As I Die Lying (40 page)

“
Self-actualization,” said
Mister Milktoast. “Egocide. A masochist’s massacre, masturbatory
manslaughter.”

“
All you knead is love,”
Loverboy said.

“
Hey, you’re catching on,”
Mister Milktoast said. “Maybe next time I’ll give you more
lines.”

“
It was always love,”
Bookworm said. “And don’t forget, I’m the writer here.”

“
You’ve never loved, none of
you,” the Insider rumbled, thunder in a teapot. “That’s why I could
do anything I wanted. My power always came from
you
.”

“
No dice, Insider. You can’t
lay your little guilt trip on me anymore,” I said.

I said it. Me. Forget
Bookworm.
I
was
the writer here and I got to change things around to suit me before
I mailed it off to my agent.

“
You were always mine,
Richard Coldiron,” the Insider said.

“
And I have always loved
you.”

“
No. You despise me. Because
I
am
you.”

“
And that’s why we love
you,” Bookworm said. “Because you are us.”

I was deep in the trees now, in the hushed
world of winter, the Subaru and Arlie’s cabin out of sight. The air
was thin and cold and sweet. My lungs sucked it in and welcomed its
harshness. Snowflakes fell in their endless whispers.

The Insider struggled, and I knew it was
trying to escape me then. It sensed that it was trapped. We had
built a prison with our love. Turned the Bone House into an
improvised Alcatraz, with hope for barbed wire and self-esteem for
bricks, surrounded by a gooey moat of sacrifice and topped with a
weathervane that pointed away from ill winds.

“
That’s it, big boy, come
into my heart. Come on, Angel Baby. It’s open, a room with a view
just for you,” I said. “Believe in me.”

“
We all love you, Richard,”
Mister Milktoast said.

I concentrated on the swirling thing in my
chest. “You see, Insider,” I said, as my feet churned through the
snow between the silent trees. “In your search for light, you
forgot the brightest light of all.”

“
The inner light,” said
Bookworm.

“
Right on, bro’,” Loverboy
said. “I like to flip a pancake as much as the next guy, but it’s
not much fun when the Insider is holding the spatula.”

“
Is that why you finally
decided to join us, Loverboy?” I asked through chattering
teeth.

“
Hell, yeah. All for one,
and all that jack-off crap. Peace, free love, and fucking
understanding, my man. But let’s get one thing straight. I love you
guys, but don’t go getting sweet on me now. I’m an Alpha male
psycho and that’s that. And as soon as we’re rid of this Insider
bastard, I’m going to cast some fucking loaves upon the
waters.”

The Insider churned, flailed, sliced. I fell
to my knees. If only I could love it enough, hold it in my heart,
smother it with my light. “We love you,” I said.

It was our new mantra, so much more tangible
than Flower Power ideals, so much more focused than Tibetan chants,
so much more sincere than the Lord’s Prayer. Hate as the highest
achievement of love. Selfishness boiled down to its purest essence.
Love as the means to its own self-serving end.

An unbroken circle jerk.

“
Why?” It was weaker now,
staggered by the light, feeble under the reflection of its own
mirror, failing to hold up under close examination. “Why hast thou
forsaken me?”

“
Don’t try to play the Jesus
card, my midnight friend,” I said. “This love goes deeper than
self-sacrifice. No more martyrs allowed in the Bone House. This
love goes all the way to the fucking foundation.”

“
And you, too, Little
Hitler? I thought, of all of them, you would understand...and
appreciate...what I’ve done.”

“
I would gladly have
followed you through eternity, to the next host and beyond,” Little
Hitler said. He was weeping and the tears froze on my cheeks. “But
your hate isn’t sincere enough. You only serve yourself. You say
you are what humans have made you become. But we hate because we
want to, not because we have to. Free will.”

“
He’s right, Mister Badass
Soulsucker,” said Loverboy. “You laugh at us humans, but you’re
worse than any of us. Sure, we’re all slaves to our pathetic needs.
But in here, we’ve all got to stick together.”

“
Safest sex,” Mister
Milktoast said. “Get it?”

“
Hey, Mister M, you’ve
finally turned that protected love of yours back home,” said
Bookworm. “Back to Richard. To this fabulist construct, this
comic-book hero, this inconsistent protagonist—”

“
Don’t go getting faggy,”
Loverboy said. “You’ll always be Dickworm to me. Not that ‘always’
looks like it’s going to last a hell of a lot longer. But what you
told us made sense. At the heart of the matter, the fuck-all and
be-all, is that we really are one. We belong to this dick-squiggled
Richard-meat, for better or worse. But the Insider...the Insider’s
a frigging illegal alien. It just bootscooted the fuck on in here
without even passing ‘Go,’ much less asking for a green
card.”

“
And you love Richard more
than you love the Insider?”

“
Dance with the bitch what
brung you, that’s what I say.”

We clenched our heart, squeezing down on the
hot black tarball of the Insider. Our love was a ring of hellfire,
roasting the Insider in its own sorry juices. That’s when the
curtain of black pain dropped over my mind and I fell face-first
into the snow...

And I was riding a high cloud, a huge tuft of
warm ice cream that rocked gently up and down like an angelic hobby
horse. The sun showered golden light and rainbows. I looked down on
the earth below, a drugged king on a magic carpet. The ground was
wrapped in a crystal mist.

The cloud accelerated and swooped and the
thin edges of the horizon crumbled away, dropping off into the
blackness that lurked underneath the corners of the world. Dark
cracks ran through the mist and the scene shattered like a glass
photograph smashed with a hammer.

The shards collected and coalesced into the
image of Mother’s face, with a jagged skinscape and eyes that were
pools of dead hate set against a bleak fog. The face changed and
slithered into a thousand likenesses, each forming for a split
second before giving way to the next, and all, all, screaming.

I fell into the dark maw of open mouths and I
looked down the throat at an ocean of writhing maggots, then I was
falling falling falling into blackness and I saw that the maggots
weren’t maggots at all, they were naked human beings, and the great
throat was closing and swallowing—

“
Wake up, Richard,” Mister
Milktoast said.

I opened my eyes against the cold snow. An
avalanche roared in my ears. My nose was bleeding and my fingers
were numb from frostbite.

“
Oh, no, you don’t,” I said,
the exhaust of my words making tiny furrows in the snow. “You’re
not getting Mother.”

The Insider had almost escaped, almost
slipped out of my heart and into my mind. From there to drag its
little voodoo bag of horrors to the one who had never meant any
harm. But I wasn’t about to let Mother get hurt any worse than she
already had.

“
Besides,” Bookworm said.
“If this ends with, ‘And it was all a dream,’ I’m going to kill you
myself.”

“
You’re a clever bastard,
Insider,” I said, lifting myself from the frozen white. Drops of
blood leaked down my face into the snow. “Trying to go where you
can hurt me the most. Still eating my guilt. But guess who’s
smiling now?”

I hoped the pain in my abdomen meant that the
Insider was still locked away. Either that or a hundred hungry rats
had been loosed in my bowels.

“
You were falling asleep,
Richie-wuss,” said Loverboy. “And you know what happens when you
sleep. That’s one wet dream nobody wakes from.”

“
Yeah,” Little Hitler said.
“Leaving us here to do all your dirty work. Not that I mind too
much. I’ve grown fond of your guilt and misery.”

“
I had a hell of a
nightmare,” I said. “Turned out
we
were the bad guys.”

“
Us? Bad?” Little Hitler
said. “That’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said about me. You
must really love us.”

“
I love everybody. It’s a
wonderful life. A fucking Jimmy Stewart remake with a contemporary
spin and no character realizations at all.”

“
I can’t wait for this to be
over,” Loverboy said. “Nothing personal, but you’re getting on my
goddamned nerves. Say, you think Beth will ever want to do the old
Humpty-Dumpty-Roll-Over-and-Bump-Me again?”

“
As cold as it is?” Mister
Milktoast said. “I predict a serious case of blue balls in your
future.”

Bookworm came out, Bookworm who had been the
psychic superglue that had held us together through our fight with
the Insider. The bookbinder, the plotter, the editor, the
typesetter. “It’s not sex you’re after, Loverboy. You just want to
be accepted. You just want to be a part of something bigger than
yourself. An unconditional love.”

“
Bite me, Bibliofuck. I’m in
it for the fucking donut holes.”

“
We all live to
serve.”

“
And we serve the light
menu,” I said. “Low carb, low cal, tastes great, less
filling.”

The glow expanded in my chest, radiating out
from my poisoned heart. The black essence of the Insider smoldered
and fumed underneath the heat of our love. The love was big,
overwhelming all of us. This was the hero’s journey, the most
powerful myth, the purpose of all stories.

I waded through the surf of snow, dragging my
tired legs as if they were tree stumps. The snow was still falling,
and fat dreamy flakes collected on my eyelashes. My breath sent
frozen fogs into the evening twilight. The mountain called me,
commanded me forward.

I would never solve the riddle of the
Insider. It was a trick of nature, just another entity, just
another parasite in a universe of parasites. Just part of the
cosmic soup. Maybe horrible in human terms, but against the
backdrop of an incomprehensible universe, it could be
understood.

That monster was made, not born. Built from
pieces of hopelessness and pain, from loneliness and guilt, brought
to life by the energy of sin. Just another thing that needed belief
and faith to sustain it. Just another psychic vampire trying to
claim a stake.

Love was the real mystery. Love was the
ultimate weapon. Love could defeat the cruelest monsters. But was
love ultimately just human vanity? Or did it come from somewhere
outside all of us?

Good and evil were nothing but concepts in
Bookworm’s cheesy pulp fiction. They had no place in my
autobiography. All I could do was pay for my own sins and let the
theme fall to the eye of the beholder.

Bookworm murmured drowsily. “Isn’t it a bit
deflating that the main character doesn’t find resolution through
another person? Shouldn’t our love for Beth serve as the redemptive
force?”

“
Good question,” I said. I
loved her, but I’d ditched her before the story was over. Maybe
that said a lot. Maybe not.

The dark forest surrounded me. The trees
stood like soldiers lining both sides of a vast hall, as if I were
meeting royalty, kissing Odin’s ring in Valhalla. The cracked bark
of wild cherry peeled off in coppery strips. Laurel bowed humbly
under the crush of snow, its waxy green leaves curled from the
cold. A stunted spruce leaned against the dead limbs of an oak. The
forest was a silent temple. The wind whispered its prayers in the
high branches.

Bookworm called out, weak and chilled.
“Richard, I think...I used too much of myself...spelled it all
out...”

“
Alphabetical ardor,” Mister
Milktoast said.

“
Hang in there,” I said,
comforting my discerning proofreader. “We’ve almost
won.”

“
No, I served my role. Last
in, first out, the aesthetic cycle. Aristotle said the end was in
the beginning, after all. Now I’m writing myself out of the story.
Keep the faith...roomie.”

And Bookworm was gone, adrift like invisible
smoke, with scarcely a twinge to mark his passing. The Insider
scrambled toward the sudden void, seeking to consume some of the
psychic residue and inhabit the empty room. We kicked his ass back
into the crawlspace of my heart. A sewer pipe must have broken in
the Bone House, because something smelled awfully ripe down
there.

The cold settled into my marrow like dull
fire and carved its pockets of pain in my fingers and toes. The
snow fell even faster, a foot thick and skirling. The world was
being buried, succumbing to the virginal suffocating whiteness. I
looked behind me at my tracks and saw that they were already filled
and swept smooth, as if I had never been. Hot bile rose in my
trachea and boots rattled my rib cage. The Insider was summoning
its strength for a final run at the back door.

“
Allow me,” said Little
Hitler. “I could use a good hurt.”

He swallowed, ten-penny nails and fishhooks,
charcoal and blood, stardust and comet ice, a dollar’s worth of
candy, acid tears all sliding away. He absorbed it and relished the
pain, then scurried down whatever dark corridor of my mind he had
come from. He turned a corner and disappeared forever.