Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  But that’s garbage now.

  Another scream erupts, somewhere else in the building. Ron Wolper notices it. He cocks his head.

  Why are people screaming?

  Ron Wolper returns to the phone, his voice is different. “Uh-huh.”

  Some guy runs past the room, down the empty hallway, holding his hand to his mouth.

  Vomiting and running at the same time.

  What is happening?

  Ron Wolper has been on the phone for at least a minute. What is this, some negotiating move? Make me twist in the wind, make me wait for it, psych me out?

  At last Ron Wolper puts the phone down.

  But he does not say what I expect.

  He does not say, “It’ll cost you.”

  He just pushes the folded paper toward me.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Take it. It’s free.”

  What’s up with his voice?

  Wait.

  Look at him. He’s bluffing. No—something more. Ron Wolper knows something I don’t. Something he just learned. Something making his voice catch the tiniest bit.

  Afraid?

  Never seen Ron Wolper afraid.

  Afraid of what?

  Look into his eyes.

  Ron Wolper’s face is pale.

  What did they just tell him on the phone?

  I have no idea what Ron Wolper was uh-huhing on the phone. I have no idea what’s written on that paper.

  But I am now absolutely certain it has nothing to do with my death.

  Then I realize it.

  It is happening.

  It is happening right now.

  Someone else screams in the hallway, closer.

  It was Xuuzi in that meeting room.

  Particle. Antiparticle. The last step of the proof clicks.

  “Is there anyone in this office named Xuuzi?” I say.

  Ron Wolper swallows. “What?”

  “Or not that—maybe Susan? Suzy?”

  Ron Wolper looks away.

  The derivation is finished. The proof is shining in my brain. Eschaton and anti-eschaton are both fully in the world now. Me and Xuuzi. To do the math makes the math come true. Because the Great Calculation has already begun. Happening right now in rooms all throughout Dare to Know. The mass actuation of thanatons. The screaming. The dreadful rightness.

  Somewhere in this building, I feel her begin to move toward me.

  My phone dings. I’ve received a text.

  Ignore it.

  “Go ahead,” says Ron Wolper. “Read it. Your death. It’s free.”

  Terror in his eyes.

  I say, “That paper doesn’t have my death.”

  More people are screaming downstairs. Men, women. They’re not even trying to hide it from me anymore.

  I say, “I don’t know what’s written on that paper but it’s not my death.”

  “Pick up the paper,” says Ron Wolper.

  I say, “7:06 two nights ago wasn’t fake. I really am dead.”

  “Read the goddamned paper,” pleads Ron Wolper, voice quivering, and I glance at the folded paper and unexpectedly I see right through it.

  I see through the walls around me.

  I see every room in the building simultaneously.

  I see the people are being murdered, right now, in various rooms throughout this building. Clubbed, stabbed, poisoned, in the meeting rooms and offices, dozens of human sacrifices are being carried out precisely on time, at this very moment it is happening below me, above me, down the hall from me, people screaming, each computed act of violence cracking open the gates a little more. Consecrating us into a metaphysically destabilizing state. Clearing the way for the ritual.

  A Great Calculation.

  Ron Wolper is still holding out the paper to me, a paper Kulkarni must’ve given him, a paper from Kulkarni’s great-uncle, I realize now. Ron Wolper is begging me to take the paper but I see through it clearly. It’s not my death date written on that paper. It’s a sacred glyph whose sheer geometry was supposed to obliterate any evil that gazed upon it.

  They thought that would work on me.

  Ron Wolper starts chanting the same words my phone was chanting when I was driving back from Julia’s. The solemn recitation of the list of ancient names, the counting down of strange numbers.

  They thought that would work on me, too.

  My phone gets another text. Then another. Ding. Ding. It’s the vast invisible thing trying to talk to me, it wants the universe to keep going, it wants to speak reason to me, it wants to talk man-to-man.

  Pleading with me.

  I stand.

  Centuries fall off me.

  I feel her coming.

  Xuuzi is advancing toward me and the room floods with metallic light. Outside the window new stars have erupted, the people gathered around the hill stare upward, and this room is tipping, tipping over, and as it is tipping it is changing. The floor becomes the ceiling and the ceiling becomes the floor, the walls are turning bronze, then gold multiplying on bronze, gold and bronze walls everywhere, and then we are inside the enchanted hill surrounded by dreams and dreams of dreams, we are atop Monks Mound surrounded by people lining up to be sacrificed, Xuuzi is coming up in the elevator and my phone which is not my phone is ringing, ringing, ringing.

  Julia. More texts. Ding. From Erin. Ding. From my mom. Ding. From Martin McNiff. Ding. Ding. Ron Wolper’s phone is ringing too. My phone won’t stop ringing.

  She comes down the hall.

  She stops.

  She knocks on the door.

  Every thanaton in the universe streams toward me, the walls blaze bronze and gold, boiling silver ocean, flaming mountains of brass—

  “Read the paper, read it,” pleads the melting thing that is no longer Ron Wolper—

  Xuuzi says, “Now we are in Cahokia.”

  And then everything begins to flicker.

  * * *

  —

  I am in darkness, deep underground.

  I rise. The dreaming bird cloak is on my shoulders. I can’t see a thing. The ground is packed dirt. The world around me black as night. I reach out and feel earth on either side, rough rock, roots, soil. The air dense with bitter smoke. I cough, nose and throat stinging.

  I am inside the enchanted hill.

  I am in Cahokia.

  I hear their footsteps, coming down the narrow tunnels.

  They are coming for me.

  I rip the bird cloak off my back.

  Throw it down.

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  I am pixels. I am a glowing man. I am a collection of squares gliding through darkness. The blocky computer graphics of alligators, spiders, lizards, snakes lurk somewhere, twitching among endless levels.

  They adjust their vectors.

  They are coming for me.

  I sprint through bitmapped floors, I hop over low-resolution piles of skulls and garbage heaps and glitchy trapdoors, looking for her. Where is she?

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  I wade through steam tunnels underneath the university. Dirty water soaks through my shoes. I swing my flashlight and my surroundings jump out of the darkness in fragments, flashes of crumbling brick, pipes diverging in all directions, multicolored graffiti, bundled wires and electrical boxes, looking for Renard—

  Renard isn’t down here.

  I’m alone in the tunnels. I’m lost.

  I hear creatures shrieking down the dark flooded tunnels, looking for me.

  Where is Xuuzi?

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  I am back at Dare to Know.

  I stumble down the bright empty hallways, e
verything corporate, clean, and sterile. I try door after door. All locked. Screams up and down the halls.

  I can’t find her.

  Cahokian smoke burns my throat, smelling like the scaly black meat Xuuzi had burnt in our hotel room, the weird shit. I don’t remember how I got from Ron Wolper’s office to this hallway. My feet are soaked with steam tunnel water, squishing in my shoes. What happened to Ron Wolper? An invisible subroutine draws and erases my bitmap repeatedly as I move through the halls. The smoke makes my head swim. Concentrate. I had been in Ron Wolper’s office—there had been a knock on the door, then Xuuzi’s voice—And then the world changed.

  A mass actuation of thanatons.

  Giant amount of human death.

  We are in the consecrated world now.

  I hear my name.

  I turn. Hutchinson approaches me from one end of the hall, holding up that beaded bird cloak. He is solemn, he is in no hurry. I glance at the other end of the hallway. Ziegler walks toward me, with Gaffney and Hwang right behind him, their heads bowing in rhythm, their hands slightly raised, a holy procession.

  I swerve down an adjoining hallway, dashing through the fluorescent-lit maze of white, passing one glassed-in conference room after another. All full. Every department apparently having an all-hands meeting.

  Where did Xuuzi go?

  In every conference room, a PowerPoint presentation is projected onto the whiteboard:

  NOW YOU DRINK THE BLACK DRINK

  The employees in the conference rooms drink from their Starbucks cups.

  I keep running, looking for her.

  Outside the sky is in revolt. Heavens collapsing. Stars catching fire.

  In every conference room, the PowerPoint advances to the next slide.

  NOW YOU DIE

  I keep running.

  Every conference room door electronically locks itself. A stunned moment, and then the employees within the rooms are scrambling to their feet, cardboard cups tumbling to the floor. They’re staggering for the suddenly locked exits, clawing at the glass walls, but then the black drink kicks in.

  Screams.

  The project managers in each room take out their knives and stab each Dare to Know employee one by one, precisely on the schedule announced aloud by their phones.

  NOW YOU ARE IN CAHOKIA

  I am in Cahokia and San Francisco and all the holy places at once.

  I scramble through a hallucinogenic fog.

  Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang are still walking toward me.

  Flicker. The four men are now choppily animated sprites jerking through the digital void. A crocodile, a snake, a lizard, a spider.

  Flicker. They are four Cahokian priests, forbiddingly cloaked and jeweled.

  I’m lost in spinning colors in the black. The taste and smell of Xuuzi’s weird shit catches in my throat, the scorched guts of an insect. Fog burns my eyes. I’m clumsy and muddled, my feet heavy.

  I stagger, grabbing the wall to stay upright.

  In the cave the puppeteers are throwing the puppets into the fire. In Cahokia the pits are filling with bodies, clubbed and stabbed. In the enchanted hill the wizard gloats as dreams butcher dreams. In the video game errors run riot, the code is warping, data crumbling. At Dare to Know death is being dealt in every locked conference room, knife in the heart, club to the head, blood on the computers, blood on the ergonomic chairs.

  With each holy killing, the tissue separating the worlds gets a little thinner. Each divinely timed murder cracks open the gates of the supernatural a bit more, brings us more fully into the consecrated reality. So pile it on, overdo it, until nature is overwhelmed and we are free, we are weightless, for a moment no longer bound by physics but by something else.

  The dreadful rightness.

  I enter a Dare to Know break room. The espresso maker is spattered with fresh blood. Cut-open corpses are heaped on the dining table, staring blankly up at the fluorescent lights. Dead beef, bad food. The refrigerator has a word spelled out on it in magnets, I am startled to see it is my name, but the letters of my name are backward, they spell something else. It’s not my name; it’s a nightmare word, but that nightmare word is also the secret of the universe.

  All of this happened in Cahokia a thousand years ago.

  San Francisco will be obliterated soon. Just like Cahokia. Nobody will know or remember what happened here.

  Everything flickers.

  * * *

  —

  I‘m in the steam tunnels. The water is up to my knees now. Rickety pipes loom out of the darkness, jungles of valves and tubes and knobs. My flashlight is about to die.

  I hear Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang coming up behind me, clanging and splashing through the maze of tunnels, catching up. I know what they intend to do.

  Bring eschaton and anti-eschaton together, unleash their world-ending energy, divert that energy to revive the dying thanatons. Bring me and Xuuzi together, sacrifice us. Hurl king and princess back down into the darkness of the cave, to wander and search for each other for even more hundreds of years.

  But Xuuzi and I have already found each other.

  She’s here.

  Xuuzi is ahead of me in the tunnel.

  I slog hard through the water. I’m trying to catch up with her. Xuuzi looks like she’s walking toward me but she’s somehow moving backward, sliding away from me. The thanaton power surges between us, a wobbling repulsion forcing us apart as if we’re the like poles of two magnets, but I’m fighting toward her and she’s straining toward me, squeezing the invisible resistance between us, generating more of it.

  Colors flower out of the darkness.

  I look into Xuuzi’s eyes.

  Cold. Inhuman.

  Something vast and alien but intimately connected to me, as impersonal as electricity and yet buzzing with opaque emotions. I move. The anti-eschaton responds to me. I feel her shape and behaviors shifting in reaction to me, as naturally as wax takes the form of its seal.

  The thing I called Xuuzi gazes back at me with fathomless absorption.

  King and princess.

  I am just as incomprehensible to her.

  Then Xuuzi and I break through the last of the energy pushing us apart, eschaton and anti-eschaton, every timeline overlaps in this looping moment, the compressed energy between us spikes, the world rips open, and beyond the rip a glaring metal landscape rolls out to forever. Kingdom of raw gold, flashing purple sky, ocean of molten silver. I thrash my glittering tail, I flex my ridged thorax of iron and gold, I raise my metallic body. What used to be Xuuzi is a creature of brass and silver, jeweled and many armed, spiky golden claws, whirling eyes of flame.

  Our hideous kingdom.

  Eschaton and anti-eschaton merge.

  * * *

  —

  The king and the princess take each other’s hands, the last loose threads come together, and I see how the fairy tale should really end.

  In the darkness of the enchanted hill the princess found the king. When they saw each other, the king and the princess awakened, and they remembered their true selves at last.

  They rushed to the mouth of the cave. Provoked, their dreams and the dreams of their dreams rose up to stop them, dragons and goblins and warriors and strange beasts, with such a clamor that the very walls of the cave began to shake.

  But just as the king was about to depart the cave, he halted. For he recognized the dreams as his. His dreams and the princess’s dreams, and the dreams of those dreams, were still trapped here, weak and miserable, chained to the wizard’s staff, forced to do the wizard’s bidding.

  The king hesitated.

  The princess tried to draw the king away, to leave the enchanted hill and their dreams behind.

  But these dreams were his own.

  The enchanted hill began to colla
pse—

  * * *

  —

  A deep wrenching—

  Hands grab, catch, and then they’re all over me.

  I’m yanked back into Dare to Know.

  Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang seize me. They’re kicking me as I’m curled up on the gray corporate carpeting in the white hallway. I see smashed-open glass walls, with Dare to Know employees running everywhere.

  * * *

  —

  The king was overpowered by his dreams, and the dreams of his dreams, who dragged him back into the cave.

  * * *

  —

  I stare up at the fluorescent lights. There is blood in my mouth, a broken tooth, my eye is crushed. I’m being lifted, taken somewhere. The breaking-down universe can’t maintain a single form. Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang carry me up stairs of corporate architecture, up dirt tunnels of burning smoky blackness, up through glowing levels of colorful pixels, up the enchanted hill. All four of them are singing in a way I recognize, wheedling and whining, mechanical and insinuating.

  They carry me onto the rooftop of Dare to Know.

  Chilly wind blows in the dusk.

  The green-black sky is crowded with a jagged new constellation.

  A flaming face leers down from heaven.

  Thousands of San Franciscans shuffle around the bottom of the hill. Weird-shit smoke scorches my nostrils, my eyes. Hutchinson and Ziegler and Gaffney and Hwang cross and interlink their arms, chanting their familiar song.

  Across the roof, I see other Dare to Know employees carrying Xuuzi.

  They got her, too.

  And there is someone else.

  * * *

  —

  The princess was also overpowered by their dreams, and the dreams of their dreams. They brought both king and princess before the wizard, who was busy preparing his spell to make the king and princess forget themselves again, for perhaps a night, or perhaps a thousand years.