Mister B. Gone

But the fire didn’t spare my lips. It took them too, erasing them utterly. My mouth is now just a slot that I can barely open an inch because the scarred flesh around it is too solid.

Is it any wonder that I’m tired of my life? That I want it erased by fire? You’d want the same thing. So, in the name of empathy, burn this book. Do it for compassion’s sake, if you have the heart, or because you share my anger. There’s no saving me. I’m a lost cause, trapped forever between the covers of this book. So finish me.

Why the hesitation? I’ve done as I promised, haven’t I?

I’ve told you something about myself. Not everything, of course. Who could tell everything? But I have told you enough that I’m surely more than just words on a page, ordering you about. Oh yes, while I think of it, please allow me to apologize for that brutish, bullying way I started out. It’s something I inherited from Pappy G. and I’m not proud of it. It’s just that I’m impatient to have the flame licking these pages and burning up this book as soon as possible. I didn’t take account of your very human curiosity. But I hope I’ve satisfied that now.

So it remains only for you to find a flame and get this wretched business over with. I’m certain that will be a great relief to you and I assure you an even greater relief to me. The hard part’s over. All we need now is that little fire.

Come on, friend. I’ve unburdened myself; my confession is made. It’s over to you.

I’m waiting. Doing my best to be patient.

Indeed, I will go so far as to say that I’m being more patient right now than I’ve ever been in my life. Here we are on page 18 and I’ve trusted you with some of the most painful confessions I have ever made to anyone, simply so that you would know this wasn’t some fancy trick. It was a real and true account of what happened to me, which, were you ever to have seen me in the flesh, would be instantly verified. I am burned. Oh, how I am burned.

It’s a sign of your mercy that I’m really waiting for. And your courage, which I’ve somehow sensed from the beginning was like your mercy, a quality you possessed. It does take courage to set a flame to your first book, to defy the sickly wisdom of your elders and preserve words as though they were in some way precious.

Think of the absurdity of that! Is there anything in your world or mine, Above or Below, that is so available as words? If the preciousness of things is bound in some measure to their rarity, then how precious can the sounds we make, waking or sleeping, in infancy or senility, sane, mad, or simply trying on hats, be? There’s a surfeit of them. They spew from tongues and pens in their countless billions every day. Think of all that words express: the seductions, threats, demands, entreaties, prayers, curses, omens, proclamations, diagnoses, accusations, insinuations, testaments, judgments, reprieves, betrayals, laws, lies, and liberties. And so on, and on, words without end. Only when the last syllable has been spoken, whether it’s a joyous hallelujah or someone complaining about their bowels, only then is it that I think we can reasonably assume the world will have ended. Created with a word, and——who knows?——maybe destroyed by one. I know about destruction, friend. More than I care to tell. I’ve seen such things, such foul and unspeakable things …

Never mind. Just the flame, please.

What’s the delay? Oh wait. It isn’t that remark I made back there about knowing destruction that’s got you twitchy, is it? It is. You want to know what I’ve seen.

Why in Demonation can’t you be satisfied with what you’ve been given? Why do you always have to know more?

We had an agreement. At least I thought we did. I thought all you needed was a simple confession and in return you’d cremate me: ink, paper, and glue consumed in one merciful blaze.

But that’s not going to happen yet, is it?

Damn me for a fool. I shouldn’t have said anything about my knowledge of destruction. As soon as you heard that word your blood started to quicken.

Well …

I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you a little more, as long as we understand one another. I’ll give you just one more piece of my life and then we’re going to get this book cooked.

Yes?

All right, as long as we agree. There has to be an end to this or I’m going to start getting angry, and I could make things very unpleasant for you if I decided to do that. I can get this book to fly out of your hands and beat at your head ’til you’re bleeding from every hole in your head. You think I’m bluffing? Don’t tempt me. I’m not a complete fool. I half-expected that you’d want to hear a little bit more of my life. Don’t think it’s going to get bright and happy anytime soon. There was never a happy day in my whole life.

No, that’s a lie. I was happy on the road with Quitoon. But that was all so long ago I can barely remember the places we went, never mind our conversations. Why does my memory work in such irrational ways? It remembers all the words to some stupid song I sang when I was an infant, but I forget what happened to me yesterday. That said, there are some events that are still so painful, so life changing, that they stay intact, despite all attempts by my mind to erase them.

All right. I surrender, a little. I’ll tell you how I got from there to here. It’s not a pretty sequence of events, believe me. But once I’ve unburdened myself any doubts you still have about what I’ve asked you to do will be forgotten. You’ll burn the book when I’m finished. You will put me out of my misery, I swear.

So …

As is self-evident, I survived my fall into the fire and the minute or longer that Pappy Gatmuss left me to struggle there in my bed of flames. My skin, despite the toughness of my scales, melted and blistered while I attempted to get up. By the time Pappy G. caught hold of my tails, and unceremoniously dragged me out of the fire, then kicked me over, there was barely any life left in me. [I heard all this later from my mother. At the time I was mercifully unconscious.]

Pappy Gatmuss woke me up, however. He brought a pail of ice water from the house and drenched me. The shock of water dowsed the flames and brought me out of my faint in an instant. I sat up, gasping.

“Well look at you, boy,” Pappy Gatmuss said. “Aren’t you a sight to make a father weep?”

I looked down at my body, at the raw blistered and black flesh of my chest and belly.

Momma was yelling at Pappy. I didn’t hear all she said but she seemed to be accusing him of deliberately leaving me in the fire in the hopes of killing me. I left them arguing, and crawled away into the house, grabbing a big serrated knife out of the kitchen in case I had to later defend myself from Gatmuss. Then I went up the stairs to the mirror in my mother’s room and looked at my face. I should have prepared myself for the shock of what I saw, but I didn’t give myself time. I stared at the bubbling, melting masterwork of burns that my face had become, and spontaneously vomited at my own reflection.

I was very gently wiping the vomit off my chin when I heard Gatmuss’ yowl from the bottom of the stairs.

“Words, boy?” he yelled. “You were writing words about me?”

I peered over the banister, and saw the enraged behemoth below. He was carrying a few partially burned sheets covered with my scrawled writing. Obviously he’d plucked them from the fire, and had found some reference to himself. I knew my own work well enough to be certain that there was no mention of Gatmuss in any of those books that was not accompanied by clots of insulting adjectives. He was too stupid to know the meaning of “malodorous” and “heinous,” but he wasn’t so dense as to not be able to grasp the general tone of my feelings. I hated him with all my heart, and that hatred poured out of the pages he carried. He dragged his lumpen carcass up the stairs, calling to me as he came:

“I’m not a cretin, boy! I know what these here words mean. And I’m going to make you suffer for them, you hear me? I’m going to make a new fire and cook you in it, one minute for every bad word about me you wrote here. That’s a lot of words, boy. And a lot of cooking, you are going to be burned black, boy!”

I didn’t waste breath and time talking back at him. I had to get out of the house and into the darkened streets of our neighborhood, which was called the Ninth Circle. All the worst of Humankind’s damned——the souls that neither bribes nor beatings could control——lived by their wits in its parasite-infested wastelands.

The source of all parasitic life was the maze of refuse at the back of our house. In return for our occupancy of the house, which was in a state of near decrepitude, Pappy G. was responsible for keeping watch on the garbage heaps and to discipline any souls who in his opinion were deserving of punishment. The freedom to be cruel suited Pappy G. hugely, of course. He’d go out every night armed with a machete and a gun, ready to maim in the name of the law. Now as he came up after me it was with that same machete and gun. I had no doubt that he would kill me if [or more likely, when] he caught up with me. I knew I had no chance of out-running him on the streets, so throwing myself out the window [my body curiously indifferent to pain in its present state of shock] and heading for the steep-sided heaps of refuse, where I knew I could lose him in the endless canyons of trash, was my only option.

Pappy G. fired from the window I’d just jumped out of a minute or two after I’d started to climb the heap of trash, and then he fired again when I reached the top. Both bullets missed me, but not by much. If he managed to make the jump himself, and then closed the distance between us, he would shoot me, in the back, I knew, without giving the deed a second thought. And as I stumbled and rolled down the far side of the hill of stinking refuse, I thought to myself that if the choice was between dying out here, shot down by Pappy G., and being taken back to the house to be beaten and mocked, I would prefer the former.

It was a little early to be entertaining thoughts of death, however. Even though my burned body was emerging from its shocked state and starting to pain me, I was still nimble enough to move over the mounds of rotted food and discarded furniture with some speed, whereas Pappy G.’s sheer height and cumbersome body made the garbage heaps far more treacherous. Two or three times I lost all sight of him, and even dared believe I had slipped him. But Gatmuss had the instincts of a hunter. He tracked me through the chaos, up one slope and down another, the troughs getting deeper and the peaks higher, as I ventured farther from the house.

And I was slowing down. The effort of climbing the heaps of refuse was taking its toll, the garbage sliding away beneath my feet as I attempted to scramble up their ever-steeper slopes.

It was only a matter of time now, I knew, before the end came. So I decided to stop once I reached the summit of the pile I was climbing, and give Pappy G. a good clear shot of me. My body was fast approaching collapse, the muscles of my calves spasming so painfully I cried out, my hands and arms a mass of gashes from slitting my cooked flesh on the shards of glass and the raw edges of tin cans as I sought a handhold.

My mind was now made up. Once I reached the top of this hillock I would give up the chase and, keeping my back to Gatmuss so that he couldn’t see the despair upon my face and take some pleasure from it, I would await his bullet. With the decision made I felt curiously unencumbered and climbed easily up to my chosen death site.

Now all I had to do was——

Wait! What was that hanging in the air in the trench between this summit and the next? It looked to my weary eyes like two beautiful shanks of raw meat, with——could I believe what I was seeing?——cans of beer attached to each piece of meat.

I had heard stories of people who, lost in great deserts, seemed to see the very image of what they wanted most at that moment: a glittering pool of refreshing water, most likely, surrounded by date palms lush with ripe fruit. These mirages are the first sign that the wanderer is losing his grip on reality, I knew, because the faster he chases this phantom pool with its shady bower of fruit-laden trees, the faster it recedes from him.

Was I now completely crazy? I had to know. Forsaking the spot where I had intended to perish, I slid down the incline towards the place where the steak and beer hung, moving just a little on a creaking rope that disappeared into the darkness high above us. The closer I got, the more certain I became that this was not, as I’d feared, an illusion, but the real thing; a suspicion that was confirmed moments later when my salivating mouth closed round a nice lean portion of the steak. It was better than good, it was exceptional, the meat melting in my mouth. I opened the chilly can of beer, and raised it to my lipless mouth, which had dealt well with the challenge of biting into the steak and now had their hurts soothed by a bathing of cold beer.

I was silently thanking whatever kindly soul had left these refreshments to be found by a lost traveler when I heard a bellowing from Pappy G., and from the corner of my eye I saw him at the very spot I’d chosen to die.

“Leave some of that for me, boy!” he yelled, and having seemingly forgotten the enmity between us, so moved was he by the sight of the steak and beer, he came down the steep slope in great strides. As he did so he yelled:

“If you touch that other steak and beer, boy, I will kill you three times over, I swear!”

In truth, I had no intention of eating into the other steak. I’d eaten all I could. I was happy to nibble at my steak bone, which still had a hook around it, the hook attached to one of the two ropes that hung so closely together that I’d assumed they were one.

Now, however, with my stomach filled, I could afford to be inquisitive. This wasn’t a single rope holding both beer cans. There was a second rope, much darker than the bright yellow of the food provider, which hung innocently beside the others. Nothing I saw hung from it. My gaze followed it down past my shoulder, hand, leg, knee, and foot, only to find that it disappeared into the mass of garbage on which I stood.

I bent over at my hips, my fire-stiffened torso almost touching my legs, and went on searching for the continuation of the rope amongst the trash.

“You drop a bone, did you, idiot?” Pappy Gatmuss said, his words accompanied by a shower of spittle, gristle, and beer. “Don’t you take too much longer down there, you hear me? Just because you ordered me a steak and beer doesn’t mean … Oh wait! Ha! You stay right where you are, boy. I’m not going to put my cold gun in your ear to blow off your head. I’m going to put it in your rear and blow off your …”

“It’s a trap,” I said quietly.

“What ’ya talkin’ about?”

“The food. It’s bait. Somebody’s trying to catch——”

Before I could speak the syllable that would finish my sentence, my prophecy was proved.

The second rope, the dark stranger that had lingered so close to its bright yellow companion that had been almost invisible, was suddenly jerked eight or ten feet into the air, pulling the two dark ropes taut and hauling into view two nets, which were large enough and spread widely enough that whoever was fishing from Above was knowledgeable enough about the Underworld to know about the presence here of the remnants of the Demonation.

Seeing the immensity of the nets, I took some comfort from the fact that even if I’d comprehended the trap in which we were standing more quickly, we would never have been able to get beyond the perimeter of the net before those in the World Above——The Fishermen as I had already mentally dubbed them——sensed some motion on their bait-lines and scooped up their catch.

The holes in the net were large enough for one of my legs to be somewhat uncomfortably hanging out, dangling above the chaos below. But such discomfort meant little when I had the pleasure of seeing the net beneath Gatmuss also tightening around him, and lifting him up as I was being lifted. There was one difference. While Gatmuss was cursing and struggling, attempting and failing to tear a hole in the net, I was feeling curiously calm. After all, I reasoned, how much worse could my life in the World Above be than the life I was leaving in the World Below, where I had known very little comfort, and no love, and had no future for myself beyond the kind of bitter, joyless lives that Momma and Pappy G. lived?

We were being lifted at quite a speed now, and I could see the landscape of my young life laid out below. The house, with Momma standing on the doorstep——a diminutive figure, far beyond the range of my loudest cries, even if I’d cared to try, which I didn’t. And there, spreading in all directions as far as my eyes could see, was the dismal spectacle of the wastelands, the peaks of trash that had seemed so immense when I’d been in their shadows, now inconsequential, even when they rose to mountainous heights as they defined the perimeter of the Ninth Circle. Beyond the Circle there was nothing. Only a void, an immense emptiness, neither black nor white, but an unfathomable grey.

“Jakabok! Are you listening to me?”

Gatmuss was haranguing me from his net, where, thanks in part to his own struggles, his huge frame was squashed up in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. His knees were pressed up against his face, while his arms stuck out of the net at odd angles.

“Yes, I’m listening,” I said.

“Is this something you set up? Something to make me look stupid?”

“You don’t need any help to do that,” I told him. “And no, of course I didn’t set this up. What an asinine question.”

“What’s asinine?”

“I’m not going to start trying to educate you now. It’s a lost cause. You were born a brute and you’ll die a brute, ignorant of anything but your own appetites.”

“You think you’re very clever, don’t you, boy? With your fancy words and your fancy manners. Well, they don’t impress me. I got a machete and a gun. And once we’re out of this stupid thing I’m going to come after you so fast you won’t have time to count your fingers before I cut them off. Or your toes. Or your nose.”

“I could scarcely count my nose, you imbecile. I only have one.”

“There you go again, sounding like you’re so high and mighty. You’re nothing, boy. You wait! You wait until I find my gun. Oh, the things I can do with that gun! I could shoot off what’s left of your babymaker, clean as a whistle!”

And so he went on, an endless outpouring of contempt and complaint, spiced with threats. In short, he hated me because when I’d been born Momma lost all interest in him. In past times, he said, when for some reason or another Momma’s attention had been distracted, he’d had a foolproof way of getting it back, but now he was afraid of using that trick again because he’d been happy to have a daughter, but another accidental son would only be a waste of breaths and beatings. One mistake was enough, more than enough, he said, and ranted about my general stupidity.

Meanwhile, we continued our ascent, which having begun a little jerkily was now smooth and speedy. We passed through a layer of clouded darkness into the Eighth Circle, emerging from a ragged crater in its rocky desolation. I had never strayed more than half a mile from my parents’ house, and had only the vaguest notion of how life was lived in other circles. I would have liked time to study the Eighth. But we were now traveling too fast for me to gain anything more than a fleeting impression of it: the Damned in their thousands, their naked backs bent to the labor of hauling some vast faceless edifice across the uneven terrain. Then I was temporarily blinded once again, this time by the darkness of the Eighth’s sky, only to emerge moments later spluttering and spitting, having been doused in the fetid fluid of some weed-throttled waterway of the swampy landscape of the Seventh. Perhaps it was the drenching in swamp water that got him mad or, simply, that the fact of what was happening to us had finally broken through his thick skull, but whichever it was, at this stage Pappy Gatmuss began to vilify me in the most foul language, blaming me, of course, for our present predicament.

“You are a waste of my seed, you witless moron, you bonehead, you jackass, you putrid little rattlebrain. I should have throttled the life out of you years ago, you damn retard! If I could reach my machete, I swear I’d hack you to pieces right here and now.”

He struggled as he accused me, attempting to get his arms to reach back towards the net, where I presume he had the machete. But he had been trapped by the net in such a way as to make any such movement impossible. He was stuck.

I, however, was not. I still had in my possession the knife I had picked up in the kitchen. It wasn’t a very large knife, but it was serrated, which was useful. It would do the job.

I reached out and started to saw at the rope that was holding up the net containing Pappy G. I knew I would have to be quick. We had already passed through the Sixth Circle and were rising through the Fifth. I paid no attention to the details of their topographies now. I just kept a mental count of their number. All the rest of my concentration went into working on the rope.

The outpouring of nauseating filth from the mouth of Pappy G. was growing more obscene, of course, as my little knife finally began to have some effect upon the rope. We were passing through the Fourth Circle now, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. I was sawing for my life, literally. If I failed to cut the rope before we reached our destination, which I assumed to be the World Above, and Gatmuss was freed from his net by whoever was hauling us up, he would slaughter me without need of machete or gun. He’d simply pull me limb from limb. I’d seen him do it to other demons, a lot larger than me.

It was powerful motivation, let me tell you, to hear my father’s threats and insults becoming ever more incomprehensible with fury until they finally turned into an incoherent outpouring of hatred. Once in a while I would glance down at his face, which was pressed tight against the confines of the net. His porcine features were turned up at me, his eyes fixed on me.

There was death in those eyes. My death, needless to say, rehearsed over and over in that testicle-sized brain of his. While it seemed to him he suddenly had my attention, he stopped piling insult upon insult and tried, as though I hadn’t heard all the obscenities he’d been spewing, to move me with absurdities.