It has happened, and I cannot believe
This is John Smith, publishing this for The Checkout the second night after the incidents that took place, which I describe below. Thus, this can only be a past-tense account, and only of what I myself saw.
I was in the theater, watching “Alphaville.” I saw Manny Face down in an end seat on the right in one of the front rows – I was in the same seat, but up in the last row far above him.
About a half hour into the movie the exit door down the left of the hall quickly opened and closed and when I looked along that side, down about the middle rows sat The Hunched Cornish, who never went to the movies. I don’t know how he managed to fit into one of the seats, but I did hear a breaking and cracking and it would later turn out that he’d pulverized the armrest between two seats to make one seat out of two.
After a minute, it became clear to me that neither Manny Face nor The Hunched Cornish knew of the other’s presence in the theater for the duration of the movie.
Until the lights began to dim back on – then it was only The Hunched Cornish who saw Manny Face strut out the door, talking into his convenient electronic recording device.
For a minute, for more than a minute – it could have been as many as five – The Hunched Cornish just sat there, as if in shock. Needless to say, no one was in any hurry to usher him out of there, and if it had been his wish to stay for the next showing, they were more than ready to oblige. I had ducked down low, because I did not want him to see me, and I was determined not to move until he went himself.
Finally, he moved. I hoped against hope that Manny Face would be nowhere near by now, but I don’t think that would have mattered, because after seeing him, it was all but certain The Cornish would head to Manny’s place, crash through his door, or skylight, kill Manny, and either take Tango Baby, and the baby that was in her, or kill them both in his rage.
I thought all-out carnage would be the order of the night, and there would be nothing I could do about it, save get myself killed – by The Cornish – trying somehow to stop it.
Sure, we had had many lunches and dinners together, and sure, I knew he liked me, but I don’t think I’d have been able to speak the first word back into his reason.
I knew he was being driven by something completely outside any notion similar to reason, outside anything even remotely like it, by something in his nature that was completely alien to us, even to human psychopathy and lunacy, and like some animal running on an instinct programmed into it from the start, or the inevitable chemical change in its blood and brain that drove it out of its mind or compelled it to kill, without a thought, but as a matter of its own life force, there was nothing that could stand in the way of his intent, and I knew nothing short of an act of a higher god could stop him. I went out the door directly after him.
As The Hunched Cornish turned into the lobby, we both saw Manny Face at a small table drinking coffee. After that, there was nothing that could match The Cornish’s speed, except for maybe the fourth dimension out of which he came.
Like The Cornish, Manny Face was from a similar place, both part of this Earth and out of it, but he was slower, and weaker; yet these were not the terms by which to understand what he was, or why he was. For he was a thing of beauty, and dignity, and confidence, of dynamic movement, of terrific pro-generating fecundity, like a fantastic garden, and of immaculate poetic grace, light and air, and the fluid motion of water with its ever-changing contours and waves captured in ice at every moment of achieved perfection, to suddenly melt until the next iced peak was reached, immediately following, constantly moving and in that movement transforming one back into the other, over and again, both the dancer and the dance, a harmony of balance and potential-and-released energy, of power transfigured into beauty, of beauty dissolved and reformed into something different yet just as beautiful, amazing both for the beauty and that beauty’s perpetual change, not brute strength, and a thing of a completely different grade, and purpose, from The Cornish. And as their worlds collided there – in that other space, or dimension, or world, which may have been some other form of our own Earth to which we had no entry, wherever it is they came from – out of what history, out of what past, neither I nor any of us know – so did they here.
Yet, for all his hideousness and the curse of his looks, this fire without a shape, forming into nothing yet always there, both solid and crumbling earth, in his way The Cornish was also beautiful, the intellect that shaped his existence even more profound, the thought behind it more out of reach; where, if one tried, one could begin to describe that beauty that was Manny Face, but no words could begin the process with The Cornish. And, after all, he was immensely ugly. More often than not, even he was at a loss for words, tormented, I think, by his own existence, why he was here, the reason for his being. I never knew if he was capable of dying, and I don’t think he knew himself, and I think this tortured him too; I think, like us, he would have been able to sigh quietly to himself with a sad expiration of relief if he knew he would one day have to go.
Dropping like a wrecking ball out of nowhere, I saw a huge scarred arm smash the table of Manny Face, the resulting detritus blowing out in a speeding cloud of dust and splinters, filling the air. Seeing me as he jumped to the ledge of the large window under the theater’s Parthenon roof, Manny Face flung out his arm, and then crashed through the glass, as I snatched out of the air the electronic recording device he’d thrown toward me.
Peering through the jagged nimbus of the destroyed pane from where I’d bounded to and tottered, in the blinking streetlight, under the dome of Kyiv’s signaling stars, I saw the magnificent pitched sheen of a black horse’s hind legs kick out powerfully, off the ledge, striking the anvil jaw of The Hunched Cornish, whose grip on Face’s legs failed. The hooves kicked out again, splitting the god-monster’s head in a gusher of blood. And a massive figure – more terrifying than any crouching gargoyle, giant rock-horned and jagged-toothed, come rising from its haunches, spiraling and hissing into evil life beveled by devil-purchase out its edifice stone – plummeted through the pavement below, into the hollow of the underground mall connected with the passes of the Lev Tolstoy metro hub.
And then I saw him crash back up and out of his own monstrous crater, people at the scene paralyzed, astonished, shocked, with yet others strewn about like broken tree branches, horribly mangled, burned, and dead, and the black stallion scrambled and clattered on the roof of his building across the street – no sense in plunging for his own skylight, knowing the hopeless fight about to come; for it was too late; it was now all but over – and the demon below a mass on fire; he couldn’t fly, but cars crumpled like tin cans against his either side as he raked his flame across the street and scaled the building – faster… faster than anything I’d ever seen… Below, the McDonald’s arch, installed at street-level, above the main entrance to the metro hub, gaped yellow with the stunned gaze of a bomb-demolished gate in wartime. Continued –
John Smith, October 4, 2014