His hand felt only cold air.
Darkness or not, he could see quite clearly. His hand reached straight through the foot.
And then, because this was Kent State, and because every student knew this was the parking lot, Benjamin Howe realized what he was seeing.
He got into the car, started it carefully, and backed up. There was no sound of dragging, no sound of flesh and bone crushing under the tires. When he'd backed up far enough, there was only the sight of a body bleeding on the pavement. A guy about Benjamin's age, wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt.
There was another body not far off. A woman's. A third corpse farther along, and a fourth in the middle of the road out of the lot. He cranked the wheel hard, hopped over the curb onto the grass, and kept driving.
When Benjamin Howe got back to his apartment, Cathy Weiss was still there. She thought that he treated her coldly at first, but he seemed glad to see her.
Back on campus, more bodies were appearing. At 11:30 the village of My Lai materialized in the football practice field beside the Taylor Hall parking lot—the village was close to Kent State in spirit, if not geography.
This materialization was observed by chemistry grad student Rebecca Kendall, who'd been awake 36 hours studying for exams. The sight of the phantom village terrified her…not because she thought it was a ghost, but because she thought it was a hallucination. The prospect of her mind breaking down filled her with fear, cold and pure. Her brain was all she had—no friends, no easy social graces, no Playboy bunny face and flesh, just her brain. And now her brain saw a ragged clutter of huts and butchered bodies out in the middle of a football field.
Rebecca started shivering and couldn't stop. If someone had convinced her she was seeing a ghost she would have felt nothing but relief. As it was, she walked home in a cold sweat and went straight to bed. She didn't fall asleep for hours.
On campus at quarter to twelve, a crowd of martyrs flickered into existence atop Blanket Hill…not the usual martyrs celebrated for clinging to their beliefs in the face of death, but the ones who died meaninglessly, without the chance to take a stand. Innocent women accused of witchcraft, hanged and drowned and burned. Civilians whose homes lay in the path of marching armies. Tribespeople who succumbed to disease, starvation, and sorrow in the cargo holds of slave ships. Hundreds of unmoving bodies appeared on Blanket Hill, many of them touching or overlapping: a young widow cremated in suttee, lying with her head on the chest of a teenage boy who froze in Siberia because his uncle denounced Stalin; a drowned passenger from KAL 007 linking arms with one from the Iranian Airbus A300.
As midnight approached, more and more bodies accumulated: in the roadways, on the Commons, inside buildings. Fearing panic, university security evacuated an on-campus pub when Bhopal gas victims began piling up the dance floor. "Nothing to worry about," the security guards said as they hurried students out. "We'll take care of it."
"What are you going to do?" someone asked. "Call in the National Guard?"
That was my question too. What was I going to do? Call in the National Guard?
Look: ghosts appear because they have unfinished business. And if anyone has unfinished business, it must be those who were killed senselessly. But what can they do to finish their stories? Should the four Kent State students haunt the living National Guardsmen and torment them for their acts? That's so cheap: just crude revenge.
Should the bodies be brought back to life at midnight, whereupon they could have a single hour to come to terms with their deaths? Maybe the same thing happens twice a year like business conventions, Walpurgisnacht and Hallowe'en, each get-together hosted by different committees—the soccer fans at Hillsborough, say, or the Jews and gypsies and gays processed through Nazi death camps—and the goal is simply to purge anger and regret, a little bit more each meeting, until finally the soul is ready to let go and move on. I could envision the Kent State students wandering their old campus, talking to night-owl students, trying to find peace…
Students at Kent State were demonstrating for peace when the four victims died.
I broke off writing for supper. Sunday supper, traditional time in North America for family and conviviality. I don't remember how convivial I was. I could have been distracted because I wanted to get back to writing after dinner.
But when I went back, I realized I had trivialized my subject again. It wasn't just that the tone of voice was flippant; it was the glibness with which I tossed off references to tragedy. My Lai, for example—what did I know about the My Lai massacre except that a lot of Vietnamese civilians were killed? I could research and find more details, but that wasn't the point. I had used the name My Lai for its immediate guts'n'gore familiarity, not out of genuine feeling for the victims. The same for all the other ghosts—I had used them to give the story color, nothing more. They were only empty names. They were just body count.
I stared at the computer screen for a long time, wondering what to write…wondering if there was anything I could write that wasn't just exploiting someone else's pain.
Nothing came to mind.
A mathematical singularity is a place where a function, a formula, breaks down. Often the breakdown happens because the function "goes to infinity" at that point; for example, the formula for the function may try to divide by zero.
In the heart of a Kerr-Newman black hole there is a singularity in a function called R, the Riemannian scalar curvature, a measurement of gravity. R goes to infinity. It cannot be measured.
For a long time, physicists wondered if the singularity was genuine. Maybe it was simply a result of their choice of coordinates: the way they wrote out the formula for R With the right choice of coordinates, one can extend the black hole model past the singularity into the white hole beyond. Perhaps with another choice of coordinates the singularity in the middle would go away. Perhaps it was only the ruler that broke down, not the universe that the ruler measured.
In the late 1960s, mathematicians proved that the singularity existed in all coordinates. All possible rulers broke at the same point. At the heart of the black hole's darkness, physicists could only throw away their rulers and stand back in blank contemplation.
Days and weeks passed. I kept thinking. Nothing more, just thinking. I didn't see the dead students in my dreams. To tell the truth, if I wanted to remember their faces I had to go back and look at their photos in the book.
Kent State didn't haunt me. It niggled at me.
The library books came due. I wrote the names of the books in my files and took them back. I also recorded the names:
Allison Krause
Jeff Miller
Sandy Lee Scheuer
Bill Schroeder
Those names hadn't appeared anywhere in my three story attempts. I had to write them down separately so I would remember them. Otherwise I'd lose the names and be left with three uncompleted story-scribbles that all missed the point.
Now and then I would open my "ideas" notebook and see my original jottings about Kent State. Time travel. Ghosts. But I couldn't travel backward in time. I couldn't summon ghosts or lay them to rest. I could stuff my stories into the empty spaces surrounding the tragedy, but the stories themselves walled off the reality, put it out of reach.
The situation reminded me of a white hole. A white hole floods its universe with light; but you can never touch it.
And so I began thinking of white holes, black holes, and a mathematics thesis whose math had leaked away, leaving behind only metaphors. The result wasn't a story about Kent State. But at least it was my story to tell.
Imagine an object falling into a black hole: something small like the body of a young man or woman, or perhaps something large like the campus of a university.
Imagine an outside observer, a distant spectator far removed from the immediate pull of the black hole. He shines a light toward the falling object—the object casts no light of its own, so if the observer wants to see it he must provide his own illumination. He waits for the
light to strike the object, then return to his eye.
There are several possibilities for what happens next.
The light may strike the object as it falls through the ergosphere, a region where places become moments and moments become places. That close to the black hole itself, the returning light particles may take years to climb back out of the gravity well and reach the observer. But someday the light will return.
Or the light may not reach the falling object until the object has crossed the event horizon. If the object is inside the hole, the light may strike the object and bounce, but it cannot reach the observer outside. The light will only bounce deeper into the blackness. The observer will never see it.
Or perhaps, if the cosmos deigns to conform itself to mathematics, there is a third alternative. The falling object plunges through the heart of the black hole and out a white hole on the other side. By the time the observer's light enters the black hole, the object is gone. The light finds nothing but blackness. There is no contact. To the observer, the object has fallen into an impenetrable dark; but in another universe, perhaps the object tranquilly sails on.
The outside observer waits for his light to return. He wonders if the object has fallen so far he will never truly see it. There is no way to tell until the light actually comes back. If it ever does.
Other observers have given up and gone home.
The outside observer waits.
Withered Gold, the Night, the Day
The vampire Rogasz had taken to carrying a knife when he walked the streets on his hunt. It was not for protection; it was to slash the faces of his victims as they lay drained of blood, to cut them for being so stupid. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he screamed at them…and sometimes witnesses heard his cries, drunks hidden under piles of trash or street kids waiting to turn tricks in darkened doorways. The witnesses sold their accounts to impatient Eyewitness News teams and so the story spread throughout the city, "STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!" ran the headlines, and in the coffee shops, reporters from all the media brainstormed what they would call this latest novelty. The Stupid Slasher? No. Not menacing enough. And menace was what sold newspapers.
Meanwhile, Rogasz stalked through the city like a jaded library goer who can't find any books he wants to read. Some rainy nights he would just stake out a territory, attacking anyone who violated the space: striking them down, cutting them with his knife, throwing them off his land without even drinking their blood. He couldn't bring himself to feed on such meager feasts; they would taste the same as all the others, back through the centuries. Besides, he hardly needed to drink these days—the city air was so full of blood and desperation, it seeped into his pores by osmosis. In a more lucid moment, he wrote in his notebook,
I have the feeling I do not drink blood, but rather karma—the personal richness of a human soul. This explains the poignant flavor of a virgin as opposed to sluts…and yet, in this bleak age, the difference is nearly imperceptible. The best wine is but a hairs-breadth from vinegar. The world has lost its saints.
There came a steamy summer night when the city smelled of garbage—garbage rotting in Dumpsters as hot as ovens, garbage thrown into the streets by children whose mothers said, "Get this stink out of the house, I don't care what you do with it." Long ago, no one heaved decaying food onto someone else's sidewalk, nor did people sit in front of overloud TVs, too desensitized to realize they were bored. Rogasz prowled past fortress apartment buildings and screamed at the flickering television light reflected in every window. "Poisons, poisons, poisons!"
(Lately, he had taken to saying things three times. He knew he did it; he couldn't stop.)
On he walked, words pouring from his mouth and tears streaming from his eyes, until he reached a corner bus shelter, its glass thick with obscenities written in faded black marker. A man leaned against the doorway of the shelter; and as Rogasz drew nearer, he recognized the man as the Adversary—the Fallen One, the Lost One, the Morning Star Eclipsed.
"Good evening, little brother," the Adversary said.
"Lord of Pus, Lord of Pus, Lord of Pus," Rogasz replied. "I am drowned in the depths of your ocean."
"Then it's time you learned to swim, isn't it? Whatever you're doing now, try something different."
"Different?"
"Yes, change your ways." The Adversary paused a moment. "I've heard it can be pleasant to do good. Why not give that a stab?"
The Adversary smiled. His teeth were white and even. He had no fangs.
Rogasz thought how soothing it would be, to walk through the world so pure and clean.
That night, he killed a hundred pushers.
They died firing their guns at blackness, and their backup men, hidden in doorways or parked Cadillacs, also emptied their pistols into the dark executioner who seeped out of the night's shadows. Seven innocents were injured in the panicked gunplay, one fatally…if you can use the word innocent for someone who has come to the Zone in search of a fix.
Police talked of gang wars and gritted their teeth—not that most of them cared about the scum who got killed, but they dreaded the media circus that would follow. Besides, the streets got jittery with so much death in the air. Teenage kids necking in stairwells might suddenly catch the blast of a shotgun, fired by some righteous citizen terrified at the sound of a kiss. People might park their cars in their own garage, then find they'd lost the nerve to step outside, to walk the dozen paces to their dark back doors; and maybe come morning, their blue-lipped corpses would be found by paperboys or postmen, once-living mothers or fathers reduced to inert depositories of carbon monoxide.
That's what happened when death went on a spree: it was too contagious to be constrained by the hands of one person, even if that person had the ancient strength of a vampire. Rogasz killed a hundred pushers. Those higher up in the drug-peddling chain gunned down hundreds more, every rival or potential rival, every employee whose loyalty could be questioned, every wino or panhandler who sat too long across the street.
"I am cleaning up the city," Rogasz told himself. "Cleaning up the city. Cleaning up the city. I am changing my ways by doing good."
But when he killed a pusher, he never bothered to take the pusher's stash. The next customers to come along usually ripped off whatever they could find, unless the drugs had already been picked up by dogs or rats or street kids woken by the noise of gunfire.
So a few more deaths got added to the tally, this time from clumsy overdoses. Coke-ravaged nostrils poured out blood. Junkies sat dead on the toilets of all-night doughnut shops, infinitely reused needles still dangling from their arms.
"STUPID, STUPID, STUPID" read one paper's headline the next morning. The editor had seen no reason to change it from the previous day.
Rogasz stood in front of his soot-stained mausoleum and watched the eastern sky brighten before dawn. The weather looked like it would be lovely and clear. He felt changed, the claws of insanity easing their grip on his skull. Colors seemed more vivid—a dandelion growing beside his tomb had tiny yellow petals so sharply distinct, he could stare at them for hours. It took every drop of his strength to pull himself away, to retreat to his coffin before the sun's corona inched a blazing bead above the horizon.
Yet the promising daybreak faded quickly to gray overcast. Cops, ambulance drivers, waitresses snatching sips from their own cups of coffee whenever they picked up orders in the kitchen…many of those awake to see the dawn were struck by the way its initial brightness soon bleached out of the sky, leaving a hot muggy gloom no forecaster had predicted. Thunder rumbled softly as parents laid out their breakfast tables in the muted light of morning; and a troubled few who had somehow freed themselves from the compunction to explain things rationally whispered that the city itself had created the clouds—that the pall of death simmering in the streets had ascended on its own convection currents to block out the sun.
Near noon, a riot broke out in Shantytown. Every TV station gave a different reason for how it started, but their footage was
identical: the broken windows, the angry accusations, the weeping faces, all interchangeable.
In response, middle-aged men wearing business suits sat in air-conditioned conference rooms and discussed the possibility of martial law; but they only dithered and delayed. Perhaps it was the dispiriting gray overcast seeping down from the sky. Perhaps even middle-aged men wearing business suits could feel weighed down by the overwhelming sadness, the hopeless, restless sense of damnation that smoldered in the streets.
Rogasz felt it as soon as he woke: the crushing sameness, the sense that any change had only been for the worse. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," he hissed, not knowing whom he meant. "Stupid, stupid, stupid…stupid, stupid, stupid." Like steam, he gushed from his tomb and flowed through the open window of the first car to pass the cemetery. Death to the driver; then Rogasz sped through the growing twilight, never slowing for stop signs or traffic lights, seizing a new car whenever the one he was driving got T-boned at an intersection.
Once he heard the yip of a police siren. Just once. The city was somehow thinning out, as if all the forces that tried to keep it working were shrinking to wisps of thread, laced on a wide, wide loom with giant holes in the weave. A crazy man could drive straight up the middle and never be touched by anyone who cared about saving the last scraps of the city's sanity.
At the end of a trail of wreckage, he reached a certain bus shelter. Abandoning his most recent car in the middle of the road, Rogasz stormed up to the Adversary.
"It didn't work," the vampire said. "I tried to do good, but it didn't work. I failed, I failed, I failed."
"Of course you did," the Adversary replied. "You can't do good if you don't know what good is."
"How do I learn what good is?"
Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection) Page 8
