Apocalypse of Jude

The sight of Caul still leaning vacantly against the curve of the arch after some hours, drowned in the flood of acid, catches Jude’s eye. With the music dead, Jude takes a moment to lean his backside on the bar shelf. He bitterly contemplates Caul’s almost knightly countenance, as if suffering from remorse.

/now that my spirit has been killed/ /seems like im wandering around with you in this dark wood youve been telling me about caul/ /is that what happened to you/ /did paul do it to you/ /i dont think you would know if he did/ /seems like he can have his way with both of us now/ /while we wait though/ /maybe we could lead each other out of here/ /out of this rats alley where dead men lose their bones/

“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.”

Ben’s tuneless howl sends a frozen fear through Jude as he knows Paul’s gaze is on him. Ben cracks into laughter from the side of the bar closest to the wall, where he now sits with Drew. The patrons around the bar exchange laughter and clink glasses, or at least raise them. Ben is emboldened.

“A bottle of beer for the performance?”

“You singing for your supper again Bennie?”

“It’s an honourable job.”

“What? Begging.”

Drew raises his voice in a growl. “It’s soothsaying. He sooths what we can’t see and you buy him a beer.”

“Bennie’s saying keep the bar open Jude. Make it better for all of us.”

“Fat chance. I’m calling last round people. This night’s wearing thin.”

“Comedowns!”

“You all don’t look so great yourselves.”

Jude lifts himself from the bar ledge and goes seeking a tape, inserting it to let the sounds of rhythmic ambiance emerge. He and the girl fall wordlessly into issuing last drinks, their hands moving in time with the orders, rhythmically grabbing and uncapping, exchanging currency, and filling glasses with liquids that reflect but hold no light. But he also watches as the shadows of death—those of the negligent, indolent and unshriven—mill around the bar, ever more seeking the comfort of the bar’s gloaming light as they feel the night thinning, but entering its darkest. And he listens in horror to their rootless voices over the electronic soundscape haunting the bar in an ominous drone of deep thunder riding in, as if heralding the coming darkness. Then he sees Paul walk over to Caul.

“Earth calling Caul.”

Caul turns with glazed eyes as he tries to navigate out of his wormhole, where shards of normalcy intersect with altered shards, switching him back and forth between hallucinations and distortions and sharp bytes of rational realisation. His eyes eventually focus Paul’s visage, cigarette hanging from the mouth, and sideburn daggers cutting deep into sharp cheek bones.

“You’ve gone and done it again Caul. Standing vacant there for the last few hours. What are we going to do about you?”

Caul leans forward in urgent whisper.

“This bar. It’s just trapping people for its own sick desire. Forget our little trip. This is like eternal living death.”

“It’s the acid you know. Makes you hallucinate.”

“Not like any hallucination I’ve ever had before.”

“So is the acid. Get a grip. Anyway, I wanted to tell you, Mae’s walking alone again.”

The confirmation of a hope Caul has done everything to suppress all night literally bursts open the gates of a garden he has long since entered, and long secreted away in his heart.

“Touch a nerve did I?” Paul is smiling almost warmly.

“Apparently it was her or her father, and Gary chose the money.”

“There’s a lot more to consider than them just breaking up Paul.”

“I know. That’s why I’m getting Gary to come stay with us. So that he doesn’t land up back in their apartment and making up.”

Paul smiles again an almost warm smile that of late, Caul has not been able to penetrate, and suspicion of his own death, seeded by Janice’s words, seeps its way from his soul into his blood.

“What have you been doing Paul?”

Their chests are parallel, a pool cue erect like a lance between them. Paul’s neck stretches his mouth to Caul’s ear.

“Screw you, you coloured bastard. This is what you’ve been pining for isn’t it, these past three years?”

Paul steps back to the pool table and scatters a litter of balls in violent fashion as if angered with Caul. The balls ricocheting off the table’s green felt edges send a tremor of shock through Caul, breaking up the inertia holding him, allowing him to heave his figure forward towards the door, confusion settling heavily into him about a half-brother whose intention he can no longer ascertain, a horrifying vision he cannot understand, and a question about despair that he cannot communicate.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 40