Bleak History Read online

  Scribbler took his guests through a doorway covered by a shabby brown curtain, into what had been a living room. It was now a musty cave of stacked boxes and square-edged columns of mildewed, yellowing magazines bound with string in blocks of exactly twenty issues. The window onto the street was completely covered up by boxes—Bleak only knew the window must be there because this room was at the front of the building. The room's single light, on the coffee table, was from a lamp with a white shade that had been covered in scribbles, mostly in black ink. Here and there on the shade was a red-ink scribble, and the light seemed to make the red ink phrases stand out. Bleak picked out one in red ink: Breslin hemmed in. Did that refer to President Breslin?

  The cluttered coffee table was wedged in front of the black-draped sofa bed. Somewhere an air conditioner worked wheezily, just enough to keep the apartment from being dangerously hot. Scribbler lived in fear of the fire marshal seeing his place.

  He lived in fear of other things too: about twenty prescription-medicine bottles were on a small tray in the corner of the coffee table. Under the clutter, the coffee table was also covered with a black cloth, for the same reason that Scribbler wore black. His graphomania.

  Among coffee cups, empty wrappers for energy bars, and cookies—Scribbler ate almost nothing but one or two energy bars a day, and Oreo cookies—writing implements in mason jars shared the table with a long roll of white wrapping paper. Most of the pens were the cheap plastic, three-way sort, each pen with three different colors, red, blue, and black, depending on which button you pushed.

  Scribbler eased himself onto the edge of the sofa bed, blinking in the cone of light from the lamp. He carefully selected a pen from ajar with his left hand—a pen apparently identical to the others. “This one ought to be good.” His voice was very New York, and he tended to crowd the words together.

  Bleak and Shoella and Loraine stood awkwardly nearby, squeezed like pens into the small floor space.

  “My name is Loraine Sarikosca,” Loraine said suddenly, perhaps hoping for his name in return. “I am here to just...offer the possibility of friendship and...” Her voice trailed off. As if she were wondering, herself, what she was offering.

  Scribbler flicked a look at her, then looked quickly away, as if abashed—he couldn't bear eye contact, Bleak knew. Some form of Asperger's. “I know your name. It's in there.” Scribbler nodded his head at a large plastic paint bucket tucked against a high stack of People magazines; the faces of celebrities on the top magazine were covered with scribbles. The bucket he pointed out was packed with other rolls of paper, standing on end—all covered with scribbles.

  “I see, well, I...” Loraine coughed and rubbed a watering eye. Stifled a sneeze. “Sorry. I've got allergies.”

  “It's the dust in here,” Scribbler said, the words tumbling over one another. Itsadustnhere. “An' the little mites what live on the dust, and the paper fleas. When the air conditioner's off, you can hear the paper fleas ticketytickingaround.” He seemed delighted by the idea and gave a grimacing grin at no one in particular; his teeth were edged in black.

  “Where's Oliver?” Bleak asked.

  “Said he didn't wanna come.” Saidhedidnwannacome. “Changed his mind. Said he wasn't going to trust no one from CCA, said they don't believe in neutral ground.” “I believe in it,” Loraine said, sniffling.

  Bleak glanced at Loraine. She was standing over by the lamp, and he could see the dust in the air around her in the smaller, inverted cone of lamplight from the coffee table. Was Oliver right? This whole encounter with Loraine was counterintuitive. But Shoella's work with Scribbler had convinced her that Agent Sarikosca was a “bridge to a secret that could liberate us, and it's worth the risk. “

  “Let's get this done, let's get this done, it's too crowded in here,” Scribbler said, his long, slim, trembling, white fingers becoming one with the pen, rolling it from finger to finger and back to a writing grip. The others stood with their backs close to stacks of boxes and magazines—there was no place to comfortably sit—and they watched him as he turned almost sideways to the coffee table and with his right hand pulled an old Parker Brothers Ouija board from under the sofa bed, set it on his lap, pulled on the roll of paper so it unreeled onto the Ouija board. It acted as his writing desk.

  “A Ouija board?” Loraine murmured, surprised. “Does that signify anything? I mean traditionally it—”

  “Fool,” Shoella interrupted, “sure it signify something—that Scribbler man has a sense of humor.”

  “Quiet,” Scribbler snapped. When he'd got the paper arranged just so, he reached into the clutter on the coffee table and drew a black sleeping mask from under an Oreo wrapper. He pulled it over his eyes, with a single practiced motion, so that he was blindfolded. He murmured, “Where is my friend? Where is Conrad's friend? Speak through me, my friend. Where is...” He broke off—and immediately began scribbling on the roll of paper with his left hand, dragging it slowly past him with his right so that, turned as he was, the ribbon of written-on paper piled up on the floor by his feet. The pen moved with remarkable speed, with dexterous exactitude, straight across the page as if following ruled lines— without having any. The cursive scribbling was difficult to read but almost beautiful, appearing like the lines on a seismograph recording vibrations in the earth. Which is what it was, in a way, only it recorded vibrations in the Hidden, the unseen cloak of the earth.

  The words used up most of the sixteen-inch width of the wrapping paper, and they ran together, in one continuous flow per line, so far only in black ink. A little space between letters indicated separate words. He filled up inch after inch of paper as the seconds passed. He could fill up reams this way. Scribbler had a special ritual, Bleak knew, for getting rid of old “scrolls,” which he performed each full moon. It was the only thing he willingly got rid of.

  Scribbler scribbled for several minutes. His thumb only clicked the pen once, making a single line blue instead of black; then returning to black ink. He knew which button to press for red or blue or black, though his eyes were covered.

  Bleak edged around to Scribbler's left, craned to try to read the newest scribbles:

  ... Chicano poet memoirist Rodriguez calling the recent devastation the most terrifying indoor weather to defer to the cynical and to just assume that beneath the veneer the world is made up of predators and prey and all you can hope for is a kind of break in the isolation in attempts to envision the worst of our world indentured epiphany lost in these moments and you always lose something but come out on the other side having always felt a kind of entelechy to be drawn on...

  It was nonsense, for the most part. Still, Bleak suspected it meant something, from some perspective in the Hidden.

  Scribbler scrivened on. After writing the words “wildly experimental scenes in those days,” without any apparent pause in writing, he clicked on the red ink and started writing in something more like sentences, and Bleak paid close attention to the words scribbled in red, which started with “and emerged from opposite ends.”

  ...always felt a kind of entelechy to be drawn on, that's what happens in the other end, a dismaying social consequence, wildly experimental scenes in those days and emerged from opposite ends of the world, the stony and the starry, Gabriel and Loraine, and she draws him and another draws her to draw him to them, where Sean awaits to lock minds with Gabriel. One will lock hearts, the other would lock minds. Loraine does not know that you can trust her but you can. It is like thinking you cannot trust your own left hand. In your right hand you hold her despair and if you make a fist you destroy it and the glass egg breaks and hope melts free to run between your fingers to take a shape of its own determination. Shoella's heart stands in the way, Shoella's heart is the doorway to be broken, though Yorena frowns from dark clouds in the place of ancestors. Loraine is beyond the doorway for Gabriel, arms an entrance, Loraine and Gabriel like puzzle pieces made to fit. Sean seeks Gabriel as an anaconda seeks the sleeping child. The President is afraid, B
reslin is afraid of the man within the man who stands on his right, and the crack in the wall lets the Great Wrath through, who darkens like ink in the water those he would conceal, and yet move toward Facility 23 and find the liberating truth on the way to the North, there in the North tragedy mates with triumph and the Ten shrink to the new Ten and she must return to them alone for now for they seek her nearby but she will not knowingly draw them to me and we must do that which we would never do, we must trust Loraine this time and always so long as it is her will who guides her and sometimes they're psychopaths but most of the time people rationalize everything they do, that is what keeps us trapped in who we are, our rationales, the constructions we make to justify our behavior are our destiny...

  Scribbler had returned to using black ink with “and sometimes they're psychopaths,” and that was the end of the oracle's message.

  Staring at a sentence in red, Bleak felt a surprising embarrassment of exposure. Like something he'd felt in a dream of riding a subway—and suddenly realizing he was riding it stark naked.

  Shoella's heart is the doorway to be broken, though Yorena frowns from dark clouds in the place of ancestors. Loraine is beyond the doorway for Gabriel, arms an entrance, Loraine and Gabriel like puzzle pieces made to fit.

  Bleak shook his head. Like puzzle pieces made tofit?He didn't know the meaning for certain quite yet—but he suspected it. He'd come to expect irony from life.

  Scribbler filled another four lines with cryptic black script, then abruptly dropped the pen, swept the blindfold off, and set to massaging his left hand with his right, chewing his lower lip. “Hurts. Hurts like a bitchy old lady. Speakin' of bitchy old ladies, wish my mama was alive, she used to massage my hands.”

  “I'll massage it for you,” Loraine said, with calm assurance. She sat on the arm of the sofa bed, took his left hand between hers, and began to massage it.

  Both Bleak and Shoella stared in astonishment—they expected Scribbler to jerk his hand away from her.

  But he let her massage his fingers for a couple of minutes, though he wouldn't look at her. His face blissed-out like a dog getting its belly rubbed.

  Bleak waited for Loraine to ask for something in exchange for the intimacy. An interpretation. An appointment, perhaps, with CCA. But she said nothing. And after all, Bleak supposed, if Loraine chose to, she could simply make a phone call and CCA would storm this place and drag Scribbler away.

  He was sure she wouldn't do that, though. Because Scribbler always knew. He was always right. And he had let her come here. He knew, somehow, that she would not betray him, though it was her job to do so.

  Unless, for once, Scribbler was wrong.

  Bleak looked again at the scribbles in red. The part at the end...

  ... and she must return to them alone for now for they seek her nearby but she will not knowingly draw them to me and we must do that which we would never do, we must trust Loraine this time and always so long as it is her will who guides her...

  Bleak noticed the phrase will not knowingly draw them to me.

  And he noticed that as Loraine rubbed Scribbler's hand, she was looking at what he'd written, in red, as if trying to memorize it.

  She was still an agent of CCA.

  At last Loraine drew her hands back and stood up. “Is that any better?”

  Scribbler still wouldn't look at her. But he said, “Yeah. Thank you. Loraine. My name is Conrad, by the way.”

  “Conrad.” She nodded.

  “But I still have to charge somebody for the words. It's a rule. You can't take it with you unless you pay. Whoever takes the red page has to pay.” He ran his left hand over the scroll; over the words in red, as if his hand were counting. Never looking right at it. “That's two hundred eighty-six words. At one dollar a word that's two hundred eighty-six dollars.”

  “I'll pay it,” Loraine said. “Can I write a check or—”

  “/will pay it!” Shoella interrupted loudly, taking folding money from a pocket. “I have that much. The one who pays takes the paper.” She scowled at Loraine. “You will not take it. You have seen it, that is enough. I had to have you here—Scribbler said so. The ancestors advised it. But I don't have to give you the paper.”

  “But...you have to give me the two hundred eighty-six dollars,” Scribbler reminded her.

  ***

  OUTSIDE, SHOELLA, BLEAK AND Loraine paused on the front steps to look for a CCA chopper or a spy drone because the words in red said they seek her nearby. But if they were nearby, they were well hidden.

  Yorena flew down from above and settled on Shoella's left shoulder. Shoella scratched the back of the familiar's neck and said to Loraine, “I had to see you two together, and I had to bring us into a room with Scribbler, to get his Sight, and...Gabriel and I will discuss it. Someplace else. Alone.” She 214 touched her blouse, where she'd tucked away the folded, red-inked paper torn from Scribbler's scroll.

  Shoella glared up at the one working streetlight as if that's what she was mad at, streetlights. But Yorena seemed to glare at Loraine. Who exactly was Shoella angry at? Bleak wondered. Hadn't this been her idea? Hadn't she been talking about working with CCA, if they could retain their freedom? “Shoella—” He waited as a police car and then another sirened by on the avenue, going downtown, followed by the whine of an electric bus. “You feel like you can interpret the writing he gave us?”

  “Later. She...” Shoella nodded at Loraine. “She doesn't have to hear. She only had to be there with us when he did it.”

  Bleak looked curiously at Loraine. “What made you rub Scribbler's hand like that? I've never seen him let anyone else touch him.”

  “Why?” Shoella snorted. “So she could read what he wrote.”

  Loraine shook her head. “I'm sure he'd have shown me anyway. I just wanted to.” She took a long, slow breath, frowning in thought. “I don't know. I just felt like he needed it. I felt sorry for him. Like he'd gotten close to me in some way and looked into me and when he did...1 don't know how to say it.”

  Bleak nodded. This woman could surprise him. Which was something he liked. “I don't want to spend any more time around this woman,” Shoella snapped. Not looking at Loraine as she said it.

  Why this desire in Shoella to get away from Loraine? Bleak wondered. Was it jealousy—or mistrust because she was CCA?

  The look in Shoella's eyes suggested it was something personal. As if she too suspected a bond between Bleak and Loraine. An extraordinary bond.

  He seemed to hear Oliver's bitter voice again: “I suppose you know that Shoella's in love with you. “

  “I'll be going soon, Shoella,” Loraine said, in a low voice. “Bleak-what did it mean...what it said about me, and you? I didn't exactly...follow.”

  Bleak pretended to be interested in looking at Yorena. “I don't know for sure. It appears you and I are connected in some way. Linked somehow. But I don't know how. Not yet.” He had a suspicion, though. And the suspicion renewed that feeling of embarrassment. Of feeling naked.

  Loraine nodded quickly, as if glad to have put the question behind her. “And—what did the...the divination mean, 'the President is afraid of the man within the man'? And what is the Great Wrath?”

  “I don't know that either. Eventually it'll show itself to us, as the facts start to unfold. I do know that this oracle often tends to be surprisingly literal.”

  “By this oracle—you mean, um, Conrad?”

  “No, he's just a medium for the message. Just the transmitter. We say, 'Scribbler says this,' but we don't mean it's really him saying it. His vocabulary doesn't even extend to a lot of the words he writes.” Bleak paused, thinking about how to explain it. Feeling a breeze off the East River. It smelled of the river's living murk. “No, the oracle is an entity in the Hidden that is trying to help, but it has to do it indirectly. It doesn't seem to make sense when the oracle speaks because you aren't caught up to the truth yet. That's something you find out later—then you see what it meant. But I could guess at one
thing—if it says 'a man within the man' about someone around President Breslin—it's talking about some kind of diabolic influence.”

  Loraine's eyes widened. “Diabolic influence. Around the president?”

  Shoella said sharply, “Evil souls like to be with evil souls.” She gave Loraine a look that conveyed matter-of-fact hatred as effectively as a hard slap to the face. “The president approved your Central Containment Authority. I know what your people have done to my people.” Shoella seemed to loom over Loraine as she spoke, her voice becoming a hiss. “I should tie you to a roof and let Yorena eat your eyes. I should call the baka who eats minds—and I should say, 'Feed on her!' But”—Shoella made a gesture of exasperation and drew back from Loraine—”you are to be of use, some kind of bridge, this the oracle says, so I got to bring you here...and let you walk away.” Adding, her voice barely audible, “Though you are sure to betray me.”

  Loraine remained outwardly unmoved, watching Shoella closely during the diatribe but not showing any fear, and not arguing.

  “Sarikosca here won't betray us,” Bleak said. “Scribbler would have warned us. The Hidden seems to say she won't. Seems to say we should trust her. I know it doesn't make sense—but...”

  He turned to Loraine—and for a moment, when she looked back, he felt an electric connection between them. He felt a stirring, a pull. Then, lips parted as if she were catching her breath, Loraine looked quickly away. “But she won't betray us,” he said again.

  “I didn't mean she will betray me like that,” Shoella said softly. She turned to him, adding more forcefully, “Now, Bleak, you come with me. We need to talk. And she must go.”

  Loraine turned to Bleak, their gazes intersected again, and though her face was impassive he saw, quite clearly, the depth of emotion in her eyes. “I...had better go anyway,” she said. “I'm not going to tell anyone about Scribbler. Or Shoella. I will talk to them about the possibility that CCA could be in a different kind of...of relationship with ShadowComm. A new deal.”