In Extremis

by John Shirley

  Helleck grimaced—but then shrugged and said, “Why not—it sounds quick. Just get it done fast, okay?”

  “Yuh.”

  Helleck lay down on the gravel, head on the railing, right side down, and began singing one of his songs.

  “I don’t care If you don’t know it

  I know I’m a genius and the world doesn’t deserve me

  I know it because the rats tell it to the cockroaches who told it to me

  So fuck you all, fuck you all, fuck you all, fuck you all . . .”

  He broke off and looked sidelong up at Grunauer who was towering over him, a smelly silhouette. “Grunauer—what are you waiting for?”

  “I was listening to your song!”

  “Just tell people you heard it at the end and how great you thought it was—now do it! Break my skull!”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Helleck closed his eyes, half inclined to run—but it was too late, he heard a whipping sound of something coming through the air, and then—crack. Tremendous pain in his left ear. This is it! The end!

  Tremendous pain, waves of pain, on the left side of his head . . .

  That didn’t stop. Just . . . that one crack and then . . .

  He opened his eyes. “Grunauer—shit that hurts!—why’d you stop?”

  Grunauer’s voice sounded distorted through all the blood pooling in his ear. “Yuh ain’t dead yet?”

  “No!”

  “My arm hurts—that thing’s heavy!”

  “So?” Helleck felt dizzy, removed, dreamlike. “You only hit me once! Now bust my fuckin’ skull!”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Crack. Another blazing pain this time on the side of his head above his ear.

  “Shit! Ow! Can’t you hit straight! Kill me!”

  “I want some more beer, dude!”

  “Get it later! Come on, I paid you—make like Nike and just fucking do it! “

  “I just . . . it’s fucked up Helleck . . . I don’t like breaking open heads . . . it makes my stomach hurt! I like stabbing okay . . . couldn’t I stab you some?”

  “What? With what? Ow, my fucking head . . .”

  “There’s a big old rusty nail lying over here . . . on this wood thing . . . useta be old Gunky’s shack . . .”

  “Whatever, just get it fucking done! I can’t stand this! End it! Stab me—here, I’m turning on my back, stab me in the chest, stab me now, stab me in the fucking chest RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

  “I didn’t pick up the nail yet.”

  “You . . . moron!”

  “Wait, I got it now . . . I got it . . . Oh, let me put down this other thing . . . okay . . . hey, there’s old Gunky down there, waving! Maybe he’s got some wine! When I was a kid he gave me wine if I let him play with my peter! Do you think he’s got some wine, Helleck?”

  “WILL YOU FUCKING KILL ME YOU CRETIN?”

  “I don’t like to be called names. But, whatever, dude. Uh-kay. I’m kneeling down here . . . Ow—kneeling here on these rocks hurts my knees, dude!”

  “My fucking skull is cracked! You don’t think that hurts? Just do the job! FUUUUUUUCK! NOW! STAB ME IN THE HEART RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Grunauer took the long rusty nail in his hand the way a man holds an ice pick, and stabbed down—right into Helleck’s breastbone.

  “EEEEE-YOWWWWW that fucking hurts! You dumbass dicklicking shithead—that’s not my heart!”

  “I thought your heart was right there in the middle, ain’t that where a heart is, dude? We always put our hands over that spot when we was in grade school and they made us do the Pledge of Allegiance—”

  “No, fuc—get it out, it’s fucking killing me! I mean it’s not killing me, it’s hurting me! Pry it out . . .”

  “It’s stuck . . .”

  “OWWWWWWWW!” Helleck reached up and pried the nail out of his breastbone himself and handed the nail up to Grunauer. “Now here! Stab it in my heart—my heart is right over here! See where I’m pointing? It’s right—FUCKING OW! What are you doing, you stabbed me in the hand!”

  “You said to stab where you were pointing and your hand was there and—”

  “No, under my hand!”

  “I can’t get under your hand because it’s in the way—and now your hand is nailed to your chest! It looks really cool! But it’s stuck on your chest! The nail went right through and—”

  “AUUUGH!” And Helleck pulled the nail out of his hand, and chest, and—his uninjured hand trembling so much he could barely hold onto the nail—he handed it again to Grunauer. “Will you just get it over with! Stab in that same hole but deeper, between the ribs, right into my heart!”

  “Right there? Uh-kay!”

  Grunauer stabbed but the nail glanced off a rib, cracking it.

  “ARGH FUCKING OW FUCKING SHIT FUCKING PISS THAT FUCKING HURTS!”

  “You said, you SAID right there, Helleck!”

  “But I said between the ribs, you can see where the ribs are—”

  “But it’s all slippy like with blood and I can’t aim with all that blood!”

  “Try fucking AGAIN!”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Grunauer clamped his tongue between his crusty teeth, closed one eye, and, aiming carefully, he stabbed down. But the nail only stuck out under his fist an inch or so and it didn’t quite go deep enough to penetrate Helleck’s heart—it just scratched the outside of his heart painfully.

  “EEEEH YOW! You fucking idiot!”

  Invisible and all-encompassing, vast but subtle, the Macrobeing had surveyed most of the planet Earth, had paused in several places—Darfur, parts of India, parts of Florida, a concentration camp in North Korea, hundreds of thousands of old people’s homes and hospices ... and was still uncertain. On the one hand, Earth seemed to cry out for a compassionate veterinary “putting down—but on the other hand it seemed to the Macrobeing that though indeed these creatures lived, at best, lives of quiet existential confusion and misery, and at worst lived with great suffering, there were also positive, redemptive feelings and events and ideas, and maybe this world should be allowed to go on so that these creatures could evolve . . .

  And then it noticed a spike of suffering in a part of “California” called “Fremont” and it glanced down to see Grunauer trying to kill Helleck—all the time Helleck begging him to do it—and the Macrobeing watched them in sickened fascination for a while . . .

  “You have to . . . to . . . to . . .”

  “To what, Helleck?”

  “Stuh . . . stuh . . . stuh . . .”

  “I don’t know whatcha saying, yuh not talking English—”

  “STAB ME! STAB ME IN THE HEART YOU IDIOT! PUSH IT IN and . . . OH FUCK . . .” Helleck had to pause to turn over and vomit up his meager breakfast. This took a while. Finally he flopped onto his back with a groan. “Push the nail in and then hammer it in my heart with that crowbar . . .”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Grunauer shoved the nail in, then got the bar of iron, and started to hammer at the nail with it—but he aimed badly, and the nail went to the side and jammed in the tissue under Helleck’s pectoral, over the heart . . .

  “YAHHHHHH! That hurts! YOU MISSED, you fucking MORON you!”

  “Helleck—a train’s coming! You could jump in front of it!”

  “No . . . no . . . can’t do it myself—you . . . you . . . you got to throw me in front of it! Pick me up! I’m small, you’re strong—pick me up—”

  “Uh-kay.”

  Grunauer picked Helleck up in his arms and moved back from the tracks and waited and in a moment the freight train came barreling along, screaming with its horn, and Grunauer got close to the train and tossed Helleck between two freight cars—

  Only he did it clumsily and Helleck didn’t quite go in, but got stuck with his arm between the car and the metal wheel and was dragged along. His backbone curled, his arm twisted right off with a pop, and then the train was gone and Helleck was left there in a bloody wrenched semi-huma
n pile next to the tracks, groaning and alive . . .

  “Helleck—you ain’t dead . . . dude?”

  “No you BLUNDERING IDIOT, you failed to kill me AGAIN!” Helleck cried, though it was difficult to see where his mouth was in the knotted-up wreckage of him.

  “Uh-kay. Sorry. Hey I guess that’s half of the killin’ anyway. You can keep the other half of the money. I got to go, my mom was gonna make me something to eat.”

  “What? You FUCKER! Stay here and kill me! Just get a big rock or jump up on my head or—”

  “I can’t, I think the police is coming—”

  “You’d better fucking kill me or I’ll tell them you hurt me without being paid to. Now dammit, KILL ME!”

  “No, well, uh . . . I dunno . . . ’zactly . . . what should I do?”

  Watching Helleck and Grunauer, the Macrobeing had had enough. These two seemed to sum up this world, in a general way they were the final straw, the turning point. The Macrobeing made up its mind, pity got the best of it. The Macrobeing decided to put this planet out of its misery.

  So the vast amorphous creature stretched out its energy field, and encompassed the planet Earth, enclosed it like a small animal in a man’s fist, and squeezed, just enough . . .

  And in just under ninety-three seconds the entire Earth was wiped clean of life. Painlessly and entirely. It was all gone, even plants, even micro-organisms. The Macrobeing liked to be thorough. Since there were no micro-organisms left after it was done, there was no decay, and all the organisms in the world simply stopped moving and stopped living and sometime later each one fell into a nice dry heap of dust.

  Afterwards, Macrobeings would sometimes visit the lifeless planet, simply because it was so very peaceful there . . .

  CRAM

  Gino and Telly were already half an hour late and the BART train was just now leaving the last station in Oakland. The train gave out a soft squeal as it started out of the station, snaking into the underground tube for the trip across the bay to the Embarcadero. “It don’t matter, dude,” Telly was saying, “Geisenbaum don’t give a fuck which fuckin’ bike messengers are there, long as somebody’s there to take out the first packages.” Telly was lean, muscular, tanned, long hair tied in three pony tails. He wore a sleeveless Coil tee he’d bought from a scalper at the concert, and surfer shorts. Telly didn’t like the tan he got on his arms from biking the waterfront. It blurred his tattoos. But he wore the short sleeves so the tats could be seen.

  “Yeah, Telly, but if he’s got a morning rush floodin’ packages, we’ll get our asses fired.”

  Gino could talk acceptable bike-messenger but he was a night school grad student in Modern Lit, Postmodern Specialties, when he had the tuition. And he’d pulled a 3.8 with almost no effort at UC Berkeley, majoring in English Lit, minor in Philosophy.

  Working with guys like Telly was philosophically satisfying, it was Working Class. It gave Gino a sense of meshing with the genetic core of humanity, the people who’d rejected him in high school. The ones who knew how to be really into whatever they were into.

  Gino only had the one tat, the Maori pattern around his wrist like a bracelet. Enough to give him credibility with the Tellys, not enough to prevent his getting tenure someday.

  Telly had his bike with him on the subway car; Gino’s bike was locked up at Geisenbaum’s. Telly’d picked up some glares pushing the glossy black, sticker-swathed mountain bike into the crowded train car. It was the last car, where you could bring a bike, but this car was packed and so was every other car for the peak of morning rush hour. The bike’s pedals jammed into the ankles of the lady, probably a lawyer, in a grey pants-suit standing across from Telly; its handlebars forced a heavyset, heavy-breathing man in a red jogging outfit to hold his gut in. Telly usually said “Hope nobody farts, bro’,” when it was like this but, mercifully, hadn’t said it so far. He and Gino got seats when two people got off at the downtown Oakland stop. Telly was leaning on the bicycle seat, and in the swaying press of people looming around them they felt agreeably hidden away though they could smell the exact proportions of sweat mixed with perfume and deodorant around them.

  Gino knew for a fact that the lady in lavender with the big hair, standing next to his left knee, had a yeast infection. Her crotch smelled like a bakery on fire.

  “Big shit, if he fires us,” Telly was saying, tugging on a tuft of goatee. “How many messenger services can we work for? Beaucoup bikin’ out there, bro’.”

  Gino leaned back a little to peer through the swaying forest of fabric and torsos, thinking about losing his job, at the same time trying to define what was always so odd about the light here in the crossbay tunnel. Beneath sand and silt and sharks and ships and a sheath of rock and concrete, there was not a trace of light here except the artificial light.

  His gaze settled on a black security guard squeezed in the access passage to the back door of the car, the guy was at least a hundred pounds overweight, with a long silvery cop’s flashlight propped on one shoulder like a sentry with his rifle. Beside the fat black guy was a woman in the same kind of Brinks uniform—she was roundfaced, otherwise skinny, with badly conked hair. She had a flashlight too. Both of them standing, wedged together. They weren’t guards for BART. Why’d they need a flashlight at this hour, working downtown? Maybe they were coming off-shift from an all-nighter in the East Bay. They looked tired enough. And their expressions said they were underpaid.

  “I like working for Geisenbaum,” Gino said at last, “he pays fifty cents an hour more than most of ’em.”

  Telly ducked his head to acknowledge a baseline truth. “We gettin’ there, dude.” He looked at his Zippy the Pinhead watch, then reached down and absently flicked his thumbnail up the spokes on his bicycle wheel, the faint twang almost lost in the metallic hiss-and-rumble of the BART train as it strobed past tunnel lights. He continued the motion up the spokes and past the wheel to flick, finally, the ring in his lower lip and the one through his nose; sounds you couldn’t hear. He was peacock proud of his tattoos and his piercings. Glanced at the twining red-andbluegreen Chinese dragon on his forearm as he raised it to look again at Zippy’s gloves on his watch, repeating: “We gettin’ there—”

  He broke off, lifting his head, listening like a dog at a whistle pitched too high for everyone else. Then Gino felt it too: a crosswave of vibration, a shivering of the car that didn’t harmonize with the faint vibration of the plastic seats, the metal floor.

  And then the train braked; it braked with a suddenness that rattled vertebrae like dominos, and everyone became rodeo cowboys in their seats, and then darkness, profound darkness like when he’d toured a cavern and the State Park guide had switched off the lights so they could experience geological absolutes; and then a scream of metal that sounded almost apologetic and a sizzle of breaking glass and he lost his seat entirely as the world pitched him over its shoulder. And direction, as a thing-in-itself, was uncreated: and Gino had a new relationship to gravity. Bodies pummeled him and people wailed and sirened, so loudly, from so deeply, Gino could feel the twisting weight of their bodies in the sound.

  After that a cymbal crashed against the side of his head and he heard Telly screaming like a baby and the sound got very faint and distant and vanished in the silence.

  When Gino came to, it was to a cold wetness on his right side and wet warmth on the other. His thoughts were almost immediately clear and he was surprised at his own comforting detachment.

  He knew with a knifelike certainty that there had been an earthquake.

  He knew he was lying atop a wet stack of bodies in the darkness and in blood and sea water and a thin scum of sewage from ruptured viscera. People were screaming.

  He knew it had been a big earthquake and they were halfway across the bay and under thousands of tons of water, and no one would ever, ever rescue them.

  He knew he’d been hit in the head and knocked out and something was still breaking in his head, but he was sure, somehow, that it had only just happ
ened, no more than a minute had passed. Maybe it was the energy in the screams and the flailing around him. It was the energy of a fresh catastrophe.

  The screaming, though, came to him filtered through a buzzing in his head; he was fairly sure that one of his eardrums had burst. There was pain in that ear, but it seemed unreal. That surprised him, too, in an insular kind of way: pain ought to be the realest thing of all. But mere pain had no rank here. Both fear and pain were subordinate to the seeking cone of perception, the exploratory probe of a terminating life. Two of his senses, smell and taste, had mostly shut down; he knew this meant that the rest of his senses would shut down. That the oozing chill in one corner of his skull was spreading, would shut him down.

  These realizations were not articulated for Gino: they were experienced the way one experiences the cold surface of a concrete wall under the fingers.

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, he tried to look around.

  Experimentally, he tried to move. It didn’t hurt more to move than to lay still. He began to crawl. A hand flapped in his face; fingernails, probably a woman’s, dug into his cheek, and he pulled his head back, in reflex, but otherwise ignored it, kept moving.

  Sometimes the wailing ebbed and there was only a vocal rasping, a murmuring, like the sounds of an unseen flock of birds. Then the wailing would resume. One sound was equal to another.

  Gino turned, and his eyes cleared, and he saw that now there was a little light, yellowish light from below mostly, and a faint sheen of red light from the sides. After what might have been a full minute of looking he knew that the yellow light was from the rear of the car which was now directly below him. The BART tunnel had curled like a bent finger, knuckled under to the buckling of the earth’s crust, to a wedge of strata jammed upward, sheer as a seismographic spike. Horizontal had become vertical and everyone was pressed down into the tin can of the car by bodyweight and by slowly-increasing water and by mud coming in through widening seams of metal and by thickening blood. And more bodies had come in from the second to last car, gravitationally forced through the shattered door, packing, cramming this lower car so full there were only a few crawl-spaces left. Yet there were apertures, wet and ready places that seemed to be there for him, for this moment, for whatever remained to Gino.