Part Four definitely contains some NSFW content. Enter at your own peril.
PART FOUR
Ed entered the apartment like a sleepwalker. He might have been roused had Toby been there, crowing over Ed’s shame, but Toby was out and Ed was almost certainly all out of rage.
Instead, he shivered a little and looked around the drab main room of the apartment. And he seemed to be peering down the dim corridor of years stretched ahead of him, at an endless parade of inebriate evenings on a succession of already ruined couches across from a stream of steadily degenerating sitcoms. Part of his mind was panicked by this vision; but another part countered, advocating the scenario as a reasonable approximation of peace, if not precisely the same sort of peace he sought in Catania’s apartment. Ed stopped short at this latter thought and threw himself onto the couch, and he told himself not to mistake peace for passivity.
And this thought stunned him; for a long moment he simply sat motionless, savoring it.
*
Toby entered quietly a few minutes later and found Ed sitting on the couch, staring into space, with Vanessa curled in his lap.
“Even the pure peace of the deep, deep forest is at the same time full of the slow riot of the growth of the trees. And the blank wall silently bears heavy loads! There really is no such thing as passivity; merely avoidance.”
“Now you’re starting to get it,” Toby said, but Ed didn’t hear him.
Ed shook his head. However revelatory the idea, it didn’t help him come any closer to peace. In fact, he felt a growing despair, because it meant he didn’t even know what peace meant to him – acknowledging peace as an activity actually made him feel less comfortable. And the deeper implications that revealed for an idea as complex as love simply caused his mind to shut down.
He groaned, and the sound caused Vanessa to leap from his lap in a fright.
Toby said, “Brother, I believe you have found the right way. Do not falter from the path simply because it feels strange to your feet.”
Ed looked up. Ten minutes ago, he would have argued anything with Toby. Now he asked, “When did you get here?”
Toby stepped into the kitchen. “A couple minutes ago.” He idly drew a few ideograms in some sugar spilled on the countertop. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I can’t get my head around it, man. I just…don’t know what reality is any more. Every time I find what I think I want, I find that it isn’t actually what I want. It’s like that quantum crap. The words I apply to define a thing keep changing the thing so that it isn’t the thing I just defined. I mean, what the shit? How am I supposed to get anywhere in a world like that?”
“Who says you’re supposed to get anywhere? Why can’t you already be where you need to be?” Toby casually started searching through the cupboards.
Ed looked around the room, thinking about Cat’s apartment. He shook his head and sneered. “No. This can’t be where I need to be.”
“Ed. We’re not talking want, here; we’re talking about need.”
“I don’t need filth, Toby. I don’t need a job that makes me suicidal or homicidal. I don’t need to feel trapped.” Ed groaned, and the groan rose to a shout. “Fuck!”
Part of his mind thought, I need a woman. But another part of his mind’s eye filled with guns, and he thought, Fuck that.
“I think I need most to stop thinking about it.”
But his mind wouldn’t let it go. Peace. Was Cat’s apartment peaceful? Yes, except when she was in it. But without her, it couldn’t exist. Was she at heart a peaceful person, then? Or was she too just searching?
“God damn it, I need to stop,” Ed said
“Fair enough,” Toby said, popping the fridge and clashing around inside. “I may offer a little advice?”
“Please.” Ed was ready to hear anything just then.
Toby straightened, pulling a beer and a game controller from the fridge. “To paraphrase Jiminy Cricket, ‘Always let you subconscious be your guide.’” He walked to the couch. “Give your forebrain a break, Ed, and let your hindbrain do the heavy lifting.”
Ed stared for a moment, then shrugged. “What the hell.” If peacefulness is an activity, he thought, maybe not thinking is the way to understanding. What have I got to lose? He picked up a game controller. “Gimme a beer.”
*
They drank a beer and played their favorite military espionage game. They drank another, and played a game wherein the objective was decidedly more artistic and involved saving the world through the use of symbols painted by a magical dog’s tail; Toby chose that one. By the third beer, Ed began to see fireflies out of the corners of his eyes; Toby had an amazing aura, and the starfighter game they were playing was simply a black hole in the room. Ed’s head throbbed as if Toby were playing his bass inside Ed’s skull, or a platoon of dwarves was forging weapons behind his eyes. Within moments the throbbing reached a level where it seemed that the dwarves must come bursting out of the back of his head.
“You must seek past your pain, Brother, if you would come by your enlightenment honestly,” Toby said, his voice curiously disembodied.
“You think Zeus had issues with Athena? Not on your life,” Ed said.
That was a little headache compared to this; not even a migraine, no lights, no flashing, no sirens. No, the sirens were for Odysseus, and he had a plan for them. Still went out of his head, but maybe that’s not a bad thing, Ed thought.
“Maybe I need to see about getting me some sirens around here to help get these dwarves out of my head.”
Toby made his guitar scream like an ambulance on the way to a party. “You always want women way out of your league,” he said. He hit a rimshot, which was followed by something like thunder.
Ed looked to the door, but decided the pounding and clashing was simply the dwarves breaking free, and it wouldn’t have been such an ordeal if they’d simply waited until after cleaning up the placenta to put on their armor. But no, not only had they ripped their way from his braincase fully armed and armored, but now they had gunk encrusted all through the joints of their well-joined carapaces. First they asked him for polish, brushes, oil – the works; none of which Ed had, seeing as he hadn’t really expected half a dozen dwarves in jewel-tone enameled plate and chain mail to crack open the back of his head and wander about tracking blood all over his nice white carpeting with their big damn boots and sollerets. Granted that it was a rental, it was still Ed’s damage deposit, and he had to ask, “What kind of moron puts white, of all colors, carpeting in a goddamned rental?”
Then the dwarves picked up signs and started picketing, marching in a little circle and chanting in some guttural backwards tongue. One sign said, PSYCHIC DEFENSE LOCAL 9000 ON STRIKE!, while another said, PDL9000 ID UNFAIR!. And Ed thought, Ah, because of Cat. Catania. Cat.
But no; the dwarves stopped. It’s because we need a real leader; not some insane, megalomaniac, hydrocephalic midget with a Napoleon complex! We’re all over the place, attacking shadows, while that tinpot despot is selling the treasury out the back door.
“But what about Cat?”
Toby laughed, and then meowed.
The dwarves as one shook their heads. Forget the girl; she’s not a threat. And believe us, we know threats. You know what? We’re out of here. Tell the despot to fend for himself for a night; we want pizza! And the dwarves trooped out of the apartment.
Then the sirens showed up, and damn if they weren’t exactly as advertised. If a person took the voices of Catherine Zeta Jones, Kathleen Turner, Jennifer Connelly, and Carmen McCray, ran them through a filter and sent it out the other side, multiplied by seven part harmony, and then put that into bodies that made supermodels look like potatoes, well, maybe one can get a sense of what Ed saw and heard. He rubbed his eyes and mutely begged them to sit with him, but they weren’t interested.
He clutched the loose fragments of his skull. “Damn you, Zeus! Couldn’t have gotten in touch with Odin, could you? Passed along to him what gives half a damn about mortals the secrets of cranial c-section?” Ed cried.
The door creaked open and Catania poked her head in and asked that if they were going to party, could they at least keep the zombies from banging around in the hallway? And Ed wanted to ask her in, but the zombies pushed past her, and she was gone, and suddenly the apartment was full of the stinking undead, dropping leeches all over the carpet. Then that bastard Toby came back in with a bass guitar strapped across his skinny, naked frame, chucking out some amazing subterranean power chords that really got the ultimate consumers moving. The zombies were all over Ed like lepers on Jesus, and the sirens fled even as Ed called them back. But instead of the sirens, the dwarves came back into the room and pushed the zombies into the corners. They had decided that they weren’t done with the General yet, and they called him out.
And from somewhere behind Ed crawled this mewling thing. It wasn’t a midget; rather, it was a child. Ed as a child, in fact. And he was not insane, but rather cut in half, from the top to the bottom, the wide wound covered with skin like a scar. Ed stared in horror at himself lolling on the floor, and gagged as the half-mouthed thing tried to speak. Nothing intelligible came out, but the dwarves suddenly rushed off brandishing weapons.
“Oh, man,” Toby said, “You are messed up.”
Ed looked over at Toby to plead for an explanation, but he saw that Toby was himself cut in half. But Toby’s other half had been replaced with a collection of clinking, empty bottles and glowing Chinese calligraphy. Ed looked back at his half-self mewling on the floor and thought, Okay, I guess I get that, but now what?
Now, Cat poked her head back into the apartment and asked again about the noise on the stairwell. The halved halfling on the floor cried out and reached towards her, and the dwarves cried out and rushed at her while calling retreat, and Ed looked helplessly around the room, but only the cat was looking back at him. She was staring at him like she knew exactly what was in his head; but Ed smiled, because he knew he was empty up there just then, scooped out, and the dwarves would back him up on that.
“Don’t think you can take over my mind, cat, with those yellow eyes like particularly poorly constructed frosting roses and oh…my…god…I’m so hungry right now!” Man, when I come down, I’m going to be in a world of hurt, and I don’t just mean those damn dwarves!
But the dwarves had gone, and they had been good enough to take the pizza boxes and zombies with them, and the sirens too. That vexed Ed no little bit. And Toby had gone somewhere as well, leaving Ed alone with the cat, who just…kept…staring.
“Cats see reality as it really is, and that’s why they’re all mad,” Toby said, a disembodied voice somewhere behind Ed.
“Sometimes I can feel myself seeing the world like them, and that’s when I start the cycle of self-destruction again, and what was it I saw yesterday?” Ed said.
He had wanted to forget, and at the same time he still wanted to remember, and they both worked; he couldn’t quite remember, but he felt the apprehension as if he could.
“I suspect the cat knows, Toby, but she isn’t telling. Not that she feels more loyalty for you than for me: she is Cat, and like all of her tribe feels only loyalty to herself.” They are solipsists, are cats, and if ever a god tried to birth itself from one of their heads, they’d only laugh in that peculiar, silent, sideways of theirs, knowing as they do that all things are merely figments for their own amusement.
Ed wondered then, how would she deal with the pain of cranial birth? Would she assume it was merely a side effect of a particularly difficult mental image, or would it shake her faith in herself as the only existential thing in the universe?
“Does the cat, in feeling pain, come thereby nearest to humanity, to an understanding of the idea, at least, of the Other? I think I shall never know,” Ed said. He thought, I know it was Zeus sent Hermes to poke my mind away from that other thought, for he is a jealous god and wants all beautiful things for himself.
“The gods were ever jealous; one need only look to the example of Prometheus for proof of that,” Toby said.
Ed thought, I shall have to take a page from the cat, and admit no god but self. But his half-self on the floor seemed to oppose that idea, for it cried out piteously.
And then the dwarves came back, covered in zombie gore, and said they’d no place to spend the night and could they crash here? Ed smirked with sudden insight, and told them to use the door on the right: Toby’s room. For a second he reveled in the cleverness of himself, and Hermes cloaked invisible in the corner smiled and winked at Ed with a twinkle in his eye. But then Ed’s self-congratulation turned to despair as he watched the dwarves trooping across the room, unslinging their electric axes, their shields taking on the shape and depth of kettle drums, and they threw open Toby’s door with a mighty shout. The bass resounded like a shattering clap of thunder directly overhead; the dwarves joined in, their axes surfing over the top of the riff like lightning across a cloud-draped sky, while their shields pounded subtly, subliminally. And then Hermes threw off his hood, making himself visible, and openly laughed at Ed. The god opened a window, and leapt into the sky like a rainbow; and Ed wished Odin were there.
“If any god knows what it is to war with close friends and relatives, and still end as friends with them, it is he, All-Father and All-Brother to Thor and Loki, and patron of men both of ferocity and wisdom,” Ed said, and then he wondered where the words had come from. “It’s too much strife! I only want….”
But instead of Odin, Freya stood suddenly before Ed, in the smirking guise of the Cat, raven-haired and raven-whiskered. Tail twisting, twitching slowly and sinuously, she languidly yawned. And while this was no unusual behavior for one of Tribe, Ed knew he was in the presence of the Goddess by the sudden erection that threatened to rend his trousers clean off his body. He was priapic in the face of her terrible fecundity, and this amused her terribly, even as the weather system in Toby’s room reached a crescendo worthy of inspiring Lear to his greatest madness. It was a moment, a noise, more suited to warfare, to swords and bloodshed, rather than the moist lust enveloping Ed.
Although I am drawn to her, Ed thought, knowing her for whom she is, yet I hold myself back, for I am certain she is also only and merely a cat.
Freya stood then, goddess and not cat, and walked with a sway that the sirens, suddenly in attendance, moaned to see, envious and literally cast in a green light, and now Ed’s throbbing priapus truly did break the encircling wall of his trousers. The sirens, eyes wide, finally understood their mistake; but it was too late for them, having spurned Ed once. They would know only aching in their loins to match Ed’s as the goddess of love and fertility moved toward him like an ocean wave, unending and sinuous and recombinant; the eternal symbol of divine love and earthly lust.
She curled into his lap, purring, at once a small black feline and also a voluptuous, towering goddess, and said into his mind, What of your Cat?
And then Ed twisted, turned in the chair he had not realized had taken, and saw Cat standing once more in the doorway of the apartment. Superimposed and obscuring her left side was a seeming wall composed of smokes and vapors, out of which poked the barrels of guns and ghostly, silently screaming faces. She stared at Ed with a goddess on his lap and a half dozen nymphs arrayed about pillows of gold and satin. Her mouth opened and tears welled up in her eyes, and Ed knew she was lost to him as surely as if he had murdered her parents in front her, for how could any mortal woman compare with a goddess? Yet he knew that this was not so; even though Freya sat in his lap, riding his heavy cock, he wanted only Catania. Any other thought in his mind was only the Goddess’. But it was too late; even as both Ed and the halved mini-Ed reached out to her, Cat fled, and Freya laughed as only a cat can, cruelly and all in his mind. She licked her lips and leapt from his lap which was suddenly more empty than her departure alone could account for; and he knew that instead of his usual genital self he would see through the shredded remains of his favorite jeans a bare spot, as of a long healed scar.
Then Freya knelt down next to Ed’s mini-self lying on the floor, and with an otherworldly handjob bestowed Ed’s member upon the creature. It struggled up, and linking arms with the Goddess, hopped from the apartment. Toby and his Dwarvish Dervishes started their song anew, and Ed, like Lear, wished to cry and rip his hair and stab out his eyes in the storm of their music and his emotions, but again Freya appeared before him. She said once more into his mind that she would not allow Ed to choose his wyrd, for she had chosen him even before Odin; and although Ed revered the All-Father higher and would die in battle, she would have him.
And then she was gone, Freya, out of the cat and out of the apartment, and the sirens, too. Toby still thundered away on his bass, but the dwarves no longer surfed electric above the riff, nor battered subliminal below, and Ed sat on the floor with his left side feeling enervated while the dwarves walked their picket line around him. Then Ed’s mini-self returned, his other half composed of empty dwarvish armor; and he spoke in a ringing tenor, promising the picketing dwarves that together they could be strong, they must be strong, they will be strong! And he lead the charge back into Ed’s head, taking with them the nymphs and a few of the zombies in cages.
Toby sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need!”
“Peace?” Ed said.
But Catania was at the door.
She asked one last time to end the meteorological assault on her ears while the mute faces of her left half mouthed phrases he knew she had spoken to him but which he couldn’t remember, and Ed could only mutely point to Toby’s door, which she walked to as if she knew it by heart. The noise stopped, leaving Ed with only the sound of his own heart beating and the memory of the Goddess’ laughter in his mind, and he knew that he was the cat; he was the solipsist sitting on the windowsill with half-lidded eyes, watching himself sitting motionless on the floor as one dream cavorted with another in the deep corners of his mind. Still the memory of the Goddess’ laugh echoed in his mind, along with her promise that he would be hers as soon as he died in battle.
Ed knew then what he wanted. Peace could wait. Or, no. It couldn’t wait. And if it couldn’t be pursued, it could be practiced. And he stood then, with Freya’s words ringing in his ears, stood straight up from the floor as if there were no intervening state, nothing between sitting and standing. He walked to Toby’s door as if he were moving in a dream, understanding as he went that what he would see behind that door would surely drive him mad, farther than ever Lear went, for he would have to kill one of his most cherished dreams, and that the other dream would almost as surely kill him.
Suddenly, the dwarves were back, watching him with cats’ eyes as he walked, silently holding their double-bitted battle axes in salute, their enameled armor glowing from within. The sirens were there as well, dressed as valkyries, spears dipped to form a short passage leading to the door, and the little General stood with his hand on the knob. Ed paused before the door, and the nymphs fanned out to line the walls on either side of the door, giving a clear view to the dwarves and the cat, who was watching from the back of the couch. A dread, cold sweat broke out in Ed’s shoes, his feet suddenly slippery and fishy, and his armpits felt hot as if he were holding live coals there, and he found himself turning the knob. The moment stretched out like the instant of anesthesia’s effect, eternal and an eyeblink, and then Ed pushed the door open and saw…nothing. The room was empty. Oh, to be sure, Toby’s effects were all in place; posters, bed tangled with sheets and cast-off clothing, stereo equipment like an amateur’s recreation of Stonehenge.
But of Toby or Catania, there was no sign, as if they had never been there, as if they had only ever been in his mind. Ed turned back, closing the door, expecting to see the dwarves ready to finish him, the sirens waiting to pierce him, but the living room, too, was deserted. Except for the cat. The smiling cat, now on the windowsill, and Ed felt himself falling, falling. He fell into a blinding white light and passed from all knowledge of himself.
