Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He can picture his own body lying on the ground now, its head blown clean off. It's the weirdest feeling. The newspaper photographs of the alley cordoned off, white tape on the ground. The speculations about this mysterious first victim, this outsider forgotten and remembered here and there in the confusion of the manhunt, the arrival of the city news teams, first contact with the outside world. It's the enigma that nobody was ever able to answer: Why that first victim? Why that stranger in the alley?

  The boy reaches out a trembling hand toward the gun.

  “Go ahead,” he says.

  For the first time in so very long, he feels something. He wonders if this is what has drawn him here, if he came back here ready to die because he knew, somewhere inside, there was a chance he might remember what it meant to feel… fear.

  Kill me and you can kill anyone, he thinks.

  “Kill me and…”

  The boy's eyes are wide, dark … wet. He's crying. He'd forgotten that. He'd forgotten he was crying.

  He flicks the gun around his index finger, catches the butt in his hand, points it at the boy's head and chambers a round.

  “Fuck this,” he says, and pulls the trigger.

  The bullet—like the fist of God—punches most of his soft, little skull clean off his shoulders, leaving only the lower jaw near falling off, and other fragments of white bone that jut out from the red pulp where his head once was. The body drops, twitching with the mindless spasticity of a decapitated chicken.

  A shiver runs through it, then a final jerk, and then it's still. Such a close-range shot with .99 ammunition—Joey has blood and brains all over his hand and sleeve, little spots of splatter on the front of his shirt. He can even taste a little something warm and salty on his bottom lip when he licks it.

  He flicks the gun's safety catch back on, unscrews the silencer and slips it in his pocket, holsters the weapon. There's a part of him a little disappointed that the world hasn't just torn itself apart around him, that the shock wave of the bullet—of the paradox—hasn't punched right through reality and turned it into so much grisly mush, like the dead thing lying on the ground in front of him. He would have liked that, he thinks.

  He heads out of the alley and turns away from the high school. Been there, done that; time to move on. He strides forward, a smile on his face as he rips through the day ahead of him, a flash of light and dark as the sun flicks through the sky, away and back again, like the turning of a page. It's afternoon, and pedestrians fill the street; behind him there's the noise of local police investigating the crime scene.

  Loops and paradoxes are for the mundanes, he thinks. Time is full-on and flashback, forward and reverse, splayed out in sidewinding slipstreams of chance and causality, and layered universe upon universe, like geological strata each built upon the dust of the world crushed beneath.

  He slips a coin in a newsstand, pulls out today's edition of the Lincoln Herald, The headline is bold and brutal: Murder Rocks Lincoln, He glances through the pages as he walks—local farmboy was brutally murdered—down the high street—quiet, kept himself to himself—through the days—distinct painting style that showed real talent—onto the road out of town—why anyone would want to kill him—and off the road into the fields.

  The clay men are swinging their scythes in the fields as Joey stops, turning around for a last look at the outskirts of Lincoln.

  Why shouldn't time be like the world, he thinks, with this skin of earth made from the blood and ashes of our elder selves, a world of Adams shaped from clay and rotted back to it? The bricks of us cracked and crumbling, till the whole wall falls and the dust just settles down over the top of it, ready for the next layer of construction. It all seems so stable, with the bedrock under it, but deep down, under the crust of a million aeons, of a million universes, there's still that molten core of chaos at the heart of everything. Maybe he'll try and find a way out of this century again. Maybe he'll take a trip to Tunguska, 1908.

  He throws the newspaper sideward, fluttering, tumbling into some other corner of time and space. He doesn't give a fuck who finds it, where or when.

  Reality looks solid, and time looks like a line, but underneath it all there's no certainty, no absolutes, no law, only this cold calculus of survival that emerges from the brutal, random experiments of Death and Time.

  He looks up at the sky, churning blue, crows circling overhead.

  Reality doesn't play by your rules, fuckers, he thinks. It plays by mine.

  Errata

  —

  A Page of Crawling Chaos

  burning map of time instead of space: countries are actions, cities dates.

  Here Britain, Russia, Italy and France, America and Japan are rivers flowing into the China Sea across the continent of the twentieth century, rivers of troops that meet in Peking, 1900, where the Righteous Harmonious Fists rebel, burning churches, killing nuns and priests, beheading Chinese Christians. Follow the road from there with Boer women and children to the little British village of concentration camps, 1901, down a prison road that stretches from the Caucasus, 1902, to Siberia, 1903, and Josef Stalin walking it, learning the way through pogroms in Kishinev and Gomel, lakes of blood. 1904, another prison camp in the valley of death, Sakhalin now, island of seven thousand Russian convicts freed to fight the Japanese in Manchuria. Rocks in the water: Belgians with baskets of human hands in the Congo; women chained to posts as hostages. 1905 is a little coastal inlet where unarmed men, women and children with their hymns, crosses and banners crash in waves against the Cossack rocks on which a Winter Palace stands. 1906: The mountain range of a British Empire dwarfing rebellions in Natal and Nigeria. 1907: More mountain ranges—Portuguese Guinea and Angola, German West and Southwest Africa, French West Africa; everywhere rebellion and reprisals. The churning sea of 1908 in Macedonia—Serbs and Greeks, Bulgarians and Romanians, torching each other's villages. 1909: An island of Armenian massacre in southern Turkey. 1910: Low hills and hidden valleys— floggings and torture, secret trials and hangings of Greeks and Bulgarians in Turkish Macedonia. 1911: An ocean of republic in China washing away the hated Manchu dynasty, garrisons massacred. 1912: A river of gold and blood, of Tsarist troops killing 170 starving workers in Siberian gold mines on the Lena.

  ——

  1913: The fault line of the Balkans—Leagues and Wars—a chasm opening wider as a Bulgarian captain forces a bishop, two priests and a hundred Thracian citizens into the courtyard of a school and kills them. 1914: The edge of the great continent, the headland of a gunshot fired in Sarajevo that brings down horses on the Marne, and the map is burning to a world of fire and 1915—gas, gas, quick boys—who now remembers the Armenian Massacre?—1916—over the top at Gallipoli and the Somme, men march into machine-gun fire—and how old are ye, lads?—nineteen—seventeen—krak!—nineteen—eighteen—DOOM!

  I pull my mind out of the book, reeling and queasy at the hammerblows of history. I don't even know how I can read it; the words just seem to leap off the page into my head.

  “What is this?” I say. “What is this?”

  My brother lays his hand upon the page of crawling chaos. I look up and see his smile and suddenly I'm terrified at what this book has done to him, at what I realize it could do to me.

  “This is the way the world was meant to be,” he says. “This is history.”

  1919—the Winter Palace stormed by sixty thousand men in George Square, Glasgow— Send the tanks«/—and the German Soviet Republic stillborn, Rosa Luxemburg falling, flamethrowers in Munich—1920—Whites against Reds in Poland and the Baltic States as Caucasian Republics rise and fall, Armenia carved up by the Turks and Bolsheviks—1921—the million-strong Moplah of Malabar in India rise up, burn and loot, and Hindu heads trim the Muslim kingdoms—1922— Hail Caesar! Mussolini reigns and the fasces of the Roman Empire's raised again—1923—Hitler fires his gun in the Burgerbrau beer cellar, shouts: The German people must be saved! and Primo de Rivera burns the Spanish constitution—1924—Sociali
sm in Italy: a bloodstained car and a disappeared politician—1925—jihad in the Rif gives young Franco his first taste for blood of the tribesman put to the knife—1926—the Hitler Youth born while the U.S. Marines fight for lumber and rice, banana and sugar plantations of Nicaragua— 1927—the KKK parade in New York on Memorial Day, four hundred black-shirted fascists with them all the way—1928—Ramon Romero, striking dockworker, shot in the head, shot dead, in Puerto San Martin as the child Che Guevara breathes his first—1929—Arabs burn the Torah at the Wailing Wall, attacking Jews in Hebron where the patriarchs lie—1930—riots in India at Gandhi's arrest, more fire, a torchlit glow in the eyes of the Kaiser's son as two million Nazis cry Deutschland erwachse, Juda verrecke!—1931—an Italian flag hoisted in Libya, high as the body of Senussi's defender, and Japanese troops marching into Manchuria—1932—thirteen million votes for Hitler, and Bolivia and Paraguay fight over parched wilderness—1933 and it's Chancellor Hitler. “My God,” I say. “My God, this isn't right. This isn't our world. It's—”

  1934 and the Long Knives are out slashing—1935—Mussolini in Ethiopia— 1936—the poet Lorca in a shallow grave—1937—fascists sing at Jarama, open fire and Guernica burns—1938—the Internationals march for the last time in Barcelona, broken like windows in the Night of Broken Glass of shattered businesses as scattered flowers strew Hitler's parade into Austria—Sieg heil!— Prague is lebensraum, Poland an annex—war rips the world and now there are no years, no empty dates, only an endless Blitz beginning with Trotsky murdered, icepick like a hammer smashing, sickle slashing—tests with Zyklon-B on Soviet soldiers captive at a camp called Auschwitz—oh, but Americans stand proud and preen: We saved your asses in World War Two after the Nips blew our boats up, sonsabitches! aye, but a little late, too late, missed the train at the station—all aboard for Birkenau, Dachau and Belsen!—and shivering, freezing, in Stalingrad's snow, the besieged men surrender, so wasted and cold like the boys on the boats on the beaches of Normandy, Christ, dry us off with the firestorms of Dresden, under sheltering mushrooming clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  I can't take my eyes off the book but I can see him, feel him, standing at my side. I feel a rising panic, as if everything I've ever known is being stripped away.

  “There is no Futurism in the real world,” says my brother. “You understand? There is no Futurism.”

  But what I'm thinking as I read this book is that there is no future.

  A Pile of Death

  Jews murdered in Kielce in Poland and shipped off by Brits to the camps out on Cyprus, and Vietnam starts with the French fighting Ho Chi Minh, empires now foundering, as new states are founded and flounder, in Israel and Palestine-Arabs against the Jews—India and Pakistan—Muslims against Hindus—Gandhi is shot on his way to a prayer meeting—planes out of Egypt to bomb Tel Aviv-Kim Il-sung in Korea, the North against the South, backed by Stalin as Mao takes Peking, and his People's Republic march into Tibet—in the Senate, McCarthy—MacArthur in Seoul—the Argentines worship a dictator's actress wife but no one mourns the Jewish anti-Fascist writers, actors, poets, tried and shot behind the Iron Curtain where at Stalin's death, the VoPos in Berlin throw weapons down to join the demo—Japanese fishermen in a rain of H-bomb ash, east of the Bikini Atoll—Moroccan nationalists massacre Europeans and Muslims—Soviet tanks encircle Budapest—Hungarian security forces hang from lampposts—Israel in the Sinai Desert—British paratroopers at Port Said on the Suez Canal—peasants conscripted to labor battalions in China's Great Leap Forward—six hours’ rest in twenty-four hours—a dog sent into space to die— and there's no future now for the three thousand counterrevolutionary “rightists” of the Communist Youth League arrested in China as Battista flees the Cuban Revolution, and blacks run from the guns of the Sharpeville shootings and the Dalai Lama flees Tibet, run! new prime minister of the Congo, run! from coup to capture, torture, execution by the followers of Mobutu while on the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall's first bricks are laid, the Cuban missiles aimed, the armed blockade, Ich bin ein Berliner, says JFK, then gunshots rip the motorcade, and We Shall Overcome, they sing, the followers of Martin Luther King as Liuzzo is shot by the KKK—riots in Watts and the first U.S. combat troops land on Vietnam.

  Red Guard vigilantes of the Cultural Revolution tear down all that's old, the palaces and temples, ancient artifacts, the intellectuals, teachers and administrators, children in red armbands murdering their parents—in Vietnam eight hundred tons of bombs fall every day, and Johnson tells the troops to nail the coonskin to the wall— Egypt and Jordan attack and lose to Israel in six days—the oil refineries of Suez City blaze—the chief of the South Vietnam police holds his revolver to a prisoner's head and pulls the trigger—bang!—Robert Kennedy—bang! — Martin Luther King—bang!— Helter Skelter on a door in blood—Kill the Pigs! Make them squeal like the dead babies of My Lai: well, they might have had bombs strapped to them. Crazy? Like Bukovsky locked up as insane for protesting the Soviet use of psychiatry on dissidents—British troops in Londonderry shoot to kill on a Bloody Sunday—mercy becomes a luxury as Pinochet seizes Chile, seizes students and professors, union leaders, allprotesters mustbe tortured orthey will notsing, he says—the Greeks and Turks fight over Cyprus—the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh, the Americans evacuate Saigon and the government of Laos falls into—

  “Chaos,” I say. “This is bloody chaos.”

  My head is spinning as I push the book away into his hands and he takes it from me still open, turning it round to read. He holds it like some maniac minister reading a sermon.

  ——

  What year is it now? What year are we in? Because Franco's still murdering— now it's Basque separatists—yes, those attacks on Spain's government buildings in Lisbon, Ankara, in Rome and Milan, must be proof of conspiracy—Masons, Jews and Communists, ‘cause sure and the Christians are so much better, like the IRA attacking a Peace March or Falangists smashing a Muslim enclave in Christian East Beirut to massacre the families of Palestinian refugees, huddling, naked and shackled, Steve Biko in police custody, dead of brain damage, aye, and it's black and white and red all fookin over as Mengitsu calls for a red terror, purging Ethiopia of bandits, anarchists and feudalists and the Zimbabwe African People's Union blows an Air Rhodesia passenger plane out of the sky and hunts through wreckage for survivors just so's they can cut their throats, sure and look now, see the marines retreat in Tehran as Islamic militants take their barracks, oust the shah, and Russia advances down into Afghanistan, aye, let's shoot anyone as says Give peace a chance, and sell the fookin gun to Contra rebels in Nicaragua to raise blood money for Iran, and when the Argentines invade the Falklands, yes, the Empire Strikes Back, halle-fookin-lujah, sinks the Belgrano, tabloids rejoicing: Gotcha! sure and does it fookin matter that there's bodies floating in the water, drifting past a Warsaw priest tortured and killed by the secret police, dumped in the river roaring Tamil Tigers ambushing a convoy of soldiers in Sri Lanka firing machine guns on the demonstrators in South Africa on the anniversary of Sharpeville and it's another body in the water, old man dragged out of his wheelchair, shot, dumped overboard from the Achille Lauro— splash!—radioactive cloud from Russia's Wormwood star fallen from heaven like the manna of a UN convoy of food and medicine blocked by Shi'ite militiamen on its way to refugees at Chatila and Bourj al-Barajneh, ‘cause it's not enough, it's never fookin enough, but we've got to have Azeris and Armenians clashing in a fookin noble murderous struggle for national fookin identity, oh but we can't be doing with that, no, so let's gas the fookin Kurds of Halabja, and even as the Berlin Wall falls and a fookin velvet revolution calls, well still there's fookin tanks and tear gas in Tiananmen Square, Armenians murdered in a pogrom in Baku and no one fookin cares about Mandela's plea to stop black killing black, Inkatha and the UDF at war—and Hussein in Kuwait setting the oil alight, vast plumes of smoke turn day to night as Bosnian Serbs bring back the camps and genocide, and those as bring the medicine and food and spread the news can just b
e fookin murdered in Somalia.

  “Fire,” says Seamus. “It's all fookin—”

  ——

  Fire a fookin mortar bomb into a Sarajevo market ‘cause there's no more civilians, no more sanctuary in churches where the Hutus massacre the Tutsis in Rwanda, sure and how safe's a fookin safe haven where peacekeepers stand and watch as Bosnian Serbs take four thousand Muslim men and boys from fallen Srebrenica, eh? Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria brag: We have slit the throats of seven monks, aye, and glory be to Allah, cause the Taliban have overrun Kabul, and tourists are the new human sacrifice at Luxor, but it's liberation that they're fighting for, sure, over there in Kosovo against the Serbs or in Omagh with all the fookin courage of a car bomb—liberation?—seventy thousand villagers killed in the Sudan, and those that lived forced to convert to Islam, boys abducted and sold into slavery—liberation, is it?—in Sierra Leone where rebels and mercenaries burn the power station, post office, town hall, UN headquarters, a thousand dead, floating past a frigate sheltering Europeans, floating bodies, arms and hands chopped off.

  “Jesus,” says Seamus. “I can't go on.”

  But Jack shoves the glass up to his mouth to force the drink down a throat that's raw with all these terrible words of the future like broken glass scouring poor Seamus's ragged voice. Reynard massages his cramped hand, looks at the scalpel and the fountain pen, the needle of the syringe, and the pages of human skin piled up in front of him—the work of his hand, of Seamus's voice and Carter's translation, three weeks’ worth of Jack pacing back and forth, flipping pages to point at this symbol or that—this, here, write this one next, keep up for God's sake, man. And now it sits there, a pile of death upon the table, a history of the twentieth century and of what's beyond, what's past and present and still to come.