The Drowned Life (14 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Ford
Upon seeing the gear, she gasped and struggled to her feet. The fact that she'd just been thinking of it made her dizzy with its implications. “Where did you get that?” she asked. The implacable face remained silent, but her obvious reaction to the sight of the curio sent a murmur through those assembled. “Who sent you?” she asked. Its eye holes seemed to be staring directly at her. She started down the two steps from her throne, and her people came up on either side to help her approach the creature. As she drew near, she felt a flutter of nervousness in her chest. “Did John send you from his own dream?” she said.
When she was less than a step away from the prisoner, she
reached out for the amulet, and that is when the indigo creature inhaled so mightily the ropes binding its wings snapped. In one fluid motion, it ripped its wrists free of their bonds, the vines snapping away as if they were strands of hair, and took Zadiiz by the shoulders. She was too slow to scream, for he had already leaned forward and the pointed nozzle had shot forth from its mouth. There was the sound of an egg cracking. The Aieu did not recover from their shock until the nozzle had retracted, and by then the creature had torn the lead from its neck and leaped into the air. At the same moment, Zadiiz fell backward into her subjects' waiting arms. Jump-bones were thrown, but the assassin flew swiftly up and out of the opening at the top of the hive.
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The indigo creature flew on and on for light-years through space, past planets and suns, quasars and nebulae, black holes and wormholes, resting momentarily now and then upon an asteroid or swimming down through the atmosphere of a planet to live upon its surface for a year or two, and no matter the incredible sights it witnessed in the centuries it traveled its expression never once changed. Finally, in a cave whose walls were covered with spotted mushrooms, on an asteroid orbiting a blue-white star, it found what it had been searching forâa large metallic globe and, sitting next to it upon a rock, a robot, long seized with inaction due to the frustration of its inability to accomplish the task its master had set for it.
Dangling the gear upon its lanyard in front of the eye sensors of the robot, the indigo creature brought the man of metal to awareness. Robot 49 reached up for the gear, and the creature placed it easily into his ball-jointed fingers. The two expressionless faces stared at each other for a moment and then each turned away, knowing what needed to be done. The robot moved to his globe of
a space vessel, and the indigo creature sprinted from the cave and spread its wings. Even before the sputtering metal ball had exited the cave and set a course for the hollow world, the indigo creature had disappeared into the vast darkness of space.
On an undiscovered world where a vast ocean of three-hundred-foot-tall red grass lapped the base of a small mountain, the creature landed and set to work. Time, which had passed in long lazy skeins to this point, now was of the essence, and there could be no rest. At the peak of the mountain, the winged being cleared away a tangled forest of vines, telmis, and wild lemon tress, uprooting trunks with its bare hands and knocking down larger ones with its horns. Once the land was cleared, it set about mining blocks of white marble from a site lower down the slope, precisely cutting the hard stone with the nail of its left index finger. These blocks were flown to the peak and arranged to build a sprawling, one-story dwelling, with long empty corridors and sudden courtyards open to the sky.
When all was completed upon the mountain peak, the creature entered the white dwelling, passed down the long empty corridors to the bedroom, and sat down upon the edge of a soft mattress of prowling valru hide stuffed with lemon blossoms. It could see through the window opening the ringed planet begin its ascent as the day waned. Twilight breezes scudding off the sea of red grass rushed up the slopes and swamped the house. The indigo creature folded its wings back and stretched its arms once before lying back upon the wide, comfortable bed it had made.
As the horned head rested upon a pillow, many light-years away, at the center of the hollow planet, robot 49 fitted the small gear into place within Onsing's remarkable machine. Cheers went up from the 999 metallic brethren gathered behind him. And the 1,001
st
robot, designed solely to press the start button on the machine, finally fulfilled its task. A lurching, creaking, clanging of
parts moving emanated from the strange device. Then invisible waves that gave off the sound of a bird's call issued forth, instantly disabling all of the robots, traveling right through the hollow planet and outward, in all directions across the universe.
The indigo creature heard what it at first believed to be the call of the pale night bird, but soon realized it was mistaken. It then made the only sound it would ever make in its long life, a brief sigh of recognition, before it began to melt. Thick droplets of indigo ran from its face and arms and chest, evaporating into night before staining the mattress. Its horns dripped away like melting candle wax, and its wings shrank until they had both run off into puddles of nothing. As the huge dark figure disintegrated, from within its bulk emerged a pair of forms, arms clasped around each other. With the evaporation of the last drip of indigo, John and Zadiiz, again young as the moment they first met, rolled away from each other, dreaming.
In the morning they were awakened by the light of the sun streaming in the window without glass and the sounds of the migrating birds. They discovered each other and themselves, but had no memory, save their own names, of their pasts or how they came to be on the mountain peak. All they remembered was their bond, and although this was an invisible thing, they both felt it strongly.
They lived together for many years in tranquillity on the undiscovered planet, and in their fifth year had a child. The little girl had her mother's orange eyes and her father's desire to know what lay out beyond the sky. She was a swift runner and climbed about in the lemon trees like a monkey. The child had a powerful imagination and concocted stories for her parents about men made of metal and dark-winged creatures, of incredible machines and vessels that flew to the stars. At her birth, not knowing exactly why, John Gaghn and Zadiiz settled upon the name of Onsing for her and wondered how that name might direct her fate.
Outside on the cracked concrete sidewalk stood a wooden Indian with headdress and hatchet, which my grandfather had christened Tecumseh. Inside, the place smelled like a chocolate egg cream laced with cigar smoke and filtered through the hole of a stale doughnut. From beneath a pervasive layer of dust, one could dig out
Green Lantern
comics and
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear
. In the back, next to the phone booth with flypaper glass, were wooden shelves holding plastic models of planes, monsters, and the awe-inspiring car designs of Big Daddy Roth. There were spinning racks of paperback books, rows of greeting cards, crinkly bags of plastic soldiers, paper and pens and crayons. At the soda fountain, they made cherry Cokes, black-and-whites, and malteds that were hooked up to a green machine and cycloned into existence. My father bought his Lucky Strikes there. My grandfather bought his horse paper there. My mother would go in once a year, stir the dust, and come out with a notebook to keep her thoughts in.
The owners, Leo and Phil, carried on a subdued argument day
in, day out, which occasionally erupted into shouts of “Shmuck” and “Stick your ass in a meat grinder.” Leo was tall with glasses and a bald head. He always wore a green T-shirt and a graying apron with which he would swipe your glass before setting it under the soda jet. The brown, smoldering length of stiff rope he smoked throughout the day made him talk out of the side of his mouth in a voice like a ventriloquist's dummy. “Put 'em back in your head,” he would bark from behind the counter when he'd see my gaze drift up over the comics to where the
Playboy
s were kept. He worked the register, but the register never worked. So when you brought your purchase to him, he'd blow smoke in your face and add the prices out loud: “Eh, let's see here, fifty-four, twenty-eight, seventy-five, ahhhhâ¦a buck ninety.”
Leo's brother-in-law, Phil, was short, with a broken nose and one walleye always looking to the left. Mrs. Millman said the bad eye was a result of all of those years of spying on Leo at the cash register. Phil was crankier than his partner and would scurry around with a dirty rag, dusting. Many of his days were spent in the center aisle, trying to remove a giant wad of gum that had been flattened into the linoleum and blackened by a million footfalls. “It's a sin, watching him go at it,” my mother said. Once he brought in a buffing machine with the idea of whisking that sin away, but when he turned it on the thing went out of control, knocking fat Mrs. Ryan on her rear end and denting a shelf. The presence of children made Phil nervous and he gave us namesâCocker, Fuck Knuckle, Putzy Boy, and something that sounded like Schvazoozle.
In the back of the store, through a small doorway you could only get to from behind the fountain counter, was a cramped stockroom. Old centerfolds were the wallpaper, and chaos reigned among the shelves. At the center of that room, beneath a single bare bulb, sat a card table and four chairs. On Thursday nights after closing, those chairs were occupied by Leo, Phil, Dr. Geller,
and my grandfather. They played a two-card game of their own invention called Fizzleâquarter ante, deuces high, fold on any pair, ace of spades takes all. They moved like reptiles in the cold, eyeing their cards, drinking whiskey, cigar smoke swirling with nowhere to go.
One Thursday night when my grandmother had taken sick after dinner and my father was not home from work yet with the car, my mother sent me to fetch my grandfather from the store. I wasn't usually allowed out that late, but my grandmother needed the milk of magnesia and my grandfather had put it somewhere and never told her where it was. It was a week before Halloween and the night was cold and windy. The trip down the back road spooked me as barren branches clicked together and dead leaves scraped the pavement. When the Beware of Dog lunged out of the shadows, barking behind its chain-link fence, I jumped and ran the rest of the way, thinking about a boy who had lived on that block and had been hit by a car and killed over the summer.
When I made it to the store, I opened the door and went inside. The lights were out and the place was still. I walked quietly up the aisle, noticing how all of the toys and books appeared different at night, as if when no one was looking they might come to life. A muffled voice drifted up from the back of the store, and I followed its trail behind the soda fountain to the door of the stock room. They all saw me standing there, but no one acknowledged my presence because the doctor was talking. I stood still and listened, trying not to seem too interested in the ladies on the walls.
Dr. Geller was a short, heavyset man with wavy black hair and a face nearly as wide as the seat of a fountain stool. I never saw him that he wasn't yawning or rubbing his eyes. When he'd come to the house on visits to tend to my brother and me, he would finish his examinations and then sit down in my mother's rocker where he'd fall asleep, smoking a cigar. In his vest pocket he had a silver
watch on a chain he would let us see if we did not flinch at the bite of the needle.
His voice came out cracked and weary amid sighs of defeat as he told about how Joe, the barber, had a heart attack and was lying on the floor of his shop facedown among the curls of hair. “Five minutes after I checked his vital signs and pronounced him dead,” said Geller, “Joe stood up, took the little whisk broom from his back pocket, cleaned the chair he was closest to, and then spun it around for the next customer. His eyes were rolled back in his head and blood was leaking from his nose, but he spoke to me. âTrim and a shave?' he asked. And I said, âNothing today, Joe.' After that he fell back onto the floor and died for good.” The doctor drew on his big cigar, and my grandfather called me over and put me on his lap.
My grandfather was a powerful man even in old age. He had been a boxer, a merchant marine, a deep-sea diver. There was a tattoo on his left bicep that when looked at straight on was a heart with an arrow through it, filigree work around the borders. Across the center of the heart, written in vein blue, was my grandmother's name, Maisie. When you looked at the same design over his shoulder, as he had my brother and me do sometimes, standing on the dining room table, the image became a naked woman bending over, waving to you from between her legs.
“Don't tell your mother,” he'd say and laugh like a bronchial wolf.
He was well respected among the card players, because he had
an inside line at the track. He worked in the boiler room at Aqueduct Racewayâthe Big A. Over the years he had struck up as many friendships as he could with the jockeys, the paddock boys, the ticket punchers. Whatever the word was on a given horse, he made it his business to know before it was led into the starting gate. In addition, he studied the
Telegraph
, which he called the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text, working the odds, comparing the results of stakes races, jotting down times and blood lines in the margins. He knew a lot about Thoroughbreds and won a considerable amount of the time, but, still, he was not the best handicapper in the house. A constant point of aggravation for him was not so much that when my grandmother bet she would invariably win but that her method lacked any logical cogitation.
Her winners came from her dreams. “Last night, I saw yards and yards of burgundy silk,” she said at breakfast one morning, and later that day she put two dollars to win on a horse, Rip's Burgundy, running in the eighth. My grandfather scowled and rolled his eyes. “Bullshit,” he said, but when the race was over, a horse he had considered a total pig had come out of nowhere on the back turn and scorched the field.
Whenever she was about to go to the track she had these dreams. Sometimes she saw numbers, sometimes it was just a fleeting glimpse of something that had to do with a horse's name she'd find in the morning line. No matter how sure she was of her bets, though, she would never play more than two dollars. Because of this, her winnings never seemed as spectacular as my grandfather's.
Her other talent was for reading futures from an ordinary deck of playing cards. About once every two months, she and my mother would have a little get-together of the neighborhood ladies. They'd drink sherry from teacups, eat thin sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and gossip. After everyone was a little tipsy, the women would
beg my grandmother to take out the cards and read their fortunes. Everyone pretended it was just for fun, but even from the back room, where I'd be perusing the latest
Green Lantern
, I knew when it was happening because of the sudden silence. Then I'd drop my comic and hurry out to see.
She'd be sitting at the dining room table across from Mrs. Sutton or Mrs. Kelty, her pupils obscured by the rims of her glasses, her lips pursed and moving, staring at the white tablecloth where she was about to place the cards. She would then say, “You must cross my palm with silver.” A quarter was the going rate. The blue curtains behind her were always filled with a breeze when the cards hit the table. “To your self, to your heart, to your home, to what you least expect and what's sure to come.” She'd lay the cards faceup in groups of five. This was followed by a period of silence in which the ladies smiled at one another. Her first line was always, “You are about to meet a man,” and broken clues to this liaison would, thereafter, pepper the reading.
The only vacations my grandparents ever took were to racetracks. The autumn following the summer of the death of Joe, the barber, they took a trip up to Rockingham Park in New Hampshire. The first night at the hotel, my grandmother ate oysters and had a dream about violet smoke. She told my grandfather at breakfast and he said, “Jeez, here we go,” and checked the morning line to see if there were any horses names that had anything to do with violet smoke. She made him slowly read off the names and finally decided on a horse in the fifth race called Quiet Pleas.
“What's that got to do with smoke?” asked my grandfather.
“It's kind of wifty like it,” she said.
“You're wifty,” he said and shook his head, but later, at the ticket window, he had a feeling and also put fifty dollars on Quiet Pleas to win. When the horse paid enough for them to ride home in a new car, he began to see the beauty of it.
