"So tell me," I said, "just how come I ended up on Mars? And get me another beer."
He got it.
I chugged it down.
He said, "We brought you back."
"I was dead?"
"Yes."
"And you brought me back? So you can bring Jane back too?"
"No, Buk. No, I'm sorry. We can’t."
I took another swallow of beer.
"So why me?"
"Because you're one of the greats, Buk. We've brought back the greats."
He watched me. I said nothing.
Hear that, you fuckers? Hear that, Pa, all you bastards who said I was shit, hear that, all you phonies in all the cities who took one look and said no?
"One of the greats?" I said. "When did I die?"
He said, "March, 1994."
"Jee-sus fucking Christ..."
The guy gave me a funny look. "You don't remember?"
I shook my head. "Last I recall, it's '73..."
"You lived another twenty years, Buk. You became famous. Your books sold millions, you were big in France, Germany."
"So why can't I remember any of that?"
"It sometimes happens. Retrieval can result in memory loss, often it’s only short term. Your memories will return."
I saluted him with the bottle. I had that to look forward to: remembering my successful future.
I laughed. One of the greats?
And I was on Mars.
I swung myself off the bed. "I need to take a dump. Where's the john?"
He was still there when I got back. "Who else?"
"Excuse me?"
"Who else you brought back? The greats."
"Artists. Composers. Other writers."
"Writers like who? Celine?"
He shook his head. "No, not Celine."
"Hamsun?"
"Knut Hamsun? Yes, all the Nobel prize winners."
"How'd he take it, being brought back?"
The guy nodded. "He's fine. He's writing. He has a little place on the slopes of Olympus Mons."
"Lawrence?"
"D.H. or T.E?"
"D.H.."
"Yes. He took it badly at first, but he adjusted. He's travelling – crossing the Mare Acidalium, the last we heard."
"And Doe – Doe–"
"Dostoevsky?"
"That's the guy."
"We made the retrieval, but..." The guy shrugged.
"What happened?"
"He went mad. It sometimes – very infrequently – happens."
"Mailer?"
"Yes. He's fine. Doing the celebrity circuit."
I thought some. "How about Hemingway?"
"Yes. He's living nearby, as are most of the other retrievals. You'll meet them all, eventually."
"Fuck that. I didn't want to meet other writers when I was alive, and I sure don't want to meet the fuckers now."
"That's fine, but I think you'll change your mind, in time. It's somewhat therapeutic, let's say, to meet others of your kind."
I took a long swallow of cold beer.
"But you didn't bring Jane back?"
"I'm sorry."
"But you could? I mean, you have the... the ability to do it, yeah?"
He would not meet my gaze. "We only brought back the greats–"
"Listen, buddy, Jane was great."
"I'm sure she was, Buk, but–"
Something tore open inside me, something big and cold and gray.
He said, "You must be hungry. I'll get you some food. Then you can sleep a while, rest. In the morning I'll show you around. Now, food. What would you like?"
I was hungry. I said, "Hamburger and fries. You got those? And some wine? You have wine on Mars?"
"We have the finest vineyards in the solar system growing on the slopes of Elysium Mons"
"Riesling, sweet and cold?"
"I'll see what I can do."
The guy left the room through a sliding door.
I drank my beer.
In the morning I woke up and went to the john and puked and I felt better after that. I got a beer from the cold chest behind the bed and chugged it down, and then the guy in the silver suit came and said he'd show me around. I said okay, but would there be beer? He said there'd be plenty of beer.
We left the room and walked into warm sunlight, down a path in a concrete complex with silver domes in the red sand. I was wearing old chinos and an old shirt, just like old times.
The guy didn't offer his name and I didn't ask.
We came to an open buggy with big wheels like beach balls and the guy said climb in. I got in the passenger seat and the guy indicated the back seat, a cooler there. I got myself a beer and drank and we set off.
We drove out of the complex of domes and into the red desert. The guy told me a whole bunch of stuff about the terraforming of Mars. Most of it I didn't understand, and I wasn't interested enough to ask. The bottom line was that mankind had spread from Earth and was living on Mars and some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, spread like a disease.
Once when I turned in the seat to get another beer, I looked back at the complex we'd left. The domes glittered in the morning sunlight.
After an hour we arrived at another complex in the desert, only this one as well as domes had factories with great pipes coming from them and spreading out across the desert.
"These are the lungs of the planet, as it were," the guy said. He told me that here was where a whole load of stuff was pumped into the Martian atmosphere to keep it breathable. I didn't see a single person anywhere about the place.
We passed the lungs of the planet and moved further into the desert, and I sat in the passenger seat and drank beer after beer.
The guy said, "I make it a duty to read all the work of the retrievals I'll be working with."
"That so?"
"I've read practically everything you've ever written."
I was impressed. There was a lot of it. "So what you make of it? My guess, a guy like you..." I gestured with the bottle. "Probably means jack shit to you."
He said, "Buk, I was appalled, but I must admit fascinated at the same time."
I saluted him with my bottle.
"The drinking, the women... that was incomprehensible enough, but what really appalled me was your apathy."
I shrugged. I couldn't be bothered to argue. The only time I ever defended myself was in a fist-fight. "So why the fuck did you read all the stuff?"
"Because I was paid to do so, Buk."
"Pretty easy job, as I see it, reading a whole bunch of stuff. Even stuff you didn't like."
He ignored that and said, "Your apathy really astonished me, Buk. You were interested in nothing but drinking and copulating and the races..."
"And boxing and books," I reminded him. "I read some, too."
"And even here, now, Buk – you're just not one bit interested in the wonders of the modern age, are you?
He gestured at something sailing by in the sky. It looked light and airy, like a kite made from aluminium and tin-foil, only it was about the size of an aircraft hangar.
I remembered the sky scrapers and the railroads, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Saturn V rocket. I said, "Show me wonders of the modern age and all I see are rich fuckers getting richer."
"You don't see progress?"
"Progress is just another word for shitting on those at the bottom."
He said, "You're ignorant."
I stared at him. "Everyone is ignorant," I said.
We drove on some. He said, "Why did you write?"
I thought about that. "Because I had to."
"Why did you write the kind of stuff that you wrote?"
I thought some more. "Because I lived the kind of life I lived."
"A life of ignorance and apathy and quiet desperation."
I didn't argue. I looked down at my body. It was the body of a seventy-three year old, but the strange thing was I felt young and strong.
I said, "Pull up."
&n
bsp; He looked at me. "What?"
"Stop."
"We're in the middle of the desert. Why–?"
"Stop the fucking car and we'll get out and fight."
I wanted to feel what it was like to fight again, knuckle on bone, I wanted to feel his fist on my jaw.
"I'm not stopping, Buk."
"Then shut the fuck up," I said.
We came to a sprawling settlement in the desert. We travelled through it on an elevated road. I made out what looked like factories, and then domes. The thing was, these domes were situated in the middle of big green lawns.
I laughed.
The guy said, "What's so funny."
I said, "You even brought lawns from Earth!"
He said, "You don't like lawns, do you, Buk."
"Lawns make me want to puke."
We drove on. I said, "Slow down."
I saw broad in a bikini sun-bathing on one of the lawns down there. She stood up as we passed, took off her sun-glasses and watched us: tall and tanned, with a nice ass and stacked.
"Whoa!" I yelled and waved my bottle at her.
We shot past, back into the desert. The guy was gripping the steering wheel, staring ahead. He was saying, "We don't have cities, as such, but small settlements scattered across the face of the planet, manufactories run by a skeleton staff employing AIs..." Blah, blah, blah.
I tuned him out and got another beer. I was getting drunk but the sun was getting hot out there in the desert.
I said, "So why did you bring us back? The Greats?"
He said, "So you can write, and compose, and paint."
"You got no writers and composers and painters on Mars?"
"We have artists of all kinds, yes. But we wanted to resurrect the greats of Earth."
I swallowed some beer and looked ahead. Heat shimmered in the distance above the red sands. I said, "So you want me to write?"
"We'd like that, yes."
"Write what?"
"Whatever you like. Your life on Earth." He looked at me. "We'll get you a dome, a word processor."
"A what?"
He thought about it and said, "A computer, so you can write."
"Fuck a computer, buddy. I want a typer. A Remington upright, okay?"
"That might be difficult..." he started.
I said, "You bring the greats back to life from bone and shit, and you can’t get me a Remington typer?"
"I'll see what we can do."
We arrived back at the complex and the guy said, "Would you like to go to a bar?"
I stared at him. Was he joking? I said, "That's the first sensible thing you said all day."
We parked and walked along a concourse between silver domes to a patio area around a pool. A crowd of men and women sat drinking around the pool. The guys looked like a bunch of phonies but most of the women were lookers.
We went into a dome set with tables and chairs, clean and dead. Not my kind of place at all. We sat at a table overlooking the pool and the guy said, "Beer?"
"Make it Jack Daniels. A bottle."
He came back with a quart and I sat and drank and watched the beautiful people talk and laugh and jump into the pool.
The guy was watching me. At one point he leaned forward and pointed through the dome and said, "The gentleman drinking beside the diving board. Hemingway."
Hemingway was fat and bloated. He looked like I could take him out easy and drink him under the table.
I said, "And the blonde talking to Hemingway?"
"That's Samantha Dennison, a poet working in the mid twenty-first century. Would you care to meet her?"
"Sure. Bring her over."
He hesitated, then stood and left the bar. I watched him cross to Hemingway and the blonde and murmur something to them. The blonde looked up, squinting against the sunlight. She nodded, said something to Papa, and walked back with the guy.
I raised my bottle at Hemingway and he smiled and saluted me with his glass.
The blonde had style, the way she walked in and folded herself into the chair and held out a hand. "Mr. Bukowski," she said.
I nodded. "Drink?"
She looked at her glass. It was empty. She said, "G&T."
The guy stood up and hurried to the bar and came back with a drink. She sipped and looked at me and said, "Have you been here long, Mr. Bukowski?"
"A day, and that's a day too long."
She smiled. "You'll get used to the place," she said. "We all do."
I took another shot of Daniels and leaned forward and said, "You're a very beautiful woman."
Her smiled faltered. "Why, thank–"
"You and Hemingway down there. You together?"
She said, "We're friends, Mr. Bukowski."
I leaned forward, swaying a little, the Jack Daniels on top of all that sun. I said, "You put out, Samantha?"
"Excuse me?"
"I said, do you fuck?" I said.
"What–"
"How'd you like to come back to my place?"
She said to the guy, "Did you say Mr. Bukowski hails from the dark ages, Max?"
The guy – Max – he said, "Mr. Bukowski was writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, Samantha."
"Writing what?"
Max said, "Poetry?"
"Poetry? I find that hard to believe."
I was losing it and all I wanted to do was get her in the sack. I looked from her perfect face to her perfect breasts.
She said, "You are somewhat primitive, Mr. Bukowski."
She stood and strode from the bar.
"And you," I called after her, "you're one sassy round-heeled little cunt!"
I sat and drank. The sun moved across the sky. I finished my quart and I was sweating. I missed Jane. At one point I turned to the guy, Max, and I said, "Take me to a whorehouse, Max."
"I'm afraid, Mr. Bukowski, that we don't have such establishments on Mars."
"What kind of place is this?" I yelled.
I sweated and drank and I was feeling bad. I thought about LA. I thought about Jane and the arguments and the drinking and the fucking and I missed her.
I said to Max, "I want to go back to Earth, Max."
"I'm afraid that's impossible, Mr. Bukowski."
"Why impossible? You bring me back to life. You bring Papa and all us fucking so-called greats back to life. What's a little rocket trip back to Earth?"
He looked at me. "The Earth doesn't exist anymore, Mr. Bukowski. We managed to extract a few thousand DNA samples before the last war–"
"Doesn't exist?"
"The planet was annihilated in the Fourth global conflict."
I looked into the twilit sky, looking for Earth. All I could see were the first of the stars coming out.
I stood up and knocked over the table and staggered towards the exit. Max was at my side. He took my arm and I felt like swinging for him but I just said, "Doesn't exist..." to myself and he guided me back to the dome.
I got myself a beer and he left. I sat by the wall and stared out across the red sands.
I thought about LA and the races and Mulholland Drive and Macarthur Park and the Post Office where I worked my ass to death and I thought about Jane and Barbara and Frances and Linda and all my other women and the other good souls I knew and Bob the editor at Black Sparrow Press, who saved my life when he got me out the Post Office, and gave me enough to allow me to write.
And I drained the bottle and smashed it on the floor tiles so I had a nice long shard like a blade, and I stretched out my left arm and cut it, not across the wrist like a fairy but real good, from the wrist upwards to the inside of the elbow, slicing the length of the vein, like a man. Blood flowed bright and I passed out laughing.
"Wake up, Buk!"
I opened my eyes and sat up.
Max was smiling down at me.
"How are you feeling, Buk?"
I looked at my arm. The scar was healed. I was okay, a bit of a hangover was all.
He said, "You can't do things like that, Buk
."
"Get me a beer."
He got me a beer from the cooler and I drank.
The sun was up and the desert outside the dome was red. There was no one about and that was fine by me.
I said, "What do you want me to do?" and I hated the note of pleading in my voice.
He said, "Write about Earth, Buk."
He left the dome and I sat in the chair before the wall and stared out and drank.
Later that day he came by with an upright Remington and a ream of quarto, then left without a word.
I drank all day and around about ten that evening I sat at the desk in front of the Remington and I wound in a sheet of paper and reached for a beer and began typing.
10.03, in my dome, on Mars.
THE EVISCERATORS
by
RICHARD FORD
-A Thadddeus Blaklok Short Story-
‘What was that? I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch it.’
‘Mmmppphhlggmmnnnghhh!’
‘Oh you are so very droll, Mister Milo.’
Mister Milo looked up, a wide grin beaming out from beneath his bowler hat.
‘Yes, I do believe I am, Mister Krane.’
There was a short pause before Milo and Krane burst out in a fit of hysterics.
They were in a small vault, illuminated by a single gaslight that flickered and whickered in its glass case. Mister Krane stood to one side of the slab, tall and gaunt, his hawkish features poking out from beneath a bowler hat, his body covered in a black leather smock. Mister Milo stood at the other side of the slab, identically dressed, but where Krane struck a towering, rake-like figure, he was short and fat, his features round and porcine.
‘Mmmmmpppphhhlllllgggllllgggghhh!’
Both men stopped their laughter and focused their attention on the slab that sat between them… or more accurately the squirming figure strapped to that slab. He was laid out like a piece of meat, his naked body pale and hairy in the half-light, his arms bound tight above his head, legs splayed, cock hanging flaccid and shrivelled between. In his mouth bulged a shiny red ball-gag, which prevented him from making any sense at all. His eyes were wide with terror, mucus and a little vomit having managed to spurt from his nose and mouth at some point to run down his chin and dangle in quivering strands.
‘Well then,’ said Krane. ‘Shall we begin?’
‘Oh, I believe we shall,’ Milo replied, daintily plucking a long slender scalpel from a side table with chubby hands, encased as they were in heavy leather gloves. Krane reached toward a second table, choosing for himself a much larger instrument with a wide, curved blade.
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