The Unnoticeables (29 page)

Ha-ha. Where would I run to?

What's the point, without Jackie? She's why I was in L.A. in the first place. She was so sure we'd make it. That we both had something special and amazing that we couldn't capitalize on anywhere else. What was I going to do, if I left her here? Go back to my shitty overpriced apartment and count roaches? Turn up to work so I could sling drinks and absorb the auditory poison of a thousand vapid L.A. douche bags?

I looked around for Marco. For the blank-eyed bastard that started all of this. It was hard to recognize him with half of his own face yanked off. But he was there: standing in front of those bloody turning gears, whirling and raving. They weren't words. Not that I understood, anyway.

Nonsense. All around me. Nonsense.

Carey saw that I wasn't moving and that he wasn't in good enough shape to make me. He looked sad. He released my hand.

Right now, I couldn't remember why I wasn't supposed to let him do that.

“Sammy,” he yelled to the angel, “Sammy, is that you?”

I laughed.

The living inferno that was killing my friend was named fucking
Sammy
? That's something you'd name a hamster.

The angel directed some of its focus toward Carey.

“Come on, Sammy. That has to be you. I'd recognize that rotten wino-breath anywhere, you ugly son of a bitch.”

The angel processed. It wavered, and then a brief snippet of clashing guitars faded in from nowhere. A moment of silence. Then a scent like a thunderstorm in the desert. It was trying to figure something out.

It was trying to figure out Carey.

“Knock that off, dumbass,” Carey snapped. His broken teeth gave the last word a whimsical little whistle. I laughed again.
It was all so goddamned funny.

“You know, I've been around too long to fall for that bush-league shit. Please, Sammy. I didn't know you well when you were still around, but we were always all right, you and me. I'm sorry that I only got a sense of who you were—who you really were—after you were gone. That was my fault. But I know what you were trying to do that night. I guess it didn't work, but you can still stop it here! I don't know what happens when you turn. If there's some little piece of you left in there or what—but you seemed like kind of a stubborn dick back in the day, so I'm going to bet that there is. If that's true, then you gotta stop it, Sammy. Don't let this fucker win.”

The angel flickered. It withdrew a bit. It dimmed a little. Carey smiled. It was a sad, gentle expression that I didn't think his crumpled paper bag of a face was capable of. And then the image of a half-burned T-shirt with the Spanish flag on the front flashed in the air in front of him. Carey's face curled up and he tried to spit something out. Then he screamed. His voice echoed. It was the only sound that did.

I looked to Jackie.

I couldn't see her anymore. Just slick, black ooze in the shape of a woman. Blinding white voids where her eyes and mouth should be.

I looked back to Carey. He was clutching his head in both hands. Bent double in pain. He saw me looking and grinned feebly, trying to reassure me.

I took a step toward the angel.

“Oh, son of a bitch.” Carey lunged for me, but he fell short, wracked with sudden spasms.

I took another step.

“Don't be a fuckin' moron!” he shouted from somewhere behind me.

But it was too late. I was already flying.

*   *   *

I don't know what I was expecting. That I'd go sailing straight through the light, unimpeded? That I'd, like, bounce away from its force field or something? No idea. I just know that I sure as hell didn't expect an angel to feel like cr
è
me br
û
l
é
e.

Maybe surface ice on a frozen lake is a better analogy: There was a thin, fragile shell that gave way the second I touched it. Then the light inside, dimmer but somehow bigger, with a texture like air in a library.

From the outside, the angel looked like a blank spot in the universe—impossible and deep and
wrong
—but not very big. The thing only had a diameter of a few feet, depending on how closely your eyes could stand to look at it. But when I cracked through the shell and into that vacant space, I didn't fall or impact or puncture the other side. I just drifted right on through into nothing.

I'm not explaining this right. I didn't have any literal sense of my body. I wasn't moving, but there was motion and sensation and … Look, I jump through windows and serve sandwiches for a living. I'm not a poet, and I've certainly never had to explain being removed from existence before, so cut me some goddamned slack, okay?

I figured I knew what was actually going on. Back in the real world, I was being solved. Purified or whatever. I was dead, dying, or just vanishing, and all this was the result of a few random brain cells firing, trying to make sense of visual information when they were no longer attached to eyeballs.

I was kind of okay with it. Maybe it would help Carey. Maybe it would help Jackie. Or maybe I just wouldn't have to deal with this crap anymore and I could get some rest.

God, I was going to miss my bed.

I felt a strange release of pressure all around me. An emotional atmospheric change. Have you ever been in the room at a party at the exact moment when two people decide to hook up? It's like you can feel their sense of impending accomplishment. Their restrained glee.

It was like that, but magnified and cruel and everywhere.

The angel was …
happy.
It was so satisfied that I was here. I was supposed to do this, I realized. This was exactly what it wanted all along. This was where it needed me to be.

I felt a pull on my brain stem. Not a physical pull, and not my physical brain stem, but that's how I think of the core of my being. Where I store whatever crude central impulses that make me who I am. And somebody had just put both of their greasy hands in there and taken out a heaping scoop of Kaitlyn.

It was a strange, violating sensation. Painful in an abstract, nostalgic way. Like hearing about a childhood friend that you haven't thought of in decades suddenly dying in a car crash.

I wanted to give it up. I wanted to be ready to let it all go because this was all just too goddamned much.

But I couldn't. I was just too mad about the whole thing. The angel wasn't just happy, it was
fucking smug.
There was no relief to the sense of satisfaction, because there was never any doubt. The angel always knew that I would do this. It wasn't like getting the big promotion; it was like telling your snotty kid brother “I told you so” after you warned him not to touch the hot pan.

I tightened my fists, though strictly speaking I don't suppose I had hands anymore. But I could feel my phantom extra finger there. It didn't hurt. In fact, it felt good. Stronger than ever.

I pictured swinging that fist into some self-satisfied ball of light's stupid face. Again and again and again and … something broke.

A little shard of light shook, dislodged, and fell away. I could see a two-inch snatch of varnished wood out there, beyond the whiteness. I gritted my teeth and mentally swung again. The void around me shook, or shimmered, or I don't know—it felt the impact somehow. Another shard fell. Bigger this time. I could see a weathered old hand, clutching at some thin brown and gray hair.

I gathered myself up, took a few metaphorical strides, and I sent a leaping soul-uppercut right to that radiant bastard's angelic balls.

More shards fell and the gaps widened. But, more important, I could see there was something in here with me now, floating around in the void like it had been dislodged from its anchor point. It was small. Made up of bits of broken glass and faded cloth. It sat just below me, rotating listlessly among the splintered light. It was a tiny little sculpture of the number six. It was crude and so simple, but there was genuine care put into it. You could tell just to look at it. Macaroni pictures on the fridge. An ashtray from camp.

I reached out with my immaterial hand and thought about touching it.

Warmth ran through my absent body. It settled in the empty space behind my eyes. It wanted to reassure me. It wanted to thank me. But it didn't have the words. So much of it was gone. It was just a little piece. Just the smallest remnant of a human being. A man named Sammy.

And he was so happy that it had all worked.

Then he was gone.

I took another look around the fractured null space. There were dull brown veins of corruption tracing their way through the pristine light. The atmosphere was different. Now it was like standing next to a coworker while he got chewed out by his boss.

The angel had done something very stupid, and it knew it was going to pay for it.

I thought of myself growing larger. I tapped into that smoldering little ball of fury in my gut that I can never seem to fully get rid of. I felt it cool and harden into iron. It gave me weight. I pushed out with my intangible hands and the white void strained. I pushed harder and it buckled. I reared back, curled the fingers of my left hand into a shaking fist, and I punched the bastard right in its heart. The light shattered into a million pieces, disappearing as they fell. Flecks of glass buried in the sand.

I laughed.

It all went black, and I finally got to rest.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.

I dreamed that I was floating on an impassive black sea. Its surface was glassy, unbroken and unending. Something in the water was sapping my strength, so I couldn't paddle or even turn my head. The moon was high above me, bright and cold. No clouds up there, just a flat, deep blackness. There was no border between the sea and the skies. They flowed into each other, a seamless sheet of stillness.

It was peaceful, in a way, but it also filled me with unease. I couldn't quite place why. Something about the depth of field in that sky was wrong. It took me a bit to figure it out.

The stars.

They were going out.

There was something swimming in the murk beneath me. I was sure of it now. I couldn't see it, and the waters didn't so much as ripple to betray its presence, but I knew it was there. You know the feeling: You're sitting in your living room, killing time—watching TV, playing on the Internet, just generally wasting the few unclaimed hours left in your life—when you suddenly drop the book or mute the television. A few seconds later, there's a knock at the door. You must have heard something, felt a vibration that gave away the visitor, but if you think about it, you can't place exactly what that something was. You weren't aware, and then suddenly you were.

So it was with this thing beneath me. I could feel it moving down there, like a planet through empty space: far away, unimaginably vast, and unspeakably uninterested in me. Then something changed. The entity shifted direction. It noticed me. It had a long way to go, but it was coming my way, and when it got here it would swallow me and barely notice.

I tried to move my arms. My legs. There was a weight on my chest. I recognized the feeling.

Sleep paralysis.

My eyes shot open, but it took a dozen panicked breaths and a careful effort to get my hands and feet to respond. I was in my own bed. I could see that much, though my room was dark. A sliver of light split clean through the gap between my closed door and the frame. There were voices out there. Hushed but happy. Giggling. I could hear music but couldn't make out what it was.

I focused on my fingers. I tried moving them, and though I broke out in a thin sweat from the strain, I eventually got two of them to twitch. With a shattering effort, I closed my right hand into a weak fist. I did the same with my left, and was so relieved when it moved that I almost didn't notice the ache in my useless extra finger was gone.

I tried to sit up slowly, but the head rush still exploded behind my eyes, tunneling my vision to a few bloody pinpoints. It passed. There wasn't room to stand—my bed takes up the entire room—so I shuffled on my butt toward the door. I twisted the knob, the chipped white paint coming off on my palm, and eased it open.

The voices paused.

My legs felt like half-inflated balloons. I moved like I was on wet stilts. I leaned heavily on the wall until I eventually made it to the living room. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw Carey frozen in place, obviously in the middle of telling a story of some kind.

At least I hope that was the reason he was miming a two-handed death grip on a giant imaginary cock, paused in mid–pelvic thrust against my recliner.

“K!” Jackie fired up out of the sofa like her ass was made of gunpowder. She flew across the room and locked her arms around me.

I laughed and tried to return the hug, but my arms were still weak. They rested uselessly on her back.

“Carey said you'd be okay, but Christ—you slept for, like, three days.”

Carey released his phantom phallus and gave me a knowing smile.

“I'm fine,” I meant to say, but instead I made a sound like a sick frog.

“I know three things,” Carey said happily: “You're going to sound like Clint Eastwood for at least a week, you're not going to poop for four days, and you can't remember the tune to ‘Amazing Grace.'”

“What?” I wiped the crust out of one eye and laughed at him. “What's that supposed to mean? Of course I remember ‘Amazing Gr—.' Holy crap.”

“I am the magic man. I take payment in cheap beer and cheaper women.”

“No, seriously. How did you know that? I honestly can't—it'll come to me, won't it?”

“Nope.” Carey shook his head. “It's totally gone. You'll have to relearn it. No idea why that is. The angels take different things when they do that nasty soul-scoop business. You'll be finding blank spots for years. But for some reason the melody for ‘Amazing Grace' is always gone.”