by Nick Mamatas
And that memory, that milestone of the self, I lived it again sitting on a puddle in the middle of a haunted sewer, lived every forgotten tear and chilly leaf, then typed it up on the Underwood in my mind, cranked the paper out of the carriage, crumpled it up into a little ball, and then threw it away. A fiction, memory coated with details from books and the demands of drama. That's me, Jack Duloz, Jack The Louse. Away.
And without self I stood up, my butt soaked with black sewer water, and walked again towards the huffing and yelping and mad gangster giggling ("heh heh heh heh heh." Edward G. Robinson discovers bennies) with open hands and an open heart.
The purple rose of dusk dimmed the light from the sewer gratings over my head as I turned the final corner and saw Allen. In the splash light of a fallen flashlight, he was buggering some young man, the cat bent over and his curls shaking with each of Allen's thrusts. They were both making the noises, girly and squeaking like old shoes. I'd never quite gotten the etiquette on interrupting homosexual sodomy before, so I just walked up to the pair, looked Allen in his (squinting, ecstatic) eyes and asked just what the hell was going on.
"The" he said, then huffed. "Whole." Another huff. "City." Two thrusts, the boy with the curls grunted, "is--"
"Okay! Stop and just tell me! Send the boy away!" I turned my back on the pair. I heard some shuffling, bumping and zipping up, then footfalls scrambling away up a ringing ladder. I turned back to see Allen there, licking his fingers and dabbing his thick eyebrows, "Really Jack, I'm sorry. You know, I have a problem. A compulsion, it's like a disease, a sickness in me. I can feel it squirming around my spine."
"Not you. Them," I told him, glancing up towards the ceiling, towards The City. I would as soon forget the whole nasty business.
Allen shrugged. "You saw it didn't you? The faces, empty or insectoid. They can't see it. A couple of . . . friends, have even been institutionalized for insisting that they see the mugwumps. The more straitlaced a person is, the greater the transformation, the deeper they bow to the Dark Dreamer," he said, and bowed low himself, his hands fluttering.
I opened my mouth to say something, to just tell Allen to shut the hell up already and tell me where Neal was going, but he interjected, "It is actually pretty amazing, who hasn't fallen to the Cult of Utter Normalcy, really. The local state assemblyman is a good guy. Must be the time he puts in brainstorming with his constituents down at the--"
"Stop," I said, almost angry, almost full of attachment and desire, but then I smiled. "I understand. So, you're going to hold down the fort here?"
"Spread the madness! Larry's out of town, so is Neal. After he got out of the joint, he . . . changed. I mean, the man's still fine, still crazy. He just got old." Allen slumped down onto his haunches, "We all got old, man. All except you. He's off to Nevada to go open a gas station." Allen nearly spit, "Damn, he wants to support his kids. The rugrats he calls 'em! Rugrats, Jack!" I let Neal's rugrats wash over me, then took a step and walked past Allen.
"Nevada. Sodom in the American desert. Gas and hot air. What's the lure, the filthy lucre? I mean, Neal, damn, he can't have gone straight," Allen said behind me. "Jack?" I turned and looked at him, hunched over like a bridge troll, his marionette string shadows playing on the curved wall behind him. His flashlight was burning orange and weak now, like the dimming light of the world. I knew he wasn't going to be moving tonight. Maybe he had a pocketful of pills to keep him up and frantic in the dark, maybe he'd sleep in his own piss or jerk it all night 'til he was bleeding, just to keep from joining the mass of maggots topside on the rotten flesh of town.
"You need any money?" he asked. The tainted money. The cursed money that the Lord's own rats had thankfully chewed to pieces before I stepped on the road again. Money chained Neal to the road, to a pipe dream leading to a roadside filling station in Nevada when he was needed here to fend off the inky darkness.
"No, I own the entire world already," I told him, and I reached into my pocket and tossed him the little crowbar he'd lent me before. I took to the nearby ladder, pushed the manhole cover open with my head and shoulder, then slipped out on the dark and slick streets again. Like the back of a beached whale, nice and slick and curving towards the depths. Ah, it was just another hill in a damn town full of them, but without a lick of traffic. A century of Mother Earth flexing her black and fiery muscles to throw this town off her back hadn't been enough of a hint, so she called in Bigger Brother for reinforcements, and The City just wasn't big enough for the three of us. I looked up again, looked up at the moon, a flaming silver half-lidded eye. He was a big one, the kind of fat schoolyard bully who likes pulling legs off spiders just because little round nubs are more interesting looking than graceful stilt-legs. I stood there for a long time, my neck craned upwards in a staring contest. Tentacles thick as buildings shifted in and out of the fog, pouring from Cthulhu's chin and stretching out from the sea, brushing the tops of buildings and then reaching out all across this gray land. Go East young man, catch me if you can. But oh I can. My heart was a metronome; I'd sweated out the Benzedrine in Big Sur and calmed my nerves with the tart juice of the juniper berry in sweet, decayed Frisco. The last good bite of rotten fruit. I'd left the ghost of old Gerard in the underworld, along with sick Allen and his last pair of stained slacks. I put out a thumb and by the force of Buddha's palm, a truck stopped for me. Without a word I stepped up and slid into the cab, slammed the door behind me and we drove off, into the depths of America.
CHAPTER FIVE
The best thing about riding with a trucker like Ed was his ready supply of solid laughs and a glove box full of bennies. He was taking them by the handful and not bothering with the Coke he held between his knees. "Both hands on the road, eat the yelleh line all up," he said over and again. Ed wouldn't take the new interstates being slapped up; he said that there were too darn many moon rockets being hustled left and right on wideload trailers. "They say they're fer the Reds, heck, they say the rockets don't even exist, but if you see 'un, it's fer to blow up the Reds, but I know betteh. Rockets to the moon. Sekrit bases on the fahr side of it. I see 'em firin' in the desehrt," he said, not once or twice, but every time he took a handful of bennies and chased them with nothing more than the swirling cheekload of saliva.
Me, I drank my share of Cokes and swallowed enough diet pills that I forgot all about California. I don't remember much except for sweaty dreams of missiles firing in the night until we hit Highway 99. The windshield and cab both (Ed liked to drive with the windows open, though he cursed the wind and splattered bugs) looked like Araby from the dust and sand. Ed handed me a hot apple and I bit into it with relish. My hair hurt from being blown so hard.
"Hey," he yelled. "Going all the way to Montana!"
"Nah!" I told him for the third time or so. "Just to a filling station round here."
"That one good?" he said and nodded to an oasis right off the side of the road, six pumps and a restaurant that looked to be named EAT. But the pump handles and hoses had been removed and storefront windows had been shattered and stood agape like the mouth of a toothless old codger. Like Ed's own mouth.
"I'm looking for one that hasn't been built yet," I said nice and loud, and we both laughed. "How 'bout that one!" Ed cried and pointed to a scraggly bush on the opposite side of the highway. "Or that one!" and his finger whirled. "I'll stop right now!" Both canned-ham hands were back on the huge steering wheel now, and Ed hopped in his seat, jumping on the brake; the truck stuttered with his stupid enthusiasm, "Here," and I jerked in my seat, "or here!" and another jerk, "Or how about here!" and the jerk next to me jerked suddenly too and smacked his paunch into the rim of his steering wheel. Then he leaned back and drove on like he wasn't a jittering freak at all, but just some salt of the earth fellow bringing ottomans to Montana and coffee tables to California, all part of some crazy living room algebra.
"How long you been driving this rig, Ed?" I asked. I smelled something acrid and ashy like a campfire of garbage, the clutch a bit burn
t maybe.
"Three weeks. Three weeks Friday." I laughed so loud and he joined me. I couldn't take my eyes off of him. Then he stopped and explained that only a month ago he'd been selling siding, aluminum siding. He'd worked his way up from the crew that'd actually wrap homes in the stuff; he had a good eye and a steady hand, and even better, a wide jack-o'-lantern smile and a nervous tic. The tic, Ed demonstrated, was a spasm in the neck, it made him tilt his head and wink and smile wide as the prairie for a second of thick white teeth. Whenever he said something like "Howdy" or "Friday" Ed would have this friendly little spasm, the kind of freak folksy smile that made me want to hand him the shirt off my back, and my pants too.
"So I was really good at sellin' sidin'," Ed explained, his face twitching in robot warmth at the word "really" and oh yes I knew he was really good at selling siding. "But the bosses wanted me to sell more and more, every day," (twitch twitch twice in a row there). "They gaymee a script. It said 'really' and 'very' and 'pardon me' and 'today' and all sorts of other words that set off mah tic.
"But it done gone set off too much and mah face froze," and he turned to me with his wild smile and wink, a face that forgot to fade back to human proportions. The skin across his face was stretched across the bones and bunched up by his right eye. His smile was wide, too wide, like some tough in a bar had taken a knife to Ed's cheek and left a big flapping scar from lip to ear. He held the look for a long time (good thing the road was mostly empty, I could feel the truck drifting across lanes) and then turned away. "Scared the shit outta alla us. It was stuck lahk that for a month or more. But the boss took money outta his own pocketbook and sent me to the doctehr, and he fixed me up. Long needles and ointments and it worked."
"And then they fired you, Ed? Why would they spend all that money on you just to let you go?" I asked him.
"Nah. When I got back to the office, boss didn't want it tah happen again. So he kept me in tah office and I sold sidin' over the phone. But folks just plum stopped buyin'. The boys in tah bullpen were real sorry to see me go though. They said they lahked mah face." And he smiled again, this time for real, a relaxed smile fueled by the joy of the road. He took a hand off the wheel and idly passed his palm and twitching fingers over the dash, looking to corral some wayward pills.
As the day drifted into afternoon I began to worry a bit as so many of the Highway 99 roadside diners and truck stops seemed to be closed. We'd barely crossed the state line by my reckoning, but already some of the little roadside establishments were boarded up; others seemed open at first but as Ed slowed we saw that their windows were darkened, pumps locked, parking lots home only to weeds growing into brush. I didn't want to dip into a town yet, not if even Frisco was set to fall to the demon in the sky.
I remembered too many old towns from my trips with Neal back in the fifties, back when the little burgs of ol' 99 were still half-mad with freedom. One ville I'd never even wrote about broiled away under the Nevada sun, little more than a scattering of buildings around a chain link fence factory. They didn't do anything themselves down in little Compassion, Nev. All the food was trucked in, all the trucks were stuffed with government cash and miles of fencing on the way out, but when sun set and weeks ended, the whole town went a little wild. Old men drove their creaky Models A Fords in crazy eights around the town square. Girls and guys both thumped on iron drums and whooped it up on their porches. On the edge of town, Neal and I saw lizards and brown mice scattering like they'd been called by a Pied Piper playing "Anywhere but Here." Neal kicked at them as we walked past the one lamppost in town and into the weekend bacchanal. Party was religion, between Friday at five and Monday at nine. I even got a day job at one of the bars, lifting drunken managers and linemen up firemen style, walking them across town and dumping the bodies out by the factory gates for a splash of cold water from the foreman's bucket. The mayor paid me off personally, with his wife's pie, plus a handful of old silver dollars and a great and loving handshake.
They don't make towns like that anymore.
Our ribbon of highway was a long stretch of nothing, except for a little wrinkle. A tent, a folding table and an old convertible, and a hill of dirt in the shade. I nudged Ed and asked him to please pull over, and even before he brought the truck to a complete stop, I was out the open passenger-side door, shouting, "Neal! Neal! It's me Jack! Hey Neal! C'mon out!"
And out of the dirt pile he walked, legs and arms loose and swinging. I hopped out of the cab and tumbled to my knees. Neal was already on me, dusting off my pants and shoulders, "Jack! Jack, old chum, old bean, old buddy! It's been--"
He stopped and looked away from me, shifty-eyed. Then he turned back, flashing me a grifter's smile. "It's been a long while! How's the book going? Did you get my letters? I still have a bunch of yours." And he ran behind me and both hands on my shoulders started hustling me towards the little tent. "You need to meet my partner too." I turned to Ed. He was out of the cab and urinating on his front tires, for luck or at least for lack of another place to politely let it fly.
So I ducked under the flapping tent roof (the walls were rolled up to better fling dirt away) and noticed a shallow little hole, some maps on a card table and a man snoozing alongside the freshly dug ditch. He had wavy hair, the kind that looks windblown before the wind even starts up, and cheap glasses. One arm was tossed casually outside the shade of the tent and had tanned into a bright gold. Neal woke him up by kicking a bit of dirt on him. "Hey Nelly, Jack is here." Nelly just smiled and nodded though, not bothering even to pop open one eye and give me a gander. I liked that about him, actually.
"So! Let me tell you everything!" Neal started. "God, chronologically. No, too long and ridiculous, in order of importance." He flung out a hand and gestured like a Broadway producer. "This! Is! Your! Last! Chance!" He waved both arms, almost ready to fly. "It's a filling station! You know, I almost called it On The Road filling station, but I thought that might get me into trouble, you know, with your publishers. It'd bring the girls in though--it's amazing how many of them drive past here after they give up their Hollywood dreams." His arm was back around my shoulder, and he turned me back towards the road and waved his hand again in a feverish attempt to transform Ed's long-winded piss against his piss-poor truck into an opium dream of chicks in cars, all smiles and cat-eyed sunglasses, here to ball.
"Neal?" I asked him. "Wouldn't this be the first chance gas station from California's point of view?" And he laughed, that old powerful laugh. The laugh that made him the center of the world once upon a time, and he turned again and shouted over his shoulder, "Hey Nelson, you were right!" If Nelson responded, it wasn't with his voice or body.
"Is that guy okay?"
"Oh yeah--he's been doing most of the digging. I'm more of the idea man. I'm going to make this an A-1 roadside attraction. Hang out here all week, pumping a little gas, maybe helping a motorist in distress or three, then Friday at five, I'll hang up the Closed sign, then roar back into LA. Maybe head on up to the city. Nelson can watch the place on Mondays even, if I'm too hungover or if my babies need me."
"Babies, eh? Are you still with--" I'd forgotten her name. She had had a hang-dog look about her. "Nah," Neal said, before she even came to me. He knew he was far beyond whomever it was I remembered. "I want to settle though. You know, being kept in stir does a number on a body sometimes." He looked up at me again and then his face exploded into yet another smile, this one a warm smile, a grin from his boozy little heart. "You're here!" he said, realizing it for the first time. Then he looked up at the sky, "Boy's really something. Looked like something I scooped up in a net once, when I was down in Baja." I just looked at his chin, flat as an iron. He was shaved utterly clean, the veins in his neck still blue under pasty, pimpled skin. Neal hadn't been out here for long.
Ed in his foghorn voice said, "Hey thyeah, Jack. Ahr yer comin' along or is this tah spot?" I nodded and trotted up to him. We slapped hands, his still sweaty from the slick wheel of his truck, mine cold, tingly. Neal was
a little off, somehow. Time and distance and a sky full of madness (and as I shook Ed's hand, I saw Neal was peering up at the sky, not in fear or in wonder, but seemingly in communion. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, like he used to do for Allen's poetry back in New York) had done a little something to him, I wasn't sure what. Once Ed rode off, his truck growling like a fat old dog, I walked back to Neal and looked up too. The tentacles were seemingly right overhead, black and translucent at the same time, and swirling, ever swirling and knitting into one another as they spewed out of a central vortex, a black pit of tiny red stars.
All of this, like some psychedelica splashed over the plain blue and white sky as if from an overhead projector.
"Do you see the constellation?" he asked me, or he asked the sky itself. I just got a look at his nervous, bobbing Adam's apple. "They're alive, you know. The stars. Swirling in infinity. They are the infinity really; they just seem like little sparkles from here, but this planet it just a pebble swimming in between the stars, the matrix." He didn't look at me, but Neal changed his tone, he got all friendly, the Dale Carnegie way. "Jack, you ever draw a connect-the-dots page. You know, of an elephant balancing on one stumpy leg on a platform, and a big beach ball on his tusk. I tell you Jack, connect the dots up there." He smiled, I could see it in the twist of his cheeks, but he was still leaning back, head up, trying to see the whole swirling, dreamy sky at once. "Go on Jack. Keep looking up. Connect the dots. Chaos at the center of the universe. That's all it is you know."
"Neal, c'mon," I said and I stepped forward. Too late already, I thought, my last chance blown. I wanted to tackle him, shove his face back in the dirt, God help me, remind him of his kids if I had to. But Neal heard my footfalls stomping in the sand and he snapped his head back to me, "Don't you see, the country, maybe the world is going mad again! I'll have something to write about." And I laughed.