Dead Lines
Page 25
I will find the key to this prison. I will end this game.
It wasn’t a very hard thing to do, physically speaking. Certainly no harder than bribing the mortician. It was a private room, at the end of the hall, and the acoustics were such that you could hear approaching footsteps from clear down to the nurse’s station. It didn’t even take very long. The pillow was big, and very soft, and he was so weak. His lungs were godawful bad, practically emphysemic. Who would notice one more brief choking spell?
I will know what lies behind those sad blue eyes.
Kane looked at the skull. The beetles went about their task, unmindful of the audience.
Very soon.
Meryl turned the last page with trembling fingers, reached for the brandy, pulled her hand back sharply.
He had come too close, too close this time. He had dragged her down to the secret place and ground her face against its walls. The reek of self-destruction was a tangible thing in the air, a rotting stench that clung to her like night sweat. She could almost hear the flies. ^
“Please,” she said, imploring the walls. The walls hung on her words. “Come back. Come back. Don’t take me all the way down here and leave me, don’t… just don’t let it end like this, please…”
She reached out her hand for the final folder, hesitated an inch from its manila skin. There was no way around the dread she felt. It was as real as the paper on which it focused. She prayed for the next words to bear her some comfort, to shine with some shred of the vanishing light.
She prayed for those things.
But only the walls were listening.
THE DIFFERENCE
Part I: Terminal
Blood and dust and frozen rain: the tastes and textures of the world. Max Hart carried the first through the second and out into the third: away from the screech of the South Ferry station, to be wetly pelted and embraced by a night as black as a cancerous lung. Boot-heel clack and puddle splash, step after step, in pain and on purpose.
Then through the smoke-caked door of glass.
And back to dust again.
Inside the terminal, only one of the escalators was working. Up and up, not down and down. “This must be some kind of a joke,” he said, wiping ice and water from face and hair. “You got your metaphors crossed. To go down is easy. Going up is what’s hard.”
Nothing new. God was lying again. He’d have thought that he’d have gotten used to it by now, but no. God’s treachery was one big fat endless surprise. The world was His jack-in-the-box, and He held the crank, so you never knew when or where that sinister clownface would rear up, leering. You only knew, if you ever got wise, that it would. Sooner or later.
Max Hart stared at the broken escalator and wished that it was working. He’d have liked to walk up as it rolled down, bucked the tide one last time before drowning beneath it.
No such luck.
Blood and dust and frozen rain.
He took the escalator, as God had willed, secure in the knowledge that what goes up must come down.
The Manhattan terminal of the Staten Island Ferry was a* sprawling concrete Purgatory. Max slipped his quarter in the slot and slid through the turnstile, began the final wait.
He wasn’t alone. Dozens of lost souls were in attendance, scattered throughout the vast interior. Most of them didn’t seem to know exactly how lost they were. They were lining up for coffee and beer, hot dogs and cookies and grim psuedo-pizza; they were milling about the magazine stand, lapping up scandals from the alleged lives of vapid celebs and corrupt politicians, some straining their craniums all the way up to the V. C. Andrews and Judith Krantz-populated heights of contemporary literature. For every dozen that kept to themselves, a cool dozen more were shucking and jiving. The air was alive with their echoing laughter.
They didn’t know—they couldn’t know—how completely the joke was on them.
Max didn’t care. He was beyond caring. Max was just waiting for the great door to open. Depending on which clock he believed, it would be anywhere from five to twenty-five minutes. He prayed for the former and banked on the latter, tried very hard to keep his mind as empty as his eyes and his heart had become.
Fat fucking chance.
There was a pane of glass in front of him, windowing in to the drunks lined up at the terminal bar. He didn’t see them, didn’t see them at all. His eyes were locked on the pale reflection that stared back at him, a ghost already…
The shade in the glass stood just under six feet. Its face was puffy and milk-spider pale, the cheekbones buried under scruff and swelling. The soul-black eyes were moist glinting islands, adrift in pools of purple bruise-flesh surrounding either side of the broken nose.
The shade was dressed in battered chic, high style gone to brawling seed. There was blood on the scarf around its neck, blood down the front of its open jacket. The white cloth wrapped around its hand was almost entirely red: a quaint reminder of the last mirror that had reminded it of who it was…
Max Hart stared at the shadowed glass one moment longer, then turned away. He did not want to see himself, but at least the urge to smash was gone. It had been beaten out of him some forty-five minutes earlier, along with the rest of his will to live, by a surly McSortey’s waiter who’d had every right to punch his lights out. He had, after all, chosen to go nuts in a public place, destroying private property and screaming his lungs out; it had earned him a very public beating, and a boot out the door into his own private hell.
It was no big deal.
It was just the last straw.
Last straw plucked from a scarecrow’s gut, leaving the empty fabric shell to cave in on itself…
And that, of course, threw the whole thing wide open. Let it all hang out, as the groovy denizens of the sixties had been wont to say, fucking baby-boomers who’d grown up thinking they were the only important generation in human history. Yeah, they’d been known to say all kinds of shit that the darker days a-comin’ had proven pathetic: things like sock it to me and I really grok your vibes, far out, man and flower power and you can’t trust anyone over thirty.
But of all the stupid things they’d said, the dumbest and most pernicious of the batch was all you need is love. Mostly because it sounded so good, it sounded so right; when the Beatles sang it, you had to believe it was true.
More lies from God. More goddam lies. All Max had to do was look around him—even easier, look inside at his own charmed life—to blow that misbegotten bastard sentiment right out of the water for good.
Oh, yeah, Max growled to himself in silence, tears taking form in his pummeled eyes. All you need is love. But a rubber ain’t a bad idea, either, because all you really need is herpes or AIDS or maybe just a nice simple unwanted pregnancy. In which case, all you need is an abortion, and all you need is for them to fuck it up. Yeah, that’s the ticket! all you need is a botched abortion. Then all you need is to run away. All you need is a series of accidents, a healthy dose of cowardice, and a nice ledge to jump from. All you need is an empty bed to scream in as you lay awake in the dark of a night that never ends. All you need is a butchered baby whose face you’ll never see, a woman who you thought you loved and whose face you’ll never see again, all you need is love but all you’ll get is the hate she feels and the hate you feel for yourself…
Then the great door opened, and he took his tears with him as he followed the lost ones who now filed out.
Toward the death ship.
And the other shore.
Part II: Death Ship
It was one of the old ones, for which he was grateful. It was, in fact, his favorite: the one and only Death Ship. Max felt a pang of something almost like joy, more like vindication, as he set foot on its icy deck.
He hated the new boats. Floating bus stations, Cassie had called them, and Max could not improve on the appellation. Plastic seats of orange and yellow, as far as the eye could see. Ticky-tack snack bar. Balconies enclosed with smoke-shittied safety glass. They were horrid contraptions
, bereft of charm, funkless as the smooth expanse where Barbie and Ken’s genitals were meant to be.
But this one—the Death Ship, the John F Kennedy—was without a doubt the cream of the Staten Island fleet. It had character out the ass. It had character like Humphrey Bogart’s face had character, and was probably just about as old as the best of Bogie’s films. The seats were made of solid wood; no goddam plastic here. They looked lived-in, the way your grampa’s favorite rocker did. The snack bar was crummy, but at least it didn’t look like a Burger King caught in a trash compactor.
Best of all was the upper deck, with the open-air balconies adorning the sides. You could stand up there, leaning out over the rails, and stare straight down at the brackish water of the upper New York Harbor. No murky, spittoon-flavored safety glass between you and the Jersey insecticide vats, the eternally waving Statue of Liberty.
That was the important thing: no safety glass.
Max stood on the lower deck, watching the last vehicles wheel aboard, nestling themselves in the three aisles of parking womb that the ferry provided. Then the crewmen cordoned off the end zone with a stout length of chain, unhooked the boat from the loading ramp, and they were ready to cast off toward the black horizon. This had always been his favorite part of the journey; no way was he going to miss it now.
Standing there, watching the boat’s slow disengagement and retreat, was purest real-life cinema. The rumble of the massive engines, shuddering up through the soles of his feet. The white foamspray of the deep dark water, madly churning in the widening gap between the hull and the receding shore. The gates at the end of the vehicle ramp, / fading back to the vanishing point, the great weathered and beaten wooden walls looming up and out to either side, the vista slowly widening, broadening, spreading out as rumble turned to roar and foamspray segued into cold mock-percolating swath and trail, the black-irised camera lens panning regally back and further back as the panorama quantum-leaped in magnitude, majestic sweep too huge for tiny camera-brain, sucking air from camera-lungs as the edge of the city unfolded, revealed itself, bared its infinite glittering glimmering blind glass eyes, doorways to the soul of the city, to him …
.. . and he felt the pull of it, the yank of his spine, the tug of lifelines playing out and playing out, searching for just an inch of slack and finding none, the reel unraveling, hot as it spun, melting the ice that his heart had become, ice water trickling down into his belly, cold as the frozen rain creeping down his back as he stood there, watching the city fade back into distance…
.. .and it was his life he was leaving behind, it was a stinking shitty life in a stinking shitty world but it was the only one he knew, and he couldn’t stop the sadness, the sense of pain and the sense of loss, any more than he could stop the boat or the waves it rode or the earth it adorned, speck of dust in an empty universe, speck of dandruff on the lapel of the empty laughing lunatic God that manufactured it all, from the primordial slime from whence it came to the bombs that would send it right back where it came from, back to nothing, dust to dust…
…and when the line was all played out, and the high-tension hum was the roar of the engines, he turned his thoughts to Cassie and his blown last chance at love. He thought of her as she had been when their eyes first met, when their smiles first alighted. He thought of those eyes, and the promise they’d held. Promise of warmth, an inner spark, infusing his life’s cold bleak terrain with light and heat and meaning…
… and it had been good, it had been good, he could remember nights so sweet their ghosts still ached in the pit of his stomach, days so fine and full of laughter he could almost believe in the words to the song. He could remember them all too well, because there had been so few of them, and they had been over so quickly…
… and then had come the mornings when he had awakened, not to her willing warmth, but to the sound of her heaving in the bathroom down the hall. It had taken no genius to figure out what that meant. Those harsh, wracking tonalities harkened back to the world he understood, the one he’d hoped was left behind: the world where dreams were cannon fodder, where love was an artificial carrot on a stick, a reason to live for the donkey-faced hordes…
… but, lo and behold, that world was back; indeed, from all the evidence, it had never really left, just been pushed back for a while by his own mad desire to see the little dreamy dream come true, to hold God to His fucking word for once, just for once…
… but no …
“Stop,” he whispered. “Stop it. Now.” Absurd, of course: there was no end. Only in the water.
Only beneath the waves…
Max took a moment to get his bearings, dragged a clipped breath in and out. The city was small now, a toy box in the distance. He could take the World Trade Center and crush them in his hands. Off to his left was Ellis Island; slightly behind him, the Liberty Belle. She was waving hello.
She was waving goodbye.
It was time to go inside now. It was time to go upstairs. Somewhere in the course of his quaint reminiscence, the lifelines had snipped and gone falling away. Arrivederci, mon ami. Sayonara. Bon voyage.
There was nothing left for him to do.
But go inside.
And go upstairs.
* * *
They called it the Death Ship for three main reasons. First, and most obvious, was its proper namesake: our beloved President, John F Kennedy, he of the exploding head and endless conspiracy theories. Second was the fact that, for some strange reason, it had been involved in more accidents than any other in the ferry run’s history. Stupid shit, mostly: coming into the dock too fast, pasting the very occasional tugboat. Some people had died along the way. The way of the world. The world as we know it.
The third reason was the most important, at least from Max Hart’s point of view. It was the reason why he’d come: why his footfalls dragged upwards, step by step, on purpose and in pain.
It was at least part of the reason why the upper deck was closed at night.
But they hadn’t bothered to lock the doors. He had known that they wouldn’t. That was why he had come.
Standing amidships, he looked around. No one was watching. No cops at all. No one to stop him as he moved to the doors with the sign that read CLOSED AFTER 9 P.M.
Opened the doors.
And stepped into the darkness.
Part III: Voices
Blood and dust and frozen rain: the tastes and textures of the world. Max Hart, alone with his senses, took them in and savored them, a psychic gestalt snapshot to take with him.
On his journey to the other shore.
The upper deck, unlit, at night, resembled nothing so much as the inside of an abandoned church: the empty wooden benches so much like pews, row upon row, disappearing into the deeper dark; the wind, whistling through the sliding doors, like the spirit-residue of some long-ago parish choir. It stirred something in him that he scarcely expected: a flicker, a spark, of misguided but undeniable reverance.
Reverence for what? he demanded of himself, feeling bile-scented anger well up in response. Reverence for life? Give me a fucking break. Life is cheap, and born to die. If life was worth the meat it’s etched in, it wouldn’t be dealt in such shabby hands. Reverence for love? I won’t even dignify that horseflop with an answer.
Reverence for Cod? Get out of my face. That malevolent turd is the last on my list. If God had any reverence for life or love, I…
And that was where he stopped, because the statement begged a question that he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. It struck him as chickenshit to raise those doubts at this late stage of the game. He had all the answers he needed, all the right and reason in the world to do this thing, this thing that had brought him to this place…
… and the sliding doors were to his right, the wind and the rain were calling to him, the water below was calling to him and there was no more time to waste. All too soon, the ferry and all the lost souls it transported would be pulling into Staten Island, perpetuating the farces that
were their lives. Max had no intention of being among them.
He moved toward the doors.
But as he moved, his mind raced on, speaking not in words but in pictures. And the pictures refused to leave him alone, they badgered him with every step, tugging at him as he gripped the handles, pulling at him as he yanked the doors open, tearing into him as the wind and the rain tore into his face… … and he stepped outside…
… and the pictures were of Cassie’s face, her eyes so bright, the bed so warm; the pictures were of a baby he had never seen and never would; the pictures were of a baby that had never been but still could be, it had happened once, it could happen again, there was no reason on earth why it could not happen again…
… and he heard himself screaming, “FUCK THE BABY! WHY WOULD I WANT TO BRING A BABY INTO THIS" the sound carried off by the wind and the rain, his tears subsumed by the wet ice pelting his battered face, his burning eyes …
… and still the pictures, still they came… … as he gripped the guardrail with trembling hands, leaning out over the waves …
… and then he heard the voices, softly singing, from below.
Part IV: The Other Shore
Voices of water and voices of mist. Icy voices. Shadow voices. Voices that sang in mournful moaning choruses, voices that wailed behind, voices that sang of love and loss and infinite regret… “No,” he whispered.
The voices sang…
… of other nights and other days, looking down over the rails; of other emptinesses, each one different, all the same…
“No.” His hands: unclenching, clenching. “It’s all in my head. More lies from God…”
:. .the voices, singing Death Ship songs… “More goddam fucking lies…” … the voices, calling out to him… … and he could see them now, could see them floating on the water: skeleton arms reaching out in welcome, skeletal jaws parting wide in song. He closed his eyes. He still could see them. He opened his eyes. He still could see them…