The Apocalypse Reader (8 page)

On a dewy morning Lionel and I left for St. Germain-en-Laye. We arrived, much later, at a quaint country house. Lionel's uncle sat dead on a kitchen chair. His arms were crossed, his milky eyes stared at us in disappointment, it seemed. Lionel did not cry. We were beyond such things.

In the basement we found the preserves collection: rows of rough-hewn wooden shelves that held thousands of jars of jam. Some were petite vessels with barely an ounce inside; others were as large as footballs, made of heavy green glass. Each batch was labeled in a careful hand: Cassis 1990; Fraises et Framboises 1965; Griotte 1981. We ate three jars each. The sugar exploded in my mouth. It made my fillings tingle.

"We will not tell Harriet," said Lionel, licking his teeth. "She would have us launched off the death chute by now. Our supplies are running low and soon she will starve. We must be strong and show no mercy."

We shook hands. We agreed to take only a duffel bag of jam back to Paris. We would hide it in a secret location and eat it only when we were sure Harriet was not around.

HARRIET WOULD GO out early in the morning, scavenging for food. She never found a scrap, and slowly, she wasted away. For awhile, it seemed as though her huge biceps would not give, but then, they too faltered. She went gaunt. Lionel and I weren't much better, but the jam at least gave us energy.

HARRIET COLLAPSED TO the stage floor. "That's it for me," she said.

She lay there for days, but never once did her eyes close. A couple of times I went to check if she was still breathing. "Get the hell away from me, lecher!" she'd say.

But soon she became like an infant, babbling and singing strange songs. She cried sometimes, then licked at her tears, desperate for salt.

She wouldn't die. It became painful to see her, so I was relieved when one night I woke up to find Lionel spoon-feeding her a late-eighties marmalade.

"I have broken the pact," he said to me. "In the morning you will execute me."

"Of course not," I said.

"We have done something terribly wrong," Lionel said.

I looked down at Harriet and could see that she was gone. A dollop of orange marmalade stuck to her stiff blue tongue.

THE BALLAD OF HARRIET

THE SCENE:

The Unimpeachable Goddess (Harriet) is flying high up in the clouds with giant wings made of fine cashmere. She is draped in jewelry and she shimmers in the morning light. In her arms she cradles the skeleton of a puppy. She carries a banner that reads "For God's Sake Don't Put Me On "That Stupid Fucking Slide."

THE UNIMPEACHABLE GODDESS

(Stares angrily into the audience, but does not say a word)

END.

We are in some endless office building in the sixteenth arrondissement. Lionel has his mallets going and I'm zinging pencils at a metal filing cabinet. Then the glass stops shattering and I hear Lionel say, "You must come here and look at this." It's a memo about a Bastille Day celebration.

We ride our bicycles to a storage facility at the edge of the city. It takes a while to pry the lock open. Inside we find crates labeled "Class B Fireworks." Next to the crates are a giant switchboard and a generator full of diesel fuel. We load everything into the trailer and move it back to the Odeon.

We build a cockpit out of plywood and mount the switchboard inside to serve as our control panel. Lionel unpacks the fireworks. We connect the igniters with xlr cable and distribute the charges to various places in the theater. We put Blue Thunder, 1000's of Silver Coconut, and Brocade Crown in the balcony. Gold Willow and Chrysanthemum with Blue Pistil go in the stage boxes. Along the flies we attach White Tiger Tail roman candles and we stuff the stage manager's desk full of Dragon Eggs with Thunder canister shells. We attach the biggest charges, Fire God and Rising Twinkling Tail to Red Gamboge to Twinkling Chrysanthemum, along with four sticks of dynamite we found in Sven Ronsen's old room, to the space beneath our cockpit's flight chairs. We aim the Crackling Royal Ceiling Lamps and Watercolor Glitter aerial shells at the stage curtains. We rub everything down in diesel fuel.

GRAND FINALE

THE SCENE:

Cape Canaveral, Florida. Morning. Two astronauts prepare for liftoff. Rex (Lionel) is an ace pilot. Sebastian (Me) is a scientist testing the effects of antigravity on a jar of premium vintage fruit spread.

REX

(hands at the switchboard)

Ten seconds to liftoff. You ready for this?

SEBASTIAN

You bet.

Sebastian opens the jam jar and sticks his nose within. He inhales flavors of mint and sweet berries, of bitter spice. He bites into the jelled concoction. He chews it. He savors it. Here on earth it will taste different. It will have an earthly flavor that is important to understand before he compares it to the outer space flavor. Every experiment must have a control.

REX

... two ... one.

END.

WHAT IS IT
WHEN GOD SPEAKS?

Diane Williams

THIS WAS THE house which once inspired a sister of one of the guests to declare, "People kill for this."

That's where the guests were on the perfect afternoon, not the sister.

It was a shame the afternoon became evening before the guests had to leave, not that anything was less lovely because it was evening.

There was a tender quality to the lack of light on the screened-in porch where they all were sitting, as there was also a tender quality to the small girl too old to be in the highchair, but she was not too large for it. The girl had insisted on being put up into the highchair. She was ecstatic to be locked in behind the tray.

Her hands tapped and stroked the tray. She was not up there to eat. It was past time for that.

Behind the handsomest man on the porch was the array of green leafy trees and lawn, lit by a yard light, veiled by the black porch screen. The handsomest man smiled. He was serene.

Across from him, his wife, on the chintz flowered sofa, who was the most beautiful woman, smiled serenely at her husband. She said of her husband to the others, "He never wants to leave here. Look at him! He likes it. The food is so good and healthy. He can keep swimming in your pool. Look at him! He is so happy!"

Then the man lifted up his girl, who was smaller than the other girl, who had never ever-his girl-been irritable even once, there at that house, and he put her up onto his shoulders. Her short legs were pressing on his chest, because he had wanted her legs to do that.

Her father felt his daughter on the back of him and on the front of him, on top of him, all at once. She was slightly over his head too, her head was. Her light heels were tapping lightly on his chest. He took her hands in his. She was ready for the dive that would not be possible unless he would fling her from him.

He should.

KRAFTMARK

Matthew Derby

BURTSON WAS WADING calf-deep in a foresty bog, following close behind the guide, a small man in fussy khaki fatigues. The diffuse, lame half-light of dusk punched out the detail of trees in the canopy, making them look like massive, buoyant cartoon mascots, maybe a clutch of parade floats for the dead. The color had run out of the world, and they still had not found Alan.

Every time he found a capsized landmine, Burtson was sure it was the last thing he'd see. The mines in this area were different from what he'd come to know through television, word of mouth, knowledge wafers, and childhood memory. The mines he remembered were crisp and angular. They radiated a colorful sphere of dread, and the dread was what kept people from going where they weren't supposed to go. It was a perfect system. These, though, were barely visible at the surface of the swamp. They had an animal quality, like squat snapping turtles, except that, instead of taking an assworth's flesh from your shoulder, like the real turtles, they would pound you with a bucket of bent nails going a thousand miles per. These were mines like animals that washed on shore after a tsunami-rigid, translucent whipfish that made you sure there was a God out alone in the universe, hunched over some dense ball of gas, wishing up the most fantastic creatures just to watch them gorge on their peers and rut like jackhammers.

"THIS LOOKS THE same as the last stretch," he huffed to the guide, light on breath from the struggle to drag his desk and accessories through the dense, sluggish undergrowth that pulled at his delicate loafers with each step.

Toshikazu did not turn, just shook his head, holding up one hand to beg for silence.

"Okay, okay. No talking. I get your drift. I can appreciate that. Meanwhile, we're walking around in circles, my slacks are, well, I couldn't even give them away at this point. I mean, they're toast."

Burtson had hired Toshikazu from an ad in the back pages of a monthly magazine for harpooning enthusiasts. Burtson was not interested in harpoons or the people who built and serviced them, but he liked the idea that he could be a collector of things. He liked the thought that he could be master of some great weapon-that he could lean toward a tablemate at dinner and explain how sailors hundreds of years ago managed to pierce the tough armor of a whale's hide without batteries or sonar or rocket fuel. Toshikazu's ad took up a quarter of the page-a crudely designed block of text accompanied by a low-resolution photo of a man hanging upside down from a palm tree, aiming a blowgun at an off-camera target. The text read, "Taking care of loved ones can be a difficult and painful process. Kitano Toshikazu has trained in academies in Europe IV and South Paraguay for over seventeen years. He will treat your loved ones with grace and respect in their final moments, ensuring that they leave this world in peace and with dignity." Burtson did not want his son to feel pain when the time came to take care of him. Worse, though, was the thought of how the boy would be treated afterward if Burtson left the job to the special ops team at KraftMark. They were brutal and immoral, especially Douglas. Rand had once shown Burtson a snapshot of his son's corpse. The kid had packed a clutch of naked, hairlined friends into one of the branded delivery trucks and crashed the thing into a transmission tower. It made the evening news statewide, which was as good as a death sentence. Rand and Burtson were standing side by side in the corporate restroom at KraftMark headquarters in Delphine. Rand held up a blunt, smudgy Polaroid in the blank wallspace at which Burtson was staring absently. "They gave me this instead of Julian," he said. The boy's naked body was covered in cigarette burns. A pair of panty hose yanked over his head made his face distorted and fat, as if he'd been stung by bees. There were a couple of finishing nails buried in his chest, right through the nipples. Burtson didn't want that for his son. It wasn't necessary.