I Will Rise (17 page)

Half of me is happy, my destiny in full effect, but the other half is sad and kind of pissed. I wasn’t really given much choice in the matter. With Lumpy or Paunch or Eddie I didn’t know what I was doing. If I was given the opportunity to go back, knowing what I know, I don’t know if I would do it again. I wouldn’t kill Paunch and I sure as hell wouldn’t harm Eddie—maybe Lumpy, but maybe not because he was just doing his job. The more I think about it, the less I like what I’ve become.

At first, my brain going five million miles an hour, the plausibility of purpose and the idea of making a difference, lit me up inside: Fuck yes, I am the man, the destroyer, and all that bravado bullshit. Now, I don’t know. This change has forced away my insular little world. I am able to see that life is more than Mr. Shithead and the shit-talking kitchen spics (take that) and my crappy apartment and my God complex. And now with this strange desire for Annabelle, my sex complex is fading, and I am interacting with all kinds of different people and developing a twisted appreciation for humanity. For the past I don’t know how many years I have locked myself away and built up an impenetrable wall and let myself forget that not all people are bad.

Not all people are good. But there is a balance. Like Logan, a deviant, thief, drug-using homosexual, would-be murderer who would drop everything to help a man find his would-be son. For every repulsive character flaw there are a number of redeeming qualities.

The wall of eyes, the thousands dead, every one of them is a dichotomy of goodness and unpleasantness and I am not as sure as I was before about them deserving to die.

“Don’t be going soft on me.” Annabelle smiles at me from the passenger’s seat. She looks as fabulous as ever, wearing the usual getup but with darker hair. The red has gone so deep it looks almost black.

My heart does a somersault in my chest and I swallow back a lump. “Hi,” I stammer.

“Hi yourself. Where the fuck are we?”

“Close.”

“Close?” She sounds irritated and my idiot heart takes a dip. Something worrisome and debilitating thumps my brain.

Annabelle folds her pretty little arms over her bountiful bosom (snap out of it, dumbass) and continues on, “What were you doing in Vegas?”

“Vegas?” How does she know?

“Yes. Vegas, Charles. What were you doing tearing apart Vegas?”

“I was—”

“It’s all over the fucking news, Charlie!”

“I was trying to touch people, you know…spread the disease.” Given her anger I decide to omit the Eddie stuff.

“Right and you did a fantastic job,” she says evenly and then with some volume, “Compromising our fucking mission! You are all over the news! You! They’re showing your picture and some footage an asshole tourist shot and although they still don’t know what to make of things, they are after you!”

“But—”

“But nothing, Charles! You royally fucked up. So much for keeping it cool, so much for brushing up against people and allowing the world to die in confusion. Walnut Creek was our get-out-of-jail-free card. We had it made, nice and easy. Now you are public enemy number one. Now things are going to be hard.”

“I’m sorry—”

She cuts me off again, “Sorry? What the hell were you thinking? You pulled a lady from this van, which we have to ditch as soon as possible, and drained her right there in the middle of a busy intersection! They are showing the surveillance tape every five minutes!”

“How do you know?” Time to fight back.

“What?”

“How do you know? I thought you were blind.”

“I am, but I can still hear.” She gives me an extremely agitated expression and rolls her eyes and then growls in anger. “Fuck it. This isn’t going to work.”

“I’m sorry.” Idiot.

“Yeah, me too. I thought you were the one.”

“I am the one, I just went a little crazy.”

“Good luck then.” She waves and closes her eyes.

“Wait, I said I just went a little crazy, I’m okay now.”

Annabelle makes a funny little smirk with her lips and closes her eyes harder as if concentrating superhard.

“Annabelle?”

“Good-bye, Charles.”

The concentration continues. She is trying to wake herself up.

“Wait, Annabelle. Don’t go. We can still make this happen. I’ll be in Mesa in a few hours.”

She opens her eyes. “Don’t bother.” She closes them again.

How can she abandon me? Me, the most important man in the world? So what if I fucked up a little? What am I supposed to do? And why does it feel like my insides are being pureed?

“Please wait. I didn’t know what I was doing. This is all so new and I couldn’t control myself. My body just reacted. All of those people-lined streets. I couldn’t stop it. And now inside. I, I, I love you and it hurts.”

She opens her eyes. “The change,” she sighs. Her demeanor softens. “I’m sorry for yelling, I know you didn’t mean any harm, it’s just that there is so much riding on keeping things low-key. When I heard the news, I flipped. I’m still flipping.” She takes a long pause, stares out the window and then looks at me with huge, lovely, happy eyes. “But don’t worry. I won’t give up on you. We’ll get through this somehow.”

“I won’t let you down again.” I beam and just like that everything feels right as rain and my insides pulse strong, healthy, light, airy, happy.

“Good.” Annabelle’s smile lights up the van. “Good,” she repeats. “Now before we play nice, what is all of this human sympathy crap?”

I play dumb. “What?”

“Come on, I can feel it. You have to squash those thoughts. You have to get your mind right, Charles, or this will never work. Vegas for all its probable disastrous consequences proved your capability; you took out a lot of people, but you can’t wimp out in the end because some random human shows you kindness or courage or some another amiable characteristic.”

“It’s just hard because they’re not all bad. They don’t all deserve to die.”

“No, they’re not all bad, a lot of them are even wonderful, but make no mistake, they all have to die. It’s not even a matter of deserving to or not deserving to. You are not touching someone because they are despicable or deserving of death, nor are you touching them because they are great and deserve to live. There’s no distinction for you or me to make—you are touching them because someone just has to. Someone has to save the world before it’s too late.”

And that’s me, whoopee! “But why me?”

“Why not you? Why me? Who knows?” Annabelle shrugs her shoulders.

I sigh, “It sucks because there’s nothing at the end, you know? I keep thinking about it and when this is all over, then what? No promise of heaven or a thousand virgins or my own kingdom or anything?”

Annabelle snaps her fingers as if to say
Bingo
and then she really says, “That’s exactly why humanity has to die. Everything doesn’t, everything shouldn’t, warrant a reward or a benefit. Some things are done just because they need to be done.”

“What if I just say to hell with it?”

“Then another would come along and finish it. It might even be too late. You may have done enough already. Besides, you wouldn’t leave me, would you?” She flutters her eyes at me coyly, playful.

I blush and go giddy like a love-struck schoolgirl. “No,” I giggle back.

Annabelle frowns. “I have my doubts about this love tactic. I understand the purpose, but this expanding of your emotional range is allowing dangerous tendencies to seep in. Enjoy it or whatever, but don’t let sensitivity take you over.”

“Me, sensitive? Never.” I make a severe face for effect.

“Cute. So how much longer?”

Did she just call me cute? Spider legs, tingly footfalls, multiply across the underside of my skin. I smile and squeeze the wheel.

Annabelle repeats, “How much longer?”

“Soon.”

“Just hurry, I have to get out of here sooner than soon.”

I step on the gas.

“Be careful, you’re a wanted man. We have to get rid of this van.”

“A wanted man. I like the sound of that.”

A wanted man. How about that? A wanted man.

“You would,” Annabelle snickers.

Feisty. “What’s it like being blind?” I ask.

“It sucks.”

“What do you see?”

“I don’t.”

“You know what I mean,” I retort.

She looks out the window and stares off. I didn’t mean to offend her or hit upon a touchy subject and I tell her so. She waves me off and shakes her head. “No, it’s okay, I don’t really like to talk about it is all.”

“That’s cool. Tell me something about yourself. What do you like to do?” Stupid, I know, but I’m not really good at interpersonal communication.

“I wasn’t born blind. It happened when I was twelve. One day I was fine, the next I couldn’t see. The doctors couldn’t explain it—it was just one of those freak-of-nature occurrences. We tried different surgeries and techniques and optical therapeutics, but to no avail. Anyway, like I said, it sucks. It’s limiting. I can pretty much remember what everything looks like so it’s easy for me to conceptualize.” Annabelle air-traces a box and then waves her hand and air-erases it. “Not like a natural-born who only understands what’s in their head, I’ve seen the outside world, colors, shapes, objects. If you tell me about something you saw, chances are I can visualize it. But sometimes it’s a scary feeling because it’s been such a long time since I’ve actually seen, and I can’t always remember what something looks like. Sometimes it takes a minute or two, but my brain eventually retrieves the proper image. Sometimes it doesn’t, my brain having somehow erased or forgotten the visualization. I hate that. I hate having to rely on my imagination to build a replacement. Overall, everything is fuzzy and weird, like I’m always dreaming. I hate it. I just want to wake up and see things as I used to see them, but then again at forty-five years old things probably look a whole lot differently than they did at twelve.”

“I prefer the way the world looks in dreams,” I interject, trying to make her feel better.

Annabelle nods. “Yeah. At times I see some incredible stuff, but it still sucks because I can’t contrast it with the world beyond my eyelids. This whole thing”—she motions with her hand in a giant circle—“is the closest I’ve come to actual vision since I went blind. You are the only person I’ve actually seen since I went blind.” She goes silent for a second and then says, “Also, forget what I see, it’s all about what I can’t see. I can’t drive or wave at somebody or watch a movie or look in the mirror.” She sits up in her seat and cranes her neck and looks at herself in the rearview mirror. “Damn, I’m hot.”

“Yes, you are,” I agree.

Annabelle frowns and her face darkens. “I have to warn you, this isn’t how I look.”

“How do you know?” I smile.

“I don’t know for sure, but I am positive I don’t have pretty dyed hair or boobs”—she cups her perfect breasts in her hands—“like this, or a smokin’ little body. I have a much fatter ass.”

“I’m sure you are beautiful.”

Annabelle winks at me. “Don’t be so sure.”

“I am designed to love you—I don’t think you could be anything but.” I don’t think that was a compliment.

“Right.” She bites her lip in thought and then says, “Charles, you have to remember that you can’t touch me. You can’t so much as brush against me or it’s over.”

“I know.”

She continues, “I’m still alive and susceptible. You have to protect me, you can’t let anybody touch me.”

“I won’t let anybody near you.” I wonder if she lives with a caregiver or a dog or something. I ask, “What about at your house? Do you live alone?”

“No, I live with my parents.”

“What about them?” Parents? Forty-five?

Annabelle’s eyes narrow to slits. “They’ve been taken care of.”

“What do you mean ‘taken care of’?”

Changing the subject she says, rather commands, “Let’s stop here and get another car. Mesa is a fairly big city, lots of cops and whatnot. If you drive in with this thing, you’ll get nailed.”

A rest stop looms ahead. I nod in agreement and pull off the freeway. We drive silent for the next two minutes: me, wondering what all of that was about: her, obviously not wanting to talk about it. Pulling into the rest stop Annabelle points to a lonely shady spot apart from the four cars that are parked in front of the monolithic restroom.

The moment I park she says, “You have to kill them all.”

“I think I can get us a car a little easier than that.”

“No.” Annabelle looks kind of crazy, her eyes look hungry and her mouth twitches. “No witnesses. None. You have to kill every one of them.”

I look out the window. I see a whole lot of kids running around, three sets of parents sitting at a picnic bench, and one middle-aged man standing by the bathroom smoking a cigarette.

“Even the kids?” I complain.

“Every one of them.” She breathes heavily.

I am about to explain my haunted eyeball fears when Annabelle raises a finger to her lips and gestures for me to hush.

“Every one of them, for me.” She extends her hand toward me and makes suggestive, sexy eyes.

A naughty shiver shudders throughout my body and before I know it I am out of the car fast-walking toward the soon-to-be dead. My logical mind tries to rebel, reminding me that I don’t even care about shit like sex and if I did, it wouldn’t matter because I couldn’t touch her anyway, but my passionate mind counters that this isn’t about something as trivial as sex, this is about pleasing my love, this is about getting her so hot and so enamored that she will love me without the forceful aid of the dreamer. This is about making her love me as strongly and as totally as I feel that I love her.

Besides, my body is humming. It approves, it craves. The killing hand is ready and damn the eyeballs, damn the guilt, I want to destroy.

Chapter Twelve

Tell Me What I Want

We score a late-model Cadillac, plush and stylish, and cause for Annabelle to widen her fabulously beautiful eyes. She tells me how dream vision—her connection to me and number three (I wince and she quickly un-mentions, or rather, pretends she never mentioned, the jealousy-inducing number three)—has allowed her to see things fresh and new. Now when somebody mentions a late-model Cadillac, this stunning piece of machinery will appear in her mind’s eye as opposed to the old-school image she has burned into her memory banks sometime between the ages of zero and twelve.

This whole experience, as adverse to the human race as it may be, is really benefiting the two of us (probably the three of us, but we won’t go there). It’s like: you’ve been shit on your entire life, but here’s a little consolation, a little joy for enjoyment’s sake while you help to end it all. I think that kind of sucks. I mean, it’s cool that Annabelle gets to replenish her images and actually gets to see things, really see them, for the first time in…forty-five minus twelve years, and it’s great that I get to feel a host of normal emotions—love, joy, sadness—and that I get to care about people and feel alive and like I am a part of something as opposed to the ultra-loneliness that defined my old life, but it all seems a little too late and unfair and cruel.

While talking to Annabelle I do my best to let on that I want to kill everyone and sometimes—like back at the rest stop, up to my elbows in screaming children and horrified adults—I do kill them, but most times, like now with a bigger, fortified wall of eyes turning my brain to sorry mush, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want to kick the whole thing into reverse and pick up Annabelle and drive to a remote beach and spend forever just talking and appreciating each other and—gasp, for shame—be human. I want to indulge these happy new feelings and push them and see what they become.

Man, you would not believe how good it feels to hear someone, especially someone like Annabelle, tell me that I have dramatically improved her life. I want to show Annabelle everything, I want to update her mind and bring her in line with the rest of us ungratefully sighted. I want to do it. Me. I want the credit and the appreciation and the admiration and the dependency and the right to say to her: I gave you sight, I changed your world, I opened your blind eyes to the new world and you need me, you want me, you love me.

And with all of these thoughts there is heat. There is desire. I want to touch her so bad and a few times, overwhelmed with need, I reach over and wave my hand through her near-transparent dream form.

“Charles,” she warns playfully, neither condemning nor discouraging.

There is flirtation and maybe even invitation in her voice. There is a mutual attraction electrifying the air between us. My rest-stop murder spree has turned something on inside of her and I like it and she likes me and I hang on because my insides are going crazy. Finally we have time to vibe and get to know each other and it’s greater than I could have ever imagined. Up until now it has been sooo hectic and our conversations have been limited to cajoling yells, discussing my fuckups, or head-bursting revelations. Now: the calm. Now it’s just Annabelle, a luxury car and a couple of hours of unmitigated drive time to kill. Perfect.

“Charles,” she repeats, “you have to control yourself. You can’t do that sort of thing when you pick me up. If you touch me, I die. Remember?”

“I know.” I know. Here is a female that would quite possibly let me touch her, here is a female that for the first time in my life I want to touch, normalcy creeping in, and I can’t. Forbidden. Denied.

“Please be careful. I won’t be able to see you or warn you”—Annabelle gestures at her eyes—“so you have to watch it. Our fate depends on you not fucking up.”

No pressure or anything.

I make a face and Annabelle reassures, “You’ll do fine. Just focus.”

Focus? Me, the eternal fuckup? Me, the manufactured loser? I can barely remember what we were talking about five minutes ago, let alone maintain focus. I don’t tell Annabelle this. I want to keep her happy and smiling so I say, “No problemo,” and flex my mouth and raise my eyebrows and lay it on just right.

“Good. Can you believe this?” Annabelle taps her lovely knees. “Aren’t you excited, Charles?” And how can one not be excited by her exhilarating enthusiasm.

“Yes,” I say. Yes, yes, yes.

“Yes.” Her smile looks as if it might split her face. “This is so great. I am finally getting out of here. I was pretty worried. I kept thinking I was wrong. Crazy, you know? Maybe I am, maybe, nevertheless, we’ll find out soon enough.” She takes a deep breath and exhales. “I swear to God, Charles, if we get to my house and I wake up and you’re not there, you’re not out front madly honking the horn, summoning me, I will freak out. I’ll absolutely fucking freak. I’ve invested a lot, you know?”

I nod my head. Invested? I’m not really sure what she means, but I keep quiet.

“If you aren’t real, Charles, I don’t know what I will do. Probably kill myself.”

“Shut up, don’t say shit like that,” I say loudly.

“Seriously. What else is there? If you’re not real, I am the craziest bitch in the world. Ditto for you.”

“True.” She has a point.

“Don’t you ever think about it? What if this is all in your head?” She taps her head with a forefinger. “What if I am just a figment of your imagination or worse, what if you’re a mere figment of mine? I know this shit is still pretty new to you, and you haven’t had a whole lot of time to think about it, but trust me, I’ve been dreaming you for years.”

“For years?”

“Yep.”

“Years? Jesus, what do you see when you ‘dream’ me?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?” I redden when I think about my every move being watched.

“It’s sort of like I am this invisible camera hovering a few feet above you, monitoring your every move.” Annabelle laughs and seems to enjoy watching me squirm. “You’re sweet, Charles,” she reassures. “The sweetest man in the world and you don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. Besides, up until a few days ago every visit felt like a dream, looked like a dream, you know, surreal and disjointed. I didn’t actually get to see everything as it really was, just dreamy impressions.”

“How do you know you don’t have it backward?” Let’s shift gears here. The last thing I want to do is start discussing what I do when I think no one is watching.

“What, you dreaming me? Who knows, but for all intents and purposes, as far as we both know, you’re presently awake and here I am dreaming, transparent”—she waves her hands over her body—“ghostly. When I wake up, you remain, driving, thinking, living out this twisted adventure. Guess where I go when I wake up?”

I am about to answer, but she continues, “I am returned to reality. My reality, where I am fat and old and blind and unimportant, living with overprotective, idiot parents, listening to the constant blaring of their idiot TV, wishing I could see, wishing I could escape or better yet, wishing I could just be someone else altogether.”

“I like who you are,” I defend.

“You can’t help it, dear, you were made to like me. For a long time I was just an observer in your world, a world I thought was solely in my head, purely dream. I thought you were just this reoccurring part of my crazy dreams, maybe a sad mirror image of my own lonely life.”

“Thanks a lot.” A sad mirror?

“No offense, Charles, but face it, your life isn’t… Let me rephrase that. Your life
wasn’t
exactly an exciting affair.”

“Touché.”

“Anyhow, things started to get weirder and the images in my dream world—your world—started getting crisper and sharper. All the blurry, dreamy aspects began composing, almost attaining the same clarity and definition of when I could see for real.” Annabelle stares out the passenger window at the sweeping landscape. She looks as if she is far away and when she starts talking again it’s like she is talking to herself. “All of these odd plans and weird little ideas started forming in my head. These strange, ethereal, wordless voices, these odd little sounds that I figured for side effects of the blindness, you know, lose a sense like sight and make up for it with dog hearing or something bizarre, started making a subtle sort of sense. They started slow, I’m talking over thirty years slow, but in time I came to realize that they were trying to tell me something.”

Annabelle breaks from the window and looks at me. She smiles and says, “They were explaining our purpose, you and me and this mystery man number three. They were professing their desire for the human end and aligning our wonderfully tragic destinies. In the days before your transformation I was hard-pressed to tell the difference between my dreams—you at the library, at work, at your apartment—and the world I would wake to. Your world, my dream, seemed more real because the clarity levels kept ratcheting up and it was like I was actually seeing, not dream blurry, not blind blurry, but real sight like before I went blind, like right now.

“Anyway, it all came to a head that magic night with the cop. Fate pushed me to interact, to try and break through and communicate with you, so I took a chance and started talking to you and to my surprise I had this lovely body, and these awesome, functional eyes, and this gung-ho attitude and you responded, you could see me, and the possibility that this was more, that this was something real, hit me. I felt so alive and so beautiful and so confident. I never wanted to wake up.”

Twin tear trails cascade down her cheeks and I am about to ask her if she is all right and do the comforting thing when she takes another deep breath and then goes on, “After you died, while we were stuck in that digital blue dead zone, all those years of inexplicable internal articulations, the enigmatic voices and garbled instructions came clear. They flooded my being and infused my mind with overwhelming wisdom. In an instant I knew why I went blind, why I had become increasingly uncomfortable with myself, why I was blessed with the opportunity to watch you struggle through life and why in an overall sense things were the way they were. The words, the enigmatic blueprints, which I am still struggling to understand myself, came pouring out. I probably confused you more than anything that night with my explanations, but I learned something very important about our mission: I learned that the voices inside weren’t a part of me, they weren’t even remotely human, they were a gift of enlightenment from the most exquisite, kindest, glorious thing you could imagine. There aren’t even words to describe it. All I know is that humanity is vile, sick, and disgusting in comparison. Humanity is a threat. Humanity has to die so that this breathtaking beauty can live on.”

I am thoroughly confused and all I can think about is how good Annabelle looks. Like before I chose to keep this to myself. I nod my head and listen and fall into her sparkling eyes. Focus.

Annabelle brushes a strand of hair out of her face. “Everything has been moving so fast since then and it’s frustrating because all I learned on that fateful night comes and goes. I can’t hang on to it—only bits and pieces and immediate objectives and of course the beauty, the shrouded knowledge that what we are fighting for is beyond perfection. Shit, Charles, can you imagine my astonishment at hearing those news reports?”

I nod enthusiastically.

“Those news reports, the deaths, the exact correlations, oh how my heart practically leapt out of my chest with excitement. I wasn’t crazy. This was proof. At long last, proof apart from my dreaming mind. This mystic splendor inside didn’t mean I was crazy and needless to say I got right to it. I listened extra closely to those numinous instructions and in between visits with you I’ve been making all of the proper arrangements. The instructions keep coming and the information implanted in my head is slowly being revealed. The picture is becoming clearer and before long I will know everything. That is if you’re really real. You’re my last island of doubt, Charles. God, how I hope you are real.”

“Don’t worry, I’m real. I’m as real as those news reports. I have no doubts.” And I don’t. I’ve drained people with my hand. I’m freaking dead. I have no doubts whatsoever that this is happening.

“Am I making any sense?” She looks at me and her eyes say: tell me I’m not crazy.

I don’t want to be dishonest, but then again, I don’t want to hurt her feelings. “Sort of,” I say, playing it safe. I hope it will suffice.

“What don’t you understand?” she asks.

Shit. “Um…”

“I know it’s hard to explain. I just wish you could see it like I do.”

Me too. Me too, and then maybe I could get my head straight, maybe I could send away the wall of eyes for good and find something to believe in.

“Charles?” Annabelle asks…nervously?

“Yes?”

“I really appreciate you hearing me out. I don’t know if any of this helps you, but it sure feels good to say it aloud, to tell someone. To make it true.”

“No problem.”

“One more thing and then maybe we can just enjoy the rest of the drive, talk about each other, have fun, whatever. I know I’ve said this before, but I have to get it out one more time. This isn’t who I am. I am not this young, vibrant, beautiful, spunky siren. This is only who I am in your dreams…”

“I don’t care…”

“I know, and whatever is going on inside you, a safety mechanism or whatever, will probably see this thing through, keeping you bonded to me until the end, but just the same, this isn’t me. It’s important to me that you understand that. And it’s not only my looks. It’s not only this gorgeous fucking body, this face.” Annabelle looks herself over and starts to full-on sob.

“Hey,” I say and reach for her. My hand passes through.

Sniffling, she says, “It’s my personality. I’m different. I’m more reserved and incredibly shy. I don’t do so well with other people and it may take me some time to feel comfortable.”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry,” I reassure.

Don’t worry, because I don’t care about shit like that. Right? It has been ages since I’ve had a relationship with another person and I can’t even begin to imagine how things will affect me. Will it matter to me if she acts different, if she looks different?