Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (29 page)

Borne aloft by updrafts of decay, the Loser floats out over the hollow, draws himself into a ball and touches down on the naked dirt before the bunker.

The glow of it is so bright. How could he be so blind? The thing he has been searching for all these (years?) countless thousands of circuits through the city, honing his senses to see only lost things, to see through the world, to find—what? Who he was and what he lived for, when he lived. It is inside.

Maybe he has seen it a thousand times and forgotten, the
Now
rotting and falling away before he can nail it to his abandoned past and unbearable future. Or maybe he has seen and made himself forget, because he’s better off lost in the Now. Is he stronger now, than before he lost his mind? He knows that he is not quite a man, anymore. If he stops now, he won’t have to change.

Still, he finally decides, and flies like a lamp-dazzled moth towards the One Lost Thing.

Igor waddled out into the yard and faced the Loser with his hands on his hips. “I ain’t tellin’ you again. Get the fuck out of here.”

The Loser looked puzzled, though Rope couldn’t see an inch of him under all his coats and his broad-brimmed hat. He whirled around and only then did Rope see and hear the rat-jackals skulking out of the junk, tubercular, rasping snarls and sickly giggles as they drew together in a slipknot around the Loser.

A big one with clumps of oversized human ears growing out of its back leapt at the Loser, who just slumped there with his big old shopping bags weighing him down like balls and chains, and when he looked up, all Rope saw of his face was round, cracked spectacles and a gray scarf wound tight over his gray face.

With its curly talons extended, the rat-jackal pounced on his face, but the Loser ducked and it twirled stupidly in midair to see where its prey went, when a shopping bag full of junk completed the elaborate geometrical proof the Loser had just worked out, smashing into the airborne scavenger’s ribs.

The bag and the rat-jackal both exploded in a flameless conflagration of dust and ash and the tiny thunderclap of a vacuum violently closed. The blown-out carcass crashed and spewed syringes, spent condoms and Popsicle wrappers.

Igor trembled. The rat-jackals cowered and slunk away. He sidled over to the lost collection while the Loser shuffled towards the bunker.

Rope stood in the doorway, equally afraid, suddenly, of going in or out. “Mr. Blasco? Igor? What do I do?”

“Try to shoot him,” Igor shouted, and took cover behind a pyramid of wigs and college textbooks.

Rope had put down the shotgun when he moved the barrels. He had no idea where it was now, somewhere in the bunker, or in the truck, but it probably didn’t matter.
Try
to shoot him?

The Loser came within ten feet of Rope, and he breathed a little easier. The little freak came up to his shoulder, and wore half a dozen raincoats, but the bags worried him.

The Loser took another step. Igor held something up in the air and roared, “Stop, motherfucker!”

It was the crack-baby.

Igor cocked his arm like he fully intended to bowl a strike with the tiny, mewling body, but he froze in mid-stride and tensed every muscle, as if he had just shit his pants.

The baby cried out once, then it turned gray and flaked apart like a smoked cigarette and blew away. Wracked with spasms, Igor fought to hold the pose, as if he were trying to force a strike with the sheer power of his will.

The Loser paused in midstride, one mismatched oxblood wingtip out over the ground, when it split open beneath him.

A bloated gray tentacle slithered round his outstretched leg four times before he could move, hauled him into the air and brought him back to earth with bone-shattering gusto, then tried to drag him into its trench.

Rope tracked the acid-drooling limb to a meat-tree thirty yards away, bent and straining like an angler reeling in a prize catch. The Loser undid a belt buckle and shed his outermost pants, charcoal gray polyester slacks with a white macramé belt, and emerged intact, though one leg was banded with smoking wounds, and seven layers of severed trouser legs unraveled as he got up and walked towards the bunker.

Igor closed his fist on the smoking baby skull and cocked his arm back like a homicidal baseball pitcher. The air around his fist crackled. The gathering force threatened to split the sky, but it collapsed on itself when he tried to throw it.

Igor’s fist turned gray, instant frostbite creeping up his arm and he could only scream Portuguese curses at this ultimate outrage, as his fingers disintegrated and fluttered away like blasted moths. The harder he tried to force it out, the faster it ate him up.

The Loser came within arm’s reach of Rope, who still couldn’t decide which way to jump. Rope could hear the small man’s wheezing breath through the scarf, and smell his leg burning. “Mr. Blasco, what do I do now?”

Igor thrashed on the ground like he had a mongoose in his mouth and a cobra up his ass. The last thing he had was answers.

Rope backed up into the bunker. Maybe he could find the shotgun.

The Loser passed right by Rope, with his head swiveling back and forth to take in the mad jumble of junk. He went up the center aisle to where it jogged right, where Rope had crashed the dolly, and he knelt down before the melted, cracked stack of coolers.

The Loser didn’t seem to notice the hole. Slowly, painfully, he removed his hat and peeled off the scarf, mottled and blotted with sweat. Underneath, his round, bald head gleamed in the dim light, bulbous, convivial features cruelly hollowed out, like a defrocked cherub on a hunger strike.

He tugged the melted blue Igloo cooler out of the stack, peeled the brittle duct tape off the lid, and opened it.

A puff of necrotic dust wafted out. Rope, sneaking up behind the Loser, gagged and threw up into his hand. He got close enough to look over the Loser’s shoulder for just a second before he had to get away. Away from the smell and the sight of the putrid remains in the cooler, and the sound of the Loser’s weeping.

He loved her, before she was ever born.

He built a nest of his life, a secure and prosperous bower around a vacancy he dared not seek to fill, so idealized was his image of true love. But he had no such illusions about himself; his peers, blessed with more honesty than imagination, had left him no room for doubt, but that he was a loser. He was not handsome or strong, and painfully shy, so he sought to make beautiful things—gold jewelry and occasional poetry, to show the world the beauty inside him.

His poetry even bored him, so he became an English teacher, and found some pale consolation in passing his own unignited literary passions on to the few students who stayed awake in his classes.

But the jewelry line took off. His fingers succeeded where his words had failed, in venting the molten sensuality trapped in his unassuming, roly-poly body. His gold wedding bands came into local vogue for a while, their asymmetrical contours warped by a molten longing that made any half-appealing suitor irresistible. But he had never asked a woman for a date, let alone for her heart, her hand.

As he watched his waist spread, his hair fall out, his tragic resemblance to Elmer Fudd deepen, he tried to find words to tell himself in the mirror, some formal token of surrender of the last and greatest dream of his sad little life.

And then, long past the eleventh hour, it came.

True love, sealed in the first clash of eyes. Two hearts beating in tandem, two minds shedding cold cocoons of loneliness to join together in a Tiepolo sky of bold, infinite possibility, all before he even knew her name.

Francine Klowden sat in the front row of his third-period Junior English Composition & Literature class. She would be sixteen in October.

He was forty-eight.

It could have been a scandal, with a man more forceful, a student less modest, but he held himself back as much for fear of rejection as the impropriety of it, and told himself the signs she seemed to send him were wishful thinking.

Francine was plain and chubby, and favored unflattering sweaters and skirts, and was twice as shy as he. She loved Elizabethan and Romantic poetry, and wrote well. He let her compose sonnets for extra credit, and was shocked out of his paralysis by what he read. They were self-conscious and unsure of their imagery, and took frightful liberties with the rigid Petrarchan meter, but they burned with a submerged metaphysical lust that stoked the dead coals of his own love of language, and his love of love.

They were for him, she said. And she wrote more. He replied, taking up his old fountain pen and chewing up fine Venetian paper journals in search of the words he’d given up hope of ever getting out. John Donne he was not, but his fumblings somehow found their mark.

All the rest of that year and through the summer, they met and read and discussed poetry. He sent a few of her less ardent pieces to an amateur journal edited by an old schoolmate, who printed them. Her gratitude knew no bounds. She ran out of words, and a week before her seventeenth birthday, she offered herself to him.

The Loser weeps now, as the sweetness of those days and nights came back to him. The meetings in secret; trips taken under forged school field trip documents; the things they shared, the poetry that flowed from them as they helped each other to grow. Senior year was torture, until she arranged to take an independent creative writing period with him. They were almost caught so many times, a delicious game for her, but the terror of exposure nearly killing him every afternoon. When she was eighteen next fall, he would quit teaching, and they would marry.

They redecorated his bachelor pad, consecrating a well-lit storage room as an office for her to begin her brilliant career. Every moment of every day, he looked over his shoulder for the inevitable blow; discovery and scandal, blackmail, or, worst of all, a change of heart. For though he had never known a girl so strong of mind or anyone so passionate, he knew she was young.

Her poetry grew surer and broader in its themes, incandescent footprints in her path to womanhood. She still wrote him love poems, and they still nailed his heart, but they seemed paler, less mature, than the blossoming body of her serious work.

Just before graduation, she sold a poem to a prestigious small-press literary journal, about a caterpillar. He thought it a bit trite, but never told her so; what really gnawed at him was the pensive stillness of the piece, that suggested Francine had no idea what changes the transformation would bring. It had not yet come.