the writing of john scott ridgway
The weight of Shanky's memories grew slowly over the years, imperceptibly becoming a fantastic boulder that made him slump his shoulders and walk half bent over.
Inside the cold, unyielding granite were traces of all the lovers and pets and parents and friends who'd passed away; their obituaries a ticket into the virtual world where they played through endless loops of behavior salvaged from the bits and pieces of moments remembered.
He feels for a moment the loss of the first woman who broke his heart, Lynette Smith... can see how she wrote the script for all those to come. Every time their eyes and mouth and lives and endless conversations all said this was going to be different, of course... this was going to be the one worthy of the romantic myths of love that he'd consumed in novels and movies and porn.
He thinks of himself at the altar three times... first as a young man, then middle aged, and then this last time... death took her. He remembers a series of film clips of Liz Taylor, taken from what seems like hundreds of weddings, as she says over and over again, "This times it's true love." The same words came out of all of her different faces -- the Black Beauty beauty with the bottomless brown doe eyes,
the middle-aged fatty with obvious signs of drink and drug decay, to her latest air-brushed, surgically enhanced features--as she fights tooth and nail to keep the idea of GRACE out of her aging equation. Her doomed Mantra of love had made him laugh at her at the time, feel superior. Age had taught him, if nothing else, that they were all hypocrites -- living out and criticizing all the same banal ape behaviors.
He starts his car, looks around at a few cars whizzing by and steels himself to wait a few seconds until the light on the corner turned red and created a gap in the endless flow of commuters on Sheridan. He is driving downtown to do what he has wanted to do since he was a middle aged man. A dream he couldn't fulfill without prison, with his luck, had grown along with his years... until there he was covered in the shreds of pictures from his past that told him why he had to get the gasoline and torch the fur store.
He had somehow remained childless through the years, and this had added to his moral circle taking in all sorts of creatures. From the first two kittens he took in onward, his heart had stopped making distinctions between humans and other animals.
He had mourned the passing of those kittens, watched them age and decay so quickly... and he had mourned them as much as his parents. Over the course of his life he had owned twenty-three cats, four dogs, and various hamsters and birds and... He had never been able to see an animal trap without imagining one of his own screaming from the wounds of the snapping metal teeth. When he was a kid, people used to throw red paint on the fur wearers. He had always wanted to do something like that... some grand gesture. Not necessarily about animals, either. Just some grand gesture that would make his life memorable to people. An image for them to play in their minds after he was gone. Blowing up a fur store would work.
Some would say there was a lot of meaning in his act, whether there really was or not. He did love animals, and would have stopped the fur trade in a second if he were somehow declared king of the world, but he had lived long enough to question his motives, to wonder about the deeper subtext to his actions--and to know that he was bombing the store to fulfill some need of his own... the whims of the unseen god of his subconscious were all confusing to him... he had come to accept the belief that they were all tied to some crack in his childhood, the manifests of forgotten slaps and strokes during crucial periods in the genesis of his personality, though the thought hardly brought him any comfort -- the answer, like all the good ones, just left him with a new set of questions.
He pulls the van over in front of a sign with a cartoon of the Fur Fairy, a middle aged looked woman in a fur coat with a magic wand which makes the furs magically appear, rather than the bloody, sordid little truth of screaming animals dying slow and pain wracked, the stench of blood on drying skins, and the soul hardening required to support the heinous.
He found the recipe for the bomb on line in The Anarchists Cookbook. He was surprised how easy it was to create something as deadly as a car bomb. There was no one in the streets, hardly. He watches a lonely cab coming up behind him from about six blocks back. Tells himself that after it passes, he will obliterate his aches and pains... shut down the self for the last dissolution into sleep.
The cab driver looks half asleep as he passes. Doesn't bother looking up at Shanky. He watches the red tail lights shrink away from him. His long, wrinkled and spotted fingers begin to tremble. He chose the store because it was unattached to other buildings, and in the middle of the night he knew the place was empty. He had made sure, too... bought a device from a spy store that let him read the warmth of people inside a building. He had the device along, and had told himself that even through he had checked for people off and on for six months that he would check again this night... He had been about to blow it off.
He aims the black box at the building and slowly scans across. If there was anyone, he would have to blow off his plans. He watches the green screen for signs of body heat and is surprised to find himself hoping for some excuse to call off his grand gesture, and then disappointed when he finds the building lifeless.
He thinks of all the animals who died for the vanity of the vampires, feels a twinge of the usual pathos of acknowledging the beginning of the post-wildlife state of the world... Defiance starts in his chin, grinds his teeth
and makes him determined to at least try to make a difference -- even if it is merely in the way he is remembered as someone who at least tried to stop the madness once...
He had spent his life avoiding conflicts like the one he was about the generate, because of the usual fear of the man throwing him in prison to be sodomized by the ghetto crippled. He whispers to himself, "Time to join the ghosts in someone else’s memory," dials the number of the detonator and listens as the phone begins to ring. . .
The explosion blasts a two foot by three inch shard of metal from the base of the passenger seat straight up into his temple, sheering off the top third of his head. A cosmic breeze blew unseen across the planet and smacked his soul out of his mangled flesh, tumbling him down a dark tunnel that smells like fish. When he struck the bottom, he was surprised to find that wherever the hell he was, he could still feel a pain in his ass.
"Hey, welcome to the after life. Name's Speckled Peersnipple. I've just been looking over your Karmic track record, and it seems that you were quite the mouse killer there at the end. Forty six, including twenty two babies, died in your little explosion." The deep, bass voice comes from his left at first appears to be a talking rock, before his eyes focus and he see's a small grey mouse looking up at him as its whiskers twitched and flickered about. In his tiny paws was a very, very small book.
"Sorry about that."
"Too little, too late. Sucks for you that god is a mouse."
"A mouse?"
"Yes, and for your crimes against his chosen ones, you are going to be eaten alive by opossums with extremely dull teeth, and atrocious mouth odor."
"I just martyred myself to save animals from..."
"Decimation of corpses is how we are looking at that charge."
"So this is hell?"
"For you. I mean, that is a very limited understanding of what we do here..."
"Do any humans ever get into heaven?"
"Infant deaths, mostly."
"How about the others?"
"There have been four."
"Four? Who were they?"
"No one you would know."
"Figures."
"Oh, wait... it says here that you are going to heaven for blowing up the Fur Fairy."
"Really?"
"Yes. Persuante to your cosmic sins, you will, at the time, be mostly a shirt for a lamb... as well as a belt and shoes for a cow."