Shuttered Sky

They know when they tuck me in.

Gears grinding, the door moving.

They know from their graves, beside hers these many years, and they will always know.

Solid titanium cutting a slow arc behind him. So I will kneel for forgiveness. Kneeling in the path of the closing door. I will bow my head.

Head hung low in the jamb, the door only inches away now. I will press this memory out from me.

The door becomes a vice; his skull engages; the pressure builds . . . I will smash this guilt away leaving my flesh as fractured as my mind. And the bone finally gives, Bussard’s last thought crushed from him by the sealing door, his blood greasing the shafts of the deadbolts.

13. Restoration

Dillon was dreaming.

He was dreaming the way he dreamt when they sedated him, for although the sedatives could control his body, they could not shut down his mind. Once again his mind was violated by images that had no business there. The bruise-colored recliner.

The man had long since left his recliner, and was out in the world, but his chair remained. The image wasn’t a dream unto itself—but instead infected whatever dream he was having. The chair would be there, sitting on the divider of a freeway, or out in an empty field, or at the bottom of the sea. Wherever his dreams took him, that chair would follow, and the conspicuous absence of its occupant disturbed Dillon more than anything else. There were times Dillon could see him in the distance, at the edge of the horizon, or the other side of a chasm that Dillon could not cross.

And then there was the diving platform, infecting his thoughts and his dreams with the same alarming frequency. Unlike the man who had left his chair, the three divers were still there, waiting on the platform. But he knew that sometime soon they would be gone, just as the man had left his chair.

Today he dreamed that the platform was in the sky. Oily wooden piles encrusted with barnacles sprouted from its base, holding it above roiling cumulus, like a pier in a sea of clouds. There was something new today; the three figures held fishing rods. They speared worms on the tips of their barbed hooks, and cast their lines into the clouds. He tried to see their faces, but they kept their backs to him.

“Why am I here?” he asked them. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Pray,” answered the smallest of the three. “Pray like a pigeon.”

Then the small one’s line went taut, and he jerked on it, pulling a bird from the clouds below. He ripped the pigeon from the hook, and dropped it, dead, to the floor. Only then did Dillon notice that the platform had turned a mottled grey. It was covered with the bodies of birds. Pigeons. Thousands of them, pressed flat beneath the march of thousands of feet. Suddenly the air was too thin, and Dillon had to gasp for breath. And as he fell to his knees he heard a new voice. An ominously familiar voice; neither male, nor female.

“You’re so pathetically limited,” the voice said. “You see everything, and yet you see nothing. You disgust me.”

Dillon rolled over onto his back, still unable to breath. This was a voice he hoped he would never hear again. “Okoya! No! Not Okoya!”

He began to scream, over and over, until the scream broke free from the dream, and took root in his throat, he could hear it now, and the sound of his own scream dragged him out of sleep. Hands pressed on his shoulders, holding him down.

“Easy, easy!”

He opened his eyes to see Maddy looming over him. Above her head hung a gathering of lobsters.

“You were dreaming,” Maddy told him.

He closed his eyes again. “I still am,” but when he opened his eyes, the crustacean menaces were still there. Large red claws—hundreds of them hung from above. They were nailed to the posts, they were crawling on peeling wallpaper. They were almost as unpleasant as the pigeons. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else,” she said. “State Route 93. I forget which state. Arkansas, I think.”

Dillon sat up.

They were in a restaurant, or what was left of one. The place had been deserted for years. Lakes of rainwater had formed on the warped linoleum floor, beneath holes in a termite-tattered ceiling. The smell of mildew saturated the air with such intensity, Dillon could taste it like aspirin in the back of his throat. Although the rainstorm had ended, droplets still trickled through holes in the roof, plinking an irregular rhythm in the puddles below.

“Welcome to ‘The Crawfish Maw,’ ' Maddy said. “The sign said ‘always open,’ so here we are.”

She was dressed in dark sweats—probably the same clothes she was wearing when she shot him and spirited him away from the Hesperia plant, but he had been too busy convalescing to notice what she wore. Having never seen her in anything but her uniform, it struck him how much younger she looked.

The humidity was thick enough to swim in, and his own clothes clung to him, pulling in the moisture from the air with the same vo­racity with which it had drunk the blood from his body. Now the blood had dried, and the holes in his shirt had woven themselves closed. There was no evidence on his body of the wounds. The pain in his knee and gut was gone, and the wound to his chest had closed, resolving into a faint ache when he breathed too deeply. But his face didn’t feel right. It felt as if a spider had woven its web across his nose.

Maddy touched his shirt, where the wound had been. “I’ve never seen anything so amazing,” she said. “The wounds closed themselves while you slept.”

“How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours. I didn’t know where you wanted to go, and until we got that straight, I thought it best to find a place to lay low, so Bussard won’t find us.”

Dillon stood up and looked out of a foggy window. Beyond some overgrown trees, he could see cars passing on the highway. “Bussard’s not a problem anymore.”

Maddy hesitated, but didn’t ask how Dillon could be so sure. She just accepted it. “Still, they’re not going to let you disappear.”

“I’m no stranger to being a fugitive.” Dillon threw her a grin, but found that one side of his mouth didn’t quite rise to the occasion. He reached up to touch his face, and felt a jagged network of troughs and crags in his skin.

“The scars will go away soon, too, won’t they?” Maddy asked.

Dillon didn’t answer her. “This place have a bathroom?”

She pointed him to a cramped little washroom that had long since lost its door. “I promise I won’t look,”

“Your loss,” he said, then immediately regretted it. He was not beyond blushing, and so left before she could see.

The toilet was dry and ringed in filthy strata. He relieved himself in the dry bowl, then turned to view himself in the mirror above the sink. He wasn’t quite ready for what he saw.

Deep canals cut across his face. The web of knotty scars that wove across his cheeks and nose was even worse than he had imagined. He hardly recognized himself, and had to take a few deep breaths to get over the shock of his new appearance. When he touched his face, there was no tenderness to the flesh, only stiffness, which meant there was no more healing going on there—whatever healing there would be had happened while he slept. He ran his tongue on the inside of his mouth and poked at his teeth. Several of his molars were missing. The raw holes had healed over, as if the teeth had been pulled long ago.

Maddy appeared behind him. “How long till they’re gone?” she asked. “The scars, I mean.”

He took a moment to consider how he should answer, then de­cided on the simple truth. “The scars won’t go away,” he told her.