by Fawver, Kurt
Castro held the bread beneath his nose and breathed deep. The odor of rot crouched heavy in the air.
“So he’s not just insane, he thinks he’s some kind of goddamned messiah, too,” Hickson spat.
During Castro’s story, Curry had retreated to the darkest shadows on his side of the tub. There he sat, curled like Rodin’s Thinker.
“I told you, the Gravebaker isn’t insane,” he said. “At least, no more than anyone else still left. A famous serial killer, yes. A man with a middling philosophy, yes. But not insane.”
Ignoring them both, Castro continued to cradle his bread to his face.
The tub motored onward, tugged by psychokinetic forces beyond mortal control.
Hickson set to work chopping at his shackles with the cleaver but they offered no discernible weakness. He soon abandoned the idea and, instead, began to examine his ankles, squeezing and prodding the area just above the reach of the restraints.
To either side of the tub, a series of black dots began to blink into view—other tubs, thousands of tubs, from other concentration zones around the world, all carrying trios of sacrificial criminals.
At the horizon’s edge stretched a vast line of richest red, as though the space where sea and sky met had been opened like the wrist of a suicide.
“Do you see it out there?” Curry asked no one in particular. “It’s waiting. It’s always been waiting, somewhere. It’s always known every single life it will snuff out, every action it will take, and every action that will be taken against it. It knows the exact moment and place and manner of its death. Can you imagine? Can you even dream of what it must be like to perceive time that way, as an immutable, static dimension rather than a dynamic, flowing succession? Everything for Thalak is already dead; everything will always be alive. Nothing will ever change. No wonder it wants to destroy the universe. I almost feel . . . sorry for it.”
Hickson rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“So you’re crazy, too. Great.”
“How do you know so much about Thalak’s mind?” Castro mumbled from beneath his bread.
Curry smiled wide. It had been years since either Hickson or Castro had seen a genuine, undefeated smile. Somehow, the gesture seemed perverse.
“I have inside information,” he replied. “I know all about Thalak. And much, much more.”
Hickson sighed, reclined against his side of the boat, and folded his arms over his chest.
“Alright,” he said, “I’ll bite. What’s your deal? What do you know? Why are you on this tub?”
“Do you want the long version or short version?” Curry countered. “Short version: I’m here because I committed sacrilege. The bishops caught me communing with . . . ah . . . something not quite Thalic.”
Hickson cocked an eyebrow.
“Sacrilege? How’s that possible? I thought the only two religions left were fear and The Order.”
“Sound like the same thing to me,” Castro coughed.
For the first time since they’d been bolted to the tub, Curry rose to his feet. Inexplicably, unbelievably, the surrounding shadows rose with him. He waved a hand and they spread out from his side of the barge until they enveloped the two other men. Their touch raised goose flesh wherever they glided over uncovered skin.
Hickson dropped his cleaver, which clattered to the deck.
Castro, no longer tormented by the afternoon heat, skittered to and fro, as though a bug on a hotplate.
Wrapped in shade cast from nowhere, Hickson muttered “What the hell . . . ?” and looked up into the cloudless, sunlit sky.
“There are,” Curry said, seemingly floating toward the butcher and the baker, “other possibilities.”
He reached into a shirt pocket and produced a short, thin, unremarkable white candle.
“Life, as both of you have so succinctly explained, is not a course of straight lines and right angles; it’s a helical infinity, curving backward, forward, into places we can never imagine.
“Myself, for example. I was orphaned when I was four. I don’t remember my father at all. I suppose he was really just a fifty dollar bill in my mother’s pocket. She was a heroin addict and, apparently, she prostituted to feed her demon. I don’t remember her doing it, but several of my foster parents were more than happy to share that crumb of information with me when I misbehaved.
“Still, I don’t remember my mother being a strung-out whore. In fact, I only have one real memory of her: she’s holding a heated frying pan over my head—I don’t know what’s in it, probably breakfast for me—and the scalding grease from whatever she’s cooking is splattering out, flying in all directions, pocking the walls with dark spots and my body with pinpricks of scalding oil. It hurts. It hurts so much. But I don’t cry out. I don’t move. I just sit in my chair and I wait for my mother to either spill everything in the pan onto me or feed me. Boiling death or glorious satiation—I don’t know which is coming. But I do know that, one way or the other, whether my mother hurts me worse or makes me feel better, there’s only one road to escape: detachment. If I flail out and try to move from under the pan, fearing burns, I might hit her arm and she might spill it due to my flurry; if I try to grab it from her and take the food, hoping to fill my rumbling stomach, I might spill it on myself. The only way to survive is to sit back and let go of hope, let go of fear. Just . . . watch, be careful, and accept whatever falls from the pan—oil or bacon, pain or delight. And so I do. I sit back and wait for whatever comes next. And you know what happens in that memory? My mother doesn’t spill that sizzling greasepan. But she doesn’t give me its contents, either. No. You know what she does? She heaves it through a closed window, glass shattering into a billion sparkly bits, and screams at someone outside, then launches herself through the open pane and takes chase of whoever invoked her ire.
“The future, the past: places we can never imagine.
“In any case, one day not long after that memory, my mother never returned home and the government—men in blue polo shirts who smelled of wintergreen—came and took me away. So I grew up in foster homes. Twelve, altogether. My childhood was a transitory affair to say the least. One year I’d have five brothers. The next, four sisters. I was shunted between more schools than I can count.
“I had no friends and I had no family. Yes, I had people who exhibited concern for my well-being, but that concern arose from avarice or narcissism, not love. I was an easy source of income and self-satisfaction. Foster families were willing to have me in their houses, so long as I remained quiet, calm, and malleable.
“When I was ten, for instance, I lived on a farm in nowhere, Ohio. The family that owned the place, the Peggs, had eleven children—four of their own and seven rotating fosters. Their four ‘naturals,’ as I developed the habit of calling them, were all home-schooled. Strange children. They didn’t play with toys and they asked me bizarre, esoteric questions like ‘How will you honor him?’ and ‘Are you ready to choose a side?’ The parents, Bill and Vicki, spent most of their evenings building and stocking a palatial subterranean bunker that sprawled beneath one of their fields of soybeans. The interior of that bunker—I managed to sneak in to see it only once—was packed with canned food and bottled water and stacks of blankets and barrels of gasoline and hundreds of boxes of bullets that were meant to fill the plethora of guns that hung on every wall. Some of the rooms were floored with delicate tile. One room held a furnished industrial kitchen. Another contained an empty swimming pool. And in still another sat a billiard table and piles of board games.
“All that would have been excusable, if eccentric, but for the fact that none of us—the fosters, I mean—had more than two shirts and one pair of pants. Each day when we returned home from school, Vicki would strip us naked and stand watch over us until we washed our clothes. She and Bill didn’t want us to stink and arouse suspicion, I suppose. But even that could have been brushed aside as perhaps just an inconvenient frugality . . . if not for our food. The Peggs never gave us anythi
ng to eat other than rice and beans that they bought in fifty pound bags. Breakfast: rice and beans. Dinner: rice and beans. Forget snacks. Forget treats. Everything was rice and beans. I was glad to eat free school lunches—horrible and gelatinous though they may have been—just so I could experience flavor.
“I spent a year with the Peggs and then was shuttled off to somewhere else. But I didn’t forget the peculiarity of that place. I was never in mortal danger. I was never abused in any overt sense. But I knew I wasn’t a person when I lived there. I didn’t know what I was, but it wasn’t human. The next year, I learned about “cash crops” in a fifth grade social studies course. That was exactly it: I had been a cash crop. The Peggs planted despondent children in their ground and reaped the profits when the government decided it was time for harvest.
“Now, I look back at the Peggs and I laugh, because I know that their underground fortress is sitting abandoned. The Peggs are either dead or they’re barely eking out a living in a CZ somewhere. They scammed taxpayers and neglected children only so they could diligently prepare for the wrong apocalypse.
“Again, the future, the past: places we can never imagine.
“So I grew up in places like the Peggs’ farm. I understood my value as a commodity and I understood that none of the families I stayed with truly thought of me as a son or even a pet. No, I was just a visitor who couldn’t leave, a tenant who had no agency over the duration of his lease.
“I embraced the identity. By the time I was a teenager, I had constructed a cloud-borne platform from which I could look down upon the world. I perched atop my loft and screamed my soul as ‘Outsider.’ I didn’t talk to other kids in school; I didn’t talk to my foster families except in the most perfunctory way. All I did was read. Fiction, philosophy, religious texts. Not so different from every other teenager, I tried to determine where someone like myself might fit into the greater orders of culture, civilization, and cosmos. Like the Gravebaker here, I needed to know what the purpose of existing might be and, like the Gravebaker, human knowledge failed to provide any answer more solid than ‘none.’
“I became mired in my own hollow reflection. I painted my fingernails black, wrote tremendously terrible poetry, and spouted all the wrong lines from Nietzsche at anyone who bothered to address me as a person. I stole a punching bag from my high school’s gym, ripped out its sandy innards, and replaced them with bricks. Every evening, I spent an hour beating that bag and every evening my fists ruptured. Over and over again, my knuckles cracked and splintered and tore through skin. The flesh on my hands throbbed every second of every day. And still I kept at it. I beat purpose into the world. But, truly, all I was doing was beating an infection further into my heart. I was committing suicide, ever so gradually.
“Then it all ended. I rose for school one morning, dressed, ate breakfast, and, as I was walking into my first class, collapsed on the floor, dead.
“I died. Literally. For ten minutes, I was stretched out across the most absolute nothingness I could ever conceive. But in that nothingness I felt . . . something . . . something tremendous and dense, something that labored under the weight of itself, something both violent and benign, distant yet steadily approaching. I couldn’t begin to grasp its whole, let alone its nature or function. I was as an ant crawling through the eye of a hurricane. And I realized: there is more. There is so much more. And then the nothingness contracted and spat me out and I fell into a something I could name, a something that was intimately familiar—sleep.
“I awoke in a hospital three days later, my hands bandaged and in casts and my chest on fire. When I finally talked to a nurse, she told me that I’d gone into cardiac arrest due to a chronic bacterial infection in a heart valve. That infection? It wasn’t just a metaphor. I’d died, been resuscitated by paramedics, and was placed on a steady stream of high-end antibiotics.
“But I didn’t care about it. I didn’t care about being an outsider or not having a place in the world, either. Those were petty concerns. Now all I wanted was to figure out what I had felt in that place on the other side of death.
“It took years. I graduated high school, turned eighteen, and ran free from the unlove of government responsibility. With no money, I decided to travel to the mystic corners of the globe. Often, I had to sleep in gutters and eat from trashcans. I worked small jobs here and there when I could find them but, surprisingly, bedraggled Americans aren’t high on hiring lists in foreign nations. So the trades I picked up were mostly from local craftspeople.
“In Peru I learned to knit wool; in Nepal, I learned to smelt iron; in Egypt I learned to mold candles. And all along the way, most importantly, I learned secret history. I traced the path of a very obscure, very old religious sect that dealt in the kind of experience I’d had. Voidists, they called themselves.
“The Voidists, as near as I could tell from my own haphazard translations of archaic scrolls and interpretations of local lore, were a group of philosophers who believed that beyond our phenomenal reality existed infinite layers of possibility—‘Void,’ in their words. These layers, when resolved, descended into our realm of perception and became our experienced reality. When we died, the Voidists claimed, we entered into this teeming mass of possibility. To our weak human consciousness, the Void would seem a maelstrom of nothingness and not-yet-being. But that perception isn’t accurate; the nothingness is also an everythingness. It contains all that is and might ever be, as well as all that is not and can never be. Think of it as the ultimate state of quantum flux.
“However, unlike the pragmatic physicists of our pre-Thalic world, the Voidists claimed that the only way the flux could ever resolve into our reality was if the Void was a thinking being in and of itself or was ordered by a thinking being. Something, they reasoned, had to push possibility into certainty, something had to decide this and not that. So they searched for an answer. They searched by entering the Void. Scores of Voidists committed suicide. They drowned themselves and drank poisons and bled themselves dry. And if they could be brought back to life, they drowned themselves and drank poisons and bled themselves again. Over and over, suicide on suicide—the first Voidist ritual.
“And through all the death, the philosophers gleaned a disturbing wisdom: the Void was, indeed, self-aware but it did not control its own resolution. Something else, something even more sprawling and unknowable, decided the shape and form of Void when it congealed into our reality. There was a place beyond the beyond; an afterlife to the afterlife. Just as our lives are tugged to and fro by the Void, so, too the Void is subject to forces entirely divorced from its control. The Voidists grew weary of this interminable regress. How were they to know anything about what lay above the Void? Such knowledge would require not only death within death but also resurrection from resurrection. And even then, what if they discovered an equally imprisoned consciousness greater than that of the Void? Labyrinthine lunacy. So the Voidists abandoned their project and, over centuries, their sect faded into oblivion.
“Until I came along.
“I returned to the States and, thanks to my experiences in Egypt, began making candles as a means of supporting myself. Everything I crafted came from fine, all-natural extracts and organic waxes. My wares were in demand from the very start. I earned twenty, thirty, even forty dollars for a stick of light and a vague aroma. And all the money I made I spent toward one goal: getting back in touch with the Void.
“I bought IV machines and black market bags of morphine and slipped absurd amounts of cash into the pockets of nurses and doctors so that they’d stand over me, defibrillator or syringe of adrenaline at the ready, and drag me back from the Void after I’d gone to meet it.
“In this way, I killed myself six times. Six deaths. And only once did I consciously connect with the Void. But once was enough.
“There are no words to describe the conversation I had with the Void, no signifiers that could adequately contain the broad palette of meaning that inundated my mind. The Void did not think a
s we think, in limited correspondence of idea to symbol. Rather, it thought in multitudes, in compacted transpositions that humans can only hope to understand when broken apart and temporally stretched. Imagine . . . imagine a being for which an entire textbook or novel or film is not a series of interconnected ideas and images, but one instantaneous thought. Now imagine millions of those thoughts all running together. That was the mind of the Void.
“It explained to me, in what feeble way I could comprehend, that our universe is nothing more than pieces of itself. Long, long ago, a power unknown to even the Void mutilated it. This power flayed the Void, sending slivers and slices of it into our reality. Here, those slivers cohered from possibility into definition. It cohered into us, into birds and beetles and trees and stars. We are Void made certain. For the Void, this state of affairs was, and is, agony, because the force that slashed it to tatters returns again and again. Imagine if your arms or your legs were endlessly severed and reattached, severed and reattached. This is the Void’s existence. This is why suffering manifests in our world—we are limbs of a greater body, incomplete and seeping confusion.
“Knowing this, then, knowing that its torment was my own—all of our own—it made me an offer: if I helped it reclaim its whole, it would reward me by never letting me stray from its thoughts. In the Void, I would not dissolve into uncertainty. My consciousness, unlike most others, would not be forgotten and scattered. I would be allowed to be within the heaven and hell of not-quite-being.
“I accepted and the Void instructed me. It told me to ready for the coming of a creature from outside our plane of existence. This creature, not being made of resolved Void, could act as a doorway through which the Void could enter our universe and return everything to its original state. The Void bound up just the tiniest fraction of itself inside me—the most it could possibly squeeze across realities—so that when the creature arrived, all I had to do was go to it and call upon the Void. And then it sent me away, back to what we call life.
