Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella Page 8

  She does her thing and it’s getting dark, so the crowds trickle back to the parking lot under the pall of burnt kettle corn. Lila, Edna the tattooed lady, and I are talking and they invite me to the “after the show get-together”; a bunch of them always do. They gather under some tarps pitched between their trailers and wagons. I meet Cleo the strongman (who’s definitely over the hill and suffering from chronic asthma), and Buddy Lemon and his wife Sri Lanka, the trapeze artists, and Armand, the guy who trains the lions and elephants, although I’m informed he sucks at both by Lila who whispers that two of the lions have mauled people and Dino stomped on a carnie, all in the last three months. Judging from how fast Armand guzzles a bottle of corn mash, I suspect she may be on to something.

  They’re a sweet bunch, raw and melancholy. As always, there’s got to be one asshole in the crowd, though. A barker named Niall. A pigeon-chested guy with a pencil moustache and a waist like a fashion model. His crappy yellow and white striped suit is cut a size too small, even for him. He makes a snide remark about my “swarthy, and exceptionally stout” personage in a smarmy English accent. He tells Cleo to “watch out, mate, she appears as if she could beat you out of a job.” I’m relieved and grateful when Lila glares and he slinks off to his quarters.

  As the group drifts apart, Lila grabs my arm and says to come with her back to the trailer. I’m privately questioning the wisdom of this, because I’ve never had another woman come on to me before, and more importantly, there’s the Doctor to consider. He keeps strange hours. There’s no telling what mood he’s in. I might be punished for leaving the house without permission. But I’m in a perverse mood so I follow her.

  We’re surrounded by farmland. It’s extra dark on account of it being a moonless night, which Lila tells me is perfect for stargazing. She says the constellation she’s been monitoring is tricky to capture due to its distance. Light pollution only adds to the degree of difficulty. She spends a few minutes adjusting the rig and muttering to herself, and I steady her elbow as she sways on unsteady legs.

  Finally, she says, “Okay, all right, here we go. I’m getting damned good at this -- you have no idea how hard it is to nail down the Serpens galaxy.” She guides my eye to the viewfinder and makes adjustments as I describe what I see, which at first isn’t much but black space punctuated by random lights.

  Then, “Oh. It’s…beautiful.” And it is beautiful, an impossibly remote field of stars veiled in clouds of dust and gas, and at its heart, a wavering flame that illuminates from the inside out, like fire shining through a smoky glass. I know it’s old, old. Older even than my ancestors who scrabbled and clawed in the earliest days on this rock.

  “Have you used a telescope before?”

  “No,” I say, slightly embarrassed that Dr. Kob often visits the Deer Mountain Observatory just a few miles from our house and yet I’ve never once asked to tag along.

  “Don’t blink,” she says. “Like my Pa used to say, ‘you gotta hold your jaw just right’ when he taught me how to fire his deer gun. You blink, NCG 6118 will go poof and you might not ever find her again.”

  “How do you find her again?” I don’t need Lila to explain her fascination with the constellation, her fear of losing it forever. Its austere beauty stirs something cold in my breast.

  “I memorized her position. Also, I’ve got a chart with the coordinates and the Dreyer description. Doesn’t make it easy, though.”

  “You wrote it down? Where?”

  “It’s in my stuff. In my suitcase.”

  “I’d love to see it,” I say.

  “Yeah? Why? This some kind of trick to get me cozy in my trailer?”

  I wrestle my gaze from the telescope and take her small hand in mine. “Something like that.”

  “Man alive, I’d love to see it through a real telescope.”

  I think about the mega-powerful telescope owned by the Redfield Observatory and tremble. “What about your family? Couldn’t your dad pull a few strings?”

  “Yeah, if I hadn’t left him behind for all this.” She laughed. “I haven’t spoken to him in…a while.”

  “Father-daughter relationships are the worst,” I say.

  We pack it in and meander to her trailer. She shares it with a couple of other girls, but one missed the trip, and the other stays with a boyfriend when she’s in town. Nothing happens. We have a couple of Southern Comfort nightcaps. Then she falls asleep on her dumpy couch. After she’s snoring, I rummage through her bags and find the astronomical charts she’s gathered and stick the one I need into my pocket next to the cold, lethal smoothness of the prod. I smooch Lila’s furry cheek on my way out the door.

  * * *

  The storm broadsides the estate an hour or so before dark.

  The Doctor has sent word that I’m to report to the laboratory at once. He requires me at the crank that revs up the dynamo. Like all his gadgets, the crank is unwieldy and impractical and nobody else is physically strong enough to make it turn with sufficient speed. The combination of my efforts and the electrical storm are crucial one-two punches in the pursuit of scientific progress. Tonight’s the night he jump starts yet another patchwork corpse, and maybe this time it’ll work and he’ll snag the Nobel and show his lamentably deceased dad who the real scientist is in the family.

  At the moment, I’m on the front porch, standing beneath the awning, goggling at nature’s wrath. Thin, jagged bolts of lightning splinter in white hot strokes that repeat every fifteen to twenty seconds. Wind and rain crash upon the eaves like an avalanche. By some confluence of atmospheric forces, the air dims and reddens as the grounds have been transmogrified into the soundstage of a Martian epic. I swing my hand back and forth, fascinated at how it seems to float and multiply as it drags through the bloody light. I skip from the sheltering eaves toward the middle of the driveway, feigning carefree abandon as I throw my hands skyward and tilt my face so water streams from it. The reality is, the strikes are marching ever closer and I want to get the hell clear of the house.

  Pelt sits in a rocker by the rail of the third floor balcony. He strikes a match on the sole of his cowboy boot and lights one of his nasty hand rolled cigarettes I can smell from a hundred yards away. He eyes me with the cold intensity of a raptor studying a mouse and I wonder if his instincts are actually that damned sharp. Could he really know? The notion chills me in a way the deluge can’t.

  A second later none of that matters. Lightning flares directly overhead, and I feel in my bones that this is it, this bolt has been drawn into the array. And man, oh, man, had I screwed that over big time earlier in the day. I clap my hand over my eyes. The blue-white flash stabs through the cracks between my fingers. The top of the house explodes and the effect is epic beyond my fondest dreams. The concussion sits me down, hard, as all the windows on this side of the building shatter. Fiery chunks of wood, glass, and stone arc upward and outward in a ring. Debris crashes to earth in the gardens, is catapulted among the waving treetops. It’s glorious.

  The house remains upright, although minus a substantial portion of the third story. Smoke pours down the sides of the building, thick and black, and chivvied by blasts of wind; it roils across the muddy yard and acres of lawn, lowering a hellish, apocalyptic shroud over the works. I’m on my feet again and primed for violence. Pelt will be coming for me. Except, the sly bastard’s vanished—his left boot is stuck in the mud near the front steps. I hope against hope he’s dead. Servants stumble through the smoke, clutching each other. Their quarters occupy the ground floor, so I doubt any got caught in the explosion. This is their lucky day. None of them glance at me as they file past, moaning and sobbing like a chain of ghosts.

  I have to be sure. The rain kills the worst of the flames, snuffs them before they can create an inferno. The grand staircase is in sorry shape. Several steps are gone. I hopscotch my way onward and upward while lightning flashes through the giant hole in the ceiling. Happily, the laboratory, its various sinister machines, have been obliterated. Upon c
loser inspection, I spy the Doctor’s mangled and gruesomely mutilated person fallen through the floor where it lies pinned beneath a shattered beam. His body is burnt and crushed. He’s quite mindless in his agonies, shrieking for his dead parents and the friends he doesn’t have.

  Yeah, I should finish the job. That’s the smart move. Alas, alack, I’m too melodramatic to take the easy way out.

  * * *

  The Doctor keeps a machine in the cellar. When I’m feeling blue I sneak down and bathe in its unearthly glow. It kicks mad scientist-old school; a mass of bulbs and monster transistors, Tesla coils, exposed circuitry, and cables as thick as pythons going every which way. At the heart of this ‘50s gadgetry is a bubble of glass with an upright table for a passenger. Allegedly the bubble shifts through time and space. Dr. Kob’s grandfather built the prototype in 1879, powered it via lightning stored in an array of crude batteries. The new model still runs on deep cycle batteries Dr. Kob Jr. scavenged from backhoes and bulldozers.

  The main reason the Master traps lightning to energize his devices is because they suck so much juice the electric bill would draw prying eyes sooner rather than later. There’s a backup diesel generator gathering dust for a true emergency. The Doctor is sentimental about his methods, obsessed with the holistic nature of the process. He won’t drive or fly, won’t operate a computer, not even a typewriter. He scratches in his voluminous journals with quill and ink. In the mansion, every lamp runs on kerosene, the stoves and furnaces, coal, our black and white televisions and radios, batteries. We’re like an evil alternate universe version of the Amish.

  The T&S machine holds special significance for me, because that’s the device of my genesis, my cradle and incubator. Dr. Kob reached back into the great dark heart of prehistory to pluck an egg from my mother’s womb and fertilized it with God knows what. He effected a few cosmetic alterations to bring me marginally in line with the latest iteration of the species, dressed me up like a real girl, taught me to walk and talk and hold a spoon. He forbade my partaking in any sort of significant education—apparently he couldn’t reconcile his anthropological interest with his fear that I might become too smart for his health. Indeed, I’m certain if he ever had the slightest inkling of my true intellectual capacity, he’d have sent Pelt to slit my throat in the night.

  However, I learned to read, no thanks to him. Poor dearly departed Goldilocks took care of that on the sly. I was ripping through college level lit by the tender age of fourteen. Eliza Doolittle, eat your heart out.

  The procedure hasn’t been without unexpected complications, however. You wouldn’t believe my psychedelic dreams, and if I’m ever caught and placed on trial for crimes against humanity, I’ll get an insanity pass on the descriptions alone. Genetic memory? I dunno; all I know is that in dreams I go for a ride on an astral carpet to a high desert wasteland that spreads under a wide carnivorous sky. The tribe kills with rocks and clubs; it assembles in caves and lays its feasts upon the dirt. They haven’t invented fire, thus meat and skin is crushed and smeared on rocks, like finger paint and wet clay. The brutes, my people, see my apparition, doubtless grotesque in its familiarity, and hoot in alarm and outrage, jam-red mouths agape. Then, the large males, the killers, snarl and snatch up their clubs and their stones, and hop toward me with murder on their minds.

  Nine times out of ten, I jerk into wakefulness, alone in my dingy cell with the television screen full of snow. The tenth time out of ten, I come to in a field, naked and covered in scabs of blood, with no memory but the dream memories.

  * * *

  Even the Doctor isn’t quite mad enough to do what I’ve done. He’s a lunatic, yes indeed. He’s also a survivor. Better than most, he understands that one screws with the infinite at one’s own peril. I’m sure the meticulously recorded results of those Victorian experiments with peasantry cooled his jets.

  I, on the other hand, am a desperate sort.

  Those nights the good Doctor and his toady spent drunk off their asses, I took the T&S Machine for joyrides. The calibrations weren’t difficult—I simply plugged in the various sequences from Doctor Kob’s logs. The wild part is, the machine goes forward and back and to any physical location in the universe, provided one has the coordinates. The places I’ve gone, weirder and more frightening than those Technicolor nightmares.

  After Doctor Kob and Pelt murder me in that squalid alley, I give them a moment to wonder at my dying words. But it’s only a possible me, a shadow. Travelers exist in duplicate during collocation. It’s complicated; suffice to say, each of us unique snowflakes, aren’t. We exist as a plurality. That old saw about meeting yourself…it’s only kinda true. The universe didn’t unravel when I skipped ahead and met one of my future selves, an inveterate alcoholic and aimless wanderer, one bound to run afoul of Dr. Kob’s plots of revenge. If she’s anything like me (haha!), she won’t mind making the sacrifice to even the score.

  Pelt knows something’s wrong, but even as he turns I tap him with the prod and he’s gone in a belch of gas and flame. The Doctor takes it in stride. He’s a hobbled shell of a man, yet arrogant as ever. He commands me to drop the weapon and submit to my well-deserved punishment. I slug him and he falls unconscious. That feels so good, I’ve revisited the moment a dozen times.

  This is how it ends for Daddy dearest: I strap him into the machine and send him to the land of my ancestors, and once he’s evaporated into the abyss of Time I take an axe to the machine. I’ve gotten my kicks. That conscience I’ve been incubating stings like hell. Who knows what havoc I might wreak on material existence were I to keep dicking around with the timestream.

  I sent the Doctor with a mint copy of Frankenstein, a dozen bottles of wine, and the prod with a full charge. It’s the least I could do. The very least.

  * * *

  I track the Banning Circus to a show in Wenatchee. The owner, the great, great grandson of Ezra Banning, is skeptical when I apply for the strongman job. He’s got a strongman, he says, and I say I know. I also know his guy is getting long in the tooth and suffers from asthma, or emphysema, or whatever. Banning tells me to hit the bricks, he’s a busy man, blah, blah. I walk over to the lion cage and tear the door off its hinges—naturally, I try to make it look casual, but the effort does me in for the day. The owner picks up his jaw. He sends one of his flunkies to break the news to poor Cleo. He doesn’t even mind that it takes Armand the better part of two days and the assistance of local animal control to corral their lion and get him into his cage.

  I knock on Lila’s trailer door. A monster storm cloud is massing in the north and that could be good or bad. It certainly sets the scene. My hair is standing on end. Lila screams and throws her arms around me. She’s crying a little and there’s snot in her beard.

  “Hey, this is for you,” I say and give her a small wooden coffer I bought off a guy at a garage sale where I also scored some dumbbells to get in shape for my strongman—strongperson—audition.

  “What is it?” She lifts the lid and gasps. An eerie golden light plays over her face.

  “Stardust.”

  “Stardust?”

  “I hope it’s not radioactive. Maybe we should get a Geiger counter.”

  “You’re yanking my chain.”

  I smile. “Never happen.”

  “Well…my God. Look at this. Where…?”

  I take the folded, spindled, and mutilated piece of paper with the Dreyer entry for galaxy N1168 from my pocket and give it to her. Lightning parts the red sky like a cleaver. It reflects twin novas in her eyes. I grasp her free hand and press it against my heart.

  Three, two, one. Boom.

 

 

 
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