I landed in the water.
Sank like a fucking stone….
Coldness.
Smothering, death-bringing cold. Annihilating, electrocuting cold. The air crushed from my lungs.
My body writhes. Shots in my wake. I gasp for breath. I swallow greasy, frigid water and sink and am rocketed downstream. I fall through the poisons and heavy chemicals toward the choked sandy bottom, clutching, screaming, down-down-down.
I touch bottom, I’m dragged along rocks.
My blood freezing, my eyes open.
So this is how it ends.
In this river. With these gray claws and ash tide. The Platte with its hard line and dead current. This river. Like the gun, to the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic. This river. To its black, tenebrous heart. And I go to you and I see you in the dark. I see your traces along the trail that you have beaten to the Great Perhaps. And are you there, Victoria, and are you there, Mum? It’s cold, it hurts. And I smile. This river. This time.
But no.
Not yet.
That will come.
But not yet.
My fingers find the Velcro straps of the Kevlar vest. I pull them, the straps loosen, the Velcro rips, the vest falls off me and I tumble upward to the surface. I suck a desperate breath, float for a minute in the fast-moving water, before smacking into a rock on a sandbank. I lie there for half an hour.
Wade across the shallows to the bank.
Walk.
Shivering, oblivious to the rain, shoulder wound, leg wound. Two miles back to Fort Morgan. Empty streets, neon signs, and not another human soul.
Adrenaline fighting against blood loss and exhaustion.
Three floors to Pat’s apartment. The door.
“Help me,” I manage and Pat turns, horrified, toward me.
And I fall at his feet and slip into that other realm where things made sense and the guilty suffered and equity lived and we all were saved.
11: THE LAST INCARNATION OF VISHNU
Ash on the fire escape. Images. A black cloud. My mother’s hand. Her cold fingers. What will you do, son?
I’ll join the cops, Ma.
No, no, don’t do that, it’ll upset your father, stay at university, it’s for the best.
Ok, I will, Ma. I will….
Them’s brave boys that are out in that, John mutters.
Aye, I say.
We sit and drink and the smoke comes slowly overhead like a continent. Ash from the big wildfire near Greeley. John walks to the rail and is almost lost in the vertical cliff of choking smog that hangs in a blanket above the buildings. A stink of fire. Water-carrying planes flying overhead. I’m waiting with him on the narrow fire escape steps. I’m standing and hugging myself and he is hunched over and spitting down onto the dead potted plants of the floors below.
We both smell of smoke. He passes me the bottle and I take it in my left hand. The American whiskey tastes sour. I gulp down a big swig of it and the fake heat evaporates the cold out of my ears. I give him the bottle back and he swallows down the rest. For a minute I think he’s going to throw it onto the ground and see if it smashes, but instead he sets it carefully on the iron slats of the fire escape.
We can maybe get ten cents back on that bottle, I say.
He turns to look at me and shakes his head, his shaggy hair still as his face moves. It’s a weird effect, not unconnected to the booze. I laugh a little.
I’m drunk and cold, I tell him.
If you’re cold, you can’t be drunk, ya big wean, alcohol numbs the senses, he announces in a tone of pissed authority.
Bollocks, I think. But I don’t want to argue with him. After all, he is dead.
Let’s go in, he says, this overhang is barely giving us any shelter. This smoke can’t be good for your lungs. Gimme a hand to get this thing open.
He gives me his cigarette and tugs on the window and tries to pull it up. It sticks on the first shove and he has to thump it. A heap of red ash falls on us from the wooden board covering the air conditioner on the next floor.
Hey, watch what you’re doing, John, I say.
Relax.
He bends his body and pushes past me, climbing in through the window, over the grille of the security gate.
Aye, like you couldn’t wait for me, I say sarcastically and look around at this sorry excuse for a town, the orange sky, the old buildings, shriveled and spectral. And all I can think about are the gray waves that separate us from our home. A moat between me and the braided dark.
Eagla, mathair, eagla, I whisper into the stinking air.
Are you saying something? he mutters from inside.
No.
Aye, well, get in and we’ll get this window closed, so we will. Quit your gabbing and get moving, he says suspiciously.
I put a leg over the metal trough. It’s sharp and comes up to my groin, so I can’t lean on it. I end up falling in and landing in a clatter on the floor.
Keep your comments to yourself, I say before he can call me an eejit.
You care about my comments, he says, with a sly grin on his pale face. Anyway, it’s late and it’s time we were in bed, he says.
I am in bed, I say.
And he looks at me, surprised.
So you are, he says. What are you doing?
I’m recovering from drowning and from Pat taking a shotgun pellet out of my leg and the fact that I’m going off ketch forever.
You’re not.
John, I have to. They’re having a fund-raiser, a ball. We saw it on Channel 9. And I’m going. And this time I won’t screw up. This time I’m going to kill him. I’m quitting ketch. Pat’s helping me.
John looks at me skeptically.
You couldn’t kill someone, he says, and don’t say you killed that guy in the cemetery, there was no report about it in the paper, they must have taken him with them.
I gave him half a clip, I protest.
How many hit him? John mocks.
The dying man, who has been in the corner the whole time, looks up at me. His flat cap is askew, shotgun by his side, he’s still soaked, but with blood, not rain.
Enough hit me, he says.
John snaps his fingers in front of my face.
Ignore him, he says. Continue.
Pat’s making me healthy, I say.
Sure, he’s in no fit state himself, he says.
He’s fine. End of conversation. All right?
Aye.
And now I have to see Ma, and I have to reveal the black secret at the heart of the Troubles.
That’s ok, just don’t say that thing again.
What thing?
I am the Last Incarnation of Vishnu, the Avenger, Storm Bringer, Lord of Death.
Ok. I won’t, I say, and pause for effect and then announce: I am the Last Incarn—
He turns off the light….
Ma is in the ground six weeks, and I’m on the Scotch Quarter being interviewed. They’re accepting my application to join the police. It has annoyed my lefty, progressive father, and that’s the beauty of the thing.
“Alex, we always want someone who has experience of the law and your A levels are outstanding, do you have anything you want to say?”
Do I have anything I want to say?
My eyes fluttering…
The bedroom spinning.
Pat gives me the bucket and I throw up.
“Neither poppy nor mandragora will ever medicine to thee that sweet sleep which thou hadst yesterday.”
“What?”
“Not poppy, not mandragora (whatever that is) will give me that sweet sleep of yesterday. I see that now. Heroin takes, never gives. That and that alone can explain so many mistakes since coming to America.”
“And you say heroin is to blame?”
“Yes.”
“But earlier you said heroin saved your life?”
“It did.”
“How?”
Like this:
I’d been a policeman for nearly six years. A full detective for three. I had gone straight into homicide. As Commander Douglas of the Samson Inquiry will tell you, this is practically unheard of. Being groomed, and I knew it. I was being used, but I wanted to be used, I wanted to make my way up. There were factions within the RUC that didn’t like the way things were. Fine, use me to further your ends. My talents, my skill. My techne.