Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  The office's occupant wasn't looking at Chuck. It didn't seem that it was looking through the large windows either. It seemed to just be concentrating on something going on inside its head.

  Chuck approached it cautiously. Now that he was only about twelve feet from it, he could see a bit more of its anatomy. That thing—whatever it was—was one of them, or had been at some point. The bloodstains on its forehead matched the spot where the Captors had those horns that moved like antennae. The bloodstains on its sides could be easily linked to the place where its wings had been, while the stains on the wrists coincided with the spurs the Captors had on the inner part of their reptilian front limbs. So the rumors were true: that this being related to the Captors—or probably the leader or father of them all—had undergone several operations to remove body parts. And the result, thought Chuck, was obscene: Doctor Angeli, if that was what was sitting there imitating the posture of a human being in the Oval Office, had been operated on so he would look more human.

  And that was when it happened: while Chuck was thinking about all that, Doctor Angeli's head moved. Just a little, just enough for the yellow lights of his eyes to look in Chuck's direction.

  Under that monster's gaze, which observed him as it directed the battle, Chuck experienced an intense feeling of guilt and shame. His hand was tightly closed around his weapon, but he couldn't do anything with it. What Chuck was feeling in that moment, as inexplicable as it was, was very similar to the feeling of a child caught doing something he shouldn't. But that creature wasn't his father or his mother. It couldn't be, Chuck was telling himself. And yet, that was exactly what he felt: an intensely filial remorse and shame. That filled his mind completely. It didn't matter that the conscious and still lucid part of his mind knew perfectly well that that hellish being from another world was taking control of his emotions and his deepest feelings.

  “Mr. Kimball?” said Paul's voice from the part of the office closest to the door. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Chuck dropped his weapon on the desk of the Oval Office. Like some sort of offering to his parent. On the other side of the office windows, the battle seemed to be at its most bitter moment. It was almost impossible to hear over the booming explosions.

  “Mr. Kimball!” said Paul's now openly alarmed voice. “Get away from it!”

  But it was too late. Chuck had already given himself over completely to that yellow gaze. His entire being devoted to it. He fell to his knees and hugged that monster's leg and rested his head on its lap. Happily.

  PART IV

  “Hide Us from the Face of He Who Sits on the Throne”

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 56

  Lucas Giraut

  The lights come on over the dunes. Somewhere someone puts on a record. The lights that come on over the dunes are the kind that often illuminate dreams: like spotlights on a stage, although they don't seem to be hanging from any ceiling or supporting structure. And this is a dream. The Filial Dream of Camber Sands. As can be inferred by the partially destroyed, seaweed-covered sign that Lorenzo Giraut and his son Lucas are now looking at. “WELCOME TO CAMBER SANDS.” Sitting on the dunes. At night. That's another of the main characteristics of the Filial Dream of Camber Sands. It's always at night.

  “This doesn't make much sense.” Lucas Giraut looks in the general direction of the beach's cafés and restaurants and a parking lot filled with cars. At its highest point, the sea is a half mile from the first buildings on the coastline. “I've never been to Camber Sands. You're the one who was here. This is where it happened. Where someone sold you out. I don't even like the beach.” He shrugs. “Though I don't suppose you'd know that.”

  The relative ages of Lucas Giraut and his father are clearly off. As often happens in dreams. Lucas must be around thirty. His father is that indeterminate age fathers have when their sons are little kids.

  “You have been here.” Lorenzo Giraut smiles distractedly. “But you couldn't possibly remember. Because you haven't been here yet. But you will have by the time you have this dream.”

  Lucas Giraut furrows his brow. He searches in the pocket of his suit pants. He takes out a glossy brochure. With seaside views and full-color landscape photographs. The first page says: “THE FILIAL DREAM OF CAMBER SANDS: GENERAL OPERATING PRINCIPLES.”

  “If you've gotten this far,” reads the brochure, “you must already have a pretty good idea of how this works. It's not like the signs are very subtle. Right, Lucas?”

  Lorenzo Giraut shakes his head. Smiling.

  “You never were very smart,” he says. His tone isn't exactly mocking. It's that vaguely unintelligible something that Lucas has always associated with his father. That refusal to say things outright or to speak in any other way besides in enigmas. As if every conversation between father and son was some sort of unofficial test of his deductive reasoning skills. As if every one of his father's sentences was a reaffirmation of his father's essential unintelligibility.

  “Wait,” says Lorenzo. Looking into the distance. Toward something bright that approaches, floating over the beach restaurants. “One's coming. Hit the ground.”

  Lucas throws himself to the sand and lies facedown with his hands behind his head, just as he had seen somewhere that people do in potentially dangerous situations. Something moves a couple of inches from his sand-coated face. Maybe a crab. After a moment he can see a green glow reflected in the sand. Like the glow of radiation you see in some movies. He lifts his head slightly. Surreptitiously. The thing approaches, floating through the air. Over the restaurant roofs. Slowly. Bathing the coast of Camber Sands in its green glow. With its feet about four yards off the ground. The truth is it doesn't look like an angel. Its face is green. Green and very long, and it looks like the face of a corpse, except for the fact that its eyes are like very powerful flashlights or maybe like car headlights. It's missing a piece of its face, although it's hard to see because of the hood of its raincoat. Because the figure that floats over the rooftops giving off a green glow is wearing a raincoat. One of those long yellow raincoats fishermen wear. With seaweed and mollusk shells stuck to it and green fluorescent slime everywhere. With a starfish on its shoulder the way some storybook pirates have parrots.

  “Is it one of them?” Lucas rests his face back on the sand. “One of the Captors?”

  “I've never heard them called that,” says his father. “Do you really think these things come from another planet?”

  They both remain facedown on the sand for a minute. The floating green being approaches them and passes over them without making any sign of having seen them, and then finally heads off. Toward the north-northwest. During the seconds when the thing is right above their heads, Lucas can hear the sound it makes. An electric sound. A sound similar to an electric generator or the hum of an appliance. Like that sound refrigerators make at night, thinks Lucas Giraut.

  Lucas waits for his father to get up before getting up himself and shaking the sand off of his suit and out of his hair. Over the roofs of the town, at least two hundred yards from where they are on the beach, there are more than half a dozen of those floating things. Floating. With their yellow slickers. With their arms extended out in front of their bodies. Some of them carry fishing rods in their hands. One of them has fishing nets tangled around its arms and head. The figures float and look down with their headlight eyes and Lucas understands what they're doing. They are searching. They are searching for survivors.

  “Wait!” shouts Lucas to his father, who is already running with his bowed body toward the town. “I figured out who did it to you! Who betrayed you!”

  A moment later he regrets having shouted. He covers his mouth with his hand. For a moment he had the impression that one of the floating figures turned its head and looked in his direction. With a pipe in its corpselike mouth. With the slime and the putrefaction eating away at its face. Then he starts running after his father.

  The town of Camber consists of little more than a dozen t
iny streets around the Lydd highway. That leads either to Rye or to Lydd-on-Sea. With the redbrick mass of the Hotel in the Sands at one side. The streets are small and have paving stones instead of asphalt and in general retain the placid picturesque atmosphere of the sixteenth century, which is when they were built. A placid, picturesque atmosphere that's quintessentially English. Now bathed in a radioactive green glow.

  “Avoid open spaces,” says Lorenzo Giraut to his son when they get to the first house in the town. Sitting on the ground and leaning on the back wall of the house. He picks up a stick and draws a sketch of the town on the sandy ground. “We have to get to the Map Store.” He draws an X on the ground. “It's here, in the middle of town.”

  Father and son begin to walk, staying glued to the walls. At one point a space appears between the houses to his left and Lucas can see the far-off roofs of the village of Rye, bathed in green light. At a nearby corner they bump into a sign put up by the Local Tourism Office.

  OLD LYDD ROAD

  FISHING TROPHIES AND AWARDS

  MERCHANTS DRIVE

  SEA ROAD

  OUTER DREAM & RYE

  OTHER DREAMS

  Following the sign's indications, they arrive at the enormous building that houses the Fishing Trophy Room. Lorenzo Giraut enters and makes a sign for Lucas to leave the light turned off. Lucas nods. Lorenzo flicks on his lighter and looks around. The walls are covered with display cases filled with fishing trophies and framed photographs of people wearing yellow slickers with fish in their hands. The decoration consists of fishing nets filled with mollusk shells and starfish and taxidermied fish. Lorenzo points to the other end of the room.

  “We have to get there,” he says. “You see that light?”

  Lucas squints. At the other side of the room there is a window and at the other side of the window a light blinks on and off. Like those lights in spy movies that blink out Morse code. Giraut doesn't understand Morse code. Suddenly a deep, booming sound makes the walls and floor tremble. Several trophies fall inside their display cases and some of the framed photographs crash onto the floor. The sound continues. Becoming clearer and clearer. With the cadence of footsteps. Giant footsteps coming closer. Lucas looks at his father with a worried face.

  “Don't blame me,” says Lorenzo Giraut. In a mocking tone. “No one would have wanted to spend much time at home. With your mother.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Blame that trip we made to London together. Before you were born. If we hadn't gone, later things wouldn't have gone so wrong. But none of that matters now. In fact, none of it ever mattered to me. You go on alone,” he says. He gestures toward the window where the Morse lights blink. “Before she gets here.”

  Lucas Giraut starts to walk hurriedly along the trembling floor. Around him the trophy display cases are collapsing. Cracks appear on the walls. Rubble falls from the ceiling. Forcing Lucas to walk staying glued to the walls. Covering his head with his hands. Many of the framed photographs still on the walls are familiar to Lucas. They all seem to show the same person. Dressed in a yellow slicker. But in the photographs the person's face is always covered by a black square. On the black square it says “CENSORED BY THE DREAM AUTHORITY®.” Lucas stumbles into the middle of the room, where there is a framed image larger than all the others. The frame is antique and gold and seems like it should frame a painting, not a fishing award. The black square, however, covers the entire image. Leaving a simple black square with a gold antique frame. “HIDE US FROM THE FACE OF HE WHO SITS ON THE THRONE,” reads the label.

  Lucas runs away from the censored picture across the last stretch of the room and arrives at the window, from which he can see the light. Whatever it is that is approaching with giant steps must already be upon them, because the thundering of footsteps is everywhere and several panes of glass are starting to shatter. Lucas looks back. His father is naked and old in a bed. Sweating. Waving good-bye. Then he opens the window and looks out at the place the lights are coming from.

  It is an old store in an old building. The sign on the store says: “YE OLDE MAPPE SHOPPE.” From the window of the Map Store, Valentina Parini is signaling to him with a flashlight. A patch covers one of the lenses of her small eyeglasses. When she sees that he is watching, Valentina starts to signal to him with her hand. She turns and points her flashlight at an X written in ballpoint on the back of her neck. The Protective Sign. The Fishing Trophy Room seems to be sinking around Lucas. Plaster dust rains down on his hair. The wall is crumbling. The sound of footsteps abruptly stops. Everything stops shaking.

  The unexpected silence makes Lucas's ears ring. Suddenly, someone taps him on the shoulder.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 57

  Mirror Ball

  The events that take place in The Dark Side of the Moon at this point in this story unfold just like the images on the surface of a mirror ball. With the same flashing combination of simultaneity and succession. Warped into a mosaic of distorted fragments that appear and disappear with a blink and reappear every time the ball completes one of its rotations. Without any one of the images taking center stage for more than the infinitesimal instant it takes for it to be absorbed in your consciousness.

  Mr. Bocanegra, Showbiz Impresario, is sitting on a bar stool in the Eclipse Room, flanked by two dancers dressed in G-strings and high heels. Holding a cocktail with a tiny umbrella in his right hand and a lit cigar in his left. Smiling broadly beneath his impeccably trimmed mustache.

  Mr. Bocanegra is a bar, just as he often likes to say. Not exactly a catalyst or the glue that binds other elements together, like those people that everyone seems to know and around whom most of the leisure activities of a given city revolve. Not exactly like those people who always seem to be at the center of everything and whose function in life seems to be putting people who would otherwise act independently in touch with each other. Achieving groups that are more than the sum of their parts. Mr. Bocanegra is all that, but also something more. Something perhaps similar to what a bar is literally. Like a place. Like a comfy place where people can sit down and gather and talk and relax and order their favorite drink. Like a place designed for the enjoyment of life. Or at least that's how Mr. Bocanegra sees himself.

  At the other side of the bar in the Eclipse Room, half a dozen waitresses under twenty years old and dressed in the official uniform of G-strings and stiletto heels serve drinks to groups of men in suits who unabashedly flirt with them and make the joke of trying to stick bills under the elastic strap of their G-strings. The joke is always the same. Night after night. The same boozed-up smile and the same arm reaching out over the bar trying to stick a folded fifty-euro bill under a G-string strap. The girls laugh at the joke and serve their drinks with professionally seductive smiles.

  The Dark Side of the Moon's admission policy hasn't changed a bit in the last twenty-five years. Formal attire is still considered a requirement. Suits make Mr. Bocanegra feel good and comfortable and willing to show his Good Side. Suits are like the carpeted floor and the velvet sofas and the mirror balls and the quality wood paneling. They are like the thighs of The Dark Side of the Moon's girls when they brush against the velvet sofas. They are one of those things in life that make you feel good. They are, without a doubt, like statues. And there is nothing that makes Bocanegra feel as good as statues do.

  On the stage of the Eclipse Room there are several dancers having sex with each other. On one of the tables closest to the stage, a member of the city government has gotten up on the table and is doing a supposedly erotic dance that consists mainly of rhythmic hip motions. With one of the table napkins tied around his head. A dozen of his sycophantic underlings laugh a little too hard at his attempts to be funny and clap to the beat of his pelvic movements.

  Mr. Bocanegra has never been against the right kind of fun. In fact, he considers himself a mastermind of the right kind of fun.

  Several customers at the tables closest to the door of the Eclipse Room have stopped paying attention to what'
s happening onstage and are now turned, with various degrees of concern on their faces, toward the door. Whatever's going on near the door, it still hasn't attracted the attention of the customers close to where Bocanegra is sitting. It still isn't visible to the waitresses serving drinks or to the drunken customers trying to stick wrinkled fifty-euro notes into their G-strings.

  At the exact center of the room a gigantic mirror ball turns. Over the tables. The dancers having sex onstage and the clients reaching their arms over the bar and the statues are reflected in each one of its facets, as is the city government official dancing on the table. Whatever it is that's going on near the exit door is reflected there, too. And whatever it is, it is attracting more and more attention at more and more tables and some people are even standing up with alarmed faces. But for someone sitting near the bar to see what's going on at the door, the mirror ball would still have to make another full turn on its axis. The gigantic mirror ball that turns in the middle of the room turns slowly, and its rotations project hundreds and hundreds of brightly colored shapes onto the walls and the statues and the faces of the people. A statue near the bathrooms' entrance, representing the god Pan chasing a nymph, is dyed completely red, and then gold, and finally an amalgam of every color.

  One of the dancers having sex onstage with two other dancers looks up, removes her hand from one of her sexual partners and stares at the door. Momentarily abandoning the sexual task she was in the middle of. She's just frozen, on her knees up onstage, looking at the door. With her brow furrowed. Other dancers onstage begin to stop as well. After a second, the politician dancing on the table with a napkin tied around his head, who has now also dropped his pants to thigh height and is festively shaking his rump, abruptly stops his dancing. He stares at the people coming in through the door for just a fraction of a second, and then pulls his pants up hurriedly.