A WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD

Audrey was walking on a mall in bright sunlight. Ahead he could see mountains shrouded in mist, brightly colored food stands, tables under umbrellas, waiters in red uniforms. This could be a small resort town in Switzerland.

He was passing a huge marble snail, a bronze frog and a beaver. Fourteen-year-old boys lounged on the statues in studied postures, eating ice cream and looking at each other, insulated from the passersby by some invisible barrier.

Farther on, boys in cowboy boots, Stetson hats and jeans posed in front of a clothing store with the same stylized unsmiling nonchalance, engaged in some timeless charade. A boy with white-blond hair sat on a stone bridge dangling his legs.

Audrey turned into a paved courtyard and suddenly the air was oppressive and heavy with tropical heat. Youths in eighteenth-century clothes lounge in cane chairs sipping rum punch. They look cruel and languid as they caress pistol butts in their belts with slow obscene movements.

A private eye is talking to the bartender. “What were you doing in Bill Gray’s Tropico?” It’s an old western and Clem Snide is a fabled shootist. The bar is full of black powder smoke, the smell of entrails, blood and chili. The walls and roof fall in.

A sweet dry wind rises from the southeast. Audrey with some last-minute purchases. Almost the same buckboard it is already taken care of Meester once he gets up beside the boy and they start off down the road where flint chips glitter in the sun. Ahead they see mountains shrouded in mist, the orange and purple sky glowing behind.

He must have dozed off while he was walking—it’s known as the Walkies—you get it from space travel. You can walk and talk and get yourself around while you are sound asleep, living in a dream. The dream is made of your actual surroundings—so you don’t bump into things. You just see them differently.

A ragged street urchin falls in beside him for a fraction of a second. He glances sideways and knows it is one of the miniature youths, strong and quick as little cats.

The boy flashes ahead leading the way through mirrors and walls, through shops and urinals that open into squares where street acts are in progress: minstrels, Gnaoua drums, lutes, horns, zithers, tumblers, fire eaters, jugglers, snake charmers—all blurring together.

Audrey is walking very fast to keep up with the youth’s “sorcerer’s gait,” past a platform where several boys are doing animal copulation acts as they impersonate cats, foxes, lemurs, and horses, snorting, whinnying, growling, whimpering. The spectators roll in the street pissing with laughter.

Audrey is struck by the variety of garb and racial types that flash by like scenes glimpsed from a train window: Mongols with felt boots, eighteenth-century dandies in silk pumps and breeches, pirates with cutlasses and patches, medieval jerkins and codpieces, sharp smell of weeds from old westerns, boots and holsters, djellabas, togas, sarongs, and youths clad in a transparent fabric like flexible glass lounge about in the studied postures he had noticed in the mall—obviously there to be seen … superb Nubians naked except for leopardskin capes and boots of hippopotamus hide … boys in tight rubber suits with smooth poreless faces like green-white glazed terra-cotta.

“Frog boys from underground rivers…” the guide throws over his shoulder.

Audrey notices that his guide and most of the other people he passes carry at their belts a tool like a little crowbar hooked at one end. Now a ripple passes along the street, actors and musicians are gathering up instruments and props behind him as the word moves from lip to lip.

“HIP.” (Heroid Patrol)

People are dodging into doorways, prising up manhole covers with their tools, and scrambling down ladders into a maze of tunnels where the Heroids do not dare to venture. Audrey follows his guide through twisting tunnels, past youths on roller skates, scooters, and skateboards.

The tunnels open here and there into caverns where people live in stalactite-and-quartz houses and tend pools of blind fish. Up twisting iron ladders are Turkish baths, lodgings, houses and brothels. Privies open into restaurants and patios.

Down a rope ladder is a dusty gymnasium where boys are practicing with various weapons as they wait for an assignment: Jerry and Rubble Blood Pu, Cupid Mount Etna, Dahlfar, Jimmy Lee, and the Katzenjammer Kids, as we call the German boys. They drift over to greet him.

“How’d you make out with the Eyetie?”

“Easy and greasy and lots of fun … the look on his lousy wise-guy face when he knew. It was tasty.”

Audrey sees a number of the little people climbing up and down ropes and swinging from rings with great agility. He is amazed to see that some of them have long prehensile tails and retractable claws on their feet and hands that enable them to scramble up trees like squirrels.

As he watches, one boy drops thirty feet to the floor, lighting like a cat. The other boys are constantly trying to touch the little people but they are skittish of contact, dodging away from outstretched hands or snapping with their sharp little teeth.

All of them are expert assassins, deadly with knife and strangling cord, dropping on their victims from trees or roofs or climbing into seemingly inaccessible windows. They are also highly proficient with firearms, using a tiny revolver that shoots naillike projectiles and a rifle that shoots poison darts with a range of two hundred yards.

The subtlest assassins among them are the Dream Killers or Bangutot Boys. They have the ability to invade the REM sleep of the target, fashion themselves from the victim’s erection, and grow from his sexual energy until they are solid enough to strangle him.

Audrey finds Toby in the locker room, sitting naked and pensive on a worn wooden bench. He looks up absently and pats the bench beside him. Audrey sits down and they both stare vacantly at the wall for several minutes.

Finally Audrey asks, “Is Arn around?”

Toby looks at him blankly from an empty space. “I never heard of it.”

“I uh thought … I mean this morning…”

“Well, my scent glands are so potent sometimes people hallucinate,” Toby tells him smugly. “Perhaps you dreamed up the whole thing.”

“Well, maybe.” He puts his arms around Toby’s shoulders hoping to excite him so he will give out the smell which is like exquisite perfumed poppers.

Toby’s cock begins to stir and stiffen as he stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back, looking thoughtfully at his toes. Two little people come in rubbing against his legs like cats. They give off a delicate sand fox smell that floats on the heavier male scents of the locker room like a pousse-café.

A thirteen-year-old in the black suit and straw hat of an English public school “fag” sticks his head in and calls to Audrey:

“The Shrink wants to see you.” He pushes his eyes up at the corners to make a Chinese face and adds in falsetto, “Chop-chop!”

After a few general questions about space lag, the Doctor asks with elaborate casualness: “Would you please tell me in your own words everything you remember about this uh Arn.” He glances down at a file in front of him.

Audrey tries to comply but he encounters blanks in his memory like trying to recall a dream that hovers just out of reach on the edge of perception, skittering away as you try to grasp it, erasing memory traces with a little broom that fades out, in turn wiping away footprints in distant sand.

The Doctor leans across the table and breaks an ampule under his nose. “Just relax now and breathe in deeply.”

Audrey finds himself on a table looking up at masked faces.

“That’s right now—count up to fifty.…”

When Audrey wakes up he finds a shaved spot at the back of his head that is slightly sore to his touch.

“Well, Audrey,” the Doctor explains, “we’ve installed a separator. Might come in handy if you ever need to be in two places at once.…” He pats Audrey’s shoulder. “You can leave the hospital tomorrow morning. Now I’m going to give you an injection.”

The days seem to flash by like a speeded-up chase scene in a 1920s comedy … patrols always behind them, bullets thudding into flesh, bombs in Middletown bars and theaters and restaurants. A wake of glass, blood and brains and the hot meaty smell of entrails remind Audrey of a rabbit he had once seen dissected in biology class. A girl had fainted. He could see her slump to the floor with a soft plop.

Shatter Day always closer …