Goddes of the New Dark Age
(For Chara)
“What is real?” he wondered aloud.
Then Smith heard the words: Revere me. Make me real. Not his words, but a muffled hiss, like someone whispering on the other side of the wall…
The wall was nightmare: tremoring flesh, skin sweating in turmoil, pain, despair. So I’m dreaming standing up now, Smith thought. Wide awake, in daylight.
Flecks of mica glittered up from the sidewalk. The sun raged. Old man, he thought. City cops cruised by, eyeing him, squab faces dark behind tinted glass. “Frog, Ice, Cokesmoke?” a hand- pocketed black man asked him. By a newspaper stand, where headlines blared MAN SETS WIFE & CHILDREN ON FIRE, a raddled prostitute twitched, scratching at needlemarks inside of her thigh. In the mouth of a brick, urine-soaked alley, a woman in rags vomited up blood as rats the size of small puppies boldly approached the emesis, to eat.
Smith hated the sun. It seemed bright with life, which made him feel even older, more depleted. Where am I going? The question didn’t mean now, today, this minute. Where am I going forever? he wondered. Where have I been?
The footsteps padded behind him; they had for weeks. Smith had long since stopped looking back. It sounded like someone walking barefoot — a woman, he surmised, a robust, beautiful woman. He also detected the lovely scent — perfume, and some kind of inexplicable heat at his groin and his heart. Whenever he turned, though, at the sound and the lush fragrance, nothing was there. Just a shadow sometimes, just a fleck, like the mica in the cement.
Perhaps it was a ghost, whatever ghosts were. Ghost, or just hallucination. His physical body felt like vermiculated meat. Too many artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, alcohol, saturated fats. A body could only take so much vandalism. But Smith didn’t care. Why should he, now? Or ever, for that matter?
Or maybe ghosts were real. Physical residuum, he speculated. Interplanar leakage. Was there really a netherworld, like an anxious tongue licking across pressed lips, desperate for entry? He’d read somewhere that horror left a stain, a laceration through which the tenants of the void could ooze into the world. But if this were true, mankind would surely be smothered by such ooze.
So what was this “ghost?” A spirit? An angel?
Was the ghost real?
Sometimes he could actually see it, via the presage: the longing perfume scent, the warmth. Generally only at night. Of course, he thought. Night. Dr. Greene had told him to expect as much. But ghosts? “Be prepared for some contraindications from the chemotherapy,” came the words like a clipped dissertation. “Olfactory and aural hallucinosis. Exodikinesis, immoderate scotopic debris, synaptic maladaption and toxicity intolerance. It’s normal.” Normal, Smith reflected. Dying’s normal too. Three treatments left him racked for hours, dry heaving bile. His hair had fallen out. “To hell with this,” he’d told Greene, on the fourth visit. “Let me die.” Cancer seemed an appropriate way for a writer to die. It seemed nearly allegorical. The festering beneath the miraculous veneer of human flesh.
No, the ghost wasn’t a side effect. It must be real. He thought he could see it, the shadow within the shadow, peering back. A shadow in want of flesh.
Was it Smith’s flesh it wanted? Why should it want me? My flesh’s dying. I am essentially a walking corpse. He could smell the perfume, even over the city’s mephitis of carbon-monoxide, stale sweat, and garbage. “You smell beautiful,” he whispered. “Whoever you are.” He walked on, shriveling against the glare of the sun, but then stopped to look back once more.
“Are you real?” he asked.
*** “What is real?” Smith lit a cigarette; it scarcely mattered now. But the question kept occurring to him, like an itching rash. Why should it be so important?
His biopsy analysis — now that was real. The single sheet seemed too thin for such a grievous message. It drooped in his hand like something already dead:
CYTOLOGY REPORT
Name: Smith, L.
Age: 61, W/M
Clinical Consultation: Large Cell Coaxial Mass
Specify: Right Lung Mass Aspirate
_ Negative
_ Atypical
x Positive
Microscopic Description: Right Lung Aspirate showing numerous malignant large cells, some of which showing large vesicular irregular nuclei, consistent with non-keratinizing carcinoma, probably large-cell differentiated type of adenocarcinoma.
Smith was a realist. No sense in crying over a spilt life. He felt he had a mission now, but wasn’t sure what it could be. He couldn’t stop thinking of the ghost.
“Are you real?”
Behind his typewriter, behind his desk, a shadow, or a smudge, seemed to nod. “Who are you!” Smith suddenly yelled. “What do you want from me?”
Your reckoning, something seemed to hiss. It wasn’t even really a sound, more akin to insect appendages abrading. The soft bare footfalls followed him to the bathroom. A ghost is coming into the toilet with me, he thought. It was almost funny. He smiled at the lovely perfume- scent, then winced, urinating blood. Of course: by now the disease had bloomed. Dr. Greene had warned him, hadn’t he? “Renal malfunction. What happens, Mr. Smith, is that the raging malignant cells become insinuated into the nephrons and the cortical kidney tissue, sceloriticizing the calyx cavities.” Charming, Smith thought now. The pain was extraordinary, like bright light.
Smith had been a writer for over forty years. Had been, he emphasized, pulling up his zipper. He flushed the toilet, and thought of his career. Had he been a good writer? He’d thought so, until Greene had told him the truth. The good doctor had at least been respectful enough of Smith’s profession not to mince words. “You’re dying,” he’d said. “You’ll be gone in oh, say, six weeks.”
Gone, Smith considered. He was still in the bathroom. What did gone mean? Did it mean no longer real? The question continued to nag at him, worse than the cancer. “What is real?” he asked.
Find out, the hiss replied. You haven’t much time.
As a writer, he’d spent his life trying to create realities out of assessments of imagination. The
