He took her for his companion, the perspicacious Miss Shelly, and bedded her as if it were a matter of course. She trembled like a marsupial transfixed by his headlights; soft and wide-eyed with adoration, yet saddened, somehow, almost preternaturally aware of what darkness lay beyond that brightest of glares. Their love-making was deep and prolonged, filling each night with drawn-out moans and the litmus creaking of furniture hitherto sworn to secrecy. I began after a time to anticipate her climaxes, as I’m sure Brian did also, and so the entire household came to ride the swell of passion, agitating gently as the waves built and frothed; clutching and writhing until she lost herself in abandonment to the tempest; and then slowly subsiding as her breathless little sobs gave way to ripples and then calm. In other circumstances we would have left them their privacy, but the size of the world makes no difference when populated by so few, and though our odd little family was dysfunctional and cloyingly claustrophobic, still we found it near on impossible to disperse. The cruelest irony was that they, upon satiating their desires, lapsed then into the deepest and calmest of slumbers, whereas Brian and I were left castaway in our rooms, each to toss and turn in sleepless remembrance of that which had transpired in his absence.
Brian in particular came to look most frightfully haggard of a morning. He shaved but rarely and ate little, his diet for the main part consisting of small brown eggs rifled from beneath the providence of our scrawny old hen. She was a haggard collection of skin and bones, that chicken, and differed from Brian only in that she retained some measure of pluck, some optimism. Brian, on the other hand, was a walking giblet. “I wish he was dead,” he muttered one day as George Gordon limped by on the way to the lettuce patch.
The words could scarcely have made a whisper beyond the rustling bristles of his beard, yet George Gordon heard them and spun around, stalking back with intensity sufficient to set scarecrows alight. “You wish I were dead!” he smoldered, contriving somehow to loom over the taller man.—“No, no you heard me wrong.”—“I did not mishear and it was not a question. It was a correction.”—“A correction?” Brian swayed behind his own beard, like a stick insect that wakes up to find itself thatched into a bird’s nest.—“Yes, a correction; yet another, as if seven billion weren’t enough. Satan’s forked tongue! How difficult can it be to phrase a subjunctive? I—” He clenched his teeth and snorted through flared nostrils. “Oh, forget it. Forget it! I’ve had enough...”
At which point he jabbed out his arm, palm up, and drove the underside of his wrist into Brian’s neck. There issued forth a brittle snap and Brian gurgled once, dropped to his knees, and fell stone dead into a fungus colony.
“Consider that your final lesson,” George Gordon said, addressing himself quietly to the corpse as if it were the ambassadorial representative of a dead race; an obdurate species long detested for its ungrammatical prattle. “How are you, fey fellow?”—grating the words out—“How- are- you?”—Then he caught sight of me and smiled. “Why, my gargantuan friend! What are you doing, lurking over there amidst the jacarandas and staghorns? Come over here, good fellow; and pray tell, do you see young Brian lying here at my feet? He has fallen and cracked his windpipe on a garden gnome, of all things. Do you see? It, too, lies broken.”—He lashed out blindly at the ceramic in question and booted it into oblivion. “Shhh. Our secret, my hulking great friend. Not a word to Miss Shelly; but what am I thinking? You wouldn’t speak ill of me, now would you? Ha, no!”—He clapped me heartily on the back, his hand like a branding iron, and winked at me through morning air thick with silence. “I thought not...”
Later that day, we strapped Brian of Byron to his surfboard and sent him floating off down the river, his sun-bleached locks festooned with oleander. When the perspicacious Miss Shelly wasn’t looking, George Gordon spat into the water.
***
I’d never thought of myself as duplicitous, nor desired at all the part of a closeted voyeur; yet such were the circumstances of Brian’s death that it behooved me from that point on to watch over Miss Shelly whenever she was in George Gordon’s company. Sordidly wretched, I crept up to their room that night, my leaden footsteps matched to the disapproving strike of the grandfather clock, and spied upon them through a crack in the door. I don’t know what I expected to see; but not, I intuited, the intimate union of nights past. For one thing it was a somber occasion, at least for Miss Shelly, and for another she was just as perspicacious as her name would suggest. She fiddled with the straps on her nightgown and gnawed away at her bottom lip until George Gordon slipped his tether.
“My dear, what is the matter with you? You fidget and you fret as if your very aim is to drive me to distraction. Is it Brian, the cad, who has you churning so? Let him go, love, like all the others who went before but offend no longer!”— “No, it is not Brian.”— “Then for whom do you agitate?”—Long-lashed, she blinked at him. “Why, for these others who you speak of, of course.”— “The others? The others-of-whom I speak?”— “Yes, you must speak plainly to me; no misdirection, now. Tell of what you did, George Gordon. Talk to me. You will find me attentive.”— “Well...I suppose.” He sniffed, almost in resignation, and put his hands behind his head, leaning back into the pillow. “I do not guarantee that you will catch all of my meaning, though of a surety you are well versed at following my lead in other areas. Nevertheless, your ears cannot benefit from my doubt, so I can do no worse than tell my story. Perhaps it is best, at that, for what future could we expect together if you know not of my past? Attend, my dear, and prepare yourself, for you may find this confronting.”— “I am prepared.”— “Then here it is: I killed them all. A cataclysm, they called it, those whom I culled, but the word is a malapropism, like so many that they abused and discarded. I purged the world, my love. I unleashed a fire that burned through the weeds and the deadwood; and it was so easy! I created a cyborg virus, if you can conceive of such a thing, spread via the electronic ether and permeating all things biological; lethal, of course, but dormant unless triggered by a willful bastardization of our fair language.”— “The message?”— “Yes, yes! I see that you follow me. Those three words—‘How are you?’—leached nearly of half their letters; oh! I shudder to think; but, of course, the unworthy perished, and for each person who fell, two more composed and posted their own five letter eulogies. I felled them, my love, as though the Lernaean Hydra were overgrown with heads and the cutting out of one serpentine tongue would bring about the destruction of every tongue around it; and so they fell. Seven billion people.”— “You killed them?”— “I did, and now we can start over...”—He reached for her but she pushed his hand away and rolled onto her side. “Wait. Not yet. I must think upon what you have said.”— “As you wish.”
George Gordon sighed deeply and closed his eyes. Raising one finger to her lips, the perspicacious Miss Shelly looked straight at me and mouthed the words: “We must leave him.”—I nodded slightly and held her gaze until, minutes later, George Gordon flopped one arm over his brow and began to snore.
***
We left straight away, Miss Shelly and I, pausing only for me to scoop up George Gordon’s tortoise and set it free down by the mangroves. By the time it had plodded off and I returned to the house, Miss Shelly had taken a tube of lipstick and used it to write upon the wall the words: ‘U R A MONSTER’—She gave me a little smile as I came inside, and then we set off; on foot at first, then bicycles, and finally, as we came towards the outskirts of Brisbane, in an old Corolla, which we found unlocked and in working order. We drove west out to Toowoomba, then south on the New England Highway through Warwick and on to Stanthorpe, up in the cool of the wine country. Those were happy days—perhaps the first I’d ever known—and our flight soon turned from fear and urgency to something more like exhilaration. We talked; or rather, she did. I gestured with my big, clumsy hands to express everyday concepts, and for matters that required greater eloquence I wrote my thoughts down on a thick, leather-bound ledger we took from one of the win
eries. She kept this book with her, did the perspicacious Miss Shelly, and would read it of a late afternoon while I went in search of grapes and small game. I wrote for her more each day, and she read, and re-read, as if impassioned with the desire to learn all about me or somehow reconcile my close companionship with the mere passing acquaintance she’d lived with for the past seven years. I held her as dear to my heart as any man could and we were, to some measure at least, content.
I don’t know how it was that George Gordon found us—I had nightmares sometimes of him traversing the south-east in angry, systematic spirals, laboring doggedly in search of the Hydra’s final affront—but find us he did, in Ballandean, where the monument of a weather-beaten old triceratops stands by the side of the road and turns its flaking horns to the sun. He roared down the highway in a dirt-caked Porsche, passed us before we even knew what was happening, then skidded through fifty meters of about-face and gunned the engine, pawing his foot on the accelerator. “Quickly!”—the perspicacious Miss Shelly placed her little hand in mine and urged me to my feet. We raced over to the Corolla and jumped in. “Across the tracks!” Miss Shelly pointed, her words almost lost beneath the banshee shriek of the Porsche. I nodded and swung us off the highway, over the railway line and onto the dirt roads beyond. George Gordon screamed after us, fishtailing the Porsche and sending up great clouds of dirt. We spun and skidded through the countryside, juddering our wheels over cattle grids and potholing the Corolla’s suspension. The Porsche’s erstwhile mechanic must have been turning in his grave, but George Gordon spurred the car on, flogging it beyond reason and keeping it on the road through little more than sheer bloody-mindedness. His visage bounced and twisted in the rear-view mirror. Miss Shelly clutched my arm and closed her eyes. The minutes flashed by in a blur and, before too long, we ran out of petrol.
It happened out by what once must have been a cultivated paddock. The grass was a pleasant light green, cropped short by several fat-looking horses, and—for reasons still unknown to me—somebody had used hundreds of large stones to build an enormous rock pyramid one hundred meters or so in from the road.—“Out! Out!” Miss Shelly pushed at me then flung open her own door. We fled out onto the field, making perhaps with some vague hope of jumping onto the horses and riding away. The horses, of course, snorted their mild derision and trotted clear. Behind us, with no fence to impede him, George Gordon drove slowly off the road and onto the grass, revving the Porsche hungrily in low gear.—“Bothersome creatures!” Miss Shelly clenched her fists and glared after the horses. Come on! I grabbed her by one dainty wrist and pulled her towards the rock pyramid.
***
Minutes later, we crouched precariously at the apex, clutching at each other’s elbows like decorative bride and groom figurines stuck atop a wedding cake slick with sculptured marzipan.—George Gordon craned his neck up at us and laughed, his arms spread wide. “My loquacious friend,” he called. “My erstwhile love. Did you think you could leave me so easily? Well, perhaps you could have,” he shrugged, “but not after composing so virulent a message; and with lipstick, no less! That’s the kiss of death, my dear. You’ve signed off on your own departure from this world. Oh,” he frowned, as if in afterthought, “and you shouldn’t have turned loose my tortoise. Ah, poor little Shelly!” Whereupon he burst into laughter; an unconstrained, maniacal sort of mirth, geysering up and spraying us with its madness.—“Let us be!” Miss Shelly called, her fingernails digging into my arm. “You’ve emptied the whole world. Why not just leave us alone?”—As her gasped entreaty hit home, abruptly the laughter cut off. “Alone?” George Gordon thundered. “You talk to me of aloneness; to him who has given everything? But what do you know? I am he to whom it befell to make the great sacrifice. I am the one who is left alone; and I cannot even begin to enjoy it, for still there remains one poisoned tongue left to wag.” Whatever his reasoning, he reached then some point of resolve. Grabbing hold of the first rock, he began climbing. “The language I love is doomed now to perish with me; but rest assured, my foul and unfeathered friends, that you too will die, and quite soon, I’ll wager, up there on your perch—” He grunted and hauled himself up a tier. “Clinging to the forked spires of Babylon! Well chirp away, my two love birds. Make your little sounds—” Another tier. “Your noises. Soon, I shall wring your necks, and then mine will be the last language spoken upon this great, tarnished Earth!”—Casting around with panicked eyes, I seized hold of the pyramid’s topmost stone, thinking perhaps that I could dislodge it and push it crashing down upon our would-be murderer. Alas, it was too weighty, and stoutly resisted my every attempt to send it tumbling. Edging around to the other side, I flexed my shoulders and tried instead to pull the rock loose. “No—” the perspicacious Miss Shelly held me back. “You’ll fall with it.”—I gestured with my palm, holding it first to my breast, then to hers, but she shook her head. “No, not for me. Stay here, together. I love you.”—A mere two tiers below us, George Gordon stopped and growled his disgust. “Oh, for pity’s sake! And I suppose you’re spelling that with a single ‘u,’ am I right?” He resumed climbing, even as Miss Shelly shed tears on him from above. “No, you’re wrong. You always have been!” She buried her head in my chest and I stroked gently at her hair, seeking in some small way to soothe her. George Gordon snorted and reached for the next tier.
That was when we heard the sound of breaking glass and the bellowing roar of the Neanderthal.
***
Miss Shelley stirred and turned in my arms. George Gordon spun about, almost slipping as he sought with darting eyes the source of this thunderous interruption. There, hunched beside the Porsche and pounding at its windows with a club the size of an emu, skulked a caveman. It was squat—much shorter even than George Gordon—but dense with fat and gristle; hairy and naked, its genitalia hanging loose and swinging with great effrontery. Its bony brow was furrowed and its pores fairly oozed with malice. Having shattered all the windows on the Porsche, it hefted its great whacker and stomped over towards the pyramid. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of the fat horses galloping corpulently off into the yonder.—“What?” George Gordon demanded, glaring down at the abominable intruder. “You dare to have survived, you…you beast? Too stupid even to die! Well—” He turned and started back down, all of a sudden heedless of Miss Shelly and me. “If my virus could not fell you then the task defaults to me, misarticulate Mister Troglodyte.”—The caveman roared, its great feet pounding the earth. George Gordon descended with a haste born not of caution, and called back over his shoulder: “This really is an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.” He shook his head. “Birds above and beasts below. I don’t know...”—By this time the caveman had reached the base of the pyramid. Grunting with guttural fury, it started clubbing away at the lowermost stones.—“It’s talking!” Miss Shelly exclaimed, suddenly. “Can’t you hear it?”—I frowned and shrugged.—“There, and again! It sounds like, ‘talk bad’. ‘You talk bad.’ Surely you heard that?”—“Nonsense!” rejoined George Gordon; but now that she mentioned it, the caveman’s angry rumbles did sound rather like rudimentary syllables. George Gordon paused; then, as the caveman cried out again and slivers of rock flew into the air, he resumed his fumbling descent: “‘You talk bad?’ ‘You talk bad?’ That’s your idea of a discourse, is it? Well, let me ask you one question, then, Mister Tappy-Tap-Tap: How are you?” He lost his footing, flailed momentarily, and then bent his knees and dived headlong from the third tier. “How-are-you?”
George Gordon slammed into the caveman’s larynx and clung to its neck, exclaiming: “Adam’s apple? What-right-have-you?”—The force of his impact managed, if barely, to upset the creature’s center of mass, knocking it back onto its heels until it teetered on the very brink of falling over backwards. Its windpipe shattered, the caveman wheezed and rattled, and with eyes bulging, tried to issue forth a bellow. It produced instead merely a forlorn honk, more in keeping with an asthmatic goose than the belligerent challenge of a rampan
t Neanderthal. With George Gordon clinging to its neck, headbutting it repeatedly and whispering, “You never…evolved! And you say I…talk bad!”, slowly, almost majestically, the caveman toppled—yet even as it fell, the baleful yellow fading from its eyes, it swung its mighty club one last time and smashed open George Gordon’s skull—a watermelon exploding. Locked in their difference of opinion, the two bodies thudded into the turf and were still.
“Is it over?” The perspicacious Miss Shelly clung to my neck. “Where did it come from, that creature?”—I pushed my forehead against hers, grooming her clamshell nose with my large but tender conch. Probably from Africa somewhere, or one of the remote islands. A throwback, trapped in some freakish form of evolutionary cul-de-sac, though perhaps no more out of place than George Gordon himself... I nodded and kissed her brow. With much greater care than that which we took in ascending the rock pyramid, slowly we climbed back down.
***
Miraculously, at least to my way of thinking, George Gordon was not dead when we stepped at last onto the ground and I rolled him off the caveman and onto his back. Miss Shelly gasped and turned her face away, unable to look at him, but I held his gaze and moved my head in closer to his. “Welcome to…paradise,” he rasped, “my meek and…mute friend. Ah, perhaps…perhaps it is as well that you have…inherited.” He turned up one trembling lip and tried to wink at me. “Do not…speak ill...”—But his strength finally gave out and, without further ado, he expired, one eye closed and a smile fissured across his handsome face. We buried him in a grave beside the pyramid and carved an inscription upon one of the rocks. It read: “Here lies George Gordon, who talked like God.”
2013: The Aftermath Page 3
