James raised his head and forced himself to look in the mirror. The thing in the mirror no longer had a nose or mouth, only eyes. All he had were eyes.
The unblinking mirror face nodded. James reached out 58
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to touch it, his fingers trembling, but every time his hand approached the mirror he felt cold all over. The mirror possessed no resemblance to him at all. Breaking it would be a futile waste. Even looking at it was a futile waste. He needed to blind himself, to gouge out his own eyes and lose sight forever. It is better to be blind, he thought, than be like that man.
“Will you free me now?” he said. “Let me go!”
The buzzing electric lights running along the ceiling died and the dressing room went dark.
He heard the pitter-patter of footsteps. He fumbled around for the gray suit on the floor and called out. “Show me who you are. I know you’re there. Show your face, goddamn you.”
The footsteps approached his dressing booth. He wondered if the footsteps belonged to the voice. He wondered if other dressing booths existed in the dressing room, or if his was the only one.
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door. He heard breathing. He reached for the handle but jerked away.
Whoever stood on the other side, they would have to open it themselves.
They knocked.
“Whoever it is, go away,” he said, out of old habit.
He was so startled by the knocking that he wanted to crawl inside the mirror just to escape that door, and all others, forever.
“Death will catch up to you,” said the voice.
James felt uncertain earlier. Now he decided. It was not a human voice. It could not be human. It was better if it was not.“Just go the hell away, will you?” James said.
Footsteps receded.
“What a rotten scheme,” he muttered. “I don’t belong here.”
“Are we having fun now?” said the voice, from right inside the dressing booth.
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CAMERON PIERCE
“Who are you? How many of you are there?” he said.
The footsteps were gone, but the owner of the voice should’ve been standing right next to James. He groped around in the dark and found no one. Pangs, sharp as the appendicitis he once endured, pierced his side. As he rolled about on the floor, catching brief, blackened flashes of himself in the mirror, a red light flickered above the dressing booth.
“Did you do something bad, James? Is that why you could no longer face yourself?” said the voice. The red light flickered in sync with the voice. The walls of the dressing booth rattled.
“Who are you?” James said, between gritted teeth.
“This is a quiet life you’re leading, cooped up like a factory chicken. Do you like your dressing booth? Did I pick a good one for you? Do you like your gray suit? Are you having fun?
Why don’t you come out for sunshine? You remember sunshine, don’t you? Or can you not face it?
“Why could you no longer face yourself? Don’t answer. I know. Do you know, James? Do you know why you came here?
Do you know who I am?”
“Go away, goddamn you!”
“That’s the spirit. Goodbye, James. Enjoy your dressing booth.”
A door opened and shut. The red light dissipated and the overhead lights turned back on. James rubbed his eyes. The piercing in his side softened to a dull throb. He felt forsaken, but by whom or what he did not know.
Days and weeks passed.
The voice did not visit. It had spoken its part, James knew.
He sat on the bench, gazing up into the fluorescent lights until sunspots pixilated his scope. It was a resigned way of life.
He felt detached from himself and even enjoyed his detachment.
During this period, he did not move at all. He just stared at the lights.
A year or more went by, until one day he folded his hands in his lap. Startled, he tore his vision from the lights and looked 60
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at his hands. He rolled up the sleeves of his jacket and felt his wrists. Although his vision was fractured, he still saw that his skin had flaked away. He was nothing more than a skeleton. “I can waste no more time,” he said, finally knowing what had to be done.
James turned his head slowly. His neck crackled and popped.
He looked in the mirror, voluntarily now, and smiled—
61
PERSONAL SAVIORS
You’re sitting cross-legged in a field, thinking you’re final y ready to trust the chemists.
What’s the worst that could happen? After all, they’re offering to pay the mortgage on all those fried serotonin receptors. And even if they’ve mutated six billion people into brain-eating atrocities, they spared your ass, right?
Okay, you’ll give it a shot.
Whoa.
The moment you decide you’ll go with their program, a fishy manta hand reaches down from heaven and sets a pill and a slip of paper at your feet. You wipe the pill on your jeans to get some of the dirt off and unfold the paper.
According to the slip, the pill in your hand is a tryptamine compound, plus two methyl groups. The directions say, “Crush it up and smoke it.” And because you trust the fish-faced chemists in the sky, you crush the pill and pack your pipe.
Hold it.
Animals scream beyond the foxtails. At least you think they’re animals. Maybe some goats getting munched by the dead. You set the pipe beside you. The chemist who gave you the pill stares down at you from above the marine layer. The chemist is making this noise. The chemist is screaming at you, pissed that you’re not smoking its magic pill. For days you 62
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thought they didn’t speak, like hardcore silent monks.
Now they are screaming. Projecting their goat cries into the field around you, howling in the wind and the grain. You marvel that the chemists sound so nasally, seeing how they look like stuntmen in bad manta ray costumes.
You’re ready this time. So many dead receptors in your skull and even more dead people walking the planet, of course you’ll trust the chemists. After all, they’re gods or something. You suppress the nagging worry that you might be wrong, but the alternative is that much worse. Getting your brains munched by shambling death machines would be a lousy way to die.
You raise the pipe to your lips and torch the crushed pill.
Inhale. Hold it in. Breathe out.
Two hits later, a bundle of white snakes falls from the sky.
All knotted together, the snakes form a ladder leading to heaven.
A chemist holds the top of the ladder and waves a manta hand.
It wants you to climb.
Now the goat cries sound more like hissing roaches. You wonder if they always sounded this way, if you heard wrong before. It’s true, you’ve lost a lot of the best things in your life through simple misunderstandings, like when you and Leslie broke up last week, the day before the chemists appeared in the sky, and she said—
Hold it.
Not the time, man. Get her out of your head. You’ve got to trust the chemists. Christ, with what they did to Leslie and everyone else on the planet, how could you trust them? But you’ve got to. You’ve got to find out why they offered to fix your head. Maybe you’re so damaged that making you into a dead thing is impossible. Whatever the reason, they’re sparing your ass. Take advantage of that.
The insect noises vibrate the air around you. Calm down, breathe. If the chemists want you to climb their snake ladder, you damn well better climb it.
You step onto the ladder. Remember, take it one step at a 63
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time and don’t look down. Above, the chemist who gave you the pill nods and holds the ladder steady. Yes, you think, almost free of this wasteland.
Climb.
Twenty feet up.
Forty.
You must be one hundred feet high now. They’ll take y
ou in, you tell yourself. They’ll fix your transmitters, your receptors.
They won’t screw with you. They won’t fuck you over like they did everyone else, all the people now wandering the planet as mindless skull-biters. You will be enlightened to the cause of the world’s demise, you tell yourself.
You’re halfway to the top when you look down and it just might be the worst mistake in your short, miserable life.
Thousands of the dead scuttle in the field. You force yourself to look away.
You always forget how awful their appearance really is.
They’re nothing like the zombies of Romero or Fulci. Hell, you wouldn’t even call them zombies. Hundreds of legs, dark glassy flesh, eyeless . . . you call them centipeople. A brand new species. Manufactured by the chemists in the sky, your personal saviors.
The centipeople grab for the ladder and you scramble upward. No turning back now. The higher you climb, the more your head throbs.
You hope it’s only another fifty feet to the top, but you could be wrong. Your skull pounds so bad you’re afraid it’ll burst. You fix your eyes on the chemist above and force yourself not to look down again. Remember to breathe and keep your foothold.
Breathe breathe breathe.
The chemist grabs your arm and pulls you into Heaven.
And you realize your mistake.
Being a centiperson does not equal being undead.
Centipeople equal larvae. This notion pops into your head as 64
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blue-gray manta hands strip off your rags and carry you up a staircase of clouds. The chemists must be telepathically charged, which explains how they led you to the field in the first place and provided the pill the moment you decided to submit to them. It also means you’re fucked.
At the top of the stairs, four chemists hold a giant wooden sun. The chemist that helped you into heaven opens its fishy slit of a mouth and says, “The sun cannot be the sun. It can only represent the sun.”
The chemists holding the wooden sun tilt it downward.
The one holding you slides your body onto this so-called representation. You struggle but they hold you down.
You vomit blood as they nail you to the wooden sun.
Nobody wants to save you. You’ve been taken for a fool.
Your head explodes. A million gallons of your blood and brain matter leaks down the staircase and out of Heaven, onto the dead below. Cleansed in your sacrifice, they rejoice. The dead are ready to hatch. Your teeth fall from heaven and scatter in the field, trampled by the million-footed dead. Your teeth howl in the wind and the grain, and they join the forsaken cries of teeth belonging to other saviors across the planet.
You wait for rebirth.
65
EMBRYO TREE FOR
ANDROID
Inside the first room of the cosmos, a shadow emerged from a patch of blue-black fungus on the door. It sprouted limbs and genitals, eye sockets and mouths. After the first in a series of grand mal seizures, the shadow separated into two shadows. The two shadows mated. Together, they gave birth to Android.
“What will we feed it?” said the first shadow.
“The door fungus won’t last,” said the second.
And so the shadows collected the white beetles that nested in the fluffy darkness of their bellies. They crushed up the insects and ground them into the door fungus. Dissatisfied, they mated once more, crushing up the new birth-creature’s skull and using its red blood as a sort of glue that held the beetles and the fungus together.
“This is what we feed Android,” said the first shadow.
“Android will be pleased,” said the second.
They scuttled to the corner of the room where Android was dreaming. “We have brought you food,” said the shadows.
Android did not move.
“It must be dreaming new rooms,” said the first shadow.
“But it must be hungry,” said the second shadow.
The first insisted that Android must be hungry, so they tried 66
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harder to wake their crustaceous metal child, but Android still failed to wake. The first shadow crawled into Android’s mouth and inspected the black box in Android’s chest. The box was silent. The shadow returned to the room through the Android’s mouth and said, “Android is dead.”
The shadows tried grieving for the loss of their child, but since each of them was no longer a whole shadow, they did not possess the capacity to feel sadness.
“What will we do about this?” said the first shadow.
“It is wrong not to grieve now that our firstborn is dead,”
said the second shadow. “Now there will always be something to grieve for. Let us commit ourselves to suffering.”
The first shadow agreed, and so they set about planning their descent into perpetual unhappiness.
Since the shadows had originally been one, it seemed appropriate to create a new creature to be their double so that each shadow-half could be completed with this new, other half, and then together they could suffer. They called the new beings Human, a word that had come to the shadows in a jointly experienced death dream.
“How should we create Human?” said the second shadow.
“Man should be dreamed,” said the first, “because Android died dreaming.”
The shadows wrapped themselves around each other and closed their eyes. They waited to dream of Human, but the dream never came. Instead, they dreamed of mushrooms sprouting from a black monolith. The slimy white mushrooms decayed on the black stone almost as fast as they appeared. The fallen mushrooms floated around the base of the monolith, wilting into little skeletons that resembled what would eventually be known as Human.
They approached the black monolith.
“How should we create Human?” said the second shadow.
“By eating the mushrooms,” said the first.
They grabbed at the mushrooms, shoving only the most 67
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decayed specimens in their mouths to increase their personal suffering, but shortly after their miserable feast began, a spike-mouthed gray worm crawled out of the monolith and said,
“You are not welcome here.”
The shadows suddenly found themselves in a black desert with no sky above.
“There is no more room for us in the universe,” said the second shadow.
“At least we have dreamed of Embryo Tree,” said the first.
“We have nothing but this desert, now,” said the second.
“But our sacrifice will bring Human into being,” the first shadow said.
“I wish we could see it.”
“Maybe Android can see it.”
“Android sees nothing.”
“We failed,” said the first shadow. “We have given up our room in the cosmos. Now the room houses Human, but Human is a mirror to us. Without us, Human reflects dead images.”
“No,” said the second. “Android is still in that room.”
“Android is dead.”
“So the humans will reflect dead Android.”
After a while, the black desert grew darker and the first shadow said, “Do you think our suffering was worth it?”
“I expected something else.”
“Regret is not much to expect.”
Each shadow, beginning to confuse itself with the other shadow, laid down in the dry sand of the black desert with no sky. They snuggled close, and quickly lost their bodies in each other. Together, in umbra sadness, they regretted giving birth.
68
HOW TO LIVE FOREVER
Time had frozen in southern California. People got stuck in Los Angeles traffic for sixty years. While trying to create a black hole on the side of Highway 101, Charles Bender had glued Time to his cardboard hands. He was a clumsy scientist. It took six earth decades to unstick Time. The flesh peeled off of his hands, so when Time kicked into gear again, Charles was transported to the center northbound la
ne of Highway 101.
Los Angeles traffic turned into a deadly board game where nobody died. Cars ate their drivers and digested them into fuel.
Officers on motorcycles rode around as mad-robotic gargoyles.
The freeways lifted up and licked the sky like concrete tongues.
Bender the Scientist received the worst of the lot. Now he was nothing more than a giant rubber hand.
Charles froggered across Highway 101 on his four fingers.
A semi with the face of a dragon belched fire and scorched the metal hairs on his thumb-head. Charles went blind and fell onto a cactus beside the road. The spines of the cactus pierced his fingertips and side. His face melted. Nobody died anymore, so he laid there and listened to the world play out in fast forward.
He cursed his miserable predicament and wondered what went wrong with his experiment. He had always dreamed of living forever, but not like this. This was not what he envisioned when he schemed up a plan to live forever.
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CAMERON PIERCE
The machine creatures honked and screeched. It sounded like they were enjoying the new world. Charles Bender sighed.
He would be stuck here for a long time.
Some while later, an owl-shaped helicopter swooped down and took Charles in its beak. The evil noise of traffic faded.
Charles Bender’s hollow stomach churned as he rose higher into the air. Thank God I am saved, he thought. A deflated smile appeared on his melted face. But the helicopter was without a pilot and had scooped him up by mere chance. It dropped Charles when it reached the upper layer of smog, favoring a winged otter over his rubber body. Charles fell. He landed in a bush beside the highway. He laughed now, for the tyranny of life was such a joyous, mysterious thing.
A semi spit flames, lighting Charles and the bush on fire.
Somewhere in Hollywood, a black hole checked into a motel.
70
TEA FOR A MYSTERIOUS
CREATURE
A mysterious creature follows me home. I want to call it a raccoon but it looks nothing like a raccoon. Its fur is blue, its face round as a dinner plate. I turn and tell it, “Creature, go away.”
Lost in Cat Brain Land Page 6
