Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  But right behind Bucky, close enough to startle him, was his own body, bits of flesh being torn out like tufts of grass at a driving range, shoots of blood looking like hopeful red plants just coming into sunlight. He circled, by willing it, about his body, feeling the cumulus clouds cotton under his feet, soothing his soles, as he gazed in astonishment at his head, pate cracked open all round like the top of an eggshell, hovering a foot above the rest of it in a spray of blood and brain. He reached out, touched the stray piece of skull, tried to force it back in place, but it was as if it were made of stone and cemented for all eternity to the air. Likewise the freshets of gore issuing like bloody thoughts from his brain, which, though not cold, were as stiff as icicles.

  The music swelled, recaptured his attention. Looking about for its source, he saw emerge from each tiny cloud a creature, all in white, all of white and gold, delicate of hand, beatific of face, and every one of them held a thing of curves in its hands. Their angel mouths O’d like moon craters. Thin fingers swept in blizzards of beauty across iridescent harps. And yet their music was neither plucked nor sung, but a pain-pure hymn rolling out in tones richer than any man-made organ.

  They made the bloody scene beautiful, sanctifying it with their psalm. And now their bodies swerved as though hinged and they raised their eyes to the dioramic massacre before the altar and up past the huge golden cross even to the white plaster ceiling above it, beyond which the spire lofted heavenward. With a great groan, as if angelic eyes could move mountains with a look, the top of the building eased open, sliding outward on invisible runners to hang there in the open air. And down into the church descended a great blocky bejeweled thing, an oblong Spielbergian UFO Bucky thought at first. But then he saw the sandals, the feet, the robes, the hands gripping firmly the arms of the throne like Abe Lincoln, the chest bedecked in white, and the great white beard, and he guessed what he was in for.

  But when the head came fully into view, Bucky had to laugh. Like Don Rickles trapped in a carpet, the face of an angry black woman grimaced out from behind the white beard and mustache of God. Her cheeks puffed out like wet sculpted obsidian, her dark eyes glared, and just in front of a Hestonian sweep of white hair, a tight black arch of curls hugged her face like some dark rider’s chaps curving about the belly of his steed. The white neck of the deity was stiff and rigid, as if locked in a brace.

  “Bucky Stevens,” She boomed, Her eyes moving from him to a space of air in front of Her, “you’d best be getting yourself up here this instant, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’m,” he said, drifting around his exploding corpse and sailing up over the bloody crowd at the altar. He could still sense how fat he was, but he felt as light and unplodding as a sylph. “You sending me to hell?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Looks to Me like you found your own way there.” Her eyes surveyed the carnage. “First off, young man, I want to say I ‘preciate what you did for Me. I like sinners who listen to My suggestions and have the balls to carry them out.”

  “That was You?” “Does God lie?” “No, ma’m.” “Damn right He don’t, and I’m God, so you just shove those doubts aside and listen up.”

  “Um, scuse me, ma’m,” said Bucky, shuffling his feet in the air, “but how come God’s a black woman? I mean in Sunday school, we never—”

  “God ain’t a black woman, Mister Bucky, leastways no more He ain’t. He’s been that for a while, oh ‘bout three weeks or so.” She smiled suddenly. “But now He gets to be a fat white boy named Bucky Stevens.”

  Bucky brightened. He didn’t doubt for a moment what She’d said. He couldn’t. It speared like truth into his heart. “You mean I get to . . . to take over? There’s no punishment for killing all these people?”

  God chuckled, a high-pitched woo-wee kind of sound. “That ain’t what I said a-tall.” She did a stiff-necked imitation of a headshake as She spoke.

  Bucky was mystified: “I don’t get it.”

  God leaned forward like She had a board strapped to Her back. “I’ll be brief,” She said, “just so’s you can hustle your fat butt up here quicker and let Me come down and do My dying. I killed me a whole officeload of people three weeks ago, got blown away by a security guard after I hosed those heartless fuckers at Century 21. Same sorta miracle that’s happening to you now, happened to me then. Only God was this unhinged lunatic I’d seen on Dan Rather the week before, some nut who went to O’Hare and picked off ground crew and passengers not lucky enough to be going through one of those tubes. He got blown away too, became God, then talked me into wiping out my co-workers when they gave me the axe. So I did it, and coaxed you along same’s he did me, and here we are.”

  The music was doing beautiful things to Bucky’s mind. He grew very excited. “You mean I’m going to be in charge of everything? I can make any changes I feel like making, I can stop all the misery if I want to?” God ummm-hmmmed. “But why would anyone, why would You, want to give that up?”

  She looked agitated, like She wanted to laugh and cry and holler all at the same time. Instead She said, “As My momma used to say, young Master Stevens, experience is the best teacher a body can have.” She glared at him suddenly and Bucky felt himself swept forward and up.

  He windmilled his arms, struggling to find his center of gravity, but found himself fluttering and turning like an autumn leaf, tumbling spout over teakettle toward the great black face, toward the crazy brown eyes. He headed straight between them, fearing he’d smash on the browbone, but instead doubled and split like a drunkard’s vision and fell and swelled into the black pools of God’s pupils. In the blink of an eye, he inflated. That’s how it felt to him, like his head felt when they stuck his arm and taped it down, knocking him out for an ingrown toenail operation when he was ten, only all over his body this time and he didn’t lose consciousness. He unlidded his eyes just in time to see the stocky black woman wink at him before she put her hands together as if in prayer, sang out “So long, sucker!” and swan-dived into his shattering body.

  Bucky gazed about at the angels on their clouds and felt guy-wires coming from their O’d mouths as if He were a Macy’s Day balloon and they the marching guardians who kept Him from floating free. The throne rose slowly and the angels with it. Bucky took His first Godbreath and felt divine. Like Captain Kirk, He was in command now, He sat at the helm, and things by God were going to fly right from here on out.

  But then, as He lifted above the church and its roof clicked into place, time unfroze and, with it, the pain of those inside. He felt it all, like a mailed fist slamming into His solar plexus again and again: Simon Stone, small and mean inside like a mole, gasping for one final breath; Sarah Janeway, two months pregnant, trying in vain to hold back the rope-spill of her intestines; kind-hearted Elvira Freeborn, in so many ways the sanest person there, who let her dying fall over her like a new sun dress, a thing of razor and flame. And even the dead—Coach Hezel, the Atwoods, Irma Wilkins and the rest—even from these, Bucky felt the echoes of their suffering and, transcending time, seeped into their dying a thousand times over.

  And then He rose over New Falls, did Bucky Stevens, feeling His holy tendrils reach into everyone that wept and wandered there. He knew at last the torment of his parents and the riches they’d lost inside themselves, and it made His heart throb with pain. Bucky rose, and, in rising, sank into every hurting soul in town, spreading Himself thick everywhere. And all was painful clarity inside Him. It grew and crackled, the misery, and still He rose and sank, moving like Sherwin-Williams paint to engulf the globe, seeping deep down into the earth. Bucky wanted to scream. And scream He did. And His scream was the cause, and the sound, of human misery.

  He tried to bring His hands to His face. To puncture His eardrums. To thumb out His eyes. But they clung like mules to the hard arms of the throne, not budging, and His eyelids would not shut, and His earflaps sucked all of it in like maelstroms of woe. Pockets of starvation flapped open before Him like cover stories blown, and each death-eyed Et
hiopian became unique to Him—the clench of empty stomachs, the wutter and wow of dying minds.

  Like dental agony, layer beneath layer surprising one at the untold depths of it, Bucky’s pain intensified and spread, howling and spiraling off in all directions. And after a while, it didn’t exactly dull, nor did He get used to it, but rather He rose to meet it, to yield to it as the storm-tossed seafarer gives up the struggle and moves into the sweep of the sea. He was the pincushion of pain, He was the billions of screaming pins, He was the billions of thumbs pressing them down into flannel. He suffered all of it, and knew Himself to be the cause of it all. Caught in the weave, He was the weave.

  He almost smiled, it was so perverse; but the smile was ripped from His face by new outrage. There seemed no end to the torment, no end to burgeoning pain. As soon as He thought He’d hit bottom, the bottom fell out. He began to wonder if the black woman had lied to Him, if maybe He was trapped in this nightmare for all eternity. While He watched with eyes that could not close, new births killed young girls, new deaths tore at mourners, new forms of woe were kennel-bred and unleashed. Bucky was fixed in His firmament, and all was hell with the world.

  Plunged down the slippery slope of despair, He cast His great eyes about, sought for pustules of resentment, found them. The seeds of His redemption they were, these seething souls. The black woman—Miriam Jefferson Jones—had, like her predecessor, been nursing others along, and now Bucky reached out to them and took up the whisper in their ears, the whisper momentarily stilled at the shift in deity. Heavens yes, Sean Flynn, he assured the young man leaned against the stone wall, huddled with his mates, it’s only proper you elbow under their fuckin’ transport at night, fix old Mother Flammable there, crawl the hell out o’ there, give it the quick plunge, watch all them limey bastards kiss the night sky over Belfast with their bones. And yes, Alicia Condon of Lost Nation, Iowa, it’s okay to take your secret obsession with the purity of the newborn to its limit, it is indeed true that if you could wipe out a whole nursery of just-delivered infants before they hit that fatal all-corrupting second day of life, the Second Coming of My Own Sweet Son would indeed be swiftly upon the sinning race of mankind. And yes, oh most decidedly yes, Gopal Krishnan and Vachid Dastjerdi and Moshe Naveh, you owe it to your respective righteous causes to massacre whole busloads, whole airports, whole towns full of enemy flesh.

  There were oodles of them walking the earth, ticking timebombs, and all of them He tended and swayed that way, giving with a whisper gentle nudges and shoves toward mass annihilation. New ones too, promising buds of bitterness, Bucky began to cultivate. Some one of them was certain to bloom any moment now—oh God, how Bucky prayed to Himself for it to be soon—at least one brave quarterback on this playing field of sorrow was sure to snatch that ball out of the sky and run for all he was worth, pounding cleat against turf, stiff-arming those who dared try to block him, not stopping till he crossed the forbidden line and slammed that bleeding pigskin down in triumph.

  That was the hope, through agonies untold, that kept Bucky going. That was the hope that made things hum.

  At Eventide

  BY KATHE KOJA

  So what have we learned from all this?

  Whether you feel that life has intrinsic meaning, or only the meaning we ascribe to it—or even no meaning at all—in the end, the human hope is to somehow make peace. Find a way to reconcile both our beautiful and terrible truths.

  To both live, and then die, as best we can.

  Which brings us, at last, to “At Eventide.” Courtesy of Kathe Koja, who quietly codifies the end of our journey in terms so brilliant and haunting and true that no climactic explosion could possibly compare.

  I could not ask for a better note to leave on. Take care, everybody. I wish you well.

  What he carried to her he carried in a red string bag. Through its mesh could be seen the gleam and tangle of new wire, a package of wood screws, a green plastic soda bottle, a braided brown coil of human hair; a wig? It could have been a wig.

  To get to her he had come a long way: from a very large city through smaller cities to Eventide, not a city at all or even a town, just the nearest outpost of video store and supermarket, gas and ice and cigarettes. The man at the Stop-N-Go had directions to her place, a map he had sketched himself; he spoke as if he had been there many times: “It’s just a little place really, just a couple rooms, living room and a workshop, there used to be a garage out back but she had it knocked down.”

  The man pointed at the handmade map; there was something wrong with his voice, cancer maybe, a sound like bones in the throat; he did not look healthy. “It’s just this feeder road, all the way down?”

  “That’s right. Takes about an hour, hour and ten, you can be there before dark if you––”

  “Do you have a phone?” “Oh, I don’t have her number. And anyway you don’t call first, you just drive on down there and––”

  “A phone,” the man said; he had not changed his tone, he had not raised his voice but the woman sorting stock at the back of the store half-rose, gripping like a brick a cigarette carton; the man behind the counter lost his smile and “Right over there,” he said, pointing past the magazine rack bright with tabloids, with PLAYBOY and NASTY GIRLS and JUGGS; he lit a cigarette while the man made his phone call, checked with a wavering glance the old Remington 870 beneath the counter.

  But the man finished his call, paid for his bottled water and sunglasses, and left in a late-model pick-up, sober blue, a rental probably and “I thought,” said the woman with the cigarette cartons, “that he was going to try something.”

  “So did I,” said the man behind the counter. The glass doors opened to let in heat and light, a little boy and his tired mother, a tropical punch Slush Puppy and a loaf of Wonder bread.

  Alison, the man said into the phone. It’s me.

  A pause: no sound at all, no breath, no sigh; he might have been talking to the desert itself. Then: Where are you? she said. What do you want?

  I want one of those boxes, he said. The ones you make. I’ll bring you everything you need. Don’t come out here, she said, but without rancor; he could imagine her face, its Goya coloring, the place where her eye had been. Don’t bring me anything, I can’t do anything for you.

  See you in an hour, the man said. An hour and ten.

  He drove the feeder road to the sounds of Mozart, 40’s show tunes, flashy Tex-Mex pop; he drank bottled water; his throat hurt from the air conditioning, a flayed unchanging ache. Beside him sat the string bag, bulging loose and uneven, like a body with a tumor, many tumors; like strange fruit; like a bag of gold from a fairy tale. The hair in the bag was beautiful, a thick and living bronze like the pelt of an animal, a thoroughbred, a beast prized for its fur. He had braided it carefully, with skill and a certain love, and secured it at the bottom with a small blue plastic bow. The other items in the bag he had purchased at a hardware store, just like he used to; the soda bottle he had gotten at the airport, and emptied in the men’s room sink.

  There was not much scenery, unless you like the desert, its lunar space, its brutal endlessness; the man did not. He was a creature of cities, of pocket parks and dull anonymous bars; of waiting rooms and holding cells; of emergency clinics; of pain. In the beige plastic box beneath the truck’s front seat there were no less than eight different pain medications, some in liquid form, some in pills, some in patches; on his right bicep, now, was the vague itch of a Fentanyl patch. The doctor had warned him about driving while wearing it: There might be some confusion, the doctor said, along with the sedative effect. Maybe a headache, too.

  A headache, the man had repeated; he thought it was funny. Don’t worry, doctor. I’m not going anywhere. Two hours later he was on a plane to New Mexico. Right now the Fentanyl was working, but only just; he had an assortment of patches in various amounts––25, 50, 100 mgs––so he could mix and match them as needed, until he wouldn’t need them anymore.

  Now Glenn Gould played Bach,
which was much better than Fentanyl. He turned down the air conditioning and turned the music up loud, dropping his hand to the bag on the seat, fingers worming slowly through the mesh to touch the hair.

  They brought her what she needed, there in the workshop: they brought her her life. Plastic flowers, fraying t-shirts, rosaries made of shells and shiny gold; school pictures, wedding pictures, wedding rings, books; surprising how often there were books. Address books, diaries, romance novels, murder mysteries, Bibles; one man even brought a book he had written himself, a ruffled stack of printer paper tucked into a folding file.

  Everything to do with the boxes she did herself: she bought the lumber, she had a lathe, a workbench, many kinds and colors of stain and varnish; it was important to her to do everything herself. The people did their part, by bringing the objects––the baby clothes and car keys, the whiskey bottles and Barbie dolls; the rest was up to her.

  Afterwards they cried, some of them, deep tears strange and bright in the desert, like water from the rock; some of them thanked her, some cursed her, some said nothing at all but took their boxes away: to burn them, pray to them, set them on a shelf for everyone to see, set them in a closet where no one could see. One woman had sold hers to an art gallery, which had started no end of problems for her, out there in the workshop, the problems imported by those who wanted to visit her, interview her, question her about the boxes and her methods, and motives, for making them. Totems, they called them, or Rorschach boxes, called her a shaman of art, a priestess, a doctor with a hammer and an ‘uncanny eye.’ They excavated her background, old pains exposed like bones; they trampled her silence, disrupted her work and worst of all they sicced the world on her, a world of the sad and the needy, the desperate, the furious and lost. In a very short time it became more than she could handle, more than anyone could handle and she thought about leaving the country, about places past the border that no one could find but in the end settled for a period of hibernation, then moved to Eventide and points south, the older, smaller workshop, the bleached and decayed garage that a man with a bulldozer had kindly destroyed for her; she had made him a box about his granddaughter, a box he had cradled as if it were the child herself. He was a generous man, he wanted to do something to repay her although ‘no one,’ he said, petting the box, ‘could pay for this. There ain’t no money in the world to pay for this.’