Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

his still sweaty from the slick wheel of his truck, mine cold, tingly. Neal was a little off, somehow. Time and distance and a sky full of madness (and as I shook Ed’s hand, I saw Neal was peering up at the sky, not in fear or in wonder, but seemingly in communion. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, like he used to do for Allen’s poetry back in New York) had done a little something to him, I wasn’t sure what. Once Ed rode off, his truck growling like a fat old dog, I walked back to Neal and looked up too. The tentacles were seemingly right overhead, black and translucent at the same time, and swirling, ever swirling and knitting into one another as they spewed out of a central vortex, a black pit of tiny red stars.

All of this, like some psychedelica splashed over the plain blue and white sky as if from an overhead projector.

“Do you see the constellation?” he asked me, or he asked the sky itself. I just got a look at his nervous, bobbing Adam’s apple. “They’re alive, you know. The stars. Swirling in infinity. They are the infinity really; they just seem like little sparkles from here, but this planet it just a pebble swimming in between the stars, the matrix.” He didn’t look at me, but Neal changed his tone, he got all friendly, the Dale Carnegie way. “Jack, you ever draw a connect-the-dots page. You know, of an elephant balancing on one stumpy leg on a platform, and a big beach ball on his tusk. I tell you Jack, connect the dots up there.” He smiled, I could see it in the twist of his cheeks, but he was still leaning back, head up, trying to see the whole swirling, dreamy sky at once. “Go on Jack. Keep looking up. Connect the dots. Chaos at the center of the universe. That’s all it is you know.”

“Neal, c’mon,” I said and I stepped forward. Too late already, I thought, my last chance blown. I wanted to tackle him, shove his face back in the dirt, God help me, remind him of his kids if I had to. But Neal heard my footfalls stomping in the sand and he snapped his head back to me, “Don’t you see, the country, maybe the world is going mad again! I’ll have something to write about.” And I laughed.

A giggle at first, half-nervous, half-hysterical. “You know,” Neal said, “the plane of the earth is becoming non-Euclidean. Jack, we’re an hour from Denver now, Jack. Tomorrow we’ll be four thousand miles from the same city. Remember Denver? Remember the black mountains that looked like clouds?” He hiked his thumb behind his shoulder, and I looked over at what he was pointed at. Yep, mountains like angry clouds, or the shadow of the Great Dreamer.

“Fuck, Neal, what happened to Colorado? Did it get bigger? Did we get bigger?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. What do you think, Jack?” More grift, more unctuous flimflam, asking me. “Let’s go eat on it.” And off he walked before I could say yes. I was carried off in his wake back to the tent where he told Nelson, “We’re driving up to Mom’s. Bring you back a sandwich?”

Nelson stirred, barely. “Rule number one, never eat at a place called Mom’s.”

Neal turned and smirked, “He says that every day.”

“And don’t play poker with a man named Doc,” Nelson said before drifting back to his little opiate sleep.

And don’t drive across country into a maelstrom of shifting sands, deadly cities full of slavemen and snickering queers, along highways lined with drunken babblers and ghost trains, all under horrible bright blue skies with a guy named Neal. We took the car, and on the way to the diner Neal told me of his own brush with the primordial beings, with the demon Kilaya. He didn’t get the girl (surprisingly enough, Mary wouldn’t stay a virgin around Neal) but instead one of the demon’s original forms. A man, Mongloid but muscled, from the torso up. Waist down, Neal said, nothing but knife. Neal was in Mexico, he said (“I went out to get some milk for the kids. It took me six weeks.”), and saw the spirit out in the wild brown of some dead field, scratching out a path with the tip of his body-blade. “It was us, Jack,” Neal explained, giggling, “our trips, the way we stitched this country together. It was a message, a sign and a portent, a telegram from God. And then he whispered in my ear.” And then Neal whispered in my ear, and it wasn’t the sutra that Marie had buzzed before. Neal had received a darker teaching.

He had walked down to the whirling spirit, and not knowing what else to do, bowed down to it. And in the now slowly spinning blades, Neal saw himself. Two reflections, one on each side of the blade. The first good ol’ Neal, slick hair, sparking eyes and a voice like a monk’s flittering flute. But as Kilaya spun, the sinister side of the dagger showed another image; Neal sallow and deflated, gray skin stretched over deformed, spiked bones. Lips gone, replaced with a huge slash of jagged skin showing off jaws and gums. But in that horrible petrified rictus of a face, power. The phantom Neal’s eyes glowed and pulsed with it, his tongue long as snakes and thrashing, ready to kill. And able to kill as well, with a word, with an alien syllable mere humans can’t even dream of pronouncing. Neal could do it; he birthed a generation, he could kill a generation—all he had to do was bind himself to the black and squirming chaos in the sky.

“But,” Neal said, his face alight, painted orange by the slowly setting sun. “But that wasn’t a warning, Jack, it was a promise. Like Kilaya learned compassion and turned to the protection of the dharma, I can. That’s why it was sent rather than some other bodhisattva, some old man or baby. The world’s changing again, there’s power in the skies. We should grab some, use it. Call your big New York agent for me Jack, when we get to a pay phone. Use a whole burlap sack full of quarters if you have to, because we’re going to rewrite the world.” And with that, we were at Mom’s.

The man with the golden arm was right, Mom’s was awful. Brown cherries in the pie, gray vanilla ice cream and flickering lights. Mom’s had a jukebox filled with old white jazz 78s, long since warped from the sun and the sealed tin diner atmosphere itself. The speakers sang like weird and distant whales, even the clarinets were deep and made the floor rumble and whine. Neal was drawing a symbol in pepper and salt. “Yin and yang. You can’t play the notes without the rests, as you well know.” And he placed a pinch of pepper over a tear drop shape of salt. “Sometimes attachment can be best conquered through excess. Remember my letter? The bit about the girl on that bus from, damn, what was it, fifteen years ago now? The little perfect virgin on the bus. The way I blew past all the small talk and chitterchat, the way I made sure she was meat for me. A little pink rosebud between her sweaty thighs.”

“Wait, I thought you didn’t get that girl.”

He snorted, “I didn’t!” and the symbol of the Tao collapsed in a burst of sandy condiments. I wiped my hands with a napkin. “But I owned the wanting of it, of her. That was enough; I was dejected back then, and of course found another girl a couple of days later,” he said as the girl with his bacon sandwich found him and he smiled at her. “But now I am not. The seeking is the thing, not the getting, you know?” I didn’t, really. “So,” Neal said, “I think I should give myself over to the Dark Dreamer, and then, bound to that power, I can use it to protect reality from the on-rushing chaos overhead. Embrace the threat, it vanishes. Resist it, and it remains.” He shoved the corner of his sandwich into his mouth lustfully, and spoke through the crunching. “I’ll be a dharma protector” is what I thought he said. So I said, “What did you say?” and he swallowed like a snake and said, “I’ll be a dharma protector.”

He leaned across the Formica table like a guy reaching over for a kiss from his teenybopper girlfriend. All that was missing was the shake. “Look at me, Jack. I know you have the gift too. The jazz. I didn’t even write my letters in Earth characters, Jack. You never would have been able to read them otherwise. If you didn’t have the jazz in you. Look at me, friend. Is there any trace in me? Yeah, I want to settle down, but I’m no mugwump.” He wrapped his long fingers around his own throat. “This neck has never felt the noose of a tie.”

“I really don’t think that qualifies you for bodhisattva status,” I told him. Neal’s eyes were placid like frozen lakes.

He nodded. “No!” An upraised finger, one of those queer little gestures Neal learned from some cementheaded correctional officer in reform school. One finger could shut up a room of tough little snots. He wagged his index finger at me, and it had a callus. His little Underwood typewriter must have tasted some blood too, when he wrote his letters. “Not yet! But that’s the journey, right? A cross-country trip through chaos and cultists, that will be the initiation. We’ll see the old, the crippled, the dying, the corrupted twisted man-animals who call themselves Ned and all their bowling league buddies too.

“Jell-O molds. Have you ever seen this stuff?” He grabbed the sides of the table and shook it. My slaughtered cherry pie filling jiggled, and crumbs tumbled and spun in little orbits on the plate. I saw a hair in the mess (great) but Neal was the really disturbing thing. “Gelatin, like bloody cranberry sauce. Everyone’s eating the stuff. My kids, Jack! They feed it to my kids in school!” He relaxed and slid his hands across the chrome rim of the table, back towards his own side. “I had to leave, ya know? I just had to recapture the old magic.” Then he looked out the big window. “Nobody needs to buy gas around here anyway.”

“Nobody but us.” There was silence then, except for the popping and buzz of the giant neon MOM’S sign on the other side of the ceiling.

Finally Neal said, more thoughtfully than I ever heard him (and it was sad, when even he felt the need to think before acting rather than just diving on in, a pure spirit), “Maybe it’s not so bad. Is it really any worse than what happened before? People killed themselves for reasons just as foolish. People go to work, stuff themselves full of meat, get down on their knees and wail before something or other, crap out babies from bloody crotches, then feed the worms.” He turned to me with his old smile, “Is it even any different? We’re back, looking for—” And he stopped, tongue out, eyes twisted up thinking, finally like a writer, about what would be the perfect word. “—further. And nobody else is anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said, slow. Neal was just a bit too off. He could see things I couldn’t, he knew things I didn’t, and he was trafficking with dark spirits it seemed. The road was mine, this country and this trip were still mine, but those places between the spaces, the breathless vacuum between atoms of air, those all belonged to Neal, that’s what the little Marie-buzz in my ear