Briarpatch by Tim Pratt Read online

  Darrin’s hindbrain generated little pulses of fear and confusion. Nicholas stalked toward two people leaning against a wall near the topless club. The woman was young, hollow-eyed, blonde hair too stringy and dirty to trigger Darrin’s Bridget-recognition sensors. The man was short, thin, black-jacketed, scarf wound around his throat, long-faced and pale in a way that made Darrin think of portraits of dead kings, a face that might be called soulful or dolorous or melancholy, even at rest. “That’s the guy I saw Bridget with,” Nicholas said, and it was like a splash of chill water on Darrin’s brain. He straightened, stared, and stopped, standing by the curb. Nicholas apparently felt no hesitation, existential or practical, and he raised his voice to say, “Hey, I want to talk to you!”

  The dirty-blonde turned and walked away on her high heels. The pale man only looked at Nicholas, not even expectant, hands in his pockets.

  “You’ve been fucking around with my friend’s girl,” Nicholas said, and the man glanced at Darrin for the first time.

  “Oh?” His voice held neither challenge nor even, really, curiosity.

  “Do you know Bridget?” Darrin took a step forward, sober enough suddenly to ask the next, and only important, question: “Can you tell me where she is?”

  “It’s not my place to tell you, Darrin,” he said, but he was looking at Nicholas.

  “You’ll tell him all right,” Nicholas said, all bearish menace, and Darrin felt a surge of affection for him. He could be crass and unsubtle, but Nicholas was a good friend—he might not die for Darrin, but he’d certainly get into a fight for him. Nicholas moved forward, to grab or shove or throttle the man, Darrin never knew. The pale man flicked his wrist, and a long black baton appeared in his hand, matte and telescopic, hidden in a sleeve or pocket in its collapsed state but now opened into three feet of menace. “Stop,” he said, and Nicholas did, holding up his hands, saying “It’s cool, I just want to talk to you.”

  “Please.” Darrin was unable to keep a note of pleading from his voice. “Can you, would you, at least give her a message? Tell her to call? I need to talk to her. The way she left, without a word, I—”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Please, Mr., ah . . .”

  “Plenty,” he said, a word that made no sense, until he elaborated, pinned it down as a name: “I’m Ismael Plenty.”

  “Bridget never mentioned you.” Darrin swallowed. “Was she . . . seeing you?”

  “She didn’t leave you for me, Darrin. She left you for herself, and that’s why she’ll never come back.”

  “Please, where is she?” Darrin took another tentative step toward him.

  “You are tedious.” Ismael sounded like he was agreeing with someone. He shook his head, but in exasperation, probably, rather than in answer to Darrin’s question.

  “You’d better tell him,” Nicholas said, and the man merely sighed. Diplomatic channels exhausted, Nicholas lunged, grabbing for the baton. Ismael ducked, squatted, and brought the weapon around in a hard flat arc, slamming it against the back of Nicholas’s leg, right in the meaty part of the calf. Nicholas fell backwards with a look of drunken outrage, and Ismael straightened up. He stepped lightly toward Darrin, baton cocked back, and said “Next.”

  “You bastard.” Darrin launched himself at Ismael without even thinking. He wasn’t a confrontational person by nature, but he wasn’t going to back off after his best friend was attacked. Fortunately, his rush took Ismael by surprise, and when they collided, Ismael fell hard—he couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds, barely more than Bridget—his baton clattering on the sidewalk. Darrin reared back to kick him, and Ismael scuttled away.

  “Enough,” Ismael said, and ran for the safety of a narrow alleyway. Darrin started to pursue, venturing in a few steps after him, but came to his senses—this could only get uglier if he escalated things, but oh, how he wanted to escalate. He returned to Nicholas, who was rising and wincing. “Fucker,” he said. “Did you see which way he went?”

  “Yeah, he ran into—” Darrin started to gesture toward the alley, but let his hand fall. There was no alley, just a wall, and Darrin wondered just how drunk he was to hallucinate an escape route where there wasn’t one. Where had Ismael really gone? “He . . . just ran off,” Darrin finished.

  “Hell.” Nicholas tugged up his pant-leg, looking at his calf. “It’s bruising already. Fucker had an ASP baton, I’ve seen those at gun shows, the guy who sells blackjacks and brass knuckles has them. He could’ve broken my goddamn leg.”

  “You okay?” Darrin helped Nicholas up, letting him lean against him.

  “Wish I could’ve whipped that guy’s ass for you.” Nicholas’s voice was all regret and chagrin, his anger gone along with Ismael.

  Darrin nodded. Now that his adrenaline was starting to fade, he didn’t feel fear or anger or outrage but simple grey exhaustion. “This didn’t turn out to be as much fun as I’d hoped,” Darrin said. “I appreciate it, but maybe we should just give tonight up as a loss.”

  Nicholas stood straighter. “Fuck no. I’m all right, that prick just knocked the wind out of me. I ever see him again I’m gonna shove that baton up his ass and open it sideways. Come on, I need some painkiller. Beer will have to do.”

  “Nicholas, I don’t know . . .”

  His friend gave him a wounded look. “Don’t let this night end with me getting beat up on the street, huh? I’d be a lot happier if the last thing I saw tonight was a great set of tits instead of that fucker Ismael’s pasty face.” Nicholas grinned, and Darrin let himself laugh.

  “All right, you win, one more dance.”

  “One more lap dance, maybe, I haven’t even bought you some time in the champagne room yet.” Nicholas limped toward the bar, and Darrin paused by the wall where—he could have sworn—the alley had been. Was there a crack, a shadow, a suggestion of a narrow escape? No, nothing at all, and Darrin turned away.

  Orville Jumps, Too

  1

  On the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning in October, Orville Troll stood with his hands on the rail looking down at the waters of the bay, and worried about messing things up again. This would be his last endeavour, and he wanted to do it right, if only to prove he was capable of completing one momentous act in his life without failing. He imagined climbing over the guardrail, tangling his legs in the railing or snagging his coat, slipping and cracking his head against metal, knocking himself unconscious and tumbling in a rag-doll pinwheel down to the bay below. Sure, he’d still die, the result would be the same, but he wanted to go wide-eyed and conscious to death, wanted to look up at the sky and watch the world that had so reliably mistreated him for the past thirty years disappear. So he ran through the physical moves in his head, visualization intended to overcome his innate clumsiness, a lifetime of slips and falls having broken his confidence. He would swing first one leg over the rail, then the other, keeping his grip on the rail with his hands. He would turn to face the bay. A deep breath, because a moment like that, a no-turning-back moment, deserved a breath of contemplation. Then he’d release the rail, step forward, and fall, straight as a plumb bob, and dash himself to death on the water below.

  Orville wondered if any of the tourists on the bridge would notice him climbing over the rail, if anyone would try to stop him, pull him back from the brink, convince him life was worth living. If so, it would be a first. There were days when Orville looked back almost nostalgically on his junior high days, when he’d been picked on mercilessly, because at least then he’d been part of a social order—he’d had a place. As an adult, he didn’t even warrant much in the way of ridicule.

  Orville climbed over the railing, careful, careful, because the way you did things mattered, and he wanted a proper death, exactly the death he’d chosen.

  It was windy on the bridge, fogless, and there were a few boats sailing out on the bay
. What would it be like, he wondered, to have the sort of life where you owned a sailboat, with so few cares that you could take advantage of a clear morning to go out on the water? Orville would never have that sort of life, even if he didn’t kill himself. Orville was a telemarketer—or had been until yesterday, when he walked out of the job—working from a warehouse in Oakland in an echoing space with dozens of other dead-end men and women, selling newspapers, magazine subscriptions, dietary supplements, or whatever else the script indicated. Orville received plenty of hang-ups, of course, and profanity, and he mumbled through his scripts by rote, feeling his soul atrophy a little more with each day. It barely bothered him, anymore—at work, Orville was a talking zombie.

  But yesterday, his last conversation had been different. The computer dialled, someone picked up, Orville asked “Is this Mr. Ismael Plenty?” Upon hearing the affirmative, Orville launched into his spiel. The man at the other end didn’t interrupt, or say anything, until Orville was done, but then he began to speak. There was something strange in his voice: a kind of infinite pity. “Is this your life?” he said. “You make these calls?” He then described his own life: Arctic expeditions, overland caravans, desert nights, tense meals with mortal enemies, fortunes found and squandered, lovers, wine, wonder. Orville listened, rapt, the man’s voice a low enchantment. And the man said, “My friend Harczos used to say that a small life is worse than no life at all, because a small life commits the singular sin of squandering potential. I have lived, and now, I am ready to die. But you have not lived, and by the sound of your voice, by the rustle of your breath in the receiver, by a dozen tiny tells, I’m sure you never will live. And so, I feel compelled to ask: Why do you bother? Why don’t you just kill yourself?”

  Orville’s mouth was dry. “I don’t know.”

  “Come meet me for lunch,” the man said, and named a restaurant within walking distance of the warehouse. “We’ll talk it over, and figure out your next step.”

  Orville didn’t intend to go, of course. Only crazy people asked to meet with their telemarketers. Orville didn’t eat at restaurants anyway, because he had no sense of taste or smell—hadn’t since he was a baby, ageusia and anosmia as the result of early head trauma—and so, for him, eating was just taking on fuel, not a pleasure.

  But when his supervisor yelled at him a few minutes later—Orville had let a call go through without reading his script or speaking at all—Orville tore off his headset and rushed out of the room, out of the job, out into the street. The sunlight was dazzling and merciless. Orville went to the restaurant, just a little sandwich place with outdoor seating, and a tall, narrow-faced man with dark eyes stood and nodded at him. “You’re Orville,” he said. “Sit, and talk with me a while.”

  Orville did. Afterward, he couldn’t remember much of what Ismael Plenty said, but every word had somehow carried great weight, and sitting in his presence had been like sinking into a cloud of dense smoke. Ismael had talked of the commonplace terrors of life, Orville remembered that much. He said happiness was an illusion, that corrosion was the nature of the world ; all lives were miserable, differing only in the degree of their misery. “And your life is miserable to a great degree,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  Orville nodded.

  “Then I ask again,” said Mr. Plenty, leaning in, looking at him seriously, paying attention to him in a way no one ever had before. “Why don’t you kill yourself? If you free yourself from this world, a better world might wait for you beyond. And even if it doesn’t, wouldn’t oblivion be preferable to this?” He stood, threw some bills on the table to pay for his apparently untouched lunch, and said “Ponder that.”

  Orville pondered. Talking to Mr. Plenty had made it all seem clear, as if the man’s aura of fatalism had enveloped Orville, and clung to him even when Ismael himself was gone. Orville went home to his small apartment in a bad part of town, because he had nowhere else to go. He sat up most of that night, flipping through old unsigned yearbooks and sparse photo albums, thinking about his lack of goals or plans, and finally deciding the world would be better off without him—and him without the world. He had, literally, nothing to live or die for, so why not die, since that was easier? He dreaded waking and working in the mornings, and he dreaded coming home to emptiness at night. Weekends were too long and increasingly difficult to fill. He’d lived for thirty years, and had never made love to a woman, never found or lost a fortune, never made a mark nor been noticeably marked himself. Having given life a fair shake, he’d discovered it wasn’t really for him, so why shouldn’t he kill himself? Best advice he’d received in years.

  So Orville stood on the far side of the railing, the last barrier between himself and the chance of a clean death. He wondered if it would hurt, and thought not—from this height, death would surely be instantaneous. He took a breath, prepared himself—and then caught a glimpse, from the corner of his eye, of a woman climbing over the rail and, with far less deliberation, jumping off headfirst. Orville watched with a sick weight in his stomach as the blonde woman in the red coat tumbled the impossible distance to the water below. But when she struck, she disappeared, swallowed utterly, no mark of her passing left behind. It wouldn’t be so bad, then. He’d just disappear, like she had. He did wish he’d jumped first, since he’d spent most of his life following other people, and he’d wanted this to be something he did on his own.

  But it is, he thought. Everyone gets their own death.

  People shouted, pointed, clustered around the rail, and a sailboat began tacking toward the place where the woman had gone in, but there was no way it would be able to reach her or help.

  No one was paying Orville any attention, which was just as well, really. He looked up, into the blue sky, and took a single step off the edge.

  He plummeted, feet first, wind screaming past his ears, eyes watering as he watched the bridge above him recede. The sensation of velocity was profound, but it seemed to Orville that he fell for a long time. His life did not pass before his eyes, and he was glad; his life was behind him now, or rather, above him, and he was falling out of it with great relief. This wind, this giving in to gravity, this onrushing sprint toward death—this was the feeling of freedom. He had no regrets. He did not believe in heaven, or hell, or reincarnation (life would have been better if he’d had the comfort of such beliefs), but he believed in oblivion, and he looked forward to that dreamless sleep in a state where loneliness did not exist even as a concept.

  He looked down at the water, which seemed close and far all at once, with nothing in his field of vision to provide a sense of scale. But he saw something in the water, a luminosity, a pale soft light shining up and out of the bay, a light that seemed not warm, exactly, but rarefied, clean.

  Heaven? he wondered, but before hope or incredulity could follow, he hit the water, feet first. The light was all around him, then, but the pain as his ankles shattered and his legs broke was so tremendous it forced consciousness out, blackness closing over him before the waters of the bay could do the same.

  2

  The first problem was: Orville woke up. He opened his eyes and saw light. But not the soft light that had surrounded him when he hit the waters of the bay, that Heaven-coloured light—this was buzzing fluorescent with too much blue, a cold hospital light.

  There was pain in his legs and ankles, but the pain didn’t seem important—more a distant curiosity than something of any real importance. There were square acoustic ceiling tiles above his head, just like the ones in the telemarketing pen.

  “I’m not dead,” he said, and his own voice seemed far away. He didn’t expect an answer. But a blonde woman in a red coat—so familiar, but who was she?—leaned into his field of vision and sneered. He wondered if she was a nurse, but only in a sort of perfunctory way, because nurses were the sort of people he expected to see in such circumstances, not because she looked anything like a nurse at all.

 
She said, “No, you’re not dead. You should’ve jumped headfirst. You jumped like you were trying to survive a sinking ship, feet first, ankles crossed to keep from smashing your crotch to bits on pieces of flotsam.” She sighed. “Or so I gather from listening to the doctors. I was already gone by the time you made your leap.”

  Orville recognized her, and reached out for her, weakly. “I saw you jump. You survived, too.”

  He couldn’t quite touch her. It seemed like he should be able to—her wrist was there, his fingers there, they should have been occupying congruent space—but there was no physical contact. The drugs must be messing with my mind, he thought, and that was his first understanding that he was medicated, on some painkiller that didn’t actually kill pain but merely made pain seem trivial.

  The blonde woman moved back, out of his field of vision, and turning his head seemed like a Herculean task, so he let her pass from view. Her voice remained, husky and a little echoey, as if she were actually speaking around some corner in a corridor, the sound bouncing toward him through strangely angled acoustics. “Yes, you saw me jump, I guess. But no, I didn’t survive. I did it right, head first, mind cleared, straining toward the light like Ismael told me—”

  The light, Orville thought with a thrill of recognition; oh, if only he’d fallen into and through that light.

  “—but I just died,” she finished, bitterness and bile in every syllable. A sigh. “Well. I didn’t just die. I came unhinged, halfway between here and there, body gone under the water, and the rest of me, the parts that Ismael taught me to separate and hold apart, those are still here. My spirit, if you want to call it that, left behind.”