Labyrinth

Why him? Why here? Why this? How had any of it happened? He had always said he wanted to be a doctor. Once, a lifetime ago, he had a toy doctor’s bag, a glossy black affair with a clasp. Inside, vials of candy pills, a different color for every disease, and a reflex hammer, and a stethoscope that didn’t work. He wanted to know the names of the bones and was fascinated and horrified to learn that a skeleton walked where he walked.

That was when life was a road, with milestones. Everything clearly marked. Crawling at around eight months, walking by twelve. Complex grammar by three years. Stages and syndromes and clusters of cognitive leaps. It was a sensible, well-mapped world. Smart landmarks marched to the horizon and beyond, stars for pilgrims.

Now, life was a labyrinth you didn’t even know you were lost in. He spent all his time squinting to see clues that weren’t there. The walls all looked the same. From visions of doctor, with a fistful of candy-colored pills, to this. Odd jobber. Freelancer. Pleasant, almost exotic names for what he was: someone always between places he had never visited and would never arrive at. His dreams at night found him stymied by white walls. On waking, he realized he had left all the lights on. He had to remember to breathe.

Life was a desert, and he had surrendered in the face of it. He would wait at the edge, wait for a sign. His friends had drifted upward, away, snapping their tethers to him. Life was a jungle, thick with things hunting him. No, an ocean. A trackless void. Endless and endlessly swallowing him. He was lost in the gape of the world. He was sleeping more and more and his dreams beat down on him like a naked sun.

Everything Isn't There Anymore

Everything isn’t there anymore. It’s been going on for a long time now, but I’ve only started noticing it recently. Driving up Hanlon on my way to pick up PJ, I saw the white gravel pit that used to be Forlynn’s. Used to be, as in used to be last week. No lingering sickness of desperate gimmicks leading to the humiliation of Going Out Of Business as all hope for dignity withers away. With the obscene pennants and their forced, flapping smiles and Isn't it a pity? and I only hope the end comes quick. None of that. Just a sudden, senseless no more.

And then I started seeing all kinds of buildings that weren’t there anymore. That one-story apartment block with the florid graffiti. And the house next to the house next to that guy Alan’s. It was a nice house. Big windows filled with sunshine in the afternoons, but for some reason that didn't matter. Not enough. Now it’s just the absence of a house. The streets are filled with gaps. 901 Western, 903 Western, nothing, nothing, 909 Western, nothing.

How can these things just vanish like this? Did anyone see them dismantled? Did anyone hear the walls come down? One day, there’s a living thing there, with skin, veins, muscles, a heart, an electrical spark and pulse. The next, not even a hollow body to bury. Nothing but a vacant lot bulldozed flat. Somebody loved that house. Somebody feels its loss as a blow. An amputation. A death in the family or the failure of an organ. Something that means life will Never Be The Same Again. “The place I used to live.” “The house where I grew up.” “The restaurant where we first met.” Gone now.

And in their places, perfect new structures. No blemishes. They're waterproof. Sunproof. Windproof. Memories will slide right off them. They will have the smells of new chemicals, fresh from the factories. I’m watching now. I’m waiting to see it happen.

The Bishop

The bishop disguised himself as frogs, but his eyes gave him away. It’s always the eyes. They are thresholds. A frog’s eyes have nictitating membranes, filters, fine skins that give them away. The bishop has endless corridors of thoughts. That’s how he is detectable. Whether he enters on white clouds, whether he has his unheavenly host with him—Arms and Legs—whether he smiles or talks like a cat. His thoughts have the sound of footsteps. They boom, self-contained bombs that ping like pianos.

Arms and Legs—one is made of wire and muscle, the other of blood and dogspeed—have no minds. They have been hollowed out. When the bishop pays their salaries, they can do nothing but eat the money. The pills they fed me were self-contained bombs that rang like bells. Who gave them the power? Was it the chemical structuralists, who constructed the pills through formulation?

I’ve been gone for many winters. Their grip on me has faded. The punctures have closed like irises. Sealed doors that keep out the light that flows from their nostrils. In that way, now that the punctures have closed, I am safe from the bishop. The chemical structuralists can’t find me in their notebooks or computers. I have become invisible to them. Radar drips from me like smoke. I leave no trail. I leave no scent.

The bishop is always luring me, but his eyes give him away. He can take the form of frogs and crows. I can see they are him. He sleeps in meters on the side of streets, on top of buildings, within wires. When the bishop lived inside the hospital, when Arms and Legs tried to convert me, tried to turn me to a gas they could bottle and bag, I knew I was a different species. I’ve become three different species, each more alive than the last.

Twenty Bucks a Pop

I felt worse about every step we took. I wasn't some crybaby animal person, worrying about the poor little baby deers and all. Truth is, I didn't think about animals too much at all. I ate meat. Still do. Never saw anything wrong with that. And I'm convinced that Maureen's turkey casserole could bring anyone to his knees and make them beg for a fork. So, okay, that's where I was coming from. Sensible man, but not too sensitive, if you see what I'm saying. Medium. Even keel. Still, the further we got into the trees, Wes, Dean, and me, the worse I felt.

The ground was hard frozen—it was the dead-end ass of December—and my ankles and shins were starting to gripe. My feet were blistering. New boots. Maureen said I should wear them in some, but that would have just made this whole thing feel like it was starting a week early.

Let's just say Wes didn't have the right way of thinking about this, for my money. He was too excited, like a kid opening Christmas stuff, and it was because some fella at Ruby's said something about a man he knew wanted to buy fox pelts. Fox pelts. Fella said this dealer would pay twenty bucks a pop. Wes got charged up over that, started adding up numbers so hard he forgot to finish his beer. That's the way Dean tells it. I wasn't there. I hadn't gone drinking with them two for I don't know how long. Better things to do with my time. Game on, or a project down in my shop. Wes got it in his head that I needed to go out with them, for fox. I started to say no, Wes standing on the woven rug in the living room, dripping snow all over, but watching his fist clench and unclench, I said yes. Just like that.

Didn't want to be there. I didn't even believe the part about the dealer. Twenty bucks for a fox? Who's going to pay that? So I'm wondering, the whole time we're banging into the woods, what the hell we're doing there. Then one of their guns goes off, maybe thirty, forty yards up. I run up, slapping my feet on the ground like flippers and there's Dean, down on the ground. He's bleeding from the chest. He's on his back trying to find the sun with his eyes. And Wes is looking at me like I'm next.

The Hunter

Drawer on top of drawer of specimens. These over here are all indigenous. That other stack, and the drawers in the hallway, those are exotics. And he collected them all himself. Although "collected" sounds so dry. As though he simply called on a shop and turned in his ticket and they passed a package wrapped in brown paper across the counter!

No, he was a hunter. Still was. Until the season returned, he had his trophies. He didn't even know how many, exactly. Something he learned from Professor Pines, not counting them. Oh, he knew that he had approximately eight hundred different species, affixed in their "sets," as they were called, "pinned and pegged," as they say.

As he walked past them, on his way to the living room, or out the front door to gather the morning paper, he still felt a charge. Even after all these years. Just knowing that so much color—colors like most people never see, not the watercolorists, not the botanists, not the birders—was stashed away in his stacks. It was still a thrill.

He was solving mysteries he couldn't even name. Amassing evidence. Taking one chaotic corner of Gaia's domain, and with a sweep of his hand, and a swish of his net (yes, don't laugh, he still used a net) he imposed order upon it. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but man abhorred a secret. So he collected the Iris Fringe, the Maubry's Fruitillary, the so-called "Lavender Hover," and the rest of their kind, these magnificent peoples of sunlit places. To know. To understand. To have. To travel into her secrets and find a prize and return with it aloft, a flutter still in its wings.

Warm Water

The celibacy wasn’t the hard part. The big things are easier to accommodate. Close the door and lock it, stash the key on a high hook, and it’s done. But the trivial things nagged like itches. Mattresses made sleep a grave indulgence, instead of a practical necessity, and were therefore forbidden. Likewise, socks underneath shoes. And only the drinking of warm water was allowed, cold water having been declared a luxury "intended for kings and noble savages." They were neither; they were members of the Order of Saint Anselm, and so cold water, mattresses, socks, and a host of other comforts were banished.

Cooped up in gray brick dormitories, shuffled to Reflection or Meal (silent, always silent, except for the scrape of insolent silverware), carted off to Devotion (five miles away in equally isolated Calley). Life in the Order was stiff as the starched choir robes.

There were few opportunities to be tempted away from celibacy, but the warm water! The furtive comedians of the dorms knew that warm water was only meant for "bathing and baptizing" and that "where warm is the norm, ice is the vice." It was surprising how stubbornly warm water and sockless feet could wear away at a person. This was a slow, pricking torture, all the more frustrating for the small footprints of its agony. No one ever died of flies, either, but waving an arm again and again and again to clear the air around a face led to its own kind of illness. A wasting of the spirit. A feeling that if God intends life to be this routine of tedium and discomfort, then maybe Someone has the wrong idea.

Some members took the strictures as evidence for their own weakness. If defiance weren’t so deeply rooted within them, if such minor inconvenience didn’t gnaw at their souls, they wouldn’t be at Saint Anselm’s in the first place.

Danny Conway Street

I walked down the street like I owned it. My street, got it? Danny Conway’s street. I was stepping over cars in my way, kicking them out of the gutter. I’m walking here. I’m out. Served my time. Repaid my debt to society. Which means you, you umbrella fuck. You don’t like my rain? This is my rain. I brought this rain with me. The outside gate at Morrel opened up, I walked through, and the rain fell down. It’s been raining ever since. It’s okay, I’ll let you use some of my rain.

Don’t worry. I’m rehabilitated. A new man. Impulse control is tight as tits. Cashed in all my PX tickets for these shoes. Clean and white. New. Like me. Had the same eighty bucks in my pocket I had when I walked in 72 months ago, and I was looking to make something happen with it. So I was just walking down Danny Conway Street, my new white shoes eating up the sidewalk, when I walked into Buster Holmes. I mean, I walked into him and almost knocked him down.

Buster had been out for almost two years and he looked soft. And it made me mad. Buster’s hair wasn’t coming back in yet. Morrel had thinned him out up there, which you see a lot of. Comes from having to keep one eye open all the time and never knowing where to put your back.

So Buster at first acts like he doesn’t even know who I am. Or maybe he really doesn’t. Being out and soft, maybe all that is so far in the past he can’t even remember it. I said, “Buster, you asshole, it’s Danny!” And he stood there looking at me for a while. And then you could see it: he remembered. And he got even softer. Like a loaf of bread. “Buy me a drink, asshole. I’m out, and I got something I want to talk to you about.”

The Big Q

Quigley was everywhere. From the giant golden Q atop the Quigley Building in downtown Chicago, to the golden scoreboards generously donated by a certain loving Father Corporation and dotting ball fields all over the South, to skywriting competition that wafted its one-letter nom de mercantile across the skies of San Diego, Quigley stood tall.

In Japan, people now used ku-wi-guri to mean "certainly" and "of course," as well as a flashy approximation of "right on!" Quigley was engineering a standardization of habit, of taste, of life. Their confidential executive manuals—which they probably could have sold in bookstores for unexpected profit—spoke of Quiglification. And they weren't kidding around. Already, three full-length Hollywood features had been created around Quigley products. They had plots and characters, naturally, but Quigley was center stage, and no one missed the point. The Big Q had won the Oscar in the newly formed Best Corporate category, and two or three more by the end of the decade was predicted by all.

Everywhere, even where Quigley products happened not to be in use, people talked about Quigley. "Was it bigger than a Quigley 301?" people asked, routinely, when trying to picture the one that got away on the latest fishing trip. Textbooks and scientific journals commonly used the ubiquitous Quigley CMI—the first in Quigley's "revolutionarily beloved" integrated trisister modules—as a size comparison. It used to be dimes, or pennies, or pedantically, rulers. Now the CMI lent a sense of scale to everything from dinosaur teeth to micrometeorites. The Q had found its way into everyday speech, too. "That dress is Golden Q on you!" "He's the Q of the defensive line."

There was talk of Quigley forming its own colony in the Lesser Antilles. Already, unofficial reservation lists were up in every major city. At least four hundred and fifty thousand people clamored for a space on the Quigley island, where they hoped to loll the days away under a grandly rising, golden Q.

The Raft

The raft was a bucking mule and he had to hang onto the burls in the logs. His hands were raw from hanging on. Every time the raft lurched, he pressed himself to the logs, but his feet would swing way out over the water, and the waves would roll over. He was breathing hard. Water was in his eyes and ears and mouth. It was taking over.

The smell of the raft made him think of his grandfather's cabin, and while he felt images of hot fireplaces and full tables with white tablecloths and white bowls with steam miraging the air above them, thunder cracked the sky. The raft dipped. He lost his grip. His left hand dragged over the logs. The skin tore. The box of supplies was tied to the raft more securely than he was, but the ropes were making noise. He heard the stutter and creak, even over the wind and water. And the thunder boomed again.

His left hand was bleeding and his right hand was going numb from the cold. Choppy waves circled him like sharks. He squinted. Nothing to see ahead, to the left. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see behind him, and he didn't dare change his grip. His grip was keeping him alive. He was staining the raft red. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear except the wind, shouting into his ear. The raft tipped, his legs swung around.

It was becoming almost routine. And then the ropes holding the box of supplies just fizzled. They unwound like smoke from a snuffed candle. Flapping snake tongues, they uncoiled and the box slid down the raft. He reached out for it with his left hand, but his left hand was useless now. He sat up and lunged for the box, but the slippery raft was speeding it along, toward the edge, and the hungry ocean that waited for everything. His canteen, some matches, his wallet in a plastic bag with a seal, some hard candy. The box hesitated at the lip of the raft. A wave reared up and plucked it over the side. He couldn't tell the splash it made from the war of noise that surrounded him. His left hand was still staining the raft red.

The Voice

When it was windy, the house rattled. The windows in the library (we called it the library). Where the big bookcase was. The kitchen rattled, too. Wind in the vents above the stove. I didn't like the sound. It reminded me of a busy signal, a message not getting through. A lonely sound.

I remember being in the kitchen, getting something. Peeling an orange, I think, standing in front of the sink. The Davises' clothesline next door was humming. The wind got trapped in the stove vent, and then the sound went hollow, like it was squeezing itself through. And it said, "Do you?" I heard those two words, in the wind in the house. "Do you?"

Did I what? It said it again. A woman's voice, or maybe a child's. It was almost formless, a faint whistle at the beginning. "Do you?"

I dropped the orange on the counter and backed away from the stove. When I was a kid, my fears were a frayed screen. Anything could get through to me. I hadn't lost all of that (I guess you could call it) openness. My mind was flexible, and if it had to fold to fit some new fear, it would. I kept my eyes on the stove. I heard the blood racing through my ears. The clothesline buzzed.

The wind talked again: “Do you?” The voice was getting clearer. The voice knew I was there. My heart bounced up and down, jumping with the startled branches outside. I took a step toward the stove. Do I what? I was maybe a foot away. The trees were waterfalls.

The wind said, "You will." The clothesline sang Amen and the wind died, and it wasn't long enough before I heard the voice again.

Winters

Everything was shutting down for winter. The clouds had been getting pretty sparse. They hadn't seen a big cottony cumulus for months as it was, and probably wouldn't again until spring. What was up there now was mostly streaky little things. Leftovers. Remnants. Probably couldn't even make one good cumulus out of what was left. Same with the rain. Summer had seen rain like buckets overturned. Big, thick drops that slapped you on the back of the head, drummed on windshields like fat fingers. The stars, too. So bright and piercing a month ago, but now, power was down by half and the stars were too dim to resolve. They were one milky smear far, far away.

All this was enough to make anyone lose faith in winter. It didn't used to be like this. Winter used to have its own supplies. Winter was okay back then. You could say winter was your favorite season back then and no one would look at your funny. The fluffy snowflakes and clear skies were tops on a lot of people's lists.

That was when the whole thing was managed better. Used to be, twelve months meant twelve months. They worked it. Now, somehow, they can't stretch twelve months worth of stuff for the whole year. You'll even see shortages in fall every once in a while. Leaves stopped changing in fall a couple years ago. Just for a few days and to be honest, not too many people even noticed. But still. It's who they have running things now.

They don't really understand what they're doing. It's just a job to them. They move some air masses around, look at a few temperature and pressure areas, collect a paycheck, and go home. Whole thing's a joke now. Winter used to be a lot of people's honest-to-god legitimate favorite season. Now you'd have to have a hole in your head.

Melissa

All he knew at first was that the thing wasn't connected to the crook of his arm anymore. And he didn't feel the plastic things in his nostrils. And everything was quieter, at first. All he heard was a far-off whoosh of air, no more of the electronic beeps and tones that had filled the room for over three months. And, he didn't know how to say it, but the white had changed. It was moon-white now, not plastic-white, all the color bleached out. Now it was a gentle, warm white, a luminous white that glowed behind his eyes.

And he felt good. He wasn't sure exactly what he felt, actually, but he knew what he didn't feel. He knew it keenly. He didn't feel pain. And he didn't feel fear. For the last few months, fear pricked at him every time someone in a uniform came into the room, which was every five minutes, it seemed. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, assorted technicians, the people who wheeled around the magazines and books. And the pain that came on its own schedule. In the beginning, it came exactly when they said it would. "You'll feel a twinge." "Okay, now—this might hurt a little." "You'll be sore for the next few days."

The morphine wasn't able to keep it at bay by the end. It had grown, gathered its strength and regrouped. When it came back, it came back glorious. And every day, even when he was asleep—he could see this now—Melissa had come. To hold his hand, he thought, or sit by his side. Her eyes would be red from crying. And now, a sound did find him, over the rush of wind. It was Melissa, crying. Melissa, who was left behind. Melissa, who was too alive to be sucked into the vacuum.

He didn't feel fear anymore, or pain, but he did feel sadness. A pure sadness. He had no more self-interest to fray the edges of sadness. This was a sadness that was clean and sharp and the sound of Melissa crying made it grow until the clouds rang with it.

UAVI

The doorbell rings and he's up like that, pressed to the wall of the living room. Quick door-check: gauzy shadow through the curtain. Subject no more than five five. He runs through the day's itinerary. He's not expecting anyone. He doesn't know anyone five five. Time: eleven oh five.

He pads to the door ISF (In Stocking Feet). Stays in the shade. Sunlight outlining pillars of dust in the air. Steps over floorboard that has PTS (Propensity To Squeak) and stands beside door. Listens. Birds (two, maybe three—a jay, sparrows) and a lawnmower (push-type) halfway up the block. Subject not moving. Subject making no sound. He puts his hand on knob. Still has full-on EOS (Element Of Surprise). Grips the knob. Quarter turn CW (clockwise). Subject immobile. A second quarter turn CW. Subject inattentive. Bolt is fully withdrawn. Subject turns to street and back to house. Knob turned to completion, throws door open approximately halfway.

Subject appears startled. Subject attempts to look past him into the house. He moves to block UAVI (Unauthorized Visual Inspection). Subject dressed as follows: loose, "baggy" trousers, blue; green "T-shirt;" light blue sweatshirt. Subject exhibits NFSH (No Fixed Style of Hair), overlong (half-inch over top of ear covered). He looked at Subject, a boy.

"State your business."

Subject shifts uncomfortably in loosely laced, rubber-soled shoes. "Yeah, is Jennifer home?"

He narrows his eyes at subject. Quick estimate of weight, reach, speed. "She's home, but unavailable."

Subject looks hurt. (Subject will be hurt if he doesn't vacate in ten seconds.) "She said to meet her here at eleven."

He looks at watch. Eleven oh seven. "You're late. She's unavailable." Subject looks inside house again. Starts to speak. Stops. "I suggest you leave before there's any more trouble." Subject has head down, sloppy turn, slow retreat. Door is shut. Position on couch assumed.

Jennifer walks into living room WFIH (With Food In Hand). "Was that
Randy?"