by Nick Mamatas
I left him to die too, didn't I? I hadn't even thought about him since then, and now he's not just dead, he's deep under the burgeoning Pacific in Cthulhu's dark embrace. Trust this Neal doppelganger; damn, I was barely sure I was human myself at that moment. Luckily, in the next moment, a growling pickup truck pulled up and idled. Bill rushed up to it and grabbed the driver by the ears and started yanking, while I grabbed the body. Neal's face shimmered and shifted into a horrible tusked boar, but I kept low as a barbed prehensile tongue spilled forth from the boar head. The human slab of man was belching for help too, and trying to jerk free, but I kept low, wrapped my arms around his thick waist and finally threw him onto the ground. I jumped over the tangling whip of a tongue and ran to the truck.
Bill hadn't gotten the driver out, but managed to shove himself in through the open window. His legs were sticking out and flailing like he was trying to swim for it. I rushed up to the door, opened it and helped pull the driver out, then slid into the driver's seat, yanked Bill over my lap and dumped him, crumpled and upside down, into the passenger seat and punched it. We were off in a roar of dust, whooping and shouting and flipping the old bird to the backwards boar-faced thug and the chump we just rolled for the ride.
We blasted over the border and through the steel tentacle buildings of black Gary, Indiana. Bill stayed twisted like the letter C, but upside down and backwards, till we had hit the heartland, then finally snaked into seat properly. "Look, a farm," he said, nudging me with his elbow. The highway was a knife's cut through endless fields of blasted grain, sprinkled with skeletal cows. Only Bill Burroughs could look out at that landscape and see a farm. I saw poisoned earth and chewing machines swaying in the air-warped heat. The silent, sleepy, staring houses far from the roadside could tell all that had transpired here in these late days, but they were not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness that helped them forget. It would have been merciful to cut the wheel hard and drive right up to the front stoop, and to throw a flaming thatch of blackened wheat through the window, to kill these houses, to end their haunted dreams. But Bill nudged me again and smiled and said, "Look, a farm." It wasn't getting any funnier, not the next twelve times he said it either. "Look, Dachau," he should have said. "Look, the moldy tainted heart of our heartland. The nation's breadbasket with a clicking mandibled-chin head in it rather than a sweet loaf," he should have said.
"Look, a farm," again. Then, "I need to take a fucking leak. And we need gas too."
There were rest stops on the highway, but on this fatal plain we had to be careful. Slow down when we see one on the highway, try to spy with my little third eye the taint of extradimensional evil, but then it may already be too late. Grease monkeys swarming on our car, smashing the windows with tire irons, dragging us into the local diner for deep frying. So no, you don't slow down at the first truck stop you see, that's where they are waiting.
But you don't just zip past it either, not when your pickup is already coughing out black exhaust. The beetlemen behind the counters or a pear-shaped goblin waitress peeking through the venetian blinds in a little side window spot you half-dead on the road, acting all casual, and call ahead to the next rest stop. Pull in there, fast or slow, and they're waiting for you. All smiles, all lips twisted and hardened into thick chitinous hooks. All service too. Sure, fill the tank, have a cup of joe (on the house even) with two lumps of sugar, one for the coffee and one for the gas tank. Then, three miles down the road, when the truck wheezes and fails just over the horizon, we come for you, drag you out of the cab, slice your vocal cords and listen and laugh as we drag you over the hot asphalt back not to their stop but to the one before. What's left of Jack and Bill, bloody and stained roadkill, served up as Sunday hash in two different diners.
Maybe the third stop, if you have enough gas because you sure as hell don't want to be walking the shoulder alone with nothing but an empty gas can, if this purloined jalopy even has a gas can, because you won't even be able to throw a punch before they get you. And at that third rest stop you don't slow down, you blaze on in, tires squealing and red hot. You grab the gas quick, at gunpoint if you have to, if guns even work on these shambling monsters, and shove a wedge of apple pie in your mouth, roll out on the bill and hit the road before the cops or great tentacles made of bright noonday sky itself come to claim your soul.
"There's a rest stop," Bill said. I slowed down and pulled in without incident, and haggled for some gas. The gas man was a good old boy who'd seen better days. He had a Bible in one hand, a whittling knife in the other, and was just leaning and looking, his eyes little pebbles. I walked right up to him and told him that I'd stolen the car, that I was a great horrible beatnik and that if I didn't get to New York and soon like, the stars would align and the world would be consumed by great Cthulhu, or maybe just destroyed by Azathoth.
"Have you been washed in the blood of the lamb?" he asked. "Have you been slain in the spirit?"
"Sure." What else can you say to that? And there was that one time when a hobo preacher laid hands on me and I whooped it up for nearly an hour, in the grasp of some golden fist, though that could have been a parlor trick. I meditated for days after, searching for that elusive clump of nerves or spiritual door that would make it happen again, but I never found it, except in the tickytack of the Underwood. Anyway, we really needed gas and the fellow liked Bill's watch, so we filled the tank and two five-gallon tanks we found in the back of the truck, plus a redneck blessing written into the dust on our hood with his finger.
I pushed the truck hard and it ate highway like a rattling monster. The steering column was a thing of primitive beauty, a divining rod. Ease up now, then punch the gas hard, Jack, it told me with faithful vibrations. We skirted the edge of the performance envelope, goading the engine on with pumping splashes of hot gas and then easing up just before something might start to smoke. The last I wanted was to crack the head in Indiana and wait on the road for the cult of Cthulhu to skin us alive, or for that matter, for the goddamn Pacific Ocean to show up. The jalopy loved me though; like the sweetest girl it guided my hands to the sweet spots and we drove on with a fierce energy. Bill slept, head cocked to the side like a dead man, a string of drool writing spirals on his lapels.
Indiana was gone by the time I had to pull over and pour one of the emergency gas cans into the tank. The sun was high and a sunset red. The sky looked like orange juice; what Outsider Being had spilled his brunch mimosa on the terrarium dome of our sky? It was hot; I was probably going mad at about that point, but since Bill was such an old lady of a driver, I dared not wake him and have him take over. He would have stopped at every bathroom and corny roadside attraction on the way. Ancient genuine pointy rocks labeled "Indian Arrow Head" under glass; skinned monkeys stuffed and displayed as stillborn freak babies; two-headed calves with heavy industrial staples glinting along the seam of the sinister head's neck. Who said America is in the grip of a weird evil now; we've always been fascinated with it ever since the first burly settlers chased sweet squaws into the woods, and came out smiling and dripping with sex and a bloody scalp. Even this Beat thing just led to what: a lot of bastard kids, bad poetry, and the junky faggot next to me who snored like he was percolating coffee in his sinuses.
Neal was still everywhere. Silvery Greyhound buses matched speeds with us and his face leered out in the flesh of tourist jowls from every window. He smiled, he commanded a hearty thumbs up from enslaved old men, he melted and attacked the bus driver, then tried to run me off the road, but my stolen truck could gun past an overstuffed bus any day. Other Neals waved from the roadside and left cans of gas and bags of little white pills; I filled up and munched them down by the handful. Eventually, my hands were shaking so much they vibrated through the steering wheel. I needed to switch off on the driving duties, quick like.
"Bill!" I tried to shake him but my fingers flowed like water through the fabric of his jacket and dribbled onto his shoulder. I turned back to the road just in time to see i
t cut hard to the left. I wrapped my arms around the wheel as best I could, my shirt and flesh splashed against my chest. We drove into the cliff face wall that bordered the highway and melded into it, driving through stone and roots.
"It's a Stanley blade," the man named Gin said. He was a weird one, old Gin. Skull like a bird with eyes set so deep in his head he always looked scared and always scared me a bit, whenever he turned my way. Gin's thin fingers wrapped around the little knife and sliced through the newspaper headline. "And it cuts so easily, so well." He was English, his voice lilted. All his features lilted, the little bird man. Gin's hands, thick green and black tattoos spiraled and pointed their way up his well-veined arms. His shoulder rolled like a swimmer's when he moved.
Even his cut-up was like a ballet, beautiful to behold. Not much else was in this dusty room, dark and with yellowed newspapers stacked to the stamped-tin ceiling. Even the window was gray with dust and outside I saw a street corner like the black hoof of a great beast. I knew the rest of the town--though I didn't know what alien city it was supposed to be--would be rich with filthy bums and piggish slavers, married whores and deep black rivers stained from the crushed bones of the earth. What mountain of corpses was this built on? Indians, diluted and destroyed by hot firewater, stooped over Negroes toothless from sugar and beatings, or just plain old white folk huddled in the corner of their huts, hiding from the leaping shadows and dance of firelight? Taxman was always coming, pulling behind him his cart of war--
I looked up and smiled at the applause. "Pulling his cart of war," I repeated and nodded, because that's what intellectuals do even when the clappers are just stooped-over roaches with out-of-fashion hats balanced on their heads, and a few slick trained seals in the cheap seats by the kitchen. I looked down at my notes and saw only the gibberish of dreams. "Or just on the road," I read, squinting, trying to fool the letters into coherence. "Carrying garden tools for no good reason to anyone but Neal, looking to get back to Denver or New York. I nearly cried at the thought of missing him, and bit my lip hard, 'til my mouth filled with tired blood in the game." They applauded anyway, the way Auntie applauds her Mongoloid neighbor boy for singing "Happy Birthday" wrong.
"Off to he who called himself Doc. Bury a body in the desert, or dig a tunnel to a sweet freedom underground and away from the blasphemous sky. Neal announced who he was to a wall, and shoved an old feller, extinguished, thin, and named Howie at me, foreign cigarettes on me and Howie smiled and chest until I showed off a gap them what they wanted."
After. Or waiting for my show to begin. At the bar. With a drink. Tasted like broken glass, like warm ice that won't melt. Tentacles, flippers, hot human hands patting my back as if to say "Better luck next time, chump." Once after drinking sixty great rounds in 1942 I found myself wrapped around a porcelain toilet, vomiting so hard that I didn't just stain the bowl, I chipped it. I spat up my soul and stayed tied to the commode like a dead vine while three days and nights of winos and sailors did their business over, around, and on me until I was entirely encased. I could have stayed there 'til this day and just woke up this morning and walked into a whole new world that had already passed me by. Then I'd expect someone to walk up to me in shimmering space armor or a Mao jumpsuit and tell me, "Better luck next time, chump." Not today though, not when I was in The New York Times, not when I had the word visionary stapled to my name like a second head. Something from my drink was sharp against my tongue. I reached into my mouth and pulled out the swift triangle of a Stanley blade. I put the point to my wrist and cut, up--
"Aigh!" Bill cried out, throwing his hands and elbows up into his face, "I can't stand this goddamn car." I lolled my head and lifted one eyelid. The yellow road lines were drifting into the view of my window on the passenger side. Quite a trick. Bill was a better driver than I thought, going sideways and all.
A million Greek relatives spun in lazy snake circles, out the door of the VFW and then back in to the hoots and gasps of the few white friends Memere invited. Stella was radiant but I really wanted to marry the puddle of sticky whiskey at the bottom of my glass. Bouzouki music trilled endlessly under stomping and applause and tinkling glasses and forks. I looked down, my rented lapels were out to here; I could have flown off and escaped if I had a running start out in the parking lot. The purple tentacles in my salad writhed suggestively to me, but I couldn't find the proper fork to stab them with. I never wanted a formal wedding, too square even if the dances were all group rounds. I could die right here, hand my soul to Stella and have her eat it with the cake. She had a tv, she had some money, she had a couch. I'd be fine. Just leave me alone, I'll tell her five days a week, and two days a week I'll lay her and that will keep her quiet and purring, so I can die in the living room, a moment at a time, like I want to.
Gin poked me hard and got my full attention. His hand wasn't in front of my face, it was somewhere in the inside of my face, his fingers in my eyes and nose like they were the triple holes of a bowling ball. I could still see though, see those deep-set coal eyes demanding my whole world from me. "The cut-up is a random event, but that doesn't mean you have to accept any snowflake lattice of word and image, Jack. You're still in the driver's seat, you and Bill together. Remember what Neal did to your old immortal town of Denver; he tore it apart right in front of you. So are the beings from beyond--he's nothing but the teeniest phalange of their might and chaos, a finger dragged along the dust of an antique market." He pushed the knife into my hand and nodded towards the newspapers. "Cut again."
The clicking of the blinker woke me again for a moment. "How long have you been trying to turn?" I muttered to Bill, who explained that the road was a spiral sinking away from the surface of the planet and that it was only headed in one direction. Down. He'd been making a left-hand turn for hour after hour. Our land was being torn apart, its remains washed away in a rain of black spirits from the darkening sky. Reputation aside, I never traveled directly from end to end of this great country--there were always false starts at rainy bus stops, big times missed thanks to some cotton picking adventure, or a premature end to my journeys thanks to fistfights and fevers. My trip through the American Dream was never made in a bee-line, how could it be?
Marie's secret enlightenment, her last-minute whisperings, saved me again. Do the absurd thing. I looked in the glove box and found an AAA map in folded tatters. I tore the pieces apart and shuffled them atop the dash. Bill didn't even look at me, he was leaning over the steering wheel like The Red Baron in his Fokker. I built Ohio and Pennsylvania a new system of veiny highways, and I cheated. I threw half the map out the window, extinguishing hundreds of miles; it would have been bad news for thousands of ordinary folks if they weren't all mugwump slaves already.
"Make the next right, Old Bull," I told Bill, and suddenly, like a spotlight on a dark stage making that golden saxophone shine, there was a right turn to be made. We hit the turnpikes in Pennsylvania and Jersey and I paid the tolls in bewildering haiku. My kireji shocked the poor late-night bastards. "Earth burns, becomes smoke," I told them, then I said a secret line that explained it all. I don't remember those seven syllables to this day, but it beat trying to pay with tainted change. One toll booth operator looked like a mandibled Neal but old Bill just screamed like a woman, floored it and blew right through the gate, taking the yellow and black beestriped guard arm with us for half a mile after. "How ya like that, you goddamn sumnabitch! This is my fucking world, and I'll stomp my feet wherever I like, over and through every magic circle your Wall Street wizards make! Notional boundaries, conceptual traps, I'm destroying all rational thought, and taking your ugly shit stalls with me!" The next booth, this one also holding a Neal doppelganger, Bill just rammed right into over and over, and when it collapsed we drove over it. "Now that, my friend," I howled, "is the spirit!"
That was a fine truck we stole.
I drew new highways in the blood from my well-chewed fingernails on the glove box's map and scraped a free road from central Pennsylvania and p
arallel the Jersey Turnpike. No man's cosmic enthusiasm could endure that labyrinthine road, but the force of Buddha's palm guided us along a new path. It steadied our backs. Up through the pine barrens, past the flaming chemical plants that really burned earth into poison smoke (and made us beg, each and every day, for more plastic marvels, more disposable moments, more dead tv dinners), and into the squalid Negro cities. By dawn, we were in Hoboken, where the air smelled of factory coffee from Maxwell's down on the far end of Washington Street.
We switched off again and drove us through the mile square city. The dregs of society lived here; Negroes were but shadows and the poor whites starving Dachau ghosts. The bars never closed in Hoboken; I could taste beer on my tongue with every breath. Morning ferries were pulling out, loaded high with miserable drunks trudging back to Manhattan--they came here at two when their bars closed and stayed 'til dawn, then shuffled to Charon's own barges. Back to their newsstand kiosks to hawk disaster for two bits. To Bowery factories, to slap together industrial ovens. Floors needed sweeping, shirts needed stitching. You want a night sweeter than wine, you pay for it in the morning, with a hangover, a stiff workaday shift, and a little chunk of soul carved right out of you with a sharp Stanley knife.