Aurora Wolf

WAITING OUT ETERNITY

by

Steven P. Servis

Heaven was death to me as I lay shivering in the hotel shower, wondering how long before I blacked out, the blood spilling out of the gaping crevice in my stomach; I was desperate to transcend. Many times before the hotel room had been rented—the gun cleaned and cocked and pointed at my brain, but the internal antagonist flanked each ambition my will could muster, abandoning me in truths, fighting to survive despite a tsunami of dejection and mental anguish. With each attempt to end my life, the fateful task grew more difficult than before; a voice would sneak into my self-preserving brain and fool my trigger finger into doubt. The knife, however, solved that problem; the focus necessary to slowly plunge the stainless steel into my gut created a calamity of noise, immersing the voice in agony and self-loathing ambition. The enemy, my brain, was choked into delirium and died.

***

 I sat on a boulder underneath a lone, elderly crab apple tree on the corner of the northeastern hay field, staring aimlessly at the white house blending seamlessly into the white light of a rising sun. I spent most of my days as a child on that rock, staring at the waves of hay as they swayed with the fair breeze. Now white clouds scurried across the deep sky forming abstractions, and I imagined them to be heroes with swords and guns; I was dead in this eternity. 

Daily, mother would call me into the house, and I would vacuum the floor for fifty cents to spend on candy at the mom-and-pop convenience store down the road, the Garter 5 and 10. As a child, I met up with my friend Billy, and we rode our bikes in circles in the parking lot, lollypops dangling from our mouths.

But once when I was alive, and now every day, Gray Brighton shows up, and Billy takes off with him, denying our friendship, perpetuating that childhood rejection.  There wasn’t anyone I didn’t know in the town of Garter, and I already knew the ending of that story. But suddenly in the midst of my insanity, something new happened.

A man dressed in an ash-colored trench coat and pinstriped fedora hat showed up around the time I realized my favorite apple tree was dead and rotting.

I had stopped sitting on the rock; the tree offered no shade and the branches would fall sporadically, hitting me when gusts of wind blew. Rather, I sat in the hayloft of the barn watching the wind blow dust across the barren fields. The hay had died, because we hadn’t had rain since my arrival. The clouds were always the same, never a rain cloud, and now only ashen, hasty clouds raced by.

Even the barn began to fall apart, but I was reluctant to leave it.

All the while the man waded through the rising dust, black against the sunlight, seemingly confused in the field, as if plucked from Chicago in 1932 and now dropped in the country like an unwanted mutt. I watched him as he wandered in and out of sight trekking the rolling hills, each day drawing closer to the barn. One day he stood outside the shutters, looking at the would-be window, the loft, but I had closed the shutters, anticipating his arrival. I peered between the splintering boards, hoping that he would soon leave. But he knew I was there, and I felt his intrusive presence.

                “Who are you,” I yelled from the barn explosively, breaking the silence like the wind broke through the cracks of the barn.

                “Sam,” he shouted, rising to his toes as if the added height might help me hear his heavy Chicagoan accent.

                “Sam who?”

                “Just Sam.”

                “I’ve never seen you here before,” I told him.

                 “I have business with you,” he said, squinting in the sun. “May I come up and have a word?” He palmed his hat, removing it from his sanguine face. His dark hair was styled into a pompadour, and he combed his hand over it. Sam reached in his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, blotting the sweat from his forehead.

                “You know anything about God?” I asked, my voice echoing across the sky.

                He cackled. “I know he ain’t here,” he said and unbuttoned the crisp, white collar smothering his fat neck. A powdery, red dust stormed up from the gravel, and Sam squinted, shielding his eyes.

I opened the shutters. “How come everything’s dying?” I asked.

                “It ain’t everything—it’s just you,” he said and spit in the gravel. “This is all you,” and he turned and spread his arms into the vacancy of life around him, his silhouetted coat waving beneath his arms against the red Earth behind him.

                Since my death, everything I perceived was an aspect of my past life except him. His only motivation, I pondered, was to convince me to follow him to Hell. There was no conflicting possibility. He was likely Satan, but, desperate for answers, I opened the shutters and faced the man silhouetted under the peaking sunlight. I wondered about his intentions.

                “You say I’m dying?” I inquired.

                “Yes. You have to let me save you,” he said, glancing up, “or you will perish.”

                I thought about the different ways Satan would save someone like me and decided that none of them could be of any benefit.

“I don’t trust you,” I yelled. “I’ve got no reason to.” I slammed the shutters. I folded my arms and leaned against a supporting beam.

                “This is your chance,” he yelled. “Just look around you. You’re dying here.”

                “I don’t want to leave. This is my home.” I peeped through a crack.        

                “Earth is dead,” he blurted, “and you will be, too.” He took a deep breath and pulled a cigar out of his pinstriped jacket. He tried to light it, but a dust-infested breeze kept the flame down. The dust swirled upon the fiery red and Mars-like landscape, but littered upon the arid surface were the remnants of buildings, forgotten, no longer cherished by families and capitalists.

                “You’re a Mafioso aren’t you? The Outfit. I can tell by your dress.”

                He threw his stainless steel liter at the barn door; it sounded a precise, echoing knock. “What are you, some kind of prophet?” Sam asked. A flame was conceived immaculately, exploding out of his cigar and simmered into a cherry. Smoked billowed out of the sides of his mouth as he puffed on the cigar, his facial skin loose and red, his yellow teeth exposed.

                “You’re from Hell, aren’t you?”

                “Why don’t you come down here, kid, so we can talk?” he asked, his boney shoulders subconsciously twitching in frustration. He bobbed the extremity of his fingers to emphasize the argument. “You think you can just live here forever?” He raised his eyebrows.

                “Why don’t you leave?” I yelled.

Through the silence, thunder pummeled the sky and pierced my ears. A hazy cloud blotted the sun, and rain fell to slap the dust ferociously. Lightning struck in the distance, and orbs escaped the bolt, floating outward. Sam turned he gazed cautiously and passively upon the drifting orbs in the distance.

“Those orbs will kill the Unwanted,” he chuckled nervously, pointing his chin upwards as if his oversized jaw was trying to escape his face. “They steal energy. If you touch one, it will suck you in and take you away.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know. No where you would want to go I suppose.”

                 It had never rained before. I wished and prayed to God that it would rain, but it never did. Everything died due to the lack of it. And I hadn’t seen lightning since I was alive, but I didn’t feel any nostalgia for it. I merely wished it would rain for the sake of the hay so the animals could eat like normal. I stood there gazing at the orbs as they drifted out of sight.

                “It’s no worry,” I said. “It’s only striking off in the distance there.” I raised my finger and pointed at the red hill in the distance a few miles away.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck down through the roof, and the barn groaned and shook from the impact. I hugged a nearby truss and planted my feet. Orbs escaped the bolt in four directions, absorbing matter in their paths, droning like motors. I watched in terror as an electrified, transparent globe passed my face as I bent backward, narrowly avoiding its pull.

                Sam stood with impeccable posture, dry in the rain with a half-smirk and a cigar dangling from his lips. Smoke billowed out of his mouth as he tilted his head back and let the smoke roll out of his throat, veins and tendons extruding from his skin like the pipes and wires of an industrious machine.

                “Even Heaven gets rain sometimes, huh?” He flicked an ash off his cigar; it fell to the ground and sizzled in the accumulating puddle.  The roof of the barn groaned, and a rotting board fell, smacking the floor with a sharp, snare-like crack.

                “That’s not rain.  It’s acid,” I realized.

                “Acid rain, technically,” he said. The barn shook and began to collapse. “Are you sure you don’t want to come down and have a chat. I’d hate to see you get all jumbled up in there.”

                “What have you done?” I asked frantically as dirt was shaken out of the cracks of the roof. Balancing myself against the trusses, I made my way to the stairs, and I skipped down them in threes, leveraging my weight on the banisters. I kicked open the barn doors and escaped on the edge of a cloud of dust as the building buckled behind my fleeting shoes.

Sam laughed fiercely at the sight of my fleeing, frightful face and lost control of his balance, his body collapsing to the red dust.

“You think that’s funny?” I scolded. He couldn’t stop laughing long enough to answer me. “Why are you laughing?” I asked. “You’re dead.”

He dusted off his hands. “This is Earth. Everyone’s been dead for years,” he said inertly. “Just like you.”

                I looked around at the barren landscape. Everything had died. “Of course,” I agreed, “that’s why everything is dead. The whole planet is dead!” I scratched my head and considered the possibility.

                “There’s no one to take care of it. It’s uninhabitable anyhow,” Sam reinforced as he brought himself to his feet and dusted off his coat.

                “No, no, that can’t be. My friends are here. My family is here.”

                “It’s all just your perception,” he said. He frowned and jostled his hands. “You know your memories. You keep reliving your thoughts, but your ability to differentiate thought from reality died with your body. You can’t reason anymore.”

                “What? What are you saying?”

                “You can stay here if you want, but all this will be gone soon. There’s an asteroid,” he pointed at the sky. “Everything will be destroyed. You’re living on borrowed time,” he fabricated a smile.

                “Why would I want to be saved by you? Why would I trust my life to you?”

                “Is that what you were thinking when you put that knife in your gut?” he asked and blew smoke out his mouth, his eyes staring down the ridge of his long nose like I a special  specimen. “You have to come with me; you’re not happy. You killed yourself to get away from this.”

He analyzed and judged, but I was secure with myself. I was not the uninvited one. 

“Well, I guess you care about your cross more than you care about getting to Heaven,” he tossed the cigar away.

                “Heaven?” I asked. “What do you know about Heaven?”

                “I was there,” he said. “I saw the light.”

“So this isn’t Heaven.” I said as I paced in the acid rain. “I never saw the light. Of course.” I threw back my head and looked at the grey sky.

                “You’re lost,” he said. He shook his head. “When you killed yourself, you messed things up. You see, you’re not God. You don’t get to decide that.”

I shook my head. “I never had a chance anyhow. The world would have kept me running, until I was used up, all the while holding my aspirations over my head, urging me to continue my suffering for the sake of ideals I feigned belief of in exchange for social acceptance.”

                “You’re looking at it all wrong,” Sam said.

                “I’m happy with my independence,” I stated.

                Sam scratched his big chin.  “What’s the big deal, anyway?”

                “I won’t disregard my perceptions. I can’t keep marching blindly, pretending that hope is not a horse whip designed to keep me working.”

“You can’t stop the inevitable,” he said. “This world is fading as time trucks along.” Steam rose out of the dirt as the acid disintegrated the bio-matter. “It’s only a matter of time before you expire,” he said. “You’re not prepared for the reality to come. You need my fellowship.”

  Lightning struck nearby and I fell to the ground. Sam’s eyes widened with fright; his smile faded. Eight orbs escaped the bolt, and Sam turned and ran with incredible speed toward the hills, an orb following behind him.

“The Fellowship was a machine that I didn’t care to be a cog of!” I yelled from the ground after him. “This is my Heaven!”

Sam changed direction hastily; veering down the hill at a right angle in an attempt to avoid the orb’s destructive path, but the orb also changed directions and tailed the fleeing mobster. Suddenly, shredding through his coat emerged venous, featherless wings like a pterodactyl.  He flew into the sky, disappearing into the clouds with intense, random flaps of his wings, the translucent orb mimicking his path closely behind him like a heat seeking missile.

I sat in the acid storm as the red dust rose around my neck. I scratched my dry head. I felt my way to the pile of rubble, and climbed on it to get a better view of the landscape. Dust rose higher as the rain dumped down.

Sizing up the landscape and the house in the distance, I decided it would be too risky. I would get lost, I thought. The dust over my head; I would have to wait it out.

Abruptly, I heard a voice; my mother. “Derek? Derek? It’s time to come in for dinner.”

“Mom!” I yelled. “I can’t make it, mom. I’m stuck out here. The dust is too high.”

“Well, okay, Derek. I’ll keep it on the burner so it doesn’t get cold.”

The screen door slammed.

I climbed into the rubble as the dust storm grew fiercer. It seems like I’m forgetting something, I told myself. I tried to remember, but the thought had left me.

I stared at the boards like I had once done with the clouds and tried to see if the patterns looked like anything. The rings look like the shroud, I thought.

I ran my fingers over the darkened grooves—over His nose, His beard. “Does He exist?” I thought aloud. “Why hasn’t He come for me?”

As the words escaped my mouth, the massive cumulonimbus cloud thinned, the bulk moving north along the jet stream, the acid rain like a giant gray wall departed, plowing over the distant hills.