by Rio Youers
He watches the door.
Someone knocks.
Brandon doesn’t answer. He holds his breath.
He digs the knife from his pocket.
The knocking intensifies.
Brandon unfolds the knife, grips the blade tightly.
He crosses the room. The steady knocking rattles the door in the frame. He holds the knife in one hand, keeping it flat against his thigh. With his other hand, he grips the doorknob. He doesn’t bother looking out the peephole. He knows who he will see. He opens the door.
The dead man stands across the threshold from him.
Behind him, the world ends. The misting rain has stopped. Now, the world heaves and bucks and undulates, coming undone, substance and form bleeding into nothingness like paint breaking apart in water. It is no longer night, no longer dark. Instead, a borealis of bloody light roils through the sky. Faceless, ghostly figures tumble through the air, rising, raptured from this world, but unable to see or hear what is happening. Pattern-eels swim in the spaces between substance and oblivion, devouring the featureless travelers, snapping at them as they tumble upwards. Some of the eels are thousands of feet long, and they tear through the curtain of reality, burrowing through existence, leaving a shit trail of writhing memories in their wake.
Names, sensations, phantom-like faces—wash over him in waves.
His wife. His daughter.
His house.
His boss and co-workers.
His doctor, stone-faced as he delivers his diagnosis.
Before he can grasp hold of any one memory, they all roll away.
The dead man acknowledges none of this.
He has murdered the world with as little care as he might give crushing an ant under his thumb.
Looking into the eyes of the dead man, Brandon feels himself smile madly.
The dead man mimics the expression.
“You found me,” Brandon says.
The dead man speaks at the same time, saying the same things.
“I wasn’t looking for you,” both men say.
And, “You were never lost.”
Brandon can’t be sure if he is looking into the face of a world-destroying monster . . . looking into the eyes of the awful creature he had been fleeing from . . . or if he is peering into a mirror.
***
The doctor’s office is cold, quiet, sparse.
Morgue-like.
“This is a lot to take in,” he says. “I’m sure you have questions.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“I would encourage you to seek out a second opinion, of course.” He is the harbinger of the Blight, the servant of the dead man. “I can offer some referrals if you like.”
“I’m too young. This only happens to old people.Old people, hobbling around with their walkers, shuffling through nursing homes, drool running down their chins, eyes wide and confused, unsure where they are, unsure who they are. And now . . . Now, I’m going to be one of them.”
Early onset—that’s what the doctor calls it.
His face is a mask of practiced non-emotion.
“When you’re ready, we should start discussing a course of treatment to slow the advancement of—”
***
Moving suddenly, Brandon lashes out with the knife, the dull blade ripping a ragged tear through the dead man’s throat.
The reflection shatters. The dead man’s eyes widen, and his mouth falls agape. His head lolls back, and the gash in his neck suppurates, blood gushing out, spilling down his chest. He clutches one hand feebly to the wound. He reaches out, a pleading gesture, toward Brandon.
Brandon strikes with the knife again, slicing across the fingers of his mirror image.
The dead man steps back, shaking his stinging fingers. His digits are loose now, hanging by tatty shreds of flesh, flapping loosely. Brandon slams the motel room door closed.
Brandon can’t catch his breath. He spins in place, looking around the room. Questions form on his lips. But there is no one to ask. The bloody knife falls from his fingers, thumps to the carpet. His heart races.
What has he done?
Through the gap in the curtain, he sees the red, undulating glow of the Blight fade.
He moves to the window and pulls the curtain aside.
The world is back to normal. The sky is dark and clear. The cars in the parking lot are empty. Nothing moves within. In the distance, cars cruise along the highway.
Brandon coughs out a laugh.
His legs give out from under him and he drops to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. His shoulders sag.
The world—he’s saved the world.
The world . . . with his wife Margaret and his daughter Kimmy . . . with his job at the insurance company . . . with the receptionist, Kendra, who brought in cookies every Wednesday . . . with his doctor, who had been so wrong about the diagnosis.
It was all clear—lucid, now.
He looks at the phone.
He needs to call his family, to apologize for scaring, to promise he’ll be home soon.
He’s succeeded.
He’s won.
He outran the corruption and the madness.
The Blight.
The end.
His fingers tremble as he picks up the phone. He dials the area code, the first three digits, the fourth. But he hesitates.
The next number—what is it?
From outside, he hears the awful, scraping grind of machinery.
He finishes dialing.
“We’re sorry, but the number you have dialed is not a working—”
Through the gap in the curtain, red light spills into the room. Serpentine shadows move in the glow.
He drops the telephone’s handset.
Frantically, he looks around
The knife—where did he drop it?
Someone knocks at the door.
NEVER WALK ALONE
François Vaillancourt
MOTEL NINE
CHRISTOPHER BUEHLMAN
Of the many chain motels he has come to know in his time on the road, he likes Motel Nne the best. He likes the one in Ames, Iowa for the tomato-red carpet that blazes like a challenge to the snow so often lurking outside the pale of artificial heat. He likes the one in Berea, Kentucky, for the false-medieval roof beams and garden trompe l’oeil that betray its origins as a Knight’s Inn. The one in Weeki Wachee, Florida boasts a mermaid statue in the lobby, and a vending machine that only offers peanut M&Ms; he can’t say why that charms him considering he prefers plain M&Ms, but it does. Something to do with a certain level of dedication, perhaps. Another thing about this chain is that the price is right. Money isn’t a particular problem for him, but it makes no sense to spend it on nothing. He isn’t entertaining sexual partners. He isn’t hosting clients. He just needs to get from here to there, from now to then, and get what sleep he’s able to. Also, and most importantly, whether the chain is calling itself Motel Nine, Motel Six, or the less common Motel 66, all of them always welcome pets. Even cats. The man travels with a brownish-black cat that some would still call a kitten. The animal seems infatuated with, and perhaps even loyal to, everyone who meets it, which can be a source of bother to the man, whose preferences decline toward solitude. Even the most conscientious people briefly consider stealing the cat because they sense it is actually their cat, mistakenly placed with the thin, balding young man who seems to hover more around it than it around him. Taking the cat wouldn’t be theft, it would be correcting a wrong. Nobody does, though.
“What’s his name?” a clearly covetous woman in Hope, Arkansas asks the man as he sits outside his room in the humid morning air. When she turns her eye away from the tabby, she finds herself looking at the man’s bald spot, wondering what flaw others first perceive in her. How could she know that every person instantly wonders the same thing when they see his scalp shining at the crown of his head, ringed by mouse-brown hair it looks like a strong showerhead might wash off? This woman is r
eally staring at the bald spot. “Her name is Hattie,” the man says, smiling despite his desire to cover his head then bodily push the woman off to her own open doorway.
In Independence, Missouri, the cat is Harry. In Xenia, Ohio, he calls the cat Toast for the benefit of a one-legged man enjoying the bike trail with the aid of a good prosthesis. “She looks a little like toast,” the cyclist says. “He does,” the man replies, taking another bite of his cheese sandwich and brushing crumbs off the bench. Anyone who presumes to know the feline’s sex is always contradicted, unless the questioner is a child.
The small, balding man indulges children.
Now there is the matter of his car. He drives a 1979 Mercury Cougar with two huge doors and no modern circuitry that might be affected by the conditions of his particular sort of travel. The cat alternates between sunning itself on the beach-like dashboard, curling up in a ball on the passenger seat, or peering out the window. Other drivers who see the cat looking at them frequently remark upon it to their passengers, noting its steady gaze or its sharp ears or the golden color of its eyes, which varies between molten steel and a just-risen moon.
At this moment, the diurnal moon hangs pale and chalky like its own ghost above a McDonalds Play Place in Mineola, Texas as the man asks a five-year-old girl, “Do you know that this town was named for two little sisters, Minnie and Olla?” She just stares. “Did you know that you are not the only you that God made?” he says, before her mother, who had been planning to call her lover on the cell phone, and who would have been engrossed for nearly an hour while her daughter grew dangerously bored, leads her by the hand away from the slide. The woman demands a manager. The manager cranes to see who the child-approacher may be, but the man is already gone. When the other version of him pulls up, the one without the cat, the one with a little less hair, the little girl and her mother are also already gone.
He eats in McDonalds from time to time, though he prefers Wendy’s. If he takes an exit in just the right way, he can hit Wendy’s in the early nineties, when they still offer the baked potato bar. You can just keep topping that baked potato for about three dollars, filling the skin with salad, cheese, chili, whatever you fancy. There isn’t a better deal on the highway. He can also take an exit in just such a way as to go back to when he isn’t so hungry, but eating gives him something to do.
The man likes the highway. He likes the juniper smell of the air freshener hanging from the mirror and the way his own eyes look in reflection when he checks them, thinking:
Yes, these are the eyes of a man doing the right thing. I am not a good man but nonetheless I am doing the right thing.
Nobody can find him here, call him, send him a bill, or a summons, or even a postcard from any place real or imagined. His solitude is a small price to pay for making himself benign. It is a small price to pay for seeing inside creation, just a little, just at the margins. He embraces the knowledge that he will spend the rest of his strange days alone, except for the cat and, of course, the radio.
He enjoys National Public Radio, enjoys hearing an older or younger Garrison Keillor talking about Lake Woebegone. It’s hard to get NPR in the sticks, though. He hates it when All Things Considered, with its endless variations of this or that world event—President Hart, President Clinton, President Bush bombs Serbia—blurs back into the static it came from, or worse, gets overwhelmed by the inevitable country station or fire-and-brimstone radio preacher. The preachers irritate him with their twanging-tin-can self-righteousness and mind-numbing repetition. It isn’t that the hell-sellers are all that wrong about justice and redemption, it’s just that they seem to see themselves above it. They underestimate their own capacity to harm by spreading the germs of pride and blindness.
The cat seems indifferent to the long hours in the car, as they hurry to meet some conjunction or kill time until another one presents itself, but it always perks up for their nightly stops at Motel Nine, where the man turns it loose to comb the brush of the Nowherevilles for small, peeping things to tear open under the children’s-aspirin-orange or sulphur-white lamps. Coyotes approach the cat outside Prescott, Arizona, hoping to add to the collection of collars and nametags they’ve harvested from adventurous pets, but the way the cat moves towards them with its shoulders low makes them yip away into the cooling desert air and darkness beneath the deaf stars. While this happens, the man is sitting outside his room on the motel’s other side, watching Mars glimmer pale red like a king among courtiers, wondering if there are other versions of it, too, where life continued, and earth shines pale and dead in their night sky.
When the man confronts his other selves, he rarely needs to speak. This is because he enjoys the element of surprise. It is also because in most of his incarnations he is a frail thing, barely possessing the dark courage needed to transgress. In Victor, New York, he stares at himself in the parking lot of a farmer’s market and gas station until that him, who was peeking into the back of a station wagon, glances around and goes white. The frightened one scrambles toward his own car, this time a Honda with pewter-grey duct tape ringed in layers around the right headlight and drives away. The man stays near the station wagon until the father comes out with a paper sack of apples and opens the door, giving the man a hard look. The man turns away.
Most of the other versions of himself are corrected by that one fleeting glimpse of their own doppelgänger, in whose appearance at a moment of temptation they divine the wretched course their lives will take if they progress beyond their current stage of illness. Many will be arrested for passive consumption of media, some will be suicides. But they don’t do That.
The Hard Cases are of course the worst. The cat lets him know when they’ve got one, growling a low warning as they approach the conjunction, causing the man to wipe his sweaty upper lip and say, “Oh God. Oh God. Okay. God.” The hard cases won’t be scared, so there’s no point trying. They tend to be thinner, though the one in Zion, Illinois is packed in ropy muscle and covered in blurry-looking tats. The man finds himself sitting outside Motel Nine, smoking a small, noisome cigar. Tobacco is not a common vice among his iterations, but sitting outside motel rooms in the early evening is. He has to work himself up to approaching the Hard Case, taking a beta-blocker to keep his hands from shaking; he knows it won’t have time to kick in, but knowing that its calming, flattening magic is on the way helps him open the door, swing his leather shoe out to scuff on the asphalt.
I am not a brave man but I am doing the right thing.
He walks towards the motel.
“Shit, you my brother?” the stronger, slightly older him says.
“Actually, yes.”
“Well, have a seat, brother. You want a beer?’
The man sits. He’s trying to think of what to say. He knows it’s dangerous to say anything because his natural tendency is to try to please, to ingratiate, and that’s not what he’s here for. Besides, he immediately likes this one, likes the crow’s feet around his eyes, how much more self-possessed he seems than the man himself has ever been. He immediately feels the prick of guilt for indulging even that venal spark of envy.
“So, I guess it’s bound to happen. All the people in the world, one of em’s bound to look like you. I mean, just fucking like you. In the joint, lots of fuckers say there’s somebody looks just like them, you know what I mean? But here you are. My alibi. Maybe you robbed that Lebanese place.”
He pops a beer open.
“Nah, that was me. I remember it.”
He passes the beer to the man.
“Here, skinny brother, wet your whistle.”
He drinks, his hand shaking a little.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
He’s thinking that if he says just the right words he can make tonight come out better, do the work gently. He’s thinking maybe there’s been a mistake—this guy doesn’t feel like one. So, he goes straight for the button.
“Kids
.”
The man seems to draw in a little. His eyes narrow.
“What about ‘em?”
Shit. He is one. He’s like me. And he’s already done That. He’ll keep doing it.
Back in the Mercury, behind him, in the parking lot where broken glass twinkles under the streetlamp, the cat growls. He can’t hear it but he can feel it. The gooseflesh ripples on the back of his neck.
“You’re starting to freak me out a little,” the tattooed man says.
The man vocalizes something meant to sound like ‘sorry,’ but it doesn’t. The stronger one stands up. Afraid, the small one stands up, too, puts his hand in his coat pocket.
“What you got there anyway?” The stronger one’s voice is friendly, seductive even. Hypnotic. He moves very close, unafraid of the man.
“Thought it was a little warm for a coat. You mind if I look?”
The beer is foreign and bready on his other self’s breath, as it was on their father’s breath. The tattooed man keeps eye contact, slips his hand over the smaller man’s hand in his coat pocket, feels the small revolver gripped in the white, sweating fingers. The bigger man’s hand is irresistible. He pulls it out of the pocket, uses his other hand to strip it away.
“Come inside,” he says, backing into his dank room, pulling the man with him by the collar. The man notices the red carpet that for some reason makes him think of the sands of Mars.
The man hears his car’s huge door open. Then close.
“Sit down,” tattooed him says, gesturing at the bed. He obeys. The larger man shuts the motel door, looms over him, keeping the gun close to his own body where it won’t be easy to grab. Not that he’d have the guts to grab it.
“Suppose you tell me who the fuck you are and what you want.”
“Okay. Okay. God. I’m . . . ”
“Quit shaking, you pussy, and talk.”
He points the gun at him.
“Okay. You won’t like it.”
“I already don’t like it.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay.”