Chapter Twenty-One
“Aboard This Tiny Ship”
Nearly two hours after more helicopters than had ever before been seen in Herschberg touched down, the woman, who was not yet old enough to drink, wandered cheerfully up the aisle, brushing her fingertips lightly against product as she walked. She touched dozens of canned products (Campbell’s soup, Heinz Beans, Alpo Dog Food, Bumblebee Tuna, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee’s Ravioli—it’s nice, how all our products have names), some of which she picked up and examined before returning to the shelf.
Passing the magazine rack, she unconsciously ducked her eyes to avoid seeing the porn mags on the top shelf and began walking down the next small aisle, swaying a bit as she walked, whistling to herself. She stopped short at a display of potato chips, but chose the Planter’s peanuts instead—only to trade in the peanuts a moment later. Peanuts were nice, but Annabelle Lee had just spotted the breakfast cereal section. She sat down, cross-legged, on the floor directly in front of the small section, so she could delight in the ridiculous array of choices the American economy offers its consumers. Her vision filled with bright box colors featuring smiling cartoon characters, Annabelle began the serious task of choosing a road snack.
•
The van had room enough to seat nine people comfortably, if one ignored the fact that these particular van seats were inherently uncomfortable, and would be so even if one person had the van all to himself. They were made of some sort of fake leather, but the manufacturers hadn’t bothered to put a texture on the mold that had no doubt created the sheets of gummy brown seat cover, instead allowing them to leave the factory with a wholly unnatural smoothness. The lack of texture was annoying. The seat covers were entirely too smooth, endless, without distinguishing detail, other than where the metal skeleton of the van seats could be seen pressing up against the too-thin material. What seat padding remained was lumpy, forming random, gentle hills; it reminded Albert of some featureless feces-colored desert, broken only by the blacktop highways formed by the seatbelts, which criss-crossed the desert here and there. Albert approved of the metal seat-skeletons, which would make lying across the seats not merely uncomfortable but actually painful; people should sit up straight. If people want to droop around like wet rags, let them do it in their homes, not on their way to an important occasion.
Still, the smoothness of the vinyl bothered him.
Despite the available space, only six of the nine seats were taken. Five, actually, unless one counted Albert; and Albert was sourly certain that he did not count for seating purposes. Or, indeed, for any purposes.
The woman in the front passenger seat looked at her watch. "What is taking them?" she snapped, and glanced at her watch again before glaring out the van window, staring at Zabar’s ("Your campus store since 1904") as if the power of her gaze could force her friends to appear in the doorway. "Jesus!"
Bobbi sneezed.
"It hasn’t been that long, Allie. Relax," Barry suddenly suggested from his seat next to Albert (or really, Albert thought, next to nobody), startling Albert quite a bit—Albert had thought that Barry was asleep. In fact, he still appeared to be asleep, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, head tipped back against the too-hard headrest. The other four passengers swiveled in their seats to look uncertainly at him.
"You awake there, Barry-boy?" asked Bobbi. Barry didn’t respond at all, an attitude Albert certainly understood. "Barry?"
Albert didn’t like Bobbi, who with her fat face and wide, staring eyes always reminded him of a particularly insistent cow, one that perhaps requires milking and has unaccountably decided that you are the person who will milk it, if only it follows you around long enough. Today she seemed to have a cold, making her seem even more pallid and bovine than usual. Bobbi’s skin was smooth, tacky and expansive, like the van seats.
"He’s asleep," said Pile authoritatively, glancing up from the Bible he had been flipping through (since when does he carry around a Bible? Albert thought.). "The man’s a machine, can drop off anywhere."
"That’s your diagnosis, is it?" said Alison, in a tone that would have seemed bitterly sarcastic to anyone who didn’t know she always sounded like that.
"It is," replied Pile, unperturbed.
Albert didn’t like Pile, with his asymmetrically pimpled face and his purple marker poetry. What on earth had ever given him the impression that any stranger, passing in the hall, would care to see his scrawled verses? Acts as if he’s Claudia Teck, Albert thought, not that Albert had any taste for Teck’s verse—all those metaphors about blood and crockery and nail polish and vomit wore thin after the first line or two. (Albert’s taste ran more to songs, especially those with peppy tunes and clever rhyming. The Violent Femmes and, embarrassingly, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers were his current favorites.)
Alison glanced at her watch, again, and glared out the window, again. She visibly bit back some sort of comment. From the driver's seat, Sam covertly watched Alison’s slim body twist in the seat.
Bobbi wiped her nose on her jacket sleeve and squinted at Barry. "A broken machine, don’t you think?" she asked. "He doesn’t do anything, just sleeps. I mean, machines do something. That’s what they’re for."
"Blame the creator, not the creation. Barry is a perfect sleeping machine, and it’s not his fault if a perfect sleeping machine isn’t much use in our day-to-day life. He just hasn’t found his place yet. Somewhere out there is a job which needs somebody to sleep through it, and when Barry finds that job, all the world will admire his perfection."
"Air Traffic Controller?" suggested Alison, sneering.
"I wouldn’t mind being able to sleep like that myself," said Bobbi, and sneezed again. "Would certainly make the drive go faster."
Albert sat back in his seat, sinking into the seat just slightly, and tried to focus his mind on the day ahead. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a shadow of a man was driven to his own funeral.
•
The man walked tiredly through the woods, stopping only when he caught sight of the building through the thick trees. On a good day, he might have seemed unusually handsome, a bit like Peter O'Toole. But right now he was hungry, and he was thirsty, and he had slept under a log, and no one looks their best under such circumstances.
Not that he was concerned with being seen; quite the opposite, it was essential he not be seen. Especially not here. And especially not at his next stop, where he hoped to rob the office of precisely the person whom it was most desperately important that he not be seen by. He checked his watch again, still annoyed with himself—he had actually overslept on the most uncomfortable night's sleep of his life.
He cast about for a spot in the woods where he could keep an eye on the door. Sooner or later the old man was sure to go out for lunch, and then he'd have his chance. All he needed was a little luck. That, and a shower. And a qualified dry-cleaner. He stopped and raised his head, surprised by a sound.
A distant sound of… horses. Galloping horses.
Coming closer.
He stood up, looking around. The sounds echoed, and it was hard to identify a direction, but they were definitely getting much closer. He spun in place, puzzled and frightened.
He had just decided that what he most needed, actually, was to be up a tree when the first horse hit him, a blur of snowy fur and cloaked, faceless rider, spinning him into the air. His face scraped painfully against a tree trunk before he fell to the ground beneath another horse. Red hooves smashed around him, incredibly loud, and a huge dark mass that was either the horse overhead or the ground below. A front hoof scraped against his side, ripping easily through cloth and flesh, and something scraped painfully against his stomach, and something horrible and fast happened to his calf, and he couldn't hear anything for the roaring in his ears.
It was several minutes before he realized that he was still alive, that the horses were gone, and that what he actually needed was to be taken to a hospital. Pulling himself upright by pulling on a low tree branch, he staggered towards the building he had intended to sneak into. He had lost his watch, which was understandable under the circumstances; but still. He probably wouldn't have gone in, if he had been watching. If he had seen who had entered just a few minutes earlier.
•
The van—one of two making the trip to Minneapolis for Albert's funeral, which Herschberg U. had agreed to lend after Albert's mother had placed a angry phone call to President Hoover's office—turned right at the corner and sped up, as Sam pulled and pushed on the gearshift knob.
"I think what we're missing is fart," said Don thoughtfully.
Annabelle considered it, then shook her head. "No, he added that later, when he expanded the monologue. Fart wasn’t part of the original list."
Don grunted and stared fixedly at nothing, a dopey expression on his face, trying to bring to mind all the words he had never heard on TV.
"Tits. Tits. Tits. The missing word is tits!" screamed Albert, who had sat through this conversation with the correct answer and a mounting sense of frustration. This was the first time he had left Jill's hospital room (not counting walks, and trips to the TV room, and a movie, no one could be in one room all the time—none of those trips meant anything, clearly. This was his first real trip out of the room), and he didn't want to spend most of it listening to people who couldn't even remember a simple comedy monologue correctly.
"I can never remember these things. Asshole?" asked Don.
"Jesus Christ, who cares?" snapped Alison. "You guys have been fucking trading swear words for the last half-hour!"
Annabelle laughed, and pointed out that she and Don had only gotten back from the store five minutes ago.
"Speaking of which, how does it take twenty minutes to buy coke and cookies?"
"They're not cookies, they're breakfast cereal shaped like little chocolate chip cookies. Little elves mine them from a cookie mine, see?" Annabelle held up the cookie box so that Pile could examine the illustration on the back of the box; Pile nodded and said he stood corrected. "I'll pay you back tomorrow, Sam" Sam told her not to worry about it. "Anyway, I was ready before Don was," Annabelle concluded. She reached into the box, grabbed a handful of cookie-colored disks, and threw them into her mouth.
Don grinned a little sheepishly. "They've added pocket watches to the, you know, the little plastic spinning rack with watches? They've added pocket watches. I've always wanted a pocket watch."
"Well, how long could it take to buy a pocket watch?"
"Oh, hours," said Don, seeming surprised by the question. "I didn't buy one, I was just, um, looking."
"I like that," said Bobbi. "Trading swear words. It's like, two kids in a treehouse with all these little cards. I've got a shitheel and a shit-for-brains, if you just take my goddamn whore in exchange for your flagrant bullshit then I'll have the complete shit set. I bet Albert would have thought that was funny. Trading swear words."
Albert, who had in fact been chuckling at Bobbi's treehouse story, stopped short. Alison reached back to hold Bobbi's hand, but Bobbi drew her hand away.
"Albert didn't think anything was funny," declared Pile. "How did you you get onto discussing dirty words anyway? Old man Zabar cuss you out at the register?"
"Fuck you, you pretentious asshole," Albert told Pile. "I've laughed at your lame poems any number of times."
"On the wall behind the watch spinner rack, they have this poster, the seven wonders of the world?" Annabelle grinned. "I saw it while I was waiting for Don, but it's written in these kinda fancy script letters, so at first I thought it said seven wonders of the word. And that reminded me of the seven words you can't say on TV. Did you know one of the wonders was a lighthouse?"
"Really?" said Pile. "Which lighthouse?"
"I don't know, I just looked at the pictures. But still, you know, a lighthouse. Even a very nice lighthouse hardly seems like a wonder of the world, don't you think?"
"Yes, well, you know those ancients. They didn't get out much."
"Holy shit!" said Sam, pressing hard enough on the brakes to cause everybody in the van to lurch forward, except for Albert, who actually shot through the seat in front of him and was disgusted to find himself embedded in Bobbi, who had a sneezing fit, which disgusted Albert even more. Alison, red-faced, rolled down her window, stuck her head out, and yelled "morons!"
"What the hell happened?" asked Albert, backing out of Bobbi and glaring at Sam's back. Sam was breathing hard.
"Did we hit something?" asked Barry, rubbing his eyes.
"Morons!" yelled Alison out the window again.
"Jesus Christ…" said Sam, leaning back in the driver's seat and exhaling long and slow. "Is everyone all right?"
"Sam? What happened?"
"We just nearly ran over the SCA, is what happened," snarled Alison. "Two morons in cloaks on horseback."
"You're joking!"
"No, that's what happened," agreed Sam. "They ran right in front of the van. I don't think the second one was more than a foot from the front bumper."
Everyone made various noises of astonishment and disgust.
"Morons,” muttered Alison again. "They could have really hurt the horses…."
Sighing, Sam put the van back into gear and accelerated down the road. On their right, Hiawatha Towers sped by and was soon behind them.
"Anyone else want to sing?" asked Annabelle.
•
"Not as old as all that. Still recognize my own piss on a log." Doc Shriever looked up at the visitor with grizzled defiance, daring her to disagree. "Can still recognize dead."
"Uh-huh," said Sheriff Jennifer Little Bear. "Well, then, we’ve got a fucking miracle on our hands, that’s all I can say. The girl’s alive, Doc. Breathing and everything."
Doc Shriever turned and spat phlegm into the big metal sink. Charming, thought the Sheriff. "I’ll need to get copies of all your paperwork. The FBI folks want to go over your notes, and that’s the end of it. Did you take any photos of the body during the autopsy?"
"Didn't do an autopsy—body disappeared first."
"That’s right. Shit. Well, just the paperwork then. And they want custody of all this stuff, but we’ll take photos first." For some reason, Jennifer Little Bear liked swearing in front of old Doc Shriever; it made her feel like a good ol' boy. Using a pencil she drew from her hip pocket, she poked through the pile she had dumped out from a paper bag onto Doc Shriever’s big metal counter: bloody clothing, a purse, a blood-splattered poster showing a screaming face, several transparent evidence bags. The Sheriff picked one of the bags up and held it to the light. "Well, I’ll be fucked."
"Yuh?"
"I’ve been wondering how anyone could 'sharpen' a piano wire. But when you see it done, it’s really pretty obvious, isn’t it? What’s this black dust?"
"Idiot tried to fingerprint it."
"That cocksucker."
"I may be many things, but I am no… idiot."
Doc Shriever and Jennifer Little Bear spun around. A tall man staggered in the open doorway, leaning one shoulder against the sill, a once-elegant suit hanging in rags from his thin body. Blood and dirt covered one side of his face, and also one calf, where the pants had ripped entirely away from the leg. A long gash extended from a ribcage to a hip, the shredded clothing not hiding the bloody rip in his flesh. Shriever—who had last seen the man three days ago, and had expected never to see him again—gasped and backed up, putting the metal counter between himself and the intruder.
"Youngjack!" snarled Little Bear. "Jesus, you’d need three weeks of SAT courses to upgrade yourself to idiot, you motherfucker! What the fuck are you thinking, coming back here after what you did? Didn’t I tell you never to show your miserable cunt jackal face in Herschberg again?"
"Language! I’m afraid, my dear," said Youngjack, with the barest hint of a smile, "that taking orders has never been my strong suit." He closed his eyes and waited to faint, and was quite surprised, after a few seconds, to find himself still conscious and upright.
Dammit, he thought. That would have been the perfect moment.
An awkward silence ensued.
•
Albert had been pleased that his body had finally been released by the authorities. That meant a funeral. A chance to see his family one last time, and to hear his friends say nice things about him. Plus, Albert liked coffins aesthetically: rectangular without being featurelessly blocky, shiny without being slick, and the dark wood textures were visually pleasing. He hoped his own coffin would be walnut, but didn't know if coffins were available in walnut. If they were, it would probably be very expensive, and Albert didn't remember ever telling his mother how important a walnut coffin was. You never think of these things ahead of time, Albert thought.
For example, he had never imagined his funeral would include Annabelle, Don, Barry and Pile yowling "and that briiiings us baaaack to Doooooooooe!" while Allison scowled out the window slightly and Albert himself screamed at the top of his ethereal lungs that they should just SHUT UP! SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! Still, nothing is ever what you expect it to be; why should this be any different? Albert thought. But he did not stop screaming.
In the last couple of days, Albert had often found himself screaming. Yelling. Singing. Laughing. Clucking. Just making aaaahh noises. There was a curious freedom in not being heard; in retrospect, remaining quiet had been very stressful.
The singers came to a ragged stop, and Bobbi let loose a sneeze she had been holding in. "Actually, I was fine until I got on the van. I think I'm allergic to whatever the dry cleaners put in this dress," Bobbi explained, even though no one had asked.
Annabelle offered her cereal-cookies around, which were refused by Bobbi but eagerly grabbed by Don. Barry leaned back into his seat, apparently settling down for another snooze, and Albert noticed that his skin and clothing had just turned paper-white. Just like that, Albert was sitting astonished on the pavement, his nose inches from the van's rear license plate for a subliminally quick moment before the van drove further down the road.
Albert gaped at the van, which wasn't yet too far away for him to hear the next song beginning. He yelled, and screamed, and ranted, but the van did not hear him or turn back.
After a while, he turned back towards town, pausing only to stare at the cheerful, bright-blue road-sign, with rust-edged bullet holes sprinkled across it in a way that reminded Albert of Pile's complexion. He raised his middle finger to the sign and noticed that color had returned to his arm (and, presumably, to the rest of him).
Albert stomped off—which was not easy for an incorporeal being, as you need some weight to properly stomp, but he put quite a lot of effort into it and managed to stomp—a rather slow and deliberate stomp, true, but a stomp nonetheless—and as he stomped, he dolefully sang the song that was now stuck in his head, snarling out a word with each stomp. "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip… That started from this tropic port…"
•
Albert might have felt better had he known that fourteen minutes later, Sam was made to pull over the van at a roadblock that had been set up. A short, heated argument (most of the heat coming from Alison) ensued, but the end of the argument was inevitable before it had even begun. The van did a clumsy seven-part-turn and drove back the way it came. By the time they passed the blue sign, with its cheery letters declaring "You are leaving Herschberg. Come back soon!," Albert was long gone.
•
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