Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  Niko screws the cap back on and wipes his trembling hand against his pants. Attaboy. Now look away from it. Come on. Leave it.

  He grabs his guitar case and kicks the hole in the wall a little wider. He bends to crawl outside but halfway out he stops and yells Shit and shoves the hardcase out ahead of him and backs into the slagging igloo and picks up the bottle. Fuel. I’ll need fuel. The air is sauna thick as damping fire steams. Niko puts the fifth in a coat pocket. Its weight an anchor as he hurries from his shelter’s rain.

  TRUDGING ON THE frozen plain and holding high a makeshift torch a few hours later Niko feels the temperature begin to rise. An oddly warm wind gusts. Niko lowers the guttering torch and draws a deep breath. Rot decay corruption. He glances behind him. No one here but us chickens. Somewhere back there his igloo has melted to a puddle and frozen again.

  Niko sets the guitar case on the milky ice and pulls his last branch from his belt with stonestiff fingers. He transfers the flame from the dying brand to the new one like a lost Olympian and shields it with his body against the mild breeze until the new branch catches. It brightens right away. Well, how bout that. The torch is passed.

  Niko continually trades torch and guitar so that his hands can recover some mobility and feeling. At one point the shadow of his torch wielding hand falls across a face caught screaming in the ice and Niko’s shadowfingers form a figure. He says Bunny and makes it hop.

  Niko’s feeling pretty danged good. He was just breathing in a room full of whiskey vapor and he’s buzzed for the first time in a quarter century. Thanks to his old anesthesiologist pal Dr. Daniel his scrapes and cuts and bruises are now dull background throbs. If he makes it off the ice his wounds will probably sing an aria as his body warms again. Meantime thankee Dr Dee.

  The abortive toast he’d shared with Phil to commemorate the Deal twentysomething years ago had been Niko’s last taste of alcohol. Drinking champagne beside a wreck that held the body of his brother and convinced he was hallucinating. The whole episode brought on by head trauma after the accident, with a dash of withdrawal symptoms thrown in for good measure. The Mouton Cadet had barely cleared his palate before he was on his knees in the middle of that preternaturally quiet Hollywood street and retching while above him Phil-for-short had grinned and grinned. “If you think that’s bad, wait’ll next time you try shooting up. Welcome to sobriety, Niko-holic.”

  From that moment on the very smell of alcohol made Niko queasy. Drinking it was out of the question. Any other drug was inconceivable.

  But now he wants to suck on that old JD bottle like a baby at its momma’s tit. He has it in his power right this very second to fall off the wagon hard enough to get road rash and it sounds like a terrific idea.

  I should throw the fucker out on the ice right now. But I might need the alcohol for fuel. Besides it’s a test.

  A test, buddy pal? Like the smoking test you failed with flying colors in the cab and on the Battlements? You know you’re digging yourself a hole that leads straight down to china white.

  He holds high the burning torch and continues his determined march across the frozen plain, Prometheus in rags.

  Now with the air warming and his last torch burning Niko suddenly remembers the message in the bottle. Shit, how could I have forgotten it? Well you’re juggling a lot of balls here buddy. He sets down the guitar case and feels in his pocket for the glass tube. His fingertips brush the box of matches and the cigarillo pack. Traveler’s charms. He pulls the glass tube from his pocket and examines it by paltry torchlight. Thick as his pinky and sealed with a cork. Niko yanks the cork out with his teeth. Fuck it tastes like whiskey. His mouth waters as he spits the cork out on the ice. Litterbug.

  He taps the note out and unrolls it and unfolds it and stares at it in utter disbelief.

  Buddy pal—

  One for the road.

  Thick ivory laid cardstock paper with a deckled edge. Thin-stemmed broadcurved letters in the calligraphic style of a broadnibbed fountain pen. No signature. No need for one because the handwriting is Niko’s own.

  SHORTLY AFTER THE final torch has guttered out the ice grows slick with standing puddles. Niko has discovered Hell’s own springtime thaw, a change of seasons measured by a progression not of days but of miles. In the distance is a line that seems to mark the end of the ice. Beyond it is a redlit gleam that must be water runoff from the melting plain. Beyond that it’s hard to see.

  Niko’s hiking shoes are not exactly built for trekking over plains of melting ice. He’s already pratfallen several times and bruised his tailbone.

  The whiskey bottle taps his hip in time with his walk. With the branches burned away his rationale for toting booze has gone up in smoke. Why doesn’t he heave that bottle as hard as he can just to hear its satisfying smash upon the ice?

  The melting plain begins a slight downslope toward the river. A constant runoff flows around his heels. His frostbit feet throb with the water’s cold.

  The icy reach is dotted now with body parts uncovered by its melting. Upthrust clenching hands and idly kicking legs and staring faces brought toward the light however dim. The closer Niko gets to the river the more there are of the indifferent dead emerging from the ice, till at the slippery bank itself the icebound souls are embedded only from the waist down. Several are free above the knee. Blankly they stare at Niko as he passes among their transfixed number like an orchard keeper. He tries to tell himself he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is find a boat, a bridge, a way to reach the inner shore.

  If the plain of Hell is infinite and the earthquake-created Ledge is infinite and the Lower Plain and frozen reach are also infinite then perhaps the river carrying the runoff and the thawed out damned is infinite too. Infinitely long but not infinitely wide; the far bank is only a quartermile away. Swimming distance, if Niko were a decent swimmer even unencumbered by the guitar case. If the water were not cold enough to freeze his joints motionless within two or three minutes. If the rapid current were not laden with the detritus of bodies like a logflow.

  It looks as if a thick line runs from bank to bank downriver in the distance. A bridge?

  As he heads downriver thousands upon thousands of naked freezing bodies tumble in the shallows of the sloping shore, huddle into fetal shapes for warmth, hold one another as the current sends them downstream to bump and smash along the shore, tissue frozen but not numbed and feeling ripsaw cold in every isolated nerve.

  Suddenly an enormous black thing breaks surface, streamlined like some creature evolved for life in windtunnels. A gash of sawblade mouth opens as it arcs back into the water, and where it disappeared it leaves a large red stain that spreads and quickly dissipates.

  Niko stares at the placid water where the thing knifed out and in without a ripple. Finding a bridge is definitely the thing to do.

  A MILE OR so later Niko finds a small patch of ice free of emergent hands or legs or faces or backs. He squats on the frozen riverbank to rest his feet as best he can without actually sitting in the chill runoff.

  The frozen dead around him stare. One woman is embedded in the ice up to her thighs. She continually slaps her paleblue face as if to make herself feel something, anything, even pain as substitute for warmth.

  Ahead of Niko two embedded men face each other a dozen yards from the water. One buried to midthigh, the other to midshin. One large and fat and covered with thick black hair, the other slim and pale and nearly hairless. Both scream hoarsely at each other. Apparently each thinks the other more fortunate. They aren’t close enough to hit each other but that doesn’t stop them from trying.

  Weary sore and injured Niko decides to light a cigarillo to ward off the chill. He closes his eyes and takes a long deep drag. It’s the little things, it really is. As he enjoys the one small pleasure he has known down here he becomes aware of a lingering silence. He opens his eyes and takes the cigarillo from his mouth. The two men have broken off their argument to stare at him. Niko exhales gray smoke that roils away, un
derlit by faintly glowing ice and oddly beautiful.

  The cyanotic woman has stopped slapping herself. Her paleblue hands now on her ample hips. Gaze direct and frank. She’s quite attractive in a drowned sort of way.

  The two staring men begin to scream at Niko, loudly asking what the fuck he’s done to warrant clothes and cigarettes and matches. Has he been sent to torment them further, to sit there clothed and warm with packets of fire at his side just to remind them of what comfort their damnation has deprived them?

  Throughout their tirade Niko simply sits there smoking. His mind an empty canvas for the moment. When the cigarillo is down to the butt he starts to stub it out upon the ice but changes his mind and picks it up and stands. As the two men gape, as all the transfixed dead around him stare, Niko approaches the pale woman who had looked on him so directly but with no hint of rancor. He holds out the smoking butt of cigarillo and raises his eyebrows.

  Her smile is sly as she accepts the butt and keeps her gaze on him and inhales deeply. The cigarillo burns down so low it has to be burning her fingers. Probably she can’t feel it or maybe she doesn’t care. Her eyes close. Her face all gothic sensuality.

  Niko recovers his guitar case and nods at the smoking woman. The more hirsute of the two angry men shouts that if he were free he’d kick Niko’s ass for mocking him.

  Niko sizes the man up from head to toe. Big and burly and quite hairy, potgut but still muscular. He really does look like a bear. Niko can’t place his accent. “If you and your friend would stop arguing long enough you could probably pull each other out of here.”

  “I wouldn’t soil my hands with him,” says Bear.

  “Fuck you,” Thin Man agrees.

  Niko shrugs and says Oh well and recommences his long walk. A few minutes later he looks back. The two men are yelling at each other again, arms waving wildly as they fling their accusations. The beautiful drowned woman beyond them to one side. She sees Niko looking and waves slowly like an underwater frond. Niko waves back and turns around and laughs despite himself. Flirting with death.

  A MILE LATER Niko sees a man struggle free near the frozen riverbank. Who knows how long the man has waited for the runoff to wear away the ice enough for him to free his frozen legs? Ten years, a hundred, a thousand. However long, Niko witnesses the moment when the man frees his legs at last from out his icy prison. The man stands and lifts clenched fists like a victorious boxer. The man grins as he jumps up and down and then bends to slap his feet and massage some feeling back into his legs. Naked and barefoot on cold running water on a plain of ice and happy as a dung beetle in a manure factory. The man bows theatrically though no one cheers him on.

  Niko wonders what the man plans next. Escape? Do they really think of escape here even idly? But escape to where? The sunlit world that judged and found them wanting? To another possibly worse part of Hell? To enlist with Niko’s imagined Sub-underground cabal, an Underground Railroad ferrying desiccated souls out of perdition to a place more merciful? Where would that place be?

  The man who freed himself is running now. He slips, he falls, he slides. He gets up laughing. He bows low to the jealous crowd. Niko is all set to cheer him on when from the water near the frozen bank there bursts a black eruption, enormous glossy and alive. It arches from the water and hangs suspended there, for a moment a work of art or architecture, and then it yaws and glides onto the ice. Its front end yawns like some fanged funnel and it slides along the ice and leaves a darker trail of wet and scoops the freed man up and rolls back into the water and leaves behind only a broad wet swath upon the ice and the small twin holes where a pair of legs had for how long been encased.

  THE BLACK LINE Niko has been heading toward is definitely a bridge. There’s something odd about it though he can’t quite figure out what just yet. Something about it he doesn’t like.

  BEFORE TOO LONG the air before the bridge seems to shimmer like a road on a hot day. Niko’s socks squish in his shoes as he navigates the hadearctic waste. Across the broken reach he hears the flattened groan of straining ice, a sound a bit like leather stretching. Small flat icebergs dot the river. With the rising temperature the shore of ice has begun to calve in places, causing cracks and upthrusts in and on the plain.

  Everywhere the ice has parted Niko sees remnants of embedded frozen bodies ripped apart by glacial motion, torn off at leg or waist or neck and even lengthwise. Redcored bodies float like flies in amber all about him, distorted by pale ice.

  When he looks up again the bridge has his complete attention.

  What he had taken for wavering air is the writhing of the bridge itself. The bridge is built of bodies. Thousands of them naked and freezing and huddled against the icy current forever breaking against them and crying moans so terrible they sound like pleasure. Some of those who clutch along the outside mass fight off the clammy grip that binds them to the others and they roll into the river to swim furiously toward the frozen bank. But however hard they swim the current brings them thrashing back where they are gripped and reabsorbed into the coruscating mass. It reminds Niko nauseatingly of ants swarming a dead animal. But these aren’t ants, they’re people. Human beings.

  Half a mile later they aren’t just people. They’re people Niko knows. The bridge is built of the bodies of people he has met throughout his life. Out there on the water they’re a living groping bridge and Niko knows them, knows every damned one. Friends lovers partners. Producers critics roadies. Groupies dealers bandmates. Managers clubowners bartenders. Waiters waitresses restaurateurs. Schoolmates teachers playground bullies. Lawyers doctors deejays shrinks. And if Niko is the thing they have in common then Niko is the reason for their present suffering. There are so many.

  Niko thinks about looking for another way across but knows there will be none. He considers moving on and trying to swim across but no. If he doesn’t freeze and drown he’ll end up as an hors d’oeuvre for the black leviathan or the current will sweep him to the clutch and press of those he knew who may not wish him well. And if that doesn’t happen, well, Niko has a funny feeling about the water itself. He knows the story of the river Lethe. Or perhaps remembers it.

  Damn you Geryon. If only you had flown a little farther. But of course you left me there so I could make this trek. What you said about crossing the ice. “If you survive the walk across it, well then. You will cross that bridge when you come to it.” It’s all a kind of trial isn’t it? Or maybe just an entertainment. But one man’s trials are another’s entertainment, yes? Were you warning me then? Not against Hell but against myself? That if I fail it will not be due to obstacles but as a consequence of my own insufficiency? Who I am is my undoing. We are what we have done.

  Geryon you are arrogant and cruel but there is something about you I cannot help but like. You—showed me something? Took me— somewhere? I can’t quite remember. I think within the confines of your unforgiving laws that you were trying to help me.

  But there’s the ice and there’s the water and there’s the farther bank. And between the two are piled contorted and screaming all of those I’ve ever known who died.

  Niko looks up at the cavern sky. You bastards. How I despise you.

  But in this old drama playing out inexorably as a spring unwinding metaphors are manifest and traditions and rules inviolate as natural law. So Niko picks up his guitar case and heads out to walk across the bodies of those he has known.

  FROM THE FIRST rubbery step it is horrible. Their flesh yielding as they writhe beneath him. Some grab his ankle to restrain him. The grip always feeble but just strong enough to make him shake it off and then feel shamed. As he knows it is meant to. But still he casts them off and staggers across their terrible mass with his guitar case held high out of their reach. If he falls they will surely drag him under.

  All of them moan his name.

  Niko cannot meet their eyes. Cannot give them what they want. Acknowledgement and recognition. But he has no choice. If he looks stonily ahead he can’t see where to st
ep and he will surely fall. And to fall here is to stay here. He has to look down and in looking down must meet the desperate jealousy and need in the eyes of those he barely knew, the recognition in the eyes of many he was familiar with but hardly would call friends, the regret in the eyes of those few to whom he has felt close. Some of those he walks across he does not recognize. They’re much older than when he knew them, they’re naked, they’re gruesomely out of context, their acquaintance was too fleeting.

  But they’re people, Niko! You can’t ignore them, you knew them! There to one side is Ray, his bus driver through most of junior high school, batting aside the outstretched arm of a woman who looks just like a grownup version of Anne Ellison, the freckled girl with braces who vied with him for the spelling bee championship throughout all of elementary school and for whom he’d harbored a secret painful crush. Anne reaches out for Niko and Niko makes himself look away from her woman’s face which even agonized and crying out his name contains a ghost of the girl she was. He forces himself farther onto the nightmare bridge and steps on the reaching arm of Mrs. Bouduin, his first housekeeper, who died of a heart attack after working for him for a year. Overweight and slow but thorough and always nice and thoughtful she had stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of silver and Jemma’s jewelry over the course of her employment.

  Now among the voices crying out his name is that of Erin Farrell, a whiskeyvoiced singer he had dated once and slept with twice and never called again though he had later worked with her on several gigs. He hears her voice but does not see her as he jerks his leg away from Mrs. Thompson, his firstgrade teacher, plump woman with a broken blood vessel worming one eye that he had stared at whenever she came close. She had seemed the very picture of an upright moral Godfearing woman, what was she doing here? Niko’s leg as it jerks from her hand kicks the jaw of Stevie Dane, his old drug buddy and high school bandmate in The Spanish Flies. Stevie Dane who rode a needle right into the ground.