Dominic comes over and grabs me by the scruff of my neck, nearly lifting me out of my seat at the table. I didn’t even know I had a scruff on my neck, but Dominic obviously does.
“Get down like the rest,” He shoves me hard to the ground, but instead of lying prone like the others, I bounce back to my feet.
“Leave him, Dominic,” Henry’s deep voice intones. “I would like to see him in my celestial office.”
“Sure thing,” Dominic says, cracking a big grin that suggests he knows what is about to happen to me and he finds it immensely pleasing.
Me? I’m scared shitless. I’m going to meet the only God I’ve ever known, and he’s a loser named Henry who gets his kicks watching us squirm.
On the way back to that dark cubicle that is his celestial office, three thoughts run through my mind. The door to the outside, unlocked, beckoning is one of them. This is followed by a memory, just a flash, from the other day when Dominic had been shouting at us, telling us to face the building and I’d seen something by the corner of the building . . . what had it been? I try hard to pull a picture up, to rewind to that fleeting glimpse, but I can’t. It was too fast. All I can remember is the sensation, the sudden gripping of my insides, a dizzy feeling in my head that whatever it was had mattered.
The third thought that enters my head on the way to Henry’s idea of heaven is unrelated to the other two. Or . . . maybe it isn’t. I can’t tell. It is the realization that once again, Cecilia had not been among us.
Surprisingly, the door is unlocked. I walk right in. The room is bare except for a desk with a chair behind it and two chairs in front. The only other item of note is a long black curtain covering the back wall. Cecilia sits in one of the chairs, her legs crossed beneath her pink mini skirt, her hands folded in her lap. Despite this posture, her face tells a different story. Flushed cheeks, damp brow, languid eyes; she’s been fucking Henry again. She looks at me and smiles and starts to speak, maybe to say sorry, maybe something else, when a voice comes from behind a curtain.
“Please sit, Adam.”
I laugh, resisting the sudden urge to rush the curtain, peel back the veil and throttle Henry.
“Would you like to share your laughter with me, Adam?”
“Not particularly.” I take the seat next to Cecilia and try to look relaxed. Now that I’m here, I can’t decide if I’m afraid or simply amused.
“My son,” Henry begins, and the curtain billows a little. I wonder if he’s puffing it out for effect. “My son died on the cross for all of you, yesterday. I saved you from the Apocalypse. I fed you.” His voice trembles with emotion. “I love you. Yet. Yet, you both dishonour me. You both choose to rut in the bathroom instead of witness the greatest event in the new history of your lives. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with rutting in the bathroom. That is one of the things I would like you to understand about the new history. The old God? He was a God of rules and of sin. That’s not me. I actually encourage rutting. I need you folks to make babies if this new world is to survive. What I do demand is respect and fear. I demand you kneel when it is time to kneel. Or, if you don’t like it, damnation, the new damnation awaits, ironically, above us now.” The curtains shift, and I can almost picture a little bald man back there chuckling and scratching his ass. Anger boils inside me. I start out of my chair, but Cecilia puts her hand on my arm and I sit back down.
“Adam, my beloved, Adam,” Henry says. “The door is unlocked. Please, if you would like to join Freddie in eternal damnation, go.”
Cecilia’s hand tightens on my arm.
“Well?” Henry says. “What will you do?”
Long answer: I see myself get up, go into the room where the rest of the idiots are still prone on the floor worshiping a man who doesn’t have the courage to show his face. I tell them this is hell and I hope they’re happy in it. I shout, “I hope you enjoy your reality show!” and dash for the steps, taking them two at a fucking time as I head up to the brown door. I wait, just an instant, just long enough to breathe a good gulp of air, long enough to feel it pour into my lungs. Long enough to know I’ve made the right decision, win, lose, or die. Then I turn the handle and step into a world without precedent, a world where it could all be true or a world where it could all be false. And I am not afraid.
Short answer: My imagination has balls, but I don’t.
After we are dismissed, Cecilia and I go back to the others and assume the posture. My rebelliousness is gone, replaced by an apathy so profound I’m not sure I care about anything anymore. If the real God, the one who unfortunately has been as inscrutable as Henry in my own life, deems this to be my fate, then so be it.
The floor smells like sweat and piss and mildew, and I wonder if it has been cleaned since Ralph used to slide those half-smashed roaches across it. I try to think if I’ve ever seen Dominic with a mop before, and before I know it, I am asleep.
The dream is a simple one. Me, above ground, on a windswept piece of brown earth. There is nothing. Nothing at all around me except the same dull brown earth, hard packed and unforgiving.
The world is gone or appears to be. I’m left alone to wander this bleak landscape. But then I see it out of the corner of my left eye, a fleck of contrast, almost blinding in the drabness. I whirl and see a human body. It lays in the unnatural posture of death. I go over to it and am not surprised to see Cecilia, her face serene except for the deep cavities where her eyeballs used to belong.
I touch her skin, noting the smoothness, the soft texture, like velvet. I touch a strand of hair, moving it over one of the brooding caverns.
I sit beside her body for a very long time.
“We need to go now.”
The wind keeps blowing. It’s something. Better than nothing. And the body. Something about her body doesn’t make sense. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
“Now, Adam. We have to go, now.”
Her skin is so new. The eyeballs are gone. Who took them? Her skin is so new, even in death.
The wind is clawing at me, pulling my shirt tight against my neck.
“Wake up, damn it.”
And then I am awake. Eyes open, I see I am still on the floor, but the others have gone. I look up into Cecilia’s face.
“Your eyes,” I say. “They’re still th—” But I trail off, assimilating the dream with what passes for reality these days. “Never mind,” I add.
She stares at me, her eyes wide and earnest. She looks lovely. Not just sexy, but pretty, the kind of girl you fall in love with and leave underground shelters to face an apocalypse that may or may not have ever happened with.
“I know where the masks are. Do you want to go up? We could go look at what you saw. We could maybe learn something about the truth.” She smiles. “You know, reality show or the end of the world. One or the other. Can’t be both.”
I smile. “Sure it can. If it’s a paradox.”
She takes my hand and helps me to my feet.
“What about Henry? And Dominic?”
“Taken care of. Even the Gods and their henchman must sleep, especially after a bottle of wine and a killer blowjob.”
She says this last part without the least trace of shame, and I know now her addiction is separate from what we have, like an alcoholic who must get drunk, but still loves his wife. I decide I can deal with her addiction if it means I get to have her love. Besides, if things work out, it could be just the two of us in a new world, far above this godforsaken place. And for the first time, I realize my acceptance—no, my resignation—to the idea that the world is gone, and we are the last. I allow my mind to imagine, in detail, Cecilia and I rediscovering the world, mile by mile. The mountains, the oceans, the sky. I shudder with pleasure as a new possibility strikes me: we would not only rediscover the planet, we would repopulate it. Post-apocalyptic Adam and, er, Cecilia.
“Coming?” she says. She’s standing at the steps that lead up to the outside world.
&nbs
p; “I’d follow you anywhere,” I say. I am there when I realize it’s true. I really would follow Cecilia anywhere.
As we prepare to leave the shelter, I say a prayer. Not to Henry’s lame ass. Instead I set my sights higher, to someone or something more ancient than the earth, a master Creator who saw fit to let all us humans loose upon his sublime creation so we could fuck it up and fuck each other and fuck each other up. Perhaps I should be angry at Him for making us like we are. Putting us in a situation where our needs outpace our interests, where sex addicted angels like Cecilia are the nearest some of us will ever get to a prophet or a minister or even a person capable of true love. But I’m not angry. I’m only tense. Wound up with excitement of what could be, of what my life, so fucked up before, might offer around the next bend, outside the shelter, underneath a sky that just might have been made by a real, genuine God who loves us enough to suffer us, whether we be sex addicts or child-murdering pseudogods.
“It’s a paradox,” I say, talking in a low calm voice that, strangely, is completely representative of the way I feel, despite the possibility the world outside this door is gone and all that exists is the bleak landscape of my dream.
“What is?” Cecilia asks.
“I met the false god Henry and an angelslut named Cecilia. And now, I believe in God. You made me realize that. He’s a paradox. Fully man, fully God. Once you’ve got that, everything else seems simple. Kind of like this whole experience being fully terrible and fully wonderful. Kind of like Henry being fully genius and fully insane. A paradox.” I laugh with the joy of it all, thinking how there’s one more paradox I haven’t considered. What if the world is gone? Yeah. That would suck. But what if it’s not? What if the thing I saw is a corpse, but a corpse that has eyes and died some other way than the disease? What if the world is still ticking along just the way it always has, unaware of Henry and his God games? Cecilia won’t stay with me. There’s no way. Out there in the real world, a girl like Cecilia, a sex freak, won’t give me the time of day. I take her hand in mine. I want to leave, but I want to stay; I want the world, but I want it gone, levelled by the eyeball-popping disease and wiped clean. I want to wander the bare, unpopulated earth with Cecilia, but I also want to stay right here in this moment, one hand in hers, the other on the door, a world of possibility on the other side.
“Are you sure about this?” she asks, as rain begins to fall outside the door. It sounds wonderful, and I wonder if it is cleansing the earth, washing away the disease, the hurt, the addictions. And I wonder if it will cleanse us as well, so no matter what is on the other side, we will be better than we were before.
“I’m not sure about anything,” I say, “but that’s why we’ve got to do this.”
She nods. “If the world still exists, I’m going to do you like you’ve never been done before.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
She tightens her hand on mine. “If it doesn’t, I’ll do you in the middle of Times Square.”
“Slut.”
“Angelslut. Get it right.”
“I love you,” I say and open the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Mantooth is an award-winning author whose short stories have been recognized in numerous year’s best anthologies. His short fiction has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Crime Factory, Thuglit, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology, Haunted Legends (Tor, 2010), among others.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Danny Evarts is an illustrator, editor and graphic designer, and currently holds down the role of Art Director and Technical Editor for Shroud Publishing. He has been attempting to perfect his obsession with layout and design since the mid-1980s. Danny abandoned a career in journalistic and fiction writing in the early ’90s as he came to realize that his visions were better suited to illustration, first for underground magazines and mini-comics. He soon fell in love with relief printmaking, and after a brief stint as a designer in the music industry, his works—most often original prints made through carving into wood or linoleum—now pepper the pages of books and magazines. He is also the illustrator of the Unchildren’s Book It's Okay to be a Zombie, and is fomenting further adventures in this series alongside many other projects. Danny lives with his partner in the Maine woods, where they spend most of their time working on their property and fleeing from irate wildlife.
The Cecilia Paradox: Short Story Page 2
