We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  Tiny bones. A few milk-teeth.

  It was just about the same place his womb would have been, if he’d been a woman. Except, of course, that he wasn’t.

  I saw Henry Goshaugh’s drawings, too. They didn’t look much like mine. They were very . . . exact.

  Studying them, I got the crazy idea (oops! Don’t say that word, not out loud) that . . . he’d been seeing the right thing, while I was the one who’d been misinterpreting. Like Mary Sinclair and her horse-headed thing that’d really been a roller-skater’s upturned leg.

  I never remember seeing a face in my frottage. I never remember putting a face in my drawings. But Henry had: the same face, over and over and over. And over.

  It’s hard for me to look at. Because I’ve never seen it, ever—but nevertheless, it seems so very . . .

  . . . familiar.

  | years later, pt. 3

  Once my doctors thought I was well enough to be trusted on my own—or with minimal supervision, to be more accurate—I moved into a place on Fibonacci Street, possibly named after the man who developed the geometric series based on the ancient Greek “golden mean” of architectural design . . . a ratio which also matches the proportions of an ideal-perspective human body, and turns up again and again in a whole host of biological and astronomical phenomena.

  Some mathematicians advanced the Fibonacci series as proof of a consistent, divine design to Creation, back during the early phase of the Renaissance; I have vague memories of at least one case of heresy declared against a hapless Fibonacci advocate who absolutely refused to admit that God’s infinite power could never be even theoretically calculated by something as innately limited as mere human knowledge. So they tortured him ’til he recanted, then burnt him at the stake: proof positive that what most human beings want isn’t so much convincing evidence to support their arguments, but enough reasons to warrant going on arguing.

  “You should write about it, you know,” Vivia said, during our final phone call.

  And: “What the hell would I say?” I asked, amazed at the very idea. Because I don’t know what happened, exactly. I never did, and I probably never will.

  No records can tell me when the top floor of 676 Euclid burnt down in the first place, let alone why, or who might have died in that conflagration. No amount of psychoanalysis or cheap séancery can ever prove what really might have happened to me, up there—whether the wreckage of what might once have been a person (or persons) wanted to get into me or just get the fuck out of the house, any way it could.

  But I do know this: when I found myself in the old neighborhood last week, pulled there by some sticky, invisible filament of entropy, I discovered that it had burnt down again. That there was nothing left of the hot room I once wrote and drew in, measuring my time by wet breaths, but a smouldering layer of broken wood and glass.

  Maybe this time they won’t rebuild it.

  | oh, and aaron—

  —he was inside when it burnt down, that last time. Asleep on the first floor, so they got him out fairly easily, though he was almost too drunk to move.

  Which is why he never heard the alarm, why he never stirred when black smoke filled the room around him. Why he still sustained damage to both lungs from smoke inhalation, so bad he’s needed an oxygen puffer ever since, and probably will for the rest of his life.

  A comparatively easy escape, as such things go, you might think—especially having heard my story, or Vivia’s, or Carra’s, or even poor Henry Goshaugh’s. But I never had the gall to say that to him, to dare trying to trump his pain with my own, like some kind of masochistic pissing contest. What the fuck for?

  Life’s too short.

  | last in an indeterminate series

  Throughout that entire last spiral downwards—i.e. during my sojourn at the Clarke and after—I’d find myself appearing, intermittently, on Carra’s doorstep. It was never like we planned it or arranged dates; I’d simply show up, usually whenever I literally couldn’t think of anywhere else to be. And Carra, of course, was always waiting—having known I was coming, in that same tragic way she knows almost everything. Except how not to know.

  It was like we’d skipped courtship entirely, slipping headlong into classic Old Married Couple rhythms; we’d sit around pretending we were normal people, drinking tea, watching TV or videos (though her programming choices were exactly as inevitably, predictably odd as one might have assumed, given our previous interactions—the birds and the bees of Microcosmos or The Iron Giant’s bittersweet will to self-determination, spliced crossways with sample-heavy experimental shit like Tribulation 99 or the Survival Research Laboratory). No matter the viewing fare, however, we were still more normal by far than Carra’s mother Gala, whom I never met, but often heard perpetually stumbling around upstairs like a moth in a jar. Sometimes, we talked awkwardly around what had happened to me; mostly, we didn’t even try.

  The last time I went there—a month or so before Mr. and Mrs. Mol rescued me from the depths of my own closet—I asked Carra: “So what should I do?”

  “Why would you think I would know?”

  “Well . . . you’re psychic.”

  A razored smile. “So are you.” And then, after a beat: “You know, Janis, one of these days, you’re gonna have to learn how to make up your own mind.”

  Adding, without speech—

  Because letting something else make it up for you . . . was what got us both into trouble. Wasn’t it?

  I looked down at my hands, silently; traced, in reflexive habit, the thin white worm-trails of scar tissue that ran along my palm, between my fingers.

  “I keep getting that urge to draw,” I said, finally, not looking up. “Start drawing again, I mean. Keep drawing. Problem is . . . I don’t know what I’m going to see.”

  Carra nodded, unsurprised (as ever).

  “Door’s open,” she said. “You bust one down, or let it get busted, and it’ll never really close properly again.”

  I closed my hand, so I couldn’t see the scars any more. Explaining: “But—I thought the mirror was the doorway. I thought, I really thought . . . if I just broke it, that’d all be that with that.”

  Finally looking up at Carra: “Didn’t work, though. Did it?”

  Carra blew out a breath and peered at the wall—for once not that scary, unfocused look of hers, but simply an ultra-ordinary human scowl of mingled fatigue/frustration. And: “I think,” she said, at length, “if you’re talking about the mirror, maybe it helped you a little too much.”

  “Say again?”

  “It . . . purified your control, like a static filter on a signal. Whatever was in you got stuck, halfway in, halfway out: couldn’t trick itself past your Mental Radio any more, couldn’t get far enough out to work on anybody else. All that power, building up, with nowhere to go. . . .” She shrugged. “Well.”

  (You remember.)

  I swallowed. “So when I broke the mirror—”

  Carra swept her hand off to one side and up, a rising mime-jolt, like something squirting away under pressure. “It took the first channel out it could find. Straight into—”

  —Henry.

  (Wouldn’t’ve mattered, though: him, me, her. Whoever.)

  “It didn’t have a choice,” she added with a shrug. “It had to move on. Somewhere. Through someone.”

  “Because I couldn’t see it,” I whispered. “Because I didn’t want to see it. Or hear it, or even sense it.”

  And shockingly, from Carra, came a dry, almost silent laugh.

  “Nobody,” she pointed out, “ever does.”

  Which stopped the conversation dead, right there; nothing more to say, let alone worth saying. Seeing how we both already knew just what she meant.

  | perspective

  But I wonder, still, as I always must: what else might be moving through me, even now?

  I pick up my pad at least once every day, sometimes e
ven put my pencil to it. And every time, I put it down again, leaving the page unblemished; feel my hands hover motionless, caught forever between the abortive urge to do something and the fear of doing . . . anything.

  Because: better by far that bleak, white blankness than to try drawing something, to rake up all my old pains and losses looking for something beautiful and find something unbidden crawling across my page, some unborn thing, some scuttling mouse with a ghost-foetus human face. To find only (once again) that awful light, which is so thick it clots like shadow.

  Sub terranea. Sin nombre. Pen umbra.

  I may never draw again. I may never even look, especially not at the paintings of Max Ernst. And in that way, I can only suppose, I guess it’s a little . . . just a little . . .

  . . . like being dead.

  STRANGE WEIGHT (2005)

  | chapter one

  No matter what he might have told himself later on, this was the God’s own truth: when Maccabee Roke chose to take that stupid job Le Prof offered him, it wasn’t really because he had nothing else left. He had his health, obviously; his certificate of release, signed by the Archbishop; fifty bucks and the clothes on his back, plus a voucher for one month’s free room and board at Saul of Tarsus’s Halfway House for guys (and some gals) who were . . . halfway. Halfway out, halfway back. Halfway between Church and State, between this world, the flesh, and the Devil.

  Besides which, if he’d found himself in real trouble, there was always his blood kin to turn to—though he wasn’t exactly sure what sort of reception he could expect there, given the circumstances under which they’d all originally parted company.

  Making his way from St. Michael’s Cathedral for the very last time, Mac found Sister Blandina of the Ordo Sororum Perpetualam waiting for him next to the narthex, hand on hip, tracking his every move with coolly level eyes. Not exactly a surprise, though always a pleasure.

  “Here to see me out?” he asked her, not stopping.

  She turned and fell into step with him, replying: “Mother Eulalia sent me. She said to say she wants it back.”

  “Wants what back?”

  “Don’t even, F—. . . Roke.”

  “Oh, Sister. Do I ever?”

  A shrug, like she was throwing off flies. “Hadn’t thought so, up ’til now. But after this, I can only assume . . . all the time, apparently.”

  “Gee. I’m cut.”

  Sr. Blandina gave him another type of look entirely at that, so direct it virtually came with subtitles: Not yet, you’re not. Then leaned in, voice dropping, to murmur a hot lick of breath against his ear.

  “Did you ever seriously think we don’t know what you really are, Maccabee?” she asked. “Because we do, be very sure of that. We always did.”

  They were almost in the doorway now, flanked on either side by a glowing three-tier rack of wish-candles—two-dollar coin a pick, minimum donation adjusted for inflation—vs. a slightly overfull wall font, so handy for emergency entrance/exit genuflection. He put his palm on the door handle and turned again, without warning, so fast they practically slammed up against each other; saw her recoil a fraction, and felt a flicker of sick pleasure crossbred with vague insult—just what do you take me for, Blandina? One of my in-laws?

  “Listen up, Sister,” he told her, adopting the same uncompromising tone. “Even if I did know where it was, which I’m not saying I do, you of all people should know I’m not going to be posting it on some website and giving out the URL anytime soon. So tell Eulalia it’s a simple case of me needing insurance, or leverage, or what-have-you. Tell her it’s nothing personal. And tell her . . . tell her what I think is, if your whole Order’s sense of itself is so pathetically dependent on possessing one obscure mediaeval manuscript, then maybe there are better places both of you could be. Or all of you, for that matter.”

  Meeting her gaze straight on now, unwavering, and finding . . . nothing there to hang on to, by any normal person’s standards. Just the same old same old: a killer’s stare, wrapped in a supplicant’s hide. That scarf concealing her hair might as well be some suicide bomber’s hijab, for all the mercy he could expect from calling it a wimple.

  Good thing we’re neither of us normal, he thought.

  Behind them both, a recording of a bell rang Sext. Over her shoulder, he could see the routine ebb and flow of humanity gathering—parishioners with their spiritual hands out, tourists looky-looing, homeless people sidling in, in search of a quiet pew. And almost all of them with their shadows already attached, their various ghosts and parasites trailing spindrifts of fuzzy longing or polluting obsession. Soon, the place would be chock-a-block with crossed currents, knots and nets and snarls, etheric overlay so thick he’d barely feel able to move. . . .

  And that was when it would come, as it always did. Come straight past everybody else and sit right next to him, grinning its dreadful, halo-lit grin.

  But not tonight, not anymore. Not ever.

  Blandina shook her head, very slightly, a Cylon resetting its personal hard-drive. “We need it back,” she repeated.

  “Then come and get it,” Mac told her. And left the Church, lit. and fig., without a single backwards glance.

  Seven days later, a mere week, and already the “normal” world was beginning to crush in on Mac like deep-sea pressure. The first thing he’d figured out was that, when you didn’t feel required to pray for five or ten minutes out of every hour, it freed up a lot of your time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like he’d bothered developing many other reflexive habits over his almost twenty years in God’s “service.”

  Which really did make him a pretty sad object, all told: holed up from noon to night with other faith-lost freaks on every side, scared to walk Toronto’s streets, no matter the hour, for fear of meeting someone he was related to (however distantly). His brave new life of physical freedom and spiritual ruin was quickly being reduced to a mishmash of half-remembered lines from songs: Sin, sin, everything is sin, clap hands. Saturday night, and I ain’t got nobody. Thirty-eight years old, and never kissed a girl.

  The next night, while venturing out for a copy of Vanity Fair and a pack of DuMaurier Lights, he accidentally ran into his youngest cousin, Saracen Druir, right outside Saul of Tarsus’s front door. Saracen had his arm wound around some chippie’s waist while he chatted up her best friend, sunk deep in a haze of personal glamer that masked everything about him but his poisonous, carrion-fly-blue eyes. When he saw Mac coming he slid, midline, into a double-take so note-perfect it actually succeeded in making him look even less human than he already did; the girls didn’t seem to notice, simply trancing out in tandem, as if he’d put them on pause.

  “Coz!” Saracen greeted him. “We’d heard tell of yuir . . . reconversion? Such news does travel fast, even through Dourvale. Yet I’m main glad to prove it no’ just rumour.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mac replied, for lack of any better comeback.

  “Certes. Yuir grandmere asks after ye often, even now.”

  “That’s nice of her.”

  “Aye, that it is, and ye little deserving of such respect. Still, she says ye may come by the brugh when it suits you, by high way or low, if ye’ve no’ forgot how tae walk the latter. Only bring some small gift with ye, for entry-price, and be welcome.”

  “Go up with a guest or two . . . like these gals, say . . . then come back alone, with a four-star hangover and a wallet full of twigs,” Mac agreed, going out of his way to make the analogy as insulting as possible. “That is about the size of it, right? ’Cause you know, it’s been a while.”

  Saracen dipped his head slightly, parodying a bow—la, coz, how ye do prick me!—and favoured Mac with a slow, deliberate wink at the same time: his right lid closing bottom to top in a luxuriant sweep of lash, upside-down and backwards, like every other thing the (almost-)full Fae had to offer. Sweat stung the small of Mac’s back at the sight, and the tiny hairs on his neck went up. But there was
no way in Hell he wanted Saracen to have the pleasure of knowing it, so he kept right on projecting aggressive boredom.

  It seemed to work. “Oh, coz,” Saracen purred, all regretful, “ye do me wrong. And ye’ve surely no great call tae visit if ye’ve no mind tae—would be awkward, mayhap. As it might have before were I tae’ve visited you, given yuir past lodgings.” A pause. “But not so now, aye?”

  Not so much, no.

  Mac got a sudden whiff of that last visit “home” to the brugh itself—down into Dourvale Hill’s deeps, its apple-reeking darkness—when Saracen had shown him a single skeleton hand jutting up out of the close-packed earthen floor, bones splayed in decay like some pale flower. He’d told Mac, then a postulant, that it belonged to a local girl he’d liked enough to try to pull inside, not realizing—or caring—what an unexpected trip through solid rock might do to her; Saracen’s capacity to make non-Fae-style jokes had always been fairly limited, as Mac recalled, but stuff like this was just the kind of politically incorrect, human-unfriendly jest that really set the whole Druir family’s toes tapping. And truth be told, Mac had giggled a bit about it himself before throwing up, once he was safely back on hallowed ground.

  Because: They’re no’ like us, coz, as Saracen was quick to point out, and yuir no’ like them, for all ye may try. Ye never will be.

  So why chase a dream of salvation, especially when you weren’t sure—not even after all this time, not really—if the offer applied to you? If you even had a soul to save, let alone one worth the effort of saving?