Chapter Five: In the Darkness

There was a terrible pause; the world jerked back and forth and sideways. Then the sirens crescendoed. And crescendoed. And crescendoed. Joe closed his eyes and seemed to sink; Earthquake? No; in fact he was falling onto his bed, but it seemed to him he was falling on a pile of dolls jumbled on a table in Chinatown, cheap plastic dolls, but then they turned into women, or the heads of women, floating on doll bodies. Very fat doll bodies. They were so fat that they were used as a jewelry display: these women stuck to fat doll bodies had to work as human display cases. Wearing beautiful jewelry with elaborate hairdos, they stood erect every day by virtue of being pushed together so they could never move and they were all stitched into the same giant dress. No choice, no hunger, no danger, no days off. They smiled but you could feel dissatisfaction under the smiles. Is this all I get to do? said the doll smiles. Was this a metaphor for the exploitation of the dream factory? Or was it spider venom?

Joe had been bitten by Borriss.

Borriss was the most poisonous spider on Earth, but Joe had a … a reaction Borriss didn’t expect. The only expected reaction was to keel over and stop his stupid breathing, so anything after that was gravy for Joe, no matter how weird it became. The spider was simply tired of him and had decided on a whim to shut him up—not that he ever planned to admit it, even if Joe survived.

“He’s a genetic fucking freak,” Borriss muttered to himself. Joe ranted and raved and narrated the entire experience in a tone of voice that implied he thought he was some kind of famous person, being interviewed about his real life.

In the delirium, Joe thought everything going on in his sputtering brain, as well as things Borriss did, was the real thing, real life, although he wondered from time to time. He had delusions of grandeur; delusions of being even smaller and less important than he was; and delusions that were morally neutral but bizarre: the landlady had mechanical cats rather than real ones, for instance. Afterward he thought it was all a fever dream — even the stuff Borriss actually pulled. This was a coup for the spider.

And to think he merely meant to kill him! Borriss had created a kind of shaman patsy. He was interested to see what prize he would pull out of the candy box now.

Joe went down through a maze to what should have been a dull and sterile place. But it wasn’t. He was fantastically painting the walls down there, and the walls leapt into cartoon life. There was a lot of pain, and so his brain, or what was left of it, was sparking madly.

It was a toy in his head that was dying.

He felt guilty later on when he learned how worried his brother was about him. Because he was playing while in pain.

There was no surface reason to feel guilty. He could not have called his brother even if he were merely in pain and bored. He could not move, see, eat, or drink.

Yet he was playing, somewhere in the pain. There were layers where he had too much fun for someone who was almost dead and worrying everyone. The science fiction book he wrote and reread in his head for three days, for instance, was so monumentally entertaining—at least to him, since he could see all of the pictures in their original format, without even an incompetent cross-hatching job or CGI to distract him—that he was only mildly annoyed that it would never be written down, as he was clearly dying.

There was no one to help him in the apartment. He was all alone. All the people in the modern world were available if he could only operate the telephone.

It was out of batteries. Not that he could see it to read the worried messages anyway. When his eyes were closed, he was in a world that was clear, bright, and magical, if terrifying. When his eyes were open, he saw crossed lines, more hallucinations, a dizzed blur. It was less disturbing to have hallucinations with the eyes closed, so he never opened them. Eyes shut, it was like dreaming or imagining, if you held still enough to suspend the pain, your body a gyroscope that would shatter you in an instant if you moved, but you could hold it still for a while. Terror with a touch of mere horror flick.

With the eyes open, you were clearly so sick you were going to die. Nothing filmic about it, nothing dramatic, nothing coherent. Not fun! We need a plot, not lurching shapes. Back to the book.

“Maybe the outside world doesn’t understand telepathy, Book, but you’re a best-seller in here, my dear,” Joe said fondly. “To us, you are A-Number-One.” He never gave it a title. He was too busy trying to mentally beam it onto the television. Never mind. He was proud. When he was done writing it, he read it again. It held up. Unfortunately, it was probably Young Adult. Not technically Shakespeare. “Well,” Joe said philosophically, “Adolescents, they’re the only people who have time to read anymore anyway.” Then he reminded himself that he was going to die before he wrote it down, and gave a comforted grunt of chagrined relief.

Chagrined relief is sometimes the best you can do.

He even imagined an unlikely event: what if he survived?

“I’ll have robotic parts,” he said. “I will be the hero after the journey into the abyss and back. Like in a comic book. A whole new look. Worse but better. An eyepatch. Knee-high leather boots.”

“Are you gay?” scoffed Borriss.

“I can’t remember,” said Joe. “Maybe?”

“Weakling.”

“Probably. We’ll see.”

Secretly, Borriss was impressed. This made him want to urinate on Joe’s face, so he did. Later Joe chalked that up to the fever; the piss scars healed, after all. Borriss’s piss was acidic like the guts of a car battery, but Joe was a bizarrely hard person to harm, much less kill. He didn’t look like a genetic freak, but somewhere in the depths of the fever he suspected the government had been engineering people who were tough enough to parachute without parachutes, so the enemy couldn’t pick them up on their radar. Just drop them and they figure out how to land. That’s impossible though, so they just managed to make people who can survive a comical amount of poison, fever, starvation, vertical drops, and giddy despair.

Then Joe’s grandfather escaped, and instead of a super-soldier Joe became a spider’s stupid pet. What a thing fate is.

Borriss, who was as old as he fake-fakely claimed, knew just how close Joe’s fever paratrooper dream was to the truth, and wouldn’t tell him. This improved the spider’s mood every time he considered it. “He’ll never know!” Borriss giggled aloud. However, this was one of the few things Joe remained fairly sure had actually occurred. Some self-preservation instinct was still working, even in apparent death.

When he slowly came to, in the weeks of convalescence, he was sporadically distressed over the fact that he couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been real in that time. He remembered all kinds of things; he was elected president by a multiple choice test against his will, but slowly warmed to the idea, since he would no doubt get excellent, free health care; he had no memory o his actual installation in a tenth-rate medical facility. Somehow the dying body was discovered, and he was moved to a hospital, where he began to be fed. He was so light he was surprised he could stay on the bed and not levitate. He felt like he was levitating, and then again like he was being crushed by the air; when he began to move, his limbs were so weak but light they jerked like a marionette, his motor centers unable to judge how the laws of physics would affect them. Easy here, hard there. He found he could dance like a gymnast, but carrying a five-pound load was almost impossible. He flailed like a teenager.

Then he woke up in a mental ward. It was horrific. People go in depressed and they never come out. Opiates. Synthetic, other things. Inertia and money. A business in a lucrative place in the state’s intestines.

“I’ve seen things,” was all Joe would say about it. He preferred to wonder how he was alive.

And how was he safe? Had the neighbors heard him raving? Had he been able to use a phone or call for help? All he remembered was mechanical cardboard cut-outs doing reenactments of famous and beloved Chinatown gangsters’ violent deaths. And some jealous girl from his waking life came into Chinatown to kill Joe. She became a mechanical cardboard reenactment, too. He never knew if this was real either, so he avoided all mention of her religiously.

Which city’s Chinatown was this? Well, wherever there’s a menacing grove of ancient virgin pine trees in a city that are being used to hold up a dance hall full of bizarre gambling rituals run by Irish mobsters (why were there Irish mobsters in the Chinese mafia?) who don’t mind watching a young lady die of cocaine.

The gang stuff was terrifying. Joe had no affinity for organized crime. The Godfather left him cold. It wasn’t glamorous; it gave young girls bloody heart attacks. And then the junkies come and lick her puddle of blood. In the fever dream, her enormous bloodstain was found by the police to be dried, goopy, surrounded by tongue marks, from zombies slurping up the drug-heavy blood. The old woman who ran the Chinese part of the gang was furiously angry and filled the drug supply with an instantly deadly poison. The corpse’s fur coat was even full of tongue marks, tongues in the fur like something obscene. Well, it was obscene, just in the death way not the sex way. The two were not an easy mix like they are in the movies. Even if it looked like a movie.

But some of his hallucinations (?) had been dreamy, to force a pun. Nice. Lovely even. Personal things, not just the book. He pained himself by wondering if he could keep anything. Could just a few things be real? Please? One souvenir I can hold? Why did only the sickness have to come true? Why never the compensations we invent? Why never the salve or the wishful madness?

Could I at least have the lover I imagined?

Whoah, that’s asking a lot, Joe. A lover? That’s asking the entire pot. be content with the ten-thousand-dollar freelance gig you imagined. Take the book, write it down. Can’t remember it? Well, better yet, sleep. Food. Go to sleep, Joe, and rebuild. You need to sleep to convalesce. Eat some protein. That’s a good Joe. Go to sleep. Go to sleep, ahh, shh.

He began to see terrible things in the dark weeks after the full madness ended. That was what he got to keep.

These horror creatures aren’t even related to the fucking plot of the dream. Go away. I’m afraid of a non sequitur. During the dream he had begun to believe in God, but God had abandoned him again. “You’re out of chances, buddy,” Joe muttered, and then he went to sleep. The terrible things persisted.

This could have been God being sullen, he supposed.

Or righteous. Be patient. One more round of stupid belief, and He will be there for you. The bubonic plague was just a misunderstanding. We’ll all have a good laugh about this later.

… Shut up. You’re alive, Joe.

You were dead. And here you are eating an ice cream cone. You. Jon Snow, that kind of shit, it happens. You psychic paratrooper. You one-eyed badass.

He had one toy moment in his brain again and it forced a shivering smile. Then came a natural smile. I fucked you, death. Extra. Bonus round. Gravy. It’s all gravy from here to the real end. Don’t be an ingrate.

He didn’t know what he was thanking but he whispered thank you and clamped his mind around the toy. Thank you, Gravy.