Dead and Alive

suppositories and laxatives, tangles of frayed rope, a worn-out slipper, red-white-and-blue political posters proclaiming the right, the need, the duty to vote, a soiled platinum-blond wig, crushed skeletons of long-dead rats, a garland ofred Christmas tinsel as sinuous as a boa, a doll with a smashed face and one staring eye, the other socket empty.
    After the doll’s face, he lost sight of the lacquered montage past which he was carried, and saw instead a thousand faces exhumed from his memory, broken faces and startled faces and bloody faces and faces half peeled back from the bone, the faces of men and women and children, those whom he had used and used so well, and not merely a thousand but two thousand, multitudes. They didn’t frighten him, but filled him with contempt, for he despised the weak who would let him use them. They thrilled him because he had always been thrilled by his power to bring others to the realization that they were nothing but meat, to strip from them their fragile defenses, their trust in justice, their childish illusions that they mattered, their delusions of meaning, their idiot faith, their hope, and even their sense of self, until in the end they
wanted
to be nothing but meat, unthinking meat and sick of life.
    When faces from the past stopped cascading through his mind, he found that he had been carried out of the passageway into a gallery with a floor curved like a bowl. This seemed to be their destination, for here they stopped. When they brought him off their shoulders and put him on his feet, he stood bewildered because every face in the crowd was now that of a stranger. “So many faces,” he said, “tumbling through my mind like blown leaves moments ago…. Now I can’t recall one of them or who they were. Or who youare.” A terrible confusion overcame him. “Or my face. How do I appear? What name do I go by?”
    Then out of the crowd stepped a giant, the right half of this face badly broken and the damage only half disguised by an intricate tattoo. Looking at the wholesome side of the face, he sensed that he had known this man before, and then he heard himself say, “Why … you are one of my children … come home at last.”
    The tattooed man said, “You were never a madman during any moment of your diabolical work. You were wicked from the moment of your first intention, rotten with pride, your every desire venomous and unwholesome, your every act corrupt, your arrogance unbridled, your cruelty inexhaustible, your soul bargained away for power over others, your heart empty of feeling. You were evil, not mad, and you thrived on evil, it was your sustenance. Now I will not permit you to escape awareness of the justice you receive. I will not let you escape into insanity, because I have the power to hold you to the reality of your vicious life.”
    The giant put a hand upon the head of the insane, and at the touch, the madness blinked away, and Victor knew again who he was, where he was, and why he had been brought here. He reached for the pistol under his jacket, but the giant caught his hand and broke his fingers in a crushing grip.

CHAPTER 70
    ERIKA FIVE WHEELED the SUV to the curb and stopped a few yards short of the entrance to the tank farm, Gegenangriff, Inc.
    What little character the building possessed was faded by the darkness and the rain.
    “How nondescript the place looks,” she said. “Why, it might be anything or nothing much at all.”
    The troll was sitting up straight in his seat. Usually busy with elaborating gestures or making meaningless rhythms, his hands were still, folded on his chest.
    “Jocko understands.”
    “What do you understand, Jocko?”
    “If you have to take him in there. Jocko understands.”
    “You don’t want to go in there.”
    “It’s okay. Whatever. Jocko doesn’t want you in trouble.”
    “Why do you owe me anything?” she asked.
    “You were kind to Jocko.”
    “We’ve known each other only one night.”
    “You squeezed a lot of kindness into one night.”
    “Not that much.”
    “The only kindness Jocko ever knew.”
    After a mutual silence, she said, “You ran. You were faster than me. I lost you.”
    “He wouldn’t believe that.”
    “Go. Just go, Jocko. I can’t take you in there with me.”
    His yellow eyes were no less eerie and no less beautiful than when she had first seen them.
    “Where would Jocko go?”
    “There’s a whole beautiful world.”
    “And none of it wants Jocko.”
    “Don’t