400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  She shouldn’t have come, he thought, but there was no way she could go back now. He forged toward her while the mob stood paralyzed, packed tight as beans in a jar, trapped between the soldiers in the terminal and those that had just arrived.

  “Give me your hand,” he said. Her touch was hot; he could not pull her from the vise of bodies. “You must come with me now, Angelica.”

  “All right, Joseph. Yes—”

  He tugged but her hand slipped away, carried by a tidal shift in the crowd. His box of attars snagged, holding him back; he lifted it free, held it aloft, and started after her.

  “Angelica!”

  He searched for her among the many heads, but it was a different face that he finally recognized, at the same instant he saw her between him and the doorway. Miguel stood at the threshold. His grin was simultaneous with Joseph’s groan.

  Angelica did not see Miguel, but he spotted her. “Here!” she cried, looking straight at Joseph.

  Miguel shouted a command and soldiers pressed in around him. Joseph fell back, but he could not bring down his arm for a moment; he could feel himself losing his grip on the chest. As he jerked forward to keep it balanced on his palm, the crowd parted miraculously, leaving an empty corridor down which Miguel—or Angelica—could walk to him. It was not a miracle, however: it was the guns.

  She rushed toward him.

  “Down!” he cried, too late, and threw himself sideways, abandoning the box of essences, reaching for his life.

  Everyone fell.

  The shooting went on forever.

  Mass burial, bodies still writhing, presided over by the deific voices of the guns pronouncing death for all. He crawls through a tunnel of flesh and nails on a floor slick with blood. Broken glass cuts his hands, his blood joins the rest, but in such insignificant quantities that he wishes he could laugh.

  Then he sees Angelica’s face, cooling eyes and tattered throat, and screaming he drags himself backward, though never far enough. Everywhere he looks, he sees her face. Deeper into the nightmare now, he sees the scattered vials, all shattered, distillations mingling with the vital liquids of the dead and dying. The perfumes blot out the smell of blood, bringing a whiff of heaven, or delirium. A woman with half a skull sits up laughing, ripping at her hair, overcome by the stench of rapture. Someone howls an ecstatic prayer. Miguel stands over his men, regarding his handiwork, while over his face parades a chaos of conflicting emotions: pleasure, anger, innocence, malevolence, flickering and disjointed. Then, as the cloud of scent-molecules becomes thoroughly combined, and as Joseph holds his breath, every emotion in the air comes into Miguel’s face at once. It should be a phenomenon like the joining of a spectrum’s colors into unity, into brilliant white light. But it is not at all like that. No matter how many attars Joseph had captured, he had by no means forced the whole range of humanity into his bottles; critical things are missing, essences he’d never had time or thought to distill.

  It was not white light that came pouring from the soldiers' faces: it was pure madness.

  Joseph worked his way backward, head bowed, breathing through his collar. The dying crowd had begun to roar.

  A hand fastened on his sleeve and he pried it off, gasping at the sudden bite of nails; the involuntary gulp of scent provoked a kind of fury, gave him the strength to tear himself away, to keep moving.

  He sipped the air slowly but it was too much; he wanted to take in huge draughts. Now he exhaled, fighting the tide of atoms streaming in against his olfactory nerves, hoping that he could hold onto himself an instant longer. It might be long enough.

  The guns held a brief conversation. He glanced up as the soldiers at the rear door toppled; the customs official stared at him as he crept past, though his eye was not in his cheek.

  His heart beat against his ribs, clamoring for oxygen. Only when he had reached the far door did he look back, and all he could see was the dead. Miguel and his men lay staring, heaped around the door they had been so eager to enter; his cousin’s face was fixed in madness, as he would ever remember it.

  Then he was outside, inhaling great breaths of the warm dusty air, absorbing the whole of the night.

  Ahead of him he heard a metallic whining and saw a row of bright lozenges floating in the air. Long moments passed before he realized that it was an airplane. He shouted. A figure appeared in the doorway, hurrying to pull the door shut, and he screamed again at the silhouette. The person stopped, uncertain.

  “Wait for me!” he cried, on his feet and running. “I’m alone, please don’t go, wait for me.”

  The short run took an age; the night had made distances deceptive. The stairs were a mile high, or the scents he’d inhaled made them seem that way. Now all he could smell was blood. It soaked his clothes, engloved his hands. The door full of light was before him; he tumbled in and heard it shut. He lay on his face, hearing voices above him, feeling the plane begin to move slowly, jostling. He knew the instant it left the ground because he began to sob with relief and terror, grieving for Angelica even as he gave thanks for his own survival. Most of the emotions passing in the flood were unfamiliar to him. Very few had mixed with the blood on the terminal floor.

  “Can you hear me, sir? Can you get up? We have a seat for you, you’ll be more comfortable.”

  He rolled over weakly and saw a black face looking down at him. Ife or Nmimi or Fombeh or Kaak, he couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter which. It was simply another face, a human face, a living being. He reached up to take it in his hands.

  “Your name, sir? Can you tell me your name?”

  “My name?” He choked, almost laughed, remembering in time not to give himself away.

  “I’m afraid if you’re injured there’s not much we can do. We have a first aid kit, but no doctor aboard.”

  “No doctor?” he said. “Yes there is, yes there is. I’m a doctor, my friend. Doctor Dodo, that’s me.”

  * * *

  “Mad Wind” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Century #4 (Jan./Feb. 1996), edited by Robert K.J. Killheffer.

  TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT

  (An Excerpt from Mock-Up,

  An Abandoned Novel)

  When Morris was seventeen, he didn't see much of his parents. His stepfather was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying with his customers in those same tubs. Morris's mother had accompanied her husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband's behavior—though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times—had uncovered some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral pharmaceutical companions.

  Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in search of something he would know when he saw it—in search of some magic that might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the radio spewed Barry Manilow ("At the Copa—Copacabana. . .") and Eddie Money ("I got. . .two tickets to paradise. . .won't you. . .pack your bags and we'll leave tonight,") and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him—as if the dream of packing his bags for paradise were so
mething his spirit yearned for. He nearly drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into oblivion.

  Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys and Copper Pennys and 7/11's, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise unremarkable Holiday Inn: "Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!"

  He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer, and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie Walker Red (his stepfather's drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and then a third time before braving the party again.

  He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him he vaguely recognized from the jackets of novels he had glanced at, if not actually finished. The faces seemed to swim and bob around the room, so he was less than eager to approach any of them, until two came rather close to him. A woman and a man, both like enough to have been brother and sister, with similar hair long and curled, although the woman was tall and very thin, while the man was quite short and plump. Hers was the deeper voice; his was very faint and distant, almost indistinct, as if lost in his thick moustach and bush of beard just shot through with a few strands of grey. Her hair had much more iron in it, threads that stood out like white wire, unruly hair that was held in place with a unicorn pin, which made him think of virgins, which Morris still was. Their eyes were the same shade of green, but that didn't necessarily mean they were related; it might have been only the reason they had been drawn together. Morris's own eyes were green, after all, and now they had been drawn to him.

  The couple eventually took him aside, although not without filling his cup again, and introduced themselves as Janet Kutz and Sherwood Spierman, authors, editors, partners in a vast enterprise of fictional empire building. Under the name of Jan Kutzwood they had penned more than a dozen volumes of fantasy, a triology of trilogies and sequelae. They had edited, they told him, nearly twenty anthologies under various other names. Not to mention solo novels each had produced and published in the last several decades. He had been vaguely aware of their presence on the edge of the book racks, though he could not bring himself to tell them that theirs were the last sorts of books he would ever turn to. He read science fiction for its stranger aspects, for the truly wild talents harbored and hiding there, not for the tame generic stuff. He would rather re-read Gravity's Rainbow for the third time than open volume one of the Dragonstaff Chronicles.

  The couple, whom he came to think of as the Kutzwoods, since that was the shared identity that had brought them to the convention, continually implied that there were depths to themselves that no one suspected. . .that they dared not reveal in their books, although they would bare the secrets for a small, select circle of friends.

  What this baring eventually amounted to was the somewhat anticlimactic culmination of an event Morris had been looking forward to with mixed anticipation and dread for the entirety of his adolescent life. It required all of his considerable sense of humor to get through it without laughing; but afterward he felt anything but joyful or amused.

  He had drunk enough that night to render his memories of the event patchwork and hazy and warped. In the least pleasant of them, he was vomiting while Janet rubbed his shoulders and whispered that yes, he must cast out the poisons of guilt and insecurity that mundane life had instilled in him. He vomitted Johnny Walker Red and something else besides, a gluey white foam that rode on the surface of the burning scotch, which he couldn't remember ingesting (quite), although he feared that if he thought about it hard enough he would remember, and that might be even worse. Sherwood hovered above him, near the toilet bowl, throughout his wife's minisrations, with a distraught look; and Sherwood was quite naked, his penis looking raw and red, ropy and wrung-out between his fat thighs. The sight made Morris gag again and commence the further emptying of his guts.

  He was not sure where exactly in the evening this memory occurred, but it was unrelated (except thematically) to the others that surrounded it. The best of them, he supposed, was in the darkened Holiday Inn room, on the creaking bed, with Janet bouncing on his crotch, then leaning forward to rub her almost perfectly flat chest against his own, a sensation that thrilled him even though it felt like someone pressing pencil erasers over his nipples. He realized that he was in her, inside a woman, although he couldn't quite feel himself down there; as if from the waist down he was numb. But even the qualified pleasures of this memory were further qualified when he turned his head and saw Sherwood kneeling on the floor beside the bed, right up against the mattress, clutching at the bedspread as he bucked and banged against the bedframe, as if humping the tight crease between mattress and boxspring while his wife humped Morris.

  And another memory, of his face between Janet's legs, the musky, leathery, horse-like scent of her, as if she had been riding in the saddle all day and her thighs were lathered with horse-lather. Her thighs gripping tight around his head as she shook and tremored, and he gripped at her nonexistent breasts, and at the same time felt something sucking hesitantly at his own limp penis, and the brushy sensation of a beard between his legs.

  He could not remember, further, how the evening ended; but he did recall clearly waking in the darkened room and slipping out and into the parking lot and finding his car, and finishing his night's sleep there, until a cop woke him and sent him on his way. And he supposed that would have been all for the Kutzwoods, except that for some reason during the night he had given them his address, and they began to send him letters and copies of their books.

  The letters evoked indistinct memories of conversations they'd had at the convention, a generalized plumbing of his bored and anguished adolescent soul. They meant to minister to him long-distance, he realized; and it was some kind of reflection on the state of his day-to-day life that after a few months of receiving their correspondence, and responding with a few halfhearted postcards, he began to think about that night at the hotel with a quickening, and he masturbated to images of Janet squirming against him, and the taste of her came into his mouth; and even the thought of Sherwood did not completely put him off anymore. So when they extended an offer for him to come visit them in Berkeley, to spend "a weekend among the mysteries," as they put it—he listened to his mother and his stepfather arguing in the living room, and immediately picked up the phone and called them and agreed to come if they paid for his ticket.

  The Kutzwoods had always been coy about "the mysteries" until the night they collected him at the Oakland Airport. They were different tonight, in their own element, looking supernal and aristocratic in black robes, moving gracefully among the airport's ranks of Krishna beggars. Even when he saw their broken-down wreck of a truck, he thought there was something transcendent about them.

  He had visited San Francisco once with his mother, but never Berkeley. He had no idea where he was when they pulled up on a quiet street among quiet houses and took him down an overgrown path to a small house that looked weirdly slumped upon its tiny plot of ground. Somehow, as prolific authors, he had figured they would be living in some grand estate; but it became obvious to him that the place was a decrepit old farmhouse lacking (his biological father was a contractor) even a foundation. The walls were covered with mold; green fur had climbed the curtains; there was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets. He drank wine from a milk glass until he had swallowed enough to reveal rings of hardened matter like the remains of a petrified parfait. Scraggly marijuana plants grew under fluorescents in the bathroom, and a softshell turtle lazed in an algal green scum in the bathtu
b, eyeing him aggressively when he leaned to look inside, in disbelief. There was seepage and brine stains in the squelching carpets, and the toilet was so calcified that there was hardly an opening left for drainage, and so it was full of paper and cigarette butts and tampons, and he went instead into the backyard under a pretense of touring the house and pissed near a rabbit hutch, hoping he could survive the weekend without taking a shit.

  The Kutzwoods were not alone in the house. They had roommates, somewhat younger than themselves, but no more wholesome. They looked like refugees, junkies, and he distinctly saw scabby tracks on the arms of one or two, which they scratched distractedly. It did little to reassure Morris when these other roommates vanished into their fetid little rooms and reappeared wearing black robes like those Janet and Sherwood wore. He sat in a corner of the front room, trying to avoid contact with any and all surfaces, and let his eyes roam the titles of paperbacks crammed on the shelves that ran from floor to ceiling along every wall. There were pots of half-eaten food on the floor, looking like charred soybeans, solidified and clouded with mold. Dishes where food crumbs mingled with cigarette butts. He distracted himself finding titles he hadn't read, or had the slightest interest in reading, and at least unearthed a huge cache of Philip K. Dick, all stacked more or less in one teetering pile. Most were so yellow they looked pissed upon, rescued from garbage bins or incinerators. Old Ace-doubles, Dr. Futurity, Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, the Man Who Japed. He hadn't read most of these. But others, more recent, were on the top of his own stacks of favorite and frequently re-read titles: Martian Time-Slip, The Crack in Space, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle. When Janet came through beaded doorway, he raised a copy of Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, as if in a toast.