The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (37 page)

"Damned tragedy, you getting in a car crash after losing your wife and all. I bet you were crying your eyes out to Hank Williams or somethin'—didn't see the curve until it was too late. Damned tragedy." He shakes his head. "Oh, I noticed a dent in your bumper. Was that paint from another car? Guess you backed into somebody and didn't report the accident. No worries. Olympia PD has better things to do than hassle you on a misdemeanor hit-and-run beef. I put in a good word for you."

The doctor appears from stage left. He taps Fisher on the shoulder and harangues him in Esperanto or Cantonese. Fisher laughs the good-natured laugh of a career cynic, raises his palms to ward invisible blows. He pauses at the curtain, says, "Hey, we got the results on that Jane Doe. She's not a Jane Doe anymore. You busy sonofagun—we found a few of her friends. Made yourself a whore graveyard."

I'm getting sick to my stomach. I see the choppers, the hounds, burly men in windbreakers muttering into handsets. Not a desert in Nevada or New Mexico, but a green Pacific Northwest divide lumped with unmarked graves.

The burning car, the placid cows. Marchland observing his handiwork from the road. He tugs the brim of his hat to shade his Devil's face, although for a tick his face could've been anyone's, even mine.

A full tank of gas could've taken Marchland halfway to the moon. Or to a lonesome stretch of the I-5 Corridor where girls of all ages hawk their services along the archipelago of strip malls and truck stops, motels and casinos. A savage border where a grimy three-foot-high concrete buttress holds back the woods and the night.

I can't even twitch my fingers. Getting sleepy.

Fisher keeps talking, he's got a mouthful of static. My eyes close. I'm thinking of cats in boxes, radioactive elements, and one simple question. As long as the cat stays boxed the answer is maybe.

Violins and horns scratch my cerebrum, catch fire.

I'm dancing with Miranda under the glitter ball. The band has Old Blue Eyes down cold. If I don't look at the detective, the song will go on and on, perhaps forever. If I don't hear Fisher's words Miranda and I can keep on dancing until the champagne runs dry and the ball dims to a cinder.

The glitter ball pulses. It's the white exit of a black entrance, mouth of an event horizon, the hole at the heart of everything. In moments it has filled all space, has compressed all time to a point.

The possibilities are infinite.

This must be a seizure.

There is no warning. The pressure in the room changes.

The wallop of pain strikes her temple like a mallet, causes her to cease humming, to discard the nail brush, scattering droplets of cherry enamel, to curl in the center of the room, trembling. She has never heard of a seizure causing pain. There shouldn't be pain. She can't coordinate her thoughts to assail this incongruity and it circles down the drain.

The world falls silent. Dull light curdles against the window, foams in her hair, reveals her delicate skull inside translucent flesh, traces the kaleidoscope of veins and nerves. She struggles to her feet and gropes toward the kitchen like a drowning swimmer.

The great, physical silence throbs and builds. White light fuses her vision and then recedes like a wave. She sways before the kitchen door. But there are too many doors. They shift and flex. Light and dark flicker through them. The light and the dark are cold and vast and the room distends, balloonlike, beyond its natural circumference. The doors distend also. Vertigo begins to crush her spine. The room is an inescapable gravity well.

Then, it's finished. The pain withdraws its hooks and clamps and leaves her shaken, but otherwise unmarked. She wipes her eyes and everything is restored to its proper place and perspective. Yet, yet, something has changed. The house is different now. An ant farm suddenly, terminally decolonized.

She finds the kitchen empty.

A block of ice in bits, drips, drips. The ice pick is balanced on the counter edge, its point a morning flame. The microwave clock nictitates indecipherable fragments of numerals, of words, a dying signal.

She smells the musk of his aftershave, the warmth of his smoky exhalations yet hanging in a gulf of dust motes. It's as if he dropped through a sprung trap door.

She says, "Jack? Honey?"

Out there, the scotch broom nods, nods.

EXCERPTED FROM THE ACTION 9 COVERAGE OF MIRANDA CARSON BRIEFING (by Rod Jones—6/9/99):

MC:  . . .and in closing I just want to thank everyone involved with the search for Jack. There are so many people who have given their time . . .I thank all of you for the cards and letters. It means so much to us.

And to whoever is holding my husband: please, let him come home. Take him to a hospital or a fire station. Please, from the bottom of my heart, I beg you to do the right thing. Please let Jack come home to his family. You have the power.

Jack, I love you. We won't stop looking.

THE ROYAL ZOO IS CLOSED

—ENTR'ACTE—

Sweeney smeared a bloody thumbprint on the refrigerator. He stared at it, studied it, at length. Stared as if he'd discovered a roadmap of a foreign country, stared like it was going to show him the quickest means to apprehend some territory he hadn't thought of—not aloud, not yet.

He stared at that thumbprint, his thumbprint, but already alien, already drying from red to black. He thought,
Why did I think of a map, it's a completely different shape—a cockroach, a butterfly, two butterflies fucking. And fuck me, it's changing.

Actually, several hundred-thousand thoughts were crashing in the supercollider of his cerebrum; asteroids caroming off a cortex loaded to the steerage with memories of pancakes, prison, premature ejaculations and continental drift. How in the Beginning the whole wobbly volcanic mass had two heads, Laurasia and Gondwanaland, and J. W. Booth was captured in a barn, and how Underdog and Popeye couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag until they'd had their fix. However, it was the Rorschach-eats-Escher quality of his own fleshly warps and whorls in bas-relief that set his synapses ablaze, shot alarm pings across the radar screen.

Sweeney stepped away too fast, the instinct of a man caught out by a truck speeding through the crosswalk, the convulsive jerk that gives a pious soul pause to genuflect, elicits lips to a crucifix, or a rosary, the antenna-twitch of a bug in the descending shadow of some colossal hand. An orchestra tuned off-key instruments in the pit of Sweeney's belly.

Just a bloody thumbprint on a white background. Just that. Only the fridge humming and the window rattling from the traffic on the street. He checked the clock, watched it tick into a new hour. He gathered his papers from the kitchen table, stuffed them into his briefcase with the mindless preoccupation of an animal scavenging for winter. Now his heart was quiet in its cage and he was feeling better and also a little stupid. The last time this happened he spent three hours gaping at the filament of the bathroom light, paralyzed with an unshakable conviction that it suddenly represented the last dying spark in a universe of frozen ash.

He walked out of the apartment and was waiting at the bus stop for the 76 when it occurred to him to wonder how he cut his hand. He flexed his fingers searching for a wound that wasn't there and considered if the department head would buy stigmata.

Sweeny's portfolio was spattered in blood and probably ruined, but it didn't matter—the machines and the cockroaches would doubtless inherit everything precisely as Hawking always promised. And anyway, this was his last day at work.

Riding from the University District to downtown in the morning meant crowds. Crowds meant nothing to Sweeney. He was a veteran of the city, the first one off the platform and perched on a seat above the wheel-well, briefcase across his knees. He looked out the window at the skyline, chromatic superstructures strung by blinking lights. Dusty haze coiled within the sunrise. The Needle slid past on the starboard side. Quite apropos, since this city was the West Coast plexus of the Heroin Nebula. Sweeney hadn't bought a ticket to the revolving crown of the famous tower, not in thirty years—and wouldn't ever. Every morning he half-expected to watch it flare like a firecracker and rocket into space.

Stop and go in the freeway crush lasted twenty minutes. It always seemed like an hour packed tight as olives on the stinking bus with the blue-haired new-wave lawyers, twitching nosebleeds of all sexes on the double to their doctors, and the transients in Technicolor rags, polyester business suits and garbage bags, smelling of ammonia and microwaved meat.

One guy, a fat guy in a coat and tie with an Adam's apple that truly resembled an apple, a Washington Golden Delicious, muttered a monologue about passenger pigeons. Nobody could shrink away from him, nor escape his encyclopedic recitation; there was no space to squeeze. Sweeney might as well have been trapped aboard a mail train stalled on the outskirts of The Third World, waiting for a smashup to wipe the excess of human cargo from the tracks, except here there were no chickens, no soldiers with fingers inside trigger guards, and the heat wasn't hammer and tongs yet. It was still coming.

A fire engine revved its klaxon, bullied past them, crawling upstream through columns of stalled metal, and Sweeney considered how in the dimness of his childhood he had wanted to be a fireman, to wear the helm with the symbol, the black and yellow turnout coat, to wield the ax.

Sweeney wouldn't take the job if they paid him triple. He wouldn't be a cop either. Or a teacher. Christ, he wouldn't set foot inside a high school, they were shooting galleries these days.

The bus disgorged in the tunnel. Worker ants poured from the barrel, flowed up the escalators into the street. Sweeney led the surge, chin in his chest, striding past the Korean espresso stand, the all-star a cappella rappers, and the heavies with their hats out. A radio sputtered static. Jimmy Swaggart shrieking on full automatic, accompanied by a horn section, the hiss-boom-bah of the hometown coliseum, a cymbal clash. Jesus wasn't dead, just in hiding like Cousin Waldo. Maybe they were shacking with Noriega at a Vatican safehouse.

Fresh graffiti slashed across green mailboxes, a dog bristled at Sweeney's approach, practically slavered to take a piece of his ankle, but didn't. A bum wearing a Seahawks parka and a monogrammed sock cap he'd likely ripped off called the dog back, gave it a pat with a hand most of the skin had curled from, like scales on the dirt-blacked talon of some large, flightless bird. Sweeney hurried on. He was going places.

He was thinking and obsessing about the graffiti on the mailboxes, the brick walls of the buildings, and everywhere it splattered and proliferated; a specialized urban life form, human kudzu bred in the caverns of a hive mind that chanted slogans like FREE WILL, and INDEPENDENCE, and REVOLLUTION. And spelled it incorrectly, mostly.

What was encrypted in the glyphs of the modern age, what did it mean? Certainly a cipher, as was the ancient Cockney, invented as the argot of the disenfranchised, the disaffected, the cant of thieves who crept into darkened homes and ate the peanut butter and drank the beer and put their greasy mitts on your daughter, if you had one, and pretty soon she'd be following them around, learning how to do loop-de-loops on a skateboard, a bullring in her nose, or wherever, a satellite in a decaying orbit. She might wander off to Hollywood, do a tour in the trenches, wind up on the casting coach hoping to become the next Norma Jean bursting from a cake to serenade the knights of Camelot, another domesticated seal; thoroughly modern though, because her tattoos said as much. A cipher by any other name and
I'm sorry Mr. & Mrs. So & So, we found her in a ditch.
That's where the smart money was in the whole degenerate crap shoot.

Sweeney, consumed with graffiti, recollected graffiti artists he had known. Jacks of the trade, as it were. The best of them always went armed with a pithy salvo, inscrutable as a ghetto to the sleek banker rolling in an SUV.

When you're outta crack, the crack of dawn will do
, so said a former would-be sumo named Confucius, Confucius Alexander Trey, or Cat for short. A college buddy, a drinking buddy, the one who went the wrong way down the track, although these days Sweeney wasn't so certain of that estimation. Cat was a sure-enough Michelangelo with a spray can or a magic marker and his canvases of preference were the temples of wealth and avarice—as defined by the book of C. He didn't make it far, geologically speaking. He died in '99, shotgunned in the face outside a shelter in Pioneer Square. Closed coffin, open circuit, and there's no apothegm to counter that, so shovel on the dirt. Karma, brothers and sisters, has a mouth as big as the world.

Sweeney glimpsed Confucius smirking, here and there, not every time, but with sufficient regularity to warrant suspicion, and it was another thing to worry about. Confucius knew something, obviously. Maybe it was true—the handwriting was on the wall.

Things were getting too complicated. In the eighteenth century when the Cockney slang was in flower, blokes trundling along Buck's Row weren't worried about Big Bangs or ICBMs pointed at their bedrooms, or String Theories tweaking the chords of high-strung theological violins. They didn't give a fig about Stephen Hawking, or nanotech out-sprinting human evolution to the brass ring, or wristwatches. The world wasn't on its last legs in 1788, wasn't sucking in its last breath, wasn't ready to topple from the roof of heaven into an abyss, even if a few critics thought it might, or that it should. The prophecies were shouted lowercase.

Today of all days, the graffiti held a message for Sweeney that had lurked there from the beginning, astride the mortar and the calculus.

Sweeney read HELL between the isosceles, ellipses and hoops. He read EAT OR BE EATEN and THE END IS HERE. He read SWEENEY CALL HOME. And he read no further. He went on his way, wearing the stunned expression of a man who has forgotten something important. A man fumbling in his pocket for keys to a car he doesn't own, a house he's never lived in.