Logorrhea

by John Klima

  He came home and dropped his bag on the couch and carried the phone into the bathroom to sit with Pia while he bought himself some time. He called his job and told them his wife had family troubles and that he needed to take vacation and sick time early. Sorry about the Astai demo. Naeem could probably sort it out. He told a few of his and Pia’s friends that Pia had a family emergency, and that she’d flown back to Illinois, to help. He notified Pia’s work, saying that she’d be in touch when she knew more about what kind of emergency leave she might need. He chatted with Pia’s parents and told them he was taking her on a surprise vacation for their anniversary and that phone service in Turkey would be unreliable. Every conversation closed doors of friendly inquiry. Every conversation lengthened the time between suspicion and discovery.

  The steadiness of his voice surprised him. Somehow it was hard to be nervous when the worst was already done. He bought a pair of plane tickets in his and Pia’s name to Cambodia with a departure a month away. From Vancouver, just to confuse things a little more. And when he was done, he made himself a gin and tonic and sat and soaked with Pia one last time in her macerate. There was a smell about her now, the rot of her guts, the gasses of her belly. The ruin wreaked by hot water on dead flesh. But he soaked with her anyway and apologized as best he could for remaking his life via her dead body. Then he went over and reclaimed his shovel from Gabby.

  By the light of a few alley streetlamps, he buried Pia in the backyard under a part of the garden. He left a note for the police, describing generally what had happened—including an apology—for when he was finally caught and needed some faceless court to forgive him and let him out in less time than they would have demanded of a pot grower. He scattered sunflower and poppy and morning glory seeds on the mound and thought that the 7-Eleven clerk would approve.

  That night, he drove across the mountains. He wondered if he had finally crossed the line between manslaughter and murder, or murder two and murder one, but didn’t really care. A bit of travel just seemed in order. A long vacation before a longer prison sentence. Really, it wasn’t much different from changing jobs. A bit of a break before the new job started up.

  He sold his car in Las Vegas for another five thousand in cash, pretending to be a gambling junkie sure his luck would turn around. Then he struck off down the road, headed for the interstate and the wider world beyond.

  On a desert on-ramp he stuck out his thumb. He wondered if his luck would keep holding and then he wondered how much he really cared. He marveled that he had ever worried about something as trivial as a 401(k) allocation. He was on the road to Mexico with its sun and sand and pleasant rhythms and…who knew? Perhaps he would be caught. Or perhaps he would simply disappear into his strange new life.

  Jonathan had once read that Japanese samurai lived as if they had already died. But he doubted even they had any idea what that really felt like. Standing beside the hot Nevada interstate with gritty winds and big rigs blowing past him, he thought he might have an inkling.

  By the time he’d pulled Pia from the bath and buried her, he’d feared she would fall apart from all her soaking. His mother used to say that if you stayed in a bath too long you’d shrivel up and disappear. But Pia had held together all right, even after a couple of days. She was gone, but still recognizable. He, on the other hand, was still around—and yet utterly changed.

  A sporty RAV4 hit the on-ramp. It whipped past him in a flash of white, then slowed suddenly and pulled onto the margin. Jonathan jogged after it, his messenger bag of cash jouncing against his hip. He yanked open the little SUV’s door. A kid with a crushed cowboy hat studied him through mirrored Ray-Bans.

  “Where you headed?”

  “San Diego?”

  “You pay gas?”

  Jonathan couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah. I think I can help with that.”

  The kid motioned him in, gunned the little engine and accelerated onto the highway.

  “What are you doing in San Diego?”

  “I’m actually going to Mexico. Somewhere with beaches.”

  “I’m going to Cabo for spring break. Gonna get drunk, suck titties and go native.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Yeah, man. It’s gonna be great.”

  The kid cranked up the stereo and whipped the RAV4 into the passing lane, zipping past eighteen-wheelers and late weekend traffic returning from Vegas to L.A.

  Jonathan rolled down the window, reclined his seat and closed his eyes as the stereo throbbed and the kid yammered on about how he wanted to be in a skateboard video someday and how much he was going to get laid in Mexico and how you could buy phat weed down there for nothing.

  The miles sped by. Jonathan let himself relax and think again about Pia. When he pulled her from the bath, he’d been amazed at how soft her skin had become.

  The next time he got married, he hoped he’d be softer, too.

  * * *

  T•R•A•N•S•E•P•T

  tran·sept 'tran(t)-'sept

  noun

  : the part of a cruciform church that crosses at right angles to the greatest length between the nave and the apse or choir; also: either of the projecting ends of a transept

  * * *

  Crossing the Seven

  JAY LAKE

  WHEN HALCYONE WAS QUEEN in Cermalus the blackstar first came into the sky.

  With the coming of the blackstar, tradesmen and civitors alike cried for protection from the throne. The working people of the city paid no more attention to the shouting on the hill than we did to the lights in the sky. The end of the world might be at hand, but there was still bread to be baked and dogs to be fed and gutters to be cleaned.

  I myself was most concerned with the state of the tiles on the roof of the villa belonging to the first mistress of the civitor Tradelium. I was called Andrade, slave of the city.

  The civitor was not an unkind man, in that he sometimes managed to remember his slaves and servants were human beings with needs and desires. It was more than most of that august class could keep in mind, who had been borne amid a cloud of attendants and would die there, either of old age or bloody assassination.

  Kindness or no, his sweet mistress had experienced an in-pouring of water, ruining a set of silk sheets and some quite expensive leather intimates brought at significant cost from decadent Oppius. This had sent her into a rage of epic proportions. In turn, the civitor Tradelium experienced no little irritation as the mistress had accosted his wife.

  In accordance with the fundamental principle that feces flow downward, all became my responsibility for having failed to divine in advance of the need for repairing the roof. And thusly, while the second sons of the wealthy were rending their garments in the streets for fear of the blackstar, I was up on the roof resetting glazed tiles across my carefully built grout-and-plaster. I had no intention of coming down from my perch for the sake of flood, fire, or barbarian invasion, not after the civitor’s mixture of threats and promised bonuses.

  I was standing on that roof with the long-bladed file in my hand, balanced on the slick curved tiles, when the high priestess of the Temple Regina rode astride her white ass down the cobbled street below. She wore only the three veils of propriety and the seven beads of virtue. Her Worship being about ten stone and forty years to the far side of lissome, the three veils were as effective as a sneeze and a promise. It was a large ass. Both of them were, in fact—the one attached to her and the one beneath her. The high priestess’s avoirdupois was of no moment as all good Cermalians knelt in prayer facing away from her line of procession. The bad Cermalians turned away too, out of a sense of good taste or possibly sheer self-preservation.

  Even her temple guard marched with their eyes averted.

  So it was that when the blackstar discharged its bolt of unholy violet lightning, mine were the only eyes hers chanced to meet.

  Given that I stood a good fifty feet above her on the roofline, limned from behind by the blinding light—and I thank th
e stars themselves I was not looking into the bolt—what the high priestess saw was a purple angel descended from the heavens, harbinger of the blackstar.

  What I saw was her great maw opening for a shriek. I figured it was me for a goner, on account of profaning the sacred form of the high priestess by casting my base eyes upon her. I’d have gladly given that vision of pulchritude right back to the pond from whence it flopped, if I had had the chance.

  She yelled, a second bolt struck the long-bladed file, my hair caught fire, and I was blown off the roof.

  After that, things got bad.

  It might have gone better for me if I had not landed on the high priestess. She broke my fall, but together we broke the ass’s back. I wound up with my face buried perilously close to her heavenly gates, which smelled of old shoe leather, while the poor, screaming animal had somehow collapsed upon my buttocks and thighs.

  In very short order an impressive collection of ceremonial brass spear points pricked me, while an angry man with a face like a tamarind monkey was screeching for me to get on my feet immediately upon pain of sudden and excruciating death. I rolled my eyes at him above the quivering curve of her Worship’s belly, contriving to indicate that I could neither move nor speak in my current situation, but he was clearly not a rational fellow.

  “Raise up the heretic,” he shouted.

  The spear points fell away, the screaming ass was levered free, and several pairs of rough yet ungentle hands yanked me off the sacred person of the high priestess, who was promptly covered with a guard’s sable cloak. Three cloaks, actually, it took to ensure the requirements of modesty were met.

  I dangled in the air as someone finally put the poor beast out of its misery. The officer leaned close, his anger somewhat better under control. “Any confessions before your summary execution?”

  “I didn’t—” I began, but obviously I had. Dropped from the sky, interrupted the parade, seen her Worship in the forbidding flesh, harassed her Worship’s person. There were doubtless a dozen more crimes of which I was guilty. Having neither wit nor patriotism to sustain me, I merely shook my head.

  “Wait,” bellowed the high priestess.

  Half a dozen stabbing spears paused with a shiver. My gut was in such a pucker I almost wished they’d finished it.

  She struggled to her feet, a titanic wave of loose sable and pale free-swinging flesh. “Somebody bring me my robe,” she snapped to the world at large. Then, to the guard captain: “Don’t you know who this is?”

  His mouth worked, but he obviously made the same calculus so recently completed by my own panicked mind. “Madame,” he said.

  The response of cornered guard captains everywhere, I thought with sharp satisfaction. Though I had no idea what she meant either.

  “He is our messenger from the blackstar!” she shouted.

  An entire street full of people, rushing out of doors for the exciting prospect of an imminent execution, immediately cheered this news that one had come who could speak for, and presumably protect them from, the dreaded blackstar. While most of them cared no more than I did for the heavenly apparition, their masters or their masters’ masters, or their masters’ masters’ masters certainly did.

  There was a general riot of cheering. I quickly found myself lifted upon the shoulders and hands of a mob, and borne toward the Cermalic Palace. The high priestess bobbed somewhere behind me, moving at a slower pace, and if she was lucky, drinking heavily.

  It was certainly what I wished in that moment—a stout drink, followed by a nice, safe execution.

  So I came before Halcyone, borne by temple guards and a mob of plebes and proles and slaves who under normal circumstances would not have been allowed through the main gates of the palace. Somewhere in the course of the mad rush I discovered that all the hair on my head, and indeed even my eyebrows, had been burnt away by the violet bolt. Perhaps no one would know me.

  Even as we muddled to a halt before the throne, a hasty delegation of civic dignitaries rushed in, led by none other than the civitor Tradelium.

  Once more I found myself wishing for that drink.

  The throne room of Halcyone is lined with two rows of pillars, each ten times the height of a man. Between them is a peaked clerestory, with colored glass that lights the floor far below in a pleasing array of shadows. I cannot tell you what is behind the pillars, for bright braziers set before them blinded my eyes to the deeper shadows. The floor is some complex mosaic which I never saw clearly.

  Halcyone was a slim bird of a woman, sprawled sidewise within the Cermalic throne. The chair itself was gilded, in the shape of a giant lotus only partially opened, so that the queen resembled nothing so much as an overthin infant pushing its way out from betwixt its mother’s womanly parts.

  Though she might look the spoiled child, when confronted by an armed mob in her own throne room, Halcyone had the mind of a ruler. “What is your purpose?” she called out to me in a cool voice which should have been able to stop a battle.

  It certainly stopped the mob.

  “Majesty,” said the guard captain, dropping to one knee as he swept off his helmet. Everyone else took this cue to kneel, which resulted in me being dumped on the floor. “Her Worship the high priestess of the Temple Regina has declared this man to be the messenger of the blackstar.”

  I stood, bowed, and tried to brush myself off. My tunic was singed by lightning, rent by spears, stained with blood, and covered with crisped strands of my hair. “Majesty.”

  She raised a hand to forestall further statements from me. The queen slithered out of her throne and stood tall. She wore only a simple white chiton, pinned at the left shoulder, leaving her right shoulder and most of her right breast bare.

  “It is known to us,” she said slowly, “that the mighty of our city fear the coming of the blackstar. We are not an astrologer, nor are we a mathematician, but even a queen must give nod to a messenger from beyond the heavens. Here is the source and solution to our problems. Speak, and tell us what you will.”

  She gave me such a hard, calculating look that I knew I was being set up for a fall worse than the one I had just taken from the civitor’s rooftop. I drew a great breath and said the only thing I could imagine which might save me. “I am come from the heavens to cross the Seven Cities. When I leave this greatest of cities, I will take your fears with me. Convey me now to Cispius.”

  Halcyone quirked a smile, and gave me a tiny nod. As I was swept up again by the mob I could hear the civitor Tradelium saying, “But that’s the slave who maintains my rooftops.”

  When Sterope was queen in Cispius the messenger of the blackstar began his journey across the Seven Cities, the peregrination that in ancient times had been called the Transept.

  The high priestess’s guard officer, one Leutherion, was assigned to be my own guard captain, a duty he liked no more than I. The rest of my attendants were likewise selected at random from those in the throne room the day of my elevation—servants, plebes, and soldiers who were not pleased either. They considered my heavenly mission to the Seven Cities nothing more than a criminal deceit. The fact they were correct did nothing to ease my fears or my conscience. Instead I played haughty, as if I were a civitor and they no more than slaves.

  We rode forth mounted on brown asses from the queen’s stables, Leutherion bearing in my honor a black-on-black banner affixed to the haft of a spear. No noble destriers for us—her majesty was nothing if not practical. In our train we bore a great chest filled with slips of paper on which the great and plebian alike of Cermalus had written their greatest fears for the blackstar, to be carried forth by me, the messenger of heaven.

  I was already mightily missing my rooftop duties.

  Our journey passed with varying rounds of bickering and silence across a demon-haunted scrubland, in which old bones stood taller than my head and shadows gibbered, chuckled, and howled by night. I might have thought myself in the lands of the dead save for the blackstar which stood overhead day and night. In s
unlight it was a hole in the sky. In darkness it crackled a baleful purple.

  I could only be where I was thanks to its inimical agency.

  After six days of infighting and shivering in the dark, we approached Cispius. Much like Cermalus, the city was situated upon a hill, proximate to open water and arable land. Unlike Cermalus, where wealth and power had migrated upward, the Cispians had built themselves a sort of circular palace, a circus of the mighty which ran the circumference of the base of the hill, leaving stables, huts, and slave camps for the upper slopes.

  I later understood this had to do with the availability of water, and lack thereof, on the slopes of the hill. Cermalus is blessed with springs all the way up its heights and so I had in my naïveté assumed that all the Seven Cities were so arranged.

  Flanked by two of his men, Ironpants and Pelletier, Leutherion stopped before the brass-bound great gate. The pair of doors were perhaps three man-heights tall, each a third as wide. Though a smaller wooden trade gate stood wide open nearby, out of which flowed a succession of carts and fieldhands bound for the farms, the formal entrance was closed to us until we stated our business and presented our credentials.

  “The messenger of the blackstar is here,” Leutherion called loudly. “Come to carry away the evil which descends from your skies.”

  Had we possessed a trumpet amongst our little caravan, I am certain he would have blown it.

  An armored man leaned out of the shadows of the trade gate. “I knows a Cermalian accent when I hears one,” he shouted. “Your embassy’s done come and gone for the season. ’Less you got a caravan permit, be off with you.”

  Some of my attendants snickered as I glanced behind me at the days-long trail through the scrub, but my guard captain was made of sterner stuff. He and his outriders kicked their donkeys over to the trade gate. I did not deign to follow, but awaited negotiations. These appeared to be part bribery and part threat.