The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (43 page)

    L's left sleeve rustled with inner life and slowly, horribly from its cavernous depths birthed a puppet. The thing that emerged was the girth of a toddler, soft and yellow as decayed bone, and glistening with a sheen as of jelly. It wore a skullcap, rusty bells, dark surcoat, a red cloak and red leggings; a diminutive malformed jester, or a monk of Franciscan lore. Misshapen, malignant, diabolic-the hand puppet's countenance was remarkable in its jaundiced smoothness, its cockeye, and demented smirk. Its arms were overlong, its spindly hands and fingers mockeries of human proportion. The hands were restless. They writhed and gestured, both languid and spasmodic, gracile and palsied.

    The puppet gazed at the audience, tilting its head and shuttering one off-kilter eye, then the other. It reached out with the deliberateness of a hunting spider extending a pedipalp to taste prey, and tapped the microphone. During none of the creature's articulations did the towering form of L so much as twitch. So dexterous were L's manipulations, the puppet appeared to operate wholly independent from the man himself.

    The puppet said breathily, the male analogue to Marilyn Monroe prepping to sing
Happy Birthday, Mr. President
, "I am Mandibole." And, after a pause where it groaned like an asthmatic, "Tonight, I shall recite a story created by my benefactor, the incomparable L. It has never been told. It is a true story." The voice seemed to emanate directly from the puppet's twisted lips. "Imagine the heads of everyone at every table in this room disembodied and attached, like ripe fruit, to the branches of a tree in a field. A huge, leafless tree in a wide and grassless field. The field is black dirt and the tree is also dark, fleshy and warm, however it does not live so much as persist, suckling the life force from its own fiber, its own fruit, in essence a cannibal of itself.

    "The hanging heads: your comrades, your neighbors, yourselves, do not speak, cannot speak, for their mouths and yours are crammed with bloody seeds. You and they hang from the black tree in the black field, this tableaux illuminated by interior flames from the heads, for the seeds glow with fire, swelling and frothing maggots of deathly light. You sway in the breeze like Jack O' Lanterns and cannot utter protest, or question your Maker, or petition your Accuser. You are muted by choking mouthfuls of gore. And this is Hell, my friends. It will continue and continue unto Eternity, until it becomes something worse. Something worse." It repeated
something worse
at least twenty times, imperceptibly lowering its voice until the words trailed off.

    I observed this spectacle with profound unease. I felt as a man helplessly staked near a colony of fire ants might feel, flesh crawling in anticipation of the approaching swarm. A needlessly surreptitious glance around the room confirmed that every person was slack-jawed, faces shining in rapt concentration while their bodies faded to lumps within deepening shadow. John and Michael had completely forgotten my presence. They, along with everyone else at the Kremlin, were on some distant soundstage in Hell, hanging from the Tree of Anti-Life.

    Certainly my overreaction was the result of mental depression and an admittedly tenuous grasp on reality. Being wasted on god knew how many brands of liquor was likely a contributing factor. This tempered my urge to beg forgiveness of John and Michael for doubting them, for sneering at the notion L was some evil messiah sent by the dark gods to spread a message of disharmony and dread. But only a little.

    Mandibole said, "Now imagine the hours passing, the days, weeks, months…Imagine the flesh deliquescing from bone, hair peeling in strips. The blackbirds feasting on eyes, noses, tongues…But you see everything that happens, feel every exquisite inch of yourselves slithering down the craws of the flock…"

    I rose and lurched to the bar, hand covering my good ear to block the persistent drone of Mandibole's oration. The bartender didn't meet my eye when I demanded a shot. He grabbed a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker and shoved it at me. I cracked the seal and had a pull worthy of Lee Van Cleef and Lee Marvin combined, and listed against the rail, gasping for breath, and for a few moments this distracted me from whatever malevolent shit the puppet was spouting.

    "Hey there, sailor," the blonde from L's table said, sliding next to me so her red lips were near my neck, the heat off her tongue tracing my skin in collaboration with the alcohol igniting my veins. Her body lotion was lilac and water. She laid her hand on my thigh and didn't exactly smile, but made an expression something like one. "Buy a girl a drink?" She took the bottle and sipped, delicate and ladylike. Her un-smile widened. "You seem sad. It's because you're alone."

    "I'm with friends," I said, conscious of the thickness of my voice, wondering if its intrusion upon the scene would cause the crowd to turn on me, to hiss at me for silence. No one seemed to notice; they were a roomful of wax dummies glued into their seats, heads fused, gazes fixed upon the podium. Only the brunette and the man in the turtleneck were watching us. Both of them were doing the un-smiling thing.

    "Don't worry about these…people," the blonde said, her breath hot and sweet with the Johnnie Walker. "We're
all
all alone in the world." She wasn't a true blonde-her roots showed dark where the peroxide ran thin.

    "Of course we are. That's why I'm sad. Man alive, I carried a torch for Julie Andrews. You're more vulpine, but I'm not picky."

    "It's a different thing entirely. Sun and moon. Heaven and Hell." Her fingers roamed my thigh as she talked. Strange though, rather than erotic; jittery and unsynchronized as Mandibole's hand movements or Poe moonwalking as Michael pulled its strings.

    I stuck out my hand, although the gesture seemed superfluous at this point. "I'm-"

    "We know who you are, Mr. B."

    "We?"

    "Certainly. You're recognizable enough if one squints just right."

    "What's your name, baby?"

    "I'm W Lindblad. Whom else?" She swept her fingers perilously near my crotch, then tweaked my nose, leaned back and laughed coldly. Over her shoulder, the man in the turtleneck gesticulated and pantomimed the blonde's motions and behind him Mandibole exaggerated a pantomime of Mr. Turtleneck. Elsewhere, Pluto groaned and rolled off its axis.

    "I fucking knew it would be something like this." I had to chuckle, though. The last time a beautiful woman approached me at a bar she'd bought me a scotch and then asked if I'd found Jesus. JC was still missing, apparently. "Of all the poor schmucks in this joint, you had to pick on me?"

    "You're the only one rude enough to interrupt this momentous performance, this ritual that will open the way and bridge the gulf between new stars and old ones." She laughed a dog's laugh without changing expression.

    "Oh, okay. Amazing work with that puppet. I assume it's one of yours."

    "You refer to puppets as
it.
Refreshing. Most people say he or she."

    "No sense in imbuing inanimate objects with sexual characteristics, even in jest."

    "Says a world about you. In this case
it
is more correct than you could possibly conceive. The precise term, in fact. None other would do. However, Mandibole is no invention of mine.
It
comes from elsewhere. It's a traveler. A visitor."

    In the background, Mandibole said, "
Something worse, something worse, something worse,
" and kept chanting it and chanting it. Several of the listeners joined in and soon it was like a church revival meeting with the parishioners chorusing the right reverend's punch lines. All of the lights had died except for the one hanging directly over the podium. Beyond the first row, all was darkness. The blonde and I sat, bumping knees, in darkness too.

    The blonde's face blended into the ink. Her eyes glinted red though, seeming to hang in blank space. "Why the ring? She's gone gone gone."

    I didn't understand for a moment, then reached instinctively for my throat where I kept my wedding ring on a chain under my collar. The ring was an empty gesture, not that acknowledging this changed anything, and so the emptiness conquered all. I couldn't decide how to feel, so I tittered uneasily. "Nice. Are you a cold reader? Do divinations for old biddies and their toy poodles in Manhattan?"

    "I like Rick James and long walks on the beach. Maybe I'm too forward. My secret weakness. I read minds as a party trick. Free of charge. So, if you had to guess, why do you think your woman left you?"

    "Leave me? Ha! She kicked my ass to the curb."

    "Why do you suppose this sad thing has occurred?"

    "Why is the center of the universe as soft as a tootsie pop undulating with nuclear sludge serenaded by an orchestra of idiot flautists playing
Hail to the Chief
?"

    "Fair enough," she said.

    "Wanna get out of here?" I said.

    Her red eyes burned like coals. "A minute ago you were thinking of our Lord & Savior.
There's
a fascinating case."

    "Is this a long story? Because-"

    "Silence, fool. That Christ was a puppet, strings played by a master in the gallery of stars, is the kind of truth that would get you burned in earlier days. The parallel between God and Gepetto, Christ and Pinocchio, surely an absurdist's delight. I think the supernatural element is bunk and lazy storytelling to boot. That the holy carpenter was only a simple lunatic with delusions of grandeur makes his fate all the more grisly, don't you agree? His suffering was the ultimate expression of the form. Torturers long ago discovered that pleasure and pain are indistinguishable after a certain point. Jesus ejaculated as the thorns dug in and the spearhead stabbed, and he waited in vain for his imaginary father. Suicide is a sin, so they say. Unless you're a martyr, then green light go. Doesn't have to be hard, even though it's harder for some. Some have a talent for destruction. I swallowed seventy sleeping pills and half a magnum of raspberry champagne on prom night. Wow, my mascara was a mess. The homecoming queen was my sister, if you can believe. She snuffed it right with a bag of bleach over her face on New Year's Eve, 2001. Bitch was better at everything."

    I froze, dreams of a semi-anonymous fare-thee-well blow job in the bathroom across the hall going down like the Titanic, so to speak, and considered the possibility that besides obvious derangement, the woman might be physically dangerous to me, especially in my current helpless state. The scene had taken on the tones of the anaconda from
The Jungle Book
cartoon mesmerizing that sap Mowgli with its whirly eyes and thespian lisp:
trust in me!
It seemed wiser to keep my trap shut and grunt noncommittally, which is what I did.

    She said, "But he's beyond all this and he finally knows. He's a real boy now."

    "What
does
Jesus know? The obvious answer would be everything, at the Right Hand of God and such."

    "He's seen the beautiful thing that awaits us all. Waiting at the bottom of the hole beneath everything."

    "If you're saying shit rolls downhill, I have to concur." I turned away and she grabbed my wrist. Her flesh was icy beneath the gloves. I witnessed Christ broken upon the cross. The sky burned. Christ's battered face was my own. The sky dimmed to starless black and filled his eyes with its void. "Jesus!" I said and blinked rapidly and flinched from the woman, convinced she'd somehow projected this image into my brain.

    Mandibole cried, "Death is the aperture, the cathode into truth, the beginning! The beginning, my sweet ones. More fearsome words were never spoken. A more vile threat has never been uttered. Yes, there are worse things, worse things, and death is not among them."

    The blonde's grip tightened and tightened. Oh, yeah, an anaconda, all right. "That's a goo-ood boy," she said and her many teeth glinted as her eyes glinted. Not a serpent, but a monstrous rat with tabby tom under her claw and pleased as punch. Good ol' Punch. Or, maybe just maybe it was Judy who'd become a real girl. "I can see that you've seen. Infinite dark, infinite cold, infinite sleep. Much better than the alternative-infinite existence as a disembodied spirit. Awareness for eternity. All you have to do is let go. Let Mandibole eat your consciousness. Then, trot back to your little hotel room and go on permanent vacation."

    "My choice is non-being via having my mind dissolved or be a screaming head for eternity? What the fuck happened to door number three?" I said.

    "Be glad of the choice. Most don't receive one. Talk to L after the gig. He can help you get your mind right for the voyage into nothing. Don't quit your quest a few miles from home. Don't linger like HP and die of a tumor, last days spent wasting away on tins of cat food and the indifference of the universe. Don't end it foaming and raving in a ditch as dear Edgar did. Who'd come to your grave with a flower and a glass of brandy every winter to mark your sad demise? You don't rate, I'm afraid."

    Something cold and hard pressed against my temple and across the way, Mandibole, haloed in a shaft of hellish angelic light, the far wandering ice-light of devil stars, swiveled and stared into the gloom directly at me, into me, and winked, and an abyss was revealed.

    "Oh, what is this bullshit again?" A bulb in the liquor case behind the bar blinked to life as a diving bell surfacing from the deeps, and worldfamous publisher GVG appeared and pried the bottle from the woman's hand where she'd stuck it to my head. "Go tell Tom I don't care how many Horror Writer's Guild Awards he's got rusting on his mantle. I still don't regret not publishing that crap." He smacked her sequin-studded ass and shooed her away, and she retreated to her friends with a hiss and a glare.

    GVG owned a venerable science fiction magazine and had given me my first pro sale. I hadn't seen him since the previous year's World Fantasy Convention.

    "Thanks," I said, slumping with sudden weariness. "Quite a scene. One minute I'm getting lucky, the next I don't even know what."