Steve Tem - Ubo

Falstaff blinked, grimacing. “No, no—I didn’t mean that. I think I’d imagined he’d said it a long time ago. Maybe because it’s so, wise, I think. It’s very perceptive, what he said, what it says about the dynamics between men and women.”

“Oh, I suppose. It seemed a little exaggerated to me. Funny but, it overstates, don’t you think? Like most humor? I know I’m not dangerous like that, certainly not to a woman.”

Falstaff was silent for a few moments. “It’s not an accusation leveled at any specific male. It’s about what challenges us, what we have to overcome, the things we’ve always been forced to live by. It’s-it’s what Alan said, something about how men have always been fed this poor approximation of the truth. About how we’ve all been immersed in a lifelong distortion. And what that’s done to men, and to most human beings. It’s made us more… dangerous. Do you have a daughter?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But if I did, I’d be afraid about what she might encounter. It embarrasses me.”

They started to get up, then Daniel said, “There was a young boy with me, with Whitman. He participated in the shootings.”

“A doppelganger.”

“Doppelganger?”

“It happens sometimes. There’s someone else in your scenario, some persona who commits some of the crimes. It takes some of the pressure off you.”

“It didn’t make me feel any better.”

Falstaff shrugged. “It works differently for different people. Did he look like anyone you know?”

Daniel couldn’t think about it for very long without a thrill of anxiety riding across his skin. “No,” he said firmly. “But it reminded me of myself. I was never as angry as I was when I was young. My dad would have to calm me down. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous on the planet,’ he told me, ‘than an angry young man.’”

They took another flight of stairs. The deterioration was more pronounced. Paint peeled from the walls like leaves and fronds wilted and the color drained out. Stair steps were cracked, the treads missing large chunks. Rusted brick-a-brac clogged the darkened corners of the landings.

They reached the final landing, a final door. “Wear these.” Daniel slipped the sunglasses on as Falstaff pushed open the door.

The roof of the building was much larger than Daniel had expected—going on for hundreds of yards, it was vast, a rambling stretch of stone and tar and metal and some fibrous material he did not recognize with a rotten, blasted surface. Loose debris lay scattered over everything. It was like some abandoned, ruined beach.

Besides numerous pipes sprouting from hidden sources deep inside the building, and duct ends of old rusted ventilation shafts, he could detect the remnants of foundations across broad stretches, and here and there an actual piece of a wall, indications that at one point there had been additional rooms up here, maybe even a partial level.

There were also crude lean-tos and makeshift loungers, a number of crudely assembled shelters, an array of furniture dragged up from the levels below, and gray-uniformed residents lying around in the sun, and only a short distance away the roaches doing their own lounging, their gleaming carapaces reflecting brilliant green and blue fractal patterns that hurt the eyes.

Most appeared relaxed, apparently glad that sunshine and moving air were possible in this strange prison. But consternation and irritation were evident in some of the isolated small groups. An older man and a woman—the first female he had seen since coming here—were screaming at each other so furiously he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

A man in his seventies, wasting away in a voluminous robe, and a younger fat man were seated together. The fat man was stroking the old man’s emaciated face and hands, speaking in soft murmurs, then reaching out with clawed fingers and digging into the old man’s chest, the fingers coming away slightly bloodied.

“Father and son, I believe,” Falstaff said.

Here and there were some solo performances in the crowd: a man sitting on a broken piece of stone sculpture, quietly nibbling at his left hand. A young woman walking repeatedly to a shiny piece of metal, staring at her reflection and bursting into tears.

As they got closer to one edge of the building the roaches far outnumbered the residents. They watched silently and, like the soulless soldiers Daniel suspected they were, slowly turned their heads with those enormous multi-faceted eyes. A few were half‑hidden in the debris, betrayed only by a barbed black leg straying around a corner, or a section of dark carapace showing behind gaps in a wall or through metal mesh. Several lounged ridiculously on steps or benches, their stiff legs erect and suspended in mid‑air. Daniel almost laughed.

“Daniel!”

He ran into something hard and immediately felt the salt taste. He looked up past hard black branches with daggers attached, to his face mirrored hundreds of times in the black facets of the globes. A smell like rancid motor oil and urine. He was rigid, and thought he might scream.

But only the antennae moved, drifting fractionally in the still air. Daniel turned and walked away from the enormous roach.

“Notice how they’ve gathered around the edges, as if shielding the air space,” Falstaff pointed out.

It was true. The roaches appeared to have strategically placed themselves along the perimeter of the roof, blocking the residents from accessing the building’s edge. On one side he saw the gleam of water and a boundless emptiness of ocean, and on the other a wide stretch of dirt and then a distant, ragged jumble of concrete and brick ruins. He was startled. He’d had no idea they were near an ocean.

“What are they doing? Are they afraid the residents might try to escape?”

“I think it’s more along the lines of suicide prevention. Although what’s to prevent a roach from taking the leap I don’t know.”

Daniel determinedly looked away from the roaches and the residents, lifting his eyes toward the sky. It was mottled with dark clouds, smoke or pollution, and slight traces of a shimmer, as if it were all cooking. Then further away, hovering above a more distant rubble, gray and red, with sudden plumes of black.

“Feeling as if you’re in the crosshairs?” Daniel nodded nervously. “It’s a common notion people have up here on the roof. Remind you of the Charles Whitman scenario?”

“Yes, yes it does. But from the victim’s point of view.”

“He was the first, or the first we remember, to shoot strangers randomly that way. Death from the skies. It’s because of him that American police departments established SWAT teams.”

“But an aberration,” Daniel insisted. “Not everyone does things like that.”

“I suppose not. But one of our more famous American writers—I’m sure you studied him in school—he’s part of the literary canon as they call it—Harry Crews, he once wrote after visiting that Texas Tower that he knew that all over the earth people were resisting climbing the tower. That all of us have a Tower to climb. And to deny that you have your personal Tower is to risk the possibility that you might someday climb it.”

“Harry Crews? He wrote Car , right? About a fellow who eats a car? And Feast of Snakes ? Great stuff, but you don’t study a writer like that in school, at least not where I come from. You discover him at a sleazy newsstand, or in a box of used paperbacks at a garage sale.”

A darkness came into Falstaff’s face. And something odd was happening with his mouth. “I suppose. He’s just a writer… I admire very much. I misspoke.” In the bright afternoon air his face shimmered with vague shadows and Daniel had to look away.