Anyone would have described Cotton as clever. He built things. He fixed things. He looked at things, studied them like an artist studied his subject, turned them, touched, sometimes tasted, closed his eyes and caressed them until he knew them with the kind of intimate familiarity usually reserved for a twin or a beloved.
Cotton was not joined to anyone though, and had no twin—in fact he had no one—but these things seldom, if ever, occurred to him. He was self-possessed. Content in his solitude.
He knew people certainly; the village wasn’t far and they all came to him eventually. But his neighbors no longer invited him to meals or the modest celebrations they cherished. They knew he would decline uncomfortably, dissemble, and say ‘another time’, although he never meant it.
His hands were limber, facile and graceful. His eyes, like pooled Lapis veined with gold, were set deep, almost as if under a cliff of bone, saw everything, noticed, knew to be still until the way of a thing, the heart of a thing, was known. His name—Cotton—had been born in his childhood, but was not his given name. He had been a tow-head, but when the silky hair of infancy gave way to a few months growth, new hair had appeared; white as the simple shifts of skin the young women wore on their joining days. His hair became curly and soft, and the adults took to patting his small head for luck and called him their ‘Little Cotton ball’. They had never seen hair so white. Naturally, the nickname stuck and eventually was truncated to Cotton.
But as he grew in stature and skill, he grew apart as well. He wasn’t shy, nor did he seem morose or unhappy. He was merely quiet, comfortable in his own head, and prone to wandering imaginations. Cotton did not avoid people—in fact, over the years and to his eventual surprise, he found himself the village wise man. People came to him with questions and troubles, fears, heartache and suspicions. His willingness to listen, which was more the result of unfailing courtesy than any sense of intimate concern, gave the impression that he had found a calling. His silence drew them, led them to believe he had been imbued with a gift unique to him alone.
His home set him apart as well. The villagers, indeed all people known to them, built with rock and mud, when they built at all, using timber as rough lintels and other supports, but fashioning their spaces on both the limitations and strengths of native stone. Cotton built a home of wood. He lived outdoors for two years, under a rude shelter and lean-to, while he thought and watched and studied the trees and how they grew, how they bent to the wind and why. Only then did he begin to fell the trees and split them with rough stone wedges, using rocks as mallets, so he could study the wood itself, the grains and patterns, the flow of it, the breath and heart of it. He learned how to tell the heart from the sap wood, how to deal with limbs as they grew inside the tree, eventually erupting through the bark. He fashioned tools to work the wood, adz stones and scrapers, working from intuition alone, and practiced with them until he knew the secrets of the mighty trees, how best to treat them, how long to wait before working them, and how to orient the grain for the best strength and the greatest economy. He never thought about beauty. Two years had turned to eight, and still he slept on the ground, tending his little garden, endlessly observing, practicing, experimenting. Finally he began to search for the timber he knew he would need and dragged them to the place he had chosen, villagers helping, mostly to see what he might be doing. Felling trees was beyond the scope of their understanding, but the wind always blew many of them down. He separated the logs by function. These would become the beams, these the lintels and braces, these others were for roofing and walls. When he judged them dry, he worked methodically, one task at a time, neither hurrying nor dawdling, picturing the next stoke in his mind, feeling the blow before he struck it, and holding the entire image before him always. He worked from first light to last light each day for months, his years of preliminary labor and study allowing him to make few mistakes and to design a stout structure based on the forms always in his head.
He set his home on the rise of a hill, adjacent to a rock outcropping which would afford shelter from rain and prevailing winds, as well as protection from raids. The structure followed the lines of the cliffs, the curving striations of the rock, subtle over-hang and cove-like forms which reminded him of the shells he had found along the edge of the Farthing Sea. It looked nothing like the villagers’ homes, the stout and strong and plain structures nestled in the little valley a short walk down-river. It seemed to rise from the ground unbidden, as if a part of the sand and stone and forest, natural and abiding. He set clever openings in the walls and filled them with mica from the mine over the mountain in order to let light into the rooms. He designed the rafters to be useful for storage and drying skins. He fashioned latches of wood and cured leather, made hinges from the hardest wood, and set his skins around, as robes and rugs, each exactly where it needed to be. His hearth and chimney were exquisitely fashioned of worked stone, the draw efficient, the ambient heat maximized by the placement of large stones around the crude fire-box.
He declared it finished on the day winter arrived, bringing sleet and snow from the north, with ice forming along the banks of the river. Three rooms, which was unheard of in the village. The main room where he cooked and ate and did all those things an enigmatic man might do, a small room for his pallet with its own small fireplace and hearth, and an even smaller one where he could store things. Everyone else built one room, large enough to hold a growing family, and small enough to hold the beams of timber which held up the thatching on the pitched roofs.
On that evening, when he announced to himself the end of his labors, never thinking of the years at all, he dressed in his warm skins, the coarse, woven undergarments acting as a mid-barrier, the thick fur hide nothing more than a hooded wrap thrown over the head and shoulders, bereft of clasps or other such devices, and went out into the darkening day-end to scout up the little river a ways, looking for sign of any animals he might want to trap or hunt. All the men hunted, even Shaman’s and wise men, even tinkerers like Cotton. The trails were full of the prints of fur-bearing kin, as well as birds and the small but dangerous cats which prowled the hills and mountains further away. There were few people living around the Farthing Sea and Cotton knew winter would not be a hardship. Game would be plentiful, he had a store of wild berries and roots, a few vegetables he knew were good to eat and his loud friend, the one called Teller, had brought a new kind of grain with him from his trek over the mountains. The village had grown a good crop of the little golden kernels and put it up in clay jars stacked in the caves above the village. As a member of the village a portion of the grain was his, even though he had not helped grow it. After all, he fixed things, and knew things, and these skills were as important to the villagers as farming or hunting.
He took note of the best places to set snares and plodded back to the new dwelling, his feet booted with thick hide from the Whistlers, the large, antlered Elk. He was thinking about the antlers the great beasts grew each year in the Moon of Death, and how one might cut a piece of the horn and fasten it to a hide and then cut a hole in another piece so that the antler tip could be threaded through. He could see it in his head as he walked, his breath billowing out his mouth and nostrils, unseen in the dark. Two small holes on one side, and thread a string of sinew through them, wrap the horn tip with them then do it again and again until it could be knotted and sealed with hot bees wax. Then pass the horn through the other hole—he could see how it would work, how tying it in the middle would allow both halves to stay put on the other side of the hide. Cotton smiled as he walked. It would work. He spent the rest of the time wondering what it might be good for.
He had left a small oil lamp burning in his home, and through the mineral in one of the holes he’d put in the walls, he saw a shadow move, someone going from the door to the fire, he thought. He was not surprised, people came to see him and never cared much as to time or day and night.
He shuffled snow from his feet and opened the door to the pleasant structure, ducked his head and stepped inside. A young girl, no more than three hands of years, sat huddled in a robe of woolly fur, wrapped up around herself as if trying to pull her own body into a ball and vanish. He knew her. She was the third daughter of the village Headman. Her name was Spring because her mother had been fetching water when she came. The Headman and his woman had four daughters and three sons. Others had been born but had flown back to the Place Where Life Began on the same day. One had died of a sickness no one had seen before. The Shaman had been helpless, but had done his best. It was how the world was, and no one argued or complained about it. A person might as well complain about the sun rising, or trees dying each year—what would such complaining change?
“Spring,” Cotton said her name, almost in a whisper. “It is late. The hunters are out. You should not be here alone.”
She turned her head to face him, the light from the fire dancing shadows across her cheek and one eye. Her hair was long and dark, with streaks of ocher in it, and she kept it braided like the other girls. He had seen such a face many times. Something troubled her. Her eyes told him everything but the exact problem. She had been crying. His people did not cry much, so it must be something bad.
He pulled the fur over his head and set in onto a peg in the wall, then sat in on of his thick furs in front of the fire, opposite the girl. He would wait and eventually she would decide to talk. But it took a while.
When she did, it was in between barely controlled bursts of sobbing, her chest rising, breath catching in short gasps.
“I have lain with Hunter’s boy, Good Spear,” she told him. Her eyes were wide. Even now the sound of her deed surprised her, took her breath away and frightened her. How had she managed to say the thing at all, he wondered, if she was this frightened.
Their people’s law concerning such things was plain. One did not lay with another unless the Headman and Shaman approved and joined them. There were good reasons for such a restriction and Cotton knew them all. It was he, after all, who had reasoned out the connection between seeding a woman and the birth of a child. Some still did not believe such a thing, but he knew it was true and so did most of the women. He thought carefully, slowly, looking into the heart of her words and seeing the distant outcomes as if standing on a high peak and looking down into the future.
“Why?” He asked. Spring looked at him with anguish.
“He . . . he drew me,” the girl told him. “Is there a magic to these things? Because I could not help myself. A spirit took me and hid my mind from me. I wanted only Good Spear and thought of nothing else.”
Cotton nodded. He had heard such things before. The seeding spirit was powerful, he knew. It overcame a person, drove them to the act. Those who were joined were free to pursue that spirit with one another except on sacred days, but never with anyone else. It was the law, and Cotton knew why better than most.
“There is a spirit,” he told the girl. “When did it take you?”
Spring looked down and away from him, letting the fire draw her attention.
“Has the spirit visited you more than once?” He asked, confident of the answer.
She nodded without looking up. He could see new tears falling, glinting in the firelight like drops of crystal. She wiped across her nose with a forearm.
“Has your blood flown from you?”
Spring turned back and was able to look at him as she nodded.
“You are making a child,” he told her. No need to be gentle. She knew. But this time she didn’t respond.
“Headman will be angry,” he said. And this is why she had come. Her father might kill her. He would certainly beat her, possibly make her a slave and give her to some unjoined man. She was terrified.
He did not tell her this was the result of her actions; of letting herself be carried away by the seeding spirit. She knew it already and there was no reason to dwell on what could not be undone.
“What will happen to Good Spear,” she asked, her voice trembling.
Cotton made the gesture for ‘who can say?’ and mentioned a few possibilities, all of which she knew. Good Spear would be punished and that would end his part in the broken law. Women were held to a higher accountability. They made children and the people would vanish from the land without the new ones. This was one of the reasons they were careful to follow the law. They had to be sure each child would be cared for, kept safe and taught the ways of the people. Her child would have no people. It would have no village, no place to which it could return from its sojourn. If the Headman, her father, allowed it to live.
He looked into the fire for a while and the girl remained silent. In the village they taught the children the correct behavior when visiting Cotton. When he was quiet, thinking, they were to let him be. He spoke only when he deemed himself ready to do so and children were not to disturb him. She readjusted the robe she had wrapped around her. It was one of his but this kind of sharing was proper among the people. What one had was their own, but when someone needed a thing, it belonged to everyone.
“You will come here to live in this house,” he told her. There was no room for discussion in his tone. She hid her fear and waited.
“Your father will be angry and you should be away from him. Your wrong will shame your family and they cannot keep you, but I am alone. There will be no wrong if I take you for a hearth girl.” It was decided. She knew what would happen. In the morning Cotton would walk to the village and speak with her father. They would come to an arrangement which would no doubt include her banishment, and they would all pretend she was gone. Cotton could use some help. He hoped her mother had taught her well.
Spring finally gave him a single, weak nod and lowered her head onto her chest.
He pointed to a corner of the room. “Sleep there,” he said, and took a bowl of stew from the hearth and retreated into his sleeping room, as he called it.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
El Lobo Blanco
From the journals of alejandro Diego Ometecuhtli
August 12, 1827. I have suffered from a sense of dread for weeks now. Long ago this affliction tormented me, haunted me, and the aftermath of my foreboding was too horrible to relate, even in a private journal such as this. Dreams have come to me again, dark visions of grotesque shadows, faintly outlined by somber, unnatural light, dim and ill-perceived. I struggle to move but cannot. I try to make the vision clear but it dances just out of the reach of clarity, taunting me, mocking the light I crave. A Power is coming. I sense it. I fear it. But I cannot name it. It’s features are forever in motion, blurred at the edges as if out of pace with time, it’s umbra deep in another sphere, one of sinister origins and devilish ambitions. It is not the same as before—this I know. It is ancient, forgotten, lost in the dust and stone of ages, older even than my kind, older than man or even the primeval hominids who roamed the earth before the floods. It has no history and no heart. It is not spirit but is incarnate.
I have denied it, hoping it would vanish as only a dream, but now, even waking I sense it, cringe from it and find myself searching for places to hide, to run to ground and pull the earth, the sweet, loving earth, over me as a blanket. But I cannot. I know this. I am not a coward but I am so very tired.
Has it a purpose? What does it seek? Annihilation? Immolation at the hands of the Source? Or does it seek these things for humankind—for me and those like me? I am morose these days—I know it but am unable to shake the feelings of dread. Now I know that I must wait and let it reveal itself. Only then can it be approached. Only then can it be challenged, if challenge is even possible.
The villagers do not feel it. They go about their daily chores with purpose and light hearts. I cannot tell them. For a generation I have kept myself apart and now they are not comfortable with me around. Eventually I will have to approach them and reveal all but until then I will listen and watch, feed and continue my work. Only the virgin, Maria, still comes to my lair with offerings. She brings the gifts the others are now too timid to present. She seems to have no fear. Often I see her resting on the ledge, her back to the stone, reading or weaving baskets. But even when she knows I am there, deeper in the caverns, she does not approach me or violate my privacy. She bides her time and then returns down the mountain to the village with no stories, no lies or tales of horror or of beauty. At night I hear them talk in their beds and in the sweet darkness of their verandas, honeysuckle and sage making the air a perfume, and I know she has not mislead them. They whisper, wondering if I am still here, or if some disaster has befallen me but Maria bids them have faith. She tells them she knows I am with them. She tells them change is coming with the storms of Autumn, that they should make ready and be watchful. She is their new Chamán but they will not know for another brace of years. Not until the children being born are running along the canyon trails and learning the joy of their lives in the village and of their destinies. Thus it has ever been.
So many times malevolent forces have called me forth and each time I have answered. I will do so again, but one day I will be bested and I fear my ignorant and sweet-tasting brothers will fall to one manifestation or another. What then? What of my race and their collected dreams and destinies—the unique thing that they are?
I will sleep now. The Moon of the Open Eye is coming and I must rest. Maria will bring the offerings and I will feed and they will know that I am still among them, guarding them, watching over them as if a flock of helpless sheep. But I love them! I have always loved them! Soon I will be called upon to find a way to love them all while they revile me in return. I pray that I am up to that thankless task.
October 17, 2008 Montana State Prison
“The volunteers are in the holding cell doctor.” Martia Bennett shuddered as she always did when waiting for her employer to speak. His voice was cruel—she knew the idea was silly but could not explain it better than that. It lacked humanity, compassion. It sidled out like a skulking apparition rather than a normal person’s voice. It was cold and thin and petulant. He had never treated her with anything but genteel grace and still she cringed. If she could have, she would have quit the job and found another but the bills, the ranch, her husbands care—it all cost and there was no one else.
“Thank you Martia. When the guards are finished with the restraints have them brought into the exam room one at a time and alphabetically please.”
“Yes sir.” It was awful. Two years of that insufferable voice and his pretentious airs. If Rance were well he’d have seen to Doctor Maliphant right enough. Her Rance didn’t take to rude men. And he didn’t take to anyone making her unhappy or nervous. Why, he’d take on hell itself for her. She smiled to herself as the image took hold of her. Yessir, hell itself.
The doctor threw on his crisp lab coat and moved like an ill wind through the outer door and into the suite of rooms set aside for his work. Martia remembered when he first arrived, a new defense grant in his pocket and acting as if the warden were merely his gofer. The army must really want this rabies vaccine. Something had to be done about the new bio-weapons—one of which was Synth-Rabies—coming out of the Middle East. She knew that and approved of the research, but having to work with this . . . person . . . was beginning to feel like too much, even for the sake of her country. One injection, before or after being infected, that’s what Maliphant claimed. She was yet to see any results though. Mostly he tinkered around with his equipment, giving her orders in that imperious, whiny voice.
But now he was ready to start human trials. She had the signatures of twenty volunteers, all lifers, all living on Death Row. If the new vaccine worked they might have their sentences commuted. She was one of many who did not approve but the Doctor had powerful friends in Washington and industry. The prisoners were ugly men, inside and out. She had a gift for those kinds of things—seeing into the heart of someone—and only one person in the whole facility was darker than the twenty volunteers—Doctor Maliphant himself. Of course the warden loved him. Money poured in. Prestige followed on its coattails and Warden Lassiter was basking in his new celebrity. He’d been on Twenty-Twenty and The Factor. He’d been to New York to receive an award for his forward-looking policies and innovative programs—all because of Doctor Maliphant. But she knew better. Nothing but trouble would come of this experiment. And the only person she could talk to who would listen was Rance . . . dear, broken Rance in his chair and blanket, with one half of his body lost to him. And to her.
The first of the inmates was escorted into her little office, sullen, one skinny, one larger, with food stains on his shirt, and she motioned the two of them through the same door the doctor had whisked through moments ago. It was her responsibility to monitor each man’s vitals while Maliphant administered the three doses of three new, powerful, synthetic drugs. Two days ago they had been inoculated with a live rabies virus. They had been told that if his concoction didn’t work they would have to go through the two-week cycle of shots like anyone else but that they wouldn’t be in any danger. If it did work, they would then be infected with Synth-Rabies and go through the whole process again.
The first one was large, typically muscled and tattooed, his head freshly shaved, the ubiquitous tear-drop dark against his left eye. He wore a Fu Manchu moustache and was covered with scars. He knew he was never getting out—why not have some fun? The man sat on the exam table and leaned back until his head was resting on the little pillow. They had all been coached. Martia busied herself with the routine of a check-up, the last of several, and waited for Maliphant to finish his preparations. Then she attached the restraints to his arms and legs. The inmate allowed her to buckle him down, his eyes following her, each movement. A guard stood to one side, with another out in the office—just in case, but so far there had been no incidents.
“Everything seems normal Doctor,” she told him. “No changes, no surprises. He has a slight temperature and his heart rate is up as expected.”
“Thank you my dear.” He always called her ‘my dear’. Well she wasn’t his ‘dear’, and she never would be. Her body shivered again. The day could not be over soon enough.
Doctor Maliphant turned and came over to the exam table, holding a stainless steel tray with three large syringes. Martia began looking for a vein in the man’s arm. She had to insert an IV and administer a medium dose of Versaid and Fentynal. The experimental procedure was painful and government protocol required that they reduce pain and discomfort to whatever extent was reasonably possible.
“Comfortable?” the doctor smiled a thin line, lipless and banal, at the inmate.
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Nurse Bennett is going to give you something to relax you and dull the pain. As you recall from the orientation, this is not without its discomforts.” The man barely responded. These people were such dweebs. He’d like to see ‘em join a gang—then they could talk about ‘discomfort’. They’d never get passed the initiation. Martia pushed and the liquid vanished into his vein. It only took a moment before he began to feel—pretty good, really, and then the doc bent over him.
“First dose Mister Ortega.” He always called them Mister. The greenish fluid, thicker than water, flowed into his body. Almost instantly he began to feel his arm getting warm, then hot, but in his current condition he couldn’t build up any anxiety over it. Another minute and his whole body was tingling as if he was wrapped in a heating pad like his mom used to have but as big as a sleeping bag. No one spoke. The doc just watched the second hand on a wall clock.
“Number two.” He said after a few minutes and pushed again. The same thing happened, warm, then hot, then a strange tingling. After four minutes both drugs had had a chance to combine and suddenly a new sensation shot through Mister Ortega’s body. It felt as if he’d been given a good jolt of electricity. His back arched and his face contorted. Even through the potent combination of drugs it hurt like hell. It felt like four billion knives the size of ants or something were digging into each separate nerve ending. And it was getting worse. Ortega gritted his teeth. No way was he going to let them see him lose it.
“Number three Mister Ortega.” Push. Hot, hotter, and he was burning up from the inside out. He thrashed—he could see the fire in his minds eye as it raced through him. It was like something he’d seen on TV. He was being burnt to a crisp! From a distance he heard someone scream, a long, animal sound with no humanity in it at all and he passed out.
The Doctor took a stethoscope and listened to the inmates chest.
“That went well, don’t you think?” He asked and pressed a button on the wall. Two orderlies on loan from the Veterans hospital in town came in with a gurney, undid the restraints and hefted the limp figure onto their cart.
“Send in the next one please.” Maliphant said to their backs.
And so it went, all day long as the sun arced the sky, men coming in, tough, dangerous in ways normal people didn’t understand, lost to hope and reason and any sense of a future. Men who believed only in doing what they pleased. And each of them, when the third push found them, screamed their desire to die, pleaded with God or the devil or someone to end it, and then found relief in whatever world the unconscious mind reveals. Except two never passed out. One just kept screaming until Maliphant told Martia to give him another dose of sleepy juice and the other seemed to experience only a mild irritation. He described it as ‘about a million bees stinging me’ but seemed to not be affected much by the ordeal.
The borrowed orderlies wheeled each man down the silent hall, past two small wards of indolent inmates, the rubber wheels squeaking on the polished floor, and set them in two neat rows on either side of a large, empty room with old, ten-paned windows looking north toward the distant hills. Nurse Martia and her staff took up residence in the hall, down at the far end where a makeshift station had been set up amidst stacks of old journals and mattresses so soiled and infected that the prison was not allowed to dump them. Right there in the room—fifteen old mattresses which had cradled every condition and rampant infection, every disease and unpleasant usurpation the human body could experience. Men had died in them, festering, wallowing, crying like children for their mothers as the medical staff played cards or watched TV and waited for them to die. The prison had a long history of indifference. Maliphant told them it wouldn’t matter, the mattresses had been there so long they were inert by now. The inmates were criminal detritus—how would they know any different?
During the night the condemned men woke to a fevered stupor. One at a time, in no discernable order or perceived pattern. Martia and her nurses, all men, checked on them and found each with symptoms of influenza. Headaches, ‘flu-skin’; that sensitive sensation people often got which made any motion and every touch a burden, fever and cyclic nausea. But it wasn’t the flu. She had expected the symptoms. All the inmates had been briefed on what they could expect based on the primate trials. The ordeal lasted about forty-eight hours and one by one they improved until Maliphant was reasonably confident they could be released back to their miserable lives, back to crazed, incontinent, cellies who either never spoke or never shut up—and all of whom lied constantly. Most states didn’t put lifers together. Usually they at least got their own cell. But in Montana, a state with few people, they had a prison population problem and no one saw any reason to not double them up. If they killed each other so what? They were all sentenced to death anyway, either by lethal injection or one of many horrors that culled the elderly from the herd.
By the end of the week the ground was covered with a thin layer of premature snow and the twenty men were once again ensconced in the folds of their despondent lives.
The two orderlies stayed. Once a day they escorted the volunteers, one at a time, along with armed guards, to Nurse Martia and she gave them each a thorough check-up. Maliphant seemed distracted as those days were crossed off the calendar, as if her were waiting for something, expecting some kind of event only a man like him could welcome. He barely spoke to Martia and not at all to anyone else.
Two weeks went by. The snow melted, mild weather returned. Maliphant became agitated, stopped eating and paced incessantly. If she hadn’t known better she would have suspected him of taking Methamphetamines or some other kind of upper.
At the same time the men began to demand more food. This was not unusual but it seemed more strident than normal. Most of them had accounts at the commissary and they were buying up everything they could find, anything edible. It went on for three days and nights and then seemed to fade as quickly as it had erupted. She estimated they had gone from about two thousand calories a day to somewhere around eight thousand—or more—at lest the ones who could afford it.
Then, one evening when he should have been long gone to his home and mysterious wife, Maliphant walked into the infirmary and smiled at his nurse.
“There’s a full moon tonight Mrs. Bennett.” He announced. She looked at the wall behind him, the drab green, out of style forty years ago, the barred window and ancient hat stand. She kept a calendar there from 1957—Andrew Wyeth. She loved it despite the revelations in recent years of his affair. The current calendar said it was October 14th.
“I hadn’t noticed doctor,” she replied, hoping he was not leading up to some kind of celebration or ritual or worse.
“Things might get interesting tonight,” he confided, “please call me if anything untoward takes place. Whatever the time.” He smiled again and a vision of desolation swept through her.
“Like what doctor?” She didn’t like this posturing one bit. He was scaring her.
“Oh, I’m not expecting anything—not specific anyway—but if something does happen, I need to be informed immediately. Do you understand?”
She nodded, a little too quickly, cowed by his tone. “It would help if I knew what to look for,” she tried again, losing her resolve to stand up to him
“You’ll know it when you see it.” He turned and left, his heels softly padding down the empty hall in the poor light of too few bulbs of too low wattage.
* * *
It was late when she remembered what he’d said. The prison had been unusually quiet all evening. The guards had not been called out once and Death Row was like a mausoleum. Her infirmary was one of two—this small one for Death Row and another across the quad for the rest of the prison population, so she didn’t always know when something was happening.
She had taken the last reports of the orderlies an hour before and written up her nightly. This part of the shift was often pleasant. She was free to read or knit or watch television. Only an emergency would break that routine until her replacement arrived at six o’clock.
She enjoyed Tom Clancy books and was half-way through Rainbow Six when the alarms began. At first they were far away, well on the other side of the complex but almost immediately her own building was wailing and screeching—begging someone to find a problem and fix it.
One of the orderlies came in with a question on his face. “I haven’t heard anything”, she told him. “It just started to ring.” He frowned and looked back out the door, down the hall, trying to think what to do first.
“Should I go check on them?”
“We can do it here,” she reminded him and pointed to the bank of monitors along the back of her station. He rolled his eyes and stepped in, letting the door close behind him. The other orderly was down on the wing with the sergeant, playing cards.
Martia looked at the clock and noted the time on her log, wrote ‘alarms sounding’ and told the computer where to look first with a deft twitch of the mouse. It was ten fifty-three, P.M.
Through the brick and stone, the old pipes and concrete floors, they heard a muffled boom, then another and then another alarm, different. Clanking, yelling, all distant, as if they were listening to bad speakers broadcasting something happening in the recent past. Another boom, the sound of men shouting and then another sound—one to chill the blood and make the moon want to pull itself behind thick clouds and hide. It was an animal sound Martia thought . . . but not. She looked at the orderly, a large man, young and in good shape, and he was staring back at her.
“You ever heard that before?” He asked and she shook her head.
“Now that I have I wish I hadn’t.” She tried a smile but could feel it fade before it had time to mature. Martia was a ranchers daughter and wife. She’d lived in Montana all her life and she didn’t scare easily. She’d heard a lot of different sounds before, animals and humans at their best and worst, but nothing like this—it was . . . terrifying, visceral, as if affecting them on some level they hadn’t even know existed.
Ron, the orderly, reached over and turned the office lights off, leaving only the glow of the monitor. Martia silently pushed the button to it and waited while that light faded as well. In the dark they could see the quad, the yards and other buildings. The lights were all on, guards at their posts—nothing was obviously wrong. She could see no smoke or fire, no prisoners running free.
She stepped over to the radio on Maliphant’s desk and picked it up, depressed the pad and spoke into it.
“One, this is Ten. You there?” She waited a moment while Ron kept watching out the window.
“Ten, One here. Go ahead.” Each time one of them lifted off the pad there was a static click, like a brief and weak bolt of lightening had flashed.
“What’s going on? We can’t see anything.”
“Not sure Ten. We’re looking into it. All the boards are green but we can’t raise Eight.”
“At all?” Eight was the Sergeant’s station downstairs. In her building.
“Everything’s working—it’s not the equipment. Nobody’s answering.”
Martia liked the staff—especially the guards. She couldn’t understand where all the negative press came from. These guys were all professional and friendly and unfailingly courteous. And they were all experienced at handling emergencies—which were regular events at a prison. But Bill, the shift Lieutenant, sounded nervous.
“Should we go check it out?” She dreaded the answer.
“Absolutely not!” He put all the firmness he could into his answer. “Stay put. I’m inserting a Search team. We’ll let them figure it out okay?”
“No argument here,” she told him gratefully. Ron was looking at her as if she were crazy.
“Would you really go down there?” He asked in a way that made her think if she had, it would probably have been alone.
“I don’t know . . .” What else could she say?
The . . . sound . . . came again. This time closer and was followed by awful clanging, as if someone were throwing cell doors down the tier. She raised the radio again.
“Don’t you leave us Bill,” she told the Lieutenant. “And keep talking, please!”
“You got it Martia—not going anywhere.”
Silence settle over the yard again. Ron, still peering out the window, motioned her over, pointing. She looked and could see the Team advancing on the main door, their shields and armor reflecting sparks from the security lights around the grounds.
She looked up and past the facility and saw the moon, bright, pale and white as a bride’s dress, throwing it’s reflected light down on the hills beyond the prison. It seemed harsh to her, different, as if it were prophesying, or involved in it’s own mad vision. She could envision it as a huge pallid eye, a witness to all things nocturnal.
The team was gone, inside the building she assumed. Ron went back to the door and locked it then began to pull the old-fashioned shades down on the windows looking out on the hall.
They heard shots and men shouting and Ron let slip the chord he was pulling. The shade slapped up and made a flapping sound. He pulled it down again and hurried over to the window while more shots were fired, this time full-automatic.
The sound roared again but this time it came from several sources and then men screaming, the shouting gone, replaced by nearly inhuman, inarticulate pleas for life . . . or something, they couldn’t be sure.
Martia remembered she was supposed to call Maliphant if anything ‘untoward’ happened. She let a cough burst from her, half-laugh, half-frantic breath.
Quiet again. No guns, no men shouting or screaming, no monstrous wailing. Someone had turned the alarms off and she hadn’t even noticed.
The main doors burst—they could hear the hinges tear loose and glass flying—and both of them looked down, trying to keep their own profiles to a minimum.
A clutch of figures ran out into the moonlight, stooped, wrongly shaped and moving too fast for men, even though they were on two feet. The light was good but the distance long and Martia’s brain refused to accept the impulses her eyes were sending. Gunfire broke out again, this time the towers firing down into the quad. Now prisoners were yelling from their cells, screaming, banging whatever they could find against the walls and doors, demanding someone let them out, shouts of what’s going on? And lemme outa here! Ringing across the yard.
Bullets ripped the hard ground like gravel being thrown at crepe paper. The running figures didn’t slow. When they got to the first fence two of them stopped and tore it open with their bare hands, holding the pieces back while the others ran through. Bullets followed them. Martia could see them impact the running—things. One of them faltered, fell and rose again. A hail of rounds pounded into it while it staggered forward and then it fell again and stopped moving.
The others never looked back. They went through three more fences and then—it was a long way away and the light back there wasn’t as good—it looked as if they jumped over the stone wall that marked the prisons boundary. She raised her hand, started to point and mumble numbers.
“Seventeen,” Ron told her quietly, as if he were afraid something would hear.
She stopped, taking his word.
“Ten? One.” Her radio said.
Startled, she raised the box and spoke into it, her voice cracking.
“Ten. Go.”
“Stay put. Who’s with you?”
“Ron.”
“Okay. Don’t leave the office. Are either of you armed?” She looked at Ron, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Can you barricade the door?”
She looked around then her gaze fell on the windows covered by blinds.
“We have a whole bank of windows Bill.”
“Oh, right. Damn.” He barked.
“We’re coming but it will take a few minutes. Do what you can to stay safe.”
“From what?” She asked, not wanting to know.
Bill hesitated, she could sense it in the delay of the radio. “Wish I knew.” The radio hissed. “Hang tight,” it said and fell silent.
August 12, 1827. I have suffered from a sense of dread for weeks now. Long ago this affliction tormented me, haunted me, and the aftermath of my foreboding was too horrible to relate, even in a private journal such as this. Dreams have come to me again, dark visions of grotesque shadows, faintly outlined by somber, unnatural light, dim and ill-perceived. I struggle to move but cannot. I try to make the vision clear but it dances just out of the reach of clarity, taunting me, mocking the light I crave. A Power is coming. I sense it. I fear it. But I cannot name it. It’s features are forever in motion, blurred at the edges as if out of pace with time, it’s umbra deep in another sphere, one of sinister origins and devilish ambitions. It is not the same as before—this I know. It is ancient, forgotten, lost in the dust and stone of ages, older even than my kind, older than man or even the primeval hominids who roamed the earth before the floods. It has no history and no heart. It is not spirit but is incarnate.
I have denied it, hoping it would vanish as only a dream, but now, even waking I sense it, cringe from it and find myself searching for places to hide, to run to ground and pull the earth, the sweet, loving earth, over me as a blanket. But I cannot. I know this. I am not a coward but I am so very tired.
Has it a purpose? What does it seek? Annihilation? Immolation at the hands of the Source? Or does it seek these things for humankind—for me and those like me? I am morose these days—I know it but am unable to shake the feelings of dread. Now I know that I must wait and let it reveal itself. Only then can it be approached. Only then can it be challenged, if challenge is even possible.
The villagers do not feel it. They go about their daily chores with purpose and light hearts. I cannot tell them. For a generation I have kept myself apart and now they are not comfortable with me around. Eventually I will have to approach them and reveal all but until then I will listen and watch, feed and continue my work. Only the virgin, Maria, still comes to my lair with offerings. She brings the gifts the others are now too timid to present. She seems to have no fear. Often I see her resting on the ledge, her back to the stone, reading or weaving baskets. But even when she knows I am there, deeper in the caverns, she does not approach me or violate my privacy. She bides her time and then returns down the mountain to the village with no stories, no lies or tales of horror or of beauty. At night I hear them talk in their beds and in the sweet darkness of their verandas, honeysuckle and sage making the air a perfume, and I know she has not mislead them. They whisper, wondering if I am still here, or if some disaster has befallen me but Maria bids them have faith. She tells them she knows I am with them. She tells them change is coming with the storms of Autumn, that they should make ready and be watchful. She is their new Chamán but they will not know for another brace of years. Not until the children being born are running along the canyon trails and learning the joy of their lives in the village and of their destinies. Thus it has ever been.
So many times malevolent forces have called me forth and each time I have answered. I will do so again, but one day I will be bested and I fear my ignorant and sweet-tasting brothers will fall to one manifestation or another. What then? What of my race and their collected dreams and destinies—the unique thing that they are?
I will sleep now. The Moon of the Open Eye is coming and I must rest. Maria will bring the offerings and I will feed and they will know that I am still among them, guarding them, watching over them as if a flock of helpless sheep. But I love them! I have always loved them! Soon I will be called upon to find a way to love them all while they revile me in return. I pray that I am up to that thankless task.
October 17, 2008 Montana State Prison
“The volunteers are in the holding cell doctor.” Martia Bennett shuddered as she always did when waiting for her employer to speak. His voice was cruel—she knew the idea was silly but could not explain it better than that. It lacked humanity, compassion. It sidled out like a skulking apparition rather than a normal person’s voice. It was cold and thin and petulant. He had never treated her with anything but genteel grace and still she cringed. If she could have, she would have quit the job and found another but the bills, the ranch, her husbands care—it all cost and there was no one else.
“Thank you Martia. When the guards are finished with the restraints have them brought into the exam room one at a time and alphabetically please.”
“Yes sir.” It was awful. Two years of that insufferable voice and his pretentious airs. If Rance were well he’d have seen to Doctor Maliphant right enough. Her Rance didn’t take to rude men. And he didn’t take to anyone making her unhappy or nervous. Why, he’d take on hell itself for her. She smiled to herself as the image took hold of her. Yessir, hell itself.
The doctor threw on his crisp lab coat and moved like an ill wind through the outer door and into the suite of rooms set aside for his work. Martia remembered when he first arrived, a new defense grant in his pocket and acting as if the warden were merely his gofer. The army must really want this rabies vaccine. Something had to be done about the new bio-weapons—one of which was Synth-Rabies—coming out of the Middle East. She knew that and approved of the research, but having to work with this . . . person . . . was beginning to feel like too much, even for the sake of her country. One injection, before or after being infected, that’s what Maliphant claimed. She was yet to see any results though. Mostly he tinkered around with his equipment, giving her orders in that imperious, whiny voice.
But now he was ready to start human trials. She had the signatures of twenty volunteers, all lifers, all living on Death Row. If the new vaccine worked they might have their sentences commuted. She was one of many who did not approve but the Doctor had powerful friends in Washington and industry. The prisoners were ugly men, inside and out. She had a gift for those kinds of things—seeing into the heart of someone—and only one person in the whole facility was darker than the twenty volunteers—Doctor Maliphant himself. Of course the warden loved him. Money poured in. Prestige followed on its coattails and Warden Lassiter was basking in his new celebrity. He’d been on Twenty-Twenty and The Factor. He’d been to New York to receive an award for his forward-looking policies and innovative programs—all because of Doctor Maliphant. But she knew better. Nothing but trouble would come of this experiment. And the only person she could talk to who would listen was Rance . . . dear, broken Rance in his chair and blanket, with one half of his body lost to him. And to her.
The first of the inmates was escorted into her little office, sullen, one skinny, one larger, with food stains on his shirt, and she motioned the two of them through the same door the doctor had whisked through moments ago. It was her responsibility to monitor each man’s vitals while Maliphant administered the three doses of three new, powerful, synthetic drugs. Two days ago they had been inoculated with a live rabies virus. They had been told that if his concoction didn’t work they would have to go through the two-week cycle of shots like anyone else but that they wouldn’t be in any danger. If it did work, they would then be infected with Synth-Rabies and go through the whole process again.
The first one was large, typically muscled and tattooed, his head freshly shaved, the ubiquitous tear-drop dark against his left eye. He wore a Fu Manchu moustache and was covered with scars. He knew he was never getting out—why not have some fun? The man sat on the exam table and leaned back until his head was resting on the little pillow. They had all been coached. Martia busied herself with the routine of a check-up, the last of several, and waited for Maliphant to finish his preparations. Then she attached the restraints to his arms and legs. The inmate allowed her to buckle him down, his eyes following her, each movement. A guard stood to one side, with another out in the office—just in case, but so far there had been no incidents.
“Everything seems normal Doctor,” she told him. “No changes, no surprises. He has a slight temperature and his heart rate is up as expected.”
“Thank you my dear.” He always called her ‘my dear’. Well she wasn’t his ‘dear’, and she never would be. Her body shivered again. The day could not be over soon enough.
Doctor Maliphant turned and came over to the exam table, holding a stainless steel tray with three large syringes. Martia began looking for a vein in the man’s arm. She had to insert an IV and administer a medium dose of Versaid and Fentynal. The experimental procedure was painful and government protocol required that they reduce pain and discomfort to whatever extent was reasonably possible.
“Comfortable?” the doctor smiled a thin line, lipless and banal, at the inmate.
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Nurse Bennett is going to give you something to relax you and dull the pain. As you recall from the orientation, this is not without its discomforts.” The man barely responded. These people were such dweebs. He’d like to see ‘em join a gang—then they could talk about ‘discomfort’. They’d never get passed the initiation. Martia pushed and the liquid vanished into his vein. It only took a moment before he began to feel—pretty good, really, and then the doc bent over him.
“First dose Mister Ortega.” He always called them Mister. The greenish fluid, thicker than water, flowed into his body. Almost instantly he began to feel his arm getting warm, then hot, but in his current condition he couldn’t build up any anxiety over it. Another minute and his whole body was tingling as if he was wrapped in a heating pad like his mom used to have but as big as a sleeping bag. No one spoke. The doc just watched the second hand on a wall clock.
“Number two.” He said after a few minutes and pushed again. The same thing happened, warm, then hot, then a strange tingling. After four minutes both drugs had had a chance to combine and suddenly a new sensation shot through Mister Ortega’s body. It felt as if he’d been given a good jolt of electricity. His back arched and his face contorted. Even through the potent combination of drugs it hurt like hell. It felt like four billion knives the size of ants or something were digging into each separate nerve ending. And it was getting worse. Ortega gritted his teeth. No way was he going to let them see him lose it.
“Number three Mister Ortega.” Push. Hot, hotter, and he was burning up from the inside out. He thrashed—he could see the fire in his minds eye as it raced through him. It was like something he’d seen on TV. He was being burnt to a crisp! From a distance he heard someone scream, a long, animal sound with no humanity in it at all and he passed out.
The Doctor took a stethoscope and listened to the inmates chest.
“That went well, don’t you think?” He asked and pressed a button on the wall. Two orderlies on loan from the Veterans hospital in town came in with a gurney, undid the restraints and hefted the limp figure onto their cart.
“Send in the next one please.” Maliphant said to their backs.
And so it went, all day long as the sun arced the sky, men coming in, tough, dangerous in ways normal people didn’t understand, lost to hope and reason and any sense of a future. Men who believed only in doing what they pleased. And each of them, when the third push found them, screamed their desire to die, pleaded with God or the devil or someone to end it, and then found relief in whatever world the unconscious mind reveals. Except two never passed out. One just kept screaming until Maliphant told Martia to give him another dose of sleepy juice and the other seemed to experience only a mild irritation. He described it as ‘about a million bees stinging me’ but seemed to not be affected much by the ordeal.
The borrowed orderlies wheeled each man down the silent hall, past two small wards of indolent inmates, the rubber wheels squeaking on the polished floor, and set them in two neat rows on either side of a large, empty room with old, ten-paned windows looking north toward the distant hills. Nurse Martia and her staff took up residence in the hall, down at the far end where a makeshift station had been set up amidst stacks of old journals and mattresses so soiled and infected that the prison was not allowed to dump them. Right there in the room—fifteen old mattresses which had cradled every condition and rampant infection, every disease and unpleasant usurpation the human body could experience. Men had died in them, festering, wallowing, crying like children for their mothers as the medical staff played cards or watched TV and waited for them to die. The prison had a long history of indifference. Maliphant told them it wouldn’t matter, the mattresses had been there so long they were inert by now. The inmates were criminal detritus—how would they know any different?
During the night the condemned men woke to a fevered stupor. One at a time, in no discernable order or perceived pattern. Martia and her nurses, all men, checked on them and found each with symptoms of influenza. Headaches, ‘flu-skin’; that sensitive sensation people often got which made any motion and every touch a burden, fever and cyclic nausea. But it wasn’t the flu. She had expected the symptoms. All the inmates had been briefed on what they could expect based on the primate trials. The ordeal lasted about forty-eight hours and one by one they improved until Maliphant was reasonably confident they could be released back to their miserable lives, back to crazed, incontinent, cellies who either never spoke or never shut up—and all of whom lied constantly. Most states didn’t put lifers together. Usually they at least got their own cell. But in Montana, a state with few people, they had a prison population problem and no one saw any reason to not double them up. If they killed each other so what? They were all sentenced to death anyway, either by lethal injection or one of many horrors that culled the elderly from the herd.
By the end of the week the ground was covered with a thin layer of premature snow and the twenty men were once again ensconced in the folds of their despondent lives.
The two orderlies stayed. Once a day they escorted the volunteers, one at a time, along with armed guards, to Nurse Martia and she gave them each a thorough check-up. Maliphant seemed distracted as those days were crossed off the calendar, as if her were waiting for something, expecting some kind of event only a man like him could welcome. He barely spoke to Martia and not at all to anyone else.
Two weeks went by. The snow melted, mild weather returned. Maliphant became agitated, stopped eating and paced incessantly. If she hadn’t known better she would have suspected him of taking Methamphetamines or some other kind of upper.
At the same time the men began to demand more food. This was not unusual but it seemed more strident than normal. Most of them had accounts at the commissary and they were buying up everything they could find, anything edible. It went on for three days and nights and then seemed to fade as quickly as it had erupted. She estimated they had gone from about two thousand calories a day to somewhere around eight thousand—or more—at lest the ones who could afford it.
Then, one evening when he should have been long gone to his home and mysterious wife, Maliphant walked into the infirmary and smiled at his nurse.
“There’s a full moon tonight Mrs. Bennett.” He announced. She looked at the wall behind him, the drab green, out of style forty years ago, the barred window and ancient hat stand. She kept a calendar there from 1957—Andrew Wyeth. She loved it despite the revelations in recent years of his affair. The current calendar said it was October 14th.
“I hadn’t noticed doctor,” she replied, hoping he was not leading up to some kind of celebration or ritual or worse.
“Things might get interesting tonight,” he confided, “please call me if anything untoward takes place. Whatever the time.” He smiled again and a vision of desolation swept through her.
“Like what doctor?” She didn’t like this posturing one bit. He was scaring her.
“Oh, I’m not expecting anything—not specific anyway—but if something does happen, I need to be informed immediately. Do you understand?”
She nodded, a little too quickly, cowed by his tone. “It would help if I knew what to look for,” she tried again, losing her resolve to stand up to him
“You’ll know it when you see it.” He turned and left, his heels softly padding down the empty hall in the poor light of too few bulbs of too low wattage.
* * *
It was late when she remembered what he’d said. The prison had been unusually quiet all evening. The guards had not been called out once and Death Row was like a mausoleum. Her infirmary was one of two—this small one for Death Row and another across the quad for the rest of the prison population, so she didn’t always know when something was happening.
She had taken the last reports of the orderlies an hour before and written up her nightly. This part of the shift was often pleasant. She was free to read or knit or watch television. Only an emergency would break that routine until her replacement arrived at six o’clock.
She enjoyed Tom Clancy books and was half-way through Rainbow Six when the alarms began. At first they were far away, well on the other side of the complex but almost immediately her own building was wailing and screeching—begging someone to find a problem and fix it.
One of the orderlies came in with a question on his face. “I haven’t heard anything”, she told him. “It just started to ring.” He frowned and looked back out the door, down the hall, trying to think what to do first.
“Should I go check on them?”
“We can do it here,” she reminded him and pointed to the bank of monitors along the back of her station. He rolled his eyes and stepped in, letting the door close behind him. The other orderly was down on the wing with the sergeant, playing cards.
Martia looked at the clock and noted the time on her log, wrote ‘alarms sounding’ and told the computer where to look first with a deft twitch of the mouse. It was ten fifty-three, P.M.
Through the brick and stone, the old pipes and concrete floors, they heard a muffled boom, then another and then another alarm, different. Clanking, yelling, all distant, as if they were listening to bad speakers broadcasting something happening in the recent past. Another boom, the sound of men shouting and then another sound—one to chill the blood and make the moon want to pull itself behind thick clouds and hide. It was an animal sound Martia thought . . . but not. She looked at the orderly, a large man, young and in good shape, and he was staring back at her.
“You ever heard that before?” He asked and she shook her head.
“Now that I have I wish I hadn’t.” She tried a smile but could feel it fade before it had time to mature. Martia was a ranchers daughter and wife. She’d lived in Montana all her life and she didn’t scare easily. She’d heard a lot of different sounds before, animals and humans at their best and worst, but nothing like this—it was . . . terrifying, visceral, as if affecting them on some level they hadn’t even know existed.
Ron, the orderly, reached over and turned the office lights off, leaving only the glow of the monitor. Martia silently pushed the button to it and waited while that light faded as well. In the dark they could see the quad, the yards and other buildings. The lights were all on, guards at their posts—nothing was obviously wrong. She could see no smoke or fire, no prisoners running free.
She stepped over to the radio on Maliphant’s desk and picked it up, depressed the pad and spoke into it.
“One, this is Ten. You there?” She waited a moment while Ron kept watching out the window.
“Ten, One here. Go ahead.” Each time one of them lifted off the pad there was a static click, like a brief and weak bolt of lightening had flashed.
“What’s going on? We can’t see anything.”
“Not sure Ten. We’re looking into it. All the boards are green but we can’t raise Eight.”
“At all?” Eight was the Sergeant’s station downstairs. In her building.
“Everything’s working—it’s not the equipment. Nobody’s answering.”
Martia liked the staff—especially the guards. She couldn’t understand where all the negative press came from. These guys were all professional and friendly and unfailingly courteous. And they were all experienced at handling emergencies—which were regular events at a prison. But Bill, the shift Lieutenant, sounded nervous.
“Should we go check it out?” She dreaded the answer.
“Absolutely not!” He put all the firmness he could into his answer. “Stay put. I’m inserting a Search team. We’ll let them figure it out okay?”
“No argument here,” she told him gratefully. Ron was looking at her as if she were crazy.
“Would you really go down there?” He asked in a way that made her think if she had, it would probably have been alone.
“I don’t know . . .” What else could she say?
The . . . sound . . . came again. This time closer and was followed by awful clanging, as if someone were throwing cell doors down the tier. She raised the radio again.
“Don’t you leave us Bill,” she told the Lieutenant. “And keep talking, please!”
“You got it Martia—not going anywhere.”
Silence settle over the yard again. Ron, still peering out the window, motioned her over, pointing. She looked and could see the Team advancing on the main door, their shields and armor reflecting sparks from the security lights around the grounds.
She looked up and past the facility and saw the moon, bright, pale and white as a bride’s dress, throwing it’s reflected light down on the hills beyond the prison. It seemed harsh to her, different, as if it were prophesying, or involved in it’s own mad vision. She could envision it as a huge pallid eye, a witness to all things nocturnal.
The team was gone, inside the building she assumed. Ron went back to the door and locked it then began to pull the old-fashioned shades down on the windows looking out on the hall.
They heard shots and men shouting and Ron let slip the chord he was pulling. The shade slapped up and made a flapping sound. He pulled it down again and hurried over to the window while more shots were fired, this time full-automatic.
The sound roared again but this time it came from several sources and then men screaming, the shouting gone, replaced by nearly inhuman, inarticulate pleas for life . . . or something, they couldn’t be sure.
Martia remembered she was supposed to call Maliphant if anything ‘untoward’ happened. She let a cough burst from her, half-laugh, half-frantic breath.
Quiet again. No guns, no men shouting or screaming, no monstrous wailing. Someone had turned the alarms off and she hadn’t even noticed.
The main doors burst—they could hear the hinges tear loose and glass flying—and both of them looked down, trying to keep their own profiles to a minimum.
A clutch of figures ran out into the moonlight, stooped, wrongly shaped and moving too fast for men, even though they were on two feet. The light was good but the distance long and Martia’s brain refused to accept the impulses her eyes were sending. Gunfire broke out again, this time the towers firing down into the quad. Now prisoners were yelling from their cells, screaming, banging whatever they could find against the walls and doors, demanding someone let them out, shouts of what’s going on? And lemme outa here! Ringing across the yard.
Bullets ripped the hard ground like gravel being thrown at crepe paper. The running figures didn’t slow. When they got to the first fence two of them stopped and tore it open with their bare hands, holding the pieces back while the others ran through. Bullets followed them. Martia could see them impact the running—things. One of them faltered, fell and rose again. A hail of rounds pounded into it while it staggered forward and then it fell again and stopped moving.
The others never looked back. They went through three more fences and then—it was a long way away and the light back there wasn’t as good—it looked as if they jumped over the stone wall that marked the prisons boundary. She raised her hand, started to point and mumble numbers.
“Seventeen,” Ron told her quietly, as if he were afraid something would hear.
She stopped, taking his word.
“Ten? One.” Her radio said.
Startled, she raised the box and spoke into it, her voice cracking.
“Ten. Go.”
“Stay put. Who’s with you?”
“Ron.”
“Okay. Don’t leave the office. Are either of you armed?” She looked at Ron, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Can you barricade the door?”
She looked around then her gaze fell on the windows covered by blinds.
“We have a whole bank of windows Bill.”
“Oh, right. Damn.” He barked.
“We’re coming but it will take a few minutes. Do what you can to stay safe.”
“From what?” She asked, not wanting to know.
Bill hesitated, she could sense it in the delay of the radio. “Wish I knew.” The radio hissed. “Hang tight,” it said and fell silent.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
The Seaweed Bar and Grill
The sun, round and pulsing and full of promise, bore down with no apparent rancor and touched everything with light, normal in all respects but causing a rarified effect because of the recent blue-sky rain.
J. Beluga Worthington listened to his shoes impact the sidewalk, trying to think of a word which might describe such a sound, sitting on so fine a balanced edge between wet and dry, but he could not. Words eluded him primarily. So he turned into a place between two buildings, not an alley and not a street, too narrow for either, where the drying sky seemed distant and the water would sit all day, waiting for that brief moment of sunlight when it could properly reflect, shimmering in errant breezes, and he walked to the end of it and found a door. The building on his right was made of stone and brick, erected years ago at the turn of the century according to a plaque on its façade which Jay had not seen. It held offices mostly and two store-front businesses, a travel agency and one of those ubiquitous neighborhood shops which carried one of everything and had evolved, over the years, into a specialty shop catering to its regulars so that one could purchase a bottle of single-malt scotch no one had ever heard of and a particular brand of Scandinavian chocolate to which several old ladies down the block were happily addicted. The building on the left was new, comparatively speaking, and was made of concrete and glass and steel, not entirely soulless but of another species than most of its neighboring structures. It too housed offices and a bank and had its own parking garage which made it popular with the commuters who worked downtown. Some people, when seeing the building on the left for the first time, saw fleeting visions of heroic dioramas, frozen in time like ants in amber or of strangely romantic scenes Mediterranean in nature and for which no cause had ever been found. Jay could not know it but the phenomenon was frequent enough and intense enough that doctors had been consulted and physicists employed but any explanation was not, as yet, forthcoming. A few alarmists had suggested consulting a Priest but in downtown Salt Lake City only two blocks from Temple Square the idea had been quickly vetoed. The structural interstitial slot in which Jay found himself stopped abruptly at the brick rear of yet another building, but both of those encasing him laterally held a door as if he were in a Lovecraftian gameshow forcing him to choose. In an actual Lovecraft novel J. Beluga would have scaled the rearward wall, clinging precariously to the rough mortar squeezed so long ago from the bricks by half-crazed masons, tearing his fingers and hands to shreds until, having reached the top, he would be stark raving mad and find himself staring, bereft of reason, at the widening maw of a soulless universe. Sensing the third alternative Jay turned to the left, perhaps because of his genetic heritage since he made no conscious choice and tried the knob on the old, weathered and constantly vandalized metal door. It was not locked. H.P., a veteran of such things, would have advised turning around at that point but he was long dead and J. Beluga Worthington had never heard of that writer, or very many authors of fiction for that matter.
Jay stopped for a moment thinking of the time, years ago, when his brother the worlds-youngest-drunk had dared him to go through a similar door and that had turned out well so he felt as if a positive precedent had been set. He opened it and stepped through, stopping on a narrow landing where stairs went both up and down. A bare bulb lit the stairwell with light of such a malignant quality that Jay momentarily lost faith in his decision but then he heard music and felt better. The door, attached to security hinges, closed behind him with a gurgling sigh. He stood for a moment, determining the source of the sound echoing off of walls so in need of paint that they actually wept at night between the watchman’s rounds.
Down. Or so it seemed. He took three steps and waited with his head cocked to his favorite ear. Yes, it was coming from down there somewhere. He continued on, picking up the hint of an odor as well, the music becoming stronger with each creaking step until he found the bottom after an unusual twenty-three steps. Another bulb. The music sounded like World, that nascent genre adopted in recent years by the dispossessed and those with yearning souls, taking influences from around the globe and fusing them in another futile attempt to hide from God. Another door confronted him, this one mostly textured glass with the words “Seaweed Bar and Grill” professionally painted on the glass.
Seaweed Bar and Grill? He thought to himself. Jay would never be mistaken for a genius but even he knew that was an odd name. Still, he was unencumbered, the errand he had been on proving fruitless—and between jobs, which he almost always was, so he opened that door too, stepped inside and was instantly assailed by the most intense and odious smell he had ever encountered. It was not entirely horrible, like rotting garbage or vomit drying in the sun, but it was not pleasant either. It was strong, mostly. At this point it occurred to Jay to wonder why the Seaweed Bar and Grill had no advertising out on the street. At least he hadn’t seen any.
Even from where he stood at the very front of the place he could tell it rambled. Rooms sat haphazard, connected by arches or swinging doors or ramps—he could see no steps up or down.
Tables lined one wall to his left where someone had painted a large window on the blank wall, a tropical scene of palms and ferns and brightly colored birds. Lamps with green glass shades hung from a high ceiling over each table which in turn were covered with white butcher paper. A counter stood high and cluttered beyond the tables and opposite the counter were more tables and a jukebox and an old air-hockey table, neither of which worked—he could tell at a glance from the heavy dust and a certain unevenness of cant. Items of a sea-going nature decorated the place by virtue of having been placed with reckless abandon and never moved again. An anchor too heavy to lift and obviously too large to have been taken through the door was propped in a corner, rusty and crusted with the desiccated remains of aquatic life. Nets and floats were hung like a knot-tied night sky, their frozen billows reminiscent of eternal waves, their carefully tied and woven loops forever bereft of fish.
Jay looked up and found the source of the lingering scent. Dried seaweed, hanging like laundry from nylon fishing line strung across the ceiling in a pattern mimicking the brain-waves of schizophrenic air-traffic controllers, exuded oceanic chemicals, pheromone of cephalopod, fertile odor of roe, which Jay was sure he could actually see as they rippled like heat across the room.
“Its actual seaweed” he said aloud even though he had seen no other human, and reached up to pull a sliver of the stuff from one of the long fronds. He brought it to his nose and sniffed, nodded, then took a bite. It tasted like the ocean but nastier. It was tough and leathery, semi-dried and wrinkling in the way of things meant to be forever moist.
From further back ruffling sounds carried to him and a head poked around the far corner of the counter.
“Oh hey!” It smiled. An upper front tooth was gold and caught the light with a momentary twinkle. “Didn’t hear you come in. What can I get ya?”
J. Beluga did not answer right away. He was staring at the outsized head topping the strangely shaped body. Whoever it was waited patiently, letting him take all the time he needed.
“Something to eat?”
He realized he had been looking too hard. Rude.
“Yeah. What’d’ya have?”
“I’m partial to food but a few of our regulars like to eat Styrofoam and glue.”
“Foods good.” Twittering filtered in, female, plural.
“Tuna sandwich?”
“Is that a joke?”
“It’s a good sandwich, my own recipe.”
“Do you have potato chips?” The gold tooth loomed in a mad smile.
“Oh yeah!” The head disappeared.
Jay looked around again and decided he was the only person in the place other than the head and whatever unembodied creatures were twittering in the back. He decided on a table, one near the mural and the counter both and not too close to the anchor because it looked to him as if it could plummet through the floor at any moment.
“And apple juice!” He shouted. Perhaps the nets wavered.
“Grape juice is better with tuna!” The disembodied voice shouted back from behind the cluttered counter.
“Oh.” Jay was too confused to argue.
“What’s that music?” After a few minutes he had begun to worry that the head had slipped out the back and so he spoke, hoping to generate a conversation. He could think of a lot of questions.
“Phillip Glass.” The voice answered on cue. “He’s old school avant guard.”
“It’s terrible. It actually hurts.”
“Amazing huh?” The voice suddenly sounded close and Jay turned to be startled by the asymmetric man standing behind him with a plate and a paper cup. He set them on the table. A stack of chips covered the plate except where the sandwich lay.
“Mind if I observe your technique?” The head took a chair and turned it around, sitting backwards, letting his noggin rest on an elbow and hand.
Jay looked around worried he was in a Zombie movie. “What technique?”
“How you stuff the sandwich.” Jay stared until he saw the humor buried in the bizarre and smiled, nodding and shaking his head at the same time, setting up a dangerous oscillation. He opened the sandwich by taking off the top slice and began to lay potato chips randomly over the tuna salad until he had a multi-layered stack. The slice went back on, straight down like a junk-yard magnet, and he put a massive hand over it, fingers splayed, and pressed. He liked to hear the chips break and shatter. Then he took the plastic knife and cut it diagonally, like his mother had, picked up one half and took a bite.
“Very nice.” The head decreed. “Reminds me of the music; random, atonal . . . like a criminals mind.”
“You get all that from the way I make a sandwich?” It was muffled by the food but discernable.
“It comes to me. I don’t have a lot of friends—‘cause I’m a freak and all—so I have a lot of time to think.”
Half the sandwich disappeared in silence. The music stopped and it felt to Jay like being let into heaven.
“What is this place?”
“Xanadu. Shangri-la. The hole in the wall. Valhalla.”
“It smells.”
“Part of the charm.”
“How often do you have to change the seaweed?”
“Never. We just add to it.” Jay rolled his eyes. Was it possible to like such a place?
“You like the tuna?” Head asked shyly. It was endearing.
“Best I ever had but I think the smell makes it taste this way.”
“It does. I developed the recipe with that in mind.” Jay rolled that around.
“So it would taste different elsewhere?”
A pinched face answered the question. “Horrible. I’ve tired it.”
“That’s weird.” He finished the lunch, wondering why he was there, how he had found it.
“You forgot ‘Twilight Zone’.”
The head smiled again and tooth came out like the morning. “Right. I knew I forgot one.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Head.”
Jay took it as the first effects of shock hit. “Are you serious?”
“Nickname actually but that’s what everybody calls me. It fits.” He took his hand back. “Who’re you?”
It struck him that here was a chance to change, to correct past indignities and remake himself. He’d never be back. Probably couldn’t find the place again if someone he liked bet their life on it. (He never bet his own life.) The correction would be futile, one person wide.
“J.B.” he said, becoming a romantic.
“What’s that stand for—Jules Bern?” Head chuckled the kind of laugh someone used when they knew they were being an idiot and were proud of it.
“J. Beluga . . . Worthington. The J. doesn’t stand for anything.”
“I’m actually Randall Zeno-Parkinson but I like Head better. Never met anyone with an initial for a name, that’s pretty cool.”
“I’d have gone with Zeno. That’s a great name, very pre-Socratic.” Head nodded and JB, freshly minted and feeling a sense of freedom bordering on libertine excess took a leap of faith.
“I like this place. You ever get any actual customers?”
“A few. Accidents like you. I depend on regulars.”
“People come here more than once?” He cocked his head like a bird of prey. “On purpose?”
“The Seaweed Bar and Grill has hidden charms and several mystical powers left here by the previous owner.”
JB finished his grape juice judging the combination to be superior as Head had predicted.
“You gonna come back maybe?” The question had layers. One night three years ago in Tulsa JB had walked through a similar question, his past catching up like pressure waves, his future bleak and all too certain. And here he was, still alive and in a café where no one ever came, facing another pounding.
“Yeah. Maybe . . that okay?”
“Sure, unless you aren’t wearing a shirt or go barefoot. There’s some . . . ground rules. Guidelines. Survival tips.”
“Well that makes it all worthwhile. I usually try to patronize places that need survival tips.” He leaned back. “Why?”
Head ignored the comment and the question, already concentrating on the rules. He held up a finger and bent it back with the other hand. “One.” He said. “Nothing said in here can ever leave this place.”
“Why would it?” JB asked with the innocence of a recently deflowered concubine. Head reacted to the question strangely; he was startled out of hand and stared wide-eyed for a moment.
“Okay, you got me there.” He finally said. “But still, it’s a rule.” JB nodded wisely, sensing it best to agree.
“Two,” another finger pulled back like a catapult, “The last person out has to remember to lock the door.”
JB turned his head a little, indicating with an accurate chin-point the direction he had come in. “Is that the only door?”
“Yeah. And the lock doesn’t work real good but it’s the discipline that counts y’know?”
“Is there another exit?” Head shook his head, the longish, wiry hair making a kind of mountain bush effect.
“Isn’t that illegal?” A pained expression, as if the first signs of the flux were manifesting.
“Are you one of those?” JB had never heard quite that inflection before. He intuited that nothing good could come from being “one of those.”
“Not on purpose. I just worry about fires and things. I worry, you know?”
“Well there should be another exit any time now. Swordfish is working on a tunnel under the bank.”
“Swordfish?”
Head chuckled again, sounding like small rocks being ground round in the surf. “That’s a funny story really. He’ll tell you all about it. Are you sure you’re likely to come in here again?”
“What’s the third rule?”
“Oh right. He bent back another finger with abandon. “First time you’re a customer. After that you’re a member and expected to follow the rules.”
“Member of what?”
“Hey! We’re in Salt Lake man. Have to be a private club to serve liquor.”
JB experienced some small relief. He had begun to envision an ancient cult of studied indifference or abject confusion meeting down in the Seaweed, performing alchemical experiments of a para-social nature, half biologic, half Newtonian occultism.
“I don’t drink.” He admitted, relieved to be at least in the ball park of sanity.
“Right, but some of my members do.” Head’s eyes wrinkled and one corner of his mouth twisted up in a sobering display of elasticity making a face of some kind. “It is a bar and grill” he said, making quotes in the air.
“Seriously, do other people ever come here?”
“We’re not real busy in the day time. Mostly they come around at night.”
“Are we alone right now?” He remembered the twittering earlier.
The massive head shook again like a sheep dog with a concussion. “The twins are in the back.”
“The twins.” Head had said it as if everyone on the planet but JB knew the twins were in the back.
“They’re getting ready for tonight.” He bent a fourth finger, stalling any effort to extract additional information about the twins, the coming night, or other topics currently on JB’s mind. “Fourth; you always have to tell the truth. You don’t have to say nothin’ about nothin’ if you don’t want to but if you say something it has to be the truth or at least your honest opinion.”
“What about jokes?” Head was nonplussed.
“Damn. You ask hard questions.” He closed his eyes and pinched his face into a cartoon of himself. “I guess jokes are a separate category. We like good jokes.”
“I got a joke for ya.” JB wasn’t sure why he’d said that. He only knew a few and rarely told them but this one was his favorite.
“Right now? In the daytime?”
“Is that against the rules?” Pinched face again.
“No, I guess not but it’s unorthodox.”
“I’m not even Jewish.” JB couldn’t believe he’d said it even before he was finished. He often wished there were a way to catch words as they traveled between mouth and ear and take them back, stuff them into a word pocket where they could be rearranged and recycled. But Head liked it. He smiled and then laughed a little, that watery stone sound.
“What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic and a dyslexic?” Head really thought about it, tried to think of an answer, which ruined many a joke in JB’s opinion. How were you going to figure out a nonsense riddle? He waited. Head finally shook his head.
“You got me. I don’t know.”
“Someone who lays awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.” He tried not to smile but he did every time. He loved that joke like some people loved pets or vacation spots. Head looked at him for several seconds—a typical reaction to that particular joke—and then light began to dawn on the infinitely furrowed brow. Eyes went wide (still too small for such an enormous skull) and he laughed, surprising himself, the explosion coming before he was ready which made it even better and he got control of it and took off on a serious binge, nearly falling out of his chair. Later, when it was quieter, Head wiped tears from his eyes, still smiling.
“Oh man,” his chest and shoulders bounced with internal mirth, “that was great. I love that. You’ll do JB, you’ll do.”
J. Beluga Worthington listened to his shoes impact the sidewalk, trying to think of a word which might describe such a sound, sitting on so fine a balanced edge between wet and dry, but he could not. Words eluded him primarily. So he turned into a place between two buildings, not an alley and not a street, too narrow for either, where the drying sky seemed distant and the water would sit all day, waiting for that brief moment of sunlight when it could properly reflect, shimmering in errant breezes, and he walked to the end of it and found a door. The building on his right was made of stone and brick, erected years ago at the turn of the century according to a plaque on its façade which Jay had not seen. It held offices mostly and two store-front businesses, a travel agency and one of those ubiquitous neighborhood shops which carried one of everything and had evolved, over the years, into a specialty shop catering to its regulars so that one could purchase a bottle of single-malt scotch no one had ever heard of and a particular brand of Scandinavian chocolate to which several old ladies down the block were happily addicted. The building on the left was new, comparatively speaking, and was made of concrete and glass and steel, not entirely soulless but of another species than most of its neighboring structures. It too housed offices and a bank and had its own parking garage which made it popular with the commuters who worked downtown. Some people, when seeing the building on the left for the first time, saw fleeting visions of heroic dioramas, frozen in time like ants in amber or of strangely romantic scenes Mediterranean in nature and for which no cause had ever been found. Jay could not know it but the phenomenon was frequent enough and intense enough that doctors had been consulted and physicists employed but any explanation was not, as yet, forthcoming. A few alarmists had suggested consulting a Priest but in downtown Salt Lake City only two blocks from Temple Square the idea had been quickly vetoed. The structural interstitial slot in which Jay found himself stopped abruptly at the brick rear of yet another building, but both of those encasing him laterally held a door as if he were in a Lovecraftian gameshow forcing him to choose. In an actual Lovecraft novel J. Beluga would have scaled the rearward wall, clinging precariously to the rough mortar squeezed so long ago from the bricks by half-crazed masons, tearing his fingers and hands to shreds until, having reached the top, he would be stark raving mad and find himself staring, bereft of reason, at the widening maw of a soulless universe. Sensing the third alternative Jay turned to the left, perhaps because of his genetic heritage since he made no conscious choice and tried the knob on the old, weathered and constantly vandalized metal door. It was not locked. H.P., a veteran of such things, would have advised turning around at that point but he was long dead and J. Beluga Worthington had never heard of that writer, or very many authors of fiction for that matter.
Jay stopped for a moment thinking of the time, years ago, when his brother the worlds-youngest-drunk had dared him to go through a similar door and that had turned out well so he felt as if a positive precedent had been set. He opened it and stepped through, stopping on a narrow landing where stairs went both up and down. A bare bulb lit the stairwell with light of such a malignant quality that Jay momentarily lost faith in his decision but then he heard music and felt better. The door, attached to security hinges, closed behind him with a gurgling sigh. He stood for a moment, determining the source of the sound echoing off of walls so in need of paint that they actually wept at night between the watchman’s rounds.
Down. Or so it seemed. He took three steps and waited with his head cocked to his favorite ear. Yes, it was coming from down there somewhere. He continued on, picking up the hint of an odor as well, the music becoming stronger with each creaking step until he found the bottom after an unusual twenty-three steps. Another bulb. The music sounded like World, that nascent genre adopted in recent years by the dispossessed and those with yearning souls, taking influences from around the globe and fusing them in another futile attempt to hide from God. Another door confronted him, this one mostly textured glass with the words “Seaweed Bar and Grill” professionally painted on the glass.
Seaweed Bar and Grill? He thought to himself. Jay would never be mistaken for a genius but even he knew that was an odd name. Still, he was unencumbered, the errand he had been on proving fruitless—and between jobs, which he almost always was, so he opened that door too, stepped inside and was instantly assailed by the most intense and odious smell he had ever encountered. It was not entirely horrible, like rotting garbage or vomit drying in the sun, but it was not pleasant either. It was strong, mostly. At this point it occurred to Jay to wonder why the Seaweed Bar and Grill had no advertising out on the street. At least he hadn’t seen any.
Even from where he stood at the very front of the place he could tell it rambled. Rooms sat haphazard, connected by arches or swinging doors or ramps—he could see no steps up or down.
Tables lined one wall to his left where someone had painted a large window on the blank wall, a tropical scene of palms and ferns and brightly colored birds. Lamps with green glass shades hung from a high ceiling over each table which in turn were covered with white butcher paper. A counter stood high and cluttered beyond the tables and opposite the counter were more tables and a jukebox and an old air-hockey table, neither of which worked—he could tell at a glance from the heavy dust and a certain unevenness of cant. Items of a sea-going nature decorated the place by virtue of having been placed with reckless abandon and never moved again. An anchor too heavy to lift and obviously too large to have been taken through the door was propped in a corner, rusty and crusted with the desiccated remains of aquatic life. Nets and floats were hung like a knot-tied night sky, their frozen billows reminiscent of eternal waves, their carefully tied and woven loops forever bereft of fish.
Jay looked up and found the source of the lingering scent. Dried seaweed, hanging like laundry from nylon fishing line strung across the ceiling in a pattern mimicking the brain-waves of schizophrenic air-traffic controllers, exuded oceanic chemicals, pheromone of cephalopod, fertile odor of roe, which Jay was sure he could actually see as they rippled like heat across the room.
“Its actual seaweed” he said aloud even though he had seen no other human, and reached up to pull a sliver of the stuff from one of the long fronds. He brought it to his nose and sniffed, nodded, then took a bite. It tasted like the ocean but nastier. It was tough and leathery, semi-dried and wrinkling in the way of things meant to be forever moist.
From further back ruffling sounds carried to him and a head poked around the far corner of the counter.
“Oh hey!” It smiled. An upper front tooth was gold and caught the light with a momentary twinkle. “Didn’t hear you come in. What can I get ya?”
J. Beluga did not answer right away. He was staring at the outsized head topping the strangely shaped body. Whoever it was waited patiently, letting him take all the time he needed.
“Something to eat?”
He realized he had been looking too hard. Rude.
“Yeah. What’d’ya have?”
“I’m partial to food but a few of our regulars like to eat Styrofoam and glue.”
“Foods good.” Twittering filtered in, female, plural.
“Tuna sandwich?”
“Is that a joke?”
“It’s a good sandwich, my own recipe.”
“Do you have potato chips?” The gold tooth loomed in a mad smile.
“Oh yeah!” The head disappeared.
Jay looked around again and decided he was the only person in the place other than the head and whatever unembodied creatures were twittering in the back. He decided on a table, one near the mural and the counter both and not too close to the anchor because it looked to him as if it could plummet through the floor at any moment.
“And apple juice!” He shouted. Perhaps the nets wavered.
“Grape juice is better with tuna!” The disembodied voice shouted back from behind the cluttered counter.
“Oh.” Jay was too confused to argue.
“What’s that music?” After a few minutes he had begun to worry that the head had slipped out the back and so he spoke, hoping to generate a conversation. He could think of a lot of questions.
“Phillip Glass.” The voice answered on cue. “He’s old school avant guard.”
“It’s terrible. It actually hurts.”
“Amazing huh?” The voice suddenly sounded close and Jay turned to be startled by the asymmetric man standing behind him with a plate and a paper cup. He set them on the table. A stack of chips covered the plate except where the sandwich lay.
“Mind if I observe your technique?” The head took a chair and turned it around, sitting backwards, letting his noggin rest on an elbow and hand.
Jay looked around worried he was in a Zombie movie. “What technique?”
“How you stuff the sandwich.” Jay stared until he saw the humor buried in the bizarre and smiled, nodding and shaking his head at the same time, setting up a dangerous oscillation. He opened the sandwich by taking off the top slice and began to lay potato chips randomly over the tuna salad until he had a multi-layered stack. The slice went back on, straight down like a junk-yard magnet, and he put a massive hand over it, fingers splayed, and pressed. He liked to hear the chips break and shatter. Then he took the plastic knife and cut it diagonally, like his mother had, picked up one half and took a bite.
“Very nice.” The head decreed. “Reminds me of the music; random, atonal . . . like a criminals mind.”
“You get all that from the way I make a sandwich?” It was muffled by the food but discernable.
“It comes to me. I don’t have a lot of friends—‘cause I’m a freak and all—so I have a lot of time to think.”
Half the sandwich disappeared in silence. The music stopped and it felt to Jay like being let into heaven.
“What is this place?”
“Xanadu. Shangri-la. The hole in the wall. Valhalla.”
“It smells.”
“Part of the charm.”
“How often do you have to change the seaweed?”
“Never. We just add to it.” Jay rolled his eyes. Was it possible to like such a place?
“You like the tuna?” Head asked shyly. It was endearing.
“Best I ever had but I think the smell makes it taste this way.”
“It does. I developed the recipe with that in mind.” Jay rolled that around.
“So it would taste different elsewhere?”
A pinched face answered the question. “Horrible. I’ve tired it.”
“That’s weird.” He finished the lunch, wondering why he was there, how he had found it.
“You forgot ‘Twilight Zone’.”
The head smiled again and tooth came out like the morning. “Right. I knew I forgot one.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Head.”
Jay took it as the first effects of shock hit. “Are you serious?”
“Nickname actually but that’s what everybody calls me. It fits.” He took his hand back. “Who’re you?”
It struck him that here was a chance to change, to correct past indignities and remake himself. He’d never be back. Probably couldn’t find the place again if someone he liked bet their life on it. (He never bet his own life.) The correction would be futile, one person wide.
“J.B.” he said, becoming a romantic.
“What’s that stand for—Jules Bern?” Head chuckled the kind of laugh someone used when they knew they were being an idiot and were proud of it.
“J. Beluga . . . Worthington. The J. doesn’t stand for anything.”
“I’m actually Randall Zeno-Parkinson but I like Head better. Never met anyone with an initial for a name, that’s pretty cool.”
“I’d have gone with Zeno. That’s a great name, very pre-Socratic.” Head nodded and JB, freshly minted and feeling a sense of freedom bordering on libertine excess took a leap of faith.
“I like this place. You ever get any actual customers?”
“A few. Accidents like you. I depend on regulars.”
“People come here more than once?” He cocked his head like a bird of prey. “On purpose?”
“The Seaweed Bar and Grill has hidden charms and several mystical powers left here by the previous owner.”
JB finished his grape juice judging the combination to be superior as Head had predicted.
“You gonna come back maybe?” The question had layers. One night three years ago in Tulsa JB had walked through a similar question, his past catching up like pressure waves, his future bleak and all too certain. And here he was, still alive and in a café where no one ever came, facing another pounding.
“Yeah. Maybe . . that okay?”
“Sure, unless you aren’t wearing a shirt or go barefoot. There’s some . . . ground rules. Guidelines. Survival tips.”
“Well that makes it all worthwhile. I usually try to patronize places that need survival tips.” He leaned back. “Why?”
Head ignored the comment and the question, already concentrating on the rules. He held up a finger and bent it back with the other hand. “One.” He said. “Nothing said in here can ever leave this place.”
“Why would it?” JB asked with the innocence of a recently deflowered concubine. Head reacted to the question strangely; he was startled out of hand and stared wide-eyed for a moment.
“Okay, you got me there.” He finally said. “But still, it’s a rule.” JB nodded wisely, sensing it best to agree.
“Two,” another finger pulled back like a catapult, “The last person out has to remember to lock the door.”
JB turned his head a little, indicating with an accurate chin-point the direction he had come in. “Is that the only door?”
“Yeah. And the lock doesn’t work real good but it’s the discipline that counts y’know?”
“Is there another exit?” Head shook his head, the longish, wiry hair making a kind of mountain bush effect.
“Isn’t that illegal?” A pained expression, as if the first signs of the flux were manifesting.
“Are you one of those?” JB had never heard quite that inflection before. He intuited that nothing good could come from being “one of those.”
“Not on purpose. I just worry about fires and things. I worry, you know?”
“Well there should be another exit any time now. Swordfish is working on a tunnel under the bank.”
“Swordfish?”
Head chuckled again, sounding like small rocks being ground round in the surf. “That’s a funny story really. He’ll tell you all about it. Are you sure you’re likely to come in here again?”
“What’s the third rule?”
“Oh right. He bent back another finger with abandon. “First time you’re a customer. After that you’re a member and expected to follow the rules.”
“Member of what?”
“Hey! We’re in Salt Lake man. Have to be a private club to serve liquor.”
JB experienced some small relief. He had begun to envision an ancient cult of studied indifference or abject confusion meeting down in the Seaweed, performing alchemical experiments of a para-social nature, half biologic, half Newtonian occultism.
“I don’t drink.” He admitted, relieved to be at least in the ball park of sanity.
“Right, but some of my members do.” Head’s eyes wrinkled and one corner of his mouth twisted up in a sobering display of elasticity making a face of some kind. “It is a bar and grill” he said, making quotes in the air.
“Seriously, do other people ever come here?”
“We’re not real busy in the day time. Mostly they come around at night.”
“Are we alone right now?” He remembered the twittering earlier.
The massive head shook again like a sheep dog with a concussion. “The twins are in the back.”
“The twins.” Head had said it as if everyone on the planet but JB knew the twins were in the back.
“They’re getting ready for tonight.” He bent a fourth finger, stalling any effort to extract additional information about the twins, the coming night, or other topics currently on JB’s mind. “Fourth; you always have to tell the truth. You don’t have to say nothin’ about nothin’ if you don’t want to but if you say something it has to be the truth or at least your honest opinion.”
“What about jokes?” Head was nonplussed.
“Damn. You ask hard questions.” He closed his eyes and pinched his face into a cartoon of himself. “I guess jokes are a separate category. We like good jokes.”
“I got a joke for ya.” JB wasn’t sure why he’d said that. He only knew a few and rarely told them but this one was his favorite.
“Right now? In the daytime?”
“Is that against the rules?” Pinched face again.
“No, I guess not but it’s unorthodox.”
“I’m not even Jewish.” JB couldn’t believe he’d said it even before he was finished. He often wished there were a way to catch words as they traveled between mouth and ear and take them back, stuff them into a word pocket where they could be rearranged and recycled. But Head liked it. He smiled and then laughed a little, that watery stone sound.
“What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic and a dyslexic?” Head really thought about it, tried to think of an answer, which ruined many a joke in JB’s opinion. How were you going to figure out a nonsense riddle? He waited. Head finally shook his head.
“You got me. I don’t know.”
“Someone who lays awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.” He tried not to smile but he did every time. He loved that joke like some people loved pets or vacation spots. Head looked at him for several seconds—a typical reaction to that particular joke—and then light began to dawn on the infinitely furrowed brow. Eyes went wide (still too small for such an enormous skull) and he laughed, surprising himself, the explosion coming before he was ready which made it even better and he got control of it and took off on a serious binge, nearly falling out of his chair. Later, when it was quieter, Head wiped tears from his eyes, still smiling.
“Oh man,” his chest and shoulders bounced with internal mirth, “that was great. I love that. You’ll do JB, you’ll do.”
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