The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  I wanted to convince them, somehow, because I wanted to convince myself.

  While I was talking, Don’s Sufferer had crept in, like some kind of affirmation of my words. It padded past Don and Randall, stopping a foot or so away from Randall’s Sufferer, I stopped talking. The two aliens stared at each other, and the distance between them suddenly seemed very small.

  I thought of the aliens’ incredible strength. I wished Don’s was bigger than Randall’s, instead of the reverse.

  “Guardian angel,” mused Randall. “That your guardian angel, Light?” The sneer in his voice made me sorry I’d spoken at all.

  “Yeah,” said Don. “It’ll always be with you now, Randall. Gonna live your life with you, see everything you do.”

  “Fuck you trying to say?”

  “Nothing. Just that you gotta live right, now, Randall. You’re being watched.” Don wasn’t saying it because it meant anything to him. He was just yanking Randall’s chain.

  “Huh.” Randall thought this over. “Light, you don’t know shit about shit. You don’t know what I do, how I live.”

  “Maybe not, Randall.”

  “I gotta get my money back, Light. Drey, take the money off Light.”

  Don handed it over, preemptively. I thought of the gun.

  “I gotta put a hurt on you, Light, like you put on me. How’m I gonna do that?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What you got that I can take? You ain’t got nothing.”

  The Sufferers suddenly both stood, and I braced for some kind of violence between them. Instead they turned and walked out of the garage together, into the frame of moonlight, and then disappeared around the corner, heading towards the water. To settle their differences?

  With them gone I felt naked, doomed.

  “Kaz,” said Randall, “you gotta do my hurtin’ for me, my man. For what Light did to you.”

  “Naw, Randall,” whined Kaz. “Naw, man.”

  “Hit him.”

  “Naw. He still got a gun, Randall, anyway. You didn’t take it off him.”

  “So take it off him.” Randall pointed at me. “You go, chump. You got lucky. Don’t fuck with me no more. Don’t go around with this dude Light, he’s bad news. Go.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Get lost. I ain’t gonna fuck with you. You didn’t know what you was doing.”

  “We’ll go together,” I said. “He’s, uh, my brother.”

  “Go.” Randall pointed, and the driver raised the gun at me.

  “Go ahead, Paul,” said Don.

  “No, I’m his brother,” I said, getting hysterical. “No.”

  Randall shoved me towards the door, and the driver followed. I took a few steps.

  “Take him, Kaz,” commanded Randall, done with me. “Take his gun.”

  “Naw, don’t make me, Randall.”

  “Do it!”

  “I’m his brother—”

  The driver kicked me, and aimed the gun at my stomach. Inside, Kaz was advancing sheepishly on Don.

  I ran, into the glare of moonlight.

  Where was the Sufferer? I ran towards the water. Behind me, the clatter of voices: Don, Randall, Kaz. I ran, gasping.

  When I found the Sufferers I thought they were killing each other. They were half hidden behind a pile of shredded, stinking tires, in a puddle of stagnant water streaked with oil rainbows. They lay entwined, limbs twisted together, both moaning like echoing wells, their bodies twitching, paws treading air, ears wrinkled back.

  Fucking. Making love—the moment it hit me was the moment I heard the shot.

  I turned in time to see the four shadows sprinting for the truck. Kaz’s voice: “You made me, you made me, you shouldn’t of fuckin’ made me—”

  They’d driven off before I got back to Don.

  He was lying on the floor scrabbling in the glass with a hand already sticky with blood. In the dark the blood looked black, and watching it seep out of his stomach was like watching his white sweatshirt disappear into the gloom. It was happening fast.

  “Fuck, Paul,” he said, when he saw me.

  “I’m going to get help,” I said.

  “Wait, don’t leave me—”

  “I’ll be back—”

  I ran out, back under the freeway, and found a woman walking her dog in the park. “For God’s sake, my brother got shot, down in the old garage down there, please can you call an ambulance, please—” I fumbled it out between gasps, repeated everything, pointing, and when she agreed I turned and ran back, clutching a knot in my side; a cramp from running, but it felt like a sympathetic wound.

  Moving too fast, I slid in his blood, and my knees buckled at seeing how little of the white of the sweatshirt was left. I sat down, in blood and glass, and held his hand.

  His gun lay to one side, and I felt suddenly sure that he’d been shot with his own gun, Kaz trying to take it from him. The gun we could have left behind so many times in so many different places.

  “I can’t see you, man,” said Don.

  “Your eyes?” My voice was trembling, on the verge of sobs.

  “No, stupid, I mean move around here, don’t sit behind me.”

  I shifted. “An ambulance is coming, okay, Donnie? So just hang on. Guess you’ll have to talk to the police or something, huh?”

  An hour ago I was still picturing Don in California. Now the dream of seeing him in a hospital bed seemed maybe too much to dare hope for.

  “You’re so stupid about the cops, Paul.” His voice was husky, and as he went on, it got rougher and softer. “I don’t care about the cops. When they arrested me before I told the guy ‘Thank you, you saved me.’ ’Cause I was a skeleton, I weighed about ninety pounds, and I knew I would dry out, get healthy in jail. That’s all jail is, man, guys gettin’ fed, getting healthy again, doing pushups, so they can go out and do it again. Shit, if they’d given me time instead of parole I might be off rock now.”

  I started weeping.

  “C’mon, Paul, relax.”

  “We could be on a plane right now,” I said. “We were right there, we were at the airport. The Sufferer, the Sufferer ruined everything.”

  “Nah, man, I didn’t want to go. Tony the Tiger didn’t blow it.”

  “Why? Why couldn’t we just go?”

  “I was all freaked out. I mean, it sounds great, right? Start over, cut out, leave all the shit behind. But I wasn’t ready. I was just going along, I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If California is my big second chance, Paul, I don’t wanna go fuck it up with my pockets full of rock. I wanted it to be like you said, but I wasn’t ready, I was afraid. If I went and I was still all fucked up there—I didn’t want to disappoint you, Paul. At least if we didn’t go I hadn’t fucked up California. It was still there, like this beautiful picture you were painting, you know—”

  His voice was trailing off, and I could barely hear him for my own sobbing.

  “It was sort of hard for me to think about California or whatever, anything else, with all that rock in my coat, Paul. When we took Kaz for rock instead of cash . . . I had to get rid of it, and if I had to get rid of it, why not get high, you know? You don’t know . . . you don’t know how much I . . . like to get high, Paul. You haven’t been around me that much. We haven’t been in touch. I’m not just, like, the little kid you knew. I been . . . doing stuff—”

  “My fault, the whole thing about robbing Kaz. You did that because of my stupid idea, to get cash for the tickets.”

  “Yeah, yeah, let’s blame it all on you and the monster. Whatever. But the California thing . . . wasn’t stupid. It was a good idea, so relax now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Shut up now and stop making me talk so much, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll go . . . we’ll still go to California.”

  I didn’t say anything, and Don closed his eyes, and we were quiet. The pace of blood leaking
through his shirt slowed down. Time seemed to slow with it.

  “I’m gonna pass out now,” he said.

  “Okay,” I managed.

  “I’m just . . . passing out, right, I’m not dying.”

  He couldn’t see his sweatshirt. “Right,” I said.

  He was dead for almost five minutes before I finally heard sirens, and they weren’t even close yet.

  I made a quick calculation about talking to a long series of people about what happened, starting with the ambulance people and the police and ending with our parents, versus getting the hell out of there, ft wasn’t a hard call.

  I took Don’s pipe and lighter and put them in my pocket and ran, south under the highway, and circled around a couple of blocks back to Broadway.

  I hopped the turnstile and took the IRT downtown, to the Village, then walked across West 3rd Street to Washington Square Park, where life went on as usual, all night every night, every night for the last thirty years, probably. I sat on the same bench I’d been on at noon, waiting for Don to turn up, finding him after so long. Now I had to share it with a guy who was sleeping, but his smell and my stare kept anyone else away.

  I wondered if I was waiting for Kaz. I couldn’t think of what I would do or say if he showed, so I guessed I wasn’t.

  I started feeling sleepy about the same time the sky began to lighten up. The deadest hour in the park, when the night is officially over. A few businessmen walked across, and joggers. It was their park now, for a few short hours.

  I got off my bench and managed to find someone dealing. There’s always someone dealing. If I’d said to him: “You seen Kaz?” or “You seen Light?” he probably would have said: “Naw, man. But he be around later. What you want him for?”

  Instead I just scored a five-dollar vial and went back to my bench.

  I put it into Don’s pipe and flickered the lighter over it and drew a hit, and at that moment the Sufferer walked up. It sat down in front of me and cocked its head.

  I tried to ignore it, which worked for about five seconds. Then, riding the rush from the crack, I jumped on it and started beating its face with my fists. “You didn’t do anything!” I screamed. The Sufferer just twisted slowly away from my blows, squinting its big eyes, shifting its feet to accommodate my assault. “You didn’t help him at all! You didn’t change anything!”

  A crowd began to gather around us. “You were fucking, you were fucking when they killed him!” My voice cracked with rage, and I tasted my snot and tears as they ran down my face. I beat at it, my fists aching, then tried to reach for its mouth, its “Achilles tendon,” but it just butted me away with its cheek. “You didn’t help him at all!”

  A couple of Rastafarians came forward out of the crowd and plucked me away. “Easy there, little man, come on. It didn’t hurt you now, you just hurting you-self. Easy up.”

  I squirmed out of their grasp and fell to the pavement in front of the Sufferer. The alien opened its mouth and moaned silently at me, then took a step away from me. The crowd ducked quickly out of its way, though it hadn’t made a sudden or violent movement yet.

  Sickened, trembling, I crawled off the pavement, into the grassy section behind the benches.

  Soon enough the little knot of attention that had gathered around us was dissolved back into the park. The Sufferer wandered away too.

  When the trembling passed I got up and staggered out of the park, half blind with hunger and exhaustion. The Village swirled around me, oblivious. I thought about Don weighing ninety pounds, reaching the end of his run, thanking the cops for taking him off the street, for noticing him at all.

  I don’t know how long I walked before I passed out on the bench on Sixth Avenue, in front of the basketball courts, but when I woke again, the sun was low. People were going home from work. I was freezing. The Sufferer was staring at me, its face inches from mine.

  I reached out, weak, wanting to hit it or twist its ears and to take its warmth at the same time.

  It pulled away, and turned and trotted down Sixth. “You fucker,” I said. “It would have been better if you’d never come at all.”

  I could have been talking to myself. Maybe I was.

  I watched the Sufferer turn the comer, and I never saw it again after that.

  The Brooklyn Bridge has a walkway. The Manhattan used to, but doesn’t anymore. I crossed the bridge under an orange sky. I walked through downtown Brooklyn to Flatbush Avenue, and took the Long Island Railroad to Plainview, to tell Jimmy and Marilla that I knew what had happened to Don, to Donovan, to Light.

  FOREVER, SAID THE DUCK

  Pearl O’Hennies was in the corner talking to Notable Johnson. “Can you believe her gall, calling everyone up like this.”

  “But my dear, that’s exactly what he did,” said Notable. “They’re the only two really here. We’re all samples.”

  They were talking about their hosts, who were in another of the blank, featureless rooms.

  “What is it, a contest?”

  “A contest, you mean to see who had more lovers? I think they’re above that. They’ve known each other all these years—”

  “Why don’t they just call each other up, then? Why all this?”

  “Well they could be with each other, of course. In the real world, instead of a dull, poorly furnished virtual space like this one. But then we wouldn’t all be here. It is about us, you see. Even if they won’t talk to anyone but each other.”

  “I heard they’ve got games planned, for later.”

  “What, Spin the Bottle?”

  Cambert Moid stepped over to where they stood. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asked.

  “Hello, Cambert,” said Pearl crisply.

  “Hello, Pearl. I suppose I should say, long time no see. But”—he mimicked a Southern accent—“I don’t rightly know if that’s true. I suppose our real selves could have warmed up to each other by now. Besides, this is hardly ‘see,’ now is it?”

  “You talk too much, Cambert,” said Pearl.

  “I’ll let you two catch up,” mumbled Notable Johnson, and he slipped away. He was en route to the monitors where guests were punching up drink simulations when he ran into Caitlice Frisman.

  “Caitlice!”

  “Oh, Johnny.” She put her arms around him. “Nice, nice, nice. But what, excuse me, what the hell are you doing here?” She leaned in close. “You sleep with that remorseless pussycat?”

  “I take it you refer to our host.”

  “Yours, not mine,” she corrected.

  He nodded his shameful assent to her question.

  “Well, a party like this is what you get, what you deserve, for a glitch like that—but enough. You’re in charge of your own regrets. Just tell me when it happened.”

  “You’re humiliating me, Cait,” he said affectionately. “Two years—how should I count it?—two years after us, after you and I—”

  “Then you know how we’ve been, and you must tell me. Because I—this copy here is from right after we broke—you weren’t even talking to me, Johnny. But you’re from later, and so you know how we’ve been, out there, in our real selves.”

  “Oh, fine, Cait. Nothing could keep us from—coffee every Monday.”

  “Ah.”

  They both fell to a moment of sadness. Then Caitlice said flippantly, “So am I magnificently fat now?”

  “Oh, no, you look terrific. But that reminds me, Cait, listen: Gavin Urnst is here, a very early sample, and last I knew he was in the hospital, quite sick—”

  “We mustn’t tell him here,” she said quickly. “Ruin his time, when he can’t do anything. Any more than you would tell me if I was fat. Do you think he—”

  “Died? I can’t know. Anyone, I mean, you or I—”

  “Shh.”

  They were quiet again for a minute.

  “Cait, if this thing goes long, let’s find each other. I mean, it could get unbearable. I’ve heard they’re hoping we’ll all pair—”

 
“Shhh. Say no more. It’s a date. Save the last dance for me. And now I must mingle, darling.”

  Notable nodded. Caitlice turned and attached herself immediately to a group containing Millard Heron, O.K. Tinkers, and Wendy Airhole.

  “This is such an indignity,” Wendy said. “I was only with him as a favor, just stayed long enough to qualify for the copying. I wanted him to have me to access, but not for this fucking party. I remember thinking that I shouldn’t, just out of pity for my poor copy—that is, me, now, here. God.”

  “Hmmm,” said Millard Heron. “He told me it was the other way. That he only slept with you—”

  “Oh Millard, what do you know?” Wendy breathed out in a weary rush. “The things women have to tell men just to keep them from imploding with insecurity, just to keep their dicks hard long enough to be entertaining—and then to think they go around repeating it to each other—”

  “Hey, we’re at a party,” said Caitlice, singingly. “Make the best of it, there’s no harm done here. You, the real you, doesn’t care about this, doesn’t object, won’t recall it. You and I, the real you and I, might be having our very-own version of this same party right now—”

  “I would never,” said O.K. Tinkers. He shuddered. “Oh, I would never want to see them all, all in the same place—”

  The four laughed, resentment suddenly abolished.

  “This could be a sort of nightmare for them,” Wendy speculated merrily. “If we somehow joined forces—”

  Caitlice took her by the elbow, tsk-tsking. “Excuse us, boys. Come for a drink simulation, Wendy.”

  “You think I should lighten up, Cait, don’t you?”

  “I think you could be having fun.” Caitlice steered her away from O.K. and Millard.

  “My kind of fun is darker than yours, Cait. Doesn’t the, the smugness of it just creep you out? But I’ll have a drink if you like. It’ll just get me bitchier. They made a mistake calling this particular lady out of storage.”