Slippin' into Darkness

1:35 A.M.

Ice cubes crackled as The Six Million Dollar Man poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s into his glass, the brittle sound playing sharp and hard off the cement walls of his fortress of solitude. Echoes, he thought, staring at the door that separated him from the world. Damn straight. I’ll tell you about echoes, friends.

The man holding the glass of JD wasn’t really The Six Million Dollar Man, the once-popular 1970s television hero, but that didn’t bother him. He’d had several identities in his lifetime. When he was a kid, everyone called him Ozzy Austin. Even his mother had called him that, and she was the one who had placed another name on his birth certificate. That name was Steve Austin, and, as any trivia buff worth his salt was sure to know, Steve Austin was also The Six Million Dollar Man’s real name. It was the kind of puzzle that the man who was-and at the same time was not-The Six Million Dollar Man often explored during the hours when the world was lost in sleep. Two men could share a name, but that didn’t make them the same.

Slowly, he rotated his wrist, a tight grip on the cold glass of Tennessee’s finest sipping whiskey. Little trickles of moisture dripped between his big fingers. The liquor reflected dim fluorescent light from above, little waves rippling over ice with a magical glow.

Two fluorescent tubes were cold and dead. The other clung to life, buzzing unevenly, so that the room was one moment a simple basement with bad lighting, the next a fortress of solitude choked with shadows. First the live tube shone white as a neon bone, whispering an electric itch, then it dimmed to the color of an October sky, casting shadows without rhyme or reason, making no sound at all. Distracting, that, because it sent Steve Austin’s mind in search of some odd connection, and tonight he didn’t want to be distracted by the silly imaginings that annoyed him the way crazy dreams annoyed most people.

Broken and battered, The Six Million Dollar Man was locked away in Dr. Rudy Wells’s Six Million Dollar Man Repair Shop. Oscar Goldman had decided that his buddy’s brain wasn’t working quite right. Maybe that long-ago crash had done more damage than Dr. Wells had believed, or maybe the computer enhancements that connected Colonel Austin’s brain to his mechanical limbs were changing the cyborg hero into something dangerous.

But The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t ready for the scrap heap. He waited for Oscar or Rudy, leeching electricity from the light, feeding on it until he was ready to wreak vengeance upon the unfeeling humans who had knitted his bones with metal, his brain with computer chips.

Steve Austin could see it all from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy recliner, his own handsome features replacing the pre-bloat charms of Lee Majors. Rubber skin over metal bone. Steel fingers wrapped around a NASA bureaucrat’s neck… The Six Million Dollar Man sipped whiskey, poured his thoughts into the hard hand of reality, and recognized the waking dream for what it was.

A picture of undisguised inadequacy.

Christ. Dredge up an example and you’re left with a nightmare pulsating in your brain. The kind of weird thoughts that flashed through other people’s dreams managed to stay with Steve Austin until they became haunting images. And thinking about this one-even though the idea was repulsively silly-Austin could almost make it as real as anything else in a life that seemed too much like a dream.

The Six Million Dollar Man considered his hands. He tried to decide which one had the rubber skin, the metal bones. But they were just hands, two things held before him. Hard hands of reality. Hands with dirty fingernails, and too-pale skin that could be cut, and bones that could be broken.

Fortunately, one of the hands held a glass filled with JD. Tiny ice cubes tinkled against the glass and the sound was oddly comforting, like wind-chimes on a lazy afternoon. It was a sound Steve Austin had always liked. He bought the tiny cubes at Safeway in blue bags, expressly for their music. Some people said that buying ice was a waste of money when you could make your own cubes in plastic trays in the refrigerator or buy a refrigerator that made the cubes. But Steve didn’t like those cubes; they were too fat to chew and too thick to make pleasant sounds in a glass.

The cubes danced, and, watching them The Million Dollar Man knew that he was missing something. Like those magazine ads that were supposed to have sex or tits or pussy written on the ice cubes that you saw the words without even knowing you were seeing them. Or saw subliminal images-naked women masturbating beneath sheets of beaded sweat on a vodka bottle, whole orgies taking place on the Camel cigarette pyramid. And then there was the famous flaccid cock face of Joe Camel himself, an image Steve Austin was more than familiar with but still couldn’t quite see. So it was like most things in his life-he had read about it, maybe even done it, but he had never experienced it, felt it really happening, recognition of action sliding under his skin and racing through his brain.

He didn’t feel things that way. Often he thought that he was like a machine that was missing an essential cog or wheel. That was why sharing a name with a cyborg frightened him. It was a weird kind of distance that separated him from his life, and he hated himself for it.

The Six Million Dollar Man considered the problem a great and tragic character flaw. Long ago, in his own way, he’d set about finding an answer to the problem. He had found his answer in a woman.

A woman who was now dead.

He remembered the girl who had so intimidated him in 1976. He closed his eyes and found her gray gaze and lingered on it before traveling the length of her cool, generous smile. But, as always, his memory returned to her eyes, twin pools beneath eyebrows that arced in a gentle curve which was somehow both intelligent and just a little bit wary

Farrah Fawcett curls that trapped the light and held it, and eyes that did the same. April’s hair had always smelled like flowers, like a perfect meadow.

Steve Austin remembered that.

But the memory lacked immediacy and, as always, it did nothing for him. He opened his eyes and stared down at the photo of the cheerleading squad in his old high school yearbook. Sure, April’s face had been blacked out in the photo, but there was that body, eighteen and perfect. That short skirt with the sharp pleats and those smooth, firm legs, and the sweater that would have been much too loose on most eighteen-year-old girls but hugged every of April Louise Destino’s magnificent upper body.

The man who did-and at the same time did not-have a brain enhanced by the latest computer technology closed his eyes, retrieving other pictures of April that he stored in his mind’s eye. Not images from high school; not those familiar pictures snapped by that wormy little yearbook photographer called Shutterbug…these pictures weren’t that old, and they were private.

He saw the shitty RV park in American Canyon that April called home. Blue Rock Estates-a name like a smirk. April moving around the hot tin box of a house, naked, her body not as firm as it had been when she was eighteen, but not bad at all for thirty-five.

April dancing to music that was twenty years old.

Third-rate romance. Low-rent rendezvous.

And he could hear her still, laughing at the stupid way he wandered through life, explaining things to him as if he were some inexperienced kid, her gray eyes bright in a way he knew was rare for her. It was corny. Steve Austin and April Destino. The Six Million Dollar Man and the girl he called his dreamweaver. A princess after the fall living in reduced circumstances furnished by K-Mart and Target and the store where America was said to shop, and a guy who still kept her on a pedestal after an ocean of water had flowed under that ubiquitous bridge.

And he remembered how much he had wanted to want the woman that April had become in the lizard brain manner of subliminal magazine advertisements and how he never once had. Even when they lay together in bed-their sweaty bodies molding faded cotton sheets to dead bedsprings, neither of them saying anything, clear gray eye to clear green eye beneath a rattling air-conditioned breeze-even under those circumstances he had not desired her in the way of other men.

That living, breathing April had understood the world, though. She had believed strongly in a set of widely unrecognized laws of nature, and those laws had guided her actions. Steve had tried to understand her beliefs, but they were intangibles, requiring faith, a commodity which his robot brain refused to transmit. He couldn’t understand them any more than be could see the real Joe Camel.

April thought her faith alone would be enough to get them through. Sometimes her inner confidence surprised him. She always seemed to know just what to do. She knew when to sit next to him on the couch, and when to sit in the chair opposite. She knew when to take his hand and lead him into the bedroom, when to leave his hand alone. She knew when it was right to say something, and when it was best to say nothing. And she never touched the money that he left on the pressed-wood coffee table until he was gone, because she wasn’t a whore when she was with him. She had enough hurt stored up inside her to be sensitive to things like that.

And suddenly The Six Million Dollar Man knew that he was thinking . Eyes closed, just thinking. Memories filled his mind, jockeying for position with fragments of old TV shows and stupid images of himself as a cyborg avenger and every melancholy ballad he had heard in his youth. It was all comic book stuff. If only things were that easy. All of those images were stuck in his head, all those neat plots and resolutions, and he was forever flipping between them like competing TV shows, searching for a perfect fit he couldn’t find.

And he couldn’t turn it off. It wasn’t going to work, despite the Jack Daniel’s and all that had gone before it. He wasn’t going to sleep. He wasn’t going to dream. Not tonight. It wasn’t going to happen.

April Louise Destino was dead.

The dreamweaver was gone.

Steve Austin opened his eyes and found himself in his fortress of solitude. Hidden away from prying eyes. Head bowed, eyes on the dead bulge in his Levi’s. (“Hey, Joe Camel,” he whispered, and laughed.) Eyes moving, focusing on the yearbook photograph: the young, perfect, pre-downfall body of April Destino. (April cheering him on in that practiced little roar of hers- “Our spirit is SKY HIGH! Your spirit is SO LOW!”) He tried to feel something. He wanted to feel something more than anything else. His eyes locked on the black hole where April’s head should have been. (Black holes…and worm holes…and five-year missions that never seemed to end…too many sleepless nights spent with his ass planted in front of a TV set, enjoying the familiar company of Kirk and Spock and McCoy, each character more familiar to him than any of his neighbors.) Eyes locked on the shadowy figure peering through a biology lab window behind the cheerleaders. (A memory from the last gasp of AM radio: I like dreamin’, ‘cause dreamin’ can make you mine… ). Steve Austin’s eyes on Steve Austin’s silhouette, eighteen years old and watching April Destino and never dreaming that life would turn her beautiful face into a black hole and her beautiful body into a cavern for graveyard worms.

Eighteen years old and wanting to feel something while he was awake.

Eighteen years old and wanting to sleep with April Destino in a way that no one else could understand.

Eighteen years old and wanting to dream.

Even now, even with all that water under the ubiquitous bridge he felt that everything would be different if only he could see that yearbook picture, and April Louise Destino, in just the right way. If only he could see the missing pieces that eluded him in those ads with the hidden messages.

If only that asshole Rudy Wells had designed a better computer chip for his wounded brain…

…he could be like everyone else if he could learn that one simple skill. He could…

Suddenly, Steve Austin could see that something else was there in the picture, hiding just above April in the shadows that climbed the wall of the biology lab. Dull black ink on slate shadow. Open, looping letters. Words that he hadn’t noticed when he opened the book earlier in the evening and looked at the picture for the first time in years.

Dream a little dream of me!

Love, April

The tiny ice cubes that came from Safeway rattled in his empty glass. The sound was not at all pleasant, but The Six Million Dollar Man couldn’t stop it because he couldn’t stop his big hand from shaking.

He couldn’t stop shaking, but there was something he could do.

He twisted open a prescription bottle, and he swallowed several of April Destino’s Halcion tablets.

Five pills, right down his gullet.

And then he drank.

He closed the yearbook and put it away. The fluorescent tube buzzed overhead. Neon white faded to storm-shadow gray. The room was a basement, and then it was a fortress of solitude.

The man with the brain of a machine didn’t move from the La-Z-Boy

But neither did he sleep.