Nocturne (2 page)

Someone got up and drew the shades and dimmed the lights. A woman he barely recognized and whose name he couldn’t remember, started giving a Power Point presentation. Her slides quickly grew tiresome, a collection of colorful pie graphs and charts with zigging and zagging lines, as if prophesying their own escape routes, and words that might as well have been written in a foreign language. But what had caught his eye was the laser pointer she was using. He watched the bright flicker of the dot as it danced across the screen, fascinated by it. It reminded him of a spark, a tiny spot of St. Elmo’s fire. He wondered if the laser would burn a hole in the screen if held against it long enough in one place, like a magnifying glass focused on a piece of paper in the bright sunlight.

Someone shifted restlessly behind him, coughed quietly, distracting him. He reached for his water bottle, and that’s when he saw the tiny flash of light in the sky, far out over the town. It was through a sliver of a gap in the window coverings that he saw this. A plane, he thought. It seemed awfully low.

But then it disappeared behind the blind.

He thought the woman might be finishing up. Someone was asking her a question and she was nodding thoughtfully, waiting for the asker to finish. No, wait, it wasn’t a question after all, but a long, drawn out comment whose point got lost somewhere long before the speaker gave up. The woman reached down to her computer and gave it a tap. Another image wiped across the screen: a table, more numbers. The red dot buzzed gnat-like over them, circling certain figures, ignoring others. The Man took off his glasses, pinched his nose. He set the glasses on his papers on the table. He stretched his fingers, re-crossed his legs, rotated his head, back and forth, removing the stiffness. Finally, someone got up to turn the lights on.

There was a blinding flash, a sound of thunder and tearing metal, incredibly loud, deafening. He was on his back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and he could smell burning plastic, burning stone, molten steel, charred flesh. Papers drifted like snow through the air around him. He became aware of shaking; the building was swaying and trembling around him. People were screaming. Burning jet fuel dripped from the lights, down the walls, searing them. His clothes were on fire. His flesh was burning away, but he couldn’t feel any of it. He stumbled to his knees, then to his feet, not bothering to pat out the flames. The woman who had been giving the talk was gone, vaporized away. Only a negative shadow of her was left on the wall where she had stood, a bright red stain splattered on the blackened and tattered screen, and as he crouched there he wondered about her for the first time since meeting her that morning, this woman from Accounting who spoke with a slight mid-western accent and smelled of Irish Spring. Was she married? Did she have any children? Was it a son? He wondered what the boy would be like.

There was an awful screech as the building jolted, tilted. Someone reached up, tore down the blinds in its—he couldn’t tell the gender—attempt to stand. Its body was shredded by the shattered glass. The wind was a vortex sucking the paper out the window. A shadow streaked by, dropping out of the sky somewhere above them, plummeting to the ground somewhere below. Then there was another, this one a burning comet. It was screaming.

How could he still be alive? He looked at the charred remains of his hands, at the dull white and gray bone underneath. Numbness. His hands found his cheeks and pulled the hardened flesh away in chunks. How could he still be alive?

They had had a son. They had given him a good, strong name. And the son had been as strong as his name.

Someone tapped his arm. He looked up, startled.

“Any recommendations before we wrap up for lunch?”

The Man shook his head.

“Good, then let’s break. Everyone, meet back here at one-thirty.”

He gathered his papers, his glasses and his pen, and trailed the others as they filed out of the room.

†   †   †

In the past, he’d occasionally patronize the café on the ground floor of his building. They made good sandwiches there; good cookies, too. On the way in some mornings, he’d buy a coffee from the cart as a special treat to himself, but he hadn’t in a while; the coffee in the break room upstairs had a permanent bitter taste to it, metallic and thin, as if something toxic had leached into the water from the pipes.

These days he rarely ate or drank anything at all, opting instead to spend his break time at the window in his office, hands clasped behind his back or in his pockets. He’d watch the people far below him, thrilling at the feeling of vertigo that would pierce his belly the first time he’d look down for the day, trying to trick himself into re-experiencing that feeling again but never quite succeeding; he could apparently only scare himself once a day. So he’d give up and just stand there, thinking of all the people on the sidewalks as tiny ants, how easily they could be wiped into oblivion. He knew it was cliché to have such thoughts, especially when he remembered how resilient people could sometimes be. Then, as always, his thoughts would inevitably lead to his son.

But not today. Today, he would be one of those ants. Let the giants far above him crush him.

He passed through the glassed front doors and out from the stunted shadow of the building. Looking up, he thought he saw sheets of paper floating down toward him, dozens of white sheets, but the shapes whirling above him caught the updrafts and did not fall. He stood and watched them for a moment as the crowd swirled past him on the sidewalk. Then, as if aware of his notice, the gulls wheeled around the corner and out of sight, leaving only the hard, grid-like shapes of shiny silver and black rising into an infinity of blue and the blazing white spot of the sun reflecting off the adjacent building, so bright in the center that it looked like a black hole.

He didn’t have a plan for where to go. He turned right, though he could have as easily turned left, but since the flow of the traffic was mostly right that’s the way he went.

Where were all these people going? Where did they come from? What were they hiding?

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and wondered these things as he walked. And it was only after ten minutes had passed and he had waited to cross at several stop lights before he realized he was heading downhill. He had become like water, finding the path of least resistance. But where would he settle? The buildings were getting older and smaller and the alleyways narrower. There were fewer people out walking, and those he did see weren’t dressed in suits of black or gray as were those around his uptown office, but jeans and sweat shirts and puffy winter coats, more often stained or torn or poorly sized than otherwise.

His nose led him to a small diner scratched out of the side of a parking garage, its windows decorated with a winter scene, the spray-on snow so obviously years-old by the messages people had inscribed in it during lunches and dinners past. The air smelled of fried pork and hot chocolate and, for a moment, he thought of going in.

He looked in through the glass, at the cheerful red and white checkered tablecloths and the mismatched cheap metal and plastic chairs, and his stomach growled. But then he realized that he was being stared back at by a man with a black mustache and a dark look in his eyes. The Man stumbled away from the window, knocking a woman who was walking past so that she almost dropped the plastic bag in her arms. It was laden with groceries. He heard the clack of glass bottles come from inside of it. She grunted, stumbled, gave him a nasty sideways glance, then hurried on.

Minutes later, he found himself at the river’s edge. Silty water swirled past him, fifteen feet below the vertical face of the unprotected concrete bank. A car passed on the bridge twenty feet overhead, a hush of tires on stone followed by a rapid
click-clack
as it reached the metal junction of bridge and road. A wind blew stale and cold off the water; the place had a desolate, abandoned feel to it.

No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t feel empty, it felt…devoid of life. Devoid of life and yet not empty. He didn’t feel alone.

The tattered remains of old pigeon nests fluttered from the girders of the overpass, painted white by uncounted years’ worth of shit. But the nests were currently empty. The shadows beneath the bridge seemed to shrink and harden, becoming cold and secretive then graying as clouds cleared the sun. He thought of them as doorways. But for what kind of nightmare creatures?

On the water, a dead animal floated past. Possum. How did the thing die?

He heard a siren somewhere, and it grew louder. Soon, it passed overhead, and the red of its lights flashed in the windows of the warehouse on the opposite bank. Then it passed and faded into the distance.

That’s when he heard the laughter. It was soft and low at first, as if the breeze itself were chuckling, or the bridge was sighing. It was joined by another, this one louder and echoing off the cement wall opposite from where he stood. He still couldn’t see anyone, but he knew he was surrounded.

“Are you lost, old man?” the shadows teased. The words were a slap to his pride, but not because he was lost—he knew where he was, roughly, and how to get back—but because he didn’t think of himself as old. The voice had sounded playful, spirited.

A second voice called out to him, female this time, sounding sultry and distinctly more threatening: “Hello there, lover boy.”

“Who’s there?”

There was a round of barking laughter coming from no one place, a half dozen distinct mouths blending into one, sounding like a hundred braying dogs. The palms of his hands tingled; his scalp tingled. He turned to leave, found his way blocked.

The boy couldn’t have been older than fifteen. He was swinging a chain, and the Man could see attached to the end of it a tangle of sharp metal scraps. It looked like spiders at first, a giant cluster of newly hatched spiders. But then he saw that it was forks and steak knives and baling wire and random metal fragments, all twisted through the links of the chain, crumpled into a ball of torture. It was not meant to kill, but to maim.

“Going somewhere?” the boy crooned.

The Man turned around and there was the girl. He was struck for a moment by her appearance. Even beneath the makeup of dark circles around her bloodshot eyes and ratty hair and pale skin, he thought she might have once been pretty. The dirty white tee shirt she wore strained against her fulsome breasts, and there were holes in it through which he could see the telltale runes of ancient battles written on her skin. The nails on her hands were broken and had recently bled; there was no bleeding at the moment. Like the boy, the rest of her costume was an industrial mixture of black and metal, but her hands were empty. So were her eyes.

There was nowhere for him to run. There was only the river.

“Go ahead,” the boy said, as if reading the Man’s mind.

From cracks and holes in the walls, more of them emerged, six, maybe eight more, a jumble of young boys and girls made genderless by their uniform depravity. They looked virile and deadly.

“What do you want?”

The boy’s lips separated into a smile that showed amusement but held no humor. The chain in his hands rattled and clanked. The Man could hear the others approaching, eerily quiet, trapping him in the space beneath the overpass, blocking all but the one route of escape, as if testing him.

He stood his ground. Death, he thought. Is this how you show your hand?

They came then, quickly and without remorse, falling upon him like starved beasts, biting and slashing at his face, tearing the clothes from him. He felt the flesh on his arms tear away, felt the boy’s mace rake his back. He did not scream, and neither did his attackers. They brutalized him without a sound, just the grunts of their blows and the low hiss of their ecstatic breathing.

Then they were gone. He was left standing, broken and bleeding, pieces of him lying all about his feet, shameful that he had been unable to defend himself, too old and too frail. He felt himself begin to fall, out over the precipice of that concrete river bank, the water rushing up at him. Then he was jerked back by the collar of his jacket.

“Hey, man! You okay?”

He gave his head a quick shake, turned it toward his rescuer. He blinked in surprise.

“One too many lunchtime martinis, eh?” the boy said, chuckling.

“I’m not…” The Man cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I was… Thanks. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”