Odd Apocalypse

Page 35

I’d forgotten the code word on the label of this brick. When I retrieved it from the closet, I saw that it said PORK RIND. At the center of the universe is someone who has a sense of humor.
Clutching Mr. Hutchison’s gift, I left my suite and locked the door behind me.
The freaks had not yet begun to chop at the front door.
I hurried up the winding stairs, past Annamaria’s suite, to the third-floor door, where I’d stuffed two dollars in the receiving hole for the latch bolt.
When I entered the high chamber, Constantine Cloyce stepped out from behind the door and slammed the butt of his pistol-grip shotgun in my face.
Fifty
I WAS IN AUSCHWITZ AGAIN, TERRIFIED OF DYING twice. I was not digging fast enough to please the guard. He kicked me once, twice, a third time. The steel toe of his boot ripped my left cheek. Out of me poured not blood but instead powdery gray ashes, and as the ashes flowed, I felt my face beginning to collapse inward, as if I were not a real man but merely the inflatable figure of a man, a hollow man stuffed with straw that had turned to ash and soot without my being aware. And in the ground where I was digging with inadequate speed there appeared a chair on which sat T. S. Eliot, the poet, who read to me two lines from a book of his verse: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
I woke on the copper floor of the high room, for a moment not sure how I had gotten there. But then I remembered Wolflaw.… No, Cloyce. Constantine Cloyce. His eyes the gray of brushed steel, his matinee-idol chin thrust forward, his jaws clenched, his small, full-lipped mouth twisted in a sneer of contempt as he drove the butt of the shotgun into me.
My face hurt. I tasted blood. My vision was blurry. When I blinked rapidly, I couldn’t see any better, but each blink caused my head to throb painfully.
I could hear him singing softly. At first I couldn’t identify the song, but then I realized it was an American standard, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave.”
Hesitant to move for fear I would draw his attention before I could see well enough to defend myself, I remained facedown, head turned to my right, for perhaps a minute until my vision cleared.
On the floor, about two feet from me, was the brick of money wrapped in plastic. Whatever my pathetic treasure might amount to, it wouldn’t buy my life from a murderer who was a billionaire.
Beyond the package of cash rose the chronosphere. I couldn’t see Cloyce’s feet moving anywhere in that glimmering construction, only the inner gimbal mounting as it silently carved lazy eights in the air, the arms of it moving impossibly but ceaselessly. And in the golden light that arose equally in every cubic inch of the chamber, my enemy cast no telltale shadow.
I was lying with my right arm trapped under me. When I moved the fingers of that hand, I could feel the swell of leather that was the belt-slider holster. Slowly, taking care not to move otherwise, I wormed my hand to the Beretta—and found that it had been taken from me.
On the floor between me and the brick of money lay a tooth. I searched my mouth with my tongue and found not one hole but two. The way the blood thickened in my throat and the taste of it were beginning to sicken me.
Judging by his voice, he was behind me, several steps removed.
Lacking a weapon, my best hope seemed to be to get up fast and rush away from him, around the chronosphere, try to keep it between him and me until I got to either the copper door or the stainless-steel stairs.
I thrust up, but dizziness and pain stalled me when I got as far as my hands and knees. Cloyce kicked my left arm out from under me, and I fell facedown again.
Now he was softly singing a different Cole Porter number: “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
His choice of songs alerted me to what was coming next, but I was powerless to escape it. He kicked me in the hip, in my left side, again in my side, and I felt a rib crack.
He jammed one boot on my back, put his weight on me, and the cracked rib seemed to catch fire and burn through my flesh.
I now understood my dream:
What the Nazis hoped to do to the Jews they killed, to the Gypsies and the Catholics they killed, was to kill them twice. It is what all tyrants hope to do, those armed with the mighty power of the state, like Hitler, and those with lesser power, like Cloyce. Mere physical destruction does not satisfy them. They use fear to wither your spirit, continuous propaganda and cruel mockery to confuse you, torture and forced labor to break more than just your body. They want to reduce you, if they can, to the condition of a frightened animal who has lost any faith that might have sustained him, who accepts his humiliation as deserved, who descends into such depression that he forsakes all belief that justice is attainable, that truth exists, or meaning. After they first kill your soul, they are then satisfied to kill your body, and if in fact they have succeeded, you cooperate meekly in your own physical—second—death. They are all in the army of the damned, and if they have a stronger faith in the righteousness of evil than their victims have in the reality and power of good, they cannot lose.
The only responses we can have to their viciousness are the courage to fight back or the cowardice to acquiesce. Well, one other option might be the pretense of acquiescence.
As the broken rib burned in my side and as waves of pain swelled through my battered face, I begged him not to hurt me any more, not to kill me. I pleaded, beseeched, implored, and groveled with my face pressed to the floor. The tears were easy to produce because the pain squeezed them from me, but he could mistake them for tears of terror and self-pity if he wished.
He grabbed me by the back of my sports-jacket collar. Commanding me to get up, he hauled me to my feet. He slammed me against the wall so hard that the pain in my chest seemed to drive a spike all the way into my skull to puncture awareness and let darkness flood my mind once more. I barely held on to consciousness, but the black wave passed.
Now Cloyce was singing “Anything Goes.” Not singing it so much as muttering it, snarling the words, his face right in mine. He was a tall man, muscular, strong. Having surprised the fight out of me with the shotgun butt, he was going to enjoy beating me to death with his fists. His breath smelled of something sour and vile. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and a handful of my crotch, and between words of the song, he suggested I should submit to him sexually as all the terrified women had done before he killed them.
My right hand fumbled its way into that pocket of my sports jacket, though there was nothing in there but a few spare rounds of ammunition and the pantry key on the stretchy pink plastic coil.
Suddenly Tesla loomed beside us, his gaunt face wild with rage. He reached for Cloyce but reached through him, passed through him as he had passed through me.
Perhaps thinking that I had hoped to be saved, Cloyce said, “It can’t help you. It’s not him. Just an aspect of him. Spun off in an experiment, bouncing around in time because it doesn’t belong anywhere.”
Twisting my hair, twisting a handful of my crotch, Cloyce began laughing at me, highly amused by the tears that streamed down my face and by the helplessness they seemed to represent.
Pinching the bow of the key between thumb and forefinger, with all my strength I drove the serrated blade of it into the soft tissue behind his chin, as deep as it could go, perhaps into the underside of his tongue, and then twisted it violently.
As a gush of warm blood spilled over my hand, Cloyce reeled backward, clutching at his throat, keening in pain, probably sure that I had shoved a knife into him.
Before he might comprehend that he would survive the wound, I staggered away from him, snatched the shotgun off the floor, turned, pumped a round into the chamber, and delivered to him his second death.
Fifty-one
JUDGING BY THE SILENCE, THE FREAKS HADN’T BEGUN chopping at the front door yet, but surely by now they had begun to examine it and fiddle with the doorknob. The axes would start to flash soon.
My jaw ached from ear to ear, the broken-off roots of two teeth throbbed, and the right side of my face was swelling, threatening to reduce that eye to a slit. I kept swallowing fresh blood that welled up in my mouth, and I was also bleeding a little from my nose. None of the elements that constituted my crotch felt good, either, but I could walk without whimpering.
Psychic magnetism works best when I’m trying to locate a person, wandering around with the face and name of my quarry in mind. But occasionally it functions as well when I’m searching for an object while conjuring a mental image of it.
I couldn’t picture the master switch of which Tesla had spoken, because I didn’t know what it looked like. I assumed, however, that anyone as obsessed with detail and order as Nikola Tesla would label the damn thing MASTER SWITCH in capital letters. I pictured those two words in my mind’s eye, hoping that what I wanted was in this high room, which seemed to be the Grand Central Station of the time-management machinery.
For a minute I circled the chronosphere, but then I was compelled to move into it, through the larger fixed gimbal mounting, toward the arms of the inner mounting that scissored multiple lazy eights simultaneously from the air. Even closer, I was not able to see how they moved in such elaborate arcs yet continued to support the rotating egg—the passenger capsule—which was always floating at the center.
Later, I would read as much about gyroscopes as my fry-cook brain could tolerate. I didn’t absorb a lot, just enough to wonder if this had been an electrostatic gyro, in which the rotor—or in this case the egg—was supported by an electric or magnetic field. But if I understand correctly, the rotor of an electrostatic gyro has to be in a high vacuum, and the egg was not in a vacuum.
As I drew near to the swooping golden arms of the inner gimbal, they seemed to make an approach to the egg impossible. I would surely be battered to death if I tried to dart among them to the prize.
But then, as if sensing my approach, the great gold-plated arcs slid into new rhythms and patterns. As they wove among one another, describing lazy eights in the air, they still seemed to occupy some of the same places at the same times without catastrophe, but now an open path lay between me and the egg.
Trusting that those golden jawbones would not abruptly snap me in two, I moved toward the passenger capsule without fear or shadow. When I was within a few feet of the egg, its rotation slowed, slowed, stopped. The capsule seemed to float unsupported in the air, a foot off the floor, the top of it about two feet above my head.
A five-foot-high segment of the egg swung upward, an access hatch invisibly hinged at the top. Within the capsule waited two leather cockpit chairs with a console between them.
When I stepped inside, turned, and sat in one of the chairs, the hatch closed, presenting me with what appeared to be a simple control panel.
At the top of the panel, a fourteen-window clock presented the current year in the first four windows; the month, day, hour, minute, and second were displayed in two windows each. Black numbers, painted on drums, rolled down like cherries and lemons in an old low-tech slot machine. As far as I could tell, the time was precisely correct.
Under the first clock, a second remained blank. Fourteen knobs, one below each window, allowed me to turn the drums until I dialed up the desired date to which I wanted to travel.
The other controls consisted of just five labeled push keys as big as those on a toy for little children. The first, on the left, advised LOCK DATE.
Beside that one was a key marked TRAVEL ONLY. Below it, a third key offered PARK. Between those two keys, painted on the console, was the word OR. I assumed that if the Roselanders wanted to take forty years off their appearance, they punched TRAVEL ONLY. If they wanted to get out of the capsule in spite of the risks known and unknown, they punched PARK instead of the key above it.
Aligned with the first two keys was another labeled LAUNCH. Beside that one, the fifth and final key promised RETURN.
Time travel for dummies.
While wandering around the chronosphere before approaching the egg, I had taken the Gypsy Mummy fortune-teller’s card from my wallet without realizing what I was doing. I stared at it in my hand: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
If I went back in time to the day before the act of terrorism that took her life, I could park the capsule, slip quietly out of the Roseland of that period—where I was not yet known—and make my way to Pico Mundo.
I could warn Stormy that she was going to be shot dead the following day. Although my story would have fantastic elements, she would believe me for two reasons: First, she knew well that my life has always been riddled with the bizarre and the absurd, and she’d been involved in many such moments with me; second, we never lied to each other, and we never doubted each other.
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
But because nothing I could do in the past would change the present from which I traveled, I would return to a world in which Stormy remained dead. Yet the Stormy I brought with me would be her, not some kind of clone or soulless automaton, but Stormy Llewellyn complete. Like Timothy, she would be a living paradox.
I would be able to hear her voice again, her laughter. Her hand in mine once more. Her lovely, loving eyes. Her face, such a face. Her kiss.
She would never age. But if I found a way to take Roseland for my own, I would have this machine, and therefore I would never age, either. We could fulfill the destiny that Gypsy Mummy had promised us. We could live here together forever.
The pain of my injuries was unrelenting, and I found myself in tears again, though not because of that pain. They might even have been tears of joy.
My psychic magnetism might not have brought me to the master switch I sought, but it had brought me to what I wanted, what I so needed, to what my heart demanded.
I entered my destination date in the second clock. I pressed LOCK DATE.
I made my selection between TRAVEL ONLY and PARK.
I hesitated, considering the risks, which were incalculable, and the implications, which were many and some devastating. I considered how much I might come to regret my choice, and I urgently reminded myself that people should never be treated like toys. I warned myself that the human heart is a great deceiver, deceitful above all things. Still I wept.
And then I pushed LAUNCH.
If the capsule began to rotate at high speed again, I had no awareness of spinning. I had no sensation either of moving up or down, or side to side, or back and forth. I did feel some motion but one I had never experienced before: a turning inward, as if I were a slack watch spring being wound tight again. That isn’t an accurate description of the feeling, although it’s the only one I am capable of giving.
During this, as I moved backward in time, my pain relented. I could feel my ribs knit again and the blood recede from my mouth. My tongue found all my teeth where they belonged, and the swelling in my face quickly declined until my eye was no longer pinched to a slit.