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There they were, all in a line, and the water was everything; they were in the water and the water was in the room and the water was in their ears, their nostrils, it was blinked frantically out of tired, scratched-raw eyes, salty and encompassing and horrific and dark.
There they were, and this was it. Charlie held Mac (his best friend since grade school, since chasing old tyres in the sun) and Mac held Dennis (he was ever so glad for it- what a privilege, to die with Dennis Reynolds) and Dennis held Dee (and she wanted to say that she loved him right back but she knew that he was already aware, and had always known, because that was what all the hurled insults and spilt beer and chocolate bars cut in even halves as children were for) and Dee held Frank, who was happy enough to die.
-and they all breathed in.
Dennis had read somewhere that death by drowning was supposed to be peaceful, a graceful and beautiful way to go. He remembered being seven at the bottom of the backyard pool, spread out like a starfish with his eyes cracked open just a slither, watching sunlight dance on the surface. He wondered how long it’d take his sister to find his body floating there if he forgot to breathe in.
Shaking now, sputtering and gasping underwater, the childhood illusion was shattered- the ocean came swift into his windpipes and filled his lungs with fire and surely there was no worse way to die. He spit and he cried and with his mouth hung open in a gaping, silent scream he clung to his sister as if he could escape his terror through her skin. Dee silently watched him score red lines into her arm with his frantic clawing. She held his hand tighter, brought it to her chest and caressed his knuckles with her thumb. She watched her baby brother die and smiled, slightly-yeah, of course it ended like this- and she followed him down.
Charlie took an easy breath in, an easy breath out, felt the water all inside of him, and all of the salt, and figured he’d felt worse- this beat out electrocution, which hurt like a bitch- and left them.
Frank knew it was his time. He was glad for it. He was glad he wasn’t in a hospice bed. He was glad that all the energetic whores and coke hadn’t caught him. He’d won, and now he got to die with- with his friends, he supposed- and then he felt his daughter’s hand go limp and he felt a tiny bit sick, but he hadn’t any time to dwell on it.
Mac knew that he would be the last. He felt alone and he willed himself to die faster, faster- come on, now- so that he could follow them all to that final place- and where was that place, exactly? Where was he going? He hadn’t thought about it- oh, how could he not have thought about it?- but he didn’t have to worry, not really, because there he went.
The gang went on toward the last light; the gang went on beyond it.
“So,” said an orchid, growing inexplicably bright and gaudy from between paver-cracks outside of a seedy massage parlour in a rather distasteful neighbourhood in south Philadelphia, “is this the catholic Heaven, Mac?”
The blade of grass he spoke to bent and swayed in the breeze, testing the edges of the physical realm, beating up against the sky with the wings of a bat, hurrying along the stretch of a comet-tail in a galaxy sixteen light years away, visiting the gates of the kingdom of God as an angel. “No,” the grass said, “but we could go there.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” said a rat, running tiny little buck teeth along the edge of his own tail.
“No,” said the grass, “I’m not sure, either. I think I’ll go there when I die, maybe; but not yet.”
“You’re not going to Heaven “ said an alley-cat, blonde and scarred all over, “none of us are going to Heaven.”
She ran them all over with grimy pink paws, squashing every single one of them, picking the rat up between her teeth and carrying him by his tail. She ran with him and leapt through every open window at once.
Two men stared at each other from opposite ends of a crosswalk. They were handsome and young and looked a little themselves, how they had been- with tweaks, of course, but that was alright- and in the space between each car they threaded themselves (they didn’t wait for the traffic lights, or the other people, or for the rain to subside) and met right there in the middle of the road, tens of tonnes of metal and the flesh of a thousand oblivious passengers scoring their bodies from every side every minute, unfelt, unseen, passing straight through.
“Why don’t you just go, Mac?”
“Because you won’t come with me,” said Mac, who had put on a substantial amount of weight in death, “because you won’t come with me, Dennis.”
“You’re the only one who has anywhere else to go, Mac. Just go. Just- just take that.”
“Dennis, I’m gay.”
“Oh, Mac, I know. But you can see it, cant you? Heaven?”
Dennis could become the smallest particle of dust and drift all the way to the pearly gates himself. Heaven was simply another place. Mac could pass through those gates, though, and rightfully he should.
“I don’t want to go to heaven,” Mac said, rippling with the after-image of a Toyota Camry, “if you won’t come with me. Because-“ and he straightened up now, and frowned deeply, “you are my- best friend.”
Nobody could see them. They could dance through every car and every person and every wall, and every bit of scrap metal and brick; they could hide anywhere they wanted, now.
If all of this should be a dream, Dennis thought, if I should be sleepwalking, I have one more chance to wake up in the middle of a four-lane highway- one more glorious chance for one of these cars to hit me!
But he phased through each car as if he were a ghost, took Mac by the immaterial hand, and walked him down an alleyway and across an empty field and the planes of an ice-star; and he walked him back into an awful little bar to reckon with the end of their futures.
The bear could not reach the bushel of fat raspberries. He teetered on his hind legs, swiping with gigantic claws- he couldn’t get used to the damn things- and the berries danced and bobbed out of his reach, taunting.
A crow, feathers askew and beak crooked, landed on the bushel and began to tear off berries, one by one, and toss them to the ground.
“Oh, Charlie, thankyou,” said the bear. “Why are you a crow?”
“I’ve always wanted to be a crow. Why are you a bear?”
“Don’t read into it.”
“I- man, I wasn’t.”
“They’re very strong.”
“I guess.”
The crow clacked its beak. The crow ruffled its wings.
“What do we do now?”
“What do you mean, what do we do? We do whatever we want.” The bear licked squashed berries off a giant paw. “We do whatever the hell we want.”
The crow, for conversation’s sake, was about to ask him if he knew where the others were- what they’d turned into, what they were doing, what time period they existed in- but there were stupid questions and then there stupid questions, because Charlie knew exactly what everyone else was doing, and could visit them in seconds -become them, even. Dennis and Mac walked the streets of Philadelphia as younger versions of themselves. Dee was-
Dee was on his back, teeth in his neck.
The crow, tilting and shrieking, hit at his attacker with frantic talons and the polecat, laughing and tittering, danced out of his way and twisted in the air like a ribbon.
“Dee,” Charlie cried, blinking surprise out of his eyes, “hey!”
“Cool it, Charlie. I didn’t bite you hard.”
“I was-“ the crow tried to compose himself- “wondering where you were.”
“Oh, Charlie,” Dee said, eyes aglint, “this dying business is wonderful. I’ve been the concrete in every single Hollywood star. I’ve been Tom Cruise’s personal driver. I’ve been-“ something like melancholy came over her- “I’ve been an asteroid, Charlie, and then I- “she coughed- “crashed into the ocean. Which I- I wasn’t expecting that, you know, so I came back down here and I was a Chihuahua for a bit. That was fun. What have you been doing?”
Charlie, so far, had been a rat and then he had been a crow.
“I’m working through types of animals,” he said, “just trying a couple out.”
“Cool,” Dee said, “cool. Okay. Hi, Frank.”
The bear waved an idle paw.
“I’m going to go and find Dennis,” she said. “Bye, Charlie. I’ll see you later.”
The polecat disappeared. Dee had returned to Philadelphia.
“Sticking around like a rock in your shoe even when you’re dead, gee-suz. You’d think she’d be the first to buzz off.”
The bear burped and lay on his back, engorged belly to the sky. The crow, trying not to think about the impossible vastness of the forest- all those frightening plants!- lay atop his fur and settled his beak under his wing, breathing up-and-down to the rhythm of the bear’s breath.
“I don’t like the forest,” he muttered.
The bear snuffled. The bear shrugged and nodded. The bear rolled over, so fast that he would have squashed the crow flat had the crow not suddenly become a worm- and had the bear not become a worm- and they travelled through the dirt, through invisible tunnels, all the way back home.
“Dennis, quit amalgamating with Mac.”
The pair were knelt in the middle of Paddy’s pub, feet slipping in and out of the flooring, arms in each other’s arms, forehead to each other’s forehead, all of each other morphing and shifting like an awful science experiment. it seemed to pain them, as Mac was grimacing, and Dennis whined like an outboard motor.
“I just want to see,” Dennis said, “how far we can go.”
“I can see you.”
“Dee, I don’t care. We’re amalgamating.”
Dee’s soul sauntered laps around the bar- a stool, a bottle, the heavy iron of the taps, encrusted with rust and mould on the edges- she haunted the television and made it crackle a little, and swung the NO MINORS sign off the hook. Charlie and Frank came and settled down as weather-beaten street dogs. They watched the DennisMac creature glitch in and out of existence.
“We can’t get very far,” Mac said, finally. “We’ll work on it.”
Dennis shrugged. “Nothing but time.”
“Nothing but time,” agreed the Frank dog. “So- what now?”
“We could go play for the Eagles,” Mac suggested, “or at least catch a game. We won’t have to pay for the tickets.”
“I could act,” Dee said, “I could haunt Scarlett Johansen.”
The bar was silent.
“Or,” Charlie said, “We could die here.”
They were dead already- of course they were dead already- but they could rest, he meant, to stop feeling all of the world and all of the impossibly vast heavens rushing in through their spent brainstems all at once.
They could be together in the bar.
They could be the bar.
A small circle of ghostly humans held hands- a seance a little too late- and began to fade into the woodwork.
“Oh, fuck. I hate walking this way. Please, can we not? That old pub gives me the creeps.”
A disposable vape clenched tight in a stubbly square jaw clouded the teenagers in a sickly strawberries-and-cream aura. The one iPhone shared between them was the only thing that broke the pitch-black of an awful, gas-stinking Tuesday night in run-down Philadelphia.
“It’s quicker this way,” the boy assured the girl, “don’t be a pussy.”
“I’m not a fucking pussy,” she muttered, “come on.”
Why didn’t they knock the damn thing down? Put a hipster cafe in there or something, or a real-estate office, or a strip club, or something? The door of Paddy’s Pub was a green face with two shuttered horrible eyes and a great yellow gem on its head like a wizard. An awful seeping miasma crept through the shattered windows and hung low on the street, a creeping cloud of dead things.
But, of course, she was crazy (her boyfriend’s words) and she was always high when she walked this street (true) and a building could hold no inherent evil. It was just an old bar, abandoned for however many years- ten? Twenty?
She walked past, swallowing that long-held childish fear, and turned her back.
A light winked on in the window-eye. She was too far away to hear it, now, but the sound that came soft through the crack in the glass would follow her home all the same- the eery harmony crept under every single doorway and wrapped around every single lamp-post and worked its way into the minds of every single living person in the city.
And I'll take with me the memories…