by T. A. Pratt
I dreamed monitor lizards were eating my face; it was one of those dreams, so I got up off my futon, dressed by the gray dawn light from the high windows, and went out. I wore fingerless gloves, so no one could cross my palm with silver when I wasn’t paying attention—I’d been bound once too often that way. The trains were crowded, but people moved away from me, though I don’t look particularly derelict or mad; they could sense my difference from them, that’s all. I changed trains at three different stations, though I could’ve gotten to my destination in one. I wanted good omens, even manufactured ones, some charms spinning a little in my direction.
I walked ten blocks from the station into a weedy, broken-down part of Oakland. Even the houses looked dispirited. I’d been here dozens and dozens of times. I never saw anything new anymore.
I climbed over the ruined rubble of foundation blocks coughed up by the ground in some long-forgotten earthquake, and walked the ragged path I’d worn through the broken glass and wildflowers over the years. I crouched down by the sewer grate where H. lived. I ran my finger along the iron bars, furred with rust; my fingertip came away powdered red. A square sewer grate, 18 inches to a side, darkness and sometimes a stink beneath. A gate to the only underworld I’d ever really believed in.
“Hey, H.” I said.
His voice came up from beneath the grate, cool and low. “B. You motherfucker. It’s been seasons.”
“Five months,” I said, looking at the ruined wall across the lot, jagged bricks like the silhouette of a stegosaurus made of Legos. “Good months. No dreams.”
“Until last night.” H.’s voice was like candy wrappers blowing along the ground in a parking lot. “Now you need me. Now you come see me.”
“We agreed,” I said, trying to hold myself aloof, trying to remember I was basically talking to a hole in the ground, a loquacious absence, nothing more. “It’s better if I stay away.”
“Shit. I changed my mind about that.”
“The dream,” I began.
“Right down to business, huh?” H. said. “Gimme gimme.” His voice was greedy, deeply desperate. I’d known that side of his personality when he was alive, but it was stronger now that he was mostly gone, nothing left but an intelligent echo, a talking aftertaste, a splash of memory and blood.
“I brought you some weed,” I said, reaching for the bag in my pocket.
“Fuck that. I want rock.”
I sighed. “Weed was good enough last time.”
“That was a long time ago. It’s a new season now. Gimme rock.”
He was punishing me. Well, why not? And maybe he really did want rock. It couldn’t hurt him now, but I still hated doing it. I’d given him enough drugs when he was alive. “I’ll be back.”
You’d think crack houses would change locations, float around to avoid trouble, but I knew one that had been in the same place for years. I knocked on the door, and the man I wanted was home, and awake, having not gone to bed at all the night before. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, smiling at me. “White boy. Superstar. Been a long time.”
We exchanged the ritual pleasantries, and I handed over some money, and returned to H.’s lot with a vial of crack. I dropped the lumps of crystal cocaine through the grate. They splashed.
“Okay,” H. said. “Tell me your dream.”
I settled back comfortably on my heels. “I was on the back of a truck, a flat-bed semi, sitting on some splintery timbers, facing backwards, looking at the road behind. The truck went into a tunnel, total blackness, for a while, then it came out, and we were on a dirt road. The truck slowed down. I saw things running along both sides of the road, pacing us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. Somebody was driving the truck. I banged on the window to get the driver’s attention, to tell him about the things following us, but he didn’t look back. We slowed down some more, because the road was muddy. Then the things jumped on the truck. They were monitor lizards.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t even know what a monitor lizard was if it wasn’t for you.” I expected him to say “I wouldn’t even be dead if it wasn’t for you,” but he didn’t. “The lizards jumped on me,” I said. “And... well... they ate my face.”
H. whistled. “Maybe you were just missing me. Lizards and guilt...”
“No. It was one of those dreams. For sure.”
“Yeah. Okay. You’re going on a journey, with a companion who will choose the path. The destination will matter to him more than you do. There will be terrors and trials. The lizards... hell, monitor lizards were my favorite... they might just symbolize monsters, but maybe they mean you’ll have to deal with guilt, or something from your past... maybe even me?”
He sounded so hopeful. I didn’t have the heart to remind him that he was dead, and unlikely to have any bearing on my life anymore, beyond these hollow conversations.
“I can’t back out? I can’t avoid it?” I asked.
“No, bro. You’re on the truck.” His voice changed, became playful. “Oh, there’s one other thing the dream means.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Classic symbolism. Straight outta Freud. It means you’re gay.” He laughed. It was a terrible laugh, because it sounded almost exactly like he had when he was alive. “Hate to break it to you.”
“Mom and Dad will freak,” I said. “Thanks, H.” I got up to leave.
“B.,” he said, softly, serious.
“Yeah?”
“I love you, B.”
My throat closed up. I shook my head. “Damn it, H. We agreed we weren’t going to say that anymore.”
He didn’t answer.
I left, trying to shake off the emotional aftereffects of the conversation, wondering when this thing would happen, when someone else’s destiny would hit me like a truck.
I went to a coffee shop, got tea and a bagel. I can’t stomach coffee anymore, not even really milky espresso. It gives me the jitters.
I sat, leafing through a newspaper. Somebody said “Hey.” I looked up. A skinny guy stood nearby, with a big nose and kinky hair, dressed all in black. He was ugly in an arresting way, with big, light blue eyes. He had nice hands, I noticed that right away; long fingers. I’ve always liked nice hands.
“You’re him, the guy.” He snapped his fingers. “Bradley Bowman.”
“Yeah.” I looked down at my paper again, but it was too late. This was the guy. The one driving the truck in my dream.
“I loved you in The Glass Harp,” he said. Most people said that. Then he surprised me. “And that spoken word thing you did, Underwater Monologues, that was great.”
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. I’d been nominated for a Grammy for Monologues, but not many people had heard it. It was the one decent thing I’d ever written myself.
“I didn’t know you lived around here.”
“Pretty close.” I hesitated, but H. had said it—I was already on the truck. “Want to sit down?”
“Yeah!” He put down his bag, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “I’m Jay.”
“Good to meet you. Call me Brad.”
“So, uh.” He fidgeted with a coffee spoon. “You, uh, doing anything—”
“No,” I said. “Pretty much out of the business, since that thing with that director.”
He actually blushed. “I heard about that, yeah.”
My last acting job. Jesus, six years ago. Fourth day on the set, I attacked the director, tried to strangle him, people said. He didn’t press charges—everyone figured I was just fucked up about H. dying, and that I was on drugs—but no one wanted to work with me after that, and I didn’t audition, didn’t return my agent’s phone calls. I’d been living off residuals from The Glass Harp and my other movies ever since.
In truth, I’d saved the director’s life. He was hag-ridden, a thing like a fat lamprey clinging to the back of his neck, feeding on him, backwashing poison into his brain. No one else could see the creature, but I could see all kinds of s
hit, after H. died. In exchange for a bottle of quaaludes poured down the sewer grate, H. told me how to make a nasty broth to soak my hands in, and then I could touch the lamprey thing as well as see it. It worked. H. is always right, now that he’s dead.
The dead know things, but the living have to do the work.
I killed the lamprey, ripped it away from the director’s neck and tore it apart, and people thought I was trying to kill the director, so I killed my career, too. It was a corpse I didn’t mourn much.
“If it’s not too personal,” Jay said. “I mean... your partner died, right?”
I nodded. “A long time ago.”
“I only mention it because my girlfriend died a couple of months ago.” He looked at the table. I couldn’t read anything into his expression at all. “She got stung by a bee, when we were having a picnic, and it turned out she was allergic.” He shook his head. “She died in the ambulance.”
“Oh, Jay, I’m so sorry.” What a shitty, out-of-nowhere thing. No one was surprised when H. died the way he did. He’d been doing more and more drugs, and I was buying them for him, I had all the connections, and he shot up too much and he died. Simple, straightforward. But to die from a bee sting... that was bad shit.
“But I think...” Jay said, and then trailed off. He looked up. He looked into my eyes. “I think I can bring her back.”
Any other day, I’d have figured he was crazy, and excused myself, and taken off. And for me to think someone’s crazy, with the things I’ve seen, that’s serious. But I’d had one of those dreams, and Jay had driven me into the darkness, so I just said “How?”
And he told me.
We managed to hide in the BART station in Berkeley, which is no mean feat, crouching a little way down the tunnel (well away from the third rail) after the last train of the night passed by. We listened as the BART cops shooed out the stragglers, and heard the metal gates rattle down, blocking us from the world above. We waited for a while, in the dark and the silence, then helped one another back up to the platform. We sat against the wall, our eyes gradually adjusting to the dimness.
Jay ate potato chips, every crunch as loud as the trump of doom. He didn’t seem nervous at all, like he did this kind of thing all the time.
“How’d you hear about this train?” I asked.
“Somebody at a party was talking about urban myths, new ghost stories, shit like that.”
“Huh,” I said. Thinking I’d never heard about a ghost BART train. Thinking the guy Jay heard at the party had probably made it all up on the spot. Thinking maybe that didn’t matter, that the confluence of Jay’s need, and my presence, and my dream, would be enough to call something imagined into being.
“It’s good of you to come with me,” Jay said. “It would be harder to do, if I was alone. I might not have come down here at all. Maybe... maybe your old boyfriend is down there, too.”
I didn’t answer. I’d thought of that, sure. But H. had been dead a lot longer than Jay’s girlfriend. Did that matter? Could we bring Jay’s girlfriend back, but not H., because she was fresher, or because she hadn’t earned her death like H. had? I could visit H. any time I wanted, sure, right in the empty lot where he’d died, by the sewer grate he’d puked blood into. But that ghost was residual heat, a fading photograph, not H. himself. If H. had a soul, something essential and eternal, it was... somewhere else. Maybe where we were going tonight. I didn’t want to think about that.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” I asked.
“Eunice. She hated that name. Her middle name was Ethel. She hated that worse. I called her E.”
E. And my H. And him Jay, and H. always called me B., though no one else did. I tried some anagrams, didn’t come up with anything. Decided it was a coincidence. Some things were nothing more than that, after all.
We talked about trivial things—my movies, the band he played keyboards for, his job debugging code. After a while I said “When do you think it’ll come?”
Then we heard the hum and rattle, felt the air come pushing down the tunnel. We both stood up. A headlight appeared in the dark, a strange pale white light that illuminated Jay’s face. He looked absolutely terrified.
The train pulled up before us. Just one car. The front compartment was all dark glass, the driver (if there was one) hidden. The train was white, not silver like a normal BART train, and it was streamlined, organic, all of a piece. It looked like it had been carved from a single enormous thighbone.
The doors slid open with a hiss of compressed air. I stepped forward. Jay didn’t move. I looked at him. He was on the edge of running away, though he wouldn’t get far, since we were locked down here. Jay had never really believed the train would come. I guess he thought this was going to be a ritual, a vigil, a night spent in E.’s honor, with no consequences.
Maybe it would have been, if I hadn’t joined him. It was more than that, now.
“Coming?” I asked. Not impatient. Just asking. This was his journey, though I never really thought he’d walk away.
He nodded, squared his shoulders, and walked into the dimness inside the train. I followed.
There were no seats, and instead of metal handrails on the ceiling, there were large bone hooks. I grabbed one. Jay did the same.
A voice, cold as dry ice, whispered “Doors are closing,” over a speaker.
Aren’t they always? I thought, and the doors hissed shut.
The train accelerated smoothly through the dark. Jay hung from the hook, his eyes closed, swaying. “I wonder how far we have to go?”
“I think it’s always a short trip to the underworld,” I said, looking at the window and seeing only my reflection against the blackness outside.
“You’d think there’d be a cost,” Jay said, opening his eyes. “You know? Two pennies each, like in the old stories.”
“That buys you a one-way ticket. I guess there’s a different price for a round-trip.”
“What kind of price?” Jay asked.
I shrugged. I figured we’d have to pay afterward.
We didn’t travel for very long. The train stopped, and diffuse light shone in through the windows, faint like the glow of bioluminescent mushrooms. There were bare trees and swirling fog, and more than anything the place looked like the set of a B-grade horror movie. The doors hissed open.
We got off the train, Jay first. “Where to?” I said. The trees were petrified, black, or else they were stone carvings of trees.
“I guess we follow the buzzing,” he said, his hands shoved deep in his pockets as he stared into the trees and the fog.
I heard them, then. Bees, off in the distance, sounding angry and busy, just like the clichés say.
“Is it dangerous here?” Jay asked.
It was, in many ways, a silly question, but I answered it seriously. “I think this place is normally beyond danger—this is where you go when the danger gets you. It’s the land of the lowest energy level. But we’re here to change things, to take someone out... so, yeah, I think it’s dangerous.” Though I wasn’t sure how. I knew things like this—magic, the supernatural, everything outside of, over, and under the reality most people inhabit their whole lives—could be unpredictable.
“I read Dante in college,” Jay began.
“Don’t think that way. Dante wrote a political treatise, a love poem, a spiritual meditation. He wasn’t drawing a map. You can’t map this place.” I pointed. “Let’s follow the buzzing bees. If there’s a path, stay on it.”
We passed through the dark wood. Was the sky empty of stars, or were we in an enormous cavern underground? It didn’t matter, really, but my mind worried at the question, to keep from wondering where H. was, I guess. This wasn’t my journey. I was the catalyst, the facilitator, nothing more, and I wanted to keep it that way.
Pretty soon we came to a clearing, a circle surrounded by trees, and there was E.
Jay gasped. I just stared.
E. was a beehive. I couldn’t tell if she’d ever been pre
tty, or if she was short or tall or fat or thin; her body was changed beyond such things. She leaned against a tree (it looked like she was fused to the tree), and her chest was filled with hexagonal chambers dripping honey. Bees flew around her like a black-and-yellow poison aura.
“Jay,” she said, or else the bees buzzed and made a sound like words.
“E. Are you...” He shook his head. “I came to get you. To bring you back.”
The buzzing increased in volume, and the bees moved faster and more erratically. I wondered if someone would get stung, and what a sting from an underworld bee would do. I hung back. This wasn’t my journey, and I wanted to stay out of the way. It seemed to me, though, that E. was at peace. Like she’d left her troubles behind.
“I’m full of honey now,” she said.
“Baby,” Jay said softly. “I’ve come such a long way...”
But he hadn’t, not really. Where were the trials? The tests, the bargains, the obstacles? Or were they still ahead? If this was it, if he just had to lead E. out of here now, it was too easy. If this was all it took, the world would be full of the rescued dead, and no one would ever have to mourn again.
Something slinked into my peripheral vision, and when I turned my head, I saw monitor lizards. Big as wolves, with dark green scales, wedge-shaped heads, watchful unblinking eyes. They flickered their tongues. They beckoned me.
I knew the lizards could take me to H. The real H., or what was left of him, whatever essential part had passed on.
“I can come back with you,” E. said, a dreamy buzz. “But only if you don’t look back. You can never look back.”
“Like Orpheus,” Jay said.
I knew that story. Learned it in school. Orpheus went into the underworld to bring back his dead lover, and he was told she would follow him back to the land of the living—as long as he didn’t look back on the way out. And, of course, Orpheus didn’t hear her behind him, and he doubted, and he looked over his shoulder, and that was that. She sank back into death forever. I always thought Orpheus was an idiot, having one rule and breaking it, but now, here, I suddenly understood.
