Page 2

A: Yeah.

—Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

I AM PERSECUTED by angels, huge and silent—marble-white, rigid-winged, one in every corner. Only their vast eyes speak, staring mildly at me from under their painful halos, arc-weld white crowns of blank. They say: Lie down. They say: Forgive, forget. Sleep.

Forget, lie down. Drift away into death’s dream. Make your . . . final . . . peace.

But being dead is nothing peaceful—as they must know, those God-splinter-sized liars. It’s more like a temporal haematoma, time pooling under the skin of reality like sequestered blood. Memory looping inward, turning black, starting to stink.

A lidless eye, still struggling to close. An intense and burning contempt for everything you have, mixed up tight with an absolute—and absolutely justified—terror of losing it all.

Yet here I am, still. Watching the angels hover in the ill-set corners of Pat Calavera’s Annex basement apartment, watching me watch her wash her green-streaked hair under the kitchen sink’s lime-crusted tap. And thinking one more time how funny it is I can see them, when she can’t: They’re far more “here” than I am, one way or another, especially in my current discorporant state—an eddying tide of discontent adding one more vague chill to the moldy air around her, stirring the fly-strips as I pass. Pat’s roommate hoards trash, breeding a durable sub-race of insects who endure through hot, cold and humid weather alike; he keeps the bathtub full of dirty dishes and the air full of stink, reducing Pat’s supposed bedroom to a mere way-stop between gigs, an (in)convenient place to park her equipment ’till the next time she needs to use it.

Days, she teaches socks to talk cute as a trainee intern on Ding Dong The Derry-O, the world-famous Hendricks Family Conglomerate’s longest-running preschool puppet-show. Nights, she spins extra cash and underground performance art out of playing with her Bone Machine, getting black market-fresh cadavers to parade back and forth on strings for the edification of bored ultra-fetishists. “Carrionettes,” that’s what she usually calls them whenever she’s making them dance, play cards or screw some guy named Ray, a volunteer post-mortem porn-star whose general necrophiliac bent seems to be fast narrowing to one particular corpse, and one alone . . . mine, to be exact.

Pat can’t see the angels, though—can’t even sense their presence like an oblique, falling touch, a Seraph’s pinion-feather trailed quick and light along the back of my dead soul. And really, when you think about it, that’s probably just as well.

I mean, they’re not here for her.

Outside, life continues, just like always: Jobs, traffic, weather. It’s February. To the south of Toronto there’s a general occlusion forming, a pale and misty bee-swarm wall vorticing aimlessly back and forth across the city while a pearly, semi-permeable lace of nothingness hangs above. Soft snow to the ankles, and rising. Snow falling all night, muffling the world’s dim lines, half-choking the city’s constant hum.

Inside, Pat turns the tap off, rubs her head hard with a towel and leans forward, frowning at her own reflection in the sink’s chipped back-mirror. Her breath mists the glass. Behind her, I float unseen over her left shoulder, not breathing at all.

But not leaving, either. Not as yet.

And: Sleep, the angels tell me, silently. And: Make me, I reply. Equally silent.

To which they say nothing.

I know a lot about this woman, Pat Calavera—more than she’d want me to, if she only knew I knew. How there are days she hates every person she meets for not being part of her own restless consciousness, for making her feel small and useless, inappropriate and frightened. How, since she makes it a habit to always tell the truth about things that don’t matter, she can lie about the really important things under almost any circumstances—drunk, high, sober, sobbing.

And the puppets, I know about them too: How Pat’s always liked being able to move things around to her own satisfaction, to make things jump—or not—with a flick of her finger, from Barbie and Ken on up. To pull the strings on something, even if it’s just a dead man with bolts screwed into his bones and wires fed along his tendons.

Because she can. Because it’s an art with only one artist. Because she’s an extremist, and there’s nothing more extreme. Because who’s going to stop her, anyway?

Well. Me, I guess. If I can.

(Which I probably can’t.)

A quick glance at the angels, who nod in unison: No, not likely.

Predictable, the same way so much of the rest of this—experience of mine’s been, thus far; pretty much exactly like all the tabloids say, barring some minor deviations here and there. First the tunnel, then the light—you rise up, lift out of your shell, hovering moth-like just at the very teasing edge of its stinging sweetness. After which, at the last, most wrenching possible moment—you finally catch and stutter, take on weight, dip groundwards. Go down.

Further and further,

then further still. Down where there’s a Bridge of Sighs, a Bridge of Dread, a fire that burns you to the bone. Down where there’s a crocodile with a human face, ready and waiting to weigh and eat your heart. Down where there’s a room full of dust where blind things sit forever, wings trailing, mouths too full to speak.

I have no name now, not that I can remember, since they take our names first of all—name, then face, then everything else, piece by piece by piece. No matter that you’ve come down so fast and hard, fighting it every step; for all that we like to think we can conquer death through sheer force of personality, our mere descent alone strips away so much of who we were, who we thought we were, that when at last we’ve gotten where we’re going, most of us can’t even remember why we didn’t want to get there in the first place.

The truism’s true: It’s a one-way trip. And giving everything we have away in order to make it, up to and including ourselves, is just the price—the going rate, if you will—of the ticket.

Last stop, everybody off; elevator to . . . not Hell, no. Not exactly . . .

. . . goin’ down.

Why would I belong in Hell, anyway, even if it did exist? Sifting through what’s left of me, I still know I was average, if that: Not too good, not too bad, like Little Bear’s porridge. I mean, I never killed anybody, except myself. And that—

—that was only the once.