I shook my head.
“Or else it’s some natural disaster. Right?”
“No,” I said. “No asteroids, no tidal waves, no, no zombies, no lava…”
“Okay, so it’s a nuke. Nuclear war.”
“No, that’s not it,” I said.
“What is it? You gave off a guilty signal just now.”
“It’s-it’s that investment.”
“How many people is it going to affect?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it going to kill more than a hundred people?”
“I-okay, I think so.”
“More than ten thousand?”
“I’m not going to answer that.”
“Fifty thousand deaths.”
“I’m not answering any more. I’m done. I’m a jerk and that’s it.”
“How big of a jerk?”
I got my eyes detached from hers and swung them around the room. The clock said it was to.
Out in the courtyard, the pool lights had gone out and without the contrast you could make out a hedge of I guess pepper trees beyond it. Over in Neo-Teo, Eos Aimatirodactylos — bloody-fingernailed dawn-was grazing the “east” facets of the roof combs. But somehow, inevitably, my focus gravitated back to her face. Our eyes locked.
She guesses, I thought.
She put the last inch of cigarette in the ashtray but didn’t stub it out.
No. No, she doesn’t. Just chill out. Just sit tight. Chill tight and sit it out. Shill sight tit shite chit…
One second. Two seconds. Was something changed in her expression? I couldn’t look away. Yes, it was. Changing.
As of today I was thirty-eight short years old, and I’d already seen more than enough horrible stuff in my exile here on Planet Retardia, and not just on YouTube, either, all the things you’d pay a lot to be able to unsee, your second-grade class’s gerbils in the act of maternal cannibalism, a tentacle-faced star-nosed mole, that photo of the six-year-old girl walking two steps behind her grandmother toward the gas chamber at Treblinka, a knot of eight dead naked toddlers in a six-month-old mass grave that No Way and I helped dig up in La Sierra when No Way and I were working for the relief corps of the CPRs, the Communities of Populations in Resistance, the unadulterated evil in the gargoyle face of Pope Benedict XVI, the giant toothy lamprey face of the Chunnel drilling machine, a woman in Mexico City with a huge facial tumor that made her head look like giant peeled pomegranate-but this, now, was easily the most horrible thing I’d ever seen, and I knew it was the most horrible thing I ever would see, not a fleshy gross-out or a monument of cruelty or an ugh-eyed monster, but, rather, just the slow, dark dawn of understanding in her eyes. She knew, I could tell that she knew, and that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. And I could tell that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. It was as though there were some kind of pneuma flowing between our eyes, like it feels with lovers orgasming together in bright light, but of course this was the hideous negative of anything loving, she was looking into me and seeing a wasteland of shit, a whole more-than-earth-size planet with diarrhea oceans broken by mountain-islands of stacked dry turds, and in my looking back I was agreeing with that assessment. A sound rose inside her, a rumble under her chest, and metastasized into something like a voice, but a voice that rasped out of some huge, recently dead thing buried in frozen ground:
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
I noticed that my knees were cracking, and that meant I was standing up, slowly. I backed away from her, toward the big desk.
“I didn’t,” I started to say, “I mean, it’s nothing, it’s the right-”
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
She bounced up and ducked around in front of me, as small, lissome people can. I jumped left and got the desk between us. Her eyes had an indescribable look-indescribable but not something I’d never seen, because I’d seen it in dying patients in the field hospitals at the CPRs, an expression of horror, horror and hatred and terror, or rather, I think, terror not for her but more, or maybe only, for her child, which is even more primal.
“I want… to… see… Max… grow… up,” she barked.
“Marena, look-”
“How-can-you — k-kill-MAX?”
The forgotten Go clock ticked once. It ticked again. Tick. Tick “Max is Desert Dog,” I said.
“What? What the fuck is that?”
“Nothing, it’s just-”
“Is that… what you call all… call all… those
… people you-”
“No, it’s just, I know it’s the right thing, it won’t hurt, there’s no way to-”
“Don’t even tell me, you fuck, you, you, you… you think you’re going to make that decision-you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser, you’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you’re, you think you mean anything to anybody? You don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re-”
On the last syllable of important, she darted to her right. I circled away, clockwise. She stopped, feinted clockwise again in kind of a Texas tango maneuver, and dashed counterclockwise, almost getting me, but I made it to the opposite side, so the French doors were at my back. Somewhere in my churning gray matter I realized something was off, that she wasn’t acting quite the way she would normally, or let’s say “normally,” act faced with this information, that even though tears were almost squirting out of her eyes, she maybe wasn’t yelling so loud as you’d have thought, but I didn’t get the implication. Damn, I thought, I should just attack her and like strangle her or bonk her brains in or something right now. Except I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I bet I’d never felt less like doing anything like that in my life-in fact, I felt like I wanted to hold on to her and shield her while the world vanished so that she and I could float off together like the shades of Paolo and Francesca, out into Earth-free space. God damn it, my other side said, you’re a pussy after all. You’d think that someone who was going to kill everybody later wouldn’t have trouble killing one person, but there’s a difference between someone who kills for fun and someone who kills out of compassion, like, say, a veterinarian, and “You shit, ” Marena said, “I was, I was, I was practically falling in love with you and you were shit. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking along those lines.” It was an idiotic thing to say, of course, but I was a long way from thinking clearly, and in fact I had just been thinking how I was one of them, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, DeLanda, and then I was thinking how she was right, that I wasn’t even an accomplished whatever like they all were, I wasn’t a conqueror or a dynasty founder or even a good public speaker, I was the worst of all of them without even being in their league, just a loser who happened to find a way to make everyone else lose along with me, except even that was giving me too much credit because it was making me out to be at least a human being and I wasn’t, I was the opposite of a human being, I was a smear of wriggling little verminettes that had to be immediately wiped off the ass of the universe “How do I stop it?”
“Just trust me, I saw the whole situation in-”
The click of a doorknob is one of those sounds you come to recognize unmistakably, and when I heard it behind me I instantly realized why Marena hadn’t been shouting at me and in fact had been speaking almost softly, and that she must have said something that had activated her earring phone and-oh, right, in fact I knew what it was, it was when she’d used the words call all, that rang all the phones in the house-and “Hey, what’s going on?” Tony Sic’s voice said.
I snuck a peek over my left shoulder. He was in the doorway, about eight feet away. “Hi, Tony, nothing,” I started to say, but before I got to the — thing part Grgur had loomed in behind him. I may have said at some point that he looked like Leonid Brezhnev’s uglier brother, but now he looked like Leonid Brezhnev himself after goi
ng through the same gamma-ray-o-genic mutation that turned Ben Grimm into the Thing. He was in his goon outfit with the collar tips spreading over the lapels of the ill-fitting gray one-button sport coat. He was big. He edged Tony aside. There was an impression of motion on my right side and a shot of pain up my right thigh, and as I folded I realized that her foot had switchbladed into my knee-it was one of those low kicks Ana Vergara’d taught her-and I thought I was going to have to operate from the floor for a little while, but I surprised myself by getting my hands on the edge of the desk and holding myself up with I guess my arm strengthened by the epinephrine that sprays into your bloodstream so unbelievably fast when your amphibian brain decides there’s a threat out there. As Marena came toward me I picked up a big old LCD monitor off the desk with my right hand and tossed it at her. She tried to bat it away but hurt her hand, I think, since she grunted, and as it fell, trailing cables, the edge hit her knee and her second kick stopped almost before it started. Run, I thought. Holy shit holy shite shat shot run run run run. My hand was on the handle of the French door and I yanked it up. It was one of those locks that open when you open it, if you know what I mean, and I slid out into the dark courtyard. Grgur was right there but I took the time to push the door shut behind me, since I figured it would buy me a good two seconds, and I turned and dashed out, with my stocking feet ouching on this sort of upscale little shiny black rocks. Bright light flashed on all over, like movie lights. I’m on camera, I thought. Oh, well.
“Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena’s voice yelled behind me, and in the middle of the word gone, it switched from a normal yell to an iron scrawk blasting out of every speaker of every phone on the system, of which there were probably at least ten in the house and four outside. There was a slight lag between them that made the roar seem to be echoing off the walls of a vast crazy-angled canyon.
“GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!!!”
I veered right. There was a sort of trapezoidal archway between the yard and the driveway, and beyond it there was an orange sliver of my car, and seeing the car must have made me reflexively thumb the key-card because there was the delicious bwheep of the door opening itself. The speakers started up. “Ride the snake,” Jim Morrison moaned, like he was breathing on my neck. Marena’s voice was louder, though, even through the layers of car: “NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW…”
(11)
“… NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW…”
Grgur’s heavy feet scrunched on the gravel behind me and then thwapped on concrete, which means he was under the arch. I’m doomed, I thought, he’s only like five steps back, I’ll never get the door open fast enough, but there was a sort of a scrunch-and-thwack behind me and a growl, “Sranje!” which I guessed was a cuss word in Urethrafuckistani, and I got the car door open the rest of the way and slid in and pulled the door closed. Reflexively, I touched LOCK ALL on the key card and the teeth inside the door snapped shut. I hit START and then snuck a look out at Grgur. He was just getting on his feet. What I guess happened-and it took me a few seconds to figure it out-was that since Marena’s replica house was one of many expressions of the twentieth-century Prometheus’ fascination with four-fifths scale, and what with the Lloyd Wright ceilings being low to begin with, and since the Grg was at least six foot six, the bastard must have scraped his head running through the archway. Good. The mighty V12 fired up on the second rev. Hah Whoa.
The supposedly ballistic driver’s window had cracked from side to side. The sound was soft, meaning, I guess, that Grgur had come upon me and smacked it with his elbow. I peeled out backward past him, steering through the mirror, which was something I used to practice. I shifted, swerved around Marena’s Cherokee, Ashley 3 ’s little purple carlet, and another two SUVs that were in the big circle. For a second I thought Grgur was going to climb up on my back bumper and try to hang on to the car while I drove, but I guess he was too trained for that sort of doomed effort because instead my last glimpse of him was as he opened the door of Marena’s Cherokee. I shifted into first and floored it. Whoa. Too much power. Almost did a Tiger Woods. The big baby banked through the two gravelly S-curves, giving me that sickening feeling like I was in a canoe getting sucked into rapids. If that bastard thinks he’s chasing me in that soccermommobile he’s less of a pro than I thought, I thought. Although, of course, I might hit an obstacle or wipe out or whatever. Gate was still open. Thank Satan. As I passed the little booth I saw the guard inside was on his phone, probably talking with Marena. Too late, dork. I got through the residential streets in thirty seconds, running the stop signs, and in forty seconds I was on the access road to Route 400. Things were slowing down and getting clearer the way they do when the adrenaline really floods in. On the other hand, one’s movements get jerky and stiff and you have to watch out for objects and things and stuff because you might bump Jim cut off and the car’s phone rang. “Answer,” I said. The line opened up. “Hi,” I went on. “Sorry about all that.”
“Jed,” Marena’s voice said. “If we don’t catch you, please reconsider. Don’t kill my kid. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please…” There was something that might have been either a sniffle or static and I wondered whether she was crying. I wished I could tell her what was what, that my motivation was utterly simple, that I’d simply seen something so horrible, or rather I’d worked out a truth that was so horrible, that I don’t think even the greatest writer who ever lived could convey it, although maybe H. P. Lovecraft, with the whole thing about the Other Gods gnawing at the crust of the universe, would come closest, except even that seems almost hopeful compared to the bleakness I’d seen when-but this wasn’t the right time for that discussion, even if Marena would have listened. I got on the ramp-and I know this is a bad time to brag, but I really took the speed bumps like Adrian Fernandez-and onto the Teflon-smooth highway, north toward the orange glow of burning houses in Orlando proper.
“Do you like Max?” Marena’s voice went.
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you love Max?”
“This-I, listen, this train of conversation is, I’m not…”
“You do, I know you love Max, so why do you, why, why, why, why…”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. For some reason, at that moment I realized I’d left the nudibranch book behind. Damn it, I thought, my resolve was getting nicked up. Marena and Max and whoever were, like, real people, people with families, people who cared about each other, and I was just a fake person nobody including myself cared about, just one of those nowhere man losers who manage to take a few other people down with them, or in my case everybody. Damn, I needed to think about things. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, maybe Marena’s tone shifted down. “I knew that samlet shit would eat out your brain,” she said.
“It’s tsam lic, ” I said. “That means like ‘blood lightning.’ A samlet’s like a fishling or some-”
“You’re a junkie and like, true to form, you’ve gone-”
“It has nothing to do with the drugs.”
“Sure. You’re just like any other OD’ing psycho.”
“Uh-huh.” The needle crossed over to the sweet side of a hundred. There was a Chevy up ahead of me going just as fast. Evidently the police had given up on the area. Billboards passed me like pages flipping in a magazine: Orlando: It’s All about Options. Spartacus Jones, Opening December 19. Legoland Orlando. I felt a thrilling lack of self-preservatory neuromodulators. When you’re sure that death’s around the next curve, suddenly you can deal with anything. What was too bad, though, was that I figured they had a LoJack and any number of other trackers on me, so I’d need to change cars pretty soon and kiss the ’Cuda good-bye. And for that matter, I could practically feel an itch on my scalp where the Warren Communications ROGS, the RapidEye Operational Geostationary Satellite, was tracking me from a hundred and forty miles overhead. And was Grgur actually chasing me? I couldn’t see any f
ast cars behind me on the GPS. Weird. Maybe he’d decided the cars they had would be too slow and hadn’t even taken one out. Just get downtown, I thought. They have everything. I clicked up a state police page that I’d marked, that showed where the manned checkpoints were and where they weren’t. It looked like if I just kept on 27 and got off at Revolutionary Road, I’d get downtown without dealing with any PoPos. No prob “Jed, I’m serious,” Marena said, “you’re not thinking clearly.”
“Look, yes,” I said, “I know crazy people think they’re not crazy, but actually I know I’m crazy about a lot of things, it’s just that this particular thing-I mean-oh, fuck. I mean, it really, really checks out. That’s like, suppose I said, ‘two times forty is eighty’ and you said that can’t be true because I’m crazy, that’s just-I mean, it’s that level of certainty.” The road went over an orchard that used to be a swamp and had tried to turn into an industrial “park” before the recession, and now was reverting to swamp. I passed six cars and a semi. There wasn’t much traffic. Even though the Park District had been closed for months, a video billboard advertising the Rainforest Cafe and the Tree of Life was still running a loop of giant rocketing centipedes. Zoom, zoom, zoom.
“Jed, everything-”
“Mister DeLanda?” Grgur’s accented voice interrupted. “We are go to ask you once and we are not go to ask you again. Stop the vehicle and wait of us. We know where you go. Understood?”
“Sorry,” I said. Either he’s bluffing or I’m toast, I thought. Maybe I should just aim this crate into the next overpass upright. I’d be out in a blaze of gory-uh, glory-and everything would still go on according to plan. But like Donald Pleasence in Telefon, I wanted to watch every little thing myself. Dimwit.
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