“Well, shit Gregor, that’s what you fucking sound like you’re saying.”
“I’m not, though. I’m not crazy. I just want you to think about what’s happening here. I want you to really get down on it, start to process what those bastard things outside are really doing here. What’s the Stonefish about, Den? One way to get close to the answers, I’ve found, is the path of excess. Nothing succeeds like it. If you can imagine the most bizarre possibility, such as...?”
“Such as there’s nothing up there. Or there is, but it’s not real.”
“It’s as real as anything down here, anyway. For what that’s worth. You see?”
“Starting to.”
“All that information. So much light, and much of it, all of it, really, old, so old. The Victorians used to take daguerreotypes of their dead children. They would pose them with the other kids, get the whole family round for a last picture, maybe the only picture the family would ever have of everyone together, because that shit was expensive. Prop the dead up on special stands or put them in chairs with their dolls.”
“Christ, that’s sad.”
“Poignant as fuck and no mistake. You had to sit still for a long time with that old-style early photography, so often the dead look sharper, more present than the blurry living folks. I think that’s basically the deal we’ve got going with the stars, Den. All the structures and phenomena are there, and we’re taking their pictures, picking up their signals and so on, but they’re long dead. Or maybe existing in a state of potentia: measurable, recordable, but not strictly actual. They’ve had strange aeons to live and die, but with enough time maybe death doesn’t apply. Like the archons. Unreal, because not from here, but just real enough to leave tracks when they want. Show up on film for a few seconds. Allow themselves to be seen, for a minute or two, or worse. Just to fuck with us.”
Gregor paused, closed his eyes. “Hey. Answer me something, Den.”
“What.”
“Did you really mean to say you kept coming up with a big problem?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Were you thinking about space and the Stonefish a lot, I mean. Working it out, really pondering the hell out of the question. Or, and hear me out, please, did you just at that moment, a few minutes ago, did you just at that moment think of it. And did it feel golden? An inspiration, a gotcha, a for real eureka moment that you just had to spew out at me?”
“It was. I mean, I did. I did just think of it.”
“Stonefish.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Stonefish, Den! Get it through your head, son! All of this is conditioned. Mapped out, allowed for, part of the weave of the terrible thing. You think you’re original, we all think we’re so fucking original, and we’re not. We’re not. We run. We run on tracks.”
In between interviews, I sifted through the archived material Gregor had pulled from the noönet during his periods of connectivity with the world, searching for the son, for Jeremy Makarios. Li’l Dougie was right. There was nothing, no information anywhere, on a Makarios heir. I would have been happy with even a shred of data, something to indicate that at least there was a ghost of the boy, but no. Even the ancient social media archives of Gregor’s, which by rights should have shown something, were empty. All the expected things, the obvious things, were absent: photos of birthday parties, vacations, science fairs, film premiers, soccer practice, hospital visits to set broken bones, the usual. Status updates to celebrate or bemoan the travails of parenthood.
All gone. Or rather, never there. Or, again, there once, and then removed from reality itself by a tampering so complete, so attuned with whatever the Stonefish is, that it was as if Jeremy had never existed, because the boy never existed. Except in the mind of Gregor Makarios.
I wanted to respect his sorrow, or at the very least, the depths of his delusion. I was, after all, living alone with a madman in the woods. A genial madman, sure, but a madman who had, possibly, fabricated an entire person, but insisted otherwise, and this among other, more troubling things.
Discretion seemed expedient.
I determined to do as Gregor did, and only speak of Jeremy while at the tree. Gregor never announced his visits to the alcove in the rocks above Stonefish House, but after a few days of observation and conversation with the man, I came to understand that visits to the tree came soon after a tonal shift in his interactions with me. A kind of reticence to speak on his part, subtle, but notable if you were used to the voluminous levels of speech that normally spilled from Gregor. And by that time, I had grown accustomed to his normal levels, for whatever that was worth.
The reticence would build over the course of a chat, and then he’d excuse himself, claiming some minor maintenance or technical task required his attention. A filter check on the air scrubbers in Pod Four, or topping up the liquid nitrogen in one of Li’l Dougie’s seven cooling tanks. All of which sounded pressing and important enough the first few times he ran with that excuse, but once I’d spotted Gregor moving up the trail on the canyon wall towards the alcove and his tree for the second time, I knew something was up. When that subtle shift, and the excuse, came again, I was ready.
“I need a break, Den,” he said, clapping his hands to his knees. “Gonna calibrate the cameras in the northeast quadrant, I think. As You Know Bob rolled through there couple nights ago, and they’ve been wonky since.” He stood, looked around absently. We’d been talking about the Stonefish and how it fucked with awareness of deep space. The implications for travel beyond the Earth, the problem with, and possible Stonefish-based solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Out there shit. Even I was tired. “See you in a bit.”
“Look, Gregor. I get why you’re doing this but I know you’re not going to calibrate cameras or whatever. I’ll just come with you up to the tree, all right?”
He frowned, covered his mouth, then let his fingers roam through his beard, tugging here and there. I had him, and we knew it. “I don’t know, it’s not really...”
“I’ve got questions. Let me ask them. But I want to ask them up there. Out of respect.”
Gregor slumped where he stood, nodded.
That slump gradually vanished as we made our way up the side of the ridge. Years seemed to slough from Gregor’s shoulders the closer we came to the Japanese maple. He wasn’t necessarily a new man by the time we reached it, but there was a notable difference. I don’t want to say that there was a hopeful cast to his features, or that his shoulders had set in a more determined way, but there was a kind of dedication to duty that his posture betrayed.
Once at the tree, he was like a different person than the one he’d been below. While he began his ministrations, I spoke.
“I couldn’t find anything on Jeremy, Gregor. As far as the world is concerned, you never had a son. Just like you said.”
“Did you expect anything but that, Den? I told you. Their erasure is near total. He’s gone, from everywhere, except up here—” and here Gregor placed a finger to his temple “—and, if I may be allowed a moment of sentiment, here.” Gregor pounded his chest lightly, twice.
“That’s what troubles me. The sentimentality of all this. You know how it sounds, right?”
“Let me tell you about a conversation I had with Jeremy once. Okay? Don’t interrupt, don’t try to reason it out, don’t color it in any way with your personal shit. I mean, if you can, Den. Can you at least try?”
“Yeah, sure. Sure.”
“We were coming back from a hike down to the Siuslaw. The Dunes, right. Special place. He’s seven, and just starting to get into classic monsters, all the Universal stalwarts. We’d watched the original Wolf Man the week before, and he’d been doing nothing but research since. You’ve got kids, right Den? Crèche kids?”
“Five, at last count. The fosters come and go.”
“Then you know what seven-year-old research looks like. They throw their minds at the wall and see what sticks, but as often as not they prefer the stuff that co
mes up off the floor with the bits that don’t. He was all over the place with his data collection and it was fucking charming. You’re a dad, after a fashion. You know what I mean?”
I thought of Inga and Duhren’s boy, Best, and Molly and Saffa, the girls. The intensity of their fascination with cultural ephemera, Pop, world mythologies, disease, the next big random noönet star. Their superstitious avoidance of certain subjects. I nodded. I knew what he meant, but I wondered how actually charming it was. Can a symptom be charming?
“We’re hauling ourselves up from the beach and he brings up the lycanthropes and he asks me, he says Dad, what would you do if you knew you’d been turned and I thought, well, here’s a chance for some ethical training. And I tell him that the thing I’d be most concerned about, were I a werewolf, is the people I might hurt once the moon was full and I changed. We’re talking classical teratology here, Den. Knowing that the wolf in me would kill, and worse, want to kill, and feed, and generally run amok, I’d arrange to have myself locked up some place secure. Chains, and so on. Convince friends, if I had any, to set a guard on the wolf, provide it with meat, entertainment. Something to distract it from its grim agenda. Anaesthetic gas! That sort of thing. And of course, because I cared so much about people, I’d be working non-stop to cure myself.
“Ethics were as far from his mind as they could be, as it turned out. Logistics, that’s where his head was at. Why do werewolves turn only at the full moon? And you know, that’s valid. Good question, I say. It may be that only a full moon pumps out the right amount of radiation to trigger the change. Or lumens, I don’t know. Could be lumens? A post-hypnotic trigger? He could do this, they all can, if we let them. You want to start approaching a problem from a different angle, ask someone under twelve.
“So the moon is the problem, he says. It’s high on the list, I tell him. But only one night out of the month, he says. Technically, three, I say, and that sets him off for a few minutes and we end up talking about what constitutes a full moon and then, then he hits me with a haymaker, he says I’d build a ray to turn the moon back. Or forward. And when I knew the moon was going to be full and I’d turn into a wolf I’d get out my moon-turner ray and fire it at the moon and turn it. Which was when I realized he hadn’t learned about moon phases yet. Took a few minutes to fix that but this ray! Where had he even picked up rays in the first place? Did you know what a ray was at his age, Den?”
I told him no, that as far as I knew, then or now, rays were a geometry thing. Or solar in origin.
“Right? But somewhere he’d picked up the old-school idea of the ray gun. So we tossed that around for a while. I mentioned that if what he was trying to do with the ray was turn the moon phase back, or forward, that what he was essentially building was a time machine. He ran with that, understanding that a successful firing of the thing would necessarily affect the entire solar system, the turning of the planets in their orbits and the sun in its socket and the mad dance of the galaxies. Fucking thrilling, let me tell you.
“And then the moral enormity of the task started to impress itself upon him. There he was, my son, my Jeremy, picking his way up the trail ahead of me, breaking it down, the ethical quandaries of forcing the planet, planets, to his will. The turn of the celestial bodies, the damage it would cause, to the oceans. The life in the oceans. People.”
Gregor turned his face from me as he worked. For a moment he brought the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes.
“And in the end he couldn’t do it. Decided against it, the moon-turning ray device...thing. Lemme tell you, Den, that invention looms large in my dreams, when I arrange to have them. The logistics of the build, the money I would have to spend. Armies I would need to raise to defend it. I think your way would probably be good, Dad he said. Like, chain me up in a cave and wait the change out.
“So, I said. You’d give up being possibly the best human, or werewolf, scientist of all time? And he stops and turns and looks at me and then comes running in for the kind of hug you hope they’ll always be happy to give you. And he says nothing, you know. But I know what he means. I do.”
“I don’t follow, Gregor.”
“No? Well.”
“He couldn’t hurt you? Is that what you’re saying.”
Gregor shook his head, passed a rough palm over his face. He raised himself from the crouch he’d held for the last few minutes, brushed his hands off on his knees.
“They took him from me, Den.”
“So you say.”
“I know there’s no record. No evidence that he ever existed. Not even his mother knows he lived. She has no memory of him. I’m sure if Kari went in for the kind of tests that could determine that sort of thing, they’d find no evidence that she ever carried a child, even, for however long, let alone actually gave birth to one. Raised one, with me, for nine years. Nine years, Den!
“Either this happened, or it didn’t. My son was alive, or he never was. The world says it didn’t, that what he was wasn’t. My memories say otherwise. So, which is right. And, given the nature of the Stonefish, of this thing they’ve made, built, grown, this thing they’ve allowed to happen, out of all the myriad possibilities that could happen, this fucking shitshow of a reality they’ve allowed to take the formal step into becoming, given that nature, what does the answer even matter?”
“Well. You have to assume it does. Otherwise, why do anything?”
“Why chain yourself up in a cave at all, Den? Why not just go out and eat your fill when the moon is full.”
“Jesus.”
“Not a werewolf, so far as the ancient texts affirm. Probably just your standard lich thing going on there.”
Gregor went back to tending the tree, working for a few minutes. For my part, I went blank. There was nothing to say, and no further questions rose in my mind, though I could feel them down there, beneath the surface of my consciousness, desperately trying to find a coherent form. I literally could not think. Chaos. Gregor’s chaos. Or not his, not really, but the chaos of the archons, the disorder and novelty their presence brought to the world, distorting it, bleeding unknown color into its streams and dreams. This burning doubt, this monstrous seed: this was the source. Of religion. War. Vacant innovation for the sake of it. All the users, using. I felt ill. Empty and ill.
Gregor coughed, startling me. He was trimming rogue twigs from the tree, refining the shape of it. He coughed again, and seemed to gather something up within himself.
“But now I see he was right. I think.”
“I’m sorry, Gregor. Who?”
“My imaginary boy. My son. Do you know? It was Jeremy that came between me and Kari. She had her career to think about, and being married to a man who was clearly losing touch with reality wasn’t exactly helping. The subject of Jeremy...I never let on to anyone but her about it, but the madness began to show. Can’t mask that forever. I came up here for Li’l Dougie and came back down to a son that never was and an angry wife. They’d ask her about me in interviews, you know. I only dragged her down. Do you happen to know how she’s doing, these days?”
“Krimes? She’s a producer now, I think? It’s not really my thing.” I struggled to think of a single track of hers I enjoyed. Better to ask Li’l Dougie. “But what about Jeremy, Gregor. How was he right?”
“Thanks for talking about him the way you are, Den. I appreciate it. He was right about which way to go, to beat the curse of lycanthropy. Chained in a cave? Or pull a gun from my belt and shoot for the moon?
“I’d go with the time ray. Hands down.”
FOUR
MANDIBOLE
We ran until running was no longer an option. We ran until our minds returned to us in something like their normal state. We ran until the world filled out with detail, color, sound. By the time we stopped running and made our paranoid camp for the night, the forest around felt full, bursting with life and significance, all of which I found difficult to reconcile with, well, everything else.
“Paradise, right
?” is what I said when I finally had it in me to speak aloud. “From the Persian, you said?”
Gregor huffed in response, and poked at the small fire he’d built. “A walled garden, the contents of which are made ready for harvest. And you shall have dominion over the beasts of the field, they said.”
“Who said.”
“They did, when they masked themselves as elohim. And you will fill the earth, and subdue it, yadda yadda and so on. That old colonial line is older than time, I’m thinking.”
“We did that, I guess.”
“Oh, too right we did. The species took that Old Testament injunction and ran it three miles into the ground. Fucked ourselves in the process.”
“I don’t follow. You mean, like, the damage to the environment? We were supposed to make a paradise of the planet? But we fell.”
“Sure, we fell! But everything falls here, Den. They arranged for things to fall here. That’s what they like to see. A perfect system where all things progress smoothly bores them. They like murder and chaos and blood. Disease and disfunction. It’s slapstick to them.
“Were we supposed to save the planet? I don’t believe so. I mean, not necessarily. Maybe keeping a kind of uneasy balance was the best we could have done. The performance they would have preferred? But we couldn’t even do that. And then, when it’s all gone so spectacularly to shit, we invent the thing that finally unites the species across all scales and what’s the result? We retreat from the world.”
“Go inside our own heads.”
“The noönet. Granted, there’s plenty of room in there. Room enough to understand each other at long last. Sure pissed off the fucking sasquatch, though. This is not the paradise they had in mind, nor the harvest.”
“But why the Numpty, then? Why not just disable the noőnet?”
Gregor shrugged, then belched. “Excuse me. Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they want to watch us flail around a bunch. They did it once before. Tower of Babel 2.0. Who the fuck knows.” He placed wide fingers on his forehead and vigorously ground them into the skin.
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