Infinite Doom

by Brian Bowyer

  “Nigel.”

  “And where do you want the tattoo of Nigel?”

  “On my back,” Tanith said. “That seems appropriate.”

  Nemesis nodded and pointed at the leather couch.

  Tanith dropped her purse onto the floor. Then she removed her shirt and stretched out on the surface of the couch, facedown. She could smell the fragrance of leather beneath her face. From behind her, the smell of something burning became noticeable. Incense. Organic matter, perhaps. Maybe some glazed paper. Probably the smell of rites coming together.

  Nemesis sat down by Tanith’s side and inspected her skin with nimble fingers. “This will be your first tattoo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your left hand. I will need to draw some blood.”

  Tanith bent her left arm behind her back and presented her left hand. Nemesis took it and slid the blade of a razor across Tanith’s palm. Her skin opened and a red line bloomed. Nemesis put the silver dish on the floor and Tanith’s blood fell in drops onto the ashes it contained.

  “Relax,” Nemesis said. “Just let your arm dangle for a bit.”

  Tanith did.

  Soon thereafter, Nemesis put the photograph of Nigel in Tanith’s right hand. “You will hold the picture up for me while I work, but I will need you to focus on the picture, also.”

  Tanith turned her head to look at Nemesis while the woman gathered her instruments. “I can do that.” Then she turned her head forward again and focused on the photograph.

  She heard the noise of the tattoo machine starting. Moments later, the needle bit deep and Tanith clenched her teeth.

  • • •

  Nigel was in his office when a sudden pain drilled through his temples. The agony was so intense that he envisioned an ice pick being shoved into his brain. He put both hands to his head and stood up from his chair. Then he fell onto the floor and started screaming.

  • • •

  Tanith smiled while the needle traced its line of fire on her skin. Her eyes were open, and she was staring at Nigel’s photograph, but in her mind she could see him writhing on the floor of his office. Over the hum and the buzzing of the tattoo machine, she could hear the beautiful music of his screams.

  • • •

  A woman from a nearby office heard Nigel screaming and rushed into his office. She found him screaming and writhing on the floor. “Nigel? Are you okay? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  Nigel opened his eyes and looked up. At first, all he could see was Tanith’s face inches in front of his own, but then—as if her face were made of smoke—he could see through Tanith’s face to the woman standing behind her. The woman was one of his colleagues, but he was in too much pain to remember her name.

  “IT’S TANITH!” Nigel screamed. “JESUS CHRIST! IT’S TANITH! GET HER OFF ME!”

  Another colleague (a male) entered the office. “What the hell is he talking about?” the man said. “Tanith doesn’t even work here anymore.”

  Bewildered, the woman shrugged. Then she pulled her phone from a pocket and dialed 911.

  • • •

  “I’m almost finished,” Nemesis said. “He’s going to resist you, but you’re going to have to be stronger than his resistance. You’re going to have to go inside and bring him back here with you. Are you ready?”

  Tanith smiled. Her eyes were still locked on the photograph. “Yes. I am ready.”

  • • •

  Nigel saw fingers that looked like smoke—Tanith’s fingers—reach for his eyes and he managed to close them, but it did no good. When those fingers entered his mind, they felt like they had claws made of steel.

  • • •

  Tanith went all the way inside him. Nigel was burning up. It felt like his entire body was on fire. Tanith heard her own irrepressible laughter.

  She shoved her fingers of smoke down his throat and poked around. She didn’t know where his soul was, but she was determined to find it.

  There were several of his colleagues in the office now, but Tanith paid no attention to any of them. She knew they couldn’t see her because her body was on the other side of town.

  Nigel started choking and convulsing on the floor. His eyes rolled upward in their sockets. He wasn’t dead yet, but he was dying. Tanith reached in even deeper, probing everywhere.

  Finally, she wrapped her fingers around a little white incandescent sphere that was apparently trying to hide in the back of Nigel’s skull. Is this the core of you, Nigel? Your nucleus? Is this what makes you what you are?

  Tanith felt, from the other side of town, Nemesis wipe a rag across her back. Then she heard Nemesis say: “It is finished. Bring him with you.”

  Tanith squeezed her fingernails into the sphere of light. Nigel screamed a final time, and then he died.

  • • •

  Tanith opened her eyes. She was still holding Nigel’s photograph. She heard the echo of a scream, and what sounded like perhaps the flapping of bats’ wings, but the tattoo machine had gone silent. She sat up on the couch and looked at Nemesis. “Did it work?”

  “Yes. Would you like to see it?”

  Tanith nodded.

  Nemesis pointed at a mirror standing upright in a corner of the room. Tanith approached the mirror and turned around to look at her shoulder blade. Nemesis approached and looked in the mirror, too. Together, they watched the moving tattoo. Nigel’s face—a perfect portrait in black ink—was surrounded by red runes, tribal designs, and cabalistic symbols. Tears fell from his eyes, which were haunted, tortured, and kept darting back and forth between Tanith and Nemesis. Whenever he looked at Tanith, his mouth opened and closed repeatedly. He was incapable of speech, but Tanith had no trouble reading his lips. He was basically saying the same four sentences over and over: I’m sorry. Please. Forgive me. Let me go . . .

  Tanith walked back over to the couch. She put her shirt on and picked up her purse. Then she turned to Nemesis. “You do exquisite work. Thank you for an amazing tattoo.”

  Nemesis nodded. “You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.”

  Tanith left.

  As soon as she stepped outside, she heard thunder and looked up. The sky was gray, and black clouds were rapidly approaching. She smiled. We’re together again, Nigel. And this time, we’re together for a long time. Are you ready to see the apartment? I’m taking you with me everywhere, now. Even unto the grave.

  When the first fractured spike of lightning fired off on the horizon, she began running home to beat the rain.

  GIFT AND A CURSE

  You’ve been inside me for over nine months now and they’re inducing my labor tomorrow, so I feel compelled to write you a farewell letter tonight. You don’t have a name yet, and your gender is a mystery to me as well. I haven’t wanted to know. I believe not knowing will make it a little easier to let you go. I love you very much, and I hope that you’ll reach an age when you would be able to read this letter if it somehow ever made its way to you. It won’t, of course, but I’m going to write it anyway. I’ll just pretend that you’re going to read it one day, and that will carry me through to the end.

  That’s what we writers do best, by the way: pretend. And although I’m only sixteen years old, writing has been what I’ve been spending most of my time doing for the past several years. So why should tonight be any different? Believe it or not, a famous writer once told me that I was (and I’ll use his words here) “not only a good writer, or a competent writer, or an original writer, but a magnificent writer.”

  That famous writer’s name was Harvey Edwards. He’s dead now, but you should look him up sometime. Someone shot him to death in his home and no one ever figured out who did it. That someone was me. I blew his brains out the back of his skull. Then I got gang-raped while walking back to the subway station that night and you were conceived.

  • • •

  My parents used to take me to the movies a lot when I was a little girl. That’s what I remember the most about my mother: how much she
loved movies. She and my father both loved films and literature, but each had their preference. My father preferred books. My mother preferred movies. I had no preference. I loved books and movies equally. I decided while in kindergarten that I would do both when I grew up: I would make movies for my mother and write books for my father.

  • • •

  My mother got cancer when I was ten. First they cut her, then they filled her with poison, then they cut her some more. I didn’t know which was worse, the sickness or the cure.

  Then it metastasized. I used to sit beside her bed in the ICU room, holding her hand. She lost so much weight it looked like her bones got bigger. She would stare at me with huge, bright, and startled eyes—like she just couldn’t believe what was happening to her. Her hands were always slippery and cold whenever I squeezed them, and she never squeezed back.

  I cried and prayed to God every night before I fell asleep. My prayers were always the same, more or less. Dear God: Please heal my mother of her cancer. Or, if you can’t heal her, please let her live for at least another ten years. I still have eight years before I’ll finish high school. And then, even if I go to film school for a year, that will give me one whole year to make a movie. All I want in life is to make a movie, and have my mother see it. Please God. That’s all I want.

  She died when I was eleven.

  • • •

  You’re awfully restless tonight, Little One. It’s after midnight and you’re apparently practicing for a swimming meet down there in my womb. Someone up the street fired off a gunshot earlier; perhaps you mistook it for a starting pistol.

  I often wonder just what exactly you can hear down there inside me. You’re a world away in one sense, but there’s also only a few layers of me between you and the rest of the waiting world. I know you can hear my voice when I sing to you, because the sound of my voice always calms you down. Sometimes I wish I could just keep you inside of me forever, where you would stay warm and safe from this nightmare factory that will only want you to be another cog in a machine.

  • • •

  After my mother’s death, my father spiraled into a terrible depression. We both did, actually, but mine didn’t hit me full-force until about a year later, when I was twelve. I abandoned my dream of making movies. I stopped writing screenplays, and began writing a lot of gloomy poetry. By then, my father was already in therapy, and he started taking me to see a therapist, too. I mentioned suicide to my therapist a few times, but never in a serious kind of way. The only time I told anyone that I was seriously thinking about killing myself was when I was writing poetry to myself.

  • • •

  Depression has levels of discomfort. Sometimes it’s just a dull, constant ache. At other times, you can actually feel a trapdoor over a pit opening up inside you, and the suction from the pit is like a vacuum drawing you downward into an abyss.

  My father and I both spent a lot of time teetering on the edge of that abyss.

  • • •

  We talked about our depression a lot, my father and I, and both of us were grateful that we still had each other. Without each other, we probably would have killed ourselves.

  We saw the world as a stovetop, and everywhere we looked, people were being cooked alive. Human souls were being prepared for consumption. The universe used time as its heating element, and when people finally gave up and died, the universe removed them from the stovetop and devoured their souls. Sometimes the universe aged the people first before it ate them; sometimes it cooked them too quickly and burned them—like it did my mother.

  • • •

  My father started writing a lot too, by the way. Short stories, mostly. And he also started working on a novel. No one ever read his stuff but me, and I loved it.

  His work inspired me. I pretty much stopped writing poetry. I started writing short stories and novels.

  • • •

  Writing didn’t save us, but it did provide a sort of equilibrium—which was about the best we could have hoped for at the time. To us, everything just seemed so meaningless. How could you look terminal cancer in the face and still think that life had any meaning? We would look at the daytime sky and see nothing but the blackness beyond the blue; the darkness between the stars. All that matter spinning around out there seeking its own equilibrium, and all of it for absolutely nothing. What difference did it make if we lived or died? Our tiny human lives were two little bubbles in a cauldron on that infinite stovetop.

  One of my father’s favorite writers was Ernest Hemingway, and writing didn’t save him, either. In the end, Hemingway simply blew his brains out.

  • • •

  Anyway, a few years passed, and my father and I had both been on the downside of manic depression for a long time when he came into my room one night and told me that one of his favorite living writers, Harvey Edwards, was going to be appearing at an upcoming writers’ conference right around the block from our apartment in a couple of weeks. “Would you like to go?” my father said.

  This was about a year ago, when I was still fifteen. “What exactly is a writers’ conference?”

  My father smiled. “Something that isn’t as popular as it used to be, that’s for damned sure. And writers’ conferences were never all that popular to begin with. They’re basically annual gatherings all over the globe where aspiring writers can go to learn from successful authors, editors, and literary agents. Through a series of lectures, panels, and workshops, aspiring writers can improve their craft, socialize, network, and try to get a foot in the world of publishing. Harvey Edwards is going to be hosting a workshop.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?” I said. “Hosting a workshop?”

  “It means he’ll be critiquing short-story manuscripts for aspiring writers and providing feedback.”

  I closed my laptop and set it down beside me on the bed. “So basically he’ll just be reading people’s stories and then telling them what he thinks?”

  “Yes,” my father said. “Basically.”

  I shrugged. “Sounds fun. Let’s do it.”

  • • •

  I had never read anything by Harvey Edwards, so I spent the two weeks leading up to the writers’ conference trying to familiarize myself with some of his work. I say trying because I was unable to finish anything written by him that I attempted to read.

  How he became a popular author was baffling to me. I found his stories to be boring, too long by half, and just plain silly. I thought his writing was awful. I also found it pretentious beyond belief. He displayed a deep contempt for most of his characters, and none of them ever seemed (to me, anyway) the least bit lifelike or realistic. He also flaunted an odd condescension toward his readers, always seeming to preach and yell throughout his prose, while constantly trying to tell them how to think and feel about everything. In a Harvey Edwards story, the evil characters are always stalking or shambling instead of walking, or cackling maniacally instead of laughing, while the good guys are always striding and chuckling brightly.

  I don’t know how my father enjoyed the man’s work. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. But I digress.

  Before I go any further, however, I should probably point out that Harvey Edwards was also famous—in literary circles, anyway—for being rude and often mean to new and aspiring writers.

  • • •

  The writers’ conference was in a hotel in Manhattan. The workshop was in a room that was set up like a classroom, with tablet-top chairs like the kind I remember from elementary school. The chairs were arranged in rows, facing the front of the room, where there was a step-up platform with a single chair on it that faced the assemblage.

  On the fifth day of the workshop, a Friday, Harvey Edwards entered the classroom, walked up to the empty chair on the low platform, and had a seat. In his hands were a fountain pen and a thick notebook. He cleared his throat and looked out over the assemblage.

  There were twenty aspiring writers in the workshop, and all of us
had already submitted our stories on Monday, four days before. As per the guidelines, none of us had included our names anywhere on the submissions, so Harvey didn’t know which among us had written each story he was critiquing. I’m only going to tell you about the two stories Harvey critiqued that were important to me: my father’s and my own. As it happened, he got to my father’s story first. I should also point out here that Harvey Edwards (and everyone else in the workshop, as far as I know) had no idea that my father and I were related.

  “I do not believe,” Harvey Edwards said, “that just anyone can be a writer. I mean, sure, anyone can string some words together in a coherent sequence if he or she has done even a modicum of reading, and has at least a basic understanding of how to use language. Which is good enough for everything from writing posts on social media to doctoral theses, obviously. But to be a writer—and not necessarily an author, by the way; there are many published authors out there who are terrible at the craft of writing—but to be a writer, I truly believe that one must have the gift. I can’t put it any simpler than that. And you can always tell when you’re reading the work of someone with that gift. It fills the page, that gift. When you see it, you can’t miss it, and that’s when you know you’re reading something special. It’s also extremely rare, so if I hurt your feelings today, don’t take it personally. Most would-be writers never make it in this business, anyway.”

  After that, Harvey Edwards began critiquing the stories of the young and old men and women gathered in the classroom, most of us wary but nevertheless hoping that he would tell us we had a chance. Surprisingly, he wasn’t nearly as rude and mean as I expected him to be.

  And then he got to my father’s story. “Clawfoot Lullaby,” Harvey Edwards called out. “Who among you wrote that?”

  My father raised his hand.

  “When I am hired to instruct a workshop,” Harvey Edwards said, “I feel it is my duty to be absolutely honest about the work. I can’t take the easy way out merely to avoid hurting people’s feelings. To do so would be betraying my craft as well as my employers. And also the best interests of the students themselves. Lying to someone who does not have the gift is not merely dishonest, it is cowardly. And you, sir, in my opinion, formed by years as a reader, writer, editor, and critic, by my years as a workshop attendee and instructor, by a lifetime of reading and struggling to improve my own writing, by everything I believe or know or suspect about good writing, you, sir—in my opinion—have no talent for writing whatsoever.”