A sudden blast of wind hit his back, and despite Igor’s grip, he got dizzy and stumbled as the air sucked at him, whistling through the jumbled maze of Igor’s collection, like the mouth of a sleeping giant startled awake by the poison pill they’d fed it, and gasping all the air out of the room.
Rope threw himself back and turned to see Igor waddling the dolly outside, and ran after him. He leaned against piles of junk until he reached the door, when the wind abruptly died off and he jumped a step forward like he’d been on an express elevator that suddenly stopped.
Outside, the seagulls wheeled over the bunker in a halo of ominous intent. They were completely silent, not diving or fighting over scraps, but just tracing circles in the air above the tin-shingled roof. The drooling meat-trees stooped and snaked their groping, ropy tentacles among the scattered piles of lost stuff, slowly but unmistakably converging on the bunker.
Something hooted and howled in the yellow mist, sounding not very far away at all.
Rope rushed the next barrel onto the dolly, hardly noticing when his gloved fingers broke through the corroded lid.
A shadow swept over the truck and startled Rope into dropping the shotgun. A huge, shapeless blob of a body wobbled out of the mist on barbed black crab legs, two stories tall. Tumors like overripe cauliflower D-cup teats drooped from its blistered form, a blubbery cluster of buttocks that expelled spastic gouts of toxic diarrhea, though he could see no mouths for taking anything in.
He backed away from the truck as the hideous thing stilted by, spraying the truck with bright orange shit that ate the paint off the hood.
Fuck this. Looking back over his shoulder at the open door, Rope sidled away from the truck, keeping it between him and the open bunker door, so he could still hear Igor cursing and moving shit around without being seen.
He got closer, and his eyes popped out as they roved over the Loser’s collection.
Like Igor’s, it was clearly a museum of lost objects, but the Loser’s was, if less esoteric, far more portable. Rope noticed the prevalence of umbrellas, books, jackets, laptops, grocery bags, phones, hats, glasses and dentures, all deliberately arranged and stacked, as if to form some image when seen from the air.
Stranger items abounded, like suits of armor, knives and bullets and white powder in bags with EVIDENCE stickers, mason jars with blobs of jelly still wriggling inside. He wondered why Igor never plundered it, because there was a fortune here; and then he wondered how it all looked so clean, when it rained only last week. The Loser collected his loot from the streets of the city, and smuggled it into the dump, where it sat…
Rope noticed an ugly doll, pale and bony, shriveled until it could sit in his palm, shrouded in a bed of grimy kids’ jackets. It was breathing.
A crack baby or a boozehead’s kid, probably left behind on a bus bench by a raving addict chasing a fix. The baby looked as if it was only napping, though the coats it lay wrapped in were all years out of style.
A look over the shoulder, and he grabbed an iPod and dropped it in his pocket. He had no idea how the damned things worked, but he’d heard of kids getting killed for them back east.
He poked around the piles until a gnarly black cockroach the size of a cat scuttled out from a camera bag and nipped at his hand. Hissing, it tore his glove off and shredded it in rusty mandibles as he ran away.
Rope jogged the loaded dolly back inside and down the narrow avenue to the hole. As he worked, he found himself floored at how he’d just accepted all this shit. It naturally made sense to him, the lost stuff and the hole and the living trash, because he was trash, himself.
Abandoned at birth at a county hospital, raised in foster homes until age thirteen, and juvenile halls and labor camps since then, he knew how people shied away from him like he was made of shit. He knew how such rejection made him feel inside, so if that ugly feeling in extreme concentrate could make the dump come alive, then that, too, was nature. And if the lost stuff, collected here in sufficient mass, could open a door to the Bermuda Triangle or the Twilight Zone, then there were probably better uses for it than dumping toxic waste. Rope’s unscientific mind buzzed with theories and propositions.
Rope’s unsupervised body walked the dolly into a pile of junk. The barrel tipped and its contents sloshed out over the rotten lip. Rope reflexively grabbed for the lid, but it broke off in his hand. The barrel slid off the dolly’s skids. Rope could just watch it happen, see it reflected in Igor’s face as he, too, watched in helpless disbelief.
The barrel rocked on its rim, but came to rest standing upright. Only a gallon or so of the milky yellow contents slopped out on the nearest pile of junk.
Igor gingerly rolled the barrel onto the skids and shoved Rope out of the way. “Get the backup dolly by the door, and don’t be so fucking clumsy.”
As Igor rolled the barrel away, Rope went to obey, but froze and looked at the wall of junk that he’d smashed into. Crusty old ice chests, stacked chest-high and sealed with duct tape. The splatter from the barrel bubbled and ate its way into the bottom ice chest, a blue Igloo the size of an Army footlocker. He recoiled from curling fumes of burning plastic, but the smell from within was worse, far worse than anything he’d ever smelled in his life.
Igor dumped the leaky barrel into the hole, and the wind ripped the smell away. Rope leaned into the cage as the alien vacuum sucked at him like someone pushing from behind as a subway train approaches, a sudden jerk that caught him by surprise, though his hands were anchored in the chicken wire.
Up close, the void was full of things, if you looked long enough. His eyes got really tricky with the visuals, furry worms of fluorescent light mating to form more complex shapes, deeper meaning. Faces—a man and a woman stared out at him, tortured grief and confusion etched into their careworn faces. Though he’d never seen them, Rope knew who they were.
He wasn’t thrown away; he was lost.
Somehow, he’d gotten separated at birth from the people who loved him, and tumbled through a hole into this world of dumps within dumps and meat-trees and ass-crab monsters. The real world was on the other side; the one where he was mourned and missed, the one where he’d always belonged. All he had to do to get there, was let go…
The Loser rides the eastbound 27, heading for the Kearny Mesa business loop and the public dump entrance on Convoy, when something touches him, like ice chips sprinkling down his back.
A tiny thread of the web he builds is being pulled apart. The vibrations travel through the magnetic ley lines of the city’s highways and jolt him like a drowsy spider, at the trembling of ensnared prey.
He tries to still his inner noise and see deeper, but he knows all the other riders are staring at him, and the world goes dead black, all gone and good riddance.
He cannot even see the lost things in the bags at his feet or in his many pockets, but he sees a light, the light he has been searching for all his life, and he knows that this is what he is for. He stares into it, and it is like all the light of the sun poured down a thread into his eyes, but he stares into it, and he cannot believe he has been so blind.
The light shoots out from the terminus of all his many routes, from the one place his invisibility has not allowed him to enter.
He will go there now.
He was going there already, but now, he actually wants to go, and this alien volition presents a paradox his mind has not been able to grasp for some time, and with that unwelcome intrusion of the notion that he might also have a past, the Loser starts to try to remember it.
He tugs the cord as they straggle down the frontage road along the 52, a mile from the recycling center at Convoy Court, but now there is no time. He drags all his bags up to the front and sees that the mechanism driving this bus is filled with boiling water and shrieking seahorses.
He tries to plead with it in its native language to stop and let him off, but it won’t relent, and extrudes a white-hot electrode to herd him back to his seat.
They are passing so close t
o the light that even when he averts his eyes, he can barely see the driver through the glare as he lashes out with his armload of overloaded canvas shopping bags. The mechanism collapses on itself, and the Loser is left to his own devices to get the door open.
The other passengers are hysterical, trying to tackle him and hold him for the police, screaming into cell phones and taking pictures, but he sees none of it. Weightless, he floats out of their grip and out of the bus, bounding across the road and vaulting over the fence, buoyed up by the swinging bags loaded with all the lost things he has found. And these, too, glow ever brighter as their potential resonates with the offerings he has assembled to find what he lost and forgot, but now has found.
The rest of the barrels went pretty quickly after that, with a minimum of spillage. Each time, the wind ripped more fiercely at them, and sucked a few flimsy items up against the cage.
Igor was nervous, but unusually cheerful, even offering Rope a stingy bump of his white stuff. Rope snorted it and soaked up the electrical buzz, his spine coming alive and sinking envenomed fangs into his hindbrain. “So who’s the loser you said to kill?”
His boss’s good mood went all to shit in a breath. “He’s the fuckin’ Loser, that’s all.” He wheezed like someone was squeezing him, but the speed took hold and the words spat off his hyperactive tongue. “He’s nothing, but you gotta watch out for him. Gray… like shadows on a rainy day. He can hide so a fuckin’ Cu Chi tunnel rat couldn’t find him in his own fuckin’ pants.”
“But who is he?”
“The craziest fuckin’ bum there ever was. Been bringin’ shit here for almost eight years. He made that hole open up.”
“Why?”
“He’s fuckin’ crazy, how the hell should I know? Maybe he wants to jump in there, and suck the whole world in after him. Whatever, you just gotta know that you don’t never touch the Loser’s shit. And you fuckin’-A gotta keep him away from the cage.”
Rope swallowed hard before asking, “You ever try to sell any of that shit, out there?”
Igor looked him up and down and spat on the floor, like Rope had cursed him. “Fuck, let’s get the hell out of here, what’re you fuckin’ around for, think I’m gonna blow you?”
Rope looked back at the hole, hungry and restless in its cage. “He brought all that other shit out here, right?” It sucked the words out of his mouth, so his own ears never heard them. It vibrated with all kinds of new and insidious patterns, now his vision was tweaked. He wanted to get closer, but the light shut off, and he tripped over something in the dark.
“Get the fuck out here, now! No skin off my ass, you wanna die, but I ain’t waitin’!”
Using the dwindling ribbon of light seeping through the door as a compass, Rope tried to navigate the room without letting panic overtake him, but it was no use. He kneed something that sent him dancing into piles and stacks of sharp, filthy, fragile blackness. He screamed and put his bare hand in something that sizzled where his fingers touched it, and he smelled that dead smell again.
Rope practically flew to the door, but the boss blocked the way and elbowed him back inside and followed him, slammed the door and threw all the bolts. “Goddamit, he’s here.”
Rope fumbled at the walls for the light switch. “What does he want?”
Borne aloft by updrafts of decay, the Loser floats out over the hollow, draws himself into a ball and touches down on the naked dirt before the bunker.
The glow of it is so bright. How could he be so blind? The thing he has been searching for all these (years?) countless thousands of circuits through the city, honing his senses to see only lost things, to see through the world, to find—what? Who he was and what he lived for, when he lived. It is inside.
Maybe he has seen it a thousand times and forgotten, the Now rotting and falling away before he can nail it to his abandoned past and unbearable future. Or maybe he has seen and made himself forget, because he’s better off lost in the Now. Is he stronger now, than before he lost his mind? He knows that he is not quite a man, anymore. If he stops now, he won’t have to change.
Still, he finally decides, and flies like a lamp-dazzled moth towards the One Lost Thing.
Igor waddled out into the yard and faced the Loser with his hands on his hips. “I ain’t tellin’ you again. Get the fuck out of here.”
The Loser looked puzzled, though Rope couldn’t see an inch of him under all his coats and his broad-brimmed hat. He whirled around and only then did Rope see and hear the rat-jackals skulking out of the junk, tubercular, rasping snarls and sickly giggles as they drew together in a slipknot around the Loser.
A big one with clumps of oversized human ears growing out of its back leapt at the Loser, who just slumped there with his big old shopping bags weighing him down like balls and chains, and when he looked up, all Rope saw of his face was round, cracked spectacles and a gray scarf wound tight over his gray face.
With its curly talons extended, the rat-jackal pounced on his face, but the Loser ducked and it twirled stupidly in midair to see where its prey went, when a shopping bag full of junk completed the elaborate geometrical proof the Loser had just worked out, smashing into the airborne scavenger’s ribs.
The bag and the rat-jackal both exploded in a flameless conflagration of dust and ash and the tiny thunderclap of a vacuum violently closed. The blown-out carcass crashed and spewed syringes, spent condoms and Popsicle wrappers.
Igor trembled. The rat-jackals cowered and slunk away. He sidled over to the lost collection while the Loser shuffled towards the bunker.
Rope stood in the doorway, equally afraid, suddenly, of going in or out. “Mr. Blasco? Igor? What do I do?”
“Try to shoot him,” Igor shouted, and took cover behind a pyramid of wigs and college textbooks.
Rope had put down the shotgun when he moved the barrels. He had no idea where it was now, somewhere in the bunker, or in the truck, but it probably didn’t matter. Try to shoot him?
The Loser came within ten feet of Rope, and he breathed a little easier. The little freak came up to his shoulder, and wore half a dozen raincoats, but the bags worried him.
The Loser took another step. Igor held something up in the air and roared, “Stop, motherfucker!”
It was the crack-baby.
Igor cocked his arm like he fully intended to bowl a strike with the tiny, mewling body, but he froze in mid-stride and tensed every muscle, as if he had just shit his pants.
The baby cried out once, then it turned gray and flaked apart like a smoked cigarette and blew away. Wracked with spasms, Igor fought to hold the pose, as if he were trying to force a strike with the sheer power of his will.
The Loser paused in midstride, one mismatched oxblood wingtip out over the ground, when it split open beneath him.
A bloated gray tentacle slithered round his outstretched leg four times before he could move, hauled him into the air and brought him back to earth with bone-shattering gusto, then tried to drag him into its trench.
Rope tracked the acid-drooling limb to a meat-tree thirty yards away, bent and straining like an angler reeling in a prize catch. The Loser undid a belt buckle and shed his outermost pants, charcoal gray polyester slacks with a white macramé belt, and emerged intact, though one leg was banded with smoking wounds, and seven layers of severed trouser legs unraveled as he got up and walked towards the bunker.
Igor closed his fist on the smoking baby skull and cocked his arm back like a homicidal baseball pitcher. The air around his fist crackled. The gathering force threatened to split the sky, but it collapsed on itself when he tried to throw it.
Igor’s fist turned gray, instant frostbite creeping up his arm and he could only scream Portuguese curses at this ultimate outrage, as his fingers disintegrated and fluttered away like blasted moths. The harder he tried to force it out, the faster it ate him up.
The Loser came within arm’s reach of Rope, who still couldn’t decide which way to jump. Rope could hear the small man’s wheezi
ng breath through the scarf, and smell his leg burning. “Mr. Blasco, what do I do now?”
Igor thrashed on the ground like he had a mongoose in his mouth and a cobra up his ass. The last thing he had was answers.
Rope backed up into the bunker. Maybe he could find the shotgun.
The Loser passed right by Rope, with his head swiveling back and forth to take in the mad jumble of junk. He went up the center aisle to where it jogged right, where Rope had crashed the dolly, and he knelt down before the melted, cracked stack of coolers.
The Loser didn’t seem to notice the hole. Slowly, painfully, he removed his hat and peeled off the scarf, mottled and blotted with sweat. Underneath, his round, bald head gleamed in the dim light, bulbous, convivial features cruelly hollowed out, like a defrocked cherub on a hunger strike.
He tugged the melted blue Igloo cooler out of the stack, peeled the brittle duct tape off the lid, and opened it.
A puff of necrotic dust wafted out. Rope, sneaking up behind the Loser, gagged and threw up into his hand. He got close enough to look over the Loser’s shoulder for just a second before he had to get away. Away from the smell and the sight of the putrid remains in the cooler, and the sound of the Loser’s weeping.
He loved her, before she was ever born.
He built a nest of his life, a secure and prosperous bower around a vacancy he dared not seek to fill, so idealized was his image of true love. But he had no such illusions about himself; his peers, blessed with more honesty than imagination, had left him no room for doubt, but that he was a loser. He was not handsome or strong, and painfully shy, so he sought to make beautiful things—gold jewelry and occasional poetry, to show the world the beauty inside him.
His poetry even bored him, so he became an English teacher, and found some pale consolation in passing his own unignited literary passions on to the few students who stayed awake in his classes.
But the jewelry line took off. His fingers succeeded where his words had failed, in venting the molten sensuality trapped in his unassuming, roly-poly body. His gold wedding bands came into local vogue for a while, their asymmetrical contours warped by a molten longing that made any half-appealing suitor irresistible. But he had never asked a woman for a date, let alone for her heart, her hand.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 18
