Mortality Bridge (18 page)

“What, you think I’m an amateur?”

“Just covering our ass.”

“The deal is, you play us some seriously depressing music and you can tag along. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Play anything happy or bouncy—”

“—or even a little bit uplifting—”

“—so much as one single note that doesn’t make me want to open a vein—”

“—and I’ll make you eat your own heart—”

“—with a side of fries.”

“Deal?”

“Deal.”

“My, he didn’t even hesitate.”

“Sure of himself, isn’t he?”

“Come on then maggot chow, it’s troubadour time.”

“There’s just one thing,” says Niko.

“A catch.”

“Always is with monkey spawn. What is it?”

“I can’t play my guitar and carry the case at the same time.”

“Well don’t look at me.”

“Or me.”

“I will be happy to carry your case, sir,” Franz says, “if it will allow us to proceed on our way.”

“Impatient all of a sudden, isn’t he?”

“Well his end’s in sight.”

The demon cackles in unison.

Niko opens the case and removes Dobro, slide, pick, and shoulder strap. He holds the case out to Franz and says Thank you.

“It is my pleasure.”

They walk side by side, the demon bringing up the rear. Niko tunes the Dobro. Franz’s intense and birdlike gaze flicks everywhere as Niko begins to play long upbending chords.

“I am familiar with the decadent American jazz,” says Franz after a few minutes. “But this is different I think.”

“It’s called blues,” says Niko.

“Ah. The rural music of the oppressed American Negro. I am hearing of it but have not heard it myself.”

“Then shut up, Fats—”

“—and you might hear some now.”

“Franz.”

““Whatever.””

Franz stumbles as he’s prodded from behind.

Niko plays. Not thinking about it much, not even worried about the demon’s threats. If he doesn’t know how to play music without a note of happiness, he’s never played a note at all.

Niko is reluctant to strike up a conversation with the naked soul beside him. Whatever hope the man holds for reaching the front of the Ouroboros line, he is doomed to an eternity of suffering and deprivation and to get to know him will only lead to helpless pity and frustration at the man’s suffering. Yet that reluctance also bothers him. As below so above, is that it, buddy pal? Mitigate your pain by backing off from feeling altogether. What kind of life is that? We all lose friends and relatives and lovers. Everything goes away. People die. Those two words encompass all the tragedy of the living world. At the core of life there lies a coiled waiting horror that is death. Niko’s always felt it slumbering there. All his life he’s drowned it drugged it lulled it with his music. And looking back now understands he saw it wake a little bit with every cigarette or shot or measured spoon or needleprick, felt it tremble closer with each shuddering climax, heard its lungless breath in every anguished note he ever played.

He mutes the guitar strings.

“Boy howdy. That was—”

“—depressing.”

“Play another one.”

Niko snorts. “You guys are gluttons for punishment.”

“Shit. Have you seen the gluttons yet, meat pie?”

“If he’s going over the Ledge he will.”

“Over the Ledge?” Niko drops back even with the demons.

“Now now,” Dexter says. “You’ll find out about the Ledge soon enough. We have a little wager on you—”

“—and we don’t want to influence the outcome,” Sinister finishes. Dexter yawns as Sinister talks and Sinister absently sticks his finger in his brother’s gaping fanged mouth. Dexter stops midyawn and snaps at the finger and narrowly misses biting it clean off.

The demon prods Niko and Franz and resumes walking beside the line, which has also started shuffling forward again. “You.” Dexter prongs Niko with the trident. “You want to know who’s being punished for what. What do you think these people are guilty of?”

Niko glances at Franz.

“It is all right,” says the softspoken Czech. “I am curious if their assessment of my, my sins agrees with my own.” A hint of amusement in the large brown eyes.

“From what I’ve gathered,” Niko says, “I’d say these people were bureaucrats.”

Dexter grins and even Sinister looks pleased. “Hand the man a Kewpie doll,” says Dexter. “But bureaucracy ain’t no sin. So why are they being punished?”

Niko frowns. He thinks about the protocol of lines and forms, Franz’s eagerness to comply and to assure the demons that he knows the system.

“Maybe they liked making people comply with procedure even when there was a shortcut. Or maybe they liked using the system to thwart people.”

Dexter nods. “Now that’s a complicated sin. On the one hand it’s a kind of tyranny, because they’re wielding power unjustly. On the other hand it’s irresponsibility, because a bureaucrat uses dogma to avoid using his will to decide.”

“Irresponsibility is a sin?” says Niko.

Franz surprises them all by saying, “To consciously refuse to exercise free will by hiding it within a bureaucratic system is to demean the very quality that renders Man special in the eyes of his creator.”

“Or so the dogma goes,” says Sinister.

“So you’re punishing them forever for being weakwilled?”

“For squandering. If a lion doesn’t use its teeth it gets punished by starving to death.”

“Look at your own name for yourselves—”

“—homo sapiens—”

“—thinking man—”

“—and then look at these fine examples—”

“—oxymorons if ever there breathed any—”

“—human beings who relegated their forebrains to a handbook.”

“I believe I begin to understand,” says Franz.

“You only think you do, Hans old buddy,” says Sinister. “Franz.”

“Whatever. You haven’t been punished as a hypocrite yet.”

“I am to be punished as a hypocrite?” Now Franz looks genuinely fearful.

“You’re telling tales out of school,” Dexter tells his brother. Sinister shrugs. “I yield to your greater experience.”

“Stick around, kid, and I’ll tell you about when they invented rocks.”

Dexter’s quip prompts Niko to ask where demons come from. Dexter smiles toothily. “You ever own a cat?”

“I’m a dog person. Mostly.”

“I have owned a cat,” says Franz.

“It ever die?”

“Yes.” Franz raises an eyebrow. “Once.”

“Well then—”

“—it’s probably around here somewhere.” The demon waves to indicate the corrupt vast cavern around them.

“I don’t get it.”

“Music boy don’t get it,” says Dexter.

“Insurance boy do.”

“Tell him, insurance boy.”

Franz indicates the demon before them. “They are the souls of cats.”

Niko stares at the twinheaded demon. They blink, blink, nod solemnly, nod solemnly, and sing in unison but not in harmony, ““We are Siamese, if you please.””

“I have long suspected something similar,” says Franz.

FRANZ GROWS MORE excited as the head of the line grows near. It would be amusing to watch the mildmannered thoughtful man becoming manic if Niko didn’t pity him. What does he think is waiting for him up ahead, paradise?

And what do you think is waiting for you farther on, buddy pal?

Table that discussion. Just play.

Aching blues scores the plain of Hell.

Franz’s eyes are bright as their motley group walks along the shuffling outside of the massive line. “I wonder how long would be this queue if one were to unfold it in a straight line?”

“Exactly as long as it is now, moron,” says Sinister. “Guess Mensa isn’t knocking down your door.”

They pass and pass the trudging dead.

For his part Niko has eyes mostly for what the demon called the Ledge. It appears to be a cliff edge that extends to his left and right as far as he can see. Faint glimmerings that might be water lead toward the false horizon of the Ledge. A river? To become a waterfall spilling off the edge and emptying into someplace worse? Who knows what lies beyond the precipice. The twin demon does but Niko is reluctant to ask what he will find below.

On the Ledge itself, the Battlements. Hewn into the cliffside they hunch in glowering light like an argus remnant of some fallen Troy. Running several miles along the Ledge’s stark cutoff the parapets and crenellations of the Battlements lend a faint medieval air to an architecture oddly streamlined and industrial.

A stubble of the flocking dead is thick upon the plain before the Battlements. Once in Buenos Aires Niko played a festival two hundred fifty thousand strong. It would have disappeared within that distant throng.

Franz walks ahead of him talking animatedly and gesturing often to the head of the line, which Niko now sees is a roped off section at a huge rock outcropping guarded by half a dozen demons. Niko frowns but keeps on playing.

Dexter/Sinister watches the line ahead and looks back the other way at Franz, nodding nodding at the man’s questions and comments. Franz is oblivious to the amused look on the demon’s lefthand face.

Niko catches up to Franz. He plays mean old twelvebar blues for a couple measures and even sings a few verses in his gravelly voice aged like whiskey by whiskey. The demon is watching him now and so is Franz. Niko fingers and chords and nods along.

“You do not really sound like a Negro I think, but there is much pain in your voice.”

“How many Negroes have you met?”

“Admittedly few. They are not so many in Prague and Vienna.”
 

Niko studies the neck of his guitar. “I’ve read your work.”

“You, you have?”

Niko nods. “You became very well-known after you...you know.”

“There is no need for delicacy, Mr...?”

And smiles down at his guitar. “Popoudopolos. Call me Niko.”

“Mr. Niko. You are Greek?”

“American. Greek descent.”

“Mr. Niko, I am living with my—I believe in English you say consumption—for many years. It is what finally took me from my home.” The thin man looks about the redlit plain, his ascetic face pained by distant memory. “I am here longer than I am alive on earth I think.”

“Yes.”

“So Max did not burn my work as he promised.” He laughs. “I think perhaps I knew he would not, you know.”

“You’re very famous now.”

“Really. Oh really.” He starts to say more, perhaps to ask about the other immortality he has gained through the redemption of his pen, but now the demon steps between them and glares and glares down at Niko.

“Don’t think we don’t know what you’re trying to do,” says Sinister. Niko isn’t quite sure which one to stare at and his gaze goes back and forth.

“It’s really kind of cruel when you think about it,” Dexter says. “We’re going to hand him over anyhow—”

“—and you jacking him up is only going to make him fall that much harder—”

“—and our deal’s off when we reach the front of the line anyway—”

“—so keep your damned mouth shut and in another hundred yards you’re out of here—”

“—capiche?”

“Si, prego.” Niko stares at the demon and realizes it is impossible to stare them down and so he looks away. Hurting minor chords carry on the bruised air. “He was a good man I think.”

Dexter spits while Sinister says, “If I fired a shotgun into that line I’d hit ten good men.”

“I’ve seen him do it.”

“We got good men like a barn’s got rats.”

“Place is crawling with em.”

“We oughta put up signs.”

“Do Not Feed the Rats.”

“Get it?”

“Got it.”

““Good.””

They turn away, and the three or four of them finish their small journey together.

A DEMON NEAR the head of the line holds a length of fanfold paper feeding from a tall cardboard box at his hooves. The dead call out their names and the demon, tigerstriped in black and red with an anteater snout and teeth splayed like a falling picket fence, searches through the fanfold stack until he finds each name and when he does he checks it off with a pencil and the damned soul is allowed to pass from the line in which he has spent years.

Dexter/Sinister halts before Tigerstripe. “Zeke,” says Dexter, “I’m passing one through. My authorization. He’s under K.”

The demon shrugs. “Your funeral.”

Franz steps eagerly away but Niko calls his name and points to the hardcase in Franz’s hand. “Oh yes of course,” Franz says. “It would not do for me to walk away with it, would it?” He returns the case to Niko. “Thank you so much for your music. It is so long since I hear anything of beauty even if that is perhaps an odd word to describe what it is you play. I mean no offense.”

“None taken. It was my pleasure.” Niko’s gaze meets Franz’s. “See you.”

“Yes, twentythree skidoo, as you Americans say.” Franz waves and turns away with his stamped and authorized papers, heading around the rock outcropping and out of sight.

Niko watches him go. He glances at Dexter/Sinister, then puts the Dobro in its case.

“Beautiful, Fonz said.”

“It sounded depressing to me.”

“How can it be beautiful and depressing?”

“I dunno. Ask the meat pie.”

“Hey meat pie.”

Niko doesn’t look up. “I thought our deal was finished.”

“We think you may have cheated.”

Niko shrugs. “I did what I said I’d do.” Behind him Tigerstripe has resumed calling out name after name from the fanfold list. “You both agreed it was depressing.”

“Yeah but it didn’t make me feel bad—”

“—In fact, it made me feel kind of good—”

“—Which is bad.”

Niko stands with the hardcase. “Well that’s your problem.” The demon looks at one another. “How can something depressing feel good?”

Niko smirks. “Ever read Russian literature?” Without waiting for reply he starts away.

“This can’t go unresolved—”

“—uncompensated—”

“—unrewarded.”

“Want to see what happens to Fritz?”

Niko stops. He knows better. Knows it will be terrible. Franz seemed a gentle and kind man with a keen mind and a wry sensibility. But Niko does want to see what happens to him.

He turns to face the demon. “Franz,” he says.