John Dies at the End (59 page)

Arnie said, “And you never ate her?”

“What?”

“You never turned into a monster and ate her?”

“No. I’ve never turned into a monster at all.” I thought for a moment and said, “As far as I know.”

“But you’re going to?”

I shrugged. Arnie let out a breath, then stood up off the floor and brushed off his pants with his hands. He said, “I don’t know what this’ll mean to ya, in light of what you just said. But I think you should hear it.”

“Are you going to tell me everything this time, Arnie? The real reason you’re here? Because I’m gonna tell you now, if you do decide to write all this up as a feature article it’s gonna suck.”

“For the purposes of what I’m gonna say,” Arnie began, “we’re gonna start with the premise that the shadow people are real, okay? Not that I’m convinced, but just for the purpose of what I’m about to say.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And that time don’t mean the same thing to them as it means to you and me. And, like you said, they can reach backward and pull you right out of the past and present and everything and nobody is the wiser.”

“Right, right.” I motioned impatiently for him to go on.

“So how far back do you think they could go? Could they go back and vanish the guy who cured polio?”

“Oh. I don’t—I don’t think so.”

“But say they worked it like links in a chain, they touch the guy who pulled Bill Gates out of a car wreck thirty years ago. Make it so that guy was never born, so he could never save Gates. Gates dies as a child and tomorrow we wake up in a world where everybody is using Macs?”

I shivered. “Oh. I don’t know, Arnie. Do you?”

“You mentioned earlier that you got a box on your TV that you play games on? The games where you wander around and shoot people?”

“Well, John’s does. He’s got six of them, if you count the ones in his closet. A PlayStation and an Xbox and whatever else they sell.”

Arnie nodded. “Those names mean nothin’ to me. Tell me, you don’t find anything weird about it? Don’t get a funny feeling when you play on those things?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Not really.”

Arnie, said, “The first time I saw one of those game machines was a month ago. And then, everybody had one.”

He waited, but I didn’t reply.

“I got a nephew,” continued Arnie. “Eleven years old. He’s all about comics and his remote-controlled cars and Rob Schneider movies. But a few weeks ago I come home and I see him sittin’ on the couch, leaning forward like he’s entranced. I mean, I never saw concentration like that on a kid’s face. Never. And he’s got this plastic thing in his hands with buttons on it and he’s just hammering away. And I turn to the television and I almost get sick. There’s just a gun barrel on the screen, at the bottom, muzzle flash shootin’ out the end and people getting ripped to shreds. Sprays of blood everywhere. And I realize, with a feeling like I ate something rotten, that he’s controlling the gun. He’s sitting there operating a damned murder simulator and his mom comes in and tells him to say hi, that his uncle Arnie is visiting and she glances at the TV like it’s nothin’, like it’s perfectly normal for a kid to do somethin’ that used to make new recruits puke back in the war. To look at a human shape—and the people on the screen looked like they were real as you and me—to look at a human shape and pull that trigger and watch it go down and not even flinch, to not feel that instinctual twinge at causing a death . . .”

Arnie wiped sweat off his brow.

He said, “I served next to some coldhearted bastards in the war, guys who had that stare, you know, kids from the streets, kids who got beat before bed every night growin’ up. And even those guys, those hard characters, they would freeze up the first time they had to pull a trigger with a living thing at the other end.”

I said, “Well, they’re pretty violent but they’re just games—”

“Open your ears, Wong. I’m not tellin’ you these games have been around and I’m such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn’t exist before last month. And now they’re everywhere, on every TV set and, hey, ask around and people say they’ve been common for years and years. I’m a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn’t sell these game boxes before, I know they didn’t because it’s insane that they do at all. But I start seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that’s
training
him. Tell me it ain’t. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hours and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside. That’s training. That’s conditioning if I ever saw it. And in your world, in this world, this version of reality that played out, nobody finds this strange? Really?”

“Well . . .”

There was nothing to say. The thought that the bad guys had that kind of power just sank me, left me numb. The bad thing was I couldn’t even write off Arnie as crazy, since he had already wasted most of his day on me and that really wouldn’t be fair.

“And the thing is,” said Arnie, “as time goes on I can feel it fading. Like a dream. I get used to the idea, I think, ‘Yeah, sure, they’ve always been there, these games. It’s me, it’s the stress, it’s age, it’s the drugs I did back in the day comin’ back.’ But then I flip around on the news and I see other little differences, things I know ain’t right. Like the pope. Pope John Paul the second, still out there popin’ and lookin’ one hundred years old. I remember that guy getting shot and killed, way back in the early nineties. He got replaced by a guy named Pope Leo the something. And I squint and I can almost picture that other pope’s face. A black guy. Younger, in his fifties. But no. No, he’s nowhere to be found now and here’s yet another little thing that’s been tweaked. And it’s impossible and it’s so big, the idea of it, that thinkin’ about it makes me feel like a worm stuck in the treads of a tire on an eighteen-wheeler. You know what I’m saying?”

I nodded, slowly. “Yes. Yes, Arnie, I do.”

“So what do we do? If this is really what’s goin’ on, what do we do?”

“I’m going to suggest ‘nothing.’ ”

He turned to me. “Because you’re afraid they’ll take Amy. Look, if we entertain the idea that these things are real and that this thing, this ‘Korrok’ is really tampering with the world, and I assume it’s not for the purpose of making it better, then surely there’s something we can—”

“Oh, there is, Arnie. I know there is. It’s called being willing to sacrifice everyone around me for the cause. And why not? All of the great men do it. The pyramids were built with tens of thousands of nobodies who were worked to death so that the big thing could be achieved. That’s the name of the game, that’s how you defeat the bad guys. Just be willing to spend your friends like pennies, that’s all. You asked me earlier if I was a sociopath. Well, you’d better hope I am because the world was built by sociopaths, men willing to send a million innocent boys into battle to be chopped to screaming giblets, all so a banner can be raised over another piece of land with houses and markets and roads soon after.”

I was talking faster and faster. I bit back my next sentence, made myself calm down. Got to focus. Freaking ADD.

I said, “That psychologist back in school, she gave me the PCL-R, that’s a test where they rate you from zero to forty based on personality traits of sociopaths. Glibness, inflated ego, violence, juvenile delinquency, all that serial killer shit. Anything above a score of thirty gets you a diagnosis of sociopathy. I got a twenty-nine. And the irony is that I had to steal the file from the cabinet to find out that score. Do you think that’s worth the extra point?”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m not following you.”

“Which would prove I’m a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people I love?”

Arnie didn’t want to get sucked into a debate on that subject and instead said, “Just hear me out. Say we just go public with it, with your story. My story, too.”

“Why, Arnie? What good is that gonna do?”

“You get other people to come forward, other people like us who sense what’s goin’ on. Strength in numbers. Hell, people believe in angels and UFOs and every other thing. They’ll listen. The bad guys can’t make us all disappear, can they? They got to have limits to what they can do. They got to.”

“Why?”

Arnie again threw out his hands, like an NBA player acting baffled by a referee’s call.

“This is all I got, Wong. I have no faith to speak of and no skill but what you see. The truth, the power of knowledge in the hands of the people, all that journalism school song and dance, that’s what I believe in. It’s all I believe in. I got nothin’ else. I got nothin’ else to fight with. But I know this, too. You took my calls for a reason. So that makes me think you had the same idea.”

I said, “It was Amy’s idea. Meeting you.”

Arnie asked, “She’s still in Utah?”

“Who?”

“Amy.”

“Just checking. Yeah, she’s still there with the lesbians. There’s been some incidents since she left. A big monstrous guy came after me and I killed him. Twice. Had to cut off his head. I found a big slug thing in my kitchen. We fought a monster made of meat. They take their shots. I didn’t want Amy to be a part of that, I wanted something better for her. I tried to sort of cut her off, get her to start a new life. Her own life. But she calls me. All the time. Ever since she left, she calls and calls. I wound up with a four-hundred-dollar phone bill one month. I told her about you wantin’ to meet me and she told me I should do it, that she had a feeling.”

“See? She knows. She knows, and you know, that we got to shine light on these cockroaches. The shadows hate the light, let’s shine
my
light on these bastards. Let people know what’s happening to their world.”

I said, “Just telling our stories, that won’t do shit. Testimony of two nutjobs, that’ll just get us lumped in with the Roswell guys, a minority of nerds pleading a ridiculous case, supported by e-mails from equally crazy and lonely people.”

“Then what do you want to—”

“We show them this.”

I pulled the silver canister from my pocket.

“This is real, Arnie. A physical piece of evidence. That’s what Amy thought, that if you could get this in the hands of somebody, a lab or something. I don’t know. And there’s gotta be more soy sauce out there. We already got two canisters. Or maybe it’ll come back in this bottle, the way it did before. Maybe the bottle manufactures it. But you got to know people, at a university, somebody with an electron microscope. Because I’m thinkin’ that whoever takes the first close look at the soy sauce is gonna have a brown stain down the bottom of his lab coat a second later.” I thought for a moment and said, “Just make sure they keep it cold.”

Arnie nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Make that the story. Hell, let ’em see the effects themselves, feed the shit to a lab rat and watch the fun begin, see the thing start levitating and speaking French.”

And just like that, I felt an intoxicating rush of hope. I tried to crush it, to push it down, to expose it to reality and kill it off. But I couldn’t. It was a sunrise, a kid’s sight of snowfall on a school morning. Hope. That all this can turn out okay, that somehow a tide this big and black can be turned back. Hope like a wildfire, thoughts of presents under a Christmas tree and a smell of cookies coming from a kitchen and a certain look in a girl’s eyes that lights you up inside. That beautiful border between nightmare and morning when you realize that all of the monsters menacing you have evaporated like smoke, leaving behind only the warm blankets and the pale sunlight of a Saturday dawn.

Amy Sullivan. Her name is Amy Sullivan. Her plane landed in Salt Lake City and she called me just two days ago and we talked for four hours and she had bought a new album and made me listen to the whole thing over the phone. Amy Sullivan. She’s still there. Amy—

I said, “And you’re willing to risk everything? Your life, your family? I mean, best-case scenario, your career as a journalist is gonna be over because from now on this is all you’re gonna be known for. And don’t forget that there may be people, real people, who don’t want this out. The people who ransacked my apartment, the people from the factory or the CIA or NSA or
Men in Black,
whoever it was—they don’t want this stuff known. Are you ready for all that, Arnie?”

“Shit. I been around, Wong. My first year out of journalism school I got knocked cold at a segregation protest. That was 1964. I wake up with my camera busted on the pavement and blood runnin’ down my shirt. This fat guy steps over me and says, ‘Stay down, nigger.’ I think back then I knew what I was doin’ this job for. But in the years since—”

Arnie saw the look on my face and stopped talking.

“What?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer.

“What? Wong?”

“They—they called you ‘nigger’? Even though you’re white?”

“Is that some kind of joke? What are you . . . hey! What are you laughing at?”

I couldn’t answer. This time it was because laughter was choking off my air. Arnie was infuriated.

“What? Asshole, answer me!”

I couldn’t. It was the kind of laughter that’s so hard it doesn’t make sound, a spasm in the lungs. And the brain. I was bent with it. Arnie stomped over and grabbed my shirt, pushing me against the wall.

“What?”

I choked out, “Describe yourself to me, Arnie. Physically, tell me what you look like.”

Arnie stepped back. Horror blew all expression off his face. He knew exactly what I was asking.

He muttered, “No, no . . . You’re fucking with me.”

“Come on, Arnie. I got places to be.”

“No . . .”

“Because to me you’re not black, Arnie. To me you’re a chubby white guy with a gray mustache. A big, fat necktie tied in a huge Windsor knot.”

Arnie’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in disgust. He threw me against the wall one last time, then backed away.

“My first thought when I saw you, Arnie, was that you looked just like I imagined you. I actually said that to myself. I should have known. And now I’ve wasted my whole day.”