by Hal Duncan
For all that time has just gone insane around him, as he walks out onto the street of people walking zombie-slow, what really strikes him is this sense that the rest of his life is just a bridge between moments like this, that he's been asleep, waiting for some call to awaken him again to his … talent. It's like when he used to paint, he thinks. When you're in the zone and something else takes over and at the end of it all you can do is step back and look at this alien, wonderful, terrible thing you've wrought. Joey Narcosis seems a good name for that something else.
Joey flips the sheet off the bed and swivels his legs out to sit up on the edge of the mattress. In the dark of the room he can just make out the black of his clothes slung over the chair beside the table, the other chair jarring the handle of the room's door just in case some hotel busybody happens in, the gun in easy reach on the bedside cabinet beside the True Crime mag, an empty can from the minibar—the one he didn't crumple into never.
He takes the cord of the light hanging over the bed between thumb and forefinger, gives it a little twist, a little pull; it took him years to master even the simplest interactions in 3-D time, but these days he can do it without even stopping his backways motion. It's all in the wrist.
So why the fuck can't he sleep? Killing has never fazed him any more than he was fazed that day to find the world around him stop and start, play and rewind at will; it all seemed just another sign of his freedom. If anything, the act of murder gives a meaning to his life, gives him peace in his soul, in the knowledge that he's doing what he was meant for. He curls up in bed calm with the certainty that nothing matters because everyone dies; sooner or later, death comes along and gathers everyone in his cold, dark embrace. And every murder Joey commits reminds him of his acceptance of that, of the choice he made and of why he made it.
Every suicide is a murder, every homicide an accident, and death the only real purpose behind every life.
So maybe, he thinks, maybe it's just anticipation, like a young child who can't sleep knowing that tomorrow is his birthday. In a way, tomorrow—or yesterday, rather—is the day that Joey Narcosis was born. Or, at least, the day he died.
Death in the Desert
Darkwater dreams. He's out in the fields walking among the clay men, gray in the light of a skull moon silver-white in the night. There are voices calling behind him but he walks on, knowing that somewhere out there, just over the next hill, there's a city, the city. Wheat whispers in the wind, brushes against the back of his hand as he pushes through the long stalks, up to the brow of the hill.
The car flashes past and brakes to a stop along the road a ways, reverses back to him. It's silver with black tinted windows that all wind down together as the man leans over from the driver's seat. Brown leather and wood interior, the dark whirling patterns of veneer, the smooth and textured, soft and tough complexities of vellum.
He's hitching, got a heavy rucksack on his back full of the moon rocks he was picking up in the fields. And the man in the silver car is offering him a lift. His long black hair pulled back into a pony tail, in his black suit, leather jacket and shades he looks… expensive. There's a black woolen overcoat lying folded on the passenger seat.
‘Are you from Italy?” he asks.
“Russia,” says the man.
Then he's inside the car, and it's moving. The coat is bulky in his lap, awkward with the rucksack on top of it.
“We can put those in the trunk, you know.”
The car pulls over.
Joey steps out onto College Street. He knows College Street in Asheville like the back of his hand, been going to school here for two years. It's all music stores and bars and cafes, a little bohemia. There's Madam Iris's Tattoo Parlor. There's Lincoln High School.
Wait, he thinks, this isn't right. Asheville and Lincoln are two different towns, in different places, different times. Wait.
“You want me to wait here?” says the driver.
“Sure, Jack,” says Joey. “You wait here.”
He starts walking toward the school gates and sees the boy push open the front doors of the building and come down the steps, rucksack on his back. As he passes a crowd of young thugs, one of them steps out—or rather a ghost of him steps out of his own body—and with a quiet, casual disregard, slashes something sharp and silvery across the boy's cheek. The boy stops, just for a fraction of a second, before walking on.
“Your lace is loose,” calls Jack behind him, and Joey kneels down to tie it.
The thugs start after the boy, their meat bodies following at a distance, but their ghost selves gathering round the kid like vultures on a carcass or hyenas fighting over a gazelle in some macabre natural-history program. Joey wants to help him but his lace is loose.
They circle the boy, reaching out to slash, to cut, to carve off strips of flesh. They smear his blood on each other's faces, lick it off each other's fingers, feed each other morsels of meat hung on the points of their knives. There's something gruesomely intimate about the way they share their victim. Joey blinks. His lace is tied but he checks the other one and that's loose as well. He undoes the knot. He takes the two ends and pulls them tight. The left over and under the right. Pull that tight. He looks up.
The boy's soul drops to its knees, drops out of his body even as the boy himself walks on. Joey makes a loop, wraps round and through. Pulls it tight. The boy's soul drags behind him, bound to him by some astral cord, like a lump of carrion dragged through the dirt on the end of a rope while the thug-souls, like the dogs they are, gnaw at its fleshy parts and fight over its entrails. The cord tears and the boy staggers forward, freed of the weight of soul, falling forward to his knees.
Joey is on his knees.
He looks over his shoulder at the car parked on the road, this white sharklike convertible with tail fins, the trunk open. He looks around him at the sands of the desert, at all these little bird skulls on the ground, so delicate that they crack and crumble under his hands. The hitcher stands behind him, holding this shape wrapped in the woolen overcoat; it looks heavy, bulky, like a rucksack full of rocks. He walks round in front of Joey, drops his bundle into the hole that Joey has dug with his fingers in the sand and bone. His hands are covered in the white dust like he's been working with plaster of Paris, just like the hand in the hole, sticking out from beneath the coat, except that one has red under its fingernails as well, deep brownish red, a mix of cadmium and ocher. The hitcher has a gun pointed at his head and Joey is crying because he should have never given the man a lift. It's not even his car, and now someone is dead and his parents are going to kill him. He's going to get the blame even though it's not his fault.
The hitcher crouches down and, though there's no sympathy in his eyes, he seems to understand. He takes the coat out of the shallow grave and lays it around Joey's shoulders like a blanket or a robe, as if to comfort him. There's nothing in the grave except a rucksack and a bunch of rocks.
The man stands up and raises the gun again. He pulls the trigger.
Joey stands there, with the gun in his hand, wearing the long, black coat, watching the body rock backward from the shot, slump sideways and back and down to the ground. It rolls right into the hole.
He wakes up, the bed soaked in sweat, and he knows he should be screaming. He should be screaming, crying or something after a dream like that. His heart should be pounding, his hands gripping the sheets in terror. That would be the sane reaction. But he feels so in control. He doesn't think he's ever felt so calm in his life. He can close his eyes and see his peers feeding on his soul. The boy in the school was him. That was him. So who was the driver? He called him Jack but it wasn't Jack, it was … something else.
He closes his eyes. He can see the hand in the grave, see the bird skulls crushing under his own palms. But what he feels … what he feels is the weight of a gun in his hand. The solidity, the certainty, of a gun in his hand.
To Kill a Myth
“Thomas,” he says, “will you put that over there.”
“Come on. Make yourself useful and give Thomas a hand, Fox, eh?”
I grab an end of the table and together we lift it to one side of the room.
“You are aware my brother is insane?” I say to the boy.
Johann laughs. He walks over to us, slaps me on the shoulder, runs a hand through the lad's hair. He can't be more than eighteen, I think.
“Oh, don't get so worked up, Fox,” he says. “It doesn't suit you.”
The boy laughs with him, gives him a look that hints at worship and anticipation, and Jonni returns it.
“Would you fetch the knife please, Thomas.”
“So this is it?” I say when the boy has left the room. “This is the spiritual love you're so obsessed by? What did you say? The love of warriors and gods, of Achilles and Patroclus, of Heracles and Iolaus?”
The tone comes out harsher than I intend.
“Well, it isn't the kind of lust that's for sale in Berlin's fleshpots,” he says.
“No,” I say. “You know … I'm a man of the world; it takes a lot to faze me. But if you really care for this boy, Jonni, shouldn't you be, I don't know, taking him for a cruise round the Aegean or something? Not playing spiritualist parlor games.”
He looks at me amazed, like I am the insane one.
“Have you listened to anything I told you, Fox? Really? Were you listening at all?”
“Oh, I was listening all right,” I hiss, “and I've never heard such nonsense in my life.”
My voice is low and I glance at the door, an involuntary reflex that I realize, suddenly, is inherited from our parents. Never let the servants hear you argue.
“Aleister Crowley is a complete charlatan,” I say. “And Nietzsche's übermensch is a metaphor, Jonni, a metaphor.”
He has told me his plan now, of course, to draw down a god into a human body, no less, to create a superhuman being, Crowley's moonchild.
“Jack,” he says. “I'm Jack from now on. And it's not a metaphor; it's a myth.”
He points at the book, sitting on a chair in the corner of the room.
“And every myth has truth in it,” he says. “You should read the book, Fox. You should see the things I've seen in there. The firebombing of Dresden. The atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. You'd understand.”
“What am I supposed to understand?” I say. “These are just words.”
“But words can be made flesh,” he says. “You say fascism is a dead idea. I say it will never die, because it is an idea. You crush it here and it will spring up there. It will always find a new form, new flesh. Why should that form not be a man? Why should that flesh not be mine? You can't kill a myth, Fox. You can't kill a god, don't you see? That's what a hero really is—part god, part man—and that's what Germany needs now. It's what the world needs: a moonchild.”
I pick up the book and sit down in the chair, laying the damned thing on my lap. I have spent the last hour trying to talk him back from the brink of this utter abyss he seems set on throwing himself into. But even with the most modern doctors, the best sanatoriums, is there any sanity left to salvage in him? If I can show him that this book is just a prop in an absurd fantasy, I wonder, would it all come crashing down, and would he be left with anything to believe in then? I have a terrible feeling that, were I to kick this elaborate dream castle of his back into sand, my brother would himself scatter into a million grains.
I fear I have no other option.
I run my fingers around the heavy brass clasp, unlatch it.
“What page?” I say. “Where will I read all these strange and wonderful prophecies?”
He grins. He has that look again, the look of fire in his eyes.
“Any page,” he says. “Just open it anywhere.”
I run my thumb down the edges of the pages, look up as the door opens and Thomas reenters. He drapes a red cloth over the table and starts to lay out upon it various instruments of their nonsense: the Eye of the Weeping Angel; a candlestick that looks not unlike a Hebrew menorah but with five branches instead of seven; a long, thin dagger. He looks at the book in my hands.
“You know,” I say, “you sound like Himmler with this occultist mumbo jumbo.”
Jonni rounds on me.
“Himmler. That swine doesn't even know what he's doing. Tonight, he's opening up the gates, and he doesn't even know it.”
The vitriol in his voice takes me aback.
“That murderous cretin doesn't even realize what he's letting loose. He has no idea of the power in the blood he'll spill tonight. I've got the book, though. I know what to do with all that blood.”
My eyes fixed on my brother, I open the book upon my lap.
“If this will satisfy you,” I say. “If this will make you see sense.”
And I look down into chaos.
THE HOLLOWNESS OF ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
He slams the clip into the Desert Eagle and slides it into the shoulder holster hidden by his black woolen overcoat. He flicks back his crow-black hair and gathers it into a ponytail, secured with a doubled-over elastic band. The face looking back at him in the mirror has a cold and callous smile on its lips, slight but noticeable, and, like the narcissist he is, he straightens the thin, black tie to look his best for what he is about to do. The frayed and tattered edges of the overcoat kind of ruin the sophisticated look he's cultivated all these years, but it's an integral part of the entire game. It wouldn't be the same without it.
He remembers how it all happened when he was the boy; he remembers the mysterious stranger that came to him, like Death himself, and the dark deal that he offered, dropping the coat upon the ground in front of him and handing him the gun.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Kill me and you can kill anyone.”
He remembers looking down at the man lying on the ground, the shattered bloody pulp where his head was blown away, and the shock so raw in seeing that carnage in front of him that it wiped out everything—the memory of how it looked before, the ability to imagine it any other way. The memory of how he was before, the ability to imagine himself as anything other than the killer of this thing. He was another person now, his past as dead as the corpse crumpled on the ground in front of him. Newborn in blood and bits of brain. He hadn't thrown up, or cried, or laughed. He felt no hysteria, no horror, only the hollowness of endings and beginnings.
Joey picks up the True Crime digest and shoves it into the inside pocket of his leather jacket along with the rest of the clippings and photographs, almost as bulky as the gun. It's almost time, he thinks, time to close the loop, to pull Joey Narcosis into existence by his own bootstraps, by handing this dumdum-loaded motherfucker of a gun to a crazy kid, giving that boy the chance, the choice, to murder his own future and, in doing so, become it.
He opens the hotel room door and cuts right through from evening into morning, walks down the corridor where a maid is coming out of another room, locking it behind her. She walks backward to the linen trolley and lays the clean towels down on it, pulls it backward down the corridor. She doesn't see him and he doesn't know how he's seeing her. This whole world, and the light that bounces round in it, is in reverse to him, and if the laws of physics were at play here, in his backways world, his eyes should be pouring out light instead of gathering it in, focusing it into vision. But, fuck it, he's long since come to the conclusion that the laws of physics are just rules of thumb. He doesn't claim to understand the journey that's brought him here; all he's interested in is the destination, and that's not far from here, not far from now. It's almost time.
As he slips out a side door of the hotel, he slips into sync with the world arou
nd him, moving with the flow of frontal time. He heads for the high school.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life, he thinks.
The alley is only fifty to a hundred yards from the school, a dank narrow chasm of brown brick slicing between a department store and a block of crafts shops. Handmade shoes and bespoke tailors. Of course, there's not exactly a lot of new stock coming into Lincoln since it drifted off into the Hinter, so the whole town's sort of regressed; he'd forgotten how quaint it all is—was. But that'll change when the CNN choppers come flying low over the fields to land in the high-school parking lot. Lincoln will never be the same again after the tragedy.
He dumps the clippings and the photographs, his wallet, all the junk that might identify his body, into a small pile of newspapers and other garbage, lights it up and lets it burn while he waits. The True Crime mag blackens and sparks, peeling away page by page into ash, till there's only the spine left.
Murder!Massacre! Mayhem! Issue 23. Macromimicon Publications.
He kicks at the ashes of the story of his life, scattering them to a gray smear on the tarmac that'll wash away in his own blood. A glimpse out of the corner of his eye.
“Hey Joe,” he says. “Joseph Darkwater.”
THE TRAGEDY OF JOSEPH DARKWATER
The boy stands at the entrance to the alley as if not sure whether to answer the call or run like fuck. Joey tosses the overcoat down on the ground in front of him, toward the boy. He holds up the gun like it's a bone for a dog, a tempting treat. Come and get it.
“Joseph Darkwater,” he says again.
And then they're standing there, looking at each other, his hand extended with the gun hanging by the trigger guard from one finger. He looks into the boy's eyes, but all the kid can look at is the gun. It must look like power itself, with the silencer screwed on it now. Somewhere, a bell is ringing, but neither of them can move, caught in this moment that their lives, their life, revolves around, this moment of death. The boy looks up at him, his pupils dark, his gaze empty, and Joey feels just a hint of sorrow, just a hint of hatred, at this ghost of his past, this hollow child. The weight of the gun in his hand feels so natural, so true, and, even as he reaches it out in offering to the boy, a part of him doesn't want to let it go.
