Weary sore and injured Niko decides to light a cigarillo to ward off the chill. He closes his eyes and takes a long deep drag. It’s the little things, it really is. As he enjoys the one small pleasure he has known down here he becomes aware of a lingering silence. He opens his eyes and takes the cigarillo from his mouth. The two men have broken off their argument to stare at him. Niko exhales gray smoke that roils away, underlit by faintly glowing ice and oddly beautiful.
The cyanotic woman has stopped slapping herself. Her paleblue hands now on her ample hips. Gaze direct and frank. She’s quite attractive in a drowned sort of way.
The two staring men begin to scream at Niko, loudly asking what the fuck he’s done to warrant clothes and cigarettes and matches. Has he been sent to torment them further, to sit there clothed and warm with packets of fire at his side just to remind them of what comfort their damnation has deprived them?
Throughout their tirade Niko simply sits there smoking. His mind an empty canvas for the moment. When the cigarillo is down to the butt he starts to stub it out upon the ice but changes his mind and picks it up and stands. As the two men gape, as all the transfixed dead around him stare, Niko approaches the pale woman who had looked on him so directly but with no hint of rancor. He holds out the smoking butt of cigarillo and raises his eyebrows.
Her smile is sly as she accepts the butt and keeps her gaze on him and inhales deeply. The cigarillo burns down so low it has to be burning her fingers. Probably she can’t feel it or maybe she doesn’t care. Her eyes close. Her face all gothic sensuality.
Niko recovers his guitar case and nods at the smoking woman. The more hirsute of the two angry men shouts that if he were free he’d kick Niko’s ass for mocking him.
Niko sizes the man up from head to toe. Big and burly and quite hairy, potgut but still muscular. He really does look like a bear. Niko can’t place his accent. “If you and your friend would stop arguing long enough you could probably pull each other out of here.”
“I wouldn’t soil my hands with him,” says Bear.
“Fuck you,” Thin Man agrees.
Niko shrugs and says Oh well and recommences his long walk. A few minutes later he looks back. The two men are yelling at each other again, arms waving wildly as they fling their accusations. The beautiful drowned woman beyond them to one side. She sees Niko looking and waves slowly like an underwater frond. Niko waves back and turns around and laughs despite himself. Flirting with death.
A MILE LATER Niko sees a man struggle free near the frozen riverbank. Who knows how long the man has waited for the runoff to wear away the ice enough for him to free his frozen legs? Ten years, a hundred, a thousand. However long, Niko witnesses the moment when the man frees his legs at last from out his icy prison. The man stands and lifts clenched fists like a victorious boxer. The man grins as he jumps up and down and then bends to slap his feet and massage some feeling back into his legs. Naked and barefoot on cold running water on a plain of ice and happy as a dung beetle in a manure factory. The man bows theatrically though no one cheers him on.
Niko wonders what the man plans next. Escape? Do they really think of escape here even idly? But escape to where? The sunlit world that judged and found them wanting? To another possibly worse part of Hell? To enlist with Niko’s imagined Sub-underground cabal, an Underground Railroad ferrying desiccated souls out of perdition to a place more merciful? Where would that place be?
The man who freed himself is running now. He slips, he falls, he slides. He gets up laughing. He bows low to the jealous crowd. Niko is all set to cheer him on when from the water near the frozen bank there bursts a black eruption, enormous glossy and alive. It arches from the water and hangs suspended there, for a moment a work of art or architecture, and then it yaws and glides onto the ice. Its front end yawns like some fanged funnel and it slides along the ice and leaves a darker trail of wet and scoops the freed man up and rolls back into the water and leaves behind only a broad wet swath upon the ice and the small twin holes where a pair of legs had for how long been encased.
THE BLACK LINE Niko has been heading toward is definitely a bridge. There’s something odd about it though he can’t quite figure out what just yet. Something about it he doesn’t like.
BEFORE TOO LONG the air before the bridge seems to shimmer like a road on a hot day. Niko’s socks squish in his shoes as he navigates the hadearctic waste. Across the broken reach he hears the flattened groan of straining ice, a sound a bit like leather stretching. Small flat icebergs dot the river. With the rising temperature the shore of ice has begun to calve in places, causing cracks and upthrusts in and on the plain.
Everywhere the ice has parted Niko sees remnants of embedded frozen bodies ripped apart by glacial motion, torn off at leg or waist or neck and even lengthwise. Redcored bodies float like flies in amber all about him, distorted by pale ice.
When he looks up again the bridge has his complete attention.
What he had taken for wavering air is the writhing of the bridge itself. The bridge is built of bodies. Thousands of them naked and freezing and huddled against the icy current forever breaking against them and crying moans so terrible they sound like pleasure. Some of those who clutch along the outside mass fight off the clammy grip that binds them to the others and they roll into the river to swim furiously toward the frozen bank. But however hard they swim the current brings them thrashing back where they are gripped and reabsorbed into the coruscating mass. It reminds Niko nauseatingly of ants swarming a dead animal. But these aren’t ants, they’re people. Human beings.
Half a mile later they aren’t just people. They’re people Niko knows. The bridge is built of the bodies of people he has met throughout his life. Out there on the water they’re a living groping bridge and Niko knows them, knows every damned one. Friends lovers partners. Producers critics roadies. Groupies dealers bandmates. Managers clubowners bartenders. Waiters waitresses restaurateurs. Schoolmates teachers playground bullies. Lawyers doctors deejays shrinks. And if Niko is the thing they have in common then Niko is the reason for their present suffering. There are so many.
Niko thinks about looking for another way across but knows there will be none. He considers moving on and trying to swim across but no. If he doesn’t freeze and drown he’ll end up as an hors d’oeuvre for the black leviathan or the current will sweep him to the clutch and press of those he knew who may not wish him well. And if that doesn’t happen, well, Niko has a funny feeling about the water itself. He knows the story of the river Lethe. Or perhaps remembers it.
Damn you Geryon. If only you had flown a little farther. But of course you left me there so I could make this trek. What you said about crossing the ice. “If you survive the walk across it, well then. You will cross that bridge when you come to it.” It’s all a kind of trial isn’t it? Or maybe just an entertainment. But one man’s trials are another’s entertainment, yes? Were you warning me then? Not against Hell but against myself? That if I fail it will not be due to obstacles but as a consequence of my own insufficiency? Who I am is my undoing. We are what we have done.
Geryon you are arrogant and cruel but there is something about you I cannot help but like. You—showed me something? Took me— somewhere? I can’t quite remember. I think within the confines of your unforgiving laws that you were trying to help me.
But there’s the ice and there’s the water and there’s the farther bank. And between the two are piled contorted and screaming all of those I’ve ever known who died.