“Do you think Daria’s in Atlanta yet?” she asks Marvin, because she needs to think about something besides being dizzy and needing to piss. He checks his watch again.
“Yeah. She should be. Do you want me to call her? I didn’t know if I should or—”
“No, I was just wondering, that’s all. I just like to know where she is,” and then they’ve reached the restroom door, painted matte brown like chocolate milk. “I can take it from here,” she says.
“If you need me, just shout, okay? And I’ll hear you.”
Niki pushes at the door, opening it just enough that she gets a sudden, cloying whiff of toilet cakes and Lysol, flower-scented liquid soap, and part of her wishes Marvin would go somewhere and find another nurse to yell at, but another part wishes just as hard that she weren’t too embarrassed and stubborn to let him follow her inside. She’d gone into the restroom at Cafe Alhazred alone, hadn’t she? And isn’t that where and when things really began to fall apart?
No, it was a long time before that.
A long, long time before that.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’ll wash my hands, just like you said.”
“Just your left hand,” Marvin reminds her quickly.
“How the hell am I supposed to wash my left hand and not touch anything with my right hand?” she asks him, and he sighs and makes a tight furrow of his eyebrows and the smooth patch of skin in between.
“Never mind,” she mutters. “I’ll figure it out.” And Niki pushes the door the rest of the way open, steps inside, letting it swing quietly shut behind her. The restroom isn’t as bright as the ER, the floor a chessboard of gray and white tiles, the wall too, as high as her chest, and then wallpaper the color of a sky before snow. Three stalls, a counter with three sinks, a big mirror, more fluorescence, but the light doesn’t seem as harsh, as desolate, as it does in the waiting room. And there are no people here, either. She wonders if Marvin would let her stay until a doctor finally gets around to looking at her hand.
She chooses the stall nearest the door, for no particular reason, and slides the shiny metal bolt firmly into place, tests it by putting the weight of her left shoulder against the door to be sure it’s not going to come open so anyone who happens by can see her sitting there with her pants down around her ankles.
Her urine is almost as dark as apple juice, yellow tinting towards orange, and she tries to remember how long it’s been since she’s had anything to drink. A sip of filtered water when she took her meds before leaving the house, but nothing since, and she realizes how dry her mouth is, her tongue like dust and ashes.
Niki wipes herself and drops the wad of paper into the toilet, is about to stand and pull her jeans up when the lights flicker and dim, and there’s a faint crackling sound from somewhere on her left, from one of the other stalls, maybe. And she stops, perfectly freeze-frame still, and listens and watches the softly pulsating bulbs overhead. Another brownout, or maybe a blackout on the way, she thinks, but then the crackling sound grows louder than before and the too-clean restroom smells, and the smell of her own urine, are replaced by an odor that reminds her of burning tires; it stings her nose, and her eyes begin to tear.
“Marvin!” she calls out immediately, deciding she can worry about modesty some other time, in some other restroom, one where the lights aren’t fluttering like an epileptic’s brain and the air doesn’t smell like fire and melting rubber. “Marvin! Can you hear me?”
But no one answers, and she stands up slowly, reaches back and reflexively flushes the toilet; for a few seconds the swirling sound of water, the little maelstrom trapped inside its porcelain bowl, drowns out the crackling. Niki’s pretty sure that her hand hurts worse than it did only a moment or two before, and the throbbing has begun to ebb and swell in time to the unsteady lights. She gets her pants up as quickly as she can using just her left hand, fumbling with the zipper and the inconvenient button at the top, as the burning-tire smell grows stronger and the fluorescents flicker.
“Marvin, if you can fucking hear me, please get your ass in here right this second!”
She slides back the latch, opens the door, and in the last instant before the lights flare bright as an artificial supernova and then blink out altogether, Niki realizes that the crackling is radio static, or something very much like radio static. And now there’s a darkness as profound as any she’s ever known, as absolute and impenetrable, and she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, stands with her hand on the stall door listening as the crackling resolves itself into thin and papery voices, voices filtered through diodes and transistor tubes and years past counting.
“Angels. I can see angels now.”…light issues forth, and at the other door…
“Listen, child. Listen hard enough and you’ll hear their wings, like war drums on the wind. Close your eyes and listen—”
…darkness enters, till her hour to veil the heaven, though darkness there might well seem twilight here.
“Blood falling from the stars, blood from stones and silence, but I can hear them now, and the sky will never be quiet for me again.”
Niki takes one step forward, half out of the stall, still half in, but the floor beneath her feet has begun to list and roll like the deck of a small boat caught off guard on a stormy sea, and she almost falls. Not a blackout, she thinks. Not a blackout at all. A goddamn earthquake. She calls for Marvin again, screaming, but the radio voices have grown so loud that she can hardly hear herself over them, so there’s no way that he’s going to hear her all the way out in the hall. No way he’ll ever come to help, to pull her back out into the ugly, safe-white hospital light.
If there is still light left out there, if there’s light left anywhere.
Thunder that isn’t thunder rumbling, rising from someplace far below, thunder and violence born from grinding, shifting rock and slipping fault-line fractures; the restroom floor heaves, and Niki is thrown, sprawling, to her knees.
…spread out their starry wings with dreadful shade…
“I see them. I see them all tumbling down like smoldering, bleeding hailstones. And I see them crawling away, broken and lost.”
“Hold the line—”
And then the thunder has grown so complete, so whole and deafening, that Niki doesn’t have to listen to the crackling radio voices anymore. She slumps sobbing against the cool restroom wall, and her hands desperately probe about in the darkness for something solid that she can hold on to, anything steady, anything at all.
“Take my hand, Niki. Quick,” Spyder Baxter says, and there is light now, the crimson light of an inferno to break the gloom apart and strew the shards like fallen leaves, light as hot and red as the seething blood of angels. “I can show you the way back.”
Niki stares up at her, amazed, disbelieving, and she knows now that none of this can possibly be real after all. No earthquake, no phantom voices, no flickering lights, just a crazy girl running scared, locked up helpless inside her own head, and she shuts her eyes tight—the way that Dr. Dalby taught her—and “I am here,” she says as though she’s certain. “I am here, and I am real, and I know the difference between what is and isn’t. I know—”
“There’s not much time,” Spyder says urgently and takes her bandaged hand.
“This isn’t real,” Niki sobs. “This can’t be—”
“It doesn’t matter, Niki,” Spyder replies, her soothing, velvet voice calm and clear above the thunder. “It can kill you, either way.”
Niki opens her eyes again, and Spyder is still there, smiling down at her. That pale, hard face that she’d almost forgotten, her memories long since grown worn and unreliable, dulled by the fear and drugs and nightmares, almost forgotten because she left Birmingham without so much as a single photograph to keep the forgetting at bay. Spyder’s tangled white dreadlocks, her heavy-lidded eyes that someone might mistake for Asian, and irises the clearest, ice-bound blue.
“You have to trust me,” Spyder says and glances over her left should
er, towards the source of the brightening, ruddy light. When she looks back, the cruciform scar between her eyes has begun to glow softly, light the same cold shade as her eyes, the same light seeping thick from the intricate spiderweb tattoos covering both arms from the backs of her hands to her shoulders. “You shouldn’t have come here yet, Niki. It’s too soon. You have to start at the beginning. And you sure as hell shouldn’t have come alone.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Niki whispers, and the heaving world thunders an angry reply, words from cracking, splitting stone, and she would scream again, would scream for Marvin, for Daria, but Spyder is lifting her to her feet.
“That’s why it’s too soon,” she says. “That’s why you can’t be here yet. That’s why you can’t come alone.”
And Niki can see that she isn’t even in the restroom anymore, that she’s standing with Spyder on a black volcanic plain. The gray and white checkerboard tiles, the three stalls, the restroom walls, all of it replaced by cooling lava and black plumes of smoke that smell like acid and rotting eggs. There’s no sun overhead, no moon, no stars, only the roiling smoke hanging low and poisonous, reflecting the crimson glow across its restless, sulfurous belly.
“We’ll have to cross the Dog’s Bridge,” Spyder says and frowns. “There’s no other way left. Not from here. Not from now. You do everything I tell you, Niki, and don’t you dare look back.”
“Is this Hell?” Niki asks. “Is that where we are?”
“Niki, you can’t keep using someone else’s stories like that,” Spyder replies, her frown deepening, drawing shadowed lines across her smooth, milky skin. “You’re going to have to find the truth of this for yourself.”
“I don’t know anything, Spyder.”
“No. That’s just what they want you to believe. That’s what they need you to believe. That’s the lie that will damn you, Niki, and you have to see past it. You have to find your own eyes down here or the crows and maggots will be picking your bones before you’ve even begun.”
“I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” Niki says, squeezing Spyder’s hand tighter despite the pain, crying harder even though she’s trying to stop.
“Remember what I said, Niki. Once you start across the bridge, don’t you dare look back. Not for anything. No matter what you hear. And remember to count your steps, all of them.”
“I was trying to get to the airport,” Niki says, wiping at her eyes and snotty nose with the back of her left hand. “I was trying to get back to Birmingham.”
“I know. And you will. But first we have to get you out of here, and we have to do it now.”
And Spyder starts walking, towing Niki along behind her. Niki can tell that they’re moving slowly towards the place where the red glow is coming from, and she’s busy trying not to stumble and fall again as Spyder picks their way over and between the broken jumbles of lava, once-liquid stone frozen sharp as razors. Here and there, fissures leak a sickly yellow steam, and Niki has to cover her nose and mouth with her free hand or it makes her gag. The stench from those fissures is almost enough to convince her that the earth here, the very land in this place, has died and is already quickly decomposing beneath her feet.
Overhead, something on ragged kite wings screeches and wheels on the thermals, gliding in and out of the low, smoky clouds. Niki only catches a glimpse of it from the corner of one eye, but that glimpse is enough that she knows she doesn’t want a better look. All around them, small albino things scurry fast across and between the rocks, disturbed by their passage.
“The world is very thin here,” Spyder says, having to shout now to make herself heard above the thunder still bellowing underfoot. “It never lasts long. This is only the latest scab du jour,” and she motions at the glistening, uneven lava around them. “But the Dog’s Bridge, it’s usually in the same place.”
Niki can hear the radio voices again, a barely audible murmur playing somewhere just beneath the rumbling earth, trying to distract her from the things that Spyder’s saying.
Great things, and full of wonder in our ears…
“Mark my words, this child will be the ruin of us all. She’ll have us all in the fires before she’s done.”
Far differing from this World, thou hast revealed…
“She isn’t even our child, Trisha. Mark my word. Demons leave their babies in our cribs—”
Spyder stops, because this is where the land ends, for now, falling steeply away to a seemingly endless molten sea of red-orange and blue-white lava a thousand feet below. The light’s grown so bright that Niki has to squint, and she can feel the heat beginning to blister her face. The rising heat bends the light, turning everything ahead of them into a vast, inconstant mirage; if there’s an opposite shore, Niki can’t see any sign of it.
“That way,” Spyder says, “there,” and she points to their right. “Right there where it’s supposed to be.”
Niki looks away from the sea of fire, beyond the compass tip of Spyder’s index finger, and the Dog’s Bridge rises in a crooked, sagging arch above the inferno. Not too far away from where they’re standing, over another pile of boulders, another lava flat or two. She blinks at the precarious jackstraw ford built not from stone or steel, but from countless bones bleached and wired together, a billion disassembled skeletons for its soaring piers and buttresses.
“The bridges are eternal,” Spyder whispers, as though she’s afraid someone might overhear. “Don’t let anyone or anything tell you different. The bridges will be here when the rest of this shit’s just a goddamn burnt-out memory.”
The world shudders, and a geyser of fire, miles and miles away, rises up from the sea to scorch the black sky blacker.
“That’s the way, Niki. Walk fast, and don’t look back.”
Niki turns away from the ossuary bridge and the fountain of fire, turning to Spyder, the blue cross shining between her eyes. “You’re coming with me,” she says.
“Not this time. This time you have to do it on your own. The path might close—”
“I can’t cross that fucking thing, not alone.”
“You can, and you will.”
“I won’t let you do this to me, not again.”
But Spyder releases her hand, fresh blood showing wetly through the bandages, and takes a step backwards, away from Niki. The geyser falls back into the sea, and the scalded clouds scream and writhe.
“You left me once before, and you’re not going to do it to me again, goddamn it!”
“I’m not leaving you, Niki. But there are rules here, and I can’t cross the bridge with you. Not this time.”
“Fuck that, Spyder. You come with me, or I don’t go.”
Spyder frowns again and looks out across the sea of fire.
“Count your steps, and don’t look back,” she says, and before Niki can reply, before she can tell her how far up her ass she can shove all of this, Spyder Baxter dissolves in a dust-devil swirl of sparkling cinders. And Niki stands there for a long, long time, minutes or hours or days, no way to tell in this place without day or night, waiting for Spyder to come back. But she doesn’t come back, and when Niki’s hand hurts too much to wait any longer, she turns, finally, and follows the narrow trail that winds along the edge of the cliff to the foot of the Dog’s Bridge.
She counts her steps, just like Spyder told her to do, and she doesn’t look back.
“Do you remember what Campbell said about schizophrenia?” Dr. Dalby asks her, and Niki shrugs and stares past him out the big window behind his desk, the San Francisco skyline glittering white and silver.
“You remember, the essay that I asked you and Daria to read together last month,” he says, prompting, and she shrugs again.
“Yeah,” Niki says. “What about it?”
“You said you read it.”
“Sure, we read it,” Niki replies, nodding her head, her eyes still on the skyscrapers and a smudgy flock of pigeons lighting on a rooftop across the street. She has a vague memory of the e
ssay, photocopied pages stapled together and sent away with her like a homework assignment. But she can’t remember whether they ever read it or not.
“I want to read you a few lines from it now, if that’s okay. It’s something you need to remember. Is it okay if I read it to you now, Nicolan?”
“Go ahead,” she tells him. “I’m listening.”
And he clears his throat, takes a sip of water from the glass on his desk, and begins.
“‘The whole problem, it would seem, is somehow to go through it, even time and again, without shipwreck; the answer being not that one should not be permitted to go crazy; but that one should have been taught something already of the scenery to be entered and the powers likely to be met, given a formula of some kind by which to recognize, subdue them, and incorporate their energies.’”
He pauses a moment then, watching her, waiting in case she wants to say something. Niki stops counting the pigeons and looks at Dr. Dalby instead, because it’s always easier if she at least pretends to listen.
“Are you still with me?” he asks her.
“I got nowhere else to go,” she says and smiles for him, but he doesn’t smile back for her.
“Good. I want to read a few more lines, skipping ahead to the end of the essay, okay?”
“We’re almost out of time,” Niki says, glancing at the clock. “My hour’s almost up.”
“There’s time for this,” he says and then begins reading again before she can object. “‘The trick must be to become aware of it’—and here, Campbell is talking about the visionary object or its witness, the visionary subject—‘to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we may all be saviors when functioning in relation to our friends and enemies—savior figures, but never The Savior.’”
Niki shuts her eyes a moment, just to be sure, and then opens them again.
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