My life.
That stupid kid jumped headfirst into the angel, just like it wanted, and it gathered up his neural patterns, now carefully conditioned to be compatible with my own, and used them to shatter the last stubborn fortress of my humanity. I couldn’t really blame him.
After all, I’d done the same thing, exactly thirty-six years ago.
Well, not quite: I had skillfully maneuvered a speedboat in a thrilling chase through the Puerto de Alicante. And in that palace in Alicante, I had swung down into my angel on a rope, just like Errol Flynn. It was far classier than an unbalanced motorcycle ride and some clumsy dive-tackle. But the sentiment was the same. As soon as I had touched the lukewarm light, I felt part of myself shunt away, never to return. And though the Empty Ones let me leave with Isra, we never saw her dad again. They turned poor Yusuf into an angel, though he’d fought against it his entire life. But I had made my decision and sealed his fate. And now a different one was being made for me. Just like, thirty-six years from now, some other fool with similar core concepts—a violent sort of loyalty, a longing for purpose, a knee-jerk disdain for authority—would do the same to Carey. Abandon him. Let him become one of these monsters. It was the cycle. It had repeated and would repeat forever, until the universe was a smoothly idling engine of sterile perfection.
In another part of my brain, the more superficial elements that comprise my self—the cadence of my speech, a key set of memories, my emotional responses to various stimuli—are being solved, simplified, and erased. I am being transformed bit by bit into one of these calculating aberrations. But I knew that was going to happen, and I was prepared. Yusuf taught me how to split my mind apart a long time ago. It wouldn’t last. I was stalling, not winning. It was clear I would not be the one to break the cycle after all. Even with the training. Even with the preparation. The second that stupid fucking kid hit that light, I was done, and now it was just a matter of time.
But man, you have to put up the effort. That’s part of being human: That arrogant little part of you that says you’re special, that you can beat it, that when the time comes, it won’t happen to you—you and you alone are immune! We all have that delusion. It’s one of the core concepts of humanity, as a species. And it’s hardly ever correct. But at least I’d spent twenty years preparing to be wrong. Two decades stitching one very simple, fundamental idea into my being—and then systematically erasing every part that even remembered why.
God, it took so many lives to get that idea. My darling Isra, the Gator, that cunt Tomas—all hollowed out or disappeared entirely, just to get me into the Citadel for thirty bloody seconds. But I got in, and I got out: I walked through that inferno and came out the other side with a beautiful killer of a concept seared into my head. I came out with the number six.
It has to be simple, you see. Anything too complex can be restructured and dismissed. You can’t count on an idea retaining the same value, or even existing at all, after an angel finishes with you. And if you have too much psychic buildup around a concept—memories, explanations, tangents—the angels will burn all of that away and the idea will still be there but hold no importance. So I made it into something they couldn’t understand.
I made it into madness.
I spent twenty years repeating the number six to myself. Twenty years finding it in everything I saw. Counting my steps by sixes and shuffling on the seventh. Every sixth breaths, I inhaled twice. Six beats of the heart, and I blinked. I found multipliers of six everywhere I looked: I broke down addresses, transcribed new alphabets and, most important, I drank myself into oblivion. I ruined every brain cell that remembered why I was doing it. I drowned every single neuron that knew the significance of the six. I burned the number into my soul even as I erased it from my brain. Even now, looking back at all I’ve given up for it, I could not tell you what the number six is supposed to mean, or how in God’s name encoding an affinity for it into the angel I will become will help anybody.
I just know that the angels can clear up madness most times, if it’s just a simple matter of tracking it back to the source. But true insanity? Irrationality and obsession that come from nowhere, with no explanation? That would have to be left behind, as a sort of spiritual remainder. Junk characters in an otherwise perfect equation.
It wouldn’t bother the inhuman light I was about to become. Not much, anyway. Most angels had some garbage floating around in them. Little quirks that gave them a bit of personality. The one that got Yusuf thirty-six years ago, it liked the sea. No idea why, but the ocean held some kind of importance to the man or woman it once was, and so it kept popping up in coastal towns. That’s how we tracked it. How we found the Citadel. How we came to know about the six.
And this one? This twinkling ball of asshole sorting out my insides like a stock boy, filing away and destroying my most important memories just so it could reproduce and turn me into a glorified lightbulb? This one, when all was said and done, would have one tiny quirk. A little thing it couldn’t quite explain.
It would like the number six.
It would seek it out. Favor it. Maybe even tend toward candidates somehow associated with that number, when it came time to reproduce again. A harmless little foible that, with a little luck, would someday kill the bastard dead. With a lot of luck, it might kill them all.
I felt my love for bicycles go. I could never explain that. I just liked them.
Then it was the taste of cheap wine.
Shit. That was getting close. That was really important to me.
I should say something meaningful. That’s what one does, typically, when they’re about to vanish from the world forever. But I have no memories to draw from anymore. No experiential basis with which to impart wisdom. I have only information.
Information is everything.
Information is purity.
TWENTY-FOUR
2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.
The fluid dribbling from Jackie’s chin started off the color of a rainbow reflected in murky water, but somewhere around her chest, it ceased its natural downward flow and reversed. It clouded up. Thickened. Grew cancerous. It looked sort of like those pictures they showed you of smoker’s lungs back in health class, but alive. It raced up Jackie’s neck and poured back over her jaw, her cheeks, her hair. It didn’t seem to be hurting her physically, but good God, with all that screaming, how could you tell?
It wasn’t the sound of pure animal agony. I mean yes, it was absolutely that—Jackie was screeching like a trapped rat—but it wasn’t just that. She was trying to communicate something: She barked out unrelated words, numbers, ratios, little snatches of music.
She started hollering out the start of a funny anecdote I recognized. It was one of her favorites. She was always such a good storyteller.
“So there I was at the prom in a full-on old-fashioned diving costume—we’re talking metal helmet and—”
Then she went back to reeling off digits. I think I recognized my phone number in there.
If the sound didn’t make it clear, the light pouring out of her would have been enough of an explanation. It fired up small, at first, like a sparkler behind her pupils. But now it was all through her. I could see her veins illuminated through the skin.
The whole church smelled like burning plastic.
Jackie was being hollowed out from the inside.
And nobody cared.
The Empty Ones hopped around idiotically, hooting like drunken monkeys and tearing their own flesh from their bodies. I looked to Carey for help, but he couldn’t have given a shit if you paid him for it. Here we were, watching my best (if I’m being honest, my only) friend burning up like a meteor in the atmosphere, and all he could do was yank on my arm and scream for me to run.
Ha-ha. Where would I run to?
What’s the point, without Jackie? She’s why I was in L.A. in the first place. She was so sure we’d make it. That we both had something special and amazing that we couldn’t capitalize on any
where else. What was I going to do, if I left her here? Go back to my shitty overpriced apartment and count roaches? Turn up to work so I could sling drinks and absorb the auditory poison of a thousand vapid L.A. douche bags?
I looked around for Marco. For the blank-eyed bastard that started all of this. It was hard to recognize him with half of his own face yanked off. But he was there: standing in front of those bloody turning gears, whirling and raving. They weren’t words. Not that I understood, anyway.
Nonsense. All around me. Nonsense.
Carey saw that I wasn’t moving and that he wasn’t in good enough shape to make me. He looked sad. He released my hand.
Right now, I couldn’t remember why I wasn’t supposed to let him do that.
“Sammy,” he yelled to the angel, “Sammy, is that you?”
I laughed.
The living inferno that was killing my friend was named fucking Sammy? That’s something you’d name a hamster.
The angel directed some of its focus toward Carey.
“Come on, Sammy. That has to be you. I’d recognize that rotten wino-breath anywhere, you ugly son of a bitch.”
The angel processed. It wavered, and then a brief snippet of clashing guitars faded in from nowhere. A moment of silence. Then a scent like a thunderstorm in the desert. It was trying to figure something out.
It was trying to figure out Carey.
“Knock that off, dumbass,” Carey snapped. His broken teeth gave the last word a whimsical little whistle. I laughed again. It was all so goddamned funny.
“You know, I’ve been around too long to fall for that bush-league shit. Please, Sammy. I didn’t know you well when you were still around, but we were always all right, you and me. I’m sorry that I only got a sense of who you were—who you really were—after you were gone. That was my fault. But I know what you were trying to do that night. I guess it didn’t work, but you can still stop it here! I don’t know what happens when you turn. If there’s some little piece of you left in there or what—but you seemed like kind of a stubborn dick back in the day, so I’m going to bet that there is. If that’s true, then you gotta stop it, Sammy. Don’t let this fucker win.”
The angel flickered. It withdrew a bit. It dimmed a little. Carey smiled. It was a sad, gentle expression that I didn’t think his crumpled paper bag of a face was capable of. And then the image of a half-burned T-shirt with the Spanish flag on the front flashed in the air in front of him. Carey’s face curled up and he tried to spit something out. Then he screamed. His voice echoed. It was the only sound that did.
I looked to Jackie.
I couldn’t see her anymore. Just slick, black ooze in the shape of a woman. Blinding white voids where her eyes and mouth should be.
I looked back to Carey. He was clutching his head in both hands. Bent double in pain. He saw me looking and grinned feebly, trying to reassure me.
I took a step toward the angel.
“Oh, son of a bitch.” Carey lunged for me, but he fell short, wracked with sudden spasms.
I took another step.
“Don’t be a fuckin’ moron!” he shouted from somewhere behind me.
But it was too late. I was already flying.
* * *
I don’t know what I was expecting. That I’d go sailing straight through the light, unimpeded? That I’d, like, bounce away from its force field or something? No idea. I just know that I sure as hell didn’t expect an angel to feel like crème brûlée.
Maybe surface ice on a frozen lake is a better analogy: There was a thin, fragile shell that gave way the second I touched it. Then the light inside, dimmer but somehow bigger, with a texture like air in a library.
From the outside, the angel looked like a blank spot in the universe—impossible and deep and wrong—but not very big. The thing only had a diameter of a few feet, depending on how closely your eyes could stand to look at it. But when I cracked through the shell and into that vacant space, I didn’t fall or impact or puncture the other side. I just drifted right on through into nothing.
I’m not explaining this right. I didn’t have any literal sense of my body. I wasn’t moving, but there was motion and sensation and … Look, I jump through windows and serve sandwiches for a living. I’m not a poet, and I’ve certainly never had to explain being removed from existence before, so cut me some goddamned slack, okay?
I figured I knew what was actually going on. Back in the real world, I was being solved. Purified or whatever. I was dead, dying, or just vanishing, and all this was the result of a few random brain cells firing, trying to make sense of visual information when they were no longer attached to eyeballs.
I was kind of okay with it. Maybe it would help Carey. Maybe it would help Jackie. Or maybe I just wouldn’t have to deal with this crap anymore and I could get some rest.
God, I was going to miss my bed.
I felt a strange release of pressure all around me. An emotional atmospheric change. Have you ever been in the room at a party at the exact moment when two people decide to hook up? It’s like you can feel their sense of impending accomplishment. Their restrained glee.
It was like that, but magnified and cruel and everywhere.
The angel was … happy. It was so satisfied that I was here. I was supposed to do this, I realized. This was exactly what it wanted all along. This was where it needed me to be.
I felt a pull on my brain stem. Not a physical pull, and not my physical brain stem, but that’s how I think of the core of my being. Where I store whatever crude central impulses that make me who I am. And somebody had just put both of their greasy hands in there and taken out a heaping scoop of Kaitlyn.
It was a strange, violating sensation. Painful in an abstract, nostalgic way. Like hearing about a childhood friend that you haven’t thought of in decades suddenly dying in a car crash.
I wanted to give it up. I wanted to be ready to let it all go because this was all just too goddamned much.
But I couldn’t. I was just too mad about the whole thing. The angel wasn’t just happy, it was fucking smug. There was no relief to the sense of satisfaction, because there was never any doubt. The angel always knew that I would do this. It wasn’t like getting the big promotion; it was like telling your snotty kid brother “I told you so” after you warned him not to touch the hot pan.
I tightened my fists, though strictly speaking I don’t suppose I had hands anymore. But I could feel my phantom extra finger there. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good. Stronger than ever.
I pictured swinging that fist into some self-satisfied ball of light’s stupid face. Again and again and again and … something broke.
A little shard of light shook, dislodged, and fell away. I could see a two-inch snatch of varnished wood out there, beyond the whiteness. I gritted my teeth and mentally swung again. The void around me shook, or shimmered, or I don’t know—it felt the impact somehow. Another shard fell. Bigger this time. I could see a weathered old hand, clutching at some thin brown and gray hair.
I gathered myself up, took a few metaphorical strides, and I sent a leaping soul-uppercut right to that radiant bastard’s angelic balls.
More shards fell and the gaps widened. But, more important, I could see there was something in here with me now, floating around in the void like it had been dislodged from its anchor point. It was small. Made up of bits of broken glass and faded cloth. It sat just below me, rotating listlessly among the splintered light. It was a tiny little sculpture of the number six. It was crude and so simple, but there was genuine care put into it. You could tell just to look at it. Macaroni pictures on the fridge. An ashtray from camp.
I reached out with my immaterial hand and thought about touching it.
Warmth ran through my absent body. It settled in the empty space behind my eyes. It wanted to reassure me. It wanted to thank me. But it didn’t have the words. So much of it was gone. It was just a little piece. Just the smallest remnant of a human being. A man named Sammy.
And he was so happy that it had all worked.
Then he was gone.
I took another look around the fractured null space. There were dull brown veins of corruption tracing their way through the pristine light. The atmosphere was different. Now it was like standing next to a coworker while he got chewed out by his boss.
The angel had done something very stupid, and it knew it was going to pay for it.
I thought of myself growing larger. I tapped into that smoldering little ball of fury in my gut that I can never seem to fully get rid of. I felt it cool and harden into iron. It gave me weight. I pushed out with my intangible hands and the white void strained. I pushed harder and it buckled. I reared back, curled the fingers of my left hand into a shaking fist, and I punched the bastard right in its heart. The light shattered into a million pieces, disappearing as they fell. Flecks of glass buried in the sand.
I laughed.
It all went black, and I finally got to rest.
TWENTY-FIVE
2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.
I dreamed that I was floating on an impassive black sea. Its surface was glassy, unbroken and unending. Something in the water was sapping my strength, so I couldn’t paddle or even turn my head. The moon was high above me, bright and cold. No clouds up there, just a flat, deep blackness. There was no border between the sea and the skies. They flowed into each other, a seamless sheet of stillness.
It was peaceful, in a way, but it also filled me with unease. I couldn’t quite place why. Something about the depth of field in that sky was wrong. It took me a bit to figure it out.
The stars.
They were going out.
There was something swimming in the murk beneath me. I was sure of it now. I couldn’t see it, and the waters didn’t so much as ripple to betray its presence, but I knew it was there. You know the feeling: You’re sitting in your living room, killing time—watching TV, playing on the Internet, just generally wasting the few unclaimed hours left in your life—when you suddenly drop the book or mute the television. A few seconds later, there’s a knock at the door. You must have heard something, felt a vibration that gave away the visitor, but if you think about it, you can’t place exactly what that something was. You weren’t aware, and then suddenly you were.
The Unnoticeables Page 22