by John Shirley
Late afternoon. The sky was lowering with smoke and haze; it looked as if the world was roofed in shale. We were in my converted Chevy—it had been converted to an electric car about ten years before and never seemed to have reconciled to the change. The body was a little too heavy for the electric engine, and it strained to reach forty. I was driving, the professor beside me, Melissa in the back, leaning forward between the seats.
A burning garbage truck careened around the corner—I pictured it as a leviathan leaping from the surface of a sea of trash, a burning metal-and-rubber whale thrashing in and out of the oceanic swells of debris and decay at one of those really enormous landfills. It curveted on two wheels into the middle of our street, streaming flaming trash, its driver a black man with a bottle in one hand, laughing and weeping—I had to drive onto the broad sidewalk to avoid it. The truck was soon out of sight behind us.
“We’ve got the wrong car for this,” I said, as we swerved around another drunken cadre of looters banging and bumping shopping carts full of holo-set players. “You need one of those hydrogen-powered SUVs—oh shit . . .”
This last as an Arab with a rage-contorted face slammed a teenage boy onto the hood of our car. He’d backed him out of his half-demolished liquor store, was digging his rigid fingers into the boy’s neck. I had to hit the brakes to keep from dragging them down the street—Melissa yelling out the window, “Stop that, stop that, let him go!” The frustrated Arab, seeing his shop destroyed by looters, finally had one in his hands, and his face was—oh yes—demonic as he slammed the boy’s head on the hood of my car. He was enraged, but was he possessed? No.
No, no one was possessed. Not exactly. There have been no possessions.
Have I said that before? I say it again. It means something.
The boy flailing and the Arab smashing, the two rolled off my car’s hood.
“Help them!” Melissa yelled.
I looked at Paymenz. “No,” he said. “Drive on. We must get there.”
Driving on, past a group of children throwing bricks through the window of a store, I remembered the game HACKK, a first-person computer game I’d been addicted to. In HACKK, a biowarfare virus that attacked the human brain had turned most of the population into murderous zombies. The zombies were controlled by Terrorist Overlords. You had to get through the smoking ruins of the city to a sanctuary on the far side, killing psychotic ax-wielding viral zombies as you went, with weapons you picked up along the way, while outsmarting the Terrorist Overlords. It had been superbly realistic 3-D, in which every adversary was a distinct, cunning individual, and yet it had been dreamlike, had the tantalizing familiarity of some half-remembered nightmare.
“Who was it,” I wondered aloud, as we veered down a mostly empty street—smoking ruins on one side, shattered plastic boxes trailing from store windows on the other—“who said that some video games had the quality of the bardos? E. J. Gold, I think. . . .”
“You’re doing that nervous, irrelevant commentary again,” Melissa said, her voice tight with fear as we drove through gathering shadows.
“Let him say whatever gets him through here,” Paymenz said.
I was driving as I was speaking—as if in a trance. I was so tired. “Remember Gold? One of the last century’s grassroots, homegrown California gurus. He used the game Quake to induce a kind of paranoia-sharpened awareness in his followers, told them to think of the bardo states that would come after death as computer games set up by some mysterious programmer. Or something along those lines. Learn the rules of that bardo and you’d find your way out, pass the test into the next realm . . . the next level. . . .”
What were the rules for this game? Were we in an afterlife bardo, here?
It wasn’t that, either. Demons or no, this was life in all its homely grit, its panoramas of blandness and grainy contrast. Still, there were rules we had yet to define in the new world erupting around us, rules as if from some mysterious programmer. And that had always been true—but now that truth was prominent, unhidden, demanding notice. You’re taking part in a game the rules of which you do not understand! Find out the rules! Now!
We passed through streets, then, that seemed untouched, distinguished only by the lack of human activity. No moving cars, everyone still hiding.
But two blocks from the convention center, we saw something big and black and steaming from vents on its knobby head, crouched just within the shattered-glass cube of a gas station. Just caught a glimpse of it, dormant in the Lull, and then we were past it—driving those last two blocks at the best speed the whiny little car could muster—and reached the convention center, near the Yerba Buena Gardens. A chopper was landing on its helipad as we approached. I watched raptly as it came in, its movements professionally smooth, landing easily. The helicopter was civilization embodied for me in that moment: civilization intact, confident, almost graceful. It was so reassuring.
“That might be Mendel,” Paymenz said, watching the chopper.
“Watch out, damnit, Ira!” Melissa yelled.
I slammed on the brakes, swerved, just managed not to rear-end a white limo pulling up at the police barriers ahead of us.
I sat with my foot still jammed down on the brake, panting, staring at the opaque windows of the limo. Gently, the professor reached over and put the car in park for me; he turned the key, switched the engine off.
The building was modern, highly designed—one of those buildings you imagined on its drawing board when you saw it—but on the whole it was shaped like a giant bunker with frills: a concoction of beveled concrete and big panes of frosted glass and angular assemblies of painted girders. There were fidgeting cops standing behind cement barriers around the building, many of them swaying where they stood, probably drunk. Others seemed grateful they had something to do that they could understand: crowd control, though there was no crowd.
A cop approached us, his beefy face blotchy red, his mouth open, breathing hard. “You . . . you people—just turn around.”
“Officer? It’s okay,” said a tall—very tall—black man getting out of the limo. He wore a gray three-piece suit cut so masterfully that it made this man, who must have been more than seven feet tall, seem to have normal proportions. His movements had a touch of the mantis about them, but his face was chiseled with quiet intelligence, and his every word emanated simple authority. The cop evidently knew who he was, and walked away without another word.
“Dr. Nyerza,” Paymenz said.
“Professor Paymenz,” said Nyerza, nodding. “It has been too long, sir.” A soft equatorial accent.
They shook hands. I thought that Nyerza seemed a little amused, looking Paymenz over; but it was not a condescending amusement, it was affectionate.
“I have gotten old, as you see,” Paymenz said, signaling for me and Melissa to get out of the car. “But you still seem—no, not the student I had, your maturity is evident—but still quite boyish.”
“Boyish at seven foot four? I enjoy the concept, sir. Thisis your daughter, perhaps? I am charmed. And—this young man?”
“He is—his name is Ira. He is here as my assistant.”
I was feeling numb. I was happy to be his assistant. He could have said, “This is my trained monkey—we’re going to teach him to ride a tricycle on a high wire today,” and I wouldn’t have blinked. Maybe he did say that.
“You all look so tired,” Nyerza said. “The emotions we have all had—it’s very draining, is it not? There are refreshments. Leave the car where it is, and I will have someone move it to safety. Come this way, please.”
We were walking down a long hallway. We passed a glass door through which I could see an enormous auditorium where groups of querulous people argued with the man at the podium in flagrant disregard for protocol. I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying. I caught only crusts and spatters of sentences. “. . . the Islamic Front claims . . . the result of prayers—who are we to say it’s not. . . . Let each man seek out his own salvation . . . perha
ps sacrifice . . . the collective unconscious . . . quantum creations. . . . We’re fools . . . dead minutes from now, everyone here. . . . Hysteria won’t . . .”
“There’s food in the private conference room,” Nyerza was saying. “But I must prepare you: First, we will pass by a Gnasher. I have just come from observing another one with a Tailpipe at the university.”
“These don’t sound like scientific terms to me,” Melissa said. Somehow, then, she had an air of speaking just to see if she still could.
And in fact Nyerza seemed surprised she’d spoken. “No—already a slang has arisen for the various demons. Reports indicate six kinds so far. One of the creatures has remarked that there are seven expected. The seven clans, he said.”
“You call them creatures,” Paymenz said. “Is this an evaluation on your part? Apart from ‘creatures’ as in the created of God, the word has implications of—”—
“Of the confines of the biologically conventional, or perhaps extraterrestrial. So I use it wrongly. It is an incarnate spirit, in my opinion. A malevolent spirit, these.”
“Demons.”
“Quite. Here—I warn you, when we pass the Gnasher and the Tailpipe—in this room, the Lull may end, they may attack. . . .”
Outside the room were six young National Guardsmen, three of them black, two Hispanic, and one a chinless, spindly Caucasian. They looked as if they were debating between accepting a probable death, when the Lull was over, or deserting.
It was a large conference room, empty but for video screens filling one wall and an oval conference table. The room was windowless; a skylight threw an increasingly rusty light on everything. The table should have collapsed under the weight of the creature occupying most of its surface. The big demon was a Tailpipe, like the one we’d seen squatting in the gas station, something like a pilot whale out of water, but its body was even blunter, curled cobralike in on itself. Nestled in one of its coils was a Gnasher, using the bigger, duller demon as a sort of beanbag chair.
The Gnasher was the color of a red and black ant; its head exactly that red, almost like colored vinyl, its body exactly that black. Its head sat on its long thin neck like an ant’s, but it had a man’s jaws, although oversized and gnashing, clashing loudly between sentences, like some exotic metallic percussion instrument—and its eyes were those of a man, the pretty blue eyes of a movie star, and its corded arms were lean and there were four arms, and they were leathery black. The Gnasher lifted its head languidly as we looked in and, unexpectedly, began to speak. It spoke at length to us—Nyerza took a step back at this. We stood in the open doorway and listened to the demon as it spoke. Its hands were talons and only talons; impossibly prehensile claws that rippled delicately like a Balinese dancer’s fingers to emphasize its words. It had an enormous phallus, armored in big, spurred scales. I couldn’t see the rest of its lower parts.
“We should have a tape recorder going. This is the first time it has spoken,” Nyerza murmured to Paymenz.
“I’ll remember every word,” I said, my voice sounding whispery, husky in my own ears.
“Ira has a photographic memory,” Paymenz muttered.
The demon reverberated on.
“I am so delighted to see you. I feel the delight as a violet fire on the roof of my mouth as I look at you, and I stiffen with recognition.”
Its voice was a languid purr, but every word stood out like billboard copy printed on the projection screen of the inside of my skull.
“This is the joy of homecoming! How long we waited, forgotten children in a forgotten nursery, weeping for our return to those who left us to ripen in the outer darkness, whose patented polymer members drove the seed into the soil of the in between. My dear dears, how we hungered for the taste of your light, the one spark that each of you carries, that each of you monstrously denies us; how you hoard your little sparks, her fallen sparks—hers, not yours, little dears, but it’s all finders keepers with you!—and for a moment when we return to the source of our course, and we pluck the fruit, and we draw the root, and we consume the harvest in one sweet bite, or two at most, and we taste the spark, we have the spark, then, within us. Oh, for but a moment. Before it flickers out . . . before it flickers out, snuffing itself like a sniffing little sob. Before it goes, the spark of your inner light warms the infinite cold of our withins; for a moment the aching emptiness is abated, and we can pretend we are the created and not the residue, and the journey is fulfilled; and then the spark flickers and is gone and we must search again for another morsel. And how does the song go?”
As it paused to consider before reciting something like verse, I thought: This is stupid, I should be running, hiding, and the only reason I’m not is because Melissa is here, watching me. And she would not run with me; she is so much braver than I am.
It seemed to savor, for a moment, the sound of one of the National Guardsmen weeping to himself, before theatrically clearing its throat to go on.
“Consider this:
His eyes are white-light ceiling bulbs,
his teeth syringe needles;
he’s attended by a retinue of shiny scarab beetles.
I stood a-teetering on the vacuum-breathing brink,
where you fall with the weight of a single thought you think . . .”
It’s very good, don’t you think? But to continue . . .
“where laughing things rise to find they truly sink
and white on white on white on white is the color of my ink.
I didn’t pass through the tunnel; the tunnel passed through me;
death will not hesitate to come unseasonably. . . .
It takes joy in coming unreasonably. . . .
I remember death—I remember death, oh but yes:
I’ve bargained with that smug old merchant of rest
though that time is past, and I pretend we never met
you know what hasn’t happened—will, onward, happen yet . . .
I no longer taunt the lion, nor will I walk the edge.
I withdrew from the void that shimmers past the ledge,
But every morning when I wake
I see the shadows smile
I know that it is but his whim to bide a while. . . .”
The demon’s mouth split his head in something like a smile. It seemed to me the demon was looking at Melissa, as he spoke . . . it seemed to me . . . as it went on.
“What do you think? One of your minor poets? Almost doggerel, in fact. But I like it. Because the fear of death is the tenderest thought you have for such as us, your forlorn offspring. The only elegy we have is your fear, your anticipation of darkness, and so we savor it, out of sentiment, sheer sentiment. How like the fish you are, swimming in the sea but unaware of it; you are the fishy swimmers awash in a sea of suffering! Waves of suffering break over us—to me, like the fragrance of a meal as it is cooked—how we mimicked you in our stony world, making meals over campfires when we could and appointing chieftains and kings and holding pageants—if you could see the pageants of our world, and how you were celebrated there!”
“What is your mission here?” Paymenz demanded suddenly. “What brought you here? Speak plainly!”
The demon simply ignored him, continuing:
“And now you at last acknowledge us, haughty till we squeeze her spark from you, and we are for a moment more truly one and—how did it go—‘what do I see, in the dusty mirror? Not a human being but a human error’ . . . And so we rectify, we return what you have supposed to be excrescence, to make you whole again, to rejoin, to warm ourselves with the singled-out sparks until the great spark, the tongue of flame that will not flicker out, is revealed to us. We shall turn our faces up to it. . . . No longer taking part in your world by proxy but a part of you as you become part of us.”
Saying this last, its voice began to boom, to make the very walls recoil in shivers, and it stood up.
“A part of us, a part of us, the infinite loneliness brought to an end, the serpent with its tail in
its mouth swallows, at long last! He swallows and swallows in infinite repercussion!”
And the Tailpipe began then to uncoil, to rear up, and its slick black skin opened pores, which oozed something like petroleum and something like sewage sludge. I saw then that the pores were something else: They were the mouths of little girls, pink and perfect, complete with teeth and tongues, hidden before and now exposed and expressing black rivulets . . . and then steam, steam in place of the black ooze, hissing and smelling of sea trenches and filling the room with a congealing cloud of hot mist.