And then, as if the shock is holding back my sensations and memories, I realize, I not only saw it—I felt it. The pit turned black as obsidian. All the surface for kilometers around turned deep dark glass, and then, like a second sky, a sky below, it twinkled with burning streaks and stars. The glassy, broken land filled with submerged and flashing lights.
“Twenty minutes to rendezvous,” the pilot announces. He has a distinct southern accent. Virginia, I think. Maybe Virginia Beach. “What the hell just happened back there?” he asks.
Nobody answers.
I close my eyes and let the acceleration lull me. Not so bad now. We’re off the Red, we’re alive, things are working out. Better and better. Right?
PART TWO
BATMAN AND SILVER SURFER SAY…
I’m drifting again. For some reason, I relive the time when Joe and I were eighteen and crossed the border in Arizona, riding in a pickup down to Chihuahua with three other guys and a nineteen-year-old tomboy named Famke. That trip ended up kind of sweet and creepy. Guided by a crazy young Mexican kid, we crawled deep into a desert cave and found a curled-up mummy wearing a grass thong. Famke examined the body—she was studying premed—and said it was a girl and really old, maybe hundreds of years. The Mexican kid insisted she had been fifteen or younger when she died, probably in childbirth. Joe got a sick, guilty look and took a folded cardboard box from the back of the truck, taping it together and mumbling something about her being lonely all these years, and now, she was back with her kind, with young people; she needed to go home with us. He insisted on removing her from the cave and bringing her back. He didn’t want her to be lonely anymore. We’d drunk so much beer, he thought he was saving her from the dark and the dust.
He filled the top of the cardboard box with dried brush.
We made it back despite stupidity and too much beer, crossing the border with the cardboard box in the back of our van, saying to ICE it was filled with stuffed and mounted frogs we were planning to give as gifts when we got home. Two inspectors cracked the box’s crisscrossed lid, barely peered inside, and waved us through.
Back in Chula Vista, we went our separate ways, except for me and Joe. Famke flew off to work in Africa. The other guys melted into the southland. Joe kept the mummy in his parents’ garage until his mom opened the box one morning, pulled out the brush, and screamed. His dad called the cops. No charges were filed. Nobody could figure out how many laws we’d broken, or what to charge us with, and besides, by then, we’d already joined the Skyrines. The authorities ended up putting the mummy in a museum in San Diego. Strange days.
I slide from kid-flick memories into deeper sleep. It seems to go on longer than the few minutes left before our rendezvous. Some part of the kid flick is still with me, because I see piles of old comic books spread out on a narrow little cot in a room with a crazy, leaning roof—an attic bedroom not much bigger than a closet and filled with shelves bent under loads of books and boxed comics, an old tablet with a cracked screen, another tablet with a keyboard that projects from the front onto a desk, so I can write stuff—not that I write much. A few essays. Once I tried to write a comic and draw it as well, but didn’t get very far. I remember I loved Silver Surfer. The freedom, the audacity, that chrome-shiny body. Kind of like T-1000 on a surfboard.
I never liked Silver Surfer. I never had an attic bedroom. I’m trying to wake up and not succeeding.
This isn’t about you. They’re shutting me down slowly, and I just want to move around a little before I’m done.
I see the Silver Surfer float along the aisle of the lander, and he’s conversing seriously with Batman. Jesus, I do not think they would ever get along. Alternate universes. Two different kinds of bad attitude. One cosmic, the other…
I tell myself over and over, I never read Silver Surfer. I never had an attic room. Never wanted to write comics. So who loved him, and who could imagine him hanging out with Batman?
It’s Coyle. Coyle is dreaming inside my head. She’s decided to share.
“Stop it,” I say. “Please.”
You and your fucking train—and Jesus, that mummy! I want out. I don’t know how to get out! I don’t know what I am.
“You’re a ghost,” I say.
I’m not dead. You know I’m not.
“I don’t know anything.”
I’ve been sucked in and I’m being stored away. Like all the others, only slower. Something seems to think I’m useful like this. Still active.
I can feel my lips moving. I’m mumbling, but I can’t wake up. “They’re all glass now.”
It’s not glass.
“What the hell is it? Silicon?”
Not that, either. If the crystals are threatened, they reach out and absorb. That’s how they learn about threats—by absorbing the things that threaten them. I threatened them. Now, I’m getting stiff. Solid.
“DJ says all of Mars could turn glass. Then you’d have lots of company.”
I’ve already got company. You wouldn’t believe how much company.
“Skyrines?”
Yeah. Some Voors, some of my team. Others, Russians and Muskies, that didn’t finish before they were blown up in the Drifter. They’ve already been recorded. Stored. I try to avoid them.
“Right.” I start to shiver. If I shiver enough, maybe someone will wake me.
Coyle goes on: You saw me get absorbed. You thought I was dead. So did DJ. I still don’t know what happens after, except… before I’m done, I can still talk to you.
“If you call this talking,” I say.
Shut up and listen. This place I’m in, if it is a place, is filled with big stuff and little stuff. I think a lot of it is old. I mean, really old—billions of years or more. With my help, maybe you can access some of it. That’s what it wants. But I need you, as well.
I just want her to go away. I want it all to go away so I can be as sane as I was before.
“I’m already there,” I say to this craziness. “Ancient bug history.”
Not just that. Really important stuff. With my help, you might be able to understand. Interpret. But right now… I can’t help. I’m locked out. There’s a kind of firewall that stops me from looking around and searching. Keeps me from being active.
“Meaning what?” I ask.
Batman and the Silver Surfer have parted ways and are now just floating. I see them despite the fact that my eyes are closed. But then, my eyes have been closed all along.
I think this place needs a user to get it to open up. Someone alive. Really alive. Somebody with a need to know that deserves access privileges.
“Is it a kind of library? Why don’t you check out a book or two?”
I am a book, shithead! There’s only so much I can do. I’m becoming a record, and records are tightly controlled.