Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

Standing, it looked to Chemayev that the stones beneath his feet were miles away, the surface of a lumpy planet seen from space. A shadowy floater cluttered his vision. The white leaves each had a doubled image, and March’s features, rising from the pale seamy ground of his skin, made no sense as a face—like landmarks on a map without referents.

“Can you walk?” March asked.

“I don’t know.”

March positioned himself facing Chemayev and examined him with a critical eye. “We better have you looked at. You might have a spot of concussion.” He adjusted his grip on Chemayev’s shoulders. “I’m going to carry you… just so’s you know I’m not taking liberties. I’ll come back after and get your things.”

He bent at the knees and waist, preparing to pick Chemayev up in a fireman’s carry. Without the least forethought or inkling of intent, acting out of reflex or muscle memory, or perhaps goaded by the sour smell of March’s sweat, Chemayev slipped his right forearm under March’s throat, applying a headlock; then with all his strength he wrenched the Irishman up off his feet. March gurgled, flailed, kicked. And Chemayev, knowing that he only had to hang on a few seconds more, came full into his hatred. He heard himself yelling with effort, with the anticipation of victory, and he dug the grip deeper into March’s throat. Then March kicked out with his legs so that for the merest fraction of a second he was horizontal to the true. When his legs swung down again the momentum carried Chemayev’s upper body down as well, and March’s feet struck the ground. Lithe as an eel, he pushed himself into a backflip, his legs flying over Chemayev’s head, breaking the hold and sending them both sprawling onto the stones.

By the time Chemayev recovered March had gotten to his feet and was bent over at the edge of the circle, rubbing his throat. Stupefied, only dimly aware of the danger he faced, Chemayev managed to stand and set off stumbling toward the trees. But the Irishman hurried to cut him off, still holding his throat.

“Are you mad, Viktor?” he said hoarsely. “There’s no other explanation. Fuck!” He massaged his throat more vigorously, stretched his neck. “That’s as close as I’ve come. I’ll give you that much.”

Chemayev’s legs wanted to bend in odd directions. It felt as if some organ in his head, a scrap of flesh he never knew existed, had been torn free and was flipping about like a minnow in a bait bucket.

Strands of hair were stuck to March’s cheek; he brushed them back, adjusted the waist of his trousers. “It’s the girl, isn’t it? Liza… Louisa. Whatever her fucking name is. Back when I was of a mood for female companionship, there were more than a few knocked my brains loose. They’ll make a man incorrigible. Immune to even the most sensible of teachings.”

Chemayev glanced about, groggily certain that there must be an avenue of escape he had overlooked.

“I remember this one in particular,” said March as he approached. “Evvie was her name. Evvie Mahone. She wasn’t the most gorgeous item on the shelf. But she was nice-looking, y’know. A country girl. Come to Dublin for the university. Wild and red-cheeked and full of spirit, with lovely great milky bosoms, and a frizzy mane of ginger hair hanging to her ass that she could never comb out straight. I was over the moon ten times round about her. When we were courting we’d sit together for hours outside her dormitory, watching the golden days turn to gray, touching and talking soft while crowds moved past us without noticing, like we were two people who’d fallen so hard for one another we’d turned to stone. Our hearts just too pure to withstand the decay and disappointment of the world.” He stepped close to Chemayev, inches away—a wise white monkey with a creased, pouchy face and eyes as active as beetles. “After we became lovers we’d lie naked in the casement window of her room with a blanket around us, watching stars burn holes in the black flag flying over the Liffey. I swear to God I thought all the light was coming from her body, and there was music playing then that never existed… yet I still hear its strains. Is it like that for you, Viktor? That grand and all-consuming? I reckon it must be.”

March clasped Chemayev’s shoulder with his left hand, as if in camaraderie; he made a fist of his right. “Love,” he said wistfully. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

Chemayev was not witness to much of the beating that then ensued; a punch he never saw coming broke his connection with painful reality and sent him whirling down into the black lights of unconsciousness. When he awoke he discovered to his surprise that he was no longer in pain—to his further surprise he found that he was unable to move, a circumstance that should have alarmed him more than it did. It was not that he felt at peace, but rather as if he’d been sedated, the intensity of his possessive attitude toward mortality tuned down several notches and his attention channeled into a stuporous appreciation of the blurred silver beam hanging in the darkness overhead… like a crossbeam in the belly of a great ark constructed of negative energy. He could hear water splashing, and a lesser sound he soon recognized to be the guttering of his breath. He thought of Larissa, then tried not to think of her. The memory of her face, all her bright particularity, disturbed the strange equilibrium that allowed him to float on the surface of this pain-free, boundless place. But after a while he became able to summon her without anxiety, without longing overmuch, content to contemplate her the way an Orthodox saint painted on an ikon might gaze at an apparition of the Virgin. Full of wonder and daft regard. Soon she came to be the only thing he wanted to think of, the eidolon and mistress of his passage.

Things were changing inside him. He pictured conveyor belts being turned off, systems cooling, microbes filing out of his factory stomach on the final day of operation, leaving their machines running and all the taps going drip drip drip. It was amusing, really. To have feared this. It was easier by far than anything that had preceded it. Though fear nibbled at the edges of his acceptance, he remained essentially secure beneath his black comforter and his silver light and his love. The thought of death, once terrifying, now seemed only unfortunate. And when he began to drift upward, slowly approaching the light, he speculated that it might not even be unfortunate, that March had been wrong about God and the hope of the Resurrection. Beneath him the garden and its pagan central element were receding, and lying with its arms out and legs spread not far from the ruined fountain, his bloody, wide-eyed body watched him go. He fixed on the silver light, expecting, hoping to see and hear the faces and voices of departed souls greeting him, the blissful creatures that patrolled the border between life and true eternity, and the white beast Jesus in all Its majesty, crouched and roaring the joyful noise that ushered in the newly risen to the sacred plane. But then he sensed an erosion, a turmoil taking place on some fundamental level that he had previously failed to apprehend. Fragments of unrelated memory flew at him in a hail, shattering his calm. Images that meant nothing. A wooden flute he’d played as a child. An old man’s gassed, wheezing voice. Sparks corkscrewing up a chimney. Pieces of a winter day in the country. Shards of broken mental crockery that shredded the temporary cloth of his faith, allowing terror to seep through the rents. Real terror, this. Not the fakes he’d experienced previously, the rich fears bred in blood and bone, but an empty, impersonal terror that was itself alive, a being larger than all being, the vacuous ground upon which our illusion breeds, that we never let ourselves truly believe is there, yet underlies every footstep ever taken… gulping him down into its cold and voiceless scream, while all he knew and loved and was went scattering.