Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  The cabbie goes to the back and opens the trunk.

  Niko checks again for pulse and respiration. Nothing. He scoots back and sets one palm atop the other on the demon’s sternum and leans down into it. I swear someday I’ll laugh at this. One and two and three and four. Nikodemus’ body moves but Niko can’t be sure it isn’t just a reaction to the compression.

  The cabbie pulls a set of heavyduty starter cables from the trunk. Twentyeight twentynine thirty. Niko pushes stiffened fingers against the turtleskin neck. Nope. He bends to the slack face again and exhales hard. It’s like playing a tuba. Nikodemus’ unwilled lungs push corpse breath into the reclaiming world. The graveyard sigh fills Niko’s nostrils. O I cannot take this, it’s too much like it was with Van. I am haunted, I am haunted. He slaps a blood-dried cheek. “Come on, buddy pal. Come on, goddammit. Come back.” Niko moves to compress his demon’s chest again. One and two and three and four.

  The cabbie ducks her head in. “Nothing?”

  Niko shakes his head. He’s covered in sweat.

  “Okay. Help me drag him out.”

  Niko doesn’t waste time asking what she has in mind but instead backs out and helps the cabbie pull the heavy body from the cab. At the gate when they had dragged the demon through the wreckage to the waiting cab he’d wondered if Nikodemus was dead. Now there is no doubt. What the difference is he couldn’t say. But he feels it and he knows the cabbie feels it too. A certain bonelessness. A stillness different from sleep or mere unconsciousness. Dead weight.

  “What are we gonna do?” says Niko.

  The cabbie goes to the front of the cab and picks up a set of starter cables. “We’re gonna jumpstart him.”

  “Are you out of your fucking—no, wait, never mind. Good idea.” Niko steps away and the cabbie clamps the black cable to Nikodemus’ left chest and then touches the red cable to his right chest. Bluewhite flash, electric sputter, flying sparks, smell of ozone and burned flesh. The galvanized body spasms. A tendril writhes like a detached lizard tail and quickly grows still. A puff of smoke rises from Nikodemus’ chest.

  “Christ.” Niko glances at the sky expecting rolling thunder and quaking ground. He leans forward and feels for pulse and respiration and shakes his head.

  A gray Mercedes with darktinted windows eases into the nearby intersection and stops with an abrupt bark. Powerlocks clack down and the sedan speeds away.

  Again the cabbie touches Nikodemus with the red cable. Sputter spark smoke. Nikodemus jackknifes as if gutpunched and goes rigid and then goes slowly limp again as if deflating. The smell of seared flesh would be nauseating had Niko not become accustomed to such things. Niko sets an ear against the broad sternum. Still nothing.

  The cabbie frowns and holds her car keys out to Niko. “Rev the engine when I tell you to.”

  Niko limps to the cab and practically falls behind the wheel. The cabbie ducks beneath the hood and moves the red clamp from the positive terminal to the starter coil and then says Okay and backs quickly away.

  The engine starts and idles knocking. Flash sputter spark and twenty thousand volts rush lightspeed into Nikodemus.

  The cabbie yells Yes and Niko hears a long asthmatic wheeze of firstdrawn mortal breath and then a bellow that can best be called demonic. Then a thud of thrashing tendril denting quarterpanel.

  Niko scurries from the cab to see the demon very much alive and on his feet and squared off with his snaking tendrils raised against the cabbie who holds up the starter cable clamps like a horror movie hero brandishing a crucifix against a vampire.

  They both turn at Niko’s voice. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he tells his demon.

  THE CABBIE DRIVES down Wilshire Boulevard. Swerving through traffic caught by surprise at the signals’ sudden change. “Sorry to take surface streets,” she shouts into the wind buffeting through the mostly empty windshield frame. “The Hollywood Freeway’s still a nightmare.”

  “A nightmare.” Niko laughs. He hears the edge of hysteria in it but he can’t help himself. A nightmare.

  People stare at the cab as it hurries along. Beat to hell, no windshield, a demon filling up the back seat and gawking like the tourist he is. How could they not? But this is Los Angeles and most of them assume there’s a movie or a television shoot nearby, or that someone’s having a theme party or premiere. Or even if they don’t think there’s a movie or a party or a premiere, well, this is Los Angeles.

  As they drive past MacArthur Park Niko can’t get over how clean everything looks. And the people! They aren’t covered with blood or shit or scabs or parasites. They aren’t buried in stone or broken in half or impaled on pikes. Those kids at the corner there. Six teenaged boys with beanie caps pulled low over shaven heads and loose shirts over baggy pants. Hands stroking belly tattoos. On constant lookout like meerkats. Not screaming, not mutilated, not blank and hopeless but whole and alive. They have no idea how beautiful fleeting rare and frail they are. No one out there has any idea. Not the woman packing up her hotdog stand or the kids dueling with their plastic laser swords or the gaunt man rattling his paper cup of paltry change or the Rasta selling homemade incense on a blanket or the man behind the counter at the doughnut shop filling a pink box with a dozen mixed or the swollenfeeted woman pushing her shoppingcart full of rags. Lucky blessed mortal oblivious and so very much alive. Unique unknowing souls one day to be contained perhaps within rude mason jars delivered to their tailored doom and every one of them worthy of the costliest rescue.

  It is an effort of will to look back at his demon. Looking back at anything will take some getting used to. Nikodemus wears a thick gauze patch taped over one eye from a firstaid kit the cabbie brought forth from the Checker Cab’s trunk.

  “How you doing?”

  Nikodemus shrugs and gestures with a tendril out the window.

  The cabbie maneuvers the Checker Cab like a porpoise through signals and intersections and traffic. “Thought I’d take Wilshire to Fairfax and take that till it hits Hollywood. That’s about the least crowded we’ll find on a Friday night without going way out of our way.”

  Niko merely nods. He would ride shotgun with her on any route she took on earth or otherwise and never question her. The city he knows seems more surreal to him than its unattended doppelganger had. These old familiar streets so new and strange. Perhaps they are not what’s changed.

  Hard west on Wilshire now. Vermont, Western, Crenshaw. Abstract neon of Koreatown. On the hillside the Griffith Observatory poised between seas of ordered light. The Greek Theatre hidden in the hills nearby. I played there for Jem and yet I’ve never played there at all. The tall block letters of the Hollywood sign dark beyond.

  Through Midwilshire now. Tar Pits, County Art Museum, Petersen Automotive Museum. At Fairfax the Checker Cab turns right and heads north. Traffic thickens as they near CBS Studios and Farmers Market and The Grove. Stopped behind a car at the light at Fairfax and Third Niko glances back to see Nikodemus staring up in mortal terror at a Gray Line Tours bus turning left from Third onto Fairfax.

  It’s okay, he tells his demon.

  Nikodemus nods doubtfully without taking his piratic gaze from passing forms of tourists backlit behind tinted windows as they point down at the smashed and battered cab.

  “What you lookin at?” the cabbie calls.

  Niko sees a camera pointed at Nikodemus. “Wave,” he tells his demon. “Wave.”

  Nikodemus waves. One for the books.

  Nikodemus what do I do with you? I have violated something in bringing you here and I have no doubt the universe will seek to rectify it.

  At Santa Monica a homeless man standing gaunt in the street like a bedraggled prophet points at the cab and shouts Motherfucker owe me money. Then the light turns green and they continue unabated across Sunset to Hollywood where they turn right and then left onto the canyon road to begin their snaking climb.

  ALL THE OLD familiar places. The gaudy lighted mailbox at 2101. The wrought iron bats of the horror movie dir
ector at 2118. The left turn that always seems about to end but in fact turns sharper. Coming home.

  Niko doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Even after everything his heartbeat quickens and his mouth grows dry and his eyes blink rapidly as they take in what will be catalogued later. My friends beside me. This ruined amazing car. Did ever an explorer come back home from unmapped oceans bearing such cargo as mine? Ferried across the sunless world.

  Behind him and below him city light sways and sways.

  The last stretch of uphill road. The final curve. The length of white stone wall. The graze mark where somebody sideswiped it some years back. My demon with me still. The flaring driveway. Security light and camera. Jemma snug against my lap and leaking out into the mortal world.

  The black grilled gate.

  The broken chain of myth.

  The Black Taxi waiting in the driveway.

  XXXI.

  WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN

  “WHAT DO YOU want me to do?”

  Idling in the middle of the road the battered yellow Checker Cab faces the sleek Black Taxi. Gunslingers on the main street of Dodge. The space between them electric.

  “I don’t know.” Niko looks past the hood of the cab across the showdown distance. Past the Black Taxi, past the gate, at the mansion at the end of the statuaried drive. You’re still there. Unbelievably still there. Through the door and up the stairs and in the room and on the bed where mere hours ago I held you while you drew your dying breath. Hours and ages later I am back with you in hand.

  “All right, screw him. We switch to Plan B.”

  “I didn’t know we had one,” says the cabbie.

  “We didn’t.”

  QUIET NIGHT. NO traffic on the high hill road. The Checker Cab’s doors creak open and the dome light shines. The cabbie gets out already patting herself for a cigarillo and Niko gets out holding the jar like a Fabergé egg while Nikodemus struggles out. Relieved of his weight the chassis lifts. All stand waiting.

  The driver’s door opens on the Black Taxi and the Driver steps out. He bids them all good evening with a touch of bony hand to glossy bill of cap and turns the hollow of his gaze toward the lambent jar in Niko’s hand.

  The cabbie lights another cigarillo. “Hiya, Sparky. TGIF, huh?”

  The Driver only looks at the jar. Experimentally Niko slowly lifts it. The Driver’s head tilts up. Niko lowers the jar and moves it out to the side. The Driver’s head tilts down and swivels slightly.

  “Hey, how’s my ride?” calls Niko. “Sure is fun to drive, isn’t she? Handles like a dream.” He smiles. “Man, I fired her up and that bitch just opened up for me and purred.”

  The eyeless gaze no longer on the jar.

  “You know for a while I wasn’t even sure who was driving who. It’s a shame I had to smash her all to hell—”

  A sound escapes the Driver that could not issue from a human throat. Keening and choppy and thin. Chihuahuas bark from the plastic surgeon’s estate next door. In the hills coyotes yip. The Driver shucks all pretense of patience and stalks toward Niko with cold murder on his jaundiced face.

  Niko says Go.

  Nikodemus sprints to the wall and jumps high and hoists himself over. His shredded wings flutter as he drops to the other side.

  Niko hands the jar off to the cabbie and hurries limping toward the Driver. He veers around the Driver and makes straight for the Black Taxi where he jerks open the heavy suicide door and jumps inside and slams the door. He yanks the key from the ignition as the door is snatched open behind him.

  While the Driver goes for Niko the cabbie calmly goes to the gate and hands the jar through to Nikodemus, and the demon dashes with it up the lighted drive.

  Niko scrambles across the seat and gets the door open just as something grabs his ankle. He kicks out blindly and does not connect but frees his leg and tumbles headfirst from the car. He manages a halfassed shoulder roll on the driveway. Sharp pain in his side like a woodrasp drawn across his broken rib. He stands and then falls back against the open door which hits the Driver hot behind him.

  Nikodemus opens the front door of Niko’s house and runs inside.

  Slouched against the closed car door Niko glances at the cabbie and she calmly nods. Behind him the window rolls down and sudden fire rips across his back. The world whites out. Niko gasps and the gasp locks up. Don’t you dare fall. He jerks forward and sees the ignition key in his hand. A hot iron pierces his back when he flings the key away. The key arcs into the darkness and lands in someone’s yard downhill.

  Now you can fall.

  Niko falls. The opening car door nudges him. He digs in his heels. Aware of the open window just above his head. His ass grows warm. What’s that about? Oh. Blood flowing down his back. Well this sure can’t last. Come on bud. Get up stand up, like Bob Marley said.

  Niko manages to stand. He pushes from the Franklin and turns around just as the door bursts open and the Driver bursts out. Niko backpedals but the Driver stops in front of him and puts a friendly arm around his shoulder and draws him close as a lover and Niko is so startled by this that he lets him. Lets him draw his gaze up slowly into the churning horror of those evershadowed eyes. He half expects a smell of fetid breath but there is no breath at all. He hears the cabbie shouting out, his name perhaps, but his true name is seldom spoken anymore upon the mythless earth. And Niko does not turn he does not hear he does not fight but only looks into that borderless and leeching face and feels a softening inside, of life of will of want, and he senses the Driver’s hand upon his chest, then senses it within his chest and rummaging there for some forgotten thing made consequential only by its perceived absence, by its need to be reclaimed and redeemed, and Niko is about to tell the Driver that what the sure and probing fingers seek is no longer there. Was bartered for a song and sold too cheaply many years ago.

  Just about to gently say these things he stops. His breath taken from him as the alien fingers brush the very thing inside him he has never truly believed existed. Never despite evidence and experience felt was really there to sell or trade.

  The Driver seizes Niko’s soul and pulls. Not hard. Not hard. Instead he coaxes teasing Niko’s soul from its asylum like a loose thread in a pattern. His nimble fingers are not cold at all.

  Yes thinks Niko as he looks into that jaundiced faceless face. o yes I will go with you. Take me with you, strip me from the prison of my flesh. Take me fuck me o it feels so good to die like this I love you.

  He feels his soul enjoined more fully than it ever was with Jemma in their most heated passion or quiet certain love. Stripped down to his foundation he shares—with the Driver! with the Driver!—a naked true communion not known since unborn he shared his mother’s body.

  The river Lethe was mere forgetting. This is vast enjoining. Who knew oblivion was so intimate? Slide the needle in and push the plunger home. You’re gone, youre gone, you are g

  one.

  PIERCING SIRENS AND howling dogs and rhythmic patting wake him. Someone says Come on come on. He wonders what all the fuss is all about and realizes that the patting is the cabbie slapping him.

  He sits up gasping hugely. Ambered overcast, Hollywood night. The cabbie kneeling over him, holding his arm.

  The siren is his house alarm.

  Where’d the Driver go?

  Niko touches his chest. Gone?

  But no. He feels his self still there. Now that he knows its shape within him it seems obvious. How could he not have known it’s been there all this time?

  Sudden tears. The soul I sense inside me now. As if pregnant with my self. And shamed. I wanted to go with him. I loved him. o christ that is his power. That you go with him gladly. A poisoned aphrodisiac. This is what Jemma felt there at the end. This is what she felt. I am cuckolded by death itself and in his embrace would have done the same and happily. I am sick and so ashamed.

  He shakes his head to clear his mind and looks up at the cabbie looking down. “What happened?” Nearly shouting in
the din.

  “He jumped out of the car and ran into you. He hugged you and then your house started yelling bloody murder, so he dropped you and ran through the gate in a big hurry. That part was pretty impressive.” Looking not at all impressed she drags on her cigarillo. “I thought you were a goner.”

  “I think I was. How long ago?”

  “Thirty seconds?”

  “I have to turn the alarm off or this place’ll be crawling with rentacops.”

  “I need to compress your back. You’re bleeding pretty bad.”

  “Gotta help Nikodemus.”

  But she’s already going around to the back of the cab and opening the trunk. “Can’t help anyone if you bleed to death.” She shuts the trunk. “Right?”

  “Yes mother.”

  The cabbie removes Niko’s shredded jacket and pulls up his flayed shirt. She draws a hissing breath and winces when she sees his back. Quickly and efficiently she puts on a thick compress and wraps his waist with surgical tape.

  “I can’t believe you have a compress that size.” Niko tries to smile bravely and not think about how his back must look. “Maxi-pad. I can’t believe you’re not screaming your head off.”

  She smooths the bloody end of the surgical tape across his belly. “Can’t feel a thing.”

  She looks doubtful but helps Niko to his feet. He hisses like a brand in water. Now the cut hurts, now he feels his broken rib.

  The cabbie brushes hair from her forehead and leaves behind a dark red streak of Niko’s blood. “Well I guess you’ll play the guitar again.”