Mortality Bridge (27 page)

Traffic was stopped all around the street. Drivers expressionless as if awaiting further orders. In the back seat of a white Impala two kids frozen in the midst of whacking each other as if posing for a portrait while their mother, hair wrapped in a floral print scarf and wearing enormous buglike Polaroid sunglasses, stared into the rearview and did not look away.

Nothing moved.

Niko looked at Van and had the insane thought that his brother had somehow done this. Somehow stopped and took all motion with him. Only a moment ago breathing and moving and thinking and now slumped here empty and inert and all the world outside him gone to silent stillness.

Niko found the doorhandle. Opened it. Couldn’t get out of the car because his seatbelt was still fastened. Unbuckled it and backed out of the car and did not look away from Van. As if he might suddenly grin at the terrific prank he’d pulled on his big brother the fuckedup junky. Good one huh bro? Because Van couldn’t possibly be dead. They’d only been going twenty miles an hour for Christ’s sake. Niko’d only sprained his wrist. Life could not possibly be that fragile.

Outside the car time was transfixed as if Niko had stepped into a photograph. Smoke hung suspended like dirty cotton in the midst of belching from a yellow Camaro stopped as it was pulling from the curb. Its jowly driver staring through blackframed glasses at motionless opposing traffic. A frozen guy in a Peruvian vest staring at a billboard advertising Levi’s. The ragdolls staring and staring on the crumpled white hood.

I’m hallucinating. You get thin and you get the shakes and you get cramps and chills and sweats and fever, and then you hallucinate. But that shouldn’t be happening yet. The accident must have brought it on. What else could it be?

He rubbed his thumbs across his fingers to test their solidity, their reality. Their sibilance distinct in the silent street.

He turned full circle beside the station wagon and still nothing moved. But it seemed he heard something. Some approaching sound.

Niko faced the intersection where a faint deep purr grew to a rhythmic gargle. Then it glided into view, long and dark and predatory, an old black sedan like a luxury car in a gangster movie. The only thing moving anywhere in sight. The big black vintage car turned right and came toward him and eased to a stop in the opposing lane beside the station wagon. The pale and uniformed chauffeur got out but left it running. He touched the glossy bill of his cap impersonally to Niko who could only stare as the driver opened the suicide door of the passenger compartment.

The man who got out was nattily attired like a movie producer trying to dress like an English rockstar. His hair in perfect disarray. He saw Niko standing confused and afraid there and he grinned as if he knew him. As if they were old friends long separated and finally reunited.

Petrified and sweating and dripping snot Niko stood with the station wagon between himself and this man. The station wagon in which his brother lay impossibly dead. The grinning man approached Niko holding a stapled sheaf of papers and a pearlescent fountain pen that gleamed in the Hollywood sun. With one hand he uncapped the pen to expose the gold nib and turned the pen in his fingers and slid the back end into the cap, all in one smooth motion without looking, like some kind of bureaucratic samurai.

Behind the man the chauffeur stared without expression at the driver’s window of the station wagon as he tugged a white silk kerchief from the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. Niko paid little attention to the natty man as he came around the car with a hand held out and grinning as if they had just consummated a used-car deal. He could only watch the chauffeur as he produced something from his jacket, something that glittered, and began walking toward Niko’s car.

The beaming stranger called Niko by his full and absurd name just as Niko saw that what the chauffeur held as he bent to open the driver’s side door of the station wagon was a small glass jar.

XVI.

FLOATING BRIDGE

NIKO WAKES UP wanting a drink. Before he opens his eyes, before he has time to think I’m alive, he has a sense of lifting a tumbler of brown liquor to his lips and drinking it down to feel the good sharp burning tunnel to his stomach and settle there as before a hearth to spread warmth throughout his limbs and ward off the—

Chill.

Niko sits up and gasps. He turns his hands in front of him as if he has never seen them before. He thinks clench and they clench. His skin burns. At first the pain is good. A reminder he’s alive. But then doubt creeps in. I have seen a world of pain down here and no one feeling it has been alive.

Well how do you know you’re alive, cowboy?

Niko tables the question. Right now there are less philosophical matters to attend to.

He is in a tiny room of ice. His shadow wavers on the curving orangelighted wall, cast by the small and cheery fire crackling before him. His black guitar case stands against the white wall like a cutout silhouette. His socks and hiking shoes are on his feet. Laces doublebowed.

As if waiting for his attention his feet begin to throb with frostbite. The soles burn as his scabbing cuts begin to thaw.

Niko touches the tender swelling on the back of his head where he got slugged. Did getting cracked upside the skull do something to his memory? How would he know if it did?

Something about the fire bothers him. The fact of it is puzzling enough. And it’s burning branches. When did he last see anything that might be used as kindling? The ice room is a little igloo six feet wide and maybe four feet high. There’s no hole to vent the smoke and provide fresh oxygen to feed the fire, or for Niko either. And without an airhole he should be choking on woodsmoke that doesn’t seem to be there. There should be water everywhere. It should have put the fire out. But the smokeless fire burns and no ice melts.

The fire’s heat is far from soothing. Niko has barely escaped freezing to death and the close warmth makes his skin feel sanded with an emery board. His cheek throbs where it’s cut and bruised. The eye the Aussie gouged continually waters.

But unquestionably the fire has saved his life. Who down here would build it and return his shoes and disappear? Not one of the damned. They are long past caring even for themselves.

One of the demons then? Why in or underneath the world would they do that? At best the demons seem amused by Niko. Most are perplexed by him and even a bit fearful. But hold on. Dexter/Sinister said there was a pool on whether Niko’d go the distance. One of them had bet in Niko’s favor. Who else might have? What might it cost you here to help out the underdog? Who would take that awful chance to win a bet?

For a moment he conceives a secret cabal, an organized resistance to the tyranny in Hell. The Sub-underground. He snorts. Yeah right. His voice is flat in this small space.

Who then?

Niko rubs his forehead. His headache’s back.

He remembers the vampiric waif who tried to drain the life from him near the foot of the Battlements. Something had streaked into view and knocked her away. Probably saved his life. Many times he’s caught motion from the corner of his eye and turned to look to find it gone. He remembers looking back across the icy reach to see a figure limned against the whiteness of the frozen plain, following him.

The fire’s heat should make him sweat but he’s too dehydrated. He sits back against a buttress of ice and taps the toes of his hiking boots together three times and says There’s no place like home.

He sits up straight. Maybe I wasn’t rescued at all. Maybe I’m inside a bubble frozen a thousand miles deep within the ice, sealed up with a fire to eat up all the air.

Suddenly the curving walls are very close. The ragged collar of his filthy shirt is choking. He needs air. Needs out. He turns toward the wall of ice to dig or pound his way out. An unfamiliar weight on the right side of his jacket makes him stop. He reaches into the pocket and his hand encounters the neck of a bottle. He pulls it out and stares at it sparking highlights from the fire. Full and sealed it calls out like a twentydollar whore who knows his name. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s.

NIKO’S GUITAR CASE is embedded in the wall. Niko works the case till it pops loose and leaves a guitarshaped hole looking out onto the windless luminous plain. He sticks his head out like a dog at a car window and sucks in breaths of frigid air, deep and cold into his lungs. The cold feels good despite his pain. He opens his eyes and looks around. His little ice cave is a bubble on the reach of ice.

The fire gutters in the draft that follows when he ducks back in. He pulls a brand out of the fire and holds it to the curvaceous opening. Immediately the ice begins to melt. So why hasn’t the whole igloo melted down?

He should have learned to stop asking these questions.

Niko collects the runoff in his palm and sniffs and tastes it before allowing himself to drink. Sure he’s dehydrated but this ice is a medium in which the bodies of the naked damned are trapped. It is impossible not to picture their encased forms as he slakes his thirst. Every hour it seems he learns something about the places true desperation can take him.

Arrhythmic hissing startles him. At first he thinks a creature is in the igloo with him, some bristling reptilian thing calling out a warning. But the fire’s deepened crackle and sudden steam tell him that the igloo’s finally melting. Got to move before the fire drowns. He holds up the whiskey bottle and only hesitates a moment before cracking the seal. He pulls three branches from the fire and sloshes whiskey on the end of each.

A small glass tube spills from the liquor bottle and clatters onto the ice. Rolled up inside the glass tube is a piece of paper. A message in a bottle.

The fire steams and crackles with dripping water. The igloo is getting humid. A tiny rain patters him now, and won’t being wet be fun when he steps back outside.

Niko scoops up the glass tube. The moment he touches it he wants a drink the way a drowning man wants air. His very tissues cry out for alcohol. Immersed in the smell of whiskey Niko drops the glass tube into his jacket pocket and pokes one of the doused branches into the dying fire. Sputter spark catch. He holds the brand away from himself and sets the whiskey bottle down to thrust the remaining doused branches through the belt of his jeans like toy swords.

He kneels beside the liquor bottle to put the cap back on and hesitates as he looks down at the open neck. Just a little nip, buddy pal. To warm your insides when you’re on the ice again. What harm could it possibly cause by now? What, you worried about your health? You’ve already started smoking again. Guess you know you ain’t gonna die from cancer huh? You won’t have time for cancer. So come on. Knock one back. Man if anyone in history ever deserved a drink it’s you. Jesus H. Himself yanked a cork or two when he knew they were gonna turn him into God’s own decoration.

Niko screws the cap back on and wipes his trembling hand against his pants. Attaboy. Now look away from it. Come on. Leave it.

He grabs his guitar case and kicks the hole in the wall a little wider. He bends to crawl outside but halfway out he stops and yells Shit and shoves the hardcase out ahead of him and backs into the slagging igloo and picks up the bottle. Fuel. I’ll need fuel. The air is sauna thick as damping fire steams. Niko puts the fifth in a coat pocket. Its weight an anchor as he hurries from his shelter’s rain.

TRUDGING ON THE frozen plain and holding high a makeshift torch a few hours later Niko feels the temperature begin to rise. An oddly warm wind gusts. Niko lowers the guttering torch and draws a deep breath. Rot decay corruption. He glances behind him. No one here but us chickens. Somewhere back there his igloo has melted to a puddle and frozen again.

Niko sets the guitar case on the milky ice and pulls his last branch from his belt with stonestiff fingers. He transfers the flame from the dying brand to the new one like a lost Olympian and shields it with his body against the mild breeze until the new branch catches. It brightens right away. Well, how bout that. The torch is passed.

Niko continually trades torch and guitar so that his hands can recover some mobility and feeling. At one point the shadow of his torch wielding hand falls across a face caught screaming in the ice and Niko’s shadowfingers form a figure. He says Bunny and makes it hop.

Niko’s feeling pretty danged good. He was just breathing in a room full of whiskey vapor and he’s buzzed for the first time in a quarter century. Thanks to his old anesthesiologist pal Dr. Daniel his scrapes and cuts and bruises are now dull background throbs. If he makes it off the ice his wounds will probably sing an aria as his body warms again. Meantime thankee Dr Dee.

The abortive toast he’d shared with Phil to commemorate the Deal twentysomething years ago had been Niko’s last taste of alcohol. Drinking champagne beside a wreck that held the body of his brother and convinced he was hallucinating. The whole episode brought on by head trauma after the accident, with a dash of withdrawal symptoms thrown in for good measure. The Mouton Cadet had barely cleared his palate before he was on his knees in the middle of that preternaturally quiet Hollywood street and retching while above him Phil-for-short had grinned and grinned. “If you think that’s bad, wait’ll next time you try shooting up. Welcome to sobriety, Niko-holic.”

From that moment on the very smell of alcohol made Niko queasy. Drinking it was out of the question. Any other drug was inconceivable.

But now he wants to suck on that old JD bottle like a baby at its momma’s tit. He has it in his power right this very second to fall off the wagon hard enough to get road rash and it sounds like a terrific idea.

I should throw the fucker out on the ice right now. But I might need the alcohol for fuel. Besides it’s a test.

A test, buddy pal? Like the smoking test you failed with flying colors in the cab and on the Battlements? You know you’re digging yourself a hole that leads straight down to china white.

He holds high the burning torch and continues his determined march across the frozen plain, Prometheus in rags.