The tank filled up and Van topped it off. Niko went to get the change and Van stood watching him in the hot and smoggy California day. He was somewhere he had never been before and about to go commit a felony with someone who might as well be a total stranger to him.
But no. However far gone he might be Niko was his brother, and Van was here for Mom and Dad. Because Mom might not have a lot more chances to see Niko after she went into the hospital. Though maybe the best thing Van could do for her would be to tell her that he couldn’t find him. Tell her Niko moved, no forwarding address. What good would the truth do her?
Niko came back holding two sweaty Cokes and a little tube of Bufferin. He passed a bottle to Van and opened the tube and tapped two tablets into his mouth and toasted Van with the Coke bottle and then chugged it and belched loudly. “The pause that refreshes,” he said.
Van made a sour face and Niko laughed and drummed the roof and got in the car and rubbed his forehead with his Coke bottle.
Niko leaned to look out the driver’s window, grinning that hideous fake grin, eager to get on the road toward his shitty little Shangri-La. “Something wrong, Van-man?”
“Gosh, I don’t know.” Van got in the station wagon and shut the door. “What could possibly be wrong?” He started the car.
NIKO’S STOMACH HAD started cramping while they were driving to the station. From the cold sweats and the tingling on his ass he’d known that everything he ate last night was about to blow out both ends. Naturally the bathroom door had been locked and Niko had to ask for the key, which meant keeping his cool. But if there was anything he was good at it was keeping his cool. He couldn’t do much about the physical symptoms but even when his hands were shaking and his nose was dripping and he was sweating like a thoroughbred he could bygod stand there in front of the Gulf Guy and say May I have the restroom key please? with his asshole clenched so tight you couldn’t pound a nail in it.
On the john he leaned his head over the sink and let go. It was as bad as he’d expected. On the way back to the car he could see Van looked steamed. Niko lit up a Kool. Showtime, folks. He kept quiet and let Van gas up the car and then went back to get his little brother’s change and also used his little brother’s dough to buy his little brother a nice cold Coke and got himself one too along with some Bufferin. He made sure Van saw his hand shake as he handed him his drink and downed the aspirin. He’d left his face wet from the bathroom sink so he’d look even more sweaty than he was. Do the vulnerable frail thing a little bit. Not exactly a stretch right now.
Sure enough when he leaned across the seat to ask Van what was wrong he saw Van’s anger turn to pity, saw the pity become guilt for judging his big brother so harshly. This suited Niko because Niko was getting thin. You could set your watch by a junky’s dose and he should have fixed hours ago. The way he felt now was nothing compared to what was coming if he didn’t score. Right now was more like an itch between the shoulderblades he couldn’t quite get to and he needed Van and Van’s bread to help him find a backscratcher. There wasn’t a virgin’s chance in Hollywood he was going back to Florida and the white picket fence trip that was their parents’ house. No way José. That would be like doing bad drugs even if his bloodstream were pure as angel’s piss. No, he’d ditch Van at some point after he scored. He’d think of something.
But right now Brother Van was Niko’s ticket to ride and he didn’t want to piss him off. So he got Van’s change and got him a Coke and joked a little too desperately and laughed a little too loudly and got him thinking maybe he’d get Niko on a plane after all. But most of all he got them moving.
The car shuddered idling at the entrance to the service station as they waited for a gap in traffic. The monotonous clack of the left turn signal was driving Niko nuts.
“Hey, let’s go to Vegas,” Niko said. “It’s a lot closer than Florida. Lot more fun too.”
“We are not going to Vegas. One shithole a year’s my limit, thanks.”
“Just joking. Jesus.” He smiled. “You think L.A.’s a shithole?”
There was no reason for what happened next. No cause. It was so simple. Van drove out onto the road in no special hurry. No opposing traffic. They turned left into the lane. The closest car a pale blue Dodge van waiting at the light in front of them. Niko saw the van in plenty of time. He even thought Hey if we don’t slow down we’re going to hit that van. It never occurred to him that Van would do anything but stop.
Van didn’t stop. He drove into the van. He wasn’t speeding. Wasn’t talking. Wasn’t looking anywhere but straight ahead. He just plain didn’t see it.
When they hit there was a single solid crunch and a mild smack like two bowling balls bumping. Not even very loud. Niko was wearing his seatbelt and he jackknifed forward but got his arms up in time and hit the dashboard with his palms and sprained his left wrist. That was it. Accident over. No shrieking brakes. No blaring horns. The van ahead of them rolled a foot or two and its double back door sprang open and a big cardboard box fell out.
Niko looked at his brother to ask him Didn’t you see that van? He was going to make a joke. Van hits van, film at eleven, yuk yuk. But Van was still slumped forward with the side of his head against the steering wheel. He looked at Niko with his tongue lolling and a doofy slackness to his face. Niko laughed. Yeah really cute, this stupid little fenderbender was the death of you, I get it.
Then a red bud bloomed in the white of Van’s right eye. It blossomed to the size of a penny. Dark red blood trickled from Van’s nose and flowed across his lip and still the bloodrose spread its petals in his eye. The dark blood trickled down Van’s jaw and welled and dripped onto the floorboard. The crimson flower filled Van’s eye now. Everything so quiet Niko heard the plop on the rubber floormat when the first drop hit.
“Van.” Niko’s voice small and lost inside the odd quiet of the station wagon. “Hey.” He touched his brother’s shoulder and his brother’s head lolled in an ugly boneless flop that leaned his body back against the door.
Niko jerked back. He looked out the windshield for help, anybody, someone who could do something. The driver of the pale blue van was just now getting out to see who had hit him. He looked annoyed but that was all. The cardboard box that fell out the back of the van had spilled cheap patchwork ragdolls onto the hood of the station wagon that beheld their liberation with vacant stupid grins that would haunt his nights for decades.
Moments that solidify the path of a life. Niko’s course was not bound by his brother’s death but instead was fixed when he looked upon his brother’s horribly unmoving form and thought How the hell am I supposed to score some dope now? Just a fleeting thought but there it was. That alien flower bloomed inside his brother’s head like something had invaded him and cored him like an apple, and all Niko could think to do was get away and hide and not talk to the driver of the van or to the police or anybody else, to gain a few more hours of freedom because every cell in his body was yelling that he had to find some god damned way to get a fix.
Niko glanced around the car. Hadn’t it been a while since they hit the van? Why wasn’t anyone coming to help them? Where was the driver of the van? He should have been back here by now.
Niko stared. The driver was still getting out of his van. One leg in broadcuffed jeans and scuffed workboots extended toward the pavement. An unlit filter cigarette clamped between his lips. The door half open as if he’d started getting out and then realized he’d forgotten something important.
Traffic was stopped all around the street. Drivers expressionless as if awaiting further orders. In the back seat of a white Impala two kids frozen in the midst of whacking each other as if posing for a portrait while their mother, hair wrapped in a floral print scarf and wearing enormous buglike Polaroid sunglasses, stared into the rearview and did not look away.
Nothing moved.
Niko looked at Van and had the insane thought that his brother had somehow done this. Somehow stopped and took all motion with him. Only a moment
ago breathing and moving and thinking and now slumped here empty and inert and all the world outside him gone to silent stillness.
Niko found the doorhandle. Opened it. Couldn’t get out of the car because his seatbelt was still fastened. Unbuckled it and backed out of the car and did not look away from Van. As if he might suddenly grin at the terrific prank he’d pulled on his big brother the fuckedup junky. Good one huh bro? Because Van couldn’t possibly be dead. They’d only been going twenty miles an hour for Christ’s sake. Niko’d only sprained his wrist. Life could not possibly be that fragile.
Outside the car time was transfixed as if Niko had stepped into a photograph. Smoke hung suspended like dirty cotton in the midst of belching from a yellow Camaro stopped as it was pulling from the curb. Its jowly driver staring through blackframed glasses at motionless opposing traffic. A frozen guy in a Peruvian vest staring at a billboard advertising Levi’s. The ragdolls staring and staring on the crumpled white hood.
I’m hallucinating. You get thin and you get the shakes and you get cramps and chills and sweats and fever, and then you hallucinate. But that shouldn’t be happening yet. The accident must have brought it on. What else could it be?
He rubbed his thumbs across his fingers to test their solidity, their reality. Their sibilance distinct in the silent street.
He turned full circle beside the station wagon and still nothing moved. But it seemed he heard something. Some approaching sound.
Niko faced the intersection where a faint deep purr grew to a rhythmic gargle. Then it glided into view, long and dark and predatory, an old black sedan like a luxury car in a gangster movie. The only thing moving anywhere in sight. The big black vintage car turned right and came toward him and eased to a stop in the opposing lane beside the station wagon. The pale and uniformed chauffeur got out but left it running. He touched the glossy bill of his cap impersonally to Niko who could only stare as the driver opened the suicide door of the passenger compartment.
The man who got out was nattily attired like a movie producer trying to dress like an English rockstar. His hair in perfect disarray. He saw Niko standing confused and afraid there and he grinned as if he knew him. As if they were old friends long separated and finally reunited.
Petrified and sweating and dripping snot Niko stood with the station wagon between himself and this man. The station wagon in which his brother lay impossibly dead. The grinning man approached Niko holding a stapled sheaf of papers and a pearlescent fountain pen that gleamed in the Hollywood sun. With one hand he uncapped the pen to expose the gold nib and turned the pen in his fingers and slid the back end into the cap, all in one smooth motion without looking, like some kind of bureaucratic samurai.
Behind the man the chauffeur stared without expression at the driver’s window of the station wagon as he tugged a white silk kerchief from the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. Niko paid little attention to the natty man as he came around the car with a hand held out and grinning as if they had just consummated a used-car deal. He could only watch the chauffeur as he produced something from his jacket, something that glittered, and began walking toward Niko’s car.
The beaming stranger called Niko by his full and absurd name just as Niko saw that what the chauffeur held as he bent to open the driver’s side door of the station wagon was a small glass jar.
XVI.
FLOATING BRIDGE
NIKO WAKES UP wanting a drink. Before he opens his eyes, before he has time to think I’m alive, he has a sense of lifting a tumbler of brown liquor to his lips and drinking it down to feel the good sharp burning tunnel to his stomach and settle there as before a hearth to spread warmth throughout his limbs and ward off the—
Chill.
Niko sits up and gasps. He turns his hands in front of him as if he has never seen them before. He thinks clench and they clench. His skin burns. At first the pain is good. A reminder he’s alive. But then doubt creeps in. I have seen a world of pain down here and no one feeling it has been alive.
Well how do you know you’re alive, cowboy?
Niko tables the question. Right now there are less philosophical matters to attend to.
He is in a tiny room of ice. His shadow wavers on the curving orangelighted wall, cast by the small and cheery fire crackling before him. His black guitar case stands against the white wall like a cutout silhouette. His socks and hiking shoes are on his feet. Laces doublebowed.
As if waiting for his attention his feet begin to throb with frostbite. The soles burn as his scabbing cuts begin to thaw.
Niko touches the tender swelling on the back of his head where he got slugged. Did getting cracked upside the skull do something to his memory? How would he know if it did?
Something about the fire bothers him. The fact of it is puzzling enough. And it’s burning branches. When did he last see anything that might be used as kindling? The ice room is a little igloo six feet wide and maybe four feet high. There’s no hole to vent the smoke and provide fresh oxygen to feed the fire, or for Niko either. And without an airhole he should be choking on woodsmoke that doesn’t seem to be there. There should be water everywhere. It should have put the fire out. But the smokeless fire burns and no ice melts.
The fire’s heat is far from soothing. Niko has barely escaped freezing to death and the close warmth makes his skin feel sanded with an emery board. His cheek throbs where it’s cut and bruised. The eye the Aussie gouged continually waters.
But unquestionably the fire has saved his life. Who down here would build it and return his shoes and disappear? Not one of the damned. They are long past caring even for themselves.
One of the demons then? Why in or underneath the world would they do that? At best the demons seem amused by Niko. Most are perplexed by him and even a bit fearful. But hold on. Dexter/Sinister said there was a pool on whether Niko’d go the distance. One of them had bet in Niko’s favor. Who else might have? What might it cost you here to help out the underdog? Who would take that awful chance to win a bet?
For a moment he conceives a secret cabal, an organized resistance to the tyranny in Hell. The Sub-underground. He snorts. Yeah right. His voice is flat in this small space.
Who then?
Niko rubs his forehead. His headache’s back.
He remembers the vampiric waif who tried to drain the life from him near the foot of the Battlements. Something had streaked into view and knocked her away. Probably saved his life. Many times he’s caught motion from the corner of his eye and turned to look to find it gone. He remembers looking back across the icy reach to see a figure limned against the whiteness of the frozen plain, following him.
The fire’s heat should make him sweat but he’s too dehydrated. He sits back against a buttress of ice and taps the toes of his hiking boots together three times and says There’s no place like home.
He sits up straight. Maybe I wasn’t rescued at all. Maybe I’m inside a bubble frozen a thousand miles deep within the ice, sealed up with a fire to eat up all the air.
Suddenly the curving walls are very close. The ragged collar of his filthy shirt is choking. He needs air. Needs out. He turns toward the wall of ice to dig or pound his way out. An unfamiliar weight on the right side of his jacket makes him stop. He reaches into the pocket and his hand encounters the neck of a bottle. He pulls it out and stares at it sparking highlights from the fire. Full and sealed it calls out like a twentydollar whore who knows his name. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s.
NIKO’S GUITAR CASE is embedded in the wall. Niko works the case till it pops loose and leaves a guitarshaped hole looking out onto the windless luminous plain. He sticks his head out like a dog at a car window and sucks in breaths of frigid air, deep and cold into his lungs. The cold feels good despite his pain. He opens his eyes and looks around. His little ice cave is a bubble on the reach of ice.
The fire gutters in the draft that follows when he ducks back in. He pulls a brand out of the fire and holds it to the curvaceous opening. Immediately the ice
begins to melt. So why hasn’t the whole igloo melted down?
He should have learned to stop asking these questions.
Niko collects the runoff in his palm and sniffs and tastes it before allowing himself to drink. Sure he’s dehydrated but this ice is a medium in which the bodies of the naked damned are trapped. It is impossible not to picture their encased forms as he slakes his thirst. Every hour it seems he learns something about the places true desperation can take him.
Arrhythmic hissing startles him. At first he thinks a creature is in the igloo with him, some bristling reptilian thing calling out a warning. But the fire’s deepened crackle and sudden steam tell him that the igloo’s finally melting. Got to move before the fire drowns. He holds up the whiskey bottle and only hesitates a moment before cracking the seal. He pulls three branches from the fire and sloshes whiskey on the end of each.
A small glass tube spills from the liquor bottle and clatters onto the ice. Rolled up inside the glass tube is a piece of paper. A message in a bottle.
The fire steams and crackles with dripping water. The igloo is getting humid. A tiny rain patters him now, and won’t being wet be fun when he steps back outside.
Niko scoops up the glass tube. The moment he touches it he wants a drink the way a drowning man wants air. His very tissues cry out for alcohol. Immersed in the smell of whiskey Niko drops the glass tube into his jacket pocket and pokes one of the doused branches into the dying fire. Sputter spark catch. He holds the brand away from himself and sets the whiskey bottle down to thrust the remaining doused branches through the belt of his jeans like toy swords.
He kneels beside the liquor bottle to put the cap back on and hesitates as he looks down at the open neck. Just a little nip, buddy pal. To warm your insides when you’re on the ice again. What harm could it possibly cause by now? What, you worried about your health? You’ve already started smoking again. Guess you know you ain’t gonna die from cancer huh? You won’t have time for cancer. So come on. Knock one back. Man if anyone in history ever deserved a drink it’s you. Jesus H. Himself yanked a cork or two when he knew they were gonna turn him into God’s own decoration.
Mortality Bridge Page 21
