Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  She took her time changing and arranging herself, let herself space out in the process. To assist, she slapped some Suzanne Vega into the compact disc player, let the sad sweet music take the back door in to settle over her subconscious.

  And in that realm of thought unfocused, she thought about J. E: his sweet and sad and savage sides, the pain-filled heart sliced razor-thin and draped across his every word. What would it be like to know a man whose walls were so thin, nerves so close to the edge? What would it be like to be such a person?

  She thought about herself, then, with uncustomary scrutiny: thought about her own walls, their staggering density; thought about the things behind them, so well concealed that they scarcely touched upon her surface life at all, so utterly sealed off from light and life that they had begun to mummify, turn dry and brittle, flesh paper-thin over sharp-boned petrified husk…

  . .. and it flashed her back to the Mexican expedition immediately preceding this phase of the Meryl Daly Story. The endless party weekend that ranged up and down the Mexican Riviera: falling in with the batch of rowdy rich kids who trashed the lobby bar at the Hotel El Mirador in Acapulco, slugging back margaritas until she passed out on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, causing a scandal on the Baja by bare-breasting herself by the pool at the Hotel Mision de Loreto.

  And, of course, that fateful trip to Guanajuato.

  It started out as a goof: chartering a private plane to Leon and then cabbing the twenty miles over to the town, all to check out the stiffs in the Museo de Momias. She didn’t even remember the name of the guy who showed her the postcards, the guy she dragged with her, Todd or Tad or whatever.

  But she remembered the postcards themselves: the bodies dried and yellow as old newspaper bales, lined up along the narrow corridor that two hundred pesos would gain you entrance to, dozens of them, naked and stiff and held up with baling wire, ex-citizens of Guanajuato or unfortunate visitors who opted to stay forever, their families unable to purchase them more permanent rest. She looked at the postcards and knew that she wanted to see them, those dearly departed sons and uncles and fathers and mothers, the papyrus flesh of their sunken faces pulled into something that looked like a laugh and looked like a scream, a hideous shrieking belly-buster at their own eternal predicament, cavities caving in where life used to burst forth, withered loins attesting to the light-years between the place they occupied and the passions that once ruled over them, brittle-stick fingers reaching up to curl around absolutely nothing.

  She looked at the postcards and knew, deep inside, that she had to see them, had to gaze into their dead dry eyes, had to reach out and rap upon their hollow breasts…

  Her disappointment upon arriving there was a mystery to poor ol’ Tad, as was the fit she threw when she found that curators had tidied up a bit since those postcard photos had been taken: laying the mummies out in wood-and-glass display boxes, encased and enclosed and utterly out of reach. He didn’t understand why she stood shaking when she got to the last chamber, were the cesarean madonna and child stood, alone in their case, frozen in time. He didn’t notice the bulb-headed infant, grinning its blind and gummy grin, still cabled to the sagging belly of the mother who stood hunch-shouldered, mouth wide, bare and bald and ready to howl until the end of time.

  Poor ol’ Tad didn’t pick up on any of that, and he certainly didn’t connect it to the fact that Meryl dragged him back to the hotel without so much as another word, blew back a bottle of tequila, and just about fucked him blind…

  … and that was just about enough reminiscing for now, thank you. She had come too close to the cracks in the vault where the things she did not care to know were kept. It was time, once again, to clamp down hard. Get down to business. This business of life. Certainly, Katie would be home soon. And then the fun—tittee rump, tittee rump—could begin.

  Meryl looked at the clock, was amazed to discover that more than an hour had passed. It was closing in on six o’clock, and she was still sitting around in her underwear. Hastily, she kicked herself into motion: sliding the spider-web stockings on, the lacy tap pants, the complete ensemble. By 6:15, she was ready for Katie to put on her face.

  But Katie was nowhere to be found.

  Fine, Meryl thought. A little late. No problem. There was still a little brandy in the glass, lots more where that | came from.

  And three more stories to go.

  At 6:25, she turned the first page of GENTLEMEN. Twenty-five extremely uncomfortable minutes later, she laid the folder shut. If the last story had been depressing, then this one was positively numbing in its cold and hopeless horror. Even the ending, with its worst-case optimism, could not overcome the terrible chill his words had placed at her core.

  And the scar on her wrist had begun to dully throb.

  “That’s enough out of you,” she told him, by way of addressing the walls. “This shit is the last thing I need right now.” The walls said nothing in response, merely soaked up her energy and fired it right back, even weirder than before.

  Meryl spent the next hour drinking and pacing, drinking and pacing, while Suzanne Vega played over and over and the darkness deepened outside her window. Periodically, a thought of comparable darkness slipped into her brainscape; she slapped it back as soon as it came. She would not let her demons get the best of her. No way in hell. She would keep herself level and steady and cool.

  And when Katie got home … oh, when Katie got home …

  She stopped herself, lest she get carried away. There was no point in getting mad at Katie. The girl was a flake; that was all there was to it. A cute little flake with a heart of cotton candy and the better judgment of a moth that has just hit the flame.

  Like this whole parade business, for example. In certain respects, blowing off the parade was the good news: the longer she waited, the less she believed that letting herself get eyeball-fucked by the freaks in Washington Square was such a terrific idea. They wanted fun? They should go as clowns. Preferably asexual ones.

  But that was Katie’s problem: the Powers That Be, whatever they were, had fashioned her into a blonde ticking bombshell and then said, “Okay, honey. You’re on your own.” And look where it had gotten her. In many ways, she was just a ditzier version of the girl in J. P’s story, doomed to bounce from loser to loser, and never quite getting the message.

  “So,” she muttered, announcing her decision. “That settles that. I’ll just keep this on ‘til she gets here, rub her face in it a little.” She laughed, swigged a bit more brandy down. “Let guilt do the rest. A little Jewish jiujitsu.”

  There was only one problem.

  It was already eight o’clock.

  So what would she do if Katie never showed up? How to spend this lovely fiin-filled Halloween night? Already, she could hear the ruckus echoing down the streets: evidently, the parade was well under way. Should she just forget her date completely, put on some normal clothes, go check out the spectacle? Should she sit down and master 150 Ways to Play Solitaire? Should she—heaven forbid—do the sensible thing: maybe get a good night’s sleep?

  On the stereo, Suzanne Vega sang:

  “And she says, ‘I’ve come to set a twisted thing straight’

  And she says, ‘I’ve come to lighten this dark heart’

  And she takes my wrist, I feel her imprint of fear

  And I said, ‘I never thought of finding you here’”

  She didn’t know why her emotions chose that moment to bushwhack her: the brandy, the tension, the mummies within, the haunting dreamlike quality of the music itself. Whatever it was, it put a ripple in the world that stopped Meryl dead in her tracks: her eyes grown suddenly hot with warning, a liquid chill rolling down her spine, a tightness in the back of her throat that spread out into her shoulders, her fingertips, the small of her back.

  And one other thing: a feeling so incongruous—so familiar and yet so out of context—that it dizzied her in its grip. Not just the feeling of being watched: that came and went. No, this was more o
f a physical thing, like sensing a warm body just behind you.

  A feeling of proximity.

  Of someone, very close…

  “Jesus,” she whispered, catching herself. The air felt suddenly leaden; she needed to sit down. She turned, brandy glass sloshing slightly, and moved back to the couch.

  But the echo of the feeling lingered, brought strange thoughts to roost with it. She looked at the last two folders beside her. The last two stories. All that stood in the way.

  It didn’t matter what the feeling really meant. She would never know.

  And so, was free.

  To draw her own conclusions…

  DEADLINES

  Kane watched the old man kill himself for a good fifteen years before he finally got it right.

  It took that long, he supposed, to prepare the intricate implements of his destruction: to allow the dissatisfactions, the failures and the unfulfilled dreams of a lifetime to simmer to perfection, like some old secret family recipe.

  “The accumulation,” his father said, clear as a bell. Kane stood by the big hospital bed and watched his father fumble with the restraints, canvas tentacles tethering his wasted limbs to the cold steel frame. His hair was an ash-white nest of snakes rimming the dome of his skull, static electricity from the sheets making the individual strands waft in the perfectly still air of the ward.

  “The accumulation.”

  His eyes stared quizzically up through the ceiling: even half-focused in fear, they were blue and piercing as shards of ice. They were a fine family trait, like the aquiline nose, and the intelligence and the wit, and the penchant for substance abuse and self-destruction. They had been engaged, for the last few hours or so, in bewildered contemplation of the miracle undulating before him: a sooty, black snow that drifted in from the corridor and across the ceiling, piling up in zigs and zags and artful twirls and swirls, only to rain down like mist and stick to his fingers like tiny, gummy bugs..

  “Don’t you see them?” he asked Kane anxiously. “For heaven’s sake, they’re plain as day.”

  “I don’t see ‘em, Dad,” Kane replied. “I’m sorry.”

  It was true. Kane was very sorry, and he really wished he could see the black snow, or the gummy bugs, or the endless corridors that stretched out past the walls, or any of the sundry other visions his father had wandered through in the last fifty hours. It might give him a clue to what lay behind the shadowy, fluttering hoods that shaded those icy eyes, a key to unlock the hell the old man had built.

  “It’s accumulating,” his father reiterated, twisting purposefully toward the edge of the bed. “This is terrible.”

  No shit. And the old man was damned well going to do something about it. He struggled weakly against his bonds, expending what little strength remained in pull after pull. Eventually the simple physics of the situation prevailed, and he slumped back against his pillow in defeat. The gaze he turned back to Kane was that of an ancient, frightened child, encased in a prison of uncomprehending and dying flesh. The straps had left deep, purplish-brown bruises on his wrists and ankles. His upper torso was clad in a johnny harness, it utility disguised in an ugly plaid cloth that was possibly someone’s idea of a jaunty robe but more likely somebody’s idea of a bad joke. The restraints did their duty: not allowing him to get up, nor turn over, nor allow any limb to touch any other. They kept him centered on the bed.

  They kept him under control.

  A necessary evil, the night nurse said. He had pulled out his catheter twice last night; Kane winced to even think about it. Hell, he’d even yanked his IV out four times, all in similar moments of delirium.

  But that’s what the DTs are all about, aren’t they? Kane thought bitterly. Delirium Tremens. Hallucinations. Disorientation. Panic. Terror. If the stroke didn’t kill him outright, the DTs still might. Isn’t that what the doctor said? We’ll just have to wait and see.

  Kane was tired of waiting. He’d been waiting for a long time now. He wondered if he was a monster for wanting to just get on with it. Or maybe he was just impatient with the method. Because, when push came to the shove, Kane’s old man had chosen to kill himself the old-fashioned way.

  Inch by inch.

  He had measured his death each day in his glass, with a squirt of reconstituted lime juice and a dash of club soda. But mostly with an endless, incremental measure of Bowman’s Virginia Vodka, which had to rate right up there with Orwell’s Victory Gin in pure viscosity and brain-rotting vileness. Kane’s old man went through a bottle every other day; sometimes more, never less.

  Kane could never understand it, though he was able to log the ritual in meticulous detail: every morning, sometime after hacking up great burbling clots of the previous day’s tar ‘n’ nicotine quotient but well before lunch, he’d start to drink. A couple of years ago he was able to wait until after lunch, when it became somewhat more respectable, even rakish. But as time wore on, it became harder and harder to resist the urge to sneak just a squeak of it into his coffee. To get the ball rolling.

  By early afternoon, it was downhill all the way: lime and soda time, and to hell with the hindmost. The glass would seem almost magical in its ability to maintain its inch of sauce, no matter how many sips he took. Of course, he’d have to freshen it up periodically. But he only really drained it two, maybe three times in a day; hence, if pressed he could ever claim that he had only two or three drinks a day. It was a neat trick, one that allowed him to damn near buy hrs own bullshit.

  Until now, Kane thought. Kinda hard to deny the fucking hallucinations, isn’t it, Dad? Hard to have a mild case of the DTs. Like being kinda pregnant.

  Or slightly dead…

  Kane could hear the tik-tik-tik of high heels echoing up the hall. Mother coming, he just knew it. He watched his dad settle into the pillow, watched those tired eyes roll deep into their plum-colored sockets. Out again. The doctors said it might be a reaction to the Librium and the Haldol, or any of the other drugs that formed the narcotic insulation that held his demons at bay. Then again it might be simple swelling of the brain. Kinda hard to tell, until the delirium subsided.

  Tik-tik-tik. Any second now. He didn’t know if he could handle it; comfort and solace seemed as utterly beyond him as the sun and the moon. He tasted the bile and the frustration welling up somewhere deep inside, and contemplated spewing it out even as he understood the essential pointlessness of the act. Why bother? At this late stage, it would be like kicking sick puppies. Anger would accomplish nothing, and solve even less. There was nothing left to do with it.

  And nowhere for it to go.

  But closer, ever closer.

  Toward the deadline…

  Explanations were always cheap, always plentiful, and always off the mark. The socially acceptable suicides were like that. If you were a misanthrope, at least, it was different: if you ate a bullet or stuck your head in the oven or jumped off a bridge, you usually left a note, some pathetically touching, unheeded cry for help. Tsk-tsk. Everyone knew your number.

  But if on the other hand you subscribed to the approved methodology, note-leaving was unthinkable. After all, that implied choice. You couldn’t suck down two packs a day for twenty or thirty years and then pin a note to your lapel, now could you? And you couldn’t very well be expected to piss on such great American institutions as the happy hour.

  No, the upright suicides were a different breed. They built the instruments of their destruction bit by bit, so that when those suckers finally fired up it was almost like a miracle, almost like an accident.

  And they left their notes, such as they were, pinned to the people they left behind. You didn’t so much see them as feel them, probing like blind fingers over braille, reading the bumps of the ritual scarification. Playing connect-the-dots with the moments of a lifetime.

  This, of course, led to endless speculations, endless readings of clues. The old man had no coping mechanism. The old man just gave up trying. Booze did it. Smoking did it. Stress did it. The devil did it.
The list went on and on. Kane always figured that if he had to pick, it would have to be all of the above and more. Much more.

  Now that it was in his face, Kane saw a whole ‘nother reason altogether.

  Deadline, (ded’ lin’) n. 1. A time limit, as for the completion of newspaper copy or other work, payment of debts, etc. 2. Originally, within the limits of a prison, a boundary li ne that a prisoner might not cross under penalty of death.

  It seemed as though the torture would never end.

  First, the stroke: number two, with a bullet. He’d been warned; number one hit the charts five years ago, and he got off with no paralysis, no impairment, a clean bill of health. His doctors told him he was incredibly lucky, give up the cigarettes and the booze and the fatty foods and he’d live another twenty years.

  He took their advice, for a couple of months. Then he went back to the old ways.

  “You can’t keep this up,” Kane told him. It was one of their home-from-college-man-to-man-late-night-drink-‘n’-rap sessions: Kane downing too many beers while his father nursed that bottomless inch-deep pool in his glass. A great time for honest forthrightness and candor. “You’ll die if you do. Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll die anyway,” his father replied.

  “Yeah, but this way you’ll die sooner.”

  “Listen, little buddy,” Kane’s father said authoritatively, using a tone that he was sure reeked of wisdom but to Kane simply reeked. “A man only has four pleasures in this life… Food … Sex … Smoke… and Drink.”

  Kane couldn’t believe his ears. It was a lunatic reasoning, like listening to Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, going “MMMMM … Food, good … Drink, good … Fire, BAAAADDD…” It was nuts.

  He watched as his father sucked in a thick acrid plume off a Winchester cigarillo. He actually inhaled it; Christ, he thought, who inhales cigar smoke? It was the smoker’s equivalent of mainlining. He exhaled in a violent coughing fit, as if something wanted out of his chest desperately. Kane watched him contort, choke, and gradually bring it under control.