MEMP’IS
BOOK
SIX – “MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE”
(Sunday
{Venuday}, January 7, 2035, and After)
Norlin steps off the bus...
breaking a thin crust of ice covering a vast, black, ankle-deep mudpuddle that
covers the disembarking bays all the way to the steps of the otherwise-empty
station. Swearing and shivering, he
splashes and sloshes to the steps as the bus pulls away, dousing him with a
dirty, knee-high tidal wash. The station
is not entirely empty; one goat, wandering and bleating among the benches
regards the trespasser... Norlin squints, but there's
no telling whether it's related to the beast he remembers from the Tulane
Hotel. It lowers its head to drink from
the six dirty inches of water under a sign on the drawn ticket window: BUY ALL
TICKETS ABOARD COACHES. Walking stiffly
towards the back door, the Corporal looks out onto an empty street of rotting
riverfront saloons and boarded-up clothiers and chandlers... underwater, maybe
to the knee, but navigable over a crooked network of planks. The cusp of a weak, pink sun peeks over the
river at the submerged end of the street, illuminating the ruined remains of a
distant bridge - nobody's around, so he opens his pants and takes a long, unsurveilled and uncollected whizz into the water, then
makes his way to the nearest West Memphis drinking establishment. A handful of drowned-looking river rats
huddled round chipped, scratched tables suss out the
cop in the newcomer and two of them place protective hands over their
glasses. The barkeep... a balding fellow
with a long waxed mustache (it's WestAmerica, after
all, if barely)... turns an unfriendly eye towards the
Corporal.
"What's
your poison?" he grunts.
"What'cha got?"
Showing long, yellow teeth under his facial hair, he bears
a disturbing likeness to a walrus… tolling off Integrals. "55.
37. 73."
An
old man at the bar begins a wheezing chuckle, head drooping over his glass...
"Fifty-five,"
Norlin says, laying an old Jackson from his father's
cigar box on the bar (as he's heard that a lot of out-of-the-way places in the
Northern republics won't take Baratarian scrip). "And a reference." He taps a finger against the edge of the
bill, as if ready to push it across an invisible frontier. "Someone with a boat who can take me
across the river and keep his mouth shut afterwards."
"Any
keb on the dock'll take you
to the middle of the river. That's as
far as you'll go," the walrus snorts.
"Guys like you been streamin' into town,
like flies, ever since all of that kebbin' Elvis-crap
started up again, but them EastAmies...
they got Memp'is locked up tighter than their lady
President's snatch, heh heh. Remember those quarantines about the plague,
‘fore the k’ball?
Well, there is that WestAmi pillboat that comes round
now and again to engage the enemy. Like
to recreate the battles for Mobile Bay and Vicksburg, they do! Lobbin' shells at
one another, most barely hit the river. Kebbin' Centennial... pilgrim... forget about payin' respects to the King. Ain't been home
since the K'ball..." the publican tugs at his
moustache, "they pretended to dig out the remains, carry an empty coffin
back to Federal City, buried it in what remained of Arlington. Nuthin' home! K'ball opened up the
graves as far east as Nashville; Elvis probably floated down your way, t'tell from all them dooks
claiming to sell bones on the FexMarket. Wound up in the belly of a gator… Chomp! Chomp!…" he
rewards the Corporal with a whiskery leer that turns, suddenly, sober, "or
else a… hey, just forget it. Nothing
there, now, but them Graceland ruins, cops with itchy trigger fingers... not
right in the head... and, well," the bartender lowers his head, "...other things..."
"From them 'sperments… at
the Arsenal," an old eavesdropper lifts his glass in a toast.
"Do
yourself a favor, boy, go back to from where you came. Ain't nobody in
West Memp'is that'll take you across." And the walrus takes out a rag and pretends
to wipe his bar.
Norlin shows another Jackson and
the barkeep glares at his inquisitive old patron, who looks down into his
drink. He lays an index and middle
finger over the two bills, leans towards the Corporal and opens his mouth,
showing those rotten, yellow tusks. The
breath of a derelict marine mammal... fish and alcohol... wafts across the
bar. Jates
knows what manner of life swims in those waters outside, Norlin
shudders.
"Nagrin's been known to take a few across, drops 'em off
downtown on the roof of this ol’ blues joint used to
be the cat’s mee-yow back in the days. Says
it's what he does... ain't none of 'em ever come back… so," the bartender whispers,
performing a dainty flourish with his rag - whisking it over the place where
the money lies.
Norlin nods, the rag whisks up
and the money is gone. "Nagrin, you say?
Where do I find him..."
"Down th'end a' lonely
street," the drunk giggles.
Thick, brown walrus-lips curl in a disgusted smirk. "Ed, you gonna
overhear somethin', someday, get you in trouble,
bad. Down at the end of the block,"
the bartender tells Norlin, "keb
runs the funeral parlor next to the pharmacy.
Oughta stop in there, first," the walrus
muses, "...get yourself some meds.
Quinine, tetanus, penicillin, they got genuine stuff from Poland 'n
Bangladesh, none of that EastAmerican fex... Memp'is, well, it's a kebbin' unhealthy place,
in more ways than you can think of. Tell
the chymist Max Black sent you, he might be willing
to sell you other things, you know? Some
waders, too, so's you can die with your boots on... heh heh..."
Twenty minutes later, the sun teeters over the river like a
shaved, pink tennis ball and Norlin sloshes out of
the pharmacy in his new waders, dry-swallowing a handful of pills as he
navigates the planks arrayed in an increasingly desolate, random order as the main
street merges with water, waist-deep now.
There is a black motorboat tied up to a dock behind the funeral home
(which advertises, also, taxidermy and taxes prepared) and only six inches of
watery swill sloshing under Norlin's gumboots, once
he's mounted two steps to the door.
Inside, an ancient, swarthy fellow decked out in full late-Elvis regalia
and a turban fastened with an enormous, fake ruby reposes in a white
satin-lined coffin. The coincidence is
so appalling that Norlin doesn't hear the funeral
director creeping, looming up behind him... a tall, gaunt spectre
in black, holding his top hat at his side in a gesture of respect for the
deceased.
"Not exactly the King, but Omar did attend one of the
last concerts, in Vegas. Says he did, at any rate... nobody left
to dispute him now."
"You're the ferryman?" Norlin
guesses.
"John Barron Nagri? I am he."
"Heard you could take a pilgrim
'cross the river," the Corporal ventures, fighting down the urge to
recourse to panicked flight... it was a funeral
parlour (tho' not like this one) at the root of his and Max
Bend's annihilation.
"As far as what used to be
downtown Memp'is - I can. Boys on the river let me tie up to the roof
of what used to be Sun Studios... after that, it's a one-way journey, I'm
afraid."
"How much?
"How much do you have?" the stork replies
Norlin pulls the rest of his money
from his pockets, counts it.
"Couple hundred..."
"That'll
do. You'll not need money, where you're
going... give me a hand with ol' Omar, now, he's
goin' to Memp'is too. Last of the local Taliban Lodge – that would
be seven thirty six.
Sun's comin' up - an' I ain't
talkin' ‘bout the studio. Wouldn't do to get caught out on the river
once the fog burns off..."
So
they wrestle the imposter's coffin off its pedestal, float it across the
funeral parlor and out the back, tying it up behind the black boat. Soon enough, they are venturing out onto the
icy Mississippi... silent profiles, shrouded in fog. Norlin ventures
conversation only once...
"Say,
you wouldn't have helped out this fellow th'other
day... tan jacket, messy hair and freckles, lotsa
freckles, maybe startin' to fall apart, stink a
little... might go by the name of Frank, or, maybe, Frankie..."
"I
choose not to disclose particulars about my clientele... my sentient clientele, that is," Nagrin reproaches him...
"No
problem, Frankie ain't, well, wholly there... know what I mean?... and he has
other ways of getting where he wants to go, where his boss wants him to go, that is."
The storklike ferryman glares back,
impassively. "Sorry I bothered
you," Norlin frowns. "But, then... never mind..."
The
riverfog hasn't burned off - in fact, it seems to
have thickened by the time that Norlin and John
Barron Nagrin achieve deep water. The pre-k'ball gasoline
motor putt-putting as the undertaker and his passenger embark out upon the
wide, milky expanse… the white casket and its white-clad, turbaned voyager
tightly secured with ropes… Norlin lifts a hand,
waves it before his eyes, barely visible.
Of Nagrin, barely a yard distant - steering,
apparently, by instinct - only the ghostly outline of the stovepipe rides above
the thickest fog.
"Take
many pilgrims this way?" the Corporal attempts conversation.
"My
share," a distant voice replies, after a spell.
In the middle of the Mississippi, they cross the path of a
police boat perhaps a hundred yards distant... bellowing foghorns, red and blue
flashing lights... but the undertaker's black motorboat is almost wholly silent
and completely invisible, so they vanish, again, into riverfog,
soon emerging among the ruins and rooftops of downtown Memp'is. There is occasional movement on a rooftop or
within one of the buildings flooded to about three floors' height... but it is
so sudden and the air still so moist and foggy that Norlin
knows only that something dwells
here, still.
"My original parlour,
was..." Nagrin points... the crooked dactyl
black with gravedirt as is his tall positivist hat
(and Norlin can almost smell the thin stream of steam
rising from bloated riverdead as the undertaker's
finger wags upriver towards the melted bluffs)...
"There! And, over there," his
finger roams, "the firmament I plowed and seeded until the k'ball shook all my labours from
their rest like squirrel-sequestered acorns leaping up in their Armani; wedding
weeds, chrysanthemum pajamas. Of a
career of enterprise: ruin! What
mushroom of rotted hats and hairpieces, human vocal organs - of sounds and stinks
and the new artifice of clever, mountainous fusion..."
"You were a farmer?"
"I owned, and managed, a garden of repose. A cemetery," Nagrin
corrects his passenger.
"Sir?" Norlin points...
"They dust our enterprises, swindlers of the worm,
tightwads... we gobble and fex, then deny nature its
due... only the slow, anhydrous desiccation - prime antithesis to pastoral
repose. Crows on the fence! Then, the k'ball,
squeezing denial and its old mushrooms from their crypts like popcorn - loosed,
uprisen morsels to the starvelings of sea and sky in
a Memphis of weeping bowels and bulbous sevenths. Cartoons of ancient debauchery, dried
sausages, discarded guitars. Between the
dark and light," Nagrin addresses his
passengers... the living and the dead... "this foul ground-cloud casts its
evolved neo-Plasmic veil across anxious themes of
strings."
"It is not," Norlin
wonders, "God's fog - nor Triple J's?"
"Plasmacism is that most advanced misticism,"
his Charon replies, "throwing shards of funkhouse
fog over that new credulity which evolution has adorned."
Suddenly,
a brilliant white shaft transfixes the small, black boat - flashing red and
blue lights loom up out of the Eastern fog and an unseen voice bellows...
"This is the EastAmerican
cruiser Hampton. You are in restricted EastAmerican waters... surrender, and identify
yourselves!"
And a barrage of machinegunfire
rips through riverwater only a few feet from Norlin. Nagrin pulls an antique musket from beneath his bench and
stands… a shaky if Lincolnesque profile… firing one volley into the fog. More gunfire and tracers answer. As Norlin ducks,
there is a tremendous explosion and shockflash, in
the midst of which the EastAmerican cruiser stands
momentarily exposed in all its antique menace.
Another amplified voice, this from the West, resonates...
"This
is the WestAmerican gunboat Paget - prepare to be
taken and boarded..."
The
Hampton answers with a volley; the Paget returns fire and, in basso-profundo thunderclaps, flashes and
shockwaves of naval combat, Nagrin steers his black
boat between the warships and into the safety of one of the innumerable,
narrow, flooded streets of the Memp'is waterfront.
"Been at their game… those two!…
oh, a decade, at least," Nagrin informs his
passenger (his sentient passenger, that is, for Omar remains in peaceful repose
within his white enclosure).
"Big guns!" Norlin
ventures.
"Bah!
Mex-American fosfors, concussion grenades -
make plenty of noise and light, but never do serious damage. Why would they want to do that?" the mortician asks,
rhetorically. "The Hampton and Paget are the only two gunboats left on this stretch of river from
the Carbondale docks south to the Baratarian
frontier… one of 'em sank the other, then
what would they do? Why would anybody pay them?"
"That makes a certain sort of sense," Norlin admits as the black boat putters between and beneath
the wraithlike skeletons of commercial Memp'is. "Ain't you
afraid that those EastAmis, at least, might try to
follow us down…"
"They'd know better," Nagrin
smirks and, for once, the Corporal gives thanks that he cannot see the
ferryman's demeanor.
The undertaker is wound up, now. "Down the river, short of Graceland, aways, the kebs were performing
secret experiments at the Memphis Arsenal when the k'ball
hit. Hell erupted, I will tell you, sir,
bloody hell itself… and from that hell, the damned and the despised crawled
out. More than likely, you will
encounter some of them," and Nagrin gives a
ghastly, fluorescent smile through the fogwisps,
"…well, we're here." He
points… Norlin can barely see the tip of a bony
finger stabbing through the fog towards something that looks like a block of
slime punctuated by a metal flagpole and its rotting ensign. The spectral stovepipe hat tilts, then swoops
downward as Death’s ambassador holds it over his heart.
"Seven-oh-six Union... Sam's one-story mountain! Last stop… everybody out!"
Norlin blinks. Ruined office
sentinels loom above greasy tide on three sides - something flashes by a window
in one. The black hat seems to return to
its perch of its own accord, a skeletal finger points downward. "Elvis recorded his best. Down there…"
Norlin blinks again, looking past
the bobbing white casket into the watery depths. "In Hell?"
"Sun Studios.
Grab hold of that rope there, the one by your knee…" Nagrin says as his craft scrapes bottom on the roof of the
building, "give our fellow a tug."
He vaults out of the boat like a hungry spider, and begins untying the
white coffin. Somewhere to the west,
beyond the shimmering frieze of moss-draped, flooded-out office towers, the
naval battle continues with explosions and the occasional burst of light as the
undertaker loosens the white coffin - belaying it by a single dark rope as he
advises Omar, "…end of the line, fellow."
"How the keb am I supposed
to get to Graceland?" Norlin carps as he lets
more rope slip through his fingers.
"Determined,
aren't you, boy! Should've thought about
that before we set off..." Nagrin sneers, "…tho' I
guess I can bring you back, since you appear
to be admitting failure...
"Th'
keb I am!"
(But Norlin's policely
determination's leaching away as he glances down at the coffin, bobbing in the
dirty water, now sploshing up to the knees of his
waders... he seizes a passing board from the debris floating southwards, back
towards Barataria.) "You just set 'em floatin' away?"
"What
they paid for. Used to tie them to th’ flagpole but rope rots out quickly here, just delaying th’ inevitable.
Current runs southeast now, take a body right alongside Graceland's
gates, maybe they even rub up against the King's old ruin itself. Most don't, of course, I've made a deal with…
well, we call 'em the boys… they leave my customers alone till they pass on by
the Arsenal, then... well... even a mute or phibe's
got to eat.
Norlin swallows back his disgust,
grasps the board tightly and straddles the coffin before it can float
downstream. Stepping back into the black
boat, fading into the fog... Nagrin, a ruined Lincoln
in graveclothes, removes his high hat and calls out his Jatesist
hail and farewell...
"Health! Security!
Property!"