Right.
There’s only one problem with that: Now I have it.
I’ve had it for a long time, and I can’t remember how to want other things. It’s been so long since anything made me truly happy. Oh, there have been moments here and there—some sunny days and massive nights—but it feels like it’s been a decade since anything really stuck.
And in the quiet times, I think about Kaitlyn.
Her bones scattered in some dark pit. No burial. No service. No grave. Nobody to even remember her name. Except for me. And I’m too much of a coward to even bring her up.
What if they asked questions?
Hey Jackie, this friend of yours sounds great. Whatever happened to her?
Oh, you know, she died fighting otherworldly monsters in the ruins of a gated community. Didn’t heed the HOA guidelines—painted her house pink, don’t you know—so of course the neighbors had to eat her face.
I hadn’t so much as spoken her name since that day at the sunken city, when Carey finally summited the cliffside path and shook his head. He didn’t even offer an explanation. By the time the tears cleared, so had Carey. I never saw the bastard again.
Ah, look at me: Becky flies me out to an island paradise, rents a whole private beach—even has the waiters sing “Happy Birthday, you slut” just to give me a laugh—and what do I do? I wander off, alone, to get all weepy about the past.
Still, just the thought of going back there and faking another laugh …
Flashing another practiced smile. Telling one of the same funny stories—“the one about the luchador! Do the one about the luchador and the van!”—it gives me heartburn.
But I am on a pristine and empty beach. I have a decent buzz—my head swimming but not spinning—and there’s cool, clean water. A moon like a spotlight.
Maybe I don’t have to go back.
Maybe I don’t ever have to go back. I could just slip into the water and keep swimming until I find somewhere I belong. And if that’s nowhere, well …
God, the papers would love it, wouldn’t they? I’d go from “quirky performer” to “screen icon” overnight. Wistful girls would hang posters of me on their bedroom walls, all emblazoned with smarmy quotes about “burning bright.”
Enough with the dark thoughts. The only good idea I’ve had all night was going for a swim, but like hell would I actually get this swimsuit wet. It costs as much as my car, and Silone would kill me.
I slipped out of it and let the ocean air prick goosebumps in my skin. I took a single step toward the water, and a star raged into life right in front of me.
My first, immediate thought was paparazzi in a helicopter, shining a spotlight to get their scandalous nudes. I was so annoyed with myself. Then I realized that the light wasn’t far away, or low over the water. It was only a few feet from me. Hovering above the sand.
No this was over no—
But it’s not that.
I don’t … think?
It looked like an angel: a ball of light so bright it’s like somebody punched a hole in the sky. But this one wasn’t white—not entirely. Shades of blue flickered in and out of it, danced around the edges, flipped and shifted to red. They went prismatic, and started flashing. It was almost playful. And what’s more: There was no sound at all. No awful noise like a million people screaming. In fact, the whole world went utterly quiet. I couldn’t even hear the ocean anymore.
An idea formed in my mind. It was Kaitlyn’s face, but not how I remembered it: just crude sketches of the important details, the rest washed out by time. It was really her: split ends and shy smile and everything.
“K?” I said, and the colors flared in response.
More ideas came surging in, complicated things far beyond words. There was comfort there, plus contentment, loss, pride, and guilt. But most of all, there was a giddy sense of awe.
Landscapes flashed through my mind: a barren field of green dust, three suns rising over a mountain range that absolutely dwarfed anything on Earth. An ocean made of mercury, silver storms and metal waves. A place where time fell like rain, in intermittent sheets, the world utterly frozen in the intervals between them.
The images went on for hours, or maybe they all happened at once and it took me hours to process them all.
At some point, I blinked away the tears and realized that the angel’s light had faded—I’d been staring at the moon instead. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and smiled at nothing. Or no: at everything.
I picked up a handful of pebbles and let them fall through my fingers. I ran my toes through the waves. I laughed at the trees. The cool sand pooled around my feet with every step like I was melting into the Earth itself. Eventually I made it back to the party. What few guests remained milled about in small groups, nursing old cocktails that were mostly melted ice. When they saw me, they all smiled and laughed with me, because we were perfect and ridiculous things, blazing through life like comets.
And also because I had forgotten my swimsuit back at the beach.
I guess that’s just more ammo for the eternal party girl myth.
THIRTY-FIVE
}}}Carey. 2015. Los Angeles, California. Santa Monica.}}}}}}}}}
“Listen, lady, first thing: I didn’t puke on your dog, okay? No way to prove that’s mine. Could be anybody’s puke. And second, that’s … pretty much pure liquor. Wash right off. So what’re you so wound up about?”
Uptight bitch won’t listen to reason. She’s got that face. That “I’m about to call the cops” face. I hate that face. Started seeing it more often since I moved out here to the beach. Hitting the bottle pretty hard. Got a rotten burning feeling down in my guts that won’t drink away. Figure I didn’t have a lot of time left, so why not retire out west? Just a few miles west, actually …
Oh, they’ll let you sleep in the park in Santa Monica, sure. But the second you punch a mime on the promenade they’re all “public disturbance” this, and “pressing charges” that.
And I said to ’em, I said:
“Who’s gonna press charges? That sumbitch ain’t sayin’ nothin’!”
I yell the punch line at a young kid with a gnarly beard. I figure, you got a thing like that on your face, you got a sense of humor.
Fucker doesn’t laugh.
“S’funny,” I tell the kid. Just trying to help him out. Let him know what humor is.
He shakes his head like he’s sad for me. The utter shit.
Boy, I love bus stops. All these people hate me, but they can’t leave or they’ll miss their ride. It’s the perfect place to hold my court. The only downside is those guys in blue that—yep, they’re coming this way.
That crazy bitch and her puke-dog ratted me out. Whatever happened to manners, huh? Used to be, we have a problem, we hash it out like people. Now it’s like every little crime and the cops get involved.
Well.
Fuck ’em!
I used to swear Jim Beam was the fightin’est liquor around. You wanna end the night kicking a guy in an alley, you start the night with Jimmy. But that’s before I found this.…
What is this?
I peer at the bottle. It’s all blurry, but I can see it’s got a picture of a spider on it.
That’s usually not a good sign.
Well, I’m all fueled up on fight juice and I can’t even remember what it was like to give a fuck, so sure, lady—
“Call all the cops!” I yell at her rapidly disappearing ass. “Call all the cops in the world!”
Oh hell, while I was busy yelling at them, the pigs snuck up and grabbed both my arms. That’s not fair. That’s cheatin’.
Ha, but I still got a forehead.
I swing it at the nearest chiseled jaw. My aim is shit. Just clip him in the ear. Make him mad.
“Lights out,” I say.
“Lights out,” he affirms, before swinging me facedown into the sidewalk.
…
Turns out that was a lie.
I woke up staring at a b
are bulb in a metal cage. Damn thing must’ve been a million watts for the headache it was giving me. I was looking forward to a nice dark place to crash for a while. Nothing like being able to actually see the world around you to make you hate it all.
I closed my eyes, but I could still see that cruel white light burning through my eyelids. I opened them again, and I swore the fucking thing had grown.
Or gotten closer.
Or—
Oh, god damn it.
The ball of light wasn’t in its cage anymore. It was hovering a few feet above my head, those sick shapes and static screams piercing my—
“Hey, wait,” I said. “Where’s the sound effects?”
The angel didn’t respond.
There were colors in this one, too. I’m not sure which ones. Felt like every time I tried to chase one down it was somewhere else, or something else. I didn’t get that cold sensation from its presence, either. In fact, looking at it now, it was almost … familiar.…
“Kaitlyn?” I asked.
Laughter. Not the sound, the abstract idea. It sprang into my thoughts and wiggled around there.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
A million more ideas came bursting through every door and window in my mind. Forgiveness. Want. Recrimination. Short films of me and Kaitlyn in that gray building beneath the coast, only I wasn’t pulling the trigger in these movies. I dropped the gun, or unloaded it, or threw it in the sea—
“You made me do it?” I said.
Apologies. Regret. Necessity. An alien snapshot: shining blue cliffs spilling out dense gas like a waterfall. A red planet with streaks of white, thousands of times larger than Earth, with glowing purple lines undulating all across its surface. An eternal aurora, a sea of diamond—
“What is this shit?” I said, swatting my hands at the air.
The images died down.
“I don’t care about this Star Trek garbage.”
The angel was silent.
I had absolutely no external cues to assume so, but I’m still pretty sure she was annoyed.
“Come on, now,” I said. “Like you were gonna win me over with waterfalls and pretty colors? I don’t need that. I just … just tell me you’re okay. Wherever you are. Whatever you are.”
Ideas: longing and heartsickness. But also contentment. Curiosity. Excitement. Burning like a road flare above all else: Determination.
She was still fighting. Good.
Ideas: Want. Questions. Self.
“What do I want?” I guessed. The light shimmered affirmation.
I felt a presence tenderly poking around inside of me. Slipping between my atoms into the core of my being, adjusting the code that makes me who I am. Removing sadness, dulling self-hatred…
“No!” I jumped up from the cot and backed into the farthest corner of the cell. “Don’t you god damn dare change it. Don’t you god damn dare make me pretty.”
Confusion. Desperation. Help.
“Just…” I slumped to the ground. I could feel the cold concrete through my worn jeans. “Just tell me what it was all for.”
Inside my head, I saw a glowing nest of tentacles shrieking and dying. In the distance, I felt something immense begin to move—
“The space whale?” I laughed.
The light did not.
Ideas: Big. Old. God/Not God.
“So what, God’s been gone forever and now we made it so he can come back? Great. Is he gonna hand out harps and togas?”
Wrong. Uncertain. God/Not God. Good/Not Good. Existence. Natural. Neutral.
I suddenly remembered, with painful clarity, a biology lesson that I’d tuned out of back in grade school. The teacher was up there droning on and on about some boring crap, so I was entertaining myself by drawing crude boobies over all the pictures of girls in my textbook. I couldn’t have told you what the lesson was about to save my life. But this scene was too sharp for one of my dull memories. This wasn’t me. This was Kaitlyn, showing me. I heard my teacher’s voice, clear as day:
“When the body is sick, it produces antibodies to defend itself from within—”
The memory cut out. Then I saw every single person I ever knew all at once: Wash, Matt, Safety Pins, Elmer Spikes, Thing 1 and Thing 2, Tub and Meryll, Randall, Rosa, my mom and dad, our old mailman, the cops that threw me in here, Kaitlyn, Jackie, and thousands more.
I threw up.
“Christ,” I said, still reeling. “Don’t do that. It’s like being punched in the brain by a high school yearbook.”
Apologies. Inhuman. Forget.
“So what,” I said to the ball of light. “The space whale is, like, the whole universe, and we’re, like, its antibodies, fighting off disease?”
Rejoice! Correct. Surprise.
“And the disease was the angels?”
Pride. Gratitude. Complete.
“Well la di da for the space whale,” I said. “I’m glad all my friends died so it didn’t have a tummy ache anymore.”
Sadness. Disapproval. Hope.
I felt that slick, lurching movement in the base of my soul that meant something was rooting around inside of me.
“No!” I screamed. “I don’t need solving.”
But the angel didn’t stop. It churned inside of me, shifting and rearranging until—
Nothing.
I ran a mental inventory: Every shitty thing that ever happened to me was still right there, front and center.
At least I think it was. Would I know if it wasn’t?
I remembered, in vivid detail, pulling the trigger and watching Kaitlyn die. If she was going to start somewhere, it would have been there.
She hadn’t changed a thing.
“What…” I started to say, but that was it.
The light had gone out.
I sat on the cot and stared at the cell walls.
That’s the thing about jail: It doesn’t give you a damn thing to do but think. Think, sleep, or masturbate. My head hurt too bad to sleep and I didn’t have anything to clean up with after masturbating, so that left thinking.
That shit angel-Kaitlyn said, when she was trying to explain everything to me. It just didn’t hit home. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t that she was wrong, she was just using the wrong metaphor. The antibody stuff—maybe smarter guys than me understand that and find it comforting—but I don’t see it that way. Now, this is just me. This is just my take on it, and it probably doesn’t help you feel any better—any less alone or weak or small or whatever your fucking problem is—but it does the trick for me. Kaitlyn was trying to tell me this:
When we look up and pray to God for help, we’re being idiots. God doesn’t help us. It doesn’t give us anything. It doesn’t need to. God isn’t up there handing out weapons so we can fight evil.
We are the weapons.
And that? That’s something I can wrap my head around.
I sat on my uncomfortable jail cell cot and I thought about that for hours before I finally realized what was different: The sickly pain in my guts had subsided.
Did I just get a liver transplant from a ghost?
I burst out laughing.
“If you think that’s gonna stop me drinking,” I yelled at the bare bulb, shining stoically in its metal cage. “You got another think comin’!”
Still …
…
Maybe I would switch to beer.
Acknowledgments
My agent, Sam Morgan, has always believed in me. I don’t know why he does that. Somebody get him to stop; it’s bad for his health. The fine folks at Tor published and supported all three installments of this very strange story, no matter how poorly I delivered it (or what it was scrawled in). My wife didn’t leave me when I devoted years of my free time to “something about space whales and punk rockers.” I love her for that, and many other things. My family managed to be proud of me for all of this, or at least lied about it very, very well. My dogs did not eat my face when I pas
sed out on my keyboard some nights. They are good dogs.
Books by Robert Brockway
Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody
Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity
THE VICIOUS CIRCUIT
The Unnoticeables
The Empty Ones
Kill All Angels
About the Author
ROBERT BROCKWAY lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Meagan, and their two dogs, Detectives Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh. He has been known, on occasion, to have a beard. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Acknowledgments
Books by Robert Brockway
Kill All Angels Page 25
