Bathing the Lion

by Jonathan Carroll

  Rubin nodded. “It’s probably really something like Joe Smith, but Duck Tape is what he goes by. I guess it’s his stage name.”

  Riley Rivers saw the two men were watching her and her companion. Something about them caught her attention. Smiling slyly she stood up and walked right over despite the fact her boyfriend was still talking. Rubin was so surprised by her approach that he moved on his stool until his back was pressed up against the bar.

  The woman ignored him and got right up close to Crebold. Unfazed, he didn’t budge even when she was only inches away from his face. Her chutzpah intrigued him.

  “You fool, Crebold, don’t you recognize me? Really? Or are you just being a dick?”

  Crebold was about to eat the last bite of sandwich but dropped it on the plate and brushed crumbs off his hands instead. “Why would I recognize you? I don’t watch porno.”

  Ignoring his insult the woman reached forward, took the last bit of food off his plate, and ate it while watching him and waiting for a reaction. After she’d swallowed she turned to Barry Rubin and in an ice cold voice told him to get lost. Confused and surprised, Rubin picked up his drink and moved way down the bar.

  Poker faced, Crebold blinked twice watching the sexy stranger. But gradually the look in his eyes changed. His whole body gave a twitch, as if it had been shouted awake out of a deep sleep. When he spoke again to her his words were full of both wonder and unease. “Milnie? Milnie Odle?”

  The woman licked crumbs off her fingertips. “Yassou patrioti. Nice to see you haven’t lost all your perception since you’ve been here. You had me worried there for a minute.”

  Crebold could not believe what he was seeing. “What the hell are you doing here, Milnie? And what’s with the porn star thing?”

  She pushed a lock of long auburn hair away from her eyes. “Well, since I had to be here I thought it would be interesting to sample their flesh, so it was either porn or cannibalism. I tried both, but porn feels better.”

  From their respective places Barry Rubin and Duck Tape watched this exchange. Once they glanced at each another but neither man had a clue as to what was going on.

  “Why are you here in this place tonight?”

  “Why are you here?” she taunted, clearly enjoying his confusion.

  Crebold slid a quick look down the bar to see how close Rubin was. “To check him out; I wanted to meet the guy Vanessa Corbin killed.”

  With a wave of her hand Riley Rivers dismissed this idea and shook her head. “Don’t bother—he’s unimportant.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you think those sandwiches were given out to everyone—because they think we’re hungry? They’re a metaphor, baby. How do you make a great sandwich? Load it up with the perfect assortment of ingredients—diverse tastes and spices and sauces.

  “That’s us, Crebold—we’re the ingredients; Rubin too, despite the fact he’s a total fuckup. They’re taking all us retirees, all our lives both here and as mechanics. Everything we are now and were and combining it into one big … sandwich.” She put her open palms side by side as if she were holding a book or two pieces of bread. She closed them together. “Think of it, Crebold: see this room as a microcosm of what’s going on all over the universe. Almost everyone in here is a retired mechanic. Like Mr. Rubin over there and Vanessa Corbin. All these lives, all these brains, all these individual experiences combined into one—”

  Crebold put up a hand to stop her. “Wait a minute, I’m not retired.”

  “Yeah you are, pal—or rather you were after that dumbshit stunt showing off with the ants at the café.”

  Shoulders slumping, his mouth dropped open in dismay. “No, really? I was?”

  “Yup—they parnaxed you immediately while you were being taken away in the van but you didn’t feel it. ’Twas all part of their plan. They’ve been collecting whole ranges of experiences and thought a secret parnax would be a good one to add.

  “So some of us knew when we were retired, others didn’t, like you.”

  “Then what have I been doing here this whole time since I was parnaxed?”

  “Living, experiencing, following your instincts, doing what you thought was right—or at least right for you. It’s why you cut the deal with Chaos, or thought you did. That was funny.” She slapped him playfully on the arm and shook her head at his impudence.

  Eyes wide and caught completely off guard, he whined, “I didn’t?”

  Riley sneered. “Hell no! They really enjoyed watching you pull that stunt. You’ve got a big fucking ego, Crebold—did you honestly believe Chaos would specifically come and court you? Uh, no! It was some of our people who made the offer. They just wanted to see how you’d react to the bait. Of course being you, you took it. And yet another little notation was made in their big book about Crebold.

  “Chaos is coming, there’s no doubt about that. Mechanics have begun disappearing everywhere. You can see and feel it already in a million different ways, but obviously the worst hasn’t arrived yet. What’s here now is mostly the grumble of thunder before the real storm comes rolling in.

  “So they decided to harvest the fruit now before the Somersault really gets going.” Having said this, Riley tugged up the front of her dress, which had drifted alluringly low. When she saw Barry Rubin staring at her while she did this, she stuck out her notoriously long tongue at him.

  Crebold put a finger to the side of his head and twisted it back and forth to indicate the whole situation was crazy. He stood up. “What do you mean, fruit? Wait, don’t answer yet—I have to pee. I can’t stand it anymore; I have to go right now.”

  Riley shrugged. “So go pee—enjoy.”

  “Enjoy? I hate pissing. I hate bodily functions. Why do they call them that? It’s pissing and shitting and is there a bigger waste of time?”

  Riley giggled like a young girl at his anger. “What don’t you hate, Crebold? Go, take your piss, and don’t hate it too much. At least enjoy the relief it brings and see it as a little intermission in our conversation.

  “Remember Jezik? Before they got her she loved to piss. It was one of the things she liked most about being human. So be nice to your dick; give it half a chance and it can be very nice to you in the right situation.” She reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “It is true though—you do seem to hate everything. Have you ever noticed it about yourself? Maybe it’s just the type of fuel you run best on. You drive into a gas station and tell them to fill it up with hate.” She shook her head and gave his shoulder another squeeze. Crebold didn’t like being touched but in light of what she’d just said about him, wasn’t about to mention it.

  Walking across the room now he looked at the various faces in a new light. He didn’t recognize any of them but that didn’t mean anything. He hadn’t even recognized Riley Rivers when she first approached him yet he’d known her forever. Did it mean they had already taken away some of his powers or—

  “Crebold!”

  He looked for whoever had said his name loudly and distinctly. No one. No one was looking at him or walking toward him. Checking again, he turned every which way just to be sure. No one.

  Continuing to the toilet he pushed on the door to go in. No one was there. It was a surprisingly large room with what must have been ten stalls and as many urinals. Walking over to the closest, he unzipped his fly as quickly as possible and fumbled his penis out of his jockey shorts. He was in the middle of an obscenely pleasant piss when he heard it again.

  “Crebold!”

  Glancing left and right while urine hissed urgently out of him, he was afraid he’d have to stop and still dribbling, stuff himself back into his pants so as to be presentable to talk to whoever had said his name.

  Crebold spoke cautiously, “Hello? Who’s there? Where are you?”

  “Right here,” said a woman’s voice. “Did you really come here to spy on me, Crebold? Has Barry Rubin been giving you all the dirt on me?”

  Vanessa Corbin.

 
“Vanessa, where are you?”

  “In your head—I told you. All of us are in you now, Crebold: Riley, me—everyone in the place. You’re the man.”

  “What do you mean? Where are you?” Looking around, he was certain he’d see Vanessa lurking somewhere just out of sight, tricking him, playing stupid mind games to throw him off and make him feel even more bewildered.

  “Look at your hand, Crebold—your palm. Look at the lines there.”

  Unhurriedly he finished peeing, adjusted himself back into his pants, and zipped up. He walked over to one of the sinks and washed his hands. He wasn’t about to let anyone rattle him. Only when he was done thoroughly washing and drying his hands did he turn them both over for a look.

  Study your palms and you’ll see perhaps four or five prominent lines crisscrossing it, intersected by many smaller ones.

  In contrast, Crebold’s right palm now had what appeared to be hundreds of lines on it, deep and shallow, long and short, straight and wavy.… There were so many that it looked like an aerial view of a railroad yard in the biggest city on Earth. You couldn’t begin to count all the lines on his hand now because if put under a magnifying glass you would see lines on top of lines on top of lines like a palimpsest, going in every possible direction.

  “Look at your other hand.”

  He did and it was the same—lines everywhere.

  “That’s us. You have all of us in you now, Crebold—all of the people in this restaurant tonight. The lines are the proof. You’re going to be carrying all of us back.”

  “Back where? Why me?” he asked while still staring at his hands. Turning them over and back, he kept making fists and opening them again, rubbing them together and looking to see if the rubbing made any difference.…

  “Because you hate everything here, Crebold, so you have no reason to want to stay. Almost all the rest of us have lots here we love and we don’t want to give it up. But we’re not in control. They’re taking whatever they need from us.”

  He kept noticing ever-new details, like the mad riot of lines was not only on the palms but everywhere on his hands—across the backs, sides, all the way up and down each finger. They looked like the hands of the oldest human being who had ever lived. They looked like they belonged to someone centuries old.

  And then in an instant all of them vanished.

  In an instant the myriad lines on both of Crebold’s hands—every single one of them—disappeared before his eyes. They shrank, shrank, shrank until from one moment to the next all were gone, leaving both of his now-trembling hands completely smooth and unblemished. They did not even have the palmar creases found on all newborn human babies.

  Seeing them disappear was even more disturbing to Crebold than the moment he’d first seen the lines on his hands.

  He called out, “Vanessa!” but she didn’t answer. He called her name again, much louder this time. His voice echoed off the white walls of the empty men’s room. Slapping his leg and grimacing from both frustration and doubt, he looked around hoping to see something, anything to give him a clue as to just what the hell was happening here.

  He walked over to one of the stalls and pushed open the door a little too hard: nothing inside but the toilet. Moving to another: nothing there either. He stood in the middle of the floor with fists clenched trying to figure out what to do next. He checked both hands again but they were bare, empty, unlined.

  Crebold was now so frustrated and angry that if he had been a fairy tale character like Rumpelstiltskin, he probably would have burned up in a furious fizzle of smoke or torn himself in half. But he was a mechanic, albeit a thoroughly confused one now, and he was going to figure this mystery out no matter what. He was an asshole—he knew it better than anyone—but he was a determined asshole, which made a big difference in his mind.

  After one last look around he pushed open the door and walked out of the bathroom.

  Right into the next shock.

  The restaurant was completely empty. The large room, which only minutes before had been humming with activity and scores of people laughing, talking, drinking, eating, flirting, grousing … was now silent and vacant. Almost as alarming, all the tables were covered with signs of messy moments-ago life: half-eaten food and drinks, women’s purses lying scattered, cell phones … It looked as if everyone in the place had vanished so quickly they hadn’t even had time to pocket their phones, gather their purses, or take the napkins off their laps and put them on the tables before leaving.

  Crebold could feel a real palpable buzzing life lingering very perceptibly all around him—like the soul of someone who’s died just moments before. In the random scatter of objects left, the way many chairs sat crookedly or pushed away from the tables as if the people sitting in them had been facing each other in conversation. Half-empty wine bottles and glasses, partly eaten sandwiches, a telephone number scrawled in vivid purple ink on a torn slip of paper held down by a full bottle of Pellegrino mineral water. Crebold could feel life’s heart still beating strongly everywhere in the vast empty room.

  What happened here? Where were all the people who had filled the place only minutes before when he’d left to go to the bathroom?

  Crebold walked around touching things, sitting in different chairs, looking at the room from different angles. At one point he even put his hands over his eyes and a moment later dropped them again like a child playing peekaboo with an adult. Only now he hoped when he took his hands away, the restaurant would once again be full of people and the situation back to normal.

  He was a mechanic—why couldn’t he understand what had happened?

  Sitting down at one of the tables, he reached for an almost full bottle of red wine and poured it into a glass right up to the rim. Taking a big mouthful he gulped it down and quickly had another. Wine was all right. Crebold had to admit he liked the stuff. What Riley had said before about his hating everything on Earth wasn’t true. There were things he liked. There were some things he liked very much on Earth but he’d just never told anyone about them. Why should he? Whose business was it that he liked wine or anything else?

  One of the cell phones on the table rang. It vibrated too, so with every ring it moved a little across the table. Crebold’s first reaction was to reflexively pull back, away from the now-alive and suddenly sinister pink object. He knew it wasn’t an accident or coincidence; the phone was ringing for him. Whoever was on the other end of the line knew exactly where he was and what had just gone on here.

  After letting it ring three times he took a shaky deep breath, let it out in a loud whoosh, and picked up the phone. Pressing the connect button, he put the phone to his ear and said, “Crebold.”

  The voice on the other end was calm and anonymous. “All of them are safely inside you now. That’s why the lines on your hands have disappeared—the process is complete. How do you feel?”

  “Confused.” Crebold did not ask who he was speaking to.

  “That’s understandable. Do you have any questions?”

  “Yes—why was it necessary for me to be parnaxed?”

  “Because they’re gathering data. They needed to see how you and Kaspar would react toward each other after his years as a human. You failed the test and proved you’re not to be trusted.”

  Crebold couldn’t help wincing at the thought of what he was about to say. “Is he … is he in me along with the others?”

  “No, Kaspar is dying; he just doesn’t know it yet. He’ll finish his life here. They’ll strip him of certain memories he has now to make him more comfortable and then leave him alone.”

  “He’s dying?” Surprising himself, Crebold was dismayed to hear Kaspar was dying and they weren’t going to stop it. “But don’t they need him? He’s one of the few allowed to keep his memory when he was retired. Don’t they need his information—all he’s learned here?”

  “No.”

  The single word and blunt tone in which it was spoken fell like a hammer blow on Crebold’s ear and assumptions. />
  He was going to say something else when suddenly he cocked his head to one side and looked, as if listening to a distant sound he couldn’t recognize. A sudden clear vision of the magazine store owner Whit Ayres had come to him for some unknown reason. At first he didn’t recognize the man because he’d never seen him before—but in an instant he did. Crebold said out loud what he already knew was the truth. “Ayres was a mechanic too, wasn’t he?”

  The voice on the telephone said indifferently, “Yes. Everyone in this room was a retired mechanic. All of you previously worked together in the same group. Even idiotic Barry Rubin who revealed things he shouldn’t have and had to be eliminated. They used Vanessa to take care of him. She did well, although she had no idea who was behind it.”

  Crebold pointed toward the bar and asked why Riley Rivers had said before some of the people in the room were not mechanics.

  “Because she’s not back up to full understanding yet, which is true about many of those who were here.”

  Crebold raised his head and looked toward the ceiling as his thoughts gradually lined up and began to make an overall sense. “Vanessa was set up to kill Rubin although she thought it was her own doing. Something about him had gone bad or wrong and he revealed stuff he shouldn’t have. Like a healthy cell in the body that kills another because the second one has become infected and threatens the others.”

  “Right again. Sometimes mechanics do go bad when they retire. Then they must be destroyed, like infected cells.”

  Crebold put the telephone on the table and reached for his wineglass. He drained what was left and touched the glass to his forehead as if to cool the overheated engine inside it. His mind was working at a ferociously fast speed processing, separating, and divvying up the ideas, truths, and revelations that bombarded it now.

  He’d once been in an air traffic control tower at Kennedy airport in New York City, watching what appeared to be hundreds of green blips representing planes approaching and leaving local airspace on the controllers’ crowded screens. At the time, despite being a mechanic, he thought he’d go mad if he had to monitor and manage this constantly changing pandemonium all day long. Yet that’s exactly what it felt like inside his skull right now.