Mortality Bridge (29 page)

Now among the voices crying out his name is that of Erin Farrell, a whiskeyvoiced singer he had dated once and slept with twice and never called again though he had later worked with her on several gigs. He hears her voice but does not see her as he jerks his leg away from Mrs. Thompson, his firstgrade teacher, plump woman with a broken blood vessel worming one eye that he had stared at whenever she came close. She had seemed the very picture of an upright moral Godfearing woman, what was she doing here? Niko’s leg as it jerks from her hand kicks the jaw of Stevie Dane, his old drug buddy and high school bandmate in The Spanish Flies. Stevie Dane who rode a needle right into the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Niko calls out to them all. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” But his cries are lost within the manythroated imprecation of his name.

Keep moving. You can do that can’t you? Can you do that? What are you if you can?

Which of course is why they’re doing this to him.

Niko sidesteps Gary Calvin Watson, who could twohand tap Two-Part Invention in D Minor on his Rickenbacker bass. Watson had got sick of the business and bought a ranch in Wyoming and got gored to death by one of his own bulls if you can believe that. Niko stumbles past Watson and brings his foot down on some half-remembered interviewer’s shoulder. Rearing from the awful seething now is Bobby Harris, more Jem’s friend than his but Niko had always respected and admired him. Bobby died of AIDS ten years ago. He’d been a good man, what was he doing here, Bobby was a good man.

Bobby’s knocked down by a woman Niko would have known no matter how much older she became because she has the reddest hair he’s ever seen. “Betty,” Niko calls. “Cousin Betty.” Her name unuttered for how long now. Betty’s batted aside and buried in the undertow of crawling damned. He had lost his virginity to Betty Towers, Cousin Betty because they were distantly related and they’d taken secret pleasure in the forbidden nature of that fact. He still wondered about her sometimes. Where she was, how she was, who she was now. And now he knows. She’s dead, she’s damned, she’s doomed to unending persecution here, used as a pawn to be used by him.

Niko screams a wordless howl. This is more than he can bear. More than can be borne. He risks a backward glance and sees he’s barely come a hundred yards. The bridge must be a quartermile long.

Harden your heart Niko. They’re dead and damned and it doesn’t matter any more. But Geryon’s words keep cycling in his anguished mind. Your armor is the very weapon they will use against you.

As Niko heaves and tears his way along the population of his life his scream becomes a wordless curse against the forces that have led him here to walk across the living corpses of those he has known. All to save one of their number venerated by his heart. He sobs his rage against whatever mind could send good people into Hell and punish them forever for the arbitrary sins of an eyeblink mortal life, a mind that could use their own humiliation just to show one man what travesty and selfish desperation he’ll commit.

Thrust against him now is a baldheaded girl whose name he can’t remember. She was young, twelve or thirteen, the Make A Wish Foundation had forwarded to his management a letter she had written. She was dying of leukemia and wanted to hear him play. He’d sat beside her hospital bed surrounded by newscameras and hospital staff, an acoustic guitar on his lap. Chemotherapy had left her bald and she had seemed a homesick fallen angel propped by pillows there. He’d asked her what she wanted to hear and she’d said she didn’t really know, whatever he wanted to play was great. Her mother and father were there and she had glanced at the cameras and reporters and at Niko, nervous and starstruck, and Niko had asked everyone but her parents to leave and nearly pushed the media from the room, and then he’d sat and played for her and her alone. As if sound waves from vibrating strings could save her. As if whatever tore its way from Niko’s core could enter her and make her anything but worse. Unbelievably she had asked him if he knew “Aint Misbehavin” and he’d laughed and picked his way through it like a beginner, remembering it really but asking her to hum the melody for him anyway so that he could pick it out and gradually perform a duet with the poor sad dying pale bruised and hollow-eyed gaunt girl tubefed and smiling there on the whitesheeted bed. He tried to play upbeat but he was saddened she was going to die, sad and angry that she would never make love, never be a mother, never toast a happy couple, wear a prom corsage, hold hands in a movie theater, pay her own electric bill, fret over what to name her baby. Never grow up.

And here she is still twelve or thirteen, dead these many years and damned for reasons he and probably she doesn’t know and doubtless would not understand, a naked thin baldheaded girl who clutches at his feet as if he is some bogus prophet come to trample his deluded flock and give them nothing but his reluctant and unhealing touch.

She calls out Mr. Niko. Mr. Niko.

Her name, what was her name? You don’t remember do you asshole? You played her some songs and joked in a hospital room and all it cost you was a day and a plane ticket, and when you left you were sad but still given some cold comfort that at least you were able to fulfill her wish and make her happy for some little while. And then she died and you forgot her.

Whatever flimsy truce of old he forged with his own inner demon shatters at the touch of her small hand upon his ankle. The old ebb tide of self destruction washes through him with an awful and familiar surge. I won’t do this. I can’t do this. I will not partake in their humiliation. Will not degrade these people for your own amusement. You win. Fuck you, you win. I want no victory if the cost is this. I’m done. I surrender.

Niko stops his forward struggle. Hands claw at him. Cover him. The bald girl reaches up toward his face and his hand intercepts hers. Their fingers touch entwine and clench. She says Mr. Niko. Niko weeps but doesn’t know it. He feels a tug on the guitar case long clutched in his hand and lets it go. Feels a tugging on his foundering soul and lets it go as well and is dragged down.

THE COLD TOUCH of the dead swarms all about him. Jem I’m sorry. I tried, I tried my best. It wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t good enough. Will it hurt when they tear into me. Will I drown freezing in the water below. Will there be a sleep and a forgetting. And after I am husked and my flayed soul is thrown out like a rind into this awful universe of garbage will I see you ever Jem. And will you forgive me if you do. A part of me hopes you don’t. I carry that hell with me as I live and breathe.

Niko’s body turns and turns. His hair is pulled as he is passed among them. He swims amid the cacophony of his name. Will they crush him, will they tear him apart like mad Bacchantes? Will he drown beneath the press of cold and naked bodies? What are they waiting for?

He opens his eyes and there is only blackness. He stares upward at the cavern ceiling. All beneath him is a jostle.

They’re carrying him. He is borne aloft atop a coruscating sea of reaching hands. Passing him overhead like a concert stagediver. Delivering him across the bridge of themselves.

For a panicked moment Niko thinks they mean to bring him to the gaping maw of some mad chewing thing that will devour him and so commit him here forever. But look at their faces. Look in their eyes. Even in the midst of such despair there is a kindled spark of gleeful rebellion, possibly the first joy or defiance they have felt or shown beyond the closure of their mortal lives.

Turning now in their collective grip he faces downward. A man he doesn’t recognize, with a split brow and a missing eye, smiles piratic up at Niko as his hands raise up to take their share of Niko’s weight. My God, there below him now is Andy Brand, his favorite session drummer, dead in a motorcycle accident how long ago now. Andy holds his hands up with the rest of them and gives Niko a look that is only reassuring and somehow conspiratorial. And now he sees, it can’t be, it’s Ave, Avery Kramer, his old manager, bald and fat and wearing the shiteating grin Niko always pictures when he thinks of him, the grin that implied he was getting away with something because he usually was. Too far away to hold him up but reaching for him anyway. Avery, Niko shouts. Avery. He forces a hand through the forest of upthrust arms and reaches out to Avery. Their fingers touch and their hands clasp. A brief squeeze and then the current carries him away.

Joy floods Niko’s heart. It hurts, it fills him with a trembling exultation. It makes him want to die. He lives within its fleeting heat like a moth dived headlong into consummating flame. Joy.

How his friends have managed this rebellion Niko doesn’t know. But manage it they have, for this brief moment in their endless suffering, and they carry Niko across a patchwork history of his peopled life. Can he really have known so many who have died? In fleeting glimpses and brief touches he encounters glad remembrances and sorrows, and passed along and past.

Now he sees the far shore nearing, sees his guitar case handed off across to it like a bucket in a fire brigade. Niko himself is being delivered like a hometown hero.

A figure stands upon the farther shore. Niko strains for a second sight of it as he is jostled and bumped and turned about, and in his narrowed focus misses many calling figures from the stages of his life. His brief joy now stained by sudden doubt. It had looked like. It couldn’t have been. They wouldn’t.

His buoyed spirits sink now in a morass of premonitory fear. Of course they would. Of course they have. Of course they saved the best for last.

Standing on the far shore just beyond the bridge, past Eddie the ice cream truck man who used to give him credit and Jake the club owner who had paid off Niko’s gigs in drugs, there with hands held out to welcome him, with the face so like his own, the face that Niko last saw sightless and unmoving against a steering wheel in a crumpled wreck.

Van.

XVII.

IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

NIKO STILLS HIS hands upon the strings. The only music now the mindless babble of the river Lethe. He looks down at the still guitar and wonders What did I just play?

He feels a forlorn sadness at his own return. As though he has not regained but instead has lost something. But what he’s lost he doesn’t know. He knows it by its absence. By the shape it leaves behind.

Patient in his armor the Achaian watches. Waiting as he comes back to himself. Niko thinks he likely has not waited long.

Niko lays the Dobro gently in its case. As if tucking in a sleeping child. Softly shuts the lid and shuts the latches slowly as if to keep from waking the encoffined steel.

“You are changed,” says the Achaian.

“I am diminished.” Niko regards the case upon the sand before him. Then nods and picks it up and turns to face the stoic soldier. “Akileo, I am sorry to see you in this terrible place.”

“I am sorrier to be in it. So you remember now.”

“I remember. I would thank you but this was no gift.”

The barest nod of helmeted head. “Not to be born is best. Failing that, then not to remember. But now you do and you will try to resume your mission, and so I must carry out my own.”

Niko wipes a palm against a thigh of his damp jeans. “I guess there’s no talking you out of this.”

“I have few words. Already we have talked too long.” Niko nods. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Your music is stirring, Orfeo. And I am the worse for its reminder of my living days.” A smile ghosts the even line of the Achaian’s mouth. “But do not flatter yourself.”

“All right.” Niko feels adrenalin surge at the certainty of the coming fight and tries to breathe evenly and keep himself relaxed. “Anything else I should know?”

The spear levels at his throat. “Only that you are mortal.”

“I know it with every breath. But you?”

The Achaian seems amused. “Nothing painful is inflicted here in vain. Stay your trepidation and tend your own house, winesack.”

“Okeydoke,” says Niko. And swings the hardcase at the spear. It slaps the bronze head. The Greek has anticipated this and follows the deflection to strike with the spear’s unbladed end. Niko is no longer there. He’s behind the soldier’s right shoulderblade, hardcase dropped and his hands on the soldier’s hands, and he mirrors their motion and continues it and exaggerates it to redirect the parabola of the strike until the arc intersects the sand. The soldier’s body follows the spear’s arc and lands hard on its back. Niko continues the motion as if enacting some wellpracticed choreography. They might be dancing. In fact they are.

Now Niko holds the spear. Someone watching would have seen the soldier seem to hand it to him. Beside them lies the guitar case.

The soldier tries to twist away and Niko steps upon the bronze breastplate. Strong hands grip his calf and Niko pushes down to gain time and brings the spearpoint to the soldier’s throat.

The Achaian grows still. Sweat wells Niko’s brow and drips to patter bronze.

“So there is more to you than music.”

“There’s more to anyone than the stories people tell.”

“Yes. Yes I know.”

Niko takes a deep breath. “So I guess it’s not just your heel any more that’s, you know—”

The doomed man snorts. “Such a thing if ever true was mortal as was I. No more.”

“And Hektor’s armor?”

“No longer his nor mine.” Bronze plates shift: the Achaian shrugs. “This was forged for me from chamberpots behind the walls of Dis. It keeps me weighted at the bottom of a lake of burning piss.” The strong chin juts. “Palaver has never been my talent and I weary of it now. Do what you must do my ancient. Do not falter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We are ever victims of our duty and our selves. A favor?”

“If I can.”

“Throw my corpse into the Lethe. Do not leave me here. The water is all that can sunder me from the misery of my existence before I am found and reawakened to resume my eternity of pain.”

And with that Niko understands the source of his deep sadness at his own resumption. “I will, Akileo.”