God Is Dead (17 page)

I think to tell him that I'm not worried. That despite the things my brother has done, despite the obvious fact that he's gone horribly and irretrievably insane, he is still, after all, my brother. But I realize that like everyone else, this man would not understand, and so I only nod and step through the door and listen as it closes behind me.

I remember my brother's silhouette rising behind the boy, blotting out the sun, huge and furious, like some vengeful god come to save me. I remember, suddenly, the words he repeated, over and over, as he beat the boy:
I am the one who kills and gives life! No one delivers from my power!

But now, in here with my brother, somehow it doesn't matter to me anymore whether this is real memory or only imagined. I am suddenly hot and exhausted, and none of it matters a bit.

Then there is the other thing I came here for, and it seems best that I get it over with, before I lose what's left of my energy and resolve.

I put a hand in my jacket pocket, feel the hard weight there.

I've brought something for you, I say to my brother. I do not smile when I say this.

I pull my hand out, and the blackjack along with it. I hear the nurse behind me, on the other side of the locked door. He makes a sound like someone has punched him in the stomach. He bangs on the door, but I pay him no attention. I hear frantic muttering, and the jangle of keys in hands clumsy with panic, but by then he is much too late.

 

Arnold was not discharged from the Marines, honorably or otherwise; there was no time for anything so official, no time for paperwork or ceremony, with incessant artillery bombardments and people, military and civilian alike, turning on one another in their desperation to escape. His departure from the Marines could most accurately be described as an expulsion. He simply dropped his rifle, ditched his uniform, and fled Mexico City, scrabbling over crumbled brick and broken glass on a night lit bright as day by fire. He had no thought of the penalties for desertion, because there clearly would be none. In the face of the final, overwhelming Evolutionary Psychologist assault, all pretense of cohesion and command had been abandoned. Arnold had witnessed a lieutenant general strip naked in the middle of the street and don bloodstained clothes stolen from a corpse, his furtive, frightened expression decidedly unbecoming an officer, and soon after Arnold removed his own field utilities and headed north, toward a home he hadn't seen in eight years.

The going was tough. The roads were clogged with stalled and burned-out vehicles, belongings sacrificed for the sake of speed, rural Mexicans driving hogs and trailing children, and the ubiquitous dead and dying. Arnold limped along the shoulder, a chunk of shrapnel lodged deep in the meat of his thigh, spurred on through pain and thirst and despair not by fear of dying, but by fear of dying without seeing his mother again. Selia, his mother, who had cursed him when she'd learned of his plans to join the Postmodern Anthropologist Marines. Who had spit on her own kitchen floor as Arnold hugged his father and hoisted his bags to leave. And who, Arnold had learned from his father's letters, now was suffering from the same dementia that had killed her own mother.

Losing people should be sudden, Arnie,
his father's most recent letter had read.
It's never easy no matter what the circumstances, but having it drag on and on is just unreasonable. There
should be a moment, and when that moment's gone, the person should be, too. Then those left behind should be allowed to go through whatever they need to go through. Grief is hard enough without being harassed by living ghosts. But I'm losing your mother in bits and pieces, one memory at a time.

This news had been particularly troubling to Arnold, not just because his mother was unwell, but because during the eight years he'd been in Mexico his own memory, previously near photographic, had slowly begun to flag. First he'd found himself unable to conjure up the faces of people from home. He would sit with his eyes closed and think of his mother, for example, would concentrate on the sweet chamomile scent of the natural perfume she wore, or the timbre of her ready laugh, but any image of her refused to rise. He tried other people—his father, friends, former teachers—and at best was able to produce only a murky, indistinct portrait in his mind, like something viewed underwater with the naked eye.

What made this all the more distressing was that, because he was a Marine interrogator, memory—both his and that of the Evo-Psych POWs he interviewed—was Arnold's stock-in-trade. For him to succeed in his job he needed to remember not just clearly but quickly, to be able to access a mental transcript of interviews with a particular subject and compare answers to similar questions from days and sometimes weeks earlier, to adjust his line of questioning on the fly and ferret out the truth. But as time went by and his memories of the distant past faded—how old had he been when his family had moved to the island? and what was the name of that girl he'd been so obsessed with in high school?—whatever was ailing him began to devour the information stored in his short-term banks, and despite the fact that he began recording interviews as a hedge against his suddenly spotty recall, he became useless as an interrogator.

Not that it mattered much; by this time the Evo-Psych blockade had strangled and finally snuffed out the Marines' ability to fight. No food, no fuel, no ammo, no chance. The war was lost; this was as plain and inevitable as death, and no amount of reliable, timely intel was going to change the fact. So Arnold fled, along with everyone else, and he imagined he had the same thing in mind as the other refugees: to reach home before the Evo-Psych troops poured north out of Mexico and laid waste to everything like a swarm of locusts.

As he limped further from Mexico City the number of those actively fleeing diminished, and with the sunrise the ranks of the dead swelled until the road was made nearly impassable by corpses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, but animals too, dogs and goats and chickens and even an armadillo, squashed flat and crisping at its edges under the desert sun. For a while he was forced to the road's shoulder, but even there the bodies began piling up, and eventually he had no choice but to climb over them, grasping at feet, arms, and necks as though they were handholds on a steep mountain trail.

It was exhausting work, scaling corpses. To distract himself from the fatigue, the thirst and hunger, the sharp flare of pain that occurred each time he moved his leg, Arnold thought of his mother. First he tried, with the usual lack of success, to picture her in his mind's eye. Then he concentrated on willing her lucid, so that when he arrived home she would be who she always had been, not some bewildered stranger who merely looked like his mother, and she would hear what he had to say.

Because it was not a joyous and tearful reunion he had planned. Arnold still loved her, but time and distance had transformed that love into something remote and abstract, whereas the anger he had for her was real and immediate and had only grown in the years since he'd joined the Marines. He was no longer a sensitive teenager who bit his tongue to avoid incurring her wrath, but a man who could fall into a profound and untroubled sleep twenty minutes after tearing out a subject's fingernails or forcing him to eat hooks of broken glass. A man, in short, who expected to be on equal terms with the people in his life.

But he was beginning to doubt he'd have a chance to settle scores with his mother. As midday approached and the sun climbed high and hot, his legs gave out and he collapsed near the crest of a hill of bodies. It took a solid minute of effort for him to roll onto his back. Panting, he rested his head on the mangepocked haunch of a dead goat and threw one arm over his eyes to block the sun. He fought to summon the mental strength to power his failing muscles. A few years earlier, when he'd still believed in the primacy of will and other tenets of Postmodern Anthropology, he would have been able to struggle to his feet on faith alone. Now his belief was as broken and scattered as Mexico City's defenses. No food, no water, no faith, no chance.

Arnold had moved far enough from the fighting that he no longer could hear the thunder of bombs and mortars, and the desert morning had been silent except for the occasional celebratory screech of vultures. But after he'd been lying atop the corpses long enough to develop aches from all the sharp angles beneath him, the knees and elbows and claws and hooves, he became aware of a distant rumbling, so faint at first that he couldn't be sure he was hearing it, then growing louder by increments as whatever was causing the sound slowly approached. Eventually he made out the whistling clatter of tank tracks, and he opened his eyes and saw an armored combat earthmover, which was really just a Schwarzkopf battle tank with a plow mounted on the front, moving toward him down the middle of the road. Bodies rode up the face of the plow and spilled off to the side, tumbling over one another like clothes in a dryer, stiff limbs flailing. Arnold raised an arm and waved weakly, and the tank stopped twenty feet from him, its turbine engine idling.

Under other circumstances, Arnold might have been more surprised than he was to see Crispy emerge from the turret. If he'd been in sharper mental condition, for example, or if Crispy hadn't had a well-deserved reputation as the sort of batshit lunatic who would steal a Schwarzkopf for a getaway vehicle without ever having driven one before. As it was, though, Arnold registered only a mild, fleeting incredulity as Crispy climbed down the front of the tank and scrambled over the mass of corpses to where he lay.

“Arnie,” Crispy said, slinging one of Arnold's arms over his shoulders and lifting him, “I want you to know I'm making a noteworthy exception, here, to my current policy of running over everyone I see.”

It took a moment for Arnold to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I'm honored,” he said finally. “Though if you don't have any water, I'd rather you just ran me over, too.”

“Not to worry, not to worry,” Crispy said. He heaved Arnold half onto the tank, then crouched and pushed with his hands on Arnold's behind. “Get on up there,” he said, and Arnold, with some reluctance, kicked his feet until they found purchase. With the help of Crispy's boost, he flung himself up onto the turret. He found himself staring down the open hatch. Half a dozen sets of eyes stared back. Somehow Crispy had managed to cram three dogs, a pig, a goat, and his own pet, a thick-billed parrot he called Pepe, into the tank's interior.

“What's with the animals?” he said as Crispy clamored up beside him.

“You know me,” Crispy said. “Not much for people, but I love me some critters.”

Arnold did know him, well enough to have given him his nickname, which was a reference to Crispy's exclusive reliance on matches, cigarettes, and in extreme cases, hot irons and lighter fluid to extract information from subjects.

“Should I ask how you got the tank?” Arnold said.

“Probably not,” Crispy said.

“How about the water?”

Crispy shook his head. “You don't wanna know. It just gets more gruesome.”

“I meant, can I have some water?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.” Crispy disappeared into the hatch, emerging a moment later with a plastic gallon jug, still sealed. “You'll have to ride up here,” he said. “Not a whole lotta room down below.”

Arnold opened the jug and drank fast, gulping, the water spilling over his chin and down his neck, soaking his shirt.

“Hey,” Crispy called from inside the tank. “Don't waste it. I like you, Arnie, but don't waste my water.”

The goat bleated once, as if to emphasize Crispy's words and the threat lurking behind them. Arnold wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He capped the jug and handed it down through the hatch.

“Hold on,” Crispy said. “I still don't really know how to drive this beast.”

The tank lurched forward. Arnold nearly went tumbling over the back, but caught himself with a blind grasp at the lip of the hatch. As the turbines wound up and bodies began tumbling again, he tried to find a position comfortable enough for him to doze.

They rolled steadily north through the afternoon, gaining speed as they finally started to outpace the dead. Crispy stopped once to hack an arm from a corpse for the dogs (“They're eyeballing that goat like he's a ham sandwich”) and a second time to pick up a tortoise sunning itself in the roadway. Though the pace was still slow, and though he was wary of Crispy, whose insanity was no longer held in check by military discipline and sanctioned opportunities to exercise his sadistic streak, Arnold was more optimistic with each passing mile. It wouldn't be long before they reached Texas, where he could say good-bye to Crispy and make his own way home.

His optimism was dampened a bit when dusk fell and Crispy brought the tank to a stuttering halt and handed the animals one by one up to him.

“We'll stay here tonight,” Crispy said, pulling himself through the hatch. “Get an early start in the morning.”

Arnold said nothing in protest, despite the fact that he suspected the more time he spent with Crispy, the more likely it was that something bad would happen, something that would keep him from home and the reckoning with his mother. If Crispy said they were staying overnight, that was that. It seemed wise not to do anything that would jeopardize his precarious favor with Crispy and hasten along that bad something.

He was so concerned with keeping Crispy happy, in fact, that despite his wound he tried to help in collecting loose sticks and scrub brush for a fire.

“Take a load off, Arnie,” Crispy said to him. “Go drink some more water. You're weak as a kitten. I think I can manage a fire by myself.”

Crispy could, of course, manage by himself, for which Arnold was grateful, because by the time the fire was going a breeze had already blown the day's heat out toward the mountains, and it was colder than Arnold could have imagined a few hours earlier. The chill reminded him of home, but again the memory was distant, intangible, as though he'd only read about Maine's frigid winters rather than experiencing more than a dozen firsthand. The animals, who (with the exception of the tortoise) had scattered upon being released from the tank, now straggled back in, drawn by the warmth and light.

Crispy sat cross-legged in the dirt, using his Ka-bar to roast strips of meat. The dogs lay near him, spellbound by the meat as it turned and sizzled at the point of the knife. When he was offered a piece Arnold didn't ask what it was; he was too hungry to let Crispy, certified animal-lover, misanthrope, and psychopath, confirm what he suspected.

“So where are you heading?” Crispy asked around a mouthful.

“Home,” Arnold said. “North. Way, way north. Much further north than you'd ever want to go.”