by Неизвестный
But this time Vera too has found her voice. “You. Are. Scum. Darrell. You murderer. No, Darrell, you bastard, it’s time for you to pay.” Vera has no weapon, nothing beyond the hatred that fills the empty spots within her, yet she draws herself up proudly, and she wears her limp and her scars as medals, and she walks naked from the bedroom to face her monster.
The orange flickers from the gas log in the hearth and the blue half-light of the snow swirling through the broken window caress her skin, clothing her form in jewels of fire and of ice. She glows and the immediate air pulsates ever so softly.
“Darrell,” she croons. “Darrell. Don’t you want to see the masterpiece you have made of my body? Don’t you want to view your handiwork? It’s something, isn’t it, Darrell, how many ways flesh can be broken. And this is only the wrapping. Only the outside. I have no insides anymore. Do you, Darrell, do you have any insides? Did you ever? Can we see?”
The man scowls and lowers his head slightly, like a bull about to charge. This is unexpected. She has never answered back before, only cowered and flinched, his forever-victim. There is something here he does not like, something that makes the small hairs rise and tingles the nerves at the base of his spine. Something unforeseen.
“Well, Vera. If you want me, you gotta do some better than that.” Darrell manages a tiny snort that translates more as a whine. “You never was really much of a looker, but you’ve sure as hell let yourself go.”
The man advances no farther and the woman stands still as well, yet the air about her continues its movements, a tiny squall, a vibration.
“Darrell.” She says it only once, but the name echoes through the room like a chant and her voice is backed by many voices --- voices that speak with the pounding of her veins emptying her blood onto the floor of the old house, voices that echo with the stilled heartbeat of their never-breathing child. “Darrell. Darrell.”
The man draws his eyebrows together still tighter, inclines towards her, clenches his fists, considers a single menacing step. The pulsing grows louder, measured bursts of rage rimmed in colors of fire and ice. The corners of the room deepen and become rounded and something in time very violently shifts. The man craves his revenge, yet his hatred is a paltry thing next to the forces unleashed on a snow-filled night in a small house in Maine.
Vera is a tiny woman-child, but she fills the room, recedes to normal size, fills the room again. She is solid, not solid, a pulsing fury and now the man shines with fear-sweat and cocks his head back ever so slightly. The pounding of his own heart thumps loudly, erratic in the way of terror. “Darrell. Darrell.”
“You bitch,” he mutters. “What kinda trick is this?” He wears the stink of his vileness like a shield. “Goddamn you, Vera. I’ll get you for this crap.” He takes that step forward.
The air sizzles and the room strobes and the floor and the ceiling give way until there is only light and vibration and a noise the sound of centuries, rage gathered to crescendo, justice as lightening. Eyes and wings and clouds and creatures of fire and wrath. And from the center erupts a vast horse, a winged stallion, and his coat glistens as a heart jewel, and his hooves show the man no mercy until the man is also red, and the room is overcome by silence.
Except for the man and his redness, the house is abruptly empty and snow drifts in through the broken glass of the door.
BACKSLIDE
by
K. L. NAPPIER
These people. What was he doing here with them? He didn’t really enjoy their company. They were pretentious bastards, focused on esoteric bullshit that had nothing to do with him or the real world.
It was like he was trapped in the opening lines of a bad joke: A physicist, a Buddhist and a heretic walk into a bar. He, of course, was the heretic. These people, who passed as drinking buddies, more or less. Who don’t know any more about him that he knew about them, other than what he’d told them when they asked, “So what do you do, when you’re not knocking back Grey Goose here at Stally’s?”
He told them what he did for a living, but not what he did with his life. Not what he’d done to his life. He damn sure wasn’t going to pour his heart out to their kind. Physicists, Buddhists ... affluent Americans, born into privilege, who could afford to think in abstracts. Who could afford to flip religions in midlife.
He was affluent, too, now. But he was nothing like these guys. He’d made his fortune through another route. And he was damn sure neither of them ever had to do what he’d had to do to make it. But, hell, it was a family tradition, dirty dealing in dirty jobs-- all the way back to an ancestral sea captain in the slave trade.
He had nothing in common with these people, who had a way of luring you into arguments that they called “debates.” That’s how he’d gotten snagged. For three Fridays in a row he’d overheard their grandiose prattle, and finally couldn’t resist making a comment from his bar stool. They had commented back, tempting him to look their way. So he swiveled the stool around, eventually walked a few steps toward their booth, eventually sat with them every Friday after work.
These elder yuppies: in their minds, always trumping his pragmatism, thinking they were better than him ... he just knew they did. The physicist, sipping his Cabernet like an old woman, the Buddhist, dawdling over a single Miller Lite, while he, the heretic, waved at the cocktail waitress, who nodded. A third Goose, light on the ice. Got it.
Tonight, the physicist was saying he’d watched a program on the Science Channel. “Either of you catch it? About Hawking’s work on black holes.”
Naturally, the Buddhist had. DVR'ed it, no less. His eyes lit up. “What really grabbed me was a particular remark. Practically a throw-away line ...” The Buddhist turned to the heretic and magnanimously brought him up to date. “One of the talking heads said he was part of a team that had worked on an equation. It calculated what would happen to someone caught on the event horizon of a black hole.”
The heretic snorted as the girl set his drink in front of him. “Why?”
“Well, the topic was the Hawking paradox. But this guy mentioned, as an aside, that the equation shows how someone caught on the event horizon would -from one perspective- be annihilated. Spaghettification, some call it. Your body would be pulled and stretched like pasta dough until it fragmented. But from another prospective ... nothing would change. To you or me, it would look as if the person was being ripped apart by the black hole. But from that person’s perspective, absolutely nothing would have changed. The person would be dead and alive, simultaneously.”
While the Buddhist talked, the heretic took a long drink and, when the Buddhist finished, the heretic licked his lips and asked, “No, I mean why the hell would these eggheads work on that kind of crap? What’s the point? Christ, no wonder the world’s screwed up, with our so-called best minds wasting carpal tunnel syndrome on shit that’s never going to happen in the first place. Jesus.”
The Buddhist shook his head, looking sympathetically amused. Sooo enlightened. Sooo much better than him. Some day he was going to have to find a way to really piss off the physicist and the Buddhist. If he couldn’t, then he guessed he’d just have to punch one of them out.
“The point is a spiritual one,” the Buddhist said, sooo patiently.
He, the heretic, snorted again and polished off his drink.
The Buddhist said, “Look, I only brought it up because it illustrates how science and spirituality are starting to converge. Equating what happens to you at the edge of a black hole comes very close to recognizing the continuation of consciousness. Suppose everyone knew this in advance of their deaths? What a relief that would be! You know, in my tradition ...”
In his tradition. Like he was a born-and-bred Asian Buddhist instead of a balding blond with an Anglo surname who grew up on the eastern seaboard.
“... we’re taught that when you die, your final thoughts are very important. If your thoughts are positive and peaceful, they can help steer you to a better rebirth. Perhaps even offset unwholeso
me karma or at least help you cope with what you’ve accumulated. If more people were convinced of their continuation after death—”
“Happy thoughts equal happy reincarnation, huh?”
“Well, not to parse words, but reincarnation is considered different from rebirth, at least by some of us. Reincarnation evokes images of flesh reanimating, you know? Dead bodies being possessed ... kind of Frankenstein-esque. Whereas re-birth is exactly what it sounds like ... your consciousness born into a brand new body.”
The heretic more or less smiled at his drinking buddies, slapped a dollar or two on the table for the girl (okay, so it was only one buck, so sue him) and scooted out of the booth. “Yeah, well, thanks for the heads up. When I take my last breath, I’ll make sure I imagine kittens cavorting in poppy fields. ‘Night, fellas.”
***
Now that he thought about it, that was the evening he had the nightmare for the first time. He could never remember much about it. He’d awaken, his chest squeezed, the sound of water swirling, his mouth filled with something not breathable. And always that sound of water swirling, swirling...
Sometimes what pulled him out of it was a voice demanding, “Wake up!” It always took him a few seconds to realize it was his wife’s. She would already have her bedside lamp on as he hauled himself up, gasping, swinging his legs over the edge, his undershirt soaked, his hair matted with sweat.
“Are you all right?” she would ask, with a mix of worry and irritation.
Most nights, he’d nod and she’d click the light off again and roll her back toward him. But sometimes he couldn’t nod, couldn’t reply, and that's when she would get out of bed and walk around to him.
“You’re red as a beet,” she’d say, annoyed that he was worrying her.
There was a time when all he might have seen on her face and heard in her voice was the concern and none of the exasperation. But he’d used up that privilege years ago. That and more. Just like he’d used up his friendships. Just like he’d used up any meaningful contact with his son and his daughters.
Sometimes she’d add to the red-as-a-beet comment, “Did you ever have that secretary of yours call the doctor and make you an appointment?”
And he would say, his voice gravelly from trying to find breath, “I’m all right.”
In a huff she would go back to her side of the bed, thump down heavier than she needed and roll her back toward him. Her parting shot was always: “How many times do I have to nag you? Go see the doctor. If not for you then for me. For heaven’s sake! You come thrashing out of your sleep like a man drowning.”
***
“You look kind of rough, big guy,” the Buddhist said.
He, the heretic, just slid into the booth and asked, “Where’s Einstein?”
“A little late. Seriously, you feeling okay? Fighting a cold?”
“Yeah. The doctor says I need to up my antifreeze.” He waved at the girl for his usual.
The Buddhist shook his head, ever amused, ever patient. They talked small for a while: jobs, sports. Einstein showed up around the second Grey Goose and, like he didn’t have a mind of his own, asked the same damn thing the Buddhist had: “Say, buddy, you fighting a cold or something?”
“Just some trouble sleeping,” the heretic replied and signaled the girl before his second Goose was gone. “This oughta help.”
“Actually,” the physicist said, “the older we get, the more liquor messes with our sleep.”
So the heretic raised his glass to his lips for an extra long swallow while Einstein watched him and added, “Wish I could knock them back like I used to. But every time I try, these days, all I do is suffer. Especially my hearing.”
“Hearing ...?” the heretic asked, too tired to realize he’d just played the straight man.
“Yeah, from Amy bitching, ‘are you hung over again?’”
The Buddhist chuckled appreciatively while the heretic acknowledged the joke with a half-smile. Then the two of them -the Buddhist and the physicist- launched into a reverie of their wilder days, happy to have had them and happy they were past.
Looked like it was a good night for a fourth Goose.
Sometime later, swaddled in his vodka haze, when the topic between the physicist and the Buddhist had turned to a book ... “Physics of Consciousness” or something like that, by a so-and-so Walker ... somebody like that ... the heretic heard himself blurt out, “So, what do Buddhists think about dreams?”
The conversation stuttered, then came a halt. The Buddhist’s brow knitted. “Dreams?”
The heretic nodded and lifted his drinking hand to point around the glass toward him. “Isn't your ‘tradition’ into interpretin’ dreams?”
Maybe it was the fourth vodka, but it seemed to him that the Buddhist watched him a little too long before giving a shrug and saying, “Not overly. Buddhists aren’t particularly attached to dreams. Although, personally, I’ve had some that I think were helpful.”
“So do they foretell the future? Or are they all about my childhood?”
“I—"
“ ‘Cause, I keep hearin’ water in my dreams. Like a flood or an ocean. Can’t be from my childhood, I was raised in a fifth floor walk-up in Detroit.”
“Well, I—"
“So you think it’s my future maybe?”
You think it’s my death? The heretic had just enough sense left to push the glass to his lips and stop that final question. The physicist and the Buddhist kept quiet for a long time. He could feel their eyes on him as he drained the glass. Then the physicist said, as if he had any reason to care, “You sure you’re okay, buddy?”
“Christ.” The heretic thumped the tumbler onto the table, then leaned to his left and fumbled for the wallet in his right hip pocket. “You two are a lot of help. Thought this kind of shit was your kind of shit.”
The physicist's carefully crafted pleasantness stiffened into irritation. Finally, after all these months, something real from that bastard. Not much, but something.
“My degree’s in science, not tea leaves,” he said.
“Yeah?” The heretic stared hard at his wallet. He was just sober enough to make sure he was getting a twenty, not a fifty. He looked up briefly at the Buddhist. “What’s your degree for? Healing Hands?”
The physicist was getting more real every minute. “What’s your problem tonight?”
“Tonight? Just tonight? Well, tonight, my problem’s the company I keep.”
“Then why the hell are you here?”
He, the heretic, stuck the twenty and a single under his wet glass and leveraged himself up. “Been askin’ myself the same thing lately.”
The Buddhist, playing Mr. Peace Maker, said, “Here’s what I think. You sit with us because you’re more like us than you want to admit. We’ve all got our terrors, big guy. And we’re all just looking for some answers.”
And the heretic replied, “Fuck you and g’night.”
***
Bad, this time, really bad. Worse than usual. The sound of rushing water was right against his skull. Beyond that he could hear groaning and weeping and something that sounded like timber getting ready to drop. Stench like a sewer, things nudging against him ... some slick and feverish, some cold and clammy. He tried to gasp, his mouth working like a carp, but it filled again, his nose closed off ...
He woke to find his wife’s hands on his shoulders and he struggled up, pushing her away. He gripped the side of the bed, like a man clinging to the edge of a life raft.
His wife asked shrilly, “Did you ever go to the doctor?”
“I will,” he said between breaths, “I will.” And he meant it this time. He was finally scared enough, even though he had a terrible feeling the doctor wouldn’t be any help. His heard his wife huff and she snapped off the light. He sat in the dark, staring down at the emptiness below his white feet. He called his wife’s name softly.
She said, “What!”
“Do you ever think about ... ? You ever give much thoug
ht to what happens after somebody dies? Reincarnation? Anything like that?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Chastened, he sagged further. “I don’t know. Never mind.” He lay down again.
Her back to him the whole time, his wife said, “What would I know about any of that? I’m agnostic at best, you know that. If you’d go to the doctor, you wouldn’t have to have that kind of nonsense on your mind.”
“Okay, okay...”
“ ‘Reincarnation.’ For all I know we’re born once, twice, forwards or backwards, a thousand times over, not at all ...”
“All right, just can it, okay? Christ ...”
***
Looking back on it, those are terrible last words for a man to leave his wife. If he could have, he’d have taken them back. But he couldn’t now, because he was only semi-conscious, just aware enough to know he was lying in a bed that wasn’t his. He was looking up at florescent lights. His throat burned. He was frightened by the feeling of something filling his mouth and gullet until he realized that, unlike in the dream, he was able to breathe. In fact, he couldn’t stop breathing if he tried. Oxygen was being pumped into his lungs by a machine.
He heard voices and swiveled his eyes, trying to take in what he could, which wasn’t much since he couldn’t turn his head. He saw forms move just beyond his vision, but it was a while before one of them came near enough to peer at him. It was his wife. She looked surprised to see him.
“His eyes are open,” she said to someone.
He felt her fingers slip between the bed sheet and his limp palm and she gave his hand a squeeze. He couldn’t remember the last time her touch had been so gentle. His eyes began to smart as tears welled in the corners.