Which wasn’t really true. He was pretty sure she was shacked up with Luke in the City. Luke, who conveniently wasn’t answering his calls, either. But Ray wasn’t about to let the conversation stray in that direction. Instead he rose, mumbled, “Man, I gotta take a leak,” and made his unsteady way to the restroom. At least it was true.
When he returned, Danny took a deep pull from his beer, looked across the table at Ray, and said, “She came here for awhile. Right after Colleen left.”
“Who came here?”
“Lisa.”
Ray gaped. “You’re fuckin’ shittin’ me, right?”
Danny shook his head, “No man, seriously. She was here. Her and Luke. She needed someone to talk to, so we all got together.”
“Did she talk about me? What’d she say?”
“It wasn’t all about you. She kept saying, ‘I know it’s me, but...’ Her but’s were mostly about how she felt jealous of the attention you were givin’ Poe and all these frogs you’re into; but she knew your thesis was important; but you were losing touch with reality; but you were ignoring her, etcetera, etcetera...”
“She never said any of this to me.”
“What she told us was she didn’t feel like she could talk to you about it. Said she tried, but you didn’t listen.”
“Man, that’s bullshit. I always listened to her.”
But had he? How many times had he blown her off for the work, for another session with Roche and his copy of the Robert et Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais? “So how long did she stay? And what was going on with her and Luke?”
“I know what you’re thinkin’, man, but that wasn’t it. She just needed friends, and we were here for her, like always. That’s all.”
“Bullshit. I know Luke’s been after her for a long time.”
“Yeah, maybe, but not this time.
“Whaddaya mean: ‘not this time’?”
“Nothin’ man, give it a rest. She ain’t fuckin’ Luke. I guarantee that.”
Their pizza arrived. Gray Danny regarded him across the table. “You still havin’ those anxiety attacks, man? ‘Cause you look a little pale right now.”
Deep breath. He’d mentioned the attacks to Danny over the phone. “Yeah, but this isn’t one. They’re just something I’ve been getting on and off since my dad died. They don’t last long. Nothing to sweat over.” Yet he already felt a cold, greasy sweat leaking over his body from every pore.
“You oughtta get seen to, man; that shit can’t be good. But not now, huh? For now, dig in. A full stomach’s just what you need.”
With trembling hands Ray nodded and tore loose a slice of the lumpy, pus-colored pizza. The waitress returned with a fresh round of Coronas, and Ray took a deep pull from his to wash that first pasty mouthful down.
They ate and drank for several minutes without further conversation. The bland waitress brought more Coronas even before their last round was empty. Danny must have told her to “Keep ‘em comin’, honey,” while Ray was in the can. That was okay with Ray. All he wanted was to get tanked. But then, Danny had convinced him to come here for more than beer...
“So Dan-man, where’s all the chicks you said would be here? ‘Cause I’m not seeing ‘em...” Fewer than a dozen other customers were visible. None were unescorted women. The bar was empty.
“I dunno, man...must be an off night. Most nights this place is crawlin’ with chicks.”
“So... are we just cursed or something? I mean, c’mon, seriously, this is pathetic.”
“What about the waitress? She should be getting’ off soon, and she looks kinda game...”
“You’re kiddin’ right? Game? She looks half dead to me...”
She returned even as Ray spoke, however, and he examined her again. Lank, dark hair fell evenly around her face from both sides, maintaining the almost parallel lines of her figure. Almost sexless. But she did have tits, C-cup at least, suppressed and taut within the white men’s dress shirt she wore. A plastic rectangle engraved with her name rode askew above her left breast. Rochelle. He imagined her coming to life in a three-way: Danny, her, him. He’d never had a three-way. Maybe that’s what he needed to cheer him up.
Danny faced her, a sagging pizza slice held aloft in his left hand. There was something wrong with his eyes, but Ray couldn’t place it. Too sunken, too glassy, the pupils too wide...
“So my buddy here was wantin’ to know where you’re from,” Danny said to Rochelle.
She turned her head slowly, right, left, looked at them each in turn, then replied, sans inflection, sans expression:
“Scranton.”
Ray sputtered into his fist and glanced at Danny. Their history was filled with hundreds of moments like this, secret in-jokes mutually acknowledged and achieving fruition at some third party’s expense. Ray could not hold back. He expected Danny to bust out, too, but his friend just stared, his glassy gaze the same—as Rochelle’s.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked, her voice even colder, if that was possible. Danny said, no, they were okay, and she walked off toward the kitchen.
“Dude, I was looking at you, trying to tell you not to laugh. But you blew it.” Danny shook his head. His timing and rhythm were the same as Rochelle’s...and the same as the motions of the “eyelab” sign outside. Except Danny’s head didn’t float off into the night. Ray watched to be sure of that.
“Sorry man. I couldn’t help it.”
“Well, we ain’t nailin’ her, now. I don’t know what’s wrong with this place, tonight. There’s usually lots of chicks.”
“I find that hard to believe, myself. This is some pathetic town you’ve found yourself in if this joint is the best you can do for a singles bar.”
“Don’t knock it, man. I tell you, livin’ here has changed my whole outlook on life. All that study, study, study, work, work, work—it doesn’t really matter. None of it matters. I got a different way of seein’ things now.”
Ray was lost with this line of reasoning, but he didn’t much care. At this point, his only plan was to get drunk and ask Danny to fix his car in the morning so he could get the hell out of Lansdale; before dark, if possible. He’d pretty well accomplished the first part already.
They both drank on in silence as beads of suspicious moisture oozed from the cooling cheese on the half-eaten pizza. By the time Rochelle brought the check, Ray was pretty much shitfaced. He paid it, just as he had expected he’d have to. Even flipped her a fiver for a tip; he didn’t know why. The booze, no doubt.
Danny and Ray were the final customers to exit Pizza Uno, and they had to duck under the burnished aluminum rolling grille already pulled down to within a few feet of the floor. The corridor outside was dim; all the stores were closed and only a single row of fluorescent panels high above provided illumination. Ray thought again of the derelict bank he had seen downtown just before his blackout and the accident, the lone bulb on a wire that lit it.
At first neither spoke as they made their unsteady way toward the exit. Then Ray tried to focus and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me Lisa was down here. To be honest, I feel kind of betrayed.” He kept his eyes on the floor, not Danny, struggling to keep his steps within a single row of tiles.
He felt Danny turn to him. “You feel betrayed? You know what, dude? You always act like Lisa was such an angel, and she wasn’t. You wanna know the truth? Luke didn’t bang her this time, but he already banged her like way back sophomore year. And so did I. A buncha times. Once we had a threesome, some night when you were too busy writin’ one of your damn English papers and we all went to the Roxy without you. It didn’t mean nothin’, you know. We were pretty wasted, anyway. But she made us promise not to tell you because she knew you had this crush on her. Fact is, by then she was already getting’ tired of waitin’ for you to ask her out. But that’s not the way it went this last time. She just hung out, told us her troubles and stuff, that’s all.”
Ray opened his mouth to reply, but
his tongue had gone numb. The space between them stretched as long as a football field, as if Ray were staring at Danny through the wrong end of a telescope. He didn’t want to believe his friend, but he knew his words were true. He knew it in his guts; he knew it from a dozen tiny suspicions that clicked into place all at once, memories he’d shunted aside. But that was all he was going to learn from his guts, because it was happening again: an elevator shaft opened in his torso and everything inside collapsed down a vast abyss. He though helplessly of Pound’s line: “But Sordello, and my Sordello?” All at once there were two Lisa’s, and both were lost to him. Now he clung to a ledge in a deep, dark pit as her image receded. The inexorable pattern had begun once more, and all he could do was ride it out. In rapid succession his mind played host to a slideshow featuring his father, his MIA mom, his scant remaining handful of distant aunts, uncles, cousins... Lisa. He grasped for each as they faded in turn. None could hold him. He shrank, diminished, dwindled to a pinpoint, a dust speck no Horton could hear in a universe of immense galaxies isolated by stifling, incomprehensible spans of emptiness. There was nothing to hang onto, no one to hold him back from the pull of oblivion. The void sucked him in, crushed him to nothingness. All he was, all his memories, vanished, gone forever. He shuddered and gasped an inchoate syllable with what seemed the last breath in his lungless chest.
And then, as quickly as it had taken him, the spell began to fade. He found himself gripping the edge of a thick concrete planter with both hands. A plastic tree trunk rose from it, almost as thick as the one he’d struck on Main. They were just outside of Penney’s. He staggered toward Danny and threw both hands out to shove him. “You fucker!”
Danny sidestepped with surprising ease, considering how sick he looked. Ray swung a roundhouse punch at him, but Danny caught Ray’s right with his left, ducked under, and slammed him in the stomach. Ray collapsed to his knees and puked a sour stew of pizza chunks and Corona.
Danny stood above him. “Fuck you, man. I try to open your eyes, show you how it really is, and you take a swing at me. You wanna live in a fantasy world, that’s your own problem. You’ll see when the snow melts. Everyone will see. But I’m finished with you here.” And he strutted off into Penney’s.
Ray fought for breath and spewed his guts out a few more times before he could struggle to his feet. Puke spattered the backs of his hands, and he wiped them on his pants, though those weren’t much better. He checked all round, but saw no one watching him, no customers, no security. He made for Penney’s and the mall exit.
It wasn’t until he was outside that he felt the sting of the winter wind and realized he’d left his coat behind. Where? In Pizza Uno? No, on that kiosk. Shit. Only a handful of cars remained in the lot, and Danny’s was not among them. Triple-shit. Ray hadn’t anticipated returning to the rear of the mall, but wherever he was going tonight, he was walking, and there was no way he was doing that without his coat. Not to mention his car keys were in the pocket, for what they were worth.
The mall was empty now. The grille was all the way down outside Pizza Uno and the lights were off. He expected to have to feel his way through the section beyond in total darkness, but a lone panel of fluorescents lit the aperture to the west wing. Others glowed at uneven intervals further down the corridor, hanging exposed from bare steel beams.
Ray picked his way down the aisle from one oasis of light to the next. He had not gone far before flashes of maybe-movement began to register in his peripheral vision: more of the long shadows. They never approached him head-on; instead they pulsed over and over at the corners of his sight, independent of the angles of the overhead lights and showing no conformity to objects on the floor. He tried to focus on his feet, ignoring the dark streaks that crisscrossed each other and rose up the walls, the hollow echoes from the plywood panels he trampled, the way the plastic sheeting over empty storefronts rippled without any breeze. Just keeping his feet together and moving forward dizzied him, and his stomach still threatened.
His worst fear was that when he arrived at the kiosk, his coat would be gone, but he saw it from a good distance off, resting almost right beneath the final flickering light panel. At last—his ordeal was almost at an end. Just grab the coat and strike a fast pace back to the exit. Maybe Danny would be waiting for him after all. Of course he would be: he wouldn’t leave Ray stranded. The coat was here, and Danny would be outside, parked at the curb with the heater running. It was all gonna be OK.
Ray was only a few yards from the kiosk when the buzzing of the fluorescents overhead cycled to the level of an angry hornet swarm, and the panel shut off altogether with a loud pop. He held his breath, straining his ears, but heard only the rippling of plastic. Yet it was not completely dark. To his right, a rectangular panel glowed softly from behind the plastic curtain that spanned an empty steel frame. Black on yellow, six letters: “eyelab.” It was the twin of the one on the pole outside, only this one didn’t move. It hung in place, pressed against the milky membrane as if straining to be born.
The overhead lights clicked back on. At once, Ray recognized the streaks of shadow everywhere, clearer than before. He turned to stare at one on his left, and this time, instead of shifting, it rolled up—rolled up and rose—contracted toward him, no longer a shadow, but a hunched figure wrapped in foul, uncertain rags. Shadows on either side underwent the same transformation, at least a dozen, and began to shuffle toward him. He gasped in drunken shock, but he was so close to his coat, now. He could get it and get out before they reached him. They were slow, and Danny would be waiting outside.
Ray stumbled up to the kiosk and stretched his arm toward the coat, not wanting to approach any closer than necessary. In his mind’s eye he saw with absolute clarity the gaunt, discolored arm that would whip across the counter and clutch his wrist, filthy jagged nails piercing his skin, but it never came, and with one lightning motion, he jerked his own hand toward his coat and gripped it by the collar. The instant his fingers closed on the fabric, he took half a dozen quick steps backwards, never taking his eyes off the kiosk, and thus fell directly into the uncovered pit behind him. He hadn’t heard them move the plywood cover.
One sharpened spike of rusted rebar drove straight through his right kidney, and Ray would have screamed if another hadn’t pierced the back of his neck and pinned his tongue flat in his mouth. Before the light clicked off again, he caught one brief glimpse of the gray, eyeless faces leaning over him. Then they climbed down in the darkness and slid the plywood back in place.
By Invisible Hands
By Simon Strantzas
The puppet maker’s hands were wizened. He stared at them, at the gnarled knuckles like cherry galls on goldenrod, at the wrinkled leather skin stretched and folded in on itself so many times it sagged. Those hands were filled with pain and loss and regret, and they radiated it outward like an unbearable heat. His hands were all he had left. His hands, and his memories. But those memories faded from his mind, slipped into the dark of the misty quiet town like the sound of an automobile into the distance. He swallowed another handful of pills and hoped that this day might finally be his last.
It had been so long since the puppet maker’s slow descent from master of his craft to ... to whatever it was he had become. Ancient, neglected, forgotten, a shell of his former self. A relic of a by-gone age where creativity had value, and skill was paramount. The puppet maker had forgotten far more about the art of creation than most had ever known, the slow leak of memories over the course of years. Some days, he no longer recognized himself in the mirror.
No one came for the puppet maker. No one cared for him. The only children he had ever bore hung on the wall of his basement, those ugly vessels for his love, with their large round heads and wrongly numbered wooden arms. He had sacrificed it all for them, sacrificed so he might bring wonderment to a public whose eyes grew increasingly duller the longer he performed for them, and at the end when no one seemed to notice or care about the art of bringing life to the lif
eless, those bedeviled creations on his workshop wall did nothing but stare back at him unblinkingly, waiting for him to pass on. Unnoticed and alone.
At first, he did not understand the letter from Dr. Toth. He knew the man’s name, albeit distantly, but could not recall the context. Had they met, he wondered, in some past life, when the puppet maker was greeted warmly by wealthy and poor alike? Time slipped so easily from his recall, faster than the pills could staunch. And the note ... the words were a jumble, their wavy scrawl like that of a palsied but familiar hand. He removed his glasses in hopes things would become clearer, but the words merely danced on the page, moving in and out of focus—sometimes, disappearing altogether like phantoms. Even the paper they were written upon was strange, folded and creased so often it felt like linen. When through sheer force of will the puppet maker managed to fix the words in place, he did not like what emerged.
Mr. L——; I have need of your services. Please come at once. —Toth
The puppet maker reread the note, then added it to the fire of his stove. There was nothing for which he could be needed. The only thing he had ever been capable of required use of his hands, his crooked old hands ... and they could not be trusted to obey. The doctor did not have wealth enough to stymie the encroaching years that freely robbed the puppet maker of everything, left him forgotten and forgetting. Nonetheless, he later found himself in his workshop, unaware of how he arrived there, staring at the equipment concealed beneath dust-covered sheets. Had he descended the stairs? And what had the marionettes hanging on the wall witnessed? For they had witnessed something. It was clear from the way their hollow black eyes stared.
Perhaps days or weeks or months passed before a relentless pounding upon his door startled the puppet maker. Awoken from a medicinal haze, he shuffled to the door on a leg full of pins and peered through the window at the long black towncar idling on the street. Its driver had already reach the door of the house, and something about the man’s disquieting features filled the puppet maker with the coldest apprehension. Something that prevented him from opening the door.
The Grimscribe's Puppets Page 20
