Quicksilver(39)
A last tunnel abruptly turned upward. I soared at a terrible velocity, as though ascending a long missile silo, in the grip of existential dread. When I erupted out of the earth, I was in a city afire from its center outward to every borough, under a low sky that reflected the flames as if even Heaven were ablaze. Sudden sound burst through streets iced with broken glass: screams of terror, howls of wordless rage, curses, pleas, lunatic laughter, rattling gunfire, explosions, sirens, horns blaring, vehicles racing from nowhere to nowhere—a celebration of nihilism in the name of justice that is really vengeance. Everywhere, outrages were committed without fear of consequences: savage gang rapes, beatings with clubs and tire irons and chains, vicious murders in a war of all against all, the crowds driven by lust and bloodlust, by lust for power and lust for money, and by the lust that is known as envy. A shrieking horse galloped past me, pulling a burning carriage. A sobbing woman ran with a bloody baby in her arms. A boy of five or six wandered shell-shocked toward one mortal fate or another, as civilization collapsed in a sea of fire. And throughout the chaos moved those creatures that Bridget called the Screamers, scanning the carnage with what eyes they might have. Their slithery tentacular fingers writhed as if they could feel the misery in the cries of their enemies. Their maws worked as if they were greedily drinking the pain of the dying, themselves without a wound, as though they operated under some royal imprimatur that made them untouchable.
Barefoot, in pajamas, I staggered backward, into the bathroom wall, the actor’s memoir in my left hand. The mirror became only a mirror again, and the cacophony of madness and anguish gave way to the quiet of the morning in Tucson.
In the bedroom, I sat in the armchair and bent forward with my head in my hands. I breathed deeply, waiting for my heart to quiet.
Whatever else the vision might have been, it was an orientation film aimed at the new recruit—me—as well as a call to duty and an urgent warning that the secret war could soon erupt into conflict on a greater scale, perhaps evolving into Armageddon.
My sense was that if I didn’t answer the call to battle, the war would come to me anyway. This was a matter of destiny. If I gave destiny the finger and walked away, that wouldn’t be the end of it. What would have happened would still happen. The malevolent beings that I’d had a chance to stand up against would crush me without resistance. That was how fate worked. It wasn’t pretty. I had no desire to pull the sword Excalibur from the stone, but if I didn’t, the stone and the sword would roll downhill and flatten me.
To prepare for what might lie ahead, I needed to learn more about how I had ended up in a bassinet on a lonely highway.
I got up from the chair and dropped the actor’s memoir in the trash can.
As I shed my pajamas and dressed for the drive to Peptoe, an infomercial on TV offered a revolutionary nonstick frying pan. The ad guy proved the pan’s effectiveness by making a cheese omelet in it, then by melting caramel and chocolate in it, and then by cooking a mixture of glue and shredded plastic. All three delicious treats slipped out of the pan without leaving the tiniest bit of sticky residue, though no advice was provided as to whether red or white wine was the best complement to a glue-and-plastic entrée.
I love this country. This is the greatest country in the world, as long as it will be allowed to last.
When I stepped outside, Sparky and Bridget were waiting by the Ford Explorer. Winston was in the back seat, his head out the side window, looking nothing whatsoever like a drug-gang attack dog, having been reformed by my moon goddess.
Sparky and I asked each other how we’d slept—like a stone in my case, like a baby in his case, both of us lying.
Bridget said nothing at first, watching me intently as I loaded my suitcase along with their luggage and closed the tailgate.
Then, as her grandfather went around to the driver’s door, she said quietly, “Bad dream?”
“No. I just didn’t like what I saw in the mirror this morning.”
“You too, huh?”
Surprised, assuming that she had the same experience, I said, “What was that?”
“Orientation. To let us know what our enemies want. The world as the Screamers and their acolytes will make it if given a chance.”
“Acolytes?”
“We have people like Butch and Cressida Hammer, and Grandpa. On the other side are fools who think a world of pure materialism will be a utopia. The Screamers will give them the world they want, a world of absolute indulgence—and rule it. Too late, they’ll realize their utopia is in fact an empire of suffering and death.”
Sparky started the Explorer.
“What you saw—you’re hiding it from your grandfather?”
“Sparing him from it,” she corrected.
“Why? He’s not a delicate flower.”
She put her arms around me and held me very tight, and I held her, and she was silent for a moment before she said, “As I endured that . . . whatever that was this morning, I had a presentiment, a strong one. Not all of us are going to survive what lies ahead.”
I had read novels in which the author wrote that a character’s heart had sunk at the receipt of one bit of bad news or another, and I had often paused to ask, with snark, where the heart had ended its descent. In the stomach? In the colon? Now I felt my heart sink into a slough of foreboding, and the sensation was so disturbing that I was beyond snark. We all arrive in this world with a ticket out of it, but somehow, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we remain convinced that those we care about will be with us for a long ride.