I stood by the car for a few more minutes, but by then I knew Belinda wasn't coming back. I checked by the road where we'd been standing, hoping that she'd dropped my keys before she'd disappeared. No such luck. She'd hadn't crushed out the pink Sherman. She'd only smoked about half of it, and I could see it glowing on the road. I picked the cigarette up and puffed. The smoke was sweet in my lungs.
Then a truck came out of nowhere and ran me down.
When I reached Hell, it wasn't the Volkswagen-size Palm Pilot the demons strapped to my back that scared me, or the enormous Rolodex treadmill I was forced to run on all day and night. It was that shredder. I knew it was out there in the dark. I could hear giggling demons sharpening the blades. It was just a matter of time.
THE END
Mementos
She's going to leave me. I know this for a fact. She's too beautiful for me. Too witty, too at ease in the world and social situations. She knows wine. She speaks French. She can see a Versace dress in a magazine and knock off a copy for herself in a weekend. Her friends are as sparkling and jewel-like as she. I can't keep up. Each night we're together, I feel her growing tired of my solidity. My lead-footed drabness.
"It's Bernice's birthday this weekend," she says. "There's going to be a big party at Jimmy's warehouse."
"Sounds great," I say.
She smiles, and says, "I'll pick up some wine." But I hear it as, "Liar."
I know she's already halfway out the door, but I can't lose her completely. I need something to remember her by. One night while she's asleep I take the ext ra sharp Japanese gardening knife I use for boning chicken and carefully remove one of her kidneys. She's a ridiculously healthy creature and will never miss it.
I wrap the kidney lovingly in colored tissue paper and store it with a sachet in the back of the refrigerator. I close up the incision using one of her sewing needles and some dental floss. She's a pale girl and will never notice the white floss against her skin. In the morning, a little guilty, I get up early and make us a big breakfast.
Over the next few couple of weeks, I take more mementos. Fingernail clippings. That sensitive spot at the base of her spine. Her spleen. A birthmark shaped like Martin Sheen.
And then she's gone. There's no last fight. No final confrontation or brouhaha, just a quiet acceptance by both of us that this is it. There's some quick packing. An awkward hug. A mention that she'd come back for the rest of her stuff in a few days, and she's gone.
Shattered, I sit down at the computer to email to my brother about what's happened. When I try to hit the space bar, one of my thumbs is missing. And I can't remember how to spell "Matthew." I scratch my head and can feel an incision all the way around my scalp, just at the hairline.
THE END
Mouse Lights
There is light now, for the first time in almost 100 years. Rubbish-heap Christmas lights, mostly, lovingly repaired and strung down both sides of the tiled tunnel. They twinkle, dime store constellations in the gloom. Their candy-colored light illuminates the derelict, hand-made train: Waterford crystal windows, soft, lamb leather seats and mother-of-pearl handles on the sliding doors. The old pneumatic-tube train, abandoned on its one-block line, had hunkered beneath Wall Street waiting a century for someone with a use for it.
Mouse had stumbled on the station by mistake. The Optic Kid had walked off with Mouse's last can of vienna sausage, and when Mouse called him on it, the Kid had come for him, his goons in tow. Mouse had to abandon all his belongings in the subway tunnels and flee into the dark, into the dampest, deepest tunnels, where no one (not even the other tunnel rats) went. In the dark, he'd crawled through a spot where the ancient concrete had rotted away beneath a steam pipe leak. Beyond was the lost pneumatic tube station. Mouse struck a match and saw a brass plaque on the wall. A name: Alfred Ely Beach. A date: 1870. The vast silent room was like some industrial cathedral. Mouse moved in on the spot.
Mouse never told anyone about his underground kingdom. When he died, several years later, he regretted little. He lay on soft leather, watched the Christmas lights twinkle and felt himself slowly merge with their brilliance. When other tunnel rats eventually discovered Mouse's lair, they quickly left. Beauty, so rare for them, had become a sacred thing. They hid the tunnel entrance and it remains lost to this day, though many claim to have seen Mouse's lights, blinking far away in the darkness of the tunnels.
THE END
Mudrosti
Almost forty eight tons of the dying Russian space station, Mudrosti, enter the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Most of the debris burns up on re-entry, but thousands of tiny glass and metal particles shower down over the west coast of the United States. One of the particles enters the roof of an office building on the corner of Sansome and Clay Street in San Francisco's financial district. The particle, a fragment of a bolt that secured a transfer conduit to the station's solar panels, is traveling at three hundred yards per second, at an angle of thirty degrees.
On the twenty third floor, the tiny fragment strikes Sean Jackson in the back, just above his left scapula, and passes through his left ventricle, causing the heart muscle to spasm. Sean had been a track and football champion in high school and college. He can count the number of days he's been sick on the fingers of one hand. The heart attack is a revelation for him. In a hospital bed, where the doctors hold him overnight for observation, he uses his cell phone to call his girlfriend and ask her to marry him.
On the eighteenth floor, the Mudrosti fragment passes through Liv Ordesky's shoulder bag, striking her new PJ Harvey CD, instantly vaporizing the aluminum layer of the disk. When she finds the damaged disk on her way home from work, the streaks left by the evaporating metal strike her as profoundly beautiful. Two weeks later, she quits her job as a media buyer for an online marketing agency and re-enters the art school she'd dropped out of two years earlier.
Kate Weinstein is on the sixteenth floor of the building, rubbing her temples to relieve the pounding headache that is really the early stages of a stroke. As the falling fragment enters her brain, it dissolves the blockage in her cerebral artery, restoring normal bloodflow. Unfortunately, the rush of blood into her brain leaves her so light-headed that when she tries to stand, she collapses, face-first, into the gold fish tank on the corner of her desk, and drowns.
On the twelfth floor, Grant Burrows is climaxing between the tight, toned rock climbing thighs of his secretary, Megan Price. The fragment strikes the chip storing the numbers he's entered into his phone's speed dial, and calls his home number. A screw head in the base of the phone deflects the fragment so that it ricochets out of the device, and passes through the center of Grant's hands. When Grant hears his wife's voice coming through his phone's speaker he looks up, in mid-orgasm, and sees that he has developed stigmata. Neither Megan nor Grant's wife understand why he begins to scream or why he later insists on going to Confession for the first time in twenty-some years.
On the ninth floor, the particle smashes through the top of Timothy Jackson’s green iMac, striking the exact spot where a glob of dried sour cream (from last night's Chavo Supreme Super Burrito) touches a gallium arsenide chip in the heart of the machine. The strange primordial chemical cloud gives rise to a whole new form of life within the iMac. As the superheated plasma cools, the life grows and flourishes, building a vast civilization across the surface of the chip. But even with all the poetry and art they create, the civilization falls into a kind of existential despair when their science correctly describes the limits of their green and plastic-encased universe. A nuclear war breaks out between the different factions fighting for ultimate control of the chip. In the aftermath, the survivors envy the dead and all traces of their elegant empire are burned to dust. This all happens in .003 seconds. Timothy is forced to reboot his iMac when it mysteriously crashes.
Orlando "The Hammer" Sinclair is holding up a woman at gunpoint in the garage beneath the office building. As the particle travels down through the garage roo
f, it passes through Orlando's gun, igniting the primer in the chambered bullet. The gun goes off, killing Victoria Hartley next to her Jeep Cherokee. As Orlando watches her body crumple to the cement floor, the stupidity of the act and the violence of her collapse surprises him. Murder isn't nearly as much fun as he thought it would be.
From the floor of the garage, the particle continues down and enters the sewer, striking a spark when it punctures a water main. In the dark, a large and fierce rat is munching on a soggy carton of day old Mu Shu pork. The sight of the spark and the tiny geyser of water from the damaged main trigger a memory in the rat's tiny brain. The rat remembers another life, when he was known as Louis, the king of France. The Sun King, they had called him. He recalls the lovely fountains at his palaces, the emerald gardens outside Versailles, the ladies in waiting. That night, he dreams a mixture of rat and Louis dreams. Furry, whiskered women in elegant ball gowns chase him playfully through halls of mirrors as musicians play minuets in his endless palace. They all make love under the gilt wainscoting and dine on glazed cherries, fine wine and fresh pheasant bones, straight from the royal dumpster. Nothing less would be fit for his majesty Louis, the rat king.
THE END
My Exquisite Corpse
I hadn't been feeling well for weeks when I went to see Dr. Breton, the surrealist surgeon. He'd graduated with top honors from the same Parisian university that had given us Salvador Dali, the famous brain specialist. Since both practiced the same Paranoid-Critical method of healing, which relied more on chance processes and instinct than on a lot of flashy "medical" training, I felt in good hands.
We began with a quick exam. Dr. Breton dispensed with traditional, dead methods of medicine and went his own bold way. Instead of anatomy charts, his walls contained maps of Kathmandu and the Cleveland sewer system, along with a glossy poster of Anna Kournikova, complete with his handwritten astrological and I Ching annotations, including her favorite color and food (baby blue and Buffalo Wings). The first words Dr. Breton said to me were, "Beauty must be convulsive, or it will not be. Now, turn your head and cough."
The good doctor pronounced me as fit as "a teacup of chicken fat, glistening in the flames of the burning Hindenburg." Healthy as I was, he recommended immediate surgery, since I was already there and the table was free.
We began with quickie séance, in which Dr. Breton requested surgical advice from the late, great Harry Houdini. The doctor seemed to be paying inordinate attention to his pretty blonde nurse, who giggled when he'd grab her thighs under the table. This, he explained to me was standard procedure in an "irrational anatomy" exam. Besides, given the choice between my spotty, larva-colored thighs and his tanned nurse's, which would I examine? At once, I was reminded of the doctor's brilliance and didn't question his technique again.
Dr. Breton was a psychic surgeon, and dispensed with the use of crude "instruments" and "those sharp, scary thingies." After fortifying himself with a couple of shots of Jagermeister, and sterilizing his bare hand in a warm bottle of Mr. Pibb, Dr. Breton plunged his left hand deep into my abdomen. Seconds later, he pulled out a set of playing cards (a good poker hand: aces and eights), a string of paper flowers, the recipe for Kishka his wife had been looking for, a large liver tumor, and three live pigeons.
Leaving Dr. Breton's office, I felt like a new man. That I had a seizure on the bus home and died a few hours later should, in no way, be seen to reflect on the doctor's healing prowess. His last observation says it all: "Death is the ultimate side effect of life," he told me, followed by, "No cash refunds."
THE END
Opener of the Ways
On a bright, crisp Saturday, Margaret walked through the dog park with Anubis. The jackal-headed guide of the dead, the prince of Magic, used his royal Ankh to scratch the parts of his back he couldn't reach with his hands.
Margaret bought them ice cream from a vendor with a cart. Other dog owners crowded around with their animals. A Russian wolfhound sniffed Anubis' ass. The god patted the wolfhound on the head and let it lick from his vanilla cone. The wolfhound's owner nervously pulled the dog away.
"Why is it always seven?" Margaret asked. "Seven deadly sins. Seven virtues. Seven pillars of wisdom. Seven lines on a grave to erase the sins of the dead."
"Seven segments of a rainbow," said Anubis, in a clear very un-doglike voice. "Seven souls."
"Is that why? Because we have seven souls?"
"Perhaps. Four parts of mortals are connected to Earth, three to Heaven. If you add up the numbers one through seven, you get twenty-eight, the same number as the cycle of the moon. Of course, it could be simpler. It could be that everyone in the universe hates six, so the gods just rounded up one."
An old woman in a bulky plaid coat stood before them. "What kind of a dog is that?"
"Actually, it's a god," said Margaret.
"Is that like a Pekingese?"
"Your khu, your intelligence, is unusually small," Anubis said. "This will not help you pass through the Judgement Hall of Osiris and into the Western Lands where worthy souls live forever."
"You have a very rude doggy," the old woman said, and stalked off, pulling her cocker spaniel behind.
Margaret called, "He's not a dog. He's a god. And, I suppose, a dog, too."
"I'm a jackal. Canis aureus. Related to dogs, but a different sub-species."
"Yeah. The kind that can talk."
"All dogs talk. They just don't talk to humans."
"What do dogs talk about?"
"That's a secret."
Margaret pointed to a brown and white mutt touching noses with a dachshund. "What's that one talking about right now?"
"It's hungry and its human watches too much porn." Anubis scratched his back again. "While I'm not a dog, I sure would like to chase the nice red ball that pitbull has."
"I have a ball in my bag. Should I throw it for you?"
"No, but thanks. It's undignified for a god."
"I understand," Margaret said. She took a last bite of her ice cream and breathed in the afternoon air. "This is nice. Being back in the park."
"I thought you might enjoy it."
"When you first knocked on my door, I thought it was a joke. I'm not used to meeting gods, much less ones who want to go to the dog park with me."
"I'd seen you here before. After your terrier died, I knew you must miss the place."
"I did," she said, then hesitated. "I'm not dead, too, am I?"
"I don't know. Did you feel dead when you bought the ice cream?"
"No. I guess not. I guess ice cream is confirmation of life."
Anubis pointed his Ankh at a meticulously-coifed poodle who was being vigorously humped by a handsome German shepherd.
"See that poodle? In a previous life, she was the greatest magician in human history. Almost a god, she was, though she was a man back then. She became a little too ambitious and challenged Amman Ra to a duel."
"What happened?"
"When she was killed, she was reincarnated as mold on the side of a tree in a mangrove swamp in southern India. It's taken her ten thousand years to get back this far up the food chain."
"Does she remember any of that?"
Anubis glanced at the busy dogs. "Not at the moment, I'd guess." They walked on down the path. The god was very adept at pointing out dog shit before Margaret stepped in it. He said, "That man you don't like. You should forget about him."
"There are so many of them not to like. Which specific man are you talking about?"
"The one who hurt you. The one you bought the poison for. You shouldn't use it. I'm the Opener of Ways. The one who leads souls to judgement. I know about these things."
"It's hard always being reasonable. Some people deserve to suffer."
"I understand. I once flooded all of Upper Egypt to get back at my brother, Set. Everyone was very angry with me. My family wouldn't speak to me for a thousand years."
"I once stuck my sister's Barbie in the garbage disposal. Not the same thing, I
suppose."
"Of course it is. Attacks on those we love are relative. And they leave us lonely and barren."
Margaret let air out slowly between her teeth. "I wasn't really going to kill him, I suppose. It just felt good to know I could."
"And now you don't have to," said Anubis. He put his arm around her shoulder. It was warm and oddly comforting. "Remember that all debts are paid, in the end."
"Does everyone really hate six?" Margaret asked.
"Gods and humans both. If we didn't need something between five and seven, no one would put up with six."
"Excuse me, ma'am," said a Regional Park cop. "Are you aware of the new leash law that's gone into effect?"
Margaret's eyes narrowed. "Did that old woman send you over here?"
"Your dog is too big to run around on his own."
"He's not a dog. And he's not running around."
"He doesn't seem to have a license. Has he had his shots?"
"He's a god. He doesn't need shots!"
"You're going to have to leave the park, and I'm going to have to give you a fine."
Anubis moved his enormous arm from Margaret's shoulder and laid his hand on the park cop's head. "You know, you bureaucrats were invented by Thoth, the scribe. But you were supposed to help mankind keep its affairs in order, not fill it with annoyance and fear."
Collected Short Stories Page 8