Member

by Michael Cisco

  Long red tubes run down each boom arm and disappear into the fliers at the base of the spine. The blood that sprays from their wounds is collected, blended, and pumped back into them through those tubes, so that each one maintains a constant volume of blood even though their circulator system is open at the neck. They are all filled with a mixture of the blood of all. A powerful hallucinogen also is added. A girl whips by the window splattering it with blood, her limp arms dangling in space, between them her face, pale with crimson streaks, slack in a dream. Sweat mingles with the blood that rills into her long hair. There are blazing orange heater coils in sconces just behind each person, and the air they slice through ripples with heat trails.

  I watch as, with precision timing, a tray is brought to its berth in the wall below me, the subject’s wound is deftly patched, and the person extricated with astounding speed. Another one has taken his place within seconds.

  I look at the faces; rapt, absent, frightened. The same blood courses through them all. They’re sharing their memories and vanishing as distinct persons, becoming part of a larger serial organism through this machine. One hallucination sweeps in the blood from brain to brain, blending the images and their values at random.

  She’s dressed like a doctor. Her papery blue-green pants are rolled up to the knee, leaving the calves exposed, and she’s barefoot. The contrast makes the natural color of her bare legs look so exaggeratedly vibrant and healthy she looks as though she’s been painted orange. She isn’t looking at me, but in through the slot.

  “Care to give it a try?” She has the tone of someone who feels obligated to offer something that she doesn’t expect you to accept, and would be put out if you did.

  “Not me,” I say, putting out my hands in alarm. “Not me.”

  She doesn’t look at me. “OK,” she says after a moment, superciliously. “Not you, then.”

  When she turns and walks away I spot a scar on one side of her throat.

  I watch them spinning in there. They don’t make a sound. I remember I never could stand the sight of an injury, and by that mistake I readmit all those old associations. My insides turn to ice water and I recoil from the window. I see the docile submissiveness of those people as they let themselves be cut open and I have to get out of there.

  The front doors are still crowded by people working their way in toward the idol. Over me the mouth is still slobbering “the functioning of Chorncendantra within the discovered order. Find the self within Chorncendantra.” I squeeze and shove through the doors at the far side, right against the hinges. There’s a placard on the wall by the door on the outside. I hadn’t seen it before, through the press of people. It says 45-KV/9. There’s no end to this crowd. People are continually emerging from doorways and sidestreets so there’s never a break in the stream.

  *

  I pass along in the dark, and the quiet, alone. A broad-faced public building with an expansive marble terrace in front of it, dotted with puddled depressions. I sit on the high ledge and look out at the city. Wind blows. The clouds are hanging down, sliding steadily by. From time to time I can hear some huge machine or other whirring out there. It’s cool and dim, and still, and lonely. I feel at home here. I should feel at home anywhere; the idea is to take the world itself for your refuge. I just let the wind play with my hair and my thoughts.

  Directly beneath you, below the stone surface of the world, there is an ocean of liquid rock. Does it glow, or is it dark down there? Further down, the rock cools and congeals into crust. Beneath that, there is an ocean where the fish swim upside down. Below this, a blue sky, and drifting clouds. A void gapes under that; directly beneath your feet, there always is a lightless, infinite emptiness. That void extends not only beneath you, but before you, behind you, to the right of you, to the left of you, and above you, falling forever away in all directions.

  I look down at the bag, lying on the curb below where I dropped it. Did it bring me here? Who’s couriering who? The wind trickles through broken windows in disintegrating apartments; the buildings over there are old brick tenements, blasted, weathered, with black pueblo house eyes. The buildings over there were put up not too long ago; many of them were never occupied. They’re already rotten beyond repair; the soggy facades slump down the listing steel frames and ragged wounds in the eviscerated corpse spill liquefied paper and foam and broken glass and crumbly cottage-cheese plastic stuff into a formless heap around the fractured foundations. Protruding rods that sway with low, sorrowful groans, stick out of the skin, and here and there I see bandages of bright orange webbing, torn to rags and flittering their ends like fringe.

  Car coming—far across the way, zig-zagging through channels in the rubble toward me—a little grey hatchback with no rear window and a train of red tarp rattling behind it. It rounds a tipped-over dumpster races past me and for a moment I see the driver pointing something at me, framed by the window at his back, across the reclining passenger—something that buzzes like a hornet stings me high on the right shoulder.

  I jerk back in surprise and then scramble blindly over the banister to retrieve my bag. The car is completing a u-turn, veering on uneven tires. I rush up the steps, back up to the terrace and the driver is already out of the car and nearly on top of me. He gets around and above me, trying to head me off before I reach the top, so I swerve without thinking much and rush back down again toward the street.

  The car is parked at the foot of the steps, and the old man with the wand sits in the passenger seat, greedily plucking up and eating little morsels of something out of a white paper bag. I get the car between myself and the driver, getting my first real look at him. He’s a scrawny, frantic-looking character with a wasted, unshaven blue face and six inches too much wrist. A flat, angular valise or purse hangs at his waist from a slender strap.

  “Give me those bandages!” he cries.

  “You could have asked, buddy.”

  “Give them to me I said!”

  With that, he launches himself across the top of the car, hands outstretched, and now I’m struggling with him. I get a faceful of stale breath and rubbery claws groping at me.

  “You’re stronger than I am! I need them more than you!”

  “What wonderful candies!” exclaims the man with the wand, who’s been wolfing them down and smacking his lips noisily. “I don’t think I’ve ever had such good candies before!”

  “Come on!” the driver is nearly pleading with me. He’s right about my being stronger than he is. He barely seems to be in control of his movements, alternately fumbling to no effect at my clothes, or trying to get at my bag, which hangs from its strap down my back.

  In the uneven light I can see inside the open collar, and through the gaps of his misbuttoned shirt, that he’s wrapped in bandages like mine, mummy-style, all over. I take hold of a handful of bandages from the vicinity of his neck and give them a wrench. A wad of bandage comes free and immediately crumbles to powder in my hand. With a good shove, I send him tumbling down onto his ass. He scrabbles forward again, not quite getting up, then abruptly runs out of steam and collapses, sobbing.

  The man with the wand looks up with a bark of alarm when I filch the candies out of his hand.

  “My candies!”

  “You touched my bandages!” The other one cries. He makes it sound as if I’d killed his dog.

  “Give those back!” the old man says, emerging from the car. He’s wearing the same form-fitting black outfit the chanters had on, without the white skull cap. I don’t think he’s the one I met before.

  “Did he give you these?”

  “They’re mine!”

  “My bandages!”

  I half-crush the candies in my hand.

  “Don’t hurt them!”

  “You can’t touch my bandages!” Blue-face is bawling.

  “Don’t hurt them, but he can hurt me all he likes, is that it? Run me down? He paid you these and you led him to me?”

  Wand-o shakes his finger.

 
“Think twice before you antagonize me! I’ve been assigned to you, and assignments of this kind can almost never be changed. You’ll depend on me to complete your rounds—remember that!”

  “What about the other one? The first one?”

  “I’m the one assigned to you! Nobody else!”

  “Bullshit!”

  “...bandages...!”

  “I’ll walk out!” the old man blusters. “I mean it!”

  “You mean I may have to learn to live without all the handy advice you’ve given me so far? You haven’t even told me where this construction site I’m supposed to go to is!”

  I dash the bag on the ground. The old man looks down at it sadly.

  “My candies...” he murmurs, dejectedly.

  Blue-face drapes himself over the car with his arms outstretched, looking at me. His distraught face is streaked with tears. Racked by sobs, his voice catches, starts and stops as he speaks.

  “He is assigned to me, too. He’s evaluated according to how well we perform our duties, so he can’t refuse to cooperate with you. The High Rationals would demote him.”

  I’d more or less rolled the bag of candies into a ball. When it struck the ground, none of the candies spilled out. They were hard candies, too. There’s no reason to assume they’re spoiled, and this must be as obvious to Wand-o as to me. All the same, he turns his back and walks back toward the passenger seat with his head hanging down.

  “He’s one of the worst,” blue face says, throwing the last word in Wand-o’s face. “The very worst they have! He never tells any of us anything!”

  “That’s not true,” the old man says, softly, nearly to himself.

  “Then how about telling me where the construction site is?” I ask.

  The old man’s head turns a little, but he doesn’t look at me.

  “I don’t know where it is,” he answers quickly, his voice still low. “But I have been instructed to tell you that information has been lodged for you at SBJ 13, 45-KV/9.”

  “I just been there. There’s nothing.”

  “Well,” the old man shrugs. “Then you ought to go back.”

  Gingerly, he picks up the crumpled bag of sweets. Then he slings his wand over one shoulder and jogs off along the way, without another word.

  Blue face’s head has dropped forward onto the hood of the car, between his slack arms. As I cross over to him, he slumps to the ground with all his weight, and his head strikes the ground with a hollow thud, like an empty gourd. In the sidelong light that greases the cobblestones under the car, I can see the livid lines of his teeth and eyes, the expression and the body alike are rigid in death.

  After a while, a soft and distant muttering makes me look up. A thunderstorm is approaching. The clouds over me are like tightly-packed intestines gliding past trailing rags, but over there the luminous silver crags give way to vague smoothness.

  I hurry toward the buildings on the far side of the open space and find a ceiling to shelter beneath and a window to look out from. The rain begins, suddenly. I hear shouts of surprise in the street. A bird swoops in out of the sky, right at me, then about a yard away it darts up and into the eaves. It has found a box or something up there, something like a glass fish tank, and it has taken up temporary residence in there.

  Now the rain is gushing down; the drops scud by in regular shoals, the glistening street undulates, the trees swirl, and the air shudders and subsides. I get that weird feeling I always get, like metal above my soft palate. Lightning flashes, in a moment a sound like a tree being twisted in half. Defiant black kids shout back from the building a few doors down; people flash between awnings with their heads covered in newspapers and plastic bags. Finding a clear spot on the floor, I sit down, then, feeling a little dizzy, I slump over, my head on—but not in—my bag. A curtain of empty beads vibrates like a struck harp under the clouds; the blinks of my eyes multiply the flashes. I resume my practice.

  *

  “This is the Stationery Office.”

  “You don’t look like you move much.”

  I’m exploring the offices that fill the basement of 45-KV/9. Overhead, the chanting, the crowding, and presumably all the other activities I’d previously observed, continue. A low wooden counter runs the width of this room, dividing it into a narrow waiting area just within the hall door, and a palatial corral filled with bare, unattended metal desks. The one occupant of this magical grotto is a doughy man in short-sleeved button-down shirt open to the mesh undergarment at the collar, who sits behind the counter, directly in front of the door. When I came in, he was filling out an index card, holding it in place with one stubby-fingered hand splayed flat, and the long pencil in the other. His seat is so short I’m looking directly at the crown of his head, which is virtually beneath my chin, even though the breadth of his shoulders tells me he’s got to be taller and bulkier than I am.

  His eyes tilt up in their bags.

  “Jokes, yet,” he says. “On top of everything else I get to listen to the humor of others.”

  “Wearing desks out one by one?”

  “We’re short handed,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “I’ll save you some time. All I need to know is who to ask about some information that’s been... lodged, I think they said... for me here.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “That’s one of the things I want to be informed about.”

  “Who lodged?”

  “I don’t know. I was sent here by one of the men with the wands.”

  The man looks at me like I’d just sprung up from between his legs in a toilet stall. Does he have any idea what I’m talking about?

  “Look,” I go on, “I obviously don’t ask you, so who do I ask? You’re not too busy to tell me that?”

  “No, I’m too busy wondering what sins I did to get a visit from you today. Aw,” he adds in an imploring tone, “you’re letting fog in!”

  I look down and it’s true. Like Marley’s ghost, I’m shawled in thin dry vapor.

  “You’re tracking it in! From the hall!” he raises his voice in stages, taking me through my paces, and even gets up on his hind legs. Towers over me.

  I wave my hand angrily in the aperture. “There’s no door!”

  “It came in with you!”

  I close some against my palm like a Japanese fan and toss it at him.

  “Is this killing you?”

  He glowers at me, and sits down again. “Some basic consideration is all.”

  In the momentary silence that follows I catch a far-off sound of heels clicking in the hall. Silence is flooding the building, like this fog. My voice sounds in the middle of expanding emptiness.

  “It has something to do with Chorncendantra.”

  The silence deepens. Every noise, the scraping of the man’s pencil as he pretends to get back to work, is distinct.

  “Never heard of it.”

  As he speaks, his affect is so flat, especially in contrast with the peevishness of a moment ago, that I wonder if he means the opposite. How much time has passed since a moment ago? Suddenly it seems as if it might have been a lot.

  “Anyone here who has?”

  He gestures at the empty desks behind him.

  “You see anybody working here apart from me? There’s nothing to do here that I don’t do or end up doing, because I’m the only one assigned here who can be discharged. The rest of them are Operationals who come when they can be spared and when they feel like coming and down here that’s never. I haven’t seen one in weeks.”

  “Is this upstairs?”

  “How should I know?” he snaps. “I never have time to go up the god damned stairs.”

  “If the others don’t ever show up, and you do all the work—”

  “What do you mean ‘if?’”

  “—then firing you means nothing gets done here at all,” I say. “So you can’t be fired either.”

  “There’s something in this world which is known as ‘a replacement,
’” he sneers. “Perhaps you’re acquainted with one?”

  “I don’t have to be. I am one.”

  “Then there’s demotion. You one of those, too?”

  “Operationals anything like High Rationals?”

  Rolling his eyes, his presses his palms both to his forehead in disgust.

  “I practically begged them to send some Operationals down here.”

  He’s drifting into his own thoughts, letting me vanish back into the fog.

  “...But no. No. They can’t spare anything for records.”

  “You have records down here with reference to a construction site? Is this where you keep them?”

  With a slight leap, his head comes back up toward me again, as if I’d nudged him on the brink of nodding off.

  “What?”

  “I ask if you have records about a construction site?”

  “You see any?” he asks wearily. “They won’t send me one Operational. Handling records isn’t worth their time. Any amount of mine, but not any amount of theirs.”

  The office behind him is as bare as the back of a new refrigerator.

  “I don’t see any records of any kind in here,” I say.

  “That is what is meant by handling them, friend,” he answers with a kind of embattled pride.

  I hold up my bag, rattle it until he looks up again.

  “Look. I’m a courier, see?”

  He’s already nodding as if he knew it all and couldn’t stand to hear even the slightest fraction of it again.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” he says. His face is turning grey, and seems to be losing its shape. He won’t meet my gaze. “Fine, whatever. There’s hardly anyone here, but you go down that hall, past the elevators, and you follow the red doors until you reach one that’s open and talk to one of them, one of the people down there.”

  “All right,” I say. “Thanks.”

  He sighs. I’m beginning to think he might keel over any moment.

  “Everything happens at once,” he murmurs, sleeking his hand back over his forehead and crown.

  “It doesn’t look to me as if anything has happened in here since the last war.”

  He gives me a long sober look.