Mortality Bridge (2 page)

Sports book now puts it at 9,000 to 1 against you—IF you hand this guy his hat.

Got a lot riding on you, cowboy. Don’t let me down.

No signature. Niko sounds his heart for some response but he finds none. This note concerns some stranger.

He looks up from the sweatstained parchment. The armored man stands patient and unblinking, a living statue on the sand. “Do you know what this says?”

“I do not care what it says.”

“I see. Well, thanks for delivering it.” Niko smiles. “Have a nice day.”

A glint of amusement in the bright blue eyes. “My duty is not discharged.”

“Ah. Well. Worth a try.”

The Achaian merely stands there. His gaze includes Niko only in the sense that Niko stands within his field of vision. As if the Achaian can see a horizon on the endless plain on which they stand.

Niko gathers his belongings and nods at the Achaian. “See you,” he says, and makes to step past him but the bronzetipped spear comes to the fore.

“Can’t we talk about this?”

“I am not sent for conversation.”

“But we are countrymen.”

“There are no countries here.”

“Well we are ancients of a sort.”

“There are no ancients here.”

Was there a falter in that gaze? “I have no quarrel with you. According to this I’m after those who sent you.”

“I am those who sent me.” The Achaian takes his gaze from that haunted private distance and looks directly at Niko for the first time. His expression yields nothing. “This time with you is a respite from afflictions I endure without surcease. Nothing you can say or do will sway me from that reprieve.”

Niko’s slow nod belies the sudden prick of anticipation and fear within his chest. “All right. One thing more?”

The armored Achaian merely stares. Niko indicates the carrying case on the sand. “This note says that belongs to me.”

“It is your second gift.”

“Okay then.”

The Achaian sets the black case on the sand without taking his gaze from Niko and steps back three paces and transfers the spear to his left hand.

Niko eyes the spear as he steps toward the case and kneels before it on the warm sand. He flips a latch and the Achaian tenses. “I don’t think it’s a weapon,” Niko says. And undoes the latches and opens the case and regards the gleaming metal thing encushioned there.

“Not a weapon?”

Niko shrugs. “No more than any musical instrument. I think it is a kind of lyre. See the strings?”

“If the strategy is to bore an opponent to death perhaps. Music is a wasteful vice.”

“I’m going to take it out.”

The Achaian shrugs but does not relax his grip upon his spear. Still Niko feels that the Achaian will not murder him but means to engage him according to some code. He pulls the heavy unfamiliar instrument from the case and holds it awkwardly as he squats there on the sand. Polished metal glinting dull red light. He frowns at the long neck with its inset metal bars. Raps the metal body with his knuckles and it gives a dull and hollow gong. Well, if it is a kind of lyre then it stands to reason the strings are meant to be plucked.

He cradles the foreign metal thing and just before his callused fingers touch the strings he has a sense of the instrument fitting itself against him with the nonchalance of a longtime lover settling with her partner into bed. Cold metal body. But the startlement of that sensation dissolves in the wash of memories that inundate him when his hands touch the strings and deliver him to himself and the dread knowledge of who he is and what has led him into Hell.

I.

BABY PLEASE DON’T GO

SHE LET GO his hand as the pallet slid into the narrow tunnel. “Niko?”

“Right here, Jem.” He squeezed her foot beneath the cover pulled so tight she looked like a streamlined mummy.

“It’s really small in here.” Her voice muffled in that cramped space. The technician’s voice came tinny from the intercom. “You okay?”

“Umm. Yeah. I think so.” Percocet thickening her tone. “It’s like wearing a knight helmet. Like a joust.”

Behind thick glass the technician nodded. “The regular CT unit is down for scheduled maintenance. Bessie here’s our backup. She hasn’t let us down yet. But we can try again another time if it’s bothering you too much right now.”

“No. We’ve come this far.”

“Okay. I’m going to activate the scan now, all right? I need you to hold perfectly still, okay? Try to keep your arms straight and don’t move. Can you do that?”

“Do you have to close the door?”

“No, we’ll keep it open for you.”

The Muzak played some watered down song by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Niko squeezed Jem’s foot to maintain contact as they listened in the nervous interlude.

A muffled laugh. “Just wait’ll they do this to one of your songs.” She began to hum a cheesy lounge act version of “Notes on Her Sleeping” and Niko smiled even as his face went tight and his eyes began to sting. “I think they already have,” he said.

“Okay,” said the intercom. “Here we go.” There was a slight vibration.

“It smells like vanilla.”

“There’s some evidence it reduces stress,” the intercom said.

The leaden laugh again. “Better use the whole can.”

Niko patted her foot and felt the corn on her big toe. Countless gigs in high heeled shoes. He pressed and her foot kicked.

The intercom said Hold still please.

“Sorry.”

“You’re doing fine, Jem.” Niko squeezed her foot again and bit his lower lip. He should get another Grammy for this. Or an Oscar. Best Vocal Performance by a Son of a Bitch in a Lead Role.

Hidden engines surged invisible energies through her head.

“I can’t feel my arm.” The fear in her voice tore a plug from his heart. They’d told her there was a slight chance of allergic reaction to the iodine. One in ten thousand, nothing to worry about. But she’d had to sign waivers.

The intercom said It’s normal for limbs to get pins and needles when forced to hold still, nothing to be alarmed about, we’ll massage them as soon as you’re out.

But there had been that single moment of mortal dread, Jemma lying without moving in a tube with metal inches from her skin, iodine coursing alien in her veins and her limbs numbing. And Niko thinking o god is this it, can this be it.

When they got home the Percocet kicked in bigtime and Niko helped her sag upstairs and tucked her into their huge bed and kissed her brow and dialed down the light and crept out of the room and eased shut the door, stopping to look back at her through the narrow slit and feeling like a father peering in on a sleeping child. He left the door cracked open and the intercom on in case she woke disoriented.

THE WEST HALL was lined with framed concert posters, many of them decades old. Drippy letters and high contrast dayglow colors. Niko’s name on all of them. Or the names of bands he’d played in long ago. Before the four letters of his shortened name alone became enough to fill arenas. Jemma’d put the posters up here. He had thought it much too vain. Decades of his pawned off life arrayed along these walls. Legendary days. Those early Perish Blues gigs, the fevered howling yearning. Fights broke out during his solos. He made the room crazy just by playing his guitar. Made the crowd want to fight or fuck or both. He just stood there playing. And somehow just standing there made the music stronger. Surrounded him with energy. Incredible such anger and such anguish could be wrung howling from the neck of a guitar throttled by a young man who just stood there like the center of a cyclone oblivious to its debris.

On the strength of their live gigs Perish Blues recorded Say Hey on the Decca label. A single got decent local airplay but the band just never caught. The feeling was they had something live that recordings could not capture. Niko’s playing was ferocious but he was bagged half the time, he forgot playlists, missed rehearsals and even gigs, tiraded incoherently. He felt restless and the band was discontent.

Perish Blues disbanded and their lead guitarist felt bad about it and felt good about it too. He sat around his apartment and drank and thought about getting another band together and didn’t. He played sessions with a few wellknown bands but didn’t get around to much else.

He’d met Jemma around the beginning of his fiery arc. She’d sung backup in some now forgotten band that opened for his, at one point trading call and response with their lead guitar. He simply couldn’t believe her voice. The beautiful pain of it. Niko so broke he had to borrow money to get his Fender out of hock to play the gig and still he asked her out. Then the long series of attempts to be together. Our staccato love, he’d joked.

Jemma left him after one of his more mundane binges. Though by then it was more correct to say that Niko was on one long bender that ebbed and flowed. This time out was not as spectacular as the time he’d thrown their furniture and clothes out on the curb, the time he’d hurled a paperweight into a blacksmoked mirror, the time he’d doused his Fender with butane and torched it on the balcony of their matchbox apartment off of Gower. This was just another drunk, a sad and stinking unshaved weekday drunk where Jemma had come home to find him crying incoherently about what a nogood shit he was, emptying himself until he slept and then awoke alone all wound in sour sheets like a corpse within a shroud. A C-clamp hangover tightened on his temples as he waited and waited for Jemma to bring him morning coffee the way she always did rain or shine, pleased with him or mad, a little ritual enacted in their daily life together. And when the coffee didn’t come he knew that she was gone. He called her name regardless but of course there was no answer. A hollow silence lay about the place that was precisely her subtracted measure. She had finally had enough. Last night just the final night in the parade of nights spent waiting for him to come home, sweeping broken glass from tile floors, bringing him a basin to throw up in, trying to convince him he was not the demon he imagined himself, holding him through his senseless crying jags and patiently thinking she could fix him. For Jemma was a fixer. She could not bear to see potential squandered. Which had sparked her interest in him in the first place and kept her with him past the point of any reason. At least until she’d understood she couldn’t fix what wanted to be broken.

However bad he got he always seemed to come through whole while those around him lost some unseen thing. You always land on your feet, she told him. And the ones who catch you fall.

With Jemma gone there’d been little to stop him slowly drowning in a whiskey river. He told himself he was only dulling the pain and the pain was pretty bad. Better put me under, doc, a local anesthetic just won’t do.

But when he slept his callused fingers clutched a pillow and caressed her absent contours like a phantom limb. She fired his brain like a lovely fever and throughout his long descent he felt her burning out there in the world apart from him. He’d lie drunk and crying in the bed just big enough to hold them both or howl the Strat he’d borrowed after torching his own, two a.m. and another whiskey bottle consigned to the graveyard of failed consolations. He’d lie on the thin worn carpet and stare up at the waterstained ceiling and make pictures out of earthquake cracks, fissures on some vast and endless plain, or he would cruise the empty glitter of latenight Sunset in a blurred and weaving stupor with the puttering station wagon’s radio cranked until the music left no room for thought. Niko driving down the unabating night and knowing she was awake in the shabby North Hollywood house she’d rented with her friend Bonnie. Knowing her bedside light was on beside her. Knowing she could feel him out here burning too.

For months he dieted on trashy novels and tv and stayed indoors. Reading the same paragraph over and over he would wonder Where are you tonight Jem, are you thinking of me, are you alone?

Friends told him he was crazy to punish himself like this. They told him to put it behind him. But he kept Jem alive in his mind precisely because he wanted to feel the pain. The pain cut through the haze as proof that he could feel at all.

One day there was a knock on his apartment door and he opened it and blinked in the bright afternoon sunshine bleary and hungover and already getting drunk again. A tall thin man dressed like some kind of psychedelic drum major with a bushy afro stood holding a guitar case and grinning as if he’d just told a really good joke and was waiting for the laugh. “Hey,” he said. “Can Niko come out and play?”

Niko stepped back into the house. “Naw. But you can come play with him.”

And so they jammed long into the night. They had never met before but they had common influences and mutual admiration. Niko played his new Dobro while Jimi played his beatup Gibson and they howled at the moon and raised the devil and drank like fish and laughed like thieves and cried the blues. It never occurred to either of them to record the session. Its frail unwitnessed evanescence made it all the better in a way. Lost in pure creation without a thought about the world without. Before the night was over Jimi dug out his rig and asked if Niko indulged and Niko said yeah sure why not, old Mr. Daniel’s isn’t getting the job done anymore.

He would only snort. Injecting was hardcore. Injecting was for junkies. It made him itch and it made him sleepy and it made him float a half an inch above the floor but best of all it made him just plain go away. He dove into a river of oblivion and lay contented in the bottom mud. Jimi staggered off sometime near dawn, leaving Niko with a little powder present in a cellophane twist. The gift that kept on giving.

Soon the rush just wouldn’t happen when he snorted so he started shooting. He became a kind of alchemist. Into his veins went china white and out his hands came sorrow and pain and terrible beauty. He fronted shortlived bands and couldn’t get a deal and played some of the best guitar of his or anyone’s career. And all the while out there somewhere shining faintly in his battlemented heart was Jemma. She was doing well he knew. Background vocals for successful acts. On the road half the year, studio time in L.A.