City At The End Of Time (57 page)

water.

Jeremy’s father was driving them from Milwaukee, in search of a new place to live—six months after his mother died, three months after a brief and, as it turned out, final gig at Chuck’s Comedy Margin—one month after Jeremy had broken his leg trying to juggle while riding a unicycle. He had been fifteen.

“You ever hear of the Bleak Warden?” his father asked.

“What’s that, a band?” Jeremy asked.

“Nope.”

The land unrolled outside the windows: flat desert and low brown desert towns, sunsets tan and pink, afternoon sky dazzling with thunderheads, and between the storms, sheeplike clouds grazing on endless blue fields.

Broke my leg?

In the empty room, his leg suddenly ached. He reached down to rub it. Bidewell opened the door for the second time, and Ginny entered. If he spoke, she did not hear him. The high hallway beyond stretched across the width of the warehouse. The air smelled cool and stuffy. She glanced at the leftmost door—Jack’s door. Shut, quiet. Whatever was happening there, it wasn’t noisy.

Bidewell closed the door behind her. With a short breath, almost a hiccup, she walked slowly to the right, inserted and turned the key, and grasped the knob, but hesitated before entering her room. Odd that she accepted that possessive without argument.

No one else had been through this door for a hundred years. What waited inside must be hers. Outside, the low, hollow destruction continued to grind time and the Earth like wheat beneath a stone mill, and she did not care. In this room, she thought, it might soon be over. What she knew—the nightmare that her
other
knew—could not be reconciled, not even by a master muse or whatever Mnemosyne was supposed to be. God. Goddess. Demiurge. Housewife of the creator, sweeper-up of unresolved messes. Kindhearted sister to the awful Chalk Princess, who was white but should have been black: Kali,
kala
—Sanskrit for time, both bleacher and blackener. Ginny had read some of the books Bidewell chose for her, pulled from a bookcase labeledNUNC, NUNQUAM —Greek and Hindu mythology, mostly. But none of their tales quite seemed to match what Bidewell was describing.
Old time is at an end, or soon will be. New memories must be made. New time will be forged.
Who will fire the forge?

Memory begins and ends with time.

These words or impressions, less than words but more deeply felt, suddenly made Ginny angry. Bidewell made her angry. Jack and Daniel made her angry. None of them fit into any sort of life she had ever wanted. She wanted
out
. She had to leave. She wanted to jump between the lines, cut them all loose—let them float away.

Instead of turning to run, however, she again grasped the knob to her door, forced it around—it stuck, she grimaced—and then the door opened and she looked across the length of the room beyond, perpendicular to the hallway, stretching to the back of the warehouse. A window mounted high in the rear wall showed a curling, flaring lick from the broken sun that had eaten the dying moon.

In the middle of the room stood the old white chair, as Bidewell had promised. The paint on its seat and back had cracked after a century of quietly heating and cooling.

Ginny swallowed and said, “I’m here.” She stood beside her chair, laying one hand on the curved back. Then she realized she had not closed the door, and turned to go back. But the door had never been opened.

A shade made way, removed itself from the chair…trick of the eyes. She was the shade.

She sat.

Bidewell opened the door.

“Hurry,” he told Daniel. Around them the entire warehouse rattled with the stuttering havoc outside. Daniel felt supremely confident. Never more so. He could beat this. He could even beat Terminus.
Someone
would get through—otherwise, why would they all be gathered here, what would the point be of this rigmarole?

There were the two young people—younger than Fred—and in a pinch there was always Glaucous, ageless in his way, and no doubt a tough subject. But Daniel knew instinctively he could not transfer to Bidewell whatever happened. He did not want to be stuck in the warehouse, and Bidewell would not leave this place and likely would not survive its destruction.

Nor could Daniel choose any of the older ladies. With a twinge, he had seen one of their little green books poking from a handbag, the spine marked 1298. The woman in the doctor’s coat, Sangloss, seemed to take a clinical interest in him. The others simply ignored him. He could almost smell their suspicion. In their way, they were stronger and perhaps more armored even than Glaucous. Not for him.

Glaucous sat on a low bench, watching this little drama with a fixed smile. “Go on,” he said. “There’s

nothing for you out here.”

How right he was. Once the door was closed, Bidewell and Glaucous and the ladies might fade away completely. The whole warehouse might just lift up like a burning feather. Anything could happen, but he would survive.

Daniel walked through. Bidewell closed the outer door. The inner left-hand door and the door on the right were both shut and quiet. He could picture Ginny and Jack sitting in those two rooms, bored, waiting for enough time to pass so Bidewell would call them out and apologize. The old man clearly had no idea what was going on.

The warehouse hummed like a sympathetic string. It wanted to join in the vast crumbling. It wanted to die.

Daniel went to the middle door, turned the key, and grasped the knob. He made sure to latch the door behind him. Nobody would sneak in. He had to observe the forms.

In the long room beyond, he sat in the white chair, hunched forward, and waited. Afraid.

The old Dodge was coming up on low hills, and soon there would be mountains, but Jeremy did not know where they were and did not much care.

He lay squished into the corner of the backseat, cast stretched almost full length across the old car. He was in a lousy mood. Not so much a mood as an unyielding concrete tunnel with no end, no exit. Ryan, his father, was dying, and that meant he would finally have no one, nothing but his rudimentary skills: mediocre patter and the poor, blunt magicks Ryan had managed to teach him.

“I had a dream about this Bleak Warden. It’s a kind of flying robot,” Ryan said. “It comes when you’re dead. Takes you away. Kind of like a garbage man, I guess.”

“Comes for
you.
Not for me,” Jeremy said, and then wished he could take it back. Ryan grinned like a raccoon. “Riiiight. There was this place in my dream, a kind of big cavern with a bright sky, filled with different people. Small ears, bushy fur instead of hair. I only remember a little. I’ve been there a couple of times. That’s what they call death, the people in the dream—they call it the Bleak Warden. Pretty scary, except in this place it never takes the living—and nobody is ever sick. They fight, but they don’t kill each other. They never steal. They raise kids, but they don’t
have
them—kids are delivered like packages. Like storks leaving you under a cabbage leaf. Weird, huh?”

Jeremy sat up in the backseat, rearranged his cast, nudged by a phantom memory. Tried to remember where he really was. Could not grasp it—

His father continued:

“They hold festivals and what they call little wars, where tough guys get the crap kicked out of their system. Interesting, huh?”

“Dreams are showstoppers, Dad. You told me that.”

“Well, this one is actually exciting. I keep wondering what will happen the next time I dream. And it’s consistent—except last night, in the motel in Moscow, it changed. I was in a different part of the same place. Some of the people were taller. They were handing out these suits, red and yellow and green, like soft armor, to the smaller ones. Self-contained, like spacesuits, except not only do they give you air and heat, but…this is tough to describe. They
keep body and soul together
.” Ryan’s voice became reverent, as if he totally believed, was totally reliving that moment.

“You were having a nightmare,” Jeremy said. “You woke me up.”

“You whacked me in bed with your plaster club,” Ryan said, glancing over the seat. “Humor me, Jeremy. This is a long trip. Now of all times.”

That hurt so much, Jeremy thought it was unfair. “I’m listening, aren’t I?”

“We’re not going to have too many of these days, you know, so I thought I’d impart a little of what it means to be your dad, a little fatherly wisdom, however cracked.”

Jeremy did not know whether his father was feeling self-pity or expelling a lousy joke. (Ryan always called telling a bad joke “expelling,” like coughing out a piece of food or a gob of phlegm stuck in the wind-pipe: “You try to tell a joke and it makes you choke, but stop! Don’t expel it. Wrong joke or wrong crowd.”)

“Impart away,” Jeremy said, preparing to suffer in relative silence, because Ryan
was
dying, he was pretty sure of that, though of course nobody would tell him anything right up front.

“All right.” Ryan thought for a moment, frowning in concentration. “These suits keep them alive and together in a dark, nasty land where there are no rules. But the people with little ears—me, my friends—we’re going out there, into the weirdness, and these
superior
people—the tall fellows—are suiting us up. They won’t go themselves. Maybe they can’t, but we can, the little ones. Weird, huh?”

“Totally,” Jeremy said. “I never have dreams like that.”

“When things change, dreams change. I used to have normal dreams. What do you dream about?”

“Roads. Toads and roads.” Jeremy had worked out a pretty funny routine about toads crossing a road, grim and hilarious. “I want to dream about Mom.”

“Right.”

Ryan drove for a while without saying anything.

My father is fat. He wants to be a comedian.
That’s what he had told Miriam Sangloss in the clinic. Jeremy’s father had thin red hair and a round red face and the body of a carny roustabout—big muscles, big bones, boiled-freckle skin, Mom had called it, that memorable time when she painted Ryan up in flower and beast tattoos for a street parade in Waukegan. She was acting in a film then, a real paying job, and they stayed over for a few weeks after the end of the shoot, doing local theater and of course that parade, which had been fun.

Jeremy had been eleven. On his fingers, he counted the days after the parade, the days before she died. Four.

The Dodge had taken Ryan and Jeremy through Montana and Idaho and into Oregon. They had stopped off in Eugene, where Ryan had worked a small circus whose owner was once Mom’s boyfriend. Ryan and the circus owner spent one night drinking and crying on each other’s shoulders—
very
weird, Jeremy had thought.

They left Eugene for Spokane, crossing the eastern high desert. Their last trip.

“We all lose our mothers,” Ryan said on that trip. “Every mother since the beginning of time has died. Memory is the mother of us all, Jeremy.”

And now—
Nunc
—he was sitting in the chair.

Everything signifies, nothing is of itself. You call yourself Jack because it is a safe name. So many
are named Jack, you can hide; but it is a strong name, universal.
The odd thing, as if there had ever been just one singular, odd thing in his life, was that sitting in this room, he had no difficulty believing that road trip with his father was his very first memory, his first experience of being alive. What went before—his mother’s death, the beginning of the trip, breaking his leg—was like the sound of the dying city outside this high, empty room: there, but unconvincing.
There is a number, assigned to volumes arranged on a nonexistent shelf in a time far away from
now, all waiting to be reconciled. Waiting for choices to be made. Where do you
really
come from,
Jeremy?