Cloud Country (13 page)

There was another thud, and another book,
The Secret Lives of My Vagina
. This she kicked over the edge. Two more books fell. Saru looked up at the stars, trying to figure out where the hell these books could be falling from, and a third book nearly smacked her in the face. This one was an obese dictator of books, and she wondered how many words were inside—a thousand? A hundred thousand? How many was a lot? And how many did you even need? Were there as many words as were in a single feed, or were there more? A feed was infinite, really, and it had pictures and sounds and motion and recordings and smells and touch, and just thinking it made her angry that someone was throwing books at her. Reading was like riding a horse to work or sewing or cooking or making your own shoes. It was slow and stupid and wasteful and pretentious. She scooped up the three books,
oomphing
at the stupid weight of their words, and chucked them all over the edge in a flutter. A job well done.

A thud and another book. Three more thuds and three more books. Saru laughed at the challenge—all right, I’ll play your game! I’ll chuck every book you got up there, buddy! She raced around madly, grabbing books and hurling them over the edge. More books fell, books of every shape and size and weight, some fluttering down and some slamming like anvils, with pictures of clowns and soldiers and spaceships and dragons. Books to make you rich, and books to make you cum, and books to make you thin and fit, and decay away your time with their plodding words. They fell in a torrent around her, impossible volumes of books, bouncing and rolling, piling up in mounds and mountains, so many she could only crouch and cover her head, and shield herself from the small books by holding up the large ones like a shield.

“I’m not reading your damn books,” Saru screamed up at the sky, and a book dropped right onto her jaw. Her teeth rang with agony, and her words disappeared into a swarm of blood-mumbled curses. Larger and larger books fell, and older books, and the precursors of books—winnowing scrolls, crashing pots, tablets carved with symbols, monoliths as large as cars, landing and cracking and shaking the stone base. And then Saru had had enough. She felt herself in the place between thought and not-thought. Flow. Focus. Awareness. Giving every sense exactly the amount of attention it deserved, no more no less, and acting accordingly. She saw the books falling in slow motion, stepping between them easily, swatting them away, or giving them just the proper nudge at the proper time to shift them an inch from her skin.

Saru looked up through the snow-sprinkle of books and saw they came from a place—they had a
source
. She stepped lightly on the book falling in front of her, and found that it supported her weight. Another step up, to the next book, and then another, and they held. A pattern emerged in her mind’s eye, books spiraling up like a staircase, and she ran, leaping from slow-fall book to slow-fall book, body thrilling at the impossibility of it all. Her stone column disappeared below, and there she was in the middle of empty space, climbing a waterfall of books, up, up, up, towards a blur of white that formed into a cloud as she drew close. She leapt upon the final book, and her arms gripped solid stone amidst the white nothingness. She boosted herself up, and stood within a cloud.

10. The Library of Dog

Saru found herself inside what must have been the library of a God. It was a hall as wide as Broad Street, and the walls on either side were shelves as tall as skyscrapers, disappearing into a starlit sky. The floor was chessboard marble, and in between the shelves was displayed all kinds of crap. There were monuments, and statues, and scrolls, and carvings, and totem poles, and paintings, and weaving doohickeys, and printing presses, and ancient compact discs. There were thingamabobs she recognized as antique computers, with tubes and boxes, and plastic keyboards etched with outmoded alphabets. Streams of books were dislodging themselves from the shelves and floating to the hole she had climbed through, and as she watched they reversed course in lightning-fast rewind. Books erupted out of the hole like it was a geyser, and snapped back to their shelves, and the hole in the floor sucked closed as though it had never been.

“Hello?” Saru called. Her voice echoed, bouncing around and coming back almost as strong as it had left her mouth. She walked over to a glass display full of old video-game consoles and shoved it over. The crash mingled with the last echoes of her voice.

“Hellooo?” she called again, and knocked over a vase, shattering it. This was kinda fun.

“Hello,” her voice returned, echoing.

Saru walked on. The hall had no end; it was longer than her range of sight, fuzzed with the distance. Onward, surrounded by books and artifacts and art, so much art. Paintings of tigers and mountains and fruits (and people rendered as fruits) and battles and landscapes in so many forms, from photorealistic to fraudulently abstract. Statues carved of wood and stone and plastic and—was that shit? Clothing of every style from every age, hung on wireframes and mannequins that stared with dead eyes. Sometimes she only just noticed the mannequins out of the corner of her eye—hiding behind a hutch of porcelain teacups or a guillotine—and she would startle, and bash them with her prod, until their pantaloons hung in shreds. Then she would wait for the echo of the blows to fade, the silence to return, and still nothing, nothing living or moving to disturb her stroll through human history.

Saru came to a circular room as large as a stadium or maybe a hundred stadiums, for the objects it held were enormous—pyramids and monoliths, temples and tombs. Other hallways as long and wide as the one she’d come from branched off from this room like spokes. This was the nexus, the central hall—or maybe it was just one hub among thousands, and there was no center and no end to this museum. Saru wove her way through the pyramids and arches and towers and coliseums and amphitheaters until the clutter of hubris thinned into a clearing. In the middle of the clearing sat the dog, the cephereal, watching her. Ghostly tendrils emanated from its skull; they spread out through the artifacts, caressing the stone and metal. As Saru approached, the tendrils faded and vanished.

“Okay,” Saru said to the dog. “I’m here, I watched your dumb movies. I figured it out. I solved the mystery. Ria, or I guess her cephereal, is thinking of destroying us. Humans. It thinks that there’s too much of a risk of humans becoming part of the UausuaU. Right? And you have a different idea, I hope?”

The dog didn’t answer. No shit. First of all, it was a dog. Second of all, it wasn’t a dog, it was an alien. Third of all, this whole thing was stupid. Still though. She’d done a lot to figure this out, and it would be nice to get some validation.

“Hey!” she yelled at the dog. “Am I on the money here? Or what?”

Her words bounced around the clearing. The tendrils sprouted from the dog’s head and slithered through the air. It seemed like the tendrils caught her words, and fluttered with the resonance, and looped in imitation of the letters. The tendrils withdrew and the dog melted. The blues and blacks and golds of its fur ran together and wrapped around to form a ball that lifted off the ground. There was a flash, and then Morgan Friar stood before her. He was dressed in the professor getup Saru remembered, and he had a strange look on his face, a vague, happy, moron smile he’d certainly never worn in real life.

“Friar?” Saru said, doubtful.

She waited for Friar to say something—to explain himself, to riddle her some cryptic bullshit, to beg for her forgiveness. When he got it all out she was going to beat the living (not-living?) shit out of him. But he didn’t say anything. He just stood there, making exaggerated faces. He frowned, a cartoon, puppy-dog frown, and then smiled, and then wrinkled his nose, and then he did a sort of dance, kicking his feet left and right and waving his arms in the air. Saru’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped in disbelief. Of all the things that had happened to her, all the surprises dropped on her head and shoveled down her throat, this might be the biggest. Was Friar high? Retarded? Insane? It was easier to imagine him as an alien serial killer than an imbecile. Friar frowned again, and then he dropped into a dramatic squat and farted. He looked at Saru quizzically, as if to see what she thought about that, and then he held out his hand, still in a squat.

“You’re too pretty for this line of work, Saru,” he said.

She punched him in the jaw, hard, just about as hard as she’d ever punched anything in her life. He took it, not reacting, not even flinching, just bam! in the face, knocked onto his ass.

“Mother fucker!” she screamed, and kicked him in the stomach, and then the groin, and then the face. He didn’t fight back, didn’t scream or shout or anything. “Mother fucker! Trying to kill me and lie to me and suck my blood and
argh
!” Saru jumped on top of him and pinned him with her knees. She punched and clobbered and elbowed and tore at him with her nails until his face was a palette of slits and bruises, and his blood was spattered in a Rorschach halo around his popped-cherry skull. She paused, panting, and shivered with a mix of joy and relief and self-disgust and what-the-fuck. She was stained to the elbows in blood.

“It’s…always a pleasure…to see you,” Friar said.

“What?” Saru screamed into his ruined face. He couldn’t do this to her. He
couldn’t
be this masterful a sadist; he couldn’t ruin her vengeance with politeness and positivity.

The blood swamp of his face began to jiggle, and the untouched skin of his skull split and ran raw. His chest sagged and deflated underneath her, like a blow-up doll with a leak. Saru scrambled to her feet. The blood on her hands stayed behind, jelling into beads and dropping in a tiny rain, and then wiggling back to the mound of gore that ten seconds ago had been Friar’s body. The skin and hair and bone and blood and the fabric of the caji suit all rolled together into a ball, a swirling, sausage rainbow of human parts. An arm punched through the surface, and then another, and two legs, and a head, and the ball shrank into a torso and wrapped into skin, and eyes, and a nose, and ears, and a mouth, and fingernails, and beautiful, curly dark hair, and Eugene stood before her.

“Listen,” Eugene said, sternly. “You need to listen to me.”

“Oh…shit,” Saru said. She took a few stumbled steps back, feeling woozy. Eugene sighed and shook his head in the way he’d done so many times before—for the first time Saru found his face revolting. She felt herself stumbling backwards, bumping into a stone column, slumping and scraping down the stone until her ass hit floor.

“Please go away,” Saru said. “I need…” she couldn’t finish the thought. She didn’t know what she needed. She closed her eyes again, and when she opened them, Eugene was standing in front of her with a puckered face like he’d jammed wasabi up his ass. He bent forward, in a wide stance, a straight-leg, bowing yoga move, and brought his face close to hers. Aside from the bizarre expressions, it was a perfect re-creation…those lovely almond eyes, that mouth, full and curving and so ready to touch, straight, strong jaw, straight, white, celebrity teeth, everything strong and soft in the right place.

“I appreciate your patronage,” Eugene said, and then flared his nostrils and clapped. He coughed right in her face, and then sneezed, spattering her with drops of mucous.

Before she knew what she was doing, her forehead had crunched into his nose and her hands had hooked his ankles and dropped him to the ground, and once again she was standing over him, it—whatever—and screaming.

“Why? What? Are you trying to get killed again?”

Eugene’s skin sagged and grew sweaty like wet clay, and flopped and folded back into a gooey flesh sphere like a human gumball. Saru forced herself to watch, to pay attention, to try and wring some clues from it, detect a pattern, but there was nothing, no answer, no explanation she could think of other than her brain had given up and was exacting its revenge for all the years of abuse.

The flesh ball shrank, and the arms and legs that sprouted out of it were skinny like sticks. Then a narrow face, freckles and straw hair, green eyes, and that smirking mouth. Joan, it was Joan, her friend from a million years ago, back on the farm, back in Tyrone when she was a kid.

Joan was dressed in that same pink dress with the yellow flowers she always wore, cause it wasn’t like her family had all that many options. Her knees were dirty and scuffed like always, dirt under her fingernails from making the mud balls they used to chuck at each other, hair scraggly, mud-caked, stuck with twigs and leaves and crawling with ants and beetles. Joan smiled, so pretty, had always been so pretty, even with the chipped front tooth Saru had given her. The scar on Saru’s knuckle was gone now, knitted away by the healing tanks in the Hathaway estate. So many fights, her and Joan, so many kicks and punches, torn hair, hurled rocks and swung sticks and bites, and make-up pecks on the cheek.

“Don’t leave me,” Joan whispered, and then she laughed and it was her laugh, exactly her laugh, that trickling, butterfly laugh, just as Saru remembered it. A tingle ran down Saru’s spine, that cold feeling of the waking past. She remembered this, this conversation, the two of them huddled in their makeshift sleeping bags in the tree fort back in the woods, the secret fort to get away, to hide, clinging to each other to stay warm, ears pricked, hearts pounding at every snapping twig and scuffling squirrel, alert, alert, alert, waiting, afraid. They could hear their names called in the distance, whiskey-sweet, traveling far in the thin fall air, and then the curses, the shouts, the yells and the threats piling into the sky like flames. Joan hadn’t been smiling then, hadn’t been giggling like she was now, but the words were the same.

“Don’t ever leave,” the Joan in front of her said, and by chance or design her voice came out real, as scared and serious as it had been back in that moment.

“I won’t,” Saru whispered, fulfilling her role in the conversation, stupid, first-love, child promises. Her backwoods accent scooped up her tongue and carried along the words like it had been waiting in the wings all these years.

“Swear it,” Joan said. “Swear it to me.” She held out her hand and the little penknife was there that they’d used to seal their stupid friendship in blood.

“No,” Saru said. She found her head shaking like a palsy, uncontrollable. “No. This is bullshit,” and then, louder, “Bullshit!” Then she was screaming at the fake Joan in front of her, the lying, shapeshifting Friar-Eugene-Joan giggling and laughing as it parroted their words.

“Get out!” Saru screamed. “Get out of here! Get out of my fucking head!”

She raised her arm to hit Joan, to beat in this imposter’s skull just like she had the others’, and her arm hung there, wavering. The fake Joan danced like she needed to pee. Her tongue lolled out and she panted. She grabbed at Saru’s hand and tugged, and tried to drag her in one direction and then another. Saru slapped her, a light cuff that knocked the fake Joan on her ass, and then she laughed at the absurdity of it, bitter chuckles gurgling up like bile. Looks like I can finally kick your ass, Joan. I win at last. The fake Joan scooted to her knees and did a cartwheel, and then jumped, and then sneezed, and then began to cry, and then laugh in a whirlwind of emotion. Then she stood statue still.

Joan’s arms and legs rolled up and her neck shrank into her chest, and the dress wrapped around it all to form a flower-patterned ball. The ball grew into a chiseled torso, and sprouted thick legs and arms, and a veiny neck with a head and a handsome, if slightly stupid, face. It was Jim—Stanley? Brad!—just some guy she’d fucked at the McFit gym a few years ago and maybe touched herself to once or twice. He was the last person she’d expect to find hanging out in a museum.

“I think I love you,” Brad said, in his same dumb, dopey voice, and Saru laughed just like she’d laughed the first time he’d said it, back in reality.

“You’ve got five seconds to explain yourself,
Brad
,” she said.

Brad started doing jumping jacks, and then he snapped his fingers. He yodeled, voice rising as high as it would go, and then low until it broke. Then he yanked off his shorts and stumbled towards her, arms outstretched like a mummy, cock getting hard before her eyes. That was the last straw. The Betty leapt to Saru’s hand and she unloaded on him, filled him with every bullet she had in the automatic clip, which turned out to be a lot. The gunshots echoed—fuck that hurt!—and Saru remembered she didn’t have any implants, and her hearing wasn’t adjusting automatically to dampen the noise. Brad was on the ground, staring at the ceiling, chest a game of whack-a-mole organs, but Saru didn’t expect that to last.

Brad’s face sagged and blorbed into nothing, a smooth tumor where a head should have been. A slit formed in his doughy non-face, and then ran down his neck through the opened-up chest all the way to his cock. His body began to deflate. A sound came from the slit, the sound of groans pressed from dead lungs, and air trapped in rotten bowels. Saru stepped back. The air above the deflating body shimmered like a heat mirage. Colors appeared within the shimmer—watercolor swatches of blue and pink. The colors spread and grew, and silver lines appeared within them like snowflakes. Bells tinkled, and rang, and gonged, the sound so large her eardrums threatened to burst. Now the body was a pile of flopping, fleshy rags, and the colors spread before her like a storm cloud, and the crystals within them were throbbing veins, filling the hall, spreading across the artifacts and shelves.