Christmas Trees & Monkeys (9 page)

In the original run of the drama they failed. But only barely. One of the three, a splotchy Irishman with freckles staining his face and arms, had knocked the bag to the ground as Jacob left the store, then held him from behind while the skinny guy kicked. Jacob’s only real memory was the blur of pain, smell of urine and oil as his face pressed against the pavement. A work boot from the third attacker, a fat man in a tight black Harley t-shirt, cracking ribs, working at Jacob’s skull. Then, Jacob simply curled up, numb, and waited to die. In subsequent dreams, like the one he found himself in now, gaps in his memory were filled. He felt every impact.

With only vague physical attributes and a generic description of a white Plymouth Fury, the police never made an arrest. Jacob’s attackers disappeared from existence. Hiding in his mind was how it felt, cowering in his head like scavengers waiting for nightfall. Until he was asleep, defenseless.

Jacob waited at the door.
Not this time. Not this time
. Still clutching the bag, he turned and walked away. Gravity pulled him down but he waded on towards the back exit. Cracked green floor tiles had an elasticity like in a carnival moon walk. He couldn’t breath. The tinkle of a bell as someone came in behind him. Heavy footsteps. A low rumbling like a distant train became the pounding of some monstrous buried machinery.

The back door was chipped red. Jacob pressed the lever. It broke off. Behind him, bottles fell to the floor. A hand slapped his shoulder. Jacob tossed his weight forward, into the door. It opened.

Daylight. Silence. Panoramic hills and distant mountains, never a part of the city’s actual landscape, spread away before him now. Cool mountain air. He was free
.
A shadow covered the hillside. As Jacob turned, something burned from the sky and screamed down on top of him.

* * *

The baseboard heaters clicked. He turned his head towards the clock. Two-thirty. He waited. Two-thirty-one. Jacob rose from the couch and peered behind the window shade. Some of the windows of other townhouses glowed the iridescent blue of televisions. He wrapped his bathrobe tighter and began his own blue-tinged vigil.

* * *

Jacob let the words of the newscasts fall across him, recycled forms of the same story. “Tomorrow is Doomsday.” And it was too late to do anything about it.

The dream tried to force its way back into his thoughts. He wrestled it away. Dr. Chin was right. Not talking about it, even with Claire, was why the dream kept returning. But he was alive, and if moving on with his life meant having a nightmare once a week, twice a week, so be it. He didn’t need to talk. Didn’t want to talk.

Muffled sounds outside. A fight. The baseball bat leaned against the table. He lifted it carefully, not wanting to move back too closely to the window. Looting and death spread like the fires that accompanied them. He imagined demons crawling from some new crevice in the world, snatching up souls before the end of everything.

Jacob lay back on the couch, hearing the occasional siren. Over the course of the night the sound came more and more infrequently. Obviously deciding that being with their families this final night on earth was the priority, police and fire crews simply gave up.

He stared at the phone. The chord hung flaccidly over the edge of the table. Claire would call. She
had
to call. Not that it mattered. He could no more get to the airport to meet her than stop the world from falling apart in a few hours. When the first news hit the air two days ago, neither of them believed. She stayed on in San Francisco. One more day and she’d have the sale wrapped up. This afternoon she phoned. Her flight was still scheduled. At that point both knew it may have been too late.

Jacob listened to the fight outside, and dozed.

When the phone rang he snapped awake with the receiver already against his ear. Claire’s voice, fighting for attention with the constant hiss of static.

“
...and, and I wasn’t eligible for the seat, and the people are crazy...”

“
Claire? Is that you? Where are you?” He checked the time. Four forty-two.

“
Jacob,” she said, “there are people and people at the door to this phone. They’re trying to get in. I don’t even know if I can get out of here....” Her voice trailed off. Jacob listened to her breathing, to the shouting in the background.

“
Claire, where exactly are you? I’ll try and pick you up - “

“
Pick me up? How the hell are you going to do that? I’m in Chicago. They made us get off the plane in Chicago and they’re not letting anyone back on. God, Jacob, open your fucking ears!”

He closed his eyes.

“
Jacob....” The background shouts gained in volume. “Jacob, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. They’re getting the door open.”

“
Claire - “ he wanted to say he loved her, that he always will, some loving phrase that could not reach his lips. She was all he had left. He couldn’t even picture the faces of his parents anymore. Only he and Claire, gripping a single electrical life line.

“
Claire, are you all right? Claire?”

A series of rapid beeps, then a man’s voice said, “Hello? Hello…!”

Jacob said, “Who is this?”

There was a slight pause, then, “Get off the phone, asshole. You’re tying up the line. You had your turn.”

“
Who the hell is this?”

“
Get off the fu - “ Jacob hung up.

* * *

CNN exploded into static fifteen minutes later. Somewhere nearby a window shattered. Jacob gripped the bat tighter in one hand, numbly sipped his last bottle of beer with the other. Liquid flashes of light from the television played across his face. He didn’t want to sleep.

* * *

The old man concentrated on a small roll of lint on his sleeve. Outside, three men shifted uneasily against the car.

They’re only parts of a dream
. Jacob wanted to believe that. Their uneasiness implied an awareness, as if these figments of his own bedeviled mind remembered how he’d gotten away the last time.

“
I need you to call the police.”

The old man looked up, then turned his attention back to the lint. “Why should I do that?” he said. “Nothing happening that I need them for.”

“
You know what’s going to happen. Just call.”

“
Can’t do that. Sorry.”

Jacob looked around. Through the sputtering neon he saw the men coming towards the door.

He stumbled past an ancient tower of greeting cards and grabbed the door handle. The guy with the dragon tattoo reached for the knob. Jacob twisted the lock.

“
Come on now, friend,” the man sang through the glass. “Let us in. We just want to purchase some beverages.” His two buddies guffawed.

Jacob had no time for this. The world was about to get smashed apart and he was having the same damned dream.

The old man shuffled beside him. “Excuse me, please.” Without looking up he reached for the lock and turned it. “We can’t be locking this door. These gentlemen have a right to come in, just like you.”

Jacob grabbed his arm, tried unsuccessfully to pull it away. The lock twisted open. The door’s small bell tinkled as the smiling men walked in.

Jacob wanted to cry. “Why did you do that? Why?”

The old man didn’t answer. In his slow gait he moved back to the counter. The skinny man put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder.

“
Hey, buddy. Long time no –”

“
Fuck you.” Jacob sent a knee into his crotch. The man doubled over. Immediately the fat guy grabbed Jacob by the shirt.

“
That wasn’t very nice.” He spun him around and shot a fist into his back.

The air in Jacob’s lungs crystallized. He fell to the floor. A boot in his ribs. Something cracked inside his chest. By now the skinny man had recovered. He grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and held it like a club.

The bell over the door tinkled. Claire stumbled in, her face bruised and swollen. Her jaw dropped open like Marley’s ghost. She screamed. For a fleeting moment Jacob felt relief. The police would hear this. The skinny man hurled the bottle at her face.

* * *

Jacob opened his eyes to darkness. The television was off. So was the clock. His heart hammered in rhythmic panic. Claire’s screams wouldn’t leave his head. Slowly, gray images from the room came into focus, dull light soaking through the shades. He gripped the bat and stood. The screaming didn’t stop. It was coming from outside. Not Claire. The scream choked off for a moment, fell to a sob. Then the woman started in again. From far off someone shouted at her to shut up.

Maybe she was being raped, long-tailed demons gripping her flesh, taking one last thrill. Reluctantly, Jacob walked towards the front door. The bat felt weightless, non-existent. Everything was going to shit outside. Between screams, the woman muttered unintelligible pleas.

He had to do something. He wouldn’t just curl up like a baby. Not this time.
They’re outside
, he thought.
Don’t make the same mistake. This time you don’t have to do anything. Just stay here.

From outside, “Someone help me, please. Someone...” Then silence.

Jacob opened the door, stepped onto the small porch. No one waited against his car. A warm steady wind tore over the buildings, the air too thick and humid for early October. A gust knocked him against the railing as he descended the stairs, bat squeezed in both hands. He rounded the corner of the building.

The naked woman was kneeling on the grass with her back to him. She was alone, staring at the sky. It took Jacob a few seconds, staring first at the woman’s tense buttocks then up to the sky, to come to grips with what floated above them.

The eastern sky was a bright white ceiling, slowly overtaking the dimming stars. The monstrosity rose from the horizon, its full outline still out of sight. Morning light along the surface gave definition to uncountable craters marring its landscape. In its completeness, the thing was the glowing face of a monster, a nightmare man in the moon.

The woman tried speaking to the sky, but her voice collapsed into a dry hissing.

Behind him a man said, “That’s the most incredible -”

The voice snapped the tentative line holding Jacob together. He didn’t think, didn’t wait to decide who it could be. Spinning on one heel, he swung the bat. He put every bit of strength he could summon into the already unstoppable momentum. When the bat hit the man’s head, Jacob leaned into it.
Hit him hard. One chance
.

The impact sent reverberations up his arms and shoulders. The man’s head tilted. His legs collapsed under him and he fell onto the sidewalk, eyes open and bleeding. Jacob had the bat sailing again. It pushed the skull into the concrete. Blood poured over blond hair. A voice deep in the center of Jacob’s mind begged him to stop. It was a weak, ineffective plea. He hammered the bat down again, and again. The victim’s face looked like a rubber mask, empty, incomplete.

Blood splashed into Jacob’s eyes. He blinked, stopped his assault long enough to wipe it away. His fingers smeared red.

The door of unit thirty-one closed. Someone had seen him. Someone watched him kill this man. He blinked away the memory of the face. He’d been one of them. Had to be. Had to be one of them.

“
Kill me, too.”

The woman’s voice behind him was so damaged it sounded artificial. Jacob turned. On her knees she faced him now, her too-pale skin flecked with dots of blood. “Please kill me. I don’t want to be here when it comes.” She closed her eyes, expecting the maniac in front of her to comply. She mouthed the word “please.”

A dark, erotic wave boiled inside him. All he wanted to do was smash the bat down, keep playing this new game, hit them, smash them, beg his buddy for more quarters.

He saw a white Plymouth Fury pass between two buildings. It glided along the drive and disappeared from view.

In a blink, animalistic mind-numbing rage twisted into terror. He had to get inside. Behind him the woman tried unsuccessfully to scream her objections.

Jacob slammed the door, let the baseball bat drop. Outside, the car hissed along the pavement. Through the curtains he watched it roll past. The car wasn’t a Fury. A nervous-looking black woman leaned over the steering wheel, obviously in search of a particular townhouse. She gave no notice to the crushed body of Jacob’s next door neighbor. That’s who he was. His name was Tom, or Tim. It didn’t matter, anymore.

Outside, the world grew brighter. Jacob leaned against the door.

“
I’m sorry,” he said. In his mind he saw a child’s vision of God, flowing white beard falling across his robes. This God looked down at him, the tight angry frown saying all that needed to be said. The image turned away.

Jacob felt the devil clawing through the ground to reach him. The room shook, sending the remote control skidding across the top of the television. The distant rumbling became a roar. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled along the carpet. The world jerked back and forth. The television tube exploded when it hit the floor. Breaking glass in every room. The townhouse was committing suicide.