Her voice a whisper. “How the hell did you know about that, John?”
I don’t remember reaching for Adena. I don’t remember putting my hands to her ropey neck and I don’t remember her thrashing to get away. I just remember Janet, waking up to pull me off, and me squeezing, fighting to keep my grip.
Descenthounds
The engine cranks.
“She won’t let you back in the car.” Daniel talks to my arm as it gets tied. From the passenger side, Janet points at the gear selector and Adena rocks it back and forth, checking the alignment. Then she tries the ignition again.
“Look, I understand. Sometimes she pisses me off and I want to punch her in the mouth. Strangling her though?” His eyes wander to the morning sun bleeding through the cumulus. “Alright I've thought about that, too. But we’re a team, we can get more done together.” The needle goes into skin, pokes for a vein. He faces away from the wind coming down the mountain. “You and I aren’t done with our own business and you go and start this.”
He doesn’t know what she did to me.
“She hit-and-ran you, I get it. How long ago did it happen, a year? Two years? A different life. None of it’s real.”
Pull up, push in, the morphine hits.
Adena pounds the dashboard, a muffled shout through the windshield. She unlatches the hood and gets out, holding an eye on me as she props it open.
“Now she’s a mechanic. We could be into the next town, instead we get to watch her figure out, again, that cars won’t start for anyone but you.”
“I’m good with cars,” I say, eyes loose in the sockets.
“Right.”
She checks the battery, the spark plugs, all the wiring she can find. Janet comes to us, pushing his oily hair back and lighting a cigarette. He says, “Man, she’s choking on it. You really fucked things up.”
“That’s what he’s good at,” Daniel says.
My eyes focus on his face. “You wouldn’t be this close to the dam without me. You wouldn’t even have the idea,” I say, tongue rubbing the roof.
“And I'd be back in my warm hotel, stocked with weapons and food.”
“And dead in six months.”
“Who are you again? Oh, I remember, you’re that junkie. You don’t know a thing about survival past what I’ve trained you.” A few yards behind him Adena is pushing at parts, tapping the distributor cap.
“He killed your father,” I call to her.
She stops working on the car. “What did you say to me?”
"Your father. Daniel killed him."
"What are you doing," he whispers, then to her: “That’s a lie."
“No,” I get closer. “He’s the coach. He’s Joel’s father.”
Her eyes go to him. Daniel’s face fills red and he rushes at me, dropping his sword and taking me down to the cold. We roll and grab and he rips at the wrappings on my face, both of us punching and pulling at each other with glass and rocks in our backs, Janet following along and laughing with the cigarette stuck between mangled teeth.
I get to my feet, the sharp decline to my back and bandages hanging from my face, and I grab for the sword. I pick it up and swing wild as he moves back, the tip catching his hand and slicing into the soft palm.
“Give it back,” he screams.
“You can’t change it,” I say, face exposed and bitter. “You think everything before the fire is gone but it’s still there.”
“You’re a liar. You manipulate us and I’m sick of it,” he says, chest up and down, holding his hand. “You pit us against each other and hold back information until you can benefit from it. You’ve been pulling our strings since we met.”
“I was keeping you from each other, but I’m done with that,” I say and throw down the sword. He picks it up by the blade, his blood down the edge. He turns it around and grabs the handle, ready, shaking his head.
“Is it true,” she asks. He looks at Adena, still at the car. “Is Joel your son?”
“I don’t have a son,” he says to the lion.
“Did you?”
“I don’t have any queer sons."
“Dan,” her voice louder.
A lacrimal lake, a wetness at the lids, he says, “I can’t.”
She steps closer. “You can’t have kids?”
“Not that kind.” The sword comes down, his wrist giving. He takes a few steps away, watching the Bristlecone pines. After a bit he says, “I had plans for him. You wouldn’t- you can’t understand. He was supposed to play college football, get a scholarship, join the Marines.”
“He still could have,” Adena says.
“Yeah, okay,” he laughs through snot. “Try telling him that. When was he supposed to meet with the recruiter, after his theater group?”
“He does sound pretty gay,” Janet says.
“I’ll chew your lungs right out of your chest,” Daniel points. Then he says, “Look. You have all these plans for them. The stuff you didn’t get to do yourself, but they don’t work out. They just,” he looks back at Adena, her bone-and-skin arms dangling. “Go bad.” Thin wisps of graying black hair push against her face, nostrils taking air in, out, looking at him. He straightens. “Was he a good man?”
She says, "He was."
“Well I can only imagine what you went through. It’s unfortunate your old man killed himself and I stayed free, but I wasn’t going to jail for doing what I had to do.” The two of them, on this mountain, clothes fluttering. Daniel says, “In the end we’re alike, you and me. I don’t apologize for who I am, either.”
Blue Spruces and White Firs moan under the push of the wind, scraping bark, their needles blowing across the road. Daniel turns and raises his sword with the length of the blade directed at my gut.
“Right,” I say.
He shakes and says, “Left.” The downhill behind me shifts, small rocks slipping down it. I realize and go left, out of the way, and Daniel stabs. The Victim takes the sword to her heart, black eyes dried with dirt. Then he walks forward, blade in her chest, his blood buried with it, and pushes her off to avalanche down with the rocks and shattered glass.
More of them are climbing up the steep angle, struggling against it. One of them nearest the fallen one, a boy, stops at her. Quickly he falls on her, thrashing and biting at the sword puncture in her chest. Then another one joins him, both of them chewing and crunching the charred meat.
Daniel’s look goes to mine, then the dark, wet spot of dirt on the ground under his hand. “The blood,” I say.
Daniel’s cheeks stretch, his teeth coming out. He brings his hand up and runs the blade over it, more red onto metal. Walking down the hill, leaning back and fighting the pull he stabs a Victim coming up at him then puts his boot to it’s shoulder and pushes it back. As it falls the ones around it catch the scent and turn, going hungry down after it.
Daniel laughs. Deep, hard, the sound of it up from his stomach.
Victims are creeping from the tree lines along the road, driven out by the blood. Janet’s mask says, “This has been absolutely lovely stopping like this, now can we get the fuck out of here?”
I brush the street dust off.
Adena says, “I should have stopped, I don’t know why I didn’t. I was going through a lot with my father. I was so full of toxins I couldn’t handle more and I had to get home right then. So it was wrong, but that doesn’t mean you can put your hands on me.”
Tumbling through the trees, dragging up the road, more bodies. Daniel wipes his hand on the sword again and runs past the SUV, slashing at a few and getting them onto each other.
“Please start the car,” she says, looking away.
We all get back in and I fix my gauze, one try and the car starts up. I tell them we’re all connected darkly. Adena says, “Get us to the dam. After that, I want you to disappear.”
Believe me, I’m trying.
Receptor Antagonist
Along another sunlight’s time we butcher the landscape, stopping to cut into th
e victims when they get thick. Daniel makes new slices in his skin when more blood is needed to jump their cannibalism, and in between there’s driving, always driving the red through mesas; dried out tables weathered and eroded by the pressures.
Adena’s skin is like a lizard’s just before molting, whitish and loose-fitting against the breeze when she says, “I need another scale,” and we go and find a store and get one.
When Daniel gets the itch he says, “I need to find a hunting supply,” and we track a store down and get inside, taking it apart to find what we want.
Janet pushes a Victim into the backroom saying, “I need some time,” and we give it to him, watching the entrance. Twenty minutes of sound later he comes back and we ask him nothing. Then before we leave he says, “I think I’m in love,” and when we look he’s holding a black crossbow.
Daniel says, “That’s a recurve model. See how the tips curve away from you.”
“My tip is curving away from me as we speak." He loads a gray bolt with green fins onto the stock and draws the bow back.
“That style gives the crossbow a better draw length. It means a faster shot and less shock on the hands.”
We walk out and Janet pulls the crossbow up to fire, a pierce through the air and into an eyeless Victim’s socket.
“How long have you been practicing,” Adena asks as it falls.
Janet says, “How long was that?”
I lose track again, a string of photographs leading through a storyline of battles and driving. In some of the pictures my hands are driving, some are of the interstate, some of fighting against ancient, red rock. Freeze frames of abandoned and rusted out cars are laid out with close-ups of ammo clips, then one of Daniel’s face, then road signs pointing the way to a stadium.
***
The image of the arena is a modern block of glass; round like a puck here, the jut-shape of a ship there, guarded out front by a sculpture and four towers retired from their lights. More shots of Victim kills, breaking in, getting inside, then the still goes choppy video and I’m real-time again, navigating the wide hollows spread with ash, the quiet food counters and souvenir stands, the restrooms, the posters of cancelled shows and trophies separated from their weight. We pull them apart with giddy energy. We shove each other, fall, get back up, kick in glass.
The doors push open and we step into the deep space of the center, a capsule shape of air and scaffolding, the plastic seat ocean descending down to the flat of the stage- a room so thick it swims the head. Between each section a stairway runs down to the bottom and we step, step, step down and out into the middle, the size of the place sitting on us. Crosswalks and support beams weave the ceiling a hundred feet above, lights hanging around a cube made of scoreboards and television screens.
“Pathetic.” Daniel points to the two flags hanging at the far end, well over the heads of the seats: a red-white-blue and a red and white maple, side to side.
“I don’t like Canada, either,” Janet says from the third row. “America’s boring headband.”
“Not just Canada, any two countries that let their flags lay together like that.”
Adena says, “You think we should have been fighting? They never did anything to us.”
“What’s the point then,” Daniel asks. “If we were on the same team, no wars and more or less an open door policy, then why separate ourselves at all?”
Adena says, “Well…”
“Lines are drawn between separate sides so they can stay separate sides. When someone crosses your line you crush their ears in, and when soldiers come to learn what's happened to their friends you bleed them out, too, and you send the coffins home.” He looks at us, no one has an answer. “A border you can cross isn’t a border at all. You either fight for yours or you join up and become stronger, expand your line so that when someone steps over it you have one army to beat them back and invade.” He adds, “And if hockey wanted to be a serious sport, it should have been us against them, every game. Not this inter-mingled sometimes-my-enemy-sometimes-my-friend shit.”
“That actually makes a little sense,” Adena says.
Is this why we came here?
Daniel turns to me. “We’re against numbers no army in history has ever faced. Even the most severe underdogs have had more than four soldiers, not to mention training and time. What we’ve done, statistically, is impossible. Yet we’ve done it. Have you looked at us out there? When we hit our stride we’re a fluid and precise monster, like a goddamn Swiss clock with swords for hands.”
White blood cells in his cuts fighting microorganisms, stem cells regenerating lost tissue. “We are what we are, anyone who can say different was burned alive.”
A few thousand seats watch us, folded up and empty. Then Janet says, “There’s too much ash in here to camp. Let’s eat and get out.”
We all turn away and go to our bags and get what’s needed; Dan and Janet take out canned food, Adena unwraps a slice of spoiled meat and runs her tongue over it, I go to my supplies and open to nothing. No morphine, no sleep hypnotics or antipsychotics or anticonvulsants, no stock of benzodiazepines, no acetaminophen and codeine cough medicines, not even diphenhydramine or dextromethorphan or the rest.
Someone took it all.
“You finished everything. You’ve been eating pill meals,” Janet says, popping a jar of olives and drinking the juice under his mask. Pores raise up, the primeval shiver response flexing hairs on my arms. Hot twitches, ant colonies on my slippery back and under the hug of the face wrapping. He says, “I have to admit, you raped my expectations. In my whole career I’ve never seen anyone who can handle what you take.”
Intestines coil like wet worms, a groan of the bowel. He says, “You okay, my man?”
He has something on him.
“You think so,” he asks through a covered smile. “You know I retired.”
No one retires, they just stop getting paid for what they are.
Janet laughs, olives falling out. “You know me better than my gyno does. I have some H but I know you're not a fan."
Color shifts and I claw his bag open, sinuses filled with smells of iron and poison. I find the bottle of opioid powder, dust synthesized from morphine extracted from poppy and I pop it open to snort.
“No, no, no, not like that.” Janet takes it from my hand and offers to cook it. I pull back to let him but only because it's his. From the bag he gets a burnt metal spoon and a packet of citric acid, one bottle of water, one filter, one lighter and tells me to give him one of my needles. As I shake for it he mixes everything in the spoon, then puts the flame under. “People will tell you you don’t need to cook the high quality stuff, but I think it takes the ritual out of it.” He sucks it up through the filter and into the needle, the line up to twenty ready. “Without tradition what are we? Just monkeys, humping in the trees.”
I tie my arm and flick, flick, the vein pushing up and I stick, pull up and let in. There’s a hesitation- nothing happens, and I think I've been tricked. Then it goes: the blood-brain barrier my own border to cross. The invader deacetylates and binds to receptors. Respiration shoots up and then falls down, heart rate and pulse come down, a rush to the head and a slackening of the musculoskeletal as all my fuses burn slowly inside.
When I was young I went to the ocean to overcome my fear of it and was met at the shore by a wave taller than my head slapping into me all at once. This is like that, if water made you come.
“His eyes,” Adena says.
Janet says, “They’re dilating.”
“No, they’re doing it again.”
“Wait,” Daniel says. “Do you hear that?” Wet sounds coming off the wavy dome, slop-mashing and blending from every angle. “Something’s moving over there.”
“There, too.”
“Oh fuck, look up there.”
Shadows blobbing under seats, mud churning. Fifteen, twenty thousand worth.
“Run, now, run,” Daniel screams and I’m blacked out but my eyes work, t
hat same feeling but this time I can see it all, see them running, see the Victims in the floor, all of them in here, the sold-out crowd of ashes turning to damp flesh, forming and heaving from the ground. We sprint up the stairs with hands reaching out to grab our feet and legs, tripping us up as we take the steps two and three at a time, reaching the top of the section as the crowd is completing. The doors swing open to the walls and we crash into the horde of Victims waiting in the outer corridor and without pause I sever a path into them, through them, fury fighting, separating from the others in the groaning and shouting confusion, carried apart by the tide of scabs.
Through new vision I am a massacre. A message sent from the dead to the dead. Heads, hands, I undo all.
I’m the first to the doors and I shove and stumble out them, ataxia hitting my legs and flopping me to the ground. I look back to the wall of fans, arms stretching, teeth grinding, all of these reborn at once, and it seems impossible. And then my eyes open. And my mouth, too, because I see now what I couldn’t before. Somnolent and alone and down on the concrete I realize the truth, because there's no other explanation.
This is all because of me.
All of this. The births, the Victims, the birds and the fish and the fire, I’ve done it all. Every time I’ve used, an equal reaction. My parents, the kids, everyone, I’ve turned populations to ash and then drawn them back out. Every milligram and ounce of my chemicals has fed this end.
A Chemical Fire Page 15
