Steven R. Boyett
MORTALITY BRIDGE
THE PRELUDE IN HELL
WET AND FACEDOWN on the sand the blank man shivers. Close behind him is a constant gentle hiss of water rushing past. He lies there blinking. Looking down and trying to remember—anything. His name. Who he is. Where. How he came to be here. Why he is wet, why cold. Why he doesn’t know or remember.
He stands and wipes grit from cheek and brow then grimaces and gasps. His cheek is swollen and bruised, his forehead scabbed. The back of his head throbs. He touches there and finds a painful swelling. His entire body cut and bruised and stiff and aching. Sand abrades the lacerated soles of his feet.
What has happened to him?
The sky is starless black. No cloud or moon or differentiation. As if all surrounding is contained within some cavern.
The blank man turns toward the inky river. On the far bank begins a vast reach of blotchy ice that seems to glow with its own faint light here in this vast yet enclosed dimness. Something’s moving in the water.
He must have just been in the water because he’s soaking wet. But he doesn’t remember being in the water. He doesn’t remember anything before coming to here on the sand.
He surveys the shore. This side’s very different from the other shore. Here the ground is like a beach. The hardpacked sand is blond. The breeze is light and warm and when it shifts from off the plain of ice across the river it contains a hint of chill. He could almost be on a beach just after sunset. If there were a sun. If there were an ocean. If this were a beach.
The clothes he wears are filthy despite being wet. He bends to sniff and nearly gags from the reek. Well there’s plenty of water a dozen feet away. Might as well make use of it and wash himself and his clothes.
He faces the water and begins removing his clothes. He holds his jacket up before him to discern what tale it tells like some maltreated tapestry. Ripped and hugely stained with blood dried brown. He wonders if the blood is his. Something heavy in the right jacket pocket. He removes it and stares blankly at a fifth of Jack Daniel’s whiskey in his hand, bottle full and seal unbroken. He reads every legible word of the white on black label. The smaller print impossible in this noxious light. He frowns and sets the bottle on the sand. Pulls off his flayed black T-shirt and winces at pain in his shoulder. Touches it as if examining someone else. Swollen and discolored and tender. His hiking shoes look fine but when he pulls them off his threadbare socks are stiff with dried blood. His buttonfly jeans are filthy but sound. He isn’t wearing any underwear. He yanks down his pants and tears out a plug of scab where a gouge on his thigh has bled and dried stuck to his jeans. He screams and does a little rain dance on the gloomy shore.
Further mysteries are produced. A waterlogged pack of Swisher Sweets containing seven cigarillos, three of them salvageable. A saturated box of matches. A folded piece of soggy writing paper with a deckled edge, blue ink smeared beyond deciphering. A wet leather wallet holding cash, platinum charge cards, and a California driver’s license with a thick silver coin taped to the back. Two round indentations in the tape where two other coins have been removed.
He frowns at the license. A blackhaired man with deeptoned skin and a constant five o’clock shadow. Nikkoleides Popoudopolos. Faintly familiar. Is that supposed to be him?
He rubs his bristly jaw and feels his wet and curling hair and brings a strand of it before his eyes. Best he can tell in this faint light it’s black. He rubs his face with both hands to form an image from his touch but lacks the tactile vision of the blind.
A silver locket hangs around his neck. He unclasps it and dangles its flattened oval before himself and watches dull red light glint from its turning surface. Like a man trying to hypnotize himself. He thumbs the catch but does not open the locket. His attention caught by thick hard calluses on his fingertips. He holds them up before him and touches them against his lips to feel their rough. Bites down on one but cannot feel it. Bites down harder and does, barely.
His knuckles are scabbed. Has he been mugged? Survived a planecrash? Shipwreck?
He shrugs. It’ll come back or it won’t.
He opens the locket and something glinting falls to the sand. He squats and sweeps his hands across the fine grit. His knees hurt and the gouge in his thigh bleeds freely. The skin around it waxy.
There. He lifts it carefully from the sand and holds it in his palm and blows it clean. A narrow gold ring, unadorned but with a half twist in the band. He knows this means something but not what. He presses the ring against his cheek and shuts his eyes. Jemma had been out of town visiting her father, Hank. Missing her and thinking of the immutable past and the oncoming wall of the future he had visited a jeweler off Rodeo Drive. He’d demonstrated what he wanted with a strip of paper. You give it a half twist and then join the ends, see? His finger sliding on the surface, traveling round the twist like some funhouse ride. It’s a twosided object that only has one side. Because of how it’s joined. Offering up the paper strip. Marriage, see? The jeweler smiled and nodded, not understanding any of it but knowing money when it walked in his door, and told him he could pick up the rings in five weeks.
The blank man’s hand closes over the ring. He’d wanted to marry her but for some reason couldn’t. Why not? Some fear not of marriage but of what it would portend for her to marry him. And she had never known he wore it near his heart for that day when perhaps he could remove it from the locket and slip it on her finger and clasp her hand and never let her go.But here is the ring. So clearly that day never came.
He tries to conjure her face but cannot fix an image. What he does remember pangs his heart. But at least a name has caught in his memory’s sieve. Jemma. His precious Jem. Something to hold on to.
The wind shifts and he gets downwind of himself. Let’s take that bath, buddy pal. You can play detective when you smell better.
He clutches his filthy clothes to himself and leaves his small pile of artifacts on the warm sand and heads toward the river. He tests the water with a toe and the toe goes numb. This is gonna be bracing. He takes a deep breath and wades on in until he’s sitting naked on the inner shore the blank man shivers, wet and staring at the sand. He blinks. Freezing water hisses past before him. He clutches a wrungout bundle of wet clothes. Beside him on the sand a full bottle of whiskey. A wallet. Cigarillos. A box of matches. A silver locket. Are they his? The clothes he’s holding are dry and ragged and stained. Are they his? Why doesn’t he know?
He opens the wallet. Cash and credit cards, an odd coin, driver’s license bearing a stranger’s picture with a long Greek name and an unfamiliar address. He looks at the picture and touches his own face. The pictured face is shaven. His own is prickly with an early beard. The remaining items hold no meaning for him either, though he pauses over the gold ring in the locket. Maybe he can trade or sell it for something useful.
He has a small and tender bump on the back of his head. A cheek and shoulder feel a little bruised. His feet are sore. A fresh pink scar puckers his thigh.
He realizes he’s thirsty. He considers the whiskey. But alcohol has never quenched any kind of thirst he’s ever had. He knows at least that much. No, a big long drink of water first.