Falling Idols Page 14

  “Oh, sure, the ripple patterns, why didn’t you just say so?” You’re really communicating now. “Look, I know that nice leather jacket you’re wearing must not’ve come cheap, but are you sure you can afford this dog?”

  You assure her you can, after Ragnarok what use will anyone have for money anyway, filthy lucre will be utterly without value. Flesh and blood will be the currency of the future, and tomorrow’s princes those who have shown an aptitude for dealing in them.

  For many years you’ve been hearing about senseless violence, commentators tossing the phrase around as though it were something they were proud of inventing and proud of scorning, above it all. They’re fools at best, at worst traitors to their species, ignorant of the natural order, they must think that deer run from wolves in a spirit of fun, that throats open and entrails spill from zippers, without a struggle. The culling of the weak can hardly be a senseless act, is labeled so only by a species that cherishes weakness, that nurtures it, that protects the weak from their natural fate. It demeans the whole system.

  “You’re not Italian, are you?” you ask.

  “No,” she says, she’s looking strangely at you. “Would it be a problem if I was, are you prejudiced?”

  “Just checking, just curious.” People all around, in windows and in cars, no one sees you or this underage whore, how blind do they have to become before they never leave home at all? “Columbus gets credit for discovering it over here even though Vikings came centuries earlier. They know better, so what’s Columbus Day still doing on the calendar? It just bugs me. Some smart Norwegian needs to restake the claim.”

  “There’s always tomorrow,” she says, then you’re looking at her back, she’s turned into an alley all but untouched by light, the bricks and wrought iron gleam with a wet nocturnal sheen.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shortcut, this way’s quicker than going all the way to the end of the block. Believe me, I live out here, I know.”

  So you follow, the alley slick beneath your boots. She takes your hand like a child afraid of the dark, you hope she doesn’t start up with the propositions again. Halfway along she pivots at the waist, scrawny torso spinning toward you when her fist slams into your stomach in that opening of your jacket, her fist and the small knife she’s holding. You grunt and she stabs you again, lets the blade pull itself out as you lurch back against moist bricks and slide down, her hands plunge into your pockets, deft and sure, they know what they want by touch alone and leave the rest.

  Before you can tell her what a mistake she’s making she’s running away with your old name and your money. You sit against the wall, you’re aware of breath and blood, aware of everything but time, you sit until something clicks inside you, it must be after midnight by now, it’s the second Thursday of the month, if only you can hold out a few hours longer.

  *

  It always comes back to roots for you, in roots lies purpose, without roots how can anyone know which direction to grow? Roots are the human pedigree, ergo one’s destiny, as surely as pedigrees match dogs to duty, canis familiaris, a single species but many breeds. Pedigrees point border collies toward herds of sheep, and bloodhounds toward scent trails, while behind them all are the wolves, the beautiful wolves, who lurk in the northern woodlands of deepest night and in the dim bestial memories of those who build walls to keep them out.

  Your fleshly grandparents were born in Norway but you’re an American, whatever that means, the answer might be found if you read enough bumper stickers but they don’t mean the same things on cars that are stolen or repossessed, and since you never know who’s driving, you’re better off trusting your roots. You have Vikings in the woodpile, plunder in your blood and Ragnarok in your future, as a heritage there’s a lot to live up to.

  They’ve given you courage, these Nordic church-burners across the ocean, obviously they knew more than you at first, being so much closer to the soil of your common roots. With Ragnarok on the way they’re making preparations, you wonder if they too heard the howl of Fenris on the second Thursday of each month, Fenris apparently too weak to claw through into this world.

  His howling is to be the beginning of the end, the old Norse legends agree that the trickster and fire demon Loki will slip his bonds, then he and his followers will meet the gods for the final battle and Fenris the mighty wolf born of the trickster Loki will unleash his howl of devastation to come and there’s Ragnarok for you. Of course everyone must die before the earth can regenerate into a new and better place, it’s a necessary sacrifice, but look at most of the people around today and sacrifice starts to seem perfectly reasonable.

  You remember hearing these old stories when you thought they were just that, just stories, tales your grandfather told to pass the winter afternoons after your parents no longer wanted you. He would take you for walks in the country, you were quite small at the time, you would help him take his dogs out to chase winter hares and laugh and kick at snow drifts and wander so deep into the forests that the day he fell over dead out there you knew you would never find your way back, late as it was, so you went to sleep instead.

  It woke you with its hot breath and rough tongue, you opened your eyes but couldn’t feel your feet, your grandfather lay where he fell although now his big belly was torn open and great steaming heaps of things lay in the snow. The yellow eyes looked upon you as if they knew you, knew everything you were and would be, you’d never seen an animal like this before, never so big nor so black, the dogs were nowhere to be found, and when it took your hand in its mouth you couldn’t feel that either. It tugged you to your grandfather, to the ragged edges of the steaming wound, where frozen hands and frozen feet might be warmed, how it knew such a trick you couldn’t understand. It had vanished before they found you, the two-leggeds, who didn’t believe you anyway. “Where are the tracks?” they asked, and with your drippy hands you pointed at the snow but they wouldn’t see, so you quit talking. They didn’t deserve it.

  You’ve always remembered the yellow eyes looking at you, how they recognized you even if you didn’t recognize yourself and even forgot yourself entirely until a month ago, the latest howl of Fenris brought it all back, you’ve known who you are ever since.

  You are Loki, you are the fire demon, you are the trickster and you’ve been playing tricks ever since, with ground glass and toxins and whatever else is handy. You’ve slipped your bonds as the legends always said you would, you wonder if anyone ever guessed that the bonds were forged not of metal but of a gray life of rent and repetition, and the gods damn them, they made you just one more link in the chain. No wonder escape took so long.

  But now you’re here, now you’re free, it’s finally the second Thursday of the month, the end of all that was never really you.

  *

  By dawn you made it to the building that you selected weeks ago for this morning and you’ve been here ever since.It’s tall, vacant too if you don’t count the vagrants below, they look asleep and in one sense they are. Two evenings ago you tricked them, you left warm deli sandwiches for them, cyanide has a very fulfilling effect, they want nothing from you now.

  The building might’ve been a hotel once, its brick shell and musty hallways feel as though they were built in an age of sunnier dispositions. You wonder what happened, if the hotel died first and took the surrounding area with it, or if it was the other way around, if the hotel choked on creeping blight. It does no good to lock the place, whoever tries, vagrants only chisel it open again.

  From a high window you view the streets below while awaiting Fenris, the insignificance of two-legged comings and goings is so much more apparent when watched from overhead, perspective is all. They’re marbles in a crate down there, they roll wherever they’re tilted, no pattern to it, and no purpose either. As a trickster you can appreciate the joke, but enough’s enough.

  You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You sit on the floor, back against the wall, whi
le you settle your stomach, settle your vision, your head feels hot this morning, never mind this chilly air. When you see him you shift as well as you can, it’s not easy with your crusted belly and thirty-two pounds of weight resting across your lap.

  For a moment he only stares, the room is atrocious, plaster crumbled everywhere and wallpaper hanging in tatters, same as the hallways, the whole place looks like a mummy.

  “I’d ask if you need help,” he says, “but I think I know how ridiculous that would sound.”

  Your soul. He’ll want your soul, it’s as good as predestined. Even from across the room you can tell what he is, he’s wearing a ministerial collar, not Catholic though, Presbyterian maybe. He’s carrying an armful of blankets, it’s what his kind does, they find the homeless in their homes and bring them blankets for the coming winter, blankets with salvation, thanks, much earlier inhabitants of the region were brought blankets too, blankets with smallpox.

  “I followed the blood upstairs. I don’t know what your story is … but son, I beg you to let me get you some help, I beg you not to do whatever it is you have on your mind.”

  “Today’s Thursday,” you tell him. “You know why it’s called that, don’t you?”

  No, no he doesn’t, you know it even before he opens his pale mouth to confirm it.

  “Thor’s Day,” you explain, slowly. “The day they dedicated to the thunder god. The one with the hammer. How can you be a holy man if you don’t even know what’s holy? You’re as bad as the rest of them down there. No, worse — at least they don’t pretend to know much of anything.”

  He’s asking if he can’t call for an ambulance, get you to the hospital, that’s a nasty-looking belly wound and maybe so but they take a long time to die from if you die at all, depends on how the rest of this morning goes.

  “That’s—” He’s shaking, now why would that be, it’s not that cold. “That’s about the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen.”

  He speaks the truth, across your lap rests a McMillan M-93 sniper rifle, each .50-caliber cartridge is nearly as long as your hand and each magazine holds twenty of them, it cost you every dollar you had in the bank and some you didn’t.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t even recognize me,” you say, then he tries to fool you, says sure, sure he does, the light was bad is all, but who’s he kidding, can’t trick the trickster. “That’s all right, nobody else does either. I’m used to it by now. Not that it matters today, right before.”

  “Before…?” he wants to know.

  “You really are in the dark, aren’t you? Doesn’t your god tell you anything?”

  It’s the wrong thing to say, all the lead-in he needs, next thing you know you’re getting a sermon, for God so loved the world, well he doesn’t actually say it but you know that’s what’s going through his head, there’s a remarkable consistency to the sheep of the lord, and if anything knows sheep it’s wolves.

  There’s a beauty in devastation that escapes the appreciation of most, they’re so attached to what has been they never think of what might be, never consider how a decomposing body can enrich a bed of roses, and that’s just the small picture. With the entire world become a graveyard there’s no telling what may grow in time, it’s the great potential that is Ragnarok, so rejoice you deaf, dumb, blind, and ravenous, a better world will sprout from your fat and clutching fingers.

  “All of them down there?” you say, with a nod at the window, the street. “As a holy man you must be very disappointed in them.”

  “No. Oh my, no.” The Presbyterian shakes his head, he’s even smiling a little. “They’ve given me good reason plenty of times. But then they turn around and delight me. And in between, there’s forgiveness to fall back on. I promise you, they will delight you too … if you’ll wait a little longer.”

  You snort at his desperate naivety. “If they only had longer teeth, they’d eat each other alive and sleep the rest of the time, they just don’t admit it. I’ve watched it for thousands of years and it never changes.”

  For a moment he looks puzzled, still holding the blankets in his arms, he’s a befuddled emissary, and then you hear it, Fenris at last, the mighty howl whose pattern you figured out is trying again and this time you’re ready, it permeates the sky, it rolls through the streets.

  “Hear that?” you ask. “I’ve waited for this forever.”

  “It’s just the disaster siren, for heavy storms and such,” he says, he still looks befuddled and why not, he’s so desperate now he’ll say anything. “They’re all over town.”

  You’ve never heard such nonsense in your life, you may be a trickster but that’s no reason for him to take you for a fool. Today isn’t the first day you’ve heard it, after all, sometimes you’d be off work and Fenris would howl, the sound seeming to come from everywhere and every dog in your neighborhood would join in because they all remembered, their instincts hadn’t dulled, their ancestral roots still ran true.

  “It’s nothing to be afraid of,” the Presbyterian says, “the city tests it once a month or so—”

  Fenris hangs at the peak of his first howl, he’s waiting for you, Loki unchained, the father of the wolf. You tilt the rifle up from your lap, you squeeze the trigger without aiming and it makes such thunder. One second the Presbyterian has two good arms and the next has only one, the other’s no longer there, you think it might’ve flown back out the doorway and into the hall. He sits down among the scattered blankets as though he’s been hit with a hammer and stares at his shoulder and empty space, it’s a good thing he had blankets since there’s blood enough for them all.

  Fenris lets his voice fall, then it crests again, when you swing the rifle around to the window your stomach rips with pain and starts to bleed again. You rest the massive barrel across the windowsill, no trained sniper would ever reveal himself this way but at thirty-two pounds the rifle needs support and you have no need of escape anyway, the world will fall around you now.

  You bolt a new cartridge into the chamber and peer through the scope, everything and everyone in your face again, they swarm like maggots on a corpse and are equally soft and hungry. You settle on the first, and five pounds of trigger pull later you’ve made thunder again, the recoil pushes back a couple of inches into your shoulder and you’ve taken the guts out of sacrifice one. The second loses her heart and lungs, now you’ve got the hang of it, you’ve got the rhythm and the roll, no different than practicing on milk jugs, and it’s time to get tricky, time to start taking heads.

  Twenty shots go by fast, Fenris seems to think so, he’s still with you as you snap on twenty more and bolt the next into the chamber, you bring the street up close again and they’re all in your lens now, some of them still standing there covered in bits and pieces and splashes of the fallen and they haven’t noticed a thing, for them not one thing has changed, sometimes you feel as though you’re the only one alive and you wonder what does it take, what does it take just to get their attention? Some guy down there is still reading a newspaper, you punch the next bullet through the headline, black and white and red all over.

  All in all, they’ve at least made your job easier.

  You’ll remember to thank them later, in that better world to come.

  Cenotaph

  After more than half a year since their debut tumble into bed, this was their first genuine trip together. But a whole month across an ocean was overdoing it. A month either cemented the bond or drove the wedge, and barely a week after debarking at Heathrow, Kate found herself warming to the idea of scrapping their return tickets in lieu of seats on the Concorde. Financial cretinism, but it would halve the hours next to Alain and his perfect face.

  A few days in London, then southwest, until they’d nearly run out of England altogether in rocky, windswept Cornwall: “My gran came from here,” Kate had told him. “Left when she was a girl, but the place never left her.”

  “Yeah?” Alain had said. “I guess everybody’s from somewhere, aren’t they?�
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  He’d not even meant it as a slight. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that he should be interested, even if it did mean a bit of diplomatic faking.

  When feeling lazy or scapegoatish she was tempted to blame the bad days on the gap between their ages, her eight-year jump. Sometimes a crack, sometimes a chasm. Look at them thirteen years ago, where they’d been in the world. She’d awakened one morning after sleeping in her car, and shot the photo that won her a Pulitzer. Twenty-three years old at the time. Alain, on the other hand, would’ve been flunking driver’s ed and drowning in hormones.

  Thirteen years later Alain Carreras still exuded the petulant charm of a scruffy teenager. This, she decided, was the problem: It was more appealing on paper. At least there you could furnish your own depth. Alain walked through real life as though having stepped fresh from one of his Gap ads, longish hair mussed so artfully it must’ve taken hours, and really didn’t have anything else going on beneath the surface. In some people — rarer than you might think — surface went all the way through.

  Cornwall was the better part of a day behind them, the county of Shropshire ahead on the A49, when he could no longer take the weather.

  “And they call this a climate? I thought climates changed.” Too bored by it to sound good and annoyed. “How long does monsoon season last in England, anyway?”

  Mist. It was a heavy mist. Barely needed the wipers.

  “Look on the bright side,” Kate told him. “It does wonders for your complexion. No sun? Might as well not even have packed your moisturizers. You’ll go home looking like a milkmaid.”

  There. That made him happy. She was looking pretty peaches and cream herself, while the damp had fluffed her hair, not quite shoulder length, just enough to make her want to grow it again, renew the wild black mass it used to be before she got practical.

  But shoot Alain in the same frame as some of the millennium-old carvings strewn about the region, and the contrasts between skin and stone would never be any more pronounced. Along with the other big difference: Some of those graven faces actually smiled, without fear of giving themselves wrinkles.