Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Pierce looks Niko up and down. “No molesta?” He sounds disappointed.

“This widdle meat pie, him go wee wee wee all the way home.”

Pierce slumps and Doggerel drapes an arm partway around the massive demon’s shoulders. Doggerel’s arms are long but Pierce’s shoulders are much broader. “Not to worry, never fear. Us will leave this meat pie here. Let him go his meat pie way. We see him again someday.”

And paying Niko no more heed they walk away. Niko watches them go, unaware of his incredulous expression. He shakes his head and picks up his guitar case and continues on his dire way.

THE STATUE GARDEN now consists of lifesized sculptures of mounted generals and declaiming politicians, the kind of statues found in parks or civic centers the world over. Except here they are not lone monuments to fallen leaders but thousands on thousands of stone figures crowded on the plain like forgotten figures in some giant child’s toy army. A general of Pharaoh’s army clutches his staff of command and inspects troops only his stone eyes can see. A Grecian senator in draped double chiton clutches a scroll and raises a fist. A Civil War general on horseback stares out across the plain with gloved fist on West Point saber. An Arab chieftain looks up to Allah with upturned palms. Their alabaster ranks are all in different stages of erosion, some merely blemished as if suffering a century’s urban acid rain, others deeply corroded and runnelled. One statue of a furclad Hun on horseback is so dissolved his helmet is cleaved in two and his features smoothed to disturbing anonymity. His mount’s ears have worn away and one hoof eaten to the base. Many statues have toppled like defeated chessmen as their foundation dissolved by whatever slowly eats their quarried flesh.

Threading through them Niko catches a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of his eye. He turns to look but it is gone. Only the vast array of frozen figures. Niko continues on his ordained way, a strange pressure between his shoulderblades. He cannot shake the feeling the statues are watching him.

After navigating the marble orchard for an hour Niko realizes that the area is littered with motley pigeons. They peck the ground and scatter in waves at his approach. Though they are stupid useless birds he keeps an eye on them. On a sidewalk or in a park he would not give mere pigeons a second thought. Here where all is sinister and strange no thing is mere.

But the pigeons waddle aimlessly and peck at nothing and stare at nothing and ruffle their feathers at nothing and crap on statues— Niko stops.

A pigeon roosts atop the combat helmet of an American twostar general in field uniform holding stone binoculars in one hand near his leg, the other hand a fist. The pigeon shits on the general’s head.

Niko approaches the statue and the pigeon flaps threateningly, then flies.

The general’s face is worn and pitted. A deep gouge has eaten into the bridge of his nose as if someone gave up sawing it off. Below one marble eye a shallow runnel grooves the pitted cheek, steady track of geologic tears. The eyes are blind as a bust of Homer but Niko feels they see him nonetheless. Where the pigeon roosted a fresh white splash of pigeonshit bubbles and crackles as acidic excrement eats into living stone.

Niko reaches out toward the sculpted face and hears an unmistakable faint moan. He snatches back his hand. The fear that speeds his heart is quickly replaced by pity for the soul imprisoned in corroded stone before him. The man now monument to himself, frozen at the apex of his glory and feeling every atom of his slow decay.

Niko turns to gaze at acre after acre of corroded statues. One nearby pedestal supports nothing but a pair of sandaled feet, all else worn away by millennia of intermittent pigeonshit.

Niko hurries through their prolonged agony.

“EXCUSE ME, SIR? There has been some kind of mistake. I would like to see someone in charge.”

Niko has come to an astonishingly long line of the damned standing patiently in a roped off queue that twists and turns and doubles back like the worst imaginable wait for the most popular attraction at Disneyland. He’s a mile closer to the wall now and the numbers of the dead are growing. Demons with pitchforks—may as well call them that even if they are tridents—herd new batches of the sheeplike damned to the end of the line, which shuffles forward constantly but doesn’t quite keep pace with new arrivals at its everlengthening end. Throughout its snaking length are arguments, shoving matches, fights.

“Sir? Are you hearing me?” The voice is Slavic, faintly adenoidal. “I wish to see someone in authority.” Near the end of the line a tall thin sickly man with springy darkbrown hair and large intense brown eyes is waving his arms for a demon’s attention.

Which of course he gets. The demon closest to the clamoring man turns its twin heads away from the group it’s prodding and gives the man the once-over. ““A mistake?”” the demons ask. They look at each other. Its right hand passes the trident to the left hand and then thoughtfully scratches its left head’s left cheek. “What kind of mistake?” asks the right head, which Niko privately names Dexter.

“I am not supposed to be here.”

The damned around him laugh. There’s a polyglot murmur as others translate for the dead and then a second wave of laughter follows.

Sickly ignores them but he cannot hide the flush that darkens his pale face. Niko looks on wonderingly as the delicate man defiantly raises his chin.

“Hey hey,” says a swarthy little man with a thin moustache. “Issa fonny ting, Ima nah supposta be here too.”

Around him comes more laughter followed by a chorus of sis, ouis, das, hais, jas, and fuckin A’s.

“Okay look,” the left hand, Sinister, tells Sickly. “Did you wait in line for your ticket?”

“Of course.”

“Number called?” says Dexter.

“Naturally.”

“Naturally,” says Sinister. “Go to your designated line?”

“Yes.”

“Get your ticket stamped?”

“Yes.”

“Get a receipt?”

“At the next line they tell me go back to the previous line and get a receipt. Then in the next line I wait again for my receipt to be stamped.”

Sinister’s hand picks Dexter’s nose and then puts the jellied finger in Sinister’s wide mouth. “And of course,” says Dexter, “you took your stamped receipt to the Receipt Processing Window.”

“Yes, and there I exchange my stamped receipt for a Personal Information Form.”

“Excellent,” says Sinister.

“Then I stand in the Pencils line to get a pencil.”

“We’re just whizzing right along here, aren’t we,” says Dexter. His other half smirks. “I’m getting a nosebleed.”

Dexter ignores him. “So with your official number two pencil and your PIF in its handtruck you waited your turn in the Forms Completion Room.”

Sickly grows sheepish. “I am completing it before a space becomes available.”

Dexter scowls. “You filled out all seven thousand six hundred fiftysix pages of your Personal Information Form—”

“—staying within the margins—”

“—no erasures, emendations, errors of spelling punctuation or grammar—”

“—bubbles completely filled in, no streaks smudges stippling or stray marks?”

“Well, I would have completed the form but the pencil is breaking.”

“Ah,” from Dexter.

“His pencil broke.”

“It happens.”

“What can you do.”

“Nothing to do but wait in the Pencils line again.”

“Management really ought to get better pencils. If they don’t break they wear out.”

“Well I’m not going to be the one to suggest that Management change pencils.”