Move Under Ground
Page 10
Out back was a huge expanse of blasted prairie. White wheat, smacked flat against the earth, crunched under my feet. Neal was easy to find, he was sticking right up and gesturing at the sky, and two girls were sitting on either side of him. Both of them were thin little things, thinner than he liked usually, with long ironed hair, one a dirty blonde, the other with glasses and hair like bootblack. They turned when they heard me but Neal didn't. He kept his back to me, one hand on his hip and the left outstretched towards the sky. He knew me though and said "Hi Jack, look!" And I looked right over his shoulder and at his hand. His forefinger and thumb were crooked to look like the letter C, and I looked through them (the moon wasn't bright, but I could see starlight glinting in his fingernails) and saw a star.
"So, which one of the stars on Orion's belt do you want to see me put out? Huh? Don't believe me? I can see you frowning, I have eyes in the back of my head." He laughed and the girls chuckled supportively. Neal squeezed his fingers shut. Something sizzled, like a chick lighting a cigarette, but neither of them had one, and when Neal took his hand down, the star on the left end of the constellation was missing.
"Cute," I said, looking up, squinting, trying to look for the tendril of cloud obscuring the star, but there was nothing. The sky was empty of anything but tiny white stars--even the tentacles, the wrathful face of Cthulhu and his burning moon-eye, were all gone. Just like that little star. It didn't twinkle; it was gone.
"I put out a star. A few are missing, do you notice them, or, heh heh, do you notice not them? There's a little poem for ya. Ever do astronomy in Boy Scouts, Jack?" Neal asked. I looked down, and the girl with the bootblack hair looked up at me and said, "It's true. Look at the Big Dipper." I couldn't bear to crane my neck up that high; I just did not want to see what Neal was doing to the sky. "You're going off the deep end," I told him. "Listen. Don't you remember the kids?"
"Oh yeah. Yeah, the kids," he said, and he squeezed his fingers shut again, just like snuffing out a candle. "Poor kids, poor old things, but there's no free ride out here, you know. The wheel just keeps on turning, and if in this life you don't get a chance to fall into bed with a belly full of beer and a lovely girl, then maybe in the next, you know. Got to look at the big picture, the big paint-splattered action painting." He turned to me, "The universe is a Jackson Pollock. I guess we're all just a bunch of drips and--!" he said, and then the nervous heh heh hehs of Neal's craziness ate the rest of his sentence. He turned back to the sky and went back to putting out stars.
Back inside I stepped over tangled messes of tramps and musicians with scraggly beards, kicking past comic books and bongo drums and empty bottles, and took up the steps to find Bill. He was up in his boyhood bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed like a bus was about to pull in and take him downtown to the Woolworth's, reading a little pulp digest. He looked up at me with his wide and tired eyes, went "Hmph" and then turned back to his magazine.
"Neal is putting out the stars. He holds his fingers up and crushes the life out of them right up there in the sky. I stared at where one used to be; it wasn't twinkling. He's doing it."
"Impossible," Bill muttered. He licked his finger and turned the page.
"No, it isn't! I saw it . . . "
"Co-in-ci-DENCE!" he barked. Bill finally set aside his magazine, leaving it open face down like a tent so he could get back to the short story he was reading. I saw the cover. Something named Super Science Stories, it was yellowed and dog-eared (like Bill himself, already, his habit having stolen life's best years) with a pin-up girl, naked except for a green sheet, on the cover. Lightning spilled from her fingertips and above her: a city-sized foo fighter drifted in space. "Look, there's no way, no matter what powers Neal may be making Faustian bargains with. Stars are light-years away, sometimes thousands of light-years away. The sky you see tonight died an aeon ago. We're just late in getting the news, is all." He pulled himself across the bed to the little window and parted the curtain. "What's missing?" he asked.
"The left star on Orion's belt. If you look over--"
"I know where it is!" He peered up through the window, licked his palm and smeared the dust on the glass with it to get a better look. "Alnitak, I think. Yep, not there anymore." He turned back to me. "Eight hundred years ago, that star sniffed itself out, not tonight. We just figured out that it was lost this evening. The star was dead by the time it was named. Didn't you ever have a telescope as a kid, Jackie?" he asked. Bill rose, like an old man, and in a step was across the room and kneeling in front of a two-shelf bookcase painted in a gay red. He pulled another little paperback out from it and flipped through the pages, wetting his thumb each time. "The belt of al-Jauza," Bill chuckled, "al-Jauza," he said again, and then another time. "Sort of . . . the central female. I should have paid more attention when I was in Tangiers."
He looked up at me. Bill had that sallow yellow skin, still. I wonder if he had actually just been this way as a boy too, stuck in a tiny room on top of a mansion, playing with fantasies of star charts and bug-eyed monsters, and shooting little birds with his Daisy air rifle. I almost asked him, but I didn't care that much, and the old bull was on a roll.
"Mother Space! That's a kick, ain't it? The woman at the center of the cosmos, upon which all creation revolves, and Neal is trying to get her to drop her knickers. Man, some fellas never change." Bill pushed out his leg and wormed back up onto the bed, then got on his back and picked up his magazine, holding it far from his face. It was a weird pose, a way to tell me to leave and go downstairs and see if there was enough beer in the Frigidaire.
I was halfway through the door when Bill cleared his throat, the soft machines in his throat and chest clanking and grinding. "You know, Jacques," he said, "Neal could not have extinguished those stars, not in the traditional three-dimensional universe, the world of length and breadth and width that moves through time like a cosmos-shaped arrow. But if there was a higher world, think of that? Think of the universe of a black orange speckled with white all the way to the seeds, in the hands of gods who ooze through reality like gin sluicing through ice cubes in some propane salesman's after-work cocktail. If Neal could reach up and into those higher dimensions, he could extinguish the stars now, but be doing it eight hundred years ago. From the vantage point of those higher worlds, where even time was just a ball to juggle, Alnitak wouldn't be a massive gas giant many times larger than Sol, it would be a pinpoint, a flaming matchhead. Easy to snuff out between two fingertips bigger than galaxies. The trick would really be to only snuff out one star and not a billion of them."
Bill turned over onto his side and hugged himself. "Yeah, that would do it. Of course, if he had that kind of power I wish he'd just create a tesseract and drag New York over to us. These damn cross-country trips make me sick to my stomach. All that driving and those lonely wormy roads." The open magazine Bill put over the side of his head like it was a tent. "Turn off the light on your way out, would you? Thanks."
So that was it. I left and headed back downstairs, the tiny buzz of my own enlightenment smashed flat by the very idea of Neal. Neal, bigger than the world. Neal, who wept for kids like a man, who only needed a wheel in his hands and four on the floor to navigate the bardo; Neal, who had it all in his hands. Neal, who wasn't out back anymore, so I went through the kitchen and saw Chinese Charlie making the girl with the bootblack hair, the two of them squirming under the man's street-beaten Army overcoat. I caught a glimpse of the curve of the girl's breast--no face, just a little underripe plum of a nipple. Good for Chinese Charlie.
In the kitchen, I was alone. It was a big room with a cool tile floor under the trash, crumpled butcher paper and stains from spilled beans and slapping footprints. And there was beer. A whole palette of cans in corrugated cardboard cases, all warm. There was no ice in the Frigidaire's freezer section, but that was fine. It was cooling down quickly out on the front porch, away from the sounds of homeless moaning, and with at least the mansion between me and the dead stars missing from the sk
y, so I took a case out there with me and cracked open can after can. It was a game, how much beer could I get into my mouth and throat without puffing out my cheeks. After a few tries, I swallowed a whole can (minus a waterfall of foam down my shirt and slacks) of the bitter stuff in one swift and graceful chug--head back, arm up, mouth open wide, it was the sweetest inhalation.
I tried it again and again and lost the trick as the booze hit my bloodstream. I kept trying though, and let the empty cans roll from my fingers and off the porch. The earth itself tilted strangely, like a car doing ninety on a hairpin turn round a mountainside and I saw the sky. The stars were going out, slowly but surely, one at the time, like baseball players dawdling before finally leaving the field and heading back to the dugout. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, just ink peppered with sparkles, and fewer of those by the second. I drank another beer because beer was real. My tongue was already numb, so that made it easier (it was some horrible local brew, made from black river water and aged for a day or three) to just pour it down my mouth like a trough. Rough beer does a number on you right quick, drinking paint mixed with pebbles wouldn't have been much less fun, but it was numbing like it I wanted it to be. Numb like I want to be, fingers tingling and heavy against the latest can. I dropped it and booze fed the earth. Onto the second case, very heroic. Even my bones were drunk. The porch felt so good, thick paint still held the heat from the daytime, and stretched out and drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of a raft on a winedark sea, bobbing slow and gentle like a kid being dandled on his grandpa's lap. The water was like quicksilver, running fast and dry over my skin and pooling in my boots and pants. It was warm out on the ocean, the damp heat of summer was a little campfire and blanket both. Then from the purple sky tentacles fell like curtains, but I was not afraid. They stroked me, fingers in my hair, over my lips in that thrilling lover's caress. The tentacles kept me warm as a chill rose from the bottom of the sea.
From ten thousand miles away I heard the screams, tinny AM radio yelps. My consciousness flew in lazy circles and dips, away from my body and towards the old mansion; it was being torn apart by space itself while robed cultists holding their torches high chanted from the curb. Space no longer defined by absence, but by presence, the presence of those familiar slithering tentacles. They weren't unfurling down from the sky, they were the sky, the space between breaths and raindrops. Like a honeybee I drifted between them, tiny and disinterested in anything but sweet ambrosia, a glistening puddle of spilled beer. Limbs and sprays of blood, splintered wood and hissing pipes flew past, but I could just buzz around them on etheric current. The tentacles were everywhere, and that isn't a description of their location, but just a fact of existence--if something existed, it was thick alien meat, stench and rubber and molten lead blood in five dimension. The world we knew was just cheap ink, flat and stretched beyond recognition against the Silly Putty surface of the REAL world. The world of the Great Dreamer, whose every somnambulant twitch and snort shook the planet and every work-a-day mind it. Except for honeybee me, my brain on a wing and a prayer.
And Bill. He burst out of his boyhood room (which was but a mass of tentacles) with a moviehouse tommy-gun and screamed about Nazis and Bombay. Stars and torchlight danced in the trap of his impossibly thick Coke bottle glasses. He lifted the gun high and with an Indian war whoop, pulled the trigger. Flames belched forth from the muzzle and bullets ripped through the air (and through the meat of the Old God's waking dream). Bill cackled as he swept back and forth with his machine gun (spent casings fell like rain, and danced on the hardwood floors) and made headway, step after painful step. Outside the mansion, some of the cultists, those old schoolmarms and clock punchers, choked on lead and fell, grinning blood.
But it wasn't. The bullets ran out before the cultists did, and Bill's hard march forward stopped, his tommy-gun's riot of poetry reduced to impotent clicking. Then the clicking of the beetlemen picked up the beat, and the drapery of tentacles returned to drown him and all the other riffraff in the Burroughs manse. He went down beneath undulating black waves, his fist clenched and veined like marble.
Then Neal, nine hundred feet tall and glowing with St. Elmo's fire, parted the curtain and smiled. A kid peeking to watch a girl roll down her stockings and then, after an eternity, unsnap her bra, that was Neal's smile. And as easy as a boy pushing curtains aside, he saved the world. The Dreamer Of The Deep was pushed aside with a casual wave, the kind of wave Neal would offer girls as we drove past.
I woke up on the porch, my shirt stuck to the paint thanks to sticky beer and burnt blood. Gunpowder filled the air. Most of the rest of the mansion was gone, like it had exploded, but the field and streets were utterly clear of any debris. The house blew up years ago. Nothing but an eastern wall and blasted black fire-places topped with impotent, wilting chimneys in the distance remained. The bricks dripped a pungent slime. Bill stood right in the middle of the wreckage, smoke dancing from the barrel of his gun like he'd been smoking it. Neal was stretched across a couch, one perfectly preserved (not even cigarette burns, forget the lack of ectoplasm of scorch marks) eating from a tin of Vienna sausages. He was stabbing into it with his old pocketknife and eating the meat right off the tip of the blade.
The streets were littered with corpses, beetlemen and Beat both. I noticed the head of the girl with bootblack hair (well, her hair and the rancid meatloaf it was attached to) but everyone, everything else, had been thrown a bit too forcefully across the landscape to makes heads or tails of. They'd been just a little too sober when the psychic onslaught began. Loose shoes were everywhere. Bill walked through the doorway, the only part of the house's façade still standing after the porch, and kneeled down next to me. Behind us, we could hear a can hit the ground and Neal's chainsaw snore start up. I looked back at him. The poor guy had wet himself during the night.
"He's going to betray you, you know," Bill told me, his voice an aria wrapped in a bull's angry snort. I looked up at him. I never liked Bill, really. He was a fag, and a rich boy, he never had to fight for anything. When the rest of us Beats were exploring the country, he ran off to Mexico, to Asia, to anywhere where a boy would bend over for an American dollar and a smile. He was a junky, his soul had been eaten away years before R'lyeh rose in the roiling Pacific. But I respected him, because he was a survivor, a roach like the mugwumps. When Neal and I were dust, William S. Burroughs would still be kicking around (hell, the bastard would still be writing for publication; I already shot my load with that) so I didn't punch him in the face right then and there. Anybody else I would have, even Neal; if he came to me and said "I'm going to betray you, you know. Tie you to an obsidian slab and draw your heart out through your nostril, just to make Cthulhu chuckle," he would have gotten a faceful of knuckles. Not Bill though. I didn't like him. But I respected him.
"It's pulp fiction. Neal's not on our side, he's on his side. Against the Dreamer, but not against the starry wisdom Azathoth teased him with."
"How do you know?"
He snorted again (it was dusty without a house to protect us from the wind kicking through the ruined wheat). "I read magazines. You two were best friends once, but now, years later, you're just going through the motions. Two dreamers chasing dreams. He's married--when he's not balling girls two at a time while we stand guard, he's playing house with some heifer and teaching his rugrats how to pray, hands all steepled together at the side of the bed." (Bill almost got a punch there too, but I was too drained to move.) "And you . . . Christ, Jack. You know your problems. This spiral path only has one ending. Of course he has to betray you, and by doing so, betray us all. It's The Shadow. Neal's the butler, and the butler did it. That's the goddamn ending to the novel he's writing about this! Pure pulp fiction."
He plopped down and tucked his legs under his ass like a kid. "Eh, fuck it, Jack. Neal would be crossing you over a pussy if he wasn't going to cross you over the whole goddamn ball of mud. Fuckin' world half deserves it anyway, as far as I can tell."
"I told you already," he croaked, "there's only one ending to this. You and Neal ain't the only ones with a taste of enlightenment. A dragon came to me, after decades of chasing it, and told me what needed doing. You know, I'm going to move to Kansas one day."
"Wow."
"I'm not looking forward to it either."
For a long time we did nothing but listen to Neal snore. "So . . . "
Bill finally turned to me, his eyes a squint. "How are your sales?"
And I laughed. I roared like the damn King of England after the court jester shits himself. "Damn! Royalties! Is that all you can think of?" He wasn't joking, but I loved the man's punchline. I laughed more and more, just jiggling on the porch; it crippled me.