by Laird Barron
I know what I am. I understand the purpose.
I left the farm and disappeared. One more name on the ominous list haunting law enforcement offices in seventeen states. I vanished myself to the Bering Coast—a simple feat for anyone who wants to try. An old man alone on a plane; no one cared. They never do.
There is an old native ghost town on a stretch of desolate beach. Quonset huts with windows shattered or boarded. Grains of snow slither in past open doors when the frigid wind gusts along, moaning through the abandoned FAA towers colored navy gray and rust. The federal government transplanted the villagers to new homes thirteen miles up the beach.
I don't see anyone when I leave the shack I have appropriated and climb the cliffs to regard the sea. The sea being rumpled, a dark, scaly hide marred by plates of thickening ice. Individual islets today, a solid sheet in a few weeks, extending to the horizon. Or forever. I watch the stars as twilight slips down from the sky, a painless veil pricked with beads and sparks. Unfriendly stars. Eventually I return to the shack. It takes me a very long time—I am an old, old man. My shuffle and panting breath are not part of the theater. The shack waits and I light a kerosene lamp and huddle by the Bunsen burner to thaw these antiquitous bones. I do not hunger much this late in the autumn of my cycle, and nobody is misfortunate enough to happen by, so I eschew sustenance another day.
The radio is old too. Scratchy voice from a station in Nome recites the national news—I pay a lot of attention to this when my time draws nigh, looking for a sign, a symbol of tribulations to come—the United Nations is bombing some impoverished country into submission, war criminals from Bosnia are apprehended in Peru. A satellite orbiting Mars has gone offline, but NASA is quick to reassure the investors that all is routine, in Ethiopia famine is tilling people under by the thousands, an explosion caused a plane to crash into the Atlantic, labor unions are threatening a crippling strike, a bizarre computer virus is hamstringing two major corporations and so on and on. The news is never good, and I am not sure if there is anything I wanted to hear.
I close my rheumy eyes and see a tinsel and sequined probe driving out, out beyond the cold chunk of Pluto. A stone tossed into a bottomless pool, trailing bubbles. I see cabalists hunched over their ciphers, Catholics on their knees before the effigy of Christ, biologists with scalpels and microscopes, astronomers with their mighty lenses pointed at the sky, atheists, and philosophers with fingers pointed at themselves. Military men stroke the cool bulk of their latest killing weapon and feel a touch closer to peace. I see men caressing the crystal and wire and silicon of the machines that tell them what to believe about the laws of physics, the number to slay chaos in its den. I see housewives scrambling to pick the kids up from soccer practice, a child on the porch gazing up, and up, to regard the same piece of sky glimmering in my window. He wonders what is up there, he wonders if there is a monster under his bed. No monsters there, instead they lurk at school, at church, in his uncle's squamous brain. Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life—it's like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh?
Ah, my skin warns me that it is almost the season. I dreamed for a while, but I do not recall the content. The radio is dead; faint drone from the ancient speaker. The kerosene wick has burned to cinders. A flash from the emerald-colored bottle catches my eye; full of cologne. I seldom indulge in cosmetics; the color attracted me and I brought it here. I am a creature of habit. When my affectations of evolution decay, habit remains steadfast.
Dark outside on the wintry beach. Sunrise is well off and may not come again. The frozen pebbles crackle beneath my heels as I stagger toward the canvas of obsidian water, leaving strange and unsteady tracks on the skeletal shore. There is a sense of urgency building. Mine, or the Other's? I strip my clothes as I go and end up on the cusp of the sea, naked and shriveled. The stars are feral. They shudder—a ripple is spreading across the heavens and the stars are dancing wildly in its pulsating wake. A refulgence that should not be seen begins to seep from the widening fissure. Here is a grand and terrible happening to write of on the wall of a cave . . .God opening His Eye to behold the world and all its little works.
I have seen this before. Let others marvel in my place, if they dare. My work is done, now to sleep. When I mount from the occluded depths what will I behold? What will be my clay and how shall I be given to mold it? I slip into the welcoming flank of the sea and allow the current to tug my shell out and down into the abyssal night. It isn't really as cold as I feared. Thoughts are fleeting as the bubbles and the light. The shell begins to flake, to peel, to crumble, and soon I will wriggle free of this fragile vessel.
But—
One final kernel of wisdom gained through the abomination of time and service. A pearl to leave gleaming upon this empty shore; safely assured that no one shall come by to retrieve it and puzzle over the contradiction. Men are afraid of the devil, but there is no devil, just me and I do as I am bid. It is God that should turn their bowels to soup. Whatever God is, He, or It, created us for amusement. It's too obvious. Just as He created the prehistoric sharks, the dinosaurs, and the humble mechanism that is a crocodile. And Venus fly traps, and black widow spiders, and human beings. Just as He created a world where every organism survives by rending a weaker organism. Where procreation is an imperative, a leech's anesthetic against agony and death and disease that accompany the sticky congress of mating. A sticky world, because God dwells in a dark and humid place. A world of appetite, for God is ever hungry.
I know, because I am His Mouth.
PROCESSION OF THE BLACK SLOTH
"There are eighteen. One for every trespass."
Royce jolted and nearly upset his plastic cup of melted ice and vodka. They'd assigned him to a business-class window seat. The window was smooth and black. The rolled up blind rattled softly as the plane plowed ahead. He said, "Excuse me?"
"May I get that for you, sir?" A flight attendant leaned across a snoring man who'd fallen asleep with the overhead lamp on. The beam illuminated the sleeping man's slack face: Ted K., a computer monitor salesman from Cleveland. This was Ted's first trip to the Far East, could Royce imagine that? Fifty-seven years old come August and he'd never traveled outside the good old US of A. Thank God for adult education, huh? He'd talked animatedly at Royce for two hours, enthused about his prospects in the Asian market. He never got around to asking about Royce's business in Hong Kong before the Canadian Clubs did him in. Which was fine by Royce. He'd have only lied and claimed to be in marketing, anyway. Revealing to bored travel companions that your trade was a security consultant who specialized in countering industrial espionage tended to start conversations with no ending. How did you get into that line, anyway? Well, I discovered I was a natural in the spy game while stalking my estranged college girlfriend . . . .
The attendant was small and as perfectly detailed as a doll. Her lipstick was very red against her face. Her hand brushed Royce's knuckles. Her red nails and lips and precisely bobbed hair complemented the two-piece uniform all the attendants wore. The girls were a matched collection, extras in a period piece. "Another, please," he said, slurring, his tongue heavy from unconsciousness and disorientation, more so than the effects of the liquor. Flight drugged him as reliably as the copious quantities of alcohol and Dramamine he indulged in to combat motion sickness.
"Sir?"
"May I have another of these?" He released the cup and smiled to allay her concerns. "Thank you, miss." She poured more vodka from the tiny bottles they always handed out on flights, and left. He turned in his chair and watched her push the service cart away. The gallery was dim as a nursery at night, its gloom interrupted by an occasional reading light, the emergency strips bracketing the aisle.
Royce finished his drink and shuffled papers from his carry-on briefcase, stared at them without really reading. In order to actually read he would've needed to
find his glasses and no matter what style he'd tried, the effect was always unflattering. Anyway, his head ached and he already knew the report front to back. Thoroughness was his watchword. Let that be my epitaph—He was thorough. He unbuckled and gingerly squeezed past his comatose seatmate whose snoring hitched then resumed.
The fore restroom was occupied and two women waited for a turn. The older of the pair scowled at him with annoyance and suspicion. I must look like hell. Or smell like it. He decided to make the journey aft, chuckling about how uptight some people got when traveling. It had been a long, long flight. Almost everyone was asleep, and the few passengers who weren't didn't glance up from their laptops or their paperbacks, but persisted in these activities with glassy-eyed concentration. Most of the passengers were Americans, and wasn't it the modern way to fill every waking moment with some gesture to productivity, no matter how minor?
His own friends always vowed to avoid calling the office, or God help them, work on vacation, but they always did, to some degree, or worse, they eschewed the innocuous emails to the office and treated their tours like contests. The winner accomplished the most in the shortest period and the prize was bragging rights at some future cocktail party or barbeque where the participants compared notes and the victors counted coup on the losers. Skin-diving, white-water rafting, wine-tasting, a fifteen-mile hike on a nature preserve, tango lessons and the opera by ten pm, and that was only on the day we landed. How about you, Mildred? This obsessive-compulsive drive was a curiously American disease.
The rear facilities were vacant and he slipped inside and locked the door. He pissed, and as he zipped, the small fluorescent halo above the mirror sputtered and died. The cramped bathroom became black as a coffin. Royce hesitated, surprised and disoriented. He stepped back, feeling for the door handle which didn't seem to be in the right place. The light hummed and ticked and began to glow. Its elements ignited then failed in rapid succession and the ring pulsed within the surrounding blackness and swung like a pendulum. Its motion made him sick in the stomach. Between these staccato shutter clicks of light and dark, something happened in the tarnished mirror. He glimpsed a movement independent of his own obscured face, a momentary blur of alabaster like the belly of a large fish rolling on its back before it sank into abyssal night.
Certainly this entire sequence happened within the span of seconds. These seconds were elastic. They stretched to accommodate the flood of primeval darkness in his brain. His thoughts were jagged and fragmented; they swam against a tide. I've got to be hammered. How many did I have? Those idiots should've cut me off. Wait-wait, how many did I have, really? What the hell was that?
Normality was restored as the light brightened and illuminated the toilet in cold, sickly radiance. The shadows slipped back into their lairs. Royce blinked rapidly, weak from the adrenal rush. His face was green and gray in the mirror. He wiped away sweat with his sleeve and was in the act of passing his hands beneath the tap when he happened to glance down.
Holy Christ, somebody had an abortion in here! The plastic basin of a sink was splattered with black ooze; and not a little. He'd observed pro anglers fishing for sharks off the Barrier Reef, knew exactly what a bucket of chum looked like, and this was close, except for what might've been a hank of hair, maybe a whole scalp. He stepped back and almost tore the door off its hinges in his haste to escape.
"Whoa, Nelly!" Ted K. the salesman from Cleveland said as Royce collided with him. Royce gaped, at a loss as to where the man had come from so suddenly. Hadn't he left the guy dead drunk and sound asleep no more than two minutes ago? Ted K.'s doughy features were lumped in approximation of genial alarm as he clasped Royce's elbow to steady them before they stumbled over the stewardess who was only a few steps up the aisle giving someone a pillow.
"Hey, guy," Ted K. said, and his hands were all over Royce, which compounded his anxiety—he hated being touched unbidden, and especially by a stranger, a neurosis doubtless rooted in some childhood trauma. He'd even occasionally rebuked his lovers for putting their hands on him when he didn't expect it. The plump man smelled overripe as fruit fermenting in a dark, humid place. "Where's the fire?" his fellow passenger was saying, sounding concerned, yet half smiling. Maybe he was enjoying this.
"Sorry, sorry." Royce was repulsed by the man's marshmallow flesh against his, but he'd almost bowled the guy over hadn't he? Good lord, what if an air marshal popped out of his seat and slapped cuffs on him for making a scene aboard a plane? He suffered Ted K.'s groping and just repeated his apology until the stewardess turned around and asked if everything was all right. He pointed at the open restroom and assured her that in fact nothing was all right and she'd better have a look. The attendant's expression changed into the mask people in the service industry put on when confronted with the irrational and unpredictable passions of the public. Her mask said, I've lost most of my English and must confer with my colleagues.
Royce recognized that look and closed his mouth. He gave her a fake smile and gently extricated himself from Ted K. and returned to his seat without a backward glance, his heart thumping in his throat. Presently, the stewardess appeared at his side and asked if he wanted another drink. He laughed at the preposterous notion; the last possible thing on Earth he needed was another drop. On the heels of this, he realized he sounded borderline shrill, hysterical. He made conciliatory noises, thank you, but no thank you. As she began to retreat, he risked asking about the problem with the toilet. Her mechanical smile told him she thought he might be responsible for the mess. "Plumbing. No need to worry. All fixed. Okay?"
Plumbing. They jettison shit at cruising altitude, you know. It freezes into a block and plummets to earth. Or is that a myth? Blue ice? God, I remember something about blue ice. Strange to think of such an inane urban legend. Was that a piece of skull I saw? A chunk of jawbone? Royce started feeling cold and stopped thinking about the weird thing that had occurred in the bathroom. He preoccupied himself with football. He was a season ticket holder in Seattle despite the fact he seldom went, mostly passed his tickets to friends and associates. Nobody played football in Hong Kong. What did they play there? He had no idea whatsoever.
The plane was in its final descent when he realized Ted K. had never returned. Royce couldn't blame him, not after the whole incident. Regardless, the plane was filled to capacity and he briefly wondered where the guy had found another seat. Then the jet banked and the lights of the city were spread before him.
A large, impassive Chinese man in a black suit met him at the airport. Mr. Jen's face was crumpled and scarred as a piece of old, battered tin. He held a sign that read mr. hawthorne. The man wasn't tall, but as he carried the luggage Royce stared at his impressively broad shoulders and thought someone could probably project a film on his back. Mr. Jen put Royce in the backseat of a new Lexus and drove him directly to the offices of Coltech Ltd.
The office was an austere marble plaza of interlinked cubicles lighted by cozy lamps with woven shades. The grand Coltech seal, a lion rampant before crossed lightning bolts, loomed over all. Scores of stolid, crisply dressed employees conducted business with quiet determination; even the clattering keyboards and buzzing phones seemed muted in that cathedral vault. After checking with security he eventually located the right receptionist and waited while she unlocked a cabinet.
"Fruit basket?" He said.
She ignored the remark, muttering to herself as she rummaged through various folders. "Ah, there we go. Here is your Octopus card, Mr. Hawthorne. And the keys to your apartment." The secretary appeared to be North American, although she wore her beehive hair and heavy eye shadow and a bright yellow space-age dress in the popular retro fashion of young, cosmopolitan Asian women. She handed him an envelope containing a plastic card and three keys on a ring. She seemed impressed with his expensive suit, the Sicilian darkness of his tan. Her eyes flickered slightly. "Unfortunately, the apartment won't be ready until Sunday. Mr. James extends his apologies. However, he took the liberty of reserving
a room for you at the Hyatt."
"An Octopus card?" Royce said, bemused. He eyed the Möbius strip configured to form a sideways eight.
"'Eight place pass' from the Cantonese. A smart card, sir. For the train and the bus service. I buy cigarettes with mine." She covered her mouth when she laughed.
"Ah." He slipped card and keys into his jacket pocket.
"Mr. Jen will drive you to the hotel, if you're ready. Oh, you have a three o' clock tomorrow with Mr. James and Mr. Shea at the Demeter Lounge."
"I see. Where—"
"Mr. Jen will get you there," she said with a dismissive smile. "Welcome aboard, sir."
The home office laid out the scenario when they originally brought him in. Coltech, a subsidiary of his employers at BelCorp, manufactured various technologies, including nuclear hydraulics systems and satellite components. They'd recently lost three territorial overseas managers to another firm; a much bigger fish on the international scene, and the deserting managers took most of their staff with them. Rumors surfaced regarding industrial sabotage, the sale of trade data, and an alleged network of moles piping corporate secrets directly to Asian competitors. Coltech got panicky and pulled a bunch of key personnel from domestic projects and sent them to China and Taiwan in a frantic attempt to secure operations.
The company drafted Royce to investigate two minor production facilities in Hong Kong—these factories were among the few that hadn't relocated to Mainland China. Circuit boards and electronic actuators were assembled at one plant; hydraulic sleeves and rotary process valves at the other. His cover as a quality assurance consultant afforded him access to personnel files, factory records, and juicy trade documents.
Martin Reardon James and Miguel Shea, president and vice president of local operations respectively, explained the specifics in painful detail upon his arrival. Shea, in his role as major-domo did most of the talking during that introductory meeting in the luxurious confines of an upscale restaurant with a view down the western slopes and their towers of blue glass, all the way to the China Sea. He referred to the enterprise as a snipe hunt. "But, hell, whatever makes the boys in Georgia happy . . ."
