Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  The guests saluted her and congratulated her on her vision. They drank Arak from antique Syrian vessels belonging to the collection of a museum that no longer existed. They surrounded Violet Vex and ingratiated themselves.

  Bishop felt the axis of the evening tilting toward his entertainment. He self-medicated from tablets he probably was not supposed to be mixing with the sharp, licorice-flavored alcohol. He drank too much, said things he should not, put his hands places they did not belong, and ended the party slumped on a couch, watching the last guests trickle out for the long walk to the elevators.

  Violet Vex remained. She was hardly drunk at all as she unwrapped herself and came over to him on the couch.

  “You promised to respect my artistic vision,” she said, and she deposited her shapely bottom in his lap. “Your man, Patrice, would not allow my dessert course.”

  “Not my fault,” said Bishop. He knocked over empty cups in search of one with something to drink.

  “The custards were laced with cyanide.” Violet wound her fingers into Bishop’s hair. “I was going to make every guest a participant in the performance. Instead, what do I have?”

  He took a drink. She yanked his head back, the Arak spilling out of the corners of his mouth. Her eyes glittered in the low lighting.

  “A limp-dicked drunk, my supposed patron.” She kissed him. The shape of her lips was well-known to him but their movement unfamiliar and new; she excited him despite the haze of pills and booze. When she had her fill of his kiss, she sat back on his knees and tousled his hair as if he were a child.

  “You really should have let me kill them.”

  “You have two million dollars,” he said.

  “Now, why did you say that?” She got up from his lap. “Now I can’t fuck you. It would be too transactional.”

  He pushed himself up from the couch and took her hand. “Tomorrow I will get them all back in this very room, and you can kill them however you’d like.”

  “You’re so romantic,” she said.

  The rookery was a catacomb of personal apartments and private lounges. He and Violet Vex found one, black lacquered walls and recessed furniture, and became entangled in the billion-thread-count sheets, working up a sweat, moaning though neither one was having any fun. The perfunctory sex ended with anticlimactic separation, and they lay alone beside each other, filling the small bedroom with the smoke of exotic cigarettes and the soft murmur of their breath.

  “I want my own clade,” she said. “We deserve it. The Vexes. Artists. We can start a commune or something. I’ll move to Napa.”

  “I don’t involve myself in that sort of decision.” He sat up, showing her the tanned flesh and freckles of his back. The liquor was being replaced by a headache. He craved pills or some sort of distraction better than Violet Vex could offer him.

  “But you could involve yourself.” She sat up behind him and insinuated her arms around his chest. She hooked her chin in the crook of his shoulder. “There’s a whole scene of duplicate artists out in Napa. Canyon makes wine, Elation runs a raw-food restaurant, and all the breeds of creatives gravitate to them. A very funny bunch. Very self-satirizing. And mostly my duplicates.”

  He did not reply. She ran her hand down to the useless muddle of his lap and gave him a gentle squeeze. She inclined her head so that she was looking into one eye.

  “Do you know BronQ?”

  “No,” he said, and hr flicked ash into the chrome cup of the ashtray.

  “He’s amazing. Type twos are very rarely so talented. He does nothing but abstract portraits of Annie Groves, over and over again. He does these triptychs of her transforming into—”

  “I want to show you something,” said Bishop.

  He harbored no particular fondness for Violet Vex. She was one of many satellites orbiting him, usually distant, occasionally drawn in by the gravity of circumstance, but she was there. In that moment he wanted to show someone.

  “Of course,” she said. “What is it?”

  They dressed in silk kimonos torn from hermetically sealed bags and exited the apartment. Patrice trailed behind them in the halls but did not follow them into the darkened dome of the observatory. The antique telescope—dreadfully boring in Bishop’s mind—was gone, removed to make room for his latest object of interest.

  The golden Operation Westward vessel rested atop the observatory platform. With a flick of a switch it was illuminated by powerful lamps, the light reflecting warmly from its restored surface. The hatch was opened and facing the door.

  “It’s a treasure,” said Violet. She was drawn into the room by the vessel’s glow. She ran her fingertips along curved seams and leaned her head and shoulders into the cockpit. “It’s beautiful. Is this a space capsule?”

  “Close enough,” said Bishop.

  “How does it work?” she asked. She was already climbing into it, sitting in the cushioned seat, strapping the harness over her shoulders, and fiddling with the capsule’s control surfaces. Bishop helped her secure the five-point harness. Her kimono caused some difficulty. She solved it with her lack of modesty. “It’s like the Venera ships the traitors used.”

  She was referring to the reviled clade of type twos who defected to the Soviets in the 1970s and became cosmonauts. They all perished, boiled alive, participating in deadly Venus landings in the 1980s. By then the Gardeners were good at catching deviants when they emerged from the Pool. The reborn cosmonauts were captured and interrogated. The Soviets never received their promised debriefings from the defectors. Venera was considered a failure for the Soviets, and Bishop’s predecessors ensured that the traitors remained zeroed in the cannery.

  Violet shifted in the seat with a creak of leather and let her fingers roam the mechanical controls.

  “There are no computers,” she said.

  “It’s much simpler than a rocket.” Bishop leaned into the capsule. “And it is old.”

  Bishop demonstrated for her the Euler control stick that operated the rudder and recessed dive planes. There was a switch to activate the electric motor, a lever to release diving weights, hatch releases, a roll-top cargo bin, and controls for internal and external recording equipment. Everything still functioned. The blank film and audio tape recovered from the capsule were still being analyzed by the Gardeners. The canisters hung open; the reel heads and other internal mechanisms lay exposed.

  Violet wrinkled her nose. “It has an odd scent. What is that? Scorched wires?”

  Bishop ignored her question.

  “I traveled to the Fane once,” said Bishop. “Have you heard of it?”

  “A room at the bottom of the Pool. Outside the Pool.”

  “It is the room that cradles the Pool’s nadir,” he said. “It is so hot and so deep, you must wear an insulated cooling suit like an astronaut. When you leave the laboratory, you follow a curving tunnel chiseled through the bedrock. There are beautiful formations of crystal as big as a house. They swim in the heat. Every step is tiring. The air hisses constantly into your helmet, cold enough that it hurts your face, but if your skin touches the glass of the helmet, you will be burned.

  “There’s something else, more oppressive than the temperature. You can feel it, through the rock: first a pressure behind your eyes, the magnetic pull of the iron, then as you near the Fane, it becomes invisible hands squeezing your brain.”

  “It?” Violet fidgeted with the control stick.

  “The Mother,” said Bishop. “She’s there at the bottom of the Pool, much denser than the surrounding fluid. The scientists call her the Threshold Mass. The Gardeners have built a macabre chapel devoted to her in the Fane. They conduct ceremonies in there, human sacrifices of a sort, to appease the Mother.”

  Violet studied him as if trying to judge if he was joking.

  “The baked skull of a stag is mounted to the wall.” He diagramed with his hands. “It hangs above two hatches. The upper hatch is painted red and only a few inches across. It opens easily. The lower hatch is much lar
ger, big enough for a man to crawl through on hands and knees. For as long as I have been CEO, the larger hatch has never been opened. I will not allow it. I have nightmares of the consequences of opening it. The smaller hatch covers a portal, a view of the Mother herself. Gold-tinted lights penetrate the churning column of fluid.

  “She is vast. Smooth and pale, like the belly of some great beast. I watched the bodies rise from her as gossamer, thin as hairs, weaving and bending into the figures of men. There were so many emerging that she quivered. As these wire men ascended, they gathered bone and flesh until they were you and me and all of the rest of us, disappearing from view as they rose to the surface. The whole while that I watched, I could feel her weight pressing at the edges of my mind.

  “The scientists long held that there was more to her, that something was being missed. The idea was that the Mother was just a small part of some larger entity, a great unseen Thing that extended beyond our capacity to detect. The scientists in New Mexico dreamed up all sorts of theories and ways to test them.

  “This capsule”—he patted his hand against the frame—“was one of ninety built during the 1940s to test their favorite theory. Trunk Theory. The capsules, the training, the experiments all fell under the rubric of Operation Westward. My forebears proceeded with the secret assistance of the US Government, which had, by then, been infiltrated and influenced by our kind.”

  “They talk about these things on the discussion nodes,” said Violet.

  “I’m sure you’re right. Most of the theories leaked to the public not long after President Whiteacre exposed our kind. Those theories were methodically discredited as conspiracy fantasies. The Soviets believe them, which only further discredits them in the eyes of all free people.

  “The capsules like this that launched in the late 1940s to test the theory entered the Mother and disappeared. They passed through the Threshold Mass, seeming to confirm Trunk Theory. And then ... nothing. No communications were received. No pilots returned from the Pool, and no capsules bobbed to the surface. Weeks became months became years, and there was no sign of the capsules. The project was abandoned.”

  “So why did you keep this one?”

  “I didn’t,” said Bishop. “It returned to us. They all did, quite recently.”

  “Where was it?”

  “That was my question,” he said. He crossed to the light switch and shut off the powerful lamps surrounding the capsule. The fading heat of the filaments survived for a few seconds before darkness engulfed the room. The stars became gradually visible through the panes of the observatory dome. The brightest appeared first. More stars became visible incrementally until the whole cloth of the sky was dusted with countless flecks of radiance.

  “All of the Westward capsules returned to us empty, except this one. The pilot was inside and dead. He’d never left the capsule. He died wearing his oxygen mask, sucking his last breaths from the capsule’s dwindling supply. After he succumbed, the capsule was opened, and someone used his camera to capture a series of photographs of the sky. They returned the camera to his pocket and returned the capsule to the Pool.”

  Bishop studied the night above them. Violet unbuckled her straps and crossed the room to join him.

  “Right there,” he said quietly. “It’s small. Just below the bright white one. Its name is a string of numbers. Based on the position of constellations in the sky of the photographs, that is where this vessel was.”

  Violet took a little assistance to find the star in the sky. She saw it, or pretended to, and asked, “How far is it?”

  “Impossibly far,” he said. “It would require countless centuries for the Soviet’s fastest rocket to reach that star. I was told it took only seconds to cross the trunk to the destination.”

  “So the Pool is a way to travel between places,” she said. “Send another capsule.”

  “There is no way to control the destination. The capsules can only follow the coincidental flows. That they were apparently scattered to different locations means there are multiple destinations, tributaries maybe. The Pool is part of a network of unseen rivers crossing the stars.”

  “Why did none of the other capsules produce pictures?” she asked.

  “Maybe there is no reason,” said Bishop. “Or maybe this one was the only one to reach a destination, out of all ninety, close enough to see the same stars as us.”

  Casper Cord stirred beneath the plywood. He crawled on hands and knees into the dirt, amid the debris of a demolished building. His body ached. The dismal air was heavy in his lungs. It was still night, but the lot was bathed in the eerie orange of the sodium street lamps.

  The dog was awake and staring at him, unmoved from where he had left it.

  “Good morning,” Casper said.

  He pissed in a gutter and scratched the stubble growing on his face. He wanted to crawl back under the plywood and stay there. Maybe he would eventually scatter into the trash strewn around the abandoned lot.

  An Army truck rumbled past, slowing down and playing its searchlight over the rubble of the building. He knew enough to keep his head down. After a few moments the diesel engine shuddered, and the truck moved on.

  He drank from a pail of hydrant water and washed his face in what was left. The dog followed him, never making a sound or pleading. When he turned around, the dog was always there.

  “Goddamn it, why are you following me?” he demanded of the dog. It cocked its head as if it understood the question. It almost seemed that it might answer him. Instead it lay down and rested its chin on its front paws. Casper shook his head. Animals were supposed to have more sense than to climb aboard a sinking boat.

  At first light he wrapped himself in the cheap blanket they’d given him at St. Philomena and made his way back to the gray Gothic church. Families of flakes as well as a group of type twos and threes formed a line that reached around the block. They kept apart from one another, and Casper kept apart from them, as he had his first night. He refused to stand alongside the other duplicates. He resented what they had done to Los Angeles while he was away. The flakes would not have him. They turned away and stepped back as if he might spread a disease to them.

  “I do smell pretty ripe,” he said to the dog. He patted its head.

  Not everyone in the line had the look of a refugee. There were a few men and women queued up behind him who seemed out of place. The men were hard types, bald heads showing fresh-shaved skin, prison tattoos on their arms and necks. They were laughing and drinking from jugs of homemade wine and had not noticed him yet. He figured it was only a matter of time.

  The doors opened right at five, and the line moved quickly and then stopped. The skinheads tossed their bottles of wine into the street. The line moved. Casper shuffled forward. One of the girls said something about the dog, but Casper couldn’t hear what. He kept his eyes on the heels of the man ahead of him. A surprisingly cold wind penetrated the blanket draped over his shoulders. The line moved. Casper shuffled forward.

  “How much for the dog?” asked one of the men behind Casper.

  He kept his head down. The line moved. He shuffled forward. The skinhead repeated the question. A heavy hand fell onto Casper’s shoulder, S-I-E-G tattooed across the knuckles. The line moved. Casper shuffled forward, pulling away from the hand. He was close to the door. He could hear the clang of silverware and the murmur of voices rumbling inside St. Philomena’s cafeteria.

  Not close enough.

  “Motherfucker.” The skinhead grabbed Casper and turned him around.

  He was an ugly one. An asymmetrical head, a chin that was an inch too long, a mouth full of teeth placed in haphazard, jagged rows. Three teardrop tattoos by his left eye, red suspenders worn over a white T-shirt, surprisingly clean, tucked into black denim. Bulging, muscular arms sheathed in a graveyard of sinister white-power tattoos.

  The dog snarled and bared the cage of its teeth at the skinhead.

  “Fucking green meat.” The smile made the man uglier. “I c
an tell by your haircut. How’d you get a pet so fast, green meat? What you doing here?”

  “Just trying to have a meal,” said Casper.

  “What, you mean one of our meals? Cuz you’re going in ahead of us, that means you’re taking one of our meals. Right?” The ugly one’s friends agreed with him. “That’s okay, though. We’re civilized and respectable, ain’t that right, Van?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Van had a shaved head and a pasty moon face monstrous with acne.

  Casper was stalling, sizing up the skinheads. There were six of them, four men, two women. They all looked dangerous in their own way. He figured he could take the big one asking about the dog, and probably the next one, Van, wearing a leather jacket too small for his husky body. After that the odds weren’t good. If they had knives, the odds were terrible.

  “So we make a deal, green meat. A dog for a meal. Looks like a good dog.” The ugly one reached a hand down, and the dog snapped at him, prompting laughter from his companions. “Might have to kick some manners into his stupid ass.”

  No point stalling any longer.

  “Just get on with it, you rats.” Casper brought up his fists. “I’ve tangled with worse.”

  “That’s enough of that.” The voice was loud, but when Casper turned, he saw it belonged to a man scarcely five feet tall. He wore the coat and collar of a Catholic priest, ruddy faced, eyes large and bright blue behind a thick pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. “Freddie, you want to eat, you leave this one alone. There’s enough for all of you.”

  The priest guided Casper away from the skinheads and into the church. The soup kitchen was plain, full of crowded folding tables and the savory smells of stew, baked rolls, potatoes, and vegetables. Families and groups of young people were already tucking in to cafeteria trays heaped with generous portions. The line was moving efficiently past the kitchen, where men and women in aprons ladled up each component of the meal.