The Collected Short Fiction

  'I've gotten very good lately at coming up with fates worse than death. How about one of those?' I said. But my words sounded hollow even to me. I was still afraid, not of Richard himself, but of what was inside him, of what had been using him, and myself, as such obliging organisms for the most vicious and sinister acts.

  'You can do whatever you want to me, sure,' he said. 'But unless I'm completely out of touch with things, you just barely made it here. And you're looking at me as if I'm standing in a black fog. Do you think you can do what you want to me and still make it to your next stop? That's where all of this is really heading for you, isn't it? Come on, you can't lie to me.'

  He was right of course. I couldn't lie to him. But I didn't think I needed to lie.

  'I believe you're right, Richard. What happened to me wasn't an accident. And it won't be over until my allotted body count is tallied up. There were seven of you.'

  'Correct. And it was seven that you took. You didn't think about Chipman, did you? He never made much of an impression on anyone. But he was the joker I planted in the deck. If you waste the last bit of light you have left on me you'll never make it to where you want to go. It's a terrible choice you have to make. I'm sure you'd like to step into the blackness inside me and dance around in it with that big knife of yours. That's the real bad guy, and we both know it. That black stuff. But what can we do about it? We're just pictures painted on the darkness. Go and save yourself, Domino, if saving yourself still means anything to you. To tell you the truth, I'm fed up with the whole thing. You can do whatever you want.'

  I suspected that Richard's words were only part of an act to save himself. I was sure of it when he asked me, 'By the way, whatever happened to that document of your idea, your special plan? Just out of curiosity. I don't really expect to see it.'

  I was in a position that was frustrating beyond endurance. The worst of the swine was the one I had to let go. It seemed I had truly been beaten while he would continue to flourish.

  'I'll tell you this, Richard. Keep watch on your computer screen. I'll send you something soon.'

  Having said that, I put my knife back in my pocket and began my crawl along the lines of darkness that would lead me to only one place, one little room.

  5

  There he was, that bundle of bleeding bandages. The EEG was still active, portraying alarming surges of brain activity and glowing with an eerie incandescence. It was only by the colored lights of the medical appliances in that room that I could see anything at all. He looked like a mummy of someone whose every limb had been amputated to some extent. Tubes trailed out of a bandaged stump that had once been a whole arm as well as from the wrappings which suggested a shapeless head beneath. A catheter snaked its way from under a blanket, dribbling into a plastic bag hung on the side of the bed.

  At the nurses' station down the quiet hallway there was a bulletin board which had pinned to it some newspaper clippings that pertained to this patient: the initial accident report (with a diagram), the investigation into the driving record of the guy at the wheel of that bus, the awful revelation that the victim still lived despite the incredible trauma sustained during the mishap, and a 'search goes on' piece that put out a call to anyone who might be able to provide information that could identify the man who lay in a coma at Memorial Hospital. The bent frames of a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses that might have belonged to the unknown man had been found some distance from his body, but the lenses had either popped out or were lost among the shattered debris of the accident.

  And you were right, Richard. It was not an accident at all. As I looked down on that remnant of a human body I was finally able to remember what happened.

  Rushing back to the office supply store to collect my forgotten packs of paper, I was very much preoccupied with the statement, my Ultimate Statement, that would eventually blacken those empty pages and eject them from the printer in my apartment. But the substance of this document still remained confused in my mind, its message frail and without force, its theme trite: 'They made me feel bad,' to paraphrase your own words, Richard, 'so I bought some guns and killed them all.' Such a statement, no matter how detailed and lengthy, simply would not do. I realized that even as I was running down the sidewalk to make it back to the office supply store before it closed. And I also knew that no words of greater weight or reason would occur to me once I had returned home. In a fraction of a second I became sick with the idea of sitting before my computer screen and tapping the same message over and over with only the slightest variations on the theme of 'they made me feel bad, so I bought some guns and killed them all'. There was nothing in such a statement except self-humiliation, self-ridicule, and self-indictment. Anyone reading it would have thought, 'What a worthless piece of human wreckage. And what a shame about those seven people.' There would have been no salvation for me in making such a statement, in committing such an act.

  But then I saw my salvation speeding down the street in the form of a bus headed for the suburbs. I picked up my pace. I raced toward the only salvation that I knew was available to me. And I timed it perfectly.

  By killing myself I felt that I would also be killing all of you, killing every bad body on this earth. To my mind, at that moment, every swinish one of us in this puppet show of a world would be done with when that bus made contact with me. Every suicide is a homicide—or many homicides—thwarted. My rage, my inner empire of murderous hate, had never been so intense as in those moments before I met that oncoming bus. Soon my statement would be made, not with words but with the violent action which is the only thing anyone really attended to, if only for a day or so. And the theme of my statement: 'To whom it may concern—I hereby refuse to be a swine living in a world of swine that was built by swine and belongs only to swine. This swine has been fed full of his swinish ambitions, his swinish schemes, and, over and above all, his swinish fears and obsessions. Therefore I forfeit my part of this estate to my heirs in the kingdom of the swine.'

  That would seem to have been the end of it. I never suspected that I was going to be put to further use. I never suspected that there was a grander—if not exactly 'grand'—scheme of things. Not for a moment did I consider that I would continue to be manipulated and conspired against... that I would become the instrument of greater manipulations and conspiracies, all the while being kept in the dark about what was really going on, about what should have been the real subject of my Ultimate Statement, as I now attempt to deliver it to you, not one of whom will ever benefit from it. People do not know, and cannot face, the things that go on in this world, the secret nightmares that are suffered by millions every day... and the excruciating paradox, the nightmarish obscenity of being something that does not know what it is and yet believes that it does know, something that in fact is nothing but a tiny particle that forms the body of The Great Black Swine Which Wallows in a Great River of Blackness that to us looks like sunrises and skyscrapers, like all the knotted events of the past and the unraveling of these knots in the future, like birthdays and funerals, like satellites and cell phones and rockets launched into space, like nations and peoples, like the laws of nature and the laws of humanity, like families and friends, like everything, including these words that I write. Because this document, this supposedly Ultimate Statement, is only a record of incidents destined for the garbage can of the incredible. And rightly so. These incidents are essentially no different from any others in the world: they occurred in a particular sequence, they were witnessed and sometimes documented, but in the end they have no significance, no sense, no meaning, at least as I—and you and you and you—imagine these vacuous concepts.

  All that remains to me, to my comatose body lying in a darkened hospital room, is to put an end to the thing beneath all those bandages. I'm sure that I'll be allowed to do so. My work is finally done. Yet having gone to all the trouble to concoct this statement, I cannot resist the ludicrous temptation to throw it out to the crowd. I told Richard I would send him something on his co
mputer, although it won't be the documentation for a New Product idea, which I destroyed in both its digital and hard-copy forms. And whatever satisfaction it may bring Detectives White and Black, I will also forward a copy to them, so that they can match the fingerprints on the handle of this knife I hold over my own body to those that wait for them in my apartment... and so that they may know something of the atrocious wonders of this world. On Monday morning all the printers in the company will be spewing out these useless pages. Perhaps this occurrence will bring on the bad publicity which those merchants of stale information, those data pushers, so anxiously desire to avoid, since the company is now struggling for its life in the corporate arena. I am now struggling for my death. That's the only thing that matters.

  I do not regret having annihilated seven persons any more than the fact that I'll never regain that lost hour which was taken from me six months ago. I make no excuses for my acts, and I beg no forgiveness or reprieve for the lives I've eliminated.

  A curse on them.

  These are the words of a swine who seeks only his own slaughter under the slicing, serrated blade of a Buck Skinner Hunting Knife.

  A curse on me.

  I was weak and afraid... and I ended up as a deadly weapon wielded by a dark hand that not even I—that no one—will ever see.

  A curse on it.

  I remember how wonderful it felt to die the little death of that cockroach in my apartment. I can only hope to know that feeling to its fullest when the moment comes and the river rushes in to drown me in its blackness. Perhaps a swine whose savage work is finally done may be allowed this much. I cannot wait to tear into the tender flesh of my last victim, and with a single slash kill two.

  I cannot wait to be dead. I cannot wait.

  I am not afraid any more.

  My Case For Retributive Action (2001)

  First published in Weird Tales, Summer 2001

  Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

  It was my first day working as a processor of forms in a storefront office. As soon as I entered the place—before I had a chance to close the door behind me or take a single step inside—this rachitic individual wearing mismatched clothes and eyeglasses with frames far too small for his balding head came hopping around his desk to greet me. He spoke excitedly, his words tumbling over themselves, saying, 'Welcome, welcome. I'm Ribello. Allow me, if you will, to help you get your bearings around here. Sorry there's no coat rack or anything. You can just use that empty desk.'

  Now, I think you've known me long enough, my friend, to realize that I'm anything but a snob or someone who by temperament carries around a superior attitude toward others, if for no other reason than that I simply lack the surplus energy required for that sort of behavior. So I smiled and tried to introduce myself. But Ribello continued to inundate me with his patter. 'Did you bring what they told you?' he asked, glancing down at the briefcase hanging from my right hand. 'We have to provide our own supplies around here, I'm sure you were told that much,' he continued before I could get a word in. Then he turned his head slightly to sneak a glance around the storefront office, which consisted of eight desks, only half of them occupied, surrounded by towering rows of filing cabinets that came within a few feet of the ceiling. 'And don't make any plans for lunch,' he said. 'I'm going to take you someplace. There are some things you might want to know. Information, anecdotes. There's one particular anecdote... but we'll let that wait. You'll need to get your bearings around here.'

  Ribello then made sure I knew which desk I'd been assigned, pointing out the one closest to the window of the storefront office. 'That used to be my desk. Now that you're with us I can move to one of the desks farther back.' Anticipating Ribello's next query, I told him that I had already received instructions regarding my tasks, which consisted entirely of processing various forms for the Quine Organization, a company whose interests and activities penetrate into every enterprise, both public and private, on this side of the border. Its headquarters are located far from the town where I secured a job working for them, a drab outpost, one might call it, that's even quite distant from any of the company's regional centers of operation. In such a place, and many others like it, the Quine Organization also maintains offices, even if they are just dingy storefront affairs permeated by a sour, briny odor. This smell could not be ignored and led me to speculate that before this building had been taken over as a facility for processing various forms relating to the monopolist Q. Org, as it is often called for shorthand, it had long been occupied by a pickle shop. You might be interested to know that this speculation was later confirmed by Ribello, who had taken it upon himself to help me get my bearings in my new job, which was also my first job since arriving in this little two-street town.

  As I sat down at my desk, where a lofty stack of forms stood waiting to be processed, I tried to put my encounter with Ribello out of my head. I was very much on edge for reasons that you well know (my nervous condition and so forth), but in addition I was suffering from a lack of proper rest. A large part of the blame for my deprivation of sleep could be attributed to the woman who ran the apartment house where I lived in a single room on the top floor. For weeks I'd been pleading with her to do something about the noises that came from the space underneath the roof of the building, which was directly above the ceiling of my room. This was a quite small room made that much smaller because one side of it was steeply slanted in parallel to the slanted roof above. I didn't want to come out and say to the woman that there were mice or some other kind of vermin living under the roof of the building which she ran, but that was my implication when I told her about the 'noises.' In fact, these noises suggested something far more sizeable, and somehow less identifiable, than a pack of run-of-the-mill vermin. She kept telling me that the problem would be seen to, although it never was. Finally, on the morning which was supposed to be the first day of my new job—after several weeks of struggling with inadequate sleep in addition to the agitations deriving from my nervous condition—I thought I would just make an end of it right there in that one-room apartment on the top floor of a building in a two-street town on the opposite side of the border from the place where I had lived my whole life and to where it seemed I would never be able to return. For the longest time I sat on the edge of my bed holding a bottle of nerve medicine, shifting it from one hand to the other and thinking, 'When I stop shifting this bottle back and forth—an action that seemed to be occurring without the intervention or control of my own mind—if I find myself holding it in my left hand I'll swallow the entire contents and make an end of it, and if I find myself holding it in my right hand I'll go and start working in a storefront office for the Quine Organization.'

  I don't actually recall in which hand the bottle ended up, or whether I dropped it on the floor in passing it from hand to hand, or what in the world happened. All I know is that I turned up at that storefront office, and, as soon as I stepped inside, Ribello was all over me with his nonsense about how he would help me get my bearings. And now, while I was processing forms one after another like a machine, I also had to anticipate going to lunch with this individual. None of the other three persons in the office—two middle-aged men and an elderly woman who sat in the far corner—had exercised the least presumption toward me, as had Ribello, whom I already regarded as an unendurable person. I credited the others for their consideration and sensitivity, but of course there might have been any number of reasons why they left me alone that morning. I remember that the doctor who was treating both you and me, and whom I take it you are still seeing, was fond of saying, as if in wise counsel, 'However much you may believe otherwise, nothing in this world is unendurable—nothing.' If he hadn't gotten me to believe that, I might have been more circumspect about him and wouldn't be in the position I am today, exiled on this side of the border where fogs configure themselves with an astonishing regularity. These fogs are thick and gray; they crawl down my throat and all but cut off my breathing.