In Extremis

by John Shirley

  Amin had grabbed Sterno’s arms, held them pinned. Was giggling into his ear.

  Another unzipping. Stinking, rotting mouths began to chew at him . . . Tom Cruise’s stinking mouth . . . Stephen King’s . . . began to chew at him . . . to chew at his face . . .

  “Death is, after all, the only true freedom, Mr. ‘Sterno’ . . .” Vreedeez was saying, lighting a cigarette. “As for the people who know where you are - we’ll either have them killed by ‘suicide’ or we’ll buy them off. It’s surprisingly easy to buy off ‘underground’ artists. Just offer them a major record contract or a movie deal . . .”

  The pain was—

  But they broke Sterno’s neck, and the pain was gone and buzzing blackness sucked him in.

  “No no no no, Idi,” Vreedeez said. “You may not eat the man’s testicles. I wish to . . . Idi . . . Stop that!”

  Vreedeez sighed. He’d finally had enough.

  He signaled P’uzz Leen, who drew the dart gun from his pocket and fired it neatly into Amin’s neck. Idi Amin fell, paralyzed.

  “We’ll mount Idi here on the new array . . . maybe with the Archbishop of Canterbury . . . Now, P’uzz, see that Mr. Sterno’s remains are fed to all the living gargoyles; a little bit, at least, for each, except of course for the brain—I’ll be taking that with me for bio-interface downloading. We should get a significant charge from this juxtaposition; events will tilt in our favor once more . . . Oh and buy more stock in Apple . . .”

  CUL-DE-SAC

  I started to see things other people couldn’t see. It began at the hospital. I mean, I saw real things, not hallucinations. It probably started happening because of my skateboard accident. With me, skateboarding is pretty much all accident. I come back from skating with my friends all covered with bruises and scrapes, with chipped bones and stuff. It’s not that I’m not good at it—it’s just that I push the envelope a lot. My right front incisor is shaped like a guillotine now because of a skateboard fall.

  This time, my worst accident, was at the skate park in Berkeley, one of those chilly days in late November—chilly but never really cold. The sky’s the same color as the skate park concrete, days like that. That day, me and DickWad were skating—

  I should tell you that DickWad (Richard Wadley, okay?) is a tall skinny white guy (I’m a short skinny one) who dropped out of school and became a skateboard pro but barely makes any kind of living at it and sleeps on his girlfriend’s couch and drinks beer pretty much twenty-four-seven.

  We were doing kick flips when we saw the turfies were coming into the park, at the other side, doing pocket checks. Pocket checks are a way of life in the East Bay. These were NBP turfies—their tats say N.B.P., means No Body’s Prisoner though a lot of them are in jail—and they’re all young, skinny black dudes with big floppy shirts and big floppy pants and they do these “pocket checks” which somehow sounds better to people than “strong-arm robbery”. They don’t get that much from any one guy, it’s like five bucks here and ten there and two there, but after doing it all across town for a couple hours they’ve harvested a few hundred bucks, enough to get some grapes to smoke—

  What? Oh. Grapes is weed that has some purple on it.

  No. No, I wasn’t smoking it. I already told the cops that what I saw wasn’t drug stuff. I wasn’t smoking pot or drinking angel’s trumpet tea or doing ’shrooms or none of that stuff.

  Anyway, last time these turfies were here, I had ten dollars in my pocket my dad gave me, so that time I skated away when they tried to do the pocket check on me, said, “Fuck off, no fucking way dude,” and managed to get out of there before the gang caught me. I didn’t want them to see me and remember that occasion, so now I said, “Hey whoa, DickWad, we gotta cut right fucking now!” And I turned and skated up the bowl onto the rim of the skate park real quick. Or tried to—I was never any good at that half pipe, vert skating stuff, not much hesh, I do mostly curb tricks, street skating, tech shit like that—

  And the board went out from under me. I fell back against the concrete rim of the bowl and went CRACK! on the back of my head. Went dark. Just like that, like somebody flicking off a computer monitor.

  Next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital room. Curtains on both sides. Monitors on me. Mom and Dad, saying they told me to use a helmet, spending time, patting my arm, going home because my aunt was looking after my little sister and they had to relieve her because you don’t want to leave anyone unsuspecting with my sister Wilmy for long.

  DickWad came to see me, and said, “Yeah dude it was sick, you were, all, lying in this puddle of blood and all the turfies left so they wouldn’t be blamed. They’re all, ‘’They gone say we did that shit.’”

  We laughed at that, in the hospital, but the cops did have a tendency to blame the turfies for everything. They were so poor, anyway, we don’t really blame the turfies for the pocket checks. We resent it, it’s fucked up, but we’d probably do the same, in their place.

  I remember laughing about the turfies running off—though it hurt my bandaged head to laugh—and then I stopped in mid-laugh, because that’s when I saw the . . . I think you call it a silhouette. It was, like, a living shadow, standing behind DickWad. At first I thought it was his shadow. But it moved around on its own, when he didn’t move. It was all restless, prowling around the room. It was literally the silhouette of a man that just walked around on its own. It didn’t have a face. It did have some kind of three-dimensional shape happening. It had depth and it had body-ness. But it was like its body was made out of space—the space between stars. So far between stars you can’t see any.

  It was shaped like a man—but it wasn’t a man. And it scared me.

  I asked DickWad if he saw it but he didn’t hear me because he was listening on my iPhone to a Flaming Lips song, and watching the video on the tiny screen, and then he walked out with my iPhone, saying he wanted to show it to his girlfriend, who was smoking a cigarette outside, and he’d be right back. But I haven’t got it back yet. I don’t think he was trying to steal it though; he smokes tree and forgets what he’s doing a lot.

  He walked out and left me there with that living shadow. Not even knowing he was leaving me with this thing. And it was looking right at me—I could feel its curiosity.

  Another one came in, another space demon—that’s what I think I’ll call them, space demons. That sounds so much tighter than silhouette and they look like they’re made out of space.

  This one can see us, said the first one to the second one.

  It wasn’t exactly in words but that’s what it was saying. When these space demons speak you hear something that your brain turns into words. I don’t know how, exactly, but then I don’t know why I can see them and you can’t.

  No, there’s not one in here with us. Something happened so that—I’ll come to that in a minute, dude.

  So these things were talking about me.

  If he can see us, we can’t hurt him, that’s the rule, said the second one.

  It’s a stupid rule, said the first one.

  It’s not our rule. It is the rule of those who will destroy us if we break it. We must submit. Perhaps we can persuade him . . . We could whisper to him . . .

  Now it is you who does not know the rules. If he can see us he cannot be persuaded by us. That is the rule.

  We could destroy those around him and create an existential mousetrap, the first one pointed out. An existential mouse-trap will neutralize him.

  (Sure I know what existential means—I’m almost nineteen, a freshman in community college already. I had to read The Stranger for a class and the teacher explained.)

  “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?” I asked them. They glanced at me but they didn’t answer.

  They turned and walked into the corner, then: it was like the lines near the corner where the floor met the walls were the perspective of a street, in the distance—where the two sides of a street come together and you watched someone walk down the street til
l they’re gone. That’s what it looked like, but really fast, in a few seconds, blip, they vanished into the point where the lines of the corner came together.

  “Nurrrrrrrse!” I yelled.

  They gave me some Xanax for anxiety and some more tests, and tried to get me to take some Haldol, because I was “hallucinating”—I didn’t take it—and kept me another couple of days. I saw the space demons again when the nurse was wheeling me out to meet my mom for checkout, in my wheelchair. I didn’t really need the wheelchair, it was something about insurance. The Filipino nurse forgot some papers and we had to stop next to one of the other patients in the room, while she went to get them. The beds in most of the rooms are just separated with curtains, in this hospital, and there I was, in my chair, sitting and waiting for her next to this old man’s hospital bed—his final bed, from the look of him—and I saw one of the space demons whispering to him. I could hear its voice in my head. It was telling him to change his will, to cut out his children and give the money to “Lisa”. I had the feeling the old guy didn’t know someone was whispering to him but he was hearing it anyway. I tried to tell him not to listen but he seemed to hear the space demon better than me.

  What? Oh—no, I didn’t tell anyone about the space demon talking to the old man. I wanted out of the hospital. I was afraid they’d put me in the “mental hygiene” ward like that guy I used to know in school, Squiddy, who got all tweaked on crystal. Started seeing stuff too—people get paranoid on crystal.

  No, I told you, I don’t do that shit. I didn’t do any crystal. No, not even X. Christ.

  My dad picked me up and we drove in the minivan back to the cul-de-sac where I live with my parents—just while I go to community college, you understand. We live in El Sobrante, in the East Bay, across from San Francisco. My dad says it’s a typical “satellite community”—he works in some kind of urban planning department for the East Bay so he talks that way.

  My dad likes to lecture me in the car because I’m stuck with hearing it there, and all the way home he was talking about how he respected my interest in “extreme sports” and “alternative sports” and all—I didn’t bother to tell him yet again that skateboarding wasn’t alternative or extreme. “All that’s cool, but,” he said, I had to do something else now because I’d been injured and the doctor said I could give myself a blood clot and die if I got a knock like that on the head again. I just shrugged.

  When I was, like, 16, I’d have said, No way I’m going to give it up, even if I die! Because—this part I’d have kept back—it’s the only thing I was ever good at. That was before I decided I might learn to be a writer. But now I don’t know if I’ll be anything because of what happened at the cul-de-sac.

  When we got there my mom was rushing out the door with Wilmy (it’s short for Wilamina), they were on their way to some Middle School soccer game. Wilmy gave me the finger and grinned behind Mom’s back. She’s a 12 year old girl but she’s a total jock, and she can do all that stuff I couldn’t do. She’s good at remembering school facts, too. I never was.

  “Oooh, there’s my poor honna-bug,” my mom said, as we met them on the front porch. She’s almost as short as Wilmy. That’s where I got what she calls my compactness. She was squinting through her thick glasses at me and wrinkling her nose in that nerdy way she has when she’s looking at you close. “How’s your head? You okay?”

  “Better, Mom.”

  I didn’t say, Better except for the space demons. I was trying to convince myself they’d been hallucinations and they’d go away when my head got better. Even though, as I said, “Better, Mom,” I saw a space demon sitting on the eaves of our split level house, with the clouds churning way too fast behind it. Just sitting there, looking down at me: dark space in the shape of a sitting man. It’s looking at me and it felt like once when I walked through a big spider web that had been trimmed in cold dew-drops. I felt the dew drops and the web together.

  I’m glad my mom and sister were gone when it started happening . . .

  I should tell you that the cul-de-sac, Shady Top Circle, is at the top of a hill, and ringed in by eucalyptus. There are nine houses in the circle, five of them four-bedroom split-levels like ours, the rest ranch style. I’ve seen the street on one of those websites where you can see your neighborhood from way up in the air, and the development looks like bicycle chains all looped next to each other, each house and yard another link in the chain. Our house is right in the middle of the cul-de-sac. Behind the houses there’s a backyard, and then a fence, and a steep drop-off. Not exactly a cliff, just a really high, steep hill.

  I still had a bandage on my head, and still felt the throb, but I decided I had to try to see this space demon closer. No, man, I didn’t try and get someone else to look. No one could see him but me. And I know why you’re asking me that, trying to get me to wonder if I’m hallucinating. Reality check, right? Uh uh. Not going to work. I know what happened. It was probably something to do with the head injury. It was like whatever normally blocked off a psychic perception had gotten damaged; the filter was broken, and more was coming through than usual.

  My dad told me to go lay down in my bedroom, “as per doctors’ orders” and I said I would, just as soon as I got a soda in the kitchen. He went into his den to call into work—and I knew that work would suck his attention up and he wouldn’t really notice what I was doing so long as I didn’t make a lot of noise.

  I went out back, circled the house, and looked up at the roof—the space demon was gone. Then I saw it’d just moved—it was on the lawn of the house next door, talking to Mrs. Hasslet. One of those old ladies that make their hair blue.

  It was telling her that it could open a window into Heaven. It was going to show her paradise.

  Mrs. Hasslet, see, was, like, late seventies, and her husband had died six months before—he was in his eighties, a world war two veteran—and she told my mom that since he was gone, life for her was “just a dry husk”. My mom tried to take her to church and get her into volunteering, to cheer her up, but Mrs. Hasslet said that she’d lived to take care of Harvey and now that he was gone she had no meaning. Her kids just acted like she was a pain in the neck when she called, and here was this spinning window into another world opening up, in the center of the circle and it was like it was offering a way out. That’s how it looked, like it was itself some kind of invitation . . .

  All the shapes that should be back of the window, the shapes of houses and posts and mailboxes and trees, were warping, twisting around in a circle, knotting, like there was a navel in space, only the knot kept twisting and twisting, faster and faster, and then things were losing definition in it, pin-wheeling and blurring and turning into a circle of light and then inside the circle of light was, just, another place completely. So it was like a window onto this other world. Only it was sort of our world—it was a beautiful ideal version of our cul-de-sac. I could see it the way Mrs. Hasslet saw it. How it looked for her. It was our street but it wasn’t. I mean, like, there were tropical birds in it—Mrs. Hasslet kept a cockatoo, so that’s not surprising. And somebody was walking in from the side, showing themselves in that window. Walking into view through a garden of giant roses. At first I didn’t recognize him because he looked so much younger than when he died—then I realized it was Mr. Hasslet, Harvey Hasslet, standing there waving at his wife. Beckoning to her. She started toward the window—and it receded. When she stopped going toward it, it stopped receding.

  No, the space demon said. You must go there the way he did. Through death. He doesn’t want to wait for you any longer. You must go now or lose him!

  She stopped for a moment in the street, looking all glazed and puzzled—maybe still trying to figure out who was talking to her and why she was seeing this. Then a Fed Ex truck drove through the window into paradise . . .

  It had really driven into that illusion-window from behind it. As if it had driven through a movie screen from backstage. The truck driver wasn’t seeing this thing, just me
and Mrs. Hasslet. The space demons didn’t show themselves to normal people but they could affect what you see with your mind. Only, pretty much one at a time, I guess. So the Fed Ex delivery guy was swinging around Shady Draw Circle, kind of fast, really, faster than he was supposed to, and he came right through that thing looking like he was going to pull up in a moment in front of the house next door. And as he drove through the window into paradise Mrs. Hasslet ran forward and just kind of tipped herself over in front of his wheels. And no, no, I didn’t push her in front of it—I told the cops that and I’m telling you that. She just threw herself under the big white Fed Ex truck. I could hear the CRUNCH when it went over her neck

  And the window into paradise vanished. And I yelled . . . I yelled for a while . . .

  Then I ran around the house, still yelling, I don’t know what I was yelling, I was really upset. I banged on the window of the den, and yelled for him to call 911. He looked up at me through the window with his mouth open. Then he got the phone. I went back to the street and the truck driver was standing there, crying, this chunky Hispanic dude, sobbing, “But she just came from her yard and she . . . she . . . I didn’t . . .” Ask him if you still think I pushed her. He said it himself: she jumped in front of the truck.

  My dad came out of the house and was putting his coat under Mrs. Hasslet’s head, but she was pretty much gone already. I was feeling sick. I told the driver I saw her throw herself under there, it wasn’t his fault, and I thought about telling them about the space demon. My dad was checking her pulse and I was trying to comfort this hysterical driver, and pretty soon the ambulance came—and just as the ambulance was loading the dying old lady, Mrs. Hasslet’s daughter Milly drove up. She had just spontaneously decided to visit her mother. Milly said she had been feeling like she was neglecting her mom and she came over right then and said, “Oh my God, this is all my fault . . . I didn’t know she was going to commit suicide oh my God, Oh my God, if I’d been more . . .” Like that, on and on, crying.