Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Yo, Bobby!”

  It’s Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like shit, y’know.”

  “I wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.

  “Where’s Carl?”

  “Taking a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “C’mon! You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to me.’”

  “I don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”

  “That’s Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”

  As they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed with her mind.”

  Bobby wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that simple.

  “What’d you say to her?” Pineo asks.

  “Nothing. I just told her about the job.”

  Pineo cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re gonna get married.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re fucking her.”

  “I’m not fucking her!”

  Pineo points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”

  “Sicilian ESP…Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”

  “I can’t believe you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”

  Bobby just shakes his head ruefully.

  “So what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”

  Irritated now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”

  “Seriously. I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job. She…”

  One of the earth movers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.

  “She was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come along and pulled her trigger. Yeah…and once the little girl thing gets over, she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”

  Bobby recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy, cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not fully grasped. That she did awaken, and not merely to her posthumous condition, but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,” maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the whirlwind.

  “Yeah, she was all that,” Bobby says.

  A WALK IN THE GARDEN

  Thursday, 1435 hours

  Paradise awaits.

  It begins at the foot of a mountain, a slice of which has been carved away by bombardment to expose a field of yellow flowers beneath—it looks as if the entire base is hollow, an immense cave utilized for this pretty purpose. Unreal. Like a puddle of yellow blood spilled from the side of a wounded rock, spread out over a patch of dead ground. To Wilson, who hails from Colorado, where the mountains have snow on their slopes, this mountain is just a big ugly hill. He’s not sure, either, that he would classify the field of flowers as the gateway to Paradise. There seems to be a division of opinion as to what the field is. The bomb they used to open up the cave was something new. Nobody is clear about what happened. According to Wilson’s buddy, Baxter Tisdale, a corporal who’s friends with some of the tech specialists, the brainiacs are talking about paradigm shifts, changes on the quantum level. When Wilson asked what the fuck was all that, Baxter told him to do some IQ, he wasn’t going to attempt an explanation that Wilson, his intellect unamplified, couldn’t possibly comprehend. Wilson was tempted to do as Baxter said. He likes IQ, likes the rush of getting suddenly smart, the way the world fits around him differently. But he doesn’t want to be too smart to do his job. In the morning they’ll walk through the field of flowers and into the shadowy places beyond. Chances are he’ll do IQ at some point before the mission, but right now he doesn’t want to be thinking about that walk too deeply.

  Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He’s shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he’s looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, “Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we’re gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!” Now he’s in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he’s not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There’s little doubt the ragheads believe it’s Paradise. If the village wasn’t cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.

  Here and there among the flowers lie chunks of rock, some big as troop carriers. Wilson tells his helmet to go tight on one of the blossoms next to the big rock. It’s long and fluted like a lily, its interior petals convulsed like those of a rose. He’s never seen a flower resembling it. Not that he’s an expert. The weird thing is, there are no bugs. He scans from blossom to blossom. Nary an ant, an aphid, or a bee. Maybe Intel isn’t bullshitting; maybe the ragheads have developed a strain of flowers that don’t need bugs to fertilize them. Maybe they’re like a cool new drug source. Better than opium poppies. Wilson indulges a brief fantasy. He’s back in Greeley, at a party, in a room with Mackie and a couple of girls, and they’re about to twist one up when he produces a baggie filled with dried yellow petals and says, “Magic time.” A few minutes later he and Laura Witherspoon are screwing on the ceiling, the walls have turned to greenish blue music, the carpet is the surface of a shaggy planet far below. He wishes for things he can’t have. That Laura was with him, that he never re-upped. Most of all he wishes that he never volunteered for Special Ops. Depressed, he instructs his helmet to feed him a trippy level of downs via ocular mist. A minute drools off the lip of time. His head feels full of syrup, a warm sludge of thought. He’s got Chinese eyes, he’s nodding like the yellow flowers in the breeze…They’re so close it looks as if he could reach out and snap off a blossom, lift it to his lips and drink secre
t nectar from the Garden of Allah.

  • • •

  2018 hours

  Sunsets from the perspective of the ledge are made beautiful by dust storms raging to the south. Immense swirls of crimson and gold figure the sky, transforming it into a swirling battle flag. Wilson watches the flowers redden, go purple at dusk, and finally vanish in darkness. He removes his helmet, picks up his sidearm, and strolls through the village. Narrow rocky streets; whitewashed houses lit by oil lamps; a diminutive mosque with a blue-and-white tiled dome. At the far end of the village, on a rocky shelf from which a path winds downhill toward the American compound, three teenage Iraqi boys are preparing to burn a cartoon of George Bush painted nearly lifesize on a sheet of cardboard and suspended from a limb of a leafless tree. Bush has been portrayed with the body of a capering monkey. His head is a grinning pasted-on magazine photograph. The boys are dressed in jeans and Tshirts. They’re smoking cigarettes, joking around, not apparently motivated by political passion as much as by a desire to do mischief. One adds twigs to a small fire beneath the cardboard sheet. A lanky black man carrying a helmet like Wilson’s under one arm is standing off to the side, looking on.

  “Hey, Baxman!” Wilson exchanges a complex handshake with his friend. “S’up?”

  “Checkin’ out the rebels here.” Baxter’s face, highlighted by the flames, is a polished mask. His eyes are pointed with flickery red cores.

  “We oughta clue these guys in there’s a new president,” says Wilson, and Baxter says, “They know that. They not goin’ forget ol’ George until he’s way longer gone than he is now. Man’s the embodiment of the Great Satan for these fuckers.”

  Wilson notes his use of the word “embodiment” and wonders if Baxter’s working behind IQ. Hard to tell, because Baxter’s a pretty sharp guy even natural.

  “Burn his monkey ass!” Baxter makes a two-handed gesture, emulating leaping flames. The boys look perplexed and fearful. “Go on! I’m not goin’ hurt you! Burn his ass!”

  “Whatcha got against Bush?”

  “What do you got for him? Dude was an embarrassment!”

  “He chased Saddam outa town, man.”

  Baxter gives him a pitying look. “Where you think Saddam’s at? He’s not dead, man. Some guys’re sayin’ the flowers might be the front of his secret hideout. I think that’s crap. Man probably had some surgery, turned himself into a woman and is right now fuckin’ his brains out on a beach in Brazil. My point bein’, all Bush did was give Saddam a goddamn golden parachute!”

  Wilson knows Baxter’s just acting pissed-off at him; he’s driving away the demons of tomorrow morning the best he knows how. “So the flowers aren’t his secret palace or something…fuck, are they?”

  Baxter pulls a sheaf of print-outs from his back pocket. The heading on the front page is Paradise and Hell: In the Light of the Holy Qur’an. It’s part of the library relating to Islamic culture and religion they were forcefed while on board the transport that brought them to Iraq. Wilson’s retention of the material was deemed substandard. “I’m down with the ragheads on this one,” Baxter says.

  “You think it’s Paradise, huh?” Wilson examines the print-outs. “It say anything in there ’bout yellow flowers?”

  “Naw, but you haven’t been hearin’ what I’m hearin’. The way the brainiacs are talkin’ about the bomb, how it maybe broke us through to some other plane. They say the whole area’s unstable, but when I ask ’em, ‘Unstable how?’ they clam up on me.” Baxter slaps the sheaf against his palm. “Paradise sounds reasonable as anything else. That’s why I’m readin’ up on it.”

  Wilson’s attention has wandered, and seeing that Baxter is waiting for a response, he feels as he often did when called on in class back in high school. Unprepared, and yet compelled to say something. “We’re not fighting Saddam,” he says. “We’re fighting terror.”

  “Say what?”

  “We’re fighting terror. Saddam’s not the target, man.”

  Baxter shakes his head ruefully. “Man, you a mess!”

  The bottom of the cardboard sheet catches fire. The flames wash upward, devouring Monkey George. The teenage boys let out halfhearted whoops and glare fiercely at the Americans; then they, too, lapse into silence and watch the cardboard shriveling to ash.

  As they walk together down the path, using their helmets in night-vision mode to find their way, the lights of the compound greenly visible below, illuminating tents and ranks of armored vehicles, Baxter says, “Ragheads got some weird ideas ’bout hell.”

  Baxter’s voice is muffled by the helmet. Wilson asks him to repeat and then says, “Yeah? Like what kind?”

  “They say most people in hell goin’ be women. Hey, call it whatever you want. Hell. Heaven. I don’t care. You can put me down in with the ladies anytime!”

  “What else they say?”

  “The usual shit. You drink melted brass, you get burned all over. They work your ass to death, but you never die. One weird thing: they let people out.”

  “Outa hell?”

  “Yeah. People in heaven intercede for people in hell and then they let ’em out. Book makes a big deal ’bout the last man gets into heaven. He has to crawl out from hell and then he sees a shade tree and after he goes through some other bullshit, he’s honored by Allah.” Baxter negotiates a tricky stretch of path banked downward from the hill over a hundred-foot drop. “’Course once he’s in heaven, he learns he’s the lowest status guy.”

  “Probably still be happy,” Wilson says. “Probably still beats hell.”

  “Sooner later he’s goin’ think about movin’ on up the ladder. It’s human fuckin’ nature.”

  They stop for a smoke, sitting on a boulder barely twenty feet above the operations tent. The sky is starless, the air thick with heat. Faint shouts and rumblings rise to them. Baxter spits down onto the tent and says, “This shit here, man, it’s not what I signed on for. I got half a mind to go for a long walk east before tomorrow.”

  “I’m not listening to this crap!” Wilson says, and when Baxter starts to come back with more of the same, he talks through him. “Uh-uh, man. I don’t wanna even take this to the level of a fucking discussion. You understand?”

  Baxter hits his cigarette; the brightened coal paints his face in orange glow and shadow, making him look both dangerous and defeated.

  “We’re gonna kick terrorist ass tomorrow,” Wilson says.

  “Mmmph.”

  “Our daddy was a stick of dynamite and mama was T-Rex on the rag.”

  Baxter flips his cigarette out over the tent and tracks its sparking downward arc. “I’m not playin’ that game with you. I’m not into it.”

  “How do you spell Democracy?”

  “You heard what I said. I’m not doin’ this with you.”

  “I want to know. How do you spell it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I am a truly ignorant son-of-a-bitch! I have a deep-seated soul-need to know how to spell Democracy.” Wilson holds out his right hand to Baxter, palm up. “I need it from you, Baxman. We going hunting together in the morning. I need to get motivated.”

  Baxter says, “Shit,” and laughs, like whatever, okay, I’ll play your dumbass game, but when he slaps Wilson’s palm, he does so with gung-ho force. Their hands lock strong in a gladiator grip.

  “How do you spell Democracy?” Wilson asks, and Baxter, all serious now, warrior-mean and going eye-to-eye, says, “With bullets, man. With bullets.”

  • • •

  Friday, 0525 hours

  Packed into a troop carrier with Baxter and six other soldiers dressed in camo spacesuits, Wilson listens to tunes until his helmet asks him to review his medal file. Using the computer built into the left arm of his suit, he pulls it up on-screen. The file consists of biographical data, likes and dislikes, personal observations, quotes, information that will be provided to the media should he perform a brilliant act of bravery and initiative, especially if he should die in its performance, in wh
ich case a gorgeous news slut will announce his name on television, breathe sadly and then pick a choice bit from the file to give color to his life, informing her public that Spec 4 Charles Newfield Wilson taught his kid sister to play hoops and had a taste for orange soda. The last item in the file is entitled 10 Things Specialist Fourth Class Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know. Wilson can’t recall the last time he modified the list, but some of it seems incoherent. It’s clear he was in a different head at the time, riding a mighty chemical wave, or—and this is more likely—the list is a product of several variant chemical states. He sits with a finger poised over the delete key, but thinks maybe he knew more when he modified the list than he does now and closes the file unchanged.