by Nick Mamatas
And she did that for months, waiting for some man to just eat the salad without making a fuss, and when she couldn't find one, she left Chicago and came down here for a new life, trying to find a real man or two. "You're a real man, Jack," she told me. I laughed (ah, and that hurt my ribs, even up against Sarah's soft body) and said that she should have just dated one of the waiters at the restaurant.
Neal came in occasionally, sometimes with hangers-on. Beats with wiry beards, young kids in Levi's, and girls, almost always a girl, some of them even wearing blue jeans or all black like bad college poets. They'd mutter and talk and compare notes while I drifted between reality and dreamland, where shoggoths still lurked with Marie's face. I never jolted myself awake before the animated ichor of their limbs--a foul discharge both solid and liquid at the same time--wrapped themselves round me, but Neal was always at my bedside on time to prod me awake or cackle and attract my blurry gaze. He always smelled like booze now, the cheap gin and rum of the biker and down-and-out miner. "Jack, you simply must see the outside world. It's like a thing alive and growing, changing every day. Bloody and screaming, like a newborn or a gook in a rice patty, I couldn't even tell you which. Tonight though, the grim survivors of this alien regime are gonna have a party. You're the guest of honor, Jack, so I hope you make an attempt to sit up if you can. All the arrangements are in hand though, and everyone is looking so forward to meeting you. You're a light unto the dharma, they say. I've gotten Lord knows how many drinks and invitations for a quiet little roll on a creaky mattress thanks to the book. You're destined to be the biggest thing to hit this town since the Rockies!" Then he'd dash out again, talking to himself instead of to me, about how he needed to go to one end of Capitol Hill and make this girl, then come back round the block to meet with some Veiled King and yipping army of man-bats. How he'd need to find a blood-filled bone horn to summon the goblin legions who would carry him in a sedan made of the ribs of babes to the hidden onyx-paved roads that led to the temple of The Blasted One. What can you say but "Good luck!" and wait for the party to start.
And it was pretty good. Most of the guests were human or almost-human toadfolk who slobbered into their own beers (they brought their own keg too; I passed on an offered mug) or Mongloid giants who peered into the apartment through the glass transom and smiled till I wandered over to open the door for them. They just sheepishly went to the corners of the living room and watched. A mugwump named Doc appeared and played poker with himself, a winning hand clutched in each of ten spindly spider arms. A few of the old drunks who knew Neal back when he was a little kid ("I was a real rugrat!" Neal announced as he shoved an old feller named Howie at me, and Howie smiled and showed off a gap in his teeth big enough for a harmonica) joined in the game, foolishly forgetting the old rule never to play cards with anyone who called himself Doc.
I thought a few of the old crowd were there, including Neal's old girl from the first time I met Neal back when the world was young, but it was just a shoggoth sent here to drive him mad. She shimmered on the edges and smelled like a swamp, her eyes were slick as fish. Neal didn't care though he cut across the room like a happy moth and cornered her with a divinely inspired grift. They left together, his arm on her waist and hers stretching like tar on the end of a stick to wrap around his shoulders once, then twice. I eased down next to some little kids who were sitting around a hi-fi in haphazard half-lotus positions, some propped up against the wall, drumming their heads against the thin plaster. New songs, short and simple, bam bam bam on a guitar and drums. Rock-n-roll ain't nothing but strangled blues made squeaking and pale by alien death-grips, and I told them so. They didn't say much in return, but one of them, a boy with eyes blind from bangs and drooping lids called me "Daddy" and then snorted and choked a tiny laugh. They were too limp to do much more than lift the needle (literally, every one of these characters had skinny white string bean arms, the six of them together couldn't generate enough disgust to take the head off my beer) and put on another episode of tribal thump and wail, so I stayed, sitting and listening for whatever love might be between the scarce notes. There wasn't much, but I could sense the heartbeats around me falling into the 4/4 rhythm of the tune, and even my own, still fluttering from a handful of bennies washed down with brew, stumbling and seizing to join them. When a record would end (little 45s, is there even room for art on those few grooves) the pasty little nuggets wouldn't even talk about the song, or nod or say how good it was. They just put on another, like librarians alphabetizing books. So I up and left, caught in the wake of some young thing with legs up to her neck, butter blond hair down to her knees and a walk like a cowboy. She was in boots in jeans so tight she must have been greased when she slid them on that morning. In her pocket was a dog-eared paperback. I caught up with her, slipped the book out and into my big palm and held it in front of her. Pretty girl she was, she smiled small, showing just a few rounded teeth between her full heart lips.
"Any good? It's good to see a girl read around here, I'll tell you that. Sometimes I wonder if girls want anything to do but marry, you know?" She nodded, her eyes glancing away from me like a little bird. "Yeah, I like it. Everyone's reading it these days. It's very--" She sucked in mile-high mountain air, then conjured up her adjective. "--inspirational. It's what led me here to Denver." Excited now, her girlish hand squeezed my arm. "I love this city. Can you believe this party, just like the one in the book!" I turned my wrist to look at the cover (probably should have done that first) and it was my book. I couldn't help but smile. "Heh, I think the party is a bit different these days, what with the strange characters here now." She snuggled up to me and turned to one of the pages with a folded-over corner. "No, look. See?" And there it was, in my book, the mugwump poker, the dumb mods huddling in a corner, Neal, his pants down to his ankles, taking his piss out into the heaven-upturned bowl-mouth of a shriveled woman no longer than a foot tall.
"Read me some," I told her and put the book to her chest, "out on the porch." I hustled her out of the pad like a nun on a truant schoolboy. There were sizzling rocket trails netting the skies, some headed up, others down and around, tracing the oval of earth. Even in Denver, you couldn't see the stars anymore through the streaks of smoke and flame. Purgatory had snuck up somewhere between heaven and earth. Even the moon was reduced to a scattering of haze, but there was an old bulb on the porch roof that you just had to turn (and just had to go "Ah!" and pull your burnt fingers away after it sparked to life, and I did both) to get light so she could read to me her favorite passages. And she read them. The showdown with the cult deep under ground, a pulp fiction shootout, ol' Moriarty crying over his writer's block till his eyes ran black with blood (he'd made his soul a gift to the wrong muse, it said). I just didn't remember writing any of this yet, and didn't remember reading it for big wads of cash before auditoriums full of serious-minded young men and women, the sorts who ironed their collars just to look neat when the time came for them to wear iron collars. But I let her keep reading, because her voice was honeyed and just so interested, she brought out the secret reasoning behind every clumsy word. She sang the stuff really, and so well we didn't hear the sirens until they circled the block like Indians. In the red-and-white moment of the police lights I looked up and saw the new brute squad. Street thugs in burlap sack and hubcap armor over business pants and smart cop shoes (black but not dusty, they shone in the otherwise smoky haze of night), and a mix of ten-gallon hats and paddy caps. "Uh oh, I don't think they're here for the party," my honey girl said but I couldn't think of another reason for them to show up. She put the book back in her jeans before I could filch it from her and walked backwards on her awkward heels till she was inside. I just smiled and gripped the porch's railings and called out howdy while they carefully took up positions around the house, behind convenient cars and across the street.
"Anything I can help you with, officers!" In my mind's eye, I saw that they were all human, not a trace of the mugwump in them. Neal was at my side, holding u
p a piece of typing paper, "Check this," he said, excited as if he'd finally gotten around to writing something. He folded it in half, lengthwise. The cops, or maybe just dress-up civilians making do, as they didn't stand like cops, dug into their weird costumes for their revolvers. Some of them had little snub-nosed .38s, others held big monster guns, the kind the old Denverites liked to show off, cradled in big callused hands like sweet babes. Neal folded the paper in half, and then in half again. "I don't really think this is the time for an old magic trick," I said. Someone blew Neal's mind once, back in reform school, with the old saw that you can't fold paper in half nine times. Near every time I'd finally sit him down in front of a typewriter, I'd leave him alone for an hour and come back to a room full of flapping little pieces of paper, all blossoming out from his half-hearted folds.
The Keystone kavemen kops surrounding us were half-hearted too, but it doesn't take a murderer to make a killer, and I was starting to grip the porch a bit too tightly, flecks of paint melted into my palms. I tried calling out to them again, but they ignored me utterly. Neal folded the paper twice more; it was a tiny little block now held between fingers and thumbs. "Watch, Jack, watch me," he said, like a little boy. He folded it again, easily really, though it was a stiff accordion pile in his little fingers now. I wished I'd brought my beer out here, my throat was too dry to say a word. I could only see them shooting Neal first (because I had to be alive to see him fall) and a bullet cutting through that stupid piece of paper, blasting it to dust and flakes to drift dramatically over our blood-Pollack faces. Neal was whoopin' about something and two of the cops had rushed up to the porch and started splashing smelly gasoline along through the rails and onto the floor. I knew, somewhere deep in my reptilian brain, the fight or flight or fuck part that attached me to this damned world, that if I kicked at them or even shouted for help I'd get a bullet in me. Of course, burning to death wasn't shaping up to be a great way to end the evening either, but the possibility just seemed distant, like the long wait for a motion picture railroad train to burst through the screen and plow engine-first into the orchestra seats, its flickering black-and-white smashing into the real colors of the world.
"See!" Neal said, holding a weird wad in his hand. "Ten times folded! It's a new world we're living in. If we dream it, we can be it, all while the Dark Dreamer himself looks to kill the dreams of all humanity!"
"Great," I said. I couldn't look at him without seeing the blood speckled across his forehead, a huge pulsing cavity, a still-living heart within, where his chest would soon used to be. "We're going to die now, I think." And Neal laughed, an "ahahahahaha" almost like one of Allen's, and ducked low. He slipped his arms between the rails and dug the fingers of both hands into the ground, then looked up and gave me that country smile, slanted on his face. "Watch!" he said and with that tore the country apart. The ground ripped like sails in the wind and the cops and cars and even the smog from a hundred rockets just went. Off into some non-being, a dark non-being, the black reflection of nirvana bliss. Just black, like space without stars. It lays under the earth like a lover under a blanket, naked and waiting. Then the rift was gone and the street just empty again, asphalt, concrete, then the brown grass of the tiny stripe of lawn in front of the porch.
"Lord God, you see that," Neal said, standing up. He made to dust off his hands on his pants, but they were clean as though he'd never dug into the dirt. "That was beautiful. When the Buddha smiles, he's opened mouthed, you know, Jack?" Neal nodded, more to himself than me. He was electric again, the world shifted a bit to make sure he was the axis about which it revolved. "White teeth are just a border surrounding a deeper dark portal, into . . . "
"Into the belly!" I said, then I blushed when Neal didn't laugh, when he didn't even hear. I shamed myself, a fool who lets his booze chatter away for him. I prayed for the bullet and the shower of blood now. Neal went on though, gracing me with presence and wisdom, the sort of thing I blundered into by simply following in his footsteps. "Something greater than the self, that's what's been missing. The mugwump slaves have been looking for it, but it was the Holy Fool who found it, ya know?" But if he was a holy fool, I was just a damned one, that's what I figured anyway. Then he turned and embraced me, "Jack, Jack oh Jack, that is what I can write!" And with that, I just had to hug him back. "You still have to teach me, you know?" I didn't know that, but why not, I thought. We went back into the party and slowly watched it dissolve. The pain of ending hung over it already, but the guests struggled against death like a note fading before the needle finally hits an absent groove and ends it all. Monsters lurked in the corners, just curious and getting a kick at being around a few folks who had their souls still sealed tight in their gullets. The true human stragglers didn't make much of a spectacle of it, they drank till their bodies made them stop, and drifted into their solipsistic little dreamlands, the mommy and daddy dreams of someone who has never been beyond the veil where Great Old Ones wait and plot and go mad. That cute girl cut out when the cops came, one of the moptops told me, out the back door and back into the warzone of Denver.
In the morning, I woke up on the couch. A seven-foot-tall man, his head an anvil and eyes just slits, sat slumped in the corner, his knees as high as I am tall. The other guests had picked their way home. I got to the kitchen and brewed up some coffee and found some cheese and bacon for breakfast, and ate alone on the little tin table the whores had picked out of the garbage. Lurlene was in the backyard, body still as tough as a cigar store Indian's, hanging up the sheets I'd sweated into for days. I'd miss her, even though we never talked. We knew one another, and that was enough. Who knows what I really gave her that night, in the language of friction and little kisses? There were no napkins so I just wiped my hands on my pants and went looking for Neal, and to say goodbye to Sarah. Hadn't even seen her at the party. It wasn't as good as the old days here in Denver; the magic was gone. All the old crowd had left years ago, or had desperate families holed up in little homes now. In the living room, the Mongoloid thing was gone too. I stood there in the empty room for a while, then walked out into streets painted orange and violet by the low-angled sun.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I spent the afternoon on a flatbed truck with Neal and a few old tramps who wanted out of town as bad as I did. In a minute or two, I think I would have been happy to stay because the argument on the bed was getting heated.
"It smells like shit!" Neal said, and that was that, a tentpeg pounded into the earth. One of the fellows though, an archetypal tramp, a guy who wandered out of dreamland with a bindle and pants baggy enough for two, just wasn't having any of it. "Smells like money," he pronounced, with a lifetime of road lore and an eye for cattle to back him up.
It was shit, the shit in streams and sumps and coating the asphalt of our poor, half-shattered highway out of Colorado. Ranching territory stinks to high heaven, and it isn't just the dung, but the very air around the cattle. The old tramp joked that if Neal lit one more cigarette just to throw the cherry-red butt out into the wind, the whole half state would go up in a bellowing holocaust. "Hamburger for everyone!" he said and laughed a hollow little laugh. The other tramps murmured not so much agreement as they did a general sentiment that a hamburger would be quite nice right about now.
Tramps and hoboes were drawn to the languid shit swirl of Colorado's ranches, but only the hoboes would work, bailing hay or twisting nasty barbed wire into mile-long swirls. The tramps took after their bug-eyed fly brothers, filching a cooling pie there, shoveling sloppy handfuls of cool pump water into their cave mouths here. There was cash to be had too, all you had to do was cut the pocket of a hobo on siesta and get to the highway and to a passing truck before the hobo got to you. Not even the greatest of tramps would dare beg or molest one of the ranchers these days though, they'd as soon shoot you as look at you the old man said, and crush your corpse under the hooves of their Arabian horses and feed the meat-sauce mess to their prize milk cows.
"Ain't the milk been tastin' f
unny lately?" he asked another tramp, one who probably hadn't had a cool glass of milk since the Depression was on. "Now you know why!" Our second tramp, a man with a two-axle spare tire and pants split in the front nodded. "Yep. The ranchers have burrs in their asses these days, The cattle too, they're all ready to stampede. You can see it in their eyes." Neal just snorted though and nodded towards a few fat cows chewing their cud off the highway. "They look pretty placid to me," he said, and flicked a cigarette butt off the bed with his speedy fingers. Then he was back to his journal, scribbling away and muttering about how it did so smell like shit, shitty money even.
I looked at the cows, my eyes focused past them at the fading horizon so that the Third Eye could peer into their little animal souls. Sweet and innocent they were, not even their shit was tainted with the rot of the Dreamer yet. The lighthouse was another story. "What the heck is that?" I asked the wise old tramp and he told me with the clarity of a sage, "A lighthouse." Fatty knew a bit more of the story, as he sang for his supper among the masons who had put it up over the past few weeks. "A gentleman from Providence, a jaundiced fellow it seemed to me, he came out here some weeks ago and ordered it built. He had men working around the clock, under huge and roaring bonfires so they could see in the night and labor unmolested by the swarms of biting insects who usually feed on the cattle in the night fields. Taciturn man, like Yankees tend to be. He didn't have much time for an old tramp," he said, his voice resigned but still lyrically thick. He could spin a tale when he had to, a tramp doesn't get that fat otherwise. "But one time, I did get up the courage to walk up to him. It was a prime opportunity, because it was a Friday and even Mr. Love gave his workers a bit of a break for some cool beers on Fridays, though he never drank himself. But he had a half-smile and tip of his hat for all the boys, so I knew he might have a word or a coin for me. I didn't get a coin when I introduced myself and told him my particular tale of woe, but I did get a word when I asked him why on earth he'd spend a whole wheelbarrow full of gold just to build a lighthouse a thousand miles from the nearest ocean."