Mortality Bridge
Page 5
Before she left she told him she was sorry and she wished him well. “You’re very strong,” she said. “But this is never easy.”
After she left Niko went into the bathroom. On the sink a small white sack containing twenty capped syringes drawn with measured doses. He held one to the light. The clear liquid promising passage. He set it back among the others in the sack and left them on the bathroom sink. Then he sat beside Jem’s bed to hold her hand and talk to her and be a presence for her as all else became an absence.
HE DID HIS best to stay beside her every moment but it wasn’t possible. He had to get her meds, go to the bathroom, go downstairs to make quick meals. He hurried through all of these, tripped on the stairs once, burned himself eating. Ignored his phone and turned hers off. Talked to her and told her everything. His brother’s death, the Deal, the shameful farce of his career. Confessed his soul and pled with her and with whatever powers lay outside them both. Apologized and begged forgiveness and offered bargains. Sometimes Jem seemed conscious but he didn’t think that she could hear him. Anyway it was all too little too late, wasn’t it? Easy for you to come clean now, isn’t it, Niko?
He gave her meds and swabbed her IV site and changed the bag and bathed her with a soft washcloth. Fingers tracing hard bone close beneath her thin and bruising skin as if needing to verify what he saw. Once she seemed to be trying to speak but he wasn’t sure. On the evening of the second day after he’d dismissed the nurse he came back upstairs with some barely noticed microwaved dinner on a plate. The moment he walked in he felt the difference in the room. He set the plate down on the floor and hurried to the bed. Her quick strained gasps. He held her hand and said her name. As if calling her back home. Jem, Jem. Jem? Her hand jerked in his and then relaxed. She breathed out calmly like a sigh and released something unseen to the reclaiming world. Niko waited but there was nothing more. The moment come and gone so mildly.
Still holding her relinquished hand he let out a horrible long bay like some wounded cornered animal. His heart torn from its mooring. The bay become a sob he leans across the bed to hug her one last time. The heartbreak yield of her.
Now let her go. The clock is ticking, Niko. Let her go. Let her go or never get her back.
He knows it’s true. He knows what must be done. He’d thought that he was ready but how could he be. Who could be ready for this? The grief that sunders him.
No. No. Contain it. You have to contain it. You have to turn your back on it. If you grieve now Jem is truly lost and all your plans mean nothing.
He straightens from the bed. Makes his hand let her hand go. Jemma’s utter stillness so pitiful there. Deep breath. Keep breathing. He steps back from the bed. Breathe. Breathe. Now turn around. Turn away. “I can’t,” he tells the bed. The room. The waiting deep. “I can’t do this.”
Oh yes you can. You know very fucking well you can. You’re the one who put her there. You goddamn well can get her back. Now turn your back on her and start this whole machine or just surrender now and save yourself the trip and live with what you’ve done.
He knows his demon voice is right. He takes a deep and shaky breath and says goodbye to her and shuts the bedroom door and pulls it tight until he hears the gentle click of latch. Soft as if to avoid her waking. Breathe.
Go.
IV.
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
TAPED TO THE back of Niko’s driver’s license are three old coins and a yellow Post-It with a neatly lettered phone number. Niko has to dial three times before he gets it right. The knot in his throat feels like a fist.
It’s picked up on the first ring. “Delivery,” a woman answers. “How may we help you?”
“I need a ride.”
“Name, please?”
Niko gives his name.
“Password?”
Niko speaks a word not uttered in four thousand years. “We show a carrier is on the way already, sir.”
He thinks about what this might mean. “Not that one. This ride’s for me.”
“One moment.” Incantatory static. Niko feels something in his hand and looks down to see an empty syringe. When did he administer this? How long has he been holding it? He tosses the syringe and it clatters likes some insect across the beveled glass coffee table.
The woman’s voice returns. “The current carrier is all we’re authorized for, sir. We’re very sor—”
“This has been willed,” he says, “where what is willed must be.” A sharp intake of surprise. “Please hold, sir. We have to speak with a supervisor.”
“I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Yes sir, we understand. Just one moment.” An interminable minute. “We apologize for the wait, sir. This is very unusual, we hope you understand. We’re sending you a driver right away. Our very best.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes at the most. The first carrier will probably arrive first.”
“I see. All right. Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome. And sir? Sir?”
Niko brings the phone back to his ear. “I’m here.”
“We just wanted to wish you good luck, sir. Good luck and good traveling.”
HARD ABOUT HIM now the empty house lies still. Tick of the old Herschede grandfather clock in the foyer, its snoring Man in the Moon face and deep broad chime that always make him think of early childhood at his grandparents’ house in Florida, which was why he’d bought it in the first place.
The bedroom door beyond the stairs. Jem I pray your pain is gone. I pray you will forgive me. All I’ve done, all I am about to try to do.
Two carriers on the way. Ten minutes at the most. Hurry. Breathe.
CLIMBING FROM THE San Fernando Valley on the San Diego Freeway the Black Taxi crests Mulholland Drive and starts the long descent across the pass and into orange city light. The big car passes through the Friday traffic and drifts right and exits on the Sunset ramp. Eastbound through Bel Aire and Westwood, through Beverly Hills and on the crowded Sunset Strip it eases forward unobserved. All without is crowded light. Massive lighted billboards, club marquees, hotels, and restaurants du jour. None of it reflecting from the metal shape that rolls among them.
ON THE FAR side of the Grecian courtyard with its Japanese rockgarden Niko opens the door to his little studio. Muted overhead light shines down on a quarter million dollars in recording gear. Framed foam wedges and thick gray carpet on the walls. Tiny vocal booth there. The phone booth Jemma called it. In the small control room Niko pauses as he looks through the window into the recording room.
They stand arrayed along one wall like dusty weapons in an ancient armory. Fender, Gibson, Ibañez. Sunburst, lacquer, mother of pearl. Sixstring, twelvestring, doubleneck, bass. Last in line the Dobro rests gleaming like a new dime. Polished steel distorts the studio around it, warps the reflection of Niko’s hand reaching past it to grab its hardshell case that leans against the wall behind it. The womanshape dull with dust.
Niko opens the case. Gray plush lining. He opens the little storage compartment. Metal slide, strap, picks and strings. He sets a hand against the plush as if in benediction. A moment only. Hurry.
He grabs the Dobro by the neck and fits it in the case and shuts the latches one two three.
IN THE LIVING room he leans the case against the black Italian couch. He sets a hand upon the case and glances up the stairs. The sense of Jemma up there still.
His thumbs jerk with sudden pricking.
Motor rumble coming up the lengthy driveway.
On his neck the locket burns.
The engine cuts off and a parking brake zips and a car door opens and then closes with a solid heavy sound. Don’t make em like that anymore.
Niko goes to stand behind the door.
Heavy footsteps up the cobbled walk.
He leans his cheek against the door and shuts his eyes. What waits on the other side. Deep breath. Don’t resist. Useless fighting here and now. This is just an errand boy, a messenger. It has no a
uthority. Your true arena waits somewhere not any where at all.
Leaden knock of knucklebone on wood against his cheek. Niko jumps back and is about to open the door when a man in a tailored chauffeur’s uniform walks through it. Thin, pale, whitehaired, Nordic, nearly albino, smooth androgynous face bony as a Siamese cat. Niko backs up several steps. The driver touches the glossy bill of his cap with cold politeness. Its shadow falls across his eyes, always falls across his eyes.
Both men look upstairs.
From a jacket pocket the driver removes a small mason jar with a twopiece lid and a white jacquard silk kerchief. He glances at Niko and then glides past him. At the foot of the staircase he touches the vase on the newel in a lingering way that is somehow lewd. He grins a pale poisonbottle grin and glides up the carpeted stairs and down the hall.
Niko follows. At the top of the stairs the driver heads down the hallway and enters the bedroom without opening the door and Niko stops. What can he do? All this is writ and in its unfolding is a thing already done. Wait. Breathe. He clenches his fists and heads back down the stairs.
By the time he picks up the guitar case the driver is gliding back downstairs, obscuring with the kerchief a faintly glowing black-tipped feather now within the small glass jar. The driver wipes the jar mouth with his kerchief and returns it and the jar to his jacket pocket where it leaves no bulge.
Approaching Niko the driver looks from the guitar case to the depressed syringe on the glasstopped coffee table and grins insinuatingly and touches again the glossy bill of his cap and makes to go past Niko.
“Wait.” Niko grabs the driver’s arm and the driver stops and looks at Niko’s clutching hand. Jaundiced eyes narrow and every plant in the house withers and dies.
Their gazes meet and Niko feels the churning horror ever waiting past the cliff edge of cognition. Some day you will sail beyond that precipice, that gaze tells Niko, and I will be there when you do.
Niko drops his hand from the tailored sleeve in sudden vertigo. “You’re forgetting something.” He sets down the guitar case and pulls out his wallet and takes out his driver’s license and removes one of the three ancient coins taped to the back and holds it out.
The driver looks surprised. He holds his narrow hand palmup and Niko drops the coin into it, careful not to touch him this time. The driver holds the small bronze lepton to the light and grins a deathshead grin and flips the coin into the air, flicking it with a yellowed thumbnail to make it ring. The coin does not fall back down.
The driver touches his cap once more and leaves through the front door.
Heavy metal of car door closing, deep gargle of welltuned V-12 engine. Niko goes to the door to look at what sits idling in the circular drive. And shakes his head. Of course. In other times in other places it has been a reed boat, a palanquin, a chariot, a coach, a train.
Bugeyed headlamps glowing as it pulls out from the curb, polished glossy black but unmarred by reflections from the lighted drive, an immaculate 1933 Franklin Model 173 seven-passenger sedan with a gold-on-black California classic vanity plate reading 2L84U glides like a stalking jaguar around the marble fountain and passes among oblivious statues along the winding landscaped drive and slides like oil through the locked iron gate and out into the narcotic Hollywood night.
CLEAR YOUR THOUGHTS and make your preparations. The words you’ll need. Ordered arcane syllables to unlock, undo, unmask. Guttural doggerel in lost languages like choking nursery rhymes. Their phrases surface now like chants from preschool primers.
He has her oh the son of a bitch he took her. You goateyed bastard I will eat your heart and spit out the pits.
Niko quickly changes into hiking shoes and bluejeans and a black T-shirt. A light jacket for the cool Los Angeles night. Should he bring a daypack? Food? How long will he be gone? A day, a week, a month?
Niko shakes his head. How could he know? How could anyone?
His fingers find the locket warm against his chest. Okay, travel light. No backpack, no supplies. It takes a month or more to starve to death, and if you’re gone that long, well, starvation probably won’t be at the top of your worries. The Dobro’s gonna be a bitch in any case.
Weapons? Niko gives a disgusted laugh. Killing anything where he is bound would be redundant. Better to be hungry and wily, unarmed and afraid.
Something, he’s forgetting something. And remembers.
IN THE PANTRY Niko finds the old box of jumbo milkbones and opens it and takes one out. Algae-green and big as a crescent wrench. He slips it into the inner breast pocket of his light coat. Weapons come in many forms.
HEADLIGHTS SWEEP ACROSS the living room draperies and Niko glances out the window to see a car pull up to the distant gate. The intercom buzzes and Niko taps the button that opens the gate. He turns away from the window and surveys the room as a chuffing engine approaches outside.
Living room, staircase, bedroom door. Furnishings, mementos, objets d’art. Our life together. Who do you think you are? Where do you think you’re going?
That baleful bedroom door shut soundly, rising like a tombstone down the upstairs hall. How can you just leave her here?
But no. Jemma’s not in there. A feather in a mason jar.
A plaintive halfassed horn toots twice. Outside the door an engine hiccoughs and sneezes.
Niko picks up the guitar case and feels a little foolish as he taps the code on the house alarm. As if concerned with guarding objects. But what if it gets tripped and rentacops show up with Jemma there upstairs? No, no. Her body has to stay there undisturbed, has to be there when he gets back. So he punches in the code and turns his back on several lifetime’s acquisitions, and when he leaves he does not look back.
DENTED AND DIRTY, some long ago fenderbender having set the dinged chrome bumper aslant in a smirk, a classic Checker Cab idles roughly in the driveway before the silent fountain. It looks like a ’55 Chevy on steroids. All that can be seen of the cabbie is an arm resting alongside the lowered driver’s window, faint orange of a lit cigarillo between two fingers.
When she hears the front door shut the cabbie hurries out and opens the cab’s rear door for Niko. The interior light tints the dirty rear windshield to the yellow of an old newspaper.
The cabbie is short, acne scarred, ponytailed, tomboyish. A ghost of former glamor haunts her features. Her eyes are bright and alive in a face that has peered into a great many dark corners. Her expression seems ready to smile in a worldly wise and weary way, as if about to be told a joke she’s already heard but still finds funny. Khaki shirt and loosely knotted thin black jazzman’s tie, old leather sneakers probably white in some former incarnation. She nods goodevening as Niko approaches and she drops her remaining inch of cigarillo and grinds a battered sneaker on the smoking butt, then holds out nicotine stained fingers for Niko’s hardcase with exactly the proper tentativeness. “Set that in the trunk, sir?”
Niko shakes his head and tries to place the cabbie’s accent.
“All right.” The cabbie sets her hand upon the opened door. The latent smile blooms. “Step into my office.” A crescent moon of grime beneath each nail.
The hardcase leads the way as he climbs in. Springs creak beneath the old bench seat and hinges squeal past audibility as the cabbie slams the door. Dog notes, Jemma called it when session producers made her sing at the top of her range.
As the cabbie gets behind the wheel Niko takes in leather upholstery, creaking springs, engine knocking stallward, huge bench seat patched with duct tape peeling up on one edge to reveal the original color which Niko thinks of as banker’s green. Lots of legroom. Smells of tobacco, leather, stale coffee from stained styrofoam cups on the floorboard, rims pressed flat with endless tiny crescent thumbnail marks. Litter of empty Swisher Sweets cigarillo packs and half-used matchbooks, gumwrappers, foodstained restaurant stubs, a pullout ashtray against the driver’s seatback overflowing with gumwads and cigarette butts, broken pencil nubs, tarnished pennies, a torn Butterfinger wrapper.
The cabbie’s bright eyes in the rearview slat. “Where to, sir?”
Niko sets a hand against the locket underneath his shirt, the other on the hardcase firm against his leg. “Follow that cab,” he says.
V.
CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC
THE BIG YELLOW cab snakes down from the Hollywood Hills and onto Sunset Boulevard and has a deceptively unhampered run down the Strip. Traffic’s heavy but moving as they ride east toward Hollywood and into Friday night cruising and tourism. Turning north from La Cienega to Highland runs them into automotive quicksand and they inch through the intersection.
The cabbie seems aware of Niko’s urgency. Near Franklin she works the cab into the beercan lane and ignores the angry honks as their car glides by crawling traffic. Every redlight turns to green at their approach as they head toward the Hollywood Freeway.
Soon the Hollywood Bowl marquee slides past in the center divider. Niko remembers the old terraced clamshell looming behind him with its enormous floating globe clusters like grapes in a giant’s cornucopia, the frozen wave of audience before him, his trademark stillness in the midst of all the beehive hum, the surf roar of the crowd above his sustained demoniac feedback howl. Homeowners two miles away had complained about the volume. Nowadays he’d likely be one of them.
The Checker Cab turns a slow hairpin right and enters the access road leading to the ramp for the Hollywood Freeway southbound. The freeway’s packed and barely moving. No one lets the cab merge as the entry lane tapers away but the cabbie eases into a space between a BMW and a Honda that Niko would have sworn could not have fit a motorcycle.