No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  Taylor trailed after her at a distance, letting gravity pull him down the subtle slope of the driveway’s cobblestones. When he reached the dock, his mother was storming up the Catalina’s gangplank, at the foot of which her “Captain,” Mark Spratt, stood saluting after her in caricature of naval protocol. He was wearing the uniform she’d bought him so as to better assume the role, though the tanned ripple of his six-pack displayed prominently within the billow of his unbuttoned shirt made him look more like a male stripper’s idea of a captain than a genuine seaman. By the time Captain Spratt was untethering the vessel from the dock’s mooring rings, Taylor had made it to the stairs at the backside of the boathouse leading up to what more and more seemed to have again become his personal sanctuary.

  The year he was born, his mother had remodelled what had then been a guest room to look like a turn-of-the-century log cabin. Aside from the forty-eight-inch flat screen bolted to the rightside wall, he hadn’t changed a thing in the ten years since he’d claimed it as his own. Various animal heads were mounted around it, along with a cluttered assortment of litany proclaiming the simple pleasures of cottage life: framed sepia-tinted photographs capturing lazy days at the beach or dockside, old fishing poles and paddles, and a full-size birch bark canoe suspended from the rafters over a queen-sized mattress supported by a driftwood frame.

  Propped against one of the pillows at its head was an envelope, the size and shape of a gift card, and beneath that a DVD. When Taylor lifted the former he saw that the latter was Two Minutes to Midnight, his mother’s last film, and that suggested to him that it was she who’d left them. After all, in the introduction to The Wind at My Back—her (mostly) ghostwritten memoir—hadn’t she related how before she’d met Bryson Wane she’d been reduced to a third-rate actress scrambling after bit parts, her best roles behind her. The only moment in her entire body of work that she’d likely be remembered for, she’d lamented, was a sultry tango she’d danced for the lead actor in her third film—Primal Heat. Unbeknownst to him, or the director, she’d performed without the encumbrance of underwear. During the dance’s climax, she’d whirled her dress about her uplifted leg and thus afforded the infamously stunned-looking lead, and later the equally delighted audience, an unobstructed view of the Brazilian wax job she’d instructed her aesthetician to provide her with, all the better to make a bold—or in one reviewer’s words, “bald”—impression in this, her first starring role in an A-list movie. The scene had guaranteed her a top-ten placement on every Best of Beaver Shots list throughout perpetuity and she’d long-since resigned herself to the dire prospect that this would stand as her legacy.

  In her own words, “Meeting Bryson Wane opened up a whole new world to me, and whenever I was feeling low, I’d curl up all alone with a bowl of popcorn and watch Two Minutes to Midnight, taking refuge in the knowledge that even on the darkest of days, the sun was still there hiding behind the clouds, waiting to share it’s [sic] light.”

  Her recent actions to the contrary, Taylor took the DVD as an assurance that she understood what he was going through on this, most surely, his own darkest day. He hurried back to the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, maybe give her a wave to say he appreciated the gesture. But Celia’s sailboat—the name of which had provided her with the title of her memoir—had already caught a breeze. All he could make out of her, at the helm and with the wind quite literally at her back, was the billow of her hair as she angled it towards open water.

  It would only take a moment for him to discover that she hadn’t, in fact, been the one who had left him the gift. The accompanying card, replete with an altogether-too-cute picture of a mournful Boxer pup with a cast on one of its paws, read: This will make you feel better, Sis. By that, Taylor took to mean the two yellow pills he found in the bottom of the envelope, rather than the movie itself. Having had ample experience with his sister’s rather twisted sense of humour, he knew she’d left that for an entirely different reason, Two Minutes to Midnight not only serving as their mother’s final film but also Taylor’s introduction to his old fighting instructor, Master Lo, whose character had been listed in the credits as The Viper.

  As he jostled the pills in the bottom of the envelope, the brightness of their neon hue was urging him towards caution but his arm was feeling again like someone had driven a nail through it and his face like it had got in the way of the hammer a couple (or nine) times while they were doing so. The doctor who’d stopped in to check on him before he’d been released from the hospital had told him he’d given his father a prescription, “to help with the pain.” The preceding rough ride had provided Taylor a pretty good idea of what his father was likely to do with anything meant to ease his son’s suffering. Certain, in the least, that whatever was in the two gel caps his sister had left him couldn’t possibly make him feel any worse than he already did, he popped both into his mouth and dry swallowed them on his way to the bathroom.

  He hadn’t had a chance to look at himself in the mirror at the hospital, the IV on a slow drip into his arm requiring him to pee into a bedpan the one and only time he’d felt the urge to go there. The face that confronted him now was hardly recognizable as his own, and it took only the narrowest of glimpses to know that he’d never want to see it again. Lifting the toilet lid, he was overwhelmed by a sudden dizziness. His legs wobbled and he sat down hard. When he’d done his business, he was unable to summon the strength to push himself back up. A short while later, his head began to feel like it was filling with helium and his belly like there was something living in there. A snake maybe. Coiling around his intestines, cramping his stomach. His tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth and when he peeled it off, it caught on the jagged fray of one of his front teeth. He flinched with the memory of the all-consuming rage in the Indian’s eyes as he’d born down upon him and its rancour was enough to drive Taylor back to his feet.

  His face was staring out of the mirror again: a twisted and red-faced devil leering at him, the four fingernail scratches gouged on either side of his throat looking all of a sudden like horns sprouting from his neck.

  “What the fuck did she give me?” he gasped, backing away from the mirror.

  Fingers touched lightly on his shoulder and he spun, startled.

  Sandra was standing behind him.

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  Though her tone was one of concern, she was looking at him through bemused eyes, laughing at him, it seemed, for taking those pills when she knew what he thought of her “little indulgences.”

  The floor was all of a sudden tilting beneath his feet like the deck of a ship in stormy seas, and he stumbled back, knocking his hand on the bathroom door’s frame. Pain shot up his broken arm and the Indian’s snarl appeared before him again, his teeth bloodied and clenched, one of his hands gripped fast at Taylor’s wrist and the other at his elbow, a geyser spewing from the bone shard piercing the skin.

  “You need to sit down,” Sandra was saying. “Get yourself together.”

  Her voice was echoing around him as if from the end of a long and cavernous hallway. He opened his mouth to reply but nothing came out but a strained whimper. Then he felt her hand on his good arm, steadying and tugging gently, leading him towards the couch.

  He’d been sitting there for a shade over one hour and forty-­seven minutes, or so said the digital display on the Blu-ray player beneath the TV. His bubble cast was propped on a pillow beside him though he hardly registered that, his world, in the interim, reduced to what he saw onscreen: an all-consuming present rendered in such vivid and immediate detail that there had arisen within him the creeping sensation that he’s not watching a movie at all but has stumbled upon a portal into a world created solely as a backdrop against which the war raging within his own embattled heart is cast.

  How else to explain what is happening now?

  Master Lo is wrenching a burlap sack off the head of a woman whom he knows to b
e New York City’s top-rated news anchor but thinks of only as his mother, even though she’d never be caught dead looking like she does: her hair a mess of frizzy curls and her makeup smeared, remaking her into some kind of demented clown figure. She is standing at the edge of an as-of-yet unfinished top floor of a skyscraper overlooking New York. The city is a twinkling starscape at her back and the man who’d confined her to a shipping container for all but ninety-six seconds of screen time is standing in front of her, wearing the uniform of a Russian General and shaking his head, tsk tsk tsking at what he sees.

  “Why the frown, Kelly Jones?” he says. “I’m about to make you the most famous voman in America.”

  At that, she spits in his face.

  The thick gob oozing down his chin only serves to bring a smile to The Russian General’s lips and he turns to Master Lo, giving him the slightest of nods. The Viper responds by snatching her hand and taking hold of her pinkie, snapping it backwards. The disbelief that Taylor felt the last time he’d watched it, as to why a man trained in the Chângquán long-fist style would be dressed as a ninja and why said ninja would then be working for an embittered Russian General, is suspended by the now-familiar crack of bone and the even more familiar pitch to his mother’s scream. The both of them serve to dispel any and all artifice. In that instant, it seems it is not The Russian General who’s ordered it so but his own father. It is a feeling of such rare and potent clarity that all memory of the act that spawned it is subsumed by the dreadful certitude that he himself is to blame—that his father is merely using her as a vessel through which to exact revenge on her son, a feeling enhanced by how, at the moment Master Lo snaps her finger back, the shot cuts to an extreme close-up of The Russian General. The crack and the subsequent scream is seen solely through The General’s eyes, grey-filmed and as lively as two acorns trapped under a thin sheet of ice, which is to say they are his father’s eyes, the sight spurning within Taylor a simmering rage found expression in his hand, scrabbling now beside him, searching for something to throw. His fingers brush over a rectangle of plastic that could only have been the remote though he hurls it with the sober intent of a brick.

  The Russian General has since departed, replaced onscreen by the film’s two heroes, both now stepping from an elevator. One is a rogue KGB agent dressed in a charcoal-grey suit with the perfectly coifed hair of a department store mannequin, the other a disgraced and possibly psychotic New York City cop who also happens to be Kelly Jones’s ex-husband, defined “Everyman” by the thin stubble outlining his cheeks and his ripped Yankees jersey. The remote strikes the latter between the N and the Y so that it seems it is Taylor himself, and not the assembled horde of heavily armed mercenaries now confronting them, who causes the heroes’ eyes to widen in sudden alarm.

  Cracks splay outward from the cop’s chest, momentarily quartering him before the screen erupts in an explosion of brightly coloured pixels and then goes black.

  “Kill zem!” Taylor hears The Russian General scream.

  This is followed by an almost pathological barrage of machine-gun fire, out of which shortly arises his mother’s voice.

  “Five years ago today,” she says, reading off a cue card at gun point, “the U.S. Military Industrial Complex launched a cruise missile at a wedding taking place at a secluded villa in Chechen’s Caucasus Mountains . . .”

  The footage is being fed, via satellite link, to the TV station where her character works which explains why a man, whom Taylor remembers as being a rather pudgy and bearded studio tech, shortly exclaims: “I’m getting a live feed. It’s from Kelly!”

  “Kelly?” This from the news director who further responds with an exclamation of his own: “Well, what are you waiting for? Patch it through!”

  More machine-gun fire and then the cop’s voice: “That’s your plan? It’s suicide.”

  “Being shot,” the KGB agent responds with his characteristic nonchalance, “is better than dying from radiation. Trust me.”

  “I told you, if you said, ‘Trust me,’ one more time—”

  “Yes, yes, you shoot me. But you are out of bullets, no? How you do this without bullets?”

  “I’ll kill you with my goddamned hands,” the cop screams back. “That’s how I’ll do it!”

  (There is a slight pause here: the KGB agent checking his watch, as he’s inclined to do every thirty seconds or so to remind himself, and the audience, that time is rapidly running out.)

  “Better make it quick then,” he quips.

  Now Taylor’s mother’s voice again: “Fifty-six people died that day, twenty-three of them women and children. The American government denied all responsibility for the attack, but on this day, a day that will forever live in infamy, they will remember what they did. You will all remember.”

  “What’s that?” This from the bearded tech, so the scene must have shifted back to the TV control room. “You see that? What he’s wearing?”

  “It looks like,” the news director responds, “a . . . parachute.”

  A parachute plainly visible to all but Taylor is strapped to The Russian General’s back as he stands at the edge of the precipice readying himself to jump. He takes a moment before he does to gaze down upon the photograph of his son in his hand. A singular tear drop trails down his cheek and spatters onto the young man’s chin. Confronted now with the black TV screen in front of him, the recent events of his past and the movie bend seamlessly into a fiction of Taylor’s own devise. In this moment he does not envision The Russian General crying over his dead son but instead spitting in the young man’s face before releasing the photograph. The camera in his mind’s eye follows its descent, drifting downwards at mercy to unseen currents, settling at last on the sidewalk where it’s trampled underfoot by passers-by and then kicked mindlessly into the street, fodder for the sweeper just now approaching, its whirling brushes forever consigning the photo, and by extension The Russian General’s son, to oblivion.

  And though spawned from the vain certainty that his father has doomed Taylor to a similar fate, the scene itself is hardly of his own imagining. It’s the scene, in fact, which closes the film. The photograph becomes dislodged from the Russian General’s harness after the cop commandeers the construction crane poised above the unfinished building, using the hook at the end of its cable to snag the parachute’s billow and swing The Russian General like some child’s plaything, the fabric tearing at the limit of its arc and hurling him into the Hudson River an instant before the timer on the nuclear bomb strapped to his chest reaches 23:58. Cue then the requisite kiss between the ex-cop and his ex-wife and the equally requisite moment of levity, this one involving a playfully winking Mickey Mouse taking a bent over Minnie from behind, which the now-shirtless KGB agent is revealed to have tattooed between his shoulder blades—“Don’t ask!”

  With the two heroes’ jocular exclamation still hanging in the air, the scene shifts to the photo floating downwards with the lassitude of a feather, its subsequent ignoble end meant, or so says the director in the DVD’s commentary, “to signify that the true tragedy of war, or really any act of violence, is how easily the real victims are consigned to the dustbin of history.”

  A sentiment starkly at odds with the dramatic up-swelling of music, vaguely militaristic in its ode to triumph, which now blares from the TV to accompany the credits. This shortly gives way to an overly sentimental, though slightly less anomalous, pop ballad blithely proclaiming, “Love Is a Battlefield.” But by then Taylor has stopped listening, his world since reduced to the persistent throb in his arm and the equally pervasive vision of an endlessly repeating cycle of feet trampling a photo bearing his likeness under heel on a sidewalk that might as well be at the very epicentre of a cruel and merciless world.

  * * *

  He awakes sometime later in the dark.

  At first he thinks that the movie must be replaying itself for he hears what is unmistakably an explo
sion: a rumbling boom that bears no small similarity to the sound the cruise missile made when it obliterated the wedding party in the film’s opening scene.

  At the time, The Russian General was watching, horror-­struck, from the elevated vantage point of a mountainside. Seeing the fireball consuming the villa where his son had just been married, he screamed, “Nyet!” and rushed forward. His second-

  in-command grasped him by the arm, telling him, “There’s nothing you can do. We must go!” Shrugging from his censure, The Russian General ignored him and hurried down the slope, even as the camera swooped skywards, zeroing in on a Blackbird spy plane flying miles above. The explosion below was defined in infrared as a receding blot on the monitor in front of which sat a reconnaissance systems officer already speaking into his headset, “Target eliminated at twenty-three hundred hours and fifty-eight minutes. I repeat, target eliminated.”

  That none of the preceding follows the explosion Taylor unmistakably hears and that the glass in the window on the boathouse’s northern wall rattles from the resulting shock wave still isn’t enough to arouse him to the suspicion that the blast did not emanate from the TV but from outside, less than a hundred feet from where he sits. The rumbling boom shortly gives way to a faint whining noise, no louder than a mosquito battering against the ceiling would have made, yet escalating with the dire intent of a runaway boat racing towards the dock, except its pitch is too high for it to be that.

  It sounds like . . . someone screaming.

  The thought has barely penetrated his consciousness when a sudden illumination flares on his periphery, as bright and orange as a nuclear blast. Its intrusion upon the quieting dark spins Taylor’s head on an abrupt pivot towards the door.