The Unbelievable Death of Joseph Goldberg

by Oliver Franks

  It was done, she told herself. Goodbye Gerald.

  *****

  Dr O’Connor just about made it home to her apartment without breaking down. It was some feat, she had to hold her breath as she rushed through the corridors to exit the complex, bag slung over her shoulder, waving her good nights, ignoring the friendly replies. Aside from self-preservation, she felt the strong urge to retreat, to be on her own, to gather herself before the storm she knew must come soon.

  Driving home, the passing lights of the city of Reno felt as distant as the stars in the desert night’s sky. She was no longer a member of that world, that society. She had travelled to another place and could only observe from a great distance what went on in ordinary people’s lives, what ordinary people did.

  Her skin peeled away stickily from the steering wheel when she finally parked the car. Though she hardly realised, she had been grabbing it so tight her nails had dug holes into it.

  The first thing she did when she entered her apartment was to play Beethoven’s 7th and to pour herself a glass of sauvignon blanc. Changing into her pyjamas and dressing gown, she curled up on the sofa. As the orchestra unfurled the drama of the symphony around her, she stared out blankly at the balcony and at the huge moon hanging there over the desert city lights.

  How long did she have before they found out, and what would they do? She didn’t have the strength to even think about it.

  And what would mom and dad think of her now? Now that she was a killer, a traitor. A sinner. She couldn’t help but ask.

  Slowly but surely, she unravelled into tears.

  *****

  “Lucy.”

  The voice awoke her. She bolted upright on the sofa, wine spilling over her front as the glass dropped from her hand. Looking around herself, it was dark, the dead of night. Outside the moon could no longer be seen, yet something glowed faintly on the balcony, with a reddish tinge. She rubbed her eyes.

  “Lucy, you’re mine now.”

  The voice had a rough, masculine tone. And it was definitely coming from the balcony. She felt her heart pump and her ears ring with fear. What was it she could see out there? She stared hard, but it remained just a red blob.

  She should do something, she thought. Get up. Scream. Run away. Or even go to it. Yet she felt such overwhelming terror she was glued to the spot.

  The voice began to laugh, bellowing with disgusting pleasure.

  “You know what you are, don’t you Lucy?” it said.

  “What?” she couldn’t help but reply.

  “You’re a murderer. A sick, cold blooded killer. Just because he ate those pills by his own hand, that doesn’t change a thing. You made him do it. That makes it all the worse. That makes it a terrible crime. And now you’re mine.”

  It laughed again.

  Lucy stood up, anger taking over from the fear. “Who are you?” she called to the balcony. “Who the hell are you to come to my home and accuse me!”

  She could make out the outline of a man, reddish. Yet it didn’t look real somehow.

  “I know everything Lucy,” said the voice, taunting. “Everything.”

  Somehow she felt certain it was smirking, whatever it was. She stepped towards the balcony door.

  “If you know everything, you’ll know I had no choice.”

  “Everyone has a choice,” it said.

  She slid open the door and stepped out into the chilly desert night.

  There it was, hanging in the air, floating just above the railings. A hazy red blob in the shape of a small man. Yet it was bent over oddly. Was it an animal of some kind, a goat maybe? The fear she felt was overpowering, stopping her from thinking straight, or even seeing straight, it seemed.

  “Do you get it now?” it said. “You gave up on me long ago, didn’t you? Decided I was a myth, just like all the others. But I’ve always been here. And now I’ve come for you, Lucy. There is no making up for what you did. No salvation. Your soul is doomed, whether you give yourself to me now, or live out a lifetime of torture, I’ll be waiting and I’ll be there for you. When the end comes, your death will be my reward.”

  As it talked, this monster of smoky red lines gradually become distinct. From the haze there grew horns and hoofs, a tail, the legs of a beast, the torso of a man. On the face, a satanic grin, toothy fangs, blotchy little black eyes. Lucy could only identify it as the Devil. The same Devil she had imagined many times as a child, in her worst nightmares.

  Oh my God, is this really happening?

  She felt herself gripped with fear and with the seriousness of heavy guilt. It can’t be real, can it? She couldn’t stop staring in terror at Satan stood there before her.

  Sweet Jesus, it’s real.

  Then like a splash of water over her face, something turned over in her mind, flipping her perception of the situation. She understood. Breathing in sharply as everything clicked into place, she felt a wave of relief mixed with new fears. They must have been watching her all along, others reporting to the General. Working on the technology without her knowledge.

  “I’m here because I care Lucy,” said General McDonnell.

  It had to be him, or one of his men maybe?

  “I’m here because you’re mine, and I want you now.”

  She breathed fast. No, it was him, she recognised the military drawl, his vaguely Southern tones. He certainly wasn’t the Devil, but he could harm her. There was only one thing she could try before he would take full control. It had never been tested before, had never needed to be, and could backfire spectacularly. But she wasn’t going to be used by him. She wasn’t going to be bullied and murdered, have her hopes and fears thrown back at her. She wasn’t going to let him do to her what she had had no choice but to do to Gerald.

  “Jump.”

  His voice was getting silkier all the time, the red light glowing fiercer, throbbing rhythmically. More suggestively.

  “Do it now and it will all be over.”

  Lucy breathed in deeply, praying to God her idea would work.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s mighty warm in hell. You’ll be comfortable—”

  She let out the loudest, most brutal, ear-splitting scream she could muster. She dug deep, scraping all the hatred and the pain and all the emotion she had inside her, focussing it on him, blasting the sound straight at him. It was like a great stream of fire bursting from her soul to his, covering him, burning him. Erasing him.

  And he disappeared before her eyes.

  *****

  “General McDonnell! General!”

  Voices swam like gusts of wind around the General. His head rang painfully with the echoes of the scream. That bitch, he thought. All he could hear was her scream, that hideous shrieking ricocheting around in his mind. All he could see was her eyes, the steely determination, the hatred.

  “Are you alright General?”

  It was Stevens, the lab guy. The General forced himself to sit up, dizzy though he was. He felt the warmth of blood seeping from his nose, tickling his lips. He wiped it with the back of a hand. Stevens pulled off the wires, unfastened the visor from his head and handed him a tissue with a nervous, frightened look.

  “I’ll live,” said the General, taking it grumpily, noting the shock on Steven’s face.

  He sat for a moment, breathing, pulling himself together. The blood kept coming so he held the tissue to his face, waiting for it to stop and for the sound and that image to leave his mind.

  “What happened?” asked Stevens.

  “That bitch,” said the General. “She bounced me.”

  “Bounced you?”

  “Not the technical term I’m sure, but that’s how it felt.”

  Stevens looked confused.

  “Nothing like this ever happened before I take it…” mumured the General.

  “No. The recipient never exerts power over the chair.”

  “Well perhaps O’Connor knows more than she’s been letting on…”

  The General’s mind churned.
He had to make sure no one found out what had happened, it could ruin everything. O’Connor wasn’t stupid, by now she’d be driving as far away as she could get. He’d messed up.

  “Get Lieutenant Fairbanks in here ASAP,” the General barked the order reluctantly.

  He respected O’Connor, wanted her on board, but he had no choice but to let Fairbanks’ Special Forces boys take care of her now.

  “Make sure all the new data you’ve gathered goes into the Supreme Leader project. Put everyone and everything on it now, 24/7, I don’t care what it costs” said the General. “We’ve not got much time to get to him before this war kicks off. After today we sure as hell know this thing works at least.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Stevens. “My team’s already testing a working model on the captured agents. We’ll have it ramped up in no time.”

  The General allowed himself a moment of bittersweet satisfaction. Everything would work out now, he’d see to that. Perhaps O’Connor could resist but that was only because she knew the tech inside out. Her knowledge made her strong. The rest of humanity was clueless. America’s enemies would be much easier, much more like that other poor wretch.

  When Fairbanks arrived the General barely managed to give the necessary official order.

  “Dead or alive,” he whispered, holding his exhausted and aching head in his hands.

  “Yes sir,” Fairbanks saluted.

  The General waved him away. The pain was like knives in his temples, her screeching voice ceaseless, those eyes ever fiery, demolishing his insides like a storming tank.

  *****

  Hours later that night the General lay in bed at home next to his sleeping wife. The screaming voice in his head still raged with the same terrible ferocity. A tireless, raging demon, rattling at his fibres and sinews. A never-ending tsunami of hatred.

  He began to wonder if it ever would end. What would it take to make it stop, make it go away?

  At 5am his alarm went off. He hadn’t slept a wink. The scream roared in his ears. Exhausted and desperate, he got up and went to the bathroom. He threw water over his eyes and looked at himself in the mirror. Blood was seeping from his nostrils and his eyes. Shocked, he wiped at his nose in panic. The blood kept on coming. He kept on wiping. Yet glancing down at his hands, he realised they were clean. He felt an immeasurable panic, felt his whole body go cold.

  “What the hell?” he rasped, shaking violently.

  Then the scream stopped.

  “General McDonnell,” came the hate-filled female voice.

  He frowned.

  The voice cackled. “You’re mine now General.”

  It couldn’t be her, couldn’t be. There was only one facility, one place under the desert, and that was on lock-down. There was no way she could have gotten in, gotten to any of the chairs.

  Then terrifying thought came to him. She wasn’t sending a signal, wasn’t using the tech. Somehow a part of her had permanently crossed the void. Sweet Jesus, she’s living in my mind now!

  “There’s no escaping me General,” she said again, as if reading his thoughts. “You’re mine.”

  “Fuck you,” he managed to say.

  He stumbled to the balcony of his two-story house. He clasped the railings and stood swaying, as erect as he could, breathing deeply, trying to gather his thoughts. The truth of what they were doing would be distorted by others, as it always was in war, but that would never diminish it. She should have understood that. She did what she believed was necessary at least, and he respected that, but she was wrong. War might be a kind of madness, but there were always methods to it, even when the how and the why weren’t so… black and white.

  Taking a deep breath of the thick desert night air, the General was overcome with clarity. The chair would win the war. Perhaps even prevent it. It was that simple.

  He effected a brief salute and flung himself over the balcony. Falling head first, extreme pride provided him a momentary, blissful silence. Then his skull smashed apart on the pavement.

  The Dark Matter of Dreams

  That night my wife slept soundly, as she always does, but I struggled to get to sleep. It was only a Tuesday, three more slow days of work still ahead of me before the weekend. I was restless.

  I took to noticing all the things around me as I lay there in bed. The tacky Christmas lights she had put up and refused to let me take down after the festive season. The orange street lamps outside, punctuated by the sound of an occasional passing car. The dusty wind, leaves fluttering and crackling on it. The few stars I could make out through the window in the city-light-obscured night sky.

  I forced my eyes shut.

  Still, my mind could not help but wander. I began turning wild thoughts over like pebbles in a stream, searching for secrets underneath. The future of humanity, environmental collapse, a species doomed to chronic readjustments. I saw revolutions on the horizon. Slaveries, grave dangers, mind-boggling traps of our own unwitting creation. These thoughts harassed me, made me toss and turn.

  Pulling the covers close to my body, I switched to the topic of God. Was ‘He’ real, or just a figment of our imaginations? Perhaps we are all literally Him? Shards of divine existence floating in the infinite expanse? Figments of His imagination? The conscious matter of the universe?

  Then an idea occurred to me. What if dark matter was somehow the pure stuff of consciousness? If so, perhaps it was expanding exponentially, with the number of living beings born to the cosmos? I knew nothing of the science, but drifting to sleep, it made sense somehow.

  It led me to another thought. What if, when you are unconscious, you are existing in this, your basic form, pure dark matter?

  The notion expanded like a bubble in my mind and, finally, I fell sleep.

  *****

  I am taking a long, slow, painless dive into a gushing river. Sucked down, I am happy to ride my luck where it may take me, my toes wriggling, my hair flying behind me through the bubbles. My destination is unknown, and doesn’t matter. This is a journey to somewhere I vaguely perceive as warm and fuzzy. I embrace it.

  I land on the edge of a forest.

  I have a strong desire to enter it.

  As I step forward, a tall man in a hood and flowing black cloak appears. He blocks my path, raising the palm of his left hand with a piercing, unforgiving gaze on his bearded face.

  “Those who wish to enter my realm must swear to open their minds and drink fully from all the waters that present themselves,” he says in a deep tone. “They must understand that life in this forest is not a game.”

  He is staring at me. Staring into me.

  He continues.

  “It is a spiritual journey that has cosmic consequences for those involved. All your actions from here on in are yours and yours alone. You must allow for the possibility of your own demise and draw strength from it as motivation for your continued existence in this universe. Do you accept?”

  “Without hesitation, I do.”

  He stands to one side, allowing my passage without so much as a flicker on his parched face.

  I breathe deeply and step forward.