A Dirge for the Temporal (8 page)

The Crookedness of Being

M
y piss fled back into my organ. At the foot of the wall opposite, on the ground, was a body—a woman. I stepped over, knowing she was dead, turned away at the sight of the dark fluid that surrounded her. She’d been shot.

  Sometimes the strangest part about being there is being there. That was damn well the case that night in
The Whaler
as I sipped my hard Scotch and wondered how many years it had been since I’d had genuine
déjà vu
. The feeling had hit me the moment I walked in from the December night, and hung with me well after I was obliged to answer the
Whuddya have?
of the embittered bartender. He obviously wanted nothing
better than to have a greasy glass in front of me so he wouldn’t have to think about my patch of counter again for awhile. Not that he had a booming business tonight. It was Christmas Eve, and only the most pathetic of us were out.

  Christmas Eve. It was why I was here, actually. My regular haunts were closed—as any self-respecting dive should have been—so I’d come down Waterfront to see what was about. Now common sense says that a man who enjoys his meager existence does his best to stay away from the Waterfront. I wish I’d had some of that, instead of the blues, that Friday night couple years back. Wish I’d had even a snifter of that. 'Cause I was ripe for the undoing the moment I first stepped foot in that Godforsaken hole. Goddamn all of us, I say, but bring us home again when you’re finished, old man.

 
Déjà
—everloving—
vu
. Can you believe that? I think drink or age or both takes away our ability to tap into the recesses, you know, into the deeper psyche…oh hell, I was never much for philosophy. Fact was, if I hadn’t been here before, I’d damn sure as hell dreamed I had, and the whiskey glass and the tinkle of ice and the lazy drone of Bing Crosby through the cheap speaker boxes, dreaming his own dreams, White Christmases my ass. When you’re married to your misery, and Scotch on ice, all the Christmases are the same dull shade of bleak. Take it from me, folks.

  Six customers besides myself, three at the bar, three at tables, all isolated
, each cupping his or her drink as if it were the last, or better yet,
some mind-opening eggnog surprise, with the secrets of the cosmos spinning
in its milky depths. Occasionally we looked at each other wondering what the other was thinking, what the other was doing here, if the other were drifting on that same wave of
déjà vu
. I remembered clearly remembering that before. You’d think I would have known better than to get up and saunter over to the nearest of my lonely cousins at the bar.

  “May I sit?” I said, and hoped my expression elaborated,
Is it really an intrusion when it has already happened?

  “Not at all.” Coldly.

  I offered her a drink, which she accepted, the bartender refreshed her glass, frowning, and we were old friends now, chestnuts and snuggly blankets.

  “They call me Jock,” I said apologetically.

  “Miriam.”

  “Miriam is really nice.”

  I would have sworn I’d said it before.

  “I’m not Miriam,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, never mind. Never mind, Jock.”

  What was I supposed to say now? I’m not Jock? This isn’t
The Whaler
? We are not on the Waterfront?

  She pointed at the wall, a fishnet, wheel and anchor adorning the aged wood. “My father was a fisherman. But you know that, I guess.”

 
I remember your telling me
…

  Perhaps I had been drunk at the time. “Yes, of course, Miriam…I mean…”

  She smiled sort of a crooked smile, a humorless smile.

  The bartender was passing. “The bathroom?” I requested.

  “Out of order.”

  “Out of order? But this is a bar.”

  “Go out back.” And moved on. To nowhere.

  I glanced over my shoulder at a door in the back of the place, metal affair, emergency bar. It appeared to be ajar. No bells, no alarms, good.

  I told the lady I’d be back and fired up a cigarette as I parted with the stool, dragging deeply as you might, worrying a lot, wishing it weren’t Christmas. Wishing the feeling would go.

  The door was waiting for me, heavy, plodding on its works. A wall came into view, other side, other side of what proved to be an alley, might have guessed. The seedy side of the city and its alleyways.

  I stepped over by a big dumpster, unzipped, freed the thing, and as men are prone to do, looked around whistling. My piss fled back into my organ. At the foot of the wall opposite, on the ground, was a body—a woman. I stepped over, knowing she was dead, turned away at the sight of the dark fluid that surrounded her. She’d been shot. In the head, in the face, the rest was hidden to me. She lay belly-down in the alley, long fox coat spread about her like a blanket, its fur saturated.

  I backed all the way to the door, which I had left ajar, slipped inside, that feeling of
déjà vu
so strong now I might have myself scripted the events of the night.

  I didn’t wait till I was seated. “John—Whiskey John!”

  The bartender was not pleased. He’d offered his handle as a matter of routine only.

  “But she’s dead,” I said, gesturing backwards with my thumb.

  “Someone you know?”

 
What?

  “Miriam,” said the lady.

  I turned towards the lady. She was so very familiar, I felt as if we were both from another planet, and everyone else, the vignette of a Christmas Eve on the Waterfront. Funny, none of them were in the least bit concerned about my proclamation of death. Perhaps they hadn’t heard.

  “There is a woman lying back there in the alley with her brains blown out. Does that concern any of you?”

  If it did, they weren't saying.

  The bartender pointed at me hard. “You are really beginning to fuck up the peace.”

  I was nearly dumbstruck. “Fuck…fuck up the peace?!”

  “Fuck up the fucking peace, yes. Peace on Earth, man. It's Christmas, for Christsake.”

  “There is—”

  “Yeah, yeah, a woman with her brains blown out. I’m sure we’ve never seen
that
before. Look, if it’s what you’re worrying about, I can get you another fur.” He turned to the lady. “How’d you like that, Wanda?”

  She looked straight at me. “I think that’s up to Jock.” As she twirled the hem of her synthetic with the nose of her revolver.

Rupture Zone

A
s I pulled up in a snarl of dust at the barrier, the idiot wandering around in the cacti yelled at me. I’d seen him as I approached, but I was coming fast and didn’t have time to ponder the notion of some fool hoofin’ it out in the middle of nowhere under the murderously scorching sun. I leaned out of my open jeep wanting to know what the fuck was going on. I had someplace to go, and now I had a barrier and this character all in the same stroke of karma.

  I’d no idea where I was anymore—New Mexico? Arizona? All I knew was Jagged was coming hard—a goddamn right metaphor for her—armed to the brim, and salivating for my blood. What’s worse, her gas
tank was nearly twice the size of mine. I had two full metal cans bouncing
like jugs of nitro in back, but she had
four
if I remembered right. Bitch. Always on top of it. Another right-on metaphor.

  “What the hell do you want?” I said to the man as he trotted up gasping
for air, bent over himself, long streaked hair hanging almost to the ground. I swear I could practically see the vapor rising out of his head. My right hand stroked the handle of the expensive Israeli handgun I had stolen from Jagged, favorite hobby of hers. Clock on the dash said ten past, and that was fucking high noon.

  “Can’t,” he heaved. “Can’t…go in there...past the barricade.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the rupture zone,” he managed to get out all in one stream.

  “What the fuck is that?” My hand on the steel relaxed. He seemed a harmless customer.

  He looked at me through curtains of hair so that I couldn’t get a fix on his expression. “You ain’t from around?”

  I chuckled. “Yeah. Lately, around in circles.”

  “You ain’t got no radio?”

  The fuck was bothering me with his suspense routine, though I didn’t
think it was intentional. I got the impression he’d lost a few cells along the way. I knew a little bit about what that lifestyle did to you. I had a mirror. Hadn’t bathed or moteled maybe in a week, but I had the rearview, at least half of which was still usable after the bullet she’d put in it.

  I turned on the radio, stock job out of some other fifteen-year-old car. Crackle, sssss, crackle, crackle…Lack of an antenna and an abundance of oblivion will do you a lot of hiss. “Just spill it, man,” I growled at him.

  “I—they’re—it’s a war zone now.” He gestured. “Hey, if you stand up in there, you might be able to see this end of the thing.”

  I gazed out beyond the barrier and saw nothing but dust and scrub and cactus. Nonetheless, I stood up in the jeep and, under the visor of my hand, surveyed the flat landscape.

  “Follow the road with your eye,” he said, pointing. “See the crack in the earth, runs right across it?”

  I did now. It looked like a mutant version of the fractures that covered
the whole slab of desert.

  “Earthquake?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, very slowly, very deliberately, as though it were nothing so pansy as a something-point-something.

  I fell into my seat, shifted into gear and rode the accelerator against the brake, signaling to the dude you comin’?

  He shook his head, hair all in his face, eyes wide like I was the freak.

  Maybe I was.

  Spinning desert all over the guy's peyote-stained clothes, I went round the barrier and off in search of hope in the fangs of the spider. War zone? Didn’t know what the fuck it meant, but it sounded like a good place to lead Jagged. There hadn’t been another road for more than fifty miles, and that last junction no doubt had my tracks all over it. I’d seen her once yesterday—her truck, that is—cresting a vapor-warped hill in the bullet-blasted rearview. She’d be along shortly, and Mescal back there would tell her all about it.

  “Come on, Jag, come on, Jag,” I sang as I sped across the flat. I’d no idea the hell I was committing myself to. But I knew hell. Jagged was fucking hell incarnate.

  The crack became a black grin in the earth, growing meaner and meaner as I drew closer. The ragged, heat-soaked blur of its lip became an undulating flutter of motion. I soon saw that the culprits were vultures teemed along the rupture’s rim, jabbing at the ground, like getting their grit for digestive purposes.

  I braked late in the approach, scattering the bastards from my side of the ravine over to the other. Jesus, it was wide, at least thirty feet across. To my left, maybe a hundred feet from the road, the end of it could be seen, dry wrinkled corner of the mouth it was. To the right, it stretched on and on, widening to at least twice the gap in the road.

  Stepping to the brink, I saw what the scavengers had been tearing at. Pieces of dried, collapsed matter that might once have been tubular and bright like the coils of intestines lay draped around and over the brink of the ravine. Whatever moisture the stuff had contained was all but gone, leaving what resembled snakeskins without scales. I reached down and picked one up, losing my equilibrium for a second as my eyes slipped past the husk into the black bottomlessness of the abyss. It was cool in the heat, yeah both the mouth in the earth and the material I held.

  A gunshot ripped across the desert, its source behind me, its echo swallowed by the killing heat. Jagged had arrived, dude with the hair was dead, probably because he reminded her of me. Well, fuck you, Jag.

  I jumped back in the jeep, took off in the direction of the near end of
the crevice, looking back towards the barrier. The wooden frame was coming
asunder as my eyes found the spot, a heat-captured, slow-motion event beneath the front end of her big truck. The fear like heights in the groin and alley darkness in the gut took hold of me. A fear familiar as the image of her face when she got the notion one sex-drenched day, in some
bizarre, acid-paranoid moment, that I was banging her recently moved-in
sister—like I needed
that
monkey too.

  That monkey was dead now. Like at least three others—including Sunshine back there—that I knew about. Love is a many splintered thing.

  Sliding around the end of the chasm, I pointed the jeep at an angle for the road again. In the distance, on the knife-edge horizon, the shapes
of man-made structures materialized. A glance back showed Jagged coming
fast. Maybe she’d be so intent on me spitting my little cloud of dust, that she’d run right into the hole. We can dream, even when we live a nightmare. Ahead, the group of buildings became a shabby town, a few old cars resting between the first of the buildings and my racing jeep. I looked back again before I reached the cars, noted she had made it around the crack, then
thump
, I hit something.

  Reflexes slamming on the brakes for me, I clutched the wheel tightly as the jeep went sliding, screech-grazing the side of a station wagon before coming to rest facing back in the direction of the ravine, the barreling
truck, and the thing I’d hit. The thing I’d hit writhed on the street. I fussed with the shifter, leg shaking crazily, grinding the gears to bone meal. As I finally got it in first, I spun forward, close enough to look down at the body, my heart hammering a ritual song. I felt the fist that resides inside come plunging up through my throat as I stared at the thing.

  Long, gangling, with naked worm-like flesh and a sickly pearlish palor, it managed through all that to somehow possess humanoid characteristics.
Its hips suggested it was bipedal, but the limbs were fantastically long, particularly the upper pair. Its features were grotesque to the degree of
absurdity, with a flat, sort of winged upper face, while the lower part protruded in a snout large enough to contain the huge, ferocious, demonically
keen teeth that gnashed wetly in the creature’s jaws. Its eyes, lacking irises, were entirely pearly like its body, bulging from their sockets as they marked me. But maybe strangest of all were the tubes of moist, pulsing tissue that protruded from the top of its head, entering again behind the wings of its flounder face, and the whole bunch of coils twisting in a Gorgonian ecstasy.

  Time was wasting. I laid hard on wheel and pedal, jerking her around back on track. Tearing through the center of town, I registered broken windows, debris strewn along the street, the absence of people, then I had to make a quick decision as a fork appeared in front of me. I chose right and was suddenly plummeting across the empty wastes again, reflections of the fucking apocalypse.

  The fury of Jagged’s pursuit grew in the mirror, and there was nowhere to go. I raised the Israeli handgun the bitch had been so proud of and prepared to go down firing. Two clips fell out of the glove box, one into my shaking hand, the other to the floor. I fished around for it, pushing it almost out of reach, finally managed to curl my fingers around it. When I came up, Jag’s truck dominated the rearview and the sound of gunfire and exploding glass filled my ears.

  I ducked down again, steering blindly with one hand, firing with the other. The first round glanced off the roll bar, ringing like a missionary at the door. As to the rest of them, sweet Jesus only knew how none of that flying lead, from my gun or hers, pierced the gas cans. Jagged began pounding on her horn, to add to the confusion. I might have been in the path of stampeding elephants, so noisy and imminent was the storm that descended. It all became one big drowning noise, the gunfire, the horn, the engines, my own yelling; I had to come up for air.

  Through the dust and the bullet-riddled windshield my eyes fell on
the yawning rupture in the ground ahead, that fucking black grin splitting
the whole world apart. I swerved left, braking, skirting the awful wound in the desert. The world turned up, the sky sideways, and blackness came up out of the hole and devoured me.

~

  I started from unconsciousness, a wet, spat-out Jonah, but it was my own sweat and blood that covered me. My skin was badly sunburned and the moisture was no comfort. I rose crookedly, but intact. The jeep was on its bars some eighty feet away, in the dust. A look to my left revealed a broken Ford truck wedged in the ground’s gaping grin, even blacker now because evening had arrived.

  In the twilight the desert was ashen; the stars appeared around a bright half moon. Blood fled down my neck from a wound reopened. Strange cries, wails, sounded in the distance. Vultures laughed off sleep in a rigid circle over the ravine. I began to walk that way. The idea that in another place I might have survived this thing, chase, wreck and all, teased me, amused me. Maybe I was somewhat delirious, but the fear was elsewhere. And the survival instinct seemed foolish.

  Jagged hung from the driver’s door of the truck, which appeared to have exploded open on impact. She hung in space, legs trapped inside the cab, head and arms reaching towards hell. Even so, an extended moan escaped her. I realized she could not have been hanging there with the
blood filling her head all this time. She must have fallen out fairly recently,
pulled by gravity, a wrong turn in her fever, a shift of the truck itself precariously spanning the gap.

  I surprised myself with the thought of crawling out there for her. I surprised myself by pitying her. The memory of our arriving at this last
crossroads in our lives flashed through my head. The horn. Her laying on the horn over and over again, almost as if she had been trying to warn me of the ravine. I halted at the edge of it, watching her body in space, swinging ever so slightly. A spasm passed from her shoulder to her hand, a feeble noise slipped from her mouth. With another look up at the vultures, I decided fuck her. Fuck you, Jagged.

  A creaking shift in the hulk startled me. I looked down in time to see a second long-fingered hand reach up out of the blackness to join one that had already grasped part of the truck’s frame. The creature’s face turned my way as I leapt back, fear returning in one great wave. Its pearly eyes were luminous in the darkness, its teeth reflecting the light of the night
sky as they parted in strings of viscous fluid. But it was in the other direction
the creature went, causing the truck to tilt and moan as it found holds in the undercarriage, moving hand over hand as if on a rope in an obstacle course.

  I moved slowly backwards, but I could not steal my eyes from the sight of it. When the creature reached the door, it swung up into the cab, found purchase with its legs, then dropped upside down so that its face was directly opposite hers. As two of the pulsing tubes separated from the sides of its head and plunged into her ears, its mouth closed over her scream and it began devouring her.

  The choke that escaped me caused it to turn for a brief moment, and I saw the rapture written in the shocking orbs of its eyes, the blood and flesh in its teeth, the gaping hole in Jagged’s face. Then the demon was on its meal again, head thrashing with the voraciousness and vigor that went into the feed.

  As I finally got the right signals to my feet, I caught sight of another
one of the creatures appearing over the lip of the chasm. My legs got tangled
up, I hit a cactus and fell. My head instantly swiveled to see what plans this new arrival had. Halfway out of the pit, its body abruptly sank and another creature came riding over its back. Following that one came another, then another, and suddenly dozens and dozens of them, clawing
and pulling at each other as they all strived to be the first over the brink, hands coming away with the tubes that coiled on the heads of those in the way.