he was sorry to see her go.
There was only one person bowling, someone dressed in what, at this distance, looked like an orange prison jumpsuit. Even a solitary bowler’s game was more than noise enough for Mike in his current state, however. The dopplershifting of the ball rolling down the lane began to say strange things to him—the mouthed and muttered echoes, in some benighted crowd, of unseen actors speaking from a hidden stage, talking of mind viruses and science fiction religions and human fertility cults, telling him that the stars are gods and we are their ashen tears.
Are alien abductions the Zeus rapes of our time? the dopplershifting asked him. Are humans the consciousness of the planet who kill the planet they are conscious of? Is a nervous breakdown like hitting the Reset or Restart button on the psyche?
Is the gravediggers’ dirtpile the positive of the gravehole in the ground, or is the gravehole in the ground the positive of the dirtpile, viewed from the other side?
His food came, blessedly breaking him out of the hastening downspiral of his thoughts. Mike ate, trying to concentrate on nothing but what he was eating. That activity, at least, was enough to fill his senses and his mind while the experience lasted.
He had just finished eating, laid out his money for the bill, and leaned back to relax and digest, arms outstretched atop the curved back of the booth, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey,” said a pale, hippo-corpulent man dressed in orange prison coveralls, “want to bowl a few frames? Knock ’em dead?”
Mike stared up at the man. His complexion was the color of bloated meat maggots. His eyes, behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, were the yellow-brown of grub worms’ heads. His visage squirmed under long, wild, muddy gray-white hair that seemed as unhealthfully alive as a nest of poisonous snakes. The man and his appearance struck paralyzing fear into Mike’s heart, so much so that he could only nod mutely in response to the bowler’s request.
The pale, bloated bowler watched diligently as Mike traded his street shoes for bowling shoes, then signed for Mike to follow him. Walking along past the empty lanes, Mike could not help noticing that the pins were in fact people frozen in the same rigid, repeated stance. The bowling balls in the returns, too, were human skulls.
Once they reached the lane on which the bloated bowler had been warming up, the game began. They bowled frame after frame. Mike felt terrible as he bowled each skull down the alley and sent the rigor-stiff pin-people flying—especially when he glimpsed the ghoulish, robo-zombie pinsetters working behind the scenes, then the reaper’s scythe coming down and clearing the pins at the end of each frame—but he bowled his absolute best nonetheless, sensing that quite literally everything was at stake.
His pale, bloated opponent grew more and more furious as Mike maintained a slim lead into the final frames. At last the corpulent competitor could bear it no longer. In fit of rage the bloated, maggot-skinned man snatched off his glasses, ripped off his own head, stuck his middle and ring fingers into his eye sockets and his thumb into the mouth, then gave the ball of his head a carefully aimed and mighty heave.
The flop-haired ball roared down the lane, shaking the whole building as it went—or rather, the world was shaken by the thunder not of one ball moving down one lane, but of infinite and innumerable bowling balls moving down infinite and innumerable lanes. The instant all those myriad balls struck their ten-times- myriad pins, a mighty blast obliterated everything, the explosion hurling Mike cruciform into the air, sending him flying until his left shoulder caught on something.
“Hey,” said someone, shaking his shoulder. “Sir. Sir!”
Mike woke to see, bent toward him, the waitress and a balding man in a dandruff-speckled suit with a tag that said KARL, MANAGER. Karl was shaking his shoulder and talking. “We’re glad you liked our food and feel so comfortable here, but if you want to go on sleeping you’re gonna have to find a hotel. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, rubbing his eyes and mouth, looking around. The bowling alley was empty, except for the three of them. No one was bowling. “Okay.”
Getting his gear together, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for nearly two hours. Getting up to leave, he noticed that the bowling alley now looked far more tawdry than surreal. Mike thought he must be coming down from the KL the driver had given him—a realization that brought him much relief, but also a little regret.
He had trusted to the kindness of strangers and it had gotten him a night out bowling with Death. Are we having an adventure in moving yet? Mike asked himself with a smirk. He’d had enough adventure for one trip, and enough trip for one adventure. Before he walked out of Reno Lanes, he asked the waitress for directions to the nearest bus station. She was only too happy to provide them.
* * * * * * *
A Shadow on Her Present
Catching Marty blissfully slow-convulsing on some perverse mix of alphanumeric chemicals—“delta nine and 5-MeO DMT,” as his trip-sitting derelict buddy Rick explained—had scared and infuriated Lydia at first. Now, however, with Mary okay and Rick ushered out of the apartment, Marty’s secret drug escapade and Lydia’s own unexpected return from a weekend out of town had combined to provide her with a pretext for something she should have done weeks before.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Marty said, pleading with her.
“I don’t want you to do whatever I want you to do!” Lydia said, shaking her curly dark hair vigorously about her head, letting him hear the frustration rising in her voice.
She looked at Marty and saw his eyes filling and reddening to a very different color than his full head of red hair. Oh God, he was starting to cry on her. Obviously, their sleeping together for the last month and a half had meant considerably more to him than it had to her.
“Look, Marty,” she said, taking him into her arms to comfort him and also so she wouldn’t have to see the tears that were beginning to trickle down his face. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve had together, but your drugging out and hanging around with Rick just confirms what I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now. Your life’s just too chaotic. I’m afraid it could never work. I need stability in my life right now. We can’t keep going on this way. I hope we can still be friends, but we just aren’t compatible in the long run. You can see that too, can’t you?”
He blubbered something that sounded affirmative. She gave a slight sigh of relief. This might turn out to be easier than she’d expected. She hugged Marty and comforted him for a while longer, thinking that she would never have gotten involved with a man nearly half a dozen years her junior—a second year graduate student in comparative literature, at that—if she hadn’t been on the rebound from breaking up with Tarik.
Not that breaking up with Tarik had been a bad thing. Lydia had lived with him for nine years, after all. It had been because of Tarik that she’d moved to California from the East Coast in the first place. He’d wanted to pursue his ambitions as a folk-punk musician and she had been his overweight and insecure “biggest fan.” Not long after their arrival, she and Tarik had survived and bonded more deeply together amid the devastation wrought by the Great Los Angeles Earthquake, the so-called Niner Quake.
Both of them had seen the madness of bright-shining angels and UFOs at that time—and had been deeply relieved to learn that, the statements of UFO or angel believers notwithstanding, those sightings were most likely not supernatural but natural, side-effects of the earthquake’s sudden tectonic stress relief. The slippage of all those miles and depths of granite, with its embedded quartz, had piezoelectrically
