Mortality Bridge (25 page)

NIKO COUGHS OUT heated air. His numb hands cup the cigarillo to protect it from the biting wind. The warm smoke hurts his frigid lungs. He’d swear he feels them thawing as he drags in deep. Maybe it’s purely psychological. Who gives a shit as long as it keeps him going. Go ahead, tell me how bad smoking is for me.

He thinks about the cabbie ferrying him through the city streets and below the world, her poise amid calamity. The cigarillos were her gift to him. Could she have known I wonder?

An enormous shadow moves upon the ice. Niko sees nothing in the sky and not enough light to cast such a shadow. He watches it moving and realizes the shadow is beneath the ice, a cruising whale-sized figure swimming somehow through the frozen medium. The souls embedded here are stopped midthrash, agonized faces almost without exception angled skyward.

The black shape slides across the pale ice under Niko’s ragclad feet. He feels caught in the dark beam of some kind of antispotlight. He fights an urge to run. Where he’d run to is moot. He can barely keep up this dragging pegleg pace as it is. But the icewhale passes underneath him, and where it passes many of the frozen damned are gone and in their place there floats a bloody silhouette marking where they were, contorted human stencils painted red.

Niko turns to watch the silent shadow continue along the ice into the distance. Behind the ochre band of the Lower Plain the black line of the Ledge provides a false horizon.

The icewhale momentarily blots out a dark shape standing upright against the pale fluorescence of the frozen lake. Niko frowns. Something’s following him across the ice.

NIKO HAS LONG since stopped trembling from the cold. He peers ahead and only sees an endless reach of ice mottled with frozen bodies. Maybe he should try to dig himself a hole. Or just curl up on the ice. Just to give himself some warmth and rest. Just for a little while.

But he keeps walking. Jemma’s out there somewhere, a glowing feather in a glass jar. So many knights forgot their way and lost their spirit in the lifelong search for their elusive grail.

Against his throat his locket burns.

Stone wings flap out in the alien dark.

Somewhere on a riddled plain a patient hand scrapes free beneath a granite block.

Somewhere on the Upper Plain a metal hammer rings against a chisel on a marble eye and a mad dog anchored to an ancient gate jerks in its manifold sleep.

Somewhere drinking light along its black contours a parked car pings beneath its hood as its huge engine cools.

In deserted tunnels beneath a city of angels a Checker Cab’s headlights probe ahead like searchlights unshrouding the ocean floor.

Somewhere out there in the turning world lost people who will meet are strangers yet. Somewhere crowded strangers meet. Somewhere consequential people fall in love. A woman dies and maroons the man who loves her on the crowded globe alone. Somewhere in history strong hands clasp and hold. Somewhere myth demands a terrible release. A penitent soul will not let go. Plucked guitar strings conjure tears. Vapor ghosts from liquid bubbling on a heated spoon. A lyre chord resounds while riots burn a city down. Siren song a singalong for old dogs’ howls. In rank apartments needles carve cuneiform on blueveined roadmap flesh, a plunger pushed to summon dreams in sepia. Somewhere cold along the Mission District a cancer riddled ragman stops and grabs his chest with sudden vivid memory, some lost love’s perfume. His callused fingers numbed by blues he played for her for thirty years in crappy underpaying bars where groping drinking paying people talked above his naked pain. Somewhere east of downtown there’s a blind man and his halfblind dog waiting for a train that never comes. In Hollywood dark deals are clinched inside a restaurant closed for many years that caters to a private clientele. In a bar where gazes never meet a jukebox gulps a coin and blank eyes become ghosted by a generation’s past as everyone and no one hears a steel guitar begin to sob. In a drawer in a desk in a secret room lie sixteen yellowed stapled pages and a signature in blood.

Alone in a house on the continent’s edge a brokenhearted father sobs and sinks beneath the burden of his grief.

In a silent house in the Hollywood Hills a body on a bed grows cool.

Somewhere on a windswept frozen plain a resolute musician falls.

XV.

COME ON IN MY KITCHEN

NIKO BLINKED AT his brother in the late morning sunshine. Van didn’t say a thing, not hello, not even surprise, but his expression clearly said Jesus Niko you look like hell. Niko silently opened the door wider and turned his back on his brother and drew his ratty bathrobe tighter as he went back into the apartment.

Van followed him inside and stood dumbfounded and turning about in the still and musty living room. Knotted bedsheets curtained the windows to perpetual twilight. A faded Navajo blanket rumpled at the foot of the threadbare couch. On the other end two stained bedpillows without cases. On the coffee table within easy reach lay empty Nehi bottles, chip bags, In-N-Out sacks, paper plates, tv dinner trays, a pizza box. Cigarette butts and crumpled wrappers everywhere. The coffee table scarred around the edge closest to the couch where butts had been left burning. The possibly tan shag carpet matted and sprinkled with detritus. Cottage cheese ceiling waterstained and earthquake cracked. The silent old tv tuned to General Hospital and bathing the room in some awful light. An unplugged lamp sideways on the stand beside it, next to a kilnstretched Pepsi bottle.

From where he stood Van could see into the kitchen where foodcaked dishes swam in gray water. The toilet droned in the bathroom, needing only a jiggle to shut it up.

Niko flopped onto the couch and began searching for his cigarettes as he stared at the mimetic soap opera.

Van wrinkled his nose and breathed out and said Jesus. “Wrong apartment. He’s a couple doors down. Tell him you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.” He snorted.

“Don’t you have a bed?”

“Yeah. It’s in the bedroom.” Niko found his Kools under the pizza box and tamped the pack. “You want something to eat?”

“This may be the first time I’ve been glad I ate on the plane.” Niko lit a smoke. “Haw haw, that’s a good one bro.”

“Where’s your girlfriend? What’s her name?”

Niko smiled a private sleepy smile. “Rumor has it she’s just hunkydory.” He looked down at himself exposed by the bathrobe when he flopped onto the couch but didn’t bother adjusting anything.

Van looked at the floor and sighed. He left the room and a moment later came hollow metallic jiggling. In the living room again he said, “Your bathroom is disgusting.”

Niko tapped ash into the pizza box. “I piss in it, man, I don’t eat off the floor.”

Van glanced at a poster of a mouse giving the finger to a diving eagle, THE LAST GREAT ACT OF DEFIANCE.

The sobbing toilet quieted.

Van found the Trimline phone under a stack of unread newspapers. He clicked it several times but got no dial tone. “You disconnected your phone?”

“Ma Bell did it for me.”

“Niko.” Van stood over Niko now. “Dad’s been trying to get hold of you for three weeks.”

“You make a better wall than window, Van.”

“What?”

Niko made a brushing gesture for Van to get out of the way of the tv. Van stared at him a moment longer and then turned around and banged the tv off. “Look, you want to crawl into a bottle and sit there in your own crap, that’s your business. You’re thirtysix hundred miles away from us and we all know what a grownup you are now.”

“You came all the way to Califor-ny-ay just to tell me I can do what I want with my life? That’s a real shot in the arm, bud.” He laughed. “Speaking of which.” He glanced around the coffee table and then started to get up.

“Niko, Mom’s sick.”

Without replying Niko went into the kitchen and opened Jemma’s Cookie Monster cookie jar.

Van followed him. “Did you hear me? I said Mom’s—”

“I heard you.” He reached into the cookie jar and pulled out a baggie.

“I didn’t come out here because she’s got the flu, Niko. Dad thinks it’d be good for her if you—” Van stared as Niko removed his rig from the baggie. Teaspoon and syringe and cottonballs and a tiny cellophane packet of china white. Cut with baby laxative but hey. Beggars can’t be choosers. Also a length of surgical tubing but Niko no longer bothered with it.

“What are you doing?”

“Making breakfast.” Niko measured a fingernail sized pinch of whitish powder into the spoon and added water from the dripping tap. He grabbed a matchbox from the foodcaked O’Keefe & Merritt stove. “Most important meal of the day you know.” He scraped a match alight and held the flame beneath the spoon and watched the powder liquefy and quickly bubble. “All your recommended daily vitamins and minerals.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Van’s tone was curiously empty. “Well I’ll tell you, brother mine.” Niko stirred the spoon with the hypodermic needle and pressed a cottonball into the liquid. He pushed the needle into the cottonball and slowly drew the plunger. “I’m cooking my heroin because snorting it just don’t float the boat no more.” He held the filled syringe up to the light and turned it to look for cotton filaments. Instead of pulling up the sleeve of his robe he unbelted it and dropped it just to piss Van off even more. Sickly thin and bareass naked in the filthy kitchen he held the syringe away from himself and glanced at the crook of his elbow. Three square meals a day for the last six months had not collapsed his veins and Niko took a certain pride that he still shot in the ditch. Not between his fingers or his toes and not under his tongue or behind his balls or in his neck or stomach like some fuckedup junky. Sure these regular meals had gotten steadily larger but hey, that’s what appetites are for. An eighth a day, big woop. A real junky’d call that a fucking tease. And hell, look at this arm. Pinpricks sure, but nothing like some of the road atlases he’s seen. His last abscess was a fading purplish memory. Good healthy veins. The better to—

That was when Van hit him. Van was taller than Niko but much lighter and he’d never been much of a fighter. The blow was more haymaker slap than punch but Niko wasn’t expecting it and the hypo sailed out of his hand and onto the baggie which promptly turned over and emptied every last expensive necessary grain of china white into the filmy gray dishwater.

Niko gaped. For a second he seriously wondered if he could shoot up the dishwater.

Van looked as surprised as Niko, as if he had just been operated by remote control.

“You asshole.” Niko made to go around Van but Van was ahead of him and rounded the counter and saw the syringe on the carpet and stomped it. Then he whirled around with his fists up but Niko only stared in total disbelief at the ruined syringe and the wet stain on the shag carpet like some backwoods king whose tiny kingdom has just vanished out from under him.

“You dick. What the fuck do I do now?”

“I guess you’ll have to do without like the rest of us.”

Niko lunged. He got Van by the collar and pushed him back into the kitchen and bent him back over the counter and put his face inches from his brother’s. “I got a special bulletin for you, Father Vangelis.” Flecking his brother’s face with spittle. “That wasn’t yours. Who told you you could show up here uninvited and fuck with my shit?”

Van tried to push back but Niko pushed him first and then turned away. “Fuck. I got no dough for more smack and my connection might as well be in Antfuckingarctica till tomorrow. Jesus in a fucking sandbox, man.” Suddenly he turned toward Van with narrowed eyes. “You came here with money didn’t you? Sure you did. Our father who art in Florida wouldn’t send his baby boy out west without a little pin money.”

“I’m not going to give you money to buy drugs.”

Niko clasped his hands and looked piously skyward. “And somewhere an angel gets its wings.”

Van watched perplexed as Niko stomped out of the kitchen and came back with a wrinkled Cheech Wizard shirt and a wrinkled pair of pants drawn from a laundry pile.

“Look Niko, whatever we need to do I’m sure we can both—”

Niko tossed a set of keys and Van caught them. “You broke it,” said Niko, pulling on the pants he’d grown too thin for. “You can help fix it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Trolling.” Niko slid his feet into a pair of rubber thongs.

THE INTERIOR OF Niko’s white Ford wagon looked a lot like the inside of Niko’s apartment. A for sale sign taped to one window, useless because the phone number on it was disconnected now. On the rear windshield some wag had written Test Dirt—Do Not Remove! The engine’s idle sounded like an offbalance washing machine on spincycle. Niko slumped in the passenger seat and yawned at the roof. He sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand as Van backed out of the driveway and onto Las Palmas.

Niko gave Van directions to a payphone on Highland and scrounged up change from the seat cushions. He was out of the car before it stopped moving. Van watched him run into the booth and slam the door and drop the change and dial and light up a Kool and try to pace the eighteen inch length of the booth. Niko’s face brightened when someone answered. He got out maybe five words and then frowned. He said hello a few times and then batted the receiver into the phone and left it hanging. He got back in the car and slammed the door and sat there scowling at a torn flyer for some band at Gazzarri’s.

“Niko—”

“Shut up man, I’m trying to think.” His face was covered in sweat. “I’m not going to help you get any more of that shit.”

Niko looked at Van as if he’d told a bad joke. A thin clear trickle of snot ran onto his upper lip.

“I mean it. I won’t have anything to do with it.”

Niko pursed his lips. Finally he nodded. He sniffed loudly and held out his hand. “Okay. Give me the keys.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You’re gonna take a cab back to the airport and tell Mom and Dad whatever the hell you want. If I can’t get hold of my guy I’m gonna drive to Watts.”

Van pulled the keys out of the ignition and held onto them. “Are you crazy?”