“I’ve got to go.”
Gunderson had an appointment with Nellie at the loft. They were supposed to go over scheduling. Whenever they went over scheduling, they tended to wind up naked on the carpet Victoria had bought in Tehran. Gunderson worried that their juices might agitate the dyes. Given all he’d already perpetrated upon her dignity, Victoria would probably have him jailed.
After the scheduling meeting he was supposed to meet the rock star for dinner and a helicopter ride. He’d get a call at the last minute regarding location. That’s how rock stars handled scheduling. This one, an arena king from the 1980s who’d traded in his coke spoon for a yoga mat, had attended one of Gunderson’s talks at an illegal ayahuasca retreat in Santa Fe and had stalked Gunderson ever since. People sneered at the rock star, his silly spiritual cant, his new music that was a parody of his old music. The man spewed platitudes, certainly, was a font of phoniness, but Gunderson sort of liked him. Or maybe he just liked being fawned over by a superannuated icon.
What you couldn’t sneer at was the man’s portfolio. He’d invested his money in silicon chips back when it counted. His petty cash could probably feed the world. Would he spare some change to save it?
* * *
That Victoria was not in Lisbon, but back in what was now — and, truthfully, had always been — her magnificent home, seemed a vicious ripple in the continuum, something no blood-streaked, rainbow-feathered priest, tripping his balls off on some sun-cooked ziggurat, could ever have predicted. That she stood now on the potentially juice-marred Persian with Carlos in her arms, both of them bawling at a nearly naked Nellie, who had obviously let herself in with Gunderson’s spare key and, in a perhaps-not-humorous-enough surrender of pretense, shucked off most of her wardrobe in anticipation of their scheduling meeting, signaled some kind of cataclysmic rupture in dark matter’s latticework.
Not that Gunderson really knew what that meant.
“What the hell?” said Victoria as Gunderson came through the door. “This is where you bring your end times whores?”
“What happened to Lisbon?” said Gunderson.
“What happened to your self-respect?”
“What happened to knocking?” said Nellie.
“Knocking?” said Victoria. “It’s my house! I’m supposed to know my ex-husband is meeting a naked slut in my house?”
“End times is more of a Christian thing,” said Gunderson. “You know I don’t subscribe to—”
“What exactly makes me a slut?” said Nellie. “Because I have sex? That’s totally retrograde.”
“Look at you,” said Victoria. “The secretary. The home office screw. Except it’s not even his home anymore. Talk about retrograde. I bet you think being practically a hooker is empowering, too. Is that what you think?”
“I think you’re a shrill narcissist who couldn’t keep pace with your husband’s spiritual growth.”
“Is that what he said while he rammed you with his world changer? Or did he just make you stick a ballet shoe up his butt?”
“Hey, kids!” said Gunderson. “How about both of you stop it. This is ridiculous.”
“Damn straight,” said Nellie. “I quit.”
Nellie scooped up her clothes, seemed about to bolt, but then just stood there, quivering. Carlos squirmed out of Victoria’s arms, ran to Gunderson, clutched his knee.
“Daddy!”
Gunderson squatted, squared the boy’s shoulders. His son, he saw now, had the most chaotic green eyes he’d ever seen.
“I love you, Carlito,” Gunderson said, sniffed sharp diaper stink. The boy was long past due for potty training, and Gunderson wondered if it was his fault, all that trauma he’d visited upon his son’s developmental years. “I think he needs to be changed.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Victoria. It was the old challenge. Gunderson knew he wasn’t up to it. He wasn’t squeamish, but he’d always preferred changing Carlos when it felt like something fun, a larkish deployment of diaper and wipe, best with an audience. So here was the deal. He’d never be a good man, a stand-up guy, a pillar, his father. His absence would have to be the honesty from which the boy could draw strength. Besides, Gunderson was a prophet, a prophet on the clock, a very scary fucking clock. Didn’t that count for something?
“Yeah,” said Gunderson, walked out.
* * *
High above the night city, he knew he’d done right. While the rock star worked the stick and hummed his old hit, Gunderson looked through the chopper’s bubbled glass at the lit grid below. His strife seemed so squalid up here in the heavens, and gazing down on the bright, sick city stirred him. Maybe we were doomed fools on a dying fluke of a planet, but we’d had a damn good run. Mostly we’d murdered, tortured, razed, but once in a while we’d made something beautiful. We’d tried so hard to love.
“Thus spake Hallmark,” came a voice through his headset. “Cut the humanist rah-rah, friend.”
Gunderson was embarrassed the rock star had heard him get so sentimental, not to mention talk to himself.
“Aye-aye, Captain,” said Gunderson.
“What’s on your mind, lad? You seem perturbed.”
“Do you really want to know what I’m thinking?” said Gunderson.
“Hell, no,” said the rock star. “Just name the number.”
“You’ve mastered telepathy.”
“Something like that. Or maybe I can just tell that you need my help and I believe in your message enough to want to give it. I’ll write the check. You lead us back from the abyss.”
Screw Jack. Screw the deal. What had to be done would be done by the secret society, his brothers and sisters in vision, like this ludicrous geezer with the thousand-dollar T-shirt and spiked white hair.
Gunderson turned to thank him, to tell him of the long march ahead and the beautiful bond they would forge, but discovered the rock star slumped in his straps, stick hand listing. It was difficult to tell exactly when the spin had started or how fast the buildings roared up. The rock star was definitely dead. Maybe it was all the cocaine he’d been sneaking off to snort during dinner. Maybe it was everything he’d sniffed and jabbed and swallowed for the last forty years. Rock stars made millions singing about their broken hearts, and then their hearts actually exploded. This guy was going blue in his helmet. And he was not being a very good pilot.
Gunderson shut his eyes, saw the strewn green of his son’s. He felt strange pressures on his body, was a boy again himself, waking slowly between his mother and father on their flannel sheets in Eugene, a happy little boat bumping up on warm, sloped isles. Pleasant, primal enough, this memory, suitable for the closing clip, though didn’t Gunderson rate revelation, every artifice fallen away, the cosmos unmasked and Gunderson receiving the supreme briefing via transcendental brain beam? He deserved that much, didn’t he? Apparently not, for here rushed the rooftops with their colossal vents, their transnational signage, penthouses lush with light and hanging gardens. Gunderson grew dizzy in his bubbled tomb. Death’s smash and grab was upon him, he could feel a hand grip his arm, though it didn’t seem to be the Reaper’s.
“Sorry about this. Not what we were expecting, is it?”
Light twirled in the gold weave of Baltran. The elf’s shimmer steadied Gunderson.
“So, it’s bullshit? The calendar? The prophecy? Dimensional interface? You?”
“No, it’s not bullshit,” said Baltran. “It can’t be.”
“Are you just a figment of my imagination?”
“Fuck you. Figment.”
“You told me to do you proud.”
“You did do me proud, kid. I saw what you accomplished. It won’t be forgotten. Not by me.”
“And now what?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The beat goes on?”