The Devil’s Peace – Part 3 [Jim #10, Short Fiction]

The angel at the docks pointed north and Jim thanked her for the canoe. He rowed for an hour and came to a place where the lake became narrow and snaked between roots and rocks. It opened up into a silent cove. The water looked like a block of metal reflecting the sky, and in the middle of it a small man fished from a wooden raft.

Jim paddled up to him.

“Uh, Mr. Christ?”

The man didn’t move. He sat on his wooden raft with his wooden fishing pole in both hands. He looked at the water.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Christ,” Jim said. “I know you’re retired.”

“I’ve been fishing this spot for three hundred years,” the man said. “Three hundred years, and I haven’t caught a single fish.”

“That sucks,” Jim said.

“If a man casts his pole into a fishless pond, does he deserve to eat?”

Jim had been a long time getting here and he was pretty tired and a little angry. “I’ll be completely honest with you, Mr. Christ, I don’t give a shit and I’m not sorry about it,” he said. “Your followers are ripping Paradise apart, and you’re out here fishing.”

“Josh,” the man said.

“Josh?” Jim knew a Josh back in Tennessee. He was an old drunk with brown teeth and a lazy eye. “Alright, Josh. I’m Jim.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Jim,” said Josh. “But the politics of Paradise no longer interest me.”

“The fuck they don’t!” Jim said. Then he realized he just said fuck at Jesus – or Josh – and he pulled back. “Sorry, maybe that’s not called for. But you’re the guy at the center of the whole thing. They’re all fighting for different versions of you.”

“No they aren’t.”

“Yes they are.”

“Not really.”

“Goddammit they are!”

“People would rather die for the things they can’t see, than live with the ones they can,” said Josh. “One look at me, and they’ll just go die for something else.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody’s dying,” Jim said. “And isn’t that why you died?”

Josh laughed. It was a deep one from the gut.

“Well I’m glad you think it’s funny.”

“Give it a few thousand years and it will be,” Josh said. “I told her those barriers were a bad idea. What finally brought them down?”

“It’s not important,” Jim said. “They’re down and nobody is special anymore and they’re pissed off about it. I came here to convince you to talk to them.”

“What did you do in life?”

“What?”

“What work did you do? How did you eat?”

“Well, I don’t know, I just worked. Welding was good money. I did some roofing and drywalling. I don’t follow you.”

“We are not so different,” Josh said. “I also just worked. Mending ploughs, building houses. I even did some roofing.” He paused and looked Jim in the eye for the first time. “Would you give another man the road because he had clean hands? Would you accept the sting of his whip because you didn’t give it fast enough?”

Jim cringed. This was the rubbery shit that kept him away from church.

“No,” he said. “I’d pull him off his horse and beat him to hell.”

“Well, we had hammers and empty stomachs, and the Romans had armor and swords. They were chosen by many colorful gods and we were slaves to a black one. So one day, after three Roman soldiers raped and killed a friend of mine, I stood on a crate and said, I am a son of God.”

Jim followed Josh’s gaze. The fishing line disappeared into the plate surface of the water. He expected the line to jerk at any moment, and Josh to finally catch his fish, but the surface never broke.

“Between the Aramaic of the people,” Josh said, “and the Hebrew of the scholars, and the Greek of the Romans, the a became a the. Articles don’t translate so well. I became the son of God, and a few years later the fuckers nailed me to a cross.”

It was Jim’s turn to laugh. He nearly capsized.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Josh said.

“The Articles of Faith!” Jim said. “I get it now.”

“I can’t help you.”

“Seriously though, you’ve got to give me something. I came a long way.”

“Work.”

“What?”

“You said you were a roofer. The firmament is a roof.”

“There’s war in Paradise because the devil lied, and now that the lie is broken the advice of Jesus Christ is that I board it up?”

“My name is Josh,” Josh said.

Jim was at the edge of the cove and still shaking his head when Josh called out some parting words.

“Jim! Before you cast off, make sure there’s fish!”

***

With a bag full of nails, a good hammer, and planks of wood donated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, Jim went to work. One nail, one board at a time. He started where the crack in the firmament met the ground and worked his way up. He doubted that Josh’s advice had been sincere, but he didn’t care. It felt good to work. Hell, maybe that was the point.

He worked for a long time. Days, weeks, a year. Hundreds of boards and thousands of nails. He didn’t eat and he didn’t sleep. He didn’t look up because it discouraged him, he didn’t look down because he didn’t care for heights. He looked at his hands and the place where the hammer met the nail.

Beneath him the strange sound of a strange war pushed him upward.

But one day the hammer broke and he looked around. He was a mile high over a shredded wonderland. His labor trailed behind him like a dead rainbow. He looked up and saw that he had the whole sky to go.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said.

“Jim!”

A friendly and wise old face popped in through the crack in the firmament. Wild hair and the blaze of intelligence.

“You goddamn crazy hillbilly!” Einstein said. “You can’t fix the sky with wood!”

“Yeah, well your dice didn’t work for shit, either.”

Einstein barked a laugh and pulled himself up and mounted the firmament like a horse.

“I’ll make it make it up to you.”

“Yeah?”

“This breach is distorting my antiverse, too. And I think I’ve figured a way to patch it.”

“Alright.”

“Do you remember when you pushed me, Jim? The power of thought and the expansion of Paradise? Well, it turns out that thought travels through the vacuum at exactly the speed of light. This isn’t too surprising, but it gives rise to some wacky results, the most obvious of which is most pertinent. The object of thought is immediately real, but our experience of it is delayed by the intervening distance over c. Everything we dream up exists for a substantial amount of time before we can even see it.”

Jim understood none of it. “I think I preferred Jesus,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyway, I’ve examined what’s left of these barriers, and I believe I understand their function. They refract the light as it returns from the object of thought, and whoever originated the thought receives only the frequencies and colors that satisfy the preconceptions of the original. Unwanted information is essentially filtered out, scattered like a prism. It’s simple and ingenious, but I believe I can improve upon it.”

“Listen, I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I’m at the end of the line here,” Jim said. “You’re talking to me because you think you can fix this thing but you need an extra pair of hands. Well, hands are the only fucking thing I got. Give them something to do. I’ll do it.”

“It’s the particles, Jim,” Einstein said, “They’re goddamn crazier than you are.” He poked wild holes in the air with his index fingers. “As soon as you know where one is, it’s somewhere else, in from the wrong direction and out at unknown speeds. We need to make waves, Jim. Waves!” He made waves with his arms. “Wonderful predictable waves!”

“I don’t know how to make waves,” Jim said.

“I’m going to implode the dark star behind me and send out a wave of anti charm-quarks,” Einstein said. “And along this breach I’ll shoot a hyper-frequency energy beam. The energy in the beam must be concentrated in waves. Any particles will rip the guts out of the anti charm-quarks. That’s where you come in.”

“Of course it is.”

“We need a distraction.”

“You want me to distract the particles?”

“The people, the war, you need to distract all potential observers. Matter and energy come in waves until a somebody takes a look, then they freak out and have a particle party. If a single person down there looks up at the energy beam, its waves will particulize and the jig’s up.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

“Take this walkie-talkie. Contact me when the distraction is in play.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I didn’t believe it until I was dead,” Einstein said, slipping back into the antiverse. “Do you know the difference between science and religion, Jim?”

“Kind of.”

“Results! Get me that distraction, and I’ll get us a barrier.”

***

Jim did his best to explain the situation. He left out the part about his atomic ejaculate and failed at explaining particle/wave duality, but he got the important stuff. The firmament had cracked, and fixing it required the distraction of a billion warring Christians.

“I won’t do it,” Hitler said.

“Oh come on,” Jim said.

“It is not a good idea.”

Hitler sat in a soft leather recliner. His pineapple pina colada had a pink umbrella. Some true crime novels lay on the table. It looked like vacation, but his fists were clenched on the armrests and his eyes were pale and serious.

“I am relaxed now,” Hitler said. “I golf. I tell jokes. I read interesting articles.”

“You don’t look relaxed.”

“I am learning.”

Jim looked at his hands. Why couldn’t he just do something with his hands?

“You instigated the biggest war in history,” he said.

“I did.”

“And maybe up here you don’t get any credit, but like a hundred million people died.”

“There was a lot of death.”

“I bet a lot of them still think you’re kind of a prick.”

Hitler pounded his fist on the table and spilled his pineapple pina colada.

“I am given neither the recognition of my conquest nor the forgiveness of the conquered!” he said. “It isn’t fair!”

“Well then let’s flip it on them,” Jim said. “Go out there, talk some shit with that silver Nazi tongue, and save the fucking day!”

Hitler stood.

“Just give me a microphone,” he said. “I will unite the birds against the sky.”

***

Einstein. Einstein. Are you there?

Jim! I am in orbit around the dark star. The apparatus is fully operational. Is the distraction in play?

It’s ready, but it might take some time.

After detonation, it will take two minutes for the anti charm-quark wave to reach the energy beam. Not a single person can witness it. No observers! Our timing must be perfect.

Do not detonate until I give the word. I repeat, Do not detonate.

What is the distraction? Fireworks? A John Wayne movie?

Uh, well, not exactly. Would that have worked?

Anything that draws the eye. We only need a picosecond. What is in play?

I went with Hitler.

What?! You goddamn crazy hillbilly!

***

Hitler stood on the shoulders of a smirking angel. He tapped the microphone, and the thud echoed through the sound system of Paradise. There was a wang of feedback and he cleared his throat.

“The – enemy – is –not – here!” he said. He said it several more times, until some of the fighting around him stopped and he had a small audience.

Jim watched from a safe distance, binoculars in one hand and Einstein’s walkie talkie in the other. The small audience became a fashionable one in a matter of minutes. Mostly Orthodox, but some Anglicans and even Lutherans looked on with interest. At first they seemed mildly amused, glad for a break from the war. But Hitler spoke with a hard rhythm and punctuated with his fists and pretty soon they were punctuating with him.

Hitler really deserves some credit for all that death, Jim thought.

When the Catholics came the sounds of war stopped. They outnumbered the others by far. Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Evangelists, Congregationalists, Pentecostalists – all dwarfed by the Catholic hoard. Billions surrounded Hitler, high on the shoulders of the smirking angel.

The Presbyterian Church of Canada was the last to arrive. They brought enough cake for everyone.

Hitler had yet to say anything of substance. Given the full attention of every Christian in Paradise he drew in a breath and cracked his knuckles. A second smirking angel came down from the sky bearing an empty canvas. Hitler raised a brush and rounded out his speech.

“The – enemy – is – not – here! There is – another – barrier! The enemy – lies – in wait! I – will bring – the enemy – to us! I – will paint – Mohammed!”

“Oh shit,” Jim said.

***

Einstein! Now! Fire! Fire!

What’s happening down there?

Hitler is painting Mohammed! I don’t know jack shit about Islam, but you don’t fucking paint Mohammed.

Dammit, hillbilly. Elvis, you could have called up Elvis. Alright, we have detonation. Two minutes to arrival.

Can you make it go faster?

Anti charm-quarks do not have a gas pedal.

He’s got the outline of the face.

One minute, forty seconds.

Is that a nose? I think it’s a nose.

And thirty seconds.

You know, he’s pretty good. It’s kind of sad how good he is.

And fifteen seconds.

The lips are taking shape.

One minute remaining to impact. Is the distraction complete? A single observer, Jim! A single eye looking up and the waves of the energy beam will collapse!

Nobody’s turning away from this shit. He’s working on the eyes.

Forty seconds.

The eyes are fucking brilliant. I almost want him to finish. It’s like, they’re looking through me, man.

Twenty seconds. Jim, if this works, there will be an immense burst of light. Following the burst –

He’s on the ears. All he’s got left is ears. I think he’s going to do it. Holy fuck!

***

FLASH

***

Jim? Jim, come in! Jim, did it work? Damn you hillbilly, what’s going on down there?

I’m – I’m here.

Did it work?

Well, Hitler finished his painting and the whole nation of Islam blitzed in from a new breach. But I think it worked. There was a huge burst of light. Something’s weird though.

What is it? Can they see each other? They should not be able to see each other.

It’s like, the opposite.

Sonofabitch. A million pole dancers in Paradise, and you give Hitler a paintbrush.

No, it’s awesome. We can see each other’s thoughts. I can’t explain it, but . . . I don’t know, it’s like we’re all looking inside each other, but on the outside. And it’s fucking crazy because we’re all thinking the same things. Wait, no, there’s some Mormons thinking something different. Everybody’s looking at them. Oh man they’re super embarrassed. I can feel it, it’s horrible. And we’re empathizing . . . alright, they’re cool. Yeah, turns out we all think the same shit. It just got real friendly down here.

Results!

***

Jim found Lucy on a low-hanging cloud. She was all Lucy now and there were bags under her eyes. Jim said nothing and stood beside her.

The throng of all religions was peaceful but stirring. The spectacle of oneness had lost its charm, and it looked like they might start to go at it again.

Then it began to rain fish.

“Are you doing that?” Jim said.

“Nope,” Lucy said.

Jim pulled out the walkie talkie.

“Einstein, it’s raining fish.”

“Is that some kind of hillbilly riddle?”

“No, it’s raining fish. Does that have anything to do with the energy beam?”

“Well, in theory, if enough neutrinos from the antiverse run up against the quark barrier with sufficient simultaneity, any number of strange physical phenomena could be localized there. Fish rain is a bizarre, but possible, outcome.”

The fish fell and fell. Big juicy happy fish. Children played with them, waving the fish around like swords and beating each other silly. Many of the fish were cooked and eaten. Some of the fish landed in water and were fished again. And the fish kept falling. There were rivers and pools that were nothing but floppy and happy fish. The fish were knee high in some places and waist high in others. Grown men made fish angels and fish snowmen and competed at fish throwing and fish juggling and some of them even tried to sell the fish.

Where oneness by itself fell short of peace, the rain of countless fish fell long of war.

“You know what Jesus said to me?” Jim said.

Lucy stopped him with a hand.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I just need a drink.”

Jim Home

The Devil’s Peace – Part 1 [Jim #8, Short Fiction]

Jim stood and stretched. The house was gone and the Paradise around them was flat and gray. Above them the mushroom cloud looked like an inverse tornado. He looked at his penis.

“How many megatons do you think that was?” Jim said.

Cherry lay on her back, nearly comatose.

“A lot,” she said. Her breasts were pink beneath the fallout. If she ever moved again, there would be an imprint of an angel in the ashes.

“Do you ever feel like we’re overdoing it?” Jim said.

Cherry didn’t answer. Jim caught a flake of ash in his palm and watched it dissolve.

Out over the flatness a jagged light broke the sky. It was bright and Jim shielded his eyes. A tremor swam through the ground.

“Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“What was that?”

“It wasn’t me.”

Then the air shimmered and warbled and out of the hole walked the devil. Jim thought at first that the face was painted, but it was mascara. She was weeping.

***

“They are so cruel to me,” she said. “Why are they so cruel? What have I ever done but give them freedom and happiness? By what rights do they accuse me? I work – so – hard – ”

Her voice quivered and her hands shook. There was rage beneath the sadness.

Jim had always been terrified of emotional women, and this one was the devil. He gulped and looked to Cherry for help but she was glazed and dumb.

“What happened?” he said.

Lucy walked at him. Jim thought it was all over, that he’d pissed off the devil and hell had found him at last. Instead, she buried her face in his neck and cried.

“What am I going to do?” she said. “What can I do, Jim? The barrier is broken. There will be war. I hate the wars of men. It’s the blood, I can’t stand it.”

Jim held her and let her cry. “It’s okay,” he said.

“I give and I give and I give and it’s never enough or maybe it’s too much I don’t know I just work so hard and now everybody’s going to hate me. They’re going to hate me and all I ever did was give them everything they ever wanted and they won’t stop until it’s all gone everything I worked for,” she said into his neck.

He patted her back and said shhhh.

Another tremor rolled through and the jagged light flared above the bleakness.

“What did I do?” he said.

Lucy pulled her face from his neck and set her eyes into his. They were beautiful and timeless and bleary. Her hand on his cheek put warmth in his bones.

“Jim,” she said. “So reckless and innocent.”

He kissed her. It was reflex. When it was over Lucy laughed and wiped some of the mascara from her eyes.

“I’m quite the devil, aren’t I?”

“You’re a beautiful devil.”

“And you’re very sweet.”

“Did I really break Paradise?”

“Paradise is yours to break.”

“Ughh,” Cherry said. “Get a fucking room.”

The rebuke stabbed Lucy in the chest. She looked staggered. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and opened different ones. “She’s right,” she said.

Her transformation was swift and Jim stood looking at a professional and determined woman in white heels, skirt, and blazer. And he was covered in a suit and tie. He made a question mark with his face.

“You’re going to help me fix this,” she said.

“I still don’t understand what’s broken.”

“With the barrier down, the Christians can see each other.”

That didn’t make enough sense to Jim. He furrowed the question mark.

“They needed to gloat, so I let them gloat,” she said. “They were all very special until about ten minutes ago, and they will not like this equality.”

Jim looked at his tie. He flopped it around. “I don’t know,” he said. “This sounds like a job for Jesus.”

“He retired.”

“What?! Why?”

“You’re about to find out.”

A shimmer and a warble and the air opened up. Lucy checked her complexion in a pocket mirror.

“And Jim, they know me as Gabriella. Say nothing about the devil.”

“Okay. Wait. Which are you?”

Her smile was coy. They went through the hole.

***

The cloud was furnished with a round table and some chairs and an 18th century neoclassical Venetian chandelier. In the chairs sat Martin Luther, Pope John XX, King Henry VIII, Saint Paul, and Joseph Smith. Gabriella claimed the final chair and Jim stood behind her.

“Thank you for coming,” Gabriella said. Her white blazer glimmered. “You are all aware of this by now, but I will say it plainly so there is no mistake. Everybody goes to heaven, and heaven is uniformly wonderful.”

There was some silence. King Henry coughed but his heart wasn’t in it. Martin Luther stood.

“Let me be the first to welcome this news, and to praise God in His mercy and His wisdom. It brings joy to my heart that the entirety of the human spirit is given this plane to thrive upon. I have ever contended for a democratic eternity, tempered by the dominion of a merciful Master, and all Protestants glory in this new brotherhood.”

Luther retrieved a stack of papers from under his seat and thudded them on the table. They were a foot high.

“And I formally submit this petition, signed by one hundred millions, demanding that the Catholics be evicted immediately.”

“Hurrrrr hurrrrr hurrr,” said Pope John XX. “One hundred millions. Hurrrr hurrr hurrr.”

“They are honest millions!” Luther said. “I would take any individual among them against all of your corrupted legions!”

Gabriella accepted the petition and coaxed Luther back into his seat. She informed him that there would be no evictions.

“Everybody goes to heaven,” she said again. “It was decided a long time ago that Earth is a hard place with an obstructed view, and it’s unfair to expect people to get anything right. If entry were contingent upon rightness, the place would be empty. Every one of you is here because none of you are right.”

“Proverbs thirteen verse three,” Saint Paul said. Arms folded, head bowed. “He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life; but he that openeth his lips shall have destruction.”

“Very good, Paul,” Gabriella said. She threw him a treat and he ate it. “It may have been a mistake to veil this relativism. It may be that the orders of angels have purchased your happiness with an awful hubris. But the barriers were built and you were given your time to gloat. That time is finished. Now that you see one another you have two options: Join together and celebrate your failures, or fight for nothing.”

“Hubris,” said the Pope. “Hurrr hurrrr hurrrr.”

“This man cannot be retained in heaven! King Henry, surely you have no love for these vicars.”

“Ay, these wonky twats been on the piss for yonks,” King Henry said. “All smart for God but they go arse over tit for an Irish penny. Never been a Pope that didn’t beggar the poor cunts that fagged around for him. Give England a sword if it’s a buggered Pope that stiffs you.”

“What?”

“It means ay. Fuck Rome.”

“Hurrr hurrr hurrrrrrr.”

“Imposter!”

It was the first word to come out of Joseph Smith’s mouth. All eyes snapped to him.

“There is no Pope John Twenty,” he said. He stood and brandished a tablet. “It says right here on Wikipedia. There is a Pope John Nineteen, and a Pope John Twenty-one, but due to an accounting error they skipped John Twenty!”

“Ha!” King Henry pounded the table with his fist. “Counting Popes is a mug’s game, any road. Can’t build a cathedral with holy bell-ends. Fuck the Popes, count the shillings! Yaa haa harr!”

“ENOUGH!”

Gabriella stood and her beauty and fury diminished everything. Jim stepped back, afraid to be near it.

“Are these trivialities not yet beneath you?” she said. “Even here, in the seats of Paradise, will you squabble over small ideas and circumstantial prejudice? Existence itself stretches out before you in all of its eternal possibility, and this is where you sit, and these are your discussions. The world that sorrowed you is a drop in the ocean. In recompense I give you the ocean, and you fight over the drop.”

She breathed and shook. Jim could not believe this was the same woman that welcomed him to Paradise with a blowjob.

“There is only one question that should concern you,” she said. “Why must angels lie to keep the peace in heaven?”

The air shimmered and warbled and she stepped through the hole and was gone, devil or angel. Jim stood forgotten on the cloud of war that he had nutted.

***

When Jim looked back to the table, Joseph Smith was crouched like a cat behind the Pope. He pounced and snatched off the vicar’s hat. There was nothing underneath it.

“Pope Fishbowl the First!” King Henry laughed.

Jim gaped. The words that nearly brought him to his knees had no effect on these men. That, and the Pope’s head was hollow.

Joseph Smith had his nose in the papal cap. “There’s something in here!” he said. The cap echoed, something in here, in here, here.

“If you pull another Testament out of there,” Luther said, “I’ll see that you eat every doorbell in Paradise.”

Smith reached into the papal cap. It required the full length of his arm and his face puckered with effort. When he withdrew his hand it held a single sheet of paper. He read,

“By the time you read this, we will have won the war. Hurrr hurrr hurrr.”

“It’s a rouse!” Luther jumped from his seat.

“Sabbing bastards!” King Henry drew his sword and slew the falsely numbered Pope.

Luther whistled and a silver osprey flew forth. “Black smoke!” he said and leapt on the bird. “Black smoke forever more!” He flew.

Joseph Smith unchained his bicycle and pedaled away.

King Henry mounted his steed and approached Jim and towered over him. “That’s a right stonker in those yankee breeches. Wield it for England and I’ll grant you all the fadges north of Leeds.”

“No thanks,” Jim said, and the king insulted him severally and galloped off.

Jim looked around and found the elevator. He held the door for Saint Paul, who entered slowly, arms crossed and head bowed. The glass door closed and soft jazz fueled the descent.

“Corinthians six, verse three,” the saint said. “Know ye not that we shall judge the angels?”

“I don’t have any treats,” Jim said.

The saint let fall a single tear, and the 18th century neoclassical Venetian chandelier rose out of view.

_____________________________

Next Jim Story

Jim Home

I Hate Myself and I Can’t Die [Jim #7, Short Fiction]

In Paradise, the snooze button gave you six minutes. Jim hit his again. He’d lost count. Maybe two hundred hits, maybe a thousand.

Outside his window the sun was shining and the birds were chirping. Every goddamn day with the sun and the birds and the breeze. He buried his head in the pillow.

His phone rattled and chimed. He grabbed it and squeezed out an eye. Cherry.

Happy hundred! Wanna party?

Had it already been a hundred years?

Na. Let’s skip it.

He drifted. The alarm sounded and he snoozed it. Another rattling chime.

Oh come on. Me and the girls made plans . . .

Great, Jim thought. Free holes: empty, wet, dark, used.

Not hungry.

No pie, I promise.

Let’s do it tomorrow.

I want you to nuke my pussy.

That almost got Jim out of bed. He’d pumped a lot of things into a lot of holes, but he’d never seen a clit go nuclear.

I don’t have that kind of energy.

Haha. Are you Mr. Bummy Pants today or what?

Fuck you.

I’m just tired.

I know just what you need, Mr. Bummy Pants.

Don’t –

Happy Hundred, Jim. Good luck!

***

His door banged open. A wild man with a beard and shining eyes grabbed Jim by the ankles and pulled him off the bed. His head bounced on the floor.

“Goosh!”

“Art thou Jim?”

Jim sat up and rubbed his head.

“I art,” he said.

The man picked up the bed and threw it out the window. Glass shattered. The frame clattered on the walk below. The mattress clung for dear life, impaled by a shard.

“I am Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and you are fortunate in the company you keep.” He kicked over the nightstand. “I am neither cheap nor easily persuaded. And I’m the best.”

With a fist like a rock he made three neat holes in the wall. He unzipped his fly and began to piss in the corner. He spoke over his shoulder.

“You have exactly three minutes to dress yourself and pack one bag. The bag may not weigh more than a stone. It ought to contain knickers for all seasons and terrain.”

“I’m not packing a bag,” Jim said. “Did Cherry send you? Tell her she owes me a bed. I’m not going out, I don’t want to go out. I don’t care about the years and I just feel like sleeping for a while.”

“Two minutes,” Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton said. He zipped up and kicked another hole in the wall.

Jim groaned and put his head in his hands. He wanted to cry. He listened as the Sir furthered the destruction of his bedroom.

“One minute.”

“Alright,” Jim said. “Alright, I’m getting up. I’m up. Just give me an hour or so. I’ll take a shower and get my shit together. You hear me? Let me get sorted, you British psycho.”

“Too late,” Sir Shackleton said. He grabbed Jim by the shoulders. “Look at this place. It’s unlivable. I’ve scheduled it for demolition.”

“You what?!”

But Sir Shackleton walked out the door without another word. Jim hopped after him, one leg in a pair of jeans.

“What does that mean, demolition? You’re not serious. I like this house. What’s wrong with a house? People live in houses. Sunnuva bitch.”

He got his pants on just in time for the front door. A tank rolled through his fence and onto the yard. Shackleton gave it a thumbs up. Jim yelled stop! but it fired a shell and his house exploded. It fired another shell and the house fell over. Jim was pretty sure the third shell was just for fun.

“This isn’t funny!” Jim said. “I was just taking a few days off. A few months maybe. Years. It doesn’t matter. Is it fucking crime to have the blues? I had stuff in there!”

Sir Shackleton’s eyes clogged his throat.

“Was it the stuff of dreams, Jim? The stuff of adventure? Did it smell like the dead salt of acrid seas or the sour sweat of the jungle? Was it a fist raised against winter and the hot blood of glory?”

Jim swallowed. “Uh, no. It was, like, albums and stuff.”

“Art thou a man?”

“Sure.”

“Sign this.”

“What is it?”

“Sign it.”

Jim signed it.

“Good. My starship is down at the bar. We’ll have to take a cab.”

***

Olympus was a mountain in orbit around a red giant. Ten thousand miles from base to peak, with no planet to support it, the mountain spun like a top that the giant had flicked into motion.

“I have to climb that?” Jim said.

“You’re going to conquer it,” Sir Shackleton said.

“Listen, I get what you’re doing and I appreciate it, but can’t you just drop me at the top? You go tool around for a while and come back and pick me up. I won’t tell anybody.”

Shackleton slapped Jim through the face.

“Thou art Jim! Thou art a man! Every moment in a man’s life is a woman, Jim, a woman with brass legs and wrecking ball chicken-tippers. Every moment is her walking by. There she goes. There goes another one. Maybe the next one will blow your sad chubby a kiss. And they’ll keep walking by, Jim. It’s a doll train to pussy town and you’re not on it. And you won’t be on it until you grab one of these broads by the throat, lift up her skirt, and open up the turnpike.”

Shackleton had both hands on Jim’s shoulders and his eyes were lasers.

“Open the turnpike, Jim.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Open the turnpike.”

“Half way, just drop me half the way up.”

Sir Shackleton sighed and released him. He handed Jim a piece of paper. It was the thing he’d signed.

“Read the last paragraph,” Shackleton said.

The undersigned hereby agrees that, upon failure to reach the summit of Olympus in full compliance with the rules stated above, all freedoms shall be forfeit for one year and one day, during which period the undersigned shall be placed in the custody of psychotics and have experiences including, but not limited to, rape, torture, and mutilation.

“I really have to start reading these things,” Jim said.

A foot to his chest and he fell out of the starship and landed on his back at the base of Olympus.

***

Jim was a quarter of the way up when he heard a foreign but familiar sound. He followed his ears, and sitting against a bare tree a young man played a haggard guitar. Blonde hair hid the edges of his face and the noise he made was brutal and sincere.

Cobain looked up and saw him. Jim felt like a gazelle coming upon a lion in the wild.

“Hi,” Cobain said. It was friendly.

“Hey,” Jim said. He took a cautious step. “I, uh, heard you playing.”

Cobain ran his fingers over rough body of the guitar. It looked like it had been hacked out of a stump and strung with wire.

“I didn’t think I’d ever play one of these again,” he said. He moved some of the hair out of his face. “Something about this place, I guess.”

“Yeah . . .”

“Sir Shackleton?”

“Yeah!”

Jim found a rock to sit on. He sat with his elbows on his knees.

“It’s funny,” Cobain said. “When you get everything you’ve got nothing. Somebody comes along and takes it from you, then you have something again.” He strummed a soft chord on the guitar. Its imperfections rattled. “You hear that? That’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s raw,” Jim said.

The two of them sat in like posture for a while. The peak of Olympus was shrouded in distance and the vacuum was close enough to touch. It was quiet.

“Can I ask you something?” Jim said. “I guess it’s kind of personal.”

“That’s alright.”

“Why did you kill yourself?”

Cobain looked at his guitar. “You know, I can’t really remember what it was like to be in that space. I remember being there, I remember the thoughts, I just can’t pick up the moment. There was a lot of pain and I didn’t know where it was coming from, and I made a decision and everything was over.”

He moved some of the hair from his eyes. There was a smile playing in them.

“The craziest thing about it was seeing it. I just expected the world to go black, and then I was standing there over my body. Like, the mess never occurred to me – it was all cerebral. It was metaphysical. But when I saw the chunks of my brain mashed into the ceiling, the whole philosophy of it seemed kind of absurd. Less than absurd, like it didn’t exist. It was more embarrassing than anything.”

Jim tried to think of something to say, the right question to ask. He couldn’t. Instead, he shifted his weight and looked at the dirt.

“What really fucked with me was when the angel popped up next to me. He said, I bet you’d have written a kickass song about that.”

“Did you?” Jim said.

Cobain plucked a few notes.

“It’s a little rough around the edges,” he said.

He played a song.

***

The peak was a fist against the bleakness. Jim pulled himself up the steep wall of the forearm one hold at a time. His arms and legs burned. It had taken a long time to get this far and it was strange to have the top so close.

He wondered how many people had made this climb. How many had gone numb with happiness and come here to feel something again? He wondered if Cobain would ever look down from here, or if he’d work at his song for eternity.

He reached the top and pulled himself up. Ten thousand miles were beneath him, and as many thoughts behind him. He stood up and breathed in. The red giant burned a red hole in the sky.

Jim pulled out his phone.

Stock your shelves, bitches. The nuke is hot.

Jim Home