In due course though, the screaming receded in volume, which made their progress easier, but sadly, once they reached the victim, she had passed from among the living without seeing their noble faces of rescue.
‘Poor soul,’ eulogized College as they stood in a moment of silence over her. ‘She was mad to the end…’
The fact that she happened to be Cleanah McRairie, the famous (and fabulous) billionaire philanthropist, was lost on them right now, nor were they in the least bit curious as to what the hell she was even doing here.
(She had actually been on site to inspect all its aspects for the feasibility of purchasing it, then flooding it, and establishing a wet-culture sanctuary for endangered sea puppies and other species, while offering mini-sub rides down to tour the sunken ‘civilization’ that had built the folly, as a sobering lesson in what not to do with the Earth’s structural gifts.)
‘So now our way is clear to exit, as our job is finished here,’ quoth Butterbugs.
With somber hearts, they covered the woman with a piece of shag carpeting found near the very edge of the precipice, and made their gloomy way upward.
Simultaneously, unbeknownst to Butterbugs, some nine hundred feet below from where they now made their bitter steps, super-mega-financier Mr. Weoka gave up his ghost after much physical trial. When the hedge fund emperor felt the dangerous objects come into contact with his wrinkly body, he was in Private Sex Gymnasium #4 on Minus-Floor 69, in appropriate S/M Receiver guise, voluntarily swallowing his fat transsexual dominatrix’s defecation directly at its source, as instructed.
There were many other significant casualties, as well. Though the population of the crustscraper was reduced to less than usual, over one thousand souls nevertheless were confronted with perishable conditions. Deukalion Smith and Loby Cruncheon did not make it out, and among the dead was also to be found, strangely, the mortal remains of Kettle Krep, former Mayor of Elko. Needless to say, scores of practically nameless staff, and persons of virtual indentured labor were to find Isaac Davis’ crustscraper to be their abiding tomb, most of whom were never to be located within the density of concrete mud now setting up, within an endless, crisscrossed tangle of tortured rebar and fiber optic lines.
The two trekked upwards. They felt a growing confidence that they were actually clearing the danger zone, and already formulating statements for the media, whom they knew lay awaiting. And between them, a bonding friendship automatically grew. Future fireside chats reviewing their adventure, and lectures in seismic breakthroughs were already in the planning stage, first at Butterbugs’ place, then at College’s. For the actor now wanted to immerse himself in the Dry Sciences, and looked forward to the PhD’s diffusion of his earth knowledge. Similar to his companion’s professional approach to today’s event’s outcome, the actor’s mind was awash with new ideas about a return to acting. He was even pondering a College Plerrie biopic, structured via flashbacks punctuated throughout the expository scenes, such as the very disaster they climbed and strived through at this very moment. Needless to say, Butterbugs himself would play ‘That Really Stupid Guy’.
Near the top (and certain relief), College Plerrie mis-stepped on a pile of Private Sex Gym bathmats that had been thrust up in the mad exhale of the crustscraper’s expiration. They covered the moody heights like mediæval shingles on a Prague tower’s turret, and looked solid enough.
‘Well now, oops…!’ the PhD ejaculated, and prepared to correct his ankle-twister with a deft choreographic step sideways.
It was indeed a fateful choice, as, Matterhorn-like, any climbable surface chanced to trick and subvert the untrained alpinist, so that even a Dougal Haston might be confounded into End Times, due to faintedness and sheer disbelief. It was no more than a matter of several millimeters, one way or another. The fact was, the move was not so much a mis-step as it was a hurried decision. But alas, it was on the wrong side.
The mat therefore became a teeter-totter, and the slant being what it was, it served to slough off the weight that was now borne upon it, dispensing the geologist in the undesirable direction of down, down, down.
‘So stupid. Really, so stupid…’ were the words of Plerrie’s analytical reaction to his latest gesture. Scientist that he was, the statement remained intact until it was properly delivered, regardless of the radical direction their speaker had taken.
‘I’m falling,’ was the speaker’s next pronouncement. ‘Yes, I’m falling now.’
Butterbugs looked down, aghast.
‘Oh, my holy, fucking…’
Though the geologist had some of the physique of the great mountaineer Reinhold Meisner, he lacked the skill to do the kind of key somersault necessary to land properly on a three-inch-deep ledge. Unlike Meisner, who’d pulled it off, all was lost, and he fell in ugly sequences on down to the remaining sheets of the Solarium roof.
Down. Way down.
It was over half an hour before Butterbugs was able to arrive at that accursed spot, and he made his way across the static plain to aid and comfort his unfortunate friend.
Indeed, the friend breathed yet! Except for a hideously gashed head, there was no overt sign of injury, but there was no movement either, except for eyelids that opened under pools of tears and lips that chanced to make words.
‘Here I lie! Here it ends as I thought it never would,’ College said in a strained croak. ‘In my quest for work, I answered the call in this morn’s light with sincerity and cheerfulness, and now I add my number to this sad, needless incident’s list of innocents!’
‘My dear fellow…!’ was all Butterbugs could say in reply.
‘Ah… I forgive you, Butterbugs! Oh yes, I do. As surely as my body has been broken by the bars of these here stricken remains, I care not to proceed with any sort of litigation holding you as liable for what has happened to me this day!’
‘College! College! Oh! Oh!’
‘Indeed, in our victory, I was going to, to… on – on bended knee, if you can believe it – humbly and apologetically thank you for the opportunities of this event on this… occasion. This – this – event! To be here, in unimaginable actuality! The flowering of my science! It was you, you, you! However horrendous, my dream was to make something instructive, something remonstrative – a great Precautionary Work to give to the world. As a warning… Oh! Help me! Hold me! I am slipping deeper…!’
‘College! Old College! No! Hold, geologist, hold! I hold! With all the power I possess! I am here! There may yet be hope! There is! I tell you, there is… hope…! Let us scan the skies for signs of rescue, whereby choppers making routine drug patrol passings might yet descend and haul us to safety, and you, first, to the surety of recovery! The date is not far off when we may dine and toast our survival of the ordeal we have lived and survived! Oh, how we will laugh and make merry, so as to reduce this unpleasantry to a mere jolly footnote, by which to amuse others through a livelong day! Oh, College, I want you there! I want it so much! And how I thank you, for bringing me to my senses, after such a dark night of the soul! Come now, let us adjourn to good company and good food and good drink! Oh, will you not join me? College, do you hear?’
‘In another world…’ College trembled with supreme pain and nameless fear, ‘we might have been friends! Friends for… life…! Friends for… ever…!’
Butterbugs could barely hold back his sobs.
‘Oh, dear and glorious geologist! Come now, let us go from this place! Let’s give it the old… ‘college’ try! Shall we, my good old egg?’
He laughed through his tears.
‘I’ll… I’ll try, sir!’
College gritted his teeth and made to soldier on, but his entire body was so blown, his systems so shattered, what remained of his life-frame wholly resembled the deep wreckage surrounding them. Several rumbles echoed from further down in the void, where gravitational settling had only just begun.
‘There’s a good old man!’
Butterbugs prepared, in all good faith, to ready College
for transport, whether to strengthen his standing, or to bear him on his back. But upon looking, with tender handling, he beheld a mass of newly-invertibrate flesh, still barely alive, rather than a vigorous man, used to striding from columnar basalt to abyssal cone, in geologic bliss.
Butterbugs sank to his knees, overcome by the loss that impatiently waited.
‘My guru of the Earth Sciences! I’ve so much to learn from you, yet! Will you impart of your knowledge, while we rest for a time, before we fly to refuge?’
The geologist was quiet, but not serenely so.
‘College! My companion! Stay close! I am here!’
‘Oh, curséd – dreary – sweven… It comes…’
‘College, really then? Oh, how I pray you feel no pain!’
‘Pain? What shall mere pain be, at the end? For it is the end! The pain I feel… Only that of my loss… And… my loss… to others…!’
The mandate of inexorable closure was painting the geologist’s cracked face ashen with approaching death.
‘And now, I… I cough up my tragic blood, as surely as I told you I might. Remembah?’
College tried an ironic laugh, but it only sounded like a prelude to the upcoming death rattle, as his træchea filled with hot, bubbling urgency.
Butterbugs’ vision became infused with blurry tears. The thousand death scenes he’d played in his former livelihood had hardly prepared him for this, life’s ultimate reality.
‘But,’ the geologist barely sputtered, ‘you are not the author of such blood that now witnesses this sorrowful daylight, nor could you have known of the raging irony by which I retreat from these living environs! Too soon! Against my will! Oh, my science, my rational, holy science… cannot take me further now. I lay it down and leave it, unfinished! And I am bereft.’
He drifted for a moment, and Butterbugs thought he was no more. But the feebling voice returned, accompanied by fluttering eyelids.
‘And to the other things… Tell my wife… that I blessed her name upon my expiration, and tell my little ones not to decry me in future, when the tale of my failures comes to their tender ears… My only consolation is that I perish by means of the land I have loved… The land, I tell you. Of rock and soil, though not of soil studies as applied to agriculture, but rather, the bedrock and all it supports, in this, my Southland… Oh, this then, this is what my very end shall be! Kiss me, new friend, for all of they who remain but cannot be summoned, even now… For you are the lone witness, the lone survivor… Kiss me, for we all shall never meet again…’
True to his word, a fount of ensanguined life-fluid pushed its way up College’s front passage, and leaked from the east–west extremities of his mouth, flowing toward the sea, thus concluding his farewell address.
It was a beautifully tragic death.
Butterbugs, whose cracked, concrete-y, and dust-laden lips drily came into brief contact with College’s domed forehead, which was lately encratered so that still late-living grey matter was exposed to the outer world, then stood tall and wept openly when he felt the impression of the man’s soul evacuate its destroyed carriage.
‘He died with high standards!’ mourned Butterbugs, addressing, in not quite a wail, the echoing void. ‘High! Do you hear?? And so too, by them he had lived; by the same creed – or so I assume. And know that his life has been wrapped up. Thus do I salute College Plerrie, PhD, geologist, good egg, and family man…!’
Leaving the corpse with the heaviest of hearts, the COO made his way back up to the chimney-vent of one of the pylons. Standing against the crazed blaze of the sunset, made lurid and bloody by a sudden up-charge of destruction that would beggar the imagination of any production designer, he was now able to truly absorb the great and terrible landscape. For the reality of such a disaster is not readily within the ken of creative minds, but might be more conceivable to persons with destructive tendencies.
Spectacle is reproducible on the screen, in all its intricacies, logistics, and pictoriality. The substance of such an experience is not so easily captured, however. Not yet.
He stood, and saw, and did what Howard Hawks would do right now: pan his camera for 360 whole degrees.
Ghastly grim!
Within this ancient-seeming colisevm of cataclysm, with its conclusive results now displayed in unutterable and excruciating detail, Butterbugs stood with only the darkling sky above, and, immediately, Kazi Nazrul Islam’s devastating lines from ‘Bhangar Gan’ forcibly occurred in his consciousness. Then he in fact began to whisper, the whisper rising to a mutter, the mutter rising to a dirge, the dirge rising to a call, in one immense symphonic downbeat, the call finally maturing into an actor’s recitation, the recitation rising to a stentorian memorial:
‘Smash the impenetrable iron gate of prison,
Demolish the bloodstained platform of stone and pain,
Where freedom lies chained in endless chain.
Oh, Ye! The Shiva of eternal youth,
Blow thy clarion of annihilation high,
Crush all barriers under the sky.
Fly in the ancient East,
Thy flag of ruin and destruction complete!’
There. He was an actor again.
And when his bleary eyes came to tilt down after the full scope of the horror had been scanned, there, on the grating that kept foreign objects from the deep ducting below, was an object of unique and sinister association.
A chair! The Chair of Isaac Davis himself! Or was it his… throne? From this seat, where his buttocks rested in times of edictal strategy and connivance, a good deal of the world might tremble, though not in the way that had caused this pillow of power to end up on this reef of woe. Vomited forth from the very depths by a blast of unknown and freakish nature, it lay on its side, trolley wheels intact, its Sooko leather merely covered with fly ash, with no gouges or scrapes at all. Unlike the miracle of a straw driven through a tree trunk by a tornado, or an earwig’s happy passage through a brain (without laying eggs), this chair – or throne – lay there, somewhat serene, and awaiting evacuation to some comfortable hotel or palace.
But Butterbugs was seized with a terrible rage as he beheld the inflated furniture. Why had it survived intact, while others had made supreme sacrifices of life and limb? Continuing the theme of scorn as described by College’s indictment of Davis’ audacious construction of this entire death machine, the chair mocked any who had failed to reach its level. And to he who had, there was only one thing to do.
If revenge were impossible, then the potential for some sort of avenging action, be it ever so impotent within this numbing miasma, now brought Butterbugs totally to his senses.
It was a wail of the ages that he now let out, in operatic tones that were still not adequate in order to express his grief and regret. However, it did serve to accompany his kicking into high physical gear, despite the depressive wimp-down that the COO role had burdened him with. Focusing entirely on the Davisian gadi of Empire, and its offensive status upon this safe harbor, the Actor returned to legitimate action and lunged at the leather symbol. He grasped it with a sort of turbo-powered resuscitative grippability, and embraced the chair, not with familial mission, but with necessary totality. A fight to the death, with an enemy at the closest of quarters. It was such a large piece that it required someone of recent refueled standing to seize, lock onto, and hoist said bulk without the aid of come-along or block-and-tackle. Butterbugs had neither at the moment, but both were rendered superfluous.
In the name of the late College Plerrie, PhD, he had it within him not only to take a hold of Isaac’s chair, he also found, further afield, the momentum to raise the item up, up, over his shoulders, over his dome, so that it formed a blot against the sunset, silhouetted and doomed, for there was only one possible direction for the chair to find its destiny, and Butterbugs, the lone discoverer, had duty in his heart and the will to see it through.
It was an awful scene, not resplendent with any soundstage conditions or anything more conducive to ci
nematic grandeur than the fading bars of muted color behind him, for when he pumped backwards with his arms and propelled the offensive remnant out into the emptiness, it was the principle of propriety that moved his joints, not filmic artifice or even opportunism meshing into gear.
However, caveat to nobility though it was, there was yet marked cinematographic artistry to be employed at that moment. Cued by the emergency coverage on certain media outlets, the enterprising and loyal Arthur Miller, ace lenser that he was, rushed to the scene with a VistaVision crew, who, perched on five key coverage points, nevertheless captured the entire incident, not to mention the quaking whole itself, with widescreen and fine-grain Eastmancolor stock, expertly managed with lens selection and zoom, skillfully-placed reflectors casting some semblance of color and dimension to the subjects at hand, on film comfortably ensconced in elephant-ear magazines, for posterity and for truth.
Now that the very bottom of the shaft – at least a thousand feet distant – had been rent by the utter shattering of the edifice’s superstructure, it was exposed to the sky for the first time. Therefore, the coast was clear, providing a solemn and final descent for the chair in a single drop, fated to make a corporate jab at the Board Room, itself newly entombed in manmade detritus, so effectively delivered. The great abyss awaited, eager to correct all error with inarguable natural law.
In various shots of the footage, Butterbugs is a tiny figure, the only thing alive in the growing shadows, but perfectly positioned to have a last ray of horizontal sun painted on his arms with a thin yellow tint. The same color is cast upon the chair, and incredibly, because of a key grip’s professional intuition, the use of a reflector panel allows the falling item to still remain in light, strongly differentiating it from the black backdrop of ruin on its way down.
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