Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  Broken: A Plague Journal

  ( The Silver Trilogy - 3 )

  Paul Evan Hughes

  An author struggles to make amends for the war-torn realities he has written into existence. He leaves his empty life behind and travels across a spectrum of parallel universes in a frantic hunt for Maire, the maniacal architect of the Sixth Extinction, who has forged a new alliance and will stop at nothing to erase all realities from existence. Both a sequel to and a retelling of Enemy and An End, Broken merges the rich, horrifying universes of the previous installments of the Silver trilogy into a haunting story that is part love letter, part handbook for the apocalypse, and part confession.

  The recipient of the silver medal for the Fantasy/Science Fiction category of the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Broken: A Plague Journal is the third and final book in the Silver trilogy by Paul Evan Hughes.

  Paul Evan Hughes

  Broken: A Plague Journal

  The Silver Trilogy: Book Three

  “You’ve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It’s as though I cannot even remember what I once desired! All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself─and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified─at least that’s what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart, Japril. In a single gesture you’ve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you’ve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don’t have it.”

  Samuel R. Delany

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  ALPHA

  and all broken tomorrows: bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and

  He inhaled.

  “Storm’s coming in.”

  “You sure this is him?”

  She nodded. Across the gulf, lightning licked at waterspouts. She brushed the fine salt spray from her cheeks.

  “Specifics?”

  “Pattern confirmed. Subject is Fourteen-Seven When intact. Age twenty-three… twenty-three years and thirteen hours. REM signature confirmed; this is the author.”

  “What’s a kid from the sticks of New York doing alone on the Gulf Coast on his birthday?”

  “The library’s empty.” The mathematician shrugged. “Watching the lightning. Getting high. Running away?”

  West nodded. “He wanted to die down here, away from everyone he knew. Tonight was the night.”

  “Shit, he’s got another fifty years before—”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  “It’s all there, everything we need?”

  “It’s there.”

  Benton sighed. “Hard to believe this kid caused it all.”

  “Wasn’t really his fault.”

  “What if we—”

  “Hope, I’m disappointed.” West took a handful of sand, let the grains sift through his fingers. They danced with the wind. “You of all people should know that killing him wouldn’t stop this.”

  “I’m just a mathematician.”

  He scoffed. “Our best quantum X theorist.”

  “Just a maths egg.”

  He wiped his hands of the beach. “You ready?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Unlock the When.”

  Benton tapped the subdermal in her throat. A halo sparked to life around her head. “Agents West and Benton, Fourteen-Seven When, request immediate unlock on my mark. Play.”

  nav fix on your position. jog to play in three, two—

  And I knew somehow that on that night in Lincoln, Nebraska, Abigail wasn’t sleeping well. Thoughts of tomorrow’s flight to Vermont, the uncertainty of a future spent mostly between airports and stages, behind cameras, and I knew that a baby was born, and his parents would name him David for his father, Smith for his mother’s side. The family lived three blocks east of Abigail, one block west of the recording studio where Lullaby recorded the album I couldn’t get out of my head.

  All I saw was silver: in the lightning, in the waterspouts, in the sand. The stillness between stars.

  “Paul?”

  He jumped.

  West studied the tension of muscles, hardening of jawline, narrowing of brow. Eyes lost somewhere between green and gray and mud went to one, went to other, went to one. Even in shadow, he saw the boy’s nose was sunburned.

  “Eri—?”

  “No.” She bent, extended her hand. Shake. “Benton. Hope. And you’re Paul?”

  “Yeah.” Something crawled behind his eyes. Heartbeat and suspicion. Names of people and places and scents and tastes; this was…. This was. “Have we met?”

  “No…” Benton looked to West.

  “What do you want?” He stood; he brushed sand from cargo shorts filled with bottlecaps and cigarettes, golden discount cards to the strip’s most popular clubs. “I don’t have any money, and I’m not into—”

  “We’re not here to hurt you. We’re just—”

  “Spring break?”

  “No.” West regarded the thousands amidst light and sound behind them. There was such stillness in the impending storm. “We’re here for you.”

  The author stepped back. “I don’t know you.”

  “You do, though.”

  “I’ve never seen you be—”

  “You have.”

  Black coat flapping in the breeze over black uniform, burn fresh on temple. Gray eyes.

  He smiled. “Great. So you’ve read the book, right? You’re a big fan. You tracked me down and want my autograph, right? Listen, this is flattering, but—”

  Benton grabbed his arm. He looked into colorless blue eyes. “You know that’s not true. You know who we are.”

  “I—”

  “You see her in me. You’re right; she’s a part of me, but you knew the character wouldn’t be purely her. I’m a combination of many. The name Hope because she loved it, the name Benton because of that band. You feel it behind your eyes. You—”

  He shrugged her off. “Don’t touch me.”

  West pulled the pack of Marlboros from Paul’s chest pocket, withdrew one. Lit.

  “They were right.” Exhale. “Every possible world that ever could have existed will someday exist in perfect emulation in machines. Every possible you that ever could have existed will.”

  “Will you—”

  “You’re carrying a virus. A contagion. You can feel it. You know it’s there. That’s why you write. You have the silver. You write about things from pasts and presents and futures that you shouldn’t be able to see.”

  Paul was silent.

  Benton squeezed his hand. “There are holes all over this When. You’re making it all fall apart. You’re ending so many worlds with each breath, and you have no idea. We’re here to take you out of this. We need you.”

  “You aren’t real.”

  “
We are now.”

  He took out a cigarette. West smiled.

  “Let’s go out to the pier.”

  I’d gone to the edge of the world and thrown myself against all that I knew: safety and solidity and the past. Life became a fluid somewhere out there in the thousands of miles between the stagnation of home and the brilliant, beautiful uncertainty of the edge. Life became metaphor: I walked wearily to the ocean after the long and dangerous station wagon journey across the country, just standing there in the sunshine and the gulf breeze, feeling the cleansing grit of sand beneath me, working its way into every pocket of my clothing, every hair-covered limb, underneath contacts and between toes and fingers and scouring the gold sheen from my Zippo. The sand worked its way into me, making me feel at once totally alien to that place and an integral part of the landscape. The sand would eventually blister my feet, itch my scalp, grit every last exposed bit of flesh with its silicon scour, but not before I’d simply stood there for a while to appreciate its exotic warmth.

  Many tens of thousands of my generation had gone to that city of sand and sunrise. Few of them shared the reason that I had for being there…We all went to escape from life for a while. We all went to be the bad people that we were told not to be the other fifty-one weeks of the year: we drank and smoked and smoked and fucked and otherwise debauched on the beach at the edge of the world. We gathered in groups of thousands and flailed the primordial dance of existence to overplayed rap songs and paid too much for beer in plastic cups and smoked cowboy killers and bummed cowboy killers from a stranger with long hair and dark eyes that looked at and through you with his intricate, recording gaze.

  i contain multitudes…

  By the hundreds, by the thousands, I watched them. I detached. I separated myself from the organism that was humanity. Hovering over the crowd, poised against a wooden railing that had seen the sun set into the emerald coast too many times to count, carved a palimpsest with the initials of the past spring breakers who thought themselves cool enough to brand their love forever on the treated wooden logs of the upstairs bar of Harpoon Harry’s before moving on to the Fountainbleau or the Reef or the Chateau for a night of refrigerator beer cans and horny sorority girls free for the week from the confines of relationships and morality. I peered over the edge down into the beast of raw abandon, people by the thousands engaged in grinding, undulating, dripping sexual frenzy, arms in the air supporting beer in plastic cups and beads ripe for the swapping of bare breasts or muff shots, sometimes even supporting smoked-to-the-filter cowboy killers bummed from the dark stranger watching from above, ashes poised eerily outward, defying gravity to the beat of the music.

  I could have made an army of them.

  Jolted from that realization, a weakness, a thin nosebleed and a smile. I smiled once. I bled more than once.

  I watched from above. That frenzy. Detached. Not a part of it. My generation. Not a part of it. At all. I was the cigarette man. I had the Cobra long-sleeved t-shirt. I made people smile. People told me to “Smile! It’s Spring Break!” I watched from above. And felt alone in a crowd of thousands. It was not for me…none of it. It never was for me. I was a voyeur. I thought too much. About. Things. There. In the midst of thousands. I was. Lost.

  But I could use them. Stir them.

  an army seven million strong by the time i

  Walking. Along Front Beach Road. Sand grinding between pinkie and second toes on left foot. Grinding away flesh. Walking along the road because it was good for us. Walking faster than traffic, slow enough to be witness to any and all displays of flesh that we could find. Beads for tits, tits for beads. Instant cameras and Daddy’s hi-8s by the dozens. An experiment in humanity: i am not a part of this. There was cleansing and rebirth in that experience. Finding the correct outlet was the key to the success of the rebirth. Finding that place to be in the midst of that chaos that would channel the fury into creativity…

  waves.

  Sitting before that inescapable wall of water…Burning tobacco and burning flesh and thoughts of She and thoughts of the blank void that was the future burning away the Paul that I once was. A limit experience in the liminal zone: fire and water, humanity and the great impossibility of the edge of the world. Sitting on the sometimes-wet sand, grit in my eyes, staring blankly off into the world that we can never have, inasmuch as we think that we’ve conquered it with small wooden and metal constructs with which we can skim along and just under its surface. Place cigarette in mouth, extract golden Zippo from right pocket, flip open lighter, flick flick flick until the stubborn flame finally licks the delicious tip of the Marlboro 100. Smoldering. Deadly. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Wind howling from the gulf, internal wind painting my respiratory tract blacker with my divine purpose of living up to the ouija board’s predictions.

  Flood of thought, sunrise, sunset…Sitting in that place of beauty and edge and impossibility. That was the place that I had so yearned for…That was the place that embodies everything that I’d felt since the loss of. Of. Dark skies in the daytime: impending storm, impending downfall, impending torrent. Sleeves pulled up around tanned but not burned arms, left still exhibiting the eleven lines that had so defined the last five years of my life, eleven lines of scar tissue now barely discernible from the surrounding scarred tissue, except for the fact that the lines were a lighter shade of tanned. Barefoot, toes buried in the sand, absorbing warmth and grounding me in that world, as the fingertips of Sakyamuni called the earth to witness not his divinity but his enlightenment. Hand outstretched, fingertips touching the earth as the armies of Devadatta raged around him, hand outstretched to call the earth, all of existence, to be witness to his enlightenment. Toes dug into the sand as seagulls raged around me, wind blew through seabreeze-knotted hair, not brushed since November, sky above growing darker in defiance of any human definition of Spring Break.

  i contain multitudes.

  Moments of lucidity: the screams of the interior fell silent as the rage of the exterior filled me. Struggle for peace; struggle for silence. I’d gone to the edge of the world to do what every good metaphorical struggling author does: find himself. I sat before the kingdom and the power and the glory; I looked into the face of the closest thing I’d seen to god. I sat until the doubt and the rage and the mourning were replaced. I sat until I was filled up again. Beauty. Sitting before that amorphous canvas and watching the power of existence paint itself in waterspouts illuminated from behind by divine lightning. There was such a peace in submission to that divinity…Take me, destroy me, tear me apart so that I won’t have to return to the places I fear. Standing out on the pier, hundreds of feet out into the surf, wishing for the overhead lamps to extinguish into black…Waves crashing into the pier, swaying the massive construct, waves illuminated orange and pink by the garish strip of humanity stippling the beach with light. All of mankind behind me, alone in that journey out into nothingness…Perfection in that black. Perfection in the relentless cycle of waves crashing against the pier. Crash into me, through me. Destroy me in your wake.

  I needed that. I needed to approach the edge of the world, to abandon everything behind me, to leave everything that mattered in the sand and walk out into the surf. On that last night, I spent a moment of solitude alone on the beach. Harpoon Harry’s raging behind me, thousands of generation enjoying the meat market that was the drunken bliss distilled in Panama City. I walked out into the ocean, took a final drag from my cigarette, launched it out with a flick of my fingers into the great black gulf until it hit the water and extinguished. How appropriate that gesture: the extinction of the spark. For years, I’d struggled with the knowledge that I’d once had a spark, and had lost it somewhere out there. What a symbolic move: killing that spark with the world screaming behind me, the noise of tens of thousands being slowly supplanted by the rage of the waves and the flood of voices that roared from within. I walked out into the waves without bothering to roll up the legs of my pants, without bothering to care about the
couples swapping their own waves of fluid on the beach behind me, thinking only of that limit experience. Merging with the unknown, feeling it caress my skin, enveloping all that I’d given to it. Sound became nothing but heartbeat and voice and voice and

  I thought. Of her. Out there.

  The future was unwritten, but I was almost there. Accelerating into turns, plummeting into the future with each instant. Somewhere out there…I felt it, the falling, the gravity of our situation. I felt the desire, the need, the utter insignificance of

  Guitar strings, nylon, strummed savagely, then gently, then the pure, resigned voice of yesterdays…Beauty in that submission. Minutes left before my ascension. Moments left, and

  Almost there. I’m almost there.

  West tossed his guttering cigarette into the gulf. “You’re a smart kid. You can handle it.”

  The author’s hands gripped the guardrail. Palms pressed: texture of the names carved beneath. Fingers clawed down, nails on treated pine. Smell of brine. The wind brought with it fragments of the hurricane. A crack and lightning flared behind the veils of approaching rain, fell to black, uneasy, uncertain in that night. Music intruded from behind.

  “It’s true?”

  Benton sat between the railing and the overflowing garbage bin: popcorn boxes, beer cans, empty suntan lotion bottles, half-eaten barbecue, smokes, rubbers, detritus and evidence that people were here to play, to drink, to fuck, to burn. The shadow of the overhead pier lamp fell over her face. Arms draped around her knees, she focused on something in the gulf, something approaching with vicious silence and wind. “It’s true.” Voice barely audible, Paul didn’t know if she was answering or meditating. He felt what she saw behind blue eyes: the physics of immortality, the intersection of ineffable paths, the tangents, the blessings. He is knowing but he knew he wasn’t.