your second-grade class’s gerbils in the act of maternal cannibalism, a tentacle-faced star-nosed mole, that photo of the six-year-old girl walking two steps behind her grandmother toward the gas chamber at Treblinka, a knot of eight dead naked toddlers in a six-month-old mass grave that No Way and I helped dig up in La Sierra when No Way and I were working for the relief corps of the CPRs, the Communities of Populations in Resistance, the unadulterated evil in the gargoyle face of Pope Benedict XVI, the giant toothy lamprey face of the Chunnel drilling machine, a woman in Mexico City with a huge facial tumor that made her head look like giant peeled pomegranate- but this, now, was easily the most horrible thing I’d ever seen, and I knew it was the most horrible thing I ever would see, not a fleshy gross-out or a monument of cruelty or an ugh-eyed monster, but, rather, just the slow, dark dawn of understanding in her eyes. She knew, I could tell that she knew, and that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. And I could tell that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. It was as though there were some kind of pneuma flowing between our eyes, like it feels with lovers orgasming together in bright light, but of course this was the hideous negative of anything loving, she was looking into me and seeing a wasteland of shit, a whole more-than-earth-size planet with diarrhea oceans broken by mountain-islands of stacked dry turds, and in my looking back I was agreeing with that assessment. A sound rose inside her, a rumble under her chest, and metastasized into something like a voice, but a voice that rasped out of some huge, recently dead thing buried in frozen ground:
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
I noticed that my knees were cracking, and that meant I was standing up, slowly. I backed away from her, toward the big desk.
“I didn’t,” I started to say, “I mean, it’s nothing, it’s the right-”
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
She bounced up and ducked around in front of me, as small, lissome people can. I jumped left and got the desk between us. Her eyes had an indescribable look-indescribable but not something I’d never seen, because I’d seen it in dying patients in the field hospitals at the CPRs, an expression of horror, horror and hatred and terror, or rather, I think, terror not for her but more, or maybe only, for her child, which is even more primal.
“I want… to… see… Max… grow… up,” she barked.
“Marena, look-”
“How-can-you — k-kill-MAX?”
The forgotten Go clock ticked once. It ticked again. Tick. Tick “Max is Desert Dog,” I said.
“What? What the fuck is that?”
“Nothing, it’s just-”
“Is that… what you call all… call all… those
… people you-”
“No, it’s just, I know it’s the right thing, it won’t hurt, there’s no way to-”
“Don’t even tell me, you fuck, you, you, you… you think you’re going to make that decision-you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser, you’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you’re, you think you mean anything to anybody? You don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re-”
On the last syllable of important, she darted to her right. I circled away, clockwise. She stopped, feinted clockwise again in kind of a Texas tango maneuver, and dashed counterclockwise, almost getting me, but I made it to the opposite side, so the French doors were at my back. Somewhere in my churning gray matter I realized something was off, that she wasn’t acting quite the way she would normally, or let’s say “normally,” act faced with this information, that even though tears were almost squirting out of her eyes, she maybe wasn’t yelling so loud as you’d have thought, but I didn’t get the implication. Damn, I thought, I should just attack her and like strangle her or bonk her brains in or something right now. Except I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I bet I’d never felt less like doing anything like that in my life-in fact, I felt like I wanted to hold on to her and shield her while the world vanished so that she and I could float off together like the shades of Paolo and Francesca, out into Earth-free space. God damn it, my other side said, you’re a pussy after all. You’d think that someone who was going to kill everybody later wouldn’t have trouble killing one person, but there’s a difference between someone who kills for fun and someone who kills out of compassion, like, say, a veterinarian, and “You shit, ” Marena said, “I was, I was, I was practically falling in love with you and you were shit. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking along those lines.” It was an idiotic thing to say, of course, but I was a long way from thinking clearly, and in fact I had just been thinking how I was one of them, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, DeLanda, and then I was thinking how she was right, that I wasn’t even an accomplished whatever like they all were, I wasn’t a conqueror or a dynasty founder or even a good public speaker, I was the worst of all of them without even being in their league, just a loser who happened to find a way to make everyone else lose along with me, except even that was giving me too much credit because it was making me out to be at least a human being and I wasn’t, I was the opposite of a human being, I was a smear of wriggling little verminettes that had to be immediately wiped off the ass of the universe “How do I stop it?”
“Just trust me, I saw the whole situation in-”
The click of a doorknob is one of those sounds you come to recognize unmistakably, and when I heard it behind me I instantly realized why Marena hadn’t been shouting at me and in fact had been speaking almost softly, and that she must have said something that had activated her earring phone and-oh, right, in fact I knew what it was, it was when she’d used the words call all, that rang all the phones in the house-and “Hey, what’s going on?” Tony Sic’s voice said.
I snuck a peek over my left shoulder. He was in the doorway, about eight feet away. “Hi, Tony, nothing,” I started to say, but before I got to the — thing part Grgur had loomed in behind him. I may have said at some point that he looked like Leonid Brezhnev’s uglier brother, but now he looked like Leonid Brezhnev himself after going through the same gamma-ray-o-genic mutation that turned Ben Grimm into the Thing. He was in his goon outfit with the collar tips spreading over the lapels of the ill-fitting gray one-button sport coat. He was big. He edged Tony aside. There was an impression of motion on my right side and a shot of pain up my right thigh, and as I folded I realized that her foot had switchbladed into my knee-it was one of those low kicks Ana Vergara’d taught her-and I thought I was going to have to operate from the floor for a little while, but I surprised myself by getting my hands on the edge of the desk and holding myself up with I guess my arm strengthened by the epinephrine that sprays into your bloodstream so unbelievably fast when your amphibian brain decides there’s a threat out there. As Marena came toward me I picked up a big old LCD monitor off the desk with my right hand and tossed it at her. She tried to bat it away but hurt her hand, I think, since she grunted, and as it fell, trailing cables, the edge hit her knee and her second kick stopped almost before it started. Run, I thought. Holy shit holy shite shat shot run run run run. My hand was on the handle of the French door and I yanked it up. It was one of those locks that open when you open it, if you know what I mean, and I slid out into the dark courtyard. Grgur was right there but I took the time to push the door shut behind me, since I figured it would buy me a good two seconds, and I turned and dashed out, with my stocking feet ouching on this sort of upscale little shiny black rocks. Bright light flashed on all over, like movie lights. I’m on camera, I thought. Oh, well.
“Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena’s voice yelled behind me, and in the middle of the word gone, it switched from a normal yell to an iron scrawk blasting out of every speaker of every phone on the system, of which there were probably at least ten in the house and four outside. There was a slight lag between them that made the roar seem to be echoing off the walls of a vast crazy-angled canyon.
“GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!!!”
I veered right. There was a sort of trapezoidal archway between the yard and the driveway, and beyond it there was an orange sliver of my car, and seeing the car must have made me reflexively thumb the key-card because there was the delicious bwheep of the door opening itself. The speakers started up. “Ride the snake,” Jim Morrison moaned, like he was breathing on my neck. Marena’s voice was louder, though, even through the layers of car: “NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW…”
(11)
