Niko stops his forward struggle. Hands claw at him. Cover him. The bald girl reaches up toward his face and his hand intercepts hers. Their fingers touch entwine and clench. She says Mr. Niko. Niko weeps but doesn’t know it. He feels a tug on the guitar case long clutched in his hand and lets it go. Feels a tugging on his foundering soul and lets it go as well and is dragged down.
THE COLD TOUCH of the dead swarms all about him. Jem I’m sorry. I tried, I tried my best. It wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t good enough. Will it hurt when they tear into me. Will I drown freezing in the water below. Will there be a sleep and a forgetting. And after I am husked and my flayed soul is thrown out like a rind into this awful universe of garbage will I see you ever Jem. And will you forgive me if you do. A part of me hopes you don’t. I carry that hell with me as I live and breathe.
Niko’s body turns and turns. His hair is pulled as he is passed among them. He swims amid the cacophony of his name. Will they crush him, will they tear him apart like mad Bacchantes? Will he drown beneath the press of cold and naked bodies? What are they waiting for?
He opens his eyes and there is only blackness. He stares upward at the cavern ceiling. All beneath him is a jostle.
They’re carrying him. He is borne aloft atop a coruscating sea of reaching hands. Passing him overhead like a concert stagediver. Delivering him across the bridge of themselves.
For a panicked moment Niko thinks they mean to bring him to the gaping maw of some mad chewing thing that will devour him and so commit him here forever. But look at their faces. Look in their eyes. Even in the midst of such despair there is a kindled spark of gleeful rebellion, possibly the first joy or defiance they have felt or shown beyond the closure of their mortal lives.
Turning now in their collective grip he faces downward. A man he doesn’t recognize, with a split brow and a missing eye, smiles piratic up at Niko as his hands raise up to take their share of Niko’s weight. My God, there below him now is Andy Brand, his favorite session drummer, dead in a motorcycle accident how long ago now. Andy holds his hands up with the rest of them and gives Niko a look that is only reassuring and somehow conspiratorial. And now he sees, it can’t be, it’s Ave, Avery Kramer, his old manager, bald and fat and wearing the shiteating grin Niko always pictures when he thinks of him, the grin that implied he was getting away with something because he usually was. Too far away to hold him up but reaching for him anyway. Avery, Niko shouts. Avery. He forces a hand through the forest of upthrust arms and reaches out to Avery. Their fingers touch and their hands clasp. A brief squeeze and then the current carries him away.
Joy floods Niko’s heart. It hurts, it fills him with a trembling exultation. It makes him want to die. He lives within its fleeting heat like a moth dived headlong into consummating flame. Joy.
How his friends have managed this rebellion Niko doesn’t know. But manage it they have, for this brief moment in their endless suffering, and they carry Niko across a patchwork history of his peopled life. Can he really have known so many who have died? In fleeting glimpses and brief touches he encounters glad remembrances and sorrows, and passed along and past.
Now he sees the far shore nearing, sees his guitar case handed off across to it like a bucket in a fire brigade. Niko himself is being delivered like a hometown hero.
A figure stands upon the farther shore. Niko strains for a second sight of it as he is jostled and bumped and turned about, and in his narrowed focus misses many calling figures from the stages of his life. His brief joy now stained by sudden doubt. It had looked like. It couldn’t have been. They wouldn’t.
His buoyed spirits sink now in a morass of premonitory fear. Of course they would. Of course they have. Of course they saved the best for last.
Standing on the far shore just beyond the bridge, past Eddie the ice cream truck man who used to give him credit and Jake the club owner who had paid off Niko’s gigs in drugs, there with hands held out to welcome him, with the face so like his own, the face that Niko last saw sightless and unmoving against a steering wheel in a crumpled wreck.
Van.
XVII.
IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY
NIKO STILLS HIS hands upon the strings. The only music now the mindless babble of the river Lethe. He looks down at the still guitar and wonders What did I just play?
He feels a forlorn sadness at his own return. As though he has not regained but instead has lost something. But what he’s lost he doesn’t know. He knows it by its absence. By the shape it leaves behind.
Patient in his armor the Achaian watches. Waiting as he comes back to himself. Niko thinks he likely has not waited long.
Niko lays the Dobro gently in its case. As if tucking in a sleeping child. Softly shuts the lid and shuts the latches slowly as if to keep from waking the encoffined steel.
“You are changed,” says the Achaian.
“I am diminished.” Niko regards the case upon the sand before him. Then nods and picks it up and turns to face the stoic soldier. “Akileo, I am sorry to see you in this terrible place.”
“I am sorrier to be in it. So you remember now.”
“I remember. I would thank you but this was no gift.”
The barest nod of helmeted head. “Not to be born is best. Failing that, then not to remember. But now you do and you will try to resume your mission, and so I must carry out my own.”
Niko wipes a palm against a thigh of his damp jeans. “I guess there’s no talking you out of this.”
“I have few words. Already we have talked too long.” Niko nods. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Your music is stirring, Orfeo. And I am the worse for its reminder of my living days.” A smile ghosts the even line of the Achaian’s mouth. “But do not flatter yourself.”
“All right.” Niko feels adrenalin surge at the certainty of the coming fight and tries to breathe evenly and keep himself relaxed. “Anything else I should know?”
The spear levels at his throat. “Only that you are mortal.”
“I know it with every breath. But you?”
The Achaian seems amused. “Nothing painful is inflicted here in vain. Stay your trepidation and tend your own house, winesack.”
“Okeydoke,” says Niko. And swings the hardcase at the spear. It slaps the bronze head. The Greek has anticipated this and follows the deflection to strike with the spear’s unbladed end. Niko is no longer there. He’s behind the soldier’s right shoulderblade, hardcase dropped and his hands on the soldier’s hands, and he mirrors their motion and continues it and exaggerates it to redirect the parabola of the strike until the arc intersects the sand. The soldier’s body follows the spear’s arc and lands hard on its back. Niko continues the motion as if enacting some wellpracticed choreography. They might be dancing. In fact they are.
Now Niko holds the spear. Someone watching would have seen the soldier seem to hand it to him. Beside them lies the guitar case.
The soldier tries to twist away and Niko steps upon the bronze breastplate. Strong hands grip his calf and Niko pushes down to gain time and brings the spearpoint to the soldier’s throat.
The Achaian grows still. Sweat wells Niko’s brow and drips to patter bronze.
“So there is more to you than music.”
“There’s more to anyone than the stories people tell.”