened thousands of times.

  But we’re cutting it close this time.

  Renard is assisted by ragged men moving in and out of the unstable darkness. Thanatons near collapse, the world shaky, jolting, glitchy.

  The universe aches so badly to end.

  He won’t let it.

  Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang have stopped singing. Muddled by the smoke, I turn my head to look at them through the haze.

  Their heads and hands are missing. Ragged men place the newly headless and handless bodies of Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang upon on a wooden pallet, their arms still interlinked. Put a sticker over them; they have done their work.

  Yesterday and today.

  Renard’s mouth and body are soaked in gore. He holds his arms high.

  The crowd below roars, or is made to roar.

  Dead beef. Bad food.

  The dreadful rightness.

  The thanatons are already evaporating. Space-time itself is wobbling, an entire ancient contraption reeling and staggering, about to crash. But he does not rush. Renard turns me around carefully by the shoulders. His fingers trace circles of blood around my eyes. A tunnel of red circles forms at the edges of my vision. Don’t look back. I feel Xuuzi behind me, other men are walking her backward toward me, compressing the energy between us. The house of computer graphics is in an uproar, lo-res creatures scurrying everywhere, like someone kicked a pixelated anthill. Renard walks me backward, looking me in the eye. Smaller red circles appear inside the larger red circles, blocking out the world more and more. I can feel Xuuzi even closer to me and power surges between us. Renard pushes me still closer to Xuuzi, squeezing the boiling energy. The thanatons shimmer to new life. More red circles. The crowd has fully entered the ritual. Cahokians circle around the giant mound under an ancient Illinois sky. San Franciscans are circling around Dare to Know.

  They lay Xuuzi facedown on the altar.

  They lay me faceup on top of her.

  The trapped energy pulses between our bodies.

  Thanatons guzzle the energy, refreshing the universe.

  I’m looking up at Renard. He raises a knife to sacrifice Xuuzi and me in one stroke.

  Why both of us at once?

  I feel Xuuzi’s unseen hand touch mine, from below.

  And I know.

  From under me, Xuuzi slips something into my hand.

  That is, I slip something into my hand.

  The red circles on the edges of my vision multiply. Xuuzi and I are the same mind. The red circles telescope my view of the world into a tunnel, crowding around a tiny Renard at the very end. The eschaton and anti-eschaton came from the same origin.

  I grip whatever Xuuzi or I put in my hand.

  Xuuzi and I are one.

  Renard’s eyes go wide.

  I stare up at him.

  Afraid. The naked fear. What I used to see.

  I grasp the levers of the universe for a moment and shift them.

  In a panic Renard brings down the knife—

  That’s all, folks!

  * * *

  —

  The princess had hidden the king’s sword in her robes.

  Before the wizard could act, before the dragons and goblins could attack, she threw the sword to the king.

  The king caught the sword and swung it, knocking down the wizard, then brought his sword crashing upon the wizard’s staff, cracking it in half, destroying the chains that shackled his dreams, and the princess’s dreams, and the dreams of their dreams. The dreams ran riot around the cave, reeling in astonishment and confusion as the wizard shrieked. The freed dreams cavorted even as the cave’s ceiling shuddered—an avalanche, and the enchanted hill trembled—boulders and masses of dirt tumbling from above—

  * * *

  —

  Inside the black vacuum, jagged pixels mutate and scatter in all directions.

  Bitmaps collapse, code reverses, truncated sprites flash and jitter, graphics turn to mush, the program is crashing.

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  In San Francisco, stars come unmoored in the impossibly colored sky. At the base of the hill the people scramble helter-skelter, suddenly freed.

  Not for long.

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  The steam tunnels are nearly full of water. I’m half swimming through it, trying to touch the floor or grab the pipes, but the current sweeps me along. The tunnels are cracking and collapsing and I hear a waterfall ahead. Xuuzi is paddling with me. We plunge through the filthy water and the steam tunnel suddenly opens into blue sky, wild sunlight, a gasp of fresh air—

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  As the cave disintegrated around them, the king and the princess ran through the throng of their freed dreams, creatures fluttering and galloping and squawking all around them in panic.

  The mouth of the cave wobbled, about to collapse. The dreams and shadows stumbled and surged and scurried for the exit. None of them would make it in time.

  Nothing in this cave would survive.

  The king and the princess took each other’s hands, slipped through the collapsing exit, and, leaving their fears and fantasies behind, and the dreams of those dreams, escaped the enchanted hill.

  * * *

  —

  Under the barren platinum sky.

  River of molten silver.

  Lonely desert of fire.

  It is only Xuuzi and me. Her face is overlapping geome
tries of spiked brass, multiplying jewels in her eyes. I rear up, my thorax of iron and gold multiplying on bronze, spikes and crests of blinding silver.

  The enchanted hill collapses behind us.

  The flowering structures of matter, energy, life, intelligence collapse.

  Light blasts through the world of shadows.

  The dream is over. People are born, and they have their thoughts and emotions and dreams. Life feels so real to them, and then they grow up and die. They never meant anything. All the people I ever knew in that world, and the billions I never knew, all shadows. All vanish with the old universe, a dream forgotten.

  Their old world is dimming.

  Losing focus.

  I’m farther and farther away.

  I don’t recognize the shadows. I never understood any of them anyway. I am already forgetting them. My mind doesn’t know how to feel them, how to find my way in, can’t tell them apart. I reach out to the fading world but there’s nothing to catch on to. I just slip off. Already I can’t even remember a single name or face of anyone I ever knew. None of them were ever even real.

  Am I always going to be the good guy in life?

  No. Learned that ages ago.

  I am Death, destroyer of worlds.

  The only real job I’ve ever had.

  Don’t look back.

  * * *

  —

  Walking to the party, on an icy hill, one of Julia’s heels broke.

  By the end of the ninth hole Julia and I had forgotten about the goose, we were both trashed, we were just laughing.

  Our clothes were off and Julia was standing on the bed wearing only sweatpants, doing fake karate for some reason, I forget why, with a lit cigarette in her mouth.

  Julia and I rode our bikes through downtown, which always seemed kind of empty, past the ominous-looking water plant, through the gardens next to the river.

  Julia flicked her cigarette butt away. It must’ve gone, like, twenty feet. How’d she manage that trick? Are you born knowing how?

  Julia looking up at the ceiling, looking self-sufficient in her happiness, but I knew the truth. I thought, that satisfaction is mine. I caused that happiness.

  Discovery in her eyes. Something novel, weird.

  Take a little home video in your mind right now. Hold on to what’s happening.

  Julia smoking. Her eyes on me. As though she had been standing behind me a long time. Looking at me almost as if puzzled, a different way than she had before.

  Julia went skidding down hard. Into the muddy, half-melted snow.

  * * *

  —

  The king let go the hand of the princess and turned back to the enchanted hill, where dreams and dreams of dreams were about to be crushed forever.

  * * *

  —

  Not just when you died, and how you died, but also why you died. The philosophical why. All the emotion I should’ve felt. The love underneath the love. The appreciation.

  One particle gets sucked into the black hole.

  The other particle in the pair escapes.

  * * *

  —

  The king dashed back to the enchanted hill.

  He flung aside his sword, ducked under the collapsing mouth of the cave, and lifted it up.

  As the king braced his shoulders against the sagging mass of rock and dirt, the dreams were able to swarm out of the falling-down cave, countless shadows escaping into the light, streaming past him.

  And as each dream emerged from the cave and into the sunlight, it became real.

  What had once, in the darkness of the cave, been the mere shadow of a bird transformed into a true hawk. What was once the shadow of a cup became a real jeweled chalice. The shadows of goblins became real warty goblins, the shadow of a dragon a true fiery dragon…

  The king strained, holding up the crushing weight.

  The wizard came out of the darkness, caught up in the rush of fleeing dreams. He tried to push past the king.

  The king blocked the wizard.

  The wizard grabbed the king’s dropped sword, and with a snarl, the wizard stabbed him.

  The king staggered but managed to keep holding up the entrance. More shadows streamed past the king and into the sunlight, all of them converting from vague shadows into vivid beings, each transforming into its own blazing reality, transfigured in the sunlight of the new world.

  The wizard plunged the sword into the king, sending the blade deep.

  The king fell to one knee.

  The last dream escaped from the enchanted hill and flowered into its true self.

  The hill was empty.

  * * *

  —

  The Cahokian high priest stabs the bodies on the roof again and again. It doesn’t work. He looks up, startled.

  Cahokia is empty.

  On the roof of Dare to Know, Renard stares around the suddenly empty city.

  Nobody is on the roof with him. No crowd circles the hill.

  San Francisco is empty.

  Keith dashes through his house, flinging open doors, running from room to room. The house is empty. Nobody is home.

  Then the furniture begins to disappear.

  Then the walls.

  The stars in the sky go out.

  The Flickering Man flashes through the empty levels of pixels, faster and faster, more and more frantic. Nothing is here. No alligators or centipedes or spiders, no piles of garbage or boxes or skeletons. Empty floors forever and ever.

  The floors fade.

  The gigantic glowing face in the sky fades.

  The empty city fades.

  The Flickering Man quivers, wavers, reverses.

  He fades.

  * * *

  —

  Just before the enchanted hill collapses overhead, I glimpse the new world.

  Pulsing purple sky, silver rivers gushing across a wild desert of flame, ranges of glaring gold mountains.

  But no longer empty. The last of the shadowy dreams stream past me into the new world, and as they do they become bright, massive, and solid, blossoming deeply and completely into reality at last.

  Kulkarni at last becomes the real Kulkarni, Ron Wolper is now the real Ron Wolper, my parents and sisters and Erin and the boys enlarged and blazing with life. Hutchinson is now the real Hutchinson, overflowing with actuality. Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang are now the real Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang. Stettinger is now the real Stettinger. The FARGS and Martin McNiff and Blattner and Hansen and Hannah Rhee and the Dare to Know receptionist are radiating, growing, filling with being. Carl the metalhead and the cashier at McDonald’s and whoever her friend was and Lisa Beagleman and super-dad David and weirdos Gregory and Craigory and Nate the scribbleboard player and everyone I ever knew, and the billions I never knew, exit the enchanted hill and go to this new place, leaving me behind as they flower into their real selves, as they proceed to the castle, where the feast of a thousand years is prepared for them.

  The real Julia looks back at me, eyes wide, baffled but happy.

  Then realizing.

  No takebacks.

  * * *

  —

  In my memory, I dashed down the snowy hill to help her up. The heel of her shoe broke when she slipped down the icy slope, but it wasn’t a shoe she cared about. She had bought this cheesy high heel at the same Goodwill as the cheesy dress. It was a joke shoe. But nothing felt like a joke right now. Snow fluttered down from the sky. Julia went quiet and I helped her up and she didn’t say anything as we headed into the house where the party was, where we could hear the music from even in the street.

  When we got into the party all of our friends were already there, in sex criminal tuxedos and cursed bridesmaid dresses, and we all looked brilliant and terrible. Someone had brewed a plastic punchbowl of something blue and e
vil. I avoided it but Julia found her way straight to it. Someone was shouting into my ear about a band that I didn’t care about. Someone else whispered to me about a girl I wasn’t interested in. Julia had disappeared.

  I felt like I had offended her even though I didn’t know what I might’ve done wrong. We had only gone out a few times. We hadn’t even kissed yet. Was she into me or just tolerating me? Where was she, even? Was she embarrassed, angry? Everyone was dancing in the basement. I went down even though I didn’t want to dance.

  There she was, not dancing. Something had changed. It was sweaty in the basement. The music was from high school—

  Madonna—and without a word we began to dance. We melted into each other in a way that we hadn’t yet. The back of her cheap pink dress was still wet from the snow. I felt dirt on my hand, too. We moved together.

  At one point the song began to skip, but everyone at the party kept dancing as though it wasn’t skipping. We adjusted our dancing to take account of it. We kept dancing for a long time as if we weren’t admitting to each other the skipping was happening, but the skipping had its own rhythm and made its own pulsing song. We were conspiring with it by dancing inside it, we were both sweaty and I looked into Julia’s waiting eyes.

  Only when I’m dancing can I feel this

  feel this

  feel this

  feel this

  feel this

  Dying doesn’t feel the way you think it’ll feel. Not enough time for panic, for freaking out, not enough time for your mind to catch up to what’s happening. When my time comes, I am calm, I do everything correctly, I keep control as much as possible, even as I think, This is it. Now I’m dead.