“Then we’re doomed,” I declared, and shoveled a heaping forkful of the delicious three-bean salad into my gob. I didn’t mean we were without hope. Even as a one-ton chunk of limestone cornice falls from ten floors above and you stand directly under it, puzzling over the meaning of the swiftly growing shadow on the sidewalk, there is still hope. If I’d thought there was no hope, I would have put aside the bean salad and gone straight for the cinnamon-pecan rolls that waited as dessert. “Doomed,” I repeated.
Bridget knew what I meant. While my mouth was full, she said, “Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue. How many Screamers, Nihilim, have they knowingly and unknowingly brought among us?”
Panthea said, “Could be legions. Or not. But when those who govern us achieve absolute power, it always and everywhere leads to insanity and mass murder. Regardless of the numbers arrayed against us, we must resist. If we fail, then the sane among us will die in holocaust after holocaust, along with the madmen and madwomen who hate us for not sharing their delusions.”
Maybe it was time for the cinnamon-pecan rolls.
We ate in silence for a minute or two as drafts stirred candle flames, as salamanders of light wriggled up the walls and slithered across the food laid out before us. Thunder crashing, rolling. Wind-driven rain snapping hard off the corrugated metal roof and walls. In the movies, they call that “atmosphere.” Mother Nature was being Hitchcock when what we needed was the Hallmark Channel. Each bite I took only seemed to leave me hungrier, and the beer did not affect my sobriety, as perhaps no volume of fine food and drink can satisfy a prisoner dining in the shadow of the electric chair.
Sparky had been considering all Panthea told us. “‘Immortal,’ you say. But we killed two of them at a truck stop just yesterday evening.”
“They’re immortal in the first universe. They’ve been condemned to immortality there. But they’re mortal when they come here where they don’t belong. And when they come here, they pass as Rishon.”
To anyone who hadn’t experienced what we’d been through, the conversation would have sounded like teatime exchanges at the Mad Hatter’s table.
Sparky persisted. “Why would they surrender immortality to come here and risk dying?”
Although Panthea had an appetite of someone twice her size, and although in her soft-spoken way she was a powerful presence, in that shadowy room lighted by tongues of flame, she seemed at times as thin and transparent as the diaphanous films of light that passed through the red cut-glass cups to reveal her. “Why risk death? Because in their world, they live in the ruins they made, and they have no capacity to create anything new. They exist to destroy. Destruction is their only joy. That’s the condition to which they willfully reduced themselves when they achieved the complete depravity of the Nihilim. Because in their world nothing remains to be torn down. There’s only rubble and dust. They live in frustration and rage that can never be assuaged. What would it avail them to reduce the remaining rubble to dust, the dust to even finer dust? There’s no pleasure in that. Being immortal, they lack the power to kill one another or themselves. And so they yearn for this second universe, where so much remains to be obliterated, where there are people on whom to impose great suffering, so many waiting to be corrupted and killed—and so many who are already on the path to becoming Nihilim themselves. Having once been favored godlings, the Nihilim know a new creation exists, and they yearn to rise from their universe to ours and be among us, even at the cost of losing their immortality.”
A dire feeling overcame me then, and I took nothing more onto my plate. At first I thought that both forms of choking disquiet—anxiety and anguish—had spoiled my appetite. Anguish is in regard to the known, anxiety in regard to the unknown. The horror of what I now knew and the terror of what might yet be to come were enough to put even a starving man off his food. However, as I listened to the others talk, I realized that fear was not what made me put my fork down. The dire feeling was instead a sense of loss, a recognition that, beginning in Beane’s Diner yesterday afternoon, when the ISA agents bracketed me at the lunch counter, and continuing since then, I’d been slowly robbed of my sense that I lived in a culture that still valued reason above unreason, civility above rote invective, which had once been the case. I wanted to be that naive nineteen-year-old kid crafting articles for Arizona! magazine and dreaming about writing a novel, but there was no way back to him.