Guernica Night

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Who can resist the Final Trip? Earth in the twenty-third century is adorned with corpses as suicides ravage a dehumanised population, compelled to live, or merely exist, in segregated complexes. Despite the technical wizardry of the Church of the Epiphany and the dictates of the unseen rulers, more and more people seek the ultimate exit. One man probes the social disease, but he too fights that dreadful and permanent seduction. If he succumbs, the victory of the Oppressors would be complete.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 128

Sample

Here we are in Disney Land/Disney World. Disney Land or Disney World; hard to make the changes on these – one in California,
the other in Florida – but the continent has become spliced, as we know, and Disney, God rest him at the age of sixty-five
and through eternity, believed in the controlled and timeless environment, stripped of any conception of space. Disney was
right. This is the concept that must be held at all costs, unless, of course, you hold that he is wrong, which is also a possibility.
Right. Wrong. California. Florida. Here we are: this is the point.


Here we are in Disney Land/Disney World; clutching the strange hands of those with whom we came, we move slowly through the
ropes under the chanting of the attendants, swatting at the insects of habitation, toward the exhibit of the martyred President.
The martyred President has become a manikin activated by machinery, tubes and wiring; he delivers selected portions of his
famous addresses, stumbling back and forth upon the stage, his plastic joints trembling off-rhythm, and this proves that history
can be not only educational: it can be genuinely entertaining. There is a certain anxiety. It is near closing time, and we
fear that the exhibit will be shut before it is our time to pass through the lines; how could we return to our homes, our friends, without being able to say that we have seen the exhibit of the martyred President? It is impossible
for us to make this admission; we would be the laughingstock of the neighborhood if we admitted that we had gone to Disney
Land/Disney World without seeing that for which he is most famous (having already ridden the monorail, which is a very distant
second choice), but lying about it would be most difficult. We would be quizzed on details very closely, as are all returnees
from the Disney exhibitions, and sooner or later our ignorance would be shown; we would stagger up against the recollection
of one who knew better … and what then would there be to say? One can hardly come to grips with this.


The sky, a dense inverted bowl, falls tightly over the World or Land of Disney tonight. At all costs Disney wanted a controlled
environment, but he was not able, up to the point of his death from cancer, to figure out a way to keep the atmosphere itself
out; given a little more time, he would have worked out something … but now the air, laden with insects and small heat flashes,
presses on us closely; for a moment there is that discommoded sense of a certain lurch toward collapse; irreality seems to
embrace us … a small explosion of fatigue at the end of a long day. Not to think of it. The line is moving now, the attendants
whisking us along, and just as we think that we will not get into the exhibit this time but will surely make it on the next,
we are allowed through – the very last, in fact, of the throng to get in – and as we move through the ropes into the passageway
the feeling of fatigue passes. It is impossible that we could have ever felt faint. It was merely the anticipation. Now that
we are in, now that we are going to see the exhibit, that weak sensation goes away, and we sense little burbles of laughter
beginning to move viscously inside. We feel fine. Everybody feels fine. Children are smiling. Over us is the smooth bulkhead
of the building; the cooling climate system of Disney whisks its way through us. Strangers and family, friends and acquaintances
jostle around us as we move down the ramp and into an auditorium, take a seat at a high place in the last row. We look through
the auditorium and see that every face here is that of someone we know, if not from a long time ago, then from quick meetings
in the corridors of the other exhibits. Nods are exchanged, little waves, greetings. Fingers prod at our hands, and we prod
them back. The lights glisten, then fall away, and we are in the darkness. Far down on the stage the curtains part. The dead President shuffles forward. The dead President raises his hand. The dead President begins to move
on the stage, side to side, and from behind him comes the sound of anthems. He greets us.


We listen to him. The darkness draws us together, and truly never have we felt so close; never have I felt so close – I must
admit this – to myself, to some sense of the nation which joins me together as the President begins to speak. Phrases roll
limpidly from him; his gestures are rather mechanical, but then again, bathed in the spotlight, his visage is very lifelike,
his flesh of an excellent hue. The music rises. He continues.


Listening to him, we feel that we are on the verge of an insight; an insight so deep and strange, true and final that it will
eclipse everything that we have known before, every portion of our lives, and in this attitude it is easy to understand Disney’s
genius as well; his ability to give us the past in a way that will become our future. And so, in perfect harmony, accord,
we listen and listen, the little figure yanking itself around the stage and, as the rifle fire begins, leveling at his neck,
then temple, in the old and accustomed way. It is with a sheer outcry of love that we watch him fall toward the stage as the
cleansing fires begin … and the walls of the exhibit fall away from us; they dissolve utterly, leaving us in Disney Land/Disney
World forever, and as the insects come over us, it is as if we too have become artifacts, the insects muttering secrets into
our ears that will in turn activate us someday so that we, actors, may create new histories for the future.


Accelerator to the floor: make the engine wail. From the tapes, I hear what seem to be the glossy sounds of copulation, although
they are only – I must know this – songs from the past carrying me home. Down the abandoned corridor of 1-80 we whisk like
bugs, Sherry and I, one of her little hands pressing the pit of my groin, the other raised to the panels of my cheek, her
gracious teeth imprinting a pattern upon my earlobe which neatly augments, addresses those sounds, although it is difficult
to separate impressions. Life is a totality. Like a great hunk of meat, it hangs loose and flapping against the wall of consciousness.
Try to take out one part, examine it, and the blood spurts.


A rabbit, maddened as if in refraction of my own heat, scoots from one side of the road to the other. I pick him up for an
instant in the lights, little steam vapors coming from the animal as he is locked into frieze; then, with a dull splat, a
diminished and diminishing seventh of the spirit, I hit him, send the body spinning high to the grasses. It becomes another
part of the dark.


Sherry shakes in her seat, catches her breath – frozen little bitch – and then exhales coolly, evenly, my eardrum baking to
her temperature. The speedometer of the Cadillac is at seventy; a fair reading this: I have it calibrated for error at no more – no more, mind you – than five miles per hour out
of the first sixty. The system worked out with the Cadillac up on blocks in the hidden enclosure, huffing gray at me, the
vapors exciting. Once again she presses. The heat is building; my lust is atmospheric but no less real for all of that.


‘Sid, oh, Sid,’ she says. My wizened genitals respond to her pressure with a heartbeat of their own – whisk, whisk, whisk
under the tapestry of cover. ‘Oh, Sid, you shouldn’t have done it to that poor little thing,’ and impulse seizes me, or perhaps
it is merely some lyric poured from the radio, something about loving and craving. I jab on the brakes irrhythmically, the
vacuum stoppers hissing, the car beginning to tremble into a long, slow glide, and then we are bouncing and rattling on the
shoulder of 1-80, the dead stones coming under the ornament of undercoat, devils slinging little pellets at the base of the
car. In her gasp is astonishment. ‘What are you doing?’ she says. ‘What are you doing to us now?’


Silly. Silly, silly, wretched little bitch, what does she think I am doing? But I conceal my tongue within the damp corridor
of mouth even as her hand dodges, and the car – all two and a half tons of wasted, gnarled metal, a true and cunning artifact
resurrected by me – settles to collapse on the side of the road. I extend a fist, then splay it into a hand, and bring her against me, feeling
the thin steam again coming from a thousand pores of her body, her empty little breasts darting up and down my arm like insects.
Always at the moment of imminence I am obsessed by scatological images; someday I will confide this to the Group.


‘What do you think I’m doing?’ I say. ‘What do you think this is, anyway?’ and cut the headlights instantly. Now we are in
a dark, deep cubicle, some compartment of the spirit, the engine dead, the radio dead, my heart alive and filled with necessity.
And I say, ‘I’m going to take you, that’s what I’m going to do,’ feeling at once the treacherous contraction of her flesh
as she moves from me, leaning now on the door opposite, her eyes two spots in the darkness. Momentarily I hit the transfer
point and am deep within her head; I know exactly what is passing through her mind, and it is as if the words are imprinted
on some teletype of the synapses. Fear, disgust, loathing, uncertainty fall against one another like clowns as the strips
come from the teletype; holding them together is that bright red string of mindless desire which controls her life. Which controls all of them, for truly, truly, they are receptacles and can be
seen in no other way.


‘No,’ she is saying now. ‘Sid, you can’t do it; we can’t do this now,’ and that is all I need to hear. I am now inflamed,
monstrous, leveled by strength – to say nothing of conviction – and I move across the seat on the pedestal of buttocks, feeling
them jutting into the seat as though they were little legs carrying me home (I am liable to sudden lurches of insight such
as this – it is a condition of my brooding, rather visual intelligence – but undue credence should not be placed in them),
and my hands strike forward in impromptu salute: one! two! arcing to touch the dull planks of her shoulders, her body all wood and planes within my grasp; but no matter, no matter
at all: she will soften yet.


‘Ah,’ she says, ‘ah God, no,’ and I seize a breast, touch it underneath the cloth; then, in a rending motion, tear her blouse
aside and hold the other in my free hand. Her little hands twitch and flutter against the roof panels as I feel that turgid,
familiar rising below, and then, at the moment of presumptive entry, there is –


– A sudden reversal of impulse, a falling away, contraction, woe and dead below the waist, my groin feels imploded as if slivers
of metal had been pierced. It has all happened before. I hold myself in that frozen posture against the window, allowing her
to bang and rattle against me. Suddenly not interested, my eyes turn to the now-accustomed dark, and I look out upon the vast,
deserted plains of New Jersey, seeing imaginary curls of brown filth come from the stacks of refineries long departed, industry
that now seems bucolic. Strange: it is strange, but at this moment of ultimate connection, I feel myself no longer to be a
man but a machine, some creation of the departed age of technology dreaming amidst the loops and wires, the barrels and refuse
of the culture.


‘What’s wrong?’ she is saying. ‘Sid, oh Sid, what’s wrong with you now?’

Little bitch, I think, the little bitch was waiting for it all of the time; even her terror contrived, some necessity of the
glands to heighten her own excitement, some outpouring keyed by metabolism to make her slicker, darker, hotter and emptier.
And I say Nothing, jabbing against her, Nothing is the matter, my thighs moving emptily in some parody of the spasms of intercourse, making their own dull comment … And I can see, moving close against her, that she is looking at me with interest
and concern, with even a bit of awe. She must know that I am strong; she knows that I am . . .