“Sure, I’ve heard the routine, fairly recently, I think. I never thought of him as that famous. What do you mean ‘once’? Did he die recently? How long have I really been away?”
Falstaff blinked, grimacing. “No, no—I didn’t mean that. I think I’d imagined he’d said it a long time ago. Maybe because it’s so, wise, I think. It’s very perceptive, what he said, what it says about the dynamics between men and women.”
“Oh, I suppose. It seemed a little exaggerated to me. Funny but, it overstates, don’t you think? Like most humor? I know I’m not dangerous like that, certainly not to a woman.”
Falstaff was silent for a few moments. “It’s not an accusation leveled at any specific male. It’s about what challenges us, what we have to overcome, the things we’ve always been forced to live by. It’s-it’s what Alan said, something about how men have always been fed this poor approximation of the truth. About how we’ve all been immersed in a lifelong distortion. And what that’s done to men, and to most human beings. It’s made us more... dangerous. Do you have a daughter?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. But if I did, I’d be afraid about what she might encounter. It embarrasses me.”
They started to get up, then Daniel said, “There was a young boy with me, with Whitman. He participated in the shootings.”
“A doppelganger.”
“Doppelganger?”
“It happens sometimes. There’s someone else in your scenario, some persona who commits some of the crimes. It takes some of the pressure off you.”
“It didn’t make me feel any better.”
Falstaff shrugged. “It works differently for different people. Did he look like anyone you know?”
Daniel couldn’t think about it for very long without a thrill of anxiety riding across his skin. “No,” he said firmly. “But it reminded me of myself. I was never as angry as I was when I was young. My dad would have to calm me down. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous on the planet,’ he told me, ‘than an angry young man.’”
They took another flight of stairs. The deterioration was more pronounced. Paint peeled from the walls like leaves and fronds wilted and the color drained out. Stair steps were cracked, the treads missing large chunks. Rusted brick-a-brac clogged the darkened corners of the landings.
They reached the final landing, a final door. “Wear these.” Daniel slipped the sunglasses on as Falstaff pushed open the door.
The roof of the building was much larger than Daniel had expected—going on for hundreds of yards, it was vast, a rambling stretch of stone and tar and metal and some fibrous material he did not recognize with a rotten, blasted surface. Loose debris lay scattered over everything. It was like some abandoned, ruined beach.
Besides numerous pipes sprouting from hidden sources deep inside the building, and duct ends of old rusted ventilation shafts, he could detect the remnants of foundations across broad stretches, and here and there an actual piece of a wall, indications that at one point there had been additional rooms up here, maybe even a partial level.
There were also crude lean-tos and makeshift loungers, a number of crudely assembled shelters, an array of furniture dragged up from the levels below, and gray-uniformed residents lying around in the sun, and only a short distance away the roaches doing their own lounging, their gleaming carapaces reflecting brilliant green and blue fractal patterns that hurt the eyes.
Most appeared relaxed, apparently glad that sunshine and moving air were possible in this strange prison. But consternation and irritation were evident in some of the isolated small groups. An older man and a woman—the first female he had seen since coming here—were screaming at each other so furiously he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
A man in his seventies, wasting away in a voluminous robe, and a younger fat man were seated together. The fat man was stroking the old man’s emaciated face and hands, speaking in soft murmurs, then reaching out with clawed fingers and digging into the old man’s chest, the fingers coming away slightly bloodied.
“Father and son, I believe,” Falstaff said.
Here and there were some solo performances in the crowd: a man sitting on a broken piece of stone sculpture, quietly nibbling at his left hand. A young woman walking repeatedly to a shiny piece of metal, staring at her reflection and bursting into tears.
As they got closer to one edge of the building the roaches far outnumbered the residents. They watched silently and, like the soulless soldiers Daniel suspected they were, slowly turned their heads with those enormous multi-faceted eyes. A few were half‑hidden in the debris, betrayed only by a barbed black leg straying around a corner, or a section of dark carapace showing behind gaps in a wall or through metal mesh. Several lounged ridiculously on steps or benches, their stiff legs erect and suspended in mid‑air. Daniel almost laughed.
“Daniel!”
He ran into something hard and immediately felt the salt taste. He looked up past hard black branches with daggers attached, to his face mirrored hundreds of times in the black facets of the globes. A smell like rancid motor oil and urine. He was rigid, and thought he might scream.
But only the antennae moved, drifting fractionally in the still air. Daniel turned and walked away from the enormous roach.
“Notice how they’ve gathered around the edges, as if shielding the air space,” Falstaff pointed out.
It was true. The roaches appeared to have strategically placed themselves along the perimeter of the roof, blocking the residents from accessing the building’s edge. On one side he saw the gleam of water and a boundless emptiness of ocean, and on the other a wide stretch of dirt and then a distant, ragged jumble of concrete and brick ruins. He was startled. He’d had no idea they were near an ocean.
“What are they doing? Are they afraid the residents might try to escape?”
“I think it’s more along the lines of suicide prevention. Although what’s to prevent a roach from taking the leap I don’t know.”
Daniel determinedly looked away from the roaches and the residents, lifting his eyes toward the sky. It was mottled with dark clouds, smoke or pollution, and slight traces of a shimmer, as if it were all cooking. Then further away, hovering above a more distant rubble, gray and red, with sudden plumes of black.
“Feeling as if you’re in the crosshairs?” Daniel nodded nervously. “It’s a common notion people have up here on the roof. Remind you of the Charles Whitman scenario?”
“Yes, yes it does. But from the victim’s point of view.”
“He was the first, or the first we remember, to shoot strangers randomly that way. Death from the skies. It’s because of him that American police departments established SWAT teams.”
“But an aberration,” Daniel insisted. “Not everyone does things like that.”
“I suppose not. But one of our more famous American writers—I’m sure you studied him in school—he’s part of the literary canon as they call it—Harry Crews, he once wrote after visiting that Texas Tower that he knew that all over the earth people were resisting climbing the tower. That all of us have a Tower to climb. And to deny that you have your personal Tower is to risk the possibility that you might someday climb it.”
“Harry Crews? He wrote Car, right? About a fellow who eats a car? And Feast of Snakes? Great stuff, but you don’t study a writer like that in school, at least not where I come from. You discover him at a sleazy newsstand, or in a box of used paperbacks at a garage sale.”
A darkness came into Falstaff’s face. And something odd was happening with his mouth. “I suppose. He’s just a writer... I admire very much. I misspoke.” In the bright afternoon air his face shimmered with vague shadows andDaniel had to look away.
4
THE INSECT VOICES at the back of his brain might have taken him anywhere. Often there was a time just before the dream was over and a new scenario began that he thought they may have taken him to some prehistoric place and left him there, some lost landscape of hard
shell and claw and bodies torn and leaking. They’d sent him to where they wanted him, to where he needed to be. They’d left him with barbed, narrow legs in his thoughts, hard exoskeletons at the periphery of his vision.
Daniel came to again while staring up at the sky. The smell here was worse than Ubo, worse than anywhere he’d ever been. He could see blackened, crumbling brick buildings in his peripheral vision, moist and dripping, a thick red sky. And all he could smell was that stench of raw sewage. He wanted to look down and make sure he wasn’t standing in it, but the character he had entered was singularly focused on that sky and wouldn’t allow it.
Daniel was surrounded by a wall of noise, beating against him from all sides, and yet his character had somehow turned it off, refusing to hear it. It was as if his new persona had eaten him.
A black plume of smoke thrust itself across the red sky, stalled, then began to dissipate into air already heavy with particles. This left some patches of sky looking oilier than others; he could see the small green and purple and blue rainbows that oil makes in a puddle.
Then the head snapped down and around and the sound came rushing back in: an incredible clatter, layer upon layer of thousands of rattling carts and buggies pouring down the kennetseeno streets, metal shod wheels on cobblestone, and their vibrating shells all sounding as if they were shaking themselves to pieces, punctuated by the more pleasing rhythm of the horses’ iron-cladhooves. Then there were the sellers, the street criers, their shouted words overlapping until he had no idea what they were saying, except the periodic exclamation of “Buy! Buy! Buy!” And then lording over them all the melodic notes of the bell tower at Christ Church, pealing out the hour.
Christ Church? And all this smoke and sewage, buggy rattling. London in the Victorian era, certainly. Early industrial London, incredibly filthy city. He never would have believed the amount of pollution that could be generated by coal, tons and tons of it burning all the time, if he hadn’t been seeing it himself.
Spitalfields, his character thought, as if in answer. And the chapel. Whitechapel. And Daniel felt his own thoughts falling away into tatters as an old rage tore up out of the deep shadows and consumed him.
A ballad monger stood on the corner, his broad sheets tied around his hat, his head dropping back (slice, slice!) as he began to bellow,
“Now Mrs. Potts says she, I’d let the villain see,
If I had him here I’d sure to make him cough,
I’d chop off all his toes, then his ears and then his nose,And I’d make him such a proper drop of broth,
His hat and coat I’d stew and flavor it with glue,Blackbeetles, mottled soap, and boil the lot,
I’ve got a good sized funnel I’d stick it in his guzzle,
And make humbug eat it boiling hot...”
And all around him the folks was laughing and jostling, speaking of Jack the Ripper. Well, that weren’t his name, now was it? But he didn’t like the name his bastard of a pa give him, so Jack would do, all jolly the way they said it now, or all full of fear the way they said it at night. Happy Jack—though he’d never been happy as far as he membered—or Sad Jack or Rippin Jack it was all him. Never mind wot they said in the papers. He didn’t read them, just heard about them, and their lies, because he’d never writ any of them letters, or called hisself Jack. But Jack, Happy Jack would do.
Oh, he knew how to read and write well enough—one of his pa’s old customers was a proper gent, some kind of professor fell into drink and become a lushington. He stank of hair oil, his bloody whiskers all curled up in bacca-pipes. Before he died—a do down one night with a holy water sprinkler bashing his noggin—he taught Jack plenty, including things Happy Jack wouldn’t think about. But Jack never liked the way the read and the writ words felt in his head, all bumping around and hurtful like a tin cup full of stones. Each word like a new voice in his head, and him with too many in there already. The “mad multitudes,” to quote Milton, the way the professor always done.
But the words kept coming none the less, with all their temptations and colorful suggestions. There was that other bloke the professor was always quoting, now wasn’t there? Something Blake? “Sooner murder an infant in the cradle (a terrible thing!) than nurse unacted desire.”
Jack never set out to be no trassewno. He never wanted to hold a candle to the devil. He weren’t born evil, no matter wot the papers or the ballad criers said. Oh, he knew life. He’d done his share o’ area diving round the Chapel, some beak hunting (he dearly loved them chickens!), bug hunting, a bit of blag. But he weren’t a bludger at first. All that bloody business come after living too many years in Hell, hearing the church bells every day and thinking about wot they promised, and then getting none of it. The Chapel were a long ways from Heaven.
Then a film come over Jack’s lamps, like it done most days ahead of sunset, betwixt three and four. Soon enough you’d hardly see your hand in front of your face, even with the gas lamps on, with all the black bits in the air. But Jack got dark afore the rest. Jack got dark with the sun still blazin high. He could see all them other blokes walking about in the afternoon of their day when for him it was nigh midnight. Not like he favored the dark, or being alone and such. The dark left him with a sick feeling in his belly and salt on his tongue, with all the times he membered living there, no matter the time of day.
So he started moving, running in his big gallies into folk, knocking em down, not cause he was of a mind to hurt nobody but cause he wanted to run out of there, run out of London if he could. Folks shouted at him, cause they knew him, though they didn’t know him as Jack.
The ripper distracted, Daniel floated up through the swirl of madness, past the thoughts of bloody hole, filth and scum and a rotting taste going down as deep as the lungs, as if seeking a gulp of clean air. He’d never experienced such chaos in a character before, not even in a murdering thug like Jesse James or a monster like Caligula, both clearly reasoning people compared to this one.
He was playing a character and the character was part him and part what the roaches had been able to find out or recreate. But the experience of being inside a character was always different, and sometimes even varied widely over the span of a single visitation.
Sometimes, like this time with Jack the Ripper, you were swallowed completely, so there seemed no difference between Jack’s thoughts and your thoughts, and looking out Jack’s eyes was the same as looking out of your own, and you smelled the stench with Jack’s nose, and when Jack raged that was you raging as well.
These were the hardest characters to shake later, when you woke up back in the barracks. You’d feel the most guilt over what Jack had done, and you’d have flashbacks into the character at the most inopportune times, like when you were eating dinner, or thinking of the family you’d left behind, and you’d curl up into a ball on the floor, knowing that a hundred showers wouldn’t wash all that filth away.
Other times it felt as if you were riding within a bubble inside your character’s brain. You could hear everything, and feel everything, but that was still you inside the bubble, horrified by everything your character was doing, and yet you were forced to watch. Their rage was not your rage—in fact when they raged against their victims, it also felt as if they were raging against you.
But if you were lucky, the walls of that bubble might be thick enough that you didn’t hear everything your character said, or see everything your character did, and sometimes you could even close your eyes and pretend you were back home with your family, no matter how hard the roaches tried to yank you out of there.
An invasion of nausea rose out of the ripper then, draining any thought of an earlier- or later‑day London, or of a Daniel or Jesse James or Caligula or of any other lifetime. There was only this...
He was here and now, trapped here in Jack, Happy Jack. Once again a tide of salt water lapped at his throat as he emptied himself of Daniel, was drained of any memories of a time or a place other than this. Inside the dark part of his eyeballs he co
uld see a roach‑head, black eye‑globes glistening, barbed legs sawing against his tender brain tissue. A skittering through his head as the roach‑thoughts clawed, digging for some kind of understanding of why Jack done what he done. Like Jack had any idea at all.
Whitechapel High Street. A man with a rough old face, his patchy white beard like some kind of infection, goaded a small drove of cattle down the street toward the slaughterhouses at Aldgate. Deerstalker cap, brown kecks and a cutaway coat‑‑even all that dunnage couldn’t hide the filthy white hair on the man’s face. Jack imagined that if he stripped off the coat he’d find more hair running the fullness of the man’s body, matted with cow shite and other filth.
Jack stared at the cuffs of the man’s trousers. They was so badly frayed he wondered if a dog had chewed them, or the man’s own cows when he slept with them. Mud speckled him from his cracked leather crabshells to his beard-eaten face. Jack could see the tiny balls of mud‑‑or maybe they was shite‑‑clinging to the ends of the man’s whiskers, as the horns of the lead animal snagged Jack’s coat. An explosion went off in Jack’s head, as much terror as anger. And suddenly he was God bringing the mayhem down on this transgressor.
Jack punched the man on the shoulder. “On yer way! Outta the street!” The old man raised his cane, looking startled, unable to speak. Jack punched him in the face. He felt the nose give way like it was made of eggshell. Blood spurted from one nostril, thickly painting the beard. Jack rocked back and forth on his feet, acting the bruiser, hitting at the old man, who was now trying to maneuver himself behind his cattle. Jack slapped out at his face, but a shoulder got in the way. The old man stumbled back against a cow, and Jack tried to pursue him around the lead animal, careful to avoid the horns. The cattle stirred restlessly, moaning deep in their throats.
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