The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

Michael went his way, barking at slow-cruising taxis that refused to stop while John and I hustled and caught the last train out of the city. Our car was empty. A throng of night-shift workers pressed on at one lonely stop, seemed to take our measure and with exchanges of warning looks moved on to the next car. Same deal with the squad of off-duty Army grunts a few minutes later.

John and I didn’t say much. His face resembled forty miles of bad road, as a country philosopher might say; hair disheveled and matted, eyes bulbous and streaked red, nose a bloody carnation; the genteel professor’s bark stripped to reveal a carving: the primitive beast in the mouth of his cave. His puppets were in worse shape. Or puppet. He’d come from the Kremlin with Poe dangling from his fist, As You Know Bob conspicuously absent. Missing in action, as it were.

The train jarred as it traveled the rails, and my teeth clicked and the lights threatened to extinguish every few seconds, and Poe’s wooden body lay flopped negligently across the worn spot on John’s knee. The puppet’s head knocked rhythmically against the metal seat divider. Something in John’s demeanor made me loath to broach the subject, and thus I satisfied my deepening curiosity with those sidelong glances we men often shoot at daring cleavage or the dude standing at the next urinal, but it was Poe that attracted my attention. Poe’s visage had warped the way wood and plastic do when exposed to melting heat. One eye was lost in slag; the other had crept toward the hairline. No longer fashionably soulful, that eye—now an oblong black marble, or an overlarge pit of a rotten piece of fruit.

I recalled Mandibole’s loving and loveless description of bloody seeds and thought that yes, blood doth turn black. Poe’s eye was the seed of corruption coagulated in a membrane of evil. It wasn’t watching me, though my poor abused mind would’ve easily swallowed the premise like I’d swallowed so much scotch. Poe wasn’t watching anything; whatever energy might’ve been imprinted upon it from kindliness and love, was gone. My recognition that the little puppet had been perverted into a dead, alien husk, and that neither Clara’s doting joy nor John’s paternal benevolence had done f*ckall to prevent such an ominous transmogrification, caused my rebellious innards to gurgle and shift. I dared not dwell on As You Know Bob’s fate.

That steady tap-tappity-tapping of Poe’s skull against metal was too much in the end. I said, “Did you get his autograph?”

“L doesn’t sign autographs anymore.”

“Doesn’t speak, doesn’t sign books, what does he do?” I said, trying for a laugh, a smirk, anything remotely human, and while I waited a string of ghostly lights of an electrical substation floated past the window, trailing into oblivion.

John smiled, a wide, carnivorous yawn of jaws and teeth. “It was… good. He wants what’s best. What’s best. We’re coming out of the cave. Got to, can’t go on like this. Got to come out of the dark.”

In my years with John, drunk, sober, and realms between those antipodes, his tone was a new one, his slur a thing unfamiliar as something dredged onto the beach from the deep sea. Tonight had been a night of such unwelcome curiosities, and considering my circumstances, perhaps a punctuating spike in the bizarre was appropriate, my karma if karma existed, if the universe kept tabs in its own insensate fashion, mindless as gravity.

We disembarked at the final station and slouched past dim and silent kiosks through frosty glass doors into a gathering storm. John paused at a trash bin and whispered to Poe, then he sneered and dropped the puppet into the trash and walked on without a backward glance. I called out a feeble goodbye that John returned with a perfunctory wave, then he was in his car, its door thunking shut. I started my own rental and drove to the hotel near the Newburgh Airport where the night man had on a soccer game and was relaxing with a big stack of Jack Chick pamphlets. I bought a soda from the machine in the hall because my tongue was swollen and leathery.

Man, it was a real let down.

I peeled some bills off the dwindling roll and left them on the coffee table for the maid, hoping she’d get them after the cops and the medics were done. I sat on the edge of the unmussed bed in that sterile, neatas-a-pin, one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar-a-night hotel room. It began to snow and flakes piled against the window. The television was broadcasting nonsense; chains of American flags, sun and moon sliding atop one another to make black rings, my wife’s face in the faces of enemies and strangers, a Nazi aiming his rifle at another man’s back, tribal hunters racing across a moor, snarls done in red ocher, Sufis keening in a temple, my wife again and again, and Mandibole cutting through it all, speaking in tongues except for one clear strain in the cacophony: clear as a bell Michael intoning through the creature’s mouth that nothing was ever easy, not this easy, and that nothing was ever clean, this wouldn’t be clean, the Eternal Footman had the check ready, no shirking the bill, no escape. This couldn’t end like this because nothing ever really ended, matter simply deformed, that’s what the Purple People Eaters wanted to tell us, why they’d sent a representative across the spoiled Milky Way to spread the word.

The blonde laughed at me as her eyes slid around most frightfully and my wife’s head superimposed and shimmered there, rippling with static, frozen in time.

I picked up the gun and I thought about my dogs that she kept in the divorce, and I thought of her as she was when we met, when she told me that it was over, and that disembodied voice replayed in my ear, promising that it would never be over, and I wished I’d run after John, wished that I’d rescued Poe from the trashcan grave and maybe I should put the gun down and get into the car and go do just that, but in this universe I’d already squeezed the trigger.