“Serge… Serge wasn’t the same at all.”
“This isn’t a good day to split hairs,” Jared said. “Not if they’re both dead when they shouldn’t be.”
We joined the others, who wandered from room to room in a kind of subdued humor, by turns warm, then mordant, everyone here instinctively craving each other’s company and heartbeats. I’d not known Terry, never even met him, and so spent awhile staring at a picture that Jared pointed out, contrasting the vibrant guy on Kodak paper with the one I’d first encountered in his coffin. Had I not had Jared’s word on it, I doubt I’d’ve made any connection.
An hour later I went looking for Jared after I hadn’t seen him for a while, and found him alone in the middle of the kitchen, the final link on the chain of rooms.
“You doing okay?” I said to his back.
When he finally turned, he had a look on his face I wasn’t braced for, a look that balled up its fist and sucker-punched me right in the heart. He pointed across the room, where he must’ve been staring for too long, toward the floor along the back wall, near the door, where you’d probably set something too large to fit in the trash can until you could run it out to the dumpster. It was an unused box of Depends. The way Jared pointed it out, looked at it, the box embodied all the loss and sorrow and indignity that had ever escaped Pandora’s.
“Diapers,” said Jared, like an accusation. Approaching tears. “That’s what it comes down to? Goddamn diapers.”
Whenever he came to the next town, the stout man in the soot-gray top hat spent a few days getting to know it from the inside out before plying his varied trades. By strolling its streets and alleyways, by poking amongst piles of rubble with his lacquered walking stick, by sniffing over puddles of spilt blood, both psychic and sanguine, he made of each town a lover from whom he could ferret out prizes most delicious. In tipping his nose to a breeze he might sort its complex melange into component threads: here, garlic; there, despair; further along, mingled excrements of men and machines.
Such habits served sentiment more than utility now. The world held no more surprises for him, and frontiers were illusory. Cities all smelled the same, the populace of one burning and burying, pissing and shitting, in equal measures to those of the one before and the one to come. He could expect nothing else so long as they in their millions sucked from the same monstrous tit.
He missed the land’s Byzantine variety of the old days, or as he remembered them to be — time did possess a peculiar gilding. Three hundred years hence, he might very well look back on these present days with nothing but fond nostalgia. Great gods! he would marvel, but back then how they knew how to suffer!
And they did. Boom times, these, everywhere he went.
He’d trod here before, fuzzy on how many decades ago, but enough such that he scarcely recognized it now. How the city had grown; how the city continued to do so, beyond all sensibility, a body sprouting brick and iron tumors in frantic abundance, beyond the needs of healthy expansion. Arteries of thought and commerce met, only to choke one another. Idled factories sat scabbed with corrosion, dead hearts presiding over the decay of a system they’d once nourished, while tenements suppurated, spilling infections into the streets.
As they had sown, so would they reap, and reaping time had come.
The pack which set stealthily upon him one evening he likened to maggots squirming from the fetid cavity that had hatched them. He listened to them jeer him, his appearance, his obvious differences. It was English they spoke, but no English he’d heard the last time he’d walked these lands, a newer dialect sprung up that would set the Queen to spinning in her grave.
That they wanted his money became quite apparent, regardless.
“Don’t be absurd,” he told them. “I’ve very little use for the currency of the realm.”
They glanced at one another, translating.
“Dead man walking,” one decided. “Only he don’t know it yet.”
He counted two guns drawn and another displayed in the waist of one’s baggy trousers before he showed them an avuncular smile, gave his face a half-turn, and lifted his walking stick to tap its pewter head upon the ruddy padding over his cheekbone, below his widening eye.
“Now if you’d take a moment from your busy schedules to look in here, we can wrap this up in a trice.”
His eye continued to bulge, window to the soul flung wide. He thought of all and nothing, the vast repertoire of his days an open book. He bent his soul into a kind of parabola, on which they might focus through pupil and metacosm, and see reflected back at themselves a thousandfold what each had cast toward it — all their loathings and hungers, resentments and fears.
It was absurdly simple. They did most of the work. And God alone knew what each one saw. Mischief-makers such as these were doers, not talkers, wasting no words to tell of terrible wonders.
Two of them soiled trousers and ran. One turned his pistol on his friend a dozen times over, even while the fallen body twitched on asphalt; the final bullet he’d reserved to put through his own mouth. Another fell to the ground screeching, then hooked his long fingernails back to gouge out both offending eyes.
The man in the gray top hat lowered his bulk to his haunches, beside the blind and whimpering brigand. Like Jack Horner seeking plums, he plunged his thumb into the runny well of one ruined eye socket. There he left it, while visions came and went, until he was satisfied: If the dead ones had lives and histories comparable to this one, he clearly had done them a favor.
“Terribly sorry I came too late. Dreadfully sorry,” he said. “But in your case there was really nothing left to save, you see.”
He tidied his thumb on the boy’s jacket, then righted himself and straightened his dingy frock coat. From a breast pocket he produced his card, dropping it onto the writhing boy’s chest. It was color of ivory and, bordered with filigree, read:
HIERONYMUS BEADLE, ESQ.
¤ Conjurer of Visions
¤ Extractor of the Psychometric Arts
¤ Trader in Souls
And so announced to the asphalt harvest, he went upon his way in search of a warm fireside, soft cushions, and whatever passed for mulled wine in this place of ignoble rot.
By the time of Terry’s funeral, Jared and I’d had a couple of good years together. Career waiter and career video store manager; the tail of the world had somehow eluded our grasp. At least Jared was still giving it a good chase. Most of my running now was in circles, five miles each day and ending right where I’d started.
I’d noticed him a half-dozen times in the video store before we’d exchanged any deeper words than when his tape was due back. Midtwenties, a generous handful of years younger than I, and with round-lensed glasses and dark messy hair looking as if he could be equally at home in a law library or aerobics class. Danielle, my favorite co-worker, finally got tired of my doing nothing.
“Let’s take a peek in his subconscious,” she said, and pulled up his rentals on the computer. I was happily intrigued to find mostly Japanese animation, Kurosawa samurai films, and everything we had directed by Ken Russell and Sergio Leone.
The afternoon he asked if we had a copy of El Topo that we weren’t letting on about, I was smitten. Jodorowsky’s horrifying symbolist western that somehow veers into socioreligious parable-the boy was no fluff- monger. He said he’d looked all over the city for El Topo, and I had to tell him that he’d finally stumped the band, that it wasn’t distributed domestically.
The instant he left the store, I phoned a gray market service in Miami for a rush-order VHS dub off Japanese laserdisc. I had it in hand two days later when he returned his current rental, and invited him to a private screening. If he was interested. Since he was such a good customer, with such commendable taste in film.
Several nights later, atop rumpled bedsheets, with our first taste of each other still on our lips, Jared said it had been the only VCR date he’d had where the other guy hadn’t popped in a Jeff Stryker or Danny Sommers video, something like that.
“When you see Beach Blanket Boner coming on again, it gets a little obvious,” he laughed.
Jared laughed a few weeks later when his lease was up, at my suggestion he move in, saying all I wanted
