Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

The Checker Cab veers off the tracks too soon. Niko slams against the restraint as the car bounces over crossties. He tucks the jar against his stomach and hears the cabbie yelling and Nikodemus yelling and ricocheting all over the back of the cab and the trainhorn’s liquefying his brains and he can feel the awful closing pressure of the Black Taxi practically being pushed into them by the speeding Blue Line train and the tunnel switchoff gapes before them now too late to turn into it but the cabbie yanks the wheel regardless and Niko’s thrown against her and Nikodemus is hurled against the side as the Checker Cab bounces off the crossties and rumbles onto the adjoining track and as it leaves the first track bygod something smacks the rear bumper and the back end slides and the left rear scrapes yellow paint onto the tunnel wall and then they’re jouncing along the crossties of the adjoining track and the cabbie jerks the wheel right-left and the cab leaps onto the new set of rails.

The bumping stops. The vibration stops. The worldfilling apocalypse of trainhorn diminishes down the tunnel they have left behind.

And the Black Taxi?

Once again the cabbie checks the rearview. This time she grins. “Nothin to it,” she says. Already fishing the cigarillo pack from her shirt pocket.

Niko doesn’t realize he’s pulled something in his back until the muscles unclench painfully and all at once. The relief throughout the cab is palpable.

Niko quickly checks the mason jar. The same, the same. The glow barely perceptible, the perfume a faint memory on a garment.

The cabbie taps his leg and points and Niko squints into the wind against his face. Length of tunnel stretching out ahead of them and now a bright amber light set in its middle. Jesus christ another train. There’s nowhere to go this time. No convenient switchoff or nick-of-time escape hatch. They’re about to meet their fate headon without a prayer.

But the cabbie seems amused and waves her cigarillo at the hovering amber light. “It’s okay. It’s a streetlight.”

Niko gapes while she slouches on the bench seat and loosens her thin tie another inch and drives on the rails with one-handed confidence.

Nikodemus pokes his huge and one-eyed head between them to stare with eager trepidation through the open windshield.

The cabbie grins. “Sometimes,” she says, “the light at the end of the tunnel really isn’t an oncoming train.”

AT 8:23 P.M. on no special Friday night in late summer a battered Checker Cab ferrying its battleweary passengers emerged into the open air and crowded light of the Blue Line platform at Flower and Seventh Streets beside the purple lighted Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, home to ten million working sweating fucking eating driving laughing sleeping struggling human beings in homes slapped onto hillsides or gridded into the Valley or cobbled together from duct taped cardboard boxes, and not a soul among them saw the tired yellow metal creature lumber from its subterranean lair, saw it swerve and bump off rails and onto smooth paved road, watched it glide to a stop, observed the brakelights flash, heard the gargle of its idle as the passenger door opened, witnessed the terribly thin man sore abused and homeless looking in his filthy ragged clothes who cautiously backed out of the phlegmatic beast like some old arthritic. Watched him straighten slowly, one hand going to his back as if it pained him while the other held some kind of moonshine jar that could hardly be seen to be glowing in the everpresent city light.

No one to see him stand there facing westward for a while. Toward the land’s end and the everdrowning sun beyond. No one apart from those who traveled with him saw him draw a ragged breath and clench his fists and nod and slowly turn

turn and look back

look back at the way he came

and saw him break the cycle of tyrannic myth.

Whatever else might happen Niko had escaped the bonds of his conscripted fate. The future that befell him was to be his own.

On that unusually deserted street he stood a moment as if something belonging to him had fallen out the window of the cab and he was trying to remember what it was, let alone glimpse it back there on the road. No beggar, no broker, no hardhanded worker saw him raise the fractured jar, for all the world a pauper king proposing a toast, or saw his free hand rise above it with one long middle finger pointing toward the bottomlit and heavy sky.

THE UNIVERSE ACKNOWLEDGES neither gesture and after a moment Niko lowers the jar and turns back to the chugging cab. “Thanks for stopping. I guess—”

In the back seat Nikodemus’ mouth is open and his one good eye stares fixedly beyond the metal roof, beyond the roofless night.

The cabbie sees this and hurries from the cab and opens the back door to lean over Nikodemus. She pries open a dark leather lid to check his lone pupil, uselessly because his eye is such dark brown.

Niko wants to check for pulse but ends up feeling stupid with one limp tendril in his hand. Instead he sets his ear against the demon’s chest just as the cabbie brings her cheek near Nikodemus’ mouth, and Niko and the cabbie bump heads.

The cabbie says Owee.

“I think his heart stopped,” Niko says.

She points her cigarillo at the Blue Line tunnel mouth. “Probably when we drove out.” She backs out of the cab and straightens. “You know CPR?”

“Yeah.”

“You work on him. I’ll be right back.”

Niko sets the mason jar on the curb and climbs on top of Nikodemus and tilts back the huge and battered head to clear the airway. “You gonna call nine one one?”

“Not yet.” She goes to the front of the cab and pulls the hood latch.

Niko grimaces as he swabs the demon’s airpassage with a finger and then pinches the nostrils shut. He takes a deep breath and only hesitates a second before he puts his lips to his demon’s lips. The jellyfish of Nikodemus’ ruined eye is warm and wet against his cheek. Niko blows. It’s like trying to inflate a hotwater bottle. He blows harder and Nikodemus’ burly chest rises. Niko lifts his mouth and the chest deflates and foul breath washes over him. Well his own breath can’t be much better. He bends again to fill his demon’s lungs. Two breaths and thirty chest compressions. Assuming the same rules apply to refugee demons in cardiac arrest in the back of taxicabs.

The cabbie goes to the back and opens the trunk.

Niko checks again for pulse and respiration. Nothing. He scoots back and sets one palm atop the other on the demon’s sternum and leans down into it. I swear someday I’ll laugh at this. One and two and three and four. Nikodemus’ body moves but Niko can’t be sure it isn’t just a reaction to the compression.

The cabbie pulls a set of heavyduty starter cables from the trunk. Twentyeight twentynine thirty. Niko pushes stiffened fingers against the turtleskin neck. Nope. He bends to the slack face again and exhales hard. It’s like playing a tuba. Nikodemus’ unwilled lungs push corpse breath into the reclaiming world. The graveyard sigh fills Niko’s nostrils. O I cannot take this, it’s too much like it was with Van. I am haunted, I am haunted. He slaps a blood-dried cheek. “Come on, buddy pal. Come on, goddammit. Come back.” Niko moves to compress his demon’s chest again. One and two and three and four.

The cabbie ducks her head in. “Nothing?”

Niko shakes his head. He’s covered in sweat.

“Okay. Help me drag him out.”

Niko doesn’t waste time asking what she has in mind but instead backs out and helps the cabbie pull the heavy body from the cab. At the gate when they had dragged the demon through the wreckage to the waiting cab he’d wondered if Nikodemus was dead. Now there is no doubt. What the difference is he couldn’t say. But he feels it and he knows the cabbie feels it too. A certain bonelessness. A stillness different from sleep or mere unconsciousness. Dead weight.