Most recently, right before waking up,
I was in the house of one of the guys who did The Usual Suspects.
He’s a big hockey fan, and in fact, I’m in his bedroom watching him lace
up his skates.
“Yeah, I love this weather,” he says. “Here, rub my arms.”
I rub his bare forearms. “I don’t feel anything,” I tell him.
“Give it a few minutes. I can actually get ice growing on my arm hairs and I don’t even notice. My forearms have no feeling at all, anymore.”
“Oh, uh, great.”
“Yeah, anyway, we’ll just go out for a bit and then hit the outdoor sauna. You’ll like that.”
I look out his bedroom window. There is snow everywhere. He has a small backyard abutting a forest and a mountain peak in the background. I see the sauna in the corner, but it is not steaming. The water looks almost iced over. As I stare at it, a polar bear actually comes out of the water and then runs across the backyard.
“Uh, it looks pretty cold.”
“Yeah,” the guy says, “it’ll be great.” He walks up to the window next to me. “Then I figure we’ll climb that peak right before lunch.”
I look at the slender iced-over mountain in front of us. “That?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “We climb it all the time.” In fact as he says this, I see two guys walk along one of its tips, casually stepping from one icy node of a foothold to another.
“Hey, Cliff,” the guy says to one of his
friends in a casual voice. His friend not only hears him but turns and
gives a casual wave. “You coming
up?” Apparently, the cold helps the
air conduct sound so well, they can talk across great distances without
raising their voices.
*****
I’m in a prison, trying to get information
that will help catch a murderer;
somewhere the murder weapon has been hidden.
The prison seems more like a cross between an airport and a hospital; lots
of people milling about in white gowns. I walk around, asking a few
questions but nobody wants to deal with me. I don’t get the idea
that anyone’s suspicious of me, but nobody seems to feel like talking.
Just as I’m about to give up, a female orderly walks up to me.
“Meet me outside the main wing, by the photo shop.”
Cut to inside a rather roomy photobooth. My partner and I are interviewing this woman. “So are you sure?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she says, nervously tugging on her short hair. “I know everything.”
Just then a voice yells outside the photo booth. “Hey, Jessica! You said you wanted the gun that killed Lisa!” And three shots cut through the photo booth curtain, killing the orderly.
My partner and I run out of the booth, out
of the building. We’re on a large campus. I start running one
direction, he runs the other. There’s a lot of different paths to
take; I think I see someone running so I cut down one path, then around
a noisy public pool. There’s lots of police around looking, but they
haven’t seen anything, I’m telling one of them to keep
looking when I see, off in the distance,
a young man with a backpack running off. I run after him.
No matter how quickly I run, he stays an
even distance away. He’s far off in the distance and if he would
cut around some corners I would probably lose him. But fortunately,
he runs in a straight line and I follow. Neither of seems to tire
as he makes his way past the campus buildings, the dorms, and out through
the parking lot. Sometimes I start to catch up, and then sometimes
I start to fall ahead. I’m very aware of how I’m running, and that
if I can just keep running at full speed, I can catch him if he doesn’t
make the most out of every stride. As I realize this, I run past
the speed bumps of the parking lot and my left leg hitches a little.
It
throws off my stride just a bit but it
allows him to pull away and disappear.
Then I’m in headquarters by the vending
machines, and my friend Keaka (who
may have been my partner earlier) tells
me that he’s got a good tip. The direction that I chased the guy
off to leads to the nearly deserted part of the city, a bunch of suburban
developments by the freeway that were never finished because the developers
went to jail. Nobody bought into
the developments because it was ugly and
unfinished, so the prices dropped until it became the haven for white trash,
drug runners and members of bike gangs who could afford cheap housing with
settlements from their various motorcycle accidents. “They
call it Shittytown,” Keaka tells me, “and there’s a student who lives out
there who not only works at the prison, but has been picked up three times
but never charged for drug handling raps.”
“That could be our guy,” I say. “Let’s roll.”
Next thing I know, Kay and I are pushing a mine car along old tracks through the woods. “They’ll never know we’re coming this way,” He says, and I grunt. We continue pushing the mine car up hill and Kay tells me about how happy he’s going to be to get his hands on the scum who killed Jessica.
We crest the hill and are looking forward to being able to just ride the mine car down when suddenly we come to a drawbridge. A bunch of kids in an elaborate redwood treehouse are blocking our way.
“Who the hell are you?” One of the kids ask, while dangling from a rope.
“We need to get through,” I say, “is it possible to lower that drawbridge." The oldest of the kids steps forward. “It should be, but it’d better if you just went through our parents’ house. You can use their mine car.”
“That’s very gracious of you,” I say, stepping off the mine car. “This is a great fort.”
“Thanks,” the kid says.
“Whoa,” Keaka says, “there’s pictures here of the Housemartins.” I turn and look at a picture of a hockey team tacked to one of the trees.
“Yeah,” says one of the kids, “they’re visiting us right now because we won a contest our cereal was having.”
“No way!” Keaka says. At this moment, three atheletes in hockey jerseys come out of the woods, being led by another kid.
“This sure is a great place,” one of the Housemartins says.
Keaka goes over to greet the Housemartins and I climb down the side of the fort and enter the living room of a house. I open a door and see a room filled with bunk beds, I close it and walk through the other door.
It must be the parents’ master bedroom. There’s a fireplace in the corner with a fire gently popping, there’s a big bed and a several recliner chairs. Over all of it is a huge burgundy tapestry, pulled taut and holding up dozens and dozens of books. I stare at the books; several binders of Dungeons and Dragons manuals, old editions of the Hobbit, leatherbound folkstories and collections of fairytales. ‘Those kids must have the biggest hippies for parents,’ I think, and pull a loose paperback off the top of the canopy. The cover is heavy, wavy cardstock, the sort that self-publishers use, and the cover reads: China’s Golden Pulps: Pulp Magazines in the Orient, 1930's.
“I’ve always wanted a book like this,” I think, and start to flip through it. I think it will be an overview of the books, but in fact it appears to be reprints of the pulp stories in Chinese with the original gorgeous chiaroscuro illustrations. I flip the pages and see the Shadow firing a gun, some hero driving a car, Doc Savage wrestling a shark. “Now have I read this story?” I think. “What would be the chances?”
*****
I am sort of malevolent force, posing as
a charismatic priest. I have a classroom full of devout followers,
of whom I intend to do great harm. I walk around sermonizing to them
in the perfect revival camp tones of a showman.
“I need you all to pray!” I yell at them, and they all drop dutifully to their knees. “I need you to help me tell Jesus that we need his help!”
I walk over to an old woman who is sitting in her desk with her hands up. “Let’s get you down on your knees here, revered sister,” and I pull from underneath her desk a small green cushion. “You want this to help you?” She nods and I put it underneath her knees as she gets on the ground.
“There is a proper position to pray,” I
say to everyone. “There is a proper
position you have to be in to transmit
your thoughts to Jesus! I used to be like a lot of other people,
very lazy, and I used to think, ‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter what position
you’re in, as long as you’re praying.’ Brothers and sisters, this
is not the truth. This is the voice of sloth
causing you to sin. I learned this
on the bus. I was coming back on a crowded bus with a bagful of groceries
and suddenly I realized I couldn’t remember if I bought the chocolate pudding
or not! And it would’ve been at the bottom of the bag so I couldn’t
look. Now, I don’t know how your missus is when you forget the chocolate
pudding__” Laughs from the crowd here– “But I know how my missus is, and
I started to pray!” The man in the back row is nodding and laughing.
“I started to pray to Jesus right on the bus. ‘Please, dear Jesus, I pray
that I remembered to get the chocolate pudding because if not, I’m going
to have to go out in this heat again and get on a crowded bus again and
get chocolate pudding for my beloved.”
Laughter from the classroom.
“And I prayed as hard as I could, with one hand on that little bar you got to hold if you don’t want to fall over when the bus stops at every stop, and with my other hand, I held my bag of groceries, and I prayed to the Lord and to our sweet Jesus just as hard as I could.”
I paused and smiled at them, feeling the malevolence inside me shifting.
“The Lord did not answer that prayer.” Laughter from the classroom. “I spent another two and a half hours out in that wretched heat getting chocolate pudding for my beloved. And all because I wasn’t in the proper position to pray!”
“You have to have your knees on the ground!” I continued. “You have to be of the earth! And your back has to be straight” I straightened up one of the people’s backs at this point, “your back has to be straight to help you transmit your thoughts to God. Your body is a transmitter, a holy transmitter, and it allows you to broadcast your thoughts to God. You don’t want God to have to work at hearing you, do you? You want to broadcast your hopes and prayers to him as strongly as you can!”
Then it’s later, and most of the people
are dead. The few that remain, I am terrorizing by cutting myself
with a straight razor. There’s part of me that doesn’t want to do
this, but I feel as if I’m following a script, acting out a part in a movie.
It has to be done, because this is the way it was done. I slash the
straight razor deep into my chest. It doesn’t hurt
but it’s very uncomfortable. I slash
both cheeks and then my wrists. People are screaming....
Later, I have been caught and tied to a chair. Several of the people are leaving to get help and leaving a woman behind to watch me. The back of the razor is stuck through my right hand and hurting me, but I can use it to cut myself free if I distract her. The schoolroom is dark.
I start telling her that there is someone in the room with us and that she should free me. I tell her that it’s him, and he has an axe or a lead pipe and that he will kill us both.
She makes no move to let me go. I tell her again to let me go. I can’t tell if I’m just psyching myself out, but I swear I can see his dark silhouette in the blackness. He is raising the axe to kill us both and I am yelling at her to let me go, but she isn’t listening. The razor is cutting at the ropes but also into my hand and it seems as if it’s too late...