Gun Work

Life ends not in triumph and fulfillment, but depletion and ignominy. Barney was used up, tapped out, leaking sentience from holes in his body, run dry of humanity, reduced to a kind of absurd chattel for the amusement of psychopaths. Alive or dead, he no longer existed; perhaps never existed before, except as a shade of himself, a suggestion of a person, a conglomeration of tics and traits and moot statistics, none quite diverting. It is easy to blow large holes in a tissue-thin simulacrum of life.

His murderers had not only denied his humanity, but contravened his existence. He was not important enough to keep, nor unimportant enough to cut free. He was nothing, and the universe at large did not care about teaching him spurious moral lessons. Given a fresh, whole body and a set of guns, he could destroy everyone who ever did him wrong, but what would that change? Nothing. Because he was nothing; he mattered not, on the big scale.

There was no balance to restore. Nobody would care. He was not a religious man; pie in the sky by and by when you die. He had structured his life so that he was never owed anything by anyone, so by what right would he claim recompense?

Again his fractured perception registered the distant sound of a woman in tears. A local: “¡O hijos mios!” Perhaps Barney was a lost child, floating home.

I have no one, the Old Assassin had told him. I care for no one. And I’m cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.

Barney could not do anything except bob along in the disgusting mulch of the river. Perceptions ebbing. The quick hallucination, dream, or flashback. Not like the legend — no clip reel of your life’s deeds and misdeeds unspooling before your semi-conscious mind; no tunnel of light; zero choir. The dull pulse of biologically blocked pain, radiating like a distant, dying sun.

This is how life ends.

Life ends when you are totally free.

Something was chewing on his foot. Maybe a sump rat the size of a terrier; maybe one of those monster catfish from the Amazon, a nine-foot-long killer mutated by the toxic waste in the river.

It nibbled on Barney’s bare heel and he feebly kicked it away, splashing black water.

Deep inside his mind, Barney was startled — a sign of life? What?! Something as simple as don’t eat me, you monster?

Another nibble and he lashed out again, completely without thinking. His lungs were still stubbornly drawing air in clotted rasps.

A bolt of pain scissored up his leg and somehow located nerve receptors long since shut down.

Oww, fucker, I need that toe for a tag; leave me alone.

Barney recalled the kids he had seen huffing paint, glazed and otherdimensional, casually homicidal. His strange hallucinations and prolapsed volition could be attributed to the poisonous bouillabaisse of the river-that-was-not-a-river, his new home. The toxic waste had recombined into luxurious new forms, folding its plasmas, infiltrating his metabolism through every bullet hole, gash and wound. It backed up in his liver and kidneys to percolate and birth new concentrated cocktails of bio-active excreta. All human activity generated some form of waste; Barney came to see himself, during his few lucid episodes, as just one more form of hazardous leftover, dumped in with all the others.

His new world was very cosmopolitan. There was a little bit of everything in it: corrosives, explosives, solvents, mercury, lead, petroleum, ashes, antifreeze, propane, caustics, pesticide, acetone, benzene, ammonia, lye, alkalies and alkalines, formaldehyde, xylene... the whole encyclopedia of wanton chemical hazard, all of it blenderized with megatons of unprocessed human sewage.

This was Mexico’s version of the Love Canal.

Along the way, Barney had contributed his own throw-off: perspiration, blood, Numbers One and Two, mucus, saliva, skin flakes, but not a single tear, or so he believed.

The sky floating above him assumed alien hues.

He still could not feel his hands.

He dreamt of a party.

No, fiesta, down here it would be a fiesta.

Piñatas, refrescos. Helado — ice cream.

Gaily attired people. Music.

Someone’s wedding, or birthday, or anniversary. Boda, cumpleaños, aniversario.

Unless it was his party.

A loose-limbed puppet carved of dark wood, with a baked-apple face, spoke to him in a language he did not understand.

The puppet was wearing a battered straw hat; a neckerchief.

Its voice sounded a billion years old.

Barney began to levitate toward the sun, which spiked in through his slitted eyes like firebrands.

The sun was all he could see, as Icarus saw it when his wax wings melted.

Muy caliente. Very hot.