Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (17 page)

The sky was an indefinite gray. An out-of-focus yellow sun gleamed faintly off the stark white employee's lounge. I stopped the truck and swung down to investigate.

There was no wind, only silence. The air was frosty without being particularly cold. What I wanted to do most was unload and get out of there, go back to Baker or Barstow or Shoshone.

I hoped that was still possible. Maybe all exits had been closed. Maybe the overseers had closed them to keep any more souls from getting out.

I tried the gate latches and found I could open them. I did so and returned to the truck, swinging the rear trailer around until it was flush with the ramp. Nobody made a sound. “Go on back,” I said. “Go on back. You've got more time here. Don't ask me how.”

“Hello, John.” That was behind me. I turned and saw an older man without any clothes on. I didn't recognize him at first. His eyes finally clued me in.

“Mr. Martin?” My high school history teacher. I hadn't seen him in maybe twenty years. He didn't look much older, but then I'd never seen him naked. He was dead, but he wasn't like the others. He didn't have that look that told me why he was here.

“This is not the sort of job I'd expect one of my students to take,” Martin said. He laughed the smooth laugh he was famous for, the laugh that seemed to take everything he said in class and put it in perspective.

“You're not the first person I'd expect to find here,” I responded.

“The cat's away, John. The mice are in charge now. I'm going to try to leave.”

“How long you been here?” I asked.

“I died a month ago, I think,” Martin said, never one to mince words.

“You can't leave,” I said. Doing my job even with Mr. Martin. I felt the ice creep up my throat.

“Still the screwball team player” Martin said, “even when the team doesn't give a damn what you do.”

I wanted to explain but he walked away toward the annex and the road out. Looking back over his shoulder, he said, “Get smart, John. Things aren't what they seem. Never have been.”

“Look!” I shouted after him. “I'm going to quit, honest, but this load is my responsibility.” I thought I saw him shake his head as he rounded the comer of the annex.

The dead in my load had pried loose some of the ramp slats and were jumping off the rear trailer. Those in the forward trailer were screaming and carrying on, shaking the whole rig.

Responsibility, shit, I thought. As the dead followed after Mr. Martin, I unhitched both trailers. Then I got in the cab and swung away from the annex, onto the incoming road. “I'm going to quit,” I said. “Sure as anything, I'm going to quit.”

The road out seemed awfully long. I didn't see any of the dead, surprisingly, but then maybe they'd been shunted away. I was taking a route I'd never been on before and I had no way of knowing if it would put me where I wanted to be. But I hung in there for two hours, running the truck dead-out on the flats.

The air was getting grayer like somebody turning down the contrast on a TV set. I switched on the high-beams but they didn't help. By now I was shaking in the cab and saying to myself, Nobody deserves this. Nobody deserves going to Hell no matter what they did. I was scared. It was getting colder.

Three hours and I saw the annex and yards ahead of me again. The road had looped back. I swore and slowed the rig to a crawl. The loading docks had been set on fire. Dead were wandering around with no idea what to do or where to go. I sped up and drove over the few that were on the road. They'd come up and the truck's bumper would hit them and I wouldn't feel a thing, like they weren't there. I'd see them in the rearview mirror, getting up after being knocked over. Just knocked over. Then I was away from the loading docks and there was no doubt about it this time.

I was heading straight for Hell.

The disembarkation terminal was on fire, too. But beyond it the City was bright and white and untouched. For the first time I drove past the terminal and took the road into the City.

It was either that or stay on the flats with everything screwy. Inside, I thought maybe they'd have things under control.

The truck roared through the gate between two white pillars maybe seventy or eighty feet thick and as tall as the Washington Monument. I didn't see anybody, employees or the dead. Once I was through the pillars—and it came as a shock—

There was no City, no walls, just the road winding along and countryside in all directions, even behind.

The countryside was covered with shacks, houses, little clusters and big clusters. Everything was tight-packed, people working together on one hill, people sitting on their porches, walking along paths, turning to stare at me as the rig barreled on through. No employees—no monsters. No flames. No bloody lakes or rivers.

This must be the outside part, I thought. Deeper inside it would get worse.

I kept on driving. The dog part of me was saying let's go look for authority and ask some questions and get out. But the monkey was saying let's just go look and find out what's going on, what Hell is all about.

Another hour of driving through that calm, crowded landscape and the truck ran out of fuel. I coasted to the side and stepped down from the cab, very nervous.

Again I lit up a cigarette and leaned against the fender, shaking a little. But the shaking was running down and a tight kind of calm was replacing it.

The landscape was still condensed, crowded, but nobody looked tortured. No screaming, no eternal agony. Trees and shrubs and grass hills and thousands and thousands of little houses.

It took about ten minutes for the inhabitants to get around to investigating me. Two men came over to my truck and nodded cordially. Both were middle-aged and healthy-looking. They didn't look dead. I nodded back.

“We were betting whether you're one of the drivers or not,” said the first, a black-haired fellow. He wore a simple handwoven shirt and pants. “I think you are. That so?”

“I am.”

“You're lost, then.”

I agreed. “Maybe you can tell me where I am?”

“Hell,” said the second man, younger by a few years and just wearing shorts. The way he said it was just like you might say you came from Los Angeles or Long Beach. Nothing big, nothing dramatic.

“We've heard rumors there's been problems outside,” a woman said, coming up to join us. She was about sixty and skinny. She looked like she should be twitchy and nervous but she acted rock-steady. They were all rock-steady.

“There's some kind of strike,” I said. “I don't know what it is, but I'm looking for an employee to tell me.”

“They don't usually come this far in,” the first man said. “We run things here. Or rather, nobody tells us what to do.”

“You're alive?” the woman asked, a curious hunger in her voice. Others came around to join us, a whole crowd. They didn't try to touch. They stood their ground and stared and talked.

“Look,” said an old black fellow. “You ever read about the Ancient Mariner?”

I said I had in school.

“Had to tell everybody what he did,” the black fellow said. The woman beside him nodded. “We're all Ancient Mariners here. But there's nobody to tell it to. Would you like to know?” The way he asked was pitiful. “We're sorry. We just want everybody to know how sorry we are.”

“I can't take you back,” I said. “I don't know how to get there myself.”

“We can't go back,” the woman said. “That's not our place.”

More people were coming and I was nervous again. I stood my ground trying to seem calm and the dead gathered around me, eager.

“I never thought of anybody but myself,” one said. Another interrupted with, “Man, I fucked my whole life away, I hated everybody and everything. I was burned out—”

“I thought I was the greatest. I could pass judgment on everybody—”

“I was the stupidest goddamn woman you ever saw. I was a sow, a pig. I farrowed kids and let them run wild, without no guidance. I was stupid and cruel, too. I used to hurt things—”

“Never cared for anyone. Nobody ever cared for me. I was left to rot in the middle of a city and I wasn't good enough not to rot.”

“Everything I did was a lie after I was about twelve years old—”

“Listen to me, mister, because it hurts, it hurts so bad—”

I backed up against my truck. They were lining up now, organized, not like any mob. I had a crazy thought they were behaving better than any people on Earth, but these were the damned.

I didn't hear or see anybody famous. An ex-cop told me about what he did to people in jails. A Jesus-freak told me that knowing Jesus in your heart wasn't enough. “Because I should have made it, man, I should have made it.”

“A time came and I was just broken by it all, broke myself really. Just kept stepping on myself and making all the wrong decisions—”

They confessed to me, and I began to cry. Their faces were so clear and so pure, yet here they were, confessing, and except maybe for specific things—like the fellow who had killed Ukrainians after the Second World War in Russian camps—they didn't sound any worse than the crazy sons of bitches I called friends who spent their lives in trucks or bars or whorehouses.

They were all recent. I got the impression the deeper into Hell you went, the older the damned became, which made sense; Hell just got bigger, each crop of damned got bigger, with more room on the outer circles.

“We wasted it,” someone said. “You know what my greatest sin was? I was dull. Dull and cruel. I never saw beauty. I saw only dirt. I loved the dirt and the clean just passed me by.”

Pretty soon my tears were uncontrollable. I kneeled down beside the truck, hiding my head, but they kept on coming and confessing. Hundreds must have passed, talking quietly, gesturing with their hands.

Then they stopped. Someone had come and told them to back away, that they were too much for me. I took my face out of my hands and a very young-seeming fellow stood looking down on me. “You all right?” he asked.

I nodded, but my insides were like broken glass. With every confession I had seen myself, and with every tale of sin I had felt an answering echo.

“Someday, I'm going to be here. Someone's going to drive me in a cattle car to Hell,” I mumbled. The young fellow helped me to my feet and cleared a way around my truck.

“Yeah, but not now,” he said. “You don't belong here yet.” He opened the door to my cab and I got back inside.

“I don't have any fuel,” I said.

He smiled that sad smile they all had and stood on the step, up close to my ear. “You'll be taken out of here soon anyway. One of the employees is bound to get around to you.” He seemed a lot more sophisticated than the others. I looked at him maybe a little queerly, like there was some explaining in order.

“Yeah, I know all that stuff,” he said. “I was a driver once. Then I got promoted. What are they all doing back there?” He gestured up the road. “They're really messing things up now, ain't they?”

“I don't know,” I said, wiping my eyes and cheeks with my sleeve.

“You go back, and you tell them that all this revolt on the outer circles, it's what I expected. Tell them Charlie's here and that I warned them. Word's getting around. There's bound to be discontent.”

“Word?”

“About who's in charge. Just tell them Charlie knows and I wamed them. I know something else, and you shouldn't tell anybody about this...” He whispered an incredible fact into my ear then, something that shook me deeper than what I had already been through.

I closed my eyes. Some shadow passed over. The young fellow and everybody else seemed to recede. I felt rather than saw my truck being picked up like a toy.

Then I suppose I was asleep for a time.

In the cab in the parking lot of a truck stop in Bakersfield, I jerked awake, pulled my cap out of my eyes and looked around. It was about noon. There was a union hall in Bakersfield. I checked and my truck was full of diesel, so I started her up and drove to the union hall.

I knocked on the door of the office. I went in and recognized the fat old dude who had given me the job in the first place. I was tired and I smelled bad but I wanted to get it all done with now.

He recognized me but didn't know my name until I told him. “I can't work the run anymore,” I said. The shakes were on me again. “I'm not the one for it. I don't feel right driving them when I know I'm going to be there myself, like as not.”

“Okay,” he said, slow and careful, sizing me up with a knowing eye. “But you're out. You're busted then. No more driving, no more work for us, no more work for any union we support. It'll be lonely.”

“I'll take that kind of lonely any day,” I said.

“Okay.” That was that. I headed for the door and stopped with my hand on the knob.

“One more thing,” I said. “I met Charlie. He says to tell you word's getting around about who's in charge, and that's why there's so much trouble in the outer circles.”

The old dude's knowing eye went sort of glassy. “You're the fellow got into the City?”

I nodded.

He got up from his seat real fast, jowls quivering and belly doing a silly dance beneath his work blues. He flicked one hand at me, come ‘ere. “Don't go. Just you wait a minute. Outside in the office.”

I waited and heard him talking on the phone. He came out smiling and put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen, John, I'm not sure we should let you quit. I didn't know you were the one who'd gone inside. Word is, you stuck around and tried to help when everybody else ran. The company appreciates that. You've been with us a long time, reliable driver, maybe we should give you some incentive to stay. I'm sending you to Vegas to talk with a company man...”

The way he said it, I knew there wasn't much choice and I better not fight it. You work union long enough and you know when you keep your mouth shut and go along.