A Dirge for the Temporal (16 page)

  “So where,” he said to the stranger sitting across from him, “has my daddy gone?”

~

  They were impatient to do the autopsy, so Domino was given the private
viewing he requested right away. Standing over the body, looking into its empty eye sockets, he had a sense of the pit and the void and the nothingness of his upbringing. Yet what precisely had his father meant by that particular touch? The candles, the bodily organs—they clearly spoke to the past. What did the removal of the eyes say?

  And what, for that matter, did Brett Frier have to do with anything? As Domino looked into the holes, he remembered the eyes they had once contained marking him as a freak. But how could his father have known about the way Brett and all the rest of them had looked at him? 

  “It was Daddy you should have been looking at, not me,” he said over the dead face. “It was Daddy who made me the freak.”

 
I thought you were s’posed to be so smart
, it said back.
Can’t even find your own mommy
.

  He walked away, pressing at his headache, trying to work out how killers killed and moms went to flickers. He turned back suddenly, stabbing
his finger at the face.

  “It was Daddy, can you understand that?!”

 
I thought you were s’posed to be so smart. Aren’t you the boy genius?
it said.

  He froze, staring. “What?”

 
Genius
, it clarified mockingly.

  The word was like a battering ram, smashing down doors inside him, revealing things that should have been left in the murk where they’d been buried.

  “It was Daddy,” he repeated, desperately. “Daddy, not me.” 

  He stared into the sockets and saw flames, burning as they had only hours ago in Brett’s room, shadows from the suspended organs dancing on the walls and ceiling, on his freshly stained hands.

  “Where has my Daddy gone?” he whispered.

  
He’s in your memories, Michael,
came her voice.
Remember that. That’s where they go when they have nothing else to offer us. Into our memories.

Along the Footpath to Oblivion

N
ight fell like dark honey on the nothingland and one of the two men under the bridge wanted to know about something.

  “Why do we do it, Mace?”

  “Why do we do what, James?”

  “Why do we kill?”

  Mace didn’t like the highwayman approach any more than his partner
did. “What else is there to do, James?”

  “I don’t know—work?” He breathed on his glasses, wiped with his soiled teeshirt.

  “We did that once. Remember? Let’s talk about it over a beer, OK?”

  “I want a motel. This time beer comes after. I need new glasses and I smell like blood.”

  “Fine.” Mace knew it was a matter of waiting it out when James got like this.

  “I mean it this time, Mace. Shower first.”

  “Glasses, too? Or can that at least wait till tomorrow?”

  James had to admit that he really didn’t want to
buy
a pair.

  “Some’ll come along,” Mace said.

  They watched a tanker out on the bay for a time. A ghostly moan-extending-into-a-screech sound came from over by the moorings, where
one of the hulking captives tried its chains. Otherwise the night was in the grip of calm, the same calm that had settled over the two men. They always knew when they would score. It could be the most desolate, forbidden
place, with the chances approaching nil, but that strange prescience was to be trusted.

  Sometimes, however, the calm eluded them, and they roamed all night without success. James became hard to live with then, and Mace was not much better. Sometimes James would suggest they simply go to someone’s home, do the ecstasy upon them right there, where they had all the comforts of the normals—shower, clean towels and sheets, a refrigerator
with beer or yogurt. Mace patiently reminded him how he got, how enthusiastic, how loud, how
inspired
they both got in doing the thing. Oblivion became their only house, and for that reason they stayed out on the fringes, beyond ears more than eyes.

  Voices stirred the calm. Two voices, heels on pavement, emerging from the unhardened pitch of night.

  The one broke the surface with a confession. “I’m tired of this. Tired of this life, tired of this craving, tired of this disconnection.”

  “Arnold,” said the other. “You need a fix, that’s all.”

  “I hate it when you say that, Buzz. It ain’t heroin, you know. It ain’t crack. It ain't something you can just buy on the street corner.”

  “You forget if you think there’s that much of a difference. Bottom line is, it's a hunger that screams to be satisfied.”

  “Don’t you remember, Buzz, how it once was? How wide the margin separating this one thrill from all the others? It narrows with every trick.”

  Mace and James found themselves looking at each other by the thin light from the moorings. Above, the debaters drew nearer but weren’t yet at the bridge.

  “You hate it when I call it a fix, but you never hesitate to call it a trick.”

  Mace nodded his head.

  “Yeah well, Buzz, it’s become that cheap.”

  Now James nodded his.

  There was a relatively long pause. Arnold, the raspier voice, broke it. “I wonder, man, you ever thought about performing the trick on me?”

  They were on the bridge now. Even the tone of their steps had changed.

  “I’ve thought about it. Especially when you get like this. But then who would I share the thing with? There aren't any others like us, you know. You ever really looked at the expression on Gramps when he gives us the key to our room? I'm sure we're not the only stained shirts to show up at the cheapest, seediest motel in the city, but he looks at us like he’s looking at the face of God.”

  “Faces.”

  “What?”

  “Faces, Buzz. We’re two faces not one. I don’t care how lost we are.”

  “It's God that has the one—did you say
lost
?”

  Their approach stopped. Mace and James sensed it even before the footfalls were snatched away by night. The highwaymen raised their brows at one another, Mace mouthing the word
Now
?

  But James shook his head.

  The last spoken word, unlike the sound of the debaters’ heels, still hung there, almost on top of the highwaymen.
Lost
.

  The raspier voice: “What am I seeing in your face, Buzz?”

  “
Lost
? As in
souls
? That's bringing religion into it. Never has religion been part of it.”

  “Is it fear I’m seeing in your face?”

  “The blood vessel above my ear is throbbing. Fear is not the emotion.”

  “Ah.” A pause separated this from his next words. “I’ve wondered what it would be like...at the receiving end.”

  Night bled with another wailing from the moorings.

  “I’ve wondered if it would be different for one who has visited the act on others.”

  Silence from the occupant of space to whom he spoke. Silence from
the trolls under the bridge, staring at each other, doing a bit of wondering
themselves—wondering about the crazy mathematics of chance, about kindred souls on life's crazy roads. It was a more immediate prospect, though, that caused them to moisten their lips with their tongues.

  There was a sound like that of air being knocked out of a set of lungs, a grunted exhalation followed by a moment’s anticipatory lull. The next was a low, deep moan that gathered strength as it came, stretching into a rolling howl that in turn became something even fiercer, even stranger…

  The notion of letting the song spread from victim to perpetrator and thereby to fullest blossom before acting was considered and discarded. Never had the two men under the bridge coveted the thing so. In spontaneous
union they surged up the short bank, hoisted by the ripping, tearing, screaming stages they knew were on the razor’s edge of taking command of the night.

  The mouth formed an O as the eyes beheld the deed. The deed faltered
only a second as it realized it was under scrutiny—how unimaginative its commencement wound must appear to these experts—then threw itself into its mutilations with all vigor.

  He was alone, the perpetrator. Alone, the victim. They were one and the same man, and ribboning himself with the instrument jerking like a composer’s wand in his hand.

  Mace and James turned to look at each other, as synchronous a response as their aspiration towards oblivion. But neither found the other looking back as the music of the mutilator suddenly withered down a long tunnel to the single concentrated note of a great chain giving under stress.

  Confounded, fragmented, but nothing so much as consumed by the lust, the two halves of the one man who had hidden under the bridge descended on the whirlwind to have a bath in its ecstasies themselves.

Hush Hush Little Kitty

C
alendar year CC060, A-Dam on Uram. Central Port bustling with the comings and goings of tourists. Inside, the subtle fragrance of the air conditioning system; outside, the smell of crumbling fungus acrid on the mizzly air...staler for the weight of the moisture, which seemed to hold it in place against a useless breeze.

  Unhappy faces as arrivals were forced to cross the distance between Landing and Receiving in the open air, thank you most graciously to a malfunction in the long tunnel which led to and from all gangways. The paneled glass façade that was the end to this particular inconvenience appeared to ripple like broken water as it accepted these unhappy faces into the giant main structure of Central Port.

  Inside the hall, at Receiving, a sweeping arcing graffito scrawled over the entryway announced:
HUSH HUSH LITTLE KITTY AND YOU'LL HEAR IT WHISPERING BACK
. The words appeared to have been sprayed across the wall, shimmering delicately in the light of the overheads, exhibiting a strange iridescence, harboring a strange meaning. Welcome to A-Dam on Uram. Check your psyches in at the main counter.

  The river of bodies leading there, the various styles and cultures, the wide, eager eyes...and lost in it all, myself.

  Myself...and the one who suddenly accosted me. An imparter of information, you know the type, inclined to brief me on the queer opalesque
greeting that stared down at me.

  “You know, man, if the power was shut down right now—you speak
standard?—OK, if the whole port went black, you would find that message
still glowing. You know why? Because it's biological, man. They keep the shit in tanks, and spray it like paint. Only it's not paint. It's
alive
. It's alive in the tanks, it's alive on the wall. See the fuzzy edges—”

  Cut off, as he was struck by a passing shoulder. Cursing as he turned back to me.

  “Where was I?”

  Where indeed. Stoned maybe, as I took him in. As I studied this moving
photograph of him, gesture and garb. Certainly that look about him. That look of the free spirit, as my grandfather had referred to them. That same look, in fact, that the travel agent had worn.

  I said, “The fuzzy edges.”

  “Yeah.” A hesitant chuckle. “You get that too, do you? When you look at things?”

  “Excuse me. I must be on my way.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, right. But hey, this your first visit to A-Dam?”

  “Yes.”

  Regarding me wisely: “Do yourself a favor. Heed what it says. Take a moment and just listen. Listen beyond the surface clutter”—leaning in, as though to keep the secret between us—“and
you'll hear it whispering back
.”

  Then my imparter of information—yes, we all know the type—straightened up, satisfied with himself as he received a nod from me.

  “I'll do that.” And moved on my way.

  Two hours later, and the bathroom mirror in Room 301, The Omni, etched with the little narcissisms we do ourselves before venturing out into new territory. The lobby door whispered to behind me, the charm and city lay before.

  A-Dam on Uram was a beehive of activity, its tourism market in flowering array. I had been told it was a close replica of its mother city, and so it seemed to me, although I had never been to Terra's Amsterdam—which of course is off-limits now. What need, with the library of discs the travel agent had made available to me, with the memories of my grandfather, once stationed there, once in love with the place and its museums. Aesthetically anyway, Uram's copycat Mecca of tourism was exactly as I
had imagined it—from the canals, the street lamps and the naughty win
dow offerings right down to the expressions on the faces of the free-spirited mix of folk who thronged the place. All as advertised, all as remembered.

  At least so far as my imagination could fit the pieces together.

  I could not have known, for instance, precisely how a café would smell, with the smoky odors of its menu's herbal selections permeating the den's secret, moody confines. I could not have named the people glorified
in its glass-protected antique posters, nor the artists whose eerie music bled from the boxes posted in no particular order about the hazy place.

  No, I could only let my senses enhance the picture I had painted, and that to only a degree—then participation was required.

  At my request, the recommendation. The recommendation, the substance
lustre
—as I had thought it might be.

  Half of this corner of the galaxy recommended it. As such products went, this one had two distinct pluses. One, no harmful side effects; and two, the coming forth of who you really were. It was the second I was more interested in, although honestly I thought the whole thing a scam. I was more than a little suspicious of substance enhancers, especially when it came to their effect upon my identity. For if I wasn't who I thought I was, then why be me at all?

  Who I thought I was, as it turned out, was still who I was—only without
the static, the noise...the “clutter,” as my hippie friend at Receiving had put it.

  When I requested my check, I happened to drop my fist against the rubbery surface of the table, and a cloud of fine dust, very strong in smell, rose from the spot.

  Stepping out of the café, I took in the fresh air, mizzly though it was. The acridness I had noticed before seemed so slight now, after the smoky interiors of the café, that it was hardly detectable. And yet it
was
detectable, to my heightened senses, and catching it in my nostrils made me remember the words that had welcomed me to this place. Amusing myself as much as anything else, I did as the graffito had instructed. I paused to listen. But just as the surface distractions were beginning to fade into the background, a woman stepped up to me.

  She was lovely and soft, luminous hair, crystal eyes, and all the melo
dious substance of my mood.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I smiled at her. “That is a good question.”

  “Here...” she said, and placed in my hand a spongy object, a growth.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “What isn't it,” she said rhetorically. She looked into my eyes as she spoke—which wouldn't have been a thing, of itself, except that we were both participants.

  “So...”

  “So?” she echoed.

  “So why are your eyes so bright on such a dreary day?”

  “Hush,” she said.

  I did.

  She watched me as I listened, and it seemed to me that she was listening, too, without trying, watching me.

  As the noises of commercial A-Dam began to slip away, so did her command of me, that subtle, powerful effect of her as I stood before this woman, a victim of my senses.

  “What is your name?” I reached, fearing I would lose her to the rising storm.

  “Shhh. Listen.”

  I did, and I heard.

  She touched my ear.

  I heard it whispering back.

  “Where is it coming from?” I asked her.

  “There.” She pointed at a sign. Its announcement spray-painted, so it appeared, and yet shivering in the awareness of itself.

  “And there.” Another.

  “There!” She pointed at the thing in my hand. I looked at it, was certain it had begun to move. I resisted the urge to toss it away, to let the image of it writhing in my palm overtake me.

  “Thank you,” I said, handing it back to her, “but I have one of my own.”

  She smiled. “My name is Sha.”

  We walked along the crowded street, together, neither of us having
invited the other, and the whole affair that was A-Dam on Uram stretching
out before us like so much romance for the taking. We dodged bicycles,
tossed coins to the colorful blankets of sidewalk musicians, amusedly declined the invitations of sprucely-dressed vendors and their often human wares. Together we visited another café, contributing to our certain
lustre
while enjoying the company of each other, without much talk, without
much pressure, without the constraints of time or any of those other con
siderations that might stand out there in the way of pleasure and relaxation. We dined at a place called
Spores
, starting on sautéed mushrooms and moving on to a delicious something covered in mushroom sauce. We drank a bitter-tasting tea and desserted on a puffy “organic” bitter-tasting cake, and all the while loving it and complimenting the chef and laughing for the sheer joy of living the lustrous life.

  When we were out among the busy sidewalks again, evening settling over the city, she pulled me to her with almost an urgency.

  Whispering, “Where has the day gone?”

  I couldn't tell her.

  “Will we roam all night?”

  “Wherever you wish.”

  And somehow we were away from there, and in her place, the sheets and the overhead fluorescence. Her elegance and my newly discovered freedom...

  She sat atop me, naked. And mathematics were too severe, physics too limiting.

  “So...”

  “So.”

  “When my holiday is done...”

  “We must return to our lives.”

  “It doesn't have to be so final.”

  After that first dialogue we had shared, strangers outside a café, I was never completely sure which one of us spoke, which one of us brought the thought to the surface.

  “No, I suppose it doesn't.”

  “Then...”

  She lowered herself to me, letting her breasts, the necklace she wore fall against my chest. We embraced tightly—lovingly, I thought, as I knew I was taking her back with me.

  And then she was sitting again, the pressure of her thighs against my legs, the terrible beauty of her nearly overwhelming me.

  I touched her necklace, pieces of gray pulpy matter strung along a chain.

  “We only bloom for a day, you know.”

  “I know.”

  And that was enough. If it was all, it was enough.

  There were no special arrangements to be made. Visas were a dime a dozen in this place. She might as well have been from here as anyplace else, and I suspected she had been here a long time. I noticed as we boarded the ship that she carried with her the scent of the place. She was
smoking before we had set off. The stewardess said it was a nonrestrictive
flight, she even brought us a pipe, and a package of the scented combustible
crystals that aided in the burning of the stuff. I shared part of Sha's necklace with her as we were lifting off. We brought no more. On the other side of the galaxy it was forbidden.

  We arrived on Abar Seven as the sun was completing its cycle. A pinkish
glow possessed the northern skies, and the land was cast in a weird silvery-pink light. As we walked from the port toward the parking pad, I threw my arms wide, which was my way of welcoming my Sha to her new home. But she looked away to the north and the fading skies and said quietly, “Hush hush, little kitty...”

  “We are not on Uram any longer,” I reminded her.

  “Shhh...listen.”

  I did as she bid, humoring her, thinking it would take some time to acclimatize her. At first I heard nothing, nothing unusual...then...

  The whispering seemed to come from all around us, as though it had always been here, as though our arrival had nothing to do with it. I turned to Sha, who had fallen behind, and found her on the ground, on her knees, her arms failing her as she tried to reach out to me. Before my
eyes she began to wilt, as from the strenuous task of living. The material
of her, the flesh of her, becoming spongy, dry, brittle beneath the retreating
eye of the day.