She’d been deaf and couldn’t hear those trapped in the meeting room, polyester carpet/ polyurethaned golden oak making a highly toxic gas so that shrieks only lasted a few minutes.
She couldn’t even hear the police who arrested her, claiming she’d started the fire—because no one else had heard this spectral, demonic wind nor had seen it wuthering down from sky to church. None glimpsed any winged scorpions. No weather instruments recorded the cyclone—no localized doppelganger on the Doppler radar.
She’d tapped her still-bandaged ears in the courtroom, trying to make sense of noise she was slowly getting back. Like an announcer whispering “Testing, testing, one-two-three…” into a microphone, she was heard murmuring to herself through thickened, blistered lips.
“The gods smelled the savor,
The gods smelled the sweet savor;
The gods gathered like flies above the sacrificer.”
(Yet they hadn’t gathered like winged black scorpions.)
From ‘The Epic Of Gilgamesh’. Anon again. Gellie was thinking of her boy. They hadn’t let her see Nonnie. And she’d miscarried the little girl because of her burns. She worried about her son, given over to his father. Tom Stirling, her ex, wasn’t a good influence. You said ‘relativity’ to him, and he thought it was a sensitivity line used for picking up bar chicks.
Some were convinced—and hearing Gellie recite things like this who could blame them?—that she was a religious fanatic. They asserted she’d torched the church on purpose, killing those twelve innocent people.
12. The number of apostles at the Last Supper. Jesus Himself wasn’t there but was out holding back the wasteland wind.
The fire department decreed the fire an accident. She’d caused it with ammonia, unfortunately ignited by the candles. Gellie was sent to the nearby women’s prison at Nickel, Texas to serve a term for involuntary manslaughter.
««—»»
After Garza’s economic disaster, most people lost just about everything…repossessed or sold to pay bills. The local cable company split town. A rich writer rented an empty storefront where there had recently existed a boot repair shop. Here he set up a big-screen television, providing satellite dish programming twenty-four hours a day. Folks would bring folding lawn chairs and drink coolers, mobile barbecue grills, and watch television since there wasn’t much else to do. The writer’s name was Damiano Mercado and he was doing research for a new book, “Despair And The Soporific Screen”.
Two seemingly unrelated news reports caused very few people to think of the church fire.
Palestine An ancient pillar inscribed with the story of Muhammed driving back a savage desert ‘simoon’ was lifted up in a storm to smash down on a mosque, crushing to death dozens of faithful followers of Islam. The locals claimed a Palestinian teacher was secretly a spy for the Israeli government and that he’d planted explosives beneath the sacred pillar. A riot ensued in which the teacher was slain.
Nepal A shrine to the Prana Buddha commemorating Siddhartha’s driving back an evil ‘peesash’ with the power of his controlled breath was destroyed by a strong wind, shattering it and driving splinters through the hapless worshippers inside. A local sorcerer was blamed and drowned by villagers in the nearby river.
Most Garza townfolk were more interested in a feature on the dust cloud which was approaching the earth from space. Discovered by astronomer Dr. Rutherford Prophet and named for him, the cloud was theorized as being the remains of a planet or other celestial body which had exploded. It didn’t appear to be made up of any large fragments which could devastate the planetary surface upon striking. It wasn’t going to be chunky asteroids or a fleet of meteors. It was just a very fine ash. Of course, it might be poisonous. Or flammable. Any of numerous negative factors made Prophet’s Cloud an undesirable visitor. It was expected to arrive in less than a year.
««—»»
Nonnie didn’t want to watch his father stick the needle in again. Tom had only become a convert to black tar a few months ago. He didn’t think of himself as addicted yet. No, Tom was no junkie. That took ruined inches of time, lack of masculine control. He’d know because he wouldn’t enjoy the rush anymore, just crave it in sweats and fits. Presently Tom was having a great time.
He’d even shot the kid up, even though Nonnie whined about the needle and sting. Even though the boy threw up and then simply sat there, tranced out.
Tom wrote a short note to Gellie each time, reporting only, “I’m teaching our son to fly.”
He’d laugh, knowing she’d been in jail eleven months.
“Must be rattlin’ the bars of her cage…”
Shamans gave their kids peyote, didn’t they? Tom believed they did. In that church where it was the sacrament or something. He’d heard this in a movie once: a rite into manhood, an initiation into mysteries. Some cool Carlos Castaneda shit or Gila monster magic, making him able to hear voices in dust storms and see visions, turning little Anonymous wise beyond his ten years.
This afternoon Nonnie crept out moments before Tom got home. He did this a lot lately, sneaking out through the back, walking down several blocks, gazing through neighborhood windows.
He wasn’t peeping, not going for a glimpse of private lives. He wasn’t trying to see into the windows; he just liked looking at them. It was something about the glass, shapes moving behind in chiaroscuro blips, light illusions and shadow mirages, images reflected in panes of tear-oily retina.
Nonnie pretended there were all sorts of possible worlds inside. He was bewitched by vagueries therein, only metaphors for form and action. Nothing defined and frightening as what he saw when his father put the needle in the crook of his arm. Nor as ruined as his mother’s face after she’d been burned. If you didn’t make it out clearly, it couldn’t be something which could hurt you, right? It was only dreams of swirling watercolors and smoky clouds, hallucinations without relentless purpose.
If a light came on and he got too good a look: some guy drinking a beer while sitting around in his shorts, a flabby armed-and-thighed lady attempting aerobics, two out-of-work parents feeding beans to their children because it was all they could afford, another kid grinding pitifully away over homework he just didn’t understand—then Nonnie looked away fast. He wasn’t supposed to be spying. People got mad when they caught children looking in their windows. They got yelled at, had things thrown at them, got the cops called on them, or had the parents told so that they got the skin hided off their backsides when they arrived home. Nonnie didn’t want to see these secrets and tragedies anyway. It was embarrassing. It was shattering.
It wasn’t fantasy. It held no fascination.
“I wish there were other worlds,” Nonnie said softly. “Anythin’ other than this one would be an improvement.”
In a window he saw a room with a flaking paint job, grime on ecru, no pictures on the walls. A man with bloodshot eyes was removing a revolver from a nightstand drawer. The hand shook as he put the gun to his temple, then he lost resolve and pointed it away. The man spun the chamber, deciding to make it a game. He put the muzzle back to his skull and gently squeezed the trigger. Nonnie didn’t hear the click as much as he felt it. He stopped dead in his tracks, trying not to see.
The man blinked, reprieved but not relieved, and repeated pulling the trigger. Again no audible click where Nonnie stood outside, frozen and forced to witness this. Again the sense of empty chamber, his own heart skipping a beat to pantomime the gun’s failure to fire.
The man wept, shoulders buckling against the sagging spine. He aimed again and squeezed.
Nothing. Sense of falling a short distance. Air stark white with the absence of black powder.
Nonnie stood still, scuffed tennis shoes in the dirt. Other windows all around yet he couldn’t turn away to be cocooned in their arbitrary parameters. He could only observe helplessly as the sobbing man in the window he was focused on took the next chance.
Supreme silence. The sort of quiet that screamed for full atte
ntion, pleading for mercy. Nonnie realized he’d balled his hands into fists; bitten fingernails were cutting into his palms.
The man stopped crying and began laughing, the shaking of his body identical with those of being wracked with grief. Could one be wracked with amusement?
Cosmic amusement?
The fellow aimed, hand a little steadier. The barrel must have started out cold but might be warm now due to being touched so often to sweating skin. Almost imperceptibly (through the panes anyway) he jerked back the tiny blue lever on the firearm.
Nonnie felt the air he’d sucked in anticipation bruise his lungs. With no explosion forthcoming he choked the breath back out again.
He could count. He’d seen enough classic Dirty Harry movies to know that revolver should hold six bullets. The man had already done five pulls on the trigger. If the gun was loaded at all, the sixth chamber would be the killer.
(So—as the question followed in that first famous film—did he feel lucky today?)
The man howled, slapped his knee, bayed at the flickering single-bulbed fixture in the ceiling’s center. Shook the gun out as if it needed airing. Raised a curse to heaven. Touched the muzzle to his skull again.
“No!” Nonnie cried out, high voice a box of ten-penny nails scratching the window glass. “Don’t do it, Mister!”
The gun fired. It spasmed in the man’s hand, surprised from the boy’s scream. The bullet exploded, expelled in a crazy violet streak peppered with bright yellow. It missed the man’s temple and shot off his nose instead. The man shrieked, dropping the gun, putting both fists over the wound in white-hot agony. Blood pulsed between his fingers, flooding into the mouth, over the chin, drenching the t-shirt.
The man stumbled to the window, sobbing again, glaring out at the boy with a mixture of hatred and heartbreak. Other windows along the street filled with faces peering close, no longer strangely mutable images, just perspiring and anxious expressions. Some were even angry because their peace had been disturbed.
Nonnie ran, escaping the neighborhood, not wanting to wait for somebody to call the police. Or for the now-disfigured man to stalk outside and grab him with those bloody hands. None of your business, kid! Look what you’ve done to me…!
Nonnie didn’t stop running until he was a couple blocks away, toward Lake Garza. It was a dirty waterhole, surrounded by thorny mesquite trees and stinky creosote bushes. It stank because of pollution from the battery place that used to be on its north shore. Otherwise Garza might have had some tourist business to help compensate for the factories abandoning it.
His side burned from a stitch. His legs cramped. He half-crouched, putting his hands on his knees. Then he stretched, gulping down for air, and tilted his head back at the sky.
How like a window it seemed, cloudless today, going back forever. Hazy visions of flocks up high, of almost invisible particles of moisture like infinitesimal bubbles moting their way upward.
Nothing there to disturb the pretending of other worlds. No men in dirty underwear, women tilting at windmills of unforgiving cellulite, guys trying to commit suicide.
Just adventures in waiting, magic unspoken, beauty in abstract.
Nonnie saw something out of the corner of his eye, in some room of that heaven. It was so far out, as if previous to the concept of atmosphere and blue, as if gathered before where night waited to fall. It moved: subtle, sly, seductive.
It didn’t seem to mind that Nonnie saw it.
««—»»
The television in the old boot repair shop window showed sitcoms about the wacky goings-on between friends in fallout shelters, cable movies about earth people dodging asteroids and comets, sports events advertising only the strong survived, soap operas where the signal blurred and reception fuzzed and the faces of players became inhuman.
News spots reported about Prophet Cloud Parties. It was supposed to be visible now, usually in the early evening and for several hours into the night, beginning on the western horizon for most people in the United States. You just looked out toward the planet Venus…
One reporter said it resembled a pale thumbprint.
««—»»
Nonnie watched the man walk toward the shop with the television in it, knowing without seeing what the guy carried in his coat pocket. Nonnie knew the guy was Roy-Sean Riptree. He could hear the man inside his head as he thought furiously to himself, “Ought to be tryin’ to do somethin’ about things. Ought to be movin’ forward, makin’ stuff right. Not jest sittin’ around watchin’ bull and more bull like they was all hypnotized!”
The item in the pocket was a grenade, purchased by Roy-Sean’s older brother years ago at a gun show over in Fort Worth, before the government passed so many restrictions that you couldn’t get anything really cool anymore.
Roy-Sean didn’t consider himself an anarchist. Certainly not a terrorist. But, damn it, time was running short if that cloud was really going to turn out to be something world-bending—and these fools needed to get off their asses before it was too late. He could make a hell of a statement by pulling the pin and tossing the grenade through the store window, hard so he broke the glass and it didn’t just strike the window to fall back into those people blissed out on beer and circuses. It wasn’t really in him to slaughter the neighbors, even if it might be necessary for a few (seated in lawn chairs near the front) to get hurt or maybe even die just to wake the others up.
Nonnie saw the shadowy glimmer from the big screen, crawling across the faces of the captive audience. There was a marathon of old Outer Limits episodes—the original series which Nonnie had seen on the Sy-Fy Channel back when his house had cable. Nothing spoke more eloquently of alien presence and absolutes than stark black and white.
Nonnie scanned everyone present. He could tell a lot about them—a lot inside them. He read what it was like to be out of work with a family to feed, what it was like to be stuck in dead-end Garza with no way to relocate (outside of thumbing it up a strange highway). He intuited what it was like to be pregnant without wanting to bring an innocent baby into a world that might be ending in only a few days. The cloud was closer, the horizon a permanent yellow haze even at midnight. There had been satellite photos taken of it. People swore the interlocking tendrils around glitter and flash—like macramé surrounding a dream—held the face of Jesus returning to claim His own. Or a host of angels bringing the final Judgement. Or even that it was a disguise for ships of alien invasion.
What he couldn’t tell from what was revealed to him in their minds was the only thing he really wanted to know. To learn that, he had to go to each individual and ask.
Nonnie walked up the opposite way from the one Roy-Sean had come. People turned to see him, puzzled expressions on their faces because he looked different from the boy he’d always been. His face was pale and his eyes were empty. Even Roy-Sean paused as he began to reach into his pocket for the grenade.
Nonnie asked the first person he came to, an old man munching a bologna and cheese sandwich, “Are you the one who stole my soul?”
He was very soft-voiced about it, the notes cold and flat. The old man simply blinked. He didn’t reply because he didn’t know how to.
Nonnie went next to two teenaged girls, trying to paint their toenails in the sparse light of streetlamps and television.
“Are you the ones who stole my soul?”
Normally they might have giggled in tandem at such a crazy question. But the little boy was too solemn, too limp. As if he were merely sleepwalking.
He asked this one and that one, “Are you the one who stole my soul?”
People gaped or shook their heads.
Another voice drifted in the dark. Somewhere a woman was calling for her child. She was plaintive and whining, insistent and wheedling.
“Hey, boy, that your mama callin’ you?” asked the old man.
“No, that’s Loretta Bosier callin’ her boy Lan. This here’s Gellie Stirling’s kid. You know. The one who burned them people to death in
the church,” answered a pregnant woman named Corrine Vondale.
Nonnie tiptoed up, creeping as spilled molasses. He made a fist-snatching gesture at her gravid belly, saying, “Your baby’s lost its soul, Ma’m.”
Corrine’s hand fluttered over her abdomen.
“Oh!” she cried. “He’s been kickin’ all night and now he’s stopped!”
The swell deflated, leaving a hollow sag beneath her smock.
“Where’s my baby?” she screamed.
Corrine started to launch herself at Nonnie but two men held her back.
“Somebody call a doctor,” one suggested, trying not to stare at her flaccid stomach.
“Can’t have been him. He didn’t even touch you,” the other pointed out.
“Anybody got a cell phone?” somebody asked.
“Yeah, it’s with my swimmin’ pool and Mercedes,” came a sour reply.
Nonnie pointed to an abandoned department store where a few naked mannequin still stood in the display window. There was a vague movement behind dirty glass. With it came a noise of pendulous sliding as brick walls trembled.
Nonnie told Corrine, “There’s your baby. See him?”
On the set in the window something shapeless wriggled around a corner in the show. Black and white and shades of gray-in-abstract. In no way gravitating toward an approximation of semblance, and with no point of reference which might make the casual observer comfortable.
There were no casual observers here now.
Nonnie stepped toward Gary Trainer, science teacher at the high school.
“Are you the one who stole my soul?”
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