Monster - A. Lee Martinez [38]
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me for telling the truth,” Judy said. “Guess I won’t see you around, huh?”
“Guess not.”
The conversation had ground to a halt. Monster muttered a quick “Take care,” then grabbed his bag and headed up the sidewalk and waved at her without a backwards glance.
She muttered as she lit a cigarette.
She sat in the idling car and smoked two cigarettes.
“Fuck it.”
She used her sweaty palm to wipe the glyph from her forehead. It didn’t remove it, merely obscured it, but she felt the slight disorientation as the haze settled on her mind. Or maybe that was just the concussion.
Judy stopped by a convenience store to purchase some aspirin for her aching skull. The clerk behind the counter asked her about the purple swelling and smudge on her forehead. But by then she didn’t remember much of it, and what little she did recall she didn’t believe.
What Judy believed was irrelevant to the universe. It wasn’t as if it were hiding things from her. It just didn’t care to share certain information. Judy was a tool, a linchpin in a cosmic engine. And an engineer didn’t usually bother explaining himself to the nuts and bolts. He just screwed them into place and let them do their job.
Judy was in communion with the most primal aspect of creation. She just didn’t know it. Her thoughts and desires were broadcast to the heart of the universe. But the signal was lousy, and most of those thoughts never reached their destination. And the few that did were garbled and all but unrecognizable. Judy’s will was a remote control with bad batteries trying to guide a massive universe more comfortable with pushing galaxies around than with the subtleties of daily human life.
The resulting chaos was understandable and only getting worse as the signal grew stronger every hour. Had Judy been aware of it, she might have taken more care in even her most casual thoughts. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but at least she could’ve tried.
Lotus was perfectly aware of this, though. She sat in her cozy den, staring at the strange letters scrawling across the stone tablet’s surface.
Ferdinand glanced up from her crossword puzzle. The muscle-bound woman paused in her steady, noiseless gum chewing. “I hate when she does that,” she said.
“Does what?” asked Ed, sipping her tea.
Lotus could sit there for days sometimes, looking into the stone’s depths, never moving. Both Ed and Ferdinand knew she was doing something, and they assumed it was terribly important. And that was all the thought they gave to it. It wasn’t in their nature to wonder. They just followed orders. If they’d ever tried to gaze within the stone themselves, they would’ve seen nothing worth noticing.
But Lotus saw the patterns within the patterns, the way it all tied together and how it was designed to turn out.
She also saw something was missing, an anomaly she couldn’t account for. The stone was working against her, but it wouldn’t make any difference. In only a few hours, less than an instant as Lotus measured time, she would know where to find Judy. And she would fix things, keeping everything on track despite the universe’s attempts to screw it all up.
That was her job, and after several billion years, she was quite good at it.
10
As Monster was getting ready for bed, Liz was getting ready for work. She had on a new red suit. It wasn’t as nice as her other one, he noted to himself, but he didn’t admit that to her.
“How was your night?”
“Don’t ask,” he said.
“Poor baby.” She gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “Don’t wait up. I’m going for drinks after work.”
“Have fun,” he said, but she was already out the door.
Monster slipped into his pajamas. He didn’t feel that tired and decided to recline on the couch, watching some TV until the urge to drift off to bed hit him. There was nothing on. Just morning news shows, which he watched with half interest.
“Twelve dead in a subway fire,” said the stoic news reporter. “Back to you, Brad.”
“Terrible