Broken: A Plague Journal

by Paul Hughes

  “Paul, you—”

  “And this one?” His bad knee locked upon attempts to rise, limped with a dragging right diagonally one row, one column. “She wasn’t nearly as passive a departure. Forced her away, murdered her in time. There’s a murder that allows the victim to persist. And persist,” he wiped the rock face, “she did, never knowing that she’d died. From the inside of a life based on lies, it’s easy to confuse continuation with happiness.”

  “You’re—”

  “A god. A fucking god here.”

  Stumbled over two, up one.

  “Paul, it’s—”

  “She,” wiped the face, his own, “died in my arms. Do you still want this?”

  “—not your fault.”

  Pulled the gloves off, clenched hands to fists, smashed both against the ground. Compound fractures, each finger. Echoed across skeleton trees. The wind had stopped. She’d felt the impact across twenty silent feet.

  He stood, dribbling blood and flecking fragments to the ground. Steam. One simple flash and his claws had repaired. Grabbed both gloves in one hand.

  “I refuse to be the end of you,” stood in place, yet she walked toward his speech, “but if we do this, there’s no other way.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I can’t,” another line burned across his temple, “but I do. I’m asking you to leave. Right now. Don’t be a part of this. I can almost see your face—You’re becoming integral.”

  Proximity. Saw silver crawling behind his muddied eyes. Alina thumbed the new burn, allowed her palm to rest against the unshaven cheek. “I’m not leaving.”

  He grabbed her wrist, considered removing her touch, but held her hand closer. Mouth played over appropriate sentiments, found none to voice. Some communications are solely internal approximations of external poetries.

  Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed’s square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love’s frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.

  Staff meeting.

  West noted the unfamiliar, growing steadily more-familiar, silence whispering out of the stillness of the birth chambers. The ratcheting and slams of a million billion artificial canals had been replaced by the echoing nothing in which you could park the moon, if you were in fact driving it, ever since Judith had—

  fused with Alina, the new woman walked in and took her place at the table. She still answered to Alina, Al, Cap’n Crunch, sweetness, but she was more. The god Judith had found home, and that home was somehow less mousy-haired, less banana-titted. She’d grown freckles for every transgression that she wore mostly on her shoulders and the back of her neck, a scatter across gently-angled cheekbones under upturned eyes. As she slid into her chair, utilitarian (the chair, completely, the woman, mostly), Reynald cleared his throat, and she raised her hand to preempt.

  “Boys.”

  And they were. Veritable sausage-fest. West, Reynald, Hank, Sam. The twins were elsewhere. The bear lacked balls.

  “Where is he?” Reynald accented over the three words, the tension materializing in the acute angles of his fingers.

  “Detox.” Her term for the silver chamber. Quickening, they all knew. More and more time in the mercury sea, leaching out, leaching in, a Chinaman’s attempt at karaoke. “Let’s hear it.”

  “The Lettuce Brothers report A/O lock at eight under, hovering on Delta.” West let the glass tink the tabletop. Things were falling in the space outside of time.

  “New sights, new sounds?”

  “Fairly certain Tunguska, 1908, fourteen-seven.”

  “Good. File under ‘sneaking suspicion.’ Next?”

  “Bleedthrough tertiaries on 1994, 1998 lines, fourteen-seven.”

  “Interesting, but no surprises. Next?”

  “Lunar meteor impact, 2047.”

  “Fourteen—?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Extrapolations?”

  “Didn’t touch our target. Fucked thirty-three over, though. Moon collision. Sixth extinction.”

  “Kink... Forget it, let’s run the nineteen naught-eight probables and feed it to the maths. Get on it asap. Target completion—”

  “Wednesday is the day we fight.”

  “‘Thursday is the day we fade, to live a life unfiltered, mirrors of the ways we smoke to graves, we are ghosts,’ et cetera, et cetera. Don’t quote him. Not here.”

  A rubber can only hold so much, and Hank finally came. He slammed his palm down on the resin tabletop, pulled off his hat, looking strangely pathetic given the tousled strands of surviving white hair sticking straight up from his head, falling in slow motion back into place, a high red rudding his nose and cheeks. His jaw working up to: “Goddamn it, just stop this shit.”

  “Problem, Mr. Cowboy?”

  “Yes there’s a problem, Jud. Al. Whoever the hell you are today.”

  “Care to bring it to the group, or are you just going to smack my table around some more?”

  There is an uncomfortable dynamic that develops when dams break, when dikes leak, when a group of people share something and must present it to an uninitiated brunt oblivious to the conflict. This dynamic evidences itself in diverted eyes, sudden attention gifted to the mundane: a hangnail, the right angle at a paper’s corner, evidences in the until-then suppressed urge to clear a throat or cough. The assembled hierarchy of Judith Command, at least those possessing balls, now all looked to Hank while Alina leaned back into her chair and interlocked her fingers with a confidence that could only have come from Judith herself.

  These men were not cowards; know that. They just didn’t know how to tell god she was wrong. They were each fictional characters, but they left it to the fictional character twice removed from reality to voice their concerns. Hank, as a character within a television show within a novel, had a disconnect that they couldn’t.

  His gun hand shaped itself into an all-fingers representation thereof and pointed at the young woman at the table’s head. “You,” he chose words just before speaking them, crafting each into viable concepts, “need to get that fucking boy out of the silver and into this room.”

  “Miss him?”

  He scoffed. “We all do, girl. But more than that—That shit’s getting into his head. He ain’t no good to us in there. If we’re gonna—”

  “I believe he met with Reynald yesterday…?”

  “He did.” Jean Reynald’s voice wasn’t nearly as unafraid as he’d hoped. “It was... I don’t know.”

  “That ain’t the point, and you know it. If we’re gonna finish this, he needs to be a part of it. Can’t all be worked out by you two.”

  “We,” Alina’s face stuttered over a smile, “have things in hand.” A jump cut reduced to a fraction of a frame, for an instant, Hank saw Judith looking out from Alina’s eyes. “Don’t you trust us?”

  “‘Us?’ No. Alina, yes. Paul, yes. Jud, you scare the shit out of me. He wrote me. You’re just along for the ride, and I don’t rightly appreciate you taking over while he’s swimming.”

  “Listen, Hank... I’ll try to be better about this. Try to get him in here and—”

  “You do that.”

  She paused. “He needs to get his shit together. That’s why—”

  “—he lives in the silver? It ain’t right, girl. He ain’t right no more.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  He’d never learned how to swim.

  He’d never trusted meditation, relegated it solely to the province of those unshowered non-Western types who embraced yoga and feng-shui and ate Thai to make themselves feel worldly. He didn’t meditate in the silver pool; he thought, too much, simple as that.

  He grew angrier with breathing.

  The pool seemed deeper in those final day
s, and not being able to swim (or float—even with the requisite remainder beer belly, he had a hard time floating), he walked into the tideless, tideful mirror lake until the surface tickled his lips, plugged his ears and slid into his nose, his eyes above the surface until the alien crawled into and through, his too-long hair a shawl on the silver, grasped and pulled under by a trillion trillion reaching robots, giving himself to the pull and disappearing under the sealing, untouched glass.

  After that first breath, he sometimes forgot to take another.

  It wasn’t meditation; he wouldn’t allow the word to stain him, so imbued with past hatreds and connotations of loss. He thought. Tried to wrap his mind around a solution: they were slowly losing the war. Maire’s nightmare forces, combinations of silvers, bleeds into all realities, were gaining non-ground quickly, urged forever onward by the great archives of knowledge stored in Hope’s and Whistler’s stolen patterns. Forts were burning, out on the periphery of core reality. Maire was strong, getting stronger. He was weak. She was coming for him, cutting straight for the heart of him, and he was tripped up more by his insecurities than a shattered knee he’d not yet lived through. The silver was the only place the outside non-world didn’t scream at him; his children, the trillion trillions, whispered, sang in voices beneath perception. It was a cold embrace, but it gave him purpose.

  The singing, bodhisattva drones, the tender tickle as they erased farmer tans, tweezed an ingrown hair from his jaw, twisted cancers from purchase in his lung and prostate, tenderly, tenderly aligned a spine, sloughed dead cells, slowed a racing heart, closed ducts and reassured, the singing, the drones.

  He felt a hand.

  Paul spun, lashed, feet pushing the bottom away, rising above the surface in motion, slowly, noting the returning droplets of the splash, the drone lapsed. He gasped, fearful that he wasn’t alone, treaded toward the shore, hands shifting and eyes burning at the prospect of combat.

  Another back breached the surface, the body arcing from one edge, familiar, unbeautiful and fundamentally same. A scar across the chest, code burns on left forearm, the white mark of Cain blaring less obviously from the right temple.

  The figure stood, bent to the right: shattered knee. The figure stood, slicked with silver, unnaturally-large hands, hardened sculptures of bone and obtuse angle, brushed the liquid metal from arms and chest. The teeth were the same. The jib was cut more of brass than silver. It extended a hand.

  “Shake my hand, brother.” And he thought of the cold war of the end of his youth, a father extending a hand to a brother, the same admonition, met with refusal. “Shake my hand.”

  Fundamentally same, but.

  “Come with me.”

  They sat at the edge of the silver pool, Indian-style, both slumped forward for the weight of their torsos. They’d once been described as unique constructs: chicken legs, barrel torsos, the longest arms and biggest hands. Not well-designed. Unique. Pieced together from leftover parts. Mistakes given life.

  Paul looked into the newcomer, had questions but didn’t ask. The older version had answers but didn’t offer them.

  Whereas Paul was an image of a specific point in history, the post-college unraveling of muscle, a jowl, a gut, hair past his shoulders (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—) and a beard, full, (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—), the other was a study in evolutions and counterpoints, the face better-defined under taut skin, the hair cropped short, now lit with a disconcerting array of pure whites on the side, a clump, Whistler-esque, growing in at the line. Deeper canyons flanking the eyes, the mouth’s edges forced a little deeper down by years. Two gray flecks marring the brown-green surface of the right eye, rendering it blind. The torso wasn’t smaller, the arms not shorter; the legs were still chicken. Gray insinuated new patterns into the chest.

  “Upgrade?”

  “Paradigm shift.”

  “Office talk.”

  “Realism.”

  “Huh.”

  “Call me your Omega.”

  “Is this better?”

  The silver pool had disappeared, replaced with the Cafe Bellona. Paul noted a sign on the counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. A bus ground to a halt at the stop down the street. The brakes sounded like screaming.

  “Not better. Different.”

  The coffee shop was empty save the two time-offset versions of the same man. Paul thought he heard a rustling behind the counter, through the door leading to the inner sanctum, coffee filters and the cash box and mops. Presumably, New Management was back there. Those hidden sounds were more frightful than they should have been, the creak of a floorboard, the swish of fabric, the clearing of a throat.

  “Where is everyone?”

  The Omega let the question hang and fall. He gestured toward the great windows at the shop’s front. There were people passing by, eyes as downcast as the day was overcast, no one diverting attention to Bellona.

  Something crashed in the back. Paul jumped.

  The link was dead. It was supposed to show the president.

  Most of the tables’ chairs were still turned upside-down on their tops. The lights were off. Maybe it wasn’t open yet? Maybe Bellona had new hours of operation? The chair legs obscured the corners in dozens. Paul noticed that theirs was the only set table.

  “Supposed to be people here. Simon and Maggie, Joseph and Helen, S—”

  “Don’t.”

  “How does it all end?”

  “More with a bang than a whimper.”

  “No.” Paul struggled over concepts. “Me. How does it end?”

  “You developed a germinoma around your pineal gland at age twenty-four.”

  “Brain cancer?”

  “You died of an overdose of anti-seizure medication at age twenty-seven.”

  “And you?”

  The Omega smiled, an expression that reminded Paul of war. “That’s me.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “—and that’s the problem. You’re sitting there setting all these events into motion, having to retype the number 6 because your keyboard’s broken, not as badly as you, and I know, I know that you saw those things, never did the research, fought with the fact that no one believed you. I know you saw things before they happened and wrote them down, uploaded them, and everyone thought you were looking into places you shouldn’t, that your predictions were just snooping or luck, the falling towers, a hanging, a wedding, the silver. I know that.

  “You’ve written things into existence, and I know you’ve struggled, tried to undo the damage done. And I know you’d sooner waste yourself away, surrender, than hurt the ones you loved again. I know you’ve seen the terrifying weaponry, the holland and hills, that you’ve walked beyond return to that edge, and you’ve tasted it, looked over and wondered. I know that. You’ve spent countless nights replaying the scenes in your head, wars fought between the worlds, great machines built of silver and light, the savage echo of billion-barreled shatter arrays, the silences, and there aren’t words for what you’ve seen; no typing can convey that.

  “I know you were basically a good man made bad by the departures of others, unable to grasp the concept that you weren’t integral, were never integral enough to include, and the mathematics never worked: you wanted to be constant in a variable existence. You wanted—maybe deserved—a new calculus you never invented.

  “You scared people.

  “You’re scaring people, and that’s why they leave.

  “I know you tried to fix it, the distance and the pills, hiding from the world while broadcasting the substance of their fear, flirting recklessly with their expectations of you, pushing away and surrendering, again, to your hate. You are a creature of hate. No forgiveness. When the world reacted negatively, you worked to dismantle it and rebuild it in your image. You fell into a place where no one could ever begin to understand.

  “You weren’t a sympathetic character.”

  Paul had been studying the city outside Bellona. People dissolved betw
een ghosts. The sky darkened, an upload spire crashing to purchase in the distance, farther off, the orbital gun rising from the water, firing blinding phase slugs into the future. The sounds from the back settled dreamlike into a rhythm, a pounding heartbeat. A shiver worked its way up his spine, settled along his jawline.

  “How do I fix it?”

  The Omega shrugged. “You were a flawed machine, and it only ended once I—once you decided to silence the misfiring synapses. It’d been getting worse, the shaking, the thoughts at night. You were consumed, consuming yourself. A spectrum of innocent histories dredged into existence, trillions dead. Because of you.”

  “You’re asking me to—”

  “No. I’m just the end point of a statistically-significant percentage of histories. I’m not asking you to end yourself. You constructed characters, turning everyone whose hand you shook into fiction. You unlearned presence. You wrote people into plotlines and barely registered their realities. You filtered everyone through pasts. I’m asking you to recognize that you’re not the episiarch, assembling realities. You’re a character who doesn’t know how the book ends. You’re distracting what limited audience you have left with flowery language, never offering substance. They want resolution, a dogfight, a gun, not self-analysis buttered with delay tactics. Write the fucking book. Get it done.”

  “You’re confusing them.”

  “And that’s why I’m dead now. You don’t have to be. If I could take it all back, the vengeance, the worlds shunted into existence, I would. What you have to do is separate your realities. These characters aren’t the people you love or your mailman or the cashier at Price Chopper. Stop living inside of your book and start finishing it.”

  It manifests itself in one side of the face, the body, the head turning to the right, that side’s eye clenching as closed as a fist, the subtle, uncontrolled flail of an arm against the table and its retreat to the lap, the foot tapping, not a symptom of boredom or nervous energy, just a manifestation of the worm that’s gripping his brain.