The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (38 page)

Sweeney gazed into the branches of the plum trees planted at intervals along the sidewalk. The trees were pleasant; it was much safer than touring the country where animals rustled among the woodwork. These trees were innocent of inhabitants—the rats only lived in them at night. Sometimes earnest dollars amounted to more than a hill of beans in a world of spoons. Sometimes someone had taste. Sometimes someone showed restraint—plum trees, glitzy fountains and the billion acres of grass you're not supposed to walk on under penalty of death. Propriety, decency, common sense were tragically underrepresented, as was exhibited by the Hammering Man looming near the SAM, the pregnant nude bronzed between a library and a Lutheran daycare, or Lenin glowering in Fremont, the self-styled Left Bank, the so-called Center of the Universe. Fremont could have him if they wanted. Stalin too—why not? Grab a shovel; shit isn't always free, just cheap. Sweeney thought they were trying a bit too hard.

Sweeney was, as ever, early. He ducked into a diner, seized the lone deserted table with remnants of the Last Breakfast—cigarette butts interred in the coagulated gravy, wadded napkins on the floor, pieces of change under a plastic cup. Brand new curses lovingly scribed into Formica, a hunk of gum with veins. He sat on calcified vinyl, watching for the waitress. Sort of a sport.

MAGGY, said her tag. Everyone was tagged. The fish in the stream, and the polar bear on the ice floe. This was the Information Age. Knowing What's What was half the game.

MAGGY asked him what he wanted. She did it telepathically, hand on hip, the interrogative frown a trademark of stoics and customer service personnel in any epoch. She'd seen Sweeney every weekday morning of several burned up calendars, and still she made the query, for it was possibly the height of professional courtesy to obey such rituals.

He said coffee, she poured it and rolled onward, appraising other mouths in the herd. She too was going places. Itzhak Bentov, the esteemed, albeit informal, poet physicist might've commented that she was already there.

Sweeney tried to read the paper, found his focus dilated telescopically. He couldn't grasp those paragraphs of multitudinous complexity, the small-town soap opera plot of places and events blown out of proportion, intumescent and malignant, somewhat staggering, yet squalid, as a drunk sailor on shore leave, or Saint Vitus wavering in a mural shot through a digital camera in the drunken sailor's paw. The typeset conspired with the graffiti. The implications were cosmic. He speculated for milliseconds what the plan was, couldn't begin to perceive its contours, much less the details, and gave up. He fixated on the pictures. Thus modern man was brought full circle to the chronicles of habit carved by hominids hunkered around tiny fires in limestone dens way back when.

Across the ocean, a medieval metropolis was catching hell. Domes burned. Thunderheads boiled atop black pillars. Panic. Chaos. Live coverage at 11. A sign read THE ROYAL ZOO IS CLOSED.

They got a grainy shot of a zookeeper in a dirty turban, face buried in his blackened hands. An emaciated tiger pressed its ribs against a cage door, appeared as if it could slip right through the bars. Its fur as matted as indoor-outdoor carpet, its eyes were sleepy. The tiger licked cracks in the concrete. Bandits had stolen the gorillas, the snakes and the elephants.

The Coalition couldn't get the water going. There was no power. There was no food. There was, however, plenty of hope. A child on a stretcher lost his parents in the shelling; people were searching for them, and incidentally, his arms had come off and nobody could find them either. He was smiling. In the background, a mob pulverized the Dictator's statue with sledgehammers, bulldozing a plot for the Golden Arches, a five-star hotel, something commercially utilitarian and ineffably American.

Sweeney flipped to the sports page. The Mariners were in spring training; they would take the West easy. He brought fifty dollars for the pool at the office. Suckers. His coffee was done. Sweeney folded the paper neatly. Like so, and so, and so.

—IMPREZIO—

The week before his last day at the office, Sweeney visited the doctor. Sweeney suffered cold sweats, heart palpitations, nausea, a whole laundry list. He was panicky, delusional, irritated, sometimes enraged, sometimes overcome with inchoate grief regarding events he couldn't quite recall and worse to come and it was nearly enough to drive a grown man to tears. Somebody somewhere once told him a good cry was as a lance to a boil. A good cry would set him right as rain.

Sweeney never cried, never shouted, never stuck a pencil in anybody's neck despite the often overwhelming compulsion to homicide engendered by modern life; nonetheless, things were not remotely copasetic. Of late, that being the last decade, give or take, Sweeney had devolved into an emotional oscillator. From moment to moment he wanted to swig sake and fly his Zero into an aircraft carrier; kick some teeth; flog his dog; flog the noisy neighbor; slit his own throat; start a fire; shoot his boss; quit his job; do heavy drugs, preferably peyote, or maybe mash-Allah in a hash-house in Amsterdam, or an authentic buffalo-skin teepee on the Great Plains and receive a vision quest; quit being a slave to cigarettes; send a letter bomb to P. Morris; get right with Jesus; join the cult of the homeless; screw a starlet, even an ugly one; or say screw everything and go home and hide under the covers until everything blew over. In the vernacular, Sweeney was freaking out.

The conversation between Sweeney and the doctor went as follows.

—Doc, I've got problems. I'm impotent, and I think I may be a racist.

—Why do you assume you're impotent?

—This woman moved in across the hall. And she's a hottie, see. She prances around in harem pants and a g-string, and yeah I want to, well, uh, know her. Biblically. God, I'm old enough to be her father. But, uh, well, that's not the problem, the problem is this: The attraction is purely intellectual, a friggin' computer algorithm—you aren't hungry, but you see some shortcake, it makes your mouth water and you know you must want it 'cause you haven't had shortcake since Oppy split the atom. I look at that chick in the harem pants and want a piece of shortcake all right, but, uh, nothing's happening with me physically. It's like a psychotic Zen nightmare and I don't even know how to repair a goddamned motorcycle.

—Stress, Sweeney. It's all in your mind. I'll write you a prescription. Why do you think you're racist?

—'Cause I'm afraid of foreigners. Not the ones who live here, not unless they're wearing turbans and carrying satchels, ha-ha. I guess what it is, what I meant was, I'm afraid of other countries.

—Ah. Which ones in particular?

—I don't know. Which ones got the bomb or are getting it? China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan for starters. Hell, France, Israel, good old U.S.A. A reformed coke fiend with a finger on the button; yeah I get scared of Texans, even the transplants, and their stupid hats, their baseball teams and Brahma bulls. They speak a different language. Call information sometime, you'll see what I mean. I guess it's irrational. Yeah.

—You're not just a racist, Sweeney. You're a xenophobe. I can help; here's another prescription. Allow me to refer you to a very fine psychiatric professional. I send all the doozies to him. Here's his card.

—What? No can do, Doc. I read the small print in the insurance manual. They only cover up to seventy percent of the couch time, no promises either. I'll shrink my head next year, when I can afford it. There's one thing though, maybe you can tell me if I'm schizophrenic. Or if I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. Can you be one and not the other, or is it always both?

—Perhaps you'd better tell me more.

—I see patterns lately. Everywhere. Clouds with cherub faces, dry leaves murmuring Chinese herbal secrets, paint peeled to make a symbol, a drop of blood trickling counterclockwise from the mouth of a dying pigeon. A car horn confuses me, makes me think big Gabe is blowing his trumpet. Shit like that.

—Oh, me too, Sweeney. Me too. Take a couple bottles of these, though. Just in case.

The mantra of Millennial anxiety: Mass Hysteria. Mass Hypnosis. Mass Production. Mass Transit. Mass Murder. Mass Media. Massacre. Mass Exodus. Mass Extinction.

Pundits said Hitler and Pol Pot gelded the term Genocide. That the Holocaust exhausted the fat muscles of pathos and empathy, unyoked them from their central gravity, sent them chasing after every rabbit, and gave the collective consciousness a callous. After Ted B. and Jeff D. the whole multiple homicide shtick was positively ho-hum. Social outrage was quarantined and relegated to splinter cells, underground presses, leftist political organizations and charities. Humanity was immunized against anguish. Horror was white noise, Misery the Muzak of a strip-mall culture. Everyone was terrorized and utterly fearless.

It may have been true, every bleeding syllable, except that morning in Pioneer Square, first a few, then many, woke up to the cold facts. Glaciers scraped these valleys; meteorites once studded the clay like a lunatic design on a masochist's tongue, excavated holes and trenches at the bottom of the ocean, added their traces of background radiation. Had civilization forgotten Vesuvius and Krakatoa? That Mother Nature likes to eat her children on occasion? No consequence—shortly, citizens of the empire were raw nerves on the hoof.

Sweeney didn't make it to the office. When he breached the plaza where the fruit market, the fiddle shop, and the Memorial lived, and Starbucks, ubiquitous as scotch broom, the trip was rendered pointless. The sky began to open its wide, toothless mouth, and that mouth slobbered the phosphorescent slime of prehistoric seabeds.

Doors were shutting, metal curtains dropping, police cruisers trolling, staccato blats of authoritarian comfort crackling from bullhorns and mouths gone flaccid with shock that pierced even the cops' shiny blue hearts. Janitors wearing sad masks emerged from recesses to take down the sandwich boards, spear the trash, sweep detritus from the stage. The big curtain began to drop, black on black.

The sun flickered, an oblong dwarf, and it seemed a little underdone, a soft yolk. The air acquired somber tints as if filtered by the lens of an artless cinematographer.

Tak Fujimoto wept.

A shudder passed through the city, the girders and the skeletons, and into bedrock. Afterward, a sound. A deep, abiding sigh as of vast lungs deflated. People walked in widening circles. People tripped over stalled cars. People vomited and cackled. People hugged their babies and their bibles. Atheists too. Dogs fell sideways and scratched until they foamed at the muzzle, bled from the eyes; pigeons heaved up on strings and smashed through plate glass, painted wet mosaics on granite. Stoplights shifted through their spectrums.

Sweeney tried to understand. He was puzzled why action figures were windmilling as they drifted from high-rise ledges; why billboards flashed random numbers; why small, hungry fires flickered in faults and crevices; why flocks of paper money whirled in funnels while seagulls plummeted in sheaves; why no one seemed to care. It was a recording. None of it was happening. Orson Welles, take your bow and sit down. Enough is enough.

Sweeney gazed into a salon on the ground floor of a hotel some local celebrity once nearly torched with a cigarette in bed after too much vodka. Beehive dryers were unoccupied; the drones had vanished, buzzed off. The TV blared. He fastened upon an image. A chasm opened, so he looked. The image fastened upon him. The chasm returned his glance. There was a brief struggle. Then it was finished. The dead German laughed.

—CODA—

Sweeney struggled home. A treacherous five-mile hike under cracked overpasses and through demolished neighborhoods. No vehicles moved. No birds sang, no children screamed. Nothing and nothing; just the erratic thud of blood in his neck and infrequent thunder that resonated far off without clouds. The air bruised purple. It filled the rippling sky; it was swelling.

Sweeney wasn't in a hurry. He was steady as she goes. He was a tortoise, and happy for it. His wingtip shoes were dirty and unlaced. He stumbled. The asphalt grew sticky.

He remembered nothing of substance. He remembered a Frenchman and his submarine. Jellyfish. Portuguese Man o' War was a predator by committee. The Man o' War wore its stomachs on its sleeve, trailed whips and stingers in dragnets, ate its prey squirming. If the sky, by sinister alchemy, or diabolical prestidigitation, transformed into a mirror of the mother sea, the primordial cradle; and if leviathans swam that breadth and hovered, softly undulating over the teeming habitations of the globe, feasting; what should you wear?

He sweated. His thoughts trickled, disjointed, timid. He decided the poets and the painters, the sculptors and the writers, the crackpot theologians and their excommunicated kin, and the mystics had it right. Reality was a makeshift prop, an amalgamation of agreed-upon conjecture, a consensus of self-limiting parameters and paradigms made palatable by endless speculation fueled by madness and hope and no mean amount of good dope. Rubber science, bouncing like a handball off the nonexistent wall of a metaphysical gulag.

The sun? Scratch the surface and reveal a skull courtesy of Dali's brush, Lovecraft's eye peeping through the socket, H. P.'s cruel dead lips whispering he warned us; he wrote the book.

The moon? No moon, only a sound stage in the Arizona desert. Stars were bullet holes in the galactic canvas. The day dark matter quavered in the pudding cup would be the universal gloaming of life as it's ordered. Today, in fact.

Sweeney didn't spy any looters and he wondered. Natural or unnatural? Did such nomenclature properly exist? Then he was at his building. He climbed the stairs, one by one, and entered his stark room. So small, artificial as a Hollywood set.

The light failed, the dim thunder faded into a well of silence. Remote and subterranean, a whale kept calling for its pod. Sweeney pulled the blinds and lighted candles; the electricity had fizzled and retreated into its maze of wires. The radio clicked and clicked and clicked and became too eerie, so Sweeney killed the switch.