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SOLVING THE FOLLOWING riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs—you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.
As soon as you get home, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded earlier. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.
Frank kept seeing things—awful things—and over the months all the king’s doctors and all the king’s pills couldn’t make Frank’s waking nightmares go away.
I was about to warn the girl about John’s coffee, which tasted like a cup of battery acid someone had pissed in and then cursed at for several hours,
She nudged aside a stack of DVD cases on an end table and sat the mug down, glancing at it distrustfully as if to remind herself not to accidentally drink from it again, lest it betray her anew.
“I told her we would look into it tonight,” John said, heading me off before I accidentally introduced some rational thought into this thing.
“I call it Dante’s Syndrome,” John said. I had never heard him call it any such thing. “Meaning, I think Dave and I gained the ability to peer into Hell. Only it turns out Hell is right here, it’s all through us and around us and in us like the microbes that swarm through your lungs and guts and veins. Hey, look! An owl!” We all looked. It was an owl, all right.
“Oh, no!” I heard John shout over the running water. “It’s dark in here and here I am in the shower! Alone! I’m so naked and vulnerable!”
My name is David, by the way. Um, hi. I once saw a man’s kidney grow tentacles, tear itself out of a ragged hole in his back and go slapping across my kitchen floor.
I should let you know that I had no idea how to play the guitar or any other musical instrument, and that the sound of my singing voice could probably draw blood from a man’s ears, and perhaps kill a dog outright.
That whole bit was something John had come up with, the man having a terrible habit of carrying out his drunken 3:00 A.M. ideas even after daylight and sobriety came. It was always 3:00 A.M. for John.
I heard something that turned my guts cold. A shriek. High-pitched, almost a whistle. Only two creatures on God’s Earth can make that sound: African Grey Parrots and fifteen-year-old female humans.
From the reaction I figured I had just encountered the most dreaded of all partygoers: the amateur magician.
I had a familiar, nervous sensation, one that goes all the way back to elementary school. It’s the simultaneous realization that I may have talked my way into another fistfight, and that I had not spent any time learning to fight since the last one.
There is no feeling I hate as much as speechlessness in the face of another man.
TELLING THE STORY now, I’m tempted to say something like, “Who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?” I won’t say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow.
I didn’t know about it until a week later because he didn’t tell me, knowing I would have kicked his ass right there in the hospital. But I told him if he ever got into that kind of trouble again without telling me I would not only kick his ass, but would in fact beat him until he died, then pursue him into the afterlife and beat his eternal soul.
“Wait, wait, wait. You took something that scared Head? The guy who did the stuff that killed River Phoenix just to prove he was the better man?”
From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again and again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I’d stop fucking up the party.
If he gets sick and dies, Robert Marley, they’re gonna find you in a ditch somewhere.
I knew I should be talking about the Jamaican. Only my knee-jerk impulse to never volunteer anything to the cops was holding me back.
I bought it after my old Hyundai got totaled a few years ago in a manner that was undoubtedly unique among all vehicles ever totaled in vehicle history.
Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.
“—So finally Dunlow says to him, ‘Look, we got dead or missing kids here and we’re gonna find out what we need to know, so you’re stayin’ in this room until I’m satisfied or you die of old age.’ Your boy, when he hears that, he falls over dead. Just like that.” “Yeah, that sounds like John.” “And now he’s gone. Got a call from the hospital, it’s just an empty bed where he was. They figured he skipped out on payin’ the bill.” “That also sounds like John.”
I turned to see what was so compelling as to draw a room full of frozen stares. Robert the pseudo-Jamaican’s body was curled up on the floor, twitching. He was saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay, mon! Just give me a minute now! I’m feelin’ better!” His words would have been more reassuring if his head hadn’t been separated from his body, laying a good two feet away from the shredded pink stump of his neck.
life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever.
I squeezed the trigger about twenty more times just to be sure there wasn’t another shot hiding in there somewhere.
He said, “Man, your little nine is useless against—” His words were cut off when the empty gun I hurled at him smacked off his cheek, knocking him backward once more. He brought a hand to his face. “Stop that shit! Don’t you know we got the same plan?”
I realized once more that I was about to enter a fight and, again, had learned no fighting skills since the last one. Only this time there was a good chance the fight would end with me feeling the opponent’s teeth ripping out my eyeballs.
“Wake up. Wake up, asshole.” More nothing. I felt eyes on me, resisted the urge to punch John right in his stupid catatonic face.
Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.” “Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”
I sighed again, rubbed my forehead with both hands. There was a very real chance that the conversation had taken a turn that would allow John to talk about his dick, which was a subject it could take hours, if not the better part of days, to come back from.
“I pieced it together through inductive reasoning and information relayed to me by John when he was talking to me through the dog. Long story.” “Okay,” Fred said, accepting it readily. I sensed that I was in the presence of the king of the go-with-the-flow types.
We had our plan. Or, considering that the plan had come from me, we had given up and were waiting to die.
I thought of John’s last pet, a little terrier dog that jumped out of his third-floor apartment window and died while he played video games on the couch. Yeah, Cucumber will be in good hands, Big Jim.
“If I die, I want you to tell everybody I died in the coolest way possible. Dave, you can have my CDs. My brother will demand the PlayStation, since I borrowed it from him a year ago, so don’t fight him for it.”
Fred whispered, “Okay. If I don’t come back, and say they don’t got my body, like if Justin eats me or somethin’, tell everybody you don’t know what happened. Make it mysterious. And then a year later spread rumors that you’ve seen me wanderin’ around town. That way I’ll be like fuckin’ Bigfoot, everybody claiming to have seen me here and there. Legend of Fred Chu.” John nodded, as if he were committing this to memory.
We stood there for a moment, looked at each other with a kind of deflated shame and defeat, then did what he said. They were waiting for me, I realized, too late. They were waiting for me to push the attack, to lead them. Welcome aboard the David Wong Disappointment Train, fuckers.
I saw a speech coming and could only pray that I wouldn’t come out sounding like a white kid raised next to a cornfield trying to record interlude skits for a gangsta rap album.
I was so baffled by this that I wasn’t even sure I had heard him right. But Fred, having perfected going with the flow to a degree that philosophers could study for centuries, shrugged and said, “Okay.”
SAY WHAT YOU want about Shitload and his disjointed pet, but neither of them either tried to shoot me or set me on fire. The same cannot be said for Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton, who strode into the house loading shells into a pistol-grip riot gun.
I wondered if they noticed Morgan didn’t exactly read Justin his rights before blowing a hole in him. I mean, I did the same thing but that’s why society doesn’t let me carry a badge.
To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.
“Make that fifty hours and thirty-seven-point-two-three seconds. It’s the adrenaline, I guess. I ain’t really been tired. The thrill of the hunt.” We drove in silence for a moment. Red taillights appeared up ahead. I reached out and gripped the dashboard. Morgan said, “That, and those loud, piercing voices in my head.” Morgan’s eyes exploded. He shrieked as two sprays of blood flecked over the windshield. Jennifer screamed behind me, John and Fred bellowed “OH, FUCK,” simultaneously.
Jennifer put up her hands, said, “Guys, let’s not make this a dick-measuring contest, okay?” There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.” Silence again. “That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.” I sighed and said, “John, I don’t think anyone in this vehicle is in the mood to—” “John, let me make one thing clear,” Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. “Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its
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“Oh, Jesus, forget it. Who cares.” I gripped the shotgun and considered shooting myself in the head. A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows. “Dave, I have a plan.”
Jen was on the other side of the fountain, kicking one of the beasts to death. I ran toward her, blew a wig monster in half, worked the pump and realized I had no more shots. I flung the gun at another one of the monsters, missed, hit an elderly man in a wheelchair instead, toppling him over.
Two of the wig beasts were bearing down on me. No, three. One of them crouched and launched itself at me— THONK The beast was batted away by a folding chair, wielded by John. He screamed “YEAH!” in a dead-on impersonation of pro wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage, grasping the folded chair by two legs. He swung again and flattened another of the beasts, screaming, “Have a seat, bitch!”
Another bite victim lay nearby, a young man writhing as if in a seizure. Eventually his legs kicked themselves free from the rest of his body. The limbs thumped along the floor on their own like two giant polyester snakes with shoes for heads. Right behind them was a loose head stuck to a single arm, furiously biting and clawing the carpet. I felt like we might not be in control of this situation any longer.
