The Glacier (8 page)

He withdraws with a gasp and stumbles backward. Then he turns his back on it and walks quickly into the safety of the neighborhood.

***

Back in the Convention Center the sound of silverware clinks through the great hall like tiny steel bells. As we move like a satellite around the perimeter of the enormous room, Simone is a small figure at the center of it. And her voice.

SIMONE

No, it's okay. It's easy. See? Just like this. A knife goes down on the table, pointed toward the center, perpendicular to the edge. Oh, you're welcome. It's nice to meet you too. Really? I'm sorry, I don't remember. Oh? That's funny—

She stops, quiet for a moment, at the far center of the room.

She places her hand on the white tablecloth.

SIMONE

Well, I should probably— No, I'm not going anywhere. There's just a lot to do here. Yes, an Event.

No. That's horrible… Why would you say something like that? I think we should stop talking now. I told you why. I know, it is kind of silly but that's the way it is. I don't want it to be that way either but there isn't anything I can do about it. Oh thank you but I don't think there's any way you can help. I'd love to but I can't right now. No. Thank you. Yes, of course. No, I don't want you to be sad but I do think we should stop talking now because I have to keep working. No, I don't want you to be mad either. No, I just— I think you should go away now. No! Stop it. No—

Simone explodes with rage.

SIMONE

I said STOP IT!

Her scream detonates across the massive hall like a bullet puncturing a steel drum—

***

In an empty white breakroom, a group of cater-waiters in tuxedo uniforms are sitting in banquet chairs arranged around an empty center. They are listening to free jazz very loudly. Their faces are all painted white.

After a stretched moment of deafening modal horns, bass, piano, and percussion, one of the waiters stands up and turns his head toward the camera—

***

Suddenly back in the Main Hall, Simone lifts her hand off the white tablecloth. She turns around and sees that she is not alone. The hall is filled with co-workers, other servers in tuxedos, setting the tables.

They are all looking at her.

Then in unison they return to work and the hall fills with the sound of clinking silverware falling like a metal waterfall.

Simone stands motionless at her table. She slowly places a knife down on the tablecloth. She tries to continue, but then she sets all her knives down and quickly walks across the hall toward the exit.

***

Robert walks back down the street toward his house. When he arrives at his driveway he notices that his porch light is the only sign of life in the neighborhood.

ROBERT

Hello!

He shouts and receives no answer.

ROBERT

Anybody home?!

No response.

Curious now, Robert approaches the house across the street. He knocks on the front door and rings the doorbell. Seems nobody's home. He tries the doorknob and to his surprise it opens. He steps back, cautiously, and lets the door swing open.

He peers in a bit and then steps inside.

The strange house is dim and apparently vacant.

ROBERT

Hello? Anybody home?

He finds a light switch. A bare bulb on the ceiling reveals that the house is not so strange. It's exactly like his own, except completely empty. No one has moved in yet.

Robert cautiously explores the house. He checks out the kitchen and runs water in the sink. He pokes his head into the garage. He opens the door to the basement and descends halfway into the darkness before he stops and scurries back up the stairs, boyish fear snapping at his heels.

He goes upstairs and walks down the hall. He opens the doors to a few bedrooms and checks out the bathroom. Shower with no curtain. Empty mirrored medicine cabinet.

Robert enters the last bedroom and turns on the light. A naked white mud man is standing in the corner of the empty room.

MUD MAN

Hello.

Shock accelerating from the base of his being, Robert frantically claws his way out of the room, through the hall and down the stairs.

He spills out of the house, sprinting across the lawn and street, ascending his driveway, fumbling with the key in the lock, and slamming the front door.

Inside the safety of his own house, he heaves himself against the front door, his own hyperventilating mass preventing all evils from entering.

The doorbell rings, a classic two-tone. Robert clamps down, full stop, all nerves, listening.

The bell rings again.

He steps away from the door, as quietly as he can, facing it and contemplating the other side. The doorbell rings a third time and almost out of annoyed bravado Robert flings the door open—

The mud man stands on his doorstep.

MUD MAN

Hello—

—and Robert slams the door shut, almost all in one motion.

He goes to the hall closest, leaving the front door unattended, and he returns with his shotgun. He flings the door open and stands back with the long-arm pointed at the ghostly visitor. Then he realizes that he's pointing his gun at a vision of himself.

Bewildered, he slowly lowers the gun. The mud man walks past Robert and enters the house. Robert stands aside and watches him.

The mud man looks around the house. He disappears into the kitchen and then returns. He goes to the curtain and fingers the texture of the fabric.

He goes to the table next to Robert's chair and picks up a picture frame. With his back to Robert he takes his time looking into the picture.

ROBERT

Who are you?

MUD MAN

I am the future of the past.

He sits down in Robert's chair and stares at the dark TV.

ROBERT

I don't understand.

MUD MAN

Then I will show you.

The mud man gets up and goes to Robert and takes the shotgun from Robert's hands. He turns the shotgun around and, squatting like a Samurai, places the end of the barrel in his mouth. He looks at Robert and pulls the trigger, blasting his own brains out the back of his head.

Robert winces, horrified.

But the mud man is still looking at him.

MUD MAN

There is no ghost in the machine.

The mud man drops the shotgun and collapses into a heap on the living room floor. For a moment, Robert watches the corpse in disbelief. Then he stumbles out the front door.

He stands on the lawn, shouting.

ROBERT

Help! Help me! Please, somebody help me!

There is no response from the neighborhood. Robert falls to his knees, retching and then sobbing.

ROBERT

Oh, I'm so sorry. I miss you.

I miss you so much. Please help me.

He sits down in the grass and cries like a baby.

The neighborhood is quiet, almost peaceful. Robert notices that a corner of sod is sticking up from the lawn. He crawls over to the offending piece of lawn and pushes the corner of grass back down into place.

Then he pulls it up again. He pushes it back down. He gets up on his knees and pulls away the entire section of sod, leaving a square of dirt exposed in the lawn.

Robert carries the section of sod into his house.

***

In the parking lot of the drive-in movie theatre, a car-park speaker hangs from its pole like the sullen face of a retired android. But it's croaking rhythmically, like a bullfrog. Another one peeps like a tiny tree frog, and another chirping like a cricket.

On the outdoor movie screen luminescent green organisms quiver and wriggle in a primordial fluid, radiant and larger than life. Wavy green light is cast and flickering across the lot. Hundreds of old car-park speakers all croaking, peeping, and chirping as on a humid summer night. It's a sonic frog pond pulsating across the wintry abandoned lot.

Samson sits alone in the concession stand, eating Chinese food and watching the light-creatures move across the gigantic outdoor screen.

The small building has been converted into a crash pad and morbid menagerie. Walls are covered with the mounted heads of a taxidermy collection. Wild birds in flight. Bats and albino squirrels. The countertop is littered with Chinese food takeout cartons among the detritus and ephemera of deceased natural history. Bones and stones and rows of mason jars containing embalmed oddities and chemical tinctures.

Sam scoops up some more noodles with his chopsticks, transfixed by the laboratory art film projected onto the big screen outside. Green translucent forms: viruses and spirochetes, twisting, spiraled bacteria, quiver on the screen, cast from undersea, outer space, or between two glass specimen plates. The sound of invisible frogs croaking and chirping over the lot.

Nearby, on the countertop, the vessel of Quicksilver is sitting next to the two milk jugs of orange-colored liquid and a crumpled-up brown paper bag.

Sam sets down his chopsticks and examines the Quicksilver. He turns the vial of liquid metal in his hands. It reflects light spilling around the room from the projector beam and the screen outside. He checks his watch. A late-'80s digital.

***

A slumped and shadowed form, Jonah sits on the side of the dark rural road.

Headlights then illuminate him, as a vehicle pulls up and stops. He's huddled and shaking, shivering in a state of near-hypothermic shock.

We hear the car door open and some heavy music spilling out of it. Sound of the car door shutting again, closing the music inside. Then the sound of a Geiger counter clicking over the idling car engine.

A shadow passes over Jonah, someone crossing through the headlights and approaching. The Geiger counter sweeps over him and he wakes from his stupor, shivering and confused. Then he scrambles to his feet. He falters in the road, struggling to stay afoot, and faces a strange man.

Radiation Man wears a full-bodied radiation protection suit. His breathing is mechanical and regulated. From inside his plastic-windowed hood, he speaks with a voice carried by some distant radio signal, like an astronaut's transmission.

RADIATION MAN

(deep space transmission)

It's cold out here. Get in the car.

***

Jonah and the Radiation Man cruise down the busy freeway in his late-'80s sedan. Instrumental psychedelic road-music is booming on the car stereo. Waves of colored light trickle and stream across Jonah's face as he watches the nightscape rolling by outside the car windows.

The freeway is a future-zone, as if the direction of time is confused. Neon streams of white and red light flow around them, tracers from the headlights and taillights of other cars. The trance music seems to be playing forward and backward at the same time.

Radiation Man speaks a transmission over the music.

RADIATION MAN

(deep space transmission)

It seems as though we are moving forward, toward something.

He points forward, through the windshield.

RADIATION MAN

But actually we are moving backward, away from it.

And then backward with his thumb, over his shoulder.

RADIATION MAN

It is coming. But it has also already happened. And it is happening all the time now. Like a giant magnet.

Jonah watches him drive and scans the freeway-scape, colored light streaming across his own face and the protection hood of the Radiation Man, like neon tears.

***

Headlights sweep and flood down a row of garage doors as the sedan pulls up to Jonah's storage unit. Jonah and the Radiation Man get out of the idling car.

Jonah goes to his unit and unlocks the door. Radiation Man takes a reading with his Geiger counter. Jonah rolls up his door and the instrument soars.

Radiation Man enters the storage unit and goes to the word processor. He passes his clicking reader over the typing machine.

RADIATION MAN

Is it in here?

JONAH

Yes.

RADIATION MAN

When you finish it, that will be the end. Where the words run out.

He exits the storage unit.

JONAH

The end of what?

RADIATION MAN

Go to the castle. Then listen for the sound of it.

Radiation Man gets back in his ride, cranks up the music, and rolls away. Jonah watches him go and then pulls his door down, shutting himself inside.

***

Simone stands in the pink hallway outside the office door. The door is marked
Office
. Defeated, her head hung, hesitating, finally she musters the courage and knocks.

MR. STEVENS

(from inside his office)

Come in.

She stalls for another brief moment, and then opens the door. She enters the office and turns, facing the door, as she attentively closes it, disappearing from view as the latch clicks shut.

Office.

A closed door.

And whatever may go on behind it.

***

Simone sits in a chair before the front edge of the desk, waiting quietly. She pushes her hair back behind her ear, and returns her hands to her lap, nervously picking at her fingernails. Unsure where to hold her gaze, she maintains it somewhere between her lap, the edge of the desk, and the smoke curling off it.

Cigarette smoke curls off the end of the desk like the numen of a sinister presence emanating from beyond our field of view.

The small clammy office is a windowless room of suicidally drab baby blue cinder blocks. Condensation beads and runs down the grooves of mortar between the blocks.

On one wall of the small room there is a standing metal locker, like a sports locker, with a small key in the lock. The cabinet is ticking, from the inside, a thousand tiny little clock ticks. Simone watches the locker, and listens to it ticking.

She attempts to clear her throat as quietly as possible. Mr. Stevens closes an epic black ledger and addresses Simone with expansive and generous tolerance.

MR. STEVENS

Simone, what brings you in here today?

Stevens sprawls behind his desk like an eagle, certain of his indispensable position. There is a classic round school clock behind him on the wall.