It's always a foul thing to slit a teenager's throat. In the Mobile train yard and the city beyond it was gray and heavy, yet with a dry and stale cold more prairie interior than coastal swamplands. The restaurants sold their stews while private militiamen gathered around trashcan fires with their rifles and crippled buskers sang their songs and bit each their for dropped change. It was the same Mobile that has always been; since our honeymoon at least and I suppose before.
The boy who tailed me was a global-generic tough; a faintly borderline case of white with head absurdly shaved bald and black Adidas jacket with chain. Such a cultureless thing couldn't have been with the Priests and I knew especially from the way he stared with no discretion, even when I looked back, and theway he trailed at an unyielding twenty feet in empty alleys & crowded corners both that this was one of the Wife's mooks. It was just the thing that she would do; sending some greenblood to prove he could do this job but really it was for me, to send some puppy easy to kill so that I could prove myself committed to this so fine. I loved her once enough to owe that. So I went to a chicken & fry place and loitered there till he came directly in front of the window; dancing a twitch as if he had ear phones though he had none. Then I stepped outside said hello and asked if the job paid him well enough to make up for school. He said that "motherfucker I know the business for a job and I know the business for school too. It's fucking Saturday anyhow and you look like an old saw who likes the rock. Now I got one price for a gram that you can take or leave right now no bullshit up to you" So I stabbed him in the side of the neck with the Vaterknife that I'd won from the Victory and pulled hard through the strap muscles round to his frontal arteries. The boy shed tears in the few seconds he had left and I regretted that he hadn't grown old enough to develop bad grooming or arrogance so that I could enjoy killing him. In his pockets were eight thousand dollars and the grams he spoke of were burned candles in the shells of ivory soap. This I left him.
I stopped for a bottle of gin at a store across from Spanish Plaza than walked calmly up Government Street to a hotel I knew that asked no questions. I knew that there'd be no question that the Wife would know I'm here. That unless I had her before she gave the order she could have me killed at any time and could probably have me killed after as well. This would be done and enough then I was fine with it. She was only testing my commitment like I said. Endangering herself but not ever without rational purpose mind you. There was an end here. I was an end and I would find out or not. The hotel was named White Pallor Residentials and in front was a billboard that read "Alabama's Dick in the Pussy Blue."
The worker at the desk was the sort of thin trim and mustached man who might be dying homosexual or both. I went to him put fifty dollars on the table and asked for an immediate room.
"Well we'll have to see some ID sir, and there are papers to sign."
"How much more to make both unnecessary? I'm between ID's right now. I'm Cotter Orleans."
"Well that I cannot say you see; we can make arraignments sometimes" He looked down to see the blood on my hands and grimaced ruefully. "How long do you intend to stay Mr. Cotter? Are you an overnight here? Here to work the oil wells."
" I never gave you my name. How much for unknowable business?"
"Well yes Mr. Cotter I'm afraid you.. " he grimaced again. " Give me two extra fifties and take the key for room 456 East wing, fourth floor of course. Just please do so quickly."
"Well alright then, you're a fair and reasonable man."
When I gave him the cash he became much more pleasant and chatty. " Three weeks past Mardi
Gras and still this chilly even now. The grandest one we ever had too man you should have seen it; what with those animals in Nola deciding to eat each other sending all their best hustlers & horn players running over to us. The days were dreary but at least we got high. Anyway you can't fault the weather or at least can't fight it. Even this far south and can get" and here he seemed to catch a look in my eye.
"Cold sometimes?" I asked.
"I was going to say boreal" he said. "Anyway you best be getting to your room now Mr. cotter sir. We'll have an eye on you."
"I know."
"Send you a nice dinner if it serves us maybe."
After several hours I was drunk to the point of near psychedelic perception. I liked it this way; long as I could sleep long enough. I hadn't eaten for a day and had no intent to just yet. On the TV were the local cable channels and an old anal-centric porn that played on loop again and again. It it had grown dusk at some point. Outside the window a prostitute stood smoking for hours and I thought to hail to her from time to time.
When the knock on the door came I rose to answer it unarmed. Perhaps the wife had come to finich me simply after all and then I could stay asleep. The shape of the room was amorphous yet solid and painful and when I opened the door I was shocked by the brightness of the hallway.
Mashireem Icaine was always light skinned but stood before me now positively ashen; with his lower eyelids completely folded in to reveal the red and spots ofhair about his face that served no end but to highlight the desolation of his body.
"A lot of time people are surprised that a 90 year old doesn't look much different than a 70 year old" he said. "The thing is there's only how bad a fuck can look and not be dead. I look about what a 150-year old would look like if he were bed-ridden for a while; and drunk."
"How can be here?" I asked. "You're dead here."
"Do you think you're the only piece-of-shit sod who can go Topland and down back and forth?" he asked? " God damn Peter but you Westerners never stop thinking you're special and you're worst of all." Lots of people can go back and forth. You just need to not have a soul is all; and most people don't. You need to be comfortable with madness and blood too, which most people aren't. You're special that way maybe though I wouldn't call it special. And who said I ever died anyway?"
"What are you doing here Icaine? Are you here to tell me something? It couldn't wait?"
"Ha. Yeah I'm here to give you the secret code of the wise wizard of the North motherfucker. I'm drunk tired and I need a place to sit down is why I'm here. Now let me sit down before I cut you out the way ya fuckin yammer."
We sat silently at an end table for some hours both drifting in and out of a jaundiced sleep when he finally gave me a look that spoke of mutual awareness. It was close to dawn now I think or at least there were blood-gold colors coming through the window from somewhere.
"My father was the Ottoman pasha of Damascus; middle 1500's it was. I grew up well as you can imagine. Wine women food and all the rest. Save the fact that war would pop up all of the time same as now and one day my father; Altan Icaine, the Red Bull, got called up to help fight the Russians. You've heard the fairy tales of those fuckin Russians out in the snow who wrestle ride bears and live till 200 well back then it was true and they killed my father. We Turks won the battle but my father was killed by a cavalry bear."
"Well back then Pashas were succeeded by their sons if their was no reason to do otherwise so I got called to Constantinople to swear my loyalty. I spent five days in the whorehouses until I got called to the palace and then they gave me an apartment to wait some more. In those days the Valide Sultan, the Queen Mom you'd call it, was the one who was really running things and she took a liking to me. She was raised Western and to my eyes at the time she was old as hell. But she was dark somehow and the fact she was old made her; I don''t know; authoritative right? So I liked her too. She took me to her bed and we fucked a lot while I waited for some bureaucracy. Eventually someone who hated me or maybe my family let the Sultan know and shit nobody likes to hear about their mom carrying on like that so he ordered me flayed alive. I had to sneak out of the palace in a sewer pipe then blend in with a pack of lepers being banished from the city and that was the end of my noble political career."
"So I started wondering the Middle East for a few years and then a few hundred years. Aging a little here and there but a lot slower than anyone else, no shit. I didn't question why. Would you? I was still living high enough, bank interest from my Damascus Jew friends added up over the centuries. I had a thousand different names and I got what I wanted. I lived a little like you do now some might say except I wasn't such a goddamn thug about it."
'So eventually about 1875 or so I stop to get a hotel room in Medina. It was an opium den too. Nasty place, only the best for me. By now I was a billionaire in your dollars and I decide to get a room in my real name because why the hell not? So I spend three there days in a fade until one day I hear a knock on my door and open it up to find an imperial policeman. Of course this is always bad no shit but I thought he just wanted a bribe or something. Instead he asks me if I'm Mashareem Icaine and I say yeah and he says I'm under arrest for high treason. They were just starting to get a real filing system going see and I was in it. I was in it and none of these blocks of wood ever asked me why I was three hundred and forty years old. The judge was some fat asthmatic prick. Sentenced me to stave to death in a steel box out in the desert. I was there for three months. Locked up tight with no one to notice, no one there to guard me, no need for that. I die harder than most people do like you know by now but it was unpleasant as all hell just the same. It was hot and it stank."
"I'd heard about Darkworld the same way you did so far as I know. Insane ramblings; forbidden lovers cries, deathbed confessions. So I made some deals in that roasting shitbox of mine. Called in favors, made promises I never intended to keep. One day it started raining so that I could feel it in the box. A cold rain; a mountain rain, a raw-boned rain like American fall and I knew by instinct that I could just walk out of the door and leave; even though the box didn't have a door as such I knew so i opened it and there I was right in downtown Spreckville; naked covered in shit and no one noticed. The street cooks tried to sell me lobster soup and the women whistled.
"I got back to what I was doing here on top; hustling, bullshitting, mysteriously rich for reasons the folk getting drunk on my dime never questioned. Well it was smuggling that made me rich. I kept my connections here; went back and forth as I pleased lot smoother than you can because I am not some delusional white-knight shit-for-brains. I trade things that couldn't be bought in standard sale. I'm the one who brought modern drugs down the Darkworld. All those gutter-rats over Osha way got me to thank for that; food that doesn't taste like plague sweat too which everyone thanks me for. Up Top here I mostly bank in madness spells; power spells, ruthlessness spells. I'm the one who made Stalin see. I wish I could let all you Christ-bothering Slavic fucks know that I'm the one who brought that hell down on ya except that would break the business. And right now I'm here to see you Peter. And do you know why? Do you know why past hour biovolating while you sat there drunk?"
"No". I said. "I don't have the first idea why".
"Because you're going to die you know. You do know that don't you?"
I hesitated for some seconds before admitting "yes".
"You're going to die. She's going to kill you when it pleases herself. Today probably, and you are nowhere near good enough to stop that. You are going to die and I hate to see anyone spend their last hours bored drunk and alone." Now take this fifty dollar bill and get yourself some breakfast. You look like hell fuck's sake."
"I don't need the money but thank you. I'll eat."
"No. He smiled. "No but all the same. And trust no one either. You think you know that but I don't mean treat everyone like an enemy all drama queen like. I mean distrust neutrally. If you think you see a Priest go along. They like you now in their way and if you give them another favor they'll buy you another cou-le hours maybe." Now you're going to get that breakfast right"
"I will."
"Good. And trust no one like I said. Not a single fucking word of what I told you is true just for example. Well some of it but none that matters." goodbye Pete.
"See you later Icaine."
"Hem. Yeah.
Alone I realized that it would indeed be good to step out into the air for a time. I reached into my wallet and found all of the eight thousand gone, save for one fifty dollar bill on the table before me. I stood up only to retch bile as on an empty stomach except an endless amount, enough to cover the table entirely. I lost feeling in my arms nd looked to find them covered in something like fang marks multiplying towards my chest. I soiled myself at least maybe and collapsed. Awaking in the plains west of Spreckville to see the city burning and an immense Russian Army singing hyms as they marched in my direction.
