by Brian Hodge
"You have to help me save Maggie."
"Why? I didn't hear her praying."
"How else can you be sure that my transformation is complete? Don't you want to be certain my faith stays strong? Save Maggie for me and I'm a believer for life."
"It doesn't work that way boy. I showed up and sneezed my brand of faith on you. It's up to you how bad a religious fever you want to grow. I saved your life. How much more do you expect?"
Bobby stood up. His legs didn't want to, his head still wobbled upon the makeshift cobweb bandage. None of that mattered. He stood up because Maggie needed him.
"You saved my life, but my heart is still broken," Bobby said.
"So call Dear Abby."
"My wife is out there with that damned monkey's paw shoved halfway down her throat. I need your help."
"And how is that my problem?"
That's it.
Bobby caught hold of Anansi, sinking his hands into the giant spider's abdomen. It felt like he was trying to wrestle the world's largest sourdough starter. What was he doing grabbing onto a spider god with mandibles as long and as sharp and as crooked as a pair of well honed Ghurka knives? It was craziness of a high degree.
Bobby didn't care.
He was pissed.
"Listen itsy-bitsy," Bobby said. "You owe me."
"How do you figure that, story man?"
Bobby pointed up at the six year old cobweb that shrouded his sixty watt ceiling lamp.
"There. I haven't broken or disturbed that web since I first set up this office, six years ago. I even learned to change the light bulb without disturbing its weave. I have kept faith and have left it growing undisturbed, a shrine to spider worshippers the whole world over. That's got to count for something."
"You're just lazy. That's no great feat."
"True enough. The laziness of Anansi is legendary and I do it daily honor. Yet I did not stop there. I went on to feed your many children by luring countless flies here with my fondness for Twinkies and dark ale."
"Twinkies and beer?" Anansi said.
"Twinkies and Guinness!"
"Damn it, boy, that's downright barbaric."
"I'm a writer. I don't fuck around, and you're not fucking around with any ordinary man."
"Now you're speaking in redundancies. Men are nothing but ordinary; a bunch of thankless beggars always begging for this and begging for that. You make the gods feel like waiters. I've helped you boy. Now go and help yourself."
That's when inspiration hit.
Bobby knew what he had to do.
He grabbed Maggie's broom, praying that Anansi didn't notice the broken cobwebs dangling from the virgin straw. Then he prayed that the spider god wasn't reading that particular thought at this particular point in time.
Bobby swept the broom at the great spider, as if he were nothing more than common vermin.
"Back, bug!"
Surprised, Anansi took a quick step back. Then Bobby raised the broom up towards the ceiling light fixture.
"Six years! Six years this has been growing. Six years I've been feeding your children. Now are you going to help me or am I going to have to whisk this broom?"
"You wouldn't dare," Anansi said.
"Try me."
The broom was getting heavier. It started to wobble. Bobby wasn't sure how long he could hold it. Being dead sure took the wind out of your sails.
"Who said anything about not helping you," Anansi said with a laugh. "Lay that broom down, right in front of me."
Bobby hesitated.
"How do I know you aren't just telling a lie?" he asked. "I know my mythology. It wouldn't be the first time that the trickster Anansi bent the truth like a rope."
Anansi swelled to twice his size.
"Do you really think the god of spiders is afraid of a broom?" he clashed his mandibles fiercely. "I could kill you anytime I want to. It's your courage that I admire."
"It is?"
"That and it's been a bit of a boring day."
"So you'll help me?"
"Oh I can't help you," Anansi said. "But I know someone who can. We just have to go and get him."
"Well where is he?"
Anansi pointed at the computer.
"In there."
"In my computer?"
"There are worlds in that computer, story man. Not worlds like you know, but worlds that fill in the spaces between the worlds that you have only just begun to imagine."
This whole thing was getting way too metaphysical for Bobby, but Maggie needed Anansi's help.
The fact was, Bobby was ready to grasp at straws.
"That comes from hanging onto brooms too long, story man."
"Stop that," Bobby said. "Can you take me to him? The one who can help me find Maggie?"
"I will do what I can. Now lay that broom down in front of me."
"Ha!" Bobby said triumphantly. "Don't fuck with a horror writer."
He laid the broom on the floor before Anansi.
Just that quickly, he let his guard down and was trapped. Anansi lunged forward and grabbed him by the waist with that wicked set of mandibles.
"That's the way that life goes," Anansi said. "You are born, and then you spend the rest of your life hanging around, waiting to die."
Bobby wanted to say something witty about talking with your mouth full, but he was too scared.
He hung there in the jaws of Anansi, waiting to die.
One more time.
* 5 *
While Bobby was busy being squeezed down into his second death of the morning by the mandibles of the giant blue spider god, Maggie and her monkey hitchhiker had just arrived at their first shopping mall. Maggie had never been much of a shopper before this. Malls had always scared her.
Now Maggie was scared for another reason.
"Welcome to Super Mall," the greeter spoke up, barely looking at her. He wasn't thinking about her at all. He was thinking about the chances that he might have of getting lucky with that new girl on cash till three. She had a piercing in her nose, and he was certain that women with piercings were trying to say something about being poked.
Maggie felt the monkey guiding her. She wasn't sure what the monkey really was, but it was touching her deeply enough to teach her a few things about its nature. It was hungry and it fed on the filling of her perceived emptiness and it sure did like to poke. The more Maggie felt that she needed to have something, the more sated the monkey felt when she got it. It fed her the urge, filled it, and fed itself.
A perfect circuit.
Maggie looked out at the mall, spread before her like a monkey-eating smorgasbord.
Then she grabbed a cart and began shopping.
She was certain she would begin filling the shopping cart at random, but it seemed there was a little more of a method to the monkey's mania. First Maggie would see something, like a coffee maker. Then she would feel a slow warm seduction creeping through her.
Foreplay was everything.
A little voice inside her would whisper to her how much she wanted that coffee maker; and then she would pick up whatever she craved and would feel a rush of sensation. Pure Pavlovian conditioning. All that was missing was a bell, a biscuit, and a pack of drooling dogs.
She filled her cart with bars of soap and boxes of candy and a half of a rack of t-shirts with assorted silk screened band names on them. Then she threw in three coffee makers and a baker's dozen assortment of disposable cameras. She shopped until her cart was full.
It took her about ten minutes.
Then she looked at the full cart.
She wanted more.
The monkey wanted her to want more.
What could she do? Buy it? It was too soon. She wanted more. She wondered if she should park the cart and fill another. Suppose someone stole the cart or replaced the goods? Such things could happen to unattended shopping carts.
She stared at the cart, seeing it in her mind like one of those logic puzzles her father had loved to stump her
with - how to get the chicken, the fox, and the grain across the river, in a single leaky foul-smelling rowboat.
The monkey looked around the mall through Maggie's eyes. It knew it could find a solution. And it did. It found a solution in the house and garden section, just past the plastic picket fences and the seedy looking lawn gnomes.
Maggie and the monkey hot wired a ride on lawn mower. The machine shouldn't have worked without gasoline, but the monkey somehow made it run. Then Maggie ran a bike chain through her grocery cart. Behind the first cart she chained two other carts, creating a chrome plated wagon train.
"Hey, you can't do that," a clerk shouted, stepping in front of the lawn mower.
That was a bad move. Maggie the monkey rolled the mower straight over the clerk's body. The body made a wet fatty clattering sound as the blades whirred through the meat, a popcorn crackling as the steel broke through calcium deficient bones
Maggie the monkey rolled down the aisle, painting the surrounding shelves with chunks of freshly slaughtered clerk. A security guard watched her pass, wondering to himself if his job was worth the challenge of trying to tackle a demolition derby ride on mower.
He was still wondering when Maggie rolled right on through the front doors. The electric eye winked at her and the monkey and the mower and opened the door wide. The monkey stretched its tail out and began plunking out a fast bluegrass banjo tune.
The Dukes of Hazard would have been proud.
The greeter didn't even bother to look up. He wasn't worried that a woman and a hitchhiking monkey had just shoplifted three shopping carts and one ride-on mower and the trailing remains of one butchered floor clerk. All that he really wanted was to get through one more hour of an eight hour how-do-you-do smiling crucifixion.
"Thank you for shopping at Super Mall."
He looked down at the blood on the floor, trailing behind the mower, and wondered if he would be expected to mop the mess up.
* 6 *
Bobby felt like a stuffed toy caught up in the claws of a Clean Sweep machine. All that Anansi had to do was squeeze and his ribs would crack open.
"Don't fuck with a god, story man," Anansi warned.
Anansi swelled in size. Bobby felt the grip of the spider's mandibles tighten about his waist. This was it. Any minute now and Anansi would issue the ultimate severance notice. Bobby did his best not to lose control of his bowels. If he was to die he was determined to be found with unsoiled boxers.
"Listen boy," Anansi said. "We jump over this broom together and two of us will be bonded. Hail to the chief and here comes the bride. Hang onto your seatbelt, we're about to launch."
Anansi jumped, reared back and shot a line from his spinneret butt.
"Sometimes a spider just has to take his chances and fart into the wind," Anansi said, shooting a web that stretched from the tip of the broom directly up to Bobby's computer keyboard.
"Listen boy," Anansi said. "Everything in this universe has a pattern, a sweet and random mad geometry understood only by a few over-starched theoretical logicians, a pack of rambling mandolin-plucking Tindalos hounds, and myself."
"You?'
Bobby sat up as best as he could, trapped within the spider's mandibles.
Anansi began spraying his web. It was a beautiful sight, a single glittery rope like cotton candy, only tougher. It spun out in all directions, like a Spirograph souped-up on snake oil and speed demons.
"My smaller brothers take their time with this art, spending hours or even days weaving their ephemeral mysteries only to lose them to a single random breeze, a poorly dropped snowflake, or the snuffling of an over enthusiastic St. Bernard."
He continued to weave.
"Look at it man. All of the secrets of the universe caught within one single secret weave. This is the road map of eternity. There isn't a Google engine ambitious enough to search this particular web. Fortunately, Anansi is the number one navigator of the entire cosmos. If I took it into my mind I could single handedly track down Amelia Earnhardt, Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, the entire cast of Lost, and the captain, crew and passengers of the S.S. Minnow."
The web was huge and it seemed to extend far further than Bobby's tiny home office would possibly allow.
"How do you make that web so fast? I thought it took a lot longer for a spider to spin his web."
"Ha!" laughed Anansi. "Where were you when I wove a web to the moon, story man? It takes me as long as any other spider, especially when I'm weaving a web as powerful as this. But there are always tricks."
"Of course. And what sort of trick are you weaving now?"
"Does a magician show you his hat liner? I am folding and refolding time, compressing an aeon into a half a moment." he grinned. Giant spider gods have a remarkably ugly grin, kind of a mix between hockey players and ancient Inuit. "You should see what origami wonders I can perform with the spindle bone of my penis. Forget about your penis puppetry and to hell with balloon sculpture. Have you heard the one about Shorty's Bar And Grill, Amarillo, Texas? Allow me to act it out for you through the cosmically-acceptable wonder of interpretive dance."
"I'll pass."
"Your loss." Anansi opened his mandibles. Bobby gingerly touched the cage of his bruised dead ribs, trying not to wince. He resisted the urge to count them.
"What's to say I don't run?" Bobby asked.
"I kept my word, didn't I? Now jump over this broom with me."
"Just jump?"
"We have to jump together. On three. One, two..."
But just before Bobby jumped, Anansi reached out one long blue spider leg and pushed him hard.
* 7 *
Anansi pushed and Bobby fell. Bobby felt himself turning over and over.
"You have entered freefall," Anansi said. "Please remember to keep both of your hands attached to your wrists at all times."
This was definitely a new sensation for Bobby. He had fallen down, fallen in love, fallen arches, but he had never before fallen into a computer until now. He reached out, expecting to feel the crash of a broken monitor screen. All he felt was a cool fading swallow, like putting his hands into nothingness and moving them deeper beyond that.
"Float, boy, float," Anansi shouted.
Bobby felt Anansi moving beside him, bonded like some kind of crazy eight-legged shadow. The spider's continued presence was a weird kind of comfort.
"Hang onto the web," Anansi said.
Bobby grabbed hold. The web tingled like a live wire of molten ice, cold and hot and electrifying, all at the very same time.
"Where am I?" Bobby shouted.
"Good question," Anansi called. "Maybe you need a little perspective?"
He caught hold of Bobby's leg. Bobby felt himself stretching out, longer, thinner, like a fist full of pale blue plasticine rolled and flattened and drawn spaghetti-fine.
"Relax, boy! Don't fight it. Learn to let go. The net will catch you."
Bobby could see the net stretched beneath him like cobwebs over fishing baskets, the weave squaring out into an infinite number of crosshatched cubes.
"Just slide, story man," Anansi called. "We are entering the interspace. The monkey wantling came from down in here, so we've got to go and find somebody down here to help bring him back."
Bobby kept reaching. He felt his arms loosen and lengthen. There were lines stretching everywhere, a maze of telephone wires strung out across a shoestring heaven.
"Everything intersects. That's how life works. Just catch hold, boy. Reach out and catch hold."
Bobby reached out, his arm stretched out along with the web like an articulated bungee cord. The arm stretched further than he could see, like a line painted down a forever highway with no speed limit in sight. Bobby squeezed his hand onto thin air and felt the emptiness that hid inside. For just an instant he felt himself touching everything all at once.
"That's how it is in life, story man. Pebbles in a pond, our ripples touching other ripples touching other ripples. You reach too far, and you always come
up a little short. This is the information highway, story man, and you're on automatic cruise control. Don't make a fuss, just leave the driving to us."
Bobby looked ahead. He saw the rear end of a large orange bus, with a series of bumper stickers plastered onto the glittering bumper. He read one of them.
FREE BILL GATES – HE COSTS TOO MUCH.
Well what did you know, Bobby thought. Transcendental post-death visions are hip to pop culture.
Bobby reached for the bumper, stretching his arms even further. One part of him kept thinking about how impossible this all was. But then another part thought about that damned blue monkey, playing Charlie McCarthy with Maggie.
"Is he on that bus?" Bobby shouted. "The one who's going to help us?"
"Just catch that bus, boy," Anansi called. "I got no answers to any questions that you might make."
Bobby kept reaching for the bus, feeling the spirits of the Banana Split Club, Fleegle, Drooper, Bingo and Snorky, watching over him.
"Hold the bus," Bobby chanted. "Hold the bus."
He reached out for the bus and felt himself caught in its slipstream, sucked along, folded and spindled and mutilated, rattling behind the bumper like a string of wedding cans. Like cosmic yoga contortionism, Bobby was bent and twisted and sucked straight in, and then all at once he was aboard the bus.
It happened fast, like a transition in a story told by lightning bolts. Anansi sat beside him, couched within the folds of Bobby's shadow, looking none the worse for wear.
The side walls of the bus were constructed of advertising banners and strangely intrusive pop-up clips, moving in and out like huckstering guillotines. The windows were monitor screens. Looking through them Bobby could see the faces of thousands of computer operators.
"That's your electronic village, story man," Anansi said. "Every time you go online you're bringing your existence into contact with a thousand thousand nameless souls. The internet is the world's largest free-floating crapshoot venereal disease party line, and you are definitely a part of it now."
Bobby stared in amazement, watching the faces flash by - Chinese, Russian, African, and a few who looked distinctly unearthly.
"Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. This is the web," Anansi said. "This is the Infobahn. A huge freeway system, more complicated than the human nervous system. Roads crossing crossroads, on and off ramps blinking past at unbelievable speeds. It's easy to get lost and harder to get found, but if you know where you are going then there at least a baker's dozen ways to get there from where you find yourself at."
