Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 31-32. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!
Summary
“What’s out there, past the last exit, it looks scary to us because he can’t bear it, because he can’t be there. There’s no place for him. If you’d only ever had salt water, would you trust the taste of sweet?”
After their campfire “reunion,” the alt-riders separate to rest before assailing Elsinore. Zelda and Sarah help a half-asleep June into her tent, and Zelda gets a glimpse of her latest sketch. It shows the four old friends gathered around the fire, plus a fifth figure to Zelda’s right. Did June imagine Sal into the sketch, or was she aware of what Zelda perceived as “a gentle pressure on her arm”?
Alone, Zelda pulls out a much-handled sketch. It’s the one of her and Sal from June’s wall; it shows “their bodies inclined together, drawn by gravity into the hollow that parted them,” Sal looking longingly at Zelda, while Zelda gazes out “to the future.” June joins her, wide awake. “I wondered if you had taken that,” she says. “I stole it,” Zelda says, because this “beautiful clear thing” didn’t represent her and Sal’s true relationship. Zelda tried to give everything to Sal, but she was too scared.
When June asks “What happened?” Zelda knows she means at the end. Since love “demanded honesty,” she finally tells the truth.
The princess calculated that the stars would come right on “the cross-quarter day in August.” That was long enough for the alt-riders to go home for July 4th. Zelda, however, only “haunted” the woods near her house, spying on her family. She was observing the town’s festivities from under cover when Sal unexpectedly appeared and drew her out of hiding. They’d just relaxed into a kiss when an old classmate recognized Zelda. Zelda was mortified, and when the classmate called to Zelda’s father, she spin-hopped herself and Sal away.
Back in Elsinore the princess welcomed the alt-riders, but the court (Zelda now realizes) simmered with whispers, resentments and conspiracies. The night before all went wrong, Sal opened a conversation Zelda wasn’t ready to have. Why did they need to go to the crossroads? Yes, things had to be fixed, but would the crossroads actually enable them to do the fixing? And how did they know the rot was evil? It eats worlds, Zelda said. But where do they go, Sal countered. Instead of thinking they knew best, maybe they should go to the crossroads to – just keep going, past rot and fear, past everything, and learn what’s really out there. Or else, they should go home and fix things the hard way.
Then Sal gave Zelda an iron ring, urging her to “walk together, forever. Under all stars. If you’ll have me.” Fearful of forevers, Zelda took the ring but didn’t put it on. Then, while the alt-riders slept, the princess’s enemies came for them.
Duels, poison, and blood running down stairs: that’s how Zelda describes their desperate escape. They got an injured Sal to the Challenger as the princess died. The sky broke open. Walls devoured people. Looking toward the princess’s tower, Zelda saw the black-flower road arch upward. They needed to run, but what if the road never opened again, offering this chance at otherwise-impossible safety? And so Zelda returned Sal’s ring and fought her way up to the cracking road.
Sal followed, only to be dragged into the void by shadow-legs. Zelda, struggling to pull her back, saw Sal’s features become monstrous and heard her claim the people from all the empty worlds were in the void, waiting. Just a little further…
Then Sal fell. Zelda made it back to Montana, where her friends deserted her. Zelda expects June to scorn and curse her. Instead June kisses Zelda’s crown. She glows amid her attendant shadows. We were wrong, she says. Their world isn’t real, isn’t right. It’s the cowboy’s world. Because he can’t bear what’s beyond the “last exit,” he’s made them fear it. Zelda glimpsed the truth Sal has embraced, but rejected it. June won’t do so. Sal’s coming to rescue Zelda, and June will help her.
Zelda lunges as June starts toward Elsinore, but June’s grown “mountain-tall and mighty,” and a “wind from beyond the worlds” blows Zelda back.
The alt-riders surround Zelda. What happened, Sarah demands. “I lost her,” Zelda says. “She’s going to the crossroads. To let them in.”
* * *
The Challenger and dead horses race to ruined Elsinore. This time things will be different, Zelda tells herself. She’s not going it alone. The thought that June may be right is a “pernicious lightness in [Zelda’s] chest,” a hope she must push away to do what’s necessary.
The castle’s awake, malevolently alive. They enter, each focused on their own knack. In the Great Hall, a massive shadow-snake attacks them, the serpent Ish has sensed gnawing at the heart of the world. The serpent strikes, to be repelled by “the raw weight of [Sarah’s] refusal to let them die.” Zelda spin-shapes a path for them up the stairs to the princess’s tower. Then their flashlights die, and shadow slams down. Ish exerts all his strength to carry himself and Ramon onward, his gun his only “certainty.” Sarah and Zelda take the lead, linked together. Zelda asks Sarah if she thinks June is right. Sarah doesn’t know, but she thinks the rest of them may be wrong.
At last the alt-riders reel out onto the princess’s balcony. Her once-elegant metal-and-glass mechanisms are broken. From the edge of the balcony, under the storm, June turns black eyes to them. “Good,” she says. “You’re just in time.”
This Week’s Metrics
Fighting the Cowboy: How to Survive the End of the World.
What’s Cyclopean: Sal points out that metaphors matter. Rot is “our word,” but it might as easily be inflammation, or the catastrophic upthrust of tectonic plates clashing. More metaphors: the path to the Crossroads (which may themselves be a metaphor) is the “black-flower road” but also a “silver lie”. Zelda’s fear is “something she had breathed in, like a miner filling her lungs with stone.”
Libronomicon: Stories about conspiracy are meant to “communicate what’s happening to the audience”. Real conspiracy, if successfully, avoids communication with anyone who’s not involved.
Anne’s Commentary
If there’s one aphorism Zelda would buck at, it’s that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Voltaire gets credit for “le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” but years earlier Montesquieu expressed the notion in still stronger terms with “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien”—the better is the mortal enemy of the good. Another so-not-Zelda proverb is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Or as Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”
Whoa, Zelda could argue, our world is neither good nor unbroken! What’s wrong with bettering the bad and fixing the busted? To varying degrees, her fellow alt-riders would agree with her. To reference another great work of philosophy, if you’re not going to be a Fix-It Felix, how much better are you than a Wreck-It Ralph? At best, you’re on par with the chubby apartment dwellers who’d do nothing but sit whining in the Ralph-Wreckage if they didn’t have a Felix to rescue them. But is it their fault they don’t have superpowers like Felix’s magic hammer or Zelda’s rot-fighting knack? Maybe. Maybe everyone could develop the super-knack latent in their innermost needs and fears if they really tried. So what if society’s game programmers designate you as a Bad Guy? Remake yourself into a Good Guy by putting your Evil Skillz to Good Uses! All you may need is to meet a pesky but charismatic kid like Vanellope or Zelda to kickstart your heroism!
Zelda has kickstarted Sal, Sarah, Ramon and Ish into doing way more than dorm-room jaw about righting a screwed-up world. Later she kickstarts June, who actually didn’t need more than a toe-tap to put her on the alt-road. It’s not that the OG alt-riders never have doubts—eventually their doubts grow big enough to sour them out of the crossroads crusade for a decade. All except for Zelda, who persists in Fixing Things on a smaller scale during those ten long years.
In Chapter 31, Zelda finally tells June the whole story about the failed crusade and losing Sal. Particularly significant is how at the eleventh hour Sal pushed Zelda into a long-needed conversation, for which Zelda was still not ready. After two grueling years on the road, “a gaping uncertainty packed with tangled questions” continued to underlie all the friends’ adventures, not only unvoiced but unthinkable – for Zelda, anyway. Sal had been able to think about them; now, not in spite of her loyalty to Zelda but because of it, she faced the uncertainty and voiced the questions. What do we want, Zelda? Why are we here? Why do we need the crossroads?
Fix-It Zelda’s repeated answer, spoken or tacit, was: To fix things. In addition, she wanted Sal, she wanted to wear Sal’s iron ring and to “walk together, forever. Under all stars,” but she couldn’t fix the part of herself that feared forever and doubted that she deserved it. As for the rot, the nature of which Sal questioned, Zelda’s answers were still terser: The rot must be evil because it’s what they see when things go wrong. Because it eats worlds and vanishes stars. Somehow, the crossroads hold the key to destroying rot and achieving the Big Fix. Because the crossroads are about to open, yes, Sal, “we’re really going to do this.”
Sal proposed alternatives, either to follow the crossroads to find out what was beyond the rot, or to return home and figure out what they could fix there. They knew too little about what their own world was and could be. What if they could only bring to the alts what they’d seen and been told back home? What if back home, instead of living their own reality, they’d been “trapped inside someone else’s dream”?
Whose dream, though? The truth came to Sal as she fell into a darkness that might not be “insectile and many-jointed with inhuman geometries,” but “something else, deep and black and clear as night,” sounding not with screams but song. The people from all the empty worlds they’ve traveled weren’t ravished away. They escaped. They left him.
It takes June, transforming into something as “mountain-tall and mighty” as Sal, to tell Zelda who the “him” is. The alt-riders have been wrong. The cowboy whose voice they’ve heard, whose specter they’ve fled, he’s the one the vanished have escaped. What the alt-riders have believed to be their world, the real and right one, isn’t real or right or even theirs, but his, the cowboy’s, filled with his small dreams and barren shadows. Doesn’t Zelda see that they could be so much more? June saw the truth the first time Zelda took her into the alts—Sal touched her way back then, only June hadn’t trusted what Sal showed her because it wasn’t what she thought she knew. Never mind. Sal’s coming to rescue Zelda, whom she loves, and June is going to help her.
Ish doesn’t seem to have had much time, or breath, to crow that he told his friends so about June. If only they’d listened! Well, he’s got his gun; it’s what guides him even in the living darkness of Elsinore. What can its target be except the one who’s waiting for them on the princess’s balcony?
Sorry, Ish. I’m hoping there’s no earthly caliber that can drop June now.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
We are coming on toward the titular last exit, and it’s time for revelations. Some quiet and domestic, some world-shaking—not that the world has ceased shaking at any point since we came onto the highway.
Or: how do I talk about chapters that question and perhaps reveal the nature of reality? I’ve guessed for many posts now that the rot was something more, as real rot is something more, is what keeps the world from being buried in bones, and trees from continuing to turn into fossil fuel. But I’ve also doubted that “anything but this” is actually a good choice. Sal, too, asked: do we go see what’s beyond the lies we’ve learned, or do we stay home and work to fix things the hard way? Can we actually stand to work on the ground, after we’ve glimpsed the possibility of eucatastrophe?
Of course her engagement ring is made of cold iron, the thing that breaks magic. Come live with me in the truth, she says, with all its discomfiting complexity.
In college, my obsession with fictional religions grew around stories of holy clowns. In Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Bokononism promises up front that it’s a lie, but a lie that will get you through life and bring you to something worthwhile anyway. Discordianism is just a joke until it isn’t: the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. One of those great truths is that reality is what hurts your foot when you kick it, even if you don’t believe. And on the flip side: we understand so little of reality that we cannot help but believe in illusions. Taken to its extreme that brings us Platonic dualism, that abiding idea that the world that we see is a prisoning illusion, perhaps forced on us by some evil power. Dualism can cause great harm, convincing people that the world we see isn’t worth fixing, that we might even benefit from breaking it so that the cave crumbles and the true stars shine through.
And the flip side of that is Lovecraft’s fear of breaking the illusion and losing every valuable thing that it offers: the lie of the cowboy, and of Ish. Walk the line. Follow the light of the gun. Make money and take power and never, never look down.
Flip again. Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown’s How to Survive the End of the World is one of my favorite podcasts, an ongoing exploration of what it means to go through the end of the only way of life we know and come out the other side. In one episode, they draw a tarot reading and talk about the Sun card. Their interpretation: we who are trying to build a better world must “make our own sun” that draws people to its beauty and warmth. We must make the alternative where people can see how beautiful it is. Not just rejecting the cowboy’s lie, but offering another version of reality that can be welcomed. As the alt-riders keep saying, how can you wish for—ask for, demand—something whose form you’ve never imagined?
Flip again: how can you change what you’ve been sheltered from seeing?
The Challenger (well-named) is increasingly clearly the voice of the cowboy, who we now know Zelda first heard ten years ago at Elsinore. (Maybe going home for July 4th wasn’t the wisest move?) The American Illusion is embodied in cars and highways as well as guns and white hats. But I write this in the passenger seat on a road trip, coming home from Chicago. Our householdmate Sam passed away a month ago from complications of cancer; this weekend we returned her mother home, brought her unfinished projects to her beloved knitting group to finish. The bins filled the back of our minivan. It would have been a different and much more difficult trip by train or bus. World-burning cars, and the community-splitting highways they ride, give us the power to show our love in ways we couldn’t otherwise.
Ish holds a gun in one hand and supports Ramon with the other. The illusion doesn’t make the love experienced within its boundaries illusory. But it also doesn’t change that he’s going to the crossroads with a gun, and with no willingness to acknowledge that he might be wrong. That there might be something worth walking beyond the line.
The path to the crossroads lies open. Everything beyond it lies open, to those willing to question their assumptions. And everything before it lies open to those who won’t. It’s beautiful, and it’s terrifying. The central question remains: what’s scary? And what do we do about being this scared?
Next week, we follow along with a pair of very specialized hunters in Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth.” You can find it in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror.
