A pocket burst as he stepped over it, covering him with its adhesive decay. He looked down and was unable to identify the victim as his own or Felix’s.
Mine shouldn’t be so far gone, he told himself.
The out-of-tune waltz strained onward somewhere without its musicians, its notes jumbling, then crashed into a pile of bright noises that sought silence as if in shame. It stirred again for a moment, a proud but mortally wounded animal, then settled into stillness.
Bruno looked around and saw with dismay that pockets were still circling him, crashing into those on the floor.
He covered his face.
“Felix!” he cried to his dead foe. “Take them away!”
Two pockets exploded nearby, spilling their innards. His eyes fixed on some potato chip wrappers, coffee grounds, teabags, banana peels, fishbones, shrimp shells, onion scraps, and pizza bits. He recognized his own life’s garbage, and for a moment expected to see what was left of Al the superintendent in the mixture that also included bottles, foil, beer cans, plastic wrappings, and crushed milk containers. The garbage and recyclables, he realized, were unlawfully together, but separate from the human bodies. Al had a pocket of his own, awaiting arrival or already somewhere else on the dance floor. If he had put out his garbage and recyclables according to the rules, they wouldn’t be here now, Bruno told himself, trying but unable to laugh.
Another pocket burst near him, a few feet above the floor, and Bruno knew at once from the crashing sounds that this was his museum of dead computer monitors, sluggish keyboards, cardboard boxes, the ink-jet printer that he had come to hate, the old electric typewriter, motherboards and crashed hard drives, all come back to him. At least there were no biological materials—no decomposition, no slime, just shattering metal and glass and snaking cables.
“You’ve had your fun!” he cried. “Take them back!”
But Felix was dust somewhere, beyond reassembly in his fortress outside the life of flesh.
“Felix!” Bruno cried in despair, and hung in the silence, picturing, for no reason at all, Al’s bags of meat waiting foolishly to be stolen from his basement entrance.
“I’m quite dead,” Felix said to him. “But I’ve left this message in your head.”
“Help me,” Bruno asked, grateful to hear his voice.
“You always felt too much,” Felix said. “Much too much.”
He was right, Bruno thought, his self-control against sympathy had never been perfect. Feelings like fleas had attacked him through the cracks.
“But now it’s time,” Felix said, “to let all your feelings expire.”
“Expire?” Bruno asked. “But how?”
“Let in the flood,” Felix said. “It will either destroy you or leave you invulnerable.”
Felix was gone from Bruno’s head, leaving him hanging in the silence.
Then, slowly, sympathies flooded into him, and it seemed that they had been hiding in the waltzes. Eleanor Jones, Banes’s secretary, spoke her name to him again, hooking his feelings. Fish swam in his bowels. They came up and swam in the colloidal semi-liquid of his brain. The two young boys... the mailman... if only he had been able to leave them out...
Bruno dropped to his knees and wept at the filth and ruin around him, and wondered if this was Felix Lytton’s revenge, which he had helped prepare for himself. He struggled against the river of sentiment suddenly flowing through him, drowning his reason. He shivered in the deluge, praying that it would wash him clean, as Felix had said, and drain away. Purgatory before heaven and forgiveness; hell if he couldn’t be helped.
Then in a sudden, inexplicable calm he saw that something was moving near him. He looked more closely. Two human figures whimpered as they crawled toward each other out of their bladders.
Henry and June had not had time to die in their pockets. As he watched them, he saw that they knew each other’s pitying cries.
They were going to live—and Felix’s cousin would have her to himself! Almost as bad as losing her to Felix.
Pockets were popping more quickly now.
“No!” Bruno cried, and crawled toward the couple, struggling against his own warring feelings of fear and compassion, come now to trouble and tear him apart.
June saw him and screamed. Then she became quiet and stared at him like a she-wolf with teeth bared. He stopped before the assault of her eyes.
“Let us live!” she pleaded. “I know how much you were hurt.” Her words forgave but her eyes did not soften, and her teeth waited.
“Beyond repair,” Bruno growled back, fighting his own lament. His body shook and he collapsed onto his stomach.
“You do know,” she asked softly, “that you are beyond hope?”
He raised himself up again on all fours, trying to regain his self-control.
“Well—don’t you know!” she shouted, and he flinched at the pain she caused in him.
The hard, black floor pressed painfully against his knees. The ballroom around him seemed to be the aftermath of a horrifying meal, bloody and decaying after the departure of monstrously satisfied diners. Musical instruments lay on the bandstand, abandoned by the fleeing musicians, but he still heard the music somewhere far away, still distorted and hateful...
Rousing himself, Bruno raised his hand to strike June, to quiet his pain, to stop her from hurting him again.
“For God’s sake, man!” Henry cried. “Don’t you see? You’re Felix’s pawn!”
“You’re doing his evil,” June added weakly. “If you ever loved me...”
“Love’s a lot of posturing,” Bruno said, waving his hands. “A mess of sentimental play-acting.”
“And what is this?” she asked.
He cried out with the hope of his power, “This is justice, revenge, strength—and wonder!” His old enemy had added to his might, and could not take it away. It was too late, Bruno thought, accepting himself. I have grown strong within myself. He would not cower before his enemies!
“Justice for whom?” June whispered.
Bruno laughed. “Why, for me. Not for you.”
She asked, “Didn’t you love me?”
Bruno said, “There are some people you want to fuck, and others you don’t. It wears off.”
“Finish it,” Henry said from behind her, his face a bloody caricature of Felix’s. “Drop us back into that black hell and be done!”
Which raised a crucial problem, Bruno thought. Satisfaction sang its song only when subjects were alive to appreciate their punishment and sing along. Of course, he wanted them dead; but it would be even more nourishing if they were dead and still able to suffer the fact of being dead, impossible as that might seem.
A great pity.
Felix! Bruno smiled at his old enemy’s gift. A siren wailed somewhere like a lost demon. Standing up now on his knees, he looked around at all the ruptured pockets, more than a hundred of them, mostly inherited from Felix; his own number was inadequate, a pale shadow of possibility.
“Where’s your humanity!” June cried. “Where’s your pity?” She looked up at him with a critical intelligence he had never seen in her eyes. Her feelings came at him like claws, tearing at his earlier selves, none of which, happily, had ever been dominant. He glimpsed a distant, fleeing self who did not look back at him.
“You can’t judge me,” Bruno said, “I judge you. You want me to think and feel as you do. We start from different places.”
“You’re missing something,” she said.
“I don’t miss it,” he said, glad of the soft, caring weakness of his sympathies, which would only make them so much easier to crush.
“Felix did this to you,” she whispered.
“Yes, Felix did this all to me,” Bruno repeated. “Thank you, Felix,” he whispered.
“Why not join him? He’s waiting for you.”
“Waiting?” he asked, looking down at her. “What are you babbling?”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you yet that he pocketed himself to escape death?”
&nbs
p; “He was cremated!”
“Something was cremated,” she said.
“So you say,” Bruno said defiantly.
“We... Henry and I, heard his voice in the dark, when we were inside. The pockets have channels leading off.”
“What!” Bruno cried out and sat back on his heels.
“Felix spoke,” Henry added calmly. “He told us how he had achieved his own survival.”
“You’re lying,” Bruno said, feeling weakness stalking him.
June hissed, “He’ll tell you. Go ask him. You’ve been his fool, Bruno.”
“Liar!” Bruno shouted. “What could he take from me? He gave me everything.”
His delayed punishment, Bruno thought again, won’t work on me, if that’s what it is. I can resist, he told himself, searching for his strength.
“He needs you to bring him out,” she said, “when it’s time.”
“Come out?” Bruno asked. “Time?”
“The police are coming,” Henry added cheerfully, and giggled.
“They won’t know what to hold me for,” Bruno said.
Henry and June might as well return to the darkness, he told himself. They were too weak to resist him. He waved open a pocket just ahead of him on the floor, wondering what June had meant about bringing Felix out...
Henry and June rose suddenly to their feet and fell onto him, throwing him on his back and pinning him to the floor. June hooked his face with her fingernails. Henry crawled around to Bruno’s feet, giggling more loudly now. June tore the skin down from Bruno’s eyes, then bit his hand. He cried out as his feet were raised. June let go of him and helped Henry roll him over on his face.
They slid him around and forward on his chest—into the pocket. It was all too quick, and part of him was uncaring.
He went down into the blackness and hit with his left shoulder, rolling over in pain just in time to glimpse the opening close above him.
He lay there, stunned and unbelieving.
As his breathing slowed, and seemed to stop, in a silence so perfect that any sound would be a catastrophe.
He lay still, thoughtless, adrift...
After a while he groped around in the dark, feeling for a way out. He breathed more slowly. The air was a mist of sweat and urine. The darkness pressed in around him with the hatred of an old enemy. Sweet, pure sympathies laid siege to him again, self-pitying and pained, as he waited to pass out and suffocate.
There was no way out. He started to scream—and lost himself. The scream fell back into a rivery flow of moaning, unable to empty into any lake or ocean.
Then, after a long while that seemed like sleep, he heard something beyond the silence...
He listened.
“Bruno?” a voice whispered.
“Felix?” Bruno asked through a dry, cracking throat.
“Yes, old buddy, it’s me.”
“Where?” Bruno croaked, wondering about air and food, and how Felix had survived here. What had he been eating? Maybe food was not needed here, and death was impossible because time in this place crawled slowly into forever, or maybe not at all.
“Where?” Bruno repeated, barely able to speak. Sweet sentiments sickened his thinking; just recriminations rode in on winged, white horses of reason; guilt razored him with regrets; pity and self-loathing crushed his weakened pride.
But it all depended on one’s acceptance—and one could still refuse! Even here he had that choice.
“Where are you?” Bruno asked, struggling in the pit of himself.
“Next one over,” Felix whispered.
There were channels!
“But how?” Bruno asked. “Why?”
“Faced with my own end,” Felix answered, “I decided it was better to live here than to be dead. Get it? Dead. What hell could count against being dead? There would be nothing I would refuse
to do if it gave me life. Nothing! You hear? I would refuse nothing.”
“But here?” Bruno asked, feeling an awe-filled hope.
“Even here,” Felix said.
How many, Bruno wondered, struck by the image of infinitely branching pockets.
They beckoned. Come ahead. Come through.
Felix was waiting for him.
And Bruno realized that here he might be able to seize Felix’s throat and choke him without killing him. The hunt for prey through these black arteries might be endless.
There could be no greater happiness.
He crawled toward the sound of Felix’s voice.
“Felix!” he cried out. “Whose pockets are these? Who are we circling?”
He stopped and waited.
There was no answer.
Finally, Felix whispered, “The one you’re in is yours, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s mine. June and your cousin Henry shoved me in after I opened it.”
“Hah!” Felix answered as if cheering them. “It’s yours because you closed it—remember? They couldn’t have closed it. And you wanted to close it. Something in you knew what it was doing!”
“And where are you?” Bruno asked, struggling to guess the unimaginable truth of his predicament. “And the others?”
“I don’t know,” Felix said. “I had to crawl into mine or die.”
“Will these burst somewhere?” Bruno asked.
“I don’t know!” Felix cried out.
“And then we’ll die!” His shout was dull in the solid blackness.
“I don’t know!” his old enemy repeated, sounding shamed by his ignorance.
Bruno tried to think. He had summoned the pocket for Henry and June, so it still had to be linked to his own mind. But was it? The channel suggested that it was also connected to Felix’s, he thought, realizing with dismay that neither of them understood the pockets. Simply using them had been all too tempting. They were what they were, whatever they were, wherever they were.
Bruno felt dampness forming on his skin. It slipped into his eyes as if it knew where to go. His eyes drank the darkness as if it were light, as if at any moment he would learn to see in a new way.
From whom had Felix learned the skill?
Another enemy?
“Felix!” Bruno cried. “I’m coming for you!”
“Come ahead,” Felix rasped, “come ahead.”
Bruno crawled.
The darkness enclosed him, touching his whole body. He moved his arms and legs. The spongy blackness gave way, then squeezed back and grasped him, flowing through his rented tuxedo, tightening, attaching itself to every pore of his skin, entering his ears, eyes, nose, and rectum, seeking, always seeking...
“Felix!” Bruno shouted. “Do you feel that?”
“Yes,” Felix croaked feebly.
Bruno crawled forward, but the black gripped again, soft yet strong.
“What’s happening?” he cried, feeling the darkness draining his strength. It seemed familiar for a moment, ancient beyond worlds, the place from which everyone came out into the light...
“We’re being... accepted,” Felix whispered.
“What?” Bruno replied softly. “How can that be?”
The black vise tightened further.
“Felix!” Bruno cried out. “Help me!” He felt a wave of weakness, then a surge of strength.
“We’re not dead yet,” Felix gasped. “Maybe... we’ll become...” he started to say, then laughed suddenly. “I think I get it now. These are our pockets, orbiting you and me. But we’re inside, so it’s a hopeless circle. They’ll never burst.”
“But we’re being... eaten,” Bruno protested, whimpering.
“Eating ourselves,” Felix said, “—it’s a circle. Eating to live and living to eat. We gain what we lose and lose what we gain. Not to worry, it’s a stable relationship.” He laughed again, more happily this time.
“What do you mean!” Bruno cried, fearing the reply.
“We can’t ever die,” Felix said. “We’re being used by somet
hing unimaginable.”
Strength shot Bruno skyward; spent, weakness hurled him into a deathly, congested sleep; a wrenching pulse shook him back to life —and tore at him. Something was alive within him, extending itself into every part of his body, painfully adjusting the beating of his heart, changing him—into what?
“Whatever it is,” Felix whispered, “we’re joining it.”
Light exploded behind Bruno’s eyes, putting out the darkness. He saw Felix suspended in a great, white space, his body skeletal and cadaverous, caught in a web of pulsing, blood-engorged pulsing.
The dark blinded him again.
Slowly, Bruno reached through the inkiness and found Felix’s shoulders. His enemy was wet and warm in his hands! Bruno found the throat. His fingers closed in triumph around the bony softness and squeezed. At last!
Felix made no sound.
Bruno squeezed harder.
Something shot into his own chest, through his heart, and anchored itself in the base of his brain.
Felix pulsed with a slow, ageless beat.
And his enemy’s throat was Bruno’s own, his hands tightening steadily but with no effect.
Light filled the pocket.
Felix opened his eyes, and Bruno saw himself through his old enemy’s sight, his own spidery body suspended in the same way. They were alive within each other’s awareness, no longer separate selves. Their memories, of pleasure and loathing, seeped back and forth.
“Whatever... it is...” Felix stammered at the precipice.
“... we’ve joined it,” Bruno said, losing himself.
Lords of Imagination
I REMEMBERED HOW THE ALIEN WORLD HAD just hung there in the blackness of my fear-filled imagination, but also a reality thirty light years away, with beings who thought about humankind and the Earth, and no one knew what they were thinking. A whole alien culture, with its own history and view of the universe, a presence whose mere existence perturbed humankind’s view of itself into an appalling uncertainty greater than any ever faced by our kind. It had been a dreadful unease that suddenly revealed all of humanity’s past masks of identity. All the efforts of tribal songs, myths and religions, national, secular, and scientific narratives that had struggled to settle on a human identity might be redefined... by inhuman strangers who would certainly have an opinion. It was an outrage! Humanity’s Jonathan Swifts and various misanthropes had done the job for us, hadn’t they? And by comparison with genuine outsiders, it was feared, our own might turn out to have been... well, kindly. Here at my editorial desk, I still remembered the time—what, only two decades ago—when the universe had been silent, and all future possibilities of any great significance, alien contact being one of the majors, had been only science fiction stories. Books and magazines had been full of aliens, with or without plausible cultures behind them. Now the silence was in the science fiction, as the greatest possible horror had overtaken the writers. The alien civilization had unveiled itself slowly, as one might turn up the lights in a dark theater, revealing a large audience of strange faces, of onlookers rather than an appreciative gathering, powerful critics rather than fans.
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