A Tear in the Veil

by Patrick Loveland

  Siobhán squeezes his hand and he opens his eyes. In her natural Irish accent she says, “I think the line’s movin’ agehnn.”

  Felix looks at her then at the wide line ahead. There’s a heavy vibration and a snapping sound and the structure at the line’s terminus lights up with an unnatural glow.

  It looks like a heavily modified baseball stadium with a huge metal dome built into its center which is visible even from out here in what had to be its parking lot. There are large machines moving on the outside surface of the dome in almost obscene pumping motions giving them at quick glance the appearance of oil derricks trying to bleed a comically small planet. On the lowest part visible that isn’t obstructed by the old stadium structure from this angle, Felix can make out the top of a huge object slowly moving around the dome. From the bit he can see, he imagines it’s a huge train engine pulling a machine the size of a large, squat building around the base of the convex metal half-bubble.

  Felix and Siobhán go with the flow of the line and enter a large mouth of an opening into the stadium. This leads to an angled, rubber-lined ramp wide enough for six across which leads up into the base of the dome. They are under it now and Felix can only imagine what the whole dome and machine look like.

  The people in front of them remove their smock-robes and place them in pneumatic chutes on each side of the line path which carry them away. They also take off necklaces and rings and place them in the tube.

  The nude people have intricate reflective tattoos in rectangular strips down the right side of their backs from shoulder blades to hips. There are thinner strips down their right forearms and calves and horizontal ones on their necks he hadn’t noticed before because they are subtler. When the row in front of him and Siobhán disrobes, Felix can see that what he took for tattoos are more like embedded holograms of cylindrically concentric, layered coding. He knows this has a purpose but his memory of it is hazy.

  Siobhán and the rest of their row take off their smocks but Felix hesitates. He’s confused by a mix of remembered familiarity and an excitement. From what he’s seen of her arms and posture, Felix can tell Siobhán is more toned and strong as he knows her, but this Siobhán is very lovely in a softer way that lacks her later toughness and predatory qualities. She gives him a nudge and he removes his smock and deposits it in the tube closer to them.

  Siobhán takes off her wedding ring and seems to place it in the tube but Felix remembers their plan. He takes his off too and lets the shim he’s had around the band’s inner circle fly into the suction tube instead, as she just did. He closes his hand tightly around the ring, hoping it won’t set off the detector due to the special film they sprayed their hands with.

  It works. They follow the rows in front of them up the rubber-lined ramp.

  They emerge onto the rubber floor and move in synch to disperse evenly around the circular plate and Felix remembers they were trained for this moment and it has been well rehearsed. When they are all inside and in their places, the angled walkway closes and locks in place flush with the floor.

  Felix looks up and studies the inner surface of the dome. The lower ends of the pumping derricks enter the dome above them in offset rhythms and disturb a layer of steam or mist collecting near the dark inner apex.

  Siobhán says, “Y’think the food’ll be better at least?” and lets out a little laugh so she doesn’t seem scared to death.

  In an Irish accent which surprises him with its natural easiness Felix says, “I hope so. I could punish eh fuhkin’ cheeseburger.”

  There’s a pulsing sound then a digital PA crunching on noisy and distorted until something catches up and clears some and what must be a scientist in an unseen control room says, “–What we do here today is for the good of our ancestors and, in the course of time, our children.–”

  This voice strikes Felix as oddly familiar but all he can associate it with is electricity and that makes little sense to him. The scientist voice says more but he’s distracted by the feeling the voice itself gives him and misses the meat of it.

  After a few minutes of silence, another, less poetic voice says, “–The Engineer of our salvation has joined you in the chamber. Prepare yourselves. Preparatory sequence commencing in five… four… three… two… one.–”

  Felix hears more machines warming up all around. Humming, whirring, and shuddering. The floor vibrates under them and rises in intensity until Felix can’t feel his feet.

  A sound rises above all the rest and with it the strongest reverberation and shuddering and it goes around the entire outer base of the dome, increasing in speed, volume, and intensity with each pass. Felix can feel it vibrating his bones and numbing his muscles.

  Siobhán squeezes his hand and he knows it’s time. He offers her his left hand and the ring in it. She takes the ring and slides it back onto his ring finger. She offers him her left hand and ring. He takes it and gently slides it back up into place at the base of her ring finger. They kiss.

  The machines are all deafening now but the thing going around the dome base is like an ever-intensifying roar of a city-sized monster lion. The room shakes violently.

  Light starts bending and warping all around. The shape of the room changes in a pulsing rhythm with the revolutions of the unseen lion and it feels to Felix like they’re inside a transforming psychedelic heart.

  The sound warps and bends now too and Felix hears Siobhán say “I love you” before she says it. He says it back in his mind but he doesn’t say it for a long moment and then it’s drowned out in the roar and screaming. Screaming?

  Felix opens his eyes but doesn’t remember closing them. People all over the chamber are screaming because they can see through themselves in flashes like they’re translucent and some are sinking into the floor or passing or falling into other each time it happens.

  The roar hits a new peak and everything explodes into a chaotic mess of organic madness and bent light.

  Felix can’t think right. He can see forward but can’t look around. They’re in a forest greener than any Ciarán has ever seen. Felix can’t move or think… think right? Everything’s vibrating and glowing strangely still but all he hears is a humming in his head. In his head?

  Felix sees Siobhán a ways away flopping around between some trees. It looks like she’s screaming but he can’t hear it. She’s almost bald and steaming or smoking all over her reddish naked body. Her hair seems to be burning on her head but there’s no visible flame. He’s forced to watch her scream herself tired and start sobbing silently.

  Eventually she hauls herself to her feet and walks around like a rickety-legged baby calf, falling and getting back up on her unsteady legs a few times.

  Siobhán scans the area and spots Felix but her expression is not one of relief. She runs as best she can and collapses to her knees in front of him silently screaming “Ciarán” but Felix can’t figure out why she’s upset.

  Tears flow down her face as she slowly reaches her shaking left hand toward his face. Felix can see that her wedding ring is embedded in her finger like it shifted in transit and fused into the proximal phalange of her left ring finger. He wonders if that happened to his as well but he can’t feel his hand so he’s not sure.

  When Siobhán touches Ciarán’s face, the glow, vibration, and humming are instantly gone and Felix’s view drops to the forest floor and slaps down looking straight up. Siobhán looks down as Felix’s view quickly fades and her eyes are wild. She looks like something snapped in her mind. Felix’s view goes black as the blood drains out of Ciarán’s severed forebrain and eyes.

  There’s an ineffable peace for an immeasurable interval before Felix perceives anything else he can get a handle on, then there’s a flood of bio-conscious concurrent time-lapse experience in which he grows from sperm and eggs into embryos and into an army of boys, turtles, girls, dogs, men, cats, women, fish, lemurs, old men, alligators, old women, a blue lobster, a suicidal hermaphrodite, a particularly playful Beluga whale, and a stupid, yet ha
ppy, zebra.

  There are many other things he experiences having been, but Felix doesn’t have the frame of reference to grasp what they are, so they feel more like a myriad of dramatically varying psychedelic feedback loops than lived lives. Alien creatures of varying types and from different planets, he’ll come to decide later.

  This all collapses closed spherically in his mind as Felix is slammed into his own nine year old body which is currently trapped under his father’s lifeless body, screaming, and trying to fight out from under the heavy empty vessel to the tune of Voltron’s intro music out in the living room.

  The experiences mesh together and young and old Felix use the same vocal chords to scream for different reasons.

  His father’s body and room implode into blinding white fractal fun and he’s free but Felix keeps screaming anyway.

  Felix’s consciousness returns and he’s still screaming as he’s wheeled down a hallway on a moving gurney. He’s curling up against straps and doctors and policemen keep pushing him down on his back.

  One of the policemen has seething, pumping bulbs on his neck and red mist pours from his nose and black-toothed mouth. A female doctor yells that Felix is going to have to relax through a small jungle of translucent, glowing tentacle parasites on her face.

  “What happened?!”

  “Fuck if I know! He was fine then flipped a bitch fit!”

  “Sedative! Get a damn sedative!”

  35

  Felix lies in a hospital bed. His leg is in a cast and it’s raised up by a cushioned sling. The television is on but Felix stares at the ceiling, uninterested. A policeman is sitting in the corner doing a crossword puzzle.

  Felix sits with his leg raised onto another chair and stares through a plate of lovely food in the Fleischmann Medical Center dining room.

  Felix sits on a bench out on an island in the big pond at the center of FMC. He looks at his leg cast then watches a koi gracefully swim by.

  He looks up at the infinite seeming reflections of the mirrored patio walls around the small lake and stares at a descending loop of his form and the back of it alternating as they get smaller into the distance. Dozens of his own eyes watch him and dozens of his close cropped heads ignore him.

  “Good morning,” he says, causing dozens of conversations to begin.

  Felix looks down at the slightly darker ring of skin around the base of his left ring finger.

  Good morning.

  Doctor Fleischmann presses play on the remote in his left hand and the camcorder starts recording. He starts a player with a different remote and readies his expensive pen over a notepad on his desk.

  Felix sees himself. He’s sitting in almost exactly the same spot. He looks drowsy and complacent but his eyelids flutter as he watches footage of another Felix; a much more elevated Felix.

  The elevated, unseen Felix yells, “–of a bitch! He knows all about you! You can blank my brain all you want! I might forget, but he won’t, motherfucker!” and the complacent Felix that Felix sees on the screen winces in shame and embarrassment. Our Felix watches this with almost no emotion.

  On the video Fleischmann says, “Let’s not get nasty, Felix. So you still believe all of this? After everything I have presented you with?”

  “You might as well just blank me, ‘cause I don’t give a shit what you ‘presented’, Obrist!”

  “My name is Heinrich Fleischmann. I wasn’t even born until nineteen forty-nine. I am no more an immortal evil scientist than you are a Vietnam veteran, Felix. I also never met your girlfriend before that day in the hospital and I wouldn’t ‘blank’ you if I could. I am trying to help you live with the luggage of your real life, not burn out one that has no basis in fact.

  Let me give you a few more things you might ‘give a shit’ about. In the interests of patient confidentiality I have withheld information about your ‘Wahrheit’. For your well-being, I will temporarily forgo my integrity. His name is Dwayne Kendall. I believe his middle name is Aloysius. He was a patient of mine who fixated on me… quite obsessively. I have even had to have him arrested for stalki–” The Fleischmann in the complacent Felix’s video presses either the stop or pause button.

  Our Felix remembers that it was “pause” because when he was complacent Felix, he had to watch his own snarling, indignant face in freeze-frame as roll bars travelled down the screen.

  Off screen, Complacent Felix Fleischmann says, “Now, you understand that I have only played you this back to show you how much progress we have made.”

  Complacent Felix says, “I understand.”

  “Wonderful. Now, I believe you are ready for a discussion of your revised diagnosis.”

  Complacent Felix nods on the screen.

  “Severe schizo-dissocia aggravated by narcotic-induced psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Chemical psychosis and PTSD? How so?”

  “After toxicology analysis, it was determined that Kendall gave you pills containing a mixture of rare herbal stimulants and psychedelics. It was quite powerful.”

  Complacent Felix considers this then says, “And the PTSD?”

  Fleischmann sighs and says, “That is more complicated. Other than the obvious damage caused by your father’s suicide and your unfortunate… proximity to it, it has become clear to me over the course of these sessions that you have repressed an even more powerful and hurtful memory. It would explain many things, not the least of which is your need to create a young woman capable of… ‘coming back to life’ in a damaged automobile in your presence.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t follow you, Doctor.”

  “Felix, you were in the automobile with your mother when she died.”

  Complacent Felix blinks a few times and becomes Confused Denial Felix.

  “She was driving you home from a Taekwondo class when you were struck by an inebriated driver in a larger vehicle. You were trapped in the auto with your severely injured mother. From what I have seen in the files there is little chance she would have survived, but you witnessed an over-enthusiastic emergency worker wrenching your mother free without being aware of her impalement by a poorly designed safety strut. She exsanguinated in front of you.”

  Felix’s eyes dart around on the screen.

  He says, “That’s not true. I’d… I would remember!”

  “It is true. I am sorry, Felix.”

  Felix breaks down. We hear Fleischmann leave his chair and cross to Felix, blocking the shot for a moment before he’s past the camera and can be seen placing his hand on the shoulder of Emotionally Destroyed Felix.

  Our Felix wonders if there’ll be another Felix watching him and what his title will be to that one and then what that one’s would be to another and on into infinity like that damned mirror-lined lake.

  Our Fleischmann pauses the player, this time causing the roll bars to travel down EDF’s face. Fleischmann gestures to the screen with his expensive pen.

  “And once again, you have made progress.”

  Felix says, “I’m glad you feel that way.”

  “I am hoping this will be our final session.”

  “So am I,” Felix says without malice.

  “How is the adjusted dosage working?”

  “Fine.”

  “Have you had any more visual or auditory ‘distortion’?”

  Felix smiles a bit and says, “None at all.”

  Doctor Fleischmann looks over his notes.

  Felix looks over at his EDF on the screen and watches the visage pulse and warp ever so slightly. Well, almost none. Nudge-nudge.

  Fleischmann says, “Everything appears normal?”

  Felix looks back at him, “Perfectly. You’re very good at what you do, Doctor.” Wink-wink.

  “Are you having any more anxiety about the auto theft and property damage suits?”

  “Should I?”

  “As I have said, not at all. You have my full support and my lawyers are quite possibly the best in the world.”

 
“Then no.”

  Doctor Fleischmann studies Felix’s face.

  Felix half-smiles.

  Fleischmann says, “This is going quite well. You’ve really come so far.”

  “Thanks to you, Doctor Fleischmann.”

  Fleischmann narrows his eyes ever so slightly at Felix like he’s unsure if he’s being patronized and says, “Last step then?”

  Felix nods.

  “I am going to present you with a hypothetical situation. Please respond honestly.”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  “Imagine for a moment that everything you believed in your delusional, intoxicated state is in fact real.”

  “But… it isn’t.”

  “Of course not. Please indulge me.”

  Felix nods but his smile is gone.

  “If those things were real, would you be happy?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Would it make you happier?”

  Felix shifts in his seat and says, “No.”

  “Felix, you needn’t feel uncomfortable. I’m just curious. If you had to make a choice between running around through a glowing, creature-filled world most can’t see on some dangerous, absurd quest… and living in this boring, safe world, which would you choose? Aware and in danger or oblivious?”

  Now Fleischmann is half-smiling.

  Felix says, “I would choose to be normal.”

  “In the hypothetical I am describing, ‘normal’ would mean oblivious.”

  “Whatever you call it, I want to be happy. Being normal will make me happy.”

  “You are sure of that?”

  “I have worried and hurt everyone who loves me. I’ve become a… a criminal by doing things I could have controlled if I had just kept taking my medicine. In my psychosis, I thought I needed answers to big questions no one really needs answers to. And those answers wouldn’t have even been real. I have all the answers I need.