Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  I knew what he really was. I held on to my mother as they carried away our fallen angel of light.

  Trigger Variation

  Does he know about the Mercabol? Damn it. Did I hide the gear last night?

  Jackson pretended to stretch his neck as he scoped out his Spartan charm-free rental unit.

  Thin mattress/weight bench/jugs of protein powder and amino fuel in the closest corner. Jump rope on the floor. Boom box with a stack of CDs placed neatly to one side, sitting next to a digital alarm clock.

  No needles. No tiny glass bottles. Thank God.

  But what if the shit’s still out in the bathroom? Keep him busy right here. Keep talking.

  Kane had just arrived, an hour earlier than expected, and was pacing Jackson’s apartment, clenching and un-clenching his considerable fists.

  Okay, what was I talking about?

  Jackson started up again.

  “I mean, didn’t you ever think, for just a second, that maybe this lifestyle . . . ”

  “Maybe this lifestyle what, man?”

  Jackson paused.

  Okay, wrong tack. Focus, man. Don’t act so shaken up.

  He let his arms drop to his sides and hissed out a deep shaking breath. Felt the blood flow to his hands, veins bulging.

  I’m heavy. Getting heavier. Finally. I don’t think they know . . .

  Jackson eyeballed Kane. Big, hair-trigger Kane. His superior by about 60 pounds and a few months of training. Thick, razor-shaved symmetrical skull and over-prominent brow. Gorilla physique. A guy prone to misunderstanding nuance. A guy deeply loyal to the EndLiners ideals. A guy who might just put a fist through Jackson’s throat that very second for questioning said ideals.

  Jackson cancelled his query/feigned mental drift.

  Kane was watching him—studying him with his head turned slightly to one side, waiting for a response.

  “Shit. I don’t know. Having a fuzzy-brained moment. I haven’t slept much the last few days.”

  Jackson noticed the oily rings around Kane’s eyes and figured he was equally exhausted. They’d been training so hard . . .

  “Yeah, man, I know what you’re talking about. My brain’s a little jacked at the moment, too. Last night I was curling and while I had the bar all the way up I started staring at the weight on the right side and seeing all the patterns in the gray metal, and then I looked up at myself in the mirror and I didn’t know who I was for a second and I wanted to jump across the room and just fucking mash the dude.”

  “What?” Jackson asked the question with excitement in his voice, glad that Kane was going to let Jackson’s earlier thought drop. Better for both of them.

  Kane continued. “Seriously. I was so pumped that the sight of what I thought was another human being made me want to go kick some ass. It was like this force was behind me, pushing me towards him . . . ”

  “Towards you?”

  “Well, yeah. And that’s why nothing came of it. Because if I would have swung on the dude all I would have got for it was a broken mirror and a fucked-up hand. But I was close, man. Some borderline shit . . . ”

  They both smiled at that. Things had been sketchy for weeks, chaos sliding into their lives a little more as each day rushed by in anticipation of the big night. Jorge had gone to jail for trying to steal a crate of eggs (ostensibly, they all guessed, to be used for protein binging). Nate got pinched for rape, his own girlfriend the accuser, her broken right wrist making it an easy case for the cops to close. Kyle was arrested for brawling downtown, and was still wearing his “Your Mom is A Rotten Cunt” T-shirt when he was bailed out. Mitchell broke his ankle trying to clear a fence after getting caught in the middle of prowling an upscale residence (for reasons none of them could readily ascertain). And Frank had . . . well, Frank had crossed a line but hadn’t been caught.

  Their fearless leader, the man behind the EndLiner ideals, had gone out one balmy Thursday to spend the night sniping zoo animals with a rifle.

  Frank saw it as further proof of human dominion, of the absolute power accorded our species, but Jackson could tell a lot of the guys were holding back a flinch or two while watching the footage.

  Ex-straight edge kids, he guessed. Wanted the extra hardcore aspect they could get as EndLiners but still harbored their old pro-animal affection (or affectation as Frank would call it). Jackson got the feeling from Frank that his empathy ran as deep as a creek in Death Valley, and that all EndLiners were expected to exhibit that same coldness. And many of them did run frosty, these ex-edge kids who’d realized how much easier it was to deride and destroy. They discovered how fun it could be if you didn’t mind abiding by their leader’s occasional extremes.

  As shaky as Frank’s digicam footage was, it had been rough watching him drop the tiger. And the monkeys. A few of those twitched as they bled out. Other monkeys came right to the freshly-plugged bait, tearing out their fur in tufts, screaming at nothing until Frank scoped them down too.

  And always, in the background, Frank’s laughter. Like a sponge full of joy being squeezed out by his throat, his love for the midnight mercenary mission on full display.

  Jackson had been paying close attention to the tape. He’d heard Frank whisper, “We win,” after the last monkey dropped. Jackson had rubbed the goosebumps off his skin quick and mustered up the best laugh he could. It sounded as false as it was.

  Kane had looked at Jackson then, too. Watched him closely.

  He can tell something’s off. Does he know about the ‘roids? What is he telling Frank? We’ve been friends for so many years, man. Jesus, I shouldn’t even be thinking about Kane like this.

  But Jackson had been out on his own midnight missions with Kane and knew the kid that helped him limp home after his first bike wreck wasn’t around anymore. Kane had developed a strong taste for the rough stuff, and there’d been a shift. They were EndLiners and now everything—everybody—fell into two categories.

  The weak and the strong.

  And God fucking help you if were even a momentary member of the first party.

  THE PILLOW FIGHTS WERE, of course, Frank’s idea. Loosely, anonymously organized, being wholly un-associated with anything End-Liner. General net shenanigans got it done. Emails, IMs with an address and a single message: Bring a pillow and be ready for battle. Frank paid a guy to pay a guy to set the ball in motion, and the results were great.

  The first fight—at McGrady’s public park—pulled a few hundred combatants and ended with a ration of bruises and grass covered thick with expelled feathers.

  Arrests: zero.

  Jackson had watched the officers from the periphery, studied their faces, guessed at their reactions. Some smirked—writing it off as the further infantilism of a worthless generation. A few cops kept their itching hands hovering over their pepper spray canisters. Some wished they’d brought their own pillows.

  The second fight was in the town square and pulled double the numbers. This time the media was invited. Everything stayed anonymous but now people who’d never even heard of the term “web browser” knew about the events.

  Those crazy kids, they commented, there’s worse things they could be doing.

  WHAT JACKSON COULDN’T TELL Kane, or anyone else for that matter, was that he was starting to have doubts about the big night.

  There was no name for the event. Frank wasn’t big on marketing.

  “No catchy slogans or simple images to tag up on a wall,” he’d said. “Being an EndLiner means respecting one thing: Human survival. If you need a ten-step plan or a secret handshake or a goddamned secret Mason reach-around, then we don’t need you.”

  Keeping the idea at the forefront—that humans were the one great species on Earth and that they must, at any costs, become ever-stronger—that’s what Frank did. He tapped into primal urges and desires. Fighting/fucking/feasting. The things that came with power and strength.

  But you had to work for it. You had to get big. Local stores ran short on protein powder/milk/eggs
/chicken/steak. The guys involved with Frank stayed loosely connected, per his instructions, but when they did meet in person their conversations invariably drifted to three topics—lifting programs, combat techniques, and music (predominately of hardcore variety).

  The straight edge kids ate it up because Frank thought that their power should come without the taint of drugs. His ideology freed them from believing in the nobility of anyone other than themselves; saved them from the inevitable letdowns that the rest of humanity had to offer.

  And they liked the fact that he allowed meat and promiscuity back into their lives. Many of them had grown skinny and anemic without their old diet of animal flesh. Surging sex-drives had made the ascetic lifestyle a bitch. Now they were bigger/more dangerous/ sexually aggressive to the point where you could taste the hormones when a group of them entered a room. And they were going to the same punk/metal shows, throwing around considerable added weight, and getting blown in the parking lot while blast beats still rumbled against the roof of the venue.

  It was ape heaven.

  At least that’s how Jackson was starting to see it.

  He’d been enchanted at first. Like a lot of the EndLiners he came from a shitty household scenario. It was close to standard issue with their crew. Jackson’s particular brand of bullshit was father-oriented.

  His Pops was an unshakeable, almost admirably tenacious alky. Even the drunken traffic wreck that broke his dad’s right leg and put Jackson’s mother in the grave hadn’t slowed down his bottle draining mission (his time “in the cups” as he called it; shooting for charming but coming off resigned).

  After that particular mom-slaughtering indignity, Jackson had been taken away by the state and started the eighth grade as a technical orphan before his dad figured out who to pay off—with money from mom’s life insurance policy—to get his kid back.

  Back home. Two years of listening to the fucker sobbing over the sound of empty bottles clinking. And then it was legal emancipation/dropping out/working groceries at the Shop N Save for rent money. Freedom, pretty much, aside from the occasional late night phone call filled with promise and apology.

  I’m so sorry, Jackson. I hope you know it. I try so hard but I don’t think you’ll ever see that. Enough talk though, right? Show and prove time. I’ve been thinking about joining a gym, and maybe I can even go back to AA if they don’t keep pumping God up my ass and . . . I don’t know. I’ll quit talking Jacky, and I’ll show you something.

  Once in awhile the old fucker sold it sincere enough to tease out a sliver of hope.

  It was that hope—and how his father used it—that led Jackson to hate the man. When Jackson was teased by those chances to see his father as a father and not just the drunk that spawned him—and when those chances were inevitably smashed like empty bourbon bottles—that was the worst of it.

  That was what made him want to be hard. To be big, and better, and clean, and powerful.

  To be an EndLiner.

  But as Jackson stared at the injection kit in front of him—a slim needle and a small glass bottle with a label reading Mercabol, underscored by some Asian writing he couldn’t translate—his doubts returned.

  I’m just as hooked as Pops.

  Jackson killed the bad thoughts, recognized they could only take him in one direction. He drew fluid into the syringe, wondering if it was really horse testosterone like the web ad had said, and then pushed the needle into the meat of his left thigh. He grimaced at the intramuscular burn, pulled the needle, and watched one drop of fluid emerge and slide loose down the side of his leg. His thoughts ran so morbid that he felt the expelled drug drip was his only way of crying now, and his face flushed red with embarrassment at the lameness of his own maudlin bullshit.

  Can your fucking emo lament. Lift. Don’t think. Get bigger.

  He pressed Play on his mini-stereo and then hit Shuffle. As Death Shall Fall/Morbid Descent/Strength Over All on rotation. Great, raw shit by men bloodied on their own instruments, singers collapsing lungs to let you know that the world was a brutal place, that will was all you had. The first disc was from Denmark and Jackson didn’t know what language it was in, but he could feel it regardless. Power had little to do with language.

  The Mercabol kicked. Jackson hit the bench and pumped the barbell until he had to roll it off him and onto the floor. His blisters popped and oozed blood. He’d been hoping they’d callous more— he wanted 1800s whaling-ship hands. But the sight of the blood made him feel right.

  I’m hard. I’m doing what others cannot. Will not. They’re sleeping now, and I’m growing stronger.

  Visions hit his brain.

  Terror-type: murder/rape/destruction. He pictured his fists calloused over, cement-hard, smashing anything that got in his way.

  Visions of fear: Frank finding out about his ‘roid habit. Frank setting the other men upon him for training. Dog meat in the center pit.

  Doubts: Needle worries—did he have guts like this without his secret injections? EndLiner worries—just what the hell was their big night really going to be like? Always worries—what made him think he’d ever be better than his father?

  Shake it off. Don’t overthink. Keep pushing. Get bigger.

  He dropped to the floor for crunches and supermans and then did push-ups on his fists to keep the filthy carpet fibers out of the ruptured blister pools in his palms. He popped up and grabbed the jump rope. He worked the rope triple-fast, setting time goals on the clock, not relenting until the right minute clicked over.

  More push-ups. Deep-lung breath like spoiled meat popping back off the carpet.

  He chugged water. He smeared the blood from his hands across his face and chest. He flexed just to flex, to feel his new size. He silent-screamed along to his music, face straining the way he’d seen in the videos.

  He desired—anyone to contradict him right now/anyone to suck him off right now.

  He wondered—how had he ever questioned that this was the right path?

  He flexed again, shaking in the dark, whispering “Fuck you” because it felt right.

  HOME FROM WORK, JACKSON always checked his answering machine before doing anything else. He was one of the five people left on Earth that didn’t have a cell phone so he spent most of his work shifts at the Shop N Save wondering who was calling him and what he was missing. EndLiners moved in small groups for their “training”—to tint their activities as the sort of random violence people brushed off when they caught it on the nightly news—but Jackson was connected to four of these small groups and didn’t ever want to miss out. He’d learned a lot during their short forays—how quickly he could run with a stolen crate of Rapid-Bulk powder in his arms (pretty goddamned fast), how hard it was to break a man’s arm (not very), how to make a noisy bar turn quiet (return to the place where you broke the guy’s arm, accompanied by five guys who look just like you).

  He noticed his finger was shaking as he reached out to press the Play button next to the blinking red light on his answering machine.

  Look at that, champ! The shakes, just like Pops . . . way to go! What’re you hooked on?

  Jackson ignored the nagging thoughts. They crept up now and then, although he’d acknowledged his new reality—he was addicted to the life of an EndLiner. So were his friends. They were getting off on violence, but at least it was violence with a purpose. They were fast-forwarding human evolution, bringing . . .

  Jesus P. Christ, man! You believe that? You buying what some crazy monkey-sniping fuck sold you through your MySpace account?

  Jackson pressed the button, anxious to hear something other than the voice inside his head.

  “Message One,” said the digital woman.

  “Hello? . . . Anybody there? . . . You there, Jacky? Okay, well, I wish you were home. I’ve got some great news and . . . well, I’d rather tell you in person . . . Okay, so you’re really not there. I’ll just tell you. I’ve met a great lady. Her name is Rhonda and she’s been so good to me, and helped me see
some things straight. The part I need to tell you about is that, um, she found a way to get some financial assistance through the city and she’s going to pay for me to go to rehab out at Pinebrook and I’ve agreed to go and that’s pretty much that . . . Shit, bud, I really wish you were home . . . The thing is I’ve got to go in today, like three hours from now, and then I’m cut off from everybody for the whole first month as part of the deal. I was really hoping you’d come see me at her place. She’s at 6705 Kent on the northwest side and I’ll be there with my luggage in the next hour and I was hoping . . . Well, I don’t know what I was hoping. It would be good to see you, Jacky. It would be really good. I know you don’t have any reason—”

  A sharp beep cut the message off.

  “Message Two,” said the digital woman. Jackson expected to hear his father’s voice continuing. Instead it was Frank’s, slow and determined.

  “Bring a pillow and be ready for battle.”

  That was all Jackson needed to hear.

  The big night was going down in about three hours.

  Jackson pressed Delete on his answering machine, clearing out the false hope and the call to arms.

  He ran to the cache in his bathroom, where two glass containers marked “Mercabol” were waiting.

  He placed the gear reverently by his front door. He’d inject at the last minute to make sure he was cresting high tonight.

  Then he was back in his bedroom, hunched over his pillow with a pair of scissors in hand.

  His music was on blast. Fuck the neighbors.

  Jackson smiled, thinking one word.

  Tonight.

  CAR ENGINES RUMBLED AROUND them, dust floating ethereal before headlights. There were maybe one hundred men, perhaps a few less than that. Jackson estimated their combined weight at about ten tons.