I Will Rise (21 page)

The blade splits a hair on my wrist and I bite my lip. I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if they cut me to itty-bitty pieces and melt me down so much as I care about fucking up. Again. Always, eternally fucking up. Why couldn’t I just go to Annabelle’s? Why did I run myself into this mess? Because I am a loser—always have been, always will be. This was my chance to rise, to do something important, to prove that I am more than the sum of my dysfunctional parts. This was my chance.

The blade bites into my skin and now it’s my turn to close my eyes and grimace. I feel the cleaver driving in, cool and hot and forceful, severing tendons and veins and then cracking through bone, sluicing through gooey marrow, cracking through more bone, shredding more tendons and veins and then ripping out through the other side of my wrist, thunking an inch deep into the table.

My left hand hops with the impact and rolls free of my arm. It comes to a rest palm up. From the severed mess at its base there is no blood, just a small runoff of thick black fluid. The same dark, viscous fluid pools from my new stump, dead-ending upon and spreading out around the table-embedded cleaver.

Strangely, none of this hurts. My head feels a little swimmy and my nervousness has been washed out, swabbed and dulled in gauzy numbness.

Jim pulls at the cleaver, but it’s stuck. He looks at me and I loll my head from side to side lazily. I feel increasingly strange, loose, like a sack of jelly. With a little more effort the cleaver comes free and great gobs of the black slimy shit slowly propels from my arm like a timid, sludgy river.

“You struck oil,” I slur and giggle.

What is going on with me? I am no longer scared or worried, I just feel drunk. I feel a great shift take place inside. Not metaphorically or emotionally but physically, a physical reallocation—and my chest rumbles. The cavity shakes and shudders and it feels as though my soul, my inner lining, has swum past my heart.

“Hurry up,” I hear a sour-faced female onlooker yell.

Jim moves around to the other side of the table and is preparing to do my other hand when I feel the oddness shiver and shake and travel from my chest to my left shoulder blade. Something is inside of me. It continues, like a wave under my skin, and creeps down the length of my left arm.

A man in the crowd notices something amiss and takes a step forward. “Jim,” he says quietly and then, “Jim,” again, louder and a little frantic.

Another crowd member shouts, “His arm!” But it’s too late for anyone to react.

You know how it feels during those head-spinning moments before you vomit? You know, the world is going round and round and all that’s tainted in your body crowns and bubbles at the top of your throat. Well that is exactly how I feel, except, as weird as this sounds, I feel it in my arm and my wrist as opposed to my throat.

At the very moment the puke feeling reaches its apex a black cloud settles around my brain. An image, grainy and deep and dark, fills the back of my head: an ocean of people, heads down, an army, a legion.

The dead are legion.

Just then, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of tendrils—tubing, capillaries, an explosion of decaying stalklike flagella—shoot from my savaged wrist. They wave and lunge at the terrified crowd, flailing like demon antennae—autonomous, ugly as sin and lethal.

I stare wide-eyed, unfeeling, unmoving, unbelieving.

What the hell am I?

What the hell have I become?

Instantly, simultaneously: the tendrils eviscerate, amputate and decapitate the entire crowd in about thirty ferociously bloody seconds. It is like the room has been transformed into the chamber of a Cuisinart and I am the blade.

A few tendrils manage to wrap themselves nice and tight around Jim’s head. His hands splay tense and the meat cleaver drops to the ground, embedding itself in a random, steamy, wet piece of eviscerated flesh. After a few seconds of struggling and thrashing, his body falls atop a growing pile of parts. The tendrils unfurl, releasing Jim’s head, and then rejoining their brethren in the chaotic tumult. The head free-falls and bounces off Jim’s body and rolls away.

After another few seconds of mess evisceration, the tendrils slow and then fan themselves out and form an organic-fleshy-knobby umbrella over my head. They begin to glow white. The carnage, the mess of broken bodies littering the room, begins to glow as well. The light, from both sources, intensifies and intermingles until the room is washed away.

I feel the souls of the dead filling my heart.

The explosion of light dims and my eyes readjust themselves to the standard overhead lighting. The tendrils are gone and my wrist is nothing more than a black-slime-encrusted stump. I think I must be going out of my mind, but the bodies—the pieces, the blood and bones and gushy organelles of what used to be my captors—still paint the room.

Without my left hand I am able to squeeze my wrist through the leather restraint. I stare into the stump. Nothing. Just rotten flesh and marred bone. My head spins, but I feel normal, not loopy and drunk like a moment ago. I keep trying to process what just happened, but my brain is being stubborn. It is more concerned with getting free and getting to Annabelle where we belong.

I work at my restraints, utilizing my stump as best I can. It takes me a good twenty minutes, but at last I am free. First instinct is to run and I am halfway out the door when I see a sign that reads
Proper Grooming is Essential – Appearance is the Cornerstone of a Successful Operation
followed by two columns listing recommended grooming standards for men and women.

No kidding. I look myself over in an accompanying mirror, one of those cheap jobs made from thick paper and some sort of reflective coating. As usual I am a fucking mess. Eddie’s mom’s green T-shirt is covered with all kinds of crap, as are her sweatpants. I’m not a clean freak, but enough is enough. Besides, maybe the sign speaks the truth.
Appearance is the Cornerstone of a Successful Operation.
Indeed. I like that. I wrinkle my nose and squint my eyes and sort through the human wreckage until I locate Jim’s headless body. The suit, save for a soiled collar and a stain here and there, still looks pretty good.

Chapter Fourteen

Murder, Torture, Control: Something Like Love

Outside of the store, I can’t stop looking over my shoulder.

Paranoia spikes, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight, and nervous heat blossoms in my head. Adding to the distress, the great eye wall pushes and struggles and fights for control of my brain.

“Fuck off!” I scream, head down, and fast-walk to a row of pay phones adjacent to the store.

Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, but the slimy little orbs blink and climb and glisten with accusatory menace. I shake my head from side to side vigorously.

There’s no need for paranoia now, nervous justification, because like always everybody really is watching me, like always everybody is staring at the freak. A parking lot full of lookie-lookies crane their necks and raise their eyebrows and tweak their ears. Quick everybody, look at the fidgety freak in the suit.

“Fuck off!” I yell again, more for the gawking onlookers than the headful of eyes. I swing my arms wildly and put off the crazy vibe: stay away, stay away, stay away, stop staring. I gotta get out of here. To hell with the bus or asking the opposing public for directions, I’m calling a cab and getting curbside service to Annabelle’s house.

Reaching for the pay phone receiver my new stump is zero help. I pick up the phone with my right, cradle it in my neck and dial 0. The operator, indiscriminate and friendly, connects me with a local cab company. Another operator, also indiscriminate and friendly, answers, “Speedy Cab, how may I help you?” I tell her I am the nicely dressed man in a huge hurry. The cab receptionist says she’ll have somebody right out.

Standing on the curb, I let out a long sigh. I am long overdue for a little pensive time. I’ve been running, running, running, since Eddie’s abduction and there hasn’t been much time for thinking beyond the hectic immediacy of these never-ending hectic moments. Once I get to Annabelle’s I am going to request a day off. I hope she will understand. Just one day locked away in a hotel room, allowing my thoughts to catch up.

The paranoid feeling creeps on yet again. I fight it for five solid minutes—leave me the fuck alone, leave me the fuck alone, leave me the fuck alone. In the end it gets the best of me and I turn to investigate, the heat and worry picking at my cognition. Sure enough a small grouping of store employees and customers are pointedly watching me. They stand in a loose circle whispering and gesturing. When I widen my eyes and look at them with exaggerated dramatics, they avert and pretend to be doing anything but congregating and discussing someone’s demise, probably mine, maybe theirs, what with the way they cautiously keep their distance. Someone has seen the mess in the employee break room by now. Their anxiousness to capture me and cut me into tiny benign pieces has been curbed, and rightly so; if anyone moves on me, I won’t hesitate to fuck them up.

I hold up my stump (it still hasn’t sunk in. My gimp hand—ruiner, fuckup, death bringer—is gone. It’s really gone. I suppose it will hit me soon enough) in an attempt to flip them off. By the time I realize the hand is no longer there, there is no time to bring up my right and finish the job. A taxicab with the words
Speedy Cab
emblazoned on its side, pulls up to the curb. Damn, that was speedy. The cab honks.

The horn is a blaring, obnoxious, unnecessary thing that startles me hyperalert. I forget the staring grocery store group and whip around. The cabdriver stares straight ahead and honks his horn again. Not a polite little honk either, oh no, this guy lays into it, holding his horn for a good ten seconds. I’m right here, I see him, and even though he keeps staring straight ahead, another bit of rudeness, I know he sees me. I know he knows I am his customer.

What is it with these rude fucking humans?

I want to scream,
I’m right here! There’s no need to honk your horn, look at me, acknowledge me, there’ s no need to—

He honks it again, loudly and long.

I reach for the door handle and my stump thunks uselessly against the metal (idiot). Shaking it off I grab the handle with my right hand, throw open the door and hop in. The moment we speed away, the cabdriver, still staring straight ahead, says, “Where to?”

“I knew you were there,” I say, annoyed, “you didn’t have to keep honking. That was incredibly rude, you know.” Not that it matters, but something aggravated inside needs placating. I have to at least make this guy aware of how goddamn discourteous his actions were. I have to have some sort of satisfaction. Maybe a head nod and a smile. Maybe a sneer. Something. Anything, just so long as he understands that I am pissed.

He ignores me and reiterates, “Where to?”

Let it go. It’s not worth it. Humans are not worth the time. They’re not worth—

“Where to?”

I dig into my sock, retrieve Annabelle’s address and blurt it out to the driver.

“Ten minutes.” Mr. Sunshine gives me a quick look in the rearview and then goes back to staring out the windshield. Good. Keep your eyes on the road. Worthless. Giving relaxation a shot, I settle into the backseat.

Okay, assessment time:

Though it’s gone, it still feels like I have a left hand. If I don’t look at my stump, I can use my brain and flex my fingers and make a fist and everything feels normal, everything feels operational, my left hand wraps itself around air and my fingers touch down upon my palm. However, when I look at the stump, there is no hand, just the stump, and those normal feelings, the sensations of touch vanish. I want to examine the gnarled mound of flesh and bone that used to be my hand in greater detail, but it will have to wait. Back in the employee break room, after I stripped Jim and donned this fine suit, I turned his undershirt into a makeshift bandage and wrapped it tightly around my wrist and forearm. I did such a kick-ass, expert job dressing the stump that I am not quite ready to unravel it.

Later, when I have a moment to scrutinize the wound, maybe I will be able to learn something about the horror show of tendrils that exploded from within. Maybe Annabelle will have some answers.

Unless Jim was right.

Unless she knows less of the truth than I do.

How am I going to figure this one through? If Jim is right and Annabelle is disillusioned, how am I going to convince her of the truth? What she knows is embedded deep in her head, it’s all she knows, and as far as she is concerned it
is
the truth.

Everything is so screwed up. I am dead and still no answers. My whole life, the God thing, and somehow, despite all rationale I managed to believe. I believed and I hoped and in my beliefs I even worked myself into a ridiculous personal position of power. I wasn’t just one of God’s believers, I was his second son. I readily suffered for the sins of the world, suffered the slings and arrows of cruel humanity, and threw my heart into the foolish idea that maybe (despite belief, there was still a maybe) I was more. Maybe I was special.

And then I die and Annabelle crowns me the most important man in the world and you know what? God and Jesus and my pseudo-pious behaviors mean jack shit.

Now it’s all about the dreamer, but it’s really not that different because here I am sinking my faith into the preposterous, ready to suffer just like before. Ready to die over and over again for your sins.

And now, headless Jim. Now some off-the-wall shit about the dead rising. Except it really doesn’t seem that out there when juxtaposed with God or the dreamer. More convincingly, Jim’s theories jibe with my dreams. A world of markers and the gloomy-as-can-be imagery dancing around in my brain seem to correlate with this notion of a dead world.

Three realities. Is there much difference? Not surface, not the obvious, physical tangibles, but within, in my heart, my mind, my being, my whatever? In me? Will I ever be happy, or satisfied or even comfortable in heaven or completely erased or living life dead? Is there a time or a place that truly belongs to me that allows my potential, my heart song, my everlasting matter, the dust and desire that fills my bones, to be spread across the universe and settled content, burned out and grayed out and at long last free?

I roll my head from side to side and close my eyes. A pinwheel aflame, contemplation round and round, thoughts like a snake eating its own tail. Somewhere within the convoluted spiraling, glowing in the eye of the cerebral storm is an answer. Truth. My providence. It’s in here somewhere. Inside me, not in Jim or Annabelle or number three or the great dreamer or God or Buddha or Allah or L. Ron Hubbard, but in me. For all things great and small that I do not know (and believe me, there are lots of them), that I continually fuck up or misunderstand or let slip by, I know this.

Suddenly, dead and handless, dressed to the nines, heading to pick up my girlfriend (my
girlfriend
!), I know the solution ticks away inside of me. I know that in time, no matter what happens, I will find it. I will find it and maybe I will finally understand.

Suddenly, I feel at ease. The eyes are gone. The paranoia is gone. Even my distaste for the rude cabdriver is gone.

Suddenly, I feel good and that good feeling resonates with more good feelings.

This is probably one of those ill-fated epiphanies. Any moment now I’ll start thinking negative, I’ll realize I don’t know shit and I’ll bring myself way, way down. Any moment now, but before the descent Mr. Sunshine grunts, “Twelve fifty.”

We’re here. We’re at Annabelle’s. At long last we are at my Annabelle’s. My girlfriend’s. And that good feeling (you know, the one emanating even more good feelings?) explodes into a zillion good-feeling pieces and goddamn it I am fucking floating.

“Twelve fifty,” again, assholish, rude. The cabdriver turns around and holds his hand out in expectation. He frowns and looks at me like I am an idiot or something.

I’m not.

I’m the furthest thing from an idiot and there is no way I am going to let this fuck bring me down.

“Twelve fifty!” With a little volume this time. His eyebrows dip impossibly far.

I have no money.

This fool will not bring me down.

He will not bring me down. He will not.

He will.

He.

He will.

He will die.

Fast as a serpent, I grab for his hand with my stump (idiot) and then luckily correct my dim-witted reaction in time to get a hold of it with my right hand before he is able to pull away.

The moment my skin touches his, he stiffens. His eyes water and his lips pull tight against his teeth. My vision recedes and turns and the next thing you know I am in my head, mini-me, small, standing on the gooey landscape of my brain, staring up in awe at the thousands upon thousands of eyeballs that line the convex surfaces of my skull. I take a few steps, but my feet resist and dig into the mush. Slowly, I sink into a pool of grayish, pinkish quicksand. Wait, strike slowly, it only takes a mere ten seconds for my brain to swallow me down.

As usual, I am falling. As usual, it is dark.

I pull my knees close to my chest and tuck my head in the fetal position. My right hand wraps around my knees. My left arm folds itself over the right and the expert dressings I so carefully and tightly wrapped around my stump fall away. I wait for the hallucination to pass. Soon, I will be unsticking my right hand from the asshole cabdriver and approaching Annabelle’s front door. Soon.

Still falling. Still dark.

The stump begins to hum and the ravaged wound maws and gapes like a second mouth. I crinkle my nose in disgust. The wound opens as wide as possible, full dilation, and then shoots forth those mysterious tendrils. They weave and loop and wisp about the dark nothingness like curious antennae. It is hard to discern any detail, what with the dark and the continual downward velocity, but they seem less malignant than earlier. They look almost soft. Playful. Smooth.

They spread out around me like the branches of an ancient tree. More tendrils snake from my wrist. They dance in the dark for a few seconds, twisting and whipping before turning in and wrapping around me like the others. More and more tendrils creep from the hole in my forearm and more and more tendrils cocoon me. Before long, I am completely entombed, held tightly by a makeshift womb of stump strands.

I may or may not have stopped falling and the dark nothing may or may not engulf the world beyond. It is impossible to tell, but frankly I don’t care. This is perfect. This is true beauty. If this isn’t the perfection and beauty Annabelle was talking about when she told me what the dreamer had shown her, then I don’t know what is. Warm and safe and vital: the blood of life, the breath of ages flooding my being, entering my body through my pores and filling me with hope. My brain is newborn, fresh from the mold, and it feels as though I know nothing and everything at the same time.

The womb tendrils begin to glow, faintly at first, white light like back in the grocery store break room. The glow intensifies with defining detail:

Me: infantile, smooth, unmade.

My womb: a thousand desiccated skulls. The end. A drain.

Detail is washed away as the glow continues to deepen, obliterating everything in a great cloud of overwhelming radiance.

My eyes blur. Retinas fight and focus on a smudgy shape. They strain and are rewarded for their efforts. Well sort of. They attain vision, but are greeted by the sunken face of the rude cabdriver. I shake my head and loosen any lingering imprints of my hallucinatory state. Before my mind has a chance to process, a single pulsing thought arises: Annabelle.

I reach for the door handle and again thunk it with my stump (idiot). Right hand. I disgorge it from the mess that was Mr. Sunshine’s greedy hand; his corpse teeters this way and that and then falls into the passenger’s seat. Ignoring the gore slicking my hand, I reach for the handle and throw open the door.

This is it, here I am, and in a blurry second’s time I am standing at the front door. I don’t even remember walking the short distance from the cab. Right now, I can’t remember much of anything. My head buzzes and a swarm of butterflies flutters in my stomach.