He stays low, walks to the edge of the aisle, sticks his head out and immediately back as a short blast of artillery pop ignites. Blumfeld wants to play with him for a few seconds before ending it.
“Mr. Gilrein,” Kroger’s voice, echoing from an indeterminate position, “step into the center of the room this instant or I am going to cut the woman’s throat.”
He does what he’s been ordered to do. He steps into the center of the room and stands still and waits. Blumfeld appears first with the Calico held high, up at shoulder level. Kroger follows, pulling Wylie along, an arm wrapped around her waist and the buck knife pointing in toward her navel. They position themselves across from one another, separated by the open mouth of the stairwell.
“The book?” Kroger asks.
Gilrein gestures back toward the aisle where the shooting began.
“I dropped it,” he says.
“Put the gun down,” Blumfeld says and Gilrein lets the Colt fall to the floor.
Kroger releases Wylie and walks to the aisle where his servant Raban has bled to death. He steps over the body, bends down to retrieve and inspect the book. And Bobby Oster steps from the shade of the exterior wall, his Smith and Wesson already extended and sighted, and shoots Kroger twice in the head.
Blumfeld panics and runs to his master and Oster, ready for the meatboy, now down on one knee and sighted on the mouth of the aisle, opens fire as soon as he appears. Blumfeld takes the assault in the chest and then the head, goes down backward, firing the whole time, the Calico blasting another shelf-load of books, tearing down the line of their spines, shredding binding and paper until at last falling silent.
Wylie crumbles to the floor and Gilrein runs to her. In a second, Oster appears in front of them with Alicia’s book in his hand. Gilrein ignores him, begins peeling the tape from Wylie’s mouth, expecting the echo of artillery to be replaced with hysteria. Instead, Wylie tips into his arms and he feels the noiseless sobbing, the quake of her body as it slides toward shock.
He goes to work on the tape wrapped around her wrists, ripping out tiny hairs as he frees the skin from the adhesive. Oster comes to stand in front of him, gun in one hand, Alicia’s book in the other. Gilrein sees that several bullets have passed through the volume.
“Hermann Kinsky,” Oster says, “is going to be pissed.”
Gilrein pulls Wylie into him, hugs her as tight as he can, and asks, “Now you kill us, Bobby?”
Oster shrugs, draws some air through his nose. The noise makes Gilrein look away.
“People disappear, Gilly,” Oster says, closing one eye, lining Gilrein’s head up along the barrel of the.38 and cocking the hammer.
Then he eases the trigger back into the cradle and lowers the gun. Gilrein stares up at him, still unsure of what’s about to happen.
“I’ve got the product,” Oster says, wagging the book. “My job’s all done, I guess.”
He moves for the stairwell and adds, “And nobody paid me to whack a brother officer.”
Sweating, his breathing labored, Oster kisses his own fingers and brings them to the lips of his comrades before rolling the bodies of Walden and Green into their makeshift grave. The boys shared everything in life, Oster reasons, so this interment shouldn’t trouble them. It’s a natural thing to do. As organic as these fat, red worms swarming in the bottom of this hole, waiting to help decompose the bodies back to the bone, to devour the flesh, transform it into energy.
Gilrein and the woman are long gone by the time Oster finishes filling the trench in the deepest part of the orchard. Oster knows he should be leaving too, getting down to that cafeteria in the Wing and delivering the book to Kinsky. Begging off the assorted innards in the glazed pear sauce and trying to save his bonus. Then maybe heading back to the Houdini and putting in a few hours with the needle if Mrs. Bloch is feeling inspired. Maybe Mrs. B can work Walden and Green into her map of the city. Some kind of representation. A symbol of his fallen brothers etched right into the skin. Something fitting.
He knows he should be going and yet he lingers in Wormland. Tamping down the already smooth grave with his boots. Toeing the pocked ground, the hundreds, maybe thousands of worm holes. And then Bobby Oster finds himself doing something wildly uncharacteristic. He feels his own forehead and wonders if he might be ill.
He sits down, gingerly, in front of the grave, his back against the base of one of the desiccated trees. And he opens Alicia’s book. He opens it randomly, somewhere in the middle, and brings a finger to a crumpled page. He’s shocked to find it’s not even a real book. The paper is cheap and thin, like notebook paper you might buy at the corner store. And there’s no fancy printing, just this terrible handwriting. Some of the lines are practically illegible. The letters don’t look familiar. But even if they did, getting the whole story would probably be impossible. All those bullet holes.
Oster is in the process of pushing his finger through one of the holes when Mrs. Bloch approaches from behind and pulls the blade of Kroger’s knife across his throat until the jugular is severed. It’s like slicing soft bread and she knows this is exactly how she will describe the act at some later date. She’ll turn slightly on her stool as one of the prodigies colors in some background. She will study the face of the child she has chosen and say, “Laik der vei du kaht entu frisch bred, gest oot uf der ufen, steel ahl meizt aend stemink.”
The spurt of blood paints Alicia’s page. Obliterates a long passage that might describe the death of Rabbi Gruen or the young mother and infant who dissolved within the bottom of the Ezzene mob. The blood hides the words that took those events and transformed them into something else, into a language that could hold the meaning of the Erasure and convey it across space and time and culture, across the gulf that separates primary from secondary experience, being from the lack of being. A language that could manage to keep the event pure and whole enough to make the child quake, even if only for a moment, with the immensity of the loss.
Though her job is to give the story to everyone who needs it, Mrs. Bloch is unconcerned as she pulls the dripping book out of Oster’s spastic hands and listens to the Magician thrash toward death.
She’s aware that she can never fill in what has been covered over or expunged. There’s just too much she doesn’t know. But she can hold on to whatever is left. She can become a constant and creative reader, even without her vision. And if her inherent ignorance of the author’s final intentions will always prevent her from delivering the complete narrative, still she possesses accounts of her own. Details which can be bound and spliced and grafted to Alicia’s tale. She can make a hybrid myth. A mutant legend. And in this manner, she’ll rebuild the book. In the end, that might be sufficient.
Because, if you want to badly enough, there are probably many ways to tell a story.
~ ~ ~
Relax. They will not bother you. These are simply a group of local fanatics. They follow the old whiskey priest. They are waiting to see if his prophecies of Armageddon come true. These are not the ones you need to fear. Calm yourself, please. This kind of stress will kill you, most certainly. I’ve seen it happen again and again. You should be happy we were able to get a booth. Drink your coffee. Try some of the food. Mr. Tang serves only the freshest of wares.
You owe yourself one final meal in the city. Can you walk away without so much as a last dinner? Reward yourself. You have been watchful and you have been patient. What you have done has required dedication and intelligence and I compliment you. Seriously now, not everyone would have persisted as you did. To be honest, I, myself, did not expect you to last so long.