I squatted and dropped to the ground, crumpled onto my side despite windmilling arms, picked myself up. Not blind to the irony of owing my life to the kind of scorn for the environment I’d been tilting against these several months. The pipe had certainly been designed to belch sewage straight into the river. And, as I learned when I swiveled around to get my bearings, it was in plain sight some dozen shameless yards upstream from the Commercial Street Bypass. Out here the sound from the sewer spilled tinny and pianissimo from the pipe, like the hiss of surf in a conch shell.
I scuttled across the loose, stony soil of the slope toward the overpass. Like the discharge pipe, an arrant misuse of public funds, in the roadway’s case for killing downtown Occam, but for which I also had to be thankful today. Not a soul, catatonic or otherwise, did I meet en route, but I was disinclined to look too carefully. The farther ahead I squinted, the more acutely I suffered eyestrain, and by peering into the shadows under the bridge I realized that the whole landscape was flickering, as it had in the sewers, but more subtly where direct sunlight dispelled it. The strain was worse as I gazed nearer the city center, as if I needed more incentive goading me toward the highway out of town. For whatever it was worth, none of the grass or trash saplings on my path were reaching skyward or tipped with transparent flames. I tossed handkerchief, still bunched in my fist, at the water, but the wind sideswiped it and it fell among some masonry.
The embankment merged with the even steeper grade up to the roadway. I was climbing to a height where I might have had a view of downtown, might have found out why the sirens and patrol cars and army trucks had fallen silent, but I trained my vision on the grass at my feet. No interest in becoming a pillar of salt. Clambered over the steel guardrail near its juncture with the bulbous abutment at the foot of the bridge.
An unkempt used car lot lay before me. Four lanes wide, and nobody in attendance. Everyone was in their cars, of course, the majority of which were linked in ugly daisy chains of rear-end collisions. At a guess, the damage seldom came to more than crushed fenders because the activating “color” must have repositioned drivers away from their gas pedals. Smoke, steam, alarms would have been history hours ago.
I trotted onto the bridge, peeking into windows though I knew damn well what I’d see. Even with their seatbelts on, some people were bleeding from their ears, their nostrils, the corners of their mouths. And behind tinted windshields, they were softly glowing.
My dear old Taurus was obviously a writeoff, but a hundred replacements surrounded me, of no mortal use to their rightful owners, and home was miles out of walking range. I was halfway over the river and had scouted few cars yet that weren’t smashed together. Took sometime longer to locate any that had coasted to a rest with room between them to maneuver out. Nothing caught my fancy, or to put it more bluntly, seemed worth stealing till I skidded short and had to smirk incredulously, in spite of the grim, if not apocalyptic, situation. The luxurious dreadnought of a late ’50s Eldorado, pristine, white and aqua, with fins and all the trimmings, was mine for the effort of displacing a scrawny pensioner. Too grand a temptation. Why not trade up?
October breeze rippled at my back, reviving my awareness of the cold slime seeping through my jacket, and for that matter through the seat of my pants, and drying under my shoes. I shrugged off the jacket, let it sit in a heap on the blacktop, kicked off my shoes, yanked off my socks. Wasn’t going to defile my house, or my new sedan, with ugly vestiges of “color.” What was the inconvenience of a chilly half hour? Popped the trunk and rummaged a pair of frayed bath towels from inside immaculate spare tire, next to a patching kit and a jack and a first-aid case. Perfect. I unpocketed my wallet, dropped my pants, and knotted the larger towel around my hips.
Swung open the door on the driver’s side, tossed my wallet onto the backseat. The codger was maintaining the usual posture at behest of cosmic tenant, and pitted gray complexion no longer gave me pause. He wore a snuff-brown polyester leisure suit and white shirt with overhanging lapels, everything a size or so too big. A snappy dresser in his own mind, I hypothesized. Had a neat, thin mustache and neat sideburns with more hair in them than on his barren cranium. He might have been a retired shop teacher or pharmacist. Aspiring to enjoy his golden years in style.
Did I really have to drag him to the pavement, abandon him to grotesque death in return for supplying me a getaway vehicle? It wasn’t decent. It was shitty, in fact. I laid the palms of my hands upon his shoulder and knee and gingerly pushed him across the squeaky upholstery to the passenger side. He could have been a Styrofoam mannequin. I pinned one end of the other towel under my headrest and unrolled it to cover the seat. His glazed eyes behind frogman lenses were as unwavering as the cool flames sprouting from upheld fingertips, his elbows bent in faux Egyptian pose to accommodate cream vinyl ceiling.
What harm in carting the aged gent along? Inert freight, that’s all he was. Disembodied death grip might weaken with the passing miles, and I’d have saved one life anyway. A big deal, a meaningful gesture, to nobody apart from him and me, but I had to try.
Settled myself on the terrycloth, winced at dampness in shirt and underwear oozing onto my skin. Could only hope the towel would protect the seat, and I could torch the towels and the rest of my outfit in the comfort of my driveway.
Held my breath and gave the key a deferential turn in the ignition. The engine coughed, revved, rattled, died. My third attempt, true to superstitious form, was the charm. I exhaled. Better and better, according to the fuel gauge, the car had conked out this morning with sufficient gas to get me home.
Entertained doubts about making the right choice of vehicle after some cumbersome navigation past vans and SUVs askew in their lanes. Too late for switching now, though. I’d already accepted moral responsibility for Mr. Snuff Brown. Beyond the bridge, the gaps among entrapped motorists gradually widened, and I took the first exit that wasn’t clogged with unmoving traffic. Committed the indiscretion once of gaping at town in the rearview mirror. Dense folds of cotton wadding clouds had screened out the sun, helping me to distinguish an oily iridescent dome blurring the humble skyline. It immediately hurt my eyes, which was actually good for firming my resolve not to look again.
I had mapped out a roundabout orbit on back roads south of Occam, clockwise up to my address. On potholed divided highways and lesser arteries, my tally of accident scenes, whether pileups or single vehicles in the ditch, hit double digits before I relented. The initial few cars racing from out the “free world” in oncoming lanes were astonishing to me, as were Statie cruisers at some mishaps and tow trucks at others. After my hours in Occam, the spectacle of troopers and Triple-A agents going about their business had a hallucinatory quality, as if this were some sparsely populated frontier between realities. Meanwhile, as housewives and delivery guys and utility workers flashed by, we treated each other to expressions of incredulity, as if nobody should be coming from our respective directions. In their case, they were right.
I rotated the dial of the AM radio with the deliberation of a safecracker, but all the local stations broadcast out of Occam. Nothing but static, except for one jolting blare of Nashville from a channel that proved to be completely automated and based in Armitage.
I clicked off the radio. Mr. Brown had been unreactive to the sharp rise and fall of decibels, but my ears bristled at an infringement in the deceptive lull afterward. It was a faraway quavering hum, subterranean rapids, an ongoing crackle, a rending of tectonic or architectural fabric, the amplified rupture of an eggshell from the inside. Each comparison rang briefly true and then resoundingly false. Shameful that I didn’t instantly place it as the protean rumbling in the sewer, finally burgeoning aboveground and expanding toward me with vegetative insistence.
I’d sworn off any more glimpses at town and had nothing to gain by reneging on that. My eyes didn’t care. Of their own accord, they swerved perversely toward a core of brightness beneath the darkening nimbus canopy. Afternoon had been preempted by
overreaching twilight, an unscheduled eclipse, except where a colossal, translucent pillar of no precise color, practically the diameter of the citywide dome it surmounted, geysered into the cloudbank. I envisioned the pillar’s cohesive ascent beyond the clouds, unhindered by gravity, into the Piscid swarm, though I drew a blank predicting what would follow.
I had this image now of skybound firefall in sync with the soundtrack of fragmentation, and it made me weak and nauseous. Nothing alive stood a chance of escaping callous, essentially incidental massacre. People I could name were immersed in that upheaval, and it was of no consequence that they were enemies, or that the intervening miles spared me every detail. The best I could do was pry my eyes away, empty my mind of vagrant speculation about the hellish end of Nathan Atwood, of the pretty redhead nurse, of everyone. But beside me was Mr. Brown to show exactly how the “color” was disrupting human bodies.
“Color” was migrating from everywhere it dwelt, bursting every earthly chrysalis. Which made getting home by roads south of town my smartest move in recent memory. Though the immolation of Occam blocked my northward view, I was confident that the reservoir, the facilities to purify and bring the water to town, and the sewage treatment plant were trapped under their own shafts of “color,” succumbing to the same transformation as Mr. Brown.
A repellently bright blaze of “color” encased him. I couldn’t tell if it were shining right through the vinyl ceiling or impeded by it with no place to go. An appalling possibility, and no chance to do anything about it before conditions worsened. The pockmarks on his face and scalp ignited into constellations glowing hotter than the aura around him. And something was burning, but what? It smelled most like dust in the radiator when the furnace comes on after long disuse. Seams thin as paper cuts were spreading between the brilliant dots. At arm’s length, and across the miles to the Gardners’ submerged well, the “color” in aggregate must have been hatching from countless figurative shells. To my joyless credit, I’d been right to liken the swelling noise from town to eggs splitting open. The cracks in Mr. Brown were implacably widening, dividing his head into numerous planes, like a rough-cut gemstone.
What happened to him next was grisly and heart-wrenching, even in the thick of my shellshock. He twisted slowly toward me, with excruciating effort, as if laboring to reverse the inertia of a millstone. Was he reenacting only the witless tropism of corrupted Morgan, of the corruption in the sewers, seeking me out merely because I was there? No, Mr. Brown’s filmy eyes homed in on me beseechingly, and his dangling jaw fought feebly to shape speech. An ember of the old man’s vitality, of his consciousness, was rallying well past his moment of truth, rekindling in the shadow of eternity. He was pleading for my help. I pulled over.
Meanwhile, the “color” within was gushing out unabated and taking him tainted cell by cell with it. The facets of his outer self were caving inward, rendering him even more shrunken inside his oversized clothes. Flecks of him were coming detached and rising from his cuffs, his collar, through the envelope of “color” and lodging against the Eldorado ceiling.
The glaze dispersed from his eyes, which were bulging with a derangement of revelation, and his mouth fell open in a mercifully voiceless howl. A blackness encroached and soon gaped behind his eyelids and his lips, and my own sensory input then reeled chaotically, and I couldn’t say if I were looking into the portals of his crumbling eye sockets or out of them as if they were mine, by virtue of emissions into my mind from his, which was dissipating, radiating like the molecules of his body.
In either case, the outcome was a melding with the “color,” and a window onto the unbearable vistas it commanded. I found myself alone among the stars, a grain in the endless gulf, except that space was actually rife with infinitesimal particles speeding along random paths and colliding explosively, and with waves of energy absorbing or bouncing off each other, and with other threads in the cosmic fabric of which I could conceive nothing. And none of this I perceived with sight, but with some inhuman faculty that beggared human understanding, and which some lowly parasite in the universal scheme of things took for granted.
I couldn’t have partaken of alien perspective for more than a second when my mind recoiled out of self-preservation, and my body followed its lead. I was back in the Eldorado, and my spine was scrunching painfully into the door handle on the driver’s side. Mr. Brown, with the last neurons of his identity, had lowered his arms and was reaching shakily for me through the enclosing “color,” a dying gesture of supplication, even as the “color,” every time his fingers almost brushed my shirt, slammed his fissioning body against the passenger-side door—in rancor, I supposed, at this confinement of its flaking substance within the car.
Those withering mosaic hands thrusting at me and receding and thrusting hopelessly again terrified me more than the “color” itself, and set my fingers groping at the door handle till I tumbled backside first upon the gravelly roadside. That guttering spark of Mr. Brown’s selfhood had bought itself a little more time by flaring into full-blown madness, and I’d gotten some crucial distance from those emissions of insanity without an instant to spare. As it was, the impact of his mental overload had to ebb before I had the wherewithal to stand upright.
Muffled by the cascading, electric cacophony from town, the thumping of frustrated “color” in human vessel against unyielding car door goaded me to act, in dread of Mr. Brown shattering and rechristening the Eldorado as a coffin full of luminous, animate carnage. Stranding me out here, with too long a hike home. I staggered around to the passenger side, yanked the door open, and used it for a shield as Mr. Brown cannonballed free, rolled without slowing down like a pinwheel, shedding sparks of “color” and confetti of flesh, till he found his footing and scrambled on buckling legs into the woods, toward the siren call of the bedlam in Occam. His sheath of cold flame clung steadfast but had paled in late afternoon sun.
I needn’t have taken cover. I was a cipher, meaningless like the sparrows that scattered before his wobbling trajectory through the underbrush. Whatever cinder of humanity lingered, the infestation was in uncontested control, though the odds of that body holding together to cross the town line had to be minute.
Leaden fatigue was catching up with me as I grabbed the wheel and put the car in gear again. To drive, to navigate, were the most I could ask of myself. Any further looks at Mr. Brown, at the maelstrom over Occam, would be too much. Dawned on me that defeat was weighing as heavily as exhaustion, and it wasn’t at the hands of the many politicos and their allies who’d stonewalled me for months.
I’d invested my last stores of decency in snatching Mr. Brown out of harm’s way, but in his moment of ultimate crisis, his dying appeal for my presence if nothing else, I’d cast him off, like throwing back an undersized fish. Human decency had been devalued into nonsense in this doomsday context, in this peephole upon an astronomical scale where morals had no more role than anything else of this earth, where my survival dictated amorality at best. Maybe that same negation of decency applied in any war zone, except that no armistice would ever repair the illusion of virtue’s role in human affairs. Not for me, anyway.
29
If I passed any vehicles or they overtook me, or if any approached on the other side of yellow median strip, I retained no image of them, of nothing but the lane immediately ahead, till I had the sensation of snapping out of a trance. I was parked in my driveway, peering through Eldorado windshield at my house. I left the keys in the ignition, unknotted the towel from my midriff, dropped the rest of my despoiled clothes on the tarmac as I trudged along, numb to the chill of October dusk.
Overhead the first few stars winked dully. They induced a queasiness, a pang of spiritual malaise, a revulsion as if the indifferent heavens had it in them to incite phobia. Had some extremely ancient, recessive mechanism been exhumed in me? How often in prehistory had a night like tonight happened? Those Cro-Magnons whose tribesmen shunned the frigid night sky in sheltering caves, who cast up th
eir eyes and tallied phases of the moon on bones and antlers and so invented astronomy, if not science altogether, had they had to overcome an aversion, already ages old, to the treacherous stars?
I lowered my sights toward town, where glowering nimbus, as sharply circumscribed as mushroom cloud or placental tissue, continued to receive the roaring pillar of “color,” which showed no sign of tapering off. Blue lightning zigzagged constantly across the overcast, but the rush of alien departure drowned out all thunder.
My house keys I’d stupidly discarded on the bypass bridge, along with my trousers. I chose a rock and matter-of-factly busted the narrow pane beside the doorknob and undid the lock, as if I let myself in like this every day. The electricity still worked, at which I marveled after flicking on the hall light. Grateful for the first time ever that some swinish conglomerate had bought up utilities statewide, resulting at least in a power grid independent of Occam’s existence. Time for the hottest shower I could endure with the undefiled water from my artesian well.
Afterward, as soon as I turned off the faucets, I seemed to hear brutal demolition going on in the next room. Warily pushed bathroom door wide enough for steam to billow into the corridor, and for me to certify that the house was intact. Put on fresh underwear and went to a north-facing window in the kitchen. The ripping, crackling upsurge of “color” had been no more intrusive from here than a neighbor mowing his lawn. Now it was like a nuclear detonation on my doorstep, but slowed down to 16 rpm, in which the uprooting of individual masonry foundations, the evisceration of street after street, the cyclonic uplift of everything and everyone broken and loose reverberated in exquisite clarity. Everything that the “color” had possessed, everything organic it had tinged, everything ever in contact with that organic material had been recruited into the starbound migration. The pillar of “color” blackened with the bricks and people and trees and soil of Occam, vortexed into slurry.
The Color Over Occam Page 25