It wasn’t much, however, and Grace and I walked back to the dog-urine fruit, which was shaped somewhat like a large golden pear, and took a few from the limbs.
We brought them back and had dog-urine fruit for dessert. It really wasn’t so bad once you got past the smell. And the taste.
Reba, being in as bad a shape as she was, wasn’t able to go on. We decided to stay a night on the beach, but did manage to help her back to the low-hanging boughs where we had spent the night before.
It was very nice under there. Cozy.
Walking back I saw something I had overlooked before, floating up between some rocks.
My backpack.
I went over and got it. Inside was my journal. A few loose pages had come out of it and had washed up on the shore. I gathered them, and while Reba rested, I spread them out on the beach and let them dry.
We spent the night under the tree boughs, and in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, we all slept deeply.
4
“I don’t remember much,” Reba said.
We were under the tree boughs, and it was daylight outside. I was pretty certain time had been working consistently over the last few days, because they had felt exactly like days. My inner clock seemed happy with the timing.
Still, for all I knew, we could have been sleeping for days before the light came.
We had meant to move on the very next daylight, but we hadn’t. We decided to let Reba regain her strength. It wasn’t like we knew where we were going, anyway. Or if we should go. Or if it mattered if we did go.
“All I know was the bus came up, I was clinging to it,” Reba said, continuing her tale, “and I think I saw you in the water,” she said, indicating me.
“You did. I dove after you. But couldn’t find you.”
“I lost my hold on the bus,” Reba said. “It came to me that it was taking me down, and I knew it was best if I didn’t hang on, but I don’t know if I let go, or the force of the water pulled me loose. But I came loose. “Still, I was too weak to swim, and I just knew I was a goner. Then I was lifted up.”
“Ed,” I said.
“Yeah. He surfaced, and as he did, he brought me up. I rode on his back for a moment. Long enough to get my breath. Then he dove again.
“I was sucked under. I thought, well, this is it. I blacked out, came awake as I surfaced again, got a gulp of air. Then, guess what? I blacked out again. Next time I woke up you were standing over me, Jack. And, believe me, that was a pretty sight ... What’s the plan now?”
“We kind of loosely thought we should go along the beach a ways, just to see what’s about. Then cut inland toward the bridge. We don’t know why, but—”
“Why not?” Grace said.
“Yeah,” Reba said. “Why not?”
We abandoned the idea of walking along the shore. It had seemed like a good idea at first. Dead fish could be collected. We might even find a way to fish for fresh ones.
But, now that we had learned to eat the dog-urine fruit, we decided to break it open and let it dry, pack it in my pack, along with my de-sodded writing goods, and carry it as food.
We wanted to go straight for the bridge.
Another thing. We thought it might be the safest place.
The night before, while sitting out on the beach, a star had fallen from the sky and landed in the water, washing a large wave nearly all the way to our sleeping tree.
The next night, we had seen the moon sag.
And that morning, much of the blue sky on the horizon was hanging low and being washed and moved by the water. The sun was almost in the wet itself.
“I get the feeling,” Grace said, “that those who put this whole thing together aren’t home anymore.”
“Or they’ve lost interest,” Steve said.
The jungle was dense, but we found a trail, an animal trail, I presumed, and we went along it as fast as we could go. It was strange. We had no idea where we were actually going, but we were damn well getting there fast.
I suppose I could say the bridge was our goal. And being as how I had become very goal oriented, because staying in any one place on the drive-in world soon led to depression, it gave me a feeling of motion and accomplishment.
We stopped several times to rest. We found plenty of water in nice gurgling pools, and there was a lot of the dog-urine fruit. We kept our dried fruit and ate the fresh stuff, and when night fell, we slept beneath trees. That is, until one night we heard a cry from the island forest so frightening that we took to the trees after that.
I thought of the trees as Tarzan trees. They were large with broad limbs, and there were enough smaller limbs about, coated thick in leaves, you could find natural hammocks to sleep in.
I felt good about this, until I thought our screaming predator might be able to climb trees.
In our nice tree hammocks, twenty to thirty feet off the ground, Steve and Grace tucked up in a bundle of limbs above us, Reba and I talked about all that had happened, about all that had been before the drive-in, about what we would do if we ever escaped this world and returned to our own.
We even discussed the idea of staying where we were.
The island was beautiful, and if we could find something better to eat than the dog-urine fruit—fish maybe—we could stay here for a long time. Maybe forever. Eventually, Reba said, either she or Grace would become pregnant, no matter how careful we were, and there would be children.
It was a thought.
A nice island.
Cool winds. Lots of water.
Plenty of dog-urine fruit ... Well, that wasn’t so good.
Most likely we would learn to catch fish, and maybe there was other food on the island. Had to be. From the sound of that scream, that was a predator, and predators had to have something to eat besides dog-urine fruit.
And maybe this wasn’t an island at all. We had come to call it that because of the way it looked. But it could have been the edge of a continent. A place away from all the weird movie worlds and strange occurrences; an oasis in a morass of what Reba called Weirdity.
And, of course, for me, there was Reba.
She was pretty and smart and we didn’t seem to age.
How would that work for children? The children in the drive-in hadn’t aged a lot. They grew, but, come to think of it, none of them ever made adulthood.
Then again, how long had we been here?
The oldest the kids had been was three or four, and most of them died. Or got eaten.
And there were the weird creatures. The results of the Popcorn King’s poisoned sperm. They had grown very fast, to a kind of retarded adulthood on one level, and on another, to an advanced childhood where they could move things with their minds.
And there was the drive-in mist. When we were close to the sea, it would come out of nowhere, floating along the black water. But it never came to shore.
Never. It was a seagoing thing, or so it seemed. And Grace had a theory about what it was.
It was similar to my own idea. Television ghosting. If this was a movie world with different stories going all at once, perhaps our past and our present were colliding; different channels and episodes running together; movies mixing and misting, and falling apart.
It was a disturbing thought.
My mind rambled like that, going from this to that, as Reba and I lay in the boughs, she cradled in the crook of my arm, my eyes on the sky.
And I thought: What a pretty thought. To stay here. To have children. To live naked and free and full of piss and vinegar to the end of our days.
Lots of lying about in the sun.
Lots of fucking.
Lots of doing nothing and needing only something to eat and drink.
Life was really simple if you let it be.
But life was never simple here. You could never let down your guard. My arm had gone to sleep, and I wanted to move it, but hated to for fear of waking Reba and disturbing the wonderful fact that I had a fine-looking woman on my arm.
For she had recovered fast. The puffiness was gone. Her hair had lightened. Her body was lean, but not starved, and her skin had developed a glow. She also wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes. Always a plus.
Yet, even with that wonderful thought to consider, we were still here.
On the drive-in world. And this was a world where Chicken Little would be right.
The sky was falling.
5
On the morning after my night contemplating, thinking maybe this place was as good as it got, and that was good enough, I awoke and climbed to the top of our tree and saw an amazing and disturbing sight.
First off, the world was blood-colored; the sun had sunk halfway into the sea, and great clouds of steam were rising up from it.
The water was drying up, running away from the shore. Fish were leaping about as they were boiled alive. All of this I could see, and when I told the others, we made the decision to hasten our pace, to see if we could reach the great bridge to the sky.
Steve said, “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to go back there and get some of those boiled fish.”
“And I was thinking,” Grace said, “the time we spent doing that might be a bad idea. We too could soon be boiled. And if the sun goes completely down into the sea, will it rise again? Will there be only night? Will the moon come out? Will it fall too? Will the stars drop off? Time, however it works here, is not on our side.”
So we went along swift in the blood-red light, and in time that light turned stranger yet as night fell. The sun didn’t want to go away, so there was a red stain across the night sky. The moon shone silver, and full, and the stars were dots of fire, and if you looked real close, there seemed to be creases in the night, as if dark velvet cloth that had been stretched was no longer taut, but was in fact drooping.
We ate the dried dog-urine fruit, and kept pushing, and just as the moon dipped away, and the day came on bloody-dark, we began to smell the odor of death. It was a stiff odor that shoved at us, but we ignored it. We could see the bridge clearly above the trees, and we pushed on in that direction, the stench growing strong enough to cut and make bricks.
It got so stout, that each of us took turns puking, but we kept on keeping on. In time, though the smell never went away, our nostrils and our stomachs accepted it.
By the time night had come, and we had slept, and risen again before the moon fell down, we came upon the source of the odor. The tropical forest had disappeared, and there was just a bleak stretch of ground, and a great milehigh (I’m guessing here as to the height) pile of something we couldn’t identify. We stood there looking at it, and as we did, slowly, the moon fell off, and the dying sunlight was all we had, giving us a rusty glow and a view of the clearing and the pile in the middle of it.
“My God,” Steve said.
“If God had anything to do with this,” Grace said, “then he’s just as big an asshole as I’ve always thought.”
I had to agree.
It was a great black pile, and the pile buzzed and flexed and moved.
6
When we came closer, an immense cloud of crows rose up against the red sky with a caw and a savage beating of wings, and with them rose a swarm of humming flies.
The bloody sunlight, formerly shiny on the dark wings of the birds and the bright green-and-black bodies of the flies, now shone on a pile of human shapes. Some of the shapes were of wood, some of metal, some of plastic. There were crudely whittled soldiers with tall hats and chin bands, painted up red and black with big blue eyes and Groucho Marx mustaches. There were less crudely molded metal soldiers with turnkeys at their backs. There were women, too, and unlike the male soldiers with painted-on clothes, they were roughly shaped with blonde and red hair and big bow mouths and wide blue eyes, pink knobs for nipples and quick swipes of black paint for pubic hair. Some of them, like the soldiers, were made of metal and were slightly better formed with windup keys at their backs. Their flesh tones varied: there were white, black, and yellow, and even green; there were all manner of shapes and sizes. Amongst these human-sized, crudely whittled, and sophisticated windup toys, were what looked like mannequins with perfect-painted features and real hair on their heads, male and female. And on these were truer anatomical features; missiles for the men, grooves for the ladies, patches of what looked like real pubic hair.
Twisted in amongst them were long green tentacles and bulbous heads and huge pop-eyes. Rubbery-looking aliens and some that looked to be made of flesh; flesh going gray and dripping with slime. I had dreamed of such beasts from time to time. Up there in the sky somewhere, twisting dials, moving cameras, proceeding along dolly-runs. Making movies, with us as their reality show. And here they lay.
Further up the pile were what appeared to be real human bodies, rotting, arms dripping off like melting plastic, legs falling free of the bone, heads twisted, coming loose, the eyes plucked out. At first I thought some of the bodies were moving, but soon realized it was the maggots squirming amidst the real corpses and the termites chewing about in the wooden figures, the crows flapping about, giving the glancing illusion of the human shapes making movement on their own.
“My God,” Reba said. “What place is this?”
No one had an answer.
Beyond this pile was one great beam of the bridge. And it was very wide. We couldn’t see the edges of it. All we could see was the gold and silver metal that made up the bridge, and those huge black cables, twisted thick and numerous as armpit hairs on a French lady.
Way up, dead center of the pile, was a dark hole in the sky, like someone had burned the tip of a cigarette through red construction paper; a hole like the one that had pulsed and shat its refuse above the drive-in.
“It reminds me of some white trash fucker’s yard,” Reba said. “Throwing shit out the window. You know, food and cans and such. But here we got a waste disposal of giant toys and dead bodies. Still, the attitude, it’s the same.”
Grace moved over close to the pile. She said, “Look at this.”
We eased next to her. The stench was so strong I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stand in front of the pile another second. My stomach did a flip-flop, gathered itself, and the feeling of nausea and light-headedness passed.
Grace reached out, took hold of a rancid, blackened arm, said, “This one has been here awhile. Look at it. Look close.”
The arm had rotted, and the crows had been at it, and though the arm was clearly meaty, inside it I could see a flexi-metal rod that served for bone, and twisted around this “bone” were wires—red, blue, white, and yellow.
“Part human,” Grace said. “Part machine.”
“Holy shit,” Steve said.
“Question now,” Grace said, “is do we still want to go up there?”
She pointed up at the wall of metal, the jungle of wires.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Reba said. “The world is caving in on itself. Whoever runs this crazed-ass shithole must be up there. I think it’s time to confront him. Beard God in his own goddamn cheap-ass Naugahyde, cheetahskin-decorated den, and kick his ass.”
“Hear, hear,” Steve said, and stuck out a hand.
We piled our hands on top of his.
“Up, up, and away,” Grace said.
“By the way,” I asked, “how do you know if there’s a God he’s got Naugahyde shit up there?”
“It fits his toss-out-the-window, white trash image,” Reba said.
“Ah,” I said.
PART FIVE
Complexities are contemplated. A bridge is climbed.
Toy soldiers get funky. Experiences with rubber, wood,
and flesh. Aliens are found. Bad things happen to good people.
The world is folded, and our remaining heroes
travel through a glass darkly.
1
Let me tell you how we did it, took that climb.
We decided, as we always knew we would, to go up that great beam, which was slanted slightly and had t
hose multitudes of cables to cling to. From a distance those twists of wires had looked like one big dark cable on either beam of the bridge. Now, I could see it was not a bridge at all, but what it was, I was uncertain. The metal beam and its skin of tangled wires ascended into the red sky, disappearing, not into the waste hole, but advancing to the top to be wrapped in clouds like a precious possession in fluffy balls of cotton.
It was not a short trip, dear hearts.
It might not have been Everest, but it wasn’t a hill back home either. It was WAY THE FUCK up there.
So, we took the dried fruit from my pack, laid it out, determined it was not enough. We went about picking more fruit and drying it. It was a scary decision. Every moment we wasted meant the sky could fall, doing us in. But, if we were to take the climb unprepared, and if it was as high up and difficult to travel as we suspected, then we could die of thirst and starvation. Not to mention we might fall off and smash our asses.
Maybe that’s where the bodies and shapes of humans had come from. They had fallen, not been pushed.
But, shit, man. Did those wooden critters walk?
Or were they just prototypes?
And how were those great potato chips made so thin and vacuum-packed in a can without crushing all of them?
I wished I were home with a can of them, sitting in front of the television set watching a rerun of The Lone Ranger. Guns snapping, bad guys falling. But no blood, man. No blood. No real terror.
Of course, when we got to the top, we could find ourselves in worse shape. But again, it was that goal business, dear hearts.
The goal.
The reason to strive.
It’s what made us want to climb, and it beat standing around with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for the world to fall apart and the sun to blow down on our heads and cook us.
Steve found some gourds and we labored at hollowing those out by twisting off the narrow, blackened, umbilical-cord tops and working a sharp stick down into them. We wormed the stick about until we liquefied the gourd’s guts, then we poured the goo out. There were numerous pools of water about, and we dipped the gourds in those and rinsed them, filled them with sand and let them dry while the fruit dried.