Mortals

seeing his friends arriving shooting and the villains jumping up and scattering, disobedient villains.

Come, Satan, he thought, waving his arms.

And then he was seeing one of his friends tearing the burning tarpaulin free and winding it into a manageable burning mass and hurling that off the side of the building and then finding himself burning, his clothes, and then dropping down and rolling around in a way that reminded him of Quartus rolling around.

It was hard to participate, lying down, but thank God for his friend Kevin. But he was seeing something. And it was the world, it was one of his friends, his witdoeke friends, doing almost a circus act tearing out and crushing against his chest the flaming tarpaulin and then hurling it over the side and managing to crush the flaming thing into a mass he could fling high out into the air and over the side. And then he knew it was over for him, he was seeing things twice. He had seen the same thing twice. He was afraid.

“I am sick,” he said to Kevin.

“Ehe, rra,” Kevin said, touching Ray’s head. Ray was understanding that Kevin had been assigned to him, to protect him like a wife. That had to be the explanation. Because Kevin had his gun with him, his popgun his shotgun and he was not using it against the foe.

He never wanted to see the same thing twice ever again in his life. He didn’t want to experience anything twice just in general. He wanted everything new, if that could be arranged. He didn’t know if it could.

There was carnage going on. He couldn’t see all of it. He wanted to stop it.

The witdoeke had arrived shooting but it had failed to stop the villains from jumping up. They had done that. Ray thought, I have an idea how to end this.

He tried to get up but Kevin pushed him down.

“Thank you,” he said to Kevin. But he still wanted to rise, to speak.

There was something he wanted Kevin to do for him, which was to go and check Quartus, who was lying still. Quartus was dead, Ray was thinking. He wanted someone to say so.

“Kevin, can you go look at him?” He pointed at Quartus, the dead Quartus.

But as Kevin crept toward Quartus, horribly the man got up on one knee and with his undamaged leg projected himself up and into a launch toward Ray, both arms extended, like a flying gargoyle, something, a horror from the media, the moron media, something like that.

Kevin pumped his gun to shoot, but before he could fire Quartus had arrived next to Ray, almost on top of him, his face in a grimace of fury, his fiery gums showing, his face very white. Ray had wanted to take him back alive like Frank Buck the animal catcher, the zoo supplier, whatever he had been Ray admired him, as a boy. He couldn’t remember everything.

But now Kevin was over them and Kevin was killing him, Quartus, again. Everything was happening twice.

Quartus’s shoulder and neck disintegrated. There would be mainly his head to take to his what, his friends his beloveds. Blood went everywhere.

“It is all right,” Kevin said. He was shaking.

Ray wanted to say things were all right, but one of his friends was throwing a villain off the roof and no one had consulted him. The man might be just wounded and not dead. It made a difference.

There seemed to be a victory. Action was stopping.

He said to Kevin that he was through with everything, but Kevin was leaving him. There was a new problem, the fire behind them. Kevin left.

“I’m coming,” Ray said, unable to move.

His friends were stamping in the flames, beating at them with nothing, with their own shirts. It was not going to work. It was too late. My knee is a bulb, he thought, a globe, making himself get up.

He had to tell his friends there was another way down, not to worry. Only he knew about the trapdoor. He had to tell them. But also he felt he had to vomit. It was bad, but he felt the need not to contribute more than he already had to the mess going on. He was fighting for control, and it was odd how something a purely physical impulse could be defeated by a scruple, something so imaginary. But in any case he was conquering. He was swallowing himself.

Kevin wouldn’t leave him. Kevin was nice.

Quartus was no longer dying, he was dead. There seemed to be blood leaking out of his eyes as well as from his nostrils, his mouth.

It was difficult to tell what was going on, except that the buzzards were back and there seemed to be more of them, but he could be glad about one thing, the smoke, the smoke from the fire that was eating its way east west north south, the smoke was having the useful effect of keeping the carrion birds up high above, in their own layer, black above black.

He had to get up and help his friends, but not with what they were doing, still doing at the moment, which was throwing dead bodies off the building.

He had to get up and make them stop, and stop it before they got to Quartus, and he didn’t know why. But he didn’t want Quartus thrown over. And he had a right to not have that happen because he had killed Quartus before Kevin did, so Quartus was his, but it was making him sick to look at his handiwork again. So he didn’t know what was for the best and maybe everything was for the best.

And then he noticed that he was whistling “The Mexican Hat Dance” through his teeth and it was almost enough to make him laugh, because deep in the heart of the rose of their relationship Iris had noticed that whenever he was nervous he would start whistling the damned thing through his teeth, and she had pointed it out to him. He had never realized he had been doing that, something that was such a dead giveaway, so he had stopped doing it, until now. And it had been the same with his drinking, being embarrassing to himself and not knowing it until he saw it in her eyes, the eyes the mirror of the soul, but not her soul, his soul, because what the mirror of the soul meant was that it was the asshole’s soul that showed up glittering in the eyes of the trusting woman who had married the asshole, beloved thing, helpmeet, beautiful thing. And she had been like a spy because the way he had whistled it between his teeth was so softly as to be almost a subliminal thing, until she came, like light, like the morning, illuminating everything.

When that bout of smoke cleared away Quartus was gone. There was nothing he could do about anything except to get something to cover his nakedness, his groin, with. Because he had the strength to stand, probably, but not until he got dressed, or mostly dressed. Because as he was, he was an exhausted device, a joke, like a jester running around doing tricks when the castle is in flames, falling.

He needed pants, but it could be a diaper, a loincloth like Tarzan’s, except that he would need Tarzan’s secret jockstrap to go with it, the reason Tarzan’s penis had never peeked out during his exertions with the various wild animals giving him no rest.

“Can you get me something?” he asked Kevin, gesturing at his groin.

Kevin wanted to help, Ray could tell. But he was baffled. He looked wildly around.

Kevin left him, strode off to find something for Ray. And Ray croaked at him to keep down. It had been a reflex. But at least for now it was safe to walk around normally so he had made a fool of himself.

Kevin was doing something. He was stripping a pair of bush shorts off one of the corpses.

Kevin presented the shorts to Ray, and turned his back, pointlessly but courteously, pointlessly because he had already seen everything there was to see. But it meant that things were going in the direction of normality. Courtesy was important during bloodshed. He thanked Kevin.

Ray got the shorts on. They weren’t clean and they were loose on him, but they weren’t bloody. It was surprising how much pants helped. He got up. He was a little unsteady. But he wanted to join in.

Kevin asked, “Are you fine?”

Ray said he was, but in fact he didn’t know how he was.

Kevin was hovering around him too much and now he was off fetching one of the parasols Ray had observed in use by the koevoet earlier. They weren’t parasols, they were umbrellas, heavy dark canvas umbrellas. He had had no idea that such a thing as a military umbrella even existed.

“No thank you, my man,” he said to Kevin. And he wouldn’t allow Kevin to hold it over him, either.

But he wanted help getting Strange News off his chest because the tape was burning where it was passed across his bare skin. There was some chemical reaction, something unpleasant, and the tape was cutting into his neck and sweat was biting badly where the flesh was raw.

“Can you help me take this off? I need to take it off now.”