Having finally arrived at what must have been the penultimate set; the last scene
of a long and torturous journey, Lincoln cast an attentive eye over her lofty
surroundings in the glorious moment of stillness which had been awarded her. All the
trimmings of a commercial age remained untouched; a scene paused in time as if life
took place on a grand TV screen; the video frozen while the lord took leave to make
himself a cup of tea during the commercial break. Countless neon drinks machines and
legions of technicolor tourist kiosks sported a pantomime plethora of reds, yellows,
purples and blues which appeared to whirl in and out of each other in the corner of her
eye like a curious cache of vivid feng shui symbols. The titanic sky high windows
presenting a near birds eye view of this semi prestigious land in all it's damned,
forgotten artistry, she felt as if she were atop a floating world; an island in the sky
which could topple at any moment into a miscreant maelstrom. The gorge like gap
between her and the earth from whence she came had the debilitating effect of
prompting a taught but reassuring vertigo which at least reminded her of her own
mortality.
Iron; sharing similar sentiments, had first noticed an inviting stream of bulbous
hanging lamps which appeared to grow out of the ceiling like a row of luminous
orchids and lead towards a single white doorway amid the surrounding drape of pit
black furniture and decor. Directing himself to the task in hand, he began towards this
hospitable cavalcade of illumination in the hope of uncovering something pure and
meaningful beyond its glowing shell. Meanwhile, Lincoln closed her eyes and thus felt
somewhat untangled as her mind looped backwards into another dimension of time
where this place was a bustling menagerie of viviparous visitors strutting around this
heaven high monstrosity like a clutch of tattling turkeys. That nightmare vision
dispelled, she contemplated the metaphorical significance of this stage of her journey; a
journey of life rather than of mere philanthropic paces. On top of the world, everything
appeared so small and she, aside from the toytown topography below; felt big;
important. Presumably it was this dizzying view of themselves the junta's top brass
wished to cultivate in choosing this as a head quarters. She breathed deeply and let the
boundaries of her self breeze away; salvaging an obscure confidence which had
somehow been lost in this mammonishing, mesmeric dream. Night was falling. An
orchestral drabness descended on this macrocosmic world like a narcissistic nocturne;
leaving the primary players to enact their final theatrics.
There was a piercing, ethereal shudder which only Lincoln felt. A pounding so gut
deep it could only have emanated from her own heart. It reeled inside her as if an eel in
a fishing net as the whirling motion picture which she clumsily nicknamed existence
shifted back into motion as some divine projectionist; waking with an inexplicable jolt
from an ecstatic sleep, hastily flicked the switch and restarted the action. She side
stepped to accommodate the appearance of two uniformed officers; Ires and Juno, who
were swiftly followed by another a-typical pairing; Ceres and Reynaldo. She was
reminded of the Japanese martial tradition of the kumite; a test in which the practitioner
faces multiple opponents in quick succession. Fifty or hundred man kumites were
reserved for expert karateka, but Lincoln felt that today she had exceeded those
figures, albeit that the adversaries were of a decidedly unproven capability. She nursed
a battered knuckle in her other hand and asked herself just how many beatings it could
dish out before she did it some real, permenent damage while Ires took the bold and
unrecommendable step they always did; leaping forward with a flying kick which was
suitably athletic but desperately lacking in placement and skill. Lincoln swiveled
majestically in response underneath the soaring agressor and chopped his body into a
contorting backward somersault with a neat extension of her back leg into his shrieking
jaw. 'Oh; that must've hurt.' She commented with a discompassionate shrug as if an
underpaid sports pundit plodding out the remainder of her meagre contract while the
disheartened Ires twirled in the air like a crazed ski jumper on an over iced slide and
crunched head first into a hardly consumer friendly marble bench. Based on previous
experience, Lincoln would expect the remaining three to take turns in attacking, thus
making everything that much easier for her. Even this far up the societal tree, the
cardboard cutout representatives of the ecotoxic establishment appeared to deplore
basic pragmatism.
She leapt to one side, thudding a jab of pin point accuracy into Reynaldo's nose
as she went as incidentally as brushing away a fly; successfully inflicting maximum
damage and skipping harmlessly away from her charging opponents. And with
Reynaldo struggling to stem the intense flow of blood which spilled from a gaping
crack in a squashed bone, Ceres and Juno were made painfully aware it was their turn;
the former stepping towards his mortal enemy with a searching hook. This decision,
however, was fated a failure even before it had been taken, and as he felt himself
hooped into an over shoulder throw and slammed into a near bursting carousel of
postcards and keyrings like a trash sack into a dustcart, he too realized that perhaps
there was a good reason that the entire military malapropism had not been enough to
apprehend these motley militants.
Lincoln gave Juno an off-putting frown through an obscuring postcard rack
before the angered bodyguard skipped around it and attacked with a roundhouse kick
only to see Lincoln flop to the floor in a cultured break fall and hook his standing leg
away with her front foot. She rubbed her hands together almost gleefully as if a
housewife having just displeased a doubting husband in successfully erecting a stable
set of shelves, and flipped back onto her feet in an imaginative jolt like an extravagant
extra rising with graceful flair from a fall in a Hong Kong fight flick; trying to grab the
director's attention and make himself a star. Juno was about to be gifted further insult
not to mention added injury as his leg was caught by Lincoln's leading hand as he
attempted a weak kick. This enabled the intruder to down her opponent for a final time
by grabbing his collar and wrenching his head into a handy standing rack of assorted
camera films and novelty mugs which clambered hopelessly over his recreant form like
a portentous persistent pub dweller turfed callously out of his favorite bar.
Meanwhile, Iron grappled with another pair of scurrilous servicemen; Bernado and
Marcellus; both of whom found themselves heavily outclassed. Rolling his neck with a
quiet crackle, he tripped Bernado with the side of his foot and slammed him head first
into a puzzilngly presciented plaque pertaining to health and safety regulations on the
near wall. Marcellus was no less unfortunate. Iron merely jigged his striking arm from
side to side to ensure his opponent’s confusion before completing a quarter turn and
shoving him into the electronically highlighted face of a drinks machine with a series of
prodding heel kicks to the stomach; each one elongating the protruding crack which
emerged across the putrid plastic until a head height roundhouse reduced the age old
beverage dispenser to a broken hulk of wire and splinters which engulfed the fallen
Bernado like a swelling avalanche of ice and snow.
Vladimir Volscenzi, standing motionless above the towering depths of the city
which panned out underneath him like the marked territory of a fretting feline,
overlooked his world in regal refulgency. Abreru; contented to stick to his master's side
like the most gross and impenetrable adhesive, cut a prudent figure as he sought to
balance the dictator's rage with disinterested, almost meditative dissatatchment. All this
reactionary upheaval infected an otherwise impregnable blasé attitude which was fueled
day in day out by the very real realization that things could hardly get any worse. He
longed for a return to the easy days; the mind numbingly boring days where he would
stand like a gawmless gaurdian angel while the garrulous pseudo monarch spawned his
spurious altercations. The idle wish for backward time travel corroding Abreru's usually
unshakable awareness, he stopped himself as he considered that in actual fact he would
rather die than listen to any more of his master's sacrilegious sermons; a preference
greater forces may have noted; and in so dropping his mental guard let Volscenzi slip
past his watchful gaze and approach Lincoln for a baneful bout of fisticuffs. Lincoln, on
seeing this match of her dreams creep up with all the poise of a lumbering elephant,
hurled the disoriented Ceres into a monotonous hot dog stand in delighted haste;
sending an epidemic arsenal of flea bitten sausages and half baked buns rolling over the
pristine floor like a split tub of angler's maggots with a protopathic sidekick. She grit
her teeth like two grand piano boards pressed together by frugal removals men who
had crammed two of the mahogony laced monstosities into one van to solve financial
incumberments. Now that the initial vexation involved in the act of catching sight of her
personal beezlebub had subsided, there was only calculation, technique and if justice
existed in the world, some measure of vengence.
The deplorable dictator; properly versed in combat training only for the
predictable dramatic purposes of the playwright, sized this niggling deviant up with a
prolonged sidekick to the head which though falling short served as a psychological
assertation of his own as yet undemonstrated skill as he sarcastically held the striking
leg out for a moment like an angled fishing rod. This petulance would have coerced
Lincoln into a frenzied and ultimately fatal retaliation if she had not been accustomed to
tackling this kind of obnoxious showmanship. In truth, her heart was already feeling as
it would if someone had made a high speed roller coaster of her intestines and strapped
it into a carriage for the treacherous test run. The effect of this long anticipated
encounter reminded her of that light, numb feeling often experienced in dreams. When
adrenaline flows so forcefully that you don't believe you can move at all. Everything
seizes up; which was just what she needed. But keen to prove her skeptical and
retentive contemplations wrong, she searched for an opening with her eternal nemesis
swinging devious head shots at her from various angles which for the time being at
least she was narrowly able to avoid.
Then it came; that shining light, that golden chalice, that cup of Christ. That big,
sparkling, slow motion opening; the pearly gates, the semantic cromlech, that elusive
gap. As if it was fate and not deliberation which guided her, Lincoln threw out a stiff
jab which; guided by an unfathomable force, sneaked between two slicing hooks and
slammed into Volscenzi's nose like a ball on a pendulum. In the brief moment which
followed Lincoln's veins swelled up with a delicious nectar as if she were a hard up
junkie just jacked up with a long sought after injection of her favorite narcotic. The
trembling uncertainty had become a distant memory. That had felt good. She smiled to
herself; or maybe even publicly; she neither really knew or cared. When you had finally
done that thing you always wanted to; that thing you always dreamed of, however
ethically dubious the fantasy, a certain freshness; a newness, is bound to well up inside
as if your heart has just become a blocked garden hosepipe. The blood was a bonus. A
visual representation of dark satisfaction having just been realized. Volscenzi; cut
remarkably easily for a character of his victim's private dark mythology, began to drop
his guard in disbelief. That was twice in the space of a week he had been accosted by
one of these boils on the made up visage of his sinarchist society. He was a king;
determined to rule by heaven; wasn't he?
Lincoln was not about to pass up the lifetime opportunity this dramaturgic delay
facilitated. Instead she hacked away at the pliant patriarch's head with a series of
pummeling rights as if she were thumping a swinging bag; her fist acting like a blood
thirsty pestle grinding whichever herb or spice languished lamentably in the bottom of a
murderous mortar into a derivative dust. Now fate was finally beginning to give her
something back.
Volscenzi covered up poorly like a toddler laid into by a brutal father until the
choice supervention of a smirchy row of off white plastic chairs placed there
ingeniously by his red skinned, cleft footed master to ensure all went according to plan
became his satiable salvation. Hopping self assuredly onto one, he twisted around as if
preparing for a death defying bungee jump and bumped Lincoln onto a knee with a
sublime backick which loosened a bottom tooth and savagely reopened that split lip
which his minions had inflicted in her own home a while ago under his specific orders.
Volscenzi's next attempt; a swinging reverse roundhouse which took the
vituperative villain off the row of seats and back onto the complaisant concrete, looped
liquescently into her face as he both cursed and praised himself; praise for the landed
kick and curse for the fact that it was the effect of that exact attack which had made his
follow up soar marginally off target.
Lincoln wiped the seeping wound with a pressing palm like a cut man in a
boxing ring attempting to cease the flow of his prize pugilist's precious life energy at
least long enough for him to complete the twelve rounds and pick up the pending
potload of a pay packet. In truth though clever and apparently effective that blow had
failed to hurt her. The opponent in question had already hurt her more than anyone ever
could again, which made her almost invulnerable to his more corporeal assaults on her
person. Volscenzi curtailed her untimely rebellion momentarily with a searching knee to
the midsection and a thoughtful front leg sweep which knocked her down to earth with
a helping crossface forearm as if she were a stray dog who needed restraining before
she did anyone any permanent harm. Lincoln shook her head clear and turned around
on the floor with a wide arch swing of the arm which ended up slicing Volscenzi's lead
foot clean off the ground like the rotating blade of a fruit blender. Intent on nullifying
her eternal enemy's palliative offensive, she caught him with a sneaky heel to the face as
he fell and drooped into an escape minded forward roll which left her just far away
enough to nail him with a obligating backick as he clambered to his unsteady feet, thus
scoring a second palpable knock down.
Volscenzi's nose by now a wreaked and twisted mess, Abreru began to release a
grin that had been so many years coming it felt like the light from a distant star having
to travel eons just to shine, but covered his mouth with a theatrical cough in order to
avoid undue punishment. At one point he would have to throw in the towel, but if he
would not survive; one way or another; a direct assault on his lord and master, perhaps
somebody else could do the necessary damage to his ego before suffering a similar fate.
But the decked despot had other ideas.
He rose like a lotus from a mud pool; a metaphor which did not suit his cruel
character, and swished a punch by Lincoln's jaw as he bowled forward only to judder
back again at the incision of a worryingly identical return from his dissenting adversary,
who followed up with a cluster of head shots irrationally brutal for a person of her size.
At this juncture there was little point or attraction in embezzling herself with a tactical
assault, which resulted in the pair slogging away at each other like a couple of pub
bruisers; Lincoln opening up that palpitating gash over the autocrat's eye while the
latter christened her with a slurring slit under her own optical receptacle. But an
unsporting low kick and the stippling suffix of an overarm right eventually endorsed in
Volscenzi's mind a bashful drop to one knee, thus rectifying the humiliation he had
previously inflicted on her.
Eagerness was to prove troublesome to Lincoln, who for once threw away her
composure to almost stamp at her opulent opponent as if he was a scuttling cockroach,
but by then Volscenzi had turned; still stooping low, into a stomach high sidekick
which caused the rash revolutionary to tumble a step backwards into a skeletal partition
wall which shuddered like a pupil called to the headmaster's room under the impact.
The deplorable dictator by now back into a peripatetic fighting stance, Lincoln dabbed
the dribbling slash under her eye and awaited an unsightly mistake, which duly revealed
itself as he span into a pirouette jump kick ahe was able to cut short with an ingenious
snatch of the ankle which allowed her to drop him face first into those unforgiving
chairs with a swish chop at the his standing leg.
She muffled a grin which may have seemed sadistic if not undue and received
another backick to the body as he used the furniture he had previously encountered to
his detriment as leverage. Her innards by now churning like an intestinal car wash with
full wax and dry, Lincoln performed a nippy duck under Volscenzi's searching swipe
and whipped a neat palm into his solar plexus with the aid of a footloose swivel which
caused the combatants to swap places as if involved in a warring waltz. A close range
sidekick to the abdomen pushed him away far enough for her to measure up a more
decisive offensive, but again her excitement at putting herself in the appropriate
position to end this uncertain revolution here and now had gotten the better of her as
the tacky tyrant almost jigged one leg in front of the other in a dancing dash like a foot
shuffling Shiva; culminating in an officious abdominal sideways heel pumping the air
out of Lincoln's ribcage as she flew backwards over that pesky row of giggling seats
like a small car reversing too quickly over a speed bump; landing on her back on the
other side as if a squashed loony toon under the proverbial acme steam roller.
Across the hall Hanzo Trinculo; by day head of security at the old trade center
and by night; once normality had resumed, preferably locked away in his
pulchritudinous penthouse overlooking the bay, nudged Abreru with a little more
urgency than he was accustomed to. He had been due to sign off at eight after an
arduous twelve hour shift, but had been called back to the scene of a potential crime
just as he had boarded the lift with the dream of a plush genetically manufactured TV
dinner and an evening watching South American soccer; the only continent which still
found time for sport; just beginning to solidify into a graspable reality in his head.
Dressed like a miscellaneous mafia hitman in an ineloquently obese black trenchcoat
which spread itself over the slippery floor like a mountain stream joining the resulting
river, he played the cack handed killjoy much to the presidential bodyguard’s doggoned
dismay.
Abereru was well aware that this uprising would have to be stopped, but it was
interesting to see just how far it could go. He and his sidekicks had had bets on the
outcome of Iron, Lincoln, and, tragically, Johnson's little rebellion, and as things went
he stood to win the pot. Rupa and Tanha had gone for early stoppages; by Kaishek's
raw recruits on Liberty island or at the hands of the welcoming party inside the lobby of
this very building. Aker had gone for broke; he had taken the thousand to one shot; that
this incursion would actually prove successful; a wager placed in jest which all four
found hilarious until Volscenzi had stepped into the room and forced them to hush up
proceedings. Abreru had commented that Aker's was essentially a fool's stake. If he
was wrong, he would loose his cash. If he was right, he would loose his job. Either
way, if Volscenzi found out where he was hedging his bets; or indeed that any of them
were doing so at all, he would surely loose his life. Abreru, on the other hand, had said
that the pair would make it all the way to the top floor, and it would take him and his
culpable crew to stop them. 'Always bet on yourself;' he had advised; 'if a job needs
doing...' But Trinculo's insistence on getting home for that damn samba soccer was
about to foil his money making scheme. As long as Volscenzi was beating seven shades
of hell out of these militants, it was his bet that was closest to the truth, and besides,
the fact that those self same militants seemed to be doing a pretty good job beating
seven shades of hell back into the boss was a dream come true for the tortured right
hand man. It was laughable that the proposed heroes had been under the assumption
that they were calling the shots; that they had not been led to the government HQ; that
they had fooled the grandiloquent gestapo by taking that supply ship to Liberty island
rather than just cruising up to the front gates of their personal hells. In reality it was all
part of the grand plan; the 'game' Volscenzi talked about so incessantly. A game
Abreru, and probably even his boss, would have enlightened their departmental
inferiors about if only they themselves knew what the outcome would be, as the real
game; if that was not a mixed metaphor for life, was being played by someone or
something; else completely. In fear of being disciplined for perjury or worse come
tomorrow’s board meeting if Trinculo saw it fit to portray his layed back conduct in a
disparaging manner, Abreru would have to put a stop to this refreshing scuffle; at some
point at least.
Lincoln had spent the last few moments wondering exactly where she was and
more importantly, what way up she was like a tortoise knocked off a road and into a
ditch by a cruel truck driver. That reminded her of a vaguely relevant symbolic scene in
the grapes of wrath, but that was beside the point at the present time. By now she was
back on her feet and deliberating exactly how to wipe, or more likely kick that
conceited smirk off the exanimate emperor's bloodied face.
He circled the furniture as if preparing an assault on the bay of pigs and
calculated that he had just about jolted his head out of range of a fierce reverse
spinning roundhouse, but Lincoln's heel was just that all important inch too elusive to
track, and hacked him into a graceless doubled over position as it contacted his jaw,
allowing the vengeful rebel to apply an excruciating wristlock to his flailing arm and
thus force the prolonged opening necessary to batter his by now unrecognizable nose
with three rapid fire shin kicks which possessed a ferocity which to the casual observer
unaware of the ancient history in which they had been involved would have indicated
that it was the attacking party who was the callous villain of the piece.
Next she twisted his already disabled arm around like the lever of a carpenter's
vice and, clinging on, turned around into a fireman's carry come shoulder throw;
hooking the traumatized totalitarian over her head in a manner which weight
discrepancies should not have allowed into the partition wall which rumbled
unnervingly and suffered a sizable dent as Abreru and co picked this opportune moment
to swab her like a wild groupee crowding in vein to get an autograph from a mean
celebrity. Trinculo directed traffic while Ires took her arms from behind as if he were a
human pair of handcuffs as Abreru 'accidentally' got a cheap chest kick in on his master
amid a frenzy of uniformed bodies, then felt bad about it. Surely though the man
himself was in no fit state to recognize whether it was friend or foe who had delivered
the blow, but there must have been a camera on him somewhere.
Having dispensed with a large but unformidable school of shame faced swabs
himself, Iron bided his time and relieved Yuvel Osric of his back leg with a cranky,
elaborate sweep while Lincoln ended the unrequited attentions of Ires with a short,
sharp elbow to the face which pushed him back that fatal step before unleashing a long
range backick to the same target as the whining henchman loosened his grasp out of
pain rather than preference. In the ensuing melee, Iron offered a somewhat aimless
spinning kick into the brut bunch of black clad bullies, all of whom ducked save the still
apparently dazed Volscenzi, who copped the shot square in the chin. Iron vented both
pleasure that luck had chosen that particular recipient and displeasure that the same
intangible force had determined that he use a technique which would not allow him to
actually see the strike land. But that indignation had rekindled a fire in the rash ruler’s
loveless heart which prompted him to burst out of the flock and clobber Iron with a
roving right hook which may well have put him down for the mandatory eight had an
obeisant postcard rack not lent a helping hand.
Abreru rolled his eyes and feigned a sycophantic concern; assuring the others
that their paragon employer could look after himself. Iron skillfully took hold of the
purged puppeteer's striking arm and rammed him face first into a pilaster wall with a
full bodied yank. Volscenzi felt his eyes tingle as if they had suddenly been replaced by
a socket full of shimmering stars by a misanthropist divinity. His nose he was less
concerned about; he had lost any notion of feeling in that area long ago. He dropped to
his feet as if to tie a shoelace and turned with an almost adventitious heel outstretched
which caught his opponent's ankle and made him stumble like livestock zapped with a
herding taiser. If luck was the tool of greater beings, then god and the devil were
engaged in a deadly game of dice.
Volscenzi; delighted to do the demon's work, pushed off the paralyzing pillar to
grant his hooking heel kick extra snap, and grinned like the Buddha under the bodhi
tree as Iron was again saved only by that selfless card rack. But an additional attempt
with the opposite leg fared disastrously in comparison as the gifted vigilante caught the
offending limb like a scuffed shot in a cricket match and atoned in some part for his
own lifelong hardship with an axiomous heel into the hallowed hegimonist's
unprotected undercarriage and another substantiating kick to the jaw which may well
have hurt less, but which guided the grudging gestapo soverign towards the souvenir
smattered ground with gastronomic graviation. "Sue sember tyrannis." commented
Lincoln just in case this menotinous though exciting thing she called life was being
broadcast to a Latin audience while she batted the homesick Trinculo's head against the
remains of a cuneiform cash register which humorously pinged and ejected its cash
drawer into his neck as if it too had had enough of consumer society.
At this point Iron was magically taken down by an unknown force which turned
out to be less than miraculous; Kofi Baptista crumpling him up with an absent minded
leg lock which the inventive insurgent illustriously broke with a frisking kick to the
head as if he was swimming in breast stroke. By this time Volscenzi had already been
shoved up a stuttering escalator by his trusty entourage, which left only two callow
caitiffs to circumnavigate before Abreru would have to make good on his bet in the
presence of the three more faithful tipsters. A cursory jab provided the perfect byplay
before Iron delivered a thunderous left which, along with the obvious candidate of age
could be held responsible for the chewing problems Baptista would experience in later
life, and a roundhouse tagged onto the end of a double turn which confused the at this
point still youthful goon that a life in the service of a military hardman was probably a
tad too hard for his tastes.
Simultaneously Lincoln dealt with Trinculo, who had always had more money
than sense despite having previously lived in desperate poverty. He was soon to realize
that money talks as she took him down to her own height with a shin kick to the back
of the knee, swiveled into a savoir-faire hook kick with the self same leg and sent him
reeling face first into the clefting cash register's carbonado casing with a pivoting spin
kick to which clouds of cadaver currency coinage cried in conspicuous cabaret
celebration.
Lincoln took a deep breath as if it was to be her last and shivered nervously as
she stood at the foot of that whirring escalator which seemed to stretch almost forever
towards an insubstantial landing housing two clumsily placed pot plants which
appeared to mark the furthest reaches of the urban jungle and the outskirts of a more
inviting one baring a nature as yet unseen. The eternally tumbling steps of the docile
machine rose and fell on their coggy hinges as they looped round and round like
chuffing engines on a small scale circular trainset, bringing to mind the notion of
impermanence. Things constantly rise and fell; came into and dropped out of being. But
her pending presentiment was halted abruptly as Iron; always the clown in a world so
deadly serious that it could only have been a momentous joke, laid out a hand in a
gentlemanly gesture for her to go first, knowing only too well that as with everything
else they would invariably go together.
The terse porch offering little cover from the biting winds which belted its
single glazed windows like enraged spirits rattling the walls of the house in which some
dreadful and unforgivable sin was inflicted upon them in life, the eclectic
revolutionaries passed through a slender door into buckling winds and a dizzying
spectacle. Utop the highest building in a sprawling Long Island, even places unknown
could be seen. From ground level the cleaved bridges just ended where the clogged
roadways used to begin; dead ends leading only to incorporeal ether and the daunting
waters below. From the roof of the world trade center could be seen both sides of the
story; on each side of the Hudson a sorrowful amputee gazing forlornly into the
swirling depths in where lost flesh and bone used to sit. Ghost limbs begging to be
reunited with their physical hosts.
Iron and Lincoln felt a chill at first as they wandered onto the blue metal
gangway as had many gumptuous tourists in times gone by. An intertwining network of
elevated walkways panned around the building flanked by a reassuring rail which made
sure that even if the visitor was inexplicably afflicted by a gut felt giddiness a fall would
be one of inches rather than what appeared to be miles.
On the opposite edge of walkway Volscenzi opened a service flap in the barrier
and hopped onto the gritty gray concrete just a step below as if an intrepid competition
diver about to throw himself artistically off the top board. The four remaining
bodyguards policed different sections of the gangway from inside, pleased that should
they fall like their unfortunate colleagues inside, they too would be hitting solid metal
rather than plummeting through space for a god awful age only to become a virtual
pizza topping should they even be able to cling onto consciousness to see the sullen
ground of the old financial sector bear down on them from below as if a preying
carnivore. Perhaps Volscenzi was planning a ritual suicide by pacing across the windy
wastes of that perilous roof. Perhaps he was just clinically insane. Abreru prayed to a
god which was surely much closer now that it was the suicide which his patriarch had
opted for, but in reality it was unlikely that he was being directed by any other force
than his own complacency.
"This has got to be the end! What good Hollywood villain doesn't end his
tyrannical reign by plummeting off a big building?"
"Hate to break it to you like this Mart, but this isn't quite Hollywood." Though some
decidedly comic things had happened to her recently, Lincoln purported to persuade
herself that the lord almighty had a little more tact than to conjure such a predictable
fate for her nominated nemesis. The irritant corner of a thunderstorm licked the
blackening skyline above them as it swept across the bald concrete stage. Lincoln
waved a hand in front of her face as if to physically wash away her persiflagent
protestations and accept the penultimate reality around her. Flickers of sunlight
squirmed enviously away in all directions as the storm closed in with a boisterous
thump and rumble which seemed to come from the bowels of time and space itself;
banging to the ground with an atomic crunch which sent ripples through the planet like
a parent ruffling a child's hair.
Lincoln shivered more with anticipation than fear. Iron tapped a knuckle on her
shoulder in what was supposed to be a motivating gesture, but directed his comments
to the patriarch himself; "That's four little bodyguards and a despot left." Volscenzi
scoured the gaunt landscape as if his primordial authority was enough to plunge the lid
of the monochrome building down to floor level to allow him a cowardly escape.
Abreru lined the remaining subaltern security men up in a hara-kiri wall blockade before
their master; a row of uncertain volunteer human shields. "If you want a job done..."
Volscenzi evidently meant to conclude that if you want a job done you should get your
imprecated goons to do it for you, but he seemed distracted with stroking a handsome
handgun encrusted with the simple iconographic depiction of an eight spoked cart
wheel which appeared out of place on his complicated although ultimately superficial
person, but soon indulged himself in a reiteration of his dubious stance as a throcratic
thespian; "As you may now realize, I posses a certain fondness of the game; the
competition; the test." Abreru and the others sighed like exhausted pensioners at a train
station just informed over the tanoid of a signal failure. "But my amusement is satisfied;
you may die now." Iron stepped aside to douse a rowdy slit on the edge of his eyebrow
while Lincoln threw herself into the ideological ruckus; "We can die now, huh? There's
one last task to be carried out; one last piece of old testament justice to be dished out."
"You believe all this has been a precursor to defeating me; destroying my hagiocracy.
On your travels you have flirted only with death; not success, not revolution; not
justice. At the end it is only irony which greets you; the irony that all that you have
achieved; the distance you have come; the obstacles you have overcome, and now, at
the end; or to be accurate just a fingertip short, you'll be relieved of this existence.
There's no method to this madness; no great destiny to immerse yourself in. There is
only survival; of the fittest; of the most resourceful."
"Oh there's a destiny alright; god moves in mysterious ways, so they say, but things
straighten themselves out. There may well be a chaos but its a strangely human one; it's
a construct of your own shabby dictatorship."
"Chaos is your true self; a pointless chaos. Dive headlong into havoc and you are all
you can be. Ethics; conscience; these are but tricks; snares in which we trap ourselves."
"Chaos may be the way of the world, but it isn't the way of human endeavor; of civility;
of ideology. Even if this world is false you can't go around using people; murdering
people. Some things a human being can't accept; some crimes; some injustices. In
moderation, we tolerate them, but that's our mistake. Our mistake is to give you room
to move; to grow."
"This is my anarchy, and I may do with it what I wish." Lincoln forgave herself for
thinking, momentarily, that she was confronting a Shakespearean villain with the words
and manner of a crazed Eighteenth Century autocrat, but it took no more than another
moment to remember this was the former petty criminal who had murdered her family.
Mythical and almost fictitious in her mind, had been shelved in as discreet a mental
corner as possible like hiding an unwanted volume in isolation at the top of the
bookshelf, only to have the thing come tumbling down on her whenever she sought to
recall those precious memories she had taken the trouble to keep close to her. This was
a moment to stand up and make herself heard. This was the moment of destiny, and
every problem, pain and complaint she had had with life would now surface, and be
resolved. "You can't control anarchy. The very idea of being able to control anarchy
denies its nature. You can't give it a ball and chain and train it like a dog, or else it just
wouldn't be anarchy. Anarchy controls you; it takes you over; influences your
decisions. It white washes your brain; makes you... crazy. You have to look behind the
scenes; see who's pulling the strings, because it's not your rational mind, it's your base
aspirations; your greed, your hatred, your delusion. You aren’t the driving force behind
this ragged distopia. Your game isn't a thing you play; it plays you. You don't pull the
strings; nobody does. You dig your hole but there are things you can't control. Destiny
won't turn puppet overnight."
Volscenzi gazed down at the ground. His shoes were worn. The concrete
suddenly looked somehow empty to him, and the ruffling wind almost made him
whimper. But he refused to be restrained by words. If anyone was to do the talking and
pass the orders, it was him; it always had been, it always would be. A man doesn't take
the trouble to rise to the top to sit on the sidelines, he does it to taste the lion's share of
the cream. "Destiny, I think, has run its course. Here we are; the final cut. This may not
be a perfect society, Miss Lincoln, but it is an improvement. My father left me a nation
state to maintain; a dream to realize, a reputation to live up to, a group of people to
protect..." This altercation was almost enough to convince Lincoln of that old chestnut
about hell being other people; or one in particular. "And another group to neglect. If
you can't make all the people happy some of the time, you shouldn't be content to just
make yourself happy all the time. This is your design; it's your responsibility. We all
have our crosses to bear, only you deny it. We all carry the weight of responsibility, but
you think you can force others to carry it for you. Why? So once you get to the hilltop
you'll have more energy than the rest; you'll survive longer wrapped bloody palmed on
that crucifix?" Volscenzi tapped his kneecap with the handle of a gun and giggled to
himself; "Biblical claptrap in which I; as a greater being; will not indulge. You don't
have a head for business. Your view of the world is an unrealizable fairy tale. Society
can't work if people can't look after themselves."
"It's easy to look after yourself. Why must we always take the easy option? The trick in
life is to put yourself out a little. This isn't a fight to survive; there's no natural
selection, no survival of the fittest. Think about it; you spend your life protecting
yourself from death. Why? It's going to happen anyway; there'd be no life without
death just as there's no light without darkness. A society is a collection of individuals,
not just a place where separated entities mill around never once interacting with the
others save to con or abuse them. We must all contribute to make society worthwhile,
or else prosperity remains a distant ideal hiding away in the day dreaming mind of some
well meaning but misguided laissez-faire politician who might like society to be a bed a
bed of roses but does nothing to make it so. Your society is a pedantic farce; a self
centered fictional universe with no firm grounding in either the present or the past.
Honestly, I sometimes think I'm just some fantasy character making myself look stupid
stumbling around in this tiny, shallow stage convinced it's all real when the whole thing
is so clearly the invention of a severely limited, sadistic mind as opposed to the divine
one. I think one day out pops a guy with a camera revealing it's all a big wind up. I
mean, where's my life? Where's the real; the underlying reality? The sad thing is, you're
even more lost than me. Even more lost; even more insane. Society locks up the sane
and releases the lunatics to go off and enslave the rest under their cast iron fists. Well
you know, history has proven that change will out; in the end. That's how things work;
progress. It's destiny's will, and there's nothing you can do about it.."
"Destiny, then; will be tested today. Let us see which way he sways; from which
deathly decanter he drinks..."
The die had finally been drawn; the curse at last cast, and after decades of
mental torment, Abreru had had enough. He would have been a long standing
champion on one of those bizarre Japanese endurance gameshows which American
audiences habitually referred to as irrefutable proof that his countrymen were at heart
inhuman nut cases. But even the most disciplined of men have snapping points, and the
autocrat's head honcho had been force fed enough metaphysical, ethical and political
banter for a veritable odyssey of lifetimes. With a succinct wave of the hand, he
communicated the long overdue call to arms which plunged the other three blunt faced
bodyguards into what would turn out to be only short term action.
Rupa and Tanha; two clean cut, stiff chinned, textbook assassins sporting grim
black uniforms owing their liquid smooth texture more to gross inactivity than a
prolonged spell in a clothes press and facial scowls which made Lincoln think they
could quite easily have been twins; were the first to make the last line of defense an
offensive institution. They came at the reactionary duo from opposite directions as the
creaking walkway jived uncomfortably under their heavy steps, but took leave of the
impromptu soiree in a markedly similar one; downwards. The fact that it was the same
procedure; respective hooking sidekicks from both intended victims, which felled the
two useless attaches only highlighted the interconnectedness of their fraternal fates.
At this Volscenzi was furious. He passed an inhospitable handgun through his
fingers painstakingly as if it were a ball point pen; the hickory handle encrusted with
that icon of the eight point cartwheel; a symbol his father had placed there on his old
ceremonious weapon of execution and the furbelow family crest back in his gestapo
days for reasons that history had never seen fit to reveal to him. Abreru took his
disparaging cough to infer that lives were on the line here; and not necessarily those of
his seemingly eternal opponents. Aker and Abreru were the only two left; the last of the
WTC home guard; the final barrier separating the hermit like ruler from his disgruntled
subjects. They were the innermost wall of the castle keep; the only hope. Walls;
inauspiciously for them; seem to be made to be broken.
Aker vaulted with equine finesse over the gantry rail on the other side of the
roof to obtain a workable angle and squatted down like a marine on a night time
reconisence mission, machine gun in hand, and unleashed a scalding spray at his
adversaries which miraculously ricocheted against every inch and edge of the metallic
structure stripping paint like a DIY multidrill in what would have been a fountain like
exhibition of graceful, effortless motion if the speeding droplets of fire it produced had
not been so much more damaging than the proverbial H2O, although not one solitary
round got in between the ample gap between upright poles to puncture their target's
meek flesh like a stake to a vampire's heart. While Aker shook his tool of supposed
mass destruction as if it was a faulty birthday toy, Abreru delivered a nonchalant swipe
which Lincoln swallowed up like a ravenous kraken before crowning the application of
a full aerial spin kick with the resonant melodic clang which came into being as the
shamed bodyguard hit the gumutlich gangway spine first as if an undertrained wrestler.
In the meantime, Aker had cast off his accursed plaything and leapt over the
railings like a cocksure boxer over the paregoric ropes which would have garroted him
had he not been both careful and proficient. As it turned out, that honor was left to
Iron, who was already half way through throwing a jaw breaking kick for which he first
lifted his knee as if demonstrating a yogic stretch then letting the striking implement fly
at almost a right angle to the ground; a side come straight heel throwing Aker back
over the barrier and head first into the gravel glazed ground before he had even realized
he had cleared the hurdle.
Volscenzi cocked the trigger on his gun as if preparing a syringe and gestured
madly like a ragged Napoleon emploring his troops to push on into Tsarist territory;
frustrated by a lack of success that had hardly bothered him in past campaigns. Abreru's
expertise proceeded him greatly when he was hired, but was evidently also the first
thing to leave him when a real fight came bumbling along. Lincoln winced away from a
series of frantic, high octane spin kicks; just leisurely biding her time until at the
culmination of one fertile twist, Abreru caught sight not of a retreating form, but of an
inquisitive boot which both asked and answered a question about himself he could only
have comprehended in retrospect; a halberd like hooking heel handing the humiliated
head hunter the intense idea that he had inherited a haranguing hemophilia before he
buckled goggle eyed onto the gawdy gangplank beyond as his preened precentor
prepared himself for a gut wrenching act of movie screenplay sabotage.
Gun arm raised in a manner in which one might offer crumbs to friendly flocks
of pigeons, Volscenzi somewhat paradoxically took aim with closed eyes and allowed
chance to determine the direction of reality. As Lincoln began to turn; oblivious of the
hellish prospect loitering menacingly behind her, a banderol bolt from the blue belted
towards her like a chiseling, churning chariot of fire; screaming into the side of her head
and inflicting a severe groove like a chortling meteor blazing inches past a densely
populated planet and taking half a city with it; shearing off just enough skull and brain
tissue to be fatal.
A queasy feeling of formlessness came over her like a celeritous rash and made
her slump knees first to the floor like a dumped tailor's dummy; a sight at which Iron
was plunged into a disorienting shock of unbelievability he had not experienced for
some time; since that terrible day.... He almost fell towards her unable to speak as if all
his insides had disconnected from their rightful anatomical positions and slipped down
into his feet. Lincoln, in contrast, felt decidedly worse at first; as if she had been
dropped like a precious china cup; shattering theatrically into a thousand pieces as her
brittle body struck the stern floor.
She leaned her baluster back against the edge of the barycentric blue metal
walkway; using it as a comfy armchair pulled up by a helpful volunteer in a home for
decrepit OAPs as the blood from the red badge wound began to filter out of a glaring
hole in her head as if the Lake Powell dam had been built just above her ear only to be
dynamited back into oblivion at the will of a destructive and ultimately insane
contractor. Iron instinctively got to his knees and straightened her sagging form as if
this was the kind of injury which could be put right with a little considered breathing,
good posture and TLC. As if this was the kind of bleeding which could be stopped by
holding up the nose and being careful not to let the stuff flow down your throat and
clog up your arteries. The world around him had already disappeared; it was hardly
significant. Time stood still in reverence and mourning to allow the downed party a
little... time. Was God misleading him all along; giving him a fool's errand; a spiked
chalice? Or did God have no idea; was He just as much in the dark as they were? Or
was this His doing? Was He in cahoots with the devil; with both he and his dying
companion's personal night terror; the joint incubus and succubus which had always
lurked deep in their minds? Were they working together all along?
Iron looked blankly into her eyes as if she wasn't there; as if nobody was home,
but soon realized the absence was only fleeting. Once the shock had cleared; once the
curtain was drawn, Lincoln looked back at him and seemed to smile without actually
really having the energy to do so. The eyes, it has been said, are the window to the
soul, and at this point her soul told Iron exactly what he wanted, and needed, to know.
A truth which perhaps words could not describe. A happiness residing between the
very teeth of despair which made him see through the world; which made him realize
that the 'script' doesn't always apply. That things sometimes fail to go to plan. More
than that, that they had won; that they had broken the script. That Lincoln had done
something she was not supposed to right at the end; right at the point where the credits
were supposed to roll. The devil had walked into his own trap; signed, sealed and
delivered his own death warrant which his virtuous counterpart had readily received.
She had made the devil deceive himself in the simple act of dying; dying when she was
not supposed to; ripping through the canvas on which life was painted at last. By not
allowing the script to pan out how it should. In effect the devil had shot himself; put a bullet through his own
clefted foot.
All this Iron saw in her eyes; her deliverance; her freedom. But his own eyes
swelled in comparison, for now at least it was a personal emancipation; one he could
not join her in. Perhaps if God gave her enough time to convince him; to pull his own
mind free of the tangling junk of the human world, he too could transcend with her,
otherwise he would loose her; and at this point that was just something his soul could
not bare to contemplate. Having said that, there was a joke here; a kind of warming
humor. More than that, there was a triumph. Despite his numbness, despite his stomach
feeling like someone had shoved a prickly stick down his gullet and was proceeding to
prod around inside him with no concern for delicate organs; despite all this in her eyes
he saw a jovial tint; and whenever he saw that tint he was somehow esoterically
inclined to laugh with her, however bleak the situation.
"It may seem a strange question, but if you don't mind me asking, how does it
feel?" Regardless of the searing agony which hurt so much it didn't seem to hurt
anymore; aside from the feeling of her life blood dripping over her ear and cheek like a
slashed gum tree; despite looking as if she had been unwantedly kitted out in some
hastily applied Navaho war paint, a mystical force appeared to take pity. Appeared to
allow her at least the ability to speak, even if surely if logic served her right; which as
memory testified it generally didn't; parts of her personality, of her psychology, were by
now lying helpless on the hard, gritty rooftop of the old World Trade Center. Out of
her grasp; frolicing in the angry winds, which would mean that she was not her at all;
that some of that old her had literally been wrenched away like the jettisoned body of a
climbing spacecraft. But god or fate or whatever its name was had chosen to deprive
her only of physical cognition, and or course; in a short time, of life. "It feels like being
kicked in the head. Shot in the head, to be quite honest. It's funny."
"Yeah, I've always considered getting blasted in the side of the head a somewhat
amusing concept."
"You won't stop barracking me 'till I'm dead, huh?" The irony was not lost on her.
"Oh, I won't stop then." Iron; the eternal optimist, had suddenly become aware of the
possibility; in fact the likelihood of the prospect; "you know, I don't always say what I
feel." Lincoln habitually gazed right through his clown like exterior like a polished
champagne glass; "I know how you feel." She paused as a globlike ball of heckling
hemoglobin snuck down her cheek like a cold cannonball dropped by a butter fingered
private in the heat of a Victorian battle; "it's like falling asleep.... or waking up. It's as if
everything is just floating away from me."
"Yeah, that would be the imminent arrival of death."
"Your life's supposed to flash past your eyes, but it's not what I've done that I
remember, but how I felt. At this particular moment, I don't want to die." She smirked
at the intriguing fruitlessness of it all and recalled what a lumberingly absurd dream life
had been. "I always had this inclination to believe my life was awful, but in actual fact,
it wasn't that bad."
"And in death you wish you could start again and live?"
"Yeah. People seem to prefer the opposite of what they have. I used to be so
depressed, so broken; soured and sullied by the corridor of rotating knives we call life.
But you've been good to me; got me appreciating things again. I can honestly say now
I'm happy in life; it's just that that realization's a little late. Tragic, huh? But heart
warming at the same moment. The problem was I'd lost hope. I thought you could
never find something good in a world so filled with hate. The best things in life spring
up in the strangest places- at the most awkward times."
"All you have to do is pick through the misery, and you find something.... worthwhile.
You know sometimes when you're falling asleep what you're thinking about at that
moment determines what happens in your dream. I don't see why the same couldn't be
true of death; why you couldn’t carry your dearest wish through; determine what sort
of life you have next; who and what will be there."
"Then I know what I'd take." With the last sorry dregs of motion in her body she
moved to sit up but found that by this time her energy could no longer propel her that
far. In despair she leant her head on her only companion's temple and took a grueling
look at her own crumpled body. It was like an out of body experience; her mind, her
feelings and her ability to voice those feelings still functioned, but the animation in her
physical form was gone. Soaked by her own profuse bleeding she felt bizzarely
refreshed in a macabre manner as if taking a warm shower after a long day's work,
although her ebbing comprehension of self denied her anything more than a numb
sensation. But with the pair's heads pressed together; both punctured and split like a
pair of well used basket balls and with her lifeblood beginning to flow into his like a
melting icicle jangling on a dangling branch and dribbling into a slushy sea, she felt the
kinship of the couple would transcend death; oppose it as they had opposed everything
else in life except each other.
Iron shut his eyes to block a tear but failed miserably and wished himself in her
place. He had lived a light hearted existence. He was the light relief; the joker in the
pack. He never took anything too seriously, and perhaps this was how he coped. In
doing so he was more enlightened that he imagined. But inside he was intensely
emotional; brittle just like Lincoln, in whose premature demise that fact had just been
highlighted. But if his fallen soul mate could no longer move, at least she could speak
for the time being, unless her words were merely Iron receiving some intrepid telepathy
from the grave in which she would soon have been placed if undertakers still operated
in this pungent hellhole. "I was afraid; of so many things. I hid, you know; I ran all my
life when I should've stood still and faced it. When you're forced to face it, it really isn't
that bad. Now there's only one thing I'm scared of. I was used to being on my own. I
was destined to be alone. Now I'm afraid of being alone again. But I know I won't be.
There's something vast and momentous waiting for me when I take my next step;
something completely new and alien. It's.... home. Close up, at least, death wears a
smile. I've knocked on the door all my life and never received an answer. Only when I
turned away from the door; when I no longer wanted to enter that place, it opens.
There's a beautiful silence I never had; a peace. My mind's clear; I can think. I can see
two worlds with one set of eyes; you know, one on top of the other. It's like two
overlapping camera reels, and me slipping between the celluloid from one to the other.
There's this light, this warmth, and all that searing buzzing is gone. I'm freed from my
chains, from my insanity; from my existence. Life is a book you read, and with every
passing page you're dimly aware of the number of chapters left crumbling away in your
hand. I've never had anything to cling on to, and that's why I've had nothing to fear-
nothing to loose. Life's easy without those.... complications. But now I feel something
biting, desperate, glaring and heartwarming. It's a strange cocktail of emotions. Really
I've got so much; we've got so much; to hold on to."
She felt her heart dissolving; fizzing into nothing like potassium in water.
Melting away; tingling like a milky way of thoughts and feelings; a shoal of stranded
amphibians thrust back oceanward in an almighty wash. But she was not alone as her
heart plummeted. Joined in the last instances of life to her soulmate, there could be no
separation in death. "This is how it was meant to be, and even death has no power over
destiny. There's no light without darkness; no order without chaos, no night without
day, back without front. You can't have a heart; a soul, without its other half. Its
empty; hollow, and that hole is like; well, its like a gaping hole in the head. Humankind
isn't supposed to know until they get there, but the divine substance likes to tease you
with a tantalizing sample before you go. The 'big questions'; the meaning of life; it's
obvious, only people have been using the wrong instruments. I've been kidding myself;
making myself suffer. I've been both torturer and tortured. That's the meaning of life-
there isn't one. There's only heaven, and not just after death. It all falls apart now; the
illusion; when challenged by reality. It falls apart at the seams confronted by existence;
and an existence that doesn't even exist. The very basis of it's existence is that it doesn't
exist! All the glorious, wonderful paradoxes. It's a great adventure; a spotless oneness
both light and dark, hollow and solid, everything and nothing, full and empty. I'll be
more alive in death than I could ever be in life." Iron held her closer as if the closer they
were the closer they would be in any future incarnation. Perhaps at one point the lord
of the afterlife would fail to distinguish one from the other and the pair would be
reincarnated together.
Almost unaware that he was weeping like a flimsy cheese holed drainpipe amid
a murky monsoon, Iron felt his world had fallen apart like a cookie in a coffee cup. It
was a nerve chomping feeling; like shedding stones of weight in a matter of seconds,
like a venomous serpent wrapping itself around his heart and squeezing it as if it was a
ripe tangerine. Until it had been torn away, he had not known how important this
relationship had been to him. It was his own ailment; his own deficiency which had
disrupted his understanding of his own experience. It was a tragedy, but one he would
much rather have experienced that not. It defined him, although until now he had not
been aware of the fact.
With the towering specter of death loitering with predictable intent in the near
background, Lincoln felt small and fragile, which on the outside she often appeared, but
now she felt it to her very core. It was as if she was nothing but bones; an old golden
leaf grasping with nothing but a hairline fingertip to an autumn branch. She felt the
world slip away, as if every aspect of her life was a page of a daily calendar and her
true nature its cardboard backsheet. With every passing moment, one sheet of the
calendar was ripped away, and another piece of her discarded like a piece of
gangrenous flesh at the hand of a surgeon's scalpel. It was here, at this present moment,
that she would remember life. At the point where worries and concentration wound
down like an old fashioned clock and where all future aspirations became an
incompatible nonsense. By now, her sight had gone; her eyes open but useless as the
connection to the brain was severed out of sheer lack of blood and relevance. She
could not have performed any act or contemplation even if she remembered how.
Nothing remained but feeling, and even that had become almost entirely spiritual.
Her existence was an unfeasible notion in rational terms. It was like each
scrawny recycled sheet of paper on that calendar was a layer of not only skin and flesh,
but of heart and soul, which grew thinner and thinner as each was torn asunder. As the
calendar grew ever more weedy and small the afterlife could be seen through it; one
reality on top of another. With the final sheet; in the final moment, history repeated
itself again and again like a video tape being incessantly rewound and replayed, except
each time it was replayed in her head it got slower and slower.
As the hand on the calendar; the bony paw of death; clasped that last sheet; the
thirty first day in the December of her life, it all stopped; the constant click. There was
no progression or regression, just the page, the hand and her heart. The heart was the
main thing, and the screeching surge of defiance within it. The pain; the agony and the
sorrow. The leaving it all behind; the realization that the reality she had always existed
in was not real, and that therefore she could not be real either.
It was a still frame, but she could look around in it; around this inanimate thing
labeled existence. It reminded her of the still, lasting image that remains imprinted on
the back of your eyes when you look away from a moving picture or turn off a TV set.
All her cognition and experiences jumped back into a blind region of her mind she had
formerly termed 'instinct' or 'condition' like rats scurrying to the back corner of a
sinking ship.
She nodded her appreciation to the person she was and in doing so was her no
longer. With everything she needed here with her she sighed a satisfied sigh and
allowed her mind to uncoil and untense as the whole muddling masquerade of life fell
away like the chalky edge of a seabound cliff to reveal something else; something
better. Warm, close, fulfilling and satisfying.
It was at once ecstasy and idleness; life and death. She clung on to her own
heart as the rest thinned; as the transparent sheet teetered there. And when death itself
broke the eternal moment; pulled that sheet away, she felt those final components of
metaphysical bone peel away and it cut deeper than it could; deeper than the deepest
location.
It wretched away the pain, the joy, the regret, the glory, the thought, the
feeling, the life, the mind; the soul.
With all that gone, there was nothing left.
The clutching itself had been dragged away.
But even death couldn't pull away her heart.
Iron squeezed his eyelids together like a neurotic car crusher and urged the
demonic demiurge who had penned this play of life to inflict a similar fate on himself;
offering himself for a pert pagan sacrifice. He gritted his teeth like the leader of a
defeated power who had submitted to an unconditional surrender watching his lands
partitioned to the hated opposition around a cavernous conference table, unable to do
anything but crunch his skull together and tense up against the satanic swell of sorrow
which carved its way through his innards like an abattoir cleaver to a plump cow.
He pressed his lost companion's worn and cluttered body against his only
minimally less bedraggled form in the vein hope that he could offer her his own life-
force and face that hideous unknown himself in her place.
He had lost much in his life, and since he had possessed little this was
particularly disturbing. Now that he had had the only person who had given him
something unrequested, he was empty again; a half person lost in the booming recess of
his own heart. A mime and a facade on the outside; a precarious placebo. Inside his
spirit was a delicate wire gauze mache of a countenance which he protected as if his
physical self was a mythical emperor's final vanguard against a drooling dragon. He had
fended off the denaturant demons of a jousting junta; bounty hunters, assassins, trained
killers; in singles, pairs and droves. He had even flounced his way into keeping back the
demons of his own mangled mind, but Lincoln had been different. He had opened up to
her. He had opened right up and let her in. She had filled that ventricle void. They had
provided that other half to each other that fate had bashfully chosen to take away. Now
she had gone she was spared of the pain; free of the body which binds us to suffering.
The hole left in Iron's heart weighed him down and hurt like a spike laden dumbbell
stapled to his tonsils with a nine inch nail, but in feeling her spirit rise out of her body in
his hands like a subliminal breeze; in feeling all her suffering waft away like ice
becoming steam in a heat haze of a cool ferocity which only the contradictionary mind
of God could facilitate, he felt his stark heart fill again as if the bottom pool on a
complicated water ride where intrepid rider's belongings ended up after being thrown
into the air at the occasion of the main drop.
And then the fire; that furnace that grows in the heart of the warrior; one of
either physical or ideological inclination. He carefully rested Lincoln's crumpled and
perforated frame against a riotously reddened railing like a favorite soft toy as he felt
that unstoppable surge; that life; that ki; roar through his vitalized body like a storm of
combined hot and cold which seemed to burst through his fingertips as if cherry bombs
had been planted in his nails. That force which made his heart leap like a record
breaking high jumper having just attained the glory of Olympic gold.
He gathered his fists as if this was to be his final battle on earth and said a silent
prayer to whichever God played the architect of this rambunctious resurrection,
because in death, He had allowed this one of His subjects to avoid abandoning him.
Some connections no force can sever. Even God must succumb to the inevitable.
As Lincoln had said to him, when freedom explodes in man, or woman in this
case; God can do nothing. The chain reaction was well underway by now. Iron was no
longer a half soul; a freak; a wanderer; a joker with no apportionable purpose. He was
two people; two brittle minded, deep spirited people with more fight than adversity
could quench, and that included the reaper himself.
Iron kissed his companion's paling head like you do a sleeping child and felt that
insane, brutal, brilliant, warming tinge of fire lick at his teeth from inside as if his body
fluids had been swapped for gasoline by a pyromaniac Almighty who had just alighted a
match to his soul and stepped back to a safe distance.
He had forgotten about sound and motion; time and space. They were hardly
relevant in comparison to the big picture, and had quite true to form dispersed when
more influential forces were pitched into play. But now it all came back to him,
although this time none of it seemed real. It was all a visage; a mask displaying a
malignant repulsiveness to cover up the unbearable beauty of the transcendent.
Then the sound; of laughing; giggling. The cackle of the acrimonious autocrat
who reveled in the misfortune; the agony of his fellow man. That baneful crowing
slunked in the prodding breeze like a bevy of paper airplanes barrel rolling through a
bland office crammed with disinterested executives fidgeting around with scrap paper.
It was all comic now to Iron; an unconvincing fiction. This hedonistic travesty
of a world; this horrendous horticulture of a garbled garden of Eden, these fancified
forays into both metaphysical and stereotypical storylines which he now just saw
through like a previously oblique paddling pool.
"Ironic, isn't it; like parents, like daughter. Decreed the same fate." Iron turned
with the vagrant gaze of a lifelong nomad about to return home as a generous dribble
from the tearduct and a brisk blob of blood from the cut on his brow rolled
simultaneously down his bottom eyelid and met in the middle in a pert pinkish drip
which fell to the fridge cold floor like a coin dropped from a high building; minuscule in
its size but devastating in its impact. He rose as a languorous Lazarus ascending to a
more prosperous plain; the stop clock of time clicking away like the ticking timer on an
unfathomably devastating bomb which his character was supposed to defuse with wry
precision just moments before the world went up in flames as a dramatic but expected
climax to the movie in which he starred.
With a fatal flick of the foot and a demonstrable discountenance, he started like
a cheating sprinter first out of the blocks headed towards a bibulous beehive of
saccharine honey; the prize only attainable if he subjected himself to having to suffer
the lambada of lashing stings which had continually prodded the protagonist's patience
from the very beginning of the tale, but nothing now could deny him that prize; his fate.
Breaking into a salutary dash which seemed to smash the barriers of physical
ability like an engenious sports car going naught to sixty in the blink of an eye, he cast
himself like a dawdling dice into destiny's hand.
Better to never have known love than to have known it only posthumously. It
was like hanging off a cliff and dropping your most precious family heirloom. As the
trinket falls and you feel it drop through your hands but know however much you
fumble that regardless of the fact that you are in physical contact with it its already
gone. You can't catch hold of it. You can only watch it plummet. But better still to take
love with you; to smash the grave with love's gargantuan gratuity; to break the rules.
Volsenzi; the maw of fate already chewing at his very sinew, hurried to empty a
trembling barrage from Baal; churning charging reams of fire into his adversary's mortal
vehicle as if a young hunter unsure his first ever kill had breathed its last and peppering
it full of holes to ensure a stark and purposeless pride.
But when the body is discarded its texture becomes intangible.
When a soul is emancipated of its straggled physicality its feelings surround it
like a veritable missile casing.
One who cuts himself free of the world; of the wheel of samsara; can no longer
fall subject to its laws and regulations.
His body transforms into an aerodynamic arrow shot by the divine archer
himself.
As Iron's pace upped and each primitive projectile released from his earthly
nemesis' hard grafting gun bolted into his flesh like a giant stapler with no incitement of
either damage or recoil, the dreading dictator felt the cold shadow of doom edge into
his person like a stranded pensioner on a pedestrian crossing as a bounding goods truck
bore down on him at a scintillating speed with precious little compassion.
And as God revealed himself to the hopeless homicidal huckster, Volcenzi came
face to face with fear; with hell itself.
He gulped guiltily as death tapped his shoulder; that heavy, plodding tap which
seemed to send seismic vibrations through his arm and into his dark heart itself. Two
others had eluded him. Death would take one scalp tonight at least.
Time failed like a cheap Chinese clock.
Iron leaped at his tormentor like a bounding cat demanding the embrace of a
busy owner after a mismatched tin roof scrap with the town's top tom; causing both to
hurtle off the edge of that abominable acropolis in one fell swoop.
As he lurched uncontrollably downwards, Iron had the distinct and displaced
sensation of soaring upward.
Feeling the crude physical entity he had previously recognized as himself drop
away like an unsuspecting passenger leaping into a bottomless boat, he was candidly
aware that he was not traveling in the direction physics decreed he must. Instead he
shot upwards as if being blasted out of a human canon; into his true self. At least, this
was the sensation. At that moment he forgave his plummeting foe. Met with a
deafening, unflinching buzz which tore soul and body apart with consummate ease, he
felt like an actor ripping up a script in disgust and thus condemning this fictitious
persona to not only non-being, but also to never having been. But if this life was a
fiction, how could Iron fathom the feeling of ceasing to exist? A non existent thing
cannot die for the simple reason that it does not live, which made death a scant
consolation that his existence was real.
Shocked at this realization; that despite death there was something, that souls
followed the paths of the stars, he was forced to ponder. Souls orbited the creator in
wide arcs and every so often crossed each other to create a metaphorical eclipse. This
was the only time when everything else in life could be blocked out; thrust into
irrelevance. When only destinies intertwined from the very beginning became apparent.
Only when invisible to the creator; moving over each other and canceling each other
out, could two souls sneak by him unnoticed and elude death. Iron and Lincoln were
two such souls who had unintentionally manufactured their escape; combining
circumstance, faith and a kind of chance which could only be of the creator's own
making. A creator who perhaps willfully enabled them to pass by his blindside.
And then the incomprehensible oneness.
It was as if a cosmic geneticist had extracted all the negative aspects of himself
and topped him up with those positives he was missing.
Corporeal experience and ego plunged away like droplets of poisonous liquid in
a vacuum like plughole.
It was almost as though he had never existed.
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