Last Days Read online

  Evenson's detective witnesses and takes part in all kinds of the childish mumbo-jumbo new faiths and other fraternal organizations employ to set themselves apart, inspire loyalty, and guarantee security for the faithful brotherhood. In varying degree, fraternal organizations from Skull & Bones to the Raccoon Lodge ritualize the appearance and observances of their membership. Some groups have actual uniforms, others content themselves with shared choices that add up to an ad hoc uniform. Have you seen Scientologists on the march in their Florida redoubt, members of the New York Athletic Club marching into their mansion on Central Park South, or Shriners whooping it up in a convention hotel? They don't really dress like other people, they dress like themselves. Ramse and Gous make Kline put on gray trousers, a white shirt, and (a brilliant detail) a red clip-on tie. That's what they all wear, the uniform of the anonymous white American drudge. Kline takes this fact in for a moment, then forgets it. So does the reader. The point of the uniform is that it is instantly forgotten.

  Before the detective can be introduced to Borchert, certain ritual satisfactions must be accomplished at the gate. It is the guard's duty to enquire, "What is wanted?" and the applicant's duty to respond with the self-congratulatory formula, "Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we." This rubbish sounds at least faintly parodic, but it is utterly surpassed by the formulaic rigmarole that goes on in the fortress of the Pauls, where the individuation of given names is erased and every remark of a person of higher status must be examined to determine if it is an orphic or parabolic bit of higher learning, a "teaching."

  "What's your name?" Kline asked.

  "I'm Paul," said the man.

  "You're not," said Kline.

  "We all are," he said.

  Kline shook his head. "You can't all be Paul," he said.

  "Why not?" said the man. "Is this a teaching?"

  "A teaching?" Kline said. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Should I write it down?"

  "Write what down?"

  "'You can't all be Paul.' And whatever else comes thereafter from your lips."

  "No," said Kline, a strange dread starting to grow in him. "I don't want you to write anything down."

  "Is that too a teaching?" said Paul. "'Write nothing down'?"

  A strange dread is right--the Pauls have decided he is the Messiah, and they intend to give him the honor of a crucifixion. The other side is just as horrifying, the only difference in their plans for Kline being that they wish to crucify him as Barabbas, not Jesus. In two regards he does seem perhaps to be singled out by a larger force: Kline could be seen as harrowing an all-but literal hell as he goes about his murderous business, and no matter how great the odds against him, it comes to seem that he cannot be killed. So as he sinks deeper and deeper into a river of blood, in the process completely aware that he is losing, then has lost, his soul, Kline may either actually have become a holy figure, the new Messiah who brings not life but the gruesome Last Days and End Times, or he may be completely deluded, off his rocker, a nut case whack job. Evenson, thankfully, lets the ambiguity stand.

  Instead of resolving Kline's worldly status, he does something far more interesting. Reeking (one imagines) of smoke, covered in blood, Kline listens to the sound of the approaching sirens and, having nothing else to do, walks off. Soon he begins to jog, then settles into straightforward running, asking himself Where now? and What next? The last protagonist of a great work of American fiction to ask himself these questions so resonantly was probably Huckleberry Finn.

  In the afterword written for the 2002 University of Nebraska Press republication of Altmann's Tongue, Evenson describes what befell him when the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, the institution in which he was raised to be a faithful and believing Mormon, decided to pose itself against his work, which it saw to be indulgent toward violence and depraved in its outlook. (It seems that none of this was made very explicit. The Church retreated into a prolix bureaucratic boondoggle intended to wear him down and ended by requesting that he prove his good faith by ceasing to write. The man was mugged by his own religion.) It is difficult not to frame the sects in Last Days as bleakly parodic versions of Mormonism, but to do so would be more than a little reductive. Sure, Mormonism is in there, but so is a great deal else.

  Early on in his afterword, Evenson speaks of a period when he was living in Seattle, studying and writing. He had agreed to serve as a bishopric counselor and was sometimes asked to perform the tasks of a transient bishop. In this role, he picked up stranded, homeless, sometimes derelict people at certain specified locations and simply drove them around the city, hearing them out and trying to figure out how best to help them. Listening to what they had to say was central to his mission as he defined it. At least once, he felt that the man beside him represented serious danger.

  The conclusion to his afterward pushes this situation up several notches:

  "You have been driving in the car, a man pointing a gun at your head, and now he has left the car and you are free. Everything around you has gone strange. You are no longer in the same world you were in before the gun bruised your temple. You have the suspicion that you are no longer yourself.

  "Now, now that you are free (if it really is you), the question is, How do you make sense of the rest of your life?"

  What are you doing, where are you going, who are you? After great extremity, everything in your life should be seen anew. The objects are pretty much the same, except of course that they contain within them the seeds of what happened to you, but the maps around and to them have all been redrawn. You can get lost in a second. Who you are is a puzzle it may take the rest of your life to solve, and in the end it may turn out that you are merely the person who spent his life trying to work out the puzzle of who he was. But that . . . that's not nothing.

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTILATION

  And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast if from thee . . . And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee . . .

  Matthew 5:29-30

  I.

  It was only later that he realized the reason they had called him, but by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. At the time, all the two men had told him on the telephone was that they'd seen his picture in the paper, read about his infiltration and so-called heroism and how, even when faced with the man with the cleaver--or the "gentleman with the cleaver" as they chose to call him--he hadn't flinched, hadn't given a thing away. Was it true, they wanted to know, that he hadn't flinched? That he had simply watched the man raise the cleaver and bring it down, his hand suddenly becoming a separate, moribund creature?

  He didn't bother to answer. He only sat holding the telephone receiver against his face with his remaining hand and looking at the stump that marked the end of the other arm. The shiny, slightly puckered termination of flesh, flaked and angry at its extreme.

  "Who is this?" he finally asked.

  The men on the other end of the telephone laughed. "This is opportunity knocking," one of them said, the one with the deeper voice. "Do you want to be trapped behind a desk the rest of your life, Mr. Kline?"

  The other voice, the one with a lisp, kept asking questions. Was it true, it wanted to know, that after he had removed his belt with his remaining hand and tightened it as a tourniquet around the stump, he then stood up, turned on one of the burners on the stovetop, and cauterized the wound himself?

  "Maybe," Kline said.

  "Maybe to what?" asked Low Voice.

  "I have it on authority that you did," said Lisp. "Was it electric or gas? I would think electric would be better. But then again it would take awhile for electric to warm up."

  "It was a hotplate," said Kline.

  "A hotplate?" said Low Voice. "Good Lord, a hotplate?"

  "So, electric?" asked Lisp.

  "I didn't have anything else," said Kline. "There was only a hotplate."

  "And then, once caute
rized, you turned around and shot him through the eye," said Lisp. "Left-handed no less."

  "Maybe," said Kline. "But that wasn't in the papers. Who told you that?"

  "I have it on authority," said Lisp. "That's all."

  "Look," said Kline. "What's this all about?"

  "Opportunity, Mr. Kline," said Low Voice. "I told you already."

  "There's a plane ticket waiting under your name at the airport."

  "Why?" asked Kline.

  "Why?" asked Lisp. "Because we admire you, Mr. Kline."

  "And we'd like your help."

  "What sort of help?"

  "We must have you, Mr. Kline. Nobody else will do," said Low Voice.

  "No?" said Kline. "Why should I trust you? And who are you exactly?"

  Lisp laughed.

  "Mr. Kline," Lisp said, "surely by now you realize that you can't trust anyone. But why not take a chance?"

  There was no reason to go. It was not a question, as Low Voice had suggested, of either a desk job or their offer, whatever their offer happened to be. The pension he had received was enough to live on. Plus, right after he had lost his hand and cauterized the wound himself and then shot the so-called gentleman with the cleaver through the eye, he had taken the liberty, in recompense for the loss of his hand, of helping himself to a briefcase containing several hundred thousand dollars. This he saw as a profoundly moral act in a kind of moral, biblical, old testament sense: an eye for a hand, and a bag of money thrown in. The fact that the eye had had a brain and a skull behind it was incidental.

  So, in short, there was no reason to accept the invitation. Better to stay put, have a lifelike prosthetic made to fit over the stump or, at the very least, wear and learn how to use the hooks that had been given him. Perfect a game of one-handed golf. Purchase a drawerful of prosthetics for all occasions. Buy some cigars. All of life was open to him, he told himself. Opportunity could knock all it liked.

  And besides, he was having trouble getting out of bed. Not that he was depressed, but it was hard to get out of bed especially when he remembered that the first thing he'd be doing was trying to brush his teeth left-handed. So, instead, he spent more and more time rubbing the end of his stump, or simply staring at it. It seemed, the termination of it, at once a part of him and not at all part of him, fascinating. Sometimes he still reached for things with his missing hand. Most days he couldn't even put on the hooks. And if he couldn't bring himself to strap on the hooks, how could he be expected to leave the house? And if he didn't leave the house, how could he be expected to go to the airport, let alone pick up the ticket, let alone board a plane?

  Things will get better, he told his stump. Someday we'll leave the house. Things are bound to improve.

  A week after the first call, they called back.

  "You missed it," said Lisp. "You missed the flight."

  "Is it because of fear?" asked Low Voice. "Are you afraid of flying?"

  "How can you say that to him?" Lisp asked Low Voice. "A man who cauterizes his own stump isn't going to let a little something like that get to him, is he?"

  "So he missed the flight," said Low Voice. "He didn't allow for enough time. Got held up at security, maybe."

  "Yes," said Lisp. "That's sure to be it."

  They both fell silent. Kline kept the receiver pressed against his ear.

  "Well?" asked Lisp.

  "Well what?" asked Kline.

  "What happened?" asked Lisp.

  "I didn't go."

  "He didn't go," said Low Voice.

  "We know that," said Lisp. "We know you didn't go, otherwise you'd be here. If you'd gone we wouldn't be calling you there."

  "No," said Kline.

  The phone was silent again. Kline listened to it, staring at the veiled window.

  "So?" said Low Voice.

  "So what?"

  "Goddammit," said Lisp. "Do we have to go through this again?"

  "Look," said Kline. "I don't even know who you are."

  "We already told you who we are," said Lisp.

  "We're opportunity," said Low Voice. "And we're knocking."

  "I'm going to hang up," said Kline.

  "He's hanging up," said Low Voice, his voice sounded worn out and exhausted.

  "Wait!" said Lisp. "No!"

  "Nothing personal," said Kline. "I'm just not your man."

  Almost as soon as he hung up, the telephone began ringing again. He let it ring. He stood up and walked around the apartment, from room to room. There were four rooms, if you counted the bathroom as a room. In every one he could hear the telephone clearly. It kept ringing.

  In the end, he picked up the receiver. "What?" he said.

  "But you are our man," said Lisp, his voice desperate. "We're just like you."

  "There's the ticket--" said Low Voice.

  "No ticket," said Kline. "No opportunity. I'm not your man."

  "Do you think we are acquaintances of the man with the hatchet?" asked Lisp.

  "Cleaver," said Low Voice.

  "We are not acquaintances of the man with the hatchet," Lisp said. "We're just like you."

  "And what am I like, exactly?" said Kline.

  "Come and see," said Low Voice. "Why not come and see?"

  "If we wanted to kill you," Lisp said. "You'd be dead by now." It was odd, thought Kline, to be threatened by a man with a lisp.

  "Please, Mr. Kline," said Low Voice.

  "We don't want to kill you," said Lisp. "Ergo, you're still alive."

  "Aren't you even a little curious, Mr. Kline?" asked Low Voice.

  "No," said Kline. And hung up the telephone.

  When the telephone began to ring again, he unplugged it from the wall. Rolling the cord up around it, he packed it away in the closet.

  He walked around the house. He would have to go out, he realized, in a day or two, to buy food. He went into the bedroom and took, from the table beside the bed, a notepad and a pen. Going into the kitchen he opened all the doors of the cabinets, the refrigerator, the freezer, and sat thinking.

  Eggs, he thought.

  Eggs, he wrote, though doing it with his left hand it came out looking like Esgs.

  My left hand doesn't want eggs, he thought. It wants esgs.

  He kept writing, his left hand mutilating each word slightly. What do you think of that? he asked his stump. And then wondered if he was speaking to his stump or to his missing hand. Did it matter? he wondered. He wondered what had become of his hand. Probably it had stayed on the table where it had been cut off. Probably it had still been there when the police arrived and had been taken away to be frozen and marked as an exhibit. It was probably still frozen somewhere.

  Esgs it is, he thought. And dread. And maybe a glass or two of nelk.

  He stared at the notepad, stopped staring only when he heard water dripping out of the defrosting freezer. He was not sure how much time had passed.

  He got up and closed the freezer and fridge, and then stood waiting, listening for the motor to kick in.

  A few days went by. His electric razor broke, emitting only a low hum when he plugged it in. He stopped shaving. The food mostly ran out. I need to get some food, he thought, but instead drank a glass of sour milk.

  He lay in the bed, holding the milk-ghosted glass with one hand, balanced on his chest. He could get up, he thought. He could get out of bed and get up and get out of the house. I need to get some food, he thought, and then thought, later. There would always be time to get food later. Esgs and dread. At some point he realized that the glass he had thought he was holding was being held with his missing hand. The glass was balanced on his chest, the stump stationed beside it, a blunt animal. He was not quite sure how the glass had got there.

  He was not going out, he realized hours later. The milk still ringing the bottom of the glass had dried into a white sheet and had begun to crack. Perhaps it was days later. He had missed his chance, he realized, and now what little will he had had slipped away and it was too late. He closed his eyes. W
hen he opened them it was dark outside, so he closed them again.

  When he opened them, a pale daylight leaked into the room through the curtains. Beside him, sitting on kitchen chairs they had dragged into the bedroom, were two men. They were bundled in heavy coats and gloves and scarves despite the warmth of the room.

  "Hello, hello," said the first, his voice bass.

  "We knocked," said the other. His upper lip was mostly missing, a ragged scar in its place; it looked as if the lip had been cut into with a pair of pinking shears. "We knocked and knocked, but nobody answered. So we let ourselves in. It was locked," he said, "but we knew you didn't mean the lock for us."

  When Kline didn't say anything, the one with the torn lip said, "You remember us? The telephone?" The man lisped on the us, but having seen the lip it was hard for him to think of him as just Lisp anymore.

  "The telephone," said Kline, his voice raspy.

  The torn-lipped man raised his eyebrows and looked at his companion. "He's pretending not to remember," he said.

  "Of course you remember," said the one with the bass voice. "Opportunity knocking? All that?"