I Will Rise (8 page)

Lucky for him he has managed to angle the barrel into my stomach. A blast of blinding white explodes between us and a surging heat rips through my lower abdomen. Lumpy screams like a girl. I feel a slick, hungry hole open in my lower back and the world wastes no time invading me, kissing my insides, sending waves of chilly tingles throughout my body. It hurts like hell and my brain sizzles like it has been dipped in fire, but no worries, I am a motherfucking trooper.

Just ask Lumpy.

Just ask Lumpy as I grit my teeth and push my bleeding body into his.

Just ask Lumpy as he moans and tries to squirm away from my hold, tighter and tighter and tighter, our skin fusing, our bones growing together, our DNA intertwining.

Just ask him and see if he can answer you through his weak whimpering.

My left hand, gimp hand, idiot maker, is throbbing, up to no good, and I arch my neck for a closer look. Using my forehead I strain and manage to push our bodies slightly apart. The source of Lumpy’s pussy whimpers—a muzzle-burned stomach, all red and gooey and charred—greets me. I wince at the damage, look away, and focus on my buzzing hand.

It grips one of poor Lumpy’s arms like a vice and an eerie whitish-bluish-greenish color defying light ominously shines out from beneath the palm. The tough nylon of Lumpy’s standard- issue policeman’s jacket melts and crusts and disintegrates. Apparently my hand is trying to get through the jacket, through the shirt beneath, to his bare arm.

The strange light makes short work of Lumpy’s clothing, obliterating the fabric of his police shirt like it doesn’t exist. The moment the light touches flesh a pillar of smoke erupts, stinging my eyes, and the smell of burning hair stings my nostrils. As the palm touches down, flesh to flesh, and closes around his forearm I hear a sick, sucking sound and feel Lumpy’s body go stiff.

Instantly I go swimmy and the world washes away. It almost feels like one of my seizures, but even more intense. My brain becomes a dead flower. A black rose blossoming in reverse. A dead funnel. My body starts to shimmy-shake, seizing, doing the horizontal jitterbug with Officer Statue frozen beneath me. My eyes roll and inner vision flickers: Jesus on the cross. He’s looking at me with a pair of big doughy eyes. Tears roll down his cheeks and he shakes his head. Forget that he is nailed to a couple of splintery boards. Forget that they are the biggest, rustiest, sharpest spikes I have ever seen. Forget the screaming, bleeding wounds gaping from his hands and feet. Forget that he is dying. The only thing that matters is those two soft, disapproving eyes. It’s like they’re saying:
Why? Why have you forsaken me? Why have you so readily turned your back on me?

And I knew this was coming.

And I can’t help thinking that nailed there, his sacred life ebbing, he’s got much bigger problems to worry about than me. I can’t help thinking that he’s the one who’s fucked and I’m sitting goddamned pretty compared to this poor fool.

The eyes:
Why have you abandoned me?

My little blasphemous thoughts grow like weeds, unfurling black dust, filling me with guilt. Why does he care about me? Why should he? How could he? And one more: how could I have ever believed that he did? And, okay, last one: given my newly acquired faithlessness, why do I still care? What’s with this guilt?

In my world, in your world, in
the
world, the one before Annabelle’s revelations opened me,
g
od was hard enough to believe in. With firm resolve and big faith, belief was possible and I took it on. But now? There’s no way. God doesn’t fit into Annabelle’s world. We don’t even fit into Annabelle’s world. We are a mistake, an aberration, a hostile imagination run wild. Perhaps there is a god of sorts who governs that which dreams us, but if so, how can it have anything to do with us?

Sometimes when I wake up from a dream I feel strange, disconnected. I try to recall things and put my finger on the unease in my heart, but I can only come up with the undemanding stuff, the objects, the weird people, the surreal places, the disjointed plots and loopy, dreamy scenarios. No matter how hard I try, or how deep I go, I can’t figure the true meaning behind it all. Maybe that’s what
g
od, our gods, our Buddha and Allah are to the dreamer. Maybe that which dreams us has a firm grasp on us, our actions and interactions and day-to-day trails, much like we remember bits and pieces of our dreams, but doesn’t understand the true meaning. Maybe it doesn’t understand the fantastical religion and myth that we as dreams dream up for ourselves? How could it? Imagine trying to decipher the dreams of a dream itself. Talk about muddled and esoteric.

When I destroy the human virus and our dreamer awakens, it will surely remember me and Annabelle and you and everything we have all done, all the drama if you will, but there is no way it can grasp that peculiar connective thread of human belief and mysticism that binds us and drives us. It can’t understand that which we don’t understand ourselves. Upon awakening, human passion and faith and fear and guilt, all the trappings of a world in love and hate with a god, all the things that make us decidedly human, will be merely opaque stains upon the dreamer’s recollections of those definitive tangibles: the ongoing interplay between flesh and earth.

So fuck it. God is dead.

But those big doughy eyes won’t let up. Despite all I know, despite the impossibility of God beyond our limited imaginings, I still feel like an asshole for shaming Jesus. I am the end of the world as you know it—transcendent, more than human—but I still feel like shit for sucking away Lumpy’s soul. Whatever reality is doesn’t change the fact that God exists in my head. It doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been programmed, that we’ve been programmed, and no matter how I try to justify it, murder is still wrong. Human morality still holds court within my brain and I want to give up. I don’t want to destroy humanity. I want to die, totally, completely, infinitely.

Somewhere, Annabelle’s voice:

“These thoughts, these inhibitions, are the human weapon. They exist to trip you up. They are fail-safes triggered to ensure that you do not restore the balance. Human idea wants to take over, remember? Fight it.”

Fight it.

Embrace logic.

Realize that it has to end sometime. Something has to change and if it weren’t me fucked beyond repair, conditioned, primed, transformed, it would be somebody else.

This is your chance to make a difference.

You are important.

Differentiated.

Vital.

Vision wobbles, the seizure recedes, and I am back. The fight has gone out of Lumpy. The life has gone out of Lumpy. I am left lying on his carcass, staring at his cracked, dead mouth. It’s puffy and streaked with dried white flakes of lip skin. His eyes are wide open, jaundiced, dried, sucked in and resembling rotten yellow grapes. His skin has gone a deep shade of gray.

I pick myself up, brush myself off and notice that there is a red hole the size of a fist in my abdomen where my stomach used to be. Does it hurt? Damn skippy, but it is a weird pain, an almost-not-there pain. I ignore it and continue to stare at Lumpy.

The spot on his arm where my palm felled him is a mess of bone and goo. The palm not only sucked away Lumpy’s life, it ate through his arm. I bring the killing palm close to my face for inspection. It’s covered in gore and I shake it in an attempt to get it clean. Chunks displace, flying this way and that and beneath the patina of bloodstained Lumpy residue, the flesh of the palm looks newborn. All lines, calluses, and grooves have disappeared. The surface is pinkish and completely smooth.

“Charles?” Annabelle calls me. I see her exquisite form out of the corner of my eye, but I ignore her. I’m having a moment here.

Lumpy is dead, beyond dead and as sure as he is empty this is my fate. All of these crazy ideas, ideas that have no business being true, have been validated by the fact that my palm just sucked the life out of Officer Lumpy. I am not seizing. I am here, standing, lucid, and aware and Jesus Christ what am I? What the fuck am—

“Charles!”

When I turn to address her, Annabelle smiles big.

“Charles, you have to run.”

I stare blankly and try to put together a few words.

“Please hurry!”

“I like your smile.” I bite my tongue as the last syllable leaves my mouth. I like your smile? What is wrong with me?

“You’re changing. You can’t help it. I think these feelings you have for me are part of the package. We have to work together to get this thing done and your devotion or adoration or whatever is growing inside of you is there to ensure we succeed. Ignore it for now.”

“You can read my mind?”

“No, just your expressions. Listen. Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“That.”

Straining, I can hear sirens in the distance.

“Run, Charles.”

“Who cares, I’m already dead and you’re not even really here.” I whoosh my right hand through the spot where Annabelle is standing. Sure enough my fingers pass right through her. “What are they gonna do?”

“I’m not here, but you are. Just because you can’t be killed doesn’t mean you can’t be captured and you are fucking useless to me in jail.”

The sirens get louder and louder. Lumpy’s corpse stares up into the starry night and wonders where his soul has gone. The answers used to be simple—heaven, hell, nothingness, maybe even purgatory or something nice like reincarnation—but now who knows? The dying digital blue? The dream recycle bin? A sea of ones and zeroes?

I see a sudden vision of Lumpy’s eyes, healthy and alert, in the back of my brain. They blink and get their bearings and stare me down, angry as hell, from the inside out. I shake my head and they disappear.

The sirens are screaming and the rushing behemoth of human aggression is bearing down. I decide to take Annabelle’s advice and start for the mini forest.

“Wait!” Annabelle waves me back. “Get your sweater out of your backpack and cover up. Your stomach looks like ground beef.” She smiles and her body begins to flicker in and out.

“Where do I go?”

“Get a car and drive.”

I scan the ground for my bag. Disentangling my sweater from the empty Ajax bottles and stolen Coca-Colas, I look up and prepare to ask, “Drive where?” Too late, a few more static flickers and Annabelle disappears.

Flashing lights dance, sirens blare, I take a second to look at my palm, its smooth perfection, more porcelain than fleshy, and before you can say Jack Splat I’m hightailing it into the woods.

My life is suddenly a zillion times more interesting than it was several hours ago. If I am crazy and this is all in my head, I might as well play along. Anything is better than desperation and worthlessness and stagnation. Crazy is worlds better, and if it gives me some sort of purpose, then rock on. If this is all true and the job I’ve been assigned is legit, then I am sorry, I hope you enjoyed your life and made more out of it than I have with mine. I guess in the end it doesn’t make much of a difference—I’ll be dead, you’ll be dead, undreamed, unmade, memory dissolved.

I run and I run and I smile, blue lights flashing behind me, cop noises piercing the night. The forest embraces me as I suck at the cool night air with reinvigorated zeal.

Chapter Seven

Focus

The 7-Eleven radiates like a baby sun, a neon sanctuary, an explosion of green and red and white. Scrambling through the dense forest, those colorful, penetrating rays of commerce grab hold and pull. My eyes smile and my heart blinks with joy. Thank God: a finish line (a starting line?), a goal, an end point, and thank heaven: I don’t know how much longer I can keep this shit up. I’ve been running, not jogging, or fast walking, but all-out running, for what seems like ever. Digging my heels in I skid to a stop and crouch down in the underbrush at the forest’s edge.

A highway sits a few feet ahead of me, beyond that the 7-Eleven parking lot, beyond that the 7-Eleven itself, and beyond that, a few miles in the distance, sporadic streaks of red, cars like ants traversing the freeway. The freeway. At this point, unless I hear otherwise, that is my ultimate goal. Annabelle said I should get a car. I can’t remember where she said to go, but the freeway is a safe bet. Getting as far away from here as possible seems like the best idea.

Settling into the brush, I lean up against a tree and take a breather. I thought those blue fuckers had me. I thought they would never give up. I sure as hell didn’t think I would have a second to kick back and figure things out. Somewhere—I’m not quite sure how far back or how long ago—the sirens and the chaotic frenzied rustling of the forest died off. Somehow I had lost the cops. I like to think the forest swallowed them up. More than likely, however, the cops
lost me
in favor of a little strategizing. I keep expecting to hear helicopters, to see blinding lights, to feel more searing bullets. Any minute now, this highway, the 7-Eleven, even the freeway beyond, should be crawling with pigs. If I don’t get out, and fast, they will capture me for sure.

You don’t just murder a couple of police officers and get away with it. Not in this day and age. The cause of death is probably driving the forensics team batty. Paunch’s mangled mess of a body and Lumpy’s sunken form will surely have them scratching their collective heads. Maybe even thinking
X-Files
type shit, but my backpack and blood will keep them hot on my trail. The bizarre may buy a little time, but regardless I have to make my move and I have to make it now.

Who knows how to hot-wire a car?

Not me, so it has to go down like this: I have to get a hold of a key, which means I have to punk somebody into giving one up. A dilemma: do I attack said victim as they are getting out of their car or do I attack said victim as they are getting into their car? Am I even intimidating enough to do the job? I guess it really doesn’t matter, what with my hand. If I demand and demand and demand and still don’t get those keys, some poor fuck is going to burn.

A few cars come and go, whooshing down the highway in either direction. I take a deep breath. A blue pickup truck pulls into the 7-Eleven, the driver (a rather large gentleman) gets out, rushes in, buys something, returns and speeds away. I exhale. I have to be a fast mother to pull this off.

No problem. Cake. I am a vandal, a murderer, a would-be poisoner. Who gives a flying fuck about humanity? I don’t. I am an antisocial death-bringer, a misfit among misfits, a bad motherfucker. Say it again. A bad motherfucker. Again! A BAD MOTHERFUCKER!!! That’s right. Stealing a car is small potatoes. Destiny awaits. Purpose awaits. No way am I messing this up.

My courage level is ratcheted up way past ten. I tingle. My brain buzzes and my stomach loops. Next one, I take. For sure. Fucking right. Next car, I throw the driver and jam.

Dashing across the highway I hold my breath and fight down a smile. Goddamn I feel like a thug. Leaning against the storefront I hook my fingers into the front pockets of my jeans and exhale. I can feel the store clerk burning holes into my back and I taunt him with my nonchalance.

Come on, motherfucker, I think, come on outside and see what I got.

I walk a few paces over to the pay phone and pretend to drop some change into it, dial, and then continue the charade and make like I’m having a legitimate conversation. The clerk keeps right on staring as if it’s cool to just stare at people (it’s not, if you’re me and on fire and ready to kill, believe me it’s not) and I glance up to meet his eyes. Caught, he looks away and pretends to straighten a display of American-flag butane lighters. I smile and swing my head and really try to get into my fake conversation. The clerk really tries to get into his pseudo-straightening, aggressively arranging horoscope scrolls and matches. I start to stare at him really hard. He runs his hands through his mullet and walks out of sight. I continue with my conversation.

Me on the phone:

“God? It’s me, Charles.”

“God? Why am I so incredibly screwed up?”

“God? Are you listening?”

“Is it your fault? Is it mine?”

“How can it be my fault?”

The smile fades.

“All I ever wanted was to fit in.”

“All I ever wanted was a little love.”

“But you don’t fucking care. You don’t even exist. We don’t even exist.”

“None of this matters, but it
feels
like it matters. None of this matters, but it
feels
like it matters, and I don’t fucking care. Not anymore. Not about you or me or anything.”

“And I hoped for so much more.”

“I’m going to enjoy demystifying the world. I’m going to enjoy sucking every last one of you dry.”

I slam the phone down and the receiver shatters, raining thousands of black shards in every direction. The guts of the phone’s earpiece dangle dead, colorful, erupting from the ruined top as if I am holding a mechanical bouquet of wires and metal. The clerk is back in view and staring harder than ever. Dumbstruck and surprised by my own strength or anger or precision, I am speechless and without recourse.

The clerk continues to stare and he looks like he is about to jump into action, call the cops or something, but he never does. Instead the edges of his body shake and he looks like a man on the verge of responding. A reaction is primed, I’m sure, lodged somewhere in his synapses, but it doesn’t come, since the unexpected state of affairs hasn’t quite set in. It’s a weird moment because I feel exactly the same way he does and through our stares we understand each other. We are both suspended, the environment gone solid and it’s like: every once and a while something startling happens and the world slows. While you’re processing and catching up, you kind of just freeze and daydream for a few seconds.

Once I catch up to myself, I drop the busted phone and shrug my shoulders at the clerk. Snapping out of it, he shrugs back at me.

Just then a large, loud car pulls in.

I turn away, hunker down, reach for the dangling receiver and frantically pretend to try and fix it or something. A rush of tingling and heat floods my face. This is my car. I have to play it cool. I have to move fast.

I keep my head down, angled, and watch through the corner of my eye. All I can make out is the ground and the lower half of the approaching car. My chariot, my escape, my ride, is a big, loud, primer-colored boat, a chortling beast spewing thick, noxious smoke. The brakes squeal to high heaven as it comes into full view and grinds to a stop. The rims are rust colored and the tires are cracked, but again, this is my car and it’ll have to do. I can’t really afford to be picky.

Attack now then?

Things are moving way too fast. The door flies open and a pair of socked feet touch down. They are dainty, and connected to a pair of legs in pink sweatpants. I was worried I’d have to deal with a large, aggressive male, so this is a nice break. The feet hurriedly pitter across the blacktop, step up onto the curb and then disappear out of my line of vision into the store. I drop the receiver, straighten up and turn.

The socks and sweatpants are carrying a disheveled woman. The woman stands at the counter, brushing her stringy hair out of her face, talking to the clerk. The clerk grabs some cigarettes, the woman digs through her purse, the transaction is almost over and here I am just standing and staring like an idiot.

Move, fool.

Deep breath and then I am striding toward the car.

Plan?

I’ll stand close and demand the keys. She better hand them over.

As I get closer to the car and the adrenaline starts to boil, I notice that the chortling, roaring of the car’s engine has never stopped. My eyes, dartlike, seek out the tailpipe. Sure enough smoke continues to billow. Holy shit. She left the engine running. I can’t believe it. Nervous fear, blood rushing in my ears or something, must have dulled my senses. The car idles out an invitation. I lean close and look inside. The driver’s seat is empty, the passenger’s seat is empty, the back seat is empty, save for a mountain of clothes, and the keys, complete with a key ring that says
Bitch Goddess
, sway from the ignition. I really can’t believe it. I blink a few times and nothing changes. This is my lucky day. I still can’t believe it and without a second thought I am in the car, throwing it into reverse, and stepping on the gas.

The woman comes screaming out of the store as I am cranking the gearshift into drive and jamming out of the parking lot. In the rearview I see her and the clerk a few paces behind, futilely running after me. Their mouths twist and stretch, hurling obscene threats and pleas, hating me, wishing I were dead or in jail or never skulking around in front of the 7-Eleven on this fateful night.

The woman is probably kicking herself for leaving the car running. She’s probably wondering why I did what I did. She’s probably wondering if her vehicle and backseat full of laundry will ever be returned. She’s probably taking karmic assessments (if she is into that sort of thing) and trying to figure what she has done to deserve this. Based on her appearance and late-night cigarette need she probably deserves something like this, but then I digress for I am being judgmental and elitist. But then again, maybe I’m not. Maybe she does deserve this.

Think about it for a second. If we are dreams, each one of us connected by the commonality that we are generated and defined by the same sleeping source, then it is reasonable to assume we are inextricably tied together. It is reasonable to assume that concepts such as destiny, fate, and providence exist. Coexisting as we do in such an insular, associated world, our actions and thoughts have power. They shape our lives and send affecting ripples throughout the dreamscape. What I do affects you; what you do affects me. This woman didn’t just drive her behemoth of car into the 7-Eleven parking lot at the exact same moment that I needed to steal a car out of sheer coincidence. She did so because she was directed, or fated, to do so.

As esoteric as this may sound, something done by someone or something in the near or distant past, triggered something, which triggered something, which in turn caused her to drive her car to this specific point at this specific time. Whether all of this is linked to behaviors, good or bad, evil or angelic, who knows? But given this theory, maybe I am not being judgmental or elitist, by presuming something she has done has led her and her car here. Shit, maybe it’s the same for the clerk. Maybe he did something, or this event is going to prompt him to do something, that will hurl those altering ripples throughout the ether, thusly affecting someone or something else in some peculiar or ordinary way.

Maybe the clerk is thinking:
I knew it
.
I knew there was something up with that phone-smashing son of a bitch
. Maybe he’s thinking he should have called the cops right off and reported the stranger loitering about. Maybe he’s thinking of the negative press and impact it may have on business (unless he is an indifferent employee—then he probably couldn’t give a shit). Maybe he’s thrilled with the excitement and thinking of ways he can embellish the story when he tells it to friends and family. Maybe he’s thinking it’s people like me who are fucking up the world.

Regardless, both the woman and the clerk are thinking thoughts and embarking upon actions that are surely shaping our world. And me too. All the time. And I can’t help thinking that I could have drained each of them into the great beyond. I can’t help thinking that in my hands I hold the end. I can’t help thinking that they had no idea, absolutely no inkling, as they screamed and cursed and chased death like a couple of idiot lemmings following the plans laid out for them in life’s ethereal blueprint. Fools.

To think, a short time ago I was one of them (or I was less than them). I was at destiny’s mercy, but now I am transformed, now I am empowered, now I am beyond destiny. I am special. I now control destiny directly. I earned this privilege. Right? Or am I mistaken, too big for my own dead britches, still governed by the rules? Am I where I am, imbued with this gift (this curse) because like everybody else a series of events, dominos in motion, placed me here?

Could I have even killed those people if I had wanted to, and if I had killed those people, would it have been because I wanted to or because fate wanted me to?

My head is starting to hurt and the more I go round, the more it aches.

Next time you make a decision, remember that you are only following protocol. If you change your mind, you are only following protocol. If you realize this and change your mind again to buck the system, understand that you are only following protocol.

Life is a lot like that car ride at Disneyland. You can step on the gas and apply the brakes. You can ram another car or allow another car to ram you. You can even turn this way and that and achieve the illusion of free steering, but no matter what you do, you are on a predetermined, concrete, limiting track. I would like to think my new station in life allows me to transcend the track, but I doubt it, after all it’s just another station and I still have to play by the rules.

I finish with this: free will is a joke best not told.

Forget it, fuck it, all I know for sure is that those two will never know how lucky they were that things went down the way they did.

I haven’t driven a car in ages. I don’t have a license or access to wheels, and public transportation has always suited me fine, but I must admit there is a freeing sensation to stepping on the gas and tearing up the road. This thing is a boat on wheels and there is a constant sway to its movements, like driving a lilting skyscraper. I can feel the engine quivering the seats, shaking my bones, dubbing me an extension, a mechanical leech. Symbiosis. We are one and together we assault the freeway with ninety-mile-an-hour exuberance.