Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  Half-asleep, Darren shuffles through to his room like one of the undead. It’s uncomfortable to watch. He oozes under the duvet then waits, steeple-fingered, while I clear my throat once, twice.

  I read to him, silently praying these short fairy tales and rhymes will send him off to sleep, but they seem to revive him into wakefulness, instead. There’s little truth to them, and what there is is hidden behind cute animals and saccharine Happy-Ever-Afters. This is my son, I think. He ought to be prepared for what lies in wait for him. He ought to know. So I close the book and it makes a satisfying whoomp! Then I tell him a tale I believe is closer to the truth of this world.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty did not have a great fall, at least, not yet. Half a dozen men pulled up in a white van with sand in its tires. They stood before him, and poor Humpty was scared, terrified, in fact. But he was on top of the wall with nowhere to go. One of the men took something from his pocket and threw it toward the base of the wall. It bounced off and rolled a short distance back. Humpty thought it was a ball, but it wasn’t. It was a rolled-up blindfold. “Put it on,” ordered one of the men. Humpty could not see any of their faces, but he could see their eyes, and they were dark. Faced by so many and with nowhere to run, Humpty did as he was told and put on the blindfold. They took Humpty to a secret place with cages and stains on the floor. They led him into a room where a box—black, silent—sat on three legs. He saw these things because his blindfold had slipped just enough for him to see over it with one eye. Then suddenly a red eye appeared on the box and the men lined up behind him. One of them made a speech and although Humpty did not understand what the man said, he wanted him to keep talking. But the man finished and then there was a lot of shouting. Humpty slumped to the ground and watched the red eye watching him. It watched as they lopped off poor Humpty’s head and yolk poured out of him onto the ground, only the yolk wasn’t yellow, it was red, like the eye of the thing that watched, not blinking as—

  Laura strides into the bedroom: pink basque, stockings, heels. She’s in a flap, it seems, like some irate flamingo. I smile; I can’t help it, things are backwards these days. She drags me out of the room, rounds on me in the hall.

  “What was that?” she hisses, struggling to keep her voice down. “What the fuck were you telling our son?”

  I’m still smiling; no, I’m grinning. Ear to ear. I can’t stop. It masks the fear. I smile a lot and people think I’m crazy. I never used to smile and people, strangers, would come up to me and say quit frowning, it might never happen. They thought I was crazy then, too. Oh, and it did happen. It snuck right up and sat its fat fucking ass on me while I wasn’t looking. Wasn’t looking.

  “What’s so damn funny?” she asks.

  I have no good answer to give her, and that scares me. And so I keep on smiling, like this is some big joke. And it is, in a way. Some big cosmic joke.

  Muffled questions try to reach us through the door.

  And then we’re in our bedroom and the door is closed but we’re not watching mpegs, nor is it what I expected to find in here, and part of me feels relieved that she’s mad and not amorous.

  “Asshole! Sick asshole! You had no right—no right to do that. He’s your son for chrissakes and you’re filling his head with nightmares.”

  My smile is gone.

  Laura is shaking in her pink basque.

  “Those nightmares?” I say. “They’re happening now. Six and a half thousand miles from this city. And they could happen anywhere—here, in our country”—our bedroom—“He needs to hear the truth, Laura. Besides, I softened it up a little.”

  “He’s five years old, Richard. He isn’t ready to hear that shit.”

  That tone, again. I won’t let this happen.

  There are licks of sweat appearing all over her, on her forehead, cheeks, tips of her nose and chin, the tops of her slender arms … in the cleft between the small rounds of her pushed-up breasts …

  “None of us are ready to hear it,” I say, starting to undress.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to take a shower.”

  “Now?” she asks. “But you already had one when you came home. Counting the two earlier today that makes four.”

  “So what?” I shrug. “Can’t I be clean?”

  Laura walks away to tend to Darren.

  The water feels like a hundred cold baby fingers drumming my skin. I soap, cocoon myself in lather. Then, with the showerhead in my hand for a close rinse, I blast the suds and watch them drain away. I’m clean. Decontaminated. The first step from the shower stall will be another fresh start. It’s what keeps me coming back again and again and again. But there’s always something I miss: that spot behind my balls where the soap tends to collect. And I know I can’t step outside the stall until the suds are gone and I am clean. But rinsing down there … the baby fingers … it feels strange, makes a choppy sea of my stomach. And sometimes … this time, yes, it’s happening … I get a hard-on. And so I start over again—soap, lather, rinse—until I’m clean and you’re gone, even if only for an hour or so.

  Laura walks into the bathroom just as I step out onto the tiled floor. She spots it as it’s nodding to sleep again, and says in a flat, humorless voice, “Now’s really not the time to have your fun—”

  “I didn’t …”

  She gives me a look. Right.

  Then I break the wall mirror in half with her face.

  At the hospital, Laura doesn’t tell, not even in the face of weighted looks from heavy nurses. They don’t like broken mirrors. They can make them very unlucky. I sit in the waiting room with Darren. The doctor who examines Laura tells me she’ll need plastic surgery, and even then she’ll be left with scars. I glance at Darren, sitting on a plastic chair two along from mine. He’s ghostly pale and hollow-eyed. When the doctor leaves, I buy Darren a candy bar and try to start up a conversation. He’s unresponsive, taking mouse-bites from a corner to show me his mouth is busy. I slip him the cab fare back to our apartment, though something tells me it is their apartment now, and I ask a nurse to sit with him while I slip outside to make a call on my cell. Only I didn’t take my phone with me.

  As I drift through the city’s dark and empty streets, suspecting that they were made just for me, the wind sighs—disappointed, it seems. Encircled by that single voice with a thousand echoes, it speaks to me, promising your imminent return. You and I, alone again. My stomach knots. And then my feet are a blur beneath me as I run to beat the devil, you, the you I created, or rather destroyed; me, the one who saw a ball that was never a ball and broke a mirror with his wife. But where to go to escape myself? Where to go? At the mall, the mirrors will only shrink away from me. And Mistress won’t lock the door long enough.

  Home is out. I could run myself into the ground, but there has to be an easier way. Steal a car … throw rocks at apartment windows … beat on some homeless drunk. Or maybe I should find a hotel room somewhere and lose a couple of days to the minibar.

  A boy of about fourteen rounds the corner ahead, strutting in my direction as I race in his. Maybe he’s the answer, I think, slowing to a fast walk. I’m equally drawn and repulsed by the notion of running straight into this kid and maybe pushing him around a little until he calls the cops. But there’s no violence left in me. Besides, what would the cops do? They’d toss me in a cell for one night. Perhaps order me to pay the kid some compensation. Then I’d be back to square one. I suppose I could flash him. Hope he calls the cops then. They like that as much as nurses like wife-beaters. Yeah, that’s what to do. Show the kid my cock. That ought to earn me a few gut-punches in a holding cell tonight. What if I rub it against him? Just a little, but enough. What would they do to me then? How far should I take this?

  But the boy passes without incident, except to tighten his eyes at me as I step aside at the last moment to avoid a collision.

  Watching him walk away, I let go of the zipper on my jeans.

  For now.

&nb
sp; When there’s a safe distance between us, I follow him.

  For some time, we move through the lamp-lit streets, him, me, boy, shadow, as the wind carries intimations of you and my fast breath fogs my vision.

  When the boy turns into a park, where there are very few lamps and every second one has been shot out by air-gun pellets or well-aimed rocks, he joins a group of friends, maybe a dozen or more. I duck behind a bush near the entrance, a soccer field’s length from their Saturday-night play: boarding, sinking beers, pulling on a three or four skin joint and then passing it around their circle. Teens are pack animals, of course.

  Then maybe this is better.

  Next thing, I’m easing down the zipper …

  Seesawing my jeans down my legs to my ankles …

  Moving out into the open, though it’s shadowed here, waddling for the orange spill of the nearest working lamp. And when I reach it, it’ll be two-fingers in my mouth and blow …

  But somebody cries out, though not in pain. He is directing everyone’s hazy attention toward something he has spotted. It isn’t me, the half-naked man shuffling through the shadows toward the light. I see only an array of backs turned toward me as they insist, it seems, on ignoring my presence. No, there is a newcomer on the scene. A young boy, much younger than any in the group, eleven at most, strolling through this park at night on a zigzagging path that keeps him as close to the light as possible—though not for his personal safety but so he can see the words in the book he’s holding four inches from his nose.

  I have three seconds, longer than a blink but still just three seconds, before the group of boys begin to move toward him as one dark, deadly shoal, and in those three seconds I think to myself, I’ve never seen anything so foolish and so beautiful—except I have. That morning, when I saw you pick up a ball that wasn’t a ball and shake it, trying to hear what was inside.

  You’re back, I see.

  As I stand there, legs weakening fast, breathing in short, tremulous gasps, I see several of the boys’ faces backlit by the glow of their clamshell phones. Aimed and ready. Drifting, but with clear intent, they form a wide circle as they move in closer to the boy, able to cover every face punch, every rib-kick, every stomp to the head from every angle. As for the boy, he walks on oblivious as words talk and sentences sing and he … he listens.

  Then I’m pulling my jeans back up to my waist …

  And I’m closing the zipper. Gritted teeth.

  I won’t blink this time, kid.

  I won’t.

  David J. Schwartz’s stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the anthologies Fantasy: Best of the Year 2007, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated Twenty Epics. His novel Superheroes was a Nebula Award nominee.

  “The Sun Inside” was originally published as a stand alone novella by Rabid Transit Press. It is both a reimagining of Burroughs-style pulp fiction and a tale about PTSD.

  “the sun inside”

  DAVID J. SCHWARTZ

  kilgore says you can’t hear me, and I know you can’t see me. Maybe you hear me in your mind, the way you do Kilgore. I’m not exactly sure why I’m talking to you, considering what you are and what you’ve done. Thinking about it makes my palms ache. If they hadn’t already hurt you I think I’d be hitting you right now, but instead I’m explaining myself. Confessing, maybe.

  I guess it’s sort of like when I first got out of the hospital with my injury. I was walking around with the cane, and I could see that people—strangers—wanted to ask about it. But none of them did, and it made me angry for no good reason. I didn’t really want them to ask, but I did want to talk about it. I wanted to talk through everything that had happened, try to make some sense out of it. Like I’m doing now.

  Where I come from, it’s a lot different from here. For one thing, the dinosaurs there died out a long time ago. No offense. It’s a lot more settled, there. The frontiers are gone, and the wilderness is tame, or at least far enough away for most people to pretend it is.

  I grew up in the suburbs. My ma sold real estate, and my daddy was a cop. We were the only black family in the neighborhood, and I used to be real little, so I got beat up a lot when no one was looking. I don’t have a lot of good memories about being a kid. As long as I can remember I just wanted to be big enough to hit back. When it happened, around about junior high, I got a little wild. My folks made me go out for football, and that helped. Wrestling, too, but it was football that stuck. I played offensive line. At first I just liked the fact that I could hit without getting in trouble, but it got to be a point of pride that no one put a hand on my quarterback. I was All-State twice.

  The first Gulf War started my senior year. I knew about it from the start, because our football coach used to tell us about Saddam. His son was a Marine, and he’d pass on stories about things the Iraqis had done: rapes and torture, dropping bombs and nerve gas on their own people, killing babies. Sick things. I guess some of it was exaggerated, they say now, but whatever part was true is bad enough.

  I don’t suppose you know who the Iraqis are, any more than I know who the Amoz are, or the Mezops. Maybe you don’t even understand about race. Maybe we’re all the same to you.

  Anyway, I decided to join up. I had colleges coming after me, scholarships for places my folks could never have afforded to send me to, but it wasn’t that hard to say no. I liked football, but it was a boy’s game, and I was ready to do man’s work.

  My folks tried told me I should do college first, get a degree, and then go in as an officer. They even got my coach to talk to me about it. He and my dad were the men I most looked up to, but their arguments didn’t ring true because they’d both served in the military right out of high school. I asked them if they regretted doing that, and they both said no, but they said that didn’t mean it was the right choice for me.

  I was sure that it was. I knew I could get hurt playing college ball, and not be eligible for the service. I could get an education later, on the GI Bill. I wanted to get in on the action right then. Only problem was, I had to finish high school, and by the time I did, the war was over.

  I don’t think you can understand time the way we do, coming from a place where the sun never goes down. No clocks or calendars to measure it by, just storms and wars and lives. Time’s one thing they teach you in the army. The numbers on the clock outrank you same as everyone else; they get you out of bed when you’re still tired, they make you wait to eat when you’re hungry, and you’re always moving too fast or too slow for them.

  There were things I didn’t like about the Army. I didn’t like getting yelled at, and it seemed like they’d yell even if you did everything right. They tried to break you down so you’d stop thinking and just do what you were told, what you were trained to do.

  After basic it was all waiting. Waiting to be assigned, waiting to ship out, waiting to do something besides drill. I remember sitting on the base in Germany, realizing that the army was just a job after all, and what a letdown that was. Not that I expected something glamorous, but I was sort of hoping for the chance—just one chance—to be a hero. The next day I applied for a transfer to Special Forces. I never got to go, though, because that same day my daddy died.

  You never had a father, did you? Kilgore told me you were all females, that there were books of instructions that helped you make eggs. He said that was why you started the bombings, to try to get those books back. So I guess your family life is different from ours.

  When I lost my daddy, it was like—I was prepared for my own death, but the people at home were supposed to be safe. I was mad at him for dying. I remember sitting on the plane thinking that if he’d respected what I was doing he wouldn’t have died and made me leave just when I was figuring it out.

  It was a bank robbery that went bad, and ended up with one cop and one robber dead. My daddy, and the piece of shit that killed him. When I saw how upset my ma was I started rethinking the Special Forces thing. She
didn’t tell me that she wanted me to stay, but I could tell. The military has a discharge policy for a parent’s death if you’re the only child. They gave me an honorable, and I followed my daddy’s footsteps to the police academy.

  I liked some things about being a cop. I liked it when we were able to stop people from hurting each other or themselves, but most of the time we got there too late for that. I felt like I’d moved from the offensive line to the outfield—I wasn’t protecting anybody anymore, just chasing down fly balls. Baseball never was my sport. It bothered me that we weren’t supposed to hit back, not even when they deserved it.

  When 9/11 came, I thought about reenlisting, but I think my ma would have lost it. She liked having me close to home. I figured, War on Terror, that’s not going anywhere, and I was right.

  Then my ma was diagnosed with bone cancer. It was another punch in the gut, you know? I tried to get her to eat better, took her for walks. I wanted her to fight. It didn’t help. I guess I’m glad I got to spend that time with her. She kept on teasing me, telling me to just pick a girl and get her pregnant. Marry her later. Ma would have liked grandkids, but she only lasted six months.

  So I was an orphan at twenty-nine. I was angry. I started having these dreams that I was in the interrogation room with a suspect; most of the time I couldn’t see his face. Sometimes it was Saddam, sometimes it was the guy that shot my dad. Once it was my dad. In the dream I had a lot questions, but the suspects never answered them. They never did anything but smile. It made me angry. I wanted to make it so they’d never smile again.

  In the dreams I’d get so mad I couldn’t hold back. I’d fight it, but in the end I always let go, and it felt really good to just let the anger take over. But it didn’t last. I’d throw that first punch, and nothing would happen. I’d miss, or it’d just graze the skin, or they’d just take it and keep on smiling. I couldn’t make a mark. It was like those dreams where you’re trying to run away, but your legs won’t move. I couldn’t hurt the suspects or make them confess. Sometimes I’d wake up from those dreams with the imprint of my fingernails on the palms of my hands. A few times I drew blood.