by Norman Crane
until only his fists were keeping him upright. His eyes rolled back in his head. His lips parted and his tongue lolled from his mouth.
I couldn't stand seeing any more of this. I circled his kneeling body and retrieved one of the knives from his boot. He didn't stop me. I don't know if he could even hear me. I sat behind him and tried to find the clamps keeping his armour in place, but failed. His skin felt hot and dry, like fish scales. I grabbed him by his red hair and pulled his head back—his tongue flopped—until his neck was vulnerable and exposed and his eyes rolled back into enough of a normal position to stare at me. I didn't want to look at them. I wanted them to disappear, him to disappear. His pus stank. I could feel his rasping breath and see the veins pulsing in his neck.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, not quite sure of what.
And then I ran the curved blade forcefully over the pulsing vein and the entirety of his neck, cutting a long, easy line that almost immediately lost its precision and overflowed with bright red blood.
Dogor jerked. I grabbed him.
I dropped the knife and when he started twitching I held him.
Then his muscles stiffed, he let out a last, bubbling gurgle of defiance, and his body went limp.
For the first time in my life, I was holding a corpse.
But almost as soon as I realized it, I smelled burning electrical wire and heard Wayne say, "Get back!" and felt my own skin sizzle while seeing Dogor's glow bright, luminous white, and without thinking I dropped him and crawled crab backwards on my hands and feet, shutting my eyes as the brightness became too much, and through closed eyelids saw light explode and heard a pop like successive firecrackers, and when I opened my eyes again, Dogor was lying on the asphalt, recognizable but heavily pixelated and having lost his third dimension.
He was flat.
"Careful," Wayne said, still pointing his crossbow at the now depthless body.
I walked forward, reaching out.
Dogor's flat corpse was warm but not too hot to touch. It felt like film.
The world was so quiet I heard the sole of Wayne's shoe rub against the surface of the parking lot. Then wind. It blew from all directions at once, threatening to lift Dogor's filmic remains and carry them off, until I grabbed them with both hands and picked them up. I handled them gently.
"It's over," I said to Wayne without turning around.
I heard him lower his crossbow.
"I'm not sober enough to ask what the hell just happened, but if it's over—what next?"
All that was left was to transport Dogor's remains, Dogor in the state of being dead as Olaf Brandywine had put it, back to Xynk. Without thinking, I knew just the way to do it. "Do you sell three and a half inch floppy disks?" I asked.
"It's not nineteen ninety-five, but I might have some in the back room. Why?"
"Take the truck and go get one," I said.
Wayne shrugged and drove off. When he was gone, I laid Dogor out on a clean section of asphalt and carefully folded him into a square that would fit inside a 3.5" diskette. With every fold I made, the thickness of the film stayed the same.
A part of me expected to hear his voice again but of course I never did.
Wayne returned and we drove to the library parking lot. There, we jimmied open the diskette and replaced its original magnetic film with Dogor's film, then put the diskette back together. We waited in the truck for an hour without talking before deciding to go for lunch. The plan was to sneak into the library at night and it was still early in the day, so we had plenty of time. We ended up at a little Italian place, where we ordered dishes I can't remember the names of. After eating, I went outside for a cigarette. My hands were shaking so much I had trouble operating the lighter. I hadn't had a cigarette in days. I smoked one, then another, then took out my phone. I wanted to call Annie, but I didn't have the gall. I didn't know what to say. I called my thesis sponsor instead. The moment she picked up, I said, "It's done. It's safe to go back to your apartment."
"The dwarf is no more?" she asked.
"No more."
I decided not to smoke a third cigarette. "It would be a useful exercise for you to write about it," she said.
"Write about what?"
"Your dealings with the dwarf who is no more."
"No one would believe me," I said.
"I believe you, but that is not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is for you to believe. If you do not write it down, soon your memory will weaken and one morning you will wake up with no memory of the dwarf at all. He will be a foggy dream. That is how dwarves are, how they operate. That is why they make excellent KGB agents."
"Maybe I want to forget."
"Absurd! Ignorance is a sin and the mortal enemy of any true scholar. Chase truth always and to wherever it leads. Write the work and I will edit it. I have only one request. Do not reveal my name."
"I'll think about it," I said. "For now I have to go."
Wayne had come out of the restaurant. I waved him on toward the truck. We left the restaurant and stopped by my motel, where I picked up my valise and the Thinkpad containing a Dogor-less Xynk.
When the sun started to go down, Wayne dropped me off at the library. I didn't want him to come in with me. "You sure you'll be alright?" he asked from behind the wheel. I said I was sure, but if I ended up getting arrested I'd call him to bail me out. He turned on the satellite radio and I walked the library perimeter to the place where the two blue recycling bins led to a half-open window. After making sure no one was looking, I opened the window wide and climbed inside.
The room was peaceful.
I tip-toed to the computer into which twenty-four hours ago I'd seen Dogor disappear. Its green light was on. I took the 3.5" diskette out of my pocket and inserted it into the appropriate drive, which hummed to life, flashed blue—and stopped. When I took the diskette out, everything was as it had always been, except for one detail that nobody in the world but me would ever notice: the film in the diskette was gone.
"That was fast," Wayne said when I got in beside him.
"Let's go get coffee."
I took the Thinkpad into the coffee shop with me and set it down on the table. "Do you have free WiFi here?" I asked one of the girls working the front counter.
"Sure do."
I supposed that meant it didn't matter whether I booted the Thinkpad or not, but I pressed the power button anyway. It reacted as usual.
> Welcome back, John Grousewater. Press any key to continue your adventure.
I pressed Enter.
> ROOM IN THE YAWNING MASK
> You are in your room in the Yawning Mask. It's bare and empty, which suits an adventurer like you just fine. In the room, you see a TABLE and a WINDOW. The only DOOR leads WEST into the HALL.
There was no dwarf standing at the door and no note tucked under it. Downstairs, the Innkeeper was going through his late evening routine. I asked him if he'd seen a dwarf tonight.
> "No, mister. One dwarf did stop by this morning to pay your bill in advance of three months, but he hasn't been back since. Naturally, I didn't ask any questions," the Innkeeper says.
Outside, the stars over Xynk were just beginning to shine.
I unplugged the power cord and shut the Thinkpad.
Wayne swallowed a chunk of chocolate chip muffin. "So what are you going to do with it now?"
"Drop it off a highway overpass."
"For real?"
I shook my head. "Nah, that's dangerous. I'll probably just take a sledge hammer to it and pound it into decommission. Also, I'll be in the market for a new laptop. Know anyone who sells them?"
Wayne faked laughter. "What about Annie?"
"I'm going to drive to her mother's tonight and state my case for forgiveness."
"So basically you're going to try to fix a marriage you didn't break by lying about how sorry you are that you broke it."
Basically, yes. "Do you have a better idea?" I asked.
He didn't. I didn't, either.
From the moment I pulled out of the driveway to the moment Annie peeked out from behind the curtains of her mother's bay window, then opened the front door, I'd been testing out lies and scenarios in my head—
"Good evening," she said.
And all the scenarios were bullshit: because as soon as I saw the tears start to well in her eyes, I knew that even though I'd never actually cheated on her, there were a hundred other things I could apologize for, and so I packed all those things into a ball, swallowed it and said, as honestly and absolutely as ever I'd said anything, "I'm sorry and I love you."
We went home that same night. Annie had never unpacked. She threw two pieces of baggage on the back seat of the car and insisted on driving. "Don't ever cheat on me again."
Which more or less brings me back to the night of the yellow moon, smoking cigarettes on the balcony and typing a confession into my new old laptop in the early hours of the morning while wishing I had a drink to go with it. Annie's asleep.