Well. Okay. That’s an exaggeration. But it rose up as high as we had been two drive-in days before. Had we decided to hang out a little longer down there, we would have bathed the big bath, baby.
The flood brought with it a bullet-hard rain and a cloud of mist, and the mist collected itself and became the drive-in ghost. We looked down on it and I saw within it the island and us on the island, and then I saw us and the pile of corpses, false and neat, and I quit watching then. Feared it might show me our future. And, frankly, I didn’t want to know.
2
“All these wires,” Steve said, “I think they run the drive-in world. They travel along these great beams, and the interconnecting parts that look like ladder rungs. They run through those. They go from the sky to the ground. They’re worked into this world’s fabric. They give it light. They make the sun, the moon and stars, night and day work. Or did. They’re starting to go bad. Shorting out maybe. No maintenance. The whole goddamn thing is breaking up. I don’t know, maybe it’s on purpose. But down there, it’s all over. I’m sure of it. From sea to shining sea, from one end of the jungle to the other, all the way down that single stretch of highway, the drive-in at either end. It’s done, companions. Done.”
We were resting in a mess of wires by one of the huge bolts, and Steve, he was running on, talking ninety miles an hour, as if he were on some kind of caffeine high, which he wasn’t, unless the dog-urine fruits were naturally rich in it.
And maybe they were, because we were all in one of those late-night type of conversational, philosophical moods that one usually associates with coffee houses or university lifers or chat-it-up smart guys trying to score pussy.
Only thing was, it wasn’t late night, it was day, but the day wasn’t much. The sun was down low, literally, and it was leaking its light over the water, making it the color of rich bourbon. There was a lot less water now. Much of it had been steamed away. But still that sun dripped into the sea, and our version of Sol had begun to lose its shape, like a rotting fruit going quick-fast to liquid. On the seabed all manner of creatures, giant squids, fish, and even our great catfish friend, Ed, squirmed in the mud.
From where we were, we could see the great fish clearly. The dark things, the ravenous cancers, or pissed- off shadows, whatever they were, those hungry things that had been inside of Ed, had exited the old boy’s ass. The shadows fluttered about the muddy seabed like crickets. There was too much light for them, fading or not, they hopped and twisted and fell about like dying locusts, came apart in little black pools that ran into the mud and were absorbed.
The people who had been inside Ed exited as well. They were very small from our position, the size of termites. But we knew they were people. They came out of the gaping mouth of the fish and disappeared into the mud. It probably went very deep, that mud. Maybe miles.
If anyone was still in the fish, they might stay on the surface for awhile, as Ed covered a lot of space and was sinking more slowly, spread out like that, but he was sinking. We could see that big buddy going down.
Goodbye, Bjoe, if you’re still there. Goodbye you man-eating, dick-jerking asshole.
The horizon had become a charcoal gray band, and it was broadening. Soon, all the world below would be dark.
Above us, the clouds were near touchable. Puffed up and white as a Jesus robe.
I said, “I think, tired as we are, we should start moving again, while we can see to climb. If the sun holds out just a while longer, I think we’ll reach the clouds.”
“And if we do,” Reba says, “who says that means anything? It can be just as dark inside a cloud as out. The sun goes, what the fuck does it matter where we are?”
“I’m thinking the beam leads somewhere,” I said. “Remember Popalong, he climbed up here, through that hole over the drive-in, and it was nearly as high as this. He saw things. He told us a little about them. This world has an attic.”
“But there’s no guarantee this leads to it,” Reba said. “This world, in case you haven’t noticed, lacks logic.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Grace said, “we made this decision, and now we’re stuck with it, we either ride the dick or use our fingers.”
“Say what?” Reba said.
“It’s an old saying I just made up, meaning, we’ve made a decision. We don’t know if it’s the real thing, the big cosmic fuck, or just us playing with ourselves. We won’t know till we get up there.”
“There really isn’t any other way to go,” Steve said. “Well, other than down. And if we climb down, I don’t think we’re climbing down to much. A lot of mud, dead fish, and such.”
“You’re right,” Reba said. “Of course you are. I’m just tired.”
We started climbing again.
There was something I hadn’t mentioned to the others. The clouds. I feared our oxygen would thin. But it didn’t. Truth was, the sky, the clouds, the whole arrangement, was way lower than back on earth. But it was a bit chilly. As we climbed through the clouds, they felt wet and sticky, like cotton candy.
And then we broke through a bank of clouds so thick you could swat them with your hand and knock them about. When we rose above them, struggling our way along the wires on the beam, we saw it.
A hole at the top of the world, the beam traveling up through it like a knife through a wound.
3
When we came to the top of the beam it began to narrow dramatically, and eventually we had to go one at a time. Grace was the first inside, followed by Steve, then Reba and myself. Behind us, the sun dimmed even more as it dissolved into the mud.
We climbed over the lip of the sky and stood in a room.
A dusty goddamn room.
A big room, I might add. But, a room.
Dimly lit, but lit. The source? Unknown.
There were all sorts of things there, and many of them were things I remembered Popalong Cassidy describing. There were backdrops of all sorts and tins of film, and loose film scattered helter-skelter, piles of television sets, all sizes.
Looking up, I could find no ceiling. Just darkness. In fact, I couldn’t see any walls. There was just a floor and lots of junk and lots more for as far as the eye could see in the dim light.
“There seems to be some kind of path along here,” Grace said.
And there was. A break in the backdrops and tins of film, forming a little corridor. Dust clouds rose and floated as we walked. We were all soon coughing, but in time the dust ceased to bother us, and we proceeded at a brisker pace.
“I remember Popalong Cassidy said he could walk into the backdrops,” I said.
“Yeah, I remember that too,” Grace said.
“We find one of home,” Steve said, “we’re set.”
And as if wishing would make it so, we found just that. A huge backdrop hung down on chains attached at the top to… Who knows what? The backdrop was so long it curled on the floor. It was a painted outside view of the pool hall back home, the street out front. It was where my friends and I had conceived our plan to visit the Orbit Drive-in; it was where Willard had kicked some ass protecting Randy, the two who were later welded together by a lightning strike, welded in such a way they became one mean creature, the Popcorn King.
“If we can step through that,” I said, “we will be in my hometown. Everyone can find a way home from there.”
I turned for an answer from the others, saw another backdrop across the way. The Dairy Queen in my
