The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Read online

  Working on the tank assembly, just as in Plymouth’s real-life operations, was a mix of men and women, white and black. One of these workers was Alice, a young black woman with warm eyes and a bright easy smile. He had dreamed of Alice before. Standing on the far side of the tank they currently labored over, she looked up and gave him one of those big white smiles. Encouraged by this, Stan overcame his shyness to ask her, “Say, Alice, what are we making all these tanks for, anyway? I thought the war was over.”

  “There’s another one coming, honey,” she told him. She called everyone honey, but it made Stan’s heart give a little kick every time, even in dreams, as if she only ever said it to him.

  “Always is,” said Frank, another worker close by. “Another war, that is,” he clarified.

  “This one’s gonna be different,” Alice told them both. “Don’t know why we’re even gonna bother, though. No way we can win this one.”

  “The USA not winning a war?” Frank said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “We’ll all be out of our minds,” Alice said, no longer smiling. “When we see them.”

  “Who is ‘them,’ Alice?” Stan asked her.

  She turned her now solemn gaze to Stan, and she was so pretty he almost didn’t notice the fear in her eyes. “Can’t tell you that, honey.”

  “What’s it, a secret?” Frank taunted. “You damn Negros gonna rise up against us, is that it?”

  “Can’t tell you who they are,” Alice repeated, unblinking, not taking her eyes off Stan’s. “Couldn’t if I tried.”

  Stan woke from this dream to the Indian Head Test Pattern on his seventeen inch screen, blurred as if it weren’t tuned in properly, when in fact the blurring was from the pain that fizzed like static in his skull.

  Stan slouched in front of his TV with his third beer in hand. He couldn’t be bothered to shove a TV dinner in the oven tonight.

  Framed in the Craig’s glass screen, a window onto an easy make-believe, the world was all black and white.

  Tonight Lucy and Ethel had somehow wound up atop the Empire State Building dressed as Martian invaders, in bizarre costumes with insect-like feelers and wearing prosthetic noses, jabbering in some weird outer space language. The tight costume emphasized Lucy’s bust, and Stan found himself becoming aroused, just as he had in that episode when burglars tied Lucy up with rope and put a gag in her mouth. The beer in him made the scene all the more surreal. He was torn between changing the channel to spare his brain – already filled to bursting with agony both literal and figurative – or unzipping his fly to alleviate his frustrations.

  He had lost his job today.

  He blamed Frank, of course, but he also blamed the pain in his skull. A storm had begun rolling in late in the afternoon, the summer sky weighted with iron gray clouds, and he could swear that changes in barometric pressure, and maybe changes in the air from dry to damp, had an effect on the steel plate in his skull. His headache today had sent spots of burning color swarming across his vision, like weird organisms viewed through a microscope.

  He should blame Schlitz, too, because he’d had to endure a hangover at work this morning, but mostly it was Frank.

  At work they called Stan the Gorilla. He had overheard it behind his back, but sometimes the other workers like Frank had even teased him to his face. It was not only because Stan was tall and heavy-set, but because the way his metal-patched cranium dipped radically, it gave his head a concave slope like that of a gorilla. He’d tried to ignore these jokes, had even laughed along self-consciously that time he had caught another worker holding a piece of steel up in front of his own forehead and staggering around with a slack expression, like a zombie, while the other men snickered. But today they had gone too far.

  Stan had cornered Alice at a time when there was apparently no one else around, just as the workers were returning from lunch break, at her station where she helped assemble instrument panels. He had been summoning the courage to ask her out for weeks, and today he had finally stammered, “Hey, Alice, I was wondering if, uh, you’d like to catch a movie with me sometime. They say On the Waterfront is really good. You know...Marlon Brando? Or, um, The Atomic Kid with Mickey Rooney sounds fun.”

  Alice had looked at him with a mix of surprise and sympathy. Or was it shock and pity? And not without a dash of horror. Stan figured the shock was partly from being asked out by a white man, and mostly from being asked out by a disfigured white man. After a stunned second or two she said, “Aw, honey, I’m sorry but I already have a fella. Thanks for offering, anyway...that’s awful sweet of you.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, immediately looking away, no longer able to meet her eyes. He shrugged. “I just thought. Anyway...sorry. See ya around.” And he had quickly turned to shamble off toward his own work area.

  But someone, probably one of the white women Alice worked with, had obviously overheard him...and told others what she’d heard. Because in no time, some of the men in Stan’s own area were laughing loudly and gesturing toward him. When Stan looked up from his work, there was Frank in front of him, saying to another worker named Jack, “You see how it is, Jack? If you can’t get yourself a nice regular white woman, you go for the next best thing, figuring she ain’t gonna be as picky.”

  “Hey,” Mike said, chuckling, “it ain’t no surprise the Gorilla would want to go with a monkey.”

  Stan didn’t consider his reaction, and didn’t hesitate in acting. He straightened up, took two strides toward the men, clapped each on the side of the head with one of his big hands, and forced their skulls together with a loud thunk. Mike dropped like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Frank managed to shuffle back a few steps, staring at Stan in dazed disbelief, before he went down.

  Stan’s boss took him aside later and was very stern, though he could have been worse about it, because he told Stan he was sorry when he fired him. Stan didn’t see Alice as he was walked out, but he supposed the story would get back to her. He wondered how she’d feel about it. He only hoped she wouldn’t be harassed by her coworkers henceforth.

  On his way out Frank, now awake and holding a cold wet towel to the side of his head, had shouted after him, “You’re crazy, you know that? Battle fatigue, huh, Stanley? Is that it?”

  Fred burst into Ricky’s living room, wearing a WWI style helmet and carrying a pump-action shotgun, breathlessly warning Ricky that he had heard about an invasion from outer space.

  Outside the twin windows of Stan’s living room, in the night, thunder growled as the storm that had been building for the past few hours broke at last. Two things happened at that instant: Stan’s TV picture filled with snow, turning Ricky and Fred into grainy shadows – drowning out their voices with static – and unseen knives stabbed Stan in both temples. He actually dropped his mostly empty beer bottle to the floor and hunched forward with his palms pressed to the sides of his head. For an irrational moment he wondered if a bolt of lightning had shot through the nearest window and struck him, attracted to the metal plate under his skin.

  Peripherally he saw another flash of lightning outside his windows. The thunder followed only a second later, indicating the storm was already directly overhead; a massive boom that made the walls vibrate. Stan felt as though he were again ducking down in a steaming trench gouged into that hellish Korean battlefield. He pulled his head into his neck, waiting for the shrapnel to hit him, though the plate in his skull was like shrapnel already, bigger than the chunk that had struck him on the battleground.

  He lurched up from his chair somehow, staggered to one open window and then the other, shutting them just as a torrential rain was unleashed upon the city. Crashing down like a Biblical flood in the making. It slammed his windowpanes as if it were an angry, sentient force demanding admission. Stan pulled the shades down, to further shut out that malignant force, before he turned and fell back into the armchair with a groan.

  When Stan managed to lift his head, which seemed to have tripled in weight as if its entire mass wer
e now made of metal, and focused his watery burning eyes, he saw that horizontal bands were now rolling up his TV screen from bottom to top and the snow had intensified, so that Ricky and Fred were even harder to distinguish. Or was that Lucy and Ethel? The two distorted figures were weirdly elongated, gesturing in dripping blurs, black holes that were probably their mouths stretching wide. Snatches of metallic voices could now be heard through the hissing static, but they were incomprehensible...unless that was Lucy and Ethel imitating Martian talk again.

  Another detonation of thunder. The glass in the windows rattled. The plate in his forehead felt like it was rattling in its frame, as well. Stan moaned again.

  The tinny, garbled voices were like ice picks in his ears, fingernails on the chalk of his spinal column. He braced his hands on the grips of his armchair and once more shoved himself to his feet. As he stumbled to his TV, the static jumped louder in a crackling burst and the horizontal bands quickened to a flutter. He took hold of the left antenna of the rabbit ears, changing its position slightly. The rasp of static diminished to a milder hiss of white noise, the unsettling voices gone. He nudged the right ear next, and the horizontal bands slowed. As he stepped back to look down at the screen, the horizontal bands stopped altogether and the veil of electromagnetic interference lessened dramatically. Stan realized then that his proximity to the TV made the reception worse, somehow, so he backed away further and reseated himself to gauge the results. Sure enough, the snow cleared to the extent that he could view the television’s images pretty clearly, and though there was still no proper sound, the fizzing static was just a whisper, almost lost under the pummeling of the rain outside.

  I Love Lucy must have ended, however, and another program begun. Whatever this show was, it was not centered on some cheap interior set, some painted outdoors backdrop. The backdrop appeared to be an actual city, but a city half reduced to its constituent parts, its components, its bricks and blocks. Rubble and rebar, wafting smoke, and Stan was reminded of the destruction in Seoul or Pyongyang or Wonsan. Was it a documentary, then? An exposé on war? But which? Only technology differentiated wars. His war? Earlier, maybe...WWII? A lot looked flattened there in the background. Nagasaki, then? Hiroshima? Stan didn’t know that this year – the same year the war in Korea had ended – the US had proposed a plan called Operation Vulture, in support of the French in Indochina, that if it hadn’t been rejected would have allowed for the use of three atom bombs dropped on Viet Minh positions. Otherwise, he might well have believed this to be the aftermath.

  In the middle distance, a dirty white sheet fluttered by on the wind, dragging its tattered ends across the floor of pulverized debris. Or maybe it was a torn-away canvas awning, or a futile white flag of surrender.

  Yet another rumble of thunder, like a freight train barreling through the apartment overhead. The plate in his head hummed as though an electric current were being passed straight into it. And – as if the lightning storm, the electrical field of his own body, and the television were all connected – the TV screen went all snowy once more, but this time in a negative image of static: a field of seething black sparkling with glitter, like time-lapse photography of galaxies of stars being born and expiring in the briefest flicker of existence.

  When the avalanche roar of thunder had passed, and the vibrating hum in his head had receded, the screen cleared to show a different angle of perhaps the same destroyed city. A church steeple stood in puny defiance, but the rest of it was a carbonized shell. There was still a faint degree of snow to the reception – yet then Stan realized it was not interference, but actual snow drifting down on the blasted city. No...no...not quite. It was a lazy fall of ash, sprinkling across the city from the churning black ceiling of cloud that capped the sky like an encroachment of deep space itself. Inky space pressing down on the atmosphere of the Earth, crushing the air, the friction of these opposing forces burning the oxygen itself into ash.

  Several more ragged-ended sheets came fluttering along on the wind, one further in the distance than the other. The funny thing was, the plumes of smoke rising into the air everywhere from the piles of shattered rubble were being carried in the opposite direction.

  The scene was depressing Stan on top of his pain, overcoming his curiosity about the nature of the program. He had learned all he wanted to learn about war – any war – firsthand. Before some orphaned tot with her face smeared in soot could stagger dazedly into the frame, Stan took advantage of the abatement of his suffering to get up from the chair yet again and reach out to turn the TV’s dial to a different channel.

  The next channel revealed a new image, but this image was a third angle of the same demolished city. He clicked to another channel. Another view of the same subject matter. Click...click...click. Only the perspective changed; the annihilation remained the same. In fact, Stan was finding that channels not normally active were receiving the transmission. He made several full circuits of the dial, as if futilely trying to crack a safe, and found that every channel featured the broadcast...only the point of view altering, as if he were receiving live feeds from a dozen or more TV cameras dispersed around the city.

  Something of great import had happened, then...but where, exactly? And what, exactly?

  When he’d drawn close to the TV to change the channel, his nearness had again caused the reception to grow grainy and noisy with static, but the various city scenes were only obscured, not fully erased. He gave both rabbit ears a few hard, impatient shifts that lessened the video and audio interference, but it wasn’t until he retreated to the armchair that the picture was clarified and the sound went mostly quiet. He had settled on one channel arbitrarily: the one that showed the blackened church steeple. He had been tempted to turn the set off altogether, but he had to know what was going on. Whatever it was, it was obviously of profound significance. Would some announcer finally come on to explain what the hell he was witnessing?

  Along came yet another bed sheet (had an exploded laundry dispersed its contents across the city?), blowing into the scene, but it stopped in the middle of the street...and hovered there. And hovered there. Hovered there, with its torn ends stirring as if it swam in place. Its surface rippled or pulsed or undulated, and the sheet was not so much dirty white as cloudy gray, with the faintest metallic sheen. As he stared fixedly at it, the floating shroud raised itself up a little, its membrane appearing to stiffen with alertness, and Stan realized then it was not a bed sheet or any other inanimate object, but some kind of living thing, however primitive its protoplasmic ameba’s body; a sentience manifested as a raw scrap of primal tissue. And it had stiffened in alertness because, just as Stan had understood on some deep intuitive level what he was seeing, the thing had seemed to understand him as well. It was seeing him. Or sensing him, in whatever manner the thing perceived the material world. And even as Stan recognized that it was aware of him, the tattered membrane started moving directly at the camera. Directly toward his screen. Toward him.

  Stan launched himself forward, thrusting his arm out. The membrane was sailing at him quickly as well, as if trying to intercept him before he could touch the dial. As he came at the screen the reception worsened, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough to blot out what he was seeing.

  Stan realized he had given out a wild cry, a blurt of panic, but before the thing could reach the thin windowpane of his screen – the flimsy bubble film that separated the two of them – his fingers found the dial and snapped it.

  Another channel. On this street, none of those hovering, parachute-like bodies. Blending together, ash and popping electrical bugs filled the smoky air. The static roared like a raging fire.

  Stan fell to his knees, his fingers still gripping the dial in case another of the apparitions came out from a shadowed alley of the ruins. He heaved with gasps, shaking badly, feeling as if he had just emerged alive from a firefight...but most of all he felt pierced by the eyeless, faceless creature that had spotted him, as if its awesome sentience had burned a hole str
aight through him. A lingering aftertaste of that inhuman, alien sentience seemed imprinted on the metal plate in his skull as if it were photographic film. Had the plate attracted that mental force, or had it in fact shielded him from it? If not for that little chunk of armor, might the creature have burrowed into his mind to consume it, or replace it with its own?

  Through his shell-shocked terror and confusion, Stan belatedly registered a few details about this particular scene that had escaped him on his previous circuits of the dial. Framed within the TV screen was a downed camouflaged helicopter, crumpled by the side of the street. Despite the damage it had sustained, it was clearly unlike any such machine Stan had ever seen; certainly nothing like the choppers he’d known in Korea, such as the Sikorsky H-19. And now he more consciously took in the charred and gutted bodies of cars he’d only noticed peripherally before. Scattered everywhere, often half buried, many crushed, some upside-down – as if they had been borne high aloft on fiery winds before plummeting back to Earth. Despite their deformities, they too were of styles unfamiliar to him. Smaller than any of the big, solid American cars he had helped construct at Plymouth. More compact, more toy-like, more...futuristic.

  He had another of his strange intuitions. This prescient instinct told him that he wasn’t witnessing a catastrophic event occurring now at some distant location of the Earth. He was witnessing a catastrophic event occurring at some as-yet distant location in time.