Viaticum

The rain fell like ruin on the scarlet city.  Eli drew the collar of his long leather duster up and stalked through the cinnabar streets, on his way to church.  He picked his way through back alleys blue like bruises, stained where the setting sun shone weakest through the gunmetal clouds.  Blacker patches hung under unlit streetlights like badges of abuse.  The scrubland didn’t see rain often and the city wasn’t built for it.  Violet puddles pooled on the broken streets, cloudy with thin mud.

He knew it was a tell that could draw predators, but he put his hand in his pocket to reassure himself that the silver was still there.  He had been lucky to find labor that paid silver.  He scanned the dusky street again.  The coins were enough to bring killers from the shadows.  It was enough for the Sacrament of the Score and then some.  A woman leaned against a cracked wall on the opposite corner and looked back at him speculatively.

Shaped like the v in evil and skinny like the l, he thought, in spite of himself, my god.  Her eyes were hungry black pits in the twilight and her exposed white belly rippled like a viper when she moved.  He felt a dark appetite to possess her but remembered his errand and tried to hurry by.

As he drew near her, he caught the stink of deep sepsis.  Contusions and circular scars covered her arms.  Some of the scabs wept a thick pus made runny by the steady rain.  A convert, he realized.  He watched her fingers slide down her thigh and figured she was probably tooled up with a hidden stiletto somewhere.  His hand went inside his coat to his own knife, a shank he’d made the day before with a five-inch spike for a blade, and he stared at her stonily.  The gesture was enough – she realized he wouldn’t be easy prey and turned away from him as if she had never considered slitting his throat so she could take what little he had.

He passed a quartet of massive bruisers wearing the ruby-encrusted breastplates of the Duke. They led a chain gang of slaves who had the Ikon of Fire tattooed on their right bicep. This marked them as property of Solitude Spire, one of the noble houses.  Eli investigated the empty gazes of the men bound to one another with heavy iron links, examined their emaciated frames and the ribs sticking through their skin.  They wore nothing but loincloths and their bare feet were dirty and bloody from their march, legs covered with mud, hair tangled and filthy and wet.  Many bore wounds from work or the whips.  As he watched, the slave in back stumbled, and the nearest patroller, a massive man with a scowl and a square beard, delivered a vicious hammerfist to the side of the slave’s head.  The blow was so hard that the slave staggered and fell to his knees.  A trickle of blood ran from his ear.  It mingled with rainfall and turned a pale pink as the guard screamed at him.

Wordlessly, the slave slowly struggled to his feet.  As he stood, the bruiser spat at him.  The gobbet struck and oozed down the slave’s bare back, driven by gravity and rain. Just one more degradation on top of all the others.  He shook his head and hurried on into the rusty evening, trying to put the pity he felt for the slave from his mind.

I’m so sorry, he thought.  We tried so hard.  And on the heels of that, all we have left now is the guilt.

 

* * * *

 

Slowly, quietly, but with a steady momentum, they had begun to organize an uprising among the free people and the slaves alike.  Eli has been ready to do his part.  He’d had each of his men gather the materials for a firearm, the way Gal had told him.  He could listen to Gal endlessly as he talked about the better tomorrow they would all share, come the revolution.  There was wealth enough to sustain everyone until a new seam of gems was found in the mines, once they had rid themselves of the parasitic nobles.  It was almost time.  Soon their lives would become a single continuous scream against the forces that ruled them.

He had met Gal when they were kids and they looked out for each other almost from the start.  They were both just old enough to remember the city before the mines played out and things got bad.  Eli knew immediately that Gal had something special. He was a leader.  He drew people with his good looks and his perfect blue bombardier’s eyes, but it was more than that.  He was frighteningly intelligent, always one step ahead of everyone else.  And his mind wasn’t just quick – it was deep.  When Gal lapsed into silence, Eli knew that the next thing Gal said would be profound.  But even that was only part of it.  His soul.  His courage.  His belief in a better tomorrow despite all he’d been through.  All they had both been through together.

 

Eli never knew who had originally betrayed them.  He had been seized in his sleep, trussed and blindfolded and taken by silent men.  When they removed the blindfold, Eli was on his knees before a regal figure who wore the finery of a noble house – pauldrons studded with sapphires denoting the Barren Manor.  A mild smile played across the man’s gentle features.

“Who are you?” spat Eli.

The corners of the man’s mouth turned up a little more.  He spoke softly.  “Who I am is not important.  It is you who are important, Eli.  We’ve heard of your… rebellion.  You are highly placed, yes?  You know the leaders.  You will tell me their names.”

Eli’s face curled into a snarl.  “I’ll go through hell before I say a word to you,” he hissed.

The nobleman raised an eyebrow and then turned his head slightly to the left.  He never stopped smiling.

For the first time Eli noticed that another stood near the nobleman, a cadaverous man in a sleeveless black sticharion.  He was rail thin and tall and wore layers of baroque vestments in black and red embroidery.  He loomed over Eli like a great, ghastly carrion bird.  An epigonation was attached to his right hip, the fabric stained burgundy by venous blood. His eyes were glazed but still glittered somehow, pinprick pupils in glassy green irises.  Faraway eyes.  Prophet’s eyes.  Junkie’s eyes.

He’d seen junkies before.  Everyone knew some of the farmers grew opium poppies to supplement their income, and that the Heroin Priests hid in the city’s underworld.  He figured this man must be one of them.  But they were a hunted bunch.  What is he doing here? Eli wondered.

When he spoke, the cleric’s tone was like the chill of an endless body of dark water.  “Indeed, you will go through hell, my son.  But in order to know hell, you must know what heaven is first.”

The man brought a crystal syringe level with Eli’s eyes.  His fingers twitched.  A thin stream of golden fluid arced from the syringe.

 

The next thing he remembered was feeling good.  Really good.  In fact, he realized, I feel fucking amazing.  And a momentary concern, another thought: am I dying?

He decided it didn’t matter.  He felt so good that it didn’t matter to him that he was in a cage, either.  He knew that would be alright.  He felt sure that things were going to be ok, that even if bad things happened, that they wouldn’t touch him, couldn’t touch him.  The cage thing would work itself out.  He felt as if his heart was glowing. Not burning, but miraculously glowing. He possessed a sense of oneness and completeness, his soul finally joined to the larger universal network, connected to everything and everyone and glowing together, all of them hanging in the Great Dark.  This knowledge was nothing he could articulate, but came to him from some deep place in his body, like a long-practiced sequence of movements.  It was as if his bones and organs and blood had been singing to him forever in a language that he only now understood, a sublime chorus which signaled undeniably that human beings were luminous, and that there was no need for sadness.  That although every human being suffered, they would all return back to this when it was time, and that returning would make everything alright in the end.  Sinners and saints, martyrs and the mad, good men and bad, they were all joined by the universal network, complete and as one in the Great Dark, and it would all work out in the end.

He often felt sleepy and sometimes he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or not.  He had long discussions with the priest.  The priest told him that control was an illusion, that human beings couldn’t even control their own bodies.  They couldn’t even help the way they felt – couldn’t choose who to fall in love with, or if their hearts hurt when that love went unrequited.  The priest told him there were stones three million years old, and that nothing any group of men did mattered in the long run, much less what any individual did.  When Eli talked about freedom, the priest told him that the end of freedom was coming, and all it would take would be the first wave of babies born addicted to opiates, but that freedom was not important.  Not when there were stones three million years old.  All was frailty, vanity, and dust, and there was nothing redeeming in the world save the wonderful glowing feeling.

 

They worked on him slowly, but it wasn't long before he was hopelessly addicted.  Then they took it away and simply waited.

Time became an enemy then, each moment a toothed thing that took slow, agonizing bites of him as it passed.  Later, he felt he may have been able to hold out if only he’d been able to get to sleep even for a half an hour, to get some relief, however temporary.  But he couldn’t get comfortable no matter what he did.  His eyes watered and his nose ran and he felt cold and hot and cold again and he’d sweat even as he froze and though he couldn’t stop yawning, sleep would not come.  His joints were full of broken glass and ground against one another when he moved.  He was desperately hungry but he gagged every time he thought too much about eating.  Once, they left a tray of beef in his cell, and the smell alone made him vomit uncontrollably.  He found he couldn’t control his bowels, either.  Muscles he never even realized he possessed began to cramp, spasms so strong and painful they twisted his entire body, made him feel as though someone were stabbing him in the back.  The contractions ripped through him and tore him into two again and again, rippling pain so strong he writhed on the floor heedless of his own waste.  When these convulsions abated, however briefly, he lay in a state of anhedonia so total, he was unable to summon the energy to even clean himself.

Every so often, the smiling man would visit, the priest ever at his side.

“Names,” he would say.

Each instant felt like a glacier and a saw combined that slid slowly over him and crushed jagged edges into his flesh so that femtoseconds telescoped into hours.  For a long while, his resolve held in spite of the timeless agony.

“Names,” the little smiling man would say.

“Fuck off,” he’d manage to spit, snot running from his nose as another spasm of cramps wracked him.

The noble’s smile would widen a little and he and the priest would leave without a word.

Finally, after an eternity of eternities in his mind, he could bear it no longer.  The smiling man visited him, and Eli cracked.  This time, even before the man could state the same demand he always had, Eli started screaming.

“Christopher Trane!”  he screamed.  “John Giller!  Harvey Stroud!”

He shrieked names endlessly.  All the names of his compatriots and co-conspirators.  Every friend he ever had.  All but one, all but Galahad Vowne.

It didn’t matter, as it turned out.  They got to him anyway.

 

* * * *

 

A motorcoach sped by with a growl, the wire-rimmed wheels running through a puddle and drenching the bottom of his long coat, pulling his mind back to the present.  The muddy water was maroon in the remains of the day.  When he was a boy, the scarlet streets had been filled with horses.  Eli missed the horses, the way a pony would nuzzle your hand.  You couldn’t do that with motorcars, which all had engines that seemed to scream hate as they shot by.

He looked down an alley to his left.  Two men were near a rain-soaked corpse.  He heard the younger of the two men say, “Man, I don’t like this, right by this dead guy.”

“Why?” came his senior’s reply, “it’s not like he wants any, he’s dead.”

That seemed to settle the thing and as they squatted near the rotting body and readied rigs, Eli quickly moved on.

 

* * * *

 

They kept him for another month after he’d turned his coat, and then abruptly let him go.  He remembered almost nothing from this time except being high, feeling good.  He knew the priest sometimes tutored him in the Orthodoxy of Opiates.  In a voice like a bottomless black well, he taught Eli the preces of the Sacrament of the Score.  He talked about how he had given Eli his First Communion, how he was a convert now, having made his choice between heaven and hell.  And how any convert could administer last rites.

After his release, he wandered the streets underneath the Mammoth, the giant statue in the center of the scarlet city, for half a day, trying to catch rumors.  The colossus’ bronze skin reflected the red city in the morning light.  He soon found out that the Orthodoxy had been legalized and there were more converts every day.  This news came as a perverse relief.  He didn’t think he could go without that feeling of connection for the rest of his life.

But there were other rumors that scared him.  Rumors about The Crown.  How fifty men had been staked in the square in front of the Mammoth with soaked ropes twisted tight with sticks about their skulls until the cord bit into the flesh.  How the heat of the day had been used as a weapon on these men.  The searing sun baked the moisture from the braids over the course of a day and that by afternoon, the ropes had dried and tightened to the point where they cracked skulls, burst brains, and how those who were not killed were the unluckiest.

When he’d heard enough, he hurried to his friend’s home with a sick feeling in his stomach.  He pulled up short as he reached the tenement where Vowne had lived.  A man was sitting outside.  The man had a horrendous scar, a ring around his head that cut a bald path through his unkempt, curly hair.  He was staring dumbly at the ground as if he didn’t know what it was.  As Eli approached, he looked up.

The sick feeling became ice lodged in his innards as Eli recognized Gal’s blue eyes.

Gal’s face was a mask of confusion.  Eli could see tiny ridges left by the braids of the rope on the raw scar that encircled his misshapen head.  It looked like it might be infected.

Gal worked his mouth without sound for a moment and then uttered a series of choked, guttural stutters.  After a bit he seemed to give up and stared wordlessly into Eli’s face.  As Eli approached, something seemed to click in Gal’s brain and his eyes widened even as his brow creased.

By nightfall, Eli understood.  All the brilliance was gone.  Gal couldn’t make words.  He couldn’t dress himself without help.  All the courage was gone.  The steel within had been ravaged by the fangs of broken truth.  He flinched at everything which came near.  Gal seemed to know that something precious had been lost but was unable to recall what it was, or why it had been taken.  He was a vestige of the spirit that had once piloted his flesh, a nerve without thought that wept without understanding and knew only pain, confusion, and terror without surcease.

By the following morning, Eli had decided what he would do.  He left Gal alone and headed into the street to find pay.

 

* * * *

He found the entrance to the church pressed between two huge tenements, purple in the twilight and dark with rain.  A tiny, ramshackle door.  The place was as anonymous as he was.  He took a deep breath and entered.

He swept the interior with his eyes.  He remembered vaguely from the private sermons that the church floor plan was designed to echo the shape of the holy syringe.  He closed the door and stood in the funnel-shaped narthex, which symbolized the needle itself.  The nave was the barrel and the transept the flanges.  The apse represented the plunger.

The grey concrete floor stretched away in front of him.  Rows of hard pews filled the space.  Several of these were occupied by parishioners, and Eli knew there would be more and more of these in time.  A man held his hand motionless in midair as if stroking his beard, though his fingers were two or three inches away from his face.  His mouth was open and every few seconds his chin dropped fractionally towards his chest.  Another believer stretched across a pew in unbreathing slumber.  Suddenly, this congregant opened his mouth and took a huge, rattling breath, breaking the calm silence of the nave.

At the far end, Eli saw the priest, and though he was shrouded in shadow, Eli knew at once it was the same vulturine cleric who had given him what was called First Communion in the Orthodoxy, his first short of heroin.  The man sat on a richly appointed velvet chair in the chancel, surrounded by candles that cast the room in dim, flickering fire, darker even than the fading light outside.  To one side of the priest, the Font, the water reflecting the candles, pinpoints of light standing on the surface of the liquid as if captured in a mirror.  On the other side, the Altar of Addiction, on which rested silvery bags filled with the Eucharist itself.  Eli approached, walking quietly up the aisle.

“I require passage to Interzone,” he intoned, beginning the Sacrament of the Score.

“And passage you shall have,” came the cold, plainsong response.  The priest put forth his hand, palm up, expectantly.  Eli felt for the silver in his pocket and passed the man the coins.

“I need to administer viaticum,” Eli said, “twice.”

The priest nodded as if he had expected this request and took six small bags from the altar as Eli withdrew his outfit and uncapped the needle, checking it to ensure it was clean and straight.  Satisfied, he turned to the font and pulled water into the syringe.  He recapped the needle and turned to the priest who held the bags out in front of him. He took them, turned abruptly and walked out of the church and back onto the street, pursued by the priest’s mocking chuckle.

Later, Eli led Gal gently into an alley where there was shelter from the rain.  He shook all six bags into the spoon and filled it with the water from the Font.  He held the spoon carefully over a candle and both men watched.  After a few seconds there was a swirl of bubbles and he immediately took the spoon off the fire.  He placed it carefully on a nearby chunk of red rubble and dropped a small piece of cotton into the liquid.  He touched the tip of the needle to the cotton.  Smoothly and steadily, he pulled the solution through the filter until the cotton itself was dry.  He raised the rig to his face, point up, and flicked the base of it several times.  Air pockets rose to the surface and he squeezed these out, slowly depressing the plunger until these blisters disappeared.  He tapped again, but nothing further came to the surface.  He squeezed the plunger ever so slightly and noted the thin stream of fluid that arced out like a line of light.  He turned it over, point down, and flicked at it one last time.  He turned to Gal and removed his embroidered belt and wrapped it around Gal’s left bicep like a noose, pulling it tight.

Eli ran his hands over Gal’s arm, up the forearm until he found the raised vein in the crook of Gal’s elbow.  He stopped and tapped the vein.

He pierced the spot with the needle.  He pulled the plunger back gently and they both wordlessly watched dark blood flow into the golden elixir and form crimson clouds.  He pressed the plunger firmly and steadily down and both men observed the plunger seal as it rode down the barrel, passing line after graduated line.

Halfway down, Eli abruptly halted and withdrew the syringe.  A thick line of crimson blood crept down Gal’s forearm.  Then Eli repeated the ritual on himself.  Pierce the flesh.  Pull back, watch the blood.  Push down.

He felt relief flood him, a balm so intense that his legs buckled.  He had placed his hands on his friend’s shoulders for support but let them drift down Gal’s sides to his hips as he sank to his knees.  Once there, he fell forward onto Gal’s lap, hugging the man about the waist.  He let a moan escape his mouth, a short but open sound of pure pleasure.  After a moment he looked up into his friend’s face.

Gal beamed down at him, the pain and confusion finally gone from his eyes.  For a moment, they were just as clear as he remembered them.  Bombardier’s eyes.  Gunner’s eyes.  Knight’s eyes.  Then they closed halfway and glazed over.

Eli’s emotion faded, replaced by the glow.  The horses and motorcars no longer mattered.  The slaves no longer mattered.  The woman no longer mattered.  His heart knew that all of it would be alright, that all of it was alright.  He understood in his body that this was simply the way the world worked.  One thing happening after another.  Stones three million years old.  Horses are replaced by motorcars. Slaves are pummeled on the street by their captors.

Rebels are broken on the altar of expediency.

Junkies overdose.

It would all work out in the end.

He watched as Gal’s head drooped forward and he rested his chin on his chest.  Watched as the half-lidded eyes closed and the breathing slowed, then stopped.  Then he hugged his friend tight and closed his eyes too.

In the Great Dark, two small pinpoints of brightness flared briefly as they were joined by threads of light to each other and to the rest of the universal network.  Then they slowly faded away, forever.

The rain fell like ruin on the scarlet city.