Back on the street with its floating cars and everything else, he glanced up at the gargoyle that he thought had been looking at him. And saw that it was in fact looking at him. It had turned its head to gaze down at the clinic now, and it appeared to be staring right at him.
The Diver stopped in the doorway and stared back at the gargoyle as a wheelchair tumbled end over end past him. A blanket was caught on one handle of the wheelchair and waved like a flag in the air.
“You need to hide,” the gargoyle said. “The ghosts are coming.”
The Diver didn’t see its lips move but he heard its words anyway. He decided there were only two possible options for what was happening. The first was that he was going mad, if he wasn’t mad already. The second was that the gargoyle was actually talking to him. If it was the first case, then there wasn’t much he could do and playing along with his madness likely wouldn’t hurt. If it was the second case, then he needed to hide immediately.
The Diver went across the street to the other building, ducking under a low-floating delivery van as he did so. Its bumper hit the pavement and the van bounced higher into the air, somehow threading its way between a bus and a car. The Diver wondered if it was just luck or if there was something guiding the vehicles as they moved through the Drift.
He went into the building through a revolving door on the ground floor. He was in a lobby with a tiled floor and art deco paintings of airships and skyscrapers on the walls. He found the stairs and made his way up to the fourth floor, where the gargoyle was. The doors were propped open at each landing, so there was enough light that he could see the stairs this time. He came out into a long hall lined with office doors and windows at either end. The carpet was worn and the walls were scuffed. One of the office doors said Mysterio Magic and another said Particularly Private Investigations. The Diver ignored them both and went to the window that overlooked the street he had been on. It had an old latch that allowed him to open the window and swivel it outward enough for him to climb onto the ledge. His air tank hit the window when he did so, but it didn’t crack the glass. The Diver was relieved about that. He didn’t want to add to the damage in the city.
He kept one hand on the wall and walked along the ledge, trying not to look down. The gargoyle was at the corner of the building. It watched him come but didn’t say anything until he sat down beside it. He had to turn sideways to stay on the ledge because of the air tank, and he put a hand on the gargoyle to keep his balance. It didn’t seem to mind.
“Tell me if I’m going crazy so I don’t waste any more air talking to you,” the Diver said to the gargoyle.
“You should probably be quiet anyway,” the gargoyle said and turned its head to look down the street, the way the Diver had come originally.
A half-dozen ghosts came along the street now, spread out in a loose line like before. They looked in all the cars they passed, and under them. They looked in the storefronts. They even looked in the garbage bins at the intersections of the streets, though the Diver didn’t know how anyone would have managed to hide in one of them. The one place they didn’t look was up, otherwise they would have seen the Diver sitting beside the gargoyle.
The ghosts went down the street and disappeared into the Drift. The buildings faded into dark shapes amid clouds of white and purple and orange and all the other colours that flowed into and through each other. They were silhouetted by a strange glow that came from farther beyond them, a glow that didn’t make any sense to the Diver’s mind. It was every colour imaginable at once and no colour at all. The Diver had seen the glow on many dives but had always stopped himself from getting too close. It was the alien ship and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what he would find at the crash site.
“Those guys are assholes,” the gargoyle said.
The Diver turned to look at the stone creature. “That’s not exactly the sort of thing I would expect a gargoyle to say,” he said.
“I'm not a gargoyle,” the gargoyle said. “Not really.”
“You look like a gargoyle.”
“I used to be a day trader. I worked in one of those offices over there.” The gargoyle looked in the direction the ghosts had gone. “I saw the ship come down. It was like a piece of the sky had broken and fallen off. It crashed right into a building I’d worked in a few years back, before I’d traded jobs. I thought I’d gotten lucky.” The gargoyle made a sound like rocks knocking together. The Diver figured it to be a laugh, although he couldn’t be certain.
“I take it you weren’t a gargoyle back then.”
“I don’t know, maybe some people said I was. But I was just another man, you know?”
“So what happened?”
“People went up to the ship to see if they could help. I watched the whole thing from my office window. The cops hadn’t managed to quarantine the area yet. There were some military guys there but they were still getting out their white suits and stuff. Some people walked up to the ship and found a door. They opened it like the ship was just a car or something. The door wasn’t even locked. Maybe it had broken in the crash. Maybe whatever was inside wanted them to open it. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The ghosts are soldiers then?” the Diver asked.
“They’re not anybody,” the gargoyle said. “They’re not soldiers any more than I’m a gargoyle.”
The Diver took a deep breath from his air tank. He was worried he was maybe breathing too much of the air of the Drift and something in it was affecting his mind. He looked at the gauge on the tank and saw he was down to his last quarter of air. He wouldn’t be able to make it back out of the Drift on the tank.
“They opened the door on the alien ship and everything exploded. There was this flash of light. Or maybe lights. All the colours. It blew up the people who opened the door. It blew up everyone else that was even near it. The soldiers and the cops and everyone that had gone up to the ship to look at it. It blew up all of us in the office. It knocked me through all the walls and windows out of the office. It knocked me all the way into this gargoyle on this building.”
The Diver looked at him for a long moment. It was a strange claim, but it wasn’t any stranger than some of the things the Diver had seen in the Drift.
“So your body is inside there?” He put his hand on the gargoyle’s shoulder. It felt like stone.
The gargoyle suddenly reared up, standing on its legs and spreading its wings wide. The Diver fell back and nearly went over the side of the ledge, but managed to hold himself up.
“There is nothing inside me,” the gargoyle said. “My body is gone. This is all I am now. This is all we are now. We are all trapped in The Drift and we will never be ourselves again.”
“Who opened the alien ship?” the Diver asked.
“A man. A woman. All of us. Does it matter?”
“Maybe. Maybe it matters to someone.”
“Tell it to the ghosts,” the gargoyle said, looking past the Diver again.
The Diver turned and saw one of the ghosts walking back down the street out of the Drift. The ghost carried an assault rifle in its hands. The ghost was looking up this time, right at the Diver and the gargoyle.
“Good thing I’m trapped in something that’s made out of stone, but you’d better get out of here.”
The Diver was already moving, pulling himself through the window before the ghost could shoot him. He ran for the stairs and went down them two at a time. Somehow he managed to not fall. He thought that if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to reach the lobby before the ghost. But the ghost still wasn’t at the building when the Diver ran out of the stairwell.
He went out into the street without stopping and lunged behind a cargo van that came tumbling down toward him. There was the sound of hammering on metal, and the Diver knew without looking that the ghost was shooting the van. The Diver kept moving, keeping the van between them as it drifted down the street. He ran to the dark Apple store. The door was closed but someone had broken all the glass ou
t of it, so the Diver ducked and tucked his arms in and went through the door. His air tank clanged off the side of it, so he knew there’d be no hiding from the ghost now.
He ran deeper into the store, slipping off the air tank as he went. He laid it behind a table of iPhones on the right. He opened up the regulator to free flow, and the sound of hissing air filled the silent store. The Diver grabbed an iMac from the wall to the left and dropped behind a table full of iPads just as the van lifted back up into the air and the ghost came toward the store.
This time the Diver didn’t hear broken glass crunching underfoot like he had when he’d hid under the mannequins. He didn’t know where the ghost was until it appeared in between the tables and pointed its gun at the Diver’s air tank on the floor.
The Diver rose up behind the ghost and lifted the iMac over his head. The ghost sensed the movement and spun about as the Diver brought the iMac crashing down, straight into the ghost’s dark face visor. The edge of the iMac crashed through the thick lens and into the ghost’s face beyond.
Only there was no face. The iMac didn’t hit anything. Instead, it kept going without hitting resistance until it caught the back of the suit’s head and pulled it down. The ghost lifted up off its feet, caught on the iMac, and fired a burst from the gun into the store’s ceiling as the Diver stumbled forward, off balance, and then fell to the floor, upending the ghost.
He landed on the ghost and he felt all the air rush out of the suit under his weight, like he’d fallen on a blow-up doll and ruptured it. An explosion of white light burst from the broken visor of the ghost’s suit, which still had the iMac embedded in it. The suit deflated and the ghost was still.
The white light drifted toward the door, shifting from a cloud into a humanoid shape as it went. It walked through the doorway and out into the street. The Diver picked himself up off the floor and looked down at the suit, which remained empty. When he looked back at the street, the light was gone.
The Diver wasn’t sure what had happened. Maybe the ghosts were people that had been blown up like the gargoyle. Maybe they’d been blown into the suits and animated them in the same way. Maybe they were aliens from the crashed ship. Maybe they were something else entirely. The one thing he did know was he had to keep moving. The shots the ghost had fired were sure to draw other ghosts.
He strapped on the air tank again and cut off the free flow of the regulator. There was almost no air left now. He picked up the ghost’s gun and slung it over his shoulder. He left the iMac and the ghost’s empty suit lying together on the floor.
Then he went back out into the Drift.
He looked up at the gargoyle and it looked back down at him but didn’t say anything this time.
He went back to the hospital the same way he had come. Away from the clinic and the vehicles drifting through the air. Past the ATM that still spat strange currency out into the world. Past the pharmacy, where he imagined the dead diver was still inside. Past the shop with the mannequins, where he had hidden from the ghosts. He breathed deep of the Drift now because he had no choice.
He didn’t move with any stealth and didn’t try to hide but he saw no ghosts. He didn’t see anyone else until he saw his reflection in the doors to the emergency room. He looked at himself for a moment and then went inside. He took off the air tank and laid it on a stretcher in the waiting room, along with the assault rifle.
The nurse was in the nursery with the babies again. She sat in a chair holding one close to her and humming a lullaby while she watched the others drift around the room. She looked at the Diver when he entered but didn’t say anything.
“I found your daughter,” the Diver said.
The babies all spun around to look at him with their dead eyes. But the Diver only looked at the nurse.
The nurse looked at the Diver, then past him, as if she expected to see her daughter step out of the shadows behind the Diver.
“Outside,” the Diver said, and he went back down the stairs and through the waiting room and out into the street again.
He stood there for a moment, watching the Drift swirl across and through the empty cars and abandoned strollers and forgotten purses on the sidewalk and everything else. He saw colours he had never seen before bloom and fade away in seconds. For the first time in the Drift, he realized he couldn’t hear the sound of his breathing.
The nurse came out a minute later, the babies swirling around her. She’d let go of the one she’d been holding and her hands were free now. She looked around again, up and down the street, then back at the Diver.
“Your daughter is dead,” the Diver told her. “And so are you.”
The nurse kept staring at him and said nothing. The babies spun around them faster, stirring up the Drift.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” the Diver told her. “But they left you for dead along with the babies when they evacuated the hospital. Maybe they were going to come back for you, but the Drift ...”
The Drift swirled around them in what seemed like every colour imaginable and many that weren’t. It grew thicker by the second. The nurse’s features were starting to blur now, and the babies were slipping in and out of the mist as they circled.
“I know what happened to her, though. She was close to the crash. There was an explosion. It made people into other things. It made the Drift.”
Maybe it had been the nurse’s daughter who had opened the door to the spaceship and caused the explosion, the Diver thought. She would have been the sort of person who tried to help. Maybe.
“She’s dead,” the nurse said, looking off in the direction of the crash.
“No more than you,” the Diver said. “She was blown up. But not into nothing. She was blown into something else. She’s the Drift. I think most of the people who went missing in the crash are the Drift.”
His son. He knew now his son was part of the Drift. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew it.
The nurse looked back at the Diver. “So the world has ended then?”
“Maybe,” the Diver said. “For some of us, anyway.”
“And what happens next?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know,” the Diver said.
The babies drifted away, off into the Drift in all directions. The nurse let them go. Maybe she wasn’t a nurse anymore. The Diver wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even sure if he was the Diver anymore.
The babies disappeared one after another, and then the Drift wrapped itself so thickly around the nurse that the Diver couldn’t see her. The shifting colours shone so bright he couldn’t look at her anyway. He left her there and went down the street.
He walked until he found himself at the intersection where he had last seen his son alive. He stopped by the ATM, which was still dropping its strange currency onto the ground. There didn’t seem to be any more of it now than there had been before. Maybe a wind came along every now and then and moved it. Or maybe something else happened.
The Drift seemed to be more active here, too. It swirled around the cars left in the street and on the sidewalk. It moved in a circular motion, like a whirlpool. As if more of it was flowing into the intersection every second. It spun around an open spot in the middle of the street. The place where the homeless man had sat down so long ago.
The Diver stood there for a moment, looking at all the abandoned cars. He wondered what had happened to the people that had once been in them. Then he went out into the street, to the empty spot the Drift had left for him. The Drift swirled closer and faster now, a blur of colours. The Diver sat on the ground and opened his arms and let the Drift shroud him.
Beat
THE GEEKS
Otto notices the rash on his arm during an episode of Beat the Geeks. This is the season of the reality science genre. Actors infiltrate university classes and seduce the profs with essays secretly written by their rivals and teams of relationship therapists. The actors break up with the profs in lecture halls full of students by reading their email exchanges aloud,
until the profs throw their laser pointers at them or run from the room. Other actors pretend to be grant administrators. They drop by labs to tell researchers they’ve won millions in funding. They say with a straight face that nothing is more important than the researchers finding out whether fruit flies can conceive of an afterlife. Hidden cameras record everything. Viewers vote on which actors did the best job. The winners get spots in real movies. Websites keep track of scientist suicides.
Otto sits on the couch with his tablet and watches an astrophysicist hold the hand of a woman in a black dress as they sit on a bench by the ocean. The astrophysicist tells the woman the latest theories all point to the universe being infinite. He says this means that anything imaginable is out there, as well as lots of things that aren’t. He looks up at the sky and says somewhere the two of them are sitting on this same beach on another earth, having this same conversation. The woman is actually transgendered and used to be a man, but the astrophysicist doesn’t know that. She looks over her shoulder, into the hidden camera mounted in the collar of a black Lab eating a dead seagull, and smiles. The astrophysicist keeps staring at the sky. He says there are an infinite number of them playing out this very scene throughout the universe right now, but Otto has already fallen asleep.
By the next morning, the rash has spread across Otto’s body. He scratches at it on the way to the shower, tearing off flakes of skin that drift to the floor. After his shower, he checks his favourite porn sites on the tablet before getting dressed. There are more than a thousand updates since he checked last night. He gets ready to masturbate as he skims through the pictures and videos at the kitchen table, but there’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. He makes scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.
After he washes the dishes and puts them away, he watches a show in which actors posing as lab assistants add chemicals to scientists’ experiments to create humorous results, such as explosions that set the scientists on fire, or fumes that cause the scientists to hallucinate and call their department heads to tell them what they really think of their lab space. Otto keeps scratching his rash the whole time and wonders if it has something to do with his unemployment.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 9
