Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Beau Reynolds. Whom I killed twice.

  There was a churchman by the name of Reverend Marquis whom Henry Ford hired to put Jesus into his factories. I guess Ford thought that instilling a Christian ethic would create more efficient workers. I met this Marquis fellow once, back when I was newly named Max Holden, and it was 1915 or 1916, on a ship crossing the Atlantic. Marquis had a pudgy face and an intellectual look. He was a bit quiet but always polite, and I learned once I got him going that he talked with enthusiasm and charisma.

  I was on a personal mission to figure out what I was going to do with myself. That mission never really ends, but it was my main purpose at the time, as that person. I was listening very carefully to everyone around me, and I’ll never forget what Marquis told me. The guy hated being aboard a ship and could barely sleep. One night I found him walking the halls, restless, and I took him to the ship’s kitchen and cobbled together a proper American coffee.

  After some polite conversation and answering his questions about the ship and about traveling the North Atlantic, I asked him what automobile Henry Ford was going to make next.

  “You misunderstand,” Marquis said. “Henry Ford is not concerned with automobiles. He rolls cars out of his factory just to be rid of them. They are the byproducts of his real business, which is the making of men.”

  Time proved Reverend Marquis at least partly wrong. He left the company because Henry Ford placed more value on productivity than spiritual enlightenment. His comment nevertheless informed my own life.

  The Gideons would make Henry Ford proud. They issue from the Pool at irregular intervals, in resurrection or in the unpredictable act of duplication, and each man who comes out accepts his fate and seems friendly with the others of his kind. They are a production series. The Model G, of unified purpose and design.

  Not so with us. With the Warrens.

  In the beginning, all the evil that had wound its brambles around us formed a new man. The act of division created two men different from the original, one good and one evil, and they became the diverging fathers of us all. Death provides a clear line, but duplication muddies our memories. It is an instantaneous process.

  If you’re a duplicate, the last thing you remember could be your originator eating a sandwich, making love, fighting in a war, or reading a newspaper on the can. A third of us awake from a dream by emerging from the Pool. You come roaring to life and have about ten seconds in that goddamn cave to smack sense into your face and decide to be a whole new person. You have to turn all those memories into a new branch of the tree.

  The Gideons seem to accept this arrangement. They’re constructing their own narrative out of all those lives. For the Warrens the interwoven past grows more clouded with each generation, more jumbled as we multiply, but I remain certain of two things: that half the Warrens are pure evil and that I’m not.

  Probably.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Los Angeles was changing, but I still thought of it as the most glamorous refugee camp in the world. The way all of America was before it turned to war and industry. It was a city of a million luckless vagrants trying to get away from something back home. Dropping out on a world that hadn’t delivered on many promises.

  They wanted to rub shoulders with legends and stars and realize the vague sort of dream you have when you can’t even think of a happy ending. Most of those folks ended up in the gutter or morgue or, worse, alone and drinking in bars like the Mermaid, hoping the world wouldn’t follow them to the bottom of their glass of hooch.

  I always went to bars like the Mermaid after a job, but the Mermaid was my favorite. This late at night it was quiet, and everybody minded their own business. I was the guy at the end of the bar all hunched up and trying to disappear into his overcoat. Flattened hat on worn bar top. Hank of hair dangling over the face of a born lemon-sucker. They were all my breed. My people. Drinking alone or in even lonelier pairs. The guilty. The condemned.

  The Mermaid was grout in the ugly seam between Chinatown and more respectable parts. It had the feel of an expat bar in a foreign country. Electric Chinese lanterns glowing through the windows dueled with blinking neon Jugheimer and Old Glory beer signs. There was neediness to all the trappings. Behind the bar it was Kentucky bourbon and American flags and framed newspapers from ’45 and ’48 already yellowed by the cigarette smoke. Back when victory felt like deliverance.

  I lit up a Bravo and looked at the photo of poor saint Harry S. I gave him a salute with my scotch and soda. Finished it off in two swallows, and the ice cubes clinked in the glass when I put it down.

  I met my own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Christ, I looked like shit. Was it killing Beau Reynolds? Was it the cancer? I knew where it snuck into me. I didn’t like thinking about the war, but you don’t get to pick when it comes back. It will hold you down and make you remember.

  The bar began to sway, gently, like a ship on smooth seas, and I could see beyond the reflections of the blinking Chinese neon to an early morning aboard a steamer off the coast of Kyushu.

  November 15, 1945. There was movement and light on the rushing black of the sea. Little ships were swarming out there. Red signals blinked among them, hypnotic flashes like those of the night squids in the Mediterranean. Excited men called out and rushed the gunwales. Assault boats. Landing craft. Some of them were coming closer. Landing craft for us. Beyond them, the bigger craft with the amtracks inside, bound for other ships and other units.

  The excitement nearly broke into a riot as officers distributed dark glasses on cords and numbered tickets for the assault boats. Marines shouted questions and struggled to be heard. This was it. We were finally going to meet with Kyushu. No more kamikazes and suicide boats in the dead of night. We’d look it in the face and howl.

  “Put on the glasses!” came the cry of the watch officer. “Do not look directly at the target zone. Do not pick up souvenirs or drink water from within the area of effect. These things may be poisoned. Form in squads! Prepare to embark your assigned landing boat.”

  I was a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. The Corps and Catholicism are two things they screw into you that don’t come out. I shouted at my squad over the din and told the boys to ignore the watch officer and wear the glasses around their necks until we were in the landing craft.

  I made a quick head count. Everyone was there, even the greenhorn looking like an artillery-sick Hun. We found our number, a gray scoop of a boat bouncing gently alongside the troopship, waiting for us at the bottom of a web of rope ladder. The assault ship’s idling engine puffed out white smoke. The pilot waved up to me, and I could see he already wore black-lensed goggles.

  I heard a distant droning above the shouting of men trying to organize. Somewhere, high above, a flight of bombers was passing toward Kyushu. A last gift for Tojo before we swam ashore.

  Those goddamn whistles sounded again, and officers shouted at us to get over the sides and into the assault boats. Order crumbled. Men monkeyed and scrambled down into the darkness, hopefully into the scooped holds of the assault boats. All of mine made it. Many from other units must’ve ended up in the wrong boat in all that confusion. Some saps were wearing their dark glasses and fumbling blindly down the ropes. I could see some who fell into the sea and cried out for help, clinging desperately to the trailing ends of the webs. Nobody could help those poor bastards now. They’d have to wait for the crew of the troopship to fish them out.

  The assault boat carrying my squad and another squad parted from the side of the troopship. We wouldn’t miss that beast much, or so we always thought in these moments. It seemed so small within the converted freighter’s holds and so vast from without, like a great iron temple scabbed with rust. In a moment its edifice passed from view.

  There was only ocean and the assault craft around us. Light was beaming on the horizon, and the world was beginning to lighten. Our assault boat was part of a pack moving through the confusion of the troopships. The picket destroyers were a
head of us to take the fire for us when we got in closer to the landing beaches.

  “Get your glasses on,” I reminded the men.

  We passed the silent monsters of the battleships and cruisers, their guns turned to face the day. Sailors waved their white caps and whistled and hooted. “Give ‘em hell!” We were drenched with the spray off the scooped prow of the landing craft. We shivered, one man against the other, faces pale and tight with fear. It was so grim that I thought to make a joke. I was in the lead of the craft, just behind the landing ramp, so I turned and faced my squad.

  “Man walks into a tailor,” I said and then shouted it again to be heard over the noise of the engine. “Asks the tailor to make him a suit. Tailor says it’ll take six weeks. Guy says, ‘Six weeks!? It only took God six fucking days to make the whole world!’ Tailor turns to the guy and says, ‘Yeah, but have you seen how it looks lately?’ ”

  A few guys tried to force a smile. Nobody laughed except for Bully, big Bully with the BAR. He hammed it up and threw back his head and laughed so big that I could see the fillings all the way back to his molars. As his mouth closed, his face was suddenly bright white. Pure white. The light’s intensity swallowed the details of his face. I felt warmth against my back.

  The light softened to golden and roiling red and lingered as though it was a flare burning very close to us, but I could see now it was at a great distance. Nearly the limit of the ocean’s horizon. It was in the direction and of the intensity of the rising sun, but the sun could not ascend so quickly.

  I squinted through the dark lenses of my glasses. I felt the boom of a massive detonation. It was followed by a howling wind that shook the landing craft and blew hot in our faces so mightily, we held fast to keep our helmets on our heads.

  There was Kyushu. For the first time we saw the shivering mountain shadows of it. Distant houses and buildings atop the rocky bluffs were surrounded and backlit by fire. These structures bathed in radiance squirmed and became smoke. The light grew and curled and exterminated, and it made its shape known as a fiery storm capping a pillar rising high above the land and sea.

  There was a second flash, beyond the horizon, and a second column of fire rose into view and pushed through the evaporating clouds. By this unearthly light the hundreds of landing boats took on a strange, indoor clarity, as if a spotlight was shone upon each. I could see the awe-struck faces in the ships nearby.

  The sky was burning. The whole goddamn sky. Some men in my squad became sick at the sight. I felt it too. I’d been through hundred-hour barrages of artillery, and I’d lived in the bloody slop of trench warfare, and this raised gooseflesh on my arms. No device like this had come before this time. No horror manifested more completely. Not the artillery or the machine guns or even the gas.

  “God Almighty,” said a Marine from the other squad.

  No one else spoke. We knew for certain what we were looking at. We knew it from the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had cheered that news, seemingly so long ago. Here was its reality. America’s atom bombs were no longer a threat to tame the Emperor and his generals. They were no longer a demonstration of might. These were weapons with a military purpose. We bore witness to the granting of a wish.

  “Ichioku gyokusai,” a chaplain had once told me. “That’s what the Japs call it. It’s why they banzai charge and come at you with hand grenades. They believe in the majesty of annihilation. To die gloriously as a nation in one hundred million shards.”

  “Sick, fucking thing,” I said, but nobody heard me in that landing craft, not even Bully.

  Scorching heat and smoke and the cinder trees of Winton Beach awaited us. Day and night were forgotten. Kyushu existed in another phase, manmade, lit by the lingering pillars of fire as our boots met its shores. The generals and admirals were sure no resistance could survive our super weapons to fight the Marines of V Amphibious Landing Force.

  They were wrong. Beyond the glassy sands, from cave and blackened bunker, from beneath every rock, came mortar and machine gun and 10,000 Japanese with Banzai! on their lips, to face the invaders of their precious world, to face us and die gloriously as a nation.

  “Need anything else?”

  I snapped back from the crunch of scorched sand and the howl of the naval artillery to Butch, the bartender of the Mermaid, making it damn clear he was tired of asking the question. He was grizzled and grandfatherly, only not the sort of grandfather you wanted. He was the grandfather who told the same story a hundred times and didn’t like kids and only wanted to talk about how to get places and why things were better long ago.

  “I’ll have one more,” I said, and I slid the empty glass across the bar. Butch grunted and took it. Yeah, I was feeling it, but I’d learned to handle my booze.

  Butch slid over the glass of scotch. The napkin stuck underneath was marked with the silhouette of the sort of girl who would never set foot in a dive like the Mermaid. She could get a flat tire right outside, and she’d still walk ten blocks to use the phone at a junkyard.

  I took one drink and started coughing. It was a rumbling, meaty cough that had nothing to do with the drink and everything to do with Kyushu. Butch didn’t know that.

  “If you’re gonna lose your soup or something ...” Butch finished the sentence by jabbing a finger in the direction of the filthy door of the restroom. I held up a hand until the coughing fit subsided.

  “Ain’t gonna puke.” I tossed a dollar down. Butch swept a hand across the counter in a way that reminded me of a beach crab grabbing for a morsel. The dollar was gone. The tip was assumed.

  I took my drink with me to the telephone booth in the back. It smelled a little like piss, so I lit a Bravo to cover the stench and closed the accordion door. The sounds of the bar were muted. My own ragged breathing seemed to echo. I put my nickel into the phone and gave the operator the telephone number.

  The operator connected me to a line that buzzed like static on a radio for several seconds. There followed a strange series of clicks, leading into a silence that seemed to echo like the void inside an immense chamber. This was always the way when I placed my calls to Harlan Bishop.

  “Mr. Bishop?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice, undiminished by age, raised gooseflesh on my arms.

  “The job is done,” I said.

  “I know,” said Mr. Bishop. “The money is waiting for you at your office, as usual.”

  “I had a question for you.” I was met with silence, so I continued. “There was an accident in Cranford this morning. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  The silence seemed to grow louder.

  “Mr. Bishop?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you come up to Chatholm Lodge tomorrow, and we can discuss this accident. Elias will tell you how to find us.”

  Before I could reply, there was another series of loud clicks. Bishop’s manservant answered and explained how to find Chatholm Lodge. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway, north of Los Angeles in a wooded area somehow left undeveloped. The turn was marked as private property and identified only by a stone pillar and the letter C. Someone was to meet me at the gate hidden within.

  “Eight o’clock tomorrow. It has its own lake. Very warm this time of year. Bring your bathing suit in case Mr. Bishop would like you to swim for him.”

  I cruised through the quiet suburban intersections and parked on the street outside a shingled bungalow. Red frame, cream-colored house. I was sure it was unlocked. Hawthorne had about as much crime as a forest preserve.

  I stepped onto the sisal mat with the word HOME woven into the fibers in front of the door. I reached for the handle, stopped, slipped off my shoes, and picked them up in one hand. The door was unlocked. I stole inside, creeping through the darkened house, wary of the crowded lamps and sofas.

  The ticking of a wall clock was louder than my footsteps on the carpet. I passed through the sunken living room and climbed the two steps up into the kitchen. The sweet smell of gardenias drifted through the open
windows, and the kitchen was full of the lingering aroma of the last meal cooked on the stove.

  In the dim light I could just make out the wood-carving of an Indian and an eagle on the wall of the hallway. I nearly bumped a tea table with a vase full of sparklers from the Fourth of July. The bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it open a little wider and stood in the doorway, looking down at the figure asleep in the bed.

  Lynn was wearing my pajamas. She was slender and still pretty, but I was aware of her aging. I could see time stealing her away from me, too slow to watch but as sure as the erosion of mountains. How much longer? Thirty years? Thirty-five? I would be gone long before her.

  Her brown hair spilled out around her on the pillow. Her lips were parted. As I watched, she stirred and turned onto her side.

  I hung my coat and hat on the closet hook and set my shoes on the footstool. I undressed down to my underwear and black socks, and I lay down on the bed beside Lynn. She rolled onto her back.

  “What time is it?” she said, her throat still glued together with sleep.

  “Three-thirty.”

  “There’s a Salisbury steak and mash under some foil.” She spoke softly and without opening her eyes. “I doubt it’s still good after nine hours.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Did you see the doctor?”

  “Something happened today.”

  She opened her eyes and rolled onto her side to look at me. “What is it? What did the doctor say?”

  “No, it isn’t the doctor.” I considered carefully how much to tell her. “Someone I knew a long time ago was killed. An old friend.”

  “That’s horrible.” Her hand rested on mine. “What happened?”

  “They were murdered,” I said. “Run down by a car. The police think it was an accident, but I’m certain it wasn’t. I don’t ... I don’t know where this is going to take me.”