by Nick Mamatas
A giggle at first, half-nervous, half-hysterical. "You know," Neal said, "the plane of the earth is becoming non-Euclidean. Jack, we're an hour from Denver now, Jack. Tomorrow we'll be four thousand miles from the same city. Remember Denver? Remember the black mountains that looked like clouds?" He hiked his thumb behind his shoulder, and I looked over at what he was pointed at. Yep, mountains like angry clouds, or the shadow of the Great Dreamer.
"Fuck, Neal, what happened to Colorado? Did it get bigger? Did we get bigger?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. What do you think, Jack?" More grift, more unctuous flimflam, asking me. "Let's go eat on it." And off he walked before I could say yes. I was carried off in his wake back to the tent where he told Nelson, "We're driving up to Mom's. Bring you back a sandwich?"
Nelson stirred, barely. "Rule number one, never eat at a place called Mom's."
Neal turned and smirked, "He says that every day."
"And don't play poker with a man named Doc," Nelson said before drifting back to his little opiate sleep.
And don't drive across country into a maelstrom of shifting sands, deadly cities full of slavemen and snickering queers, along highways lined with drunken babblers and ghost trains, all under horrible bright blue skies with a guy named Neal. We took the car, and on the way to the diner Neal told me of his own brush with the primordial beings, with the demon Kilaya. He didn't get the girl (surprisingly enough, Mary wouldn't stay a virgin around Neal) but instead one of the demon's original forms. A man, Mongloid but muscled, from the torso up. Waist down, Neal said, nothing but knife. Neal was in Mexico, he said ("I went out to get some milk for the kids. It took me six weeks."), and saw the spirit out in the wild brown of some dead field, scratching out a path with the tip of his body-blade. "It was us, Jack," Neal explained, giggling, "our trips, the way we stitched this country together. It was a message, a sign and a portent, a telegram from God. And then he whispered in my ear." And then Neal whispered in my ear, and it wasn't the sutra that Marie had buzzed before. Neal had received a darker teaching.
He had walked down to the whirling spirit, and not knowing what else to do, bowed down to it. And in the now slowly spinning blades, Neal saw himself. Two reflections, one on each side of the blade. The first good ol' Neal, slick hair, sparking eyes and a voice like a monk's flittering flute. But as Kilaya spun, the sinister side of the dagger showed another image; Neal sallow and deflated, gray skin stretched over deformed, spiked bones. Lips gone, replaced with a huge slash of jagged skin showing off jaws and gums. But in that horrible petrified rictus of a face, power. The phantom Neal's eyes glowed and pulsed with it, his tongue long as snakes and thrashing, ready to kill. And able to kill as well, with a word, with an alien syllable mere humans can't even dream of pronouncing. Neal could do it; he birthed a generation, he could kill a generation--all he had to do was bind himself to the black and squirming chaos in the sky.
"But," Neal said, his face alight, painted orange by the slowly setting sun. "But that wasn't a warning, Jack, it was a promise. Like Kilaya learned compassion and turned to the protection of the dharma, I can. That's why it was sent rather than some other bodhisattva, some old man or baby. The world's changing again, there's power in the skies. We should grab some, use it. Call your big New York agent for me Jack, when we get to a pay phone. Use a whole burlap sack full of quarters if you have to, because we're going to rewrite the world." And with that, we were at Mom's.
The man with the golden arm was right, Mom's was awful. Brown cherries in the pie, gray vanilla ice cream and flickering lights. Mom's had a jukebox filled with old white jazz 78s, long since warped from the sun and the sealed tin diner atmosphere itself. The speakers sang like weird and distant whales, even the clarinets were deep and made the floor rumble and whine. Neal was drawing a symbol in pepper and salt. "Yin and yang. You can't play the notes without the rests, as you well know." And he placed a pinch of pepper over a tear drop shape of salt. "Sometimes attachment can be best conquered through excess. Remember my letter? The bit about the girl on that bus from, damn, what was it, fifteen years ago now? The little perfect virgin on the bus. The way I blew past all the small talk and chitterchat, the way I made sure she was meat for me. A little pink rosebud between her sweaty thighs."
"Wait, I thought you didn't get that girl."
He snorted, "I didn't!" and the symbol of the Tao collapsed in a burst of sandy condiments. I wiped my hands with a napkin. "But I owned the wanting of it, of her. That was enough; I was dejected back then, and of course found another girl a couple of days later," he said as the girl with his bacon sandwich found him and he smiled at her. "But now I am not. The seeking is the thing, not the getting, you know?" I didn't, really. "So," Neal said, "I think I should give myself over to the Dark Dreamer, and then, bound to that power, I can use it to protect reality from the on-rushing chaos overhead. Embrace the threat, it vanishes. Resist it, and it remains." He shoved the corner of his sandwich into his mouth lustfully, and spoke through the crunching. "I'll be a dharma protector" is what I thought he said. So I said, "What did you say?" and he swallowed like a snake and said, "I'll be a dharma protector."
He leaned across the Formica table like a guy reaching over for a kiss from his teenybopper girlfriend. All that was missing was the shake. "Look at me, Jack. I know you have the gift too. The jazz. I didn't even write my letters in Earth characters, Jack. You never would have been able to read them otherwise. If you didn't have the jazz in you. Look at me, friend. Is there any trace in me? Yeah, I want to settle down, but I'm no mugwump." He wrapped his long fingers around his own throat. "This neck has never felt the noose of a tie."
"I really don't think that qualifies you for bodhisattva status," I told him. Neal's eyes were placid like frozen lakes.
He nodded. "No!" An upraised finger, one of those queer little gestures Neal learned from some cementheaded correctional officer in reform school. One finger could shut up a room of tough little snots. He wagged his index finger at me, and it had a callus. His little Underwood typewriter must have tasted some blood too, when he wrote his letters. "Not yet! But that's the journey, right? A cross-country trip through chaos and cultists, that will be the initiation. We'll see the old, the crippled, the dying, the corrupted twisted man-animals who call themselves Ned and all their bowling league buddies too.
"Jell-O molds. Have you ever seen this stuff?" He grabbed the sides of the table and shook it. My slaughtered cherry pie filling jiggled, and crumbs tumbled and spun in little orbits on the plate. I saw a hair in the mess (great) but Neal was the really disturbing thing. "Gelatin, like bloody cranberry sauce. Everyone's eating the stuff. My kids, Jack! They feed it to my kids in school!" He relaxed and slid his hands across the chrome rim of the table, back towards his own side. "I had to leave, ya know? I just had to recapture the old magic." Then he looked out the big window. "Nobody needs to buy gas around here anyway."
"Nobody but us." There was silence then, except for the popping and buzz of the giant neon MOM'S sign on the other side of the ceiling.
Finally Neal said, more thoughtfully than I ever heard him (and it was sad, when even he felt the need to think before acting rather than just diving on in, a pure spirit), "Maybe it's not so bad. Is it really any worse than what happened before? People killed themselves for reasons just as foolish. People go to work, stuff themselves full of meat, get down on their knees and wail before something or other, crap out babies from bloody crotches, then feed the worms." He turned to me with his old smile, "Is it even any different? We're back, looking for--" And he stopped, tongue out, eyes twisted up thinking, finally like a writer, about what would be the perfect word. "--further. And nobody else is anymore."
"Yeah," I said, slow. Neal was just a bit too off. He could see things I couldn't, he knew things I didn't, and he was trafficking with dark spirits it seemed. The road was mine, this country and this trip were still mine, but those places between the spaces, the breathless vacuum between atoms of air, those al
l belonged to Neal, that's what the little Marie-buzz in my ear told me then. "Not so different, not yet. But once we get back on the road, I think there may be problems."
And with that, it began. The earth rumbled. Glassware and forks sang like a terrified little Greek chorus. The horizon exploded in pillars of flame. Rockets, sleek and curved, like the sketch of a torso, flew up into the purple sky, slow but furious. Dust devils marched and whirled like an army of goblins across the landscape, blind, mad, tumbling into one another, all-consuming and all obscuring, except for the shafts of white hot flame. The far side of the diner was shaking now as the missiles went up in a row, like stair-steps to heaven in the distance. The poor jukebox, already a hothouse of abused jazz, just couldn't take it. The scratchy warbles of the downbeat sped up, sputtered and finally screamed, then stopped, skipping in mid-terror, like a hyena or cinderblocks scraped on their corners against a steel-grated killing floor.
"Ed was right. Like the Tower of Babel, they want the moon. They have no idea what they'll draw down from the heavens, do they?" Neal answered by pushing my napkin into my lap. His he wrapped around his face like an old movie desperado and stood up purposefully, a man about to rob a bank, or at least demand a loan from one. I followed him out of the diner and into the dust storm just as the lights at Mom's went out. The juke croaked out a final goodbye.
Outside we waded through the dust; mostly it just played in whirlpool waves about our shins. Neal stumbled, but I snagged him, and tossed him back up against the wind. Together we made the car and just fell over the doors and into the dusty seats. Neal hadn't put the roof up, but I pulled it up as he tried the choke and after a few minutes of yanking and losing and getting smacked in the face by wind and tarp, I got the old clam shell down. Neal got her going like a purring kitten and wiped down wheel and dash with his napkin. He whipped mine right off my jaw and smacked the dust off the seat with it. Then he stopped and stared straight past the pitted windshield into the shifting sands.
"I think we forgot to pay," he said. The car groaned and tilted to the right, nudged by wind.
"Drive," I said and Neal said where and I said, because America had to be remade and reset, the needle of her hot five jazz record placed on the very first grove again, "Go east young man."
And he did, full speed ahead on a wake of sand, more sideways than forwards, bumping and lurching while the motor grumbled like it was full of marbles, till we found highway again. Then the tires kissed asphalt hard like a well-paid whore and we were off, beyond the wind and sand. In the mirrors, though they were cracked and jagged, we could see them though. Moon rockets in each glass facet, climbing the jewel of the sky. Dozens of them, leaving scorched dead earth behind.
Book Two
CHAPTER SIX
The earth contracted, then expanded again like the belly of a fat and snoring old hobo under a leaky roof. We drove half-blind through Utah, the few miles there were left of it, driving even through the steam that billowed from the red-hot hood of Neal's jalopy. The state was a horrible void of clapboard towns we flew past, cracked alkali flats and squirming horrors only we could see above. The Black Dreamer filled every inch of our vision, tentacles glinting under the moon, mountainous talons sinking deep into the sands off the side of the highway. There wasn't even room for shadow to fall so Neal and I just kept our eyes on what we could see of the yellow line of the highway. When the car was about to fail, Neal cut the wheel hard, sending us into a screaming skid half a mile long. We stopped finally, blocking both lanes of the road. Then Neal got out into the cold night and plopped himself on the hood. It was hot; I could smell the hair on his arms burning, but he snuggled into it and took a single breath. With the exhalation the pain and pressure were all gone, his long nose and ears even relaxed, dropping a bit. Damn we got old somewhere along the line. But Neal was resting like a babe, an opiate smile painted across his face with a single joyous smack of a God's brush against blank canvas. Me, I just stood there shivering in the dark while Neal warmed himself up on the steaming Detroit steel of his car.
It was a huge station wagon that came upon us. It rolled up and stopped about twenty feet from us, idling a low growl, and flashed its brights. I put up a hand and squinted. Neal just smiled on, his eyes closed, his hands in his lap, gentle as flowers. The figures in the car, there were at least four, they didn't move at all. I don't know if they were expecting us to move or just to fall over like cardboard cut-outs, but they were pretty patient. Whiskers of smoke still snaked out of the grille and did a little dance in the aura of the bright lights. Then they spilled out the doors of the wagon and rushed up to me. Still stupid, I waved my arms and said "Hey!" just as the first one, a fellow in black slacks and the most neatly pressed white shirt I'd ever seen, barreled into my stomach. I punched him off, but he hung on to my arm. I kicked, but another guy (same sort of neat shirt) was already there, down low, grabbing at both my feet. One of my shoes flew off. They worked together real well; the first two were just there to take my punches, punches that were too weak from booze and buzz anyhow. It was the big guys from the backseats who really laid into me with big smacking fists. Then firecrackers went off and the biggest one, a monster with pit stains on his shirt, went dead. The others dropped me and howled "Elder, Elder!" and swarmed about the big man, so concerned and worried like babes that they didn't even see that they were bleeding. I stumbled back and from the corner of my eye saw Neal carefully fit a few more bullets into a revolver, aim and fire into the akimbo arms and legs of the suits. Then he slid off the hood and ambled up to the bodies that just weren't quite dead. They groaned a bit. The biggest of them at the bottom of the heap burbled and whispered to the blood in his mouth from beyond the veil.
"Why did they attack me? Were they cultists?"
Neal shrugged. "Either cultists or Mormons. They knew how to work together at least." He laughed. "Maybe they were missionaries! Ha ha, you almost got you some religion, Jack!" I stole a look at Neal. He was haggard and worn but full of static electricity; there were twin spirits in him, like two sides of a dagger, tussling and playing and swapping old stories as they plotted their own little adventure. I was just ballast somehow, I felt, and that made me want to wail.
"You just shot them, in cold blood," I said, trying my best to keep my voice from cracking. I had a big old bruise buried between two ribs from the beating, so it was hard enough to talk anyways.
"I shot 'em in hawt blood!" he said, shouting up at the sky. And he fired again, into the mass of slithering sky. "Speaking of blood, look into the puddle. I'm gonna put our stuff in the wagon. We got to hit Colorado soon as we can." And I looked into the puddle and saw four little souls, masses of cotton candy strands whirled into tiny baby faces, drowning in the black blood. It sizzled against the chilly asphalt.
Without a word Neal made three trips between cars, even loading extra gas from his trunk into the wagon, then got behind the wheel and waited for me. It took me a while, and not just because I had a few pings and bumps, to get up to the door of the car and slide in next to Neal. I watched the four little souls, so moral and clean, shrivel and bubble away in the muck, 'til they were nothing but pinprick stars. Then I got in, and in a dull, throbbing exhaustion, fell asleep while staring at the yellow line of the highway.
I woke in Denver two days later. We were holed up in Larimer Street and when I finally blinked awake, Neal was gone. Out catting and exploring, probably, rousing the same old hell that fell to rest back when I dragged him out of here years before. Two whores (unpimped, friends of Neal, probably, but we spent two days together in a big old bed) fed me tea and slippery sardines from a dented tin. My head was throbbing and mouth full of ghostly cotton. Every once in a while one of the girls would slide into bed with me, and curl on up. They were so smooth and milk-fed though, Lurlene and Sarah, with curves like warm winter pillows, that my poor bruised body didn't complain.
Lurlene was a quiet type, a dime novel prostitute, windblown and hardbitten in the face, but with
a smile for a raggedy man new in town, and Sarah the bubbly one with long curls. She's the one who whispered to me that Denver had gone mad with an otherworldly fever. Obscene blasphemies with naked bloated businessmen and pear-shaped women, their hips and thighs lined with varicose blue lightning, on the steps of the mint, the marble stairs running red with blood. Girls held down and raped in the schools, up against the lockers, not by the boys who are forced to kneel and watch, dicks limp and tucked between their legs, but by the principal, and the black-robed town fathers. The wind tasted of acid and coal dust all the time now because the men of the town--not because they were slaves, but because they all got the idea at once--marched to the outskirts and starting digging. First picks, then roaring dynamite for twenty-four hours a day, digging deep under ground. The night shift rolled through the streets during the day on chicken and hay trucks, shouting for death and the hungry embrace of tentacles.
"And we're landlocked, sugar," she murmured. "These boys have never even seen a tentacle." She had though, back in Chicago, where she was from. The girl was a spontaneous Freudian. She saw I was getting agitated, fired up to take to the streets and do something stupid, some ridiculous glorious act of futility, so she just stroked my hair and kissed my forehead and told me about Greektown, and the little salads she'd get for free from the hairy men with wide smiles and eyebrows thick as shrubs. That's where she'd take her beaus too, back when she lived on the cusp of her old secretarial job and her new gig as very reliable company, and she'd order salads for herself, and for her man. And they'd come, little purple tentacles, all coated with tiny kissing suckers peeking out under lettuce leaves and vinegar-soaked feta cheese, in clear bowls with a leafy design etched onto the glass. And if the boy looked all confused and said, "Well, how do you keep the suckers from sticking to your cheeks?" she'd just smile and say, "You don't. They stick, but just a little," and eat a big forkful of the stuff.