“It’s a beautiful story, Niko.”
Niko turns and glares. Three sheets to the wind on the floor of Hell. He points his finger at the demon like the barrel of a gun. Delighted and surprised his demon barks a laugh and pats himself with snaking tendrils and then shrugs and shakes his head. “Still here.”
Niko nods. “Still here.” He picks up the guitar case from where it’s propped uncertainly against the swaying wall. “And now I’m not,” he says. And jumps.
XIX.
ROADHOUSE BLUES
NIKO PASSES ON into the fabled dark. The plain is black and empty now, a starless void through which he staggers like a blind man groping, ignorant of the shape and substance of the world around him and the possibility he creates it with his every step. The scarred guitar case clutched in his uncertain hand the only thing outside himself to hold. The ground beneath his hiking shoes is solid but he cannot see it or even hear a footfall. See him from on high with a dark-adapted eye, a small blot struggling against emptiness.
A struggling blot with its first hangover in twentyfive years. And oh is it a stellar event. Every flutter of his torn and filthy jacket flails his eardrums. His scalp is wet leather tightening as it dries creaking across his skull. His entire body has a migraine. Gravity alters as he walks.
He shuts his eyes, for all the difference it makes here in the heart of the abyss, and pinches hard on the bridge of his nose. Roman candles explode inside his eyelids. He chews skin on the inside of his cheek to make the little pains distract him from the larger ones. His world and mind are narrowed on the object of his quest. Jemma hovers now at the edge of consciousness numinous as angels are said to be and become for him as mythic. Her existence somewhere up ahead the evidence of things unseen. Her captive soul’s light seen through eyes of faith. Something to believe in. At last. At last.
He lowers his hand from his nose and opens his eyes and blinks. It seems out on the plain he sees a shape that’s blacker than its dark surround. He stares into the unremitting dark and tries to mark what form lies out there brooding.
Niko stops walking.
How did I get here?
He glances behind him. Little difference that he can see. An empty unlit stage awaiting props. Hadn’t he been on a train? Playing his guitar and singing? Drinking Jack Daniel’s and getting stinking drunk with his demon?
A ravaged leathery version of his own face looms in memory and grins to show yellowed needle teeth. His demon?
Had it been a hallucination? I mean you were pretty drunk there buddy pal.
And where’d that whiskey come from in the first place?
A leathery tendril wrapped around the neck of an offered bottle of Tennessee’s finest. Okay, not a hallucination. Your own personal demon. And you got drunk with the damned thing. You played the Dobro while it blew the harmonica for Christ’s sake there in a stifling freightcar rattling down the gullet of your very ruin. Oh he remembers that all right. Smoking again. Drinking again. Hanging out with lowlifes. What’s next?
But of course we all know what’s next. Don’t we buddy pal? What looms like the Empire State Building on our personal landscape of addiction.
But how has he gotten here? When had he left the train and how? It’s as if he has been walking in his sleep and suddenly awakened, the only evidence of his drunken transit with his demon on the train a few blurry mental photographs and a bruised chest and the mother of all hangovers.
The train. His demon. Drinking. Jamming. An argument. And he’d jumped off the train? Yeah that’s right. Took a deep breath that smelled of iron and hot oil and grabbed the guitar case and hesitated at the opened doorway and then jumped. Flying a whole minute it seemed with the wind hot in his face and his jacket fluttering like a broken bird. The train a churning juggernaut beside him. The sudden openthroated howl of horn. He had waited for the fist of ground to punch the life out of him. And then. And then.
And then a sudden scrape of shoes upon the unseen plain. As if he were merely gliding across the causeless dark. He literally hit the ground running and he tripped and tumbled and the guitar case flew off to clatter loudly as he rolled to a stop. And then?
And then nothing. He’d drunkenly examined his cuts and scrapes and bruises and he’d found his guitar case, and with it once more in hand he had started following the railroad tracks.
Niko resumes his long downtending walk and heads toward the distant shape that’s darker than the black around it.
I should be dead. Or at least lying beside the railroad tracks with broken legs and shattered ribs. Bleeding internally and trapped inside the coffin of my ruined body waiting for my life and thoughts to wind down to a stop like the last ticks on a forgotten watch. That train had been going sixty, seventy miles an hour. You don’t walk away from a jump like that.
Had his demon somehow helped him?
Niko doubts it. It seems more likely that his demon drove him toward it.
Then how had he survived? Just plain old good luck? I don’t think so, Cisco. No one’s that lucky.
He glances up.
The lidded sky.
AS HE NEARS the waiting soulless shape he feels a thrumming deep within his chest. The purring of a predator asleep and dreaming of the hunt. The shape is tall as a building but asymmetrical and set about with curves as if halfmelted. There is no light to see it by yet see it Niko does. The shape itself emits a kind of black light that registers beneath vision the way some stars are only seen by looking away from them. When Niko looks away from the towering shape it leaves a violet smear and a bitter taste of lead. His fillings ache and his skull resonates with that awful thrum. In wary awe he walks around the radiating shape and as he does he sees that he’s approached it from behind. Here is the front.
It’s not a building. It’s a sculpture. Standing on the empty plain the giant naked figures of a man and woman hugging. Arms sunk into one another’s sculpted flesh. Her face turned up toward his turned down. Their faces where they kiss are fused. Features indistinct like artist’s dummies. Caught halfmelted into one another as if petrified by nuclear detonation at the moment of their embrace. Pompeiian lovers unearthed from the foot of Vesuvius. Horrible and beautiful they loom above his faithless pilgrim gaze.
He falls to his knees before their silent reproach.
The forlorn silence lying hard about the plain.
The train. He remembers the argument now. “When you get to where you’re going and it’s time for you to walk the walk how are you going to fuck it up?” The most terrible thing about his demon has never been his goading or persuasion but his unrelenting truth. Here is the thing you cannot run from. That no leap leaves behind. No drug or music silences. The irreducible particle of truth: you fuck up everything. You killed your brother. You killed Jem. Traded her for fame. For money. Sold her for a song.
And the wall around his heart gives way at last. It falls without a last defense and Niko pitches forward and cries out. His heart a redhot coal. It hurts so bad that he must surely die. What have I done. What have I done. She is gone. Jem is gone.
Niko sobs before the silent reproach of entwined lovers. Pounds the barren ground with balled scabbed fists.
Gone. The word an anchor on his penitent soul. Jemma is dead. Really dead.
We are mayflies all. We live we love we die. And you have hastened even that. Her face. Her touch. Her voice. Her life. All gone. Taken from the world too soon because of you. Jemma died, and you put on your hiking shoes and left to rescue her from death itself like some damned christ. Came down here to win her back into the daylit world. Who are you fucking kidding? Who do you think you are? You’re not going to weasel out of this one. Someone who could sell his soul out for a song is not going to play his heart out to the buyer and reverse the natural order of the world. She’s not some carnival prize, hit the devil and win the girl, oh I messed it up this time, here’s another dollar. She is dead. And you are on your knees within the heart of all damnation because you are not enough to win her back. Because you are going to lose. You have already lost. Have always lost. You have fought your way across this afflicted plain armed with nothing more than vanity. The arrogance that you can turn back the tide. That your talent, will, determination, love amount to anything at all against the immutable boundary of death itself.