Mortality Bridge (48 page)

AT 8:23 P.M. on no special Friday night in late summer a battered Checker Cab ferrying its battleweary passengers emerged into the open air and crowded light of the Blue Line platform at Flower and Seventh Streets beside the purple lighted Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, home to ten million working sweating fucking eating driving laughing sleeping struggling human beings in homes slapped onto hillsides or gridded into the Valley or cobbled together from duct taped cardboard boxes, and not a soul among them saw the tired yellow metal creature lumber from its subterranean lair, saw it swerve and bump off rails and onto smooth paved road, watched it glide to a stop, observed the brakelights flash, heard the gargle of its idle as the passenger door opened, witnessed the terribly thin man sore abused and homeless looking in his filthy ragged clothes who cautiously backed out of the phlegmatic beast like some old arthritic. Watched him straighten slowly, one hand going to his back as if it pained him while the other held some kind of moonshine jar that could hardly be seen to be glowing in the everpresent city light.

No one to see him stand there facing westward for a while. Toward the land’s end and the everdrowning sun beyond. No one apart from those who traveled with him saw him draw a ragged breath and clench his fists and nod and slowly turn

turn and look back

look back at the way he came

 
and saw him break the cycle of tyrannic myth.

Whatever else might happen Niko had escaped the bonds of his conscripted fate. The future that befell him was to be his own.

On that unusually deserted street he stood a moment as if something belonging to him had fallen out the window of the cab and he was trying to remember what it was, let alone glimpse it back there on the road. No beggar, no broker, no hardhanded worker saw him raise the fractured jar, for all the world a pauper king proposing a toast, or saw his free hand rise above it with one long middle finger pointing toward the bottomlit and heavy sky.

THE UNIVERSE ACKNOWLEDGES neither gesture and after a moment Niko lowers the jar and turns back to the chugging cab. “Thanks for stopping. I guess—”

In the back seat Nikodemus’ mouth is open and his one good eye stares fixedly beyond the metal roof, beyond the roofless night.

The cabbie sees this and hurries from the cab and opens the back door to lean over Nikodemus. She pries open a dark leather lid to check his lone pupil, uselessly because his eye is such dark brown.

Niko wants to check for pulse but ends up feeling stupid with one limp tendril in his hand. Instead he sets his ear against the demon’s chest just as the cabbie brings her cheek near Nikodemus’ mouth, and Niko and the cabbie bump heads.

The cabbie says Owee.

“I think his heart stopped,” Niko says.

She points her cigarillo at the Blue Line tunnel mouth. “Probably when we drove out.” She backs out of the cab and straightens. “You know CPR?”

“Yeah.”

“You work on him. I’ll be right back.”

Niko sets the mason jar on the curb and climbs on top of Nikodemus and tilts back the huge and battered head to clear the airway. “You gonna call nine one one?”

“Not yet.” She goes to the front of the cab and pulls the hood latch.

Niko grimaces as he swabs the demon’s airpassage with a finger and then pinches the nostrils shut. He takes a deep breath and only hesitates a second before he puts his lips to his demon’s lips. The jellyfish of Nikodemus’ ruined eye is warm and wet against his cheek. Niko blows. It’s like trying to inflate a hotwater bottle. He blows harder and Nikodemus’ burly chest rises. Niko lifts his mouth and the chest deflates and foul breath washes over him. Well his own breath can’t be much better. He bends again to fill his demon’s lungs. Two breaths and thirty chest compressions. Assuming the same rules apply to refugee demons in cardiac arrest in the back of taxicabs.

The cabbie goes to the back and opens the trunk.

Niko checks again for pulse and respiration. Nothing. He scoots back and sets one palm atop the other on the demon’s sternum and leans down into it. I swear someday I’ll laugh at this. One and two and three and four. Nikodemus’ body moves but Niko can’t be sure it isn’t just a reaction to the compression.

The cabbie pulls a set of heavyduty starter cables from the trunk. Twentyeight twentynine thirty. Niko pushes stiffened fingers against the turtleskin neck. Nope. He bends to the slack face again and exhales hard. It’s like playing a tuba. Nikodemus’ unwilled lungs push corpse breath into the reclaiming world. The graveyard sigh fills Niko’s nostrils. O I cannot take this, it’s too much like it was with Van. I am haunted, I am haunted. He slaps a blood-dried cheek. “Come on, buddy pal. Come on, goddammit. Come back.” Niko moves to compress his demon’s chest again. One and two and three and four.

The cabbie ducks her head in. “Nothing?”

Niko shakes his head. He’s covered in sweat.

“Okay. Help me drag him out.”

Niko doesn’t waste time asking what she has in mind but instead backs out and helps the cabbie pull the heavy body from the cab. At the gate when they had dragged the demon through the wreckage to the waiting cab he’d wondered if Nikodemus was dead. Now there is no doubt. What the difference is he couldn’t say. But he feels it and he knows the cabbie feels it too. A certain bonelessness. A stillness different from sleep or mere unconsciousness. Dead weight.

“What are we gonna do?” says Niko.

The cabbie goes to the front of the cab and picks up a set of starter cables. “We’re gonna jumpstart him.”

“Are you out of your fucking—no, wait, never mind. Good idea.” Niko steps away and the cabbie clamps the black cable to Nikodemus’ left chest and then touches the red cable to his right chest. Bluewhite flash, electric sputter, flying sparks, smell of ozone and burned flesh. The galvanized body spasms. A tendril writhes like a detached lizard tail and quickly grows still. A puff of smoke rises from Nikodemus’ chest.

“Christ.” Niko glances at the sky expecting rolling thunder and quaking ground. He leans forward and feels for pulse and respiration and shakes his head.

A gray Mercedes with darktinted windows eases into the nearby intersection and stops with an abrupt bark. Powerlocks clack down and the sedan speeds away.

Again the cabbie touches Nikodemus with the red cable. Sputter spark smoke. Nikodemus jackknifes as if gutpunched and goes rigid and then goes slowly limp again as if deflating. The smell of seared flesh would be nauseating had Niko not become accustomed to such things. Niko sets an ear against the broad sternum. Still nothing.

The cabbie frowns and holds her car keys out to Niko. “Rev the engine when I tell you to.”

Niko limps to the cab and practically falls behind the wheel. The cabbie ducks beneath the hood and moves the red clamp from the positive terminal to the starter coil and then says Okay and backs quickly away.

The engine starts and idles knocking. Flash sputter spark and twenty thousand volts rush lightspeed into Nikodemus.

The cabbie yells Yes and Niko hears a long asthmatic wheeze of firstdrawn mortal breath and then a bellow that can best be called demonic. Then a thud of thrashing tendril denting quarterpanel.

Niko scurries from the cab to see the demon very much alive and on his feet and squared off with his snaking tendrils raised against the cabbie who holds up the starter cable clamps like a horror movie hero brandishing a crucifix against a vampire.

They both turn at Niko’s voice. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he tells his demon.

THE CABBIE DRIVES down Wilshire Boulevard. Swerving through traffic caught by surprise at the signals’ sudden change. “Sorry to take surface streets,” she shouts into the wind buffeting through the mostly empty windshield frame. “The Hollywood Freeway’s still a nightmare.”

“A nightmare.” Niko laughs. He hears the edge of hysteria in it but he can’t help himself. A nightmare.

People stare at the cab as it hurries along. Beat to hell, no windshield, a demon filling up the back seat and gawking like the tourist he is. How could they not? But this is Los Angeles and most of them assume there’s a movie or a television shoot nearby, or that someone’s having a theme party or premiere. Or even if they don’t think there’s a movie or a party or a premiere, well, this is Los Angeles.

As they drive past MacArthur Park Niko can’t get over how clean everything looks. And the people! They aren’t covered with blood or shit or scabs or parasites. They aren’t buried in stone or broken in half or impaled on pikes. Those kids at the corner there. Six teenaged boys with beanie caps pulled low over shaven heads and loose shirts over baggy pants. Hands stroking belly tattoos. On constant lookout like meerkats. Not screaming, not mutilated, not blank and hopeless but whole and alive. They have no idea how beautiful fleeting rare and frail they are. No one out there has any idea. Not the woman packing up her hotdog stand or the kids dueling with their plastic laser swords or the gaunt man rattling his paper cup of paltry change or the Rasta selling homemade incense on a blanket or the man behind the counter at the doughnut shop filling a pink box with a dozen mixed or the swollenfeeted woman pushing her shoppingcart full of rags. Lucky blessed mortal oblivious and so very much alive. Unique unknowing souls one day to be contained perhaps within rude mason jars delivered to their tailored doom and every one of them worthy of the costliest rescue.

It is an effort of will to look back at his demon. Looking back at anything will take some getting used to. Nikodemus wears a thick gauze patch taped over one eye from a firstaid kit the cabbie brought forth from the Checker Cab’s trunk.

“How you doing?”

Nikodemus shrugs and gestures with a tendril out the window.

The cabbie maneuvers the Checker Cab like a porpoise through signals and intersections and traffic. “Thought I’d take Wilshire to Fairfax and take that till it hits Hollywood. That’s about the least crowded we’ll find on a Friday night without going way out of our way.”

Niko merely nods. He would ride shotgun with her on any route she took on earth or otherwise and never question her. The city he knows seems more surreal to him than its unattended doppelganger had. These old familiar streets so new and strange. Perhaps they are not what’s changed.

Hard west on Wilshire now. Vermont, Western, Crenshaw. Abstract neon of Koreatown. On the hillside the Griffith Observatory poised between seas of ordered light. The Greek Theatre hidden in the hills nearby. I played there for Jem and yet I’ve never played there at all. The tall block letters of the Hollywood sign dark beyond.

Through Midwilshire now. Tar Pits, County Art Museum, Petersen Automotive Museum. At Fairfax the Checker Cab turns right and heads north. Traffic thickens as they near CBS Studios and Farmers Market and The Grove. Stopped behind a car at the light at Fairfax and Third Niko glances back to see Nikodemus staring up in mortal terror at a Gray Line Tours bus turning left from Third onto Fairfax.

It’s okay, he tells his demon.

Nikodemus nods doubtfully without taking his piratic gaze from passing forms of tourists backlit behind tinted windows as they point down at the smashed and battered cab.

“What you lookin at?” the cabbie calls.

Niko sees a camera pointed at Nikodemus. “Wave,” he tells his demon. “Wave.”

Nikodemus waves. One for the books.

Nikodemus what do I do with you? I have violated something in bringing you here and I have no doubt the universe will seek to rectify it.

At Santa Monica a homeless man standing gaunt in the street like a bedraggled prophet points at the cab and shouts Motherfucker owe me money. Then the light turns green and they continue unabated across Sunset to Hollywood where they turn right and then left onto the canyon road to begin their snaking climb.

ALL THE OLD familiar places. The gaudy lighted mailbox at 2101. The wrought iron bats of the horror movie director at 2118. The left turn that always seems about to end but in fact turns sharper. Coming home.

Niko doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Even after everything his heartbeat quickens and his mouth grows dry and his eyes blink rapidly as they take in what will be catalogued later. My friends beside me. This ruined amazing car. Did ever an explorer come back home from unmapped oceans bearing such cargo as mine? Ferried across the sunless world.

Behind him and below him city light sways and sways.

The last stretch of uphill road. The final curve. The length of white stone wall. The graze mark where somebody sideswiped it some years back. My demon with me still. The flaring driveway. Security light and camera. Jemma snug against my lap and leaking out into the mortal world.

The black grilled gate.

The broken chain of myth.

The Black Taxi waiting in the driveway.

XXXI.

WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN

“WHAT DO YOU want me to do?”

Idling in the middle of the road the battered yellow Checker Cab faces the sleek Black Taxi. Gunslingers on the main street of Dodge. The space between them electric.

“I don’t know.” Niko looks past the hood of the cab across the showdown distance. Past the Black Taxi, past the gate, at the mansion at the end of the statuaried drive. You’re still there. Unbelievably still there. Through the door and up the stairs and in the room and on the bed where mere hours ago I held you while you drew your dying breath. Hours and ages later I am back with you in hand.

“All right, screw him. We switch to Plan B.”

“I didn’t know we had one,” says the cabbie.

“We didn’t.”

QUIET NIGHT. NO traffic on the high hill road. The Checker Cab’s doors creak open and the dome light shines. The cabbie gets out already patting herself for a cigarillo and Niko gets out holding the jar like a Fabergé egg while Nikodemus struggles out. Relieved of his weight the chassis lifts. All stand waiting.

The driver’s door opens on the Black Taxi and the Driver steps out. He bids them all good evening with a touch of bony hand to glossy bill of cap and turns the hollow of his gaze toward the lambent jar in Niko’s hand.