Brian D'Amato

Brian D'Amato Page 27

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I don’t think Marena really heard me, though. A menacing buzz arose, repente, behind my head. Dr. L didn’t even start with scissors; she just drove into my hyacinthine locks with her clipper thing like it was a McCormick Harvester, which, I suppose, it was descended from.

  “How’d it go with Padre Cual-es-su-nombre?” I asked.

  “He’s been a pain,” Marena said. “We offered them enough cash to buy this whole shit town and they didn’t want to take it.”

  “Well, they’ve about had it with worldly ambition around here,” I said.

  “No kidding, we had to call his boss and endow a school.”

  “You talked to God?”

  “No, no, the bird guy, the, the cardinal,” she said. “I bet God would have taken half that much. It’s going to be called, like, the Sisters of the Blessed Immaculate Sacred Bleeding Technical Virgin K through Twelve or something.”

  “What a waste.”

  Dr. Lisuarte finished the left side.

  “Yeah. And even then we had to throw in two cases of El Tesoro.”

  The whole thing took about two minutes. I felt weak, not like I was Sam-son to begin with or because I put that much faith, even unconsciously, into the whole Indian hair thing, but it was just that my ostrich-eggshell helmet was just way out there in the breeze.

  “Done,” Lisuarte said. I touched my forehead and moved tentatively up and over. My hand felt like the Lunik 3 moon probe. Into the farthest reaches of—

  “Hey, that’s a great look for you,” Michael Weiner’s voice said. I hadn’t seen him come in, and of course he hadn’t knocked or anything. I said thanks. He clapped me on the back. Ow. Schmuck. Too many warm bodies in here. Michael asked Taro how they were doing. Taro said they were ready. Dr. Lisuarte said ten minutes. This was already getting to be routine for them.

  “Okay, well … just to review?” Michael said for the camera in his TV voice. “The good sister croaked at terce, that’s about nine in the morning, on November 28, 1686.”

  Was that supposed to sound all jaunty and irreverent for TV? I wondered. Ocho ochenta, dork. This guy is a total stiff and always will be.

  “She hadn’t left this room for at least a month before that,” he went on. Or let’s say prattled on. “But she was conscious on the twenty-fourth because she signed her will on that date. Which had about three objects in it. Then it says she was able to take a last communion on the twenty-seventh. Otherwise there’s not much to know about her, but I think if we go for one in the morning on the twenty-fifth we’ll be fine.”

  Yeah, we, I thought. Egomaniac. You’re not on the Pop Archaeology Channel anymore. Can it. “We’ll go for between matins and vespers. That’s when they were all supposed to be alone, so theoretically nobody else would have been in here.”

  “One hopes,” Marena said.

  “I’m going to palpate your cranium,” Dr. Lisuarte said. I said it was fine as long as she didn’t feel my skull. She did, though. It’s weird to feel fingers on your scalp. Where no hand had gone before. Except for my mother’s, I mean, my real mother’s, when I was really tiny. I got a flash of myself sitting in her lap, her stroking a scratch on my forehead, rubbing white ashes into it to stop the bleeding. Lisuarte asked if it was okay to give me the injections and start the countdown. I said sure. Blast off, Flash. She unwrapped two syringes. The stuff didn’t come in a hypospray. I tightened up. Like most hćmophiliacs I have a touch of aichmophobia, that is, fear of pointed objects.

  “O-kay,” she said, “how about if I start you out with forty mgs of Adderall?”

  “Great,” I said. I didn’t tell her that for me that was about the equivalent of a demitasse of green tea.

  She swabbed my right inner thigh and slid in the needle. Ow. Next I got 3.8 ccs of ProHance. It’s a solution of a paramagnetic contrast medium called gadoteridol. It makes every tiny little microevent in your brain show up loud and clear on the screen, like the fissures in Angelina Jolie’s lips.

  “All right, lean back,” she said. I did. The foam of a cheap institutional pillow gave and bounced under my delicate head. I was in borrowed CONCA-CAF sweat pants and a Neo-Teo T-shirt and already felt highly vulnerable all over. She asked if I was really ready to sit for six hours. I said yes. She asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom. No, I said. If I want to do that I’ll tell you, I thought. In fact, I’ll make you hold the jar. Nosy bitch. Clara Barton, she-wolf of the Red Cross.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m going to glue on some positional ’trodes.” There was a hiss and a tiny Boreas of solvent above my occiput.

  “Do you want this?” Marena asked. She meant my hair, which she’d thoughtfully collected. I said I did, thanks, I wanted to knit a suicide voodoo doll out of it.

  Lisuarte and A2 squeezed my head into a kind of bathing cap—it was made out of that fabric that’s spun out of old soda bottles, which I guess is invisible to electromagnetism—and opened a big Zero Halliburton case. Marena helped them lift out a portable magnetoencephalograph, that is, a thick enamel-coated metal ring about the size of a Vespa tire, with two thick cables coming out. We called it the Toilet, since you stuck your head in it and upchucked your brains. It didn’t really look like much. In fact, not much of anything around here looked like a high-tech operation. One thing Taro had said that I was catching on to was how 90 percent of the technology they were using had been around since the 1970s and that they were just putting it together. They nestled the big ring into the pillow. I nudged my head up next to the opening. They twisted it down around my head and squnched the fabric up into the gap with slivers of foam, so that the bagel’s lower lip was just over my eyebrows. Lisuarte asked if it was too snug. I said it was just exactly snug enough. She hooked it up and switched it on. There was a discreet hum from the electromagnets cruising around and around inside the ring at about 380 miles per hour. When I’d tried the thing on before, I was afraid it was going to find a sliver of steel in a sinus or somewhere and pull it out through my eyeball, but evidently I was shrapnel-free. A2 rolled over a sandbagged tripod with a big monitor on a swing arm and positioned the big OLED screen just below the crucifix.

  “Can you see the monitor?” she asked.

  “A little closer,” I said. She moved it toward me and angled it down. “Okay.” My gray matter was all up there in layered translucencies like it was my carry-on bag in an airport scanner.

  “Taro?” Marena asked. “Are you on?”

  “We are already sending a leader signal,” he said.

  “How do you feel?” Lisuarte asked. She’d given me a combination of aripiprazole and lamotrigine a few hours before, supposedly just to get me thinking clearly but not obsessively. I wasn’t sure it was working, but I said I felt tip-top.

  “Okay, we’re scanning,” Lisuarte said.

  I made a thumbs-up.

  “You’ll be fine,” Marena said. “Remember, it’s all about motivation.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m betting my bra on you.”

  “Great.” Hmm, I thought, well, that sounded at least a little suggestive. Over the last few days it had felt like Marena and I were getting pretty close to the border of Intimacyland. Or at least it felt that way, but lately it had seemed more like we were approaching it asymptotically and might never get there. And also, to me, anyway, the fact that it hadn’t either been crossed or definitively not crossed was becoming a bigger deal every day.

  “I’m going to start the TMS on your left hemisphere,” Lisuarte said. She meant transcranial magnetic stimulation, which confuses the electronic events in a selected part of the brain. This supposedly encourages other parts to work harder and fire more often, and that would make their structures more visible.

  “Okay, let’s have a little privacy here,” Marena said. “Thanks.”

  Taro and everyone cleared out of the room. For the next few hours it would be just Marena, Lisuarte, and me in here. Although of course the others would all be outside watching on video, and probably providing wise-ass commentary.

  “Okay,” Marena said. “You want to start?” I said sure. I’d asked for her to r
ead the cues instead of Lisuarte. The CTP team—that stood for Consciousness Transfer Protocol—had voted on it and decided it was all right because, as I think I said, all this was mainly for my benefit anyway. Although they did want to run the new field equipment once before the main event. But the thing was, of course, if it didn’t work, that wouldn’t really tell us anything. It might just mean that Sor Soledad was too sick to move or something. And if it didn’t work, we’d just move on with the project anyway. However—according to Warren’s team of crack shrinks—if it did work, the psychological benefits would be huge.

  I sort of settled myself into the cot. Lisuarte put a thin blanket over me, I guess on the theory that it would relax me. Hmm. Actually, I was already feeling a little floaty. I focused on the crucifix, trying to get myself into a medieval mood. The plastic JC had a pretty big basket going on in his loincloth. Writhe for me, you hot, hot divinity. Take it up the rib cage. Take it up the metatarsus. Take that tree up your ass, you sacred slut. You’ve been a bad god. Suck my sponge, King of the Kikes. Ooooooh! My God, my God. The earth doth quake, and the graves do ope, and the dead saints’ members do rise and swell! Oooh, I am rent in twain! Top to bottom! OOOOOOOOH! OOO—

  “Okay, let’s go,” Marena said. She was chewing her nicotine gum, but she talked around it well enough not to be disgusting. “Can you tell us what you did yesterday?”

  I told her.

  “Okay. What’s Samarkand the capital of ?”

  “Kazakhstan.” On the screen a silent green snarl of anvil-crawler lightning flashed between the thunderheads of my ventromedial cortex.

  “What time is it?”

  “One eighteen.”

  “What’s the date today?”

  “March fifteenth, 2012. 7 Cane, 6 Dark Egg. In the Chinese calendar it’s the twenty-third day of the second—”

  “Okay, what’s in the news today?”

  “Well, the FBI arrested those Hijos de Kukulkan people. Which I guess takes care of the ‘shoulder the blame’ thing in the Codex.” HDK was a new sort of pseudo-Zapatista group from Austin, sort of a Maya version of the Nation of Aztlán. Supposedly they’d claimed responsibility, in a rally, for the Disney World Horror. On the other hand—according to No Way—this guy Subcomandante Carlos, who was kind of the head of it and who used to be in Enero 31, had told him the HDK hadn’t had anything to do with it.

  “Yeah,” Marena said. “What else?”

  “Uh, a bunch of the glowb—I mean, about eight thousand persons who were exposed to polonium particles—have gotten out of the quarantine camps and they’re camped outside D.C. And the White House is saying they’re going to intercept the marchers and keep them from reaching the Great Lawn. Uh, let’s see … they’re saying that they estimate there’s about five hundred pounds of polonium 210 in the No-Go Zone, so there’s no way anyone’s going in there for a long time without protection. Except there’s this shortage of shielded responder suits because most of them are in Pakistan, and eighty percent of the suits that are still in the U.S. are defective. Uh … there’s all this video of dead bodies coming out, and the government’s trying to close down YouTube because they don’t want people to see it, and the ACLU filed a suit yesterday to make all of it public. And some of it really is pretty … it’s pretty gruesome.” I was thinking of this one video of people at MegaCon. It was from the main display floor in this gigantic hall. Somebody’d cleared the booths out of an area in the center, and about two hundred of the conventioneers had died there together in this big sort of heap, because sick people tend to seek human contact. Like most of the bodies they were all contorted and open-mouthed or grimacing, but they were also, it seemed, uniformly overweight, and about half of them were still in costume as orcs or Hyperboreans or Klingons or whatever, and it all gave the whole thing a medieval feeling, like some mountain of slain foes that, say, Tamerlane would have left on the steppes, except it was all in that flat green fluorescent light, and then as the videobot waddled closer you could see that a lot of them were holding things in their hands like Harry Potter wands and Sith amulets and other sorts of talismanic trinkets, and then it got so close that you could see how puffed up they were, and you could see the flies on them and practically smell the putrefaction through the screen—

  “What else?” Marena asked.

  “Oh … well … a lot of victims’ families, they’re demanding that they get the corpses out, but the authorities and public opinion were sticking pretty firmly to the other side, that if they did it would spread polonium 209 around, and that they should send in some robot backhoes and maybe a few priests and whatever in Demron suits and bury all the bodies at some site inside the No-Go Zone.”

  I paused, but she didn’t say anything, I guess because the people at the Stake were seeing enough new regions of my brain lighting up that they didn’t want to put in a new stimulus.

  “So, and then there were some whistleblowers at the EPA,” I said. “And they were saying that even that would kick up too much dust and the best thing to do is leave the whole area unchanged, with all the buildings standing, as a monument, and then there was another faction that I guess wants to at least bulldoze the buildings and cut down all the trees because if there’s another fire in there it’ll spread more of the polonium, but I guess now the idea is to keep enough Forest Service planes on hand to put out any new fires. And with the bodies, now there’s a bill in the Florida state legislature for what they’re calling the Pompeian solution, which I guess is they’re going to send in teams of EMTs in special suits, and they’re going to plastinate the corpses with some kind of von Hagens process, and I guess spray them with gold paint or fix them up somehow and just leave them there, and then once there’s no more particulates in the wind they want to take the families for flyover funerals in blimps. Although that sounds kind of ridiculous to me, but—”

  “Okay, what else?” Marena asked.

  “Uh, the Ayatollah Razib says the attack was, uh, foretold in the Koran. Ted Haggard says it was to punish us for the federal gay marriage thing. The official death toll on the combined poisoning and rioting and fires, it’s getting close to forty-five thousand. About a third of the southeastern U.S. is still under martial law. A whole bunch of people got mugged for their blood last night in Tampa. I guess they woke up all pale and drained and everything, with—”

  “I mean what else is in the news other than Disney World?”

  “Oh. Uh, let’s see … there’s a civil war in Bangladesh. There’s that terrorist, Hasani, that they caught last month, he’s terminally ill, supposedly, and the public is asking for a torture sentence. Right? And today the president signed a waiver of the Geneva Convention, uh, protocols, so it could go forward. Right? And July corn contracts are up thirty percent, and spot gold’s about sixteen hundred dollars an ounce. And—”

  “That’s fine. Good. I mean, that’s not all good, but you’re doing fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Right.” She looked at her phone. “Okay, what’s the square root of nineteen?”

  “Four point, uh, hang on, uh, three five nine.”

  “I think it’s so sexy that you can do that.”

  “Huh? Oh, thanks.” Hmm, what was that about? I wondered. Was that a flirt? Huh. I wouldn’t mind beaming into her transversable wormhole. Or was that part of the idea? Get me a little embarrassed, a little turned on? Probably. Gotta watch these people. They’re tricky—

  “What was Kiri-Kin Tha’s first law of metaphysics?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What was—”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I remember, uh, nothing’s not real. Or something.”

  “Nothing unreal exists,” she said.

  “That’s it. Heh.”

  “I’m going to give you that series of nouns,” Marena said, “and we want you to remember them and write them down when you’re in place.”

  “Right, I know.”

  “Shoe … eraser … goldfish … skull … balloon … wheelbarrow.”

  “Got it,” I said. I also had a message to myself in mind, something I’d just come up with, h
ad never told anyone about, and had never even uttered aloud: Houdini’s afterlife code, Rosabelle, believe.

  “Okay,” she said. “So, now we’re going to turn off your view of yourself and show you some pictures.

  “Okay, here’s the first image,” Marena said. A still of Ronald Reagan in Stallion Road came up on the screen in glorious organic-LED detail.

  “That’s scary stuff,” I said. My amygdala was probably flashing DANGER DANGER DANGER.

  “Now, just answer when I ask.” The picture changed to a video of baby geese walking in a line behind their mother. “What color socks are you wearing?”

  That one nearly stumped me, but I think I got it right. Not that getting it right mattered. In fact, you often get more flash, that is, you get more neuronal routines to fire, when you don’t know the answer—

  Whoa. On the screen a big brown weasel or stoat or something had slunk into the shot and had already torn apart four out of six goslings. The mother flapped around the little killing field, honking in despair. Hell.

 

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