“Less than what it’s been. After the sex, it’s always less, but it wasn’t less this time.”
“What is this—I finally find a Romeo wannabe, but he’s too inarticulate for the role?”
“I’m not inarticulate. Not usually. I’m just confused.”
She looked at the power lines overhead. Half a dozen songbirds perched and twittered where rats had recently been. “Maybe it’s just the danger, the spice it adds.”
“No, it’s not that. Not entirely. Not mostly. It’s also something else that I don’t know what it is.”
She lowered her gaze from the birds to Kenny. “It’s something else that you don’t know what it is. So when will you know?”
“Maybe never if you go your own way now. Which I’d understand if you did. I would totally understand.”
She stared at him long enough for a 747 to crash in the alley if one was en route. Then she said, “The lunatic bastard burned down my house,” and she dropped her iPhone into the storm drain.
Kenny smiled. He felt great. Considering the trouble they were in, he felt surprisingly sensational. He still needed time to figure out why, but he was beginning to get an idea.
42
While Ophelia Poole and young Colson Fielding are losing hope in the church, both soon to be ready for death and the black waters of the testamentary necropolis, Asher Optime sits at the plank table and applies his precise cursive to the pages of the notebook that is the first of three planned volumes of his world-changing manifesto. For a few hours, he is transported by his brilliant prose, which flows from his pen effortlessly because what he writes is the pure truth. Most philosophers are inveterate liars who build elaborate dams with their dishonest words, but the truth is a mighty river, the power of which can’t be restrained.
Perhaps part of his time at the table is passed in one of the fugues to which he is sometimes subjected, for at one point he feels as if a weight of sleep is sliding off him, and he realizes that he is gripping the pen so tightly that his hand aches.
He doesn’t know how long the coyote might have been keeping him company. He left the front door of the saloon standing open, and the beast evidently wandered in. It lies now in a corner of the room, on its side, and seems to be sleeping, its body twitching and its legs scrabbling at the floor as if it’s running from something in a bad dream. Asher is made aware of the animal only when it cries out in a most miserable fashion, as if in terror.
The creature awakens, scrambles to its feet, and fixes Asher with its baleful yellow stare. Its lush tail is tucked between its legs, and hackles bristle along its back, though it doesn’t growl or advance. Indeed, the beast is shaking violently, as though with fear. As an emissary of Nature, it is here to honor his campaign to eradicate humankind; therefore, it can’t be afraid of him, which means the tremors are evidence of the awe with which it regards him.
Remaining focused on his host, the rangy visitor slinks across the room, pauses in the doorway, and then bolts out of the saloon.
Asher is pinching the pen so fiercely between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand that at first he’s unable to let go of it. He shakes the hand as though the agonizing cramps are the work of stinging bees that must be cast off. The pen is flung away from him, rattling across the table. With his left hand, he massages his right, striving to work the pain out of his fingers.
When he began this session of writing, he poured a double shot of Scotch, a small reward for his devotion to his mission. He is surprised to see the whisky remains untouched. He lifts the glass with his left hand and treats himself to a long swallow, hoping it will relieve the cramping.
When gradually the sharp pain becomes a dull ache, he turns his attention to the notebook, strangely uncertain if this has been a productive afternoon. He’s pleased to see that three pages of a new and inarguable case for the forced extinction of humankind have been added to his manifesto. However, he is surprised and dismayed to discover that following this brilliant beginning, he produced only five pages filled with numerous repetitions of four words, all in lower case and without punctuation: the big dark sky the big dark sky the big dark sky . . .
Indeed, he has been in a fugue state. But as he stares at the pages filled with those words, the obsession represented by the sameness of those many lines doesn’t seem to be something of which he is capable. For one thing, although the cursive is recognizable as his neat writing, it’s subtly different, the strokes sharper than usual, the curves less fulsome than they should be, suggesting that the words struck fear in the writer’s heart or at least distressed him. But Asher delights in the dark sky, is exhilarated by the void between the stars and the end of all things that it portends. It’s almost as if, during that period of blackout, a power other than his own mind controlled his pen, some fearful entity horrified by the eventual heat death of the universe and the following eternal cold that would make meaningless all of human history.