by Tim Scott
I awoke pretty quickly after that, and I knew Jack was dying for sure. I knew that this thing I had felt had come for him but had left us both, and I had one chance to get him out of there.
And that chance was now.
I took hold of his harness, and heard a deep, hollow shudder bellow through the ice, which seemed to almost split right across my own chest. The noise died, then it sounded like someone trying to squeeze a full-sized wooden sailing ship into a small suitcase. I glanced up and saw that the ceiling was running with thousands of silent cracks, and the next second the whole fissure began vibrating, sending ice and powder down like clouds of white soot.
Chasms appeared on my left and crunched shut, and awful noises sloshed in and out as vast empty caves yawned open around us and slid off downward.
I grabbed Jack’s collar and lugged him toward the small pool of daylight that shone through the haze of powdered snow at the end of the fissure. I just focused on the light and kept going, scrambling over the rocks of ice, balancing on ledges that were sliding away, trying to fend off bits of roof that were collapsing on me like cinder blocks being dropped carelessly from a scaffold.
I kept going, and each time I fell, I looked up and saw that the daylight had moved, but it was still there. I pushed and pushed into the chaos of sliding ice and noise, gripping Jack’s collar with my frostbitten hand. I was close enough to smell the cold wind whipping in from outside, near enough to believe that the old world existed after all, near enough to dream of drinking coffee out on the pier at Capitola again. I glanced back to Jack and my stomach ran with fear.
My hand was empty.
It was so frostbitten and numb I had no idea I had let go of Jack. I stood transfixed as a weight of ice felled me unconscious.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I came to, it was evening. I didn’t remember anything. Didn’t know where Jack was. Didn’t know what had happened to Mat. I managed to dig my way out and found the weather had eased, and somehow staggered down alone and found someone in the ranger’s hut.
39
I looked at the two of them and realized a deep silence had pooled around us. Even the jukebox had gone quiet.
“That’s the story. I let go of Jack in the fissure when that was the one thing I promised him I wouldn’t do. Said I wouldn’t leave him.” I realized my hands had gone numb during the telling of the story, so they ran with purple veins and white blotches.
Eli didn’t say anything. She just reached over and hugged me.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said finally, looking at me with her deep brown, tear-smeared eyes. “You see that, don’t you? In the end, all you can do is all you can do.”
I held her and felt a thickness in my throat.
“And Jack would have been proud you tried so hard,” she said, leaning back and holding my shoulders gently with her palms. “Of course he would.”
Eli was one of the special people, the way she took all that sadness and just swallowed it and never felt any resentment, or anger, or frustration about anything, as though she had an inside that shone with white light and everything that went in was purified. “Long Island Iced Teas,” she whispered suddenly, looking into my eyes and, springing up, wiped her nose. “These are definitely on the house.”
Mat reached over and hugged me with a grip a brown bear would have been pleased with. “Don’t beat yourself up,” he said. “There’s nothing to forgive, but the hardest thing is to forgive yourself. You see that, don’t you?” Eli lined up three Long Island Iced Teas.
“To Jack,” she said slipping her neat, long fingers around one of the glasses.
“To Jack,” Mat and I said. And as I held the Long Island Iced Tea there before me, in that one elongated moment, I sensed the whole of Jack’s life, from beginning to end, like a finished, complete thing. I saw it in a way it had never quite looked before, and I didn’t think it would appear so clearly again. The intensity of his presence rolled around us, like an undulating map, and it was as though his birth and death and everything in between existed all together.
I took the first, cool sip of the drink and the strangeness of the moment began to break up gently and move off, and I was content to watch it go. I had carried something of Jack with me all these years, and now, I realized, he didn’t want me to carry him anymore. We had different ways to go.
“Jack was always scared of the mountains,” said Eli, “but he loved them too, and I know he wouldn’t have missed those trips for anything.” She threw her hair back. “He’d like the fact you two are still drinking Long Island Iced Teas and catching waves at ridiculous hours of the day.”
Yeah, I thought. Actually, he would.
The jukebox woke up and started playing the sound effects of applause from a concert hall, punctuated with raucous cries of “Bravo!” And somehow that seemed as appropriate a statement to Jack as I could think of. Bravo Jack! Bravo! I thought. And we all sat there as amusement mixed with our sadness, sipping Long Island Iced Teas without saying a word as the cheers and whistles echoed around the empty room.
“Anyone want a seriously messed-up jukebox?” said Eli finally, with a slow shake of the head, as the applause began to die. I smiled, looking around the place, knowing this would be the last time I would come here and wanting to fix the moment in my mind, so I could come here again when it was all gone and think of this drink in celebration of Jack’s life.
Several of the elevators pinged and the doors eased open. The bouncer would be livid other people were still getting in here, I thought, then the roar of bikes slashed across everything and I was off my seat and running before I could even think what I was doing.
Somehow, though, Eli was ahead of me, reading the basics of the situation through my eyes and tugging at my collar. “This way,” she shouted. “This way,” and she hauled me physically around the back of the bar to a hidden elevator.
“Staff elevator,” she cried, as Mat flew in next to me and the doors slipped shut with a solid swish.
“Oh,” said the elevator. “Normally I have a lunch break at this time.”
“Get us the fuck out of here, now!” I cried.
“Please,” added Mat.
“Knock, knock,” said the elevator.
“Normally, I’d plummet and kill you but today I feel good,” I said. “Now let’s fucking go!”
40
The elevator began to descend in slightly stunned silence, and the roar of bikes thankfully melted away.
“Riders?” Mat said.
“Had to be,” I said, snorting like a small dog after a session chasing a particularly elusive stick, but also sensing, even in the flurry of this moment, that a great weight had gone with the telling of the story about Jack. “Had to be. Thought they were off our tail, but apparently not. Still keen to assassinate God, obviously.” Then something in my head made a connection. “Did I tell you I met Elnor Elnorian in Zone Securities?” Mat looked at me. “He wasn’t that hot on God, either.”
“You met Elnor Elnorian? Really? And you think he’s tied in to all this?” Mat said.
“I don’t know.” Something struck me like a crisp packet full of water dropped on my head from a great height. “Although the Riders called their boss Double E. Coincidence, do you think? Elnor Elnorian? Double E?”
“Criminal, the bar closing,” said the elevator cutting in. “Criminal! It gave me a new lease on life when it came here. Not sure what I’ll do now if no one takes the place on.”
“Another elevator wanting to go to Baja?” said Mat as I felt my patience burning up at the interruption.
“No. What would I want to go there for?” said the elevator. “No, I was thinking about becoming a fridge. Listen, I can make the noise: Mrrrrrrrnnnnn,” it hummed. “What do you think? Authentic? I’ve been practicing.”
“You’re an elevator,” I said flatly, despite myself. “How are you going to keep things cold?”
“Well, I’ll leave my doors open quite a bit
,” it suggested, after a pause.
“Nice thinking,” said Mat. “You’ve got a good future being so…proactive like that.” Then he added, “Jonny, the Double E thing. It could be a possibility; Elnorian’s been going on about trying to get funding for his space project and cutting spending on religions.”
“Yes,” I said. “I smell half of one small answer.”
The elevator decelerated to a stuttering halt and, after a tiny pause, suddenly jolted down another three inches just before the doors hustled open. Why do elevators do that? I mean, why not just go down to the right level to begin with? I looked into the small dingy room it had brought us to, which was lit solely by a wall covered in neon signs.
One of those I saw said: “This way!” in squiggly purple, with the outline of a hand next to it; another read: “Jazz Bar!” in fluorescent blue; and another, in wiry yellow neon, bizarrely said: “Osprey Housing Should Be Available to Everyone!” I had no idea what floor this was, or why it should be lit with neon signs that seemed to be collected from forgotten places.
“Staff exit is up the spiral stairs,” said the elevator. “I don’t open in the main hall, with the riffraff.”
I nodded and stepped out but I had a bad feeling about this.
“Think of me if you ever want some milk kept cold,” the elevator continued. “Listen. I have it perfectly.” And it started making a humming sound again: “Mrrrrrrrnnnnn!”
I tried not to get too irritated. I knew I had bigger fish to fry and probably a variety of other seafood to poach if it came to that, but in that moment if I could have got my hands on the person responsible for programming that elevator, I would have given them a very passionate and massively dull talking-to.
I snapped out of it and headed for the well-worn spiral staircase that jutted into the room, knowing this wasn’t the time to start arguing with an elevator about where exactly we were, and particularly not one that was doing a very bad impression of a fridge. My feet scraped bluntly off the worn iron treads and I could hear Mat right behind as we snaked our way up. I felt my back twinge slightly with the strain of twisting up these over-corkscrewed stairs.
At last, we came to a chic stainless-steel door that seemed to be hung at a rather unsettling and wonky angle. A small business card was stuck neatly to the middle of it saying, “Jonny and Mat, please don’t be late for the party!”
I ripped it off and simply stuffed it in my pocket for a later time, when my head would be able to consider such a thing.
I gripped the handle, ready to heave the door open, but it swung easily, and suddenly we were staring out across the familiar reclamation yard.
It was quiet.
I stepped hesitantly through, and saw that the door was actually a run-of-the-mill one from an old tenement someplace, but now with a steel lining. It had been hung at a weird angle to disguise it, so that it blended in with the piles of discarded doors that were heaped around in that part of the junkyard.
“Dark,” said Mat, closing it behind him, and glanced instinctively up at the Thin Building. “There goes Inconvenient,” he said toward the flicker of lights on the top two floors, and I knew what he meant. I would miss the place too.
Things change. Things always keep on fucking changing. If only they would just stay the same for a bit I could get a grip on them all, I thought.
It was terrible for Eli, losing her job, then me appearing like that, but that was just the way it turned out. There’s never a good time for some things. I wondered for the millionth time how it was we had never managed to hook up together. I guess I shouldn’t have fallen into becoming good friends with her if I had wanted to date. That easy, comfortable warmth of intimate friendship kills passion like nothing else. Except possibly peanut butter sandwiches.
Mat shambled into a run and I saw his point; it would be good to get back to the bike before the Riders sensed we were gone, but frankly I hate running. The reason is simple; after a hundred yards my lungs were clamoring for oxygen and a series of cigarettes in their habitual way. I would settle for one cigarette, I thought, trying to taste the first drag in my mind, which always made the craving worse and not better. When all this was over, I was going to make a point of starting smoking again. I was going to hold a party to celebrate the first new cigarette packet the same way people hold parties to celebrate a new house.
The running began to take its toll and I felt my stomach tighten unnecessarily; then a pain wormed its way across my chest, and my thigh muscles decided to tell me they were as tight as fence wire. I ignored their shouts and just tried to revel in the basics of breathing, which wasn’t easy. We bashed on through areas of old, ornate, crumbling fireplaces that cried for the houses they had lost. Then we dodged around piles of gigantic wooden beams ingrained with knots like crocodile eyes that might have crisscrossed the Pacific at one time as part of ships that were long gone. And all the time, we headed in the direction of the discarded staircases that perched like claws on the horizon.
I heard what sounded like distant trumpets echoing off a warehouse on the other side of the river. They faded, and I shook them from my mind until a loud screech of brass set my ears ringing. About twenty yards away, the nose of a wedding conga spat out from one of the bridges, fawning over the dusty ground with a howl of bright, garish colors that beat up the senses the way the first neat whiskey of the night bites the back of the throat. The shouts and laughter of drunken celebration flew off the small crowd like acrobats flipping about a trampoline, and these people seemed to virtually pulsate with the beat of their own drums, making the atmosphere of what had gone before seem as shy and sedate as a dead walrus.
It was a traditional wedding conga, all right. The bride and groom were being carried on wedding chairs through their neighborhood, as a public demonstration of their love, commitment, and—on this occasion—appalling clothes sense.
They would all finish at a reception someplace, burning for more alcohol and laughing good-naturedly at the nervous, mumbled speeches. The conga was a tradition begun by the now defunct Ministry of Reassurance, whose job it had been to make everyone feel that everything was OK. It was said at one time they hired four hundred good-looking women to walk around bars and tell men how great they were and how good the world was. But once the record companies needled their way into power, a lot of government ministries were mysteriously closed and the Ministry of Reassurance had been one of them. Wedding congas had survived despite this, though, having been taken to heart by the populace.
This procession spun toward us, not seemingly led by anyone in particular but giving the appearance of a lot of bees that had decided to swarm off for reasons known only to the bees themselves—and probably a couple of men with beards deep in the bowels of the University of Idaho who studied bees because they had some innate fear of human relationships, which might well have had a sad tale behind it.
The conga twisted our way, presenting an impenetrable wall of red-faced people.
We hesitated, looking for a route around it among the crumbling, dank, water-filled ornamental fountains, but there wasn’t an obvious one. And before we had made any definite decision, the crowd engulfed us in a foaming froth of excitement, snapping us into a tangle of wine bottles and cheering. Of heavy breath and kisses; of sharp hats and little-worn suits. I was flung backwards through the waving arms and trumpets, the hatted fruit and sprays of limp flowers, and for a dark second I glimpsed plumes of dust rising like explosions near the Thin Building and knew immediately they were the bike trails of the Riders, who were already ferociously on our case.
I unsnagged myself from the gigantic earrings of a middle-aged lady who had already started telling me about her hernia and was wheeled around into the steely-eyed, unrelenting stare of a man who simply said: “You’re not part of this, are you? And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Where can I get a set of encyclopedias?” And then amid this crush of people he offered up a volume.
It had to be the Belgian Carol
ine had warned me about, and I stared at him, suddenly suspended in the eye of a storm of people.
“Listen,” I found myself shouting, “tell whoever is in charge that I do not wish to buy any encyclopedias. I’m never buying a set. OK?”
“OK,” said the man with a barely audible accent, but I could see by his smile he was mocking me. “You don’t want to buy any encyclopedias? OK.”
I wrenched myself from the edge of the crowd, like a suction cup pulled from a glass door, and chased after my feet as they ran ahead, only regaining my balance with huge unwieldy steps as though I had been shoved off a moving walkway. As I straightened, I saw Mat do almost exactly the same thing. The Belgian hadn’t flinched and was watching me with a calm, unnerving stare as the conga swirled around him.
I screamed at Mat to run, and we both pounded for the flaking red bridge, clattering over it, down the narrow alley, and back toward the Flame Rouge, where we had left the bike. I just had time to see that the windows of the Flame Rouge were all thrown open. Colored smoke was pouring out uncontrollably, while a group of bored staff stood waiting outside, marooned in the road, the chef still wearing his white hat and clutching a ladle, as we skidded up to the bike.
It was covered in balloons and streamers. I couldn’t begin to understand exactly what that was all about. Some student prank perhaps? Or some advertising campaign? We snatched at them, but there wasn’t time, so I just hopped on the front, then fired up the engine as our crash suits eased shut, and screamed away—trailing streamers and party decorations.
It wasn’t the ideal start when you’re trying not to look obtrusive.
I love bikes. I love their character, but I’m not that big on them as things to worship. I’m not one of those people who gets excited about the smell of a new carburetor, or the curve of a particularly swoopy fuel tank, or the extra shininess of some new exhaust. But I had a lot of decisions milling around in my mind waiting to be resolved, and I couldn’t decide which one had priority. Maybe if I drove, my subconscious would lead me in the right direction.