Ink

by Hal Duncan

  In the magazine there's a reenactment of the rediscovery of Lincoln. A technician in a TV station, one hand on the dial that he's been twiddling trying to get rid of this strange interference, other hand up as he turns to shout—hey, look at this, look at this—while on the screen in front of him Joseph Darkwater, gray and blurred, points his gun at the camera.

  Joey turns off the TV and angles himself round backways in time again. He stands still and glides, lets the seconds and minutes wash over him. 20:43. 20:42.20:41.

  Knowing this future past, and on his way to meet it in this world's yesterday, Joey knows he may be the only person in this town, in this world, in all the worlds even, with the opportunity to change it … but he has no intention of doing any such thing.

  On the contrary. He's looking forward to yesterday.

  Plain, Polished Steel

  The painting is already framed; it was a cheap print that he got out of a thrift shop, a reproduction of a seascape with white horses running on a beach in silver spray and foam and mist of wake and moonlight, their manes blowing in the wind, their heads tossed back. Perfectly executed and perfectly vacuous. He didn't waste any time before coating the print with gesso primer, running the paintbrush over it in thick, soft strokes to murder this moronic kitsch. The mount is black velvet. The frame is plain, polished steel. With the gesso dry, he'd sort of liked it like that, just a white rectangle with a hint of texture, on a black fabric mount, in its frame of steel. It took him weeks to think of something that he actually wanted to paint on it. It was only when he turned the thing on its side, thinking that maybe he could use it as portrait instead of landscape, that he started to get an idea.

  He sits on his haunches now, squats on a chair that's turned away from it, his folded arms on the backrest, trying to decide if his Jesus is finished. He's not really satisfied with it.

  Behind it there's another painting hanging on a hook on one of the wooden posts that supports the barn's upper level; it's a painting of the diary that he doesn't write, the big leather-bound book that—if he wrote it—would be filled with page after page of the same cycling words.

  Dear goddamn world, he would write each night, like he was writing it for them to read after he's dead, to shake them with his vitriol. Like he was telling them how it is. The Gospel of Joseph Darkwater. Don't ever turn the other cheek, he'd write. The meek shall inherit the shit.

  It would just be bullshit, he thinks.

  He burned Jack's diary after he'd read it, because Jack's parents, he told himself, didn't really need to know any of that stuff about their son. That's what he told himself then, but now he knows, looking at this other diary, it was as much shame as anything—shame, and anger about feeling that shame. Jack's diary was a symbol of his failure, an emblem of hopelessness and despair, so he put it to the torch, carried the small metal bin from his bedroom down to the barn, doused the diary in paraffin and dropped it in the bin, a lit match after it.

  A sacrifice.

  His paintings are too much like that diary. They're still too caught up in the banalities he wants to get beyond. None of them say what he wants them to. They're not cold and empty enough. In the gruesome brutality of the crucifixion picture, it looks like he's out to shock, to create horror, to engender empathy. But, damn it, that's not what he's trying to do. He's trying to strip the humanity away from the Christ, show the moment not as human suffering but as the sublime butchering of this animal god. A detached, clinical observation of a sacrifice. But it's not working.

  He twiddles the brush between his fingers, like a magician with a coin, toys with the idea of painting a leering centurion in the foreground, or maybe some saintly figure with beatific grace upon his face, as if praising God that they're all saved now Jesus's blood has washed them clean. But that would make it look even more like he was—what would they say?—just trying to be controversial.

  Goddammit, he thinks, he doesn't care anymore if they don't get it. Screw them. At least he's got the backbone to see a crucifixion for what it is and what it says about the human race. Maybe he could rip out their goddamn hearts and feed them to the fuckers; maybe that's something they'd understand.

  If he wrote a diary maybe he could find the words to explain it all, but he doubts it. So instead he has his painted book, the favorite painting that he's done. Just a closed book with a dark-brown leather cover. Burnt sienna and burnt umber, yellow ocher highlights like it's lit by candles.

  Another picture: a group of girls standing at the door of a school bus, but girls with the pale glazed faces and glassy eyes of porcelain dolls—the same artificial faces, the same blank eyes, on each of them. Rouge and eye shadow on the cold masks only add to the eerie soulless quality that the image has. Here or there one of the eyes looks chipped, one of the faces cracked. He imagines them as creatures that would laugh without expression, talk without the slightest movement of their cherub lips.

  The menace of the image, the meaning of it, is something he can't put into words but something he's familiar with, as familiar as the jocks who hound him through lunch break, their hyena yips and snarls and high-pitched laughs, like they're so goddamn funny. He doesn't even hear what they say anymore, doesn't know or care if it's him they're laughing at. It doesn't matter; the sound of laughter makes him tense with rage and shame now automatically. They're too dumb to realize what they're doing, of course, but every chewed-up piece of paper flicked at the back of his head in class is another lesson to him that their pleasure is his pain, that joy and suffering are never shared, that empathy is for losers.

  He looks at the Christ in its frame of black velvet and plain, polished steel, trying to figure out just what it is that's missing.

  There Is No Magic in the World

  “Tell me about that night. Tell me about the ritual. Tell me how your brother … did it.”

  “Did what?” says the man calling himself Reynard.

  Pickering checks his watch. It's getting late and they're not getting anywhere.

  “I don't have time for this,” he says.

  There are still another two interrogations to get through before the night is over: one fascist defector linked to Freikorps activity in London; one “Lithuanian” known to be a Futurist agent. Operation Hawkwing brought in twenty-four suspected war criminals and spies in its sweep. Men and women suspected of working in the concentration camps or on the Russo-German A-bomb projects. Individuals caught on the wrong side of this country or that when the Armistice was called and the Iron Curtain came down. Individuals with invented identities, secret crimes. Ultimately, it's Pickering's job to decide who lives and who dies.

  “I have the hangman waiting outside the door, you know,” he says.

  The threat makes him feel dirty because it isn't empty, and it should be. The man shouldn't even be here among these murdering bastards, wouldn't be if his name hadn't been added to the list at the last minute, by Pickering himself. Reinhardt von Strann, he thinks. For the love of God, man, he worked for the Resistance. Are you really going to have him executed as a spy?

  He closes off that line of thought. If von Strann won't crack, neither will he.

  The man remains silent.

  “You know what he did,” says Pickering. “You were there. You saw it. How did he become this … thing, this creature?”

  “Why don't you tell me?” he says. “It's your story. I don't know anything of this. You seem to want me to be this … this incredible von Strann character, but I'm not. It's a fantasy, a fabrication. It's all very fascinating, but it's ultimately … I don't know … is this really what you want, Major? Cursed jewels? Magic rituals?”

  He lowers his head, hands on his forehead, elbows on the table.

  “There is no magic in the world, Major Pickering. I knew men like you in Hitler's Germany, men who wanted to believe so much. But there is no magic in the world. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “I told you to go ahead.”

  “Do you have a light? Thanks. Please, where we
re we?”

  A moment of disconcertion. There is no magic in the world.

  “I've seen it,” says Pickering. “I've seen … the impossible.”

  “Then you tell me. Tell me what you've seen.”

  “I've seen your brother. I've seen Jack Flash.”

  The prisoner looks up at him as if Pickering is insane. Perhaps he is.

  “A myth. A legend. I've heard the tales—”

  “I've seen Jack Flash,” says Pickering. “I know his face, and I can see it in yours. I know who you are.”

  “Tell me, then. Go on. If you keep telling me long enough I might even believe it myself. And then we ‘d both be wrong.”

  “I've seen your fucking brother. I've seen the fucking monster that he made himself. I was in London during the Blitz, on leave, and I saw him. My family, my wife, my son. Oh, Christ, I saw him in the fucking ruins of my home, walking out of the ruins of my home with my wife's—”

  “—head in one hand, and your son's head in the other. And he laughed at you.”

  Pickering echoes him, hollow horror in his voice.

  “He laughed at me.”

  He can't get the memory out of his head. The siren that came too late and the thunder of anti-aircraft guns—come on now, hurry—and a house across the street goes up, the windows blow in—Oh Joe, we'll never make it to the shelter—and the keen of the rockets and—into the cellar—and she has the baby out of the cot and in her arms, brushing glass off him, she's out of the room but he's still standing at the empty window, looking at the flames across Hammersmith, caught there, transfixed in the moment—Joe, hurry up—her voice on the landing—hurry up, Joe—on the stairs, and the rockets go silent, and then … and then … the first chime of midnight… and then …

  “And then you were lying on the ground.”

  He was lying on the ground, outside the house, in the backyard. A roofless broken wall, a stone curtain with flame behind it, windows like eyes filled with flame, the back door like an open mouth, a stone mask of death. Oh, Christ, the bomb must have hit the front. It must have hit the front where the stairs come down to the front door, where she stands and kisses him goodbye. Oh, Christ.

  “I was lying on the ground, and I saw him. I was—”

  “—wounded and dazed, but you saw him clearly in the smoke and flame—”

  “—in the ruins of my house, and he had—he had—”

  “—your wife's head in one hand and your son's in the other.”

  “I saw him,” says Pickering. “I saw Jack Flash.”

  “You can't see what isn't—”

  “Don't tell me what I can and can't have seen! Don't sit there and try to tell me what I've seen! I want the bloody truth from you.”

  He takes the pistol from his holster and puts it down on the table, his hand still on it, finger curled round the trigger. He pulls it up, pointed straight at the man's head. He can hear his own breathing. He has to control himself. He's missing something important, in this state of mind. He slams the gun back down on the table. He has to control himself. It's pointed at von Strann's head again and his finger is flicking the safety off, cocking it. He has to control himself.

  He remembers lying on the ground and screaming, the pistol in his hand as he empties the chamber into this … god of fire and war.

  Slowly, he uncocks the gun. He flicks the safety back on. And reversing his grip, he smacks the man across the face with the butt.

  Von Strann doesn't pick himself up off the floor, just lies there, raised on one elbow, hand nursing his face. He looks up at Pickering as if expecting more violence. Pickering sits back down in his chair, beckoning, and the man stands up, holding the edge of the table for support. He rights the chair and takes his seat again as if he ‘d merely fallen off of it in a moment of clumsiness.

  “How did you know?” says Pickering.

  “I've heard the stories,” he says. “I wish I could tell you what you need to hear.”

  “What I need to hear is how he did it, how he made himself this thing. What I need to hear is how to kill him.”

  “You can't kill a myth.”

  “Everything can be killed,” says Pickering.

  ALONE IN THE ENDZONE

  The red LED of the radio alarm clicks over from 03:00 to 02:59. Lying on the bed, the past scattered around him, he finds himself unable to sleep for the first time in he doesn't know how many years. He pulls himself up and twists round to punch the pillow a couple of times, but it's nothing to do with discomfort. He flops back down on the bed, hands under his head. He's tired; a freefall drop through a good couple of decades takes it out of a man. It's not as rough as pushing sideward or clawing your way down through the residual strata to the dead places, but it's tiring enough.

  So why the fuck can't he get to sleep? he wonders. Outside, the cicadas chirrup the only response. Maybe it's just too fucking quiet for him now. It's a long time since he was in a backwoods Haven like this; he's a city boy now, used to passing cars, revving engines and pumping stereos, the siren wail of an ambulance, drunks having arguments or singing in the night. He's used to jarring, discordant blares of noise like neon against black in the murder city nights of jazz cats and king rats. Guys in white vests playing submachine-gun solos on the fire escape. Christ, the cities are just as much a cliche as these nowhere towns out in the sticks, but they're his cliche now, and he feels out of place in the still of this dark rural idyll slumbering. Like a samurai sitting on a porch, using his katana to whittle wood.

  But it's not the silence. His penthouse apartment back in the city is just as quiet. He's come a long way from being a streetkid, new in the city, robbing liquor stores and sleeping rough in an alleyway or in some crackhouse, whore in one arm, belt around the other. That was forever ago. Now he sleeps in silk sheets and silence.

  A guilty conscience then? Fuck, no. Joey Narcosis has no regrets, no remorse. He sleeps the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the just. He looks back on his life with pride, and if he had to live it over he wouldn't change a thing, unless it was to turn pro a little sooner.

  It was 1989 when he made the choice—not that the year mattered much to Joey by that point. He'd traveled enough to know how fucked the world was, and that he seemed to be the only one who knew it, the only lucid dreamer of them all. He'd learned to keep his mouth shut, but—Depression Chicago or LA in the nineties—it was all just a backdrop with the same gunfire out of passing cars, and the same clubs that only open to the right knock. Like the Fox's Den.

  He remembers some guy in drag in the John that day, high as a kite on smack it looked like, laughing even as he/she smeared the lipstick on like clown makeup.

  ‘All the world's a stage, honey! The whole world's a fucking stage!”

  And he has just a hint of a smile on his face as he washes his hands at the basin, nodding because somehow the words just click.

  The queen giggles and collapses, shouting:

  “Fuck! Fuck! I broke a fucking heel!”

  He looks at himself in the mirror, and he realizes that he's been a fucking errand boy too long, hired muscle, a spear carrier standing in the background, one of those guys who gets his nose broke by the hero halfway through the movie. Screw that. He's going to be a player.

  An old garage-rock track—Radio Birdman's ‘Alone in the Endzone”—is playing as he walks out of the toilet and over to the table where the Future Boys’ second-in-command, Eight-Ball, and Father Rome of the Aryan Guns sit carving up territory; and it goes on playing even as he shoots the two dealers with a single bullet in the center of the forehead each. And then somehow time rewinds around him, and plays back and forward, back and forward, as he turns and turns again, emptying the clip, bullet by bullet, one bullet each, into the henchmen and the hangers-on. He catches glimpses of himself out of the corner of his eye like he's everywhere at once, a multiple exposure of ghost image upon ghost image, and then it's over and he has no idea of what he's just done, but he sort of knows how he did it. He st
ands in the center of the scene of carnage, untouched, and everywhere around him clubbers scream and start to turn, to run, but in slow motion, slower. He feels this … puzzle of power as the world grinds to a halt, freezes around him. A nobody in their underworld up to that point, he's just carved out his name in ten eternal seconds of violence.

  He cuts the ring fingers off the dealers and scrawls that new name and a contact number on a napkin, sticks them into the pocket of a kid he recognizes as a runner for one of the other local bigtimes. And leaves. It isn't the most conventional beginning to a business venture ever but it will make the right impression in the right circles, he's sure, a good start to his career.

  In his pocket he's got the True Crime mag that he found on the newsstand that day, with one little nugget of knowledge among all the crap, one thing he didn't already know. Not that he was adopted; his parents were quick to tell him that, even quicker to tell him that it didn't change anything, he was still their son, they still loved him, so it wasn't the big deal that the Freud Squad made of it. But the True Crime hacks had found out something his folks couldn't tell him; they'd managed to track down the name he was born with, Josef Pechorin.

  The name doesn't mean anything to him as a name but it's … someone to be. Joseph Darkwater died a long, long time ago. He's no longer the fucked-up kid in scarecrow coat, with a black hole where his heart should be, where his rage built up so much mass that one day it just collapsed in on itself. He's not the same Joey who first hefted up the heavy gun and pointed it straight at a person's skull. He's not even the Narco that he was back in the days when he was new to city life and into every drug that could take him out of it, and out of himself.