Last Cup of Sorrow #4
Suit set down the bottle and this time picked up the cool hunk of metal...sighted it on one of those torus-like larvae.
He rasped, “You don’t belong here. You and your...towers.”
But even if he pulled back on the trigger and destroyed one of them, how much would that accomplish in the larger scheme of things? It would be like launching an arrow at the sun.
Still, it would be something, if only something symbolic.
***
Saturday evening, the weather having become clear.
When he set out, the sky was tinged a deep, almost unnatural violet.
Maybe the sky just seemed unnatural to him, unearthly, because he seldom went outside at night anymore.
This time he wasn’t afraid of doing so, because he had the tarnished old revolver with him.
Suit had been thinking about how those three larvae had formed last night, as if he’d unwittingly lured them into manifesting upon the tower.
He had decided that tonight, it wouldn’t be unwitting.
He knew a place in town where there were more than just two towers.
Suit pulled his battered secondhand car over to the side of the road under the fringe of evergreen trees that bordered the town reservoir.
Between the line of trees and the edge of the hushed, lapping water was a narrow dirt path where in the day men stood fishing, and people walked their dogs.
Suit remembered bringing a girlfriend here when he was seventeen.
His car then had been even more battered than this one.
He’d hoped to kiss the girl, Kristina, had leaned over to do so, but she’d giggled and slipped out the passenger’s side door.
Well, at least they’d walked along that dirt path together, and back again, holding hands.
How old would Kristina be now? Twenty-eight? Seventy-eight?
It wasn’t the reservoir he’d come to see, though.
Across the road from it was a bare patch of dirt gouged from the side of a sloping, wooded hill.
Rooted at the side of the road here, like another fringe of trees, stood a row of six identical communication towers.
They were newer than those across from his apartment, apparently, none of them having sagged or crumpled.
He could feel their hum ringing his spine like a tuning fork, before he’d even stepped outside his car.
He wished he’d brought his vodka bottle with him, to kill off its final third. But he was also glad he hadn’t. His mind was sober and sharp, if frighteningly so. So much so that he questioned his decision to come here. Still, here he was...and it was better to be lucid.
He wore his terra cotta suit, as if he had stopped here on his way to work. Very formal. This was serious business. Or maybe it was because he had remembered Judy again. This is for you, Judy, he thought.
He looked both ways, though the road was devoid of traffic here on the rural outskirts of town, then crossed over to that rough dirt patch.
He hoped no bored policeman would cruise down this road and spot him or his dark parked vehicle.
How could he explain his presence here? The handgun in his suit jacket's pocket?
Suit stood directly under the looming towers, leaning back to gaze up at them.
He swore the fillings in his teeth ached from the hum.
By now the sky had gone from violet to black.
The town’s ambient glow didn’t extend this far; the skeletons of black metal were barely discernible except where the web of their struts obscured the scattered powder of stars.
Perhaps to prevent sleepy or drunken drivers from veering off the road and ramming into the towers, a low barrier had been erected in front of them: an old telephone pole set horizontally into supporting brackets.
Suit sat down upon it, his head still cocked back as he tried to make out the cups at the top of the half dozen structures.
They vibrated constantly, he knew; he’d witnessed that effect in the past, elsewhere.
It always gave the dishes a slightly blurred appearance, which didn’t help him make them out now.
Kristina had been quite the rare bloom, he remembered.
Her father the wealthy owner of a series of chain stores in Mexico, her mother a Russian mail-order bride.
The mother and daughter had run away from the father, eventually, settled here in this obscure town of all places.
Honey blond hair, had Kristina, and a formidable jealous temper...
though it had been she who had soon enough abandoned him for another boy.
Her hand had been warm. Sweaty at the creased nexus of its center, because it had been summer when they’d come here, as it was now.
That fleeting human connection had been one of the greatest experiences of his life and it speared him now to recall it.
He expected never to know anything like it again.
Suit’s head drooped. He hadn’t had enough sleep last night; just that doze on the porch. He hadn’t eaten enough today. Something microwaved; he’d already forgotten what it had been. He was weak...the hot night air and the gravity of memories lulled him...
Up jerked his head. “Fuck!” he hissed, realizing that he’d blacked out. For how long?
Long enough, he saw, when he looked up. Only one tower didn’t have a translucent torus coiled around it, up near the tapered neck where it flared into the dish. One tower had two loops...and the tower furthest on the right sported three larvae.
Suit stood up slowly, warily, his rump sore from sitting on the telephone pole, his back sore because he was middle-aged.
He’d come here precisely for this, but he again half regretted it. He should be home right now watching some mindless romance or action movie, slugging his vodka, waiting on the end of his days...time like a lion gripping him patiently in its jaws.
A low shape nudged its way out of the underbrush at the edge of the scooped-out area in which the six towers stood.
A second glass dog appeared at the top of the little hill into which this spot had been hollowed out, and poised there, glistening even in the near absence of light.
Suit whipped around, having detected a stealthy crunching of pine needles, and saw a glass dog across the road, stealing from between two of the bordering trees.
Its body looked wet. Had it emerged from the reservoir, from which the townspeople drank?
“Okay,” Suit said. His father had told him the gun might come in handy some day, though surely his father hadn’t anticipated anything like this...because surely, despite what Suit had always been told, these creatures hadn’t yet been here when his father was a young man.
“Okay,” he repeated, nodding, slipping the pistol out from his jacket pocket but keeping it down by his leg, not yet fully revealed.
One on his left, skulking closer, eyeless yet focused on him…
another skidding down the dirt and tumbling pebbles of the scooped-out hollow...
one dribbling reservoir water along its sides.
Three...wait...one more clambering headfirst down the furthest right of the six towers.
One of the larvae there had hastened to adulthood in only the span of moments...
but then, Suit knew what accelerated aging was like.
Four dogs? He realized he only had six cartridges in the handgun’s cylinder; had brought nothing to reload it with. Okay...only six, then. He would just have to make do.
The dogs were excited, and the vibrations they themselves now produced in his head – that metallic cicada buzz – combined with the hum of the communication towers. The combination was mounting...it was almost too much to bear...
They closed in, the glass dogs, encircling him. Wait...another one wet from the reservoir? Five? He mustn’t hesitate any longer.
Suit gave an inarticulate cry, and he began firing without aiming properly. He spun in a circle as the glass dogs charged as one, in their dream-like slow-motion way. The blasts from his gun drowned out the buzz in his skull.
Several of the larvae that had formed on the towers dropped to earth, too, prematurely – sprouting rudimentary limbs before they landed. Suit’s first shot struck one of these, more from luck than skill. The eel of gelatinous flesh thrashed weirdly on the ground before it expired.