Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 33
Lying on the bed, one sleeve rolled up, Jerry Duane says, “Okay.” His voice is kind of scratchy, like his throat is dry. “I’m cool with it,” he says.
Fat Slim looks at me and shakes his head and grins. We are in one of the upstairs rooms, just the three of us. Jerry Duane is already hooked up to the eek box and it is eeking away, faster than it would be doing if he was quite as cool with it as he says.
Seeing me rolling up my own sleeve, Fat Slim says, “You going to neck out too? Little early for you, isn’t it?”
I stretch out on the other bed, next to Jerry Duane. “Thought I’d better go along,” I say. “First time, he might want some company.” I look at Jerry Duane. “If that’s all right with you.”
“You can do that?” he asks. “Go with me? How’s that possible?”
“Just another unexplained phenomenon,” Fat Slim says, loading up a second disposable, “in the wonderful fucking world of Necrodone. Most of the best scientific minds agree that it’s not possible, that it’s only doper folklore based on the occasional shared hallucination, but you’ll see. Not everyone can do it, but Dead Henry here is one of the best.”
“How about you?” Jerry Duane asks him, and Fat Slim gives a big loud snort.
“The hell, man,” he says, “I don’t do this shit.” Which is true. Fat Slim doesn’t even smoke weed, or drink anything but beer. “Hey,” he says to Jerry Duane, “do you want some doper doing this to you?”
While Fat Slim is hooking up my eek box I reach across the space between the two beds. “Take my hand,” I tell Jerry Duane. “It helps if we hold hands to start with. Don’t ask me why.”
He gives me a funny look. “Christ,” I say, “just take it, what do you think, I’m not queer or anything.” Actually I am but that is none of his business. “And pull the mask down so it covers your eyes. They tend to open when you go under and you’ll go damn near blind from staring at the light, if you don’t use the mask.”
I pull down my own with my free hand and take a couple of deep breaths. Jerry Duane’s hand is sweaty and cold. I hear him say, “Shit!” and figure Fat Slim has stuck him. A couple of minutes later I feel the sting of the spike in my own arm. Like the nurse always tells you, it doesn’t hurt a bit.
Fat Slim is right about trying not to panic. All the same, I’ll tell you something a lot of neck-heads won’t admit: everybody freaks, at least a little, when the Necrodone starts to hit. I don’t care how many times you’ve been there and done it, you can’t help having at least a second or two of blind shitless fear, as the messages start coming in from all over your body: hey, asshole, you’re dying!
Then the dark comes down, and it’s darker than any other dark you ever saw, it’s like you can’t even remember what light looks like, and there’s no feeling in your hands and feet and then in your arms and legs and then no feeling anywhere, and the last thing you hear is the eeeeeee of the eek box registering flatline and it’s the loudest thing in the world but then it’s gone too, everything’s gone, you’re gone, you’re just . . . not, any more, you never were.
And then—it’s probably less than a second later in real time, nobody knows because nobody’s ever figured out a way to measure neck-trip time—you fall up.
That’s the only way I can describe it: you fall straight up, right out of your body, till you’re hanging there like in some kind of magic act, above the bed. You can see again, now, you can even look down and check out your own stiff if you want to, though I hardly ever do that any more. I mean, I don’t need neck to look at myself, that’s why they make mirrors, right? But a lot of people, specially first-timers, get real hung up on that part. I can feel Jerry Duane beside me and I know that’s what he’s doing right now.
Understand, that’s the only way I can pick him up. I can’t see him or hear him—even if he could talk, which he can’t, because there are no words beyond flatline, you don’t even know what words are or what they’re for—and I don’t know his name any more because that’s a word too, I don’t know mine either. But I can feel he’s there, and I know he can feel me too.
And now comes the light.
I guess everybody has heard about the light, it’s something they all talk about, and out of all the stupid shit that has been written and told about the neck experience, this is the one thing you can absolutely believe. Nobody has ever really told it the way it is—and don’t even get me started on how they tried to show it in that fucking movie—but I don’t think anybody can, because there’s no words that cover it. Like I say, it happens in a place where words don’t mean anything.
There’s this incredible white light, you never knew anything could be so clean and white, coming down from somewhere above and filling the room till you can’t see anything but the light. And you start falling up again, faster and faster, falling up into the light, it’s getting brighter all the time, if you looked at a light like that while you were in your body I think it would blind you for life but this doesn’t hurt at all, it feels good. It’s like the light is cleaning away all the bullshit and the hang-ups and you’re, like, free, you know what I’m saying?
Falling up into the light, I can still feel this somebody beside me, only now we’re both becoming part of the light, sort of dissolving in it, like meth crystals in a speed-freak’s spoon.
You know how during a really great come, there’s a moment when everything goes away and it’s like you’re everywhere and now here at the same time? That’s the closest thing I can think of, but this is a million times more intense and it goes on and on.
Some people say they see these patterns in the light, and now and then somebody even claims he saw a face, but I’ve never seen anything like that. I guess it has something to do with how your head happens to be wired up, or maybe what you’re expecting. Like I keep saying, there’s a lot about neck that nobody understands.
But some people a so hear music, and now for the first time ever, even though I must have done a couple hundred neck trips or more, I start to hear it too. It’s not like any music I ever heard before, maybe a little like somebody on a really fantastic keyboard setup but with more texture, maybe somewhere between a sitar and a pipe organ, here I am again with no words for what I’m trying to tell about.
And the tune, I swear, is Jerry Duane Austin’s great single from ’99, the one that goes:
“Death come walking
No use talking
Death come riding
No use hiding
There ain’t nowhere
Nowhere he can’t find
And that Hanging Man
Hanging Man stays on my mind.”
Only of course there are no lyrics, just the tune over and over, with chords and harmony lines that I don’t think you could write down on any kind of staff or play on any instrument ever made. There was a time years ago, when I still wanted to be a musician, that I thought Jerry Duane Austin was God. Maybe this is how his music would sound if he was.
And the music is part of the light and I’m, we’re, part of it, oh, fuck this. Words words words, listen, it’s all bullshit. If you’ve been there and done it you already know what it’s like and if you haven’t then all the words in all the languages in the world can’t tell you about it.
All this time the clock is running, down in the live world—I don’t know why but I always think of it as “down”—and Fat Slim is laying out the spikes and the resurrection cocktail just in case, and the one-hour mark is coming up on the timer, but there’s not even the idea of time there in the light.
But of course, since this is after all just a neck trip and not something like a heart attack or a bullet through the head, finally there comes a point where the light starts to fade and I’m falling back down out of the light and into the big black hole, and I hate it and try to fight it but the pull is too strong and next thing I know a couple of big hands are shaking me by the shoulders and Fat Slim’s voice is saying, “All right, partner, you’re back. How are things in scenic Croak City?”
I pull up the mask and see that Jerry Duane is already sitting on the edge of his bed, watching me. So he beat me down. That’s not unusual with first-timers. Most of them don’t even last half an hour.
“Far out,” he says, which I haven’t heard anybody say since my grandpa died.
I sit up and begin kicking my feet and slapping my hands together, getting the blood flowing again. That’s one of the downsides of doing neck, your feet and hands sort of go to sleep and it hurts like a son of a bitch when the circulation starts to come back. “You okay?” I ask Jerry Duane.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Man, what a trip. Thought I’d been around some, but I never been anywhere like that.”
I get to my feet and stomp around a little, feeling the blood tingling in my toes. Jerry Duane says, “Uh, look—what you did, going with me? I mean, thanks, I could feel you there and all, it made everything a lot less scary. Only—” He hunches his shoulders, like he’s about to try to pick up something heavy. “Man, does anybody ever, you know, meet somebody . . . over there?”
I know what he’s asking. There’s been a lot of argument about it, among the neck-heads and the researchers too. “Tough question,” I tell him. “I wish I knew the answer. It’s never happened to me, or to anybody I knew well enough to be sure they weren’t hosing me, but you do hear stories. People who claim they had some kind of encounter with somebody else who happened to be necked out somewhere else at the same time, or even somebody they knew who was noshit dead.”
Since I know damn well where he’s trying to go with this, I go on: “One thing for sure, it’s extremely rare—if it happens at all—and it’s not anything anybody knows how to control. There’s no way, that anybody’s come up with so far, to actually go looking for somebody over the line.”
“Whatever claims some weasels make,” Fat Slim puts in, “to separate the stupid from their money. Spirits of the dead contacted while you wait, and all that. Neck’s done wonders to revive certain very old scams.”
Jerry Duane stands up and starts to move toward the door. “What do I owe you guys?” he asks.
“On the house,” I say before Fat Slim can speak. “We’re, like, honored.”
He reaches in his pocket and at first I think he is going to insist on paying, but then I see he is getting out that picture of Jane Ann. “You better keep this,” he says, “in case you need it to help you find her. I’ve got plenty more.” He takes out a pen and writes something on the back. “Call this number if you learn anything. Anything at all.”
When he is gone I say, “Christ, he’s really jammed up over this girl,” and Fat Slim does another of his snorts.
“Yeah,” he says. “Poor bastard.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say, “needing anybody like that.”
“I know,” Fat Slim says. “Which poor bastard did you think I meant?”
It takes me till the middle of next week to find Jane Ann. And I know what I said, but a lot of things get more possible when you know who to ask and can pay for the answers. Especially if, like me, you can pay with something people want even more than money.
The room is on the top floor of a scabby old apartment building down near the park. Nobody answers when I knock. After I decide nobody is going to, I get out a couple of special little tools ard have a talk with the piece-of-shit lock, and less than a minute later the door opens.
The first breath I take, I start to wish I’d left it closed.
But I step back into the hallway, which luckily is still deserted, and fill my lungs—one interesting side effect of being a neck user, you get so you can hold your breath for a long time—and go in. It takes only one quick glance around the little room to find her.
I’d just as soon not tell you what she looks like. Later, I hear they figure she’s been lying there at least two weeks, maybe more. They say it’s hard to be sure because neck does funny things to the decomp process. All I know, she looks like hell and smells worse.
She doesn’t look much like the picture any more, that’s for sure. But I can still tell who she is. Or was.
Naturally I get my ass out of there as fast as I can move it, with the rest of me following along very close. I make a couple of calls, one to the cops and one to Jerry Duane’s answering machine, from a pay phone at the Port Authority. Then I get on the train—flying leaves too many tracks—and take a long vacation up in Toronto, where I have friends and business acquaintances who do not go in for asking questions or giving out answers.
I mean, you can’t be too careful. Even if nobody saw me going into her place or coming out—and you can’t ever assume that—I have been asking about this babe and even showing her picture all over this end of town. And I have a record of dope busts, even if they never got a conviction, and this is a dope death.
Which, nowadays, is all they need to pull me in on suspicion, like maybe I was the one who sold her the shit she went out on. As long as some cop’s prepared to swear that there’s a reasonable probability of a drug angle, they can keep me just about as long as they like, never mind charges or hearings, all legal as hell according to the U.S. Supreme fucking Court—dope being a clear and present danger, and all that.
And even if they never do charge me with anything, they can take everything I’ve got, right down to my spare pair of jock shorts, and keep it unless I can prove I didn’t buy it with dope profits. I’ve got most of my money stashed in a lot of blind-bogus bank accounts and I don’t think they could find them all, but with all the electronic shit they’ve got now, they can fix it so I don’t dare go near a nickel of it. Not to mention if I can’t show a legit means of support they can stick me in a labor camp—pardon me all to hell. Work Education Center—for six to a year of compulsory rehab, and they’ll do it, too.
So it is no time to be taking chances, and I stay up north for the rest of the summer, which is too hot to spend in the city anyway. But I may be worrying about nothing, because from the stories in the U.S. newspapers at the stand down near where I’m staying, Jane Ann’s case is not exactly getting the high-profile treatment. Just another tragic teenage drug death, is how they’re playing it, which is fine with me.
I am still in Toronto when I hear about Jerry Duane.
NINETIES POP STAR DEAD IN DRUG OVERDOSE. That’s what one of the headlines says, and it is pretty typical. About the only thing they get right is the dead part.
A lot later, after I finally come home, Fat Slim gives me the story.
“I got the details,” he tells me, “from the good Detective Sergeant Carmody, when he came around for the monthly donation to the Carmody Children’s Education Fund. Which, by the way, has now undergone a definite increase, indexed the Sergeant says to overall inflation rates, so now you’re back you might want to put in a little overtime to help make up the deficit. Like there’s this whorehouse up in the District, they want to set up a supply line, have the stuff on hand for certain well-off customers who want to try the necrophilia thing without actually. . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. “Takes all kinds.”
“Well,” he says, “you might go up there and have a talk with the management. Like I say, we’re developing a cash flow problem.”
He sits down on the nearest bed. As it happens we are in the upstairs room where Jerry Duane and I took our neck trip. The masks are still lying on the pillows. I think about taking Jerry Duane’s, sort of like to remember him by, but that would be a little too weird even for me.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Fat Slim says. “It was deliberate. He had enough Necrodone in him to kill a water buffalo. And he had all these pictures of Jane Ann, even clippings from the stories when she died, lined up on the bed beside him. He’d fixed himself up, too, shaved and cleaned up and put on one of his stage suits. Dude was going out in style.”
“He leave a note?”
“According to Carmody, there was a sheet of hotel stationery with the words HOLD ON, BABY, I’M COMING. Which,” Fat Slim says with one of his snorts, “mysteriously disappeared later, and there is no reference to it in any of the reports or the news stories.”
“Why the broom job?”
“Carmody didn’t know, just that word came down that this was to be treated as an accidental overdose and no mention of the S-word. Rumor has it that his agent and the recording-company executives figured this was the best way to play it, in terms of the big re-release package that’s already in the works. Puts him in the tradition of Janis and Jimi and Elvis and the others, you know? Only writers get to commit suicide. Anyway,” Fat Slim says, “I don’t suppose much pull had to be exerted to get the right ruling. After all, it’s not as if anybody gave a shit.”
“So he thought he could go after her,” I say, thinking out loud. “Like if he went out the same way, maybe he’d hook up with her in the next world.”
“Or the neck world,” Fat Slim says, and we both laugh. I mean, I feel bad the dude did it, but Jesus Christ, what a dumb idea. Fucking Texans, I swear.
About a month later I hear once again that somebody is asking around on the street, looking for me. I wonder if maybe I came back from Canada too soon, but when I go to check it out I meet this very straight-looking young dude in a really neat suit, who hands me a card that says he is from some law firm. “Mr., ah, Henry,” he says. “I have something for you.”
He takes me to where his car is parked and opens the trunk and there inside, no shit and swear to God, is a cream-finish Les Paul Gibson guitar with a leather strap that says Jerry Duane Austin.
“Just before his, ah, demise,” the suit says, “Mr. Austin added a codicil to his will, leaving this instrument to you. I must say it’s taken some doing to find you.”
He hands me an envelope. “This was to be given to you as well,” he says. “It has not been opened.”
Inside the envelope is a sheet of paper with some writing in pen and ink. It is not easy to read but I finally make it out:
