Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  Charlie went over to the tv, carrying the bottle of Jack Daniels. He turned, wielding it like a club. "This is what is real. Something you can touch and smell and taste and goddamn well drink!" He tipped the bottle and guzzled.

  "Charlie, the booze isn't real, either! Don't you hear that fucking typewriter. He's written the booze into your life!"

  "I drink like a fish!"

  Darin grabbed his friend's shoulders. "You didn't say that, you only think you said it because that's what he wrote! You hate liquor. We don't even have any in the house!"

  "You're telling me some guy in the ceiling is controlling us with a typewriter?"

  "Yes! He's the writer, we're the characters! We do what he says, say what he says! We're part of him, part of his soul. That's why we live in this stinking little apartment. Because he's got a stinking little soul!"

  Charlie was not the kind who would understand a thing like this easily. He was competent, but not mentally nimble. He frowned a deep frown, took a long, sweet pull of Jack. "I'm an alcoholic. And we've got another two cases of Jack in the hall closet. Or we would, if this fucking hole had a hall." Darin got up, grabbed Charlie's bottle. "You don't have this! It doesn't exist. And look at my skin, look at it! It's white again because he forgot to continue with the black imagery, or maybe he thinks it doesn't work and he's going to go back later and revise! He can do that, he can revise us all he wants." Gently, insistently, Darin drew Charlie away from the bottle. He pulled him over to the couch, sat him down. "Charlie," he said, "let me lick your lips for you. They look dry." He smiled softly. "Deliciously dry..."

  Darin stiffened, glared upward, screamed over the thunder of the typewriter: "I'd never lick another man's lips! Look, you've got a hell of a lot of control over what we do and say and even some control over who we are. Ok, I accept that! I don't like it, but I accept it! But I also know, because I am part of you, that you are dying of cancer and in a lot of pain and you're scared to death because you are going to leave your wife and son dirt poor, and you have a reputation as a fucking weirdo spaceman, and you're a hideous, run-down old dufus with sores on your fucking schlong that your wife doesn't know about, and—" Gasping with rage, his eyes bulging, sweat popping out all over his body, Darin took a step, glared upward. "Give me a gun, prickface, and I'll put you out of your misery! I'll shoot open those blasted lungs of yours and you'll die right now instead of in six months, clawing for air in some damn cheap hospital ward watched by indifferent gum-cracking nurses whose only concern is that you might blow a sphincter and give them a cleanup job after you go!"

  His voice cracked, he keeled, choking and gasping, like the first time the writer noticed his cancer, could not get a breath, turned purple, gagged, coughed black masses of half-dried mucous out over the rug, then collapsed to the floor, blood bubbling in his throat.

  "Just like me," a voice whispered from somewhere, "just like me..." Then the typewriter keys pounded, and the two desperate characters continued in their terrible little eternal prison of an apartment, a sleazy, half-thought out place hanging in the middle of the mind's nowhere.

  The typewriter pounded, sang: Charlie bent over him, hesitated a moment, then began to riffle his pockets. Sure, they'd been friends for years, but what a marvelous chance this was. Charlie was just a bit dumb, and he liked money because money would buy him women, and he loved women. He loved to put his big hands around their pretty necks and strangle them with great care. Sometimes he'd spend an hour at it, strangling them to the edge, then bringing them back. Listening to the breath whistling, feeling the pee coming out all hot around their legs as they passed out.

  He'd wait for them to become conscious again, looking down deep into their eyes as the spark returned, feeling an absolute thrill pass through him as they regained awareness of their situation. He'd listen as they bargained for their lives, even encourage them, even let them win.

  Then he'd strangle them again.

  Now Charlie was staring upward. His eyes were wide with horror. "Jesus Christ, you are sick!" He ran a little bit, feeling the sense of confinement, of limits everywhere.

  He knew where he was and what he was and all he was

  "I'm a man," he shouted, "we both are, and you're toying with us, you bastard, you're playing games with our reality!"

  This brought movement in the fog, a huge mass, gliding swiftly downward, and then as if the gates of hell had swept aside a huge, sweat-sheened face, the cheeks puffy, the nose disfigured by popped capillaries, the lips dry and flaked with the chalk of a thousand antacid tablets, came looming down toward him. The eyes, the eyes were terrible, glaring like headlights, with a shark's glittering emptiness. Such a horror Charlie had never imagined possible in this world, and he cried out, his soul beaten by the very ugliness of that face, his heart screaming in his breast. He grabbed Darin, shaking and shaking, screaming blindly, the words slurred by mad terror. He could not look again on the face of the monster, but he could feel it's gaze like the fire of a flamethrower boiling into his back and brain.

  He shook and shook and shook and finally Darin's eyes fluttered open. "It's here, it's come down and it's here," Charlie bellowed, "my dear God it's horrible! Oh, Christ, Darin, Darin—"

  When Darin's eyes finally focused, they gazed directly into the face that had loomed down out of the fog. Unlike Charlie, Darin did not feel terror when he faced the truth of his self and life. In the face of his creator he saw a curious mixture of sledgehammer power and awful, sardonic fear.

  "You're one, too," Darin said. And he threw back his head, and he laughed.

  Charlie was amazed. "What's so fucking funny! We got King Kong breathin' down our fuckin' necks!"

  "He's just like us—a creation, a little bit of somebody else's imagination! He's nothing, too!"

  "Yeah, but he's got the fuckin' typewriter, ole buddy ole pal!" The whisper came again, enormous, hollow, infinitely sad. "I certainly do, Charlie. So let's see you chew this little chaw." The face disappeared, and Charlie and Darin sat as still as statues for a moment, listening, waiting for their lives to continue. Soon the rythmic thunder of the Smith Corona started again:

  Charlie ripped off Darin's pants and started chewing his dick.

  Charlie was furious. He raised his head from his friend's genitals, glared into the fog. "Stop that! Don't write shit like that! Jesus, what're people gonna think?" Then, with a sort of trembling paroxysm mixed of disgust and desire, he bent again to Darin's slack member. "It is lovely, though. I must say." He bent closer, ashamed, hesitant. But Darin's hand came up and twined in his hair, gently urging him closer. There exploded in his heart a thrill of submission and pleasure as his lips came into contact with the warm, slick skin of Darin's rapidly expanding penis—

  Then both men erupted, twisting and turning away from each other. Darin screamed a little in his throat, concealing his half-engorged penis in shaking hands. "You dare to write that! My God, what will people think? They think the author is his characters, you fool! They're gonna call you a homo, a queer, a poof! And you're not, you're a staid old family man with cancer!"

  Charlie was spitting and cursing. "You about made me throw up, prickhead! Jesus God and Christ, I don't want some guy's dick in my mouth. Why don't you get a chick into this? I'll chew pussy any day of the week."

  The typewriter rumbled, it's bell clanging like the bell that calls the souls back to hell. It rumbled, clattered, spread it's poison:

  Charlie saw deep inside himself, driven there by the fear and the agony, he saw deep, deep, and there at the center was a little silver woman dancing, and he knew that his fears and his hatreds were dancing with her, and if he wanted to understand himself, ever wanted to get down deep and find out what made him dumb and scared and lonely, he would have to become her, the woman who had been hiding in him from the year one. "Oh, fuck! Oh, no, I see where this is leading!" He stared up into the dense, absent fog. "Don't do this to me!"

  But there was no choice. His deepest instincts could not
lie. He didn't want to be Charlie anymore—

  "You fucking pig!"

  —he wanted to be Charlene!

  "Fuck you!"

  Helpless to control this impulse, he picked up the phone, dialed the number he'd committed to memory when he was a flustered, desperately unhappy fourteen year old. "Doctor," he said, "I want you to make me a woman."

  Nah, this is no good. This is shit. So he wasn't talking on the phone, and Darin wasn't unconscious. Let's see. I need to do something here that'll really suck the fuckin' reader in. He's the one gonna get his throat cut, if me and Darin and Charlie have anything to say about it. So, say hey, reader, we're dropping this Charlene move, it's stupid. Every man has a woman in his heart. That's what sex is all about.

  But what we're all about, what we're doing here as we stealthily turn you into our main character, is—

  Charlie wasn't really talking on the phone, just as Darin wasn't really unconscious. Neither of them was gay and there was no bottle of Jack Daniels in the room. They weren't even in a studio apartment, they were in a luxurious flat in London in the year 1853. And Darin is not Charlie's friend. He is Lord George Darin, surgeon. And Charlie is, well, just plain Charlie, and he's got a pretty nasty cough.

  Lord George is listening to Charlie's chest with a sounding trumpet made of gutta-percha. "Take a breath, old chap," he says. He knows from the solid return when he taps the chest that there is a cancer there. He knows, also, that it is hopelessly inoperable, and if he had so much as a grain of decency he would bash the poor jerk's head in and sell his body to science. Instead he's going to operate.

  But this is 1853 and there are still a few things not in place in the operating room. Like, there is no hygiene. So, our instruments are crusted with bits of brain from another surgery. A piece of colon and a little fecal matter from yet another. Hair-thin threads of wool from being wiped by the good doctor against his apron. Looking closer, the scalpel is almost entirely covered by virus colonies that look like Pueblo cities seen from the air or the Nazca lines, and there are herds of streptococci racing back and forth in the gleaming universe of the blade's edge, hungry and screaming for food, microbes in starving agony, wondering when the blurred sailing shadows of the gods will come down and feed them into the world of paradise that they seek, the echoing halls of bloodvessels and veins, and the comfortable sweet pads of fat where they will make their happy homes.

  And so Dr. Lord Darin lifts his scalpel, absently licks his thumb and tests the blade. He is a brilliant surgeon, he can excise a gallstone in twenty seconds, remove a brain tumor in half an hour, extract a whole bubbling lung in forty minutes. This is important, this speed, because his patients will have no anesthesia not offered by the bottle and the mallet.

  Charlie breathes and it hurts, it hurts a lot. "Can't rightly do it, guv," he gasps.

  "It's the left lung," Lord George says, "a conflictive humor. It's got to come out, I'm afraid."

  Charlie sags, feels his face grow hot with fear, begins to tremble. Then he looks up, toward the ceiling painted with clouds, to the angels hiding in the cumuli that surround the sputtering candle chandelier. "You up there! Why the fuck ain't it Doctor Charles and Darin the fuckin' coalmonger with the bum airbag? You hate me, you always make me the friggin' grunt! And never any pretty girls, you perverted windbag shitface asshole!"

  Doctor Lord Darin takes poor old Charlie by the hand. Charlie gasps at his touch and he feels it to his core, the lack of air, the awful hard absence in his chest. And he thinks, this is how it feels to die, and—where the fuck did I get lung cancer?

  "Oh, no, moron, those are your thoughts," Charlie screams. "You're the one that's dying and that is flat. I'm a friggin character, I'll change. Or I'll go on after you die, waking up every time the fuckin' page is read, and because this is fuckin' quantum sympathetic magic to boot, getting off the fuckin' page and out into the world anytime some suck-ass reader thinks, hey, this guy is doin it to my head man, he is not creating characters, he is fuckin' for real conjuring. God help us all!"

  Doctor Lord Darin understands that this poor screaming maniac will not survive the operation. Of course not, but what an extraordinary addition to science, and perhaps because he dies somebody else will not die, maybe a young and worthy patient of good family will survive because of what the good Doctor Lord learns from this wretched case. He draws Charlie down to the basement beneath his chambers. There is a wooden table, guttered and bucketed like a coroner's slab. But, unlike the coroner's workspace, this object is fitted with thick leather straps.

  "Oh, no! No, for God's sake, don't do this! Don't you understand that this is real? I'm going to suffer the agonies of the damned here!"

  Which is very sad. So, he's cured!

  "Thank the Lord!"

  Nope, just joking. You aren't cured at all. In fact, you're worse. He's gonna find that both of your lungs are full of cancer just like mine you arrogant prick of a character!

  "Strip down," Lord George orders. Charlie, shaking so hard he can barely manage to untie his trouser-rope, manages. He looks like a cut-rate chicken, all dry and blue under the arms, with funny plucked-wing elbows and the turkey-neck wrinkles of long starvation. He smells like a mixture of old man and urine, with an undertone, when he breathes, of corpse rot.

  "I wouldn't mind if I could send for me wife, yer Lordship."

  That's crap. Charlie has no wife. His wife is dead. What love he once knew is long gone, dropped into the mystery of the past.

  "Never mind her. Now, lie down, that's it." He straps Charlie down. "Now, we'll have it out inside of an hour," he says. "Sister!"

  There is a shuffling sound, and a girl of perhaps ten, wearing a grotesquely oversized white gown, comes staggering into the room. A huge sister's cap practically engulfs her head. "Hey, guy," Charlie says, "she's—"

  She has the perfect face of an angel. Her eye is pure and clear, and sends a pang of utter longing deep into Charlie's soul. She has appeared as if from on high, an angel dropped from the glories in Doctor Lord Darin's consulting room ceiling. His nakedness humiliates Charlie and he tries to cover himself, then turns his face away, hurt by the assault of beauty.

  "All right, sister, I want a spread of clamps and sphincters, and my smaller bone saw for the ribs. Scissors to the right of the clamps. And there, those sponges that lie beneath the basin." The nurse wipes the mould from each sponge as she puts it on the table. She blows hot breath on the scalpel and polishes it on her sleeve, then expertly strops it against the leather strap that is nailed to the edge of the table.

  Doctor Lord Darin takes out a cigar, cuts and licks it and jams it in his face. At once a lucifer flares in the sister's pale tiny hand, and orange shadows dance the walls of the surgery, transforming it briefly into an ancient magic cavern, the lair of the rattling old lung-god himself.

  With a whick, whick, whick his lordship gets the cigar roaring. "Scalpel," he says into the blue drift of smoke. She slaps it into his hand. Immediately he swipes a gigantic incision from Charlie's sternum right under his ribcage and up into his armpit. As if shocked by the suddenness of the wound, Charlie's body for a moment does not bleed.

  "Spreaders!" he screams, jamming his fingers down between two ribs, parting them with a slither and a snap. The sister throws a bunch of railroad spikes at him, which he drives in between his shrieking patient's ribs. Black blood flows out, dropping into the bucket in thick blobs.

  "Clawhammer! Tongs! Heat them, for God's sake, red hot! Foolish girl!" Then he stops, hangs his head. "Sorry, Charlie," he says into the tearing shrieks.

  Then he lifts his head to the low beamed ceiling. "Stop this! For God's sake, are you crazy? You are fucking dying in the real fucking world and you know too damn much about what happens to people after they die, and that is what this story is really about and that is why it is a fucking horror story! So quit trying to deflect our attention with your lurid paranoiac surgery fantasies and get to the goddamn point!"

  A hand reaches
down and takes the cigar out of the Doctor Lord's mouth. The Doctor Lord grumps, says nothing. Then the angelic assistant disappears, her tongs and fires and spikes with her. Charlie's wound closes, his cancer cures itself, his clothes spin back around him, he sits up on the edge of the table.

  For an hour in heaven, the Smith-Corona is still.

  Charlie and Darin wait, marking the slow seconds, as all characters wait in all stories, to be created or read or remembered.

  Once or twice, the awful face appears above, as the writer moves about in his room puffing the forbidden cigar. Then there is a long, complex cough, like the rising of a thunderstorm. It begins with a series of pops, rises to great, roaring blasts of sounds like the barking of the hounds of heaven, then tapers into a long, long wheeze, full of liquid and disease.

  Finally Darin—who has been listening with disgust—claps his hands over his ears. "You are the loudest writer I've ever been created by! You snort, you gurgle, you cough. You keep on sticking your finger down your throat to feel that lump and making yourself throw up in the process. You have oat-cell carcinoma, dummy, they ain't gonna operate. You're gonna stay on radiation and chemo, because you ain't got a prayer. You're gonna die."

  He knew that. He knew he was going to die and he had a boy to raise and a wife to love and they were used to a nice life and it was such a happy family and it hurt so goddamn much and where the hell did I get this fucking monster of a tumor, I don't smoke, I've never smoked and why me God, why me!

  "You're smoking a cigar right now."

  "That's literary! It doesn't actually exist."

  Darin knows that this is the first time that the writer has spoken in the story, therefore entering it as a character. He reaches up. "Come on, Charlie," he says softly. "He's gonna come down."

  "Shit if he is. He's gonna send a goddamn python after us next, this guy."

  But Darin is right, the writer does come down into the story. He drops as softly as an owl to the floor of the apartment—for it is the apartment again, and the time is the present—and stands there, smiling slightly.