Strange City Page 6

  "It's tough, I know, Sonny," Uncle Vinny's voice was softer now with concern but still deep baritone, "but it'll be better for the family, for your mother, bless her heart."

  Parker wanted to respond to this soft, kind man who was . . . who was dead, who had died while Parker was in college. Parker's. It was his restaurant. There was no one else. Words eluded him still.

  "I've got the papers. All you have to do is sign them, Sonny. Think about your mother. You'll both be taken care of."

  There were papers on the table, and a pen. Had they appeared? Had he not seen them before? Taken care of. Someone would take care of him, and his mother. Hold me, Uncle Vinny? But why was the sign inside? Why were the barstools upholstered in blood-red? They should be green.

  "lust sign them, Sonny. Trust me."

  Trust. Be taken care of. Sign.

  "No!" There was another voice, another person in the room, but Parker could not see him.

  "Begone!" hissed Uncle Vinny in a whispery voice. "He is mine, m-i-i-ine."

  "No," answered the voice. It was calm, powerful.

  The papers burst into'flame. The pen melted away. Uncle Vinny scurried from behind the table. He had six spindly arms ending in claws protruding from his corpu­lent body. "Mine, m-i-i-ine," he hissed. A thin, forked tongue snaked out from between his sharp teeth. "Mine!"

  "Go!"

  Uncle Vinny dropped to the floor and scampered away, a fat cockroach fleeing the light, muttering and whining as he went.

  Footsteps coming closer. Shadowy form standing above him. The restaurant was fading away—bar, mir­ror, bottles, scent, tables. All that remained were Parker and the hazy figure before him. It reach toward him with two hands.

  Suddenly the haze, the perpetual fog, lifted. In front of Parker stood his father, not the spiteful vision of earlier, but a more accurate, realistic embodiment. His father held in his hands the caul, the death mask that Parker had unknowingly worn, that had distorted his vision and his understanding. Or perhaps it had protected him. Parker had a body himself, hands that were not sliced and peeled to the bone. He threw his arms around his father, but his father did not respond, and he was cold.

  Parker took a step back. He could see his father now. He had a tight smile, and those dark, piercing brown eyes. "I truly reap what I have sown," said his father. "Justin."

  Justin. Justin Parker. His father, Leonard Parker. With the names came words that had to be spoken, that would not be denied. They burst out as if they had been held back, dammed, for eons. "I didn't pull the trigger. I didn't. I just wanted you to hold me; and Uncle Vinny, when he died I had to take over the bar. There was no one else, and I tried. I did everything I could, but I couldn't do it. I wouldn't sell, and I wouldn't sell, but I couldn't hold on, and we went under, and it's a fucking parking lot anyway, and we got nothing." The words would not stop. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. "And there wasn't money for the nursing home. Her mind was gone, and I couldn't help her, and I couldn't afford to put her anywhere. Part of me died with her, and I loved her, and I loved you, Daddy, and I didn't pull the trigger." His body was wracked with sobbing. He felt spent. No more words were choking his throat. He buried his head in his father's shoulder. He wanted him to rub his back or stroke his hair softly, but there was no comforting response from his father. Lacking in life, even more lacking in death.

  "I know you didn't pull the trigger," said his father. "The spectres invade your dreams, your memories here. Whatever you saw before wasn't me, and that wasn't Vinny. It just wanted you to sign. It wanted your soul."

  Justin stepped back. His father may have saved him from the Uncle Vinny creature, but there was no warmth, no life, no completeness to be found here. There was something else still tugging at Justin. He could feel it more distinctly now that he knew a bit more about what had been before.

  His father spoke again, "There is power here, Justin. It won't be like before. You can help me. Let me teach you. I can be powerful, important. You can be impor­tant here."

  Justin took another step back, away from his father. This was not what was calling him. Something was wrong. He saw the death, the hunger in those deep brown eyes.

  "Come with me, Justin." A thin facade of patience was wearing away from his father's face. "Don't be an idiot. You were always a loser before. It can be different now. Come with me." Sympathetic hands reached out to Justin. He could see the white fingers with bulbous knuckles, the pale face, ichor dripping from the chin. "Come with me, Justin. Trust me."

  Trust me.

  Justin stepped farther back. The previous vision of his father had been false, but some truth had lurked within it, making it more believable. "You pushed her," said Justin. "You pushed her down the stairs."

  "Forget the past, Justin," slavered his father. "We

  can make a difference here. You can finally be worth

  something." '

  "You pushed her down the stairs," continued Justin, "and I didn't pull the trigger. You did. You did it to your­self. You made me feel like it was my fault, you bastard."

  "I removed your caul, Justin. I awakened you. I brought you into this world too. You owe me. You owe me!" His father's eyes were bulging, blood vessels about to burst. He stank of bourbon.

  "No!" Justin turned and ran.

  He could here his father screaming after him, "You'll regret this, boy! I'll make you regret it! You'll pay!"

  Justin was running from a wave. A giant crest of the Tempest was behind him, a tidal wave of chaos and loss, and he could not escape it. It crashed down upon him, carrying him with it. The despair, the regret, overwhelmed him; they tore at his soul, trying to gain entry ... his father's death, the muzzle in his mouth, the shotgun blast, the note accusing him; Uncle Vinny's final heart attack, bankruptcy, the park­ing lot; his mother's deterioration and death; his father's drinking; his drinking; so much failure, so much pain. But there was something more, some­thing important that was missing, it pulled him, something at which he had not even guessed. That was how he avoided the pull of Oblivion. He knew he was not done yet. The storm tossed him mercilessly, still reaching for his heart. He withdrew into himself and shut out the hopelessness.

  Eventually he noticed the silence. He was not sure when it had begun and when the din had faded away. The Tempest was not so close now. Its absence, or at least its remoteness, was soothing. Justin was in a room in the real world, or as close as he could come to the real world—the real world cloaked in the shadows of death. He was in an apartment that he knew in a brown-stone in the Mission District. The Mission Dolores was a mile or two away. The parking lot on South Van Ness that used to be his bar was only several blocks farther.

  The large living room had been turned into a studio. Brushes, tubes of paint, canvases, easels, and other painting paraphernalia were scattered about. Several of the canvases Justin knew were finished or partially com­pleted pictures, but to him they all appeared blank white. They were not alive to him. The carpet had been pulled up to make spilled paint easier to clean. Littering the floor were a surprising number of empty forty-ounce beer bottles and several empty Jack Daniels bottles. The room reeked of stale beer and liquor.

  The kitchen was much as he remembered it, as was the hallway to the bedroom. The bathroom door, on the right side of the hall, was closed. As he watched, the door bulged and then receded, pulsating slowly as if it were a beating heart. Justin turned away.

  He heard the footsteps coming up the two flights of stairs. Randi was home. She was the painter; she was the one with a vision of life. He had moved in after the restaurant had closed two years ago. She had cared for him as he had slid into self-pity. He could see now, only now, how much he had hurt her in the past.

  Up the steps—forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight—keys fumbling at the lock.

  She had left late Friday night, after the earthquake. Said she had had enough of the ground moving.enough of San Francisco. She had driven to Rio Dell to be with her family on ground t
hat was stable. He had known she would come back, but he had felt abandoned at the time. Two days of heavy drinking and everything had tumbled down upon him, all that the Tempest had found and more.

  The door opened and Randi stepped in with her bulging overnight bag. She never would get a real suit­case. She set the bag down and turned on the light. Justin had not noticed that it was off. She pushed her jet-black hair out of her face. Her fair skin was touched with blush on the cheeks. The loose sweater hung from her shoulders, her small breasts barely noticeable; her skirt brushed the floor. She saw the bottles, the mess. Her mouth crinkled with concern like it did when she stared at one of her paintings in progress. Justin want­ed to reach out to her, to touch her. She shivered and crossed her arms against her body. He wanted to take back everything he had ever said, everything he had done. How could he have hurt her in so many ways over the years? How could he have been so blind?

  She began to walk across the room. She seemed to move so quickly, lustin allowed himself a wry smile— the quick and the dead. Randi walked toward the hall­way, toward the rhythmically pulsating door which lustin could not face. He saw her pass, but he saw more: he saw within her. Inside her belly there was movement, the first stirrings of a child. His child. She could not even know yet. Dear God, what had he done? He had not known. He wanted to scream. How could he have failed her more? Give him another chance! Everything would be different this time.

  She walked past the bathroom into the bedroom looking for him. The light was on in there now. In a moment she would come back and open the bulging door. He knew what she would find—the old, giant bathtub, his body bloated, veins opened to the once-hot water, globules of congealed blood float­ing. How could he have done this to her? It had been Halloween, and the call of the voices and of the full moon had been so powerful.

  There was no scream. He merely heard her soft voice say, "No, baby. No." She came into the living room and leaned against the wall. She was changed; she was defeated. Justin could see death about her— extreme pallor; skin aging and falling away; the smell, the rotting flesh; and for just a moment her left eye seemed to glow eerily red. As he watched, her stom­ach began to swell. He could see the baby growing, struggling, tearing its way out into the cruel world. It did not break straight out. Instead it climbed upward, gouging its way through her chest, into her neck. Her body convulsed. Her mouth was forced open from within as she vomited blood and chunks of torn flesh. The semblance of a child climbed out, clawing apart Randi's cheeks as it did.

  Then the vision was gone. Randi leaned against the wall, shades paler than she usually was, hair hanging in her face. The child, a boy, rested in her belly. Her eyes were clear except for the tears beginning to form. She slid down the wall until she was sitting with her head on her knees. She began to cry quietly. Justin sat on the floor next to her. Why this torturous limbo? Why couldn't he just burn in Hell? He would have eternity to find out. He was bound somehow to her; and to the unborn child, both of whom he had failed so miserably. He wanted to cry as well, but he could not. He was filled only with emptiness.

  The Voice of the Hummingbird

  by S. E Somtow

  Huitzilopochtli.

  It was the will of the god named Hummingbird that our people should cease to be a wander­ing people, a desert people, an impoverished and simpleminded people, that we should journey down into the rich, green valley at the world's heart and claim its lakes and forests for our own, and rule over all the nations of the earth. We were a people with a grand and glorious destiny; we had been called to a special covenant with our god; and if there were things that our god commanded us to do which, to those who did not share our special relationship with him, appeared brutal, cruel, uncompassionate, it was only that we alone could see the higher purpose; that we alone were charged with the guardianship of the knowledge of the secret workings of the universe.

  It was the will of the god named Hummingbird that I should be the one to hear his voice and bear his message to my people; that I should lead them from the wasteland into the place where they would build the greatest of all cities, set in the center of the world as a turquoise in a circlet of gold. And it came to pass that I spoke, and the people obeyed, and we sealed our covenant with our own blood and the blood of the countless conquered. This was as it should be. Our people had been chosen.

  Later I would come to understand that there were others, people no less proud than our people, no less confident of their moral rectitude, no less certain that the salvation of the entire universe lay in the application of secret knowledge that only their tribe possessed; there was even, across the great ocean to the east, a people whose god had called them to cross a great desert and seal a covenant and conquer and build a great temple. We Mexica were not, after all, unique; we were merely a repeating pattern in the wheel of history; and our history was not even the only wheel that was in motion at the time.

  We didn't even have wheels then, anyway. After a dozen centuries I suppose one might be forgiven a few anachronistic metaphors. I learned about wheels a long time after the covenant was broken, in San Francisco.

  I learned about the other chosen people from lulia Epstein.

  There is a gap of about five hundred years in my exis­tence. One moment, the fire was raging in the streets of Tenochtitlan, and I was watching the stars fall from the sky, and cursing the silver-clad man-beasts called Spaniards who had blundered into shattering the equilibrium of the universe. Then, in a blink's breadth, it seemed, I was lying in a glass case, an exhibit in the San Francisco Museum, being pointed at by a petu­lant youth.

  That I might have slept for a time—a century or two even—would not have been surprising. I had done that before, though only of my own volition. I had slept all the way through the conquest of the peo­ple of Tlatztelhuatec; I knew it would be dull; they were little better than cattle. But there were no signs that I had been in suspended animation. No cognitive disjunction. No sensation of falling, falling, falling into the bottomless abyss.

  The room was gloomy; it had been designed to simulate the rocky chamber in which I had been found. There was no daylight. Torches flickered, yet they did not burn; the fire in them was cold and artificial.

  Even lying under the glass, unable as yet to move more than the twitch of an eyelash, fighting the inertia of the dreamless sleep, I was aware that the world had become far stranger than I could have imagined. The youth who stared down at me was a mongrel; he had the flat nose and dark skin of the Mexica, but there was also something about him that resembled the man-beasts from across the sea. He had no hair save for a crest that stood unnaturally tall and was dyed the color of quetzal feathers. His robes were of animal hide, but black and polished to an almost reflective smoothness. He was not utterly inhuman—his ears were pierced at least—but from them hung, upside-down, a pair of those silver crucifixes that symbolize the man-beasts' god, whom they call Hesuskristos, who is in reality Xipe Totec, the flayed god, as Hummingbird once revealed to me in a dream.

  He called out to a companion; this one's tufted hair was the color of fresh blood, and he wore a silver thorn through his left cheek. The language, at least, I knew, though the accent was strange and there were unfamiliar words; I had taken the trouble to learn the language of the man-beasts. There are two dialects; one, spoken by the black robes, is called Espafiol; the other is the language of their enemies, known as English. It was the second of these I heard, in a boy­ish voice muffled by glass.

  "Dude! It says he's been dead for five hundred years."

  "Pulled him out of the foundation of a fifty-story office building after that big Mexico City quake. Yeah, perfectly preserved and shit. A hollow in the rock, a natural vacuum."

  "Yeah, I saw it on 20/20."

  "Did you see that? He moved, dude!"

  "Yeah. Right."

  Five hundred years, but that was impossible! Hummingbird himself had told me that in a few short years the world would end in an apocalypse of blood and fire. Ho
w could five hundred years have gone by? Unless, of course, the world had already ended.

  That would explain the surpassing alienness of my surroundings. Even the air smelled strange. Even the blood of the two boys, which sang to me as it pumped through their arteries, exuded an unaccustomed odor, as though infused with the pulped essences of the hemp and coca plants.

  The one with the crimson hair said, "No, dude, I ain't joking. Look at him, man, I swear his eyelids are like, flickering."

  "You shouldn't have dropped acid at the Cure con­cert last night. You're still blazing, dude."

  I turned my head to get a better view.

  "lesus Christ!" they screamed.

  So the world had ended after all. The time of Huitzilopotchtli was over. There had been a fiery apocalypse—my memories had not deceived me— and we were now well into the World of the Fifth Sun, foretold to me by the god, and a new god was in power, the hanged god whose name those boys evoked, Hesuskristos.

  I was full of despair. I did not belong here. Why had I been suffered to remain alive? Surely I should have been destroyed, along with the city of Tenochtitlan, along with the great pyramids and tem­ples and palaces of my people. Could the gods not have been more thorough? But then that was just like them; come up with the grand concepts, leave their execution to imperfect mortals. I raged. My heart gave a little flutter, trying to bestir itself from its age-old immobility. My fury fueled me. I could feel my blood begin, sluggishly, to liquefy, to funnel upward through my veins like the magma through the twisty tunnels of Popocatapetl.

  Soon I would erupt.

  I lashed out. I heard shattering glass. The smells of the strange new world burst upon my senses. Then came the Hunger, swooping down on me as an owl on a mouse in the dead of night. No longer muffled, the rushing of young blood roared in my ears. The odor was sour and pungent. I seized the first creature by the arm, the one with the quetzal-feathered hair; the second, screaming, ran; I transfixed the prey with my eyes and filled him with the certainty of his own death; then, drawing him down to me, I fed.