Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  It is not certain that the Gatekeeper will allow me near my shadow, even as he has promised to let us meet once the days are shorter and my shadow is weaker. Now that winter is near, these conditions would seem surely to be fulfilled.

  My eyes still closed, I think about the Librarian. I am filled with sadness, although I cannot locate the source of these feelings.

  I have been seeing the Librarian daily, but the void in me remains. I have read the old dreams in the Library. She has sat beside me. We have supped together. I have walked her home. We have talked of many things. Unreasonably, my sorrow only seems to grow, to deepen. Whatever is the loss becomes greater each time we meet. It is a well that will never be filled. It is dark, unbearably so.

  I suppose these feelings are linked to forgotten memories. I have sought for some connection in her. I learn nothing in myself. The mystery does not yield. My own existence seems weak, uncertain.

  I shake these convoluted thoughts from my head and seek out sleep.

  I awake to find that the day is nearly over, that the temperature has dropped sharply. I am shivering. I pull my coat tight around me. As I stand and brush off the grass, flakes of snow touch my cheek. I look up. The clouds are low, a forbidding gloom builds. There is a flurry of large snowflakes drifting gently down. Winter is come.

  Before I begin my way back, I steal one more glance at the Wall. Beneath the snow-swept heavens, it rears up more stately, more perfect than ever. As I gaze up at it, I feel them peering at me. What are you doing here? they seem to say. What are you looking for?

  Questions I cannot answer. The short sleep in the cold has consumed all warmth in me, leaving my head swimming with abstract shapes. Do I occupy the body of another? Everything is so ponderously heavy, so vague.

  I race through the Woods, toward the East Gate, determined now not to look at the Wall. It is a long distance I must travel. The darkness gathers moment by moment. My balance degenerates. I stop again and again to stir up the strength to persevere, to press the numbness from my nerves. I feel the visit of night. I may hear the sounding of the horn in the Woods. It passes through my awareness without trace.

  At last I emerge from the Woods onto the bank of the River. The ground is clothed in blankness. No moon, no stars, all has been subdued by the flurries of snow. I hear the chill sound of the water, the wind taunting through the trees behind me. How much further to the Library? I cannot remember. All I recall is a road along the River, leading on and on. The willows sway in the shadows, the wind whips overhead. I walk and walk, but there is no end in sight.

  She sits me in front of the stove and places her hand on my forehead. Her hand is as ice. My reflex is to push it away, but I cannot raise my hand. For when I do, I feel a sudden nausea.

  “You are fevered,” she says. “Where on the earth have you gone?”

  I find it impossible to answer. I am without words. I cannot even comprehend what it is she asks.

  She brings several blankets and wraps me in them. I lie by the stove. Her hair touches my cheek. I do not want her to go away. I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?

  She holds my hand.

  “Sleep well,” I hear her say, from beyond a dark distance.

  15

  Whiskey, Torture, Turgenev

  BIG BOY didn’t leave one bottle unbroken. Not one lousy bottle of my collection of whiskeys. I had a standing relationship with the neighborhood liquor dealer who would bring over any bargains in imported whiskey, so it had gotten to be quite a respectable stash. Not anymore.

  The hulk started with two bottles of Wild Turkey, moving next to one Cutty Sark and three I. W. Harpers, then demolished two Jack Daniel’s, the Four Roses, the Haig, saving the half dozen bottles of Chivas Regal for last. The racket was intense, but the smell was worse.

  “I’m getting drunk just sitting here,” Junior said with admiration.

  There wasn’t much for me to do but plant my elbows on the table and watch the mound of broken glass pile up in the sink. Big Boy whistled through it all. I couldn’t recognize the tune, supposing there was one. First high and shrill, then low and harsh, it sounded more like a scraping violin bow. The screech of it was insanity itself.

  Big Boy was methodical with the meaningless destruction. Maybe it made sense to them, not to me. He overturned the bed, slit the mattress, rifled through my wardrobe, dumped my desk drawers onto the floor, ripped the air-conditioner panel off the wall. He knocked over the trash, then plowed through the bedding closet, breaking whatever happened to be in the way. Swift and efficient.

  Then it was on to the kitchen: dishes, glasses, coffeepot, the works.

  Junior and I moved our seats to the living room. We righted the toppled sofa, which by a freak stroke of fortune was otherwise unscathed, and sat on opposite armrests. Now this was a truly comfortable sofa, a top-of-the-line model I’d bought cheap off a cameraman friend who’d blown his fuse in the middle of a thriving commercial career and split for the back country of Nagano. Too bad about the fuse, not so bad about the sofa I’d acquired as a result. And there was a chance that the sofa would be salvageable still.

  For all the noise that Big Boy was making, not one other resident of the apartment building came to investigate. True, almost everyone on my floor was single and at work during the day—a fact apparently not lost upon my visitors. These guys were thugs, but they weren’t dumb.

  The little man eyed his Rolex from time to time as if to check the progress of the operation, while Big Boy continued his tour of destructive duty with never a wasted motion. He was so thorough,. I couldn’t have hidden away a pencil if I had wanted to. Yet, like Junior had announced at the beginning, they weren’t really looking for anything. They were simply making a point.

  For what?

  To convince a third party of their attention to detail?

  And who might that third party be?

  I drank the rest of my beer and set the empty can on the coffee table. Big Boy had gotten to the food: salt, flour, and rice went flying everywhere; a dozen frozen shrimp, a beef filet, natural ice cream, premium butter, a thirty-centimeter length of salmon roe, my homemade tomato sauce on the linoleum floor like meteorites nosediving into asphalt.

  Next, Big Boy picked up the refrigerator and flipped it door-side down to the floor. The wiring shorted and let loose with a shower of sparks. What electrician was going to believe this? My head hurt.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the destruction stopped. No ifs, ands, or buts—the demolition came to an instant halt, Big Boy standing in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, very nonchalant.

  How long had it taken him to total my apartment so exquisitely? Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes? Something like that. Too long for fifteen, too short for thirty. But however long it took, the way that Junior was proudly eyeing his Rolex suggested that Big Boy had made good time. As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

  “Seems like you’re gonna be busy cleaning up,” Junior said to me.

  “And paying for it too,” I added.

  “Money’s no object here. This is war. Nobody would win a war if they stopped to calculate the cost.”

  “It’s not my war.”

  “Whose war don’t matter. Whose money don’t matter either. That’s what war is.”

  Junior coughed into a white handkerchief, inspecting it before putting it back into his pocket. Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

  “Now listen,” Junior got serious, “not too long after we leave, the boys from the System will be stopping by to pay their respects. You go ahead and tell them about us. Say we broke in and busted up the place hunting for something.
Tell them we asked you where the skull was, but you didn’t know nothing about no skull. Got it? You can’t squeal about something you don’t know and you can’t fork over something you don’t have. Even under torture. That’s why we’re gonna leave empty-handed as when we came.”

  “Torture?” I choked.

  “Nobody’s gonna doubt you. They don’t even know you paid a visit to the Professor. For the time being, we’re the only ones who know that. So no harm’s gonna come to you. A Calcutec like yourself with a Record of Excellence? Hell, they got no choice but to trust you. They’re gonna think we’re Factory. And they’re gonna wanna do something about it. We got it all worked out.”

  “Torture?” I choked again. “What do you mean, torture?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said the little man.

  “What if I spilled the whole works to the folks at Headquarters?” Just thought I’d ask.

  “Don’t be dumb. You’d get rubbed out by your own fellas. That’s not an exaggeration. Think about it. You went to the Professor’s place on a job, you didn’t tell the System. You broke the freeze on shuffling. And worse, you let the Professor use you in his experiments. They gonna like that? You’re doing a very dangerous balancing act, pal.”

  Our faces met from either end of the sofa.

  “I have a question,” I said. “How do I stand to benefit from cooperating with you and lying to the System? I know zero about you guys. What’s in it for me?”

  “That’s easy,” Junior chirped. “We got the lowdown on what’s in store for you, but we’re letting you live. Your organization doesn’t know nothing about the situation you’re in. But if they did, they might decide to eliminate you. I figure your odds are way better with us.”

  “Sooner or later, the System is going to find out about this situation, as you call it. I don’t know what this situation is, but the System’s not so stupid.”

  “Maybe so,” said Junior. “But that’s later. This is now. all goes according to schedule, you and us, we’re gonna have our problems solved in the meantime. That’s your choice, if you’re looking for one. Let me put it another way: it’s like chess. You get checked, you beat a retreat. And while you’re scrambling around, maybe your opponent will screw up. Everybody screws up, even the smartest players.”

  Junior checked his watch again, then turned to Big Boy and snapped his fingers. Whereupon the hulk blinked to life, a robot with the juice switched on. He lifted his jaw and hunkered over to the sofa, positioning himself like a room divider. No, not a room divider, more like a drive-in movie screen. His body blocked the ceiling light, throwing me into a pale shadow, like when I was in elementary school and all the kids held up a pane of glass smoked with candle soot to view a solar eclipse. A quarter of a century ago that was. Look where that quarter of a century had gotten me.

  “And now,” he resumed, “I’m afraid we’re gonna have to make things a little unpleasant. Well, maybe you’re gonna think it’s more than a little unpleasant. But just remember, we’re doing it for you. It’s not like we wanna do it. We’re doing it because we got no choice. Take off your pants.”

  I did as I was told. As if I had any choice.

  “Kneel down.”

  I kneeled down. I felt funny doing it in my sweatshirt and jockey shorts, but there wasn’t much time for meditation as Big Boy swooped in behind me and pinned my wrists to the small of my back. Then he locked my ankles firmly between his legs. His movements were very fluid. I didn’t particularly feel tied down, but when I tried to budge, a sharp pain shot through me. I was immobilized, like a duck sitting in a shooting gallery.

  Meanwhile, Junior found Big Boy’s knife. He flicked the seven-centimeter blade open, then ran the blade through the flame of his lighter. This compact knife didn’t look like a lethal weapon, but it was obviously no dime-store toy. It was sharp enough to slice a person to pieces. The human fruit is always ripe for peeling.

  After sterilizing the blade, Junior let it cool slightly. Then he yanked down the waistband of my jockey shorts and exposed my penis.

  “Now this is going to hurt a little,” he said.

  A tennis-ball-sized lump of air bounced up from my stomach and lodged in my throat. Sweat beaded up on my nose. I was shaking. At this rate, I’d never be able to get an erection.

  But no, the guy didn’t do anything to my cock. He simply gripped it to death, while he took the still-warm blade and glided it across my stomach. Straight as a ruler, a six-centimeter horizontal gash, two centimeters below my navel.

  I tried to suck in my gut, but between Big Boy’s clamp on my back and Junior’s grip on my cock, I couldn’t move a hair. Cold sweat gushed from every pore of my body. Then, a moment after the surgery was over, I was wracked with searing pain.

  Junior wiped the blood off the knife with a kleenex and folded the blade away. Big Boy let me drop. My white jockey shorts were turning red. Big Boy fetched a towel from the bathroom, and I pressed it to the wound.

  “Seven stitches and you’ll be like new,” Junior diagnosed. “It’ll leave a scar, but nobody’s gonna see it. Sorry we had to do it, but you’ll live.”

  I pulled back the towel and looked at the wound. The cut wasn’t very deep, but deep enough to see pink.

  “We’re gonna go now. When your System boys show up, let ’em see this little example of wanton violence. Tell ’em when you wouldn’t tell us where the skull was, we went nuts. But next time, our aims won’t be so high, and we might have to go for your nuts, heh heh. You can tell ’em we said that. Anyway, you didn’t know nothing, so you didn’t tell us nothing. That’s why we decided to take a rain check. Got it? We can do a real nice job if we want to. Maybe one day soon, if we have the time, we’ll give you another demonstration.”

  I crouched there with the towel pressed against my gut. Don’t ask me why, but I got the feeling I’d be better off playing their game.

  “So you did set up that poor gas inspector,” I sputtered. “You had him blow the act on purpose so I would go hide the stuff.”

  “Clever, clever,” said the little man. “Keep that head of yours working and maybe you’ll survive.”

  On that note, my two visitors left. There was no need to see them out. The mangled frame of my steel door was now open for all the world.

  I stripped off my bloodstained underwear and threw it in the trash, then I moistened some gauze and wiped the blood from the wound. The gash throbbed pain with every move. The sleeves of my sweatshirt were also bloody, so I tossed it too. Then from the clothes scattered on the floor, I found a dark T-shirt which wouldn’t show the blood too much, a pair of jockeys, and some loose trousers.

  Thirty minutes later, right on schedule, three men from Headquarters arrived. One of whom was the smart-ass young liaison who always came around to pick up data, outfitted in the usual business suit, white shirt, and bank clerk’s tie. The other two were dressed like movers. Even so, they didn’t look a thing like a bank clerk and movers; they looked like they were trying to look like a bank clerk and movers. Their eyes shifted all over the place; every motion was tense.

  They didn’t knock before walking into the apartment, shoes and all, either. The two movers began immediately to check the apartment while the bank clerk proceeded to debrief me. He scribbled the facts down with a mechanical pencil in a black notebook. As I explained to him, a two-man unit had broken in, wanting a skull. I didn’t know anything about a skull; they got violent and slashed my stomach. I pulled my briefs down. The clerk examined the wound momentarily, but made no comment about it.

  “Skull? What the hell were they talking about?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’d like to know myself.”

  “You really don’t know?” the bank clerk probed further, his voice uninflected. “This is critical, so think carefully. You won’t be able to alter your statement later. Semiotecs don’t make a move if they have nothing to go on. If they came to your apartment looking for a skull, they must have had a reason
for thinking you had a skull in your apartment. They don’t dream things up. Furthermore, that skull must have been valuable enough to come looking for. Given these obvious facts, it’s hard to believe you don’t know anything about it.”

  “If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what this skull business is supposed to be about,” I said.

  “There will be an investigation,” the bank clerk said, tapping his mechanical pencil on his notebook. “A thorough investigation, and you know how thorough the System can be. If you’re discovered to be hiding something, you will be dealt with commensurately. You are aware of this?”

  I was aware of this, I told him. I didn’t know how this was going to turn out, but neither did they. Nobody can outguess the future.

  “We had a hunch the Semiotecs were up to something. They’re mobilizing. But we don’t know what they’re after, and we don’t know how you fit into it. We don’t know what to make of this skull either. But as more clues come in, you can be sure we’ll get to the heart of the matter. We always do.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Be very careful. Cancel any jobs you have. Pay attention to anything unusual. If anything comes up, contact me immediately. Is the telephone still in service?”

  I lifted the receiver and got a dial tone. Obviously, the two thugs had chosen to leave the telephone alone.

  “The line’s okay.”

  “Good,” he said. “Remember, if anything happens, no matter how trivial, get in touch with me right away. Don’t even think about trying to solve things yourself. Don’t think about hiding anything. Those guys aren’t playing softball. Next time you won’t get off with a scratch.”

  “Scratch? You call that a scratch?”

  The movers reported back after completing their survey of the premises.

  “We’ve conducted a full search,” said the older mover. “They didn’t overlook a thing, went about it very smoothly. Professional job. Semiotecs.”