The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  So, it’s hardly business as usual that Joey’s behind the wheel because my hands won’t stop shaking enough that I can drive. They won’t stop shaking long enough for me to even light a cigarette.

  “You really aren’t gonna tell me what it was happened back there?” he asks for, I don’t know, the hundredth time in the last thirty or forty minutes. I glance at my watch, then the speedometer, making sure we’re not late and he’s not speeding. At least I have that much presence of mind left to me.

  “Never yet known you to be the squeamish type with wet work,” he says and stops for a red light.

  Most of the snow from Tuesday night has melted, but there are still plenty of off-white scabs hiding in the shadows, and there’s also the filthy mix of ice and sand and anonymous schmutz heaped at either side of the street. There are people out there shivering at a bus stop, people rushing along the icy sidewalk, a homeless guy huddled in the doorway of an abandoned office building. Every last bit of that tableau is as ordinary as it gets, the humdrum day to day of the ineptly named City of Brotherly Love, and that ought to help, but it doesn’t. All of it comes across as window dressing, meticulously crafted misdirection meant to keep me from getting a good look at what’s really going down.

  “Dude, seriously, you’re starting to give me the heebie-jeebies,” Joey says.

  “Why don’t you just concentrate on getting us where we’re going,” I tell him. “See if you can do that, all right? ’Cause it’s about the only thing in the world you have to worry about right now.”

  “We’re not gonna be late,” says Joey the Kike. “At this rate, we might be fucking early, but we sure as hell ain’t gonna be late.”

  I keep my mouth shut. Out there, a thin woman with a purse Doberman on a pink rhinestone leash walks past. She’s wearing galoshes and a pink wool coat that only comes down to her knees. At the bus stop, tucked safe inside that translucent half-shell, a man lays down a newspaper and answers his phone. The homeless guy scratches at his beard and talks to himself. Then the traffic light turns green, and we’re moving again.

  This is the day that I saw silver for the third time. But no way in hell I’m going to tell Joey that.

  Just like the first time, sitting on the train as it barreled towards Cam-den and my tryst with the Czech, I felt my ears pop, and then there was the same brief dizziness, followed by the commingled reek of ammonia, ozone, and burnt sugar. Me and Joey, we’d just found the room with the body, some poor son of a bitch who’d taken both barrels of a Remington in the face. Who knows what he’d done, or if he’d done anything at all. Could have been over money or dope or maybe someone just wanted him out of the way. I don’t let myself think too much about that sort of thing. Better not to even think of the body as someone. Better to treat it the way a stock boy handles a messy cleanup on aisle five after someone’s shopping cart has careened into a towering display of spaghetti sauce.

  “Sometimes,” said Joey, “I wish I’d gone to college. What about you, man? Ever long for another line of work? Something that don’t involve scraping brains off the linoleum after a throw-down.”

  But me, I was too busy simply trying to breathe to remind him that I had gone to college, too busy trying not to gag to partake in witty repartee. The dizziness had come and gone, but that acrid stench was forcing its way past my nostrils, scalding my sinuses and the back of my throat. And I knew that Joey didn’t smell it, not so much as a whiff, and that his ears hadn’t popped, and that he’d not shared that fleeting moment of vertigo. He stood there, glaring at me, his expression equal parts confusion and annoyance. Finally, he shook his head and stepped over the dead guy’s legs.

  “Jesus and Mary, we’ve both seen way worse than this,” he said, and right then, that’s when I caught the dull sparkle on the floor. The lower jaw was still in one piece, mostly, so for half a second or so I pretended I was only seeing the glint of fluorescent lighting off a filling or a crown. But then the silvery puddle, no larger than a dime, moved. It stood out very starkly against all that blood, against the soup of brain and muscle tissue punctuated by countless shards of human skull. It flowed a few inches before encountering a jellied lump of cerebellum, and then I watched as it slowly extended . . . what? What the fuck would you call what I saw? A pseudopod? Yeah, sure. Let’s go for broke. I watched as it extended a pseudopod and began crawling over the obstacle in its path. That’s when I turned away, and when I looked back, it wasn’t there anymore.

  Joey curses and honks the horn. I don’t know why. I don’t ask him. I don’t care. I’m still staring out the passenger side window at this brilliant winter day that wants or needs me to believe it’s all nothing more or less than another round of the same old same old. I’m thinking about the woman on the Speedline and about the scuffed toe of the Czech’s shoe, about whatever Eli saw at the noodle shop and the silver vials Joey and Jack got a peep at when Tony Palamara opened the case they’d delivered to him. I’m drawing lines and making correlations, parsing best I can, dot-to-fucking-dot, right? Nothing it takes a genius to see, even if I’ve no idea whatsoever what it all adds up to in the end. I blink, and the sun sparks brutally off distant blue-black towers of mirrored glass. Joey hits the horn again, broadcasting his displeasure for all Girard Avenue to hear, and I shut my eyes.

  07.

  And it’s a night or two later that I have the dream. That I have the dream for the first time.

  I’ve never given much thought to nightmares. Sure, I rack up more than my fair share. I wake up sweating and the sheets soaked, Eli awake, too, and asking if I’m okay. But what would you fucking expect? That’s how it goes when your life is a never-ending game of Stepin Fetchit and “Mistress may I have another,” when you exist in the everlasting umbrage of Madam Adrianne’s Grand Guignol of vice and crime and profit. No one lives this life and expects to sleep well—leastways, no one with walking-around sense. That’s why white-coated bastards in pharmaceutical labs had to go and invent Zolpidem and so many other merciful soporifics, so the bad guys could get a little more shut-eye every now and again.

  This is not my recollection of that first time. Hell, this is not my recollection of any single instance of the dream. It has a hundred subtle and not-so-subtle permutations, but always it stays the same. It wears a hundred gaudy masks to half conceal an immutable underlying face. So, take this as the amalgam or composite that it is. Take this as a rough approximation. Be smart, and take this with a goddamn grain of salt.

  Let’s say it starts with me and Eli in our plastic lawn chairs, sitting on the roof, gazing heavenward, like either one of us has half a snowball’s chance at salvation. Sure. This is as good a place to begin as any other. There we sit, holding hands, scrounging mean comfort in one another’s company—only, this time, some human agency or force of nature has intervened and swept back all that orange sky-glow. The stars are spread out overhead like an astronomer’s banquet, and neither of us can look away. You see pictures like that online, sure, but you don’t look up and expect to behold the dazzling entrails of the Milky Way draped above your head, fit to make the ghost of Neil deGrasse Tyson come. You don’t live your whole life in the over-illuminated filth of cities and ever expect to glimpse all those stars arching pretty as you please across the celestial hemisphere.

  We sit there, content and amazed, and I want to tell Eli those aren’t stars. It’s only fireworks on the Fourth of July or the moment the clock strikes the New Year. But he’s too busy naming constellations to hear me. How Eli would know a constellation from throbbing gristle is beyond me. But there he sits, reciting them for my edification.

  “That’s Sagittarius,” he says. “Right there, between Ophiuchus and Capricornus. The centaur, between the serpent in the west and the goat in the east.” And he tells me that more extrasolar planets have been discovered in Sagittarius than in any other constellation. “That’s why we should keep a close watch on it.”

  And I realize then, whiz-bang, presto, abracadabra, that the stars a
re wheeling overhead, exchanging positions in some crazy cosmic square dance, and Eli, he sees it, too, and he laughs. I’ve never heard Eli laugh like this before, not while I was awake. It’s the laughter of a child. It’s a laughter filled with delight. There’s innocence in a laugh like this.

  And maybe, after that, I’m not on the roof anymore. Maybe, after that, I’m sitting in a crowded bar down on Locust Street. I know the place, but I can never remember its name, not in the dream. Nothing to write home about, one way or the other. Neither classy enough nor sleazy enough to be especially memorable. Just fags and dykes wall to fucking wall and lousy, ancient disco blaring through unseen speakers. There’s a pint bottle of Wild Turkey sitting on the bar in front of me, and an empty shot glass. Someone’s holding a gun to the back of my head. And, yeah, I know the feeling of having a gun to my head, because it happened this one time on a run to Atlantic City that went almost bad as bad can be. I also know that it’s Joey the Kike holding the pistol, seeing as how there’s a dead scorpion the color of pus lying right there on the bar beside the bottle of bourbon.

  “This ain’t the way it ought to be,” he says, and I’m surprised I can hear his voice over the shitty music and all those queers trying to talk over the shitty music.

  “Then how about we find some other way to work it out,” I say, sounding lame as any asshole ever tried to talk his way out of a slug to the brain. “How about you sit down here next to me and we have a drink and make sure there are no more creepy-crawlies in your shoes.”

  “I shouldn’t be seen in a place like this,” he says, and I hear him pull the hammer back. “People talk, they see you hanging round a place like this.”

  “People do fucking talk,” I agree. With my left index finger, I flick the dead scorpion off the bar. No one seems to notice. For that matter, no one seems to notice he’s got a gun to my head. I say, “Maybe you should bounce before some hard-nosed bastard takes a notion to make you his bitch, yeah? You ever taken it up the ass, Joey?”

  “You’re such a smart guy,” Joey replies, “you’re still gonna be passing woof tickets when you’re six feet under, ain’t you? Expect you’ll manage to smack-talk your way out of Hell, given half a chance.”

  “Well, you know me, Joey. Never let ’em see you sweat. Veni, vidi, vici and all that hùnzhàng.”

  And I’m sitting there waiting to die, when the music stops, and all eyes turn towards the rear of the bar. I look, too, though Joey’s still got his 9mm parked on my scalp. A baby spot with a green gel is playing across a tiny stage, and there’s Eli with a microphone. I’d think he was actual, factual fish if I didn’t know better, that’s how good Eli looks in a black evening gown and pumps and a wig that makes me think of Isabella Rossellini playing Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. The din of voices is only a murmur now, only a gentle whisper of expectation as we all wait to see which way the wind’s about to blow.

  “Damn, she’s hot,” Joey says.

  “Fuckin’ A, she’s hot,” I tell him. “You should be so goddamn lucky to get a piece of ass like that one day.”

  He tells me to keep quiet, zip it and toss the key, that he wants to hear, but it’s not me he wants to hear. So I make like a good boy and oblige. After all, I want to hear this nightingale, too. And then Eli begins to sing, a cappella and in Spanish, and everyone goes hushed as midnight after Judgment Day. His voice is his voice, not some dream impersonation, and I wonder why I never knew Eli could sing.

  Bueno, ahora, pagar la atención

  Sólo en caso de que no había oído . . .

  And I’m still right there in the bar, but I’m somewhere else, as well. I’m walking in a desert somewhere, like something out of an old Wild and Woolly West flick, and the sun beats down on me from a sky so blue it’s almost white. There are mountains far, far away, a hazy jagged line against the horizon, and I wonder if that’s where I’m trying to get to. If there’s something in the mountains that I need to see. The playa stretches out all around me, a lifeless plain of alkali flats and desiccation cracks. Maybe this was a lake or inland sea, long, long ago. Maybe the water still comes back, from time to time. Sweat runs into my eyes, and I squint against the sting.

  On the little stage, Eli sings in Spanish, and I sit on my bar stool with the barrel of Joey’s gun prodding my skull. I wish the shot glass weren’t empty, ’cause the baking desert sun has me thirsty as a motherfucker. I keep my eyes on Eli, and I hear the parching salt wind whipping across the flats, and I hear that song in a language that I can only half understand.

  Basta con mirar hacia el cielo

  Y gracias al Gobierno por la nieve

  Y cantar la baja hacia abajo . . .

  “What’s she sayin’?” Joey the Kike wants to know, and I ask him which part of me looks Mexican.

  In the desert, I stop walking and peer up at the sun. High above me, there are contrails. And I know that’s what Eli’s singing about—those vaporous wakes—even if I have no idea why.

  “It’s a dream,” I tell Joey the Kike, growing impatient with the gun. “Specifically, it’s my dream. I come here all the time, and I don’t remember ever inviting you.”

  The playa crunches loudly beneath my feet.

  Tony Palamara opens a briefcase, and I see half a dozen silver vials marked with yellow tape.

  A woman on a train wipes at her nose, and my ears pop.

  Eli is no longer singing in Spanish, though I don’t recall the transition to English. No one says a word. They’re all much too busy watching him make love to the resonant phallus of his microphone.

  Trying to make it rain.

  So when you’re out there in that blizzard,

  Shivering in the cold,

  Just look up to the sky . . .

  I kneel on that plain and dig my fingers into the scorched saline crust. I crush the sandy dirt in my hand, and the wind sweeps it away. And that’s when I notice what looks like a kid’s spinning top—only big around as a tractor-trailer’s wheel—lying on the ground maybe twenty yards ahead of me. A tattered drogue parachute is attached to the enormous top by a tangled skein of nylon kernmantle cord. The wind ruffles wildly through the chute, and I notice the skid marks leading from the spinning top that isn’t a spinning top, trailing away into the distance.

  And sing the low-down experimental cloud-seeding

  Who-needs-’em-baby? Silver-iodide blues.

  I stand, and look back the way I’ve come. In the dream, I guess I’ve come from the south, walking north. So, looking south, the desert seems to run on forever, with no unobtainable mountainous El Dorado to upset the monotony. There’s only the sky above, crisscrossed with contrails, and the yellow-brown playa below, the line drawn between them sharp as a paper cut. There’s not even the mirage shimmer of heat I’d have expected, but, of course, this desert is only required to obey the dictates of my unconscious mind, not any laws of physical science. I stand staring at the horizon for a moment, and then resume my northwards march. I know now I’m not trying to reach the mountains. No one reaches those mountains, not no way, not no how, right? I’m only trying to go as far as the kid’s top that’s not a top and its rippling nylon parachute. I understand that now, and I tell Joey to either pull the trigger or put his piece away. I don’t have time for reindeer games tonight. And if I did, I still wouldn’t be looking for action from the likes of him.

  I stare at the bar, and the pus-colored scorpion’s returned. This time, I don’t bother to make it go away. I do wonder if dead scorpions can still kill a guy.

  Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

  All those people in the bar have begun applauding, and Eli takes a bow and sets his mike back into its stand.

  “What you saw,” Joey sneers, “I got as much right to know as you. We were both slopping about in that stiff ’s innards, and if something was wrong with him, I deserve to know. You got no place keepin’ it from me.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” I tell him, wishing it were the truth. “Now, are you goi
ng to shoot me or put away the roscoe and make nice?”

  “Making you nervous?” asks Joey.

  “Not really, but the potential for injury is pissing me off righteously.”

  I reach the top that’s not a top, and now I’m almost certain it’s actually some sort of return capsule from a space probe. One side is scorched black, so I suppose that must be the heat shield. I stand three or four feet back, and I have never, in any version of the dream, touched the thing. It’s maybe five feet in diameter, maybe a little less. I’m wondering how long it’s been out here, and where it might have traveled before hurtling back to earth, and, while I’m at it, why no retrieval team’s come along to fetch it. I wonder if it’s even a NASA probe, or maybe, instead, a chunk of foreign hardware that strayed from its target area. Either way, no one leaves shit like this laying around in the goddamn desert. I know that much.

  “Yeah, you know it all,” Joey says and jabs me a little harder with the muzzle of his gun. “You must be the original Doctor Albert Eisenstein, and me, I’m just some schmuck can’t be trusted with the time of day.”

  Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket . . .

  And on the rooftop, Eli tells me, “The star at the centaur’s knee is Alpha Sagittarii, or Rukbat, which means ‘knee’ in Arabic. Rukbat is a blue class B star, one hundred and eighteen light years away. It’s twice as hot as the sun and forty times brighter.”