Fire Escape from Death Mountain!
“I just didn’t expect it to be a fire escape exactly,” mutters Bezel. “More an escape from a fire. Like on snowboards.”
“I can’t snowboard.” Antony follows down the rusty metal stairs. A few people are using the fire escape as a makeshift balcony, grilling out, watering window boxes.
“Also, the mountain is misnamed,” Bezel says.
“You think so?” inhales an aging woman in her bathrobe, outside on a smoke break.
“Yes,” says Bezel. “Where’s the death?”
The old lady points a shaking cigarette at him. “These things,” she says hollowly, “are going to kill me.”
Clyde and Gerno rough the basics of the contract nude in the sauna. They argue options clauses through the hot baths, then international release in the cold pool. Oiled up and scraped down, they grit their teeth and talk bonuses; six men beat them with golf clubs until they agree on sheet music rights. They swap gigs for endorsements via electroshock screams. They stumble from the gauntlet spa bleeding, clinging together, and they are bonded men: shared survivors whose friendship no record exec can break.
Or anyway that’s how it should be, thinks Clyde, signing some clause he can barely read.
Cater sticks a Q-Tip in too far and some of her brains fall out. One piece goes under the couch with the Fritos. The cat eats another and learns to program the VCR. A third goes into the vacuum cleaner, and takes with it her daughter’s name.
They take her to the doctor after that one. “Plaques,” he says, and “probably,” “good” and “early” and “years left.” While they’re frowning Cater leans over from the papered table and borrows a few brains from the doctor.
“And it’s genetic,” says her wrung-out daughter, “Alzheimer’s?”
“Whose?” smiles the doctor, nodding along.
The end of the world looks like a girl, maybe seventeen, maybe nineteen, maybe he shouldn’t ask. Her lips make him think of Eartha Kitt.
“Is your name Eartha?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
He flips papers, a little confused. “Okay,” he says, “you came with a monologue prepared, right?”
“From Eliot,” she says, and puts her hands behind her:
“Verdigris, peyote dreams,
India and rhyme
Carry claret honey trees
Paralytic sighs;
Close your eyes and swallow sand–“
“That’s not Eliot,” he interrupts.
“It isn’t,” says the end of the world, “is it,” and now it’s her turn to look confused.
“All the other kids have rocket skates,” Schutzie mentions one day, and “I could skip the bus with rocket skates” the next.
Berlin and Loretta exchange difficult glances. Loretta takes extra nursing shifts, and Berlin hocks his wristwatch. Loretta takes the L to work. Berlin skips lunch.
At last Berlin brings home the best he can find: shiny blue Goddard Inlines, with stabilizers and silver exhaust piping. But Schutzie’s listless at the velodrome, moony on the ride back. Berlin confronts him.
“I wanted red ones,” Schutzie mumbles.
“That’s what you’re moping over?” steams Berlin.
“Plus a mugger killed Mom,” adds Schutzie.
Barlowe considers climbing out the window, then removes it (and part of the wall) with one swipe. He’s aware of his muscles creaking distantly, like the rigging of a schooner; it doesn’t seem connected to any particular effort.
Dawn blues the horizon and the fire escape mostly breaks his fall. Shamblers fill the street, aimless, turning whenever they bounce off a wall or lamppost. Their voices are a rising group moan: communication? A bee dance, maybe, about feeding grounds and dangers. He can’t understand it. Their congress teases but eludes his mind.
In which, he thinks, it’s just like being alive.
Her sister, at five, speaks with the confidence and diction of a princess. “I told them,” she says, standing in the doorway.
“Who?” says Nightjar, feeling stupid. “What?”
“That you’d gone missing,” she says. “I would have confessed earlier, but I was waiting for Gnomon to leave.”
“So you’re a tattletale,” spits Nightjar.
“I saved you, sister. They wouldn’t have noticed you were gone.”
Nightjar slams the door. Confusion, anger, grief, chagrin: when she lets herself speak it’s a crack of thunder, and a crack in the dam.
POE, she whispers in her terrible new voice, and the ghost is there.
Cehrazad has six masks, not counting her underface. Columbina is her commedienne. Lafayette is a gold domino on a stick for daring nights. Calcutta, carved of mahogany, she wears for grief and bridesmaid duties; Semiot, a blue bauta, for market days. Blind is a white cord, wrapped six times around her eyes. Cehrazad wore Blind once for pleasure and once in desperation; she does not intend to do so again.
The sixth covers her from eyes to ankles, and there are very few people–not even her parents–who know that Dunyazad is not truly Cehrazad’s sister. Sometimes, Cehrazad forgets herself.
Bosco starts dieting, and loses so many inches off his waist that his belt generates a Mobius paradox. Time skids on a corner around it; light goes weird as it tries to operate in space that’s traded its curve for a Mercator projection. Things warp.
Bosco has only a second to take a deep breath before he’s sucked headfirst through the singularity in his belly button. The warp implodes and tosses him out onto a white and alien prairie: blue suns, drifting helium beasts, a sharp whiff of chlorine. Bosco is humanity’s startled envoy to a new frontier.
Thanks to dieting!