Orgonomicon (2 page)

He took his place on the floor at the end of
the couch, and joined them in the middle of the show. The male lead
was talking to his romantic interest, a woman who was already
engaged to another man that she didn't actually like, about her
lover, a bad man: "Think of all the awful things he's done to
you—you're the victim!"

The woman on the TV said, "Yeah, I know,"
while his mother brought in the pot of food and the dishes and
snorted derisively and said, just loud enough for the room to hear
over the TV, "All men are alike."

The tension in the room rose and Jaime wished
he was somewhere else, but then the scene changed and new
characters took over, and maybe they could all start laughing
again, and everything would be okay. The family served the
food.

"But she couldn't ever give you what you
needed, could she?" said the TV to itself, speaking in the voices
of two men wearing pink and blue dress-shirts.

"Never could!" his stepfather nearly yelled,
and plunged his spoon into his mouth. The dissatisfaction and
discontent were now chokingly thick, and he couldn't stand the
thought of eating his chicken-and-dumplings, and asked his mother
if he could be excused.

"What are you asking me for? Go to bed then,
you have school in the morning. Brush your teeth first."

"This tastes terrible! What, did you forget
how to use salt?" His stepfather was often unkind.

"I knew I should have listened to myself when
I thought that there was something wrong. There's too much
salt."

He went to the bathroom and cleaned his
teeth, peed and washed his hands, and gave silent thanks that he
could now close his eyes and call the day over.

Home was where he ate and went to bed, so
that he could wake and do the same things again the next day.

The two men sat on opposite sides of the
small table, immersed in their works upon their arcane machine;
they neither spoke nor looked at one another, one of them inhaling
cigarettes lit off the butts of the last, and the air was yet
thicker with evil than it was with smoke.

The machine was government issue, sleek
molded plastics and chrome plating, the size and shape of a home
stereo-console, with long trailing cables that led to the bulky
headsets they each wore. The equipment was eight years out of
date.

At last, the smoking one broke the silence.
"My turnaround-time is better than yours by exactly thirty-seven
percent. Suck on that."

The transceiver-unit in the machine broadcast
the freshly-processed horror-signal to the electrical wiring and it
rode through a series of relays, piggy-backing over a variety of
infrastructure networks and communications systems to reach the
orbital satellites emplaced by Cold War technocrats. Something
hideous rained down upon the land and coalesced on the sharp edges
of the radio-towers in the targeted area.

Emmanuel's brows furrowed, and he jerked his
head to the side and grunted, and his nightmare continued:

He wanted to work his jaws happily, sitting
with his friends and enjoying himself; it was a simple, animal
pleasure, but something had gone off.

The spoonful of mashed potatoes had turned
into some kind of bitter, black slime in his mouth and he spat it
out; he tried to clear his mouth by taking a drink of water but the
glass was filled with the same evil filth. He couldn't find
anything on the giant banquet table that didn't turn into the black
slime when he looked at or touched it. It dripped down his face and
chest, it spread across the table and ran off the sides, it oozed
down the walls in sheets. His friends happily devoured the vile
slime and each other, their auto-cannibalism whipping them into a
carnal frenzy of mutual consumption.

He couldn't vomit enough, couldn't sick it up
out of his gut; there was no way to prevent it from invading his
body.

And then he was able to shake himself awake;
he spat violently into his pillow, shouting incomprehensible
gibberish and punching at the air. The woman sleeping next to him
was jolted awake, and yelled at him, "Out! Out, get out!"

"Do you love her?"

"Get out of my head!" No matter how many
times he made the demand of himself quietly, within his own mind;
no matter if he screamed it out in public, frightening strangers
with his craziness; no matter if he carved the words into his
flesh, rubbing black soil over the wounds to stain their letters
into his spirit—it made no difference. The voice wouldn’t
listen.

He'd answered inside at first, making the
decision and reaffirming it to himself, taking it as the voice of
his conscience trying to tell him that he'd forgotten something
basic, that he'd lost who he was and what was important to him. Its
puissant tone spoke of a knowledge far greater than his, of
experience and power impossible to ignore, and it kept on asking
and asking and so he'd started replying out loud.

Most of the time it was yes, sometimes it was
no—by the time he'd gotten around to admitting to having mixed
feelings, the voice's insistent regularity was starting to get on
his nerves. It was a test. Of course he'd loved her—with everything
they'd been through together, how could he not? He owed her that
much.

And there was so much blood on his
hands...

He would prove himself. If he was persistent,
something would change in his favor.

The hours turned into days, the question
hammering him all the while, and passed like a dream. A couple
nights sleeping under the bridge wasn't so bad, was it? He'd been
worse places.

The awful envelope had turned up in the
suitcase she'd packed for him. Anything that belonged to him had
gone into the case—and there was precious little of it—jammed in
haphazardly with the manila rectangle sitting smugly on top. It was
the last thing he'd ever wanted to see. She'd gone ahead and filed
the divorce papers; this was his copy.

It was real.

The other papers tucked in with them were
just as bad. He'd spent a moment to look them over later in the bar
when he'd finally gotten his head together, quit shaking and come
down from the bad adrenaline; there were a couple bills with
staggering numbers to which he couldn't relate and a summons from
the State, regarding his welfare-status. It was being reevaluated.
Regulations were changing and they needed to discuss a few things
with him. The finality of it all crossed over into absurdity.

He spread the papers out across his little
tabletop and pinned them under a candle. So this was what his life
had come to, the next in a series of endings.

"Yo, Scott, whatcha doin' buddy?"

Great, he had a witness to his failure. This
was a long-time friend, though, someone he'd known most of his
adult life.

"Nothin' Mike, it's just..." and then he'd
spilled the whole story. All the ugly details came flooding out,
things he'd kept bottled inside safely where they couldn't hurt
anybody but him, the things he'd regretted saying the moment they
came out. And now his story was out there, and his friend was being
supportive; it was almost too good to be true.

Mike looked him intently in the eyes and
asked, "Do you love her?"

Somehow, he'd managed to stop himself from
screaming. Spending a couple days sleeping below sidewalks gave you
that ability, if it didn't break you. He looked back at Mike and
answered with a straight face, "What do you think, man? How could
I? But yeah, of course I still do..."

"Good," and Mike was almost too quick to say
it, "You better. You need to," and Mike hit him on the chest,
rapping him with his knuckles like he was knocking on someone's
door, and said something he couldn't hear. He'd have been insulted,
if only he'd had more time. The blackness rushed up on him almost
instantaneously.

"Scott, you fuckin' failure. I hate
everything about you and wish you dead. God, help out by striking
this man dead before the night is through. Fuck this guy!"

He was talking to himself.

Scott was feeling bad and looking for a
hornet's nest to stick himself into. Something had come in the
mail—he knew he had something to do. His memories of the past few
days were hazy, fuzzy recollections of some squat hotel and a
kindly-demeanored friend who didn't really want him to be there.
There was never enough beer in these people's places, anyway. He
needed to step off into the cyclone.

Everything was disconnected, had been
stripped and sterilized. His memory felt like a rake had been
dragged through it, catching up and removing anything solid.

He'd lost his job not that long after his old
lady kicked him out that third or fourth time. He remembered this
much. He hadn't kept it for long—his record washout, actually. It
had been less than seventy-two hours; he'd been drinking on the
job, just like she'd been yelling at him for, the day before she'd
dropped the bomb. Hers had only been one, the biggest but only one
of many. Nobody gave him a fair shake. You couldn't blame him for
needing his medicine. He'd always been that way.

He was thirsty, real thirsty. All he wanted
was his poison. Maybe he'd go downtown and see if he could scare up
any action. He felt fuzzy, something not right in his head; maybe
something to drink was a bad idea, maybe it was exactly what he
needed. He'd made up his mind—he was gonna wet his throat.

And then a jolt went through the universe, a
blip so brief as to be hardly noticeable but leaving its impression
wherever it touched, and then it was gone.

Scott didn't notice it, but it touched him.
Somewhere along the line, he changed his mind and switched
directions unexpectedly. He couldn't explain it: he was going one
way, and then he was going another. It was just like that. It
didn't need to be explained.

He'd been stumbling down the sidewalk,
pushing against the relentless river of people blowing against him
and threatening to knock him aside. They were all going the wrong
way. And then his foot caught in a crack in the sidewalk between
two adjacent stones, and he flew through the air with his arms
spread wide and flailing, expecting someone,
anyone
, to
catch him as he fell, and no one did. Scott hit the pavement
face-first and heard his teeth shatter on the concrete. Blood
filled his vision and he blacked out, again.

He came to. He'd been going somewhere... He'd
been going somewhere, and then changed his mind, and hadn't gotten
around to finishing with the thing he'd been trying to do.
Something prevented him? It had a lot to do with whatever it was
that was causing him so much pain—pain, of an incredible nature,
not just in his head. The voice started up, right on cue: "Was it
necessary to hurt yourself?"

"Do you love her?"

It was a needle poking him in the face, the
voice, and something caught in his throat, making him cough up a
large, splattery chunk. It was his blood, clotting in the back of
his throat. He felt like he'd swallowed a handful of broken glass.
Something was wrong; he had to get to a mirror, a private room,
someplace he could check the damage done to him. What the hell
happened? If only he could get just one drink, just one beer, he'd
be better equipped to deal with this bullshit. It was stupid.

It was purely by luck and the grace of God
that he had such good friends. Mike was looking out for him.
"Scott, hey buddy, you want a beer?" Mike was such a good
friend.

"Yeah, sure, that would be alright with me.
Beer me up."

Mike handed it over with the top already
popped, just the way he liked it, but something tasted funny.

"Hey Scott, you wanna tell me what it was
that was so important you had to ditch me to get to it? Come on
man, you can tell ol' Mikey. I'm your friend, remember?" and Mike
touched him on the side of the head, just above his ear, and Scott
didn't hear another word Mike said for the rest of the evening,
though the conversation they had was long and involving. It has
something to do with running, like he was supposed to be in a
marathon race or something, but he couldn’t remember the last time
he'd jogged down to the end of the block, much less any such thing
as a race. Who did he think he was kidding, anyway? He was a
complete and total loser. God, he needed a drink. Losing was
thirsty work.

He was alone, alone, alone. Mike had left,
gone off someplace doing Mike-things, leaving him to himself and
the company of the voices in his head. "Do you love her?" all the
time, all the time. He'd almost gotten used to it.

Sometimes, when he paused before answering,
he could hear other muttered utterances between the phrases, things
that didn't make any sense. There were bursts of static, and
ringing tones, whispers. A string of numbers meant nothing to
him—why was he hearing this stuff in his head? Where was Mike with
the beer?

And why did he have to listen to this shit
all
the time? He was starting to smell bad from it.

"Do you love her?"

"Yes! No! I don't know! I don't fucking care
anymore if I do or not! What does it matter?" Something in him
popped.

Mike came back with the beer. "Howya holdin'
up, buddy? Everything alright?"

Mike was such a good friend. He gave him a
place to stay, food and access to a shower. Mike had opened himself
up to him in ways no one else had. And now he was sharing his beer.
Mike was his only real friend in the world.

"Yeah, I'm better now."

""I got you taken care of. Here, drink your
medicine." He passed the cold can over. "Sometimes you just gotta
roll with the punches. Bottoms up, it'll put some hair on your
chest."

"I don't need any more of that."

"Well then it'll put some stick in your
spine. Drink up." Mike was such a good friend. "So, dude, that's
pretty fucked up about Ella. Bitches, huh?"