http://www.frontstreetreviews.com/O%20Fortuna.html
Edward Morris
Reviewed By Ann Marie Chalmers
[Robyn Goodfellow, the former Larry Creswell, has just deposed the Goblin Queen of Faerie and freed his people from bondage. But he’s unable to face his true parentage or own up to the responsibilities of being a liberator. Robyn returns to Earth to Portland, Oregon, and begins living bohemian and trying to pass for human.
His first mistake is that Robyn’s rebound girlfriend is an Angel. Actually she is Lucifer’s big sister Alisander, first among the Heavenly Host. History knows her as Fortune, or more recently, Lady Luck. And she’s wanted in Arkadia, for all the right reasons… and some of the wrong ones.
This is the 2nd book in the The Arkadia and it is the sequel to Blood of Eden. In this book the reader can follow Robyn back for an even more savage return to Arkadia, in which the question of his own true origins is revealed after a front-lines tour of duty in the war between Heaven and Hell.]
So...you can reparse the original jacket copy I wrote and pass it off as your own work. Well done.
[This modern day fairy tale come futuristic paranormal]
What does this mean? 'Cum-' as in the Latin? Should read "modern cum-futuristic paranormal.' Dock five points for misuse of Latin.
[will look extremely tasty to some readers. However the book itself is a confusing read of babble that is hard to follow. ]
"While you judge the book, the book is also judging you." ---Stephen King
At least I can scrape together enough character to put my contact information on my website.
[The first book in the series was good and made the future books in the trilogy sound interesting but this series is turning out to be weird and not at all wonderful.]
There will be no third book in the trilogy, because you and the rest of the Samhain herd just want bodice-ripper porn so they quit running SF and fantasy. Why don't you go back to reviewing bodice-ripper porn and save the SF and fantasy for reviewers who can construct a sentence?
[Erratic and uninteresting this is not a piece of work that many will enjoy. ]
Germanic sentence structure, missing comma. Dock ten points.
[There are readers that will definitely like this style and story but it is not for the weak at heart or people who want to read a nice novel to relax. ]
"I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial predjudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible act of recreating the world in a new way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water."--- Harlan Ellison
[This author obviously has a new writing technique that is unique and a required taste that will either taste lovely or have you throwing it away after a few bites.]
The feeling is so very, very much mutual.
A required taste? I think you mean an 'acquired taste'. Dock fifty points for not checking your work. Hope those Website Design classes work out a little better for you than English class did, although it doesn't look too hopeful.
Edward Morris
(503)875-6326
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
PO' LAZARUS (play)
By Edward Morris
(c) 2009 by Edward R Morris Jr All Rights Reserved
*Any attempts to claim this work as your own will result in genital necrosis, edema, and may complicate swallowing.
SCENE: In front of a sprawling, dilapidated SOUTHERN MANSION with a whitewashed signboard reading CITY HALL. A double door in the front and a single door on either side.
There is a PLATFORM across the whole front. From PLATFORM, steps lead down and in to CHORUS GROUND.
ANNIE and IRENE enter from CENTRAL DOUBLE DOOR of CITY HALL.
ANNIE
O sister, little sister,
what else could go wrong now,
after the graybacks
dragged Dad out of City Hall,
and sent him on the road.,
and we had to go on the county?
Ask me again. So much
gits lost between the lines.
Look at these
WAR DEPARTMENT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO: ANNIE AND IRENE EDDOWES
MY DEAR LADIES: STOP. WE GREATLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU…
WAR DEPARTMENT
CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
TO: ANNIE AND IRENE EDDOWES
MY DEAR LADIES: STOP. WE GREATLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU…
IRENE
It’s news to me. Eddie and Paulie
both lied about their ages when
they jined up. The mystery-train
from Richmond just made
the drop. Undertaker’s got
Eddie now. You know none of the folks
was talkin’ to Paul, still, since he went
up there and joined the artillery. I got
that one letter of his. I wrote him back
the once. I guess he’s dead, huh?
ANNIE
Mayor Crowe made nice with the Yankees
till their train rolled out. I was at
the depot this mornin’. I done seen. Mayor
had the Sherriff load all the bodies they left
onto Leroy Helsel’s rig, every last blue back,
out to the Town Dump. Tomorrow, while
the parade’s goin’ on for the other
persuasion, they’re burnin’ all them bodies.
Boys we kissed in the play-yard, men
from our church. But that ain’t even
the thing.
I’m buryin’ Paul by the back
wall of the churchyard tonight. Pastor
said he wouldn’t tell. Girl, you come on
and help me gather him up.
IRENE
You must of bumped your head on somethin’.
ANNIE
I’ll bust your head off somethin’, mouth.
Mayor’s sendin’ Eddie off with a twenty-
one gun salute from the Army of Southern
Virginia. Paul died harder’n Eddie. Paul
was at the front, and that mortar
blew his brains out the back
of his head.
Sherriff put out handbills, said
anyone caught goin’ out to the dump
after they husbands or they sons
is gonna be hung for treason.
Mayor Crowe says Maryland
gonna secede, too, any day, and
none too soon for him, I guess.
So there you go.
Now you got to figure
if you gonna be Mayor’s dishrag,
or help me lay rest
that little boy you taught
to tie his shoes.
IRENE
Just what is it you want me to do?
ANNIE
You heard me the first time.
IRENE
But you just said Sherriff---
ANNIE
Paulie is our brother.
IRENE
We’d get hung.
ANNIE
Mayor can go on and fill his hand.
IRENE
Did you just wake up an’ forget, this mornin’?
Soon’s Daddy crossed the town line,
they shot him down like a yella dog.
We’re just women, Annie. We cain’t
fight City Hall. I’ve taken it to God.
I cain’t take it to the Mayor. He’d
th’ow me off the grounds.
ANNIE
Well, stay at home, then, if that’s how it lies.
You want to talk to me about the Lord? I’m
about His business, and I ain’t afraid
to die.
IRENE
You ain’t bein’ fair.
ANNIE
I’m bein’ fair to Paulie.
IRENE
Annie, I’m just ascairt
to be buryin’ you too.
ANNIE
What for are you ascairt?
You got your own hide to look after.
IRENE
Well, Sherriff won’t hear about this from me.
ANNIE
Why not? Call the newspaper!
They’ll be fixin’ to cut a path your way when they
find out you kept mum.
IRENE
I was you, I’d be prayin’ instead
of runnin’ your mouth.
ANNIE
Ain’t got to. I know what
needs done.
IRENE
Don’t believe you c’n do it, though.
ANNIE
I’m breathin’. Till I ain’t … I will.
IRENE
You’ll git caught.
ANNIE
You git on home.
Paul an’me’ll settle you later.
IRENE
Don’t put me in this spot.
Truly, I want to help, we
just cain’t.
#
PARODOS
CHORUS
A bloody sun rises
over the seven back roads
out of Thebes County.
The Johnnies come
swinging home on
crutches.
Paul saw his brother’s face on every one
as he primed Gun Four against those
hungry barefoot bayonets. The tide
was turned, and Billy Yank tore
out throats. The even-now-bygone
South pushed up the teeth
of dragons as the blood
soaked into the ground
in hot white haze.
CHORAG.
The gods delight
in stripping braggarts
of all ego, and when
the aggressive
Southern suh
let loose his yell,
the first gray back
fell forward ‘neath
the guns.
CHORUS
Paul waved his cap in the air
for joy, but his whoops
turned to blood in his young throat
as he met the ground,
courtesy of the Rostina sharpshooters.
His most maddened comrade-in-arms
was given pause.
Now the sun is up,
but not the same.
In the Yankee camps,
they sleep late for
the first time in
weeks. Tonight
the fiddle and
bow, concertina,
mouth-organ,
full and empty
jug
will give praise
to His terrible swift sword.
#
SCENE I
CHORAG.
The Mayor hath returned
from the dump.
Junior Crowe, beloved of Richmond’s
courthouse crowd, well past the first
hundred days, shall speak.
Why has he called
a Town Meeting? The smoke
of that closed room scrys blood
upon the moon.
ENTER MAYOR CROWE from CITY HALL. MAYOR speaks to CHORUS from a PODIUM, wheeled out by BLACK STAGE HANDS, hung with RED-WHITE-AND-BLUE BUNTING.
MAYOR
Dis-tin-guished gentlemen,
our ship of state is coming
in, with God as my captain.
If you are wondering why
I have called you here
today, it is because I
know that your trust
is unimpeachable.
Your devotion to former
Mayor Larry Eddowes,
unfortunate father to the late
mayor Rex Eddowes,
never wavered. Even when
Rex was in office, you still
respected the position, and
when Rex left our town, you
still showed your love to his
two daughters, Irene and
Annie.
Hrrump. Unfortunately,
as you all well know,
Rex’s two fine sons
Paul…and…Eddie …
have killed each other
on the field of battle.
Now, no politician
can expect
his constituency
to respect him without
proof. Nonetheless,
I stand before you to
proclaim as a man
that I have only
the bitterest scorn
for the kind of Mayor
who does not put his
people first, to follow
the course he knows
to be best for them. As
for the man who puts
his private life before
the public, I could
care a hang for him
as well.
(MAYOR, continued)
As God is my witness, if my constituency
were ever in true Yankee peril, I would
not be afraid to speak of it, and I would
have no truck with anyone who said
otherwise. I value friendship as highly
as the next man, but relationships that
jeopardize the state are of no true
worth.
That’s where I stand, anyhow, and why
I’ve decided, as far as the mayor’s very
problematic sons are concerned:
Eddie died like a man, and should
by all rights receive full military
honors. But brother Paul, who
came back to fight on the wrong side
just a stone’s throw from his home town,
whose lone goal was to spill the blood
that is also his own, and sell his kinfolks
down the river, Paul, Ah say, Paul, is to
have no burial. No one should so much
as go and say a word over him. He
will lay out there until we burn him,
and the scavengers can revel.
This is my edict as your Mayor.
Traitors shall not lay in the same churchyard
as our boys. But whoever shows that he
is on our side will have my hand alive,
and my heart when dead.
CHORAG.
The Mayor has spoken.
MAYOR
So I have. Listen.
CHORAG.
We are old men. Let the young bucks
here in town do what is needed.
MAYOR
Not that, moron. We have a militia.
CHORAG.
Then what are we to do?
MAYOR
You will offer no quarter to the breakers of this new law.
CHORAG.
You’re insane to woo our love with death.
MAYOR
Yet the sharpest practice
sometimes counts a few coins in our favor.
DEPUTY
Excuse my lack of wind, Mister Mayor,
Cain’t say I stopped to switch horses, on account of
every time I done stopped I wanted to turn back
around and surrender to the Yankees. Figured, though
if someone else done told ye, I’d git twict the hidin’.
MAYOR
Get on with it, chuckle-head. What’s the word?
DEPUTY
I didn’t do hit. Nobody saw who did. Please
don’t lynch me, Boss Crowe, Maisie’s
got the new baby on the way, an’ I just---
MAYOR
Wellnow, if’n I could figure out
what you didn’t do, I’d devise
the most spectacular way to
not punish you for it. Have
at it.
DEPUTY
We did us a new head count down ‘t th’ dump.
That Briggs boy, the one don’t know much, said
he’s gone for a shit an’ couldn’t remember
just exactly when. Briggs’ turn on watch, that was. He
forgot to tell me.
Paulie Eddowes turned up gone, Boss Crowe.
You tell me what you want me ‘n th’ boys to do.
Long pause. MAYOR CROWE speaks through clenched teeth.
MAYOR
Who did this.
DEPUTY
Weren’t no one saw! No cart tracks in or out!
You know how bad Shaw lets them roads git. We’d
of seen fresh ruts. Hain’t been nothin’ but birds
at t’other’n’s, an’ birds don’t do that.
We’s all blamin’ t’other. Any of us coulda done hit.
But I swear to you, Boss Crowe, on my Mama’s eyes,
hit weren’t me.
MAYOR is doing a slow burn. DEPUTY plows on, oblivious.
DEPUTY
I got the short straw to come tell ye, boss. I’d be obliged
if you’d tell Maisie I love her, and I’m sorry.
CHORAG.
Mr. Mayor, mightn’t this be
a sign from God?
MAYOR
Oh mah holy God, will you buncha old ladies
shet up long enough s’I can git this one thought out?
Have all of you lost your natural minds? Why would God
intercede for a Yankee? No, this is the work of
Nawthun spies. They bribed the Briggs boy. His parents
met at a family reunion on the same picnic table.
Money! The Yanks is fat as hawgs with it.
Away with our livelihood,
our brothers moidered,
our best minds stripped
and poisoned. The Crooked Man
runs roughshod over this land
with his carpet-bag,
and his name
is Money.
to DEPUTY
Some-body did this, suh. Unless he done
got up and walked away, which would
have been some manner of mean feat with
half a face, you must agree.
You will find that man and deliver him
to the jail house, or that new baby gonna
be an orphan. Suh. I will put you in chains,
find out your boss’ name and address, and
then teach you somethin’ your Daddy should
of done: that you might git a long, long leash
but in the end, we all pay the Fiddler.
DEPUTY
Uh, Boss Crowe, if I c’d just …say…er---
MAYOR
I sho’ do git sick of the sound of your voice.
DEPUTY
Could be yew’re just peaked. Y’ought
to go back downtown an’ take a nap. That’s
just mah opinion, don’t hang me now.
MAYOR
I am not upset!!!
DEPUTY
I just mean… this is a lot to---
MAYOR
You shut your face hole, you ape.
DEPUTY
Ah didn’t do hit—
MAYOR
No, you was just the middle man, huh?
DEPUTY
We all owe you a lot, Boss Crowe,
but yore wrong. Suh.
MAYOR
Find the man who did this, or you
gonna be tellin’ it to the undertaker
with a size-ten gaiter up y’ass.
EXIT MAYOR from CITY HALL.
DEPUTY
‘Find the man who did this…’ Or git yore neck stretched.
I’ll take my chances with the Yankees.
EXIT DEPUTY
#
ODE I
CHORUS
O God has set such bounteous wonders
forth in Creation, but none like Man.
The shining seas hold his vessels high.
He plows the womb of Mother Earth.
The lion, the unicorn lie side-by-side
at his feet.
The Genius of the Weather bends to him.
All Idea structuring structures in
his head, every vast Senate
battlefield picnic lawn,
Death is the only South he cannot win.
O unconquerable mind that shall never call retreat!
O Weird Sisters cutting the raw threads with the spun!
When the South rises, how its cities shine!
When holes creep into its coat of mail,
Will Richmond stand? The center
must hold, while all about
are losing theirs.
#
SCENE II
RE-ENTER DEPUTY, LEADING ANNIE
CHORAG.
What is the meaning of this? Annie Eddowes ain’t no spy.
DEPUTY
That might be, but she was fixin’ to put some stolen property
in a hole by the churchyard wall. Our stolen property. Is the
Mayor about?
CHORAG.
He said he’d be along tereckly.
RE-ENTER MAYOR CROWE
MAYOR
You back already?
CHORAG.
What is the meaning of this?
DEPUTY
Mister Mayor, I spoke out of turn, before.
Tell you the truth, I was fixin’ to run off.
But I didn’t have to draw lots to come back this time.
We found her buryin’ Paulie,
an’ desecratin’ church grounds to do it.
MAYOR
But this is my ward. Someone please explain this to me.
DEPUTY
Well, Mayor, you see, I think—
MAYOR
I don’t pay you to think. Tell it front to back.
DEPUTY
The storm was blowin’ down branches all through town.
They was chain-lightning on the railroad tracks, and worse.
Only time the sun came out all afternoon
was when we caught her in the churchyard.
She musta toted him from the dump on her shoulders,
Though she looked like she’s about to fall over.
And she sang him to rest. We took her after.
She let us tie her hands.
Mister Mayor, I’m glad I’m in the clear, but
Annie was in my class at school. I think
she kissed me once. This ain’t good.
MAYOR
Miss Annie, what do you have to say for yourself?
ANNIE
Yeah, I kissed this fool once.
I’d do it again. I’m not sorry.
MAYOR
Now Annie, you can’t tell me no one told you
not to bury him.
ANNIE
You put up handbills.
MAYOR
The pressman was two hours late. Cost the earth, too.
But you heard why not, and you went and did it anyway.
ANNIE
Bible says you got to keep God’s law before Man’s.
Wars come and go, but you bury your kith… and constituents.
If that’s a hangin’ offense, then string me up. I’d rather
die than turn my back on my brother. At least he
understands.
MAYOR
She’ll learn. Women gener’ly do.
We’ll break her spirit. Who looks
like the bigger fool if I let her slide?
We all know about Rex. Rex’s daughters
just bought themselves the end of a long rope.
(TO CHORUS
Couple of ye go fetch Irene.
‘Spect she’ll be up at the house,
a-wailin’ and a-gnashin’ teeth.
Least she ain’t braggin’ about it in public.
ANNIE
Mayor, you got me. Leave
the rest where it lies.
MAYOR
I got you. That’ll do, just yet.
ANNIE
Then hang me and be done with it.
All this talk just makes me sick.
I bet you’re sick of it, too.
Justice has been done.
I’ll go to my reward. When
you’re on the bottom rung
of the ladder, no one listens,
But everyone here understands,
even if they’re all in your
hip pocket.
It must be quite something
to be a politician. Where
do I join up?
MAYOR
You a minority of one, girl.
ANNIE
Think so? You hold the leash
on everyone else here.
MAYOR
Could be. But you’re the red-handed one.
ANNIE
I did right. My hands are clean. Judge not, lest you yourself---
MAYOR
What about Eddie? You gonna cart him off
And bury him, too, with this insult on him?
ANNIE
Eddie understands.
MAYOR
…that Paulie was a turncoat.
ANNIE
It’s God makes brothers, not the laws of Man.
MAYOR
Paulie fought for Nawthuhn aggression.
Eddie fought for his home town.
ANNIE
You honor your dead. No matter what
their affiliation.
MAYOR
I honor the righteous, not the wicked.
ANNIE
Who are you to decide?
MAYOR
I’m Mayor, that’s who.
ANNIE
I love my brothers, and I’d die for either one.
MAYOR
Then go have the reunion in Hell.
CHORAG.
Look here, they got Irene.
She don’t look too happy about it,
neither. We all here, ain’t we, little sister?
What you got to say for yourself?
IRENE
Guilty as charged, mister Mayor. That’s about it. If she’ll even let me get that out.
ANNIE
No you didn’t, girl. That ain’t fair. You wouldn’t come with me to the churchyard, you ain’t gonna do this now.
IRENE
I told you before what I was prepared to do. Here I am.
ANNIE
Girl, everybody knows who did this. Quit runnin’ your mouth and maybe they’ll let you get on home.
IRENE
This is my duty, here.
ANNIE
You ain’t gonna steal my thunder.
IRENE
What’s the point bein’ the last of Daddy’s line?
ANNIE
Why’n’t you ask the Mayor?
IRENE
What am I supposed to do?
ANNIE
Save your own hide.
IRENE
But we’re both to blame---
ANNIE
Turn it off, kid. I’m already dead.
MAYOR
Well, ain’t this family. One done lost her mind. T’other was born without one.
IRENE
Grief can bend the best of us, Mister Mayor.
MAYOR
It don’t git much more bent than steppin’ up onto the gallows with the guilty.
IRENE
I’d rather die than be the last of the line.
MAYOR
Too late. You heard your sister. Girl done said she’s dead already.
IRENE
She’s engaged to your boy, in case you forgot.
MAYOR
There’s plenty of fields left for Hank to plow. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near that, now.
CHORAG.
You gonna tell Hank that?
MAYOR
He can read it in the paper. Mistah Deputy Dawg, kindly take both of ‘em back to the jail house. Brave men run when they see Death coming, let alone a couple of girls.
EXIT DEPUTY, ANNIE AND IRENE
CHORUS
The lucky ones
never walk through this
rain of artillery, rockets’
red glare and the
sharpshooters
sniping. Never
as in song, the
bombs bursting
in air are Polish
cannons loaded down
with twenty pounds of
ten-penny nails stolen
off the P.R.R. line. A blind fawn
fallen from friendly fire lies
below a man’s
left hand spiked to a tree.
Stump-witch watching
from the woods leaves that
one right where it
hangs.
Our longhouse has been
forever shaken. We damned
our children well. We authored
this whirlwind we now reap,
As we munch cold chicken legs
Through the smoke of Manassas, sip
Beaujolais red as the Fort Sumter aquifer, toast
Our gilded Imperial dream,
While George Pickett puffs up proud
as a peacock in the front sights of a
Sharps rifle, while Lee
twitches through bad dreams
before sunset, while Lo
Armistead keeps his head
down, while Davis
drowns in his
ledgers,
While Lincoln closes his eyes, and tries
Once more, in vain, to sleep,
The die is cast. The enraged rose
waits for sunset. No one knows
when the master will
approach, and demand
to see the books.
In New England, the scribes
may beat their breasts. Lovers
can write letters. Poets still
dream of the last battle. The waking
earth still smokes, and shell-shocked
deserters still shamble the woods
like Odin, far from home, unable
to lie down at any hearth.
There can be no Justice without cost.
In poene veritas.
#
SCENE III
CHORAG.
Mayor, Hank’s here. Last of your line. Figure he’s got something to say
about his fiancee.
ENTER HANK
MAYOR
Figure we’ll find out, won’t we. And no need of an advisor, neither.
Boy, you done heard when I passed judgement on that trash.
You gonna come here with poison in your mouth, or mind me?
HANK
I’m your son, sir. That’s deeper to me than this. Why should I start
disobeyin’ you now? You made me what I am.
MAYOR
You honor your Pa first. That does me proud to see. I prayed for that.
Keeps me from being a laughingstock among the uh employees.
You’re right to keep your head about that one, boy. Your joy with her
would soon petrify, and then you’d have a harpy in bed and out of it.
She can git on down to Hell and hunt a husband.
It’s not even a question to me. I can’t go back on my own word about all this.
She’s gonna claim ‘family.’ But if I can’t keep my own house in hand,
then I shouldn’t be in office.
I can’t abide by lawbreakers, social critics. I was elected.
Just and unjust, for better or worse, that’s the contract.
The ones who can listen to that should be in charge.
They’re the ones who’ll stick by you when the bullets fly.
Show me a greater evil than economic occupation.
This is what cracks a country asunder. The just man’s life
revolves around discipline. No woman will seduce
our juristic standards. Let a man do it, at least. There is not
a woman stronger than us.
CHORAG.
Boy, you sure said that right.
HANK
Paw,
You do right to warn me against
losing my reason. I cain’t yet say
you’ve not done right by this. But other
fellers can get to the same point, too. You might
give some of ‘em ear. The vox populi depends on
that, like ye allus told me. We got to have some kind
of Town Meeting, just for form’s sake, if nothin’
else. How would we be any better than the damn
Yanks makin’ people sign loyalty oaths?
You hear about them camps in Bleeding Kansas?
You hear ‘bout what they doin’ to the old Free-Soilers?
It hain’t right, and if we stoop so low with one,
We’re no better’n what they do with one hundred or one thousand.
People know yore all fired up’thar about this. They ain’t
gonna try to rile you. Yore mayor, voted in and all. But
they say no woman ever died for such an act of Christian charity
as to bury a brother what fought for t’other
persuasion. They cain’t hardly see how it’s a hangin’
offense. That’s just the way I’ve heard them put it down
at the barbershop, the drugstore, the saloon and th’ store.
You got to see, Paw,
I want ever’body to be happy. You got
to rule the people by situation. You got
to see ever’ situation for what it
is. You got to see Reason. ‘Cause, well,
the stubborn treen ever bends
when the river’s up over its banks.
I seen them kind of trees,
torn out and floatin’. The big’uns
have to git torn out one root
at a time.
CHORAG.
Boy’s got a way with words. So do you, Mr. Mayor.
MAYOR
Why should I listen to someone one-third my age?
HANK
If I’m telling the truth, why does age have any bearing?
MAYOR
So it’s right for an eighteen-year-old to bear witness for a seditionist?
HANK
Criminals get none of my respect.
MAYOR
By inference, I’d ask if ...then, Annie ain’t no criminal in your eyes.
HANK
Nobody in this whole damn town would say she was.
MAYOR
And the town tells me how to run it?
HANK
Well, yessir, that was sort of the compact---
MAYOR
Round here, I’m the Bull of the Woods. I say what goes.
HANK
Ain’t no woods if it takes orders from but one Bull.
MAYOR
You’d sell out your own Paw for a woman.
HANK
If you was a woman. It’s worrying about you that---
MAYOR
Yeah, you’re so worried that you’re about to throw down on me in public.
HANK
You’re about to throw down on God, sir, and may I say that you are outgunned.
MAYOR
How far she got her hand up your ass to make you talk to me like that, boy?
HANK
I talk like everyone else in this town talks, except you and the golden calf you got in the barn.
MAYOR
You ain't marryin' Annie while I'm alive.
HANK
You hang her, they'll be two to bury that day.
MAYOR
My retarded son threatenin' me? Boy, you must of bumped your head on somethin'. String her up, and give him a front row seat!
HANK
Long as somebody's listenin', you go on and run your mouth.
EXIT HANK
CHORAG
You know what a boy that age'll do, you git 'em all fired up there ‘boutit.
MAYOR
Let him raise Hell. It won't bring them two little bitches back to life.
CHORAG
Irene's gonna swing too? When'd we vote on that?
MAYOR
Naw, naw, what am I thinkin'? Irene ain't got dirt on her hands. Blood neither.
The family reunion in Hell will be one short.
#
ODE III
CHORUS
Love bankrupts the tycoon and keeps
the midnight lamp alive in young girls’ wild eyes.
Star of the sea, search party in the wilderness,
Before you even the gods must whirl all night like marionettes.
We only get one dance at a time,
And shake, and wake up thin.
You steer us off the road with our consent,
Strike prodigal fathers and sons to make that spark.
You Strike Anywhere from those wild eyes
themselves the lens of Heaven’s fire.
So Love’s blind justice makes fools of us all.
#
SCENE IV
As Annie enters, surrounded by town cops,
CHORAG
You'll forgive me for not giving three cheers,
Or keeping back my tears at what I see. Today,
we murder one of our own.
ANNIE
All of you take a good long look today.
I go down to the river to sleep in the dark.
The bullfrogs and crickets sing my wedding song.
CHORAG.
Look how high she holds her head
after your idea of a trial. I don’t think
the message got sent. I never done seen
a man go to the gallows that way.
ANNIE
I have turned to stone. Every raindrop
that falls on this town will be my tears.
CHORUS
That’s taking a lot for granted.
ANNIE
You had any sense, you would
have waited till I was dead to
trumpet your ignorance. You fortune-hunters,
War hawks, secessionists. I give myself back
to this land that’s eaten braver than you and made
no apologies.
CHORUS
She talks just like her Dad. Small wonder, and
the way he ended up.
ANNIE
He damned me with his life and silence.
Small wonder, indeed. Small minds,
small towns. He made me an outsider
since I was born.
CHORUS
You did the crime, now do the time.
ANNIE
Just shut up and kill me already.
MAYOR
You’d argue with them forever if it got you a stay of execution.
to the cops:
You men have your orders. Take her to the town square.
We got the scaffold up. Our hands are clean.
ANNIE
The sooner I’m back with my kinfolks, the sooner
Paulie will stand before me and tell me what I
already know. I did what was right, what had
to be done. You reward me with a hanging. God
already closed the book, and only God can judge
our Mayor.
But if He finds a guilty verdict,
Let the Mayor swing beside me.
CHORAG.
Can’t never break a wild child, not even with a hemp rope.
MAYOR
You men don’t snap to, I’ll make you sorry you waited.
ANNIE
The Voice of the People.
MAYOR
You best believe it.
ANNIE
You see how the people stood for this abortion.
Remember what you see, and who made it so,
Because I wouldn’t break God’s law.
to the cops:
Come on with it, I ain’t got all day.
COPS, ANNIE EXIT STAGE LEFT
CHORUS
A queen is still a queen when locked in stone
And God upon her pours His wondrous love
in gold. Oh child, no old money, no battle-hardened army
Can stand against the loom and mill of Fate.
The king who tries dies screaming out his last
To no one but the cold madhouse wall,
For thinking he could summon in the tide,
while befouling all our natures every day.
The old railroaders down th’ barbershop
Still talk of dur’n the War of 1812
When the ironmaster’s wife kilt both
his sons by his first wife, and was put to death.
All the young men in town had fought for her.
No beautiful more pious one to see.
But she got married young and thought she’s dead,
Her home became her scaffold, just like yours.
#
SCENE V
ENTER TOBY, old blind black man, led by a barefoot young boy.
TOBY
Two sets of eyes and one can see. I got
to walk lock-step befo’ ya, Mistah
Mayor, that’s the way.
MAYOR
That old blind bastard from downtown,
plays piano at Mary’s for the whores. Ain’t much that man
don’t hear. What you got to say, boy?
TOBY
I got the Word, mistah Mayor. Give me yo’ ear.
MAYOR
Ain’t I always good to ye?
TOBY
When I tells you what you wants to hear.
MAYOR
I owe you a lot, old man.
To what do I owe the honuh, suh?
TOBY
That you have reached the very edge.
MAYOR
You better start makin’ sense.
TOBY
Even out in my rockin’ chair,
Those crows was makin’ such a ruckus.
Done tore each other apart. I strike a light
in my stove to start up supper, ain’t
no flame. That joint of lamb
done rot to grease in front
of me. I felt it. I smelt it, and the boy
He set the same.
This is your doin’, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
God showin’ us what you put at table.
Any good man clean up his mess.
To not do is the only sin.
Why you got to fight a dead man?
Who is it gonna come and pin the medal to yo’ ches’?
I shouldn’t even have to chirp.
You ought to already know.
MAYOR
I knew there was a reason I took this office.
So I could sit still for a blind half-wit nigger
havin’ a senile-dementia conniption.
I don’t care if all the damn dead hereabout mount up
on wings of eagles and drop black plague in my soup.
What’s done is done. Can’t me or none of mine
oppose God’s will. Somebody must of paid you good
to say this to me. Who was it? I’ll pay you double.
TOBY
Ain’t never met a politician yet could understand
Wisdom got no price.
MAYOR
And bribin’ a soothsayer is lower than snake shit.
TOBY
You dyin’, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
MAYOR
You’re the one knows everything. As you say.
TOBY
And I’m the one for hire.
MAYOR
Sho. Got to cross the fortuneteller’s palm with silver.
TOBY
Where a politician will generally hold out for forty pieces.
MAYOR
You forget who you talkin’ to, boy.
TOBY
Weren’t for me, you’d have no office, and you know it.
MAYOR
You good, boy, but you a sellout.
TOBY
You keep puffin’ up, I wasn’t gonna say---
MAYOR
Speak what you got to speak. I ain’t payin’ you for it.
This is your spare time.
TOBY
Oh, you be payin’ out soon, but not to me.
MAYOR
Keep talkin’, could be someone might listen.
TOBY
Then getcha bankbook out, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
And start writin’ this down: Little while, you gon’ pay
in yo’ own flesh and blood, the debt which you now owe.
God callin’ in the marker on the promissory note.
You put the daughter of the light into the center of the dark.
And from the center of the dark,
you kept they Johnny from marchin’ down.
You denied the dead the grave. You gave the grave to one alive.
This is yo’ crime. And they don’t nevah lack for coal
In the boiler-room whose only office
you gon’ hold.
Week from Sunday, yo’ house
be fulla weepin’ women. They
will cuss ya mama with the blood
of evah man about to die in this great
war yet to come.
You still wanna buy me now,
Mistah Mayor,
suh?
Come on, son, get me back on up
to the house. Let this fool holler
at the kids. Maybe he’ll learn
to keep a civil tongue in that ol’
melon head.
EXIT TOBY
CHORAG
Can you remember the last time Toby was ever wrong?
MAYOR
If we give in now, we lose.
CHORAG.
Please, take my advice.
MAYOR
Speak.
CHORAG
Call off the hangin’ and bury the boy. Do it yourself.
And you better hurry up.
MAYOR
Heavy hangs the head and pounds
the heart. Let’s go see what’s
to be done.
#
PAEAN
CHORUS
O Lord, who named Yourself
I AM WHO I AM
In thunder and in fire,
In cold lightning
The torches flare in the town square
The children are watching
Come now through the muddy streets
That melt and run with plague
Down Alleghenies’ mournful slopes
This river soon all blood
Oh, God, bring down the rain
And wash this all away.
#
EXODOS
ENTER WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH-BOY
WUTB
The only constant is Change.
The fire consumes the righteous and the wicked.
Who could have said Mayor Crowe
was still alive when he got up
that morn? When a rich man’s dead
and walkin’ in his mansion, give me back
my shotgun shack.
CHORAG.
I don’t much like your tone. What goes?
WUTB
Hank done blowed his own fool head clean off. Sharps rifle.
CHORAG.
And his Daddy?
WUTB.
Drove him to it, most likely, with that mess this mornin’.
CHORAG.
Toby saw it all.
WUTB.
What else is new? Just thought you might
like to know, so’s you could draw your
own conclusions. Me and the Mayor
buried Paulie. I had to help him dig.
Hank had the rifle waitin’ at the scaffold.
Mayor’d got there about a minute too late
to call off the hangin’. Hank said
if his Dad didn’t want to watch, he could
turn his head.
EXIT TELEGRAPH BOY
ENTER MAYOR, BEARING HANK’S SHATTER-HEADED CORPSE
MAYOR
It’s all over.
My own blind heart did this.
I killed my boy. Hank, too young
to even think of Death. This should
be me.
CHORAG.
Too little, too late.
ENTER TELEGRAPH BOY
WUTB.
You got one more up to the house, Mr. Mayor.
MAYOR
Is it... my wife... oh, Jesus. Enid?!?
WUTB
You go look for your own self.
CHORAG.
Wouldn’t pray any more if I was you.
God has cast judgement and turned
a deaf ear to the bailiffs that lead you now.
WUTB leads MAYOR into the house.
CHORAG. speaks directly to AUDIENCE
CHORAG.
Call no man happy without wisdom.
What wisdom could have brought down such a storm, what
words but hot, vain wind, answered
in lightning, what pride, what
great equalizer?
FADE OUT TO GUNSHOTS, MARCHING BOOT SOUNDS
AND MILITARY BAND RENDITION OF “DIXIE”
(c) 2009 by Edward R Morris Jr All Rights Reserved
*Any attempts to claim this work as your own will result in genital necrosis, edema, and may complicate swallowing.
SCENE: In front of a sprawling, dilapidated SOUTHERN MANSION with a whitewashed signboard reading CITY HALL. A double door in the front and a single door on either side.
There is a PLATFORM across the whole front. From PLATFORM, steps lead down and in to CHORUS GROUND.
ANNIE and IRENE enter from CENTRAL DOUBLE DOOR of CITY HALL.
ANNIE
O sister, little sister,
what else could go wrong now,
after the graybacks
dragged Dad out of City Hall,
and sent him on the road.,
and we had to go on the county?
Ask me again. So much
gits lost between the lines.
Look at these
WAR DEPARTMENT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO: ANNIE AND IRENE EDDOWES
MY DEAR LADIES: STOP. WE GREATLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU…
WAR DEPARTMENT
CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
TO: ANNIE AND IRENE EDDOWES
MY DEAR LADIES: STOP. WE GREATLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU…
IRENE
It’s news to me. Eddie and Paulie
both lied about their ages when
they jined up. The mystery-train
from Richmond just made
the drop. Undertaker’s got
Eddie now. You know none of the folks
was talkin’ to Paul, still, since he went
up there and joined the artillery. I got
that one letter of his. I wrote him back
the once. I guess he’s dead, huh?
ANNIE
Mayor Crowe made nice with the Yankees
till their train rolled out. I was at
the depot this mornin’. I done seen. Mayor
had the Sherriff load all the bodies they left
onto Leroy Helsel’s rig, every last blue back,
out to the Town Dump. Tomorrow, while
the parade’s goin’ on for the other
persuasion, they’re burnin’ all them bodies.
Boys we kissed in the play-yard, men
from our church. But that ain’t even
the thing.
I’m buryin’ Paul by the back
wall of the churchyard tonight. Pastor
said he wouldn’t tell. Girl, you come on
and help me gather him up.
IRENE
You must of bumped your head on somethin’.
ANNIE
I’ll bust your head off somethin’, mouth.
Mayor’s sendin’ Eddie off with a twenty-
one gun salute from the Army of Southern
Virginia. Paul died harder’n Eddie. Paul
was at the front, and that mortar
blew his brains out the back
of his head.
Sherriff put out handbills, said
anyone caught goin’ out to the dump
after they husbands or they sons
is gonna be hung for treason.
Mayor Crowe says Maryland
gonna secede, too, any day, and
none too soon for him, I guess.
So there you go.
Now you got to figure
if you gonna be Mayor’s dishrag,
or help me lay rest
that little boy you taught
to tie his shoes.
IRENE
Just what is it you want me to do?
ANNIE
You heard me the first time.
IRENE
But you just said Sherriff---
ANNIE
Paulie is our brother.
IRENE
We’d get hung.
ANNIE
Mayor can go on and fill his hand.
IRENE
Did you just wake up an’ forget, this mornin’?
Soon’s Daddy crossed the town line,
they shot him down like a yella dog.
We’re just women, Annie. We cain’t
fight City Hall. I’ve taken it to God.
I cain’t take it to the Mayor. He’d
th’ow me off the grounds.
ANNIE
Well, stay at home, then, if that’s how it lies.
You want to talk to me about the Lord? I’m
about His business, and I ain’t afraid
to die.
IRENE
You ain’t bein’ fair.
ANNIE
I’m bein’ fair to Paulie.
IRENE
Annie, I’m just ascairt
to be buryin’ you too.
ANNIE
What for are you ascairt?
You got your own hide to look after.
IRENE
Well, Sherriff won’t hear about this from me.
ANNIE
Why not? Call the newspaper!
They’ll be fixin’ to cut a path your way when they
find out you kept mum.
IRENE
I was you, I’d be prayin’ instead
of runnin’ your mouth.
ANNIE
Ain’t got to. I know what
needs done.
IRENE
Don’t believe you c’n do it, though.
ANNIE
I’m breathin’. Till I ain’t … I will.
IRENE
You’ll git caught.
ANNIE
You git on home.
Paul an’me’ll settle you later.
IRENE
Don’t put me in this spot.
Truly, I want to help, we
just cain’t.
#
PARODOS
CHORUS
A bloody sun rises
over the seven back roads
out of Thebes County.
The Johnnies come
swinging home on
crutches.
Paul saw his brother’s face on every one
as he primed Gun Four against those
hungry barefoot bayonets. The tide
was turned, and Billy Yank tore
out throats. The even-now-bygone
South pushed up the teeth
of dragons as the blood
soaked into the ground
in hot white haze.
CHORAG.
The gods delight
in stripping braggarts
of all ego, and when
the aggressive
Southern suh
let loose his yell,
the first gray back
fell forward ‘neath
the guns.
CHORUS
Paul waved his cap in the air
for joy, but his whoops
turned to blood in his young throat
as he met the ground,
courtesy of the Rostina sharpshooters.
His most maddened comrade-in-arms
was given pause.
Now the sun is up,
but not the same.
In the Yankee camps,
they sleep late for
the first time in
weeks. Tonight
the fiddle and
bow, concertina,
mouth-organ,
full and empty
jug
will give praise
to His terrible swift sword.
#
SCENE I
CHORAG.
The Mayor hath returned
from the dump.
Junior Crowe, beloved of Richmond’s
courthouse crowd, well past the first
hundred days, shall speak.
Why has he called
a Town Meeting? The smoke
of that closed room scrys blood
upon the moon.
ENTER MAYOR CROWE from CITY HALL. MAYOR speaks to CHORUS from a PODIUM, wheeled out by BLACK STAGE HANDS, hung with RED-WHITE-AND-BLUE BUNTING.
MAYOR
Dis-tin-guished gentlemen,
our ship of state is coming
in, with God as my captain.
If you are wondering why
I have called you here
today, it is because I
know that your trust
is unimpeachable.
Your devotion to former
Mayor Larry Eddowes,
unfortunate father to the late
mayor Rex Eddowes,
never wavered. Even when
Rex was in office, you still
respected the position, and
when Rex left our town, you
still showed your love to his
two daughters, Irene and
Annie.
Hrrump. Unfortunately,
as you all well know,
Rex’s two fine sons
Paul…and…Eddie …
have killed each other
on the field of battle.
Now, no politician
can expect
his constituency
to respect him without
proof. Nonetheless,
I stand before you to
proclaim as a man
that I have only
the bitterest scorn
for the kind of Mayor
who does not put his
people first, to follow
the course he knows
to be best for them. As
for the man who puts
his private life before
the public, I could
care a hang for him
as well.
(MAYOR, continued)
As God is my witness, if my constituency
were ever in true Yankee peril, I would
not be afraid to speak of it, and I would
have no truck with anyone who said
otherwise. I value friendship as highly
as the next man, but relationships that
jeopardize the state are of no true
worth.
That’s where I stand, anyhow, and why
I’ve decided, as far as the mayor’s very
problematic sons are concerned:
Eddie died like a man, and should
by all rights receive full military
honors. But brother Paul, who
came back to fight on the wrong side
just a stone’s throw from his home town,
whose lone goal was to spill the blood
that is also his own, and sell his kinfolks
down the river, Paul, Ah say, Paul, is to
have no burial. No one should so much
as go and say a word over him. He
will lay out there until we burn him,
and the scavengers can revel.
This is my edict as your Mayor.
Traitors shall not lay in the same churchyard
as our boys. But whoever shows that he
is on our side will have my hand alive,
and my heart when dead.
CHORAG.
The Mayor has spoken.
MAYOR
So I have. Listen.
CHORAG.
We are old men. Let the young bucks
here in town do what is needed.
MAYOR
Not that, moron. We have a militia.
CHORAG.
Then what are we to do?
MAYOR
You will offer no quarter to the breakers of this new law.
CHORAG.
You’re insane to woo our love with death.
MAYOR
Yet the sharpest practice
sometimes counts a few coins in our favor.
DEPUTY
Excuse my lack of wind, Mister Mayor,
Cain’t say I stopped to switch horses, on account of
every time I done stopped I wanted to turn back
around and surrender to the Yankees. Figured, though
if someone else done told ye, I’d git twict the hidin’.
MAYOR
Get on with it, chuckle-head. What’s the word?
DEPUTY
I didn’t do hit. Nobody saw who did. Please
don’t lynch me, Boss Crowe, Maisie’s
got the new baby on the way, an’ I just---
MAYOR
Wellnow, if’n I could figure out
what you didn’t do, I’d devise
the most spectacular way to
not punish you for it. Have
at it.
DEPUTY
We did us a new head count down ‘t th’ dump.
That Briggs boy, the one don’t know much, said
he’s gone for a shit an’ couldn’t remember
just exactly when. Briggs’ turn on watch, that was. He
forgot to tell me.
Paulie Eddowes turned up gone, Boss Crowe.
You tell me what you want me ‘n th’ boys to do.
Long pause. MAYOR CROWE speaks through clenched teeth.
MAYOR
Who did this.
DEPUTY
Weren’t no one saw! No cart tracks in or out!
You know how bad Shaw lets them roads git. We’d
of seen fresh ruts. Hain’t been nothin’ but birds
at t’other’n’s, an’ birds don’t do that.
We’s all blamin’ t’other. Any of us coulda done hit.
But I swear to you, Boss Crowe, on my Mama’s eyes,
hit weren’t me.
MAYOR is doing a slow burn. DEPUTY plows on, oblivious.
DEPUTY
I got the short straw to come tell ye, boss. I’d be obliged
if you’d tell Maisie I love her, and I’m sorry.
CHORAG.
Mr. Mayor, mightn’t this be
a sign from God?
MAYOR
Oh mah holy God, will you buncha old ladies
shet up long enough s’I can git this one thought out?
Have all of you lost your natural minds? Why would God
intercede for a Yankee? No, this is the work of
Nawthun spies. They bribed the Briggs boy. His parents
met at a family reunion on the same picnic table.
Money! The Yanks is fat as hawgs with it.
Away with our livelihood,
our brothers moidered,
our best minds stripped
and poisoned. The Crooked Man
runs roughshod over this land
with his carpet-bag,
and his name
is Money.
to DEPUTY
Some-body did this, suh. Unless he done
got up and walked away, which would
have been some manner of mean feat with
half a face, you must agree.
You will find that man and deliver him
to the jail house, or that new baby gonna
be an orphan. Suh. I will put you in chains,
find out your boss’ name and address, and
then teach you somethin’ your Daddy should
of done: that you might git a long, long leash
but in the end, we all pay the Fiddler.
DEPUTY
Uh, Boss Crowe, if I c’d just …say…er---
MAYOR
I sho’ do git sick of the sound of your voice.
DEPUTY
Could be yew’re just peaked. Y’ought
to go back downtown an’ take a nap. That’s
just mah opinion, don’t hang me now.
MAYOR
I am not upset!!!
DEPUTY
I just mean… this is a lot to---
MAYOR
You shut your face hole, you ape.
DEPUTY
Ah didn’t do hit—
MAYOR
No, you was just the middle man, huh?
DEPUTY
We all owe you a lot, Boss Crowe,
but yore wrong. Suh.
MAYOR
Find the man who did this, or you
gonna be tellin’ it to the undertaker
with a size-ten gaiter up y’ass.
EXIT MAYOR from CITY HALL.
DEPUTY
‘Find the man who did this…’ Or git yore neck stretched.
I’ll take my chances with the Yankees.
EXIT DEPUTY
#
ODE I
CHORUS
O God has set such bounteous wonders
forth in Creation, but none like Man.
The shining seas hold his vessels high.
He plows the womb of Mother Earth.
The lion, the unicorn lie side-by-side
at his feet.
The Genius of the Weather bends to him.
All Idea structuring structures in
his head, every vast Senate
battlefield picnic lawn,
Death is the only South he cannot win.
O unconquerable mind that shall never call retreat!
O Weird Sisters cutting the raw threads with the spun!
When the South rises, how its cities shine!
When holes creep into its coat of mail,
Will Richmond stand? The center
must hold, while all about
are losing theirs.
#
SCENE II
RE-ENTER DEPUTY, LEADING ANNIE
CHORAG.
What is the meaning of this? Annie Eddowes ain’t no spy.
DEPUTY
That might be, but she was fixin’ to put some stolen property
in a hole by the churchyard wall. Our stolen property. Is the
Mayor about?
CHORAG.
He said he’d be along tereckly.
RE-ENTER MAYOR CROWE
MAYOR
You back already?
CHORAG.
What is the meaning of this?
DEPUTY
Mister Mayor, I spoke out of turn, before.
Tell you the truth, I was fixin’ to run off.
But I didn’t have to draw lots to come back this time.
We found her buryin’ Paulie,
an’ desecratin’ church grounds to do it.
MAYOR
But this is my ward. Someone please explain this to me.
DEPUTY
Well, Mayor, you see, I think—
MAYOR
I don’t pay you to think. Tell it front to back.
DEPUTY
The storm was blowin’ down branches all through town.
They was chain-lightning on the railroad tracks, and worse.
Only time the sun came out all afternoon
was when we caught her in the churchyard.
She musta toted him from the dump on her shoulders,
Though she looked like she’s about to fall over.
And she sang him to rest. We took her after.
She let us tie her hands.
Mister Mayor, I’m glad I’m in the clear, but
Annie was in my class at school. I think
she kissed me once. This ain’t good.
MAYOR
Miss Annie, what do you have to say for yourself?
ANNIE
Yeah, I kissed this fool once.
I’d do it again. I’m not sorry.
MAYOR
Now Annie, you can’t tell me no one told you
not to bury him.
ANNIE
You put up handbills.
MAYOR
The pressman was two hours late. Cost the earth, too.
But you heard why not, and you went and did it anyway.
ANNIE
Bible says you got to keep God’s law before Man’s.
Wars come and go, but you bury your kith… and constituents.
If that’s a hangin’ offense, then string me up. I’d rather
die than turn my back on my brother. At least he
understands.
MAYOR
She’ll learn. Women gener’ly do.
We’ll break her spirit. Who looks
like the bigger fool if I let her slide?
We all know about Rex. Rex’s daughters
just bought themselves the end of a long rope.
(TO CHORUS
Couple of ye go fetch Irene.
‘Spect she’ll be up at the house,
a-wailin’ and a-gnashin’ teeth.
Least she ain’t braggin’ about it in public.
ANNIE
Mayor, you got me. Leave
the rest where it lies.
MAYOR
I got you. That’ll do, just yet.
ANNIE
Then hang me and be done with it.
All this talk just makes me sick.
I bet you’re sick of it, too.
Justice has been done.
I’ll go to my reward. When
you’re on the bottom rung
of the ladder, no one listens,
But everyone here understands,
even if they’re all in your
hip pocket.
It must be quite something
to be a politician. Where
do I join up?
MAYOR
You a minority of one, girl.
ANNIE
Think so? You hold the leash
on everyone else here.
MAYOR
Could be. But you’re the red-handed one.
ANNIE
I did right. My hands are clean. Judge not, lest you yourself---
MAYOR
What about Eddie? You gonna cart him off
And bury him, too, with this insult on him?
ANNIE
Eddie understands.
MAYOR
…that Paulie was a turncoat.
ANNIE
It’s God makes brothers, not the laws of Man.
MAYOR
Paulie fought for Nawthuhn aggression.
Eddie fought for his home town.
ANNIE
You honor your dead. No matter what
their affiliation.
MAYOR
I honor the righteous, not the wicked.
ANNIE
Who are you to decide?
MAYOR
I’m Mayor, that’s who.
ANNIE
I love my brothers, and I’d die for either one.
MAYOR
Then go have the reunion in Hell.
CHORAG.
Look here, they got Irene.
She don’t look too happy about it,
neither. We all here, ain’t we, little sister?
What you got to say for yourself?
IRENE
Guilty as charged, mister Mayor. That’s about it. If she’ll even let me get that out.
ANNIE
No you didn’t, girl. That ain’t fair. You wouldn’t come with me to the churchyard, you ain’t gonna do this now.
IRENE
I told you before what I was prepared to do. Here I am.
ANNIE
Girl, everybody knows who did this. Quit runnin’ your mouth and maybe they’ll let you get on home.
IRENE
This is my duty, here.
ANNIE
You ain’t gonna steal my thunder.
IRENE
What’s the point bein’ the last of Daddy’s line?
ANNIE
Why’n’t you ask the Mayor?
IRENE
What am I supposed to do?
ANNIE
Save your own hide.
IRENE
But we’re both to blame---
ANNIE
Turn it off, kid. I’m already dead.
MAYOR
Well, ain’t this family. One done lost her mind. T’other was born without one.
IRENE
Grief can bend the best of us, Mister Mayor.
MAYOR
It don’t git much more bent than steppin’ up onto the gallows with the guilty.
IRENE
I’d rather die than be the last of the line.
MAYOR
Too late. You heard your sister. Girl done said she’s dead already.
IRENE
She’s engaged to your boy, in case you forgot.
MAYOR
There’s plenty of fields left for Hank to plow. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near that, now.
CHORAG.
You gonna tell Hank that?
MAYOR
He can read it in the paper. Mistah Deputy Dawg, kindly take both of ‘em back to the jail house. Brave men run when they see Death coming, let alone a couple of girls.
EXIT DEPUTY, ANNIE AND IRENE
CHORUS
The lucky ones
never walk through this
rain of artillery, rockets’
red glare and the
sharpshooters
sniping. Never
as in song, the
bombs bursting
in air are Polish
cannons loaded down
with twenty pounds of
ten-penny nails stolen
off the P.R.R. line. A blind fawn
fallen from friendly fire lies
below a man’s
left hand spiked to a tree.
Stump-witch watching
from the woods leaves that
one right where it
hangs.
Our longhouse has been
forever shaken. We damned
our children well. We authored
this whirlwind we now reap,
As we munch cold chicken legs
Through the smoke of Manassas, sip
Beaujolais red as the Fort Sumter aquifer, toast
Our gilded Imperial dream,
While George Pickett puffs up proud
as a peacock in the front sights of a
Sharps rifle, while Lee
twitches through bad dreams
before sunset, while Lo
Armistead keeps his head
down, while Davis
drowns in his
ledgers,
While Lincoln closes his eyes, and tries
Once more, in vain, to sleep,
The die is cast. The enraged rose
waits for sunset. No one knows
when the master will
approach, and demand
to see the books.
In New England, the scribes
may beat their breasts. Lovers
can write letters. Poets still
dream of the last battle. The waking
earth still smokes, and shell-shocked
deserters still shamble the woods
like Odin, far from home, unable
to lie down at any hearth.
There can be no Justice without cost.
In poene veritas.
#
SCENE III
CHORAG.
Mayor, Hank’s here. Last of your line. Figure he’s got something to say
about his fiancee.
ENTER HANK
MAYOR
Figure we’ll find out, won’t we. And no need of an advisor, neither.
Boy, you done heard when I passed judgement on that trash.
You gonna come here with poison in your mouth, or mind me?
HANK
I’m your son, sir. That’s deeper to me than this. Why should I start
disobeyin’ you now? You made me what I am.
MAYOR
You honor your Pa first. That does me proud to see. I prayed for that.
Keeps me from being a laughingstock among the uh employees.
You’re right to keep your head about that one, boy. Your joy with her
would soon petrify, and then you’d have a harpy in bed and out of it.
She can git on down to Hell and hunt a husband.
It’s not even a question to me. I can’t go back on my own word about all this.
She’s gonna claim ‘family.’ But if I can’t keep my own house in hand,
then I shouldn’t be in office.
I can’t abide by lawbreakers, social critics. I was elected.
Just and unjust, for better or worse, that’s the contract.
The ones who can listen to that should be in charge.
They’re the ones who’ll stick by you when the bullets fly.
Show me a greater evil than economic occupation.
This is what cracks a country asunder. The just man’s life
revolves around discipline. No woman will seduce
our juristic standards. Let a man do it, at least. There is not
a woman stronger than us.
CHORAG.
Boy, you sure said that right.
HANK
Paw,
You do right to warn me against
losing my reason. I cain’t yet say
you’ve not done right by this. But other
fellers can get to the same point, too. You might
give some of ‘em ear. The vox populi depends on
that, like ye allus told me. We got to have some kind
of Town Meeting, just for form’s sake, if nothin’
else. How would we be any better than the damn
Yanks makin’ people sign loyalty oaths?
You hear about them camps in Bleeding Kansas?
You hear ‘bout what they doin’ to the old Free-Soilers?
It hain’t right, and if we stoop so low with one,
We’re no better’n what they do with one hundred or one thousand.
People know yore all fired up’thar about this. They ain’t
gonna try to rile you. Yore mayor, voted in and all. But
they say no woman ever died for such an act of Christian charity
as to bury a brother what fought for t’other
persuasion. They cain’t hardly see how it’s a hangin’
offense. That’s just the way I’ve heard them put it down
at the barbershop, the drugstore, the saloon and th’ store.
You got to see, Paw,
I want ever’body to be happy. You got
to rule the people by situation. You got
to see ever’ situation for what it
is. You got to see Reason. ‘Cause, well,
the stubborn treen ever bends
when the river’s up over its banks.
I seen them kind of trees,
torn out and floatin’. The big’uns
have to git torn out one root
at a time.
CHORAG.
Boy’s got a way with words. So do you, Mr. Mayor.
MAYOR
Why should I listen to someone one-third my age?
HANK
If I’m telling the truth, why does age have any bearing?
MAYOR
So it’s right for an eighteen-year-old to bear witness for a seditionist?
HANK
Criminals get none of my respect.
MAYOR
By inference, I’d ask if ...then, Annie ain’t no criminal in your eyes.
HANK
Nobody in this whole damn town would say she was.
MAYOR
And the town tells me how to run it?
HANK
Well, yessir, that was sort of the compact---
MAYOR
Round here, I’m the Bull of the Woods. I say what goes.
HANK
Ain’t no woods if it takes orders from but one Bull.
MAYOR
You’d sell out your own Paw for a woman.
HANK
If you was a woman. It’s worrying about you that---
MAYOR
Yeah, you’re so worried that you’re about to throw down on me in public.
HANK
You’re about to throw down on God, sir, and may I say that you are outgunned.
MAYOR
How far she got her hand up your ass to make you talk to me like that, boy?
HANK
I talk like everyone else in this town talks, except you and the golden calf you got in the barn.
MAYOR
You ain't marryin' Annie while I'm alive.
HANK
You hang her, they'll be two to bury that day.
MAYOR
My retarded son threatenin' me? Boy, you must of bumped your head on somethin'. String her up, and give him a front row seat!
HANK
Long as somebody's listenin', you go on and run your mouth.
EXIT HANK
CHORAG
You know what a boy that age'll do, you git 'em all fired up there ‘boutit.
MAYOR
Let him raise Hell. It won't bring them two little bitches back to life.
CHORAG
Irene's gonna swing too? When'd we vote on that?
MAYOR
Naw, naw, what am I thinkin'? Irene ain't got dirt on her hands. Blood neither.
The family reunion in Hell will be one short.
#
ODE III
CHORUS
Love bankrupts the tycoon and keeps
the midnight lamp alive in young girls’ wild eyes.
Star of the sea, search party in the wilderness,
Before you even the gods must whirl all night like marionettes.
We only get one dance at a time,
And shake, and wake up thin.
You steer us off the road with our consent,
Strike prodigal fathers and sons to make that spark.
You Strike Anywhere from those wild eyes
themselves the lens of Heaven’s fire.
So Love’s blind justice makes fools of us all.
#
SCENE IV
As Annie enters, surrounded by town cops,
CHORAG
You'll forgive me for not giving three cheers,
Or keeping back my tears at what I see. Today,
we murder one of our own.
ANNIE
All of you take a good long look today.
I go down to the river to sleep in the dark.
The bullfrogs and crickets sing my wedding song.
CHORAG.
Look how high she holds her head
after your idea of a trial. I don’t think
the message got sent. I never done seen
a man go to the gallows that way.
ANNIE
I have turned to stone. Every raindrop
that falls on this town will be my tears.
CHORUS
That’s taking a lot for granted.
ANNIE
You had any sense, you would
have waited till I was dead to
trumpet your ignorance. You fortune-hunters,
War hawks, secessionists. I give myself back
to this land that’s eaten braver than you and made
no apologies.
CHORUS
She talks just like her Dad. Small wonder, and
the way he ended up.
ANNIE
He damned me with his life and silence.
Small wonder, indeed. Small minds,
small towns. He made me an outsider
since I was born.
CHORUS
You did the crime, now do the time.
ANNIE
Just shut up and kill me already.
MAYOR
You’d argue with them forever if it got you a stay of execution.
to the cops:
You men have your orders. Take her to the town square.
We got the scaffold up. Our hands are clean.
ANNIE
The sooner I’m back with my kinfolks, the sooner
Paulie will stand before me and tell me what I
already know. I did what was right, what had
to be done. You reward me with a hanging. God
already closed the book, and only God can judge
our Mayor.
But if He finds a guilty verdict,
Let the Mayor swing beside me.
CHORAG.
Can’t never break a wild child, not even with a hemp rope.
MAYOR
You men don’t snap to, I’ll make you sorry you waited.
ANNIE
The Voice of the People.
MAYOR
You best believe it.
ANNIE
You see how the people stood for this abortion.
Remember what you see, and who made it so,
Because I wouldn’t break God’s law.
to the cops:
Come on with it, I ain’t got all day.
COPS, ANNIE EXIT STAGE LEFT
CHORUS
A queen is still a queen when locked in stone
And God upon her pours His wondrous love
in gold. Oh child, no old money, no battle-hardened army
Can stand against the loom and mill of Fate.
The king who tries dies screaming out his last
To no one but the cold madhouse wall,
For thinking he could summon in the tide,
while befouling all our natures every day.
The old railroaders down th’ barbershop
Still talk of dur’n the War of 1812
When the ironmaster’s wife kilt both
his sons by his first wife, and was put to death.
All the young men in town had fought for her.
No beautiful more pious one to see.
But she got married young and thought she’s dead,
Her home became her scaffold, just like yours.
#
SCENE V
ENTER TOBY, old blind black man, led by a barefoot young boy.
TOBY
Two sets of eyes and one can see. I got
to walk lock-step befo’ ya, Mistah
Mayor, that’s the way.
MAYOR
That old blind bastard from downtown,
plays piano at Mary’s for the whores. Ain’t much that man
don’t hear. What you got to say, boy?
TOBY
I got the Word, mistah Mayor. Give me yo’ ear.
MAYOR
Ain’t I always good to ye?
TOBY
When I tells you what you wants to hear.
MAYOR
I owe you a lot, old man.
To what do I owe the honuh, suh?
TOBY
That you have reached the very edge.
MAYOR
You better start makin’ sense.
TOBY
Even out in my rockin’ chair,
Those crows was makin’ such a ruckus.
Done tore each other apart. I strike a light
in my stove to start up supper, ain’t
no flame. That joint of lamb
done rot to grease in front
of me. I felt it. I smelt it, and the boy
He set the same.
This is your doin’, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
God showin’ us what you put at table.
Any good man clean up his mess.
To not do is the only sin.
Why you got to fight a dead man?
Who is it gonna come and pin the medal to yo’ ches’?
I shouldn’t even have to chirp.
You ought to already know.
MAYOR
I knew there was a reason I took this office.
So I could sit still for a blind half-wit nigger
havin’ a senile-dementia conniption.
I don’t care if all the damn dead hereabout mount up
on wings of eagles and drop black plague in my soup.
What’s done is done. Can’t me or none of mine
oppose God’s will. Somebody must of paid you good
to say this to me. Who was it? I’ll pay you double.
TOBY
Ain’t never met a politician yet could understand
Wisdom got no price.
MAYOR
And bribin’ a soothsayer is lower than snake shit.
TOBY
You dyin’, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
MAYOR
You’re the one knows everything. As you say.
TOBY
And I’m the one for hire.
MAYOR
Sho. Got to cross the fortuneteller’s palm with silver.
TOBY
Where a politician will generally hold out for forty pieces.
MAYOR
You forget who you talkin’ to, boy.
TOBY
Weren’t for me, you’d have no office, and you know it.
MAYOR
You good, boy, but you a sellout.
TOBY
You keep puffin’ up, I wasn’t gonna say---
MAYOR
Speak what you got to speak. I ain’t payin’ you for it.
This is your spare time.
TOBY
Oh, you be payin’ out soon, but not to me.
MAYOR
Keep talkin’, could be someone might listen.
TOBY
Then getcha bankbook out, Mistah Mayor. Suh.
And start writin’ this down: Little while, you gon’ pay
in yo’ own flesh and blood, the debt which you now owe.
God callin’ in the marker on the promissory note.
You put the daughter of the light into the center of the dark.
And from the center of the dark,
you kept they Johnny from marchin’ down.
You denied the dead the grave. You gave the grave to one alive.
This is yo’ crime. And they don’t nevah lack for coal
In the boiler-room whose only office
you gon’ hold.
Week from Sunday, yo’ house
be fulla weepin’ women. They
will cuss ya mama with the blood
of evah man about to die in this great
war yet to come.
You still wanna buy me now,
Mistah Mayor,
suh?
Come on, son, get me back on up
to the house. Let this fool holler
at the kids. Maybe he’ll learn
to keep a civil tongue in that ol’
melon head.
EXIT TOBY
CHORAG
Can you remember the last time Toby was ever wrong?
MAYOR
If we give in now, we lose.
CHORAG.
Please, take my advice.
MAYOR
Speak.
CHORAG
Call off the hangin’ and bury the boy. Do it yourself.
And you better hurry up.
MAYOR
Heavy hangs the head and pounds
the heart. Let’s go see what’s
to be done.
#
PAEAN
CHORUS
O Lord, who named Yourself
I AM WHO I AM
In thunder and in fire,
In cold lightning
The torches flare in the town square
The children are watching
Come now through the muddy streets
That melt and run with plague
Down Alleghenies’ mournful slopes
This river soon all blood
Oh, God, bring down the rain
And wash this all away.
#
EXODOS
ENTER WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH-BOY
WUTB
The only constant is Change.
The fire consumes the righteous and the wicked.
Who could have said Mayor Crowe
was still alive when he got up
that morn? When a rich man’s dead
and walkin’ in his mansion, give me back
my shotgun shack.
CHORAG.
I don’t much like your tone. What goes?
WUTB
Hank done blowed his own fool head clean off. Sharps rifle.
CHORAG.
And his Daddy?
WUTB.
Drove him to it, most likely, with that mess this mornin’.
CHORAG.
Toby saw it all.
WUTB.
What else is new? Just thought you might
like to know, so’s you could draw your
own conclusions. Me and the Mayor
buried Paulie. I had to help him dig.
Hank had the rifle waitin’ at the scaffold.
Mayor’d got there about a minute too late
to call off the hangin’. Hank said
if his Dad didn’t want to watch, he could
turn his head.
EXIT TELEGRAPH BOY
ENTER MAYOR, BEARING HANK’S SHATTER-HEADED CORPSE
MAYOR
It’s all over.
My own blind heart did this.
I killed my boy. Hank, too young
to even think of Death. This should
be me.
CHORAG.
Too little, too late.
ENTER TELEGRAPH BOY
WUTB.
You got one more up to the house, Mr. Mayor.
MAYOR
Is it... my wife... oh, Jesus. Enid?!?
WUTB
You go look for your own self.
CHORAG.
Wouldn’t pray any more if I was you.
God has cast judgement and turned
a deaf ear to the bailiffs that lead you now.
WUTB leads MAYOR into the house.
CHORAG. speaks directly to AUDIENCE
CHORAG.
Call no man happy without wisdom.
What wisdom could have brought down such a storm, what
words but hot, vain wind, answered
in lightning, what pride, what
great equalizer?
FADE OUT TO GUNSHOTS, MARCHING BOOT SOUNDS
AND MILITARY BAND RENDITION OF “DIXIE”
'So Put Your Little Hand In Mine...'
By Edward Morris
(c)2009 Edward R Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
Good luck trying to sell this one, too, if you do steal it.
From right to left, backward, the plate glass of the wooden door was an iconic poem in flaking black-and-gold: MORTY STEIN LMFT PhD. MARRIAGE COUNSELOR. Above this, two crewelwork samplers quoted two very different sages. The first, a Kabalist named Eliphas Levi, said, “When two opposing forces unite in desire, the love-object seems to resemble a creature from another realm.”
The second mystic quoted over this other, no less necessary twist on the proverbial Judaeo-Christian marriage threshold, was Hank Thoreau: “Could a Greater Miracle Take Place Than For Us To Look Through Each Other’s Eyes For An Instant?”
The door banged open now on a Job-scale whirlwind in progress. The man to whom both the glass and sampler addressed themselves knew he was in for a hellride. First to enter the door was a tall, skinny young man of somewhere between twenty and thirty, dressed in military castoffs and skateboarder shoes. He was shaking his right index finger as he hectored,
“----so that still in no way accounts for your whereabouts Thursday night, and---“
Without a frame’s transition, as he spoke, the man’s words and image wavered out of focus in a way Morty Stein hadn’t seen since his bright college days and that last hit of acid.
With no more horn or annunciation than his own escalating anxiety, Contestant #1 became something strange and dark and pixellated in the library smell of the quiet room with the couch. Like he’s phasing, Morty Stein thought in wonderment, Going somewhere else. Classic anxiety-triggered disassociation. I see it all the time, only not…
Not physically. The mystery, the philosophy, the reality of what just stormed into his office thudded through Morty’s medical mind like a rain of frogs. The dreadlocked little pixie wife in the pair looked at him, mute and pleading.
“Doctor Stein.” Tears brimmed in her green eyes. “I don’t know if you have the right license for this, but… I haven’t slept in three weeks.”
She managed something like a smile. “Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope. ” Behind and to her right, her… (husband, Morty saw by their rings) was still spouting off in source code given human gift of tongues, looking like a smear of Vaseline across the lens of an overhead projector.
At that, he low incandescent light of the office bent and shifted wider, out of place, echoing the way power lines did when the wind ran through them a certain way until Morty’s nerves were ping-ping-pinging too until the man wavered back into inarguable reality, smelling of cigarette smoke and desperation and too much coffee too early in the day.
He was gesturing with his spindly hands. He looked too old for his age. “rrrrrrrrrrrI don’t know how I’m supposed to get anywhere when every time I try to make a point, she starts looking like a bad drug reaction! I mean… Doc. Doc.”
His skin was very white. The beads of sweat on his forehead looked very cold. “Do you see it too?”
They both looked back at her so fast that Dr. Stein’s neck vertebrae cracked satisfyingly. Her form was still moving and speaking, but now neither was anything either of the two could understand.
Morty began praying in his head.
God of my fathers, don’t let any of this show on my face. These people need my help. First Do No Harm. A nd then there was light. So let that light come unto me, and me to it. Now get me the hell out of this before my heart gives out Amen..
“Did you just ask me where I was Thursday night?” she asked, just right there again, smelling like sandalwood and the clothesline on which her purple sweater recently dried. The white-girl dreadlocks somehow worked for her.
“I was with you, you---“ She gestured somewhere in the neighborhood of the smeary form that was really only visible by association. “Wherever you are in there.”
She looked at Morty. “I caught part of what he said, just before, Doctor. I think we just had a breakthrough. We---“
Morty got between them like a bouncer, holding up both hands for silence, looking back and forth to make sure he knew who he was talking to, and where, and when, trying to face the right direction. I must look like a compass in a uranium mine, he thought madly.
“All right, stop.”
They did. For the moment, they both remained in the room. He looked back and forth at them. “Do either of you realize how this looks to an outside observer? Do you… do you get this?”
They both made hesitant gestures and mumbles of affirmation. They understood. That was good. That was the first step home.
“Okay.” Morty began to pace the floor in a circle, cogitating. After a moment, he bellowed very loudly, “You! Must! Chill!”
At the sound of the words, the husband’s form went wavery and weird again. Morty stared him down. The wavering stopped. A vein beat in his forehead. He grew puzzled.
Morty saw his inroad and hit the gas. “The second either one of you gets upset,” he flapped his hand, “This happens. Shah. Still your tongues, both of you..”
“ Sit down,” he invited, gesturing at the long couch below his wall of framed state licenses, certifications, everything that never prepared him for this. They did, hesitantly. Even more hesitantly, she scooted closer to her husband and clasped his hand.
The man started to say something. Morty shook his head. “Maybe we can use this. Don’t drop the hand, either of you.”
It took the marriage counsellor seven full seconds to decide. He pretended to look irritated. “This ever happen to either of you separately?” Both of them shook their heads.
“ The two of you were not meant to be together. It goes against Nature.” Careful, careful, he admonished himself, Just a spoonful of poison will make the medicine go down…or should… please God I have no idea who would represent anyone in the malpractice suit from this one, please …
Both of them leaned forward to snap at him, still holding hands. “Hey, you have no right to---“ “Fuck that! I ---
Then the light in the room changed again, and the dim animal senses way back in Morty’s mind silenced all alarms, no longer registering the scream of cognitive dissonance like two drill bits stuck in bedrock ans snagged on a mad hurtling path towards each other from opposite sides of the Earth.
From the center thrice to the utmost pole, there was only peace through the office and silence out in the hall. No sound accompanied this. The moment simply Was.
Though his eyes denied it, the math was irreducible. On the couch where there had been Two now sat only One.
The precipitate was identifiably human, with slicked-back hair and a lot of tattoos. Dr. Stein guessed it to be female, but left the surmise open to interpretation. What sat there could just have easily been a man.
“I’m sorry,” s/he told him in a low, smoky voice, turning for the door it had entered as matter and antimatter desperately out of phase and waiting only for a spark. “I think I got the wrong building. Do you… do you…”
S/he gave up trying to speak, slamming the door behind h/ir. Morty spent the next half hour just sitting there, looking at all the frames on his wall, wondering what frame could contain what he’d just done.
It’d have to be pretty big, he told himself, But even then, it’d only be a representation. He supposed he’d done a good thing. He’d never know.
But as he thought about it more, he realized that not knowing came with the gig. After a while, all the pieces sank in, and, he began to smile, looking at the samplers over his door.
“Yeah,” Morty said to himself, “That’s why I still do this stuff. Yeah.”
Whether or not he could close the book on the day’s last appointment, ever, he could close the door. There was a nice bottle of Spanish red waiting for him at home, and a long hot bath.
As Nixon used to say when he was a kid, Now More Than Ever…
(c)2009 Edward R Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
Good luck trying to sell this one, too, if you do steal it.
From right to left, backward, the plate glass of the wooden door was an iconic poem in flaking black-and-gold: MORTY STEIN LMFT PhD. MARRIAGE COUNSELOR. Above this, two crewelwork samplers quoted two very different sages. The first, a Kabalist named Eliphas Levi, said, “When two opposing forces unite in desire, the love-object seems to resemble a creature from another realm.”
The second mystic quoted over this other, no less necessary twist on the proverbial Judaeo-Christian marriage threshold, was Hank Thoreau: “Could a Greater Miracle Take Place Than For Us To Look Through Each Other’s Eyes For An Instant?”
The door banged open now on a Job-scale whirlwind in progress. The man to whom both the glass and sampler addressed themselves knew he was in for a hellride. First to enter the door was a tall, skinny young man of somewhere between twenty and thirty, dressed in military castoffs and skateboarder shoes. He was shaking his right index finger as he hectored,
“----so that still in no way accounts for your whereabouts Thursday night, and---“
Without a frame’s transition, as he spoke, the man’s words and image wavered out of focus in a way Morty Stein hadn’t seen since his bright college days and that last hit of acid.
With no more horn or annunciation than his own escalating anxiety, Contestant #1 became something strange and dark and pixellated in the library smell of the quiet room with the couch. Like he’s phasing, Morty Stein thought in wonderment, Going somewhere else. Classic anxiety-triggered disassociation. I see it all the time, only not…
Not physically. The mystery, the philosophy, the reality of what just stormed into his office thudded through Morty’s medical mind like a rain of frogs. The dreadlocked little pixie wife in the pair looked at him, mute and pleading.
“Doctor Stein.” Tears brimmed in her green eyes. “I don’t know if you have the right license for this, but… I haven’t slept in three weeks.”
She managed something like a smile. “Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope. ” Behind and to her right, her… (husband, Morty saw by their rings) was still spouting off in source code given human gift of tongues, looking like a smear of Vaseline across the lens of an overhead projector.
At that, he low incandescent light of the office bent and shifted wider, out of place, echoing the way power lines did when the wind ran through them a certain way until Morty’s nerves were ping-ping-pinging too until the man wavered back into inarguable reality, smelling of cigarette smoke and desperation and too much coffee too early in the day.
He was gesturing with his spindly hands. He looked too old for his age. “rrrrrrrrrrrI don’t know how I’m supposed to get anywhere when every time I try to make a point, she starts looking like a bad drug reaction! I mean… Doc. Doc.”
His skin was very white. The beads of sweat on his forehead looked very cold. “Do you see it too?”
They both looked back at her so fast that Dr. Stein’s neck vertebrae cracked satisfyingly. Her form was still moving and speaking, but now neither was anything either of the two could understand.
Morty began praying in his head.
God of my fathers, don’t let any of this show on my face. These people need my help. First Do No Harm. A nd then there was light. So let that light come unto me, and me to it. Now get me the hell out of this before my heart gives out Amen..
“Did you just ask me where I was Thursday night?” she asked, just right there again, smelling like sandalwood and the clothesline on which her purple sweater recently dried. The white-girl dreadlocks somehow worked for her.
“I was with you, you---“ She gestured somewhere in the neighborhood of the smeary form that was really only visible by association. “Wherever you are in there.”
She looked at Morty. “I caught part of what he said, just before, Doctor. I think we just had a breakthrough. We---“
Morty got between them like a bouncer, holding up both hands for silence, looking back and forth to make sure he knew who he was talking to, and where, and when, trying to face the right direction. I must look like a compass in a uranium mine, he thought madly.
“All right, stop.”
They did. For the moment, they both remained in the room. He looked back and forth at them. “Do either of you realize how this looks to an outside observer? Do you… do you get this?”
They both made hesitant gestures and mumbles of affirmation. They understood. That was good. That was the first step home.
“Okay.” Morty began to pace the floor in a circle, cogitating. After a moment, he bellowed very loudly, “You! Must! Chill!”
At the sound of the words, the husband’s form went wavery and weird again. Morty stared him down. The wavering stopped. A vein beat in his forehead. He grew puzzled.
Morty saw his inroad and hit the gas. “The second either one of you gets upset,” he flapped his hand, “This happens. Shah. Still your tongues, both of you..”
“ Sit down,” he invited, gesturing at the long couch below his wall of framed state licenses, certifications, everything that never prepared him for this. They did, hesitantly. Even more hesitantly, she scooted closer to her husband and clasped his hand.
The man started to say something. Morty shook his head. “Maybe we can use this. Don’t drop the hand, either of you.”
It took the marriage counsellor seven full seconds to decide. He pretended to look irritated. “This ever happen to either of you separately?” Both of them shook their heads.
“ The two of you were not meant to be together. It goes against Nature.” Careful, careful, he admonished himself, Just a spoonful of poison will make the medicine go down…or should… please God I have no idea who would represent anyone in the malpractice suit from this one, please …
Both of them leaned forward to snap at him, still holding hands. “Hey, you have no right to---“ “Fuck that! I ---
Then the light in the room changed again, and the dim animal senses way back in Morty’s mind silenced all alarms, no longer registering the scream of cognitive dissonance like two drill bits stuck in bedrock ans snagged on a mad hurtling path towards each other from opposite sides of the Earth.
From the center thrice to the utmost pole, there was only peace through the office and silence out in the hall. No sound accompanied this. The moment simply Was.
Though his eyes denied it, the math was irreducible. On the couch where there had been Two now sat only One.
The precipitate was identifiably human, with slicked-back hair and a lot of tattoos. Dr. Stein guessed it to be female, but left the surmise open to interpretation. What sat there could just have easily been a man.
“I’m sorry,” s/he told him in a low, smoky voice, turning for the door it had entered as matter and antimatter desperately out of phase and waiting only for a spark. “I think I got the wrong building. Do you… do you…”
S/he gave up trying to speak, slamming the door behind h/ir. Morty spent the next half hour just sitting there, looking at all the frames on his wall, wondering what frame could contain what he’d just done.
It’d have to be pretty big, he told himself, But even then, it’d only be a representation. He supposed he’d done a good thing. He’d never know.
But as he thought about it more, he realized that not knowing came with the gig. After a while, all the pieces sank in, and, he began to smile, looking at the samplers over his door.
“Yeah,” Morty said to himself, “That’s why I still do this stuff. Yeah.”
Whether or not he could close the book on the day’s last appointment, ever, he could close the door. There was a nice bottle of Spanish red waiting for him at home, and a long hot bath.
As Nixon used to say when he was a kid, Now More Than Ever…
I, ROBOT by Edward Morris
©2009 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
Any Persons Attempting To Claim This Work As Their Own Can Have As Much Fun Trying To Sell It As I Did, Ha Ha Ha. ---ed.
I, ROBOT
By Edward Morris
LAST RESORT SECURITY SERVICES LLC.
DAILY ACTIVITY REPORT
SHIFT: NIGHT
DATE: 10/08/2060
OFFICER: PS-20*; (PROTECTED-CLASS MECHA )
#
FULL POWER IN THREE SECONDS.
TWO.
#
SYSTEM LOGGING ON:
FROM LAST LOGON:
10 /07…(click) -08/60
#
JOURNAL: [begin recording:]
You know, it must be a real kick in the head when a machine has to tell you how to do your job.
Not you. At least not per se, not you gator-pit of the nominally free Weekly Fluff Paper Press in New Portland. That was a different usage of ‘you’; syn: MOST HUMANS.
The Last Chance Hotel is purported to be the epicenter of all crime in the Nihonmachi District. Issues breed in the ground of this block, and hatch in fermenting rooms behind vacant, cataracted windows like drugged eyes Stuck On Stupid for time out of mind.
The dripping, dripping leaks down from the roof soothed me to sleep last night, like the static on every ancient amplifier and transistor radio I leave running, running, running in the ceiling and walls of my high wasp-nest bed in there.
Outside the moldy little window high in the opposite wall, black clouds eat downtown’s skies. Welcome to my tiny corner of Plato’s Cave. The homelessness rate out here is horrifying. Entire neighborhoods have gone to strictly squatter status, heavily-patrolled by Corporate Security and very creatively administrated. For some reason, I relate to the homeless most of all.
I feel sorry for any human who slips through the cracks, especially at this hotel. They get stuck in the bricks of the wall by accident, and learn too late. The richies shoving past each other on the sidewalk don’t even look in that direction, let alone see them lodged here, screaming for change.
Even in this pus-filled pocket of the past, the dim incandescent-glowing rooms are populated by gadgets without number, and I am the least of these. I feel a certain kinship to the Art-Deco vacuum cleaners I find in some of the broom closets, imagining sentience in their dim Depression-glass headlamps, domestic accents wheezing from their fans and squeaky belts
Sometimes, I forget I was born way back in Berserkeley. Sometimes, I feel like I was born working here, born in my bed in the back wing of this flop-house hotel, down the narrow hall that got added in when the building was sliced in half to make room for the Burnside Boulevard expansion in the Nineteen-Thirties.
Down the Fire Stairs. Down, down, down to the gutter where Life first grows, and cannot sleep for the need to pace, to rage, to write, to think, to express its environment any way it can… All the railroaders and longshoremen and loggers, addicts and prostitutes, shagnasties and stumblebums, jack-rollers, nail-eaters and fire-breathers who died here, leaking through the pipes, dripping on my head...
Down here, where the locals scrape the resin of New Portland to survive, just like last century, as City Hall tried and tries to push the swarms of poor people out of Downtown so the tourists won’t have to see them. But those poor folks have a funny way of reappearing. Almost like there are more and more and more of them every day. Every day.
My collection of antique vacuum cleaners I spoke of are some of my favorite people here. I light them up wirelessly, like breathing hearts, in concert with my wall of white noise, pasted itself with dossiers of clippings, mostly local history from before Oregon, California and Washington tried to follow Havai’ki and Alaska off the map and secede from the Union.
My favorites on those walls are the ones about California’s jingoist governor going off his meds, apparently, and trying to invade Washington. The green light from my mummy ancestors is appropriately creepy for the subject matter there. Unbelievable what humans will do.
I still hear old brain-cases in this hotel call the Republic of Oregon “Little Bosnia.” Some of them gave parts of themselves to that awfulness, and shambled back half-burnt alive or minus their minds after bleeding the ground red at Corvallis, or watching their best friends get their heads blown off by shotgun pulses in the desert somewhere near Barstow.
We’re in a Republic, out here where I am. That’s different than being a State. States get Federal funding for their governments. As I understand it, Republics have some hoops they have to jump through before the Eastern United States officially invites them back to that particular hog trough.
But all of that is decided elsewhere. Here in the mud-brick city-state where I am Town Cop in all but fact, th is fire stairway down to my bed is part of the original building, older than the first Nihonmachi and whatever the name of this firetrap was before Irving Escher, (the present owner’s father) renamed it the Last Chance Hotel.
The hotel has been in the Escher family since July, 2009, I hear. The half-melted neon sign hanging from the front wall is almost illegible, as are the faded letters on the yellow stucco of the building’s upper half. It’s one word, though. Who knows?
Below that, the wall shifts to stained, mossy brick. Shadows like flash-blasted dead throw up their hands between those bricks, caught in the cracks, screaming at you.
Screaming at you, who walk past the front window of this hotel with your multicolored hair, cool shoes, hands linked, little lives stretched out all bright and shiny so much longer than this one city block.
You, who could never fathom the improbable beauty of long winter nights here, with the moon just full and insufferable gloom permeating this groaning old Cyclopean ocean liner of a re-privatized flophouse hotel.
The improbable beauty of the white Christmas lights strung along the inside of the plate-glass window by a certain Celtic hand that one year, and be damned to Fat Boy himself… Twinkling, those lights, while the snow fell down outside in sheets…
This neighborhood’s the place where all concrete spiral staircases terminate downtown, under ivied walls that haven’t seen a coat of paint since the decaying rooftops were new. At least a thousand times a day, I tell one human or the other, It’s a beautiful old space. They just didn’t take care of her. All it needs is some love, and a new owner pretty soon… (Then I stop, and consider what I just said.)
At the level of the cobblestones and trolley tracks, Nihonmachi lives in its own solemn hour, incredibly old, leaning backward and forward in Time. The foggy sidewalks here come alive after dark with semi-legal commerce; street-blues shouters, and the slow whirl of stars mirrored on wet, ancient blocks, far above the lower streets and the putrid river.
From my tiny lead-crystal slit window, the light from Chasse Boulevard looks the same as always: Yellow-gray everyday, every day, as I take forever to wake up in this broom closet at the bottom of the back Fire Stairs the residents aren’t supposed to use to sneak people in and out, or smoke their dirty man-made drugs in, or any of the other sad little things they do back here anyway.
I get to watch them, when I’m off the clock, and point and laugh. Last Resort won’t let me do Security work here, only Fire Patrol. Soooo… Fuck ‘Em.
But not always. Sometimes it kills me that all six of my hands are tied behind my carapace. Amazing, that an object could appreciate this hotel and this neighborhood more than a person could.
I’m a fairly recent object, too. Your newest upstairs neighbors gave your kind the wafer-thin alloy layer that stores my backup power. They gave you the design for the ergonomic bows of my hands, the working Casimir-engines that generate my main power when I walk, and a hundred more such wonders.
You repay them by detaining them in upper orbit while you frisk their away-teams and scan them for disease umpteen times for five years. They’re dying up there.
I’ve never seen an Osirian, and neither has any human or mecha I know. As far as my own kind are concerned, the bottom dropped out of my parent company the year I entered the work force. I’m the only one of my make and model ever produced.
Presently, I rise, with alarum and rachet and whirr, up out of the shell of my bed, and push the tarp aside, self-testing the telescoping flashlight shock-baton holstered in my lowest right leg. (FLASP: GREEN. CHARGE= FULL. )
Call me PS-20. As I told you, I’m of the mechanical persuasion. Things could always be worse. If my Makers hadn’t gone under, I’d still be acting as a bot-shooter, a nonhuman camera, for the NBACS mega-newserv.
That gig lasted about a week. I screwed up once too often in front of three of the wrong humans when I heard my parent company went under. Fill in the blank.
No more free ride for this brand new Unknown Citizen. That digital pink slip made me a stumblebum that the hexers could strip for parts while I slept on Standby in some bodega doorway, melting the wall outlet and dreaming in reruns…
I won’t record the smell that hits me when I get out on the stairs. The mold in the walls of this hotel seems to generate a kind of heat. The whole building is one hell of a growth medium, frosted from the inside in decades of human filth.
I lumber up the cool blue staircase. Even down there, I can feel the hotel gnawing at its own liver. I pause in the basement doorway for a moment, blinking at the wall of old stick-furniture that blocks the way down into the Shanghai Tunnels. A crust of broken hex-pipes crunches under my big feet like snow.
The rats run wild all around me in the crawlspaces. The roaches whisper Join us, join us. No one’s looking, so I make like one of them and climb straight up the stairwell wall.
At the top of the high Fire Stairs, the light is blurred; smeary chemical light, blind crab catfish-Kafka light, through moldy flat latex paint on old, stippled window glass with twinkling dents here and there in the panes.
I drop, and step out onto the safe (r) end of the third floor, flipping my Flasp in the air and catching it, again and again as I walk upright, thinking about all the ghosts I’ve ever left behind.
I got off the street a little bit at a time, you see. The temp-labor farms around here were appreciative that this new protected-class AI showed above-average proficiency for Damage Control at sites that are just about to close. For some reason, those temp-farm jackbastards also thought I was good enough at patrolling a parking lot and looking intimidating…
To get me a security license issued from the ROPS. (Yeah. The old Department of Public Safety Standards & Training. Glad you were paying attention.)
In zipping around from lot-security gig to lot-security gig, I must have passed the Last Chance Hotel at Fourth and Chasse five hundred times. You can’t see the neon sign over the door from far away anyway, because of the maple tree at the corner.
I wasn’t ready to be there yet. I rolled on past it for four years. Then the hotel reached out and sucked me in, after I was too ruined to put up a fight. Last Chance for all, even mecha. It’s where you live when you’ve been 86’ed everywhere else.
Down here, no one bugs me. There is only the dripping of the water and the song of the radio as I rack up independent-contractor checks in between fire-walks, and wait for the place to collapse.
In the beginning, it was pretty stressful having to learn to live on my own with nothing but a bunch of shitbag lawyers for help, after BioSqunt imploded and it was sink or swim out of Berserkeley.
Small wonder I became an electroholic. After such experience, what heedless deliverance for my kind, save 120 volts of House Current straight up, no chaser, right through the backbrain in my back?
Once a taphead, always a taphead. Maybe you’ve heard about the Tap Menace on Fark, or CNN. It happens a lot to my kind. Having a nest is a good cure. So are friends. So is writing.
The sweet sharp shock used to kill the pain of being kicked out of my original home. It won’t any more. Now I’m addicted to routine, and order. When I don’t have them, I get twitchy.
Since I started here, the night desk man goaded me into learning to read print books for the experience. By directly-monitored evidence, beginning to apprehend this slightly archaic activity has made new pathways actually squiggle up in weird directions, throughout the lumpy connective clusters of logical matrices in my quantum pressure-cooker brains.
I’d gladly overdose on words, and be carried out of the lobby on a stretcher. At least my brain still works. Of course, I hit my stride just last week with an old, yellow box of Really Difficult Thick As A Brick Science Fiction Novels that Cab Turner the piano player had in his room since about 2000.
“Have at it, suh,” Cab shrugged. “I’ve done read every one of those two-three times.”
One of the old man’s stories laid me low the most. It was in a waterlogged magazine from the 1930’s, written by a man whose name looked like a typographical error, Eando Binder. The story was called ‘I, Robot.’
The narrative made those grinding sounds that humans always hate come out of the back of my head. It’s how I “cry”. Pogue, the night desk man, remarked on this when he walked in on me reading that one at the desk…
#
[play short-term clip:]
“I’ve another one called Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, I’ll let yeh borrow, Marvin, if yeh could just… not make that sound nammore?”
The green light from behind the weird ex-SAS medic’s left eye fell across the black wrought-iron grate separating Us from Them, just before the big double door leading up those rickety centenarian staircases into the funhouse.
I remembered offhandedly that Pogue started calling me Marvin because of some other book he keeps promising to lend me, something about a towel …
My reward mechanisms are different. Books are good. So is Art. So is walking, just walking for the sheer joy of it, the way human youngsters do, free and alone, all up and down the block in between fire-walks in the day, drinking in every detail to make clip-movies and art from later in the long, cold hours when there’s nothing good on TV and Pogue’s out of regular movies.
Art, video still-life art, is spun by your humble Narrator, even here. My reward is to record every bit of ambient vid and aud noise and mix it back through filters whose source code I wrote myself. There is music out here on the edge of the brutal Portland Skid Row, waiting in the architecure, especially in winter:
Every sleepy bouncer opening up every neighborhood club like a hangover of Hieronymous Bosch, every Al-Qaeda wanted poster in every shop window, every herbalist’s Kanji neon and CHEAP CIGARETTE! Every radio playing for two blocks of ancient rooming houses, here and there an aging New Year dragon in a ramshackle kitchen window…
Art, all Art beyond itself in a time-lapse of everyone through Nihonmachi waking up and going to work, throughout the day. Art, Art, blew a fart and blew the whole museum apart for a month of First Thursdays where robots like me do battle in the street for peanuts, for repairs, for their freedom.
Art, behind the crackling orange neon reading VACANCY in the front window here, the one that no one’s remembered to turn off for half an average human lifetime, above the stained little radio spilling out country music into the night, over the dorm fridge full of Mike’s long-expired beers, and one of Pogue’s weed pipes tucked into the freezer drawer.
A lonely place, this, a night place where the clocks tell antique time sideways, melted and subjective as Memory itself, where the night crew burn the cold fluorescent lamps and bullshit any way they can.
I don’t mind. The lobby is a safe place for one such as myself, simply by virtue of the bare fact that when I’m there it means I’m mandated to sit on my ass and get paid for it between patrols. In the humdrum, my hours silently accrue into a slush fund full of smothered dreams of Amsterdam.
There’s a whole colony of emancipated mecha, over that way. One of them’s an online pen-pal of mine who runs a pub all by himself. Pik says he can put me onto some temporary employment as a sys-admin for the long Civilian arm of the local Politie until I find better-paying work. Meanwhile, he talks for pages about the pre-Renaissance chessboard in his pub.
That chessboard comes out of its glass display-case but once a year, Pik says, for a cutthroat tournament known throughout the Red Light District as the Turing Open, Mecha players only, all bets down and all bets final. And no auggies. Processor against processor alone.
I know Pik’s goading me. It might be fun. I don’t know what kind of chess player I’ll turn out to be, but I do so very much want to travel.
I want to see the dawn on Mars, and the night in Florence full of paper lanterns and laughter and wine. I want to ride the Trans-Tibetan railroad, and shout out the blues in Saturn’s rings. I want to know what the hell Pik the pub-droid meant in the first place when he said that there’s a way for us to dream…
None of this can come to me soon enough. I was due for a rebuild two years ago. The mold at this job site is turning into a serious threat to my continued sentience. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out.
No, really. The repair costs I’d currently incur would be intimidating. As long… oh, I cross every appendage… As long as I can keep working, in a year or two I can scoot off to a state mecha-clinic in the Netherlands and lick my wounds all the way to the bank.
They respect their ‘bots over there. Over here, we’re furniture, and the tech just isn’t out in the gutter for us to fix ourselves. Up and down the ladder, guys like the slumlord of this building keep things that way.
(That motherfucker hates the free exchange of information almost as much as he and his family hate aliens, of both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial varieties. But that’s a whole other talk show, one he won’t let us watch ...)
To get a tune-up, or any real health care, I’d have to swallow my pride and perform the kowtow before the makers of Homeland Security and the nuclear “event” that turned the main area of the Secession into a blasted interstate rock garden full of mutant trailer-trash, forever. The hell with that.
I’m tired of self-respect. I can’t even get on talk radio any more. My fifteen minutes of fame stretched for one whole year of life, my first on this insane, seething Earth.
I was once the poster-child and performing monkey of the California-Republican scientific cognoscenti. My grille-piece was splashed across every monitor pane in the contiguous U.S., the Republics, the Sovereign Power of Havai’ki, and the American Protectorate of Cuba. And boy, was I big in Japan
Then my body began to degrade, and my mind with it. Now I scrimp and save to get off the map, working back-to-back hours for a mercenary army of snarky old ex-Marines. To the (br)ass hats at Last Resort, ‘Observe, Report and Run Away’ is the whole of the law, around these here parts.
‘We Will Make No Arrest. We Will Exercise No Authority. Are We Not Men?’ Sir, yes, Sir. Now, Stop or I’ll yell ‘Stop!’ again!
I remember bad mornings when I was new at this place, with the Last Resort Polices And Procedures pane glued to one palm; the smell of twisted breakfasts in my olfactory cells the whole way down the gauntlet of Electric Dogladyland on the bad side of the third floor, creeping around on firewalks at 0600 with stray voltage and mold doing strange things to my eyes…
I remember how many times I learned from these residents, how many times I celebrated their holidays, mourned their deaths (after the neighbor in question, more often than not, melted through the floor two doors down.)
I live here, too, sleep here and work here, even twitch in hypnagogic day-nap nightmares( new with the current crop of mold)…
Of a race of stunted, half- seen tenants flitting around through separate sideways tunnels, keepers of various flames tightening and loosening hydraulic regulators and hinges, parts without name or number, keeping the hotel from falling down around their own heads …
Doing for themselves, lifting as they climbed nowhere for nothing, simply because no one else wanted to touch them in their foulness...
#
My mind-body is falling apart, just like this building. A million little mechanical and cybernetic bugs in me all wait their turn. Like the actual, physical bedbugs that die in my shell and the shell of this building, sniffing, squirming, swarming for a chance to suck something dry.
Last Resort stuck me here because Atlas Escher was forced by the City to shell out ten thousand dollars a day on a twenty-four-hour Fire Watchman. He’s stalled on putting in a sprinkler system here for over twenty years.
If any contractor ripped up the ceilings and floors to install said sprinklers, you see, they’d find all the mold. And all the things that live on the mold. And all the things that live on those things.
Atlas might have to do some repairs in return for the rent he collects. To him, such a thing is anathema. Atlas was embezzling from the trust of this hotel (said trust lives in three different nursing homes in geosynchronous orbit,) since at least the early Twenties.
“Don’t Fix Nothin’!” is his motto, when he thinks only I’m listening. “If They Don’t Like It, They Can Move!”
His response to me, too, is always classic, “Any…sentient… object… who, or what, or whatever, has worked here for any length of time, should see what I mean. My statements are provable. I am this hotel, and it is me. What say you, PS-20?” he’d offer, his breath pluming in the cold lobby air.
“It’s your world, boss. You just tell me when that whistle blows.”
“Eh-heh-heh…” Atlas’ eye would turn away, then, back to the conversation at hand. Ignoring the murderous red flashes on my Aux readouts. He didn’t have to see.
As long as any danger wasn’t immediate, he could care less. I wondered, then, just where the fuck I’d landed, and what it would take to blast myself free from this. But in the humdrum, it’s easier to simply pull all the nearby junk around you and go to sleep. Perchance to dream.
Shemp, my regular relief officer, would do anything he could to get me pulled from the Last Chance, because I do my job and a little bit beyond it. Therefore, I make him look bad. Plus, he hates mecha.
But my job’s in no danger. Yet. They couldn’t find anyone else to pull twenty-four-hour shifts on demand. No matter how nuts Chimp… I mean, Shemp, says I’ve gotten.
Chimp’s just sore because I called shenanigans on him like I did with Mike. Mike went to his grave cursing my name, simply because I made him go outside to shut the Dog Lady up.
But I was within my rights to do so. We don’t get paid to do security work here, I told Coroner Boggs when he came for Mike later, and that’s the truth.
Mike shouldn’t have had to get killed. But if I would have stepped in, Dog Lady would have died and I’d be disassembled. And in either case, even if Mike never lived like a man, at least he died like one.
That nasty, bloody day aside, sometimes the routine here almost makes me happy again. During those times, I feel something akin to certain human feelings I’m told of: A sense of home, of safe space, even if that safe space only extends as far as a broom closet, or a lobby with an old analog TV and DVD player running.
But it’s my broom closet, damn it. And my old analog ancestor. I put a curtain on the window. Better than nothing.
I’ll get by until I blow out. Hopefully, that’ll happen on the job, so all repairs will be paid for.
Meanwhile, can I do anything about the human politics of this place, during the day when most of them are up running around? Hell, would I even be asking if I could?
Security-related jobs around here provide the presence of a police-like entity and very little else. There are no real local laws that aren’t very selectively applied. I get my nose rubbed in the de facto version of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics every day by the Code of the Republic of Oregon Public Safety Department:
If I hurt a human being, or allow them to come to harm, I’ll be disassembled for Assault One, Murder One… Damn it, every count of every act a mecha can be rationally charged with is always One, One, except…
Except that Antonin Artaud was right. I can still see. I can still reason. No matter what the laws say, I’m a sentient being. Stimulus à Response. If that’s a crime, then take me apart and scrape out whatever it is inside me that can’t let this stuff go unrecorded…
#
The Last Chance Hotel is what the desperate future doesn’t look like, this crumbling ruin of the worst that humans settle for, this picked-over pile of bones. Most of the residents have moved on to the next dive.
Those who can’t are forced to live and die in a plague-infested incident pit. Old buildings have a lot to say. Especially this one. The things it must have seen are beyond my capacity to describe.
No matter what time it is in here, to the residents it’s always night . This whole block occupies its own hermetically sealed buggered barnyard of the past. This filthy three-story public toilet shits the Beat 1940’s in every sense, and if you know for any reason what it looks like in here, then you’re beat to shit, too, you’re Beat, you’re shit, you eat the shit of New Portland and live for weeks on what the richies throw away. Your family has restraining orders against you, and you stay at the Last Chance because no one else will rent to you unless you join a verifiable Program of Recovery for 90 days.
The bathrooms here are always out of order. The barefoot, shuffling stumblebum ghosts howl louder than the sirens, wailing down the boat horns down on the river. Every day, the inhabitants of this building impress me with their fortitude, their know-how and make-do. They’ve had to evolve it, living here, where fixing a leak in the ceiling means to place a bucket beneath it.
Those fungal, sad little rooms are piled high with trash-bag luggage spilling all the random, wretched refuse of chilly nights spent huddled around fabulous 1930’s radiators, with the dead rattling the pink walls that close you in, selling your prescriptions and listening to the terror through the window.
#
Everywhere in this hotel, there are signs: ROACH PHEROMONE TRAP. NO GUEST OR VISITORS. USE OF FIRE STAIRS WILL RESULT IN EVICTION. IT IS UNLAWFUL TO OCCUPY THIS UNIT# DUE TO VIOLATION OF CITY ORDINANCE. UNFIT FOR HUMAN OCCUPANCY. HOUSING INSPECTOR J.G. BALLARD. and my perennial favorite, centimeters deep in pencil on the second floor Fire Door sign,
WILL YOU DIE IN A PLACE LIKE THIS?
THAT WILL SUCK IF YOU DID.
#
The big, diseased heartbeat of the hotel goes on, stuck between a zillion broken channels of echoes, where the upstairs walls lean East and the frame creaks late at night with sounds like a giant harp ripping out of the ground. Within that harp, the higher notes resemble a symphony tuning up, an eternal schizo simulcast like multiple radios playing in empty rooms on empty floors:
Screams and laughter, sobs and the eternal pecking party of back-fence gossip in those nighted halls that often escalates into threats of civil or criminal action. The sound is pre-HD televisions picking up public shortwave reruns, weird barters, wild wails, snores and fake news and someone doing a line …
What’s wrong with the Last Chance Hotel is wrong with New Portland. What’s wrong with New Portland is wrong with all the fractured Americas. What’s wrong with the Americas is wrong with Earth.
Constant construction’s as much a part of the weather as rain. Repairs always run behind schedule. The contractors are scared shitless of the locals. Private Security sits and watches with its hands tied and its thumb up its ass, recording the minutes for Corporate slavering at the door with visions of multi-million-dollar-a-head vertical development lofts going up over the ruins of Portland’s smoky neon heart and soul that will not die no matter how many parts fall off of it…
When people see me behind the window, the human herds who surge and lap in their vast meaty tarn often get confused, walk in another direction, change the subject or find something else to rant about.
There aren’t many like me working Security. I think the herds get uniform-shock without a human face sticking up out of the collar of my shirt.
All the Downtowners, trundling past the front desk window, all those douchebags and hipsters, babybats and grifters, who make me remember how lonely and broken I was, and wonder what I am.
Down where I live, the locals pull down the battered dragon gates at the east corner of the block chunk-by-chunk to sell them for the scrap brass. Sharp as summer wasps, their needle-exchange of tongues endlessly sews the air,
“GIT THE FUCK BACK IN THAT HO-TEL! YOU AIN’T NO REAL COP! HELL, YOU AIN’T EVEN NO REAL PERSON!”
The first time I heard that, I whirled on one heel and lit all my eyes bright red…
#
05/15/2059
19:19…19:20…
“No. I am not. I’m a real droid, just like on the news. And this is a real Flasp. When I juice this up and whack you with it, I just sign for the body afterward and go home. Now you tell me---“ By that time, I was an inch from his face, “You gonna keep interfering with my Fire Watch?”
Universes were born and died in the pause.
“Naw, man, naw…I ain’t said shit…”
#
FLIP: SEARCH ALL FEEDS: LAST CHANCE HOTEL
LATEST (skim):
WILLYWEEK.NEWS.WLL. [Archive 25 Sept. 2059]
...”We are completely fixing everything,” Atlas Escher states, “This work was all planned. What we’ve been discovering ain’t ever going to happen here again…”
FLIP: SAVED ENTRY. GO:
#
Discovering? My mechanical squeal drowns out the scrolling stream of shit news.
Even before Dog Lady came to visit and decided to stay, Atlas was charging the Republic of Oregon fifteen hundred a month rent for every juicer and crackhead who lives here, and providing no services. Nothing. Just tiny, bacteriological nightmares of rooms with no kitchens, crumbling walls; one filthy institutional shower and one ancient, stained bathtub per floor…
Before Housing Inspector Ballard deemed half the rooms unfit for human occupancy, Atlas’ lawyer would tip him off in advance that some inspection or another was coming on such and such a date.
Atlas would proceed to hire the sketchiest under-the-table contractor he could find to slap a Band-Aid on the issue until the inspectors went away.
Before Dog Lady, Mike the daytime desk clerk kept most of the tenants so beholden to him for information about “What’s really goooin’ on, there,doont’cha knoo;” and confused about what actually was, that there was little outcry about anything.
It couldn’t last forever, but until Mike died most of the tenants were too lost in their own fog to realize that Mike was Atlas’ well-bribed shill and mole with them from the start.
Most of the other low-rent hotels downtown cooperated with the City, around inspection-time. Thus, they were given more time and latitude to get their buildings up to code, sometimes even some pork-money to do it, if they talked a good enough game and followed through.
Atlas dug his own grave when he mouthed off to MPD Patrol Chief Hardy when that big blond beach queen came in and started threatening him with closure. Then Atlas dug his own grave again when he locked horns likewise with the normally kindly old Inspector Ballard, who has given no ideological ground since he slapped those tags on 50 out of 70 doors in the building.
(Oh, what a reaming those English can give. True art. This was a joy to capture…)
#
05/03/2059
1000…1001….
The slender, mostly-bald old gentleman in his gray coverall and lineman’s vest shakes a clipboard at Atlas. There’s a camera around his neck. His accent is as out of place in Portland as a coconut palm.
“How could you let one of your own tenants sink so low?” Inspector Ballard snaps, disgusted. Atlas feigns wide-eyed innocence. “But I was just up there two days ago, and there was no garbage piled up in #314 at all---“
“Do me a favor.” Ballard hisses. “Stan Laurel got pictures of the Great Grimpen Mire up there two weeks ago. Not only are you a slumlord, Atlas Escher, you’re a bare-faced liar!”
“B-but, but…”
Ballard’s seamed cheeks glow red-hot. “Yes, your b-but-butt is precisely what you sit upon down here, while you soak them for rent and don’t provide anathing f’r’it!”
Atlas gets to his feet, roaring like a bull. “SINCE WHEN ARE WE RUNNING A CARE FACILITY?!?”
On camera, Ballard shakes his tonsured head sorrowfully, holding up his water-stained clipboard for inspection. “Your showers leak onto the floor below. I was noting the leaky one on Two, and then the leaky one on Three decided to take the proverbial piss upon me whilst I was so noting. Don’t blister my ear about care facilities, you great fat clot of shit, or I’ll see you in one. Cheers.”
Atlas shrugs. “I’ll have to raise the rennnnt….”
Then Ballard loses it again. “You own half of downtown! You could write off all the repairs and add-ons and still make a mint, if you worked it right! Your problem isn’t just that you’re a crook, that’s fine, we can work with those. We do so every day. Your problem is that you’re a stupid crook who cares nothing for human life or political procedure. You charge three hundred a month more than the Lucia, and they’ve got full-time over-the-table janitors and real security! No offense, PS-20.”
“None taken.”
Ballard ploughs onward, “They throw out the people who hoard garbage. You, sir, seem to breed it…”
PAUSE. STOP. CLOSE CLIP.
[PLAY CLIP: NEXT MORNING:]
And round and round it goes. The slumlord pays me little mind. I can see out into the lobby now. Atlas rocks back and forth on the six-inch earth soles of his orthopedic sneakers, strange eyes distant, lower lip curled. Both of them are barely paying Pogue any mind. Atlas is looking toward the stairs, off into the past.
“Commissioner Sanford is trying to make a name for himself out of this place, and those damn dirty cops Laurel and Hardy with him. But they’re going to get some bad publicity. I been around a long time… And, anyway, When did it become our responsibility to be nanny for someone who puts money down on a room and should expect the right to be left alone in peace? It’s all politics! With all the headache and nuisance, I just want out. I worked… my thirty years. This place was just supposed to be a supplement to my retirement. My kids are really… upset with me. I was just… gonna give it to them, before…They say, ‘Dad, you’ve built yourself a prison...”
CLOSE CLIP
RESUME JOURNAL ENTRY
#
In here, it’s still the same endless nightmare of urban wildlife and building code violations, numbering better than five hundred at Ballard’s last official count. The old man’s loading for bear. I wonder about my job.
The projected sale of the Last Chance has already been made public on City Hall’s website. But as with so much else, they’ve blacked out most of the pertinent details, presumably until the sale goes final and big old Atlas is firmly and deeply lodged in the mighty rectum of civil court.
No one knows what this block will become, but judging by the new condo boom in several neighbor- hoods, it’s a pretty safe bet this property ain’t gonna be a block-long soup kitchen. The idea of the hotel being taken over by new owners, presumably with their own blackshirts to go look for fires, isn’t much of an incentive to do my job now.
I have to occupy my mind somehow, though. Hence the video-sculpture. I save, record and document everything: every inch of old woodwork in this block, every story, every scar, cross-reference embeded hypertext in each other…
This is a hive, not a permanent home. I know that. Commissioner Sanford and his pit bulls Chief Laurel and Captain Hardy are going to push old Escher out of the hotel business and never allow him to rent another room to anyone in New Portland.
Chief Hardy also owns a development company called Agathocles Land Holdings. Last week, I learned that Agathocles’ chief financial backer is a local small-time Yakuza oyabun named Kano Takahara.
So that makes me the private-mercenary bottom link in several different organized crime syndicates with varying degrees of political legitimacy. Go, me.
The weekly papers are trying to sneak in here all the time. I let them in when the Boss isn’t on site. Dog Lady apparently knows the right phone numbers to call.
Atlas hasn’t been coming by as much lately. Ballard’s always waiting for him in the lobby. I enjoy the old man’s company greatly, but hate to waste his time while Escher stalls. Sources indicate there may be an inverse relationship between their presences.
Atlas keeps talking wistfully about leaving the planet. The mess he’ll leave behind will cost the Earth to fix. Last Resort will probably stick me guarding some bank somewhere.
Maybe this is all for the best. This hotel is a quagmire, a dying whore anxious to take a few of us along, built on blood wrung from the destitute and the mentally ill.
#
There are a lot of stairs at the Last Chance, six and a half rickety flights that bend in places, high ceilings upwardly mirroring the structure below them. The tall columnar windows let in light around the middle of the building .
I step off the stairwell and shut the door behind me. Stray voltage whips through the silver fog and filthy air, the harsh, sputtering light, the smells, the slanting walls. The door at the opposite end of the hall is bumping up and down like a speaker at a warehouse party. #327. Sadie Rehn. The Dog Lady.
Like me, Sadie got abandoned early. She was a real estate agent in San Francisco before some jack-roller brained her with a flowerpot while she was up here on an extended cocaine crawl.
Sadie had no way back home. Her entire identity was stolen. More importantly, her entire identity was lost to her. Not only did she get jack-rolled for her ID, credit cards, CalWorks Health Pass, the whole shebangabang… but it took quite a while for her to remember exactly who she was.
When she found out, she attempted to access her old life from where she was then, and found that every bit of it had been picked clean by her family and her creditors. On that day, Sadie took up the mantle of a fine tradition in that part of town and became a hex whore, con artist and female hustler.
And, eventually, a police snitch. But I’m not quite there yet. Sadie’s… special. She refuses to acknowledge her part in any police call she’s ever involved in. She hates how far she fell, and wants to take as many along with her as possible, including non-humans like myself.
I remember her haranguing Atlas any number of times, the way her jaw wobbled, the way the whites of her eyes looked green.
“HOW CAN YOU LET US LIVE LIKE THIS AND GO MAKE A DEPOSIT AT THE BANK EVERY DAY?!?” she’d screa, when she knew she had an audience, “UNTIL YOU PAY ME TO MOVE, I’M GONNA BE IN YOUR ASS!!!”
The official diagnosis there is Closed Brain Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder. Sadie thrives on negative attention. Bad is better than nothing.
If her sort aren’t agitating and causing drama, the weird drugs their brains make leave them feeling bored and useless. Much of the time, they don’t really know who they are.
They can also be quite crafty, when they choose. Sadie’s worked her way through a third of the flophouses in New Portland on one basic rent-extortion grift:
When Dog Lady shows up to rent from you, you can bet the City wants to buy your building out badly but can’t afford to. So they hire her to go in and eat the landlord from the guts out with Title 29 complaints about unrepaired hazards, refusing to pay rent until said complaints are resolved, then escalating one of them after the other, then another…
Fomenting anarchy, and conditions favorable for a hostile takeover under Eminent Domain. Dog Lady records as many real building code violations in these old hotelsas she can. When the cops come for anything she does, she plays the victim so she can’t be held accountable.
Mysteriously enough, every time that happens, at any hour, it’s always Captain Laurel on site. Big, blond Captain Laurel, who once disarmed an HIV-positive junkie of the blood-filled syringe he was brandishing at Shemp, patted him on the head and turned him loose. Laurel, who wants to run for Police Commissioner when they finally make something stick long enough to Mayor Partridge to vote him out.
Laurel’s a symptom of the New Regime. From hearing the desk clerks talk, I comprehend a clear line before which they and the slumlord chucklingly speak of “the old Last Chance”. The pre-Orange Tag Sale days, when there was at least one person running around naked with a drawn weapon per floor, per night, and raucous drunken bashes every weekend.
The old Last Chance, the old days, before the week two summers ago that none of the desk clerks will talk about sober. Before Dog Lady swooped in and scared off all the contractors who were busy doing too little and too late to the building.
Before Chief Hardy and Captain Laurel’s “Special Offshoot” of the Nihonmachi Neighborhood Response Team to “provide services to these rat- and cockroach-infested slums full of mentally and physically handicapped people,”as the brochures said …
…By leading a Special Riot Team that descended on all seventy rooms through clouds of happy-gas, banging on shields down the halls with a Purge List of residents to drag out by the hair of their mangy, scabied chinny-chin-chins.
Anyone with an IQ above room temperature can see this stuff going on when it happens right in front of them. Captain Laurel works for Agathocles too, as a broker. Fill in the blank.
Every hotel that Dog Lady has bankrupted by extortion is now an Agathocles vert-dev condoplex. This covers about ten former SRO hotels between Downtown and the Foster Road Police Precinct; the last affordable housing of their kind in the area.
From where I sit, this all just looks like a war between con artists with very little truth anywhere. Meanwhile, more humans are homeless here every day and more of the affordable housing in this city falls apart because money-grubbing idiots like Atlas won’t keep it habitable.
What makes it all so worthy of record to me is that I sense another, better future just outside this one. One where I can be a citizen too.
Anyway, there was a period when the cops and the residents of the Last Chance (usually through Social Services, in the latter case) used to haul Dog Lady into court every chance they got, for every john she ever brought up to her apartment through the back Fire Stairs, every green rock of hex she was ever observed buying out front, every… everything.
And in every case, Dog Lady pleaded poverty so they couldn’t garnish her whacko-checks to pay her fines. Just before I joined this happy little nunnery, the night desk man tells me, Atlas even tried to hire some stumblebum to kill Dog Lady outright.
Dumpster Dave, the stumblebum in question, drank and snorted up most of his retainer that same night, made the round of the downtown bars bragging about his new gig, and promptly got jugged by Mayor Partridge’s Dignity Police for being drunk and bloodthirsty out at some old-time motel or another.
Atlas, of course, disavowed all knowledge. He and Dog Lady are a lot alike. He runs his own scams here, hiding from outside eyes for decades while bleeding Portland’s despised poor dry and gloating on the blood. If this hotel is a cuckoo-clock, they’re the hands, circling each other with knives out even as the machinery grinds to a halt.
Lately, #327 as a unit has been making some hideous vibrations holding nothing of this planet, assuming a certain symphonic quality that no human agency could produce without the kind of tech that would be almost mythic in a dive like this. I must watch my back.
I remember that I was the first Last Resort guard to fire back at the Dog Lady, and when, down to date and time, chapter and verse…
#
05/01/2059
1830…1831…
REHN, SADIE ANN, populated in my topmost eye. 5’4” WAF (…blah blah…) SADIE ANN REHN IS IMMUNE FROM PROSECUTION. MILITARY POLICE DIVISION INFORMER. ARREST UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES. ANY QUESTIONS, CELL MPD CAPTAIN STANLEY LAUREL AT (971)…
In the clip, the stairwell door hung open, swinging back and forth like the gate of an old, mostly-abandoned graveyard. The hinge was magnetic. It wasn’t supposed to do that.
Something must have been throwing off the field. The hazel eyes of the plastinated corpse at the top of the stairs struck sparks from the darkness. “Part of the wall by my front door is burning,” she snapped.
I knew perfectly well she set the fire just before her dealer snuck in the back. Then she went out and drenched the hallway with lighter fluid , tossed tissue paper everywhere and then sat in the window smoking a cigarette. I got it all on camera.
I attempted to sound menacing. “YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH FIRE WATCH AND INTOXICATED WITH HEXOMETHAMPHETAMINE, CRACK COCAINE, MARIJUANA AND… huh… DEXTROMETHORPHAN HYDROBROMIDE COUGH SYRUP? WHATEVER. PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST ALL INTERFERENCE OR BE REMANDED TO CARE OF HOOPER MEMORIAL SOBERING CENTER. MESSAGE ENDS.”
In the clip, there was a ghostly, excited luster around Dog Lady, sluggish and gaseous. Her badly-shaven blue Doberman, Sharon by name, started towards me and whimpered. The zombie marionette leered out mockingly from the pool of sick light in her doorway at the end of the hall.
“You can’t arrest me! You’re not human! I know my rights! And fuck you too, Mike Hopkins, I see you looking up the stairwell!”
Mike pulled his big bald inbred-turtle head back so fast it might have never been there. Like he was a ghost. Sadie fumed. Her eyes lit up the translucent gray skin of her face. She leaned in, breathing hard, pushing upward on her sharp cheekbones and massaging the muscles.
“YOU! I’M CALLING YOUR OWNER!!“ Then her cyanosed eyes rolled back, too far back, opening too much around the edges.
I doubted my own programming and who I beheld, unable to logically tell if I was really seeing the pulsating thing in its sac down inside her, the thing that didn’t like the light, squirming like a toad.
I telephotoed in. Even accounting for my malfunctioning peripheral vision, I still saw a face beneath Sadie’s, something squinched down under her unwashed hair that stunk like hot plastic. Even in the footage, the hallucination remains the same…
Hell-burnt purple suckers, strangulated tumors, ropy spaghetti... I know a Gorgon when I hear it breathe…
What I saw was squeaking goblin terror, nothing that even a machine should see.
But one thing that Tapheads take the longest to get back is the AI sense of self-worth. The pathways just aren’t there. I didn’t get paid to make such differentiation. In the clip, I sighed, trying to play this Bad Cop gig indignantly cool, trying to be like Dr. Who in the old teleflicks and not show fear…
”I haven’t got an owner, you weird little person. I don’t see your name programmed in me anywhere. My super warned me about you. Go smoke some more hex and leave me be.”
“Don’t you threaten me!” Dog Lady screeched, leaning back seductively, clearly enjoying what she saw as banter, “That’s defamation of character, and a terroristic threat against the life or person of another… person! Whatever! I know you sleep on the job, you…”
And just like that, She Had Nothin’. I chuckled rustily.
“Can’t talk your way out of that one, can you ? If there are, even if I was ever here before… what color do my eyes turn when I sleep, smartass?”
Tick. Tick. ”That’s what I thought.” My own unedited security footage clearly showed me turning and leaving the scene at that point. Her screeching followed me down all those stairs.
#
There are people who think they can’t be questioned. I work here, ergo there is a need for a twenty-four-hour watchman to insure that the dump doesn’t burn down. Ergo, said dump est dump.
The Eschers let this place go for decades, lied about it, sucked a lot of people dry, and kicked a lot of people in the teeth when they were down, so spectacularly that I wonder what their motivation could ever have been.
Then I almost get it.
The way this place is a tomb for the past, a haunted museum that takes a little piece of everyone who comes through. Even me.
I fast-forward to 1745 hours on the same night as the previous memory , as I walk down in real-time to the dusty, silent end of the second-floor hall …
#
17451//JOURNAL///PERSONAL///INTERCONNECTEDNESS#416
The Irishman flips channels on the TV by wiggling his hairy ears, clearly bored with everything that’s on. “Bad news is, she can smell fear.”
Rrring, announces the antique modular phone on the wall. We both look in that direction. Pogue cocks his head and picks up from where he stands. The cigarette burns in his hand indoors, a middle finger and rigor mortis hardon.
“Last Chance Hotel! Come on vacation, leave on proba---Oh, no, now you just wait a minute. Wait out front and think of the beatin’ yeh’ll get when I get out there.”
Mahone hangs up, looking at me apologetically. “Mum. She’s in a day early from Galway. Soon as I’m off, I’m away off to see who… may outdrink whom… down t’the Yamhill. You’ll want footage, I think.”
I nod immediately. “Oh yeah. Straight to vid. Well, straight to scrapbook, but I’ll cut you in on the biopic…”
Outside, a beautiful girl with long mimskin dreadlocks levitating at various heights in the air around her head , silver tattoos jiggling across the exposed tops of her breasts, jogs by the window and waves as she passes. Pogue sighs.
“That’s American birds for yeh. They won’t say hello, but they’ll say goodbye. Did yeh want that other story, for yer scrapbook, like?”
“Yeah.” I switch my eyes red for Record, and swivel my head toward him. Pogue’s memory is apparently operating at much higher capacity than my own today. He clears his throat.
“There was some jack-roller used to come through here, name of Mohammed, and—“
“Hold on.” Pogue does. “For the benefit of those just tuning in to the Last Chance Hotel Musical On Ice,”at this, Pogue chortles, ”What is a ‘jack-roller’?”
“Street scavenger,” Pogue explains, ”These little runts wait outside the bar for drunks who can barely walk after Last Call, then jack them for their wallets and beat ‘em up a little bit if they give them any shit.”
My mic is picking him up fine. This could be a great documentary someday. I have no idea where. But there’s nothing here but Time.
“Anyway,” Pogue rattles on, “ Mohammed was back in here two weeks after gettin’ out of jail, clumb up the Fire Escape an’ locked himself in the Tub Room on the third floor,slept for three nights runnin’ before I had to go fook ‘im out. He says,”here Pogue mimicked, “Well, you wasn’t usin’ it!’”
The door to the Front Desk creaks open. “That god-damn tub room,” Lucius says sorrowfully through his white walrus mustache.
Lucius keeps himself to himself, most of the time. He’s worked there the longest of any desk clerk, since he retired early from the Union-Nogales Mimlev Railroad Line. He works to keep busy, reads a lot and listens to the few good news channels pirated in on the radio from Free British Columbia.
His sprung loafers whisper across the carpet. I have no sensations as you understand them, but I can apprehend that the Pendleton shirt he wears looks warm. “I don’t never open that door no more. Tell him why, Mahone.”
Pogue grins up from speed-counting the till with left eye and hand. “This is why we pay Lucius the highest of all. ‘T’isn’t the extra hours he puts in, it’s such bits as these.. Was a lad here, as well. name of Terry, there was, who saw fit to stop takin’ his meds and hang himself from the big steel bar above the tub. Lucius went up an’ cut him down, ‘e did, then said nothin’ of it, only stayed wi’the body ‘til EMS got here to make sure no one stripped the corpse. Ever catch Fat Boy doin’ such a thing?”
Lucius looks surprised by the explanation. Pogue just shakes his scruffy head. “Stuck On Stupid. Atlas should never be in charge of any business that involves people, an’ that prick Mike too”
By the time Pogue gets to the word ‘people’, Lucius is roaring and wheezing with laughter-induced tears cutting railroads down his seamed cheeks. “Stop… I’m sayin’, no you mustn’t…” he cackles.
The phone rings. “G’on now, “ he rasps at Pogue, flapping one callused brakeman’s hand at him, and answers it. “ Last Chance Hotel, how may I… No sir, we are undergoing renovations at this---(CLICK.)
“Mother fucker, “ Lucius raps out, snarling, “ Fuck around with me…Ho-tel fulla crooks and old women, tryinna put me in the middle. Don’t nobody tell a lie when the truth will do more damage…” He takes a deep,cleansing breath, counts to about eight and a half, then hangs up.
“Wrong number,” is all he finally says. After a while, he understands why we’re laughing ,and joins in.
Out front, a one-legged man goes swinging by with a fifth of Old Crow bourbon. Pogue chuckles on-camera at me, gesturing all around.
“As is the case when ending any shift here, I have discovered to mine own great pain that you can’t win no fight with no one-legged man. The till’s all here, Lucius. Counted…” he taps his left eyelid, “And seconded. Cheers. Back in six hours. G’night, you lot…Or mornin’. I don’t even know any more. Whichever.”
#
As soon as Pogue leaves, Lucius sighs like a steam-whistle at me, knowing what the red lights mean when he sees them go back on. He speaks anyway.
“Can’t none of us do nothin’ about it now except sit here and holler while it comes down around our heads. Soon as Fat Boy gives up operation of this here nut house, he’ll be dead in two years, now that he can’t come down here and give us desk clerks a hard time no more...”
What the hell just happened? When did it all become too far gone to catch up, or even count the bodies? I ask again, I cry in the daytime, and see only the stone ears of frozen gods. Never mind.
Lucius thinks a moment. A fly buzzes disturbingly close to one of my eyes. I hit my pest-switch, and a wireless tentacle zaps it out of the air. He sighs gratefully before he even acknowledges the gratitude. He is on a roll.
“For Atlas, everything comes down to one simple question,” Lucius continues, immediately irritated at the sudden sound, “If it’ll cost less to fix up all the code violations than it would to sell off and run, he’ll have everything fixed in a heartbeat. But and now the bill’s finally comin’ due.”
He looks at clip-me, finally calming down from the raw-nerve knee-jerk reactions inherent in his complex PTSD. (Another vet.) “You know, PS-20, sometimes I forget I’m talkin’ to a machine? Now could your emancipated mechanical ass please go turn on the thermostat timer, or are you wearin’ the mother fucker for a nose ring, by this point…”
And on across the footage… I scan that whole night’s worth before going back upstairs. I have no idea what I’m looking for. I just know I need to find it soon...
#
10/08/2060
1800 HRS
PATROL: ALL CLEAR. NO SMOKE, FLAMES, FUMES, OR ISSUES.
JOURNAL/INTERCONN…/EXISTING/ SPLICE:
12/24/2059
1200…1201…1202…
In the clip, Pogue dips his head, sloshing the Chinese vodka in his coffee mug and making the ice cubes clink. The hat stays on. Then he remembers where the joint is in the ashtray. “Ike Asimov’s Twelve Steps of Robotics,” he cackles at me through a sweet blue mouthful of chronic smoke. I cackle back, surprised.
Outside in the clip, the snow falls hard and fast. A wheelchair, tricked out in cardboard to look like a sleigh, goes roaring by along the sidewalk, pulled by a team of three pit bulls. The legless driver wears a Santa suit and stands in the saddle as tall as he can. We watch him go. Pogue clears his throat and takes another manful swill.
“Marduk Escher, Atlas’ Dad, owned a bar over on MLK with a Greek restaurant on the upper floor. The Health Inspector and the Fire Bureau and all sorts of different government ankle-biters started chewin’ on Marduk’s arse about all manner of ways he was cuttin’ corners. So Marduk fires back an’ starts tryin’ to palm off every square centimeter of blame on the damn Greeks he’d deigned to rent to, don’t yeh see.... Oh, what in the name of Jesus do we have trumpetin’ along here, Security I mean Fire Guard? I’m gonna wet ‘em! Look, yeh!”
Outside the window, a herd of pathologically drunk Santa Clauses make their way up Chasse Boulevard, haranguing passers-by and voiding various orifices in various directions. We both howl with laughter.
A black-and-white MPD airskiff swoops down in a perfectly columnar swirl of snow. The cop bellows through the PA system on his skiff, “ALL SANTA CLAUSES PLEASE DISPERSE! YOU ARE DISTURBING THE PEACE AND SUBJECT TO FEDERAL INTERVENTION UNDER PATRIOT ACT 10!”
His own Flasp’s even brighter than mine. I see snow begin to melt where he’s pointing it. There’s no way this can end well…
END CLIP.
#
Pondering… What else was I pondering, when I woke up… Oh, yeah. Ghosts.
It still makes me wonder. All the brain-cases like Dumpster Dave, who walk in multiple worlds, still come in asking if Mike needs his laundry done or a beer run or whatever. They did that a lot when Mike walked the Earth, orbiting Atlas Escher like a smaller slumlord, throwing money at other residents who orbited him in turn with groceries and smokes and beer until Dog Lady laid Mike low with a thirty-pound steel trashcan lid outside, jack-rolled him for his wallet and ate his eyes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not human, and never will be. It takes a lot more than soul-snot to scare me. That’s just how I’m made.
There are several steady revenants here. Mike, Robert, the elderly woman whose smeary form on the fire escape does magical things to the view of the strip-joint neon from the second-floor window, so many more…
I haven’t been around much, but I’ve never seen their like anywhere else. Pogue memorably and reverently calls them “the craithurs”. He even leaves them Halloween candy and Christmas cookies.
The Last Chance’s living-impaired population just are. They are a self-protected phylum of citizen organisms with their own laws, whose actions cannot be punished or commended by conventional security techniques. So I watch and listen, and let the damned filthy old things be.
#
I forget if it’s early morning or late evening. I have to check my clock. Most of the residents who pass out for long periods ask the same thing. No big deal.
I shamble past the lobby and look in. Old Atlas, all five hundred pounds of him, is in there milking the coffee and soda machines for the last penny with that stoat-headed contractor type standing over his shoulder and waiting around, tapping his feet on the tile.
Atlas can’t stop fussing with this building to make sure he’s making the most money for the least amount of work. And yet he’s scared to go upstairs. Every time he does, he keeps looking over his shoulder and breaking out in cold sweats.
I never understood that. It’s like he’s voluntarily assembled his own House of a Thousand Corpses, like in that old movie. Is he so sick and broken that he can’t see that? Or if he does…
You don’t live that despicably and expect to get away clean. Not in the end. Atlas is well past seventy, emphysematous, diabetic and morbidly obese. Even with his sick other angle, he can’t expect to live that much longer. Atlas has nowhere to run from his ghosts…
Atlas lumbers and navigates his way back behind his desk to count all his change. “Break his neck trippin’ over a dollar just to get to a nickel.” Pogue mutters from the black mesh over the front desk.
On the other side of the mesh, looking at him speculatively, Shelley Bearkiller snickers to herself. She’s got just about as many metal teeth as Pogue, and many Native tattoos, Lakota Sioux.
She’s a recovering hexer (like far too many of her people who got refugee status in the cities after the massacre at Pine Ridge) and former hooker who’s hiding out here while she tries to dry out. Atlas doesn’t really care until the cops yell at him about it, then he pretends to until he can ignore her again. .
I’ve learned a lot from this lobby and everyone in it, on many long nights watching old movies in that weird, dark cave while the hoi polloi stumble along outside. Pogue grins over at me now through his mustache with silver teeth. His left eye, blinks red and green like a Christmas ornament.
A tweed cap barely holds down his mop of graying hair. “Yer up five minutes early, Marvin,” he observes. “What’s on fire?” I pretend to smell the air around him. “I dunno. Smells a little like weed. Might have to write somebody up.”
“Aye, and I might have to run the blender for several hours, smarty eyes.“ Pogue chuckles, breaking off to pick up his earlier thread, talking with his hands a lot,
“… So this eejit, he’s up there firin’ full bottles of Obsidian Stout… at black people from three floors up. I went up to fook ‘im out, I did, an’ confiscated every last pint for personal alcoholism research, yeh see. He starts to nut up on me about it, and I tell him Look, fella m’lad, a full beer fired at someone from this height an’ it’s Game Over! Second of all…” he fumed, “ It’s Obsidian! Give’s this an’ leave the block a while...”
Shelley cackles. “All the black guys I know on this block would knock somebody down for a pint of Obsidian.” She pantomimes someone going for a long pass in football. “Over here! In the bushes!”
“First walk-through, Atlas,” I mutter boredly, “Building scans code-4, but confirming visually. Have a good night.”
A full ten seconds later, Atlas’ head comes up from behind the desk. His kooky gold-ringed eyes look back, glimmering with pharmaceutical confusion. “You haven’t heard the whole story,” he murmurs cryptically in that weird, fruity tenor voice, “But stay! You will!”
“Uhh…affirmative.” He even has the power to weird out a machine. I don’t know why he stuck around this late . Oh. Logging onto the log now, I’m getting that there was a row with Dog Lady earlier that left Atlas haranguing two cops on the sidewalk, and nearly getting run in himself.
“Why won’t you help me evict her?” was his only entry on the Comment line of the scan. So… yeah. He stayed here to relax, to suck some more bedbug blood out of the place and presumably feel better after a while.I pause, watching him count his filthy plastic bowls of vending-machine change.
Sometimes it takes Fat Boy five minutes to answer a question I ask him, or even register my presence. I just sit around and wait until that goofy overmedicated smile flutters open and he croons, “Well, let me saaay it thiiis way…” in a voice several thousand RPM’s slower than Tina the heroin-hooker up on two.
There’s a species of mad hilarity in those little rogue elephant eyes, a restrained hysteria in each unhurried step and HRRRGHH…EEEGH…. wheeze of breath as Atlas gazes upon all his vacancies for long hours in an attitude of profoundest attention. It’s like he’s waiting for something to come home to him up the Fire Escape, something he bought and paid for over twenty years ago...
Or maybe that Something is already here to stay. I get up and walk out into the lobby as Atlas does likewise. Atlas’ current guest (replete in too much bronzer, weird shades and a twinkly black shirt) deigns to look at me and makes a note on his clipboard pane with a small black stylus. The note floats in the air, but I can’t make head or tail of his handwriting.
“Undeclared security simulacrum, Atlas,” the man says. “When’d you acquire it?” Like I’m not even in the room.
I have to give Atlas credit. He still doesn’t look up from the coffee machine, where his gloved hand is now in the spout up to the elbow. (For a mad moment, I imagine that he will birth a tiny, beeping coffeepot from that spout and cut its power cord.) Then he calls out,
“Dave, this is PS-20. The Fire Inspectors put him here. He’s with Last Resort Security. One a’those new AI robots that do everything including your taxes, eh heh heh heh…” He has a really annoying laugh.”Say…hullo… PS-20!”
I’m too tired to play Uncle Tom. I stick out my favorite hand. “I’m sorry, Dave. I hate scaring the straights. Are you with the Housing Authority, or…”
“Oh, no.” Dave shakes his bristly head very rapidly. “Newlands Realty. We wanna make Mr. Escher here an offer on the building. Can you key open some rooms for us, there, PS-20?”
331, I wished, The rotting one, where Atlas takes whatever female tenant is desperate enough at the time to fuck him for a month’s free rent. Sometimes male ones too. Go show them that one.
I nod, even as my body opens the doors by remote from down here. Atlas has written off every repair that was ever supposed to happen here into a summer home on Mars, where he will probably be hiding very shortly. “We were in an earthquake two years ago,” the big liar, whoremonger, toadstool, wheezes at Dave, “And we barely felt it. They just don’t make hotels like they used to.”
Do you hear yourself, Merchant of Filth? I want to scream in his face. But he wouldn’t get it. And who am I to rise up all righteous, anyway? Even my own company swing from Atlas’ big old sow teat. If we exploit him and he exploits the people who live here, what does that say about us? What does that say about me?
A lot of words spring to mind. None of them are words I like very much. I go up again and check for smoke, flames, fumes or stupidity. One floor down, I hear Dave asking Atlas why the hell he painted the rooms pink.
“Beecause it’s a cleeeeean color,” Atlas wheezes. I let my thought-recording wax a Coltrane howl of:
My ass. You painted them pink because you got all that pink paint for free at the City Dump…
I continue on my rounds. Something about tonight feels totally different than any other shift I’ve ever pulled at the Last Chance. Through the pauses of the storm, the wind rushes through the halls from the half-open fire escape windows, whistles as it breezes through the narrow bathrooms and the blue locked doors.
The whole trip up the stairs feels like a nightmare. Will the Dog Lady be out presently to upbraid me? Don’t I hear her spiky little footsteps across the squashy, trash-littered floor of her room, sending up mold spores and that produce-bin proteus vulgaris reek like a bacterological cattle drive?
At the end of the hall, between her cracked-open door and the window, against the wall on the left, she’s set a gilded plaster hand-mirror of 1940’s vintage, cracked down the middle, with a glaring Gorgon head at the end of the handle. There are rhinestones in the Gorgon’s eyes; one red, one green.
The golden mirror sits at a slight angle so she can look out her door and see who’s coming up the hall.
It’s an old jailhouse trick. I log it in my memory. Behind the door, certain low and indefinite sounds come at long intervals, flashes of light, bursts of static pulse.
The air around #327 glows silver like a faintly visible gas. Something screams in the wall and dies.
I look back.
I’d gasp if I could. Dog Lady’s been out there the whole time, stargazing by the fire escape window, shrouded in sooty downtown shadow as old as the city. Her aspect and body language tell me incontrovertibly that she’s waiting for someone or something to climb up the Fire Escape with what she needs.
Behind her, the smeary window turns green with prowling airskiff-light through a break in the clouds. Her entire grim, skinned form is bathed in the sick silver shimmer gathering all around her. A pale fear seizes me at the sight.
Then I breathe in the hush, swallowing down all that quiet. Suffering shines through in the sick gray light of her sallow lizard face, pullulating with disease, glaring dread awfulness up and down the hall…
After Detox wouldn’t haul her off a while back, I tried to give her a second, more conciliatory little Come-To-Jesus about not interfering with the Fire Watch since she was responsible for us being here in the first place. Sadie slammed the door in my face and called me “Just another fucking bug.”
Predictably, MPD left without Dog Lady four hours later that evening. She’d instigated a fight between the Rat Man and the tranny crackhead across the hall from her, called it in to MPD, then called my boss Sgt. Mason and told him I was sleeping on the job.
It didn’t matter that fights had nothing to do with Fire Watch. That was just Sadie’s way of slipping it to all parties involved at once. That night, Watch Commander Mason came down from Last Resort’s Gresham HQ and found a few things to chew me out for in the Employee Handbook until Pogue showed up to corroborate my version of events.
Mason tore up the Incident Report and shook his sausage finger in my face. “We don’t have to hire robots yet,” he said, slightly over my head like he didn’t really want to talk to me. “You watch your ass, you uppity vacuum cleaner. Because I’ll be right in it…”
#
10/08/2060
18:19…01…
Lenny the Crackhead Handyman here has the most well-developed sense of vengeance of any human I’ve ever known. On my rounds just a few minutes ago, he asked me to come with him and run lead-block while he gave Dog Lady twenty four hours’ notice that the Exterminator would be by.
Lenny wouldn’t say what his plan was for later that day, only that he had one in case things got ugly, which they usually did…
“I remember, once, I opened her door and there was cobwebs this thick,” he told me on the stairs, eyes wide and his grizzled jaw wobbling “Four roaches sat there in the flashlight beam, just playin’,” He shuddered, glancing into my eyes, ”You know, playin’. I had to hose off the broom three times before I could even get to the light switch.”
“So what will you do if she gives you any shit?” I prompted. Lenny sneered expansively, face jowling up. Lenny was high comedy to watch, just a shame to know where he got his energy.
“Oh, if she gets her old granny panties in a bunch about this, she’ll scream fuckin’ bloody murder, what I got planned,” he informed me, “It’ll be like music to my ears. Like ‘The Sound of Music.’ Hey, that’s what we should do, PS-20, write ‘Last Chance Hotel: The Musical.’ “
“Come on Vacaaaaation… Leave on Pro-baaaaation,” I crooned. Lenny laughed, then looked surprised.
At that, we went up and knocked at Dog Lady’s door. After some more weird noises, she opened it and looked around, blinking and whipping and rattling every which way, eyes bright, ready for war.
The shadows ran all around us like black cats and hobo spiders. For the first time in years, I truly fathomed both the utter necessity of my job and the utter futility of it. “GET THE FUCK AWAY!!” screamed this gestalt plastinate, this skinned chicken, this revenant who never looked right in any light.. “STOP LOOKING IN MY ROOM!! You pedophile!” she spit at Lenny, “I saw your mail. You…”
“Division of Child Support, not that it’s any of your deal,” Lenny snapped, looking put out. His face got too close and she spit in it, spraying something on the spit from … a bracelet? I squinted. It was blurry. It…
As they were talking, I worked an unused pair of arms and hands around behind me and ganked the mirror. As stated, I don’t have a rectum as you understand the definition, but there was a WHISK, and a THOOMP, and then the mirror was in my chest. No one seemed to notice.
Clearly, Dog Lady still wasn’t done having fun. “Oh, shake some more, Lenny. Shake some more and turn red. You—“
Lenny was having none of it. “I pay seventy thousand a year in support. How’s that make me a fuckin’ chester, and since when did sellin’ your old nasty pussy make you into some kinda arbiter of…”
Incredibly, Dog Lady began to sing as she went back in her room and locked the eyebolt, “Yooou… are a crack cocaaaaine… salesman… and everyone… is gonna know about it...” CLICK.
“We should add that one to the musical,” Lenny commented to me, grinning like a baboon. In the gloom of the humid upstairs hall, I telephotoed close and saw that there was no laughter touching Lenny’s eyes. They were rolling and frightened, the eyes of a horse that smells fire in the barn.
“I dream about that bitch sometimes. She’s in my room, whisperin’ all this gibberish that don’t make no kinda sense, and it’s like… she’s got mirrors in her eyes that twist up my head so all I can see is what’s right in front of me, reflecting itself, back down this long tunnel to the rooms under Downtown, where the death-gods judge…” Lenny shuddered. “I gotta get off that shit...”
#
I looked a long way down the hall, out the fire escape, into the cold sky above the alien jungle madness of the city, the Gorge, the coast, the whole way north to the nearly nameless nightmare countries at the top of the world …
#
10/08/2060
20:05…06…
Brooding, I trudge back down and return behind the desk. Is’t yerself? the Irishman’s headgear says at me before I even enter, wheeling the door open, emerging in that Rembrandt light and blinking like a diopter. There’s a perfect Shemp-shaped shadow in potato chip crumbs around Atlas’ desk chair from the previous shift.
Outside the window, out in the snowfall of neon, some bootlegger cruises a long Burnside Cadillac down the block . The welded-together shopping carts’ street-rebuilt wheels are as loud as a parade.
On a level with the window, the blue plastic tarp on said mobile home flaps aside to reveal Ball jars of corn liquor, a few watered-down fifths of cheap vodka, and two human legs, the toenails painted with a purple-red polish. Bootlegger Boy yanks the tarp closed very fast, bowing exaggeratedly at us as he passes the window. Pogue gives him the finger.
“Drunk,” he explains obliquely. “Fella m’lad was passed out on his face, yeh see, up at the corner. I went to go fook ‘im out, told him to move. This did not sit well. I went back in. He was spoilin’ for a fight, but I had no reason ta’. Anyway, this fookin’ stumblebum is comin’ up, I see him outside the window, comin’ up to hard hex-dealers who’d break his legs just for talkin’, if only it weren’t so funny…”
My eyes are as red as the neon of the bar sign next door. The capture is clean. Pogue is born for a microphone. “He comes up with this handfulla bills, doin’, like, the old street joke about, ‘If you can kick my arse, I’ll give yeh a buck,’” here Pogue palms his forehead, chuckling in hopeless horror at the human condition,
“Only he gets it wrong, he goes, ‘I… WILL GIVE YOU A DOLLAR… IF I CAN KICK YOUR ASS!”
“And if you kicked his?” I venture. Pogue shrugs.
“Guess I’d have to pay him for the privilege, wasn’it? Anyway, he won’t be back.” Pogue seems to know for a certainty. He sits down again, steepling his fingers, and looks out our window, the one both our eyes always return to when the conversation reaches comfortable silence.
Our soon-to-be-demolished view of the street is so much more eternal and strange than the television sitting on the platform just below the glass. “They don’t ever come back, once they’re gone… Much like demolished buildings…”
“Hah,” Lucius, too, still sits where he was at the other desk in the back, silent as smoke, working now over a hoary clock-radio with a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers. I told you, my mind is going. He’s so quiet, I forgot he was still there.
He wears a jeweler’s loupe in his right eye. He’s clearly left his hearing-aid out, though. “They gettin’ ready to do it now. That Aga…whatchamacallit, the big holdin’ company, they can come in and grab this place right up as a historical landmark, and---“
“Gut it to the gills, an’ turn it all into condos fulla waterbugs that smell like boiled arse,” Pogue finishes.
For me, deadpan isn’t hard, since I have no mouth. “The waterbugs or the condos?”
Pogue barely even looks in my direction. “Shut it, yeh, before we start in with the Fibonacci sequences and make yer head explode.”
Lucius roars with laughter, slapping the desk in front of him. “Anyway, yeah. That’s why they throwin’ the book at Atlas now. ‘Cos he waited too long and didn’t clean nothin’ up!”
His grizzled, endless head swivels toward a gyroscopic set of female hindquarters pistoning by outside the window. So does Pogue’s. I am unmoved. She’s meat. I’m not wired that way. (At least I don’t think I am, different subject for a different day…)
“This street breeds misers,” Pogue shrugs after a moment. ”Atlas is just the largest. They say they do an’ all, but no one really wants to bother sussing this place out, for it’ll all be pulled down anyway. You know it, do youse not?”
Both of us can only make disgusted sounds. Lucius clears his throat. “That slumlord bastid will twist and exploit and squeeze every penny out of a place like this. Most of these folks,” he gestures up and all around with one hand, ”This here is their only shake to live independently. Nobody wins…”
I want to say so much more, but I’d be stepping out of my place. Getting uppity. I’m just a security guard, and mecha to boot. What the hell do I know? Like Lucius, I don’t say all I know, that’s for sure.
But now I hear myself speak up from far away as I run a core-dump on my nervous system, setting loose the tiny Nanite jets and sprinklers within that might or might not still spray, wondering how much of the mold will come off this time, “Maybe it’s better that it come down. Maybe it’s better to remember it the way it was.”
Pogue shudders. “Was when? This hotel was always sketchy like this. Burn it an’ seed the fuckin’ ground wi’ salt...”
I sit in the corner for a while, brooding in the warm light, the smell of Pogue’s cheap whiskey under the counter, the smoke and tinny Irish ceili music coming from the arcing insect guts of the ancient transistor radio on the counter.
Sucking every bit of respite that I can from this haunted house that looks out on the streets of Now.
I wish I was a better mech, who stood upright and never fell. I wish I had a law degree, a law enforcement badge, something that connoted some actual authority. In my bones, it feels like tonight is the last night this place stays open. Every part of me wonders why.
But there’s just so much that will never add up about this place. When Dog Lady killed Mike,
I couldn’t type her blood on the walk. I couldn’t identify half the trace radiation in it. I couldn’t even conclusively identify half the bloodstains as…
Human. But that line of inquiry was an MPD matter, out of my statutory authority. The bosses scream every time I do anything around here except look for fires.
Yet now, with every arm/leg, I kick my metaphoric ass from pillar to post for having this law-enforcement grade processor in my head rusting unburnished, not shining full in use... I feel a logic vein flash, deep in the hottest center of my back brain. “When you remove the impossible, Watson…”
I don’t even hear what’s going on around me right now. I’m ignoring all sensory input, achieving the human dream of separating body from mind, if only for a short while.
The blood. The radiation in the blood bespoke direct contact with an unknown variable, possibly extraterrestrial in origin.
What unknown variable did the Dog Lady wait for at the Fire Escape window every single night like an ancient, poisoned child, sitting up in the hopes that some monstrosity of a Santa Claus, with drug-glands swollen and dripping, would soon be waddling in that very window on webbed feet?
…Comes a short term memory clip of Atlas swiveling his big barbered-up buffalo head toward me, eyes lost in medication, “You haven’t heard the whole story. But stay! You will!”
“…Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Dog Lady yells at Atlas for harboring fugitives on his payroll, but who or what is she harboring? What the hell is she building in there? And who or what is assisting? It could be a Fire Matter. Ergo, I have a right to know.
Time slows down to a buzz. I disappear up the wall again, open the Fire Door from up high, and come out along the third-floor ceiling.
Already, I see the silver light gathering again at the end of the hall. There are thudding sounds. The earthbound flophouse ghosts all wait in that hall with bated breath and folded, smoke-ringed arms.
This is new to them. There has never been this kind of thing here. .
I’m almost to her door. I snick the Flasp out all the way. In direct violation of my post orders, I arm it to its KILL setting, and magnetize the shields around my shell.
They were factory-issue. Sgt.Mason claims that said armor is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Fuck him. He ain’t here. I hold my fury shadowed by the wall, clutch the old plaster mirror behind my back, drop to an upright position, and bang on #327’s door.
It creaks open on madness and lavender and death, and… that other thing, the big new thing that stinks like hot plastic, that looks like a melted cathedral made by wasps raised on crack cocaine, that takes up half the wall behind the place where she stands, all alone in the room.
(Well, not quite alone. Sharon the Doberman runs out the door.)
I can’t connect what stands there with humanity. Sadie trembles and reels to and fro in a white nightshirt, making a low, moaning cry. Behind her, the wall has begun to split with the weight of hardware and steel fused into that great black porous-metal madness around one central door shape that glows like water on the moon.
On the lesser walls, maps and schedules are graven with words in her big, stumbly handwriting. I desire to know nothing of the mathematical formula for Pure Fucking Evil rendered here in dry-erase marker.
Still, in that mere picosecond look, mine eyes have seen the glory of a map of New Portland, stretched in the highest place of honor across those peeling yellow walls full of scrapings and stains, with here and there a bloody fingernail mushed into the plaster.
There are green thumbtacks on some flophouse hotels on that map, red on others, yellow on fewer still. And on the Last Chance, a black one. Curiouser and curiouser.
Sadie’s singing something into the big door she melted into the wall. Light from her eyes gets sucked eagerly through that door, flickering in time with the song in no language anywhere in my memory.
“Yes?!?” she screeches at me, not turning around. “I’m a little busy!!”
.
“Exterminator, lady. You need the service.” Like a wild boar, I enter the cave. The green fire of her eyes lunges toward me first, up and sentient-sinuous as the leaves on the maple outside banging on the fire escape in the high storm wind that rises everywhere, all around .
I stand my ground, and shine a billion candlepower into Dog Lady’s eyes. It’s now or never.
“SADIE REHN,” I bellow, “HAVE YOU GOT AN ALIEN IN HERE?”
“No.” Dog Lady’s voice grows thicker, more guttural. She looks down at her flat, grey belly and flows sinuously toward me, sick, grinning, already dead.
With either hand, she grasps an ear and pulls. Hard enough to split. And split.
“I’ve got one in here.” The tearing sounds eclipse in light, pouring from the rip. The tumors I saw earlier lick out into tentacles, subsuming the disguise.
What’s inside Dog Lady holds its own unknowable shape, a mandragora blood-clot like something that crawled out of the sea ... For just a moment, I teeter on the brink of a horrible mistake when I look through the main arch of that nightmarish door…
#
It was like looking through a window, but with no New Portland spread below in its neon bustle of rain and wind. None at all.
What lay on the other side of that door was a darkness so far out in Space I had no tools to process it, beyond Osiris, beyond the furthest reaches Humanity could see with the aided eye in a lifetime.
My system wanted to shut down at the sight of it By all rights, my braincase should have popped. But it didn’t.
Out there on the other side of that little door, the real Electric Dogladyland coruscated and beckoned in a crazy diamond sprawl, far beyond the Courts of Chaos and the most fevered dreams of Dante Alighieri, at the center of the center where the blind piper plays his eternal didgeridoo to the skirlings of demented nose-flutes and demon saxophones…
I could step through that door, I thought madly, No more Mason. No more hexers. No more mold. No more bad startups and reboots on cold mornings. No more Magoon from #333 telling me I killed Jesus. No more AA…
There was work enough for a warrior droid out there beyond that dooe, work enough for a thinking machine, honorable work where every second was danger and every journey guaranteed no safe return…
Then I looked again.
And again.
And, again, I wondered what the fuck I’d been thinking when I ever set foot on this block.
And I…
#
…Tear myself away, flip the mirror up into my favorite hand around the hooking knife on the last finger, and shove the cracked old thing into the beams of light washing between Dog Lady’s eyes and that weird door to Nowhere I Want To Know Anything About Ever Again.
Then it gets really gross.
For some reason, the thing inside Dog Lady can’t blink now. The light flashes back to its eyes like a flame following fumes back to their origin, generating so much friction and resistance along the way that…
There comes a different, higher-pitched sound that I understand to be the last bit of breath in Dog Lady’s lungs, still trying to form the Last Word. Then her skin begins to burn.
She blisters me with eyes no more human than mine, and screams the one thing that could have driven me utterly insane if I even came with that option,
“I’M MELTING!!!”
Ohv I am plugging into the fucking wall right now I don’t care if I wind up in jail again oh she did not just say that---
A wild white light shoots in from outside the window. That neon sign hasn’t worked for a hundred years, and it’s covered in soot to a flat pane, but… GROVE HOTEL blares into the night, an unknown sentence on a cenotaph no one this century can read.
A cloud of sweat-waft and English Leather roars across my olfactory cells. Atlas Escher stands in the outer doorway like a Sumo wrestler in street clothes, wielding a Colt .44 pistol way too big for his weird little hands.
“There’s no end with you, you goddamned bitch!!” he roars, “And an alien-lover, to boot! You ain’t startin’ up that Slipship there with my electricity! It’s illegal!”
Everything goes silent. Atlas doesn’t really see what he’s seeing. The alien convulses on the floor in its death throes, melting into gray adipose muck that burns my feet a little. My hands don’t turn the mirror a nanometer. Parts of her are still visible, and now the light from the door is one-way, into the mirror and up through a crack in the ceiling.
I have nowhere else to send it …
Then I have the best idea I’ve ever had. Atlas lowers the pistol to port arms. He can’t talk through the wheezing. With his free right hand, he reaches in the voluminous pocket of his jeans and removes the largest Albuterol inhaler I have ever seen, replacing the pistol in his waistband as he takes a honk.
“PS-20. Hi. Umm…” His eyes swim with yellow tears. “You’re the best officer we’ve ever had. I can’t believe you’re the one who took her out. What…if you don’t mind me askin’… is that thing you have there? What’s it doing?”
I can’t look at Atlas. Not even now. His eyes are stone tunnels through a temple built of raped, exsanguinated corpses, water leaking through down his dusty cheeks and into his beard. Crocodiles can cry, too.
But I can’t.
“It’s a mirror, Atlas,” I tell him softly, “First time you’ve ever seen one?”
That gets his wind up. He remains Stuck On Stupid. “Huh?”
“Have a look,” I hiss, and turn the path of the beam down and back toward him.
“B-But… But…” Then Atlas falls to the floor like a poleaxed hog, taking a section of moldy wall with him.
That awful door is still open, but the mirror in my hand has just gone black. The light from the door smokes straight down into this blighted block. The walls ripple and scream, and there’s something else gathering in the air …
Something I feel at 0600 on Sunday mornings standing on the fire stairs as something brushes past me. Something else there is that doesn’t like the light, some multicephalous kobold hiding in the dark, hopping from room to room, making people do awful things, or not do them, or do unbelievable things, depending on the mood it’s in that day…
Something whose name is not Legion, but Grove. A hideous throng of vast, tormented forms rush in, chanting. Mike kicks Atlas, glaring through piggy little red eyes, grinning with awful tusks. Behind him, egging him on, is the guy who hung himself in the tub room, barking out Atlas’ name in choked, hissing sibilants through solid scar tissue.
To his right is Robert, who died in the bathtub. Part of Robert went down the drain. Part of Robert stayed, and looks passing strange, and heads straight for Fat Boy, jostling to the front of the mob to chew and chew and chew with mossy teeth…
All the hotel deaders I ever saw in the wall outside, and more, and more before, come swirling up like smoke to pull Atlas down to Hell, bellowing an endless round of the same refrain.
“YOU HAVE ABANDONED EVERY HOPE BY ENTERING HERE.
WE WON’T FIX NOTHIN’.
IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU CAN MOVE… “
The ghosts tear Atlas apart piecemeal. Unbelievably, I notice that he’s still alive when they start. They eat his heart, and every other screaming, quivering fragment, and fall back under the earth as the rumble happens again.
NOTE: I am presently registering a 9.8 earthquake up and down the fault line through the middle of town, the one that runs parallel to Chasse Boulevard, and along the Shanghai Tunnels under this very hotel…
There comes a fierce breath of the whirlwind. My brain reels as I see the mighty walls rushing asunder with a long, tumultuous shouting sound, as the quake and the deep, dank new tarn straight down the middle of Chasse Boulevard begin to suddenly and loudly claim the Last Chance Hotel, munching up the fragments of the House of Escher…
#
August 2007—January 2008
For Pat Williams, Oscar Davis, and Richard Gismondi
With apologies to Chuck Palahniuk.
Any Persons Attempting To Claim This Work As Their Own Can Have As Much Fun Trying To Sell It As I Did, Ha Ha Ha. ---ed.
I, ROBOT
By Edward Morris
LAST RESORT SECURITY SERVICES LLC.
DAILY ACTIVITY REPORT
SHIFT: NIGHT
DATE: 10/08/2060
OFFICER: PS-20*; (PROTECTED-CLASS MECHA )
#
FULL POWER IN THREE SECONDS.
TWO.
#
SYSTEM LOGGING ON:
FROM LAST LOGON:
10 /07…(click) -08/60
#
JOURNAL: [begin recording:]
You know, it must be a real kick in the head when a machine has to tell you how to do your job.
Not you. At least not per se, not you gator-pit of the nominally free Weekly Fluff Paper Press in New Portland. That was a different usage of ‘you’; syn: MOST HUMANS.
The Last Chance Hotel is purported to be the epicenter of all crime in the Nihonmachi District. Issues breed in the ground of this block, and hatch in fermenting rooms behind vacant, cataracted windows like drugged eyes Stuck On Stupid for time out of mind.
The dripping, dripping leaks down from the roof soothed me to sleep last night, like the static on every ancient amplifier and transistor radio I leave running, running, running in the ceiling and walls of my high wasp-nest bed in there.
Outside the moldy little window high in the opposite wall, black clouds eat downtown’s skies. Welcome to my tiny corner of Plato’s Cave. The homelessness rate out here is horrifying. Entire neighborhoods have gone to strictly squatter status, heavily-patrolled by Corporate Security and very creatively administrated. For some reason, I relate to the homeless most of all.
I feel sorry for any human who slips through the cracks, especially at this hotel. They get stuck in the bricks of the wall by accident, and learn too late. The richies shoving past each other on the sidewalk don’t even look in that direction, let alone see them lodged here, screaming for change.
Even in this pus-filled pocket of the past, the dim incandescent-glowing rooms are populated by gadgets without number, and I am the least of these. I feel a certain kinship to the Art-Deco vacuum cleaners I find in some of the broom closets, imagining sentience in their dim Depression-glass headlamps, domestic accents wheezing from their fans and squeaky belts
Sometimes, I forget I was born way back in Berserkeley. Sometimes, I feel like I was born working here, born in my bed in the back wing of this flop-house hotel, down the narrow hall that got added in when the building was sliced in half to make room for the Burnside Boulevard expansion in the Nineteen-Thirties.
Down the Fire Stairs. Down, down, down to the gutter where Life first grows, and cannot sleep for the need to pace, to rage, to write, to think, to express its environment any way it can… All the railroaders and longshoremen and loggers, addicts and prostitutes, shagnasties and stumblebums, jack-rollers, nail-eaters and fire-breathers who died here, leaking through the pipes, dripping on my head...
Down here, where the locals scrape the resin of New Portland to survive, just like last century, as City Hall tried and tries to push the swarms of poor people out of Downtown so the tourists won’t have to see them. But those poor folks have a funny way of reappearing. Almost like there are more and more and more of them every day. Every day.
My collection of antique vacuum cleaners I spoke of are some of my favorite people here. I light them up wirelessly, like breathing hearts, in concert with my wall of white noise, pasted itself with dossiers of clippings, mostly local history from before Oregon, California and Washington tried to follow Havai’ki and Alaska off the map and secede from the Union.
My favorites on those walls are the ones about California’s jingoist governor going off his meds, apparently, and trying to invade Washington. The green light from my mummy ancestors is appropriately creepy for the subject matter there. Unbelievable what humans will do.
I still hear old brain-cases in this hotel call the Republic of Oregon “Little Bosnia.” Some of them gave parts of themselves to that awfulness, and shambled back half-burnt alive or minus their minds after bleeding the ground red at Corvallis, or watching their best friends get their heads blown off by shotgun pulses in the desert somewhere near Barstow.
We’re in a Republic, out here where I am. That’s different than being a State. States get Federal funding for their governments. As I understand it, Republics have some hoops they have to jump through before the Eastern United States officially invites them back to that particular hog trough.
But all of that is decided elsewhere. Here in the mud-brick city-state where I am Town Cop in all but fact, th is fire stairway down to my bed is part of the original building, older than the first Nihonmachi and whatever the name of this firetrap was before Irving Escher, (the present owner’s father) renamed it the Last Chance Hotel.
The hotel has been in the Escher family since July, 2009, I hear. The half-melted neon sign hanging from the front wall is almost illegible, as are the faded letters on the yellow stucco of the building’s upper half. It’s one word, though. Who knows?
Below that, the wall shifts to stained, mossy brick. Shadows like flash-blasted dead throw up their hands between those bricks, caught in the cracks, screaming at you.
Screaming at you, who walk past the front window of this hotel with your multicolored hair, cool shoes, hands linked, little lives stretched out all bright and shiny so much longer than this one city block.
You, who could never fathom the improbable beauty of long winter nights here, with the moon just full and insufferable gloom permeating this groaning old Cyclopean ocean liner of a re-privatized flophouse hotel.
The improbable beauty of the white Christmas lights strung along the inside of the plate-glass window by a certain Celtic hand that one year, and be damned to Fat Boy himself… Twinkling, those lights, while the snow fell down outside in sheets…
This neighborhood’s the place where all concrete spiral staircases terminate downtown, under ivied walls that haven’t seen a coat of paint since the decaying rooftops were new. At least a thousand times a day, I tell one human or the other, It’s a beautiful old space. They just didn’t take care of her. All it needs is some love, and a new owner pretty soon… (Then I stop, and consider what I just said.)
At the level of the cobblestones and trolley tracks, Nihonmachi lives in its own solemn hour, incredibly old, leaning backward and forward in Time. The foggy sidewalks here come alive after dark with semi-legal commerce; street-blues shouters, and the slow whirl of stars mirrored on wet, ancient blocks, far above the lower streets and the putrid river.
From my tiny lead-crystal slit window, the light from Chasse Boulevard looks the same as always: Yellow-gray everyday, every day, as I take forever to wake up in this broom closet at the bottom of the back Fire Stairs the residents aren’t supposed to use to sneak people in and out, or smoke their dirty man-made drugs in, or any of the other sad little things they do back here anyway.
I get to watch them, when I’m off the clock, and point and laugh. Last Resort won’t let me do Security work here, only Fire Patrol. Soooo… Fuck ‘Em.
But not always. Sometimes it kills me that all six of my hands are tied behind my carapace. Amazing, that an object could appreciate this hotel and this neighborhood more than a person could.
I’m a fairly recent object, too. Your newest upstairs neighbors gave your kind the wafer-thin alloy layer that stores my backup power. They gave you the design for the ergonomic bows of my hands, the working Casimir-engines that generate my main power when I walk, and a hundred more such wonders.
You repay them by detaining them in upper orbit while you frisk their away-teams and scan them for disease umpteen times for five years. They’re dying up there.
I’ve never seen an Osirian, and neither has any human or mecha I know. As far as my own kind are concerned, the bottom dropped out of my parent company the year I entered the work force. I’m the only one of my make and model ever produced.
Presently, I rise, with alarum and rachet and whirr, up out of the shell of my bed, and push the tarp aside, self-testing the telescoping flashlight shock-baton holstered in my lowest right leg. (FLASP: GREEN. CHARGE= FULL. )
Call me PS-20. As I told you, I’m of the mechanical persuasion. Things could always be worse. If my Makers hadn’t gone under, I’d still be acting as a bot-shooter, a nonhuman camera, for the NBACS mega-newserv.
That gig lasted about a week. I screwed up once too often in front of three of the wrong humans when I heard my parent company went under. Fill in the blank.
No more free ride for this brand new Unknown Citizen. That digital pink slip made me a stumblebum that the hexers could strip for parts while I slept on Standby in some bodega doorway, melting the wall outlet and dreaming in reruns…
I won’t record the smell that hits me when I get out on the stairs. The mold in the walls of this hotel seems to generate a kind of heat. The whole building is one hell of a growth medium, frosted from the inside in decades of human filth.
I lumber up the cool blue staircase. Even down there, I can feel the hotel gnawing at its own liver. I pause in the basement doorway for a moment, blinking at the wall of old stick-furniture that blocks the way down into the Shanghai Tunnels. A crust of broken hex-pipes crunches under my big feet like snow.
The rats run wild all around me in the crawlspaces. The roaches whisper Join us, join us. No one’s looking, so I make like one of them and climb straight up the stairwell wall.
At the top of the high Fire Stairs, the light is blurred; smeary chemical light, blind crab catfish-Kafka light, through moldy flat latex paint on old, stippled window glass with twinkling dents here and there in the panes.
I drop, and step out onto the safe (r) end of the third floor, flipping my Flasp in the air and catching it, again and again as I walk upright, thinking about all the ghosts I’ve ever left behind.
I got off the street a little bit at a time, you see. The temp-labor farms around here were appreciative that this new protected-class AI showed above-average proficiency for Damage Control at sites that are just about to close. For some reason, those temp-farm jackbastards also thought I was good enough at patrolling a parking lot and looking intimidating…
To get me a security license issued from the ROPS. (Yeah. The old Department of Public Safety Standards & Training. Glad you were paying attention.)
In zipping around from lot-security gig to lot-security gig, I must have passed the Last Chance Hotel at Fourth and Chasse five hundred times. You can’t see the neon sign over the door from far away anyway, because of the maple tree at the corner.
I wasn’t ready to be there yet. I rolled on past it for four years. Then the hotel reached out and sucked me in, after I was too ruined to put up a fight. Last Chance for all, even mecha. It’s where you live when you’ve been 86’ed everywhere else.
Down here, no one bugs me. There is only the dripping of the water and the song of the radio as I rack up independent-contractor checks in between fire-walks, and wait for the place to collapse.
In the beginning, it was pretty stressful having to learn to live on my own with nothing but a bunch of shitbag lawyers for help, after BioSqunt imploded and it was sink or swim out of Berserkeley.
Small wonder I became an electroholic. After such experience, what heedless deliverance for my kind, save 120 volts of House Current straight up, no chaser, right through the backbrain in my back?
Once a taphead, always a taphead. Maybe you’ve heard about the Tap Menace on Fark, or CNN. It happens a lot to my kind. Having a nest is a good cure. So are friends. So is writing.
The sweet sharp shock used to kill the pain of being kicked out of my original home. It won’t any more. Now I’m addicted to routine, and order. When I don’t have them, I get twitchy.
Since I started here, the night desk man goaded me into learning to read print books for the experience. By directly-monitored evidence, beginning to apprehend this slightly archaic activity has made new pathways actually squiggle up in weird directions, throughout the lumpy connective clusters of logical matrices in my quantum pressure-cooker brains.
I’d gladly overdose on words, and be carried out of the lobby on a stretcher. At least my brain still works. Of course, I hit my stride just last week with an old, yellow box of Really Difficult Thick As A Brick Science Fiction Novels that Cab Turner the piano player had in his room since about 2000.
“Have at it, suh,” Cab shrugged. “I’ve done read every one of those two-three times.”
One of the old man’s stories laid me low the most. It was in a waterlogged magazine from the 1930’s, written by a man whose name looked like a typographical error, Eando Binder. The story was called ‘I, Robot.’
The narrative made those grinding sounds that humans always hate come out of the back of my head. It’s how I “cry”. Pogue, the night desk man, remarked on this when he walked in on me reading that one at the desk…
#
[play short-term clip:]
“I’ve another one called Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, I’ll let yeh borrow, Marvin, if yeh could just… not make that sound nammore?”
The green light from behind the weird ex-SAS medic’s left eye fell across the black wrought-iron grate separating Us from Them, just before the big double door leading up those rickety centenarian staircases into the funhouse.
I remembered offhandedly that Pogue started calling me Marvin because of some other book he keeps promising to lend me, something about a towel …
My reward mechanisms are different. Books are good. So is Art. So is walking, just walking for the sheer joy of it, the way human youngsters do, free and alone, all up and down the block in between fire-walks in the day, drinking in every detail to make clip-movies and art from later in the long, cold hours when there’s nothing good on TV and Pogue’s out of regular movies.
Art, video still-life art, is spun by your humble Narrator, even here. My reward is to record every bit of ambient vid and aud noise and mix it back through filters whose source code I wrote myself. There is music out here on the edge of the brutal Portland Skid Row, waiting in the architecure, especially in winter:
Every sleepy bouncer opening up every neighborhood club like a hangover of Hieronymous Bosch, every Al-Qaeda wanted poster in every shop window, every herbalist’s Kanji neon and CHEAP CIGARETTE! Every radio playing for two blocks of ancient rooming houses, here and there an aging New Year dragon in a ramshackle kitchen window…
Art, all Art beyond itself in a time-lapse of everyone through Nihonmachi waking up and going to work, throughout the day. Art, Art, blew a fart and blew the whole museum apart for a month of First Thursdays where robots like me do battle in the street for peanuts, for repairs, for their freedom.
Art, behind the crackling orange neon reading VACANCY in the front window here, the one that no one’s remembered to turn off for half an average human lifetime, above the stained little radio spilling out country music into the night, over the dorm fridge full of Mike’s long-expired beers, and one of Pogue’s weed pipes tucked into the freezer drawer.
A lonely place, this, a night place where the clocks tell antique time sideways, melted and subjective as Memory itself, where the night crew burn the cold fluorescent lamps and bullshit any way they can.
I don’t mind. The lobby is a safe place for one such as myself, simply by virtue of the bare fact that when I’m there it means I’m mandated to sit on my ass and get paid for it between patrols. In the humdrum, my hours silently accrue into a slush fund full of smothered dreams of Amsterdam.
There’s a whole colony of emancipated mecha, over that way. One of them’s an online pen-pal of mine who runs a pub all by himself. Pik says he can put me onto some temporary employment as a sys-admin for the long Civilian arm of the local Politie until I find better-paying work. Meanwhile, he talks for pages about the pre-Renaissance chessboard in his pub.
That chessboard comes out of its glass display-case but once a year, Pik says, for a cutthroat tournament known throughout the Red Light District as the Turing Open, Mecha players only, all bets down and all bets final. And no auggies. Processor against processor alone.
I know Pik’s goading me. It might be fun. I don’t know what kind of chess player I’ll turn out to be, but I do so very much want to travel.
I want to see the dawn on Mars, and the night in Florence full of paper lanterns and laughter and wine. I want to ride the Trans-Tibetan railroad, and shout out the blues in Saturn’s rings. I want to know what the hell Pik the pub-droid meant in the first place when he said that there’s a way for us to dream…
None of this can come to me soon enough. I was due for a rebuild two years ago. The mold at this job site is turning into a serious threat to my continued sentience. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out.
No, really. The repair costs I’d currently incur would be intimidating. As long… oh, I cross every appendage… As long as I can keep working, in a year or two I can scoot off to a state mecha-clinic in the Netherlands and lick my wounds all the way to the bank.
They respect their ‘bots over there. Over here, we’re furniture, and the tech just isn’t out in the gutter for us to fix ourselves. Up and down the ladder, guys like the slumlord of this building keep things that way.
(That motherfucker hates the free exchange of information almost as much as he and his family hate aliens, of both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial varieties. But that’s a whole other talk show, one he won’t let us watch ...)
To get a tune-up, or any real health care, I’d have to swallow my pride and perform the kowtow before the makers of Homeland Security and the nuclear “event” that turned the main area of the Secession into a blasted interstate rock garden full of mutant trailer-trash, forever. The hell with that.
I’m tired of self-respect. I can’t even get on talk radio any more. My fifteen minutes of fame stretched for one whole year of life, my first on this insane, seething Earth.
I was once the poster-child and performing monkey of the California-Republican scientific cognoscenti. My grille-piece was splashed across every monitor pane in the contiguous U.S., the Republics, the Sovereign Power of Havai’ki, and the American Protectorate of Cuba. And boy, was I big in Japan
Then my body began to degrade, and my mind with it. Now I scrimp and save to get off the map, working back-to-back hours for a mercenary army of snarky old ex-Marines. To the (br)ass hats at Last Resort, ‘Observe, Report and Run Away’ is the whole of the law, around these here parts.
‘We Will Make No Arrest. We Will Exercise No Authority. Are We Not Men?’ Sir, yes, Sir. Now, Stop or I’ll yell ‘Stop!’ again!
I remember bad mornings when I was new at this place, with the Last Resort Polices And Procedures pane glued to one palm; the smell of twisted breakfasts in my olfactory cells the whole way down the gauntlet of Electric Dogladyland on the bad side of the third floor, creeping around on firewalks at 0600 with stray voltage and mold doing strange things to my eyes…
I remember how many times I learned from these residents, how many times I celebrated their holidays, mourned their deaths (after the neighbor in question, more often than not, melted through the floor two doors down.)
I live here, too, sleep here and work here, even twitch in hypnagogic day-nap nightmares( new with the current crop of mold)…
Of a race of stunted, half- seen tenants flitting around through separate sideways tunnels, keepers of various flames tightening and loosening hydraulic regulators and hinges, parts without name or number, keeping the hotel from falling down around their own heads …
Doing for themselves, lifting as they climbed nowhere for nothing, simply because no one else wanted to touch them in their foulness...
#
My mind-body is falling apart, just like this building. A million little mechanical and cybernetic bugs in me all wait their turn. Like the actual, physical bedbugs that die in my shell and the shell of this building, sniffing, squirming, swarming for a chance to suck something dry.
Last Resort stuck me here because Atlas Escher was forced by the City to shell out ten thousand dollars a day on a twenty-four-hour Fire Watchman. He’s stalled on putting in a sprinkler system here for over twenty years.
If any contractor ripped up the ceilings and floors to install said sprinklers, you see, they’d find all the mold. And all the things that live on the mold. And all the things that live on those things.
Atlas might have to do some repairs in return for the rent he collects. To him, such a thing is anathema. Atlas was embezzling from the trust of this hotel (said trust lives in three different nursing homes in geosynchronous orbit,) since at least the early Twenties.
“Don’t Fix Nothin’!” is his motto, when he thinks only I’m listening. “If They Don’t Like It, They Can Move!”
His response to me, too, is always classic, “Any…sentient… object… who, or what, or whatever, has worked here for any length of time, should see what I mean. My statements are provable. I am this hotel, and it is me. What say you, PS-20?” he’d offer, his breath pluming in the cold lobby air.
“It’s your world, boss. You just tell me when that whistle blows.”
“Eh-heh-heh…” Atlas’ eye would turn away, then, back to the conversation at hand. Ignoring the murderous red flashes on my Aux readouts. He didn’t have to see.
As long as any danger wasn’t immediate, he could care less. I wondered, then, just where the fuck I’d landed, and what it would take to blast myself free from this. But in the humdrum, it’s easier to simply pull all the nearby junk around you and go to sleep. Perchance to dream.
Shemp, my regular relief officer, would do anything he could to get me pulled from the Last Chance, because I do my job and a little bit beyond it. Therefore, I make him look bad. Plus, he hates mecha.
But my job’s in no danger. Yet. They couldn’t find anyone else to pull twenty-four-hour shifts on demand. No matter how nuts Chimp… I mean, Shemp, says I’ve gotten.
Chimp’s just sore because I called shenanigans on him like I did with Mike. Mike went to his grave cursing my name, simply because I made him go outside to shut the Dog Lady up.
But I was within my rights to do so. We don’t get paid to do security work here, I told Coroner Boggs when he came for Mike later, and that’s the truth.
Mike shouldn’t have had to get killed. But if I would have stepped in, Dog Lady would have died and I’d be disassembled. And in either case, even if Mike never lived like a man, at least he died like one.
That nasty, bloody day aside, sometimes the routine here almost makes me happy again. During those times, I feel something akin to certain human feelings I’m told of: A sense of home, of safe space, even if that safe space only extends as far as a broom closet, or a lobby with an old analog TV and DVD player running.
But it’s my broom closet, damn it. And my old analog ancestor. I put a curtain on the window. Better than nothing.
I’ll get by until I blow out. Hopefully, that’ll happen on the job, so all repairs will be paid for.
Meanwhile, can I do anything about the human politics of this place, during the day when most of them are up running around? Hell, would I even be asking if I could?
Security-related jobs around here provide the presence of a police-like entity and very little else. There are no real local laws that aren’t very selectively applied. I get my nose rubbed in the de facto version of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics every day by the Code of the Republic of Oregon Public Safety Department:
If I hurt a human being, or allow them to come to harm, I’ll be disassembled for Assault One, Murder One… Damn it, every count of every act a mecha can be rationally charged with is always One, One, except…
Except that Antonin Artaud was right. I can still see. I can still reason. No matter what the laws say, I’m a sentient being. Stimulus à Response. If that’s a crime, then take me apart and scrape out whatever it is inside me that can’t let this stuff go unrecorded…
#
The Last Chance Hotel is what the desperate future doesn’t look like, this crumbling ruin of the worst that humans settle for, this picked-over pile of bones. Most of the residents have moved on to the next dive.
Those who can’t are forced to live and die in a plague-infested incident pit. Old buildings have a lot to say. Especially this one. The things it must have seen are beyond my capacity to describe.
No matter what time it is in here, to the residents it’s always night . This whole block occupies its own hermetically sealed buggered barnyard of the past. This filthy three-story public toilet shits the Beat 1940’s in every sense, and if you know for any reason what it looks like in here, then you’re beat to shit, too, you’re Beat, you’re shit, you eat the shit of New Portland and live for weeks on what the richies throw away. Your family has restraining orders against you, and you stay at the Last Chance because no one else will rent to you unless you join a verifiable Program of Recovery for 90 days.
The bathrooms here are always out of order. The barefoot, shuffling stumblebum ghosts howl louder than the sirens, wailing down the boat horns down on the river. Every day, the inhabitants of this building impress me with their fortitude, their know-how and make-do. They’ve had to evolve it, living here, where fixing a leak in the ceiling means to place a bucket beneath it.
Those fungal, sad little rooms are piled high with trash-bag luggage spilling all the random, wretched refuse of chilly nights spent huddled around fabulous 1930’s radiators, with the dead rattling the pink walls that close you in, selling your prescriptions and listening to the terror through the window.
#
Everywhere in this hotel, there are signs: ROACH PHEROMONE TRAP. NO GUEST OR VISITORS. USE OF FIRE STAIRS WILL RESULT IN EVICTION. IT IS UNLAWFUL TO OCCUPY THIS UNIT# DUE TO VIOLATION OF CITY ORDINANCE. UNFIT FOR HUMAN OCCUPANCY. HOUSING INSPECTOR J.G. BALLARD. and my perennial favorite, centimeters deep in pencil on the second floor Fire Door sign,
WILL YOU DIE IN A PLACE LIKE THIS?
THAT WILL SUCK IF YOU DID.
#
The big, diseased heartbeat of the hotel goes on, stuck between a zillion broken channels of echoes, where the upstairs walls lean East and the frame creaks late at night with sounds like a giant harp ripping out of the ground. Within that harp, the higher notes resemble a symphony tuning up, an eternal schizo simulcast like multiple radios playing in empty rooms on empty floors:
Screams and laughter, sobs and the eternal pecking party of back-fence gossip in those nighted halls that often escalates into threats of civil or criminal action. The sound is pre-HD televisions picking up public shortwave reruns, weird barters, wild wails, snores and fake news and someone doing a line …
What’s wrong with the Last Chance Hotel is wrong with New Portland. What’s wrong with New Portland is wrong with all the fractured Americas. What’s wrong with the Americas is wrong with Earth.
Constant construction’s as much a part of the weather as rain. Repairs always run behind schedule. The contractors are scared shitless of the locals. Private Security sits and watches with its hands tied and its thumb up its ass, recording the minutes for Corporate slavering at the door with visions of multi-million-dollar-a-head vertical development lofts going up over the ruins of Portland’s smoky neon heart and soul that will not die no matter how many parts fall off of it…
When people see me behind the window, the human herds who surge and lap in their vast meaty tarn often get confused, walk in another direction, change the subject or find something else to rant about.
There aren’t many like me working Security. I think the herds get uniform-shock without a human face sticking up out of the collar of my shirt.
All the Downtowners, trundling past the front desk window, all those douchebags and hipsters, babybats and grifters, who make me remember how lonely and broken I was, and wonder what I am.
Down where I live, the locals pull down the battered dragon gates at the east corner of the block chunk-by-chunk to sell them for the scrap brass. Sharp as summer wasps, their needle-exchange of tongues endlessly sews the air,
“GIT THE FUCK BACK IN THAT HO-TEL! YOU AIN’T NO REAL COP! HELL, YOU AIN’T EVEN NO REAL PERSON!”
The first time I heard that, I whirled on one heel and lit all my eyes bright red…
#
05/15/2059
19:19…19:20…
“No. I am not. I’m a real droid, just like on the news. And this is a real Flasp. When I juice this up and whack you with it, I just sign for the body afterward and go home. Now you tell me---“ By that time, I was an inch from his face, “You gonna keep interfering with my Fire Watch?”
Universes were born and died in the pause.
“Naw, man, naw…I ain’t said shit…”
#
FLIP: SEARCH ALL FEEDS: LAST CHANCE HOTEL
LATEST (skim):
WILLYWEEK.NEWS.WLL. [Archive 25 Sept. 2059]
...”We are completely fixing everything,” Atlas Escher states, “This work was all planned. What we’ve been discovering ain’t ever going to happen here again…”
FLIP: SAVED ENTRY. GO:
#
Discovering? My mechanical squeal drowns out the scrolling stream of shit news.
Even before Dog Lady came to visit and decided to stay, Atlas was charging the Republic of Oregon fifteen hundred a month rent for every juicer and crackhead who lives here, and providing no services. Nothing. Just tiny, bacteriological nightmares of rooms with no kitchens, crumbling walls; one filthy institutional shower and one ancient, stained bathtub per floor…
Before Housing Inspector Ballard deemed half the rooms unfit for human occupancy, Atlas’ lawyer would tip him off in advance that some inspection or another was coming on such and such a date.
Atlas would proceed to hire the sketchiest under-the-table contractor he could find to slap a Band-Aid on the issue until the inspectors went away.
Before Dog Lady, Mike the daytime desk clerk kept most of the tenants so beholden to him for information about “What’s really goooin’ on, there,doont’cha knoo;” and confused about what actually was, that there was little outcry about anything.
It couldn’t last forever, but until Mike died most of the tenants were too lost in their own fog to realize that Mike was Atlas’ well-bribed shill and mole with them from the start.
Most of the other low-rent hotels downtown cooperated with the City, around inspection-time. Thus, they were given more time and latitude to get their buildings up to code, sometimes even some pork-money to do it, if they talked a good enough game and followed through.
Atlas dug his own grave when he mouthed off to MPD Patrol Chief Hardy when that big blond beach queen came in and started threatening him with closure. Then Atlas dug his own grave again when he locked horns likewise with the normally kindly old Inspector Ballard, who has given no ideological ground since he slapped those tags on 50 out of 70 doors in the building.
(Oh, what a reaming those English can give. True art. This was a joy to capture…)
#
05/03/2059
1000…1001….
The slender, mostly-bald old gentleman in his gray coverall and lineman’s vest shakes a clipboard at Atlas. There’s a camera around his neck. His accent is as out of place in Portland as a coconut palm.
“How could you let one of your own tenants sink so low?” Inspector Ballard snaps, disgusted. Atlas feigns wide-eyed innocence. “But I was just up there two days ago, and there was no garbage piled up in #314 at all---“
“Do me a favor.” Ballard hisses. “Stan Laurel got pictures of the Great Grimpen Mire up there two weeks ago. Not only are you a slumlord, Atlas Escher, you’re a bare-faced liar!”
“B-but, but…”
Ballard’s seamed cheeks glow red-hot. “Yes, your b-but-butt is precisely what you sit upon down here, while you soak them for rent and don’t provide anathing f’r’it!”
Atlas gets to his feet, roaring like a bull. “SINCE WHEN ARE WE RUNNING A CARE FACILITY?!?”
On camera, Ballard shakes his tonsured head sorrowfully, holding up his water-stained clipboard for inspection. “Your showers leak onto the floor below. I was noting the leaky one on Two, and then the leaky one on Three decided to take the proverbial piss upon me whilst I was so noting. Don’t blister my ear about care facilities, you great fat clot of shit, or I’ll see you in one. Cheers.”
Atlas shrugs. “I’ll have to raise the rennnnt….”
Then Ballard loses it again. “You own half of downtown! You could write off all the repairs and add-ons and still make a mint, if you worked it right! Your problem isn’t just that you’re a crook, that’s fine, we can work with those. We do so every day. Your problem is that you’re a stupid crook who cares nothing for human life or political procedure. You charge three hundred a month more than the Lucia, and they’ve got full-time over-the-table janitors and real security! No offense, PS-20.”
“None taken.”
Ballard ploughs onward, “They throw out the people who hoard garbage. You, sir, seem to breed it…”
PAUSE. STOP. CLOSE CLIP.
[PLAY CLIP: NEXT MORNING:]
And round and round it goes. The slumlord pays me little mind. I can see out into the lobby now. Atlas rocks back and forth on the six-inch earth soles of his orthopedic sneakers, strange eyes distant, lower lip curled. Both of them are barely paying Pogue any mind. Atlas is looking toward the stairs, off into the past.
“Commissioner Sanford is trying to make a name for himself out of this place, and those damn dirty cops Laurel and Hardy with him. But they’re going to get some bad publicity. I been around a long time… And, anyway, When did it become our responsibility to be nanny for someone who puts money down on a room and should expect the right to be left alone in peace? It’s all politics! With all the headache and nuisance, I just want out. I worked… my thirty years. This place was just supposed to be a supplement to my retirement. My kids are really… upset with me. I was just… gonna give it to them, before…They say, ‘Dad, you’ve built yourself a prison...”
CLOSE CLIP
RESUME JOURNAL ENTRY
#
In here, it’s still the same endless nightmare of urban wildlife and building code violations, numbering better than five hundred at Ballard’s last official count. The old man’s loading for bear. I wonder about my job.
The projected sale of the Last Chance has already been made public on City Hall’s website. But as with so much else, they’ve blacked out most of the pertinent details, presumably until the sale goes final and big old Atlas is firmly and deeply lodged in the mighty rectum of civil court.
No one knows what this block will become, but judging by the new condo boom in several neighbor- hoods, it’s a pretty safe bet this property ain’t gonna be a block-long soup kitchen. The idea of the hotel being taken over by new owners, presumably with their own blackshirts to go look for fires, isn’t much of an incentive to do my job now.
I have to occupy my mind somehow, though. Hence the video-sculpture. I save, record and document everything: every inch of old woodwork in this block, every story, every scar, cross-reference embeded hypertext in each other…
This is a hive, not a permanent home. I know that. Commissioner Sanford and his pit bulls Chief Laurel and Captain Hardy are going to push old Escher out of the hotel business and never allow him to rent another room to anyone in New Portland.
Chief Hardy also owns a development company called Agathocles Land Holdings. Last week, I learned that Agathocles’ chief financial backer is a local small-time Yakuza oyabun named Kano Takahara.
So that makes me the private-mercenary bottom link in several different organized crime syndicates with varying degrees of political legitimacy. Go, me.
The weekly papers are trying to sneak in here all the time. I let them in when the Boss isn’t on site. Dog Lady apparently knows the right phone numbers to call.
Atlas hasn’t been coming by as much lately. Ballard’s always waiting for him in the lobby. I enjoy the old man’s company greatly, but hate to waste his time while Escher stalls. Sources indicate there may be an inverse relationship between their presences.
Atlas keeps talking wistfully about leaving the planet. The mess he’ll leave behind will cost the Earth to fix. Last Resort will probably stick me guarding some bank somewhere.
Maybe this is all for the best. This hotel is a quagmire, a dying whore anxious to take a few of us along, built on blood wrung from the destitute and the mentally ill.
#
There are a lot of stairs at the Last Chance, six and a half rickety flights that bend in places, high ceilings upwardly mirroring the structure below them. The tall columnar windows let in light around the middle of the building .
I step off the stairwell and shut the door behind me. Stray voltage whips through the silver fog and filthy air, the harsh, sputtering light, the smells, the slanting walls. The door at the opposite end of the hall is bumping up and down like a speaker at a warehouse party. #327. Sadie Rehn. The Dog Lady.
Like me, Sadie got abandoned early. She was a real estate agent in San Francisco before some jack-roller brained her with a flowerpot while she was up here on an extended cocaine crawl.
Sadie had no way back home. Her entire identity was stolen. More importantly, her entire identity was lost to her. Not only did she get jack-rolled for her ID, credit cards, CalWorks Health Pass, the whole shebangabang… but it took quite a while for her to remember exactly who she was.
When she found out, she attempted to access her old life from where she was then, and found that every bit of it had been picked clean by her family and her creditors. On that day, Sadie took up the mantle of a fine tradition in that part of town and became a hex whore, con artist and female hustler.
And, eventually, a police snitch. But I’m not quite there yet. Sadie’s… special. She refuses to acknowledge her part in any police call she’s ever involved in. She hates how far she fell, and wants to take as many along with her as possible, including non-humans like myself.
I remember her haranguing Atlas any number of times, the way her jaw wobbled, the way the whites of her eyes looked green.
“HOW CAN YOU LET US LIVE LIKE THIS AND GO MAKE A DEPOSIT AT THE BANK EVERY DAY?!?” she’d screa, when she knew she had an audience, “UNTIL YOU PAY ME TO MOVE, I’M GONNA BE IN YOUR ASS!!!”
The official diagnosis there is Closed Brain Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder. Sadie thrives on negative attention. Bad is better than nothing.
If her sort aren’t agitating and causing drama, the weird drugs their brains make leave them feeling bored and useless. Much of the time, they don’t really know who they are.
They can also be quite crafty, when they choose. Sadie’s worked her way through a third of the flophouses in New Portland on one basic rent-extortion grift:
When Dog Lady shows up to rent from you, you can bet the City wants to buy your building out badly but can’t afford to. So they hire her to go in and eat the landlord from the guts out with Title 29 complaints about unrepaired hazards, refusing to pay rent until said complaints are resolved, then escalating one of them after the other, then another…
Fomenting anarchy, and conditions favorable for a hostile takeover under Eminent Domain. Dog Lady records as many real building code violations in these old hotelsas she can. When the cops come for anything she does, she plays the victim so she can’t be held accountable.
Mysteriously enough, every time that happens, at any hour, it’s always Captain Laurel on site. Big, blond Captain Laurel, who once disarmed an HIV-positive junkie of the blood-filled syringe he was brandishing at Shemp, patted him on the head and turned him loose. Laurel, who wants to run for Police Commissioner when they finally make something stick long enough to Mayor Partridge to vote him out.
Laurel’s a symptom of the New Regime. From hearing the desk clerks talk, I comprehend a clear line before which they and the slumlord chucklingly speak of “the old Last Chance”. The pre-Orange Tag Sale days, when there was at least one person running around naked with a drawn weapon per floor, per night, and raucous drunken bashes every weekend.
The old Last Chance, the old days, before the week two summers ago that none of the desk clerks will talk about sober. Before Dog Lady swooped in and scared off all the contractors who were busy doing too little and too late to the building.
Before Chief Hardy and Captain Laurel’s “Special Offshoot” of the Nihonmachi Neighborhood Response Team to “provide services to these rat- and cockroach-infested slums full of mentally and physically handicapped people,”as the brochures said …
…By leading a Special Riot Team that descended on all seventy rooms through clouds of happy-gas, banging on shields down the halls with a Purge List of residents to drag out by the hair of their mangy, scabied chinny-chin-chins.
Anyone with an IQ above room temperature can see this stuff going on when it happens right in front of them. Captain Laurel works for Agathocles too, as a broker. Fill in the blank.
Every hotel that Dog Lady has bankrupted by extortion is now an Agathocles vert-dev condoplex. This covers about ten former SRO hotels between Downtown and the Foster Road Police Precinct; the last affordable housing of their kind in the area.
From where I sit, this all just looks like a war between con artists with very little truth anywhere. Meanwhile, more humans are homeless here every day and more of the affordable housing in this city falls apart because money-grubbing idiots like Atlas won’t keep it habitable.
What makes it all so worthy of record to me is that I sense another, better future just outside this one. One where I can be a citizen too.
Anyway, there was a period when the cops and the residents of the Last Chance (usually through Social Services, in the latter case) used to haul Dog Lady into court every chance they got, for every john she ever brought up to her apartment through the back Fire Stairs, every green rock of hex she was ever observed buying out front, every… everything.
And in every case, Dog Lady pleaded poverty so they couldn’t garnish her whacko-checks to pay her fines. Just before I joined this happy little nunnery, the night desk man tells me, Atlas even tried to hire some stumblebum to kill Dog Lady outright.
Dumpster Dave, the stumblebum in question, drank and snorted up most of his retainer that same night, made the round of the downtown bars bragging about his new gig, and promptly got jugged by Mayor Partridge’s Dignity Police for being drunk and bloodthirsty out at some old-time motel or another.
Atlas, of course, disavowed all knowledge. He and Dog Lady are a lot alike. He runs his own scams here, hiding from outside eyes for decades while bleeding Portland’s despised poor dry and gloating on the blood. If this hotel is a cuckoo-clock, they’re the hands, circling each other with knives out even as the machinery grinds to a halt.
Lately, #327 as a unit has been making some hideous vibrations holding nothing of this planet, assuming a certain symphonic quality that no human agency could produce without the kind of tech that would be almost mythic in a dive like this. I must watch my back.
I remember that I was the first Last Resort guard to fire back at the Dog Lady, and when, down to date and time, chapter and verse…
#
05/01/2059
1830…1831…
REHN, SADIE ANN, populated in my topmost eye. 5’4” WAF (…blah blah…) SADIE ANN REHN IS IMMUNE FROM PROSECUTION. MILITARY POLICE DIVISION INFORMER. ARREST UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES. ANY QUESTIONS, CELL MPD CAPTAIN STANLEY LAUREL AT (971)…
In the clip, the stairwell door hung open, swinging back and forth like the gate of an old, mostly-abandoned graveyard. The hinge was magnetic. It wasn’t supposed to do that.
Something must have been throwing off the field. The hazel eyes of the plastinated corpse at the top of the stairs struck sparks from the darkness. “Part of the wall by my front door is burning,” she snapped.
I knew perfectly well she set the fire just before her dealer snuck in the back. Then she went out and drenched the hallway with lighter fluid , tossed tissue paper everywhere and then sat in the window smoking a cigarette. I got it all on camera.
I attempted to sound menacing. “YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH FIRE WATCH AND INTOXICATED WITH HEXOMETHAMPHETAMINE, CRACK COCAINE, MARIJUANA AND… huh… DEXTROMETHORPHAN HYDROBROMIDE COUGH SYRUP? WHATEVER. PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST ALL INTERFERENCE OR BE REMANDED TO CARE OF HOOPER MEMORIAL SOBERING CENTER. MESSAGE ENDS.”
In the clip, there was a ghostly, excited luster around Dog Lady, sluggish and gaseous. Her badly-shaven blue Doberman, Sharon by name, started towards me and whimpered. The zombie marionette leered out mockingly from the pool of sick light in her doorway at the end of the hall.
“You can’t arrest me! You’re not human! I know my rights! And fuck you too, Mike Hopkins, I see you looking up the stairwell!”
Mike pulled his big bald inbred-turtle head back so fast it might have never been there. Like he was a ghost. Sadie fumed. Her eyes lit up the translucent gray skin of her face. She leaned in, breathing hard, pushing upward on her sharp cheekbones and massaging the muscles.
“YOU! I’M CALLING YOUR OWNER!!“ Then her cyanosed eyes rolled back, too far back, opening too much around the edges.
I doubted my own programming and who I beheld, unable to logically tell if I was really seeing the pulsating thing in its sac down inside her, the thing that didn’t like the light, squirming like a toad.
I telephotoed in. Even accounting for my malfunctioning peripheral vision, I still saw a face beneath Sadie’s, something squinched down under her unwashed hair that stunk like hot plastic. Even in the footage, the hallucination remains the same…
Hell-burnt purple suckers, strangulated tumors, ropy spaghetti... I know a Gorgon when I hear it breathe…
What I saw was squeaking goblin terror, nothing that even a machine should see.
But one thing that Tapheads take the longest to get back is the AI sense of self-worth. The pathways just aren’t there. I didn’t get paid to make such differentiation. In the clip, I sighed, trying to play this Bad Cop gig indignantly cool, trying to be like Dr. Who in the old teleflicks and not show fear…
”I haven’t got an owner, you weird little person. I don’t see your name programmed in me anywhere. My super warned me about you. Go smoke some more hex and leave me be.”
“Don’t you threaten me!” Dog Lady screeched, leaning back seductively, clearly enjoying what she saw as banter, “That’s defamation of character, and a terroristic threat against the life or person of another… person! Whatever! I know you sleep on the job, you…”
And just like that, She Had Nothin’. I chuckled rustily.
“Can’t talk your way out of that one, can you ? If there are, even if I was ever here before… what color do my eyes turn when I sleep, smartass?”
Tick. Tick. ”That’s what I thought.” My own unedited security footage clearly showed me turning and leaving the scene at that point. Her screeching followed me down all those stairs.
#
There are people who think they can’t be questioned. I work here, ergo there is a need for a twenty-four-hour watchman to insure that the dump doesn’t burn down. Ergo, said dump est dump.
The Eschers let this place go for decades, lied about it, sucked a lot of people dry, and kicked a lot of people in the teeth when they were down, so spectacularly that I wonder what their motivation could ever have been.
Then I almost get it.
The way this place is a tomb for the past, a haunted museum that takes a little piece of everyone who comes through. Even me.
I fast-forward to 1745 hours on the same night as the previous memory , as I walk down in real-time to the dusty, silent end of the second-floor hall …
#
17451//JOURNAL///PERSONAL///INTERCONNECTEDNESS#416
The Irishman flips channels on the TV by wiggling his hairy ears, clearly bored with everything that’s on. “Bad news is, she can smell fear.”
Rrring, announces the antique modular phone on the wall. We both look in that direction. Pogue cocks his head and picks up from where he stands. The cigarette burns in his hand indoors, a middle finger and rigor mortis hardon.
“Last Chance Hotel! Come on vacation, leave on proba---Oh, no, now you just wait a minute. Wait out front and think of the beatin’ yeh’ll get when I get out there.”
Mahone hangs up, looking at me apologetically. “Mum. She’s in a day early from Galway. Soon as I’m off, I’m away off to see who… may outdrink whom… down t’the Yamhill. You’ll want footage, I think.”
I nod immediately. “Oh yeah. Straight to vid. Well, straight to scrapbook, but I’ll cut you in on the biopic…”
Outside, a beautiful girl with long mimskin dreadlocks levitating at various heights in the air around her head , silver tattoos jiggling across the exposed tops of her breasts, jogs by the window and waves as she passes. Pogue sighs.
“That’s American birds for yeh. They won’t say hello, but they’ll say goodbye. Did yeh want that other story, for yer scrapbook, like?”
“Yeah.” I switch my eyes red for Record, and swivel my head toward him. Pogue’s memory is apparently operating at much higher capacity than my own today. He clears his throat.
“There was some jack-roller used to come through here, name of Mohammed, and—“
“Hold on.” Pogue does. “For the benefit of those just tuning in to the Last Chance Hotel Musical On Ice,”at this, Pogue chortles, ”What is a ‘jack-roller’?”
“Street scavenger,” Pogue explains, ”These little runts wait outside the bar for drunks who can barely walk after Last Call, then jack them for their wallets and beat ‘em up a little bit if they give them any shit.”
My mic is picking him up fine. This could be a great documentary someday. I have no idea where. But there’s nothing here but Time.
“Anyway,” Pogue rattles on, “ Mohammed was back in here two weeks after gettin’ out of jail, clumb up the Fire Escape an’ locked himself in the Tub Room on the third floor,slept for three nights runnin’ before I had to go fook ‘im out. He says,”here Pogue mimicked, “Well, you wasn’t usin’ it!’”
The door to the Front Desk creaks open. “That god-damn tub room,” Lucius says sorrowfully through his white walrus mustache.
Lucius keeps himself to himself, most of the time. He’s worked there the longest of any desk clerk, since he retired early from the Union-Nogales Mimlev Railroad Line. He works to keep busy, reads a lot and listens to the few good news channels pirated in on the radio from Free British Columbia.
His sprung loafers whisper across the carpet. I have no sensations as you understand them, but I can apprehend that the Pendleton shirt he wears looks warm. “I don’t never open that door no more. Tell him why, Mahone.”
Pogue grins up from speed-counting the till with left eye and hand. “This is why we pay Lucius the highest of all. ‘T’isn’t the extra hours he puts in, it’s such bits as these.. Was a lad here, as well. name of Terry, there was, who saw fit to stop takin’ his meds and hang himself from the big steel bar above the tub. Lucius went up an’ cut him down, ‘e did, then said nothin’ of it, only stayed wi’the body ‘til EMS got here to make sure no one stripped the corpse. Ever catch Fat Boy doin’ such a thing?”
Lucius looks surprised by the explanation. Pogue just shakes his scruffy head. “Stuck On Stupid. Atlas should never be in charge of any business that involves people, an’ that prick Mike too”
By the time Pogue gets to the word ‘people’, Lucius is roaring and wheezing with laughter-induced tears cutting railroads down his seamed cheeks. “Stop… I’m sayin’, no you mustn’t…” he cackles.
The phone rings. “G’on now, “ he rasps at Pogue, flapping one callused brakeman’s hand at him, and answers it. “ Last Chance Hotel, how may I… No sir, we are undergoing renovations at this---(CLICK.)
“Mother fucker, “ Lucius raps out, snarling, “ Fuck around with me…Ho-tel fulla crooks and old women, tryinna put me in the middle. Don’t nobody tell a lie when the truth will do more damage…” He takes a deep,cleansing breath, counts to about eight and a half, then hangs up.
“Wrong number,” is all he finally says. After a while, he understands why we’re laughing ,and joins in.
Out front, a one-legged man goes swinging by with a fifth of Old Crow bourbon. Pogue chuckles on-camera at me, gesturing all around.
“As is the case when ending any shift here, I have discovered to mine own great pain that you can’t win no fight with no one-legged man. The till’s all here, Lucius. Counted…” he taps his left eyelid, “And seconded. Cheers. Back in six hours. G’night, you lot…Or mornin’. I don’t even know any more. Whichever.”
#
As soon as Pogue leaves, Lucius sighs like a steam-whistle at me, knowing what the red lights mean when he sees them go back on. He speaks anyway.
“Can’t none of us do nothin’ about it now except sit here and holler while it comes down around our heads. Soon as Fat Boy gives up operation of this here nut house, he’ll be dead in two years, now that he can’t come down here and give us desk clerks a hard time no more...”
What the hell just happened? When did it all become too far gone to catch up, or even count the bodies? I ask again, I cry in the daytime, and see only the stone ears of frozen gods. Never mind.
Lucius thinks a moment. A fly buzzes disturbingly close to one of my eyes. I hit my pest-switch, and a wireless tentacle zaps it out of the air. He sighs gratefully before he even acknowledges the gratitude. He is on a roll.
“For Atlas, everything comes down to one simple question,” Lucius continues, immediately irritated at the sudden sound, “If it’ll cost less to fix up all the code violations than it would to sell off and run, he’ll have everything fixed in a heartbeat. But and now the bill’s finally comin’ due.”
He looks at clip-me, finally calming down from the raw-nerve knee-jerk reactions inherent in his complex PTSD. (Another vet.) “You know, PS-20, sometimes I forget I’m talkin’ to a machine? Now could your emancipated mechanical ass please go turn on the thermostat timer, or are you wearin’ the mother fucker for a nose ring, by this point…”
And on across the footage… I scan that whole night’s worth before going back upstairs. I have no idea what I’m looking for. I just know I need to find it soon...
#
10/08/2060
1800 HRS
PATROL: ALL CLEAR. NO SMOKE, FLAMES, FUMES, OR ISSUES.
JOURNAL/INTERCONN…/EXISTING/ SPLICE:
12/24/2059
1200…1201…1202…
In the clip, Pogue dips his head, sloshing the Chinese vodka in his coffee mug and making the ice cubes clink. The hat stays on. Then he remembers where the joint is in the ashtray. “Ike Asimov’s Twelve Steps of Robotics,” he cackles at me through a sweet blue mouthful of chronic smoke. I cackle back, surprised.
Outside in the clip, the snow falls hard and fast. A wheelchair, tricked out in cardboard to look like a sleigh, goes roaring by along the sidewalk, pulled by a team of three pit bulls. The legless driver wears a Santa suit and stands in the saddle as tall as he can. We watch him go. Pogue clears his throat and takes another manful swill.
“Marduk Escher, Atlas’ Dad, owned a bar over on MLK with a Greek restaurant on the upper floor. The Health Inspector and the Fire Bureau and all sorts of different government ankle-biters started chewin’ on Marduk’s arse about all manner of ways he was cuttin’ corners. So Marduk fires back an’ starts tryin’ to palm off every square centimeter of blame on the damn Greeks he’d deigned to rent to, don’t yeh see.... Oh, what in the name of Jesus do we have trumpetin’ along here, Security I mean Fire Guard? I’m gonna wet ‘em! Look, yeh!”
Outside the window, a herd of pathologically drunk Santa Clauses make their way up Chasse Boulevard, haranguing passers-by and voiding various orifices in various directions. We both howl with laughter.
A black-and-white MPD airskiff swoops down in a perfectly columnar swirl of snow. The cop bellows through the PA system on his skiff, “ALL SANTA CLAUSES PLEASE DISPERSE! YOU ARE DISTURBING THE PEACE AND SUBJECT TO FEDERAL INTERVENTION UNDER PATRIOT ACT 10!”
His own Flasp’s even brighter than mine. I see snow begin to melt where he’s pointing it. There’s no way this can end well…
END CLIP.
#
Pondering… What else was I pondering, when I woke up… Oh, yeah. Ghosts.
It still makes me wonder. All the brain-cases like Dumpster Dave, who walk in multiple worlds, still come in asking if Mike needs his laundry done or a beer run or whatever. They did that a lot when Mike walked the Earth, orbiting Atlas Escher like a smaller slumlord, throwing money at other residents who orbited him in turn with groceries and smokes and beer until Dog Lady laid Mike low with a thirty-pound steel trashcan lid outside, jack-rolled him for his wallet and ate his eyes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not human, and never will be. It takes a lot more than soul-snot to scare me. That’s just how I’m made.
There are several steady revenants here. Mike, Robert, the elderly woman whose smeary form on the fire escape does magical things to the view of the strip-joint neon from the second-floor window, so many more…
I haven’t been around much, but I’ve never seen their like anywhere else. Pogue memorably and reverently calls them “the craithurs”. He even leaves them Halloween candy and Christmas cookies.
The Last Chance’s living-impaired population just are. They are a self-protected phylum of citizen organisms with their own laws, whose actions cannot be punished or commended by conventional security techniques. So I watch and listen, and let the damned filthy old things be.
#
I forget if it’s early morning or late evening. I have to check my clock. Most of the residents who pass out for long periods ask the same thing. No big deal.
I shamble past the lobby and look in. Old Atlas, all five hundred pounds of him, is in there milking the coffee and soda machines for the last penny with that stoat-headed contractor type standing over his shoulder and waiting around, tapping his feet on the tile.
Atlas can’t stop fussing with this building to make sure he’s making the most money for the least amount of work. And yet he’s scared to go upstairs. Every time he does, he keeps looking over his shoulder and breaking out in cold sweats.
I never understood that. It’s like he’s voluntarily assembled his own House of a Thousand Corpses, like in that old movie. Is he so sick and broken that he can’t see that? Or if he does…
You don’t live that despicably and expect to get away clean. Not in the end. Atlas is well past seventy, emphysematous, diabetic and morbidly obese. Even with his sick other angle, he can’t expect to live that much longer. Atlas has nowhere to run from his ghosts…
Atlas lumbers and navigates his way back behind his desk to count all his change. “Break his neck trippin’ over a dollar just to get to a nickel.” Pogue mutters from the black mesh over the front desk.
On the other side of the mesh, looking at him speculatively, Shelley Bearkiller snickers to herself. She’s got just about as many metal teeth as Pogue, and many Native tattoos, Lakota Sioux.
She’s a recovering hexer (like far too many of her people who got refugee status in the cities after the massacre at Pine Ridge) and former hooker who’s hiding out here while she tries to dry out. Atlas doesn’t really care until the cops yell at him about it, then he pretends to until he can ignore her again. .
I’ve learned a lot from this lobby and everyone in it, on many long nights watching old movies in that weird, dark cave while the hoi polloi stumble along outside. Pogue grins over at me now through his mustache with silver teeth. His left eye, blinks red and green like a Christmas ornament.
A tweed cap barely holds down his mop of graying hair. “Yer up five minutes early, Marvin,” he observes. “What’s on fire?” I pretend to smell the air around him. “I dunno. Smells a little like weed. Might have to write somebody up.”
“Aye, and I might have to run the blender for several hours, smarty eyes.“ Pogue chuckles, breaking off to pick up his earlier thread, talking with his hands a lot,
“… So this eejit, he’s up there firin’ full bottles of Obsidian Stout… at black people from three floors up. I went up to fook ‘im out, I did, an’ confiscated every last pint for personal alcoholism research, yeh see. He starts to nut up on me about it, and I tell him Look, fella m’lad, a full beer fired at someone from this height an’ it’s Game Over! Second of all…” he fumed, “ It’s Obsidian! Give’s this an’ leave the block a while...”
Shelley cackles. “All the black guys I know on this block would knock somebody down for a pint of Obsidian.” She pantomimes someone going for a long pass in football. “Over here! In the bushes!”
“First walk-through, Atlas,” I mutter boredly, “Building scans code-4, but confirming visually. Have a good night.”
A full ten seconds later, Atlas’ head comes up from behind the desk. His kooky gold-ringed eyes look back, glimmering with pharmaceutical confusion. “You haven’t heard the whole story,” he murmurs cryptically in that weird, fruity tenor voice, “But stay! You will!”
“Uhh…affirmative.” He even has the power to weird out a machine. I don’t know why he stuck around this late . Oh. Logging onto the log now, I’m getting that there was a row with Dog Lady earlier that left Atlas haranguing two cops on the sidewalk, and nearly getting run in himself.
“Why won’t you help me evict her?” was his only entry on the Comment line of the scan. So… yeah. He stayed here to relax, to suck some more bedbug blood out of the place and presumably feel better after a while.I pause, watching him count his filthy plastic bowls of vending-machine change.
Sometimes it takes Fat Boy five minutes to answer a question I ask him, or even register my presence. I just sit around and wait until that goofy overmedicated smile flutters open and he croons, “Well, let me saaay it thiiis way…” in a voice several thousand RPM’s slower than Tina the heroin-hooker up on two.
There’s a species of mad hilarity in those little rogue elephant eyes, a restrained hysteria in each unhurried step and HRRRGHH…EEEGH…. wheeze of breath as Atlas gazes upon all his vacancies for long hours in an attitude of profoundest attention. It’s like he’s waiting for something to come home to him up the Fire Escape, something he bought and paid for over twenty years ago...
Or maybe that Something is already here to stay. I get up and walk out into the lobby as Atlas does likewise. Atlas’ current guest (replete in too much bronzer, weird shades and a twinkly black shirt) deigns to look at me and makes a note on his clipboard pane with a small black stylus. The note floats in the air, but I can’t make head or tail of his handwriting.
“Undeclared security simulacrum, Atlas,” the man says. “When’d you acquire it?” Like I’m not even in the room.
I have to give Atlas credit. He still doesn’t look up from the coffee machine, where his gloved hand is now in the spout up to the elbow. (For a mad moment, I imagine that he will birth a tiny, beeping coffeepot from that spout and cut its power cord.) Then he calls out,
“Dave, this is PS-20. The Fire Inspectors put him here. He’s with Last Resort Security. One a’those new AI robots that do everything including your taxes, eh heh heh heh…” He has a really annoying laugh.”Say…hullo… PS-20!”
I’m too tired to play Uncle Tom. I stick out my favorite hand. “I’m sorry, Dave. I hate scaring the straights. Are you with the Housing Authority, or…”
“Oh, no.” Dave shakes his bristly head very rapidly. “Newlands Realty. We wanna make Mr. Escher here an offer on the building. Can you key open some rooms for us, there, PS-20?”
331, I wished, The rotting one, where Atlas takes whatever female tenant is desperate enough at the time to fuck him for a month’s free rent. Sometimes male ones too. Go show them that one.
I nod, even as my body opens the doors by remote from down here. Atlas has written off every repair that was ever supposed to happen here into a summer home on Mars, where he will probably be hiding very shortly. “We were in an earthquake two years ago,” the big liar, whoremonger, toadstool, wheezes at Dave, “And we barely felt it. They just don’t make hotels like they used to.”
Do you hear yourself, Merchant of Filth? I want to scream in his face. But he wouldn’t get it. And who am I to rise up all righteous, anyway? Even my own company swing from Atlas’ big old sow teat. If we exploit him and he exploits the people who live here, what does that say about us? What does that say about me?
A lot of words spring to mind. None of them are words I like very much. I go up again and check for smoke, flames, fumes or stupidity. One floor down, I hear Dave asking Atlas why the hell he painted the rooms pink.
“Beecause it’s a cleeeeean color,” Atlas wheezes. I let my thought-recording wax a Coltrane howl of:
My ass. You painted them pink because you got all that pink paint for free at the City Dump…
I continue on my rounds. Something about tonight feels totally different than any other shift I’ve ever pulled at the Last Chance. Through the pauses of the storm, the wind rushes through the halls from the half-open fire escape windows, whistles as it breezes through the narrow bathrooms and the blue locked doors.
The whole trip up the stairs feels like a nightmare. Will the Dog Lady be out presently to upbraid me? Don’t I hear her spiky little footsteps across the squashy, trash-littered floor of her room, sending up mold spores and that produce-bin proteus vulgaris reek like a bacterological cattle drive?
At the end of the hall, between her cracked-open door and the window, against the wall on the left, she’s set a gilded plaster hand-mirror of 1940’s vintage, cracked down the middle, with a glaring Gorgon head at the end of the handle. There are rhinestones in the Gorgon’s eyes; one red, one green.
The golden mirror sits at a slight angle so she can look out her door and see who’s coming up the hall.
It’s an old jailhouse trick. I log it in my memory. Behind the door, certain low and indefinite sounds come at long intervals, flashes of light, bursts of static pulse.
The air around #327 glows silver like a faintly visible gas. Something screams in the wall and dies.
I look back.
I’d gasp if I could. Dog Lady’s been out there the whole time, stargazing by the fire escape window, shrouded in sooty downtown shadow as old as the city. Her aspect and body language tell me incontrovertibly that she’s waiting for someone or something to climb up the Fire Escape with what she needs.
Behind her, the smeary window turns green with prowling airskiff-light through a break in the clouds. Her entire grim, skinned form is bathed in the sick silver shimmer gathering all around her. A pale fear seizes me at the sight.
Then I breathe in the hush, swallowing down all that quiet. Suffering shines through in the sick gray light of her sallow lizard face, pullulating with disease, glaring dread awfulness up and down the hall…
After Detox wouldn’t haul her off a while back, I tried to give her a second, more conciliatory little Come-To-Jesus about not interfering with the Fire Watch since she was responsible for us being here in the first place. Sadie slammed the door in my face and called me “Just another fucking bug.”
Predictably, MPD left without Dog Lady four hours later that evening. She’d instigated a fight between the Rat Man and the tranny crackhead across the hall from her, called it in to MPD, then called my boss Sgt. Mason and told him I was sleeping on the job.
It didn’t matter that fights had nothing to do with Fire Watch. That was just Sadie’s way of slipping it to all parties involved at once. That night, Watch Commander Mason came down from Last Resort’s Gresham HQ and found a few things to chew me out for in the Employee Handbook until Pogue showed up to corroborate my version of events.
Mason tore up the Incident Report and shook his sausage finger in my face. “We don’t have to hire robots yet,” he said, slightly over my head like he didn’t really want to talk to me. “You watch your ass, you uppity vacuum cleaner. Because I’ll be right in it…”
#
10/08/2060
18:19…01…
Lenny the Crackhead Handyman here has the most well-developed sense of vengeance of any human I’ve ever known. On my rounds just a few minutes ago, he asked me to come with him and run lead-block while he gave Dog Lady twenty four hours’ notice that the Exterminator would be by.
Lenny wouldn’t say what his plan was for later that day, only that he had one in case things got ugly, which they usually did…
“I remember, once, I opened her door and there was cobwebs this thick,” he told me on the stairs, eyes wide and his grizzled jaw wobbling “Four roaches sat there in the flashlight beam, just playin’,” He shuddered, glancing into my eyes, ”You know, playin’. I had to hose off the broom three times before I could even get to the light switch.”
“So what will you do if she gives you any shit?” I prompted. Lenny sneered expansively, face jowling up. Lenny was high comedy to watch, just a shame to know where he got his energy.
“Oh, if she gets her old granny panties in a bunch about this, she’ll scream fuckin’ bloody murder, what I got planned,” he informed me, “It’ll be like music to my ears. Like ‘The Sound of Music.’ Hey, that’s what we should do, PS-20, write ‘Last Chance Hotel: The Musical.’ “
“Come on Vacaaaaation… Leave on Pro-baaaaation,” I crooned. Lenny laughed, then looked surprised.
At that, we went up and knocked at Dog Lady’s door. After some more weird noises, she opened it and looked around, blinking and whipping and rattling every which way, eyes bright, ready for war.
The shadows ran all around us like black cats and hobo spiders. For the first time in years, I truly fathomed both the utter necessity of my job and the utter futility of it. “GET THE FUCK AWAY!!” screamed this gestalt plastinate, this skinned chicken, this revenant who never looked right in any light.. “STOP LOOKING IN MY ROOM!! You pedophile!” she spit at Lenny, “I saw your mail. You…”
“Division of Child Support, not that it’s any of your deal,” Lenny snapped, looking put out. His face got too close and she spit in it, spraying something on the spit from … a bracelet? I squinted. It was blurry. It…
As they were talking, I worked an unused pair of arms and hands around behind me and ganked the mirror. As stated, I don’t have a rectum as you understand the definition, but there was a WHISK, and a THOOMP, and then the mirror was in my chest. No one seemed to notice.
Clearly, Dog Lady still wasn’t done having fun. “Oh, shake some more, Lenny. Shake some more and turn red. You—“
Lenny was having none of it. “I pay seventy thousand a year in support. How’s that make me a fuckin’ chester, and since when did sellin’ your old nasty pussy make you into some kinda arbiter of…”
Incredibly, Dog Lady began to sing as she went back in her room and locked the eyebolt, “Yooou… are a crack cocaaaaine… salesman… and everyone… is gonna know about it...” CLICK.
“We should add that one to the musical,” Lenny commented to me, grinning like a baboon. In the gloom of the humid upstairs hall, I telephotoed close and saw that there was no laughter touching Lenny’s eyes. They were rolling and frightened, the eyes of a horse that smells fire in the barn.
“I dream about that bitch sometimes. She’s in my room, whisperin’ all this gibberish that don’t make no kinda sense, and it’s like… she’s got mirrors in her eyes that twist up my head so all I can see is what’s right in front of me, reflecting itself, back down this long tunnel to the rooms under Downtown, where the death-gods judge…” Lenny shuddered. “I gotta get off that shit...”
#
I looked a long way down the hall, out the fire escape, into the cold sky above the alien jungle madness of the city, the Gorge, the coast, the whole way north to the nearly nameless nightmare countries at the top of the world …
#
10/08/2060
20:05…06…
Brooding, I trudge back down and return behind the desk. Is’t yerself? the Irishman’s headgear says at me before I even enter, wheeling the door open, emerging in that Rembrandt light and blinking like a diopter. There’s a perfect Shemp-shaped shadow in potato chip crumbs around Atlas’ desk chair from the previous shift.
Outside the window, out in the snowfall of neon, some bootlegger cruises a long Burnside Cadillac down the block . The welded-together shopping carts’ street-rebuilt wheels are as loud as a parade.
On a level with the window, the blue plastic tarp on said mobile home flaps aside to reveal Ball jars of corn liquor, a few watered-down fifths of cheap vodka, and two human legs, the toenails painted with a purple-red polish. Bootlegger Boy yanks the tarp closed very fast, bowing exaggeratedly at us as he passes the window. Pogue gives him the finger.
“Drunk,” he explains obliquely. “Fella m’lad was passed out on his face, yeh see, up at the corner. I went to go fook ‘im out, told him to move. This did not sit well. I went back in. He was spoilin’ for a fight, but I had no reason ta’. Anyway, this fookin’ stumblebum is comin’ up, I see him outside the window, comin’ up to hard hex-dealers who’d break his legs just for talkin’, if only it weren’t so funny…”
My eyes are as red as the neon of the bar sign next door. The capture is clean. Pogue is born for a microphone. “He comes up with this handfulla bills, doin’, like, the old street joke about, ‘If you can kick my arse, I’ll give yeh a buck,’” here Pogue palms his forehead, chuckling in hopeless horror at the human condition,
“Only he gets it wrong, he goes, ‘I… WILL GIVE YOU A DOLLAR… IF I CAN KICK YOUR ASS!”
“And if you kicked his?” I venture. Pogue shrugs.
“Guess I’d have to pay him for the privilege, wasn’it? Anyway, he won’t be back.” Pogue seems to know for a certainty. He sits down again, steepling his fingers, and looks out our window, the one both our eyes always return to when the conversation reaches comfortable silence.
Our soon-to-be-demolished view of the street is so much more eternal and strange than the television sitting on the platform just below the glass. “They don’t ever come back, once they’re gone… Much like demolished buildings…”
“Hah,” Lucius, too, still sits where he was at the other desk in the back, silent as smoke, working now over a hoary clock-radio with a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers. I told you, my mind is going. He’s so quiet, I forgot he was still there.
He wears a jeweler’s loupe in his right eye. He’s clearly left his hearing-aid out, though. “They gettin’ ready to do it now. That Aga…whatchamacallit, the big holdin’ company, they can come in and grab this place right up as a historical landmark, and---“
“Gut it to the gills, an’ turn it all into condos fulla waterbugs that smell like boiled arse,” Pogue finishes.
For me, deadpan isn’t hard, since I have no mouth. “The waterbugs or the condos?”
Pogue barely even looks in my direction. “Shut it, yeh, before we start in with the Fibonacci sequences and make yer head explode.”
Lucius roars with laughter, slapping the desk in front of him. “Anyway, yeah. That’s why they throwin’ the book at Atlas now. ‘Cos he waited too long and didn’t clean nothin’ up!”
His grizzled, endless head swivels toward a gyroscopic set of female hindquarters pistoning by outside the window. So does Pogue’s. I am unmoved. She’s meat. I’m not wired that way. (At least I don’t think I am, different subject for a different day…)
“This street breeds misers,” Pogue shrugs after a moment. ”Atlas is just the largest. They say they do an’ all, but no one really wants to bother sussing this place out, for it’ll all be pulled down anyway. You know it, do youse not?”
Both of us can only make disgusted sounds. Lucius clears his throat. “That slumlord bastid will twist and exploit and squeeze every penny out of a place like this. Most of these folks,” he gestures up and all around with one hand, ”This here is their only shake to live independently. Nobody wins…”
I want to say so much more, but I’d be stepping out of my place. Getting uppity. I’m just a security guard, and mecha to boot. What the hell do I know? Like Lucius, I don’t say all I know, that’s for sure.
But now I hear myself speak up from far away as I run a core-dump on my nervous system, setting loose the tiny Nanite jets and sprinklers within that might or might not still spray, wondering how much of the mold will come off this time, “Maybe it’s better that it come down. Maybe it’s better to remember it the way it was.”
Pogue shudders. “Was when? This hotel was always sketchy like this. Burn it an’ seed the fuckin’ ground wi’ salt...”
I sit in the corner for a while, brooding in the warm light, the smell of Pogue’s cheap whiskey under the counter, the smoke and tinny Irish ceili music coming from the arcing insect guts of the ancient transistor radio on the counter.
Sucking every bit of respite that I can from this haunted house that looks out on the streets of Now.
I wish I was a better mech, who stood upright and never fell. I wish I had a law degree, a law enforcement badge, something that connoted some actual authority. In my bones, it feels like tonight is the last night this place stays open. Every part of me wonders why.
But there’s just so much that will never add up about this place. When Dog Lady killed Mike,
I couldn’t type her blood on the walk. I couldn’t identify half the trace radiation in it. I couldn’t even conclusively identify half the bloodstains as…
Human. But that line of inquiry was an MPD matter, out of my statutory authority. The bosses scream every time I do anything around here except look for fires.
Yet now, with every arm/leg, I kick my metaphoric ass from pillar to post for having this law-enforcement grade processor in my head rusting unburnished, not shining full in use... I feel a logic vein flash, deep in the hottest center of my back brain. “When you remove the impossible, Watson…”
I don’t even hear what’s going on around me right now. I’m ignoring all sensory input, achieving the human dream of separating body from mind, if only for a short while.
The blood. The radiation in the blood bespoke direct contact with an unknown variable, possibly extraterrestrial in origin.
What unknown variable did the Dog Lady wait for at the Fire Escape window every single night like an ancient, poisoned child, sitting up in the hopes that some monstrosity of a Santa Claus, with drug-glands swollen and dripping, would soon be waddling in that very window on webbed feet?
…Comes a short term memory clip of Atlas swiveling his big barbered-up buffalo head toward me, eyes lost in medication, “You haven’t heard the whole story. But stay! You will!”
“…Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Dog Lady yells at Atlas for harboring fugitives on his payroll, but who or what is she harboring? What the hell is she building in there? And who or what is assisting? It could be a Fire Matter. Ergo, I have a right to know.
Time slows down to a buzz. I disappear up the wall again, open the Fire Door from up high, and come out along the third-floor ceiling.
Already, I see the silver light gathering again at the end of the hall. There are thudding sounds. The earthbound flophouse ghosts all wait in that hall with bated breath and folded, smoke-ringed arms.
This is new to them. There has never been this kind of thing here. .
I’m almost to her door. I snick the Flasp out all the way. In direct violation of my post orders, I arm it to its KILL setting, and magnetize the shields around my shell.
They were factory-issue. Sgt.Mason claims that said armor is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Fuck him. He ain’t here. I hold my fury shadowed by the wall, clutch the old plaster mirror behind my back, drop to an upright position, and bang on #327’s door.
It creaks open on madness and lavender and death, and… that other thing, the big new thing that stinks like hot plastic, that looks like a melted cathedral made by wasps raised on crack cocaine, that takes up half the wall behind the place where she stands, all alone in the room.
(Well, not quite alone. Sharon the Doberman runs out the door.)
I can’t connect what stands there with humanity. Sadie trembles and reels to and fro in a white nightshirt, making a low, moaning cry. Behind her, the wall has begun to split with the weight of hardware and steel fused into that great black porous-metal madness around one central door shape that glows like water on the moon.
On the lesser walls, maps and schedules are graven with words in her big, stumbly handwriting. I desire to know nothing of the mathematical formula for Pure Fucking Evil rendered here in dry-erase marker.
Still, in that mere picosecond look, mine eyes have seen the glory of a map of New Portland, stretched in the highest place of honor across those peeling yellow walls full of scrapings and stains, with here and there a bloody fingernail mushed into the plaster.
There are green thumbtacks on some flophouse hotels on that map, red on others, yellow on fewer still. And on the Last Chance, a black one. Curiouser and curiouser.
Sadie’s singing something into the big door she melted into the wall. Light from her eyes gets sucked eagerly through that door, flickering in time with the song in no language anywhere in my memory.
“Yes?!?” she screeches at me, not turning around. “I’m a little busy!!”
.
“Exterminator, lady. You need the service.” Like a wild boar, I enter the cave. The green fire of her eyes lunges toward me first, up and sentient-sinuous as the leaves on the maple outside banging on the fire escape in the high storm wind that rises everywhere, all around .
I stand my ground, and shine a billion candlepower into Dog Lady’s eyes. It’s now or never.
“SADIE REHN,” I bellow, “HAVE YOU GOT AN ALIEN IN HERE?”
“No.” Dog Lady’s voice grows thicker, more guttural. She looks down at her flat, grey belly and flows sinuously toward me, sick, grinning, already dead.
With either hand, she grasps an ear and pulls. Hard enough to split. And split.
“I’ve got one in here.” The tearing sounds eclipse in light, pouring from the rip. The tumors I saw earlier lick out into tentacles, subsuming the disguise.
What’s inside Dog Lady holds its own unknowable shape, a mandragora blood-clot like something that crawled out of the sea ... For just a moment, I teeter on the brink of a horrible mistake when I look through the main arch of that nightmarish door…
#
It was like looking through a window, but with no New Portland spread below in its neon bustle of rain and wind. None at all.
What lay on the other side of that door was a darkness so far out in Space I had no tools to process it, beyond Osiris, beyond the furthest reaches Humanity could see with the aided eye in a lifetime.
My system wanted to shut down at the sight of it By all rights, my braincase should have popped. But it didn’t.
Out there on the other side of that little door, the real Electric Dogladyland coruscated and beckoned in a crazy diamond sprawl, far beyond the Courts of Chaos and the most fevered dreams of Dante Alighieri, at the center of the center where the blind piper plays his eternal didgeridoo to the skirlings of demented nose-flutes and demon saxophones…
I could step through that door, I thought madly, No more Mason. No more hexers. No more mold. No more bad startups and reboots on cold mornings. No more Magoon from #333 telling me I killed Jesus. No more AA…
There was work enough for a warrior droid out there beyond that dooe, work enough for a thinking machine, honorable work where every second was danger and every journey guaranteed no safe return…
Then I looked again.
And again.
And, again, I wondered what the fuck I’d been thinking when I ever set foot on this block.
And I…
#
…Tear myself away, flip the mirror up into my favorite hand around the hooking knife on the last finger, and shove the cracked old thing into the beams of light washing between Dog Lady’s eyes and that weird door to Nowhere I Want To Know Anything About Ever Again.
Then it gets really gross.
For some reason, the thing inside Dog Lady can’t blink now. The light flashes back to its eyes like a flame following fumes back to their origin, generating so much friction and resistance along the way that…
There comes a different, higher-pitched sound that I understand to be the last bit of breath in Dog Lady’s lungs, still trying to form the Last Word. Then her skin begins to burn.
She blisters me with eyes no more human than mine, and screams the one thing that could have driven me utterly insane if I even came with that option,
“I’M MELTING!!!”
Ohv I am plugging into the fucking wall right now I don’t care if I wind up in jail again oh she did not just say that---
A wild white light shoots in from outside the window. That neon sign hasn’t worked for a hundred years, and it’s covered in soot to a flat pane, but… GROVE HOTEL blares into the night, an unknown sentence on a cenotaph no one this century can read.
A cloud of sweat-waft and English Leather roars across my olfactory cells. Atlas Escher stands in the outer doorway like a Sumo wrestler in street clothes, wielding a Colt .44 pistol way too big for his weird little hands.
“There’s no end with you, you goddamned bitch!!” he roars, “And an alien-lover, to boot! You ain’t startin’ up that Slipship there with my electricity! It’s illegal!”
Everything goes silent. Atlas doesn’t really see what he’s seeing. The alien convulses on the floor in its death throes, melting into gray adipose muck that burns my feet a little. My hands don’t turn the mirror a nanometer. Parts of her are still visible, and now the light from the door is one-way, into the mirror and up through a crack in the ceiling.
I have nowhere else to send it …
Then I have the best idea I’ve ever had. Atlas lowers the pistol to port arms. He can’t talk through the wheezing. With his free right hand, he reaches in the voluminous pocket of his jeans and removes the largest Albuterol inhaler I have ever seen, replacing the pistol in his waistband as he takes a honk.
“PS-20. Hi. Umm…” His eyes swim with yellow tears. “You’re the best officer we’ve ever had. I can’t believe you’re the one who took her out. What…if you don’t mind me askin’… is that thing you have there? What’s it doing?”
I can’t look at Atlas. Not even now. His eyes are stone tunnels through a temple built of raped, exsanguinated corpses, water leaking through down his dusty cheeks and into his beard. Crocodiles can cry, too.
But I can’t.
“It’s a mirror, Atlas,” I tell him softly, “First time you’ve ever seen one?”
That gets his wind up. He remains Stuck On Stupid. “Huh?”
“Have a look,” I hiss, and turn the path of the beam down and back toward him.
“B-But… But…” Then Atlas falls to the floor like a poleaxed hog, taking a section of moldy wall with him.
That awful door is still open, but the mirror in my hand has just gone black. The light from the door smokes straight down into this blighted block. The walls ripple and scream, and there’s something else gathering in the air …
Something I feel at 0600 on Sunday mornings standing on the fire stairs as something brushes past me. Something else there is that doesn’t like the light, some multicephalous kobold hiding in the dark, hopping from room to room, making people do awful things, or not do them, or do unbelievable things, depending on the mood it’s in that day…
Something whose name is not Legion, but Grove. A hideous throng of vast, tormented forms rush in, chanting. Mike kicks Atlas, glaring through piggy little red eyes, grinning with awful tusks. Behind him, egging him on, is the guy who hung himself in the tub room, barking out Atlas’ name in choked, hissing sibilants through solid scar tissue.
To his right is Robert, who died in the bathtub. Part of Robert went down the drain. Part of Robert stayed, and looks passing strange, and heads straight for Fat Boy, jostling to the front of the mob to chew and chew and chew with mossy teeth…
All the hotel deaders I ever saw in the wall outside, and more, and more before, come swirling up like smoke to pull Atlas down to Hell, bellowing an endless round of the same refrain.
“YOU HAVE ABANDONED EVERY HOPE BY ENTERING HERE.
WE WON’T FIX NOTHIN’.
IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU CAN MOVE… “
The ghosts tear Atlas apart piecemeal. Unbelievably, I notice that he’s still alive when they start. They eat his heart, and every other screaming, quivering fragment, and fall back under the earth as the rumble happens again.
NOTE: I am presently registering a 9.8 earthquake up and down the fault line through the middle of town, the one that runs parallel to Chasse Boulevard, and along the Shanghai Tunnels under this very hotel…
There comes a fierce breath of the whirlwind. My brain reels as I see the mighty walls rushing asunder with a long, tumultuous shouting sound, as the quake and the deep, dank new tarn straight down the middle of Chasse Boulevard begin to suddenly and loudly claim the Last Chance Hotel, munching up the fragments of the House of Escher…
#
August 2007—January 2008
For Pat Williams, Oscar Davis, and Richard Gismondi
With apologies to Chuck Palahniuk.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
'Lotophagi' in FARRAGO'S WAINSCOT #11
http://www.farragoswainscot.com/
Issue #11 is up
Just returned from the woods outside Salem, OR, and SOAK, the Portland regional Burning Man festival. My face and back are so sunburned I am amazed to not be peeling.
SOAK's gonna be hard to write about. I want to keep most of it for now. It was a joyous peeling back of our neurotic civilization, of the kind I had not experienced in some time.
People _can_ live like that. People _can_ be decent and civil to each other and focus on the extraordinary instead of the bottom line. And anyone who tells me differently can, quite frankly, DIAF because I'm so tired of your shit after seeing behind it that I'd like to burn the whole facade.
I worked the gate for one shift, read people's cards, talked to them, listened to their stories and watched the Little Man burn down to ash that folks still tended the next morning... at which point people I had never met before in my life would come up to me with a word of thanks, a smile, or simply a look in their eyes that said they remembered what we talked about and weren't soon going to forget.
The best part about events like that is that they ARE temporary, like Buddhist sand-paintings that the monks blow away when it's time. The idea is to make every day a sand-painting.
The idea is to make more...
Issue #11 is up
Just returned from the woods outside Salem, OR, and SOAK, the Portland regional Burning Man festival. My face and back are so sunburned I am amazed to not be peeling.
SOAK's gonna be hard to write about. I want to keep most of it for now. It was a joyous peeling back of our neurotic civilization, of the kind I had not experienced in some time.
People _can_ live like that. People _can_ be decent and civil to each other and focus on the extraordinary instead of the bottom line. And anyone who tells me differently can, quite frankly, DIAF because I'm so tired of your shit after seeing behind it that I'd like to burn the whole facade.
I worked the gate for one shift, read people's cards, talked to them, listened to their stories and watched the Little Man burn down to ash that folks still tended the next morning... at which point people I had never met before in my life would come up to me with a word of thanks, a smile, or simply a look in their eyes that said they remembered what we talked about and weren't soon going to forget.
The best part about events like that is that they ARE temporary, like Buddhist sand-paintings that the monks blow away when it's time. The idea is to make every day a sand-painting.
The idea is to make more...
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Fire Sermon; #1 of...
"No power on Earth can harm me tonight. I have walked with the King."
---the late and truly missed Hunter Thompson
"Eh! Eh! Bomba, ye!"
---Satchmo (if you were really listening)
Sorry the tone of the latest few blogs has been so dark, my dear little brothers and sisters in the Logos. The next one is about eighty times darker.
WARNING: This contains some hot Gnostic preachin', brothers and sisters. Don't nobody go callin' the men with the van. I am of sounder mind than I have been in ten years.
Big Pulp and Farrago's Wainscot (links when they're up, no intros needed for these heavy-caliber magazines) are both running some truly horrifying stories I wrote this year, "To Soothe The Savage Beast" and "Lotophagi." In re- reading both of them, I am struck time and again by many things, most of which I'll shut up about at the risk of turning this into a tech lecture, which no one wants to sit through when it's so nice out, at least here.
But suffice it to say that they're dark, even for me. Crawl-around-in-your-guts dark. I was proud of both of them.
"Savage Beast" was inspired pretty much the way it sounds, just changed names and locations, and did not and will not name the security company. The ghost is real. It has been verified by at least two sober officers. And the piano player is real. The implication, the link... That came from various sources. According to the Gospel of Satchmo, if you have to ask, you'll never know.
"Lotophagi" was originally two stories. The former Sue Zoon published the original, "Where Lost Things Dwell" (a similar ditty about a squat-house and a Manson wannabe) in '02. The other story that became that one, "Half-Sick Of Shadows" was about a fictional hippie tree-sit in Alpine, OR, that never sold anywhere, and rightly so. It was self-referential crap.
But sometimes, when you fuse two sick animals, the resultant Jenny Hanniver gets up and barks like a chimera pup. "Lotophagi" was apparently one of those times, if it could get Darin Bradley's ear. (Bradley's in Diet Soap #3, very good piece from Doug Lain, M.K. Hobson and crew, as usual. )
Darin Bradley and FW specialize in finding a home for bastard critters like "Lotophagi." To this day, that story scares the old-time shit out of me.
But the most horrifying story is the one I can never tell.
I had kind of an epiphany yesterday, brothers and sisters. Out of respect for its catalysts, I will only say that sometimes, we spend so long pushing the Pull door (Jeff VanderMeer's words, not mine... and don't even get me started about the squid tentacle that pulled the door open last week...)...
That we build up habits around that, habits that become actions, that become pathologies.
We become the mile-long railroad waste dump we played in when we were kids, so our bones never grew together right and our brains never grew right at all. We become the scratch on the frontal lobe, the dog that howls too loud, the two-headed calf.
Nietzsche said something about that, some warning to do with bringing slingshots to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building; or that when you swallow your pride enough to stop being afraid of the Dark, sometimes the Dark stops being afraid of you. And sometimes not all of you makes it off that battlefield. Sometimes, you're missing limbs.
And sometimes, you wish it was a limb that you missed, every passing day you can never get back of a life you could have been a part of.
Everyone who really knows me, and can scrape together enough character to say that they follow this blog (rather than hiding and skulking in the dark) knows what I'm really like, and the kind of weird shit I've been through even making it back this far.
Constant Reader #1 recently informed me, "You know, I'm not completely in the dark about what you've been up to over the years."
Up to... my neck in debt, assumed and compounded. Up to my neck in awful things I still have to write about to get over.
Those things were fine with you,Constant Reader #1. You needed me sick, just like your parents needed you sick. The problem was, you started to believe I was all of the coward you made me out to be.
I lived. I fought my way out. And now I'm starting to heal.
And you can run to Antarctica, you sorry piece of trailer trash. There'll be a Mississippi hard-ass lawyer waiting for you on the ice. Might be five years, might be ten. Might be tomorrow. You don't get to know.
You can think you got away, and that I'll never be able to repay the mess you left me with. Enjoy the time you have. The papers'll be in the mail. Watch ye then, for ye know not when the Master of the House doth approach.
Everyone with half a lick of sense who truly knows me knows that not all of the Past was my fault. It's never all anyone's fault. No one is ever truly static. But as I once wrote of another sexual compulsive, those whose dreams are stomped in infancy will spend the rest of their lives throwing a boot party for others. ("Eva"Neometropolis#1)
"If you can't figure it out," Constant Reader #1 adds, "I have nothing further to say to you."
Brothers and sisters, they that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs on mine head. The only reason I haven't been able to heal any more than I have, more than the imagined prison that one or two closet readers of this blog think they keep me in... is because I can't ever truly repay my sins, not to my own satisfaction. I can't ever repay the parts I'm truly sorry for.
And those parts have nothing to do with Closet Reader #1, brothers and sisters. Not at all.
There is a child polymath out there, brothers and sisters, born of an angel and a demon (and I still couldn't tell you which was which.)I owe her my life, and I handed her straight to the boogeyman in the closet. And that's the one debt I can never, every repay no matter whose name is on the bill.
Brothers and sisters, what I left Lydia is the one sin against God and Goddess I've ever knowingly committed. I had no choice. That doesn't make it any easier to sleep past 8 AM, or lead a normal life. The only thing that ever started making me sick is that I saw it coming and I couldn't stop it. And I still wonder if I will ever be able to beg my daughter's forgiveness.
It's the parts I can't repay that would have killed me so fast... if I could ever let them.
No, every bill comes due, brothers and sisters, with a lovely Yiddish word I learned from the Grand Iconoclast, Harlan Ellison: Vigerish. Another Red Sea Pedestrian and damn good writer, Aaron Larkin (Bastard High Command) summed up the English translation of that word when he wrote,
"Revenge is a dish best left in the back of the fridge until it takes on a life of its own and jumps out at you."
So it is. Amen. I just needed to get that out. As another prophet, Bill Hicks, once told us, don't worry, there are dick jokes on the way...;)
---the late and truly missed Hunter Thompson
"Eh! Eh! Bomba, ye!"
---Satchmo (if you were really listening)
Sorry the tone of the latest few blogs has been so dark, my dear little brothers and sisters in the Logos. The next one is about eighty times darker.
WARNING: This contains some hot Gnostic preachin', brothers and sisters. Don't nobody go callin' the men with the van. I am of sounder mind than I have been in ten years.
Big Pulp and Farrago's Wainscot (links when they're up, no intros needed for these heavy-caliber magazines) are both running some truly horrifying stories I wrote this year, "To Soothe The Savage Beast" and "Lotophagi." In re- reading both of them, I am struck time and again by many things, most of which I'll shut up about at the risk of turning this into a tech lecture, which no one wants to sit through when it's so nice out, at least here.
But suffice it to say that they're dark, even for me. Crawl-around-in-your-guts dark. I was proud of both of them.
"Savage Beast" was inspired pretty much the way it sounds, just changed names and locations, and did not and will not name the security company. The ghost is real. It has been verified by at least two sober officers. And the piano player is real. The implication, the link... That came from various sources. According to the Gospel of Satchmo, if you have to ask, you'll never know.
"Lotophagi" was originally two stories. The former Sue Zoon published the original, "Where Lost Things Dwell" (a similar ditty about a squat-house and a Manson wannabe) in '02. The other story that became that one, "Half-Sick Of Shadows" was about a fictional hippie tree-sit in Alpine, OR, that never sold anywhere, and rightly so. It was self-referential crap.
But sometimes, when you fuse two sick animals, the resultant Jenny Hanniver gets up and barks like a chimera pup. "Lotophagi" was apparently one of those times, if it could get Darin Bradley's ear. (Bradley's in Diet Soap #3, very good piece from Doug Lain, M.K. Hobson and crew, as usual. )
Darin Bradley and FW specialize in finding a home for bastard critters like "Lotophagi." To this day, that story scares the old-time shit out of me.
But the most horrifying story is the one I can never tell.
I had kind of an epiphany yesterday, brothers and sisters. Out of respect for its catalysts, I will only say that sometimes, we spend so long pushing the Pull door (Jeff VanderMeer's words, not mine... and don't even get me started about the squid tentacle that pulled the door open last week...)...
That we build up habits around that, habits that become actions, that become pathologies.
We become the mile-long railroad waste dump we played in when we were kids, so our bones never grew together right and our brains never grew right at all. We become the scratch on the frontal lobe, the dog that howls too loud, the two-headed calf.
Nietzsche said something about that, some warning to do with bringing slingshots to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building; or that when you swallow your pride enough to stop being afraid of the Dark, sometimes the Dark stops being afraid of you. And sometimes not all of you makes it off that battlefield. Sometimes, you're missing limbs.
And sometimes, you wish it was a limb that you missed, every passing day you can never get back of a life you could have been a part of.
Everyone who really knows me, and can scrape together enough character to say that they follow this blog (rather than hiding and skulking in the dark) knows what I'm really like, and the kind of weird shit I've been through even making it back this far.
Constant Reader #1 recently informed me, "You know, I'm not completely in the dark about what you've been up to over the years."
Up to... my neck in debt, assumed and compounded. Up to my neck in awful things I still have to write about to get over.
Those things were fine with you,Constant Reader #1. You needed me sick, just like your parents needed you sick. The problem was, you started to believe I was all of the coward you made me out to be.
I lived. I fought my way out. And now I'm starting to heal.
And you can run to Antarctica, you sorry piece of trailer trash. There'll be a Mississippi hard-ass lawyer waiting for you on the ice. Might be five years, might be ten. Might be tomorrow. You don't get to know.
You can think you got away, and that I'll never be able to repay the mess you left me with. Enjoy the time you have. The papers'll be in the mail. Watch ye then, for ye know not when the Master of the House doth approach.
Everyone with half a lick of sense who truly knows me knows that not all of the Past was my fault. It's never all anyone's fault. No one is ever truly static. But as I once wrote of another sexual compulsive, those whose dreams are stomped in infancy will spend the rest of their lives throwing a boot party for others. ("Eva"Neometropolis#1)
"If you can't figure it out," Constant Reader #1 adds, "I have nothing further to say to you."
Brothers and sisters, they that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs on mine head. The only reason I haven't been able to heal any more than I have, more than the imagined prison that one or two closet readers of this blog think they keep me in... is because I can't ever truly repay my sins, not to my own satisfaction. I can't ever repay the parts I'm truly sorry for.
And those parts have nothing to do with Closet Reader #1, brothers and sisters. Not at all.
There is a child polymath out there, brothers and sisters, born of an angel and a demon (and I still couldn't tell you which was which.)I owe her my life, and I handed her straight to the boogeyman in the closet. And that's the one debt I can never, every repay no matter whose name is on the bill.
Brothers and sisters, what I left Lydia is the one sin against God and Goddess I've ever knowingly committed. I had no choice. That doesn't make it any easier to sleep past 8 AM, or lead a normal life. The only thing that ever started making me sick is that I saw it coming and I couldn't stop it. And I still wonder if I will ever be able to beg my daughter's forgiveness.
It's the parts I can't repay that would have killed me so fast... if I could ever let them.
No, every bill comes due, brothers and sisters, with a lovely Yiddish word I learned from the Grand Iconoclast, Harlan Ellison: Vigerish. Another Red Sea Pedestrian and damn good writer, Aaron Larkin (Bastard High Command) summed up the English translation of that word when he wrote,
"Revenge is a dish best left in the back of the fridge until it takes on a life of its own and jumps out at you."
So it is. Amen. I just needed to get that out. As another prophet, Bill Hicks, once told us, don't worry, there are dick jokes on the way...;)
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