The Paradise War Page 3

  “Pipe down,” I whispered. “People are staring.”

  “Let them!” Simon shouted. “These scum-sucking slop merchants have stolen my money, but they do not get my calm acceptance of the fact. They do not get my meek submission.”

  “All right, all right. Take it easy, Simon,” I said. “Let’s just go, okay?”

  He threw the coffee cup down on the table, got up, and stalked out. I took a last sip of tea and hurried after him—pausing in the parking lot to gaze in envy at the punters taking tea in the comfort and privacy of their automobiles. It suddenly seemed the height of prudence and taste.

  Simon had the car running by the time I caught up with him. “You knew what it would be like when you went in there,” I charged, climbing in. “Honestly, sometimes I think you do this on purpose, just so you can gripe about it afterwards.”

  “Am I to blame for their criminal incompetence?” he roared. “Am I responsible?”

  “You know what I mean,” I maintained. “It’s slumming, Simon. It’s your vice.”

  He threw the car into gear, and we rocketed through the parking lot and out onto the motorway. It was a good few minutes before Simon spoke again. The silence was merely the calm before the storm; he was working up to one of his tirades. I knew the signs well enough, and, judging from the intensity with which he grasped the steering wheel, the storm was going to be a doozey. The air fairly trembled with pent-up fury.

  Simon drew a breath and I braced myself for the blast.

  “We are doomed, of course,” he said slowly, picking out each word as if it were a stone for a slingshot. “Doomed like rats in a rain barrel.”

  “Spare me.”

  “Did you know,” he said, assuming my ignorance, “that when Constantine the Great won the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the year 312, he decided to put up a triumphal arch to commemorate his great victory?”

  “Listen, do we have to go into this?”

  “Well, he did. The only problem was that he could find no artists worthy of the project. He sent throughout the whole Roman Empire but couldn’t find a single sculptor who could produce even a halfway acceptable battle frieze or victory statue. Not a man easily deterred, however, Constantine ordered his masons to remove statuary from other arches and attach them to his. The artists of his age were simply not up to the task, you see.”

  “Whatever you say,” I grumped.

  “It’s true,” he insisted. “Gibbon considered it the turning point of Roman history, the beginning of the decline. And it’s been downhill for Western civilization ever since. Look around, sport; we have finally reached the nadir. The end of the line. Finis! Kaput! We are doomed.”

  “Oh, please don’t let’s start—” My plea was a paper parasol raised against a typhoon.

  “Doomed,” he repeated for emphasis, rolling the word out like a cannonball. “No doubt there was a curse placed upon our sorry heads from the cradle. You’re an American, Lewis; you must have noticed— it’s in our very demeanor. We British are a doomed race.”

  “You look like you’re doing all right to me,” I told him sourly. “You’re surviving.”

  “Oh? Do we look like a surviving civilization to you? Consider our appearance: our hair is limp and greasy, our skin is spotty, our flesh pallid and scabby, our noses misshapen. Our chins recede, our foreheads slope, our cheeks run to jowl, and our stomachs to paunch; stoop-shouldered, bent-backed, spindle-legged, we are rumpled, shaggy, and unkempt. Our eyes are weak, our teeth are crooked, our breath is bad. We are gloomy, depressed, anemic, and wan.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I remarked, seeing as how Simon displayed absolutely none of the physical defects he described. His own physique was blissfully free of blemish; his words were smoke and sizzle without the fire, all hat and no rabbit. As expected, he ignored me.

  “Surviving? Ha! The very air is poisonous. And the water—that is poisonous too. And the food—that is really poisonous! Let’s talk about the food, shall we? Everything is mass-produced by devious men in salmonella factories for the sole purpose of infecting as many consumers as possible and charging them for the privilege, before turning them over to the National Health, who give ’em the chop and a hasty, anonymous burial.

  “And if, by some miracle, we should somehow survive our meager noonday repast, we are sure to be done in by the unrelenting meanness of our very existence. Look at us! We slog numb and shell-shocked through bleak, pestilential cities, inhaling noxious gases spewed from obsolete factories, clutching wretched plastic bags full of toxic meat and carcinogenic vegetables. The stinking rich amass wealth in tax-exempt offshore capital investment accounts, while the rest struggle along stark streets knee-deep in canine excrement to punch the time clock in soul-stifling sweatshops for the wherewithal to buy a rind of rancid cheese and a tin of beans with our overtaxed, undervalued pound.

  “Observe any street in any city! You’ll see us shuffling grimly from one hateful upmarket boutique to another, wasting our substance on obnoxious designer clothes that do not fit, and buying gray cardboard shoes made by slave labor in the gulags, and being routinely abused by blowzy, brain-dead shop assistants with blue mascara and chicken-fleshed legs. Overwhelmed by marketing forces beyond our ken and purchasing wildly complicated Korean appliances we neither want nor need with hologrammed plastic cash from smug, spotty-faced junior sales managers in yellow ties and too-tight trousers who can’t wait to scuttle off to the nearest pub to suck down pints of watery beer and leer at adenoidal secretaries wearing black leather miniskirts and see-through blouses.”

  Simon had liftoff. I settled back for the ride as his cavalcade of horror rolled on. It was all about the Channel tunnel and a landscape awash in Eurotrash and French fashion victims and acid rain and lugubrious Belgians and Iranian language students and lager louts swilling Heineken and football hooligans and holes in the ozone layer and Italian playboys, and South American drug lords and Swiss banks and AmEx Goldcards and the greenhouse effect and the Age of Inconsequence, and so on and so forth.

  Simon clutched the steering wheel with both hands and punched the accelerator for emphasis, bobbing his head to the cadence of his words and glancing sideways at me every now and then to make sure I was still listening. Meanwhile, I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to toss a monkey wrench into his fast-whirling gears.

  “We don’t have any place to call our own, but we’ll all have cold Guinness in cans and inscrutable Braun coffeemakers and chic Benetton sweatshirts and nifty Nike Cross-Trainers and gold-plated Mont Blanc fountain pens and Canon fax machines and Renaults and Porsches and Mercedes and Saabs and Fiats and Yugos and Ladas and Hyundais and Givenchy and Chanel pour Homme and Aeroflot holidays and Costa Del Sol condos and Piat D’Or and Viva España and Sony, and Yamaha and Suzuki and Honda and Hitachi and Toshiba and Kawasaki and Nissan and Minolta and Panasonic and Mitsu-bloody-bishi!

  “Do we care?” he demanded rhetorically. “Hell, no! We don’t bat an eye. We don’t turn a hair. We don’t twitch a solitary sedentary muscle. We sit transfixed before the Tube Almighty, lulled into a false Nirvana by a stupefying combination of pernicious banality and blather while nocuous cathode rays transform our healthy gray cells into jellied veal!”

  As harangues go, it was one of Simon’s better efforts. But his dolorous litanies could endure ad infinitum, and I was growing weary. He paused for breath and I saw my chance. “If you’re unhappy,” I said, throwing myself into the withering flow of invective, “why do you stay here?”

  Curiously, that stopped him. He turned his face to me. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. If you’re as miserable as you make yourself out to be, and if things are as bad as you say—why not leave? You could go anywhere.”

  Simon smiled his thin, superior smile. “Show me a place where it’s better,” he challenged, “and I’m on my way.”

  Offhand, I could not think of any place perfect enough for Simon. I might have suggested the States, but the same demons i
nfesting Britain were running rampant in America as well. The last time I was back home, I hardly recognized the place—it wasn’t at all as I remembered. Even in my own small, mid-American town the sense of community had all but vanished, gobbled up by ravening corporations and the townsfolks’ own blind addiction to a quick-buck economy and voracious consumerism. “We might not have a Fourth of July parade down Main Street anymore, or Christmas carols in the park,” my dad had said, “but we sure as hell got McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Wal-Mart mini-mall that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!”

  That was the way of the world: greedy, grim, and ghastly. It was like that everywhere, and I was tired of being reminded of it every time I looked around. So I rounded on Simon, looked him in the eye, and I threw his challenge back in his face. “Do you mean to tell me that if you found a place that suited you better, you’d leave?”

  “Like a shot!”

  “Ha!” I gloated. “You never would. I know you, Simon, you’re a classic malcontent. You’re not happy unless you’re miserable.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “It’s true, Simon,” I declared. “If everything was perfect, you’d be depressed. That’s right. You actually like things the way they are.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Dr. Freud,” Simon snarled. “I deeply appreciate your incisive analysis.” He punched the accelerator to the floor.

  I thrust home my point. “You might as well admit it, Simon— you’re a crap hound, and you love it. You are a connoisseur of misery: doom on the halfshell! Bring it on! The worse things get, the better you like it. Decadence suits you—in fact, you prefer it. You delight in decline; you revel in rot.”

  “Watch out,” he replied softly—so softly I almost didn’t hear him. “I just might surprise you one day, friend.”

  3

  THE GREEN MAN

  I had hoped to see Loch Ness. But all I saw was my own bleary-eyed reflection in the car window, made lurid by the map light in the dashboard. It was dark. And late. I was hungry, bored, and tired, aching to stop and silently cursing myself for being a party to this idiotic outing.

  The things I said about Simon were essentially true. He came from a long line of manic depressives, megalomaniacs, and megalomaniac depressives. Still, I had only hoped to get him off his whining binge. Instead, my impromptu psychoanalysis produced a strained and heavy silence between us. Simon lapsed into sullen withdrawal and would speak only in monosyllabic grunts for the next seven hours. I carried out my navigational duties nevertheless, disregarding his sulk.

  The map in my lap put us just south of Inverness. I turned from the window and peered at the atlas under my thumb. We were on the A82 approaching a village called Lochend. The narrow body of the famous monster-bearing lake itself lay a hundred yards off to the right, invisible in the darkness. “We should see some lights soon,” I said. “Three or four miles.”

  I was still bent over the Bartholomew when Simon screamed. “Bloody hell!”

  He hit the brakes and swerved. I was thrown against the door. My head thumped the window.

  The car dry-skidded to a stop on the road. “Did you see it?” Simon yelled. “Did you see it?”

  “Ow!” I rubbed my head. “See what? I didn’t see anything.”

  Simon’s eyes glinted wildly in the dim light. He jammed the gearshift into reverse, and the car began rolling backward. “It was one of those things!”

  “Things? What things?”

  “You know,” he said, twisting around to see out the rear window, “one of those mythical creatures.” His voice was shaky, and his hands were trembling.

  “A mythical creature—well, that certainly narrows it down.” I craned my neck to look out the back as well, but saw nothing. “What sort of mythical creature, exactly?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Lewis!” he shouted, his voice rising hysterically. “Did you see it, or didn’t you?”

  “All right, calm down. I believe you.” Obviously, he had been driving far too long. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

  I started to turn away and saw, fleetingly highlighted in the red-and-white glow of the taillights, the ragged torso of a man. Rather, I saw the upper thigh and lower stomach and part of an arm as it swung away and out of sight. Judging from the proportions, the body must have been gigantic. I only saw it for the briefest instant, but my strongest impression, the thing that stuck fast in my mind, was that of tree leaves.

  “There!” bellowed Simon triumphantly, slamming on the brakes. “There it is again!” He tore at the door handle and burst from the car. He ran up the road a few yards.

  “Simon! Get back here!” I yelled, and waited. The sound of his footsteps died away. “Simon?”

  Hanging over the seat back, I peered out the rear window. I could not make out a thing beyond the few feet of tarmac illuminated by the taillights. The engine purred quietly, and through the open car door I heard the sough of wind in the pines like the hissing of giant snakes.

  I kept my eyes on the circle of light and presently glimpsed the rapid movement of an approaching figure. A moment later, Simon’s face floated into view. He slid into the car, slammed the door, and locked it. He put his hands on the steering wheel but made no other move.

  “Well? Did you see anything?”

  “You saw it, too, Lewis. I know you did.” He turned to face me. His eyes were bright, his lips drawn back over his teeth. I had never seen him so excited.

  “Look, it happened so fast. I don’t know what I saw. Let’s just get out of here, okay?”

  “Describe it.” His voice cracked with the effort it took to hold it level.

  “Like I said, I don’t think I could—”

  “Describe it!” He smashed the steering wheel with his fists.

  “It was a man, I think. It looked like a man. I only saw a leg and an arm, but I think it was a man.”

  “What color was it?”

  “How should I know what color it was?” I demanded shrilly. “I don’t know. It’s dark. I didn’t see it all that—”

  “Tell me what color it was!” Simon’s tone was cold and cutting.

  “Green, I think. The guy was wearing something green—rags or something.”

  Simon nodded slowly and exhaled. “Yeah, green. That’s right. You saw it too.”

  “What are we talking about, exactly?” I asked. My stomach twisted itself into a tight knot.

  “A huge man,” he answered quietly. “Eight feet tall at least.”

  “Right. And wearing a ragged green coat.”

  “No.” Simon shook his head firmly. “Not a coat. Not rags.”

  “What, then?” Tension made my voice sharp.

  “Leaves.”

  Yes. He’d seen it too.

  We stopped for gas at an all-night service station just outside of Inverness. The clock in the dash read 2:47 a.m. Except for a flying stop to fuel the car and grab some sandwiches in Carlisle, it was exactly eleven hours since our last real rest break. Simon had insisted on driving straight through, in order to be, as he put it, “in situ” by daybreak.

  Simon saw to the gas while I scrubbed the bug juice from the windshield. He paid the bill and returned to the car, carrying two Styrofoam cups of Nescafé. “Drink up,” he said, shoving one into my hand.

  We stood in the garish glare of the overhead fluorescent tubes, sipping coffee and staring at each other. “Well?” I said, after a couple minutes of this. “Are you going to say it, or am I?”

  “Say what?” Simon favored me with his cool, bland stare—another of the many little tricks.

  “For crying out loud, Simon, you know perfectly well what!” The words came out with more force than I intended. I suppose I was still fairly upset. Simon, however, seemed to be well over it. “What we saw out there.” I waved a hand to the highway behind us.

  “Get in the car,” he replied.

  “No! I’m not getting in the car until—”

  �
�Shut up, Lewis!” he hissed. “Not here. Get in the car and we’ll talk.”

  I glanced toward the door of the service station. The attendant had wandered out and was watching us. I don’t know how much he had heard. I ducked in and slammed the car door. Simon switched on the ignition, and we pulled out onto the road.

  “Okay, we’re in the car,” I said. “So talk.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me what you think we saw.”

  “But that’s obvious, don’t you think?”

  “I want to hear you say it,” I insisted. “Just for the record.”

  Simon indulged me with regal forbearance. “All right, just for the record: I think we saw what used to be called a Green Man.” He sipped some coffee. “Satisfied?”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else is there to say, Lewis? We saw this big, green man-thing. You and I—we both saw it. I really don’t know what else to say.”

  “You could add that it’s plain impossible. Right? You could say that men made of oak leaves do not, cannot, and never could exist. You could say that there’s no such thing as a Green Man—that it’s a figure of antique superstition and legend with no basis in reality. You could say we were exhausted from the drive and seeing things that could not be there.”

  “I’ll say whatever you like, if it will make you happy,” he conceded. “But I saw what I saw. Explain it how you will.”

  “But I can’t explain it.”

  “Is that what’s got to you?”

  “Yes—among other things.”

  “Just why is an explanation so important to you?”

  “Excuse me, but I happen to think it’s important for any sane and rational human being to keep at least one foot in reality whenever possible.”