by John Shirley
Right now I was remembering myself walking down Fremont Street looking for Marissa. I could see myself, as if I were watching from overhead. The Nick Fogg I was seeing, walking on Fremont, had such a hard look on his face. The look was a message. It said, I don’t care if I’m working for Lenny and what that might mean. I need the money. So go to hell, world.
I shook myself, now, feeling a bit eerie—as if I might fall into a trance, right here, and go back to reliving my life. The worst sides of my life . . .
I tried to remember the good sides. Fixing up my Gran Torino with my friends. Going to a Blue Oyster Cult concert in that Gran Torino. Kissing my girlfriend in that car—my first serious girlfriend, an easygoing, quick-witted mixed-race girl named Luella. Maybe I should’ve stuck with her. Or maybe we were too young to stick with anyone. Then my time in community college—doing pretty well, earning a liberal arts scholarship for UCLA. That felt good.
But, true to form, I was there just a year before I screwed up. I got loaded, smashed up my car on the campus . . .
It didn’t matter. I was so young. Only I went to Vegas after that . . . years seemed to melt away . . .
I was no longer young when I took that job with Lenny Wong. And I knew better. I needed the money and I told myself I could manage it. But I knew where it might go; yeah, where it would probably go.
I had lied to myself about it. But I hadn’t really believed the lie.
Think about something else, I thought, shivering. Do something right. Help Doyle.
But all I could do right now was trudge along beside him. Our shadows stretched out in front of us, along the path through the heath; then they shrank, and started to stretch out behind us. The sun was looking into our faces now . . .
I looked up at it, and a cloud seemed to choose that moment to cover the coruscating star up, as if trying to keep something from me. As if the afterworld was saying, Figure it out for yourself. You’ll get no help from me.
Was it the increasing chill that was making me shiver? A cold mist, like the plume rising from the base of a waterfall, seemed to be pouring up from the canyon opening out ahead of us . . .
“We’re nearly there,” Doyle said suddenly.
“Yeah?”
“We’d best put on our slickers.”
I put down the lanterns, and we put the slickers on. They seemed to help us put them on, sliding into place. “What are these things made of?”
“Crude ectoplasm. Quite unrefined. Fiona makes them. Put up the hood.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to put on a hood of “crude ectoplasm” but I did. It clung to the side of my head.
I picked up the lanterns and we kept on. The sun was shattered into a faint series of rainbows in the rising mist. Beyond, there seemed to be a great haze-shrouded mountain and at the base of the mountain what I took to be the entrance to a cavern.
The trail began to descend more sharply. At times we skidded on it.
“What is that, up ahead?” I asked.
“Welcome to the Raining Lands,” Doyle said.
FOURTEENTH
It wasn’t a mountain. I saw, now, that it was a cloud, piled up in the shape of a lumpy volcanic cone. The sun was by slow degrees lowering to the cloud’s upper tip as if to charge it with volcanic heat; red light flowed over the sides of the mountain. As we approached, the sun slipped down into the cloud, and it glowed as if to explode. Lightning quivered in it, followed by thunder grumbling long slow words in a language I couldn’t quite understand. Perfectly Wagnerian, isn’t it?” Doyle said.
We were walking into a canyon, in a sort of geological notch. What’s the afterworld equivalent of geological? Postgeological? Parageological?
It was an opening into a mist-choked canyon.
The path became a series of slippery slate steps, winding ever so slightly as they descended into the canyon capped by the cloud.
“I’ve been out here four times over the last forty years,” Doyle said. “That cloud has never gone away. It has changed shape somewhat, but not altered significantly in density. From some angles it seems to wind upward, infinitely, into the sky. But you can’t see that effect from here. You have to climb those cliffs. Quite difficult.”
I heard a surging, hissing, and saw an impenetrable curtain of glass beads not far off. It rippled with ordinary rainbow light—and with colors that I’d never seen in a rainbow. I hadn’t seen them anywhere, except, maybe, for a moment, in the darkness of my closed eyelids . . .
“Wait—is that rain?”
“Why do you think we brought these slickers, Fogg?”
“But that looks like—dense as Niagara Falls, Doyle. Won’t it knock us down?”
“It’s not quite that dense. It does begin rather suddenly. Be careful on the steps when you go into it.”
We descended the stairs; down, down—the roar coming up at us. A cloud of mist rose from it . . .
Then Doyle gestured for me to wait. He paused on the next step down, just outside the curtain of rainfall. I looked up to see the cloud, starting not more than a hundred feet over our heads, sudden as a ceiling. But it was a roiling, shifting ceiling, effulgent with sullen flares of energy.
Doyle had taken the prism out of the bag, and was holding it up, in front of the rain front. “Ah! We’re on the right track! Thank God!” He glanced at me and nodded toward the upraised prism. “Do you see it? In the prism!” He had to lift his voice to be heard.
“See what?”
He passed it to me. “Don’t drop it!”
I almost did drop it, though. It was slick with rain mist. I wiped it on my shirt, under the slicker, and then held it carefully up to peer through its crystalline panes at the wall of rain . . .
I saw nothing—except what you see in a prism. Just bent images, diffusions of light into color.
“Turn it slightly, and look more closely!” Doyle prompted.
I swiveled it slightly in my fingers and squinted—then I saw it. It was the outline of a man, his back to us, carrying a woman in his arms. It was as if someone had traced them in multicolored pencil, against the backdrop of rain; and yet they were as three-dimensional even as they were lines in the atmosphere.
The woman looked to be limp in his arms. She was naked. It could easily have been Charles Long carrying Touie. But I couldn’t be sure. Her own outline seemed to be a muted emerald green, with a little light blue; his seemed red and dark blue shot with sulfurous yellow.
The more I looked at it, the more I could tell that the figures were made out of rain, really. Passing raindrops took the colors on, reproduced them for a split second, before moving on.
Doyle bent near, speaking almost right into my ear. “Rain here takes a mark from a person’s aura—it lingers for up to a day so long as there is sufficient moisture in the air. But few can see it without this prism. It was developed by one of those we saw in the Journal.”
He took the prism back, and returned it to the bag. Then we pressed on, and stepped, Doyle first, through the heavy curtain of glass beads.
We found ourselves in a perpetual rainstorm. The rain usually fell straight down—but at times it slanted. There was no particular wind—only the endless deluge.
“It never ceases!” Doyle shouted, aside to me, as we worked our way down the rain-washed stone steps. “In our favor, we can perhaps move more rapidly than he can—if indeed he is going to the Seam of Life . . .”
The slickers were efficient—they seemed to tighten, all by themselves, around our wrists and knees, and they extended out to shelter our faces a little. But the downpour hammered on our heads, and the runoff rushed round our ankles. I could feel water working its way into my boots.
“I’ve really gotta get new boots!” I said.
“What’s that you say?”
“Nothing . . .”
; “Careful now . . . watch your step!”
The descending stairway seemed to be granite. Someone had etched crisscrossing grip marks into the surface of each step, so the traveler could use them without falling. But I wished there were railings.
To either side were torrents, rushing water, sparkling in the rainbow light that penetrated everywhere. It struck shelves and low boulders and splashed upward. I saw only slight signs of erosion—but things don’t work here exactly as they do in the Before.
The air shuddered with the roaring of rain and surging floodwater. Water vapor was heavy in the air, so that it would have been hard to breathe, if we were in the Before . . .
Every thirty steps or so, Doyle would gesture for me to wait—then he would take out the prism, and hold a hand over it to keep some of the water off. He peered into it, nodded to himself, and put it away, and so we continued.
At last we reached the bottom, the floor of the canyon that was the Raining Lands. Now and then you could see the canyon walls, streaming water, off in the distance.
Here the ground was still rocky, but in places marshy, with great swathes of gray-blue growths, each one tall as a man—they reminded me a little of cactus forests but these seemed fungal—I don’t know if they were—and they seemed to have been contorted by the hand of some giant, deeply troubled child. Some were shaped like coral formations; other growths seem to hint at runes that had taken on a third dimension. All of them looked wickedly unnatural, twisted into the opposite of the shape my mind thought it should have been . . .
The rain hammered down; the streams whooshed and bucketed. Raindrops sizzled off the ground. A fatigue was creeping up on me, the closest I’d felt to Earthly fatigue since coming here. It was almost indistinguishable from depression—from despair.
I looked up to try and get a glimpse of the nourishing sun. It wasn’t there. The light was dim, gray, sometimes interpolated with rippling rainbows that seemed ever more alien in their coloration.
We tramped on, following the course of the barely visible track through the canyon, into an endless continuum of rainfall. After an hour—or was it two—it seemed as if we’d always been here, slogging along, that this was the limbo we’d been banished to, in the afterlife, and everything that had happened since I’d awakened by the Purple Sea was just a daydream. I couldn’t stand the feeling.
“Doyle,” I said, stumbling to a stop. “Can we rest? Maybe a short sleep?”
“We cannot,” he said, turning to me and wiping rainwater off his mustache. “Nor can I leave you here. You wouldn’t find your way out again. You must continue.”
“I just feel like I need to go into a . . .”
“I know. But this is not time for sleep. There is no time for trance. Just the opposite.”
“You don’t feel like you’re carrying a backpack filled with lead weights?”
“Oh—rather. But as Churchill said—”
“I thought you died before he made all his grand speeches.” I was just talking to keep my eyes open at this point.
“I did. He said it to me in person, in Garden Rest.” He added enviously, “He got the Summons rather early on.”
“Doyle—why are the Raining Lands even here? Is there a purpose?”
“Ah. Why is the sea purple, here? However—the Raining Lands are here for a reason. People come here to encounter their true nature. They come here to struggle with themselves, so they can have some hope of going on . . . to the next level. These are no ordinary rains.”
“If you say so.” I was thinking, What would happen, if I just laid myself here on the path, and let the water wash over me?
“Churchill was a fine gentleman. Had to let go of some of his prejudices once he got here. I . . . Fogg? I say, Fogg . . .”
I was staring at the neon sign looming, blinking, shining in the rain, up ahead. The sign read
THE PAY BIGGER CASINO
It wasn’t a big sign—it wasn’t a big casino. Just the tacky little place next door to the dump I roomed in. The Pay Bigger had a Chinese restaurant, but the restaurant reeked of bug killer, and the stuff hadn’t worked. Only time I ate there I saw a huge cockroach scuttling next to the wall by my table.
“Pay Bigger,” I said. “Pay Bigger. Figures.”
“Fogg? What are you seeing?”
I looked at him. “Doyle? What are you doing in Las Vegas? I’ve got something to do, I don’t have time to answer questions . . .”
I hurried to the corner, wishing it would stop raining. Doesn’t rain that much in Vegas but it was sure coming down now.
I turned to Doyle—and he was gone. Vanished. There was nothing, now, but Las Vegas . . . in the rain.
I trotted around the corner and down the side street, found myself on Fremont. And I was surprised. Fremont Street wasn’t that close to my place. I must have spaced out the walk.
I went on, looking for Marissa. The rain kept coming . . .
That wasn’t possible. There was no rain under that roof they’d put over the strip, on Fremont Street.
I looked up, and saw a big raincloud blurring the digital pictures on the ceiling.
“Raining in here . . .” The people on the street didn’t seem to notice. They weren’t even getting wet.
“Fogg!” It was Doyle, suddenly reappearing, keeping pace beside me. “I do believe you’re hallucinating! That can happen here, it’s why the major won’t come. One goes without rest, without the sun, without the trance, and it gets so heavy, so muggy in here and . . . the dreams come at you, after a time, as you walk along. I’ve had my share today. A few moments ago I thought I saw Jean . . .”
“Doyle, you’re distracting me. I’ve got to find Marissa. I have to warn her. I have to tell her to get her kid out of that motel, fast, and get out of town! Lenny is going to kill her. He’s sending some asshole to do it, anyway.”
“Indeed. And who would Lenny be?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Certainly you can. I’m on your side. You know you can trust me, Fogg. Who is Marissa? And Lenny?”
I muttered the story as we walked along, as I kept looking for Marissa. All the neon signs were shining spectrally through the downpour, dancing in the rain, looking unreal.
“And you were hired to find Marissa?” Doyle asked.
“Yeah. I was. And I did. I have to tell her not to go back there. To the motel. See, I got mad because her partner, Wax, he threw me out of his place. He had his man gut slam me one and they tossed me like a sack of cat droppings in the alley. I should get a cat. I like cats. Haven’t had a cat since my folks . . . since they . . .”
“Fogg . . . what did you do when they threw you into the alley?”
“I was mad. Pissed off. Trying to be in control again. I felt so . . . like I had no control over anything in my life. Still hurting over Bettie.”
“Yes? Go on . . .”
“So I called Lenny.” My voice broke. I had to clear my throat. “I called Lenny Wong and I told him where Marissa was. That’s what he hired me to do, anyway, but not what I set out to do when he hired me. I set out to get her to agree to make a deal with him. Set up a meeting somewhere neutral where it’d come out okay. But we never got there. Boom, Wax gave me the bum’s rush. I was ticked off so I called Lenny and he sent a guy right over to watch the place. And the guy followed her home. And he strangled her with a lamp cord.”
“I see.”
“With her kid in the place. Only lucky thing was the kid didn’t get hurt. Maybe better off, though, if the guy had strangled her, too. She’d have been with her mom.”
“You feel . . . that Marissa’s death was your fault. Because you were . . . angry. Because you made that call.”
“Because I worked for him in the first place! I knew better! But I was broke and feeling sorry for myself. Why is it r
aining here? It shouldn’t rain here any time, not on this street. And this rain—like something tropical. Crazy. Not right, Doyle.”
“It seems you made a terrible error of judgment taking that job with Lenny Wong—then you made a second mistake in short order when you lost your temper and called to tell him where Marissa was.”
“And a third one.”
“What was that?”
“I didn’t tell her—I didn’t warn her, after I called him. I should have thought about it, and realized what he’d do. But I didn’t want to think. I wanted to get drunk. So I didn’t think it through till later. Till way too late. Maybe I was mad enough to hope he’d . . . but I never thought anyone would kill her . . .”
“We all make mistakes. There were two or three patients whose lives I could have saved, people with children who needed them. I wasn’t calm enough, I didn’t take enough time over them . . .”
“You didn’t get anyone’s mom strangled to death, Doyle.” I was weeping now. “You’re not a low-life sleaze taking anything that comes along . . .”
“I think you underrate yourself. I see a good person, who . . . What is it now, Fogg?”
I was gaping at the sign. It was shimmering in the downpour, but it was there.
THE CHATTERBOX HOTEL AND LOUNGE
“That’s the place! Where I talked to her, and then Wax came over . . .” My mouth suddenly stopped working. Because there she was, in person.
Marissa. She was stepping out of the Chatterbox, looking right at me. She wore what she had when I saw her that night. And she had her little girl in tow; a little dark-haired girl. The girl, wearing a yellow-and-pink Hello Kitty T-shirt, had dark Latin eyes.
“Doyle . . . there she is. Over there . . . looking at me.”