The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  “I have a better idea,” he answered, already standing and jogging off into the dark. “Stall for time.”

  It should say something about my mental state at this point, when motherfucking Wash—who carefully unfolds his burritos because he thinks the tortilla is a wrapper—tells me he has a plan and I listen.

  Luckily, I found a way for our strategies to sync up. I decided to “stall for time” by bellowing a monumental, lung-splitting war whoop, then sprinting down the loose dirt embankment into a crowd full of monsters and hammer-punching the first one I came to.

  Like I said: “Go down there and kick some ass” has always treated me kindly, and I don’t switch horses midstream.

  The first Unnoticeable crumpled like tinfoil at the blow I sent to his kidneys. He started to make a sound like bloof and then stopped because he was too busy choking on half of my fist. The blurry-faced man next to him turned to see what was going on and got my forehead in his nose for an answer. I planted a faded black Chuck Taylor in the groin of another Unnoticeable who, I saw too late, didn’t have balls. When they were all grouped together like this, it was hard to tell even something as basic as gender. She still staggered a little bit from a firm kick in the ol’ ladies garden, but obviously she didn’t go down quite like I expected. I leaned forward and caught her with part of an elbow, as I struck for the one still reeling from my headbutt. They both collapsed in an indistinct heap.

  I felt hands grab me from behind, so I bent over sharply and sent whoever it was flying over my back. I threw a wild punch in that direction, just in case he had backup, and connected with somebody’s tit. She yelped and jumped away, immediately vanishing back into the bland mass of faceless people.

  “I am a whirlwind of genital pain,” I declared, laughing. But then my right eyeball flashed and I was on the ground.

  A booted foot caught me in the gut. Another in the spine, then the side of the head, and I stopped counting kicks.

  No idea how long I was out. It always feels like hours, but it’s never more than a few seconds. When I came to, I found myself staring down at a bunch of feet and some gravel. Several pairs of strong hands were locked around my arms, carrying me. My legs were free, but I couldn’t make them work right just yet. I sent them helpful commands like “kick” and “run,” and they flopped about like lukewarm Jell-O in response.

  A set of worn stairs passed by, then some old broken cobblestones. A hand twisted itself into my hair, and then I was looking up into Gus’s distant eyes.

  “You are very nearly as stupid as your friends,” he said, his voice like wet cigarettes.

  “I take offense to that,” I tried to quip, but my mouth was thick and some asshole had put it on sideways. My reply came out sounding like a geriatric coughing into a bowl of soggy oatmeal.

  Gus blinked and cocked his head.

  “I take,” I tried again, slowly steering my tongue around my mouth this time, “offense to that. I’m way dumber than those prissy bastards.”

  Gus laughed, all throat and no lungs. “You’re right about that, my man! I mean, you walked into this? Into all this?”

  “Into what?” I said carefully, trying not to let the drooling blood slur my words. “Your little poser posse playing with Tinkertoys?”

  Gus’s expression withdrew and his face went slack. He stepped toward me and slapped me in the mouth. Pain and probably some teeth went ricocheting around my skull.

  “Do not joke about the gears,” he said flatly. “They are the turning of the universe.”

  Gus took a step back, threw his ropy arms wide, and spun about, motioning at everything.

  “Besides, you’re so fuckin’ dim, you probably didn’t even see them, did you? Check it out, my man! Really check it out!”

  I looked around at the half-erased faces of the gathered Unnoticeables and tried to think up a more eloquent way to call them all pussies. Then I saw what Gus was talking about. The darkness around the platform, just outside the reach of the faded yellow streetlamps—it was practically glimmering. Something out there was bouncing back the light. Something liquid, and large, and flowing like cold molasses.

  Tar men. Thousands of them, lurking silently in the shadows. I could practically hear them slithering around now, though I knew it was impossible over the deafening rumble of the gears.

  Fucking hell. Are the gears always that loud?

  The ground had picked up a new kind of shudder, too. Something deeper and more immediate than the persistent thrum of the machine.

  “It is funny,” Gus said, “we did not think it was you, toward the end. So many doubted. It was all backward. You made the decision so early and so easily. You barely knew the pathetic old bum when you abandoned him in that alley outside of your apartment, and you were so very, very bad at the chase. But we should have known that the order of things does not matter. We should have had faith. Because now, here we are. It is all happening. We are … proud of you.”

  “You having a fucking stroke? Listen, save your babbling Manson crap for the groupies and just leave me and my friends out of it. For fuck’s sake, haven’t you got enough blood?”

  “No,” Gus answered immediately. “The needs of the gears are persistent. Without constant lubrication, they will seize. They will not process fuel. Without energy to turn them, the stars will no longer burn in the void. Without the unending warmth of the machine, without the rotation of the gears, the cold and the still will take everything. You do not understand it. You will not accept it. But we fight against entropy. We fight for motion. We fight for the machine. We are bits in that glorious engine, all of us. Even you. Even your friends. There may not be a final goal for us. We do not get the luxury of an end point. There is only maintenance, and our toil is infinite. But the work is good. The gears must turn. No, Carey. There is never enough blood.”

  That other rumbling again. Louder and closer. Some of the others were starting to catch on to it, too. The Unnoticeable holding my arms started swiveling his head around, trying to find the source.

  “I guess I was wrong before,” I said, “about being dumber than my friends.”

  “What does that mean? Why say that now?”

  “Because it sounds like my good pal Wash is about to do the dumbest thing I have ever seen,” I answered, smiling a bloody-toothed grin. “He’s about to hit you with a fucking train.”

  It sounded like a giant cat trying to pass a steaming load of jagged scrap metal. Little puffs of dust kicked up from the corroded tiles. A single enormous flickering light grew swiftly larger, and the stink of burning oil swept across the platform like a tsunami. I pulled my arms together, throwing the Unnoticeables holding me off-balance just long enough to lift both of my legs, plant them on Gus’s scrawny belly, and shove that junkie motherfucker right into the front of Wash’s subway car as it jumped the rails and plowed past us. Gus disappeared in a corona of blood and flecks of tanned flesh. The train carried right on into the unsuspecting crowd like a bowling ball hurled into a set of bloody pins. They splattered like slugs beneath a car tire. It was horrible. It was nauseating. It was fucking beautiful.

  And then the car caught something at the wrong angle. The whole train screeched, jumped sideways, and caught air. It lurched to one side, balanced there, then rocked back the other way. For a second, it looked like it might save itself, then it hit something large, wet, and black, flipped over onto its side, and ground to a stop in a hail of sparks. A dozen tar men went up like bottle rockets.

  The Unnoticeables flew into a panic. They chattered and clucked like nervous hens, running to and away from the wreckage, wailing Gus’s name. One fell to her knees, tore her top open, and beat at her own breasts. I only watched them jiggle for a second before getting to work.

  I sent a telegram to my stubborn, ineffective legs. The message came through muddy, and there must have been a few typos, but the general gist was understood. I took my weight on my own feet and off the Unnoticeables that had been supporting me. They hardly
seemed to care. The smudge beside me grasped at my jacket a little when I twisted away from him, but a quick jab in the old blurry area and he let go. I stumbled over toward the gears and lost my footing in a sticky pile of red stuff that I really wish I hadn’t looked down at. Randall was swaying gently in place when I found him. He rocked back and forth on his heels, bopping to some unheard music. He looked like he’d had cigarettes put out on his arms. There were thin cuts running up his side in ornate patterns—a series of initials, I saw—and both of his eyes were swollen almost entirely shut. I reached out for him, afraid I’d shatter the poor bastard if I grabbed him too hard, and closed my hand gently around his wrist.

  At my touch, something clicked inside his head. He shook his head, winced at the pain that simple gesture brought, and for the first time actually seemed to see me.

  “What, did you go queer on me?” Randall said. He was confused and a little shell-shocked, but still clearly a total asshole.

  He’s going to be okay.

  Voices shouted in the distance, back toward the toppled engine. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “—is ours,” one of them might have cried.

  “Abandoned!” another might have hollered.

  They sounded … happy?

  “Wash is in there,” I told Randall, and nodded toward the unrecognizable mess of steel.

  “What happened?”

  “He drove a train right up Gus’s ass.”

  “Who’s Gus?”

  “A guy that deserved a firm train up the ass.”

  “Good for Wash, then. Let’s go get him.”

  I thought about telling Randall to run—that he was in no shape to fight—but we’ve had that conversation before, and it never went well. Admittedly the conversation usually took place when we were both drunk and arguing with some skinheads, and admittedly it was usually Randall telling me to run, and admittedly it usually ended with me taking a belligerent swing at him for daring to suggest such cowardice. But I knew he wouldn’t listen, anyway. I threw his arm over my shoulder, and we hobbled toward the wreckage together.

  I tried my best to ignore the shimmering liquid lurching through the darkness all around the smoking heap. I tried to disregard the glints of brass I caught here and there. I tried not to think about what we were walking into or what they were going to do to us. And then I saw what the Unnoticeables were dragging up through a gaping hole near the front of the overturned train, and I actually did forget all about the tar men.

  It was limp and pale, knit through with deep splashes of crimson. It had a mottled brown three-foot-long chunk of steel through its chest.

  It was Wash.

  He was dead.

  I clenched my fists. I ground my teeth together so hard I tasted the rough chalk of enamel on my tongue. I thought pure murder. I vividly pictured strangling every one of these motherfuckers so hard their eyeballs would burst in their heads. I wanted to watch their tongues loll out and to crack their fucking skulls like eggs against the ground. I wanted to burn this whole goddamned place down, with us inside of it, just so we wouldn’t have to miss a second of their fucking flesh searing.

  But that’s not what I did.

  What I did was look at Randall and see that he was barely standing. I looked over at the platform and the handful of half-naked punk kids still milling about in a daze there. I noticed a skinny girl with short blond hair, and I pictured what she’d look like with a blue wig. I turned away from my good friend’s body—I walked away from the bastards that just killed him—and I tried to save the ones that were still alive.

  When I get drunk enough to tell this story, and when the people around me are drunk enough to believe it, they all tell me I did the right thing. They all tell me I was heroic to leave revenge behind and focus on helping. “Noble,” they call me. But every single miserable, hungover, dehydrated morning, I relive that decision for just a second—right after I piss out the last night’s whiskey and right before I crack open the breakfast beer—and sometimes, I regret it.

  Randall and I made the platform easily. What few Unnoticeables were still standing were too busy flailing and gibbering back by the train to stop us.

  “He is ours!” I heard a familiar, raspy voice proclaim. I tried not to think about its owner.

  I helped Randall up the steps and leaned him against a chipped concrete pillar. Thing 1 wobbled in place, mired in the same absent haze as the other punks. She looked so normal without the wig. So … boring. When I touched her arm, she instantly whirled on me and scratched half my face off. I swore and spat and called her a crazy bitch, at which point she realized it was me and stuck her tongue between my busted lips.

  It hurt like a bastard. I coughed a not-insignificant amount of blood into her mouth.

  It was easily the best kiss I’ve ever had.

  When we finally broke apart, she smiled at me.

  “I didn’t know it was a wig,” was the only stupid-ass thing I could think to say, still muddled by hormones and blood loss.

  “What, you thought I was a natural blue, idiot?”

  Randall laughed and snapped us out of it.

  I went around and shook each of the three remaining punk kids. At my touch, one broke into an immediate sprint. She disappeared into the darkness before any of us could get a word out. One started crying, folded into a little ball, and refused to move. We tried to drag him and he nearly clawed our eyes out. Maybe there’s something else we could’ve done, but we didn’t. I hope he got out of there okay. The last kid thought we were friends of his college buddies, pulling some elaborate prank. He refused to believe what was happening. Randall spat in his eye and I punched him in the crotch. Twice. The reality of the situation dawned on him quickly.

  I pointed up the embankment, and we all started our slow, pained crawl out of that dank hellhole with its gibberish-spouting freaks. We got maybe ten feet before the world lit up like Times Square. It was a lightning strike that didn’t fade. A flash so white it stole the color from everything else. I turned and looked right into the face of a tiny star. Which was, oddly, hovering in place about three feet behind me. Something twisted deep inside the light. I don’t know that “thing” is even the right word. It was more like an idea—just the very loose concept of sharp edges and absence.

  From no direction at all, I could hear stone waves crashing on a glass beach.

  From the whiteout area behind the star, I heard Gus’s distinct jackass guffaw. It grew and grew into a manic pitch. All the false, detached cool of the dopehead was gone. In its place was utter and complete ecstasy. An unrestrained glee you’d only normally hear from a little girl waking up to find a pony beneath the Christmas tree.

  We had been through too much, too quickly. There’s only so much fear you can experience in such rapid succession before it all gives way to numbness. I had used up all my terror in those early days with the tar men. I had been wary of the Unnoticeables. I had been sickened by Gus and the business with the gears. But if you had asked me yesterday, I would have told you I’d forgotten how to be really afraid.

  There was something turning in the white void of that star that made me remember.

  I turned to Randall, to tell the dumb son of a bitch to run until his feet ground away against the earth, but he was looking at something with such intensity that it made me stop. A confused, thin little smile bounced around his face, trying to pin itself down.

  “That’s weird,” he said in a strangled voice. “I taste beer and chocolate milk.”

  His pupils caught on fire.

  Brilliant light poured out from somewhere deep inside his brain. He made a sound like icicles breaking in a storm, and hacked up a thin liquid the color of everything. It shimmered, prismatic, when it first dribbled out between his lips, but as it ran down his chin, the fluid thickened and turned black. When it clotted on his chest and started running back up his neck, I could see it was still shimmering, just a little bit, like oil on water. I tried to wipe it off him
with my jacket sleeve, and it came back partially melted.

  I turned to Thing 1 for help, but she was gone. Already running up the embankment. Told you she was a smart girl.

  I looked around for something to do. Something to hit. Something to hit something with.

  There was nothing.

  I watched as the light spread behind Randall’s eyes, hollowing him out.

  I did the only thing I could think of. I called the malevolent star’s mother a cheap whore, and I dive-tackled the son of a bitch.

  TWENTY-THREE

  1977. New York City, New York. Sammy Six.

  I was holding on pretty good there for a little while. I thought I might make it: I’d put up nonsense barriers around all of my emotional core concepts, just like Yusuf had taught me—but then something shifted in the attack patterns. The angel punched through my psyche like a meteor, leaving a frozen trail of little pieces that used to be me. I perceived the attack sequentially, at first, when I was still holding the bastard off. Then the angel flared through, and all sense of chronological order vanished.

  I could see what happened ten minutes ago about to happen any moment. I watched the events unfold exactly 1,296 inches beneath the moldy floorboards of my shitty motel room as they happened, had happened, would happen, and did. I saw the dark arena in the subway tunnels from the angel’s point of view: a series of infuriatingly cluttered equations, constantly shifting and evolving in unproductive directions. It reached out and gently rearranged some bits, and a small chunk of the world that used to be a boy named Randall started to simplify. It projected the most probable event flow resulting from that action and was pleased when everything went according to its nature—when the candidate named Carey offered himself bodily unto the angel. The interface was … less than seamless. He had been prepped sloppily by the algorithm—this one had proved difficult—but he had been taken through experiences similar enough to my own. He had been through the chase, he had made the decision, he had abandoned the old candidate to save his friends, and he had voluntarily touched the angel. Giving it his code. Code that was now close enough to mine to provide the last missing piece for the most important problem of the day.