Forever, in Pieces

by Fawver, Kurt

  “But the sun didn’t shine as bright anymore and the air didn’t smell as crisp. Our house—now just my house—didn’t feel like a house anymore. It was the waiting room to death. My wife, gone. My daughter, gone. My livelihood, gone. Even the knives were gone; the entire set was sent off with Cat as her object of remembrance.

  “For a while, I tried to continue living. I tried to go about my daily business. But all I could see was flames and all I could hear were the terrified pleas of bishops as I kicked in their leathery faces. I wasted into a pit of hatred. And that’s when I realized what I had to do. I had to stand up and take back my world. And the only way to do it was to destroy the things that had taken my world from me: Thalak and its Order.

  “So I planned. I used every last cent I had to buy four fat hogs and twenty chickens—more than I’d ever had in Baltimore. I prepared them and stuck them in the front window of my dilapidated shop. I knew the bishops would come for them. They always did. And I wasn’t disappointed.

  “The very same day I put the meat out for display, three bishops stopped in and claimed they needed a tithe. They wanted my entire stock for a rising celebration. I was ready. I told them that I had even more in back; I told them they should come with me and I’d show them. I led them past the prep tables to the killing floor. Three bishops. They didn’t expect it. Few people are crazy enough to attack bishops, knowing what will happen if they do. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to feel a sense of purpose again, like something I did actually had meaning, like my cleaver might be able to speak the same language that Thalak spoke. And it did. Every swipe and every cut gave Cat words that the bishops would understand. Every spray of blood gave Val a chance to defend her thoughts in the court of Thalak.

  “When it was over, the killing floor was a mess. I didn’t feel sorry for what I’d done. I didn’t really believe that the bishops were people any more; they’d given up their humanity when they accepted a permanent connection to Thalak. No, I didn’t feel sorry at all. I felt relieved. I felt that Cat and Val had to be more at peace now. A very small justice had been done.

  “That night, a dozen bishops came for me. Big, strong, muscled bishops. I killed two. Clean slices across their throats. But the rest piled on me and knocked me out.

  “They sentenced me to the Tub. Obviously there was no other option. But that’s fine by me, because now I can go to Thalak, I can go to death, with my fists tight and my blades swinging. I know I can’t beat a god, but maybe I can scar it just a little. Maybe I can make it feel, for a split second, the same kind of pain it inflicts on us every day. That’s my crusade. That’s my justice. That’s all I have left and that’s all I—as nothing more than a stupid, simple man—can do.”

  Hickson nodded to himself and closed his eyes. The immutable thrum of the barge’s motor underscored his conclusion.

  Curry applauded, each smack of his hands rocketing across the too-bright sky.

  “Good show, Mr. Butcher. Good show. I like you,” he said, a hard speckle of admiration in his tone. “You have potential.”

  Castro groaned and sat upright.

  “You have to be kidding me,” he said. “You can’t possibly believe your daughter would have been better off living. Her sentence was a mercy. Dying was the best possible future for her.”

  Hickson’s eyelids flew open. He lunged toward Castro but his shackles tripped him before he could reach the baker. He tumbled to the rusty deck, still gripping his cleaver tight.

  A wheezy, deflated laugh slipped from Castro’s chapped lips.

  “She was the only good and decent thing in this world,” Hickson said, picking himself up off the deck. “You aren’t either of those things.”

  Castro shook his head and laughed again, mirthless.

  “You don’t know me,” he said “And you really don’t know what ‘good’ or ‘decent’ is. Let me tell you: ‘good’ and ‘decent’ don’t apply to the living any more. We’re all damned. We’re all in hell. And Thalak is the devil. ‘Good’ is getting out of this place and ‘decent’ is having the willpower to do it. So your daughter dying? Yes, that’s ‘good.’ ”

  Hickson tensed as though to lunge at Castro again. His grasp on his cleaver closed ever harder and his knuckles popped white and huge against the strain.

  “Gentlemen,” Curry said, spreading his arms in entreaty but refusing to move from his shade, “let’s not turn on each other. We have a common enemy and we’re going to meet it in all its putrescent glory in a few very short hours. We should remember too keep our priorities in order.”

  Hickson considered for a moment then slumped to the deck.

  “So just who are you, then?” he asked Castro. “You, who knows so much about good and evil?”

  “No one,” the baker answered. “No one important.”

  A weak, fetid breeze lazed over the tub.

  Castro reached into one of his pants pockets and pulled forth a chunk of bread.

  “This, though,” he said, raising the bread above his head reverentially, “this is important. This is righteousness, and I am its slave.”

  Hickson grunted and turned away.

  “So you’re insane. Great.”

  Curry slid closer to the baker and the butcher and, again, the shadows in which he reclined seemed to stretch with his movement. His coal-flecked eyes glittered in the darkness.

  “He might be insane,” Curry said, “but I doubt it. He has a reason for what he does. Isn’t that right, Gravebaker?”

  Hickson shot a worried glance at Curry.

  “Gravebaker?” he mouthed.

  Curry nodded.

  Castro held the bread to his heart and scowled.

  “I hate that name. It sounds entirely . . . grotesque. The people who coined it don’t understand.”

  “Understand what, precisely?” Curry asked.

  Castro laid back and spread his arms and legs wide. Splayed on the deck, an asterisk in the grand narrative of existence, he shouted at the sky.

  “They don’t understand that I’ve never intended to harm anyone . . . at least, not in the long-term. I don’t laugh like a hackneyed villain as those I help buy their daily bread and I don’t dance gleefully in the silhouette of their trespasses. I’m not a demon or a hobgoblin or a monster in the mist. No, no, no. I’m only . . . I’m only someone who’s prematurely reached the conclusion that we all must reach one day.”

  “And that conclusion is?” Curry’s prompt hissed out of the umbra in which he slouched.

  Another tide of putrefied fish and stagnant water rolled over the air.

  “Life is too much effort to live,” the baker said. “At some point everyone releases, everyone allows all physical bindings to fall away. Maybe by coercion, maybe by necessity, maybe by sheer desperate hopefulness of something else beyond. One way or the other, we all do it eventually. We all let go. We all must let go.

  “That wasn’t an easy truth for me to find. I grew up in a house so thick with Christ that you could taste the salt of his hallowed sweat as he hung on his cross. In every room, a crucifix. My parents and my uncles and my aunts and my cousins and my friends—everyone I knew called themselves ‘Catholic.’ For years, I didn’t know what that meant because I had nothing to compare it to. My family lived in Miami in a mostly isolated Puerto Rican community where it felt like everyone called themselves ‘Catholic’ whether they believed in God or not. I went to a school where all the teachers were either my ‘father’ or ‘mother’ or ‘sister,’ even though they weren’t related to me. I prayed to a corpse who was supposed to be powerful, even though it didn’t have clothes and apparently couldn’t beat anyone in a fistfight. I revealed all my sins and secrets to a man in a dark room, even though I wasn’t supposed to talk to strange men. And I called myself ‘Catholic,’ too, even though I had no real idea what it meant.

  “Well, when I was eleven, I realized what it meant—to me, at least. That year, my father, a chubby, soft-spoken man who forever smelled of acrid mass produ
ction, was accidentally shot and killed during a mugging. He’d been walking home from the bus stop after finishing a late shift at the plastics factory where he worked. He had fifty-nine dollars on him.

  “The night my father was murdered, I watched my mother, a tiny woman who wore huge silver crosses in her ears and around her neck, take off her jewelry and squeeze it in her hands until blood streamed down her arms. She told me that God had a plan for taking my father, though we couldn’t know it, and that it was our part in the world to endure the pain of His wisdom.

  “And so I did. I let the pain flood through me. At my little league games, I forced myself to stare at the empty spot between my mother and my sister. During dinner, I passed plates of empanadas and tostones toward the vacant chair at the head of our dining room table. When I loaded up video games that my father and I used to play together, I’d make sure to sign in a second player and let it sit, idle, frozen in place and barring my own progress. Kneeling beside my bed before I went to sleep, I’d ask the Lord to inflict pain upon me, to heap it upon my soul, if that would mean my father had a meaningful place, a grander purpose, in His kingdom.

  “I understood then. Faith by any name and any form meant suffering for a purpose.

  “As years passed, I devoted more and more of my time to my church. I ran administrative errands for the padres; I worked bake sales and fell into baking as a hobby, and later an occupation, because of my participation; I packed my bags and flew off to dusty African huts with stacks of Bibles; I built churches in Haiti, in Costa Rica, in Guatemala. And all along, I hated it. I hated missing my father when I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I hated serving a master that neither thanked me nor paid me the slightest regard. Most of all, I hated my friends from school who weren’t as devout as I was. They all seemed to have so much . . . fun.

  “They dated and had sex and drank and smoked weed and threw parties that I was never invited to. I wanted the abandon they possessed so easily. I wanted it desperately. I discussed my problems with the priests at my church and one man in particular, Father Guillen. Father Guillen had been the priest who presided over my father’s funeral. Like my father, he was gentle in tone and affable in spirit. Often, he said to me ‘Remember: your friends might believe they’re having a good time and you might even believe it, but they aren’t going to enjoy the rewards of the spirit that you will, in the end. Let them have their parties. You’re organizing one in heaven.’

  “And so I persevered. I opened a bakery and donated a quarter of my profits to the church. I ate dinner with Father Guillen once a week. We conversed about the weakness of the flesh, the glory of God, the pitching staff of the Marlins, and the proper thickness of a quality ganache icing. He convinced me to remain steadfast and chaste and, when I did, I could see in his weathered smile and his droopy eyes a pride for me like maybe my own father might have had.

  “For years, I baked and I prayed and I confessed and I burned with desires. But I didn’t give in. I just thought of my father, perhaps at the Lord’s left hand, and Father Guillen, whose pat on the shoulder would have to suffice for a loving embrace. For all its redundant pains and defeated ambitions, life, I was convinced, held one purpose: successfully reaching the next. I was well on my way to sainthood.

  “And then Thalak rose.

  “When it unleashed its first psycho purge, it sought out those who would oppose it and crushed them before they had the opportunity, yes, but it also sought out those who would obey it. That first psycho purge recruited the initial body of the Order, and most of the bishops, most of the pious, came from the ranks of those who already bowed to a god.

  “All those uncles and aunts and cousins who genuflected and called themselves ‘Catholic’ suddenly drew three-pointed figures in the air over their chests and called themselves ‘Thalic.’ My mother replaced the crosses in her ears and on her neck with Thalak’s symbol—the triad of red triangles. Worst of all, though, Father Guillen . . . Father Guillen lost his hair. His skin turned a darker shade, an unnatural shade, overnight. And his eyes . . . lightened . . . until they became the blue of the Order.

  “Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism: they weren’t stomped out by the new god, as a lot of people think. They were absorbed.

  “As for me, apparently Thalak knew the conflict in my soul and decided it was impediment enough to both keep me on as a slave and keep me out of the Order. Everyone else in my life, all the people who I had counted on to believe in something, to give order to the senselessness of . . . of everything . . . well, those people were suddenly wearing red and worshiping a behemoth jellyfish in the sea.

  “I couldn’t fathom the change. How could the faithful convert so easily, so readily? What would God do to them? What would Jesus think? How would they ever enter heaven?

  “Before I was sent north, first to the Savannah CZ and then on to Baltimore, I went to see Father Guillen—now under a crimson frock—one last time. I asked him ‘How could you forsake the Lord? How could you turn away from everything you held dear and follow that monster in the ocean?’

  “And you know what he said to me? New eyes sparkling, he said ‘I follow the one true God, Anthony. I’ve always followed the one true God. It’s just that now God has finally revealed Itself and Its ultimate plan for the world. God is out there, ready to destroy, ready to remake the world in Its image, as foretold in scripture. God is hallowed, my son, and Thalak be Its name.’

  “Even then, I still didn’t understand. I didn’t get it. Until . . . until they rounded us up to move to Savannah and I watched as Father Guillen beat an old neighbor woman to death because she refused to leave her house. He pounded her head against the sidewalk and smiled as he did it. And when he was finished, he tri-flected and uttered some oath to Thalak.

  “That’s when it all cracked apart, into place. Faith didn’t mean suffering for a purpose. It just meant suffering.

  “Life wasn’t given to us so that we could get to heaven. Life just was. No meaning. No purpose. Only screaming agony coming in and screaming agony going out. People believed in something—heaven or nirvana or whatever—so they wouldn’t have to face the truth that their pains, their misfortunes, had no meaning. My friends from long ago didn’t fuck and get high because they’d lost their way or were tempted by some dark force; they fucked and got high to escape the pain of existence. Everything . . . everything without objective meaning. My father died just because some asshole wanted drug money. Millions died just because some dimension-hopping creature stumbled upon Earth and wanted to play. It was all . . . excruciating nothingness.

  “And so, alone in the Savannah CZ, my family and friends now sequestered away in the Order villages, I came unglued. I still baked and traded my wares in the Order’s new barter economy, but when I wasn’t making something in the kitchen I was passed out drunk on the floor. I cried. I laughed. I laughed and cried at the same time. I intentionally cut my arms with bread knives and told myself it was accidental. I sank into that Georgia swamp.

  “But it was in the Savannah CZ that I met the ancient girl.

  “Twice a week—always on Saturdays and Wednesdays—this same girl bought a loaf of rye bread at the street-corner stand where I sold my goods. She was young. Twenty-one or twenty-two, maybe. Pretty, too. But for all intents and purposes she might as well have been an old crone. Her shoulders slouched, her face never broke from an aloof frown, and when she spoke it was in blank, ghostly tones, as though she’d witnessed all the atrocities in all the wars in human history.

  “I didn’t think much about her, falling as I was down my own rabbit hole. But, one random Saturday, apropos of nothing, she explained why she bought bread. Standing bent at my makeshift booth, she said ‘My mother and my son loved eating rye. It was their special treat. They’d slice up a fresh tomato and slather the bread with mayo, then put it all together and munch away on the back porch. They watched dragonflies out there and told stories to each other. But they were taken in the purges. I never go out on the por
ch anymore. I can’t stand rye bread, either. But I force myself to eat it at every meal so that I remember them. So that they’re not entirely lost. So that I’m not entirely lost.’

  “For the ancient girl, there was no past or future. Her links to both had been severed. All she had left was the present, a constant drone of guilt and suffering and terror. She had no joy, no true hope. Only bread.

  “It was there and then that I decided I was going to help humanity in its time of need. I was going to give people what they really wanted, what they really needed: release.

  “I began to experiment with various poisonous chemicals and ways of getting them into or onto my baked goods. I decided the best way would be to include them in a buttery glaze brushed on after the breads or cakes had risen and cooled. I wanted fast acting, painless poisons, but mostly I could only find arsenic and arsenic derivatives. Fast acting, yes. Painless, not a chance. Even so, I accepted it. The pain I inflicted was a means to an end, and my end, the end we all must come to, the great release from all this suffering, was more important.

  “So, once I had the process perfected, I sold the ancient girl a special loaf. It was a Wednesday. She never showed on Saturday. Or the next Wednesday. Or the Saturday after that. I helped her let go.

  “Shortly thereafter, the bishops sent me on to Baltimore with a transfer group. And this is where you both know me from, obviously. There, I helped sixty-six more people who came to my booth. Sixty-six people who were avatars of torment. Now, they’re free. They’re not suffering. They’re not soul-stricken. They’re just . . . gone.

  “I’m urban legend in the Baltimore CZ, I know, but no one should have ever feared me. Not the bishops, for being their competition, and certainly not the average man and woman on the street. I don’t murder. I never did and I never will. I only release. With this most wonderful of truths . . .”