A rubber can only hold so much, and Hank finally came. He slammed his palm down on the resin tabletop, pulled off his hat, looking strangely pathetic given the tousled strands of surviving white hair sticking straight up from his head, falling in slow motion back into place, a high red rudding his nose and cheeks. His jaw working up to: “Goddamn it, just stop this shit.”
“Problem, Mr. Cowboy?”
“Yes there’s a problem, Jud. Al. Whoever the hell you are today.”
“Care to bring it to the group, or are you just going to smack my table around some more?”
There is an uncomfortable dynamic that develops when dams break, when dikes leak, when a group of people share something and must present it to an uninitiated brunt oblivious to the conflict. This dynamic evidences itself in diverted eyes, sudden attention gifted to the mundane: a hangnail, the right angle at a paper’s corner, evidences in the until-then suppressed urge to clear a throat or cough. The assembled hierarchy of Judith Command, at least those possessing balls, now all looked to Hank while Alina leaned back into her chair and interlocked her fingers with a confidence that could only have come from Judith herself.
These men were not cowards; know that. They just didn’t know how to tell god she was wrong. They were each fictional characters, but they left it to the fictional character twice removed from reality to voice their concerns. Hank, as a character within a television show within a novel, had a disconnect that they couldn’t.
His gun hand shaped itself into an all-fingers representation thereof and pointed at the young woman at the table’s head. “You,” he chose words just before speaking them, crafting each into viable concepts, “need to get that fucking boy out of the silver and into this room.”
“Miss him?”
He scoffed. “We all do, girl. But more than that—That shit’s getting into his head. He ain’t no good to us in there. If we’re gonna—”
“I believe he met with Reynald yesterday…?”
“He did.” Jean Reynald’s voice wasn’t nearly as unafraid as he’d hoped. “It was…I don’t know.”
“That ain’t the point, and you know it. If we’re gonna finish this, he needs to be a part of it. Can’t all be worked out by you two.”
“We,” Alina’s face stuttered over a smile, “have things in hand.” A jump cut reduced to a fraction of a frame, for an instant, Hank saw Judith looking out from Alina’s eyes. “Don’t you trust us?”
“‘Us?’ No. Alina, yes. Paul, yes. Jud, you scare the shit out of me. He wrote me. You’re just along for the ride, and I don’t rightly appreciate you taking over while he’s swimming.”
“Listen, Hank…I’ll try to be better about this. Try to get him in here and—”
“You do that.”
She paused. “He needs to get his shit together. That’s why—”
“—he lives in the silver? It ain’t right, girl. He ain’t right no more.”
“We’re working on it.”
He’d never learned how to swim.
He’d never trusted meditation, relegated it solely to the province of those unshowered non-Western types who embraced yoga and feng-shui and ate Thai to make themselves feel worldly. He didn’t meditate in the silver pool; he thought, too much, simple as that.
He grew angrier with breathing.
The pool seemed deeper in those final days, and not being able to swim (or float—even with the requisite remainder beer belly, he had a hard time floating), he walked into the tideless, tideful mirror lake until the surface tickled his lips, plugged his ears and slid into his nose, his eyes above the surface until the alien crawled into and through, his too-long hair a shawl on the silver, grasped and pulled under by a trillion trillion reaching robots, giving himself to the pull and disappearing under the sealing, untouched glass.
After that first breath, he sometimes forgot to take another.
It wasn’t meditation; he wouldn’t allow the word to stain him, so imbued with past hatreds and connotations of loss. He thought. Tried to wrap his mind around a solution: they were slowly losing the war. Maire’s nightmare forces, combinations of silvers, bleeds into all realities, were gaining non-ground quickly, urged forever onward by the great archives of knowledge stored in Hope’s and Whistler’s stolen patterns. Forts were burning, out on the periphery of core reality. Maire was strong, getting stronger. He was weak. She was coming for him, cutting straight for the heart of him, and he was tripped up more by his insecurities than a shattered knee he’d not yet lived through. The silver was the only place the outside non-world didn’t scream at him; his children, the trillion trillions, whispered, sang in voices beneath perception. It was a cold embrace, but it gave him purpose.
The singing, bodhisattva drones, the tender tickle as they erased farmer tans, tweezed an ingrown hair from his jaw, twisted cancers from purchase in his lung and prostate, tenderly, tenderly aligned a spine, sloughed dead cells, slowed a racing heart, closed ducts and reassured, the singing, the drones.
He felt a hand.
Paul spun, lashed, feet pushing the bottom away, rising above the surface in motion, slowly, noting the returning droplets of the splash, the drone lapsed. He gasped, fearful that he wasn’t alone, treaded toward the shore, hands shifting and eyes burning at the prospect of combat.
Another back breached the surface, the body arcing from one edge, familiar, unbeautiful and fundamentally same. A scar across the chest, code burns on left forearm, the white mark of Cain blaring less obviously from the right temple.
The figure stood, bent to the right: shattered knee. The figure stood, slicked with silver, unnaturally-large hands, hardened sculptures of bone and obtuse angle, brushed the liquid metal from arms and chest. The teeth were the same. The jib was cut more of brass than silver. It extended a hand.
“Shake my hand, brother.” And he thought of the cold war of the end of his youth, a father extending a hand to a brother, the same admonition, met with refusal. “Shake my hand.”
Fundamentally same, but.
“Come with me.”
They sat at the edge of the silver pool, Indian-style, both slumped forward for the weight of their torsos. They’d once been described as unique constructs: chicken legs, barrel torsos, the longest arms and biggest hands. Not well-designed. Unique. Pieced together from leftover parts. Mistakes given life.
Paul looked into the newcomer, had questions but didn’t ask. The older version had answers but didn’t offer them.
Whereas Paul was an image of a specific point in history, the post-college unraveling of muscle, a jowl, a gut, hair past his shoulders (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—) and a beard, full, (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—), the other was a study in evolutions and counterpoints, the face better-defined under taut skin, the hair cropped short, now lit with a disconcerting array of pure whites on the side, a clump, Whistler-esque, growing in at the line. Deeper canyons flanking the eyes, the mouth’s edges forced a little deeper down by years. Two gray flecks marring the brown-green surface of the right eye, rendering it blind. The torso wasn’t smaller, the arms not shorter; the legs were still chicken. Gray insinuated new patterns into the chest.
“Upgrade?”
“Paradigm shift.”
“Office talk.”
“Realism.”
“Huh.”
“Call me your Omega.”
“Is this better?”
The silver pool had disappeared, replaced with the Cafe Bellona. Paul noted a sign on the counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. A bus ground to a halt at the stop down the street. The brakes sounded like screaming.
“Not better. Different.”
The coffee shop was empty save the two time-offset versions of the same man. Paul thought he heard a rustling behind the counter, through the door leading to the inner sanctum, coffee filters and the cash box and mops. Presumably, New Management was back there. Those hidden sounds were more frightful than they should have been, the creak of a floorboard, the swish of fabric, the clearing of a throat.