Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  His mind let go like a mental sphincter. Adam reached out with the same finger he’d touched to the sparking finger of the man half in France/half in Italy. He grinned his bleeding mouth and wrote into the ashy wind a message which hung there, despite the grit and velocity:

  gravity (g) = G x mass 1 x mass 2

  distance x distance

  where G = a universal constant

  His brain reeled. Ridiculous! There were no universal constants!

  (Didn’t need them once you understood it was a mirage.)

  Each body pushed against the others, mingling fat and something else rather spoiled and creamy. Together, yet each one isolated in its primitive, logistic misery. Allegorical algorithms of those the Devil skinned alive with lava red-to-white hot. Together these made a new decorator color: Chaos Pink.

  The Fire King’s manifesto was exhibitionism.

  In this enclosed bubble in the multiverse, would there be flies? Who survived? Not becoming fireflies in soul transmigration but laying eggs and hatching maggots? Or were the roasted haunches of Relativity and the Quantum worm incompatible? Only Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, could bless and make possible such a profound feast.

  The ground rumbled, fissures opening to swallow corpses and to disgorge craters. New cones sprung from old magma, obsidian, and seawater like poisonous mushrooms after a springtime acid rain. From Campi Phlegraei to Campi Fungi.

  I can’t be… Was he truly sinking in a mountain made from millions of cadavers? Not unless someone stacked them until the heap was as tall as Mount Etna, as tall as Mount Etna on top of Stromboli. (Taller—Everest?) And if the basin around which bodies toppled was a vast moat, it would be the diameter of the combined calderas of Campi Phlegraei, Somma, and Vulcano Island. But who would or even could do this?

  Whoosh.

  A fiery whirlwind sprang up, perhaps as tall as the Empire State Building. It was full of dead creatures: people, animals, indescribables. These were slung about with an arrogant, immoral omnipotence, as if it had its own sense of entitlement. It slung toward the flesh mountain. Adam could have sworn a giant face leered at him, as in those faked photographs the old rag sheets used to lure the slack-jawed inbred with at supermarket check-out lines. Satan Descends on Graceland.

  Dazzled by sparks like meteor showers, an intense show of a cruelly flickering plenty, spied only just before dawn, erased the host of feverish cinders, and Adam wondered how it was possible that he could still be alive, let alone thinking, observing, if that... These fireworks reminded him… Was this a true memory for a man whose brain blazed?…of names written in eye-searing gold upon a ceiling. If I could just read them…

  Perhaps he only thought of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the now-kindled Sistine Chapel. How the colors in the portraits of God, creation, saints, and miracles must have melted, running together, in a tangle of the rivulets of masterpiece blood.

  He considered Pacifica, the famine, the virus, and this perverse sea of ropey earth’s bile and slashing lahar fall. The end of the world was happening a savage increment at a time, with Biblical suddenness that he’d never understood, finding it blasphemous even to contemplate. Adam equated the very notion with surreal archetypes who always dismantled and destroyed whom they professed to love most.

  He heard voices. Eyes opened in faces that, featureless, shouldn’t possess eyes.

  “Imago homo,” they said from slits/not mouths. It was Latin, not Italian. “Quem quaeritis?”

  They called him ‘man image’.

  “Whom do you seek?”

  Someone reached down. Down down. Grabbed Adam by his seething, hairless, elasticized skull—and pulled him up. Up up.

  A young, dark-haired, very muscular man smiled at him. He wore un-scorched jeans, boots, open shirt, and thick gloves.

  Where are we? Are we back in the forest? Adam whirled, his mind racing for bearings.

  The man spoke. “Parallel universes exist in same Space/Time,” he told Adam, the exquisite body gleaming like the bronze of an ancient statue. “Numbers of copies are infinite in separate yet equal dimensions. Electrons vanish, reappear, multiple locations simultaneously. The particles must be in two—or more—places at once. God’s shifting thoughts…”

  Gods’?

  God’s?

  Adam held on, understanding the best he could. “…create universe after universe with each wandering rumination, common strayings for the very old, the dementia of the near-senile. Not to be mistaken for divine meditation or inspiration; just simple, loose fatuity.” He waved his hand, above. “Angels can travel through them, to any universe they wish.”

  He looked deeply at Adam now, his eyes wide. “Imagine a universe where Jesus lived to a ripe old age, then a parallel place where Jesus died on the cross. Schrodinger’s Christ, ha! Jesus performed miracles and exorcisms here, yet elsewhere ended up a eunuch in a Syrian brothel.”

  The man went on, a litany of alternate universes: how fallen angels battle in one genuine circumstance but never rebelled in another equally valid intrinsicality; how God sits on His Throne, and Lucifer sits far above on His Throne, vetoing all of God’s mumbly-peg laws.

  “Existences without number are at the ends of our noses,” he proclaimed. “Occasionally they touch, cross paths, reveal the miraculous and monstrous. The area within the methodically drawn circle, the invocation in its proper tonal sequence, the right essences/fumigants/faceted-colored stones—and never let us forget the perfect sacrifice—these things all call forth numerous gateways to the parallel, where one entity unfriendly in this ’brane may, from a different universe, be inclined to be at your command. But afterword—and oh how I stress this, Adam—the ceremony must end. Proper banishments must ensue, banishing, eliminating the entity from this universe. Allowing, applying force if necessary, it to return to the sphere of its origins. A being on the loose from an alternate dimension can get up to all sorts of trouble.”

  Who was this guy? His talk of beings, dimensions, and…trouble? And why wasn’t he burned? How does he know my name?

  Adam understood that he himself ought to be dead—was, in fact, in a dead body too stubborn to lie down with the rest on this… this Corpse Mountain. Earthquakes rumbled, further splitting the already violated land.

  Had Adam, in the grisliest of agonies, even understood a word this stranger said?

  The man bent to whisper seductively:

  “How do you dream yourself to be?”

  Then he grasped Adam’s head with both gloved hands, working it like a sculptor fisting a fresh lump of clay, molding and straining it until it was as pliant as the liquefied earth, as vulcanite. He stretched until Adam’s head became a diaphanous plastic. Adam couldn’t scream with his jaw distended down to his belly, tongue wrapped like a rubber band around his knees. He was a fun house mirror geek.

  The young man twisted his fingers in front of Adam’s face, then laughed. “Got your nose.”

  He opened his leather-bound hand. There it was, crusted with a roasted cheese of mucus, resembling meringue in a burned pie.

  “Ah, is this how’d you look, if you dreamed how you’d be?” He laughed again, then looked upon Adam, serious once more. “What if I said everything I just told you came from The Enantiodromia, would you get the reference?”

  Adam’s liquefying eyes widened in now elliptical sockets. The Enantiodromia. It was the very title for the book he himself had been compiling for many years: science, philosophy, occultism. Lists. He had at least one large notebook for each of the past 25 years, kept in his study at home—except for the last one which was with his belongings in France. He’d never even told anyone the title he’d given the journals. “How did…” he wanted to say, but his face was too distended, disfigured.

  “Well, you have expanded it,” the man admitted. “Very soon you will add material that will…no, I will not say it. By the way, at this precise moment Laura watches the sunset in Georgia. Love from such a woman is an interesting thing, a kind of sickness.
When she and I meet again, I will teach her love’s fruition. I’ve missed Laura, but, then, that’s your fault. Isn’t it?”

  The handsome youth squeezed Adam’s nose until the fragile cartilage popped and a disgusting gunk of red and snot-green spurted from between the leather fingers.

  In the fiery haze, Adam’s heart (still beating, why?) froze at the man’s mention of his wife.

  “L’aura che ’l verde lauro e l’aureo crine

  Soavemente sospirando move

  Fa con sue viste leggiadrette e nove

  L’anime da’ lor corpe pellegrine.”

  The young man tilted his head. “Don’t understand? Didn’t you read the book you gave her on your honeymoon, here in hell? Petrarch? In English and the original Italian? Really! You disappoint me.”

  Adam, furious at this stranger, whether it be a dream—which a nightmare it must be—or not, to threaten his wife… Poor, synthetic-brained Dr. Grigori somehow stood up, tongue uncoiling from around his slick knees to recede back into the parched recesses of his mouth, as his lower jaw clamped up into more or less its rightful position. He shook loose the stranger’s hold on his soft, vinyl skull with a whip-like snap, so electric all the skulls for a good twenty feet around the two men spat out their gumdrop teeth.

  Adam replied:

  “The gentle airs, breathing a little sigh,

  Lift the green laurel and her golden hair,

  And Laura’s face, so delicately fair,

  Let’ slip my soul to wander far and high.”

  A tiny bundle shot from the entrance at the top of the flesh mountain, like a ball from a cannon, separating the two.

  My God… Adam watched it ascend until it was out of sight…was that a baby?

  The young man at first fell backwards, startled. Then his lips curled in a derisive smile. “My sins are your sins,” he said.

  Adam answered, “Your sins are my sins.”

  And although, in fact, he had only repeated in reverse what his tormentor had just announced… to agree? For the sake of argument? As a matter of principle? A response so incredibly black-hole inside out-different (was that a baby?) that the stranger’s face first went superhot (or antibody blood cell count) white and then went as dark as an icy grave.

  The young man snarled and snuffed Adam out.

  ««—»»

  Adam found himself in a filthy narrow alley. He touched his own face. It felt normal. Eyes. Mouth. Chin. Jaw. Nose. All of it.

  Looking around, he found himself face-to-face with an individual with no…nose? He touched his own face again, everything’s fine, and looked again at the person: Large nodules on the brow and cheekbones squeezed the lids down until the eyes appeared to be constantly shut, as if the person was blind. And he (she?) had what medicine used to call a ‘saddle nose’, a deterioration in the mucous membranes of the bridge, giving it a melted, curved-inward look. Adam jumped. The long green robe swarmed with vermin, but the person didn’t seem the least bothered by it.

  “Please, sir, do not raise the alarm. I promise not to touch you. I will keep a safe and respectful distance.” The voice came out sounding harsh, a deeply nasal rattle. It gave no clue as to the gender or even the age of the sufferer. The teeth were all gone. Adam thought of the delirium he had in the woods; how the half-man’s skull popped out flowering hot buds of buttery teeth in the Orville Redenbacher region of perdition.

  No, not butter; more so custard soft, sticky, gummy bear brittle. Liquefying, liqui-frying, as major earthquakes/volcanic and super-volcanic eruptions/shockwaves generated intense heat within the confines of the strange sphere that contained the disaster without rhyme or reason.

  Adam tried not to stare. Nevertheless, this was the lepromatous form of Leprosy, as opposed to the tuberculoid form which caused numbness and paralysis of the skin. This often led to accidents, wounds, even burns that the victims couldn’t feel, resulting in infections and the frequent loss of body parts.

  “I won’t call anyone,” Adam said. “Can you tell me the name of this place?”

  “Duerose,” the leper replied, running it together as one word. Due Rose. Twin roses. A beautiful name.

  On the mossed stone wall on one side of the alley—or was it a street?—an image appeared. A large assembly of beings grouped as if in a choir, holding open large hymnal books, and singing. They were extraordinarily tall. It took Adam by surprise to see deformities similar to the lepers…and then to see their lips weren’t moving. An eerie mixture of words and a music that sounded like bagpipes and accordions reverberated from the stones.

  “Who…?” Adam began.

  The leper cut him off. “Sh sh sh. Angels.”

  Their physical attributes altered into unearthly, glittering beauty almost too marvelous to look upon.

  The books, no, they were lungs… Squeezing and vibrating themselves to produce music.

  The angels faded back into the wall, stars winking in the mortar.

  “Angels,” repeated the leper.

  “But what were they doing here?” Adam wanted to know.

  “To let me believe that even the ugliest can become beautiful again. To let me hope that even the most criminal may one day find salvation.”

  “Criminal?”

  “Those were the Watcher Angels who loved human women. The one in the middle, upfront…you saw him wearing two roses?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was their leader, Azzael.”

  Adam couldn’t see the sky when he looked up. The only stars he’d seen had vanished from the mortar. There was no moon. There were only shadows in poorly lit Due Rose. A few candles guttered on doorsteps. Most windows were shuttered closed. A torch burned here and there.

  Adam wondered out loud, “Are those clouds?”

  “Smoke,” another voice corrected him, definitely young and female.

  Where had all the lepers gone? Even his leper companion scuttled away at the arrival of this girl.

  Adam sniffed the air. He barely smelled smoke over the pungent, fecal refuse and the bloated carcasses of donkeys, dogs, cats, and rats.

  “Smoke from those torches?”

  Not enough to blot out the stars.

  “Not the torches. It’s from the Jews. They locked all of them inside their synagogue today and burned them. But if you ask me, they were not the ones who brought the plague,” she explained sadly. “Did you know Jesus Christ was a rabbi? Besides, the Jews died of the plague, too, didn’t they?”

  “Plague?”

  “God promised with a rainbow not to punish mankind with another monstrous rain and flood. But Genesis didn’t say He wouldn’t make use of a Great Morality. A disease to punish all sins, especially those of the flesh.”

  Adam took a hard look around.

  First, the hellishly implausible center of Italy’s tragedy. Now, he was in a medieval town? Hallucinations. They must be.

  Again, dreaming the phantasmagorical crux of delirium.

  A tall tower ascended from Due Rose’s center, as a finger pointing towards Heaven. Or could it be the finger of God used in accusation against the soured human experiment? The bell at the top didn’t toll for the hour or the dead. But he saw it swaying back and forth. Somehow silenced? They must have removed the clapper…

  “What are you doing out so late, m’lady?” he asked.

  M’lady? So help him if a ‘perchance’ or a thee/thou/thine slipped trippingly from his tongue, he’d rip it out of his mouth.

  {The language of the (Dream).}

  She murmured, “It is always late here. As midnight.”

  “How can that be?”

  “There was a dreadful shaking of the earth which struck Due Rose with calamitous surprise in January. It trembled snow and cedars from Naples to Venice. People reported rains of fire and foul winds. The world yawned beneath us, swallowing the Twin Roses,” the girl recounted.

  It sounded doubtful. Could an entire town be taken violently underground that way, yet survive? And how could she kn
ow the distance of the quake and the eyewitness reports, if she’d been down here?

  As if she guessed what Adam was thinking she explained, “Sometimes a stranger finds a way down here—though I think not back up again. Mateo was one such and told me all he knew.”

  “Mateo?”

  “The leper.”

  Adam suppressed a laugh. Surely the time would arrive when he would be expected to protect ‘the fair maid’.

  He’d seen enough of these things on the Renaissance Channel to start keeping an eye out for any number of Grendel or Minotaur beasties, or urbanely mannered Machiavellians whose evil is mostly in their pants—because they haven’t been laid since the beginning of the Little Ice Age which froze off their blue and pimpled balls.

  So who, or what, was the mysterious stranger from Corpse Mountain? Would he be making an appearance shortly, taking off the handsome mask to reveal the face of a Passion Play Satan?

  The girl moved closer to him as several rough-looking men went past. Though obviously drunk, they pulled carts piled with bodies. She shuddered when a man winked at her. One offered, “Want to jump on for the ride? You know what they say about dead men stiff enough to please a mare. No matter, we’ll all have you eventually, pretty one.”

  They laughed coarsely as they continued down the street.

  Adam recognized the blackish spots (sometimes referred to as roses), and also the swollen disfiguring buboes at exposed armpits, throats, and crotches of those in the carts. A nun was among them, moaning. The cart stopped as this hapless victim’s throat was cut.

  “Shut up, Sister. Nag nag nag!”

  The collectors laughed louder, ripping her habit until she lay naked. She started slipping, her sweating body and slight weight shifting on top of the other sweat-sheened corpses. Still faintly alive, she gargled—strangling on her own blood. The man who had sliced open her throat now pulled her back into place by grabbing the short hair on her head.

  {If you (Dream) of falling…}

  Such as sinking (falling) in a miles-high mass of flesh that ought to be crusted and as frangible as burned potato chips…not swampy soft. Or such as ending up in a subterranean trap among the lost archives of the 14th century. How much farther down could you go (fall) below the earth’s surface? Below. There’s ‘below’, then there’s ‘BELOW.’