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The estuary held Dead Town like an open hand that could close into a fist at any time.
Such a person moved against the pattern of tides, of stars, of seasons and, in that sense, was not bound by the idea of Time as experienced on the Forgotten Coast. Such a person was dangerous.
Did a pivotal event or conversation begin in the present or did it begin a decade earlier at the start of a friendship, only to end with an upturned table and a drunken punch while the house band played in the back? Was the faint sound of the cranes headed north—silver and ethereal and cloud-distant—happening now, or was that another season and the sky held merely the memory of their passage?
“Tomorrow will be better,” Team Leader 1 said, after they had finished the ice cream. But it wasn’t.
When the thought made his heart constrict and Old Jim’s breath came rough and uneven, like he might die, he tried to remember he didn’t deserve it. Unless he did.
Talk the dark cloud from his mouth, to some young go-getter rah-rah bullshit artist or buoyant “life coach” he could peer inside of in twenty seconds and pull his soul out of his head through his nose, shrieking.
The Brutes Jack warred against when he didn’t want to answer a question were a “new breed” that held most of the power, made policy, and were always trying to impose “an ungodly order” on what was meant to be wild and free—namely Jack’s budget.
Overheard in the hallway his last day before traveling to the Forgotten Coast: “I wish you weren’t wonderful in so many ways, because you’re so awful.”
What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?
Hard to adjust your pace to a ticking clock when you didn’t know the end date.
The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now.
The way he could be in all three places at once now—the present that had annihilated him, the past that had never left him, the future that held him still and trembling like a bird caught in a biologist’s net.
Director Captain Chef the kind of paunchy, white-dress-shirt-wearing, tan-blazer-wearing, navy-trousers-wearing motherfucker Lowry preferred to think of as overseeing a physics lab or a high school as principal, but not well, did the old hem-and-haw at start of roll call, like they weren’t highly trained, highly motivated mofo pros. Jumping up and down on blocks while screaming insults at their parents. Enduring temp extremes while “girding” their minds against “contamination.” Shouting “yes please may I have another” while lashing each other with whips while they wore heavy clothing and
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Yet, would any of them fucking die for him on the mission, the way he would for them? Like, he would fucking dive in front of a burning bus full of killer whales with a monster on the roof directing traffic while shooting RPGs out of its ass—for them. All of them. Any of them. But he fucking liked very few of them, except Landry, Hargraves, and well … maybe just those two.
Whitby had, at best, made the prancing pony team armed with mallets back in college. Or not even that, but clotheshorses or hobbyhorses, and they’d been swatting each other’s bums with mallets and the balls had all been just clicking and dancing around on shiny lawns, forgotten. Then, continuing this line of thought, Whitby had probably been kicked off the team for freezing up from the stress of accidently riding his hobbyhorse to death—a first—at the Extended Rallies, or Balls in One, or Horsey DeComp, or whatever they called the stupid fucking horse stuff at fancy prancy universities.
Lowry, staring at that f f f f f site and sight, wanted someone to hug him and reassure that Erlickson and Rodgers had failed to follow some vital protocol, although what it could be other than don’t die and have no damn bad luck, he could not imagine. They’d been no less fastidious or “with it” re: the program. But, still, that they had been their own worst enemy. That must be the fundamental truth. Better you than me. Better the rest of the yous than me.
“I plan to shoot to kill,” Lowry said, and he fucking did. He’d been hired to do a job—several jobs, actually—and one of them was to shoot the fuck out of things when the things needed the fuck shot out of them.
Oh how he wished, those quicksilver fishes, that they could stand once more in the echo chamber of jars and he could have a do-over on the saying of stuff.
Over his shoulder, Lowry shouted at Landry, “Stay safe! Keep the drugs safe!” Oh, shit, he was going to lose his fucks again. He would have to fucking ration his fucking fucks and oh shit did it even matter, if this was the state of the world.
It was an anthropological nightmare, this festering need to hold on to the foundations of your vision, your prior frame of reference.
Inside, the junk you found in secret fucking rooms.
