Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  “But it’s hard to watch you do it to yourselves and not feel sympathy for you poor bastards. We get to know you so damn well. It’s our job. And to understand is to forgive, right? So even while we push you just that final bit it hurts.”

  Niko exhumes the Dobro from its case and slides the metal tube over his ring finger.

  “You think you need us to keep you angry. Keep you producing. You defend us even when you know we’re out to get you. You think we’re part of you. Somewhere inside. Well, that works both ways buddy pal. Mostly when we feel the urge to help you out we just ignore it and go on and do our job. But sometimes we sink your boat and then throw you a line. We can’t help it. I mean there you are floundering around in hot water you usually boiled yourselves, and we ought to be laughing our ass off at how easy you make it for us, and then this little voice inside us says Hey, why don’t you give the poor schmuck a break, and next thing you know we’ve thrown you a line and we’re hauling you in.” The demon shrugs and looks a little sad. “That little voice is you. Sometimes you’re our demons.”

  Still not saying anything Niko holds his empty hand out and his demon wraps the bottle with a tendril and offers it. As Niko drinks his demon watches like a voyeur at an orgy.

  Niko holds the bottle out and meets his demon’s eye. His demon takes it back and takes a long hard gurgling pull and then recaps the bottle and sets it sloshing on the clacking floor beside the guitar case. He grins at Niko brighteyed and belches satisfaction. Smells of liquor, lighting matches.

  Niko tunes the steel guitar. The watching demon shivers at approaching harmony. Some dread resolution.

  Niko shuts his eyes and hears the train. Feels the rocking. Finds a rhythm. Lets it move his fingers on the metal strings. The Dobro cries.

  Out there in the peopled abyss demons pause their endless nailgun crucifixions as a dark refrain comes from the passing boxcar rocking gently as it rolls beyond their stations of the cross. Pinioned souls allowed a brief and unplanned respite moan and twist in parody of sexual release as this sad dopplered lullaby weeps out across the neverending night.

  As his fingers play the trainsong Niko realizes that the locomotive horn is blowing rhythmic harmony to take the top part of the melody he improvises in a plaintive slow and unarticulated speech from disenfranchised nations crying out its cureless loss.

  He opens his eyes.

  The trainhorn stops when tendrils lower from a leathern mouth.

  Niko mutes the metal strings and lets the train conduct itself to iron down the flattened plain. The demon grins a feral grin and bangs its bony hip to knock hot spit from the harmonica that gleams between its snakelike tendrils. Not a trainhorn then.

  Fascinated Niko hugs the Dobro while his demon blows a high downbending chord that finds the trainbeat in its motion and before he knows it Niko’s strumming long and sheeting heartbreak chords above that wailing harp. Chords that hover dip and glide like gulls above a churning ocean. Whiskey humming in his veins. Music’s in your blood they say.

  The soultrain groans along its iron fate, tie and spike and rail and wheel. Niko in a drunk duet upon a midnight special of his lost soul’s forging. Who he is has led to where he goes as surely as the route on which he runs, tie spike rail wheel, tracks as damning as the ones that once had mapped his arm and leading to the same conclusion.

  He keeps his eyes closed and plays on and while he plays his demon talks. “Here’s the trick, buddy pal, here’s the rub. I remove some obstacles and you think that I’m helping you.” The slide sobs high up on the Dobro’s neck. “That’s why I’m just like you. That’s why I’m torn.” Grounds the crying on the bottom string. “I want you to succeed. See? I want to watch you get away with this.” Arpeggios his doubt. “Because when I help it shoves you right into the mouth of it. You make it easy for me. I want to thank you and I want to kick your ass.” Lets a held chord bleed while reaching blindly for the bottle. Feels it pressed into his hand. Drinks deep and holds the bottle out and feels it taken. Winces not uncomfortably at the little detonation in his gut. Hello old friend. “But here’s the grand prize question. What will you do when you get there?”

  Niko mutes the strings and lets the trainsong play unaccompanied. Measure for measure, tie spike rail wheel. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when you get to where you’re going and it’s time for you to walk the walk how are you going to fuck it up?”

  A clatter from ahead goes through them and behind them as the train runs over piles of bones.

  “Who says I’m going to fuck it up?”

  “You’ve never done anything but. It’s the nature of the soul who lives in you. He ruins his life, he comes down here, he screws the pooch. Over and over, life after life. You know why? Cause he’s a fuckup, that’s why. It’s that simple.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You fucked up club gigs when you were just starting out because you were using. You fucked up every time you tried to sober up or kick.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “It’s fair to say what happened to your baby brother was a fuckup don’t you think?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why? You’ve heard all this for years. I’m just saying it out loud this time. You fucked up every band you were in so much you had to hire session players on your albums and tours. And how about Jemma, old buddy old pal? El Fuckuppo Grande. What, you think being rich and famous keeps you from being a loser? You’ve got assloads of cash, you’re famous as shit, and you fucked up your whole life. You always have. So why in the world should I doubt you’re gonna fuck up again?”

  Niko hugs the Dobro with his eyes clenched shut. He thought his demon had defected, jumped ship to help him on his sorry way. Why is he doing this to him now?

  But let’s be honest, buddy pal. Something inside you wants to hear all this. Something believes every word this son of a bitch says. Always believed it. Isn’t that why you shot up, why you drank? To shut him up or build a wall to shut him out. But all it ever really did was shut you in there with him. Like you’re in here with him now. Tie spike rail wheel. Soulmates, cellmates, oneman show. He can’t help himself, he’s what he is. We are who we are. It’s that simple.

  Niko puts the guitar away and shuts the latches on the case. His demon’s brighteyed scrutiny. He sits there still a moment, sad hand on the black case remembering Jemma’s hand. He reaches for the bottle and the bottle meets him halfway. He sips and cranes his neck and swallows loudly. Lets the bottle go. It doesn’t hit the floor.

  Listening to his demon guzzle Niko stands unsteadily. Bends to pick up the case and nearly falls. Stumbles to the door and slides it open and leans the case against the wall and stands with one hand clutching the edge of the door and watches the protean blackness gliding by. That voice inside him whispers Jump. Still inside him whispering even as its embodiment sits drinking across from him on the filthy wooden floor of the clacking train. Like staring at a cancer growth cut from your galbladder yet still feeling its hard protrusion beneath your belly. It doesn’t end, it never ends, it never goes away, however much of it may surface in the world.

  “I used to drop acid,” Niko says to the metastasizing dark. “Long time ago. Not really my drug. There’d always be a moment where things seemed right at the edge of turning bad. You’d look at things, even the air, and it all wanted to erupt and decay and rot. Jemma used to tell me you had to remember that you were the one driving. You had to be able to point at something going rotten and say And now it’s not. And it worked. It really did.” He laughs and shakes his head. “And now it’s not. It’s like being a kid and believing you can point at something and make it disappear.”

  “It’s a beautiful story, Niko.”

  Niko turns and glares. Three sheets to the wind on the floor of Hell. He points his finger at the demon like the barrel of a gun. Delighted and surprised his demon barks a laugh and pats himself with snaking tendrils and then shrugs and shakes his head. “Still here.”


  Niko nods. “Still here.” He picks up the guitar case from where it’s propped uncertainly against the swaying wall. “And now I’m not,” he says. And jumps.

  XIX.

  ROADHOUSE BLUES

  NIKO PASSES ON into the fabled dark. The plain is black and empty now, a starless void through which he staggers like a blind man groping, ignorant of the shape and substance of the world around him and the possibility he creates it with his every step. The scarred guitar case clutched in his uncertain hand the only thing outside himself to hold. The ground beneath his hiking shoes is solid but he cannot see it or even hear a footfall. See him from on high with a dark-adapted eye, a small blot struggling against emptiness.

  A struggling blot with its first hangover in twentyfive years. And oh is it a stellar event. Every flutter of his torn and filthy jacket flails his eardrums. His scalp is wet leather tightening as it dries creaking across his skull. His entire body has a migraine. Gravity alters as he walks.

  He shuts his eyes, for all the difference it makes here in the heart of the abyss, and pinches hard on the bridge of his nose. Roman candles explode inside his eyelids. He chews skin on the inside of his cheek to make the little pains distract him from the larger ones. His world and mind are narrowed on the object of his quest. Jemma hovers now at the edge of consciousness numinous as angels are said to be and become for him as mythic. Her existence somewhere up ahead the evidence of things unseen. Her captive soul’s light seen through eyes of faith. Something to believe in. At last. At last.

  He lowers his hand from his nose and opens his eyes and blinks. It seems out on the plain he sees a shape that’s blacker than its dark surround. He stares into the unremitting dark and tries to mark what form lies out there brooding.

  Niko stops walking.

  How did I get here?

  He glances behind him. Little difference that he can see. An empty unlit stage awaiting props. Hadn’t he been on a train? Playing his guitar and singing? Drinking Jack Daniel’s and getting stinking drunk with his demon?

  A ravaged leathery version of his own face looms in memory and grins to show yellowed needle teeth. His demon?

  Had it been a hallucination? I mean you were pretty drunk there buddy pal.

  And where’d that whiskey come from in the first place?

  A leathery tendril wrapped around the neck of an offered bottle of Tennessee’s finest. Okay, not a hallucination. Your own personal demon. And you got drunk with the damned thing. You played the Dobro while it blew the harmonica for Christ’s sake there in a stifling freightcar rattling down the gullet of your very ruin. Oh he remembers that all right. Smoking again. Drinking again. Hanging out with lowlifes. What’s next?

  But of course we all know what’s next. Don’t we buddy pal? What looms like the Empire State Building on our personal landscape of addiction.

  But how has he gotten here? When had he left the train and how? It’s as if he has been walking in his sleep and suddenly awakened, the only evidence of his drunken transit with his demon on the train a few blurry mental photographs and a bruised chest and the mother of all hangovers.

  The train. His demon. Drinking. Jamming. An argument. And he’d jumped off the train? Yeah that’s right. Took a deep breath that smelled of iron and hot oil and grabbed the guitar case and hesitated at the opened doorway and then jumped. Flying a whole minute it seemed with the wind hot in his face and his jacket fluttering like a broken bird. The train a churning juggernaut beside him. The sudden openthroated howl of horn. He had waited for the fist of ground to punch the life out of him. And then. And then.

  And then a sudden scrape of shoes upon the unseen plain. As if he were merely gliding across the causeless dark. He literally hit the ground running and he tripped and tumbled and the guitar case flew off to clatter loudly as he rolled to a stop. And then?

  And then nothing. He’d drunkenly examined his cuts and scrapes and bruises and he’d found his guitar case, and with it once more in hand he had started following the railroad tracks.

  Niko resumes his long downtending walk and heads toward the distant shape that’s darker than the black around it.

  I should be dead. Or at least lying beside the railroad tracks with broken legs and shattered ribs. Bleeding internally and trapped inside the coffin of my ruined body waiting for my life and thoughts to wind down to a stop like the last ticks on a forgotten watch. That train had been going sixty, seventy miles an hour. You don’t walk away from a jump like that.

  Had his demon somehow helped him?

  Niko doubts it. It seems more likely that his demon drove him toward it.

  Then how had he survived? Just plain old good luck? I don’t think so, Cisco. No one’s that lucky.

  He glances up.

  The lidded sky.

  AS HE NEARS the waiting soulless shape he feels a thrumming deep within his chest. The purring of a predator asleep and dreaming of the hunt. The shape is tall as a building but asymmetrical and set about with curves as if halfmelted. There is no light to see it by yet see it Niko does. The shape itself emits a kind of black light that registers beneath vision the way some stars are only seen by looking away from them. When Niko looks away from the towering shape it leaves a violet smear and a bitter taste of lead. His fillings ache and his skull resonates with that awful thrum. In wary awe he walks around the radiating shape and as he does he sees that he’s approached it from behind. Here is the front.

  It’s not a building. It’s a sculpture. Standing on the empty plain the giant naked figures of a man and woman hugging. Arms sunk into one another’s sculpted flesh. Her face turned up toward his turned down. Their faces where they kiss are fused. Features indistinct like artist’s dummies. Caught halfmelted into one another as if petrified by nuclear detonation at the moment of their embrace. Pompeiian lovers unearthed from the foot of Vesuvius. Horrible and beautiful they loom above his faithless pilgrim gaze.

  He falls to his knees before their silent reproach.

  The forlorn silence lying hard about the plain.

  The train. He remembers the argument now. “When you get to where you’re going and it’s time for you to walk the walk how are you going to fuck it up?” The most terrible thing about his demon has never been his goading or persuasion but his unrelenting truth. Here is the thing you cannot run from. That no leap leaves behind. No drug or music silences. The irreducible particle of truth: you fuck up everything. You killed your brother. You killed Jem. Traded her for fame. For money. Sold her for a song.

  And the wall around his heart gives way at last. It falls without a last defense and Niko pitches forward and cries out. His heart a redhot coal. It hurts so bad that he must surely die. What have I done. What have I done. She is gone. Jem is gone.

  Niko sobs before the silent reproach of entwined lovers. Pounds the barren ground with balled scabbed fists.

  Gone. The word an anchor on his penitent soul. Jemma is dead. Really dead.

  We are mayflies all. We live we love we die. And you have hastened even that. Her face. Her touch. Her voice. Her life. All gone. Taken from the world too soon because of you. Jemma died, and you put on your hiking shoes and left to rescue her from death itself like some damned christ. Came down here to win her back into the daylit world. Who are you fucking kidding? Who do you think you are? You’re not going to weasel out of this one. Someone who could sell his soul out for a song is not going to play his heart out to the buyer and reverse the natural order of the world. She’s not some carnival prize, hit the devil and win the girl, oh I messed it up this time, here’s another dollar. She is dead. And you are on your knees within the heart of all damnation because you are not enough to win her back. Because you are going to lose. You have already lost. Have always lost. You have fought your way across this afflicted plain armed with nothing more than vanity. The arrogance that you can turn back the tide. That your talent, will, determination, love amount to anything at all against the immutable boundary of death itself.
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  Jemma is dead. Abandon your hope. Let it go. Let go.

  Hope falls from him like a scab.

  HALF AN HOUR later Niko lifts his face from the plain and rubs his swollen eyes. A certain calmness wells from deep inside and spreads across him. He shuts his eyes again and rubs his throbbing forehead and then looks around the plain. Just the darkness, just the darker duolith rearing entangled before him. He notes his steady breathing. Sees his hand grab up the guitar case. Sees his body stand. Rides along as it limps to the statue’s base. He turns his back on the lovers and slumps against them and blows his nose on his ragged coatsleeve. Counts ten deep even breaths. All right. Okay. Well what now? Turn back?

  Niko laughs. And fight your way back as far as you have come with not a thing to show? The old riddle, what’s the farthest you can go into the forest?

  Halfway.

  I’m so tired. God I’d love some coffee. Hell, I’d sell my soul for a cup of—

  Tortured stone begins to creak against his back. Niko scrambles to his feet and cranes upward to see the giant forms elongating, stone like taffy stretching. For a dizzy moment Niko feels that he and the plain are sinking and he falls backward and lands on his tailbone. The stretching stone splinters and branches out to angle and stab down like spiderlegs. Niko backpedals and gazes up in awe and fear. The warm ground rumbles and the blighted air aches with moans of stretching stone. A vast shape rises on the barren plain. The fossil skeleton of some unimagined beast long dead now being given up by the very earth that housed it across the countless centuries. For a gibbering insane instant Niko thinks it is a living creature, some mindless voracious thing sent forth to fetch him to his long appointed doom. But as it coheres he sees it is the solid and imposing framework of a building extruding from the ground like something loudly growing from a magic beanstalk. Rising dark before him it joins growing bone to growing bone to form girder and arch and joist and wall, ledge and window and column and door. It settles creaking with its own weight like a wooden ship and for a moment it sits whole and still and blank and hollow before him, a gaunt dark cathedral. Then from out the formless darkness beaded colored lights rain upward in entwining strands that swirl across the building’s face. A steady hum grows with the flashing light. Machinery. Electricity.