That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (21 page)

I haven
’t spoken to the Devil since our last meeting, but the book is doing well. I confess that with part of my mind I wish it were failing miserably: then I wouldn’t have to worry that I might have been unable to resist further indebting myself to the Evil One, with another amnesia clause. But, presumably, people can succeed without the Devil’s help – so I firmly tell myself.

I
’ve started on another of the books from the living room, who, once they saw that the first one was getting written, gave up the beer and smokes and became tidy in their habits. I’ve also been conscientiously donating a percentage of my income to charity.

As for the hanky, I
’ve kept it, but only for blowing my nose.

1)

I pressed my hands against the window. I was anxious to escape from the dangerous situation I was in
– something involving espionage. My superior, a middle-aged man, was present in the room, and he was displeased with my performance in the mission. I was as wary of him as I was of the enemy agents, and I was fed up with his demands. The room was dark and there was darkness beyond the window.

I had started to wonder whether I might be dreaming. I remembered certain dreams in which I had been able to pass through solid barriers like a ghost and then fly into the freedom and safety of the air.

I bent my knees and pushed forward. My body moved in slow motion, like a diver or an astronaut. My will carried me through the window. I forgot about the possibility that I was dreaming.

Now I was in the air, travelling through a black sky above dimly
-lit angular structures which, though suggestive of architecture, might have been something else, such as furniture, for there was something attic-like about the region’s gloom. Under the influence of this impression I swam upwards, searching for a roof. A few moments later I passed through an invisible plane of demarcation and found myself flying in broad daylight.

The sky was blue, decorated with a few small clouds. The terrain below me was a green mixture of park and woodland, without a road or a straight line anywhere. The light of the sun had a noticeably yellow cast to it, so that all the greens were golden
-tinged and warm.

While I knew that I would eventually want to explore this world on foot, I did not want to stop flying. However, once I began to worry about losing my buoyancy the thought itself caused me to fall towards the ground, but I was able to stop my descent by repeating the word ‘fly’, and stabilised myself at ten or fifteen feet above the ground. I continued flying at this height, skimming over a lawn. I flew past a bronze sculpture of a planet with rings, which I took as a sign that this was the planet Saturn. There were no people, which surprised me, as the landscape had a tended look and someone must have put the sculpture there.

I looked up and saw Jupiter in the sky. Unlike Saturn it appeared as the gas giant we see from Earth. The planet looked close: a fist held up would only just have covered it. As I looked at it, it began to divide like a cell, splitting into two, then four, and then into many more. All these Jupiter cells were misshapen, and I thought, with fear, that the sky of Saturn was infected with a cancer of Jupiter.

2)

I was in a large house with twenty or thirty people, a few of them friends I had not seen for several years in waking life. We all belonged to a cult. I was a somewhat reluctant member. Our leaders, the beings we followed, were due to arrive, and I was afraid. We waited on the stairs and presently they were brought to us.

Our leaders were encased in two rectangular coffins, one black and one red. They were large and smooth with rounded corners, made of shiny material like fibreglass. These coffins were carried up the stairs in an upright position, side by side, by some of the cult members, the black coffin on the left and the red on the right, at a ceremonious pace.

I stood on the left side of the stairs. As the black coffin went past me I felt intense heat emanate from it, and my fear increased. I then felt sure that it contained the one who I will refer to here as the Marquis, a kind of discarnate being or character who in waking hours inhabits my mind as a friend and collaborator, but who has manifested in frightening forms in one or two other dreams. I was sure it was him and that he was evil and dangerous
– a demon without a jot of mercy in his soul, and an arch-deceiver. During the dream I didn’t think about the inhabitant of the red coffin, but afterwards it seemed logical to identify it as another character in my private mythology, the Captain, a magical and powerful woman with an affinity for volcanoes, who is sometimes a companion of the Marquis and sometimes his antagonist.

I seldom experience either intense fear or sensations of temperature in dreams; this dream was unusual for me in both respects.

I.

My kid is crying again. The angel we saw last night outside the town scared the shit out of him. It lay in its own impact crater with its belly to the sky, the nine or ten eyes on its torso still glowing neon orange. Nothing at all for a face. Head like a peeled potato, about the size of a truck cab. It was probably dead, the glow just residual energy, but I couldn’t cross my heart and promise him. Anyway, the safety rule is not to go poking at any angel, even after bactyls have had their buffet and gone. Not that the chickenshit little runt would go near an angel by himself. But I’m trying to teach him that chickenshit and cautious aren’t the same.

I took us up into the woods. By the smell out on the highway as we walked closer to the lights, the town was a kennel. The dogs wouldn
’t go for the angel – even a dumb dog knows an angel is about as good to eat as strychnine, unless you’re a bactyl – but they’d sure go for a couple of rodents. I may be a mouse as big as a bear – the Paul Bunyan of mice – with opposable thumbs and an AK to hold with them, but there could’ve been any number of dogs up there, and I can’t shoot for shit in the dark.

So here we are in the ditch I picked for a sleeping place, about a mile off the road at the bottom of a hill covered in beech forest. But I
’m well past bright eyed and bushy tailed – actually, my tail is twitching on its own like a spastic snake glued to my ass – thanks to the couple of bennies I popped when I first got a whiff of the angel, and he’s only sleeping in fits and starts, waking up to cry, like a baby. But he doesn’t cry too loud. Maybe he’s finally got it into his head that he has to keep the noise down.

In between the repetition of settling him back to sleep, which I do by mechanically stroking his back, I watch the stars crawl, dig a hole to piss in, cover it back over, and count the pig tins in my pack. There are twenty
-eight. Enough for nine days and a morning. I knew that, but I don’t trust this mouse brain with numbers, so I do an inventory at least once a day.

Well into the night, a looping motorcycle drone comes through the air from over the other side of the hills. So there are volk in the local picture, too. The dogs start up an answering holler, which wakes my runt, who at that point had been asleep for about an hour, so that I was starting to think he might get through the rest of the night.

I
’ve decided to stay off the road until we’re past the dogs and the volk. That might be a day, it might be three, depending on how big the volk territory is. True, there’s always a chance of meeting a dream in the back country, but with volk around, probably not that much chance. Even assholes have their uses.

As long as we can find water we could do a week on our current food supply before we
’ll have to head back down to catch a pickup going to a pig farm, leaving a day’s leeway in case something happens to the regular service and we have to spend another day on the road. I’m leaving that as an option, depending on what fortune brings. If the weather holds good I’m thinking I’d rather rough it up here than pay hard-earned pig for a stinking corner of a hidey hole in a dero town.

I get him up and in the cold foggy morning we start on the next hill, taking a deer path. I feel like shit wrung out of a sheet, and he, my rodent son, is just terrible. Starts going on about his mama. Why did I have to put one in her that day?

I say to him, You goddamn know why, and if I tell you a different story it won’t change what happened.

I say that if he asks me one more time I
’ll take him to the next farm and tell the maryjanes he’s a weird looking pig and they can have him for the meatworks, no charge.

I hope he
’s too tired to cry, but forget that.

He doesn
’t look any more human when he cries, or any more like anything except whatever the shit he is. Which is kind of like a hairless gopher. A roly-poly pocket gopher with no hair except for a bit on his head: a shaved gopher in a toupee and filthy dungarees. With high-strung feelings.

But not a lot of spunk or brains or will.

So that I’m often thinking how, if I’d come out like him, I’d never be able to protect him. But while my brain isn’t what it was, it functions enough to get us from A to B alive every day, and I’ve got more willpower than I ever had. It’s like the god that ain’t gave me just one gift. I don’t think the runt got any gifts, other than having me to look after him.

I try to cheer him up with jokes about the potatohead angel, how we were going to cut off its head and make fries like we used to on our weekends
.

Your mama wouldn
’t let you eat fries, I remind him. Funny how she wouldn’t let him have fries, or any kind of food that might make him fat, but he got fat anyway. Even funnier how he’s still fat now, when he’s getting nothing but a few ounces of pork a day and walking all the time.

He doesn
’t even pretend to laugh when I call the angel a potatohead. He used to pretend. He used to be able to think of his mouse dad’s feelings. Now he doesn’t try, I’ve been noticing lately. I’m hoping it’s just because he’s tired, but I’m afraid he’s still losing parts of himself – like a card was pulled out of a house of cards and now more cards are collapsing. He’s definitely lost some of the social basics he knew back when we were normal, before the you-know-what, the day of hoodoo, the end of reason, the big search and replace, call it what you will.

I
’m the only mouse and he’s the only thing like him that I’ve seen. It could be that we’re unique, like dreams – one-of-a-kinds. Sticking-up nails, which the volk will always try to hammer down. Not that we’d look like much hanging on a trophy wall. Anytime I wish I was something badass and fancy I remember that. Sometimes it’s better to be shabby lowlife. She called me that. Now, I won’t say who’s having the last laugh, because none of this is funny. But who’s alive, I might say, and who’s looking after the kid better than just about anyone looks after a kid these days?

After the mist lifts, it turns out to be a nice day for trekking through the woods. Clear under a high overcast, with fall colours making everything pretty as a picture. A definitely outdoors day, as my own old mama used to say. She turned pig, poor lady. Which reminds me of something. I point to a squirrel running up a birch trunk.

I ask, Do you eat those
?

No, he says.

Right, I say.

Last night I shouldn
’t have said that thing about making fries. There’s no such thing as fries anymore, but even so, I’d talked about eating something other than pig. Too many bennies, not enough sleep, and I’m angry at myself for the slip. So I ask, just to be clear, Hey, if I make Potatohead into fries, can you really eat them, or is it just pretend?

Pretend, he says. He
’s got a look like he might start up his crying motor again, but he doesn’t. He could be sulking about his mama still, but I can’t be sure, so I let it go this time.

A bit of breeze sends a few yellow leaves drifting down. It
’s a good chance to change the subject. After pointing out the falling leaves I start on some of the other things around us. I’m trying to get him to grasp the beauties of nature. I know kids don’t, normally, but apart from eating and shitting they’re life’s only source of pleasure now, and I want him to enjoy them.

I spy with my little eye. Leaf, clouds, tree. He gets those. I try a few trees by name
– birch, ash, maple – but he can’t remember those from one day to the next, and he gives up after a few wrong guesses each time. He doesn’t get shadow or spiderweb, either.