TWENTY EIGHT
CALVIN WALKED THROUGH his dreams. It was his first opportunity to sleep in nearly twenty-four hours, and in spite of his fatigue the dreams were vivid, hyper-real. He moved across desert sands under a sky crazy with stars, wheeling as if the clock of heaven had slipped a gear and ran at twenty-times speed. It was important to move in these dreams, not away or toward, just to stay in motion. If he stopped, he would have to face It and then the truth would come out.
Demon: one who knows.
The voice was his own, but the thoughts belonged to another. Calvin kept his head down and trudged. The wind fluted through an ancient skull half-buried in the sand at his feet. He didn’t stop long enough to discern whether it was animal or otherwise.
Templar?
Fuck off. I’m not turning around.
Templar?
He kept moving, kept his pace. This was how it had worked his entire life: one foot down in front of the other, head lowered, mind on the motion. Stopping to think meant hesitation and hesitation meant death.
Templar?
FINE!
He planted a bare heel and spun, grinding the sand against the thick pad of dead skin on the bottom of his foot. The dream wastes spread out before him, a land of stark blue and white, star-thrown shadows. A ball of Russian Thistle caught against a stone quivered, struggling against the night wind to resume its wanderings. A towering saguaro held up its triple-pronged hand. But there was no demon.
Over his shoulder. Templar?
Calvin whirled, throwing a roundhouse kick that would break the neck of anyone standing where his dream ears told him the speaker must be. Instead, his heel slammed into the silver frame of a large mirror. It hummed with the force of his blow, as did the bones in his foot. The glass shivered, but did not break. Calvin let out of rush of breath. His foot would have been little more than a flesh bag filled with bone shards had this been real.
In what reality would you find a free standing mirror in the desert, Templar?
The mirror reflected back in time, showing Calvin as he was when the demon cavorted within him so many years ago. The reflection stood with lanky arms at its side, piranha grin on its face. Each meatless rib was drawn in the harsh starlight. The icepick wound seeped with dark, colorless blood. The demon’s hair clumped and hung, a filthy nest of dead snakes.
No reality. This is a dream, Calvin answered, or thought. He couldn’t be sure if his mouth was moving.
And do you think it any less important for being so, Johnny?
I told you not to use my name. You can’t have that.
And you can’t hurt us here, Johnny.
Calvin sighed and his shoulders unwound a bit. It was just a dream after all. He was asleep in a bed far away from danger. Jeremy was strapped down in a locked room, and Tie was taking a shift watching him. If the demon was going to interrupt his slumber anyway, he might as well just relax and deal with it.
Might even learn something, he said.
The reflection winked. Might.
Calvin thought for a second, then said, Lemme’ ask you a question.
Yes?
What are you, anyway? Fallen angel, some sort of a being from another level of consciousness or dimension? What?
It’s rude to answer a question with another, we know, but…
Calvin twirled his hand in a winding gesture. S’okay, go ahead.
Do you know why you have no memory of our time together?
Calvin grimaced. Our time together? You make it sound like it was therapy or romance or something.
It was. The reflection traced its ragged nails up and down its ribcage, tickling. Calvin could feel the ghost of that touch on his own skin and broke out in gooseflesh, his testicles hauled for cover. But why no memory, knight?
I’ll bite, why?
What little mind you have is not enough to contain the truth of what we are. Should we pour the information into that shallow bowl balanced on top of your neck, it would run over as a never-ending stream of babble from your lips. You don’t remember, because we spared you that understanding.
Gee, thanks, Calvin said, barely suppressing the urge to flip the bird. So, if you’re so big, or infinite, or whatever you’re trying to tell me you are, why can’t you find a way to explain so a dumbass like me can understand?
What is time, Templar? What is age?
You know, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and grocked it pretty well, so you could at least give me a shot here, ya’ smug bastard.
The demon seemed to consider its response, looking off over Calvin’s head and scratching absently at a scab on its neck. The scratching became a picking. Calvin pursed his lips and half turned his face away. The demon had opened a ragged gash and was flicking away little bits of flesh and tendon, scrabbling at its neck with thick, sharpened nails. After a minute, its head hung from a mere strip of flesh and muscle. With a moist, Velcro-like ripping, it yanked off its own head and held it out for Calvin’s inspection.
The demon gripped its head by the dreadlocked hair with one hand and made a fist with the other. It knocked on the skull three times, a great booming thunder roll for each impact, and the jaw dropped open. A pearl the size of a golf ball, shiny with saliva, clicked past its teeth. It fell through the mirror, like a pebble through the surface of a pond, and plopped into the sand at Calvin’s feet. Calvin picked it up, expecting the pearl to be warm. He threw it to the ground. Cold!
The disembodied head whispered, Wisdom always is.
Calvin could feel the freeze flowing off the pearl onto his bare foot, as if he were standing next to an open thermos of liquid nitrogen.
In Eden, the demon offered, the apple’s chill was such that Eve lost three fingers to frost-bite and Adam broke his teeth.
Calvin stared at the pearl. But they still ate it.
Yes.
Calvin bent and snatched the pearl from the sand. His nerves cried out as ingots of leaden pain laced his hand. The agony was so great, so final, that Calvin’s bones felt a kind of sadness. The sky, the sand, the whole of the dream world seemed to be screaming. The reflection of the demon had vanished and left Calvin staring at himself: a barefoot priest, clutching a tiny, frozen dwarf star, his eyes and mouth agape. The screams were his. Awash in fear and paralyzing cold, Calvin watched the man in the mirror bring the pearl toward his open, wailing mouth. In the end, it proved bitter.
John Calvin awoke with his eyes already open, the reality of the wood-paneled walls and window with its shifting forest view swapping for the blue/white desert of his dream. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, naked and shivering. The feeling that he was choking to death on a chunk of ice from one of Saturn’s rings faded with his dream. His head swiveled on his neck a second before the door opened.
Tiesha exploded into the room, “Johnny! You okay? You were screamin’ like somebody set your ass on fire.” She sat down next to him on the bed, aware of his muscle and sinew, his angular man shapes, but tabling the bolts of excitement they roused within her for the moment. She put her arm around his shoulders. “Christ!” she said. “You’re so cold.”
Calvin’s skin gratefully accepted Tie’s warmth, her humanity and life. It washed through him and melted the frost away, leaving just the man and the knowledge he’d brought back. He turned his eyes on hers—flecks of gold shone in her deeper brown.
“I remember everything,” he said. “Backward and forward.”
Tie smiled. She couldn’t help it. This close to him, this close to his body, her heart was slamming. She couldn’t ignore it. “Whatcha’ talkin’ about?” Her breath was hot in her throat, her voice low. She looked at his mouth.
He caught her gaze. “I know how to win,” Calvin said. “I know what to do.” He shook his head and ran a rough palm over his face. “God, I feel like I know everything.”
She opened her mouth, perhaps to reply, perhaps not. Calvi
n decided for her with his kiss. She rolled on top of him and he pulled her into the tangle of covers. Their hands grew quick and her clothes peeled away in a flurry of fabrics, something tore. He cupped her breast and pushed his thickness against her thigh. She groaned, aching, and sank her teeth into the meat of his shoulder. Tie reached down, shifted, and they plunged into each other. Their rhythms merged along with their bodies and the big, wordless promises were exchanged on the backs of their breath. Tie’s cries were a fluid of weeping and shouts, her contractions fierce enough to bring a deep soreness.
For a long time after he stayed inside her, hard even after his orgasm. His movements were slow, minute, not driving, just stroking. They stared into one another’s faces, memorizing lines. She trailed her languid hand back and forth, up and down his spine, his skin slick and shining. He rocked just so and her eyes closed, her lips turning up at the corners. Calvin pushed faster. Her eyes flew open, burned. “Forever,” she said. “Yes,” he answered, but a splinter of night at the back of his mind made him question just how long forever might be.
IN THE BEDROOM across the hall Jeremy rotted inside his own skin, his soul turning on a spit over flames of Kelvin frigidity. The demon sat astride the boy’s soul, rotating through the tortures with him now that Calvin had welded it into the child’s body. The pain was necessary, all of it. The demon had always known, and now Calvin did too. From the depths of his wasted chest, his wasted spirit, a desperate sob welled and escaped the boy’s cracked lips. The demon whispered, “Take heart, boy. Even time ends.”