by Aaron Dries
She didn’t care.
The guilt he’d felt the following day was poison, and just like poison, his body tried to eject it from his system. The creative director stepped up to his desk and eventually told him to go home and rest. “Don’t sweat it, Mann. You look like crap. Hell, alcohol doesn’t sit well with me like it used to either.”
Ha. The man was twenty-five.
Robert went home, spun his lies. More copy.
“Look at me, Soldier,” Bonita said again. Robert did, despite himself. Her blades drove deep and carved her name against his bones.
It felt good. It always had. He’d long ago embraced the torture.
The memory of her kisses: cuts upon cuts. His father’s words: an echo that would not stop. His wife’s slap: an award he deserved. Imogen’s tears on the shoulder of his shirt: acidic.
The bedbugs.
Her sing-song voice, rich as honey, came again. “Look. At. Me.”
Robert Mann looked, and in doing so welcomed it all. He didn’t know why he’d fought everything for so long. This was the way it was supposed to be.
“Let them come,” Bonita said, nodding. Her beautiful brown skin was now the hue it was meant to be, the glass and years separating them having dissolved away.
The phone went blank. Robert stood. “What the goddarned fuck?”
He’d drained what little power remained in the battery by looking through the old albums. The machine in his hand was as dead as the men and women he’d left behind on the beach.
Let them come.
Fury gushed through him, splashing disgust into his head. He opened his eyes and hated everything around him. The island was paved with trees, and in the bark of every one there was the face of someone he’d hurt or let down. Without thinking, he threw the iPhone that he’d bought at the Apple store on West Fourteenth Street into the green. As soon as it flew beyond the reach of his fingertips, there came that oh-so-familiar regret.
“You stupid sonnofabitch! Fuck. FUCK!”
Robert slouched through waist high ferns, heading to where he thought the phone might have landed. The vines from the trees—which continued to stare and trace him with ever-open eyes—wrapped around him. He fought them off. Sweat coursed his length. The anger hadn’t receded. Everything was his enemy, and the fact that he couldn’t hurt the island only frustrated him more. For every branch he thumped and broke, there were millions behind it waiting to pull him into a splintery cuddle.
Moving faster. He could smell his own stink; it was sickening. Finding the phone would probably make no difference, dead was dead, but having its weight resting against his leg would be comforting, a thinning bond to a life he’d been so desperate to escape from.
The irony was not lost on him.
“Yeah, so fucking funny, right? You sick cunt. You bastard. Holy Christ on the cross, goddamnit!” However, it wasn’t him saying these words. No. They came from the man trapped beneath the bark of the tree in front of him. That’s so weird, Robert thought.
That fella looks a little like me.
Light.
It was dazzling, even though he knew the sun must have been close to setting. Robert let the moments roll by, sensed the anger in him evaporating as dew steams at daybreak. The breeze touching his cheeks was cooling and clean, sensations he’d suspected he would never feel again. The truth was that Robert had expected to wander in the jungle until he dried up, collapsed and died, assuming some critter didn’t knock him off first.
He had come from darkest dark to this.
Three words bloomed in his mouth. “Oh. My. God.”
He’d found himself at the apex of a small ravine, and there was a decent-size river ten yards below. The decline was steep and paved with boulders—giant dice tossed by powerful though careless hands centuries ago. There was nothing neat in their design; each rock clashed with another, creating pockets of darkness in between. A gust of wind blew, sending seaweed streamers into a flutter. The sound reminded him of when he was a kid, and of the discarded plastic bags that would snag on the barbed-wire fence separating his family’s property from that of his neighbors. They hissed. There was something hypnotic in the sound.
The river led to a bend in the ravine. The ocean was on the other side of it. He could hear crashing waves.
But that wasn’t all.
There she was, the young woman he’d saved earlier. She was running along the uneven riverbank, tripping occasionally in the sand and diving over the rocks. Her blond hair was a beacon calling out to him: SAVE ME. SAVE ME.
It all became clear. This. This was why he was here: to answer her call. And saving she most certainly needed, because Robert understood better than most what it was she stood to lose were she to go unfound…as he had already lost it.
It wasn’t just a stranger running down there. She was everyone. She was his father, his wife; she was Imogen; she was even Bonita. The girl he was sent here to save was every single spoke on the cog that had turned his whole life through, pushing him closer to this exact point in time—through lies and bullshit and bloodshed—to right now, right there at the ravine’s highest peak.
“HEY!”
Robert waved his arms.
“UP HERE! STOP! WAIT!”
Goddamn it, what is she, deaf or something?
Something caught the late afternoon light and shone up at him from between his feet. Robert followed its Tinker Bell glow and saw his iPhone lying there, dangling on a thatch of hickory grass. Not even the screen was damaged. Had someone snatched it from the air and gently placed it down on the ground in full view? Were that the case, then, thank you very much, Senior Invisible, you’ve sure earned your tip! He laughed. This discovery spoke of chance—only chance of the good kind, the kind that worked in your favor as opposed to that which fucked you over, again and again. Yeah, Robert considered himself an expert on the subject.
So without a second thought, he bent down and snatched the damn thing up. He lifted it to eye level and gave it another once-over, praying that the same magical hand that had carried it to its resting place would also herald the return of those elusive blue reception bars, especially now that he was so close to the shoreline. But he was out of luck; the screen was blank.
He caught a flicker of movement in its opaque reflection. And that’s when he felt it. The breath on the back of his neck.
Robert made as though to turn, but his feet slipped on the weatherworn boulder under him. The man who had crept out of the jungle was now just a diminishing blur as Robert’s view gave way to a sky in agonized twilight with all the reds of the sun splashed across the clouds. A galactic crime scene.
The ravine was only ten yards steep.
It seemed far more severe to Robert, who tumbled backward and frontward and sideways down the picket-fence slope. The world rushed at him. Bones rose up through flesh, spearing him from the inside out. His jaw dislodged from his face. Teeth shattered.
He thumped against a boulder and felt himself starting to slide. He scrambled for something to cling to. There was nothing there but that paper-thin seaweed, which exploded into green dust the moment he touched it. Energy emptied out of him. His fingernails clung to the barnacles and snapped backward as gravity took control and dragged him between two of the giant rocks, down into one of the black pits he’d seen from above. There was a withered tree branch at the bottom, and it was its wooden point that broke his fall: impaling his leg, thrusting upward, and then embedding itself in the underside of his right arm.
Robert was already dreaming by then.
His cold and empty apartment was just as cold and empty as he remembered it. Time had been elastic; he hadn’t been out of the United States for all that long, and yet it seemed so much longer. Stretched. Like in The Wizard of Oz, Robert thought. When Dorothy woke up and the world was black and white again. It turned out she’d just been sleeping the whole time, dreaming of walking scarecrows, witches and flying monkeys. Hardly any time had passed at all.
T
he significant difference between the end of the film he’d loved so much as a kid and the world he had stepped back into was that there was nobody there in his apartment with whom he could share an “And you were there…and you were there too!” moment.
There was just the room; a morgue with a view.
He sat at the kitchen table. The sun was setting. Robert’s shadow stretched across the Formica, the tiled floor, and rested against the door leading to the bathroom. There came a flushing noise from inside.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Robert was as still as stone. There were sirens wailing in the streets below, and the sound made all of the hairs on his arms stand on end. It was growing colder by the second, with steam puffing out from between his lips to cloud his vision.
The metal handle turned with a delicate metal scrape.
“Please, no.”
The sun time-lapsed behind the Manhattan skyline, giving the city back the darkness it thrived off and hungered for during the day. The cold took over.
Light flickered beneath the bathroom doorjamb.
A tear slipped from Robert’s eye, froze on his cheek.
Bonita fell into the room; smoke and flames were close behind. Robert tried to stand up and rush to her but he couldn’t. It was as though he were trapped inside his own body. His former lover’s curly black hair was singed to the scalp. Her hands were blackened bones, twitching and then falling apart on the floor. The floral skirt she’d been wearing (the one that he’d picked out for her from the boutique she liked on Fifth Avenue) was melted against her skin, a sinewy grafting of flesh and fabric.
Robert screamed out to her from inside but nothing escaped. He could only watch as she lifted her head to reveal molten eyes, her once beautiful, widening mouth.
She’d tasted like caramels.
“Soldier!” Bonita shrieked, gurgling blackness that dribbled and ran down her chin. “Soldier, he-eeeeelllp me-eeee!”
Small. Damp. Closing in on him from all sides.
Breathing was difficult. His skin felt too tight. When he tried to move, all he could see was white light. Dreaming was better, even with the nightmares.
Everything tasted coppery. Robert knew he was drowning on blood. Salt water rushed in from the cracks between the rocks. The tide was rolling in from the sea. Soon this crevice would be submerged and he would die.
He imagined that might be a nice turn of events.
It was colder here than it had been in his apartment, only he sensed that the cold was not on the outside of his body but inside. The pain was more than he could have ever imagined. The rocks offered no comfort. They were immovable and alien.
Look up, he told himself. Search for the sky.
Water continued to trickle and bubble around him. It was so loud.
He let his head snap backward. The white took over. In it he saw black dots swirling, imperfections against immaculate agony. It faded and he saw that other world above, so very out of reach.
The sky was painted a vivid purple and was freckled with the evening’s first stars. Robert had read somewhere that it took hundreds—or was it thousands?—of years for the light from a single star to reach human eyes on Earth… How disappointing it must have been for the star itself, to travel millions of miles through space and time, only to embrace a place where grace had never touched. Robert sighed. Even if this were true, he selfishly liked the idea that those stars were pinprick gateways back into some other time, light from nowhere reaching down to usher him back into nowhere. In some strange way, this idea made him feel less alone.
Perhaps the light came from stars that had died long ago.
If he could have cried then, he would, but even crying took energy, and Robert Mann had none to spare. So he lay there instead and watched as three words began to fade into form against the award-worthy backdrop. They were printed in bold though elegant lettering.
Yeah, they really popped.
Three words. They sounded familiar; Robert no longer knew why.
Let them come.
Drained, Robert allowed the simple sentence to sink in. It haunted him, stirred something in him that had been waiting for the right moment to come out of hiding.
Don’t fight it anymore, Robert told himself. It’s just not worth it.
Let them come.
And so they did.
The bedbugs rushed out from beneath his skin with all the strength and determination of the sea. They carried themselves on tiny legs, blinded by a hunger that could only be satisfied with misery. Robert was certain now that he hadn’t contracted them on his trip to Florida, as he’d at first suspected. No; they had always been with him.
Robert didn’t fight them. It didn’t even hurt. Not anymore.
Instead of swiping and scratching at them with his broken fingers, he focused all of his attention on the ancient glimmering above. His smile was weak, but like those faint stars, it was there.
A man stepped into Robert’s line of sight.
The stranger leaned forward to peer down at him. Beams of sunset orange doused his body. Robert hadn’t really seen him back up there near the jungle’s edge, but there was no doubt in his mind: it was the same man who had crept up on him and breathed down his neck.
“Help…me,” Robert tried to say.
The stranger simply stood there. He was Asian, his skin all tanned and leathery. It was difficult to tell his age, although Robert guessed close to thirty. Those eyes peering down at him were a dusky gray and burned with contempt. A rabid stare. His hair was matted into waist-long dreadlocks that were tied into a bunch at the back of his head. A hand-span of dark, curly beard was plaited beneath his chin, tied off with vine.
But it was the stranger’s clothes that unnerved Robert the most.
He wore a pair of cut-off jeans that might have once been blue but were now seagull-shit white, serving only to make his muscled legs look darker. They hung loose about his waist, fastened to his hips with a snakeskin. His upper half was dressed in a patchwork T-shirt that had been carefully stitched together from other, smaller T-shirts, all of which featured Star Wars iconography. Robert could see fragments of Chewbacca, Luke, Leia and Han against red, blue and white backgrounds. The thread holding the pieces together was Frankenstein-stitched with reed.
The man breathed. His barrel chest rose and fell with the throb of the ocean rushing in between the rocks. It was up to Robert’s breastbone now, which meant nothing to the bedbugs, which continued to feast.
Why doesn’t he reach down and help me out?
Why is he staring at me like that?
Robert tried to speak. It was too difficult. Help me, goddarnit, he wanted to say. We’ve got to save the girl. Don’t you get it? That’s why I’m here.
There were tears flowing from the stranger’s eyes, shimmering beads caught in his whiskers. His mouth opened in a grimace of exasperation, revealing rotten teeth webbed by saliva.
The stranger began to shake his head.
No.
And with that, Robert watched him turn away.
Wait—
Robert didn’t let his head drop back against the stone; that white pain frightened him. So he remained motionless, knowing now that he was being left here to die. He knew he deserved a lot of what had happened to him, but he honestly didn’t believe that he deserved this.
He gawked up at the sky for a final time. The three words that had seemed so important to him before were gone, and he didn’t care. The stars were still there, they were all that mattered. It was to them that he spoke.
“I’m…not…” The final word hurt too much to say aloud. It charred inside him.
Yellah.
Bedbugs wormed across his eyes and ate away at the corneas, but the stars’ dead light continued to shine, growing brighter with every throb of his veins. The coldness had him in its grip and there was no going back.
Robert held his breath until it hurt. After that, there was no choice. No alternative.
He le
t them come.
The water rose and rushed inside him, filling him up. It made everything heavier. Total pain ignited, reminding him that he still had a choice. Robert could snap his limbs from his torso and propel himself to the surface; he could double over and chew through the wood that impaled him, wearing what few teeth he still had down to nubs in the process if he really wanted to. He didn’t do either of these things. Robert did nothing.
And slowly, the pain went away, and there was calm silence on the other side. Screams he’d been unaware he was voicing were cut short. He was abandoned. Those stars shimmered a final time, dimmed, and then there came a beat of blackness. Exploding purple crystals bloomed, fireworks upon fireworks of refracted light and what looked like multifaceted shards of glass. It was astounding. It made him feel like a kid again—the marvel of it all. But like those passing years, this display started to escape him too. There was no stopping it.
Robert Mann closed his eyes and was happy to feel the insects that had plagued him for so long leaping from the kingdom and into the dark. The heaviness that had filled him when the ocean rushed in was gone now. It was as though he were naked. Free. The bedbugs had taken all of the guilt with them. He was happy.
Floating. Tipping into black—almost. A peculiar noise jolted him awake. It was a strange, comforting hiss. Robert could smile now. Everything was okay. It was the sound of plastic bags, caught on the spikes of an old barbed-wire fence in a small Kansas town, blowing in the wind.
3
The shark could feel daylight slipping away. Oncoming night didn’t bother her. She was not afraid. Her fearlessness was what gave her power, and without it she suspected she would falter. And so she continued through the jungle.
