Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas [reading rainbow books .txt] 📗

scratchy newsreel, Neal’s voice the bellow of an Edward R. Murrow or Weegee.

“We need you to join our little operation, Mr. Kerouac. All this terror couldn’t stoke half the haunted dreams we need to finally rend the veil between worlds, to let the starry wisdom of the Great Old Ones descend unfettered onto our fair cities. But you’re a battery, a dynamo. Tying your shoes is an adventure; when Jack Kerouac finds a parking space, saints weep. Your soul can rewrite the world for us, just like a book. That’s why you struggled across the country, squeezing out ghosts from your own past to push and prod you on, to make here. To be acquired by our concern.” The beetlemen clicked with the forced glee of an office Christmas Party.

“I have kids now, Jack. Kids I love, and it’s rough being a working man, being a drone before the queen. I need a book, a bestseller, an _On the Road _for the Age Of The Elder Gods. And you’re going to be my main character!”

“Swell, Neal. That’s real swell.” The statue begin to shift and move, spreading over the blank white walls, casting snakey shadows everywhere. My grin was bigger than Christmas. Neal slid on up to me, his own smile wide too, the ends of his cheeks pinched into embryonic mandibles. “A book about two best friends. For years, they were best friends! Tilting at windmills, looking for love but finding only wet and smelly sex. Living the American Dream, masters of their fates while the drones who man the offices drive the nation into a dusty death. How’s a book like that gonna end, Jack?”

“Well,” I said, “when it was my book, it ended with you leaving me in Mexico with the runs.”

_Betrayal. _ The word hung in the air. Neal didn’t quite say it, but he and I and every mugwump in the room and probably the protean statue thought it all at once. So we were agreed. I hoped Bill would get here soon.

“Yes, yes,” Neal said through deformed lips, his _esses _ already sinking into a queer lisp. “Yeth. Betwayal.” Distant echoes came closer and I smiled a little bit more. Between my feet frantic beetles flowed like streams, searching for a place to hide. Neal’s jaw finally hardened into thick mandibles. If they were antlers, they’d be twenty-point numbers, the kind hunters would wait years to bag and spend a lifetime bragging about while bloating up with beer and venison jerky and finally dying in front of their grandchildren. Huge mandibles, open with pincers ready on either side of my face, the cover of a pulp magazine if only I were a curly-haired buxom girl threatened by the four-color Monster In The Mountaintop.

“Yeah Neal, but you betrayed me already. In my book. If you’re doing your book, doesn’t that I mean that I get to betray you?” I laughed again, “Wouldn’t you betraying me again be a little, you know, derivative? Pulp fiction. I mean really, I saw it coming from a mile away. The top of the spiral, even.”

The mugwumps slapped their bones into their palms as one, like savages calling for the hunt. Neal, the part of his face that was still Neal, his sweet eyes, stared at me so plaintive and wanting. “No, I’m not betraying you. I want you to come along with me, to the next great adventure. We explored this world already, conquered it, but there is a new one waiting to be born. A safe world, a world far away from frantic bourgeois thought. There’s no need to search for God anymore, or to chase after enlightenment or race to the bottom of degradation just to see how it feels, to see if we’re still human afterwards, because we’ll know. The higher power. Join us. Join _me, _ Jack! You can rewrite the universe, along with me!”

For that moment, I wanted to. I was getting old. I felt it all throughout this trip. The road I’d taken was already gone, and the moon I’d made so many girls under already blasted to powder by missiles. Even my dear party cities of Frisco and Denver were underwater, never to rise again, though R’lyeh rose a lifetime ago. Forms like dark shadows twisted against the walls, pushing like a newborn chick against its shell, in indescribable Moebius-strip ways. More tiny beetles crawled in, but twitched and died at my feet, sweet poison coating them like perfume.

Then I ducked, just as Neal’s pincers snapped shut and took the top of my hairdo off. A hot stream of bug spray hit Neal and burned him horribly; his face went up in a howling smoke. The mugwumps converged on me, bone-cudgels raised high, but Bill was already among them, handling his wand like Doc Holliday, and one after one beetlemen fell, fell and collapsed into scatterings of beetles, the scuttlebugs bursting from their mouths and assholes. They fell easy, like drones do; the few Bill left standing I took down with quick rabbit punches and knee lifts, Jap-style.

Neal was up at us again, waving his arms, his cruel face zipping itself back into shape, human shape, as crunchy exoskeleton fell away smoking. He was standing still but still running at a hundred miles an hour. “Fellas, wait, you gotta understand. You don’t see what’s really going on! You’re from the wrong side of the river on this one. I’ve been to the golden shore, and it really, truly is better this way. Destroy all rational thought, right? Well these blind gods have done that, with a greater understanding. You’re not fighting me, you’re clinging to mama’s pussy lips and trying to shove your heads back into her warm little womb, get me?”

He went on, his speechifying hitting the intensity of Satchmo’s scats. Bill didn’t put much truck in with glossolalia though and raised the wand to spray Neal again, but got only an impotent little squirt. “Well, fuck,” he said and a massive bedrock tentacle lashed out from the far end of the wall and smacked Bill to the ground like a rag doll.

The transformation of the temple was complete. The soothing (to the mugwumps) office setting crumbled like so much chickenwire and_ papier m�ch� and the gaudy horror of it all was revealed. The walls were made of stars and a billion fathoms of void. The statue was still huge, dominating the scene behind Neal, but it stretched off into infinity in two arbitrary directions, for it was axis mundi, _ the evil core of creation. The center of the universe waiting for collapse and heat death. Hungry for it. The cosmos itself was hungry for oblivion, the rush of stars and fruitful worlds spinning themselves to cinders and then spiraling down to a dusty death.

And there was Neal, and I. We weren’t even standing on the smartly carpeted floor of the office temple anymore, instead we hung our legs over the pier of infinity.

“Behold,” Neal said again, casual and smiling rather than dime-novel ominous.

“There’s a quality to this oblivion that’s a little unsettling,” I admitted.

Neal nodded. “It’s desirous. An evil desire. Here’s a koan for you: What is the difference between having no desire and having desire for nothingness?”

“No. It’s just that desire is what is evil.”

We looked about the empty universe. “What do you miss the most?” he asked me. And I told him. Everything. The smell of a girl’s hair. My thumb, throbbing four hours after a wayward hammer smack. The chuckle after a good lay. Ham sandwiches. The hollow call of the bull-roarer over the outback. Keats. Pencil tips breaking in frustration and rage. Barbed-wire war. Even smug preachers fondling the leather of their family Bibles like it was a woman. I went on and on, pouring out everything I could remember about the world: The smell of beer. The nostalgic horror of a green plain seen through prison bars. Dead children, all bones and parchment skin, in India or old Hoboken. Soybeans spilling through gnarled fingers at market day. The first gold stamped into coins. Puffing Russians calling for nuclear holocaust as a matter of stubborn principle. It took forever to list everything I missed about the world, and there was still plenty of time left.

“Brains small, universe big.” I wrote that down once in a notebook. My brain was too small to rebuild the world; I could barely do justice to the highway system and my friends. But there was something deeper in me, the divine spark Neal knew so many years ago, the one his kind face hoped to bring here, even as the dark lust for matter within him lured me to this same blasted corner of the cold infinite. I turned to him. He raised a finger and I was enlightened.

In every raindrop there is an ocean, and every salty ocean is a teardrop. I felt my mortality rise again, like a balloon, like it did in Hoboken as I watched man-animals pummel and betray one another for moldy bread and futility. Without that mortality, that self-imposed time limit, I could do it. My Buddha nature presented itself and the universe was reborn. Reordered. Beetles scurried back up an orderly bedrock spiral and into the mortal city to refill their skins and disentangle themselves from the stacks in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. Buddha gathered up moondust and pressed it like dough back into smiling silver. Oceans receded, Allen pulled himself up from the sewers and spit out gallons of sewage, able to breathe again.

I nearly gave it all away, but under the world I made, I saw the one Neal made: drowned coasts, the dead everywhere, clicking beetlemen working in their dark, satanic mills, illusions of gilded trade laid bare. Was it any less beautiful? Of course not—misery is mayfly, beauty dross. Only the spirit, ineffable, remains eternal. There was a choice though; I was given a coin and just had to flip it. And there was a choice for me too.

To be Buddha, to embrace bliss, and leave the world as I’d left it after my travels, in ruins. Or to cut loose the silver chord, to set the world alight by offering up my own divine spark, my chance for escape from suffering. Psychic suicide, that’s what it was, nothing less. I’d pour every single joy I ever had into Creation, or it would collapse back into Neal’s nightmare. Or I could wring myself dry like a dishrag, and walk the earth dead inside, the neighborhood dog-catcher or the blocked writer in front of an eternally blank and unspoiled page, without even the buzz of sweet Marie in my ear anymore.

What’s the difference between having no desire and having desire for nothingness? Neal didn’t know; that’s why he threw his lot in with late-night poker games and cross-country chases for his own tail. He loved his own Nealness too much to lose it without wanting to take the rest of us with him. He desired nothingness, but thought he had no desire. How could the Dark Dreamer not awaken from his feverish sleep and embrace the poor boy? I wasn’t too clear on the distinction between the two choices myself, really, but rational thought isn’t the key to answering the irrational question, is it?

I offered up everything I was, all I could and ever would create, and swore never again to even glimpse the infinite. The world was born again, the stars all in their place, and as I separated dark from light, I pushed the dark down below the face of the deep.

Cthulhu wept, lost again to strange aeons. Office walls and windows returned, and the statue withered and died like December grapes. The mugwumps were gone, as were their robes, but Neal was there, standing before me,