by Allen Steele
John says nothing, though, but reaches out to grasp my left knee beneath the sheets and blankets. His grasp is hard enough to make me involuntarily suck in my breath, but when he does this I glance down and see something I’ve never noticed before.
His hand is white. As white as the sheets on which I lay. Its hue doesn’t match the color of his face.
“I hope you feel better soon,” he says quietly. “It can be a lot worse, you know.”
His hand slips back into the folds of his robe, then he abruptly stands up. He places the pitcher on the shelf, just out of reach from my bed. I know that he’s done this deliberately: petty torture.
“Lights off,” John says. “Good night.” Then he turns and leaves the room in the same darkness in which he had come, closing the door very firmly behind him.
It’s not a good night. I lie awake, thinking about those strange pink eyes and that snow-white hand, for a long time.
Big Nurse is right. Next morning, I feel as good as I ever have. A little better, in fact: for the first time, it seems as if there’s a certain sharpness in my vision, a newfound clarity to my thoughts. It’s as if the cobwebs in my brain have been swept away overnight; it just seems easier to think. Yet my stomach still curdles at the very notion of breakfast, so once I’ve showered and dressed, I ask Chip what my job is today.
“Why haven’t you eaten breakfast?” he asks.
“Because I’m not hungry.”
“Are you still ill?”
“No, not really. Just don’t want to take a chance on throwing up again, that’s all.”
“If you don’t eat breakfast, you won’t have a chance to eat again until this evening.”
“No problemo. Just tell me what I…”
Chip goes eyes-up on me:
“No problemo”—unfamiliar term. Please define.
I open my mouth, then stop. Once again, a word or a phrase has jumped out of my mouth without my thinking about it, or even really knowing what it means, just as when I had used the word “shit” the night before. This has been occurring more frequently lately, but most of the time Chip has been able to define it for me. This is one of those rare occasions when I’ve used a term that Chip can’t define, yet for once the shoe is on the other foot: I do know what “no problemo” means.
“It means…” And suddenly, new phrases leap forth: “Don’t worry about it. Don’t sweat it. Chill out. Don’t have a cow, dude.”
These are not logical statements. I do not sweat.
I cannot be cold. There are no cows here.
I am not a dude.
“I know.” An odd notion suddenly occurs to me. “That’s because you’re a computer…aren’t you, Chip?”
I am a MINN (Mnemonic Interfaced Neural Network).
“Um…okay. Is that like a computer?”
Chip’s voice returns. “I am a computer, yes.”
Something like a tiny snake crawls down my spine. I sit down on my bed and think about it for a second…then, on impulse, I clap my hands over my ears. “Say something to me, Chip.”
“Something to me, Chip.”
I should laugh, but I don’t…His voice is as clear as it ever had been, which means that it isn’t coming from an external source, but from within my very own ears.
Okay. I shut my eyes, then hold my right hand up before my face and raise two of my fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“I cannot tell. Your eyes are closed.”
Now the tiny snake has become an oily serpent. “Go eyes-up and repeat what you just said,” I say, still keeping my eyes shut.
Against the darkness, his words appear as a luminescent line:
I cannot tell. Your eyes are closed.
“Fuck me,” I whisper as my eyes snap open. “You’re in my head, aren’t you?”
I cannot fuck you, but yes, I am located within your head.
I’m feeling sick again, but not from the stomach flu. I’ve got a computer in my head, one capable of hearing my voice, seeing through my eyes, speaking directly into my ears. All this time, a magic little voice has been observing everything that I did, eavesdropping on every word I’ve spoken…
Worse yet, I’ve never really questioned these things, but merely accepted them as part of my existence, just as cattle stupidly accept the fact that they live in a barn, get milked every morning, go outside every day to munch grass, then return to the barn by nightfall. Have a cow? Hell, I am the cow!
There’s a thousand more questions I want to ask Chip—my associate, my MINN, whose name I had given subconsciously without realizing the inherent pun behind its meaning—but before I can, his voice returns to my ears.
“Your initial request was for your job assignment today. You will go to the Great Hall and mop the upper balcony and the stairs leading to it. Then you will assist Christopher in polishing the floor. Do you understand?”
Outside my room, I hear my fellow servants moving through the corridor. Breakfast is over; time for everyone to go to work. “Yeah. Okay. Gotcha.”
Unnerved by what I’ve just learned, I leave my room. It isn’t until I’ve closed the door behind me that I realize for the first time—like many other obvious things that I’ve overlooked these past many days, weeks, even months—there was no way I can lock it, either from outside or within. Yes, there’s a nameplate on the door, and I press my thumb against it when I want to enter, but that’s never prevented anyone else from visiting me. Anna was able to come in yesterday…and so was John.
This isn’t a room, but a cell. This isn’t a door, but bars on a cage. A cage that can’t be locked, but a cage nevertheless.
I’ve never been a guest here, regardless of what the pink-eyed John told me when I first came here, nor do I even have the dignity of being a true servant, who despite his meager role is afforded the basic human right of privacy. The essential fact of the matter is much more plain than that.
I’m a prisoner.
These revelations haunt me as I ride the elevator up to the castle, where I cross the Great Hall to the custodial closet. Before now, I’ve blindly accepted these chores with numbed mind and will—Alec goes here, Alec cleans that, Alec is a good guest, a-huh a-huh a-huh—but this morning the shutters have flown wide open and sunlight is streaming into the dungeon where my brain has been held in shackles. Now I’m perceiving things as they really are. My head is full of questions; they writhe around each other like a nest of snakes, their heads and tails invisible beneath their knotted mass.
Where am I? Who am I? Who stuck a microcomputer in my brain? How is it able to speak to me when my ears are shut, show me things when my eyes are closed? Why was I being made to do scut work? Who is John? Why does he want to know so much about what I remember, but unwilling to give me any clues? Who is Mister Chicago? What is this place? Who are all these people? Why am I thinking about this stuff only now, when I’ve never really considered it before?
Even as all this races through my mind, I’m going through the daily routine. Take a bucket, fill it full of water. Add some detergent from a plastic bottle on the shelf. Select a long-handled mop from the wall. Grab a couple of cloths and a bottle of furniture wax for the stairway banister.
Turning around to gather the rest of my stuff, I nearly bump into Christopher as he quietly enters the closet behind me. I’m long past being frightened of him and he’s stopped staring at me, so his presence is usually one which I ignore…but now I find myself looking more closely at him than I ever have before. Goddamn—another new word!—if he doesn’t look familiar…
Christopher barely glances my way as he takes down another bucket from the shelf and starts filling it from the spigot, yet there’s a moment when his face is in profile, that
(“Fuck, man, I know how to drive…”)
I have a feeling
(“C’mon, I wanna hear the Orb tape…”)
that I’ve seen him
(“Stop bugging me, I can drive…”)
before. Not knowi
ng what to say or do, I pick up the mop and bucket and creep out of the closet, careful not to nudge Christopher, even though I now have the odd notion that I should call him by another name.
The stairway to the gallery that encircles the Great Hall is a wide, semicircular spiral, with wrought-iron filigree supporting a carved oak banister. Cleaning the gallery is the easy part; mopping the sixty-eight risers leading to it can take hours. I usually do the gallery first, then begin making my way down the stairs, mopping each step and polishing the banister as I descend. Everything has to be perfect, or otherwise Mister Chicago might not approve. Today, it occurs to me that Mister Chicago must be the most anal-retentive asshole since Jimmy Carter…and who was Jimmy Carter, anyway?
Forget it. I place the bucket at the top of the stairs, plunge the mop into the sudsy water, pull it out again, and begin to slop it back and forth across the marble tiles. It’s a job that I’ve done many times before, although before now it’s required all my concentration to make sure that the task was done correctly. Now it’s ridiculously simple, something that a child could do. My mind is free to roam. Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter…
Yeah, okay, he was…right, sure, he was president of the United States, back when I was a kid…but when was that?
Oh, yeah, that was just before Reagan. So who the fuck is Reagan…?
Down below, Christopher is on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the mosaic that forms the hall floor. He’s starting near the center and working his way outward, as John—the brown-eyed version, not the pink-eyed guy—taught us to do countless days ago. The soft sound of his brush moving across the floor resounds faintly through the hall. I wonder if he hears my mop sloshing water across the balcony.
Reagan, Ronald Reagan…smiling, happy, wisecracking, dumbfuck Ronald Reagan. And after him, who was the next guy? George something. Tree. Shrub. Topiary. Bush? Yeah, that’s it…George Bush. And after him, the fat guy from Arkansas. A boomer. Bill something…
Another glance at Christopher, and for the first time I recognize the gold symbol in the middle of the mosaic he’s scrubbing: an upside-down horseshoe with spiked tips at the bottom of its open legs: an omega.
Bill Clinton. That’s it. Had a wife named Hillary…
An omega sign. Not only that, but it’s now clear that the straight gold lines connecting the tiny white stars in the floor surrounding the omega form constellations—twelve in all, the stellar configurations of the zodiac—while the nine concentric ellipses that loop through the zodiac are the orbits of…
My mop connects with something. I hear a soft thud, then a faint rush of water. Glancing down, I see soapy water gushing down the stairs, dripping off the balcony to splatter on the floor below. I’ve just knocked over the bucket.
“Aw, shit!” I drop the mop and bend over to grab the bucket, and as I do, I step on the slick surface I’ve just mopped and my sandals slip out from under me.
I plunge forward. I grab for the banister, but I’m already falling. I hit the stairs
(like a truck)
hard and topple down
(“Oh, shit, look out…!”)
with my legs in the air and my arms
(“Fuck! Fuck!”)
flailing every which way as if I’m
(headlights against darkness)
falling down a steep and muddy embankment
(rolling over)
and then my robe rips and my head slams
(Erin screaming, Shemp screaming)
against the risers and there’s a burst of
(car roof caving in)
pain as my right arm drags against the posts and
(hard metal against my chest)
slows my descent down the staircase
(rolling over)
but the skin on my arms and
(hitting something hard)
legs burns as flesh
(light fades)
tears open and
(darkness)
then it’s over.
A bucket collides with the hall floor.
Footsteps race up the stairway, echoing off the ceiling where winged cherubim surround God as he reaches forth to touch Adam’s hand.
Right arm in agony. A taste like warm wet pennies in my mouth.
Someone touches my shoulder.
“Hey, dude, are you all right?”
Shemp, whom I’ve known since Country Day School, is leaning over me.
“Hey, man…I think I broke my arm. Wanna call my dad?”
And then I black out.
CHAPTER
SIX
* * *
IN THE SPRINGTIME OF HIS VOODOO
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face:
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.
—William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Darkness fades. I fall into light.
I’m on my back in a narrow bed in a dim room. For a moment, I think I’ve returned to square one—spirited back to the White Room, and it’s chicken soup time again—but then the ceiling brightens and Big Nurse comes in and I realize that I’ve only gone as far as the infirmary.
My right arm, however, is completely immobile, from the biceps down to the wrist. Big Nurse examines the status panel above my head and asks how I’m feeling—pretty good, considering that leprechauns have recently used my body as a mosh pit—then she slips back the bedcovers from my arm. I’m expecting a plaster cast, but instead find my arm enclosed within the padded sleeve of a tubelike machine that flashes and beeps when she touches it.
It’s this tube that clinches my suspicions. Wherever I am, St. Louis it ain’t.
“Broken arm, right?” I ask. She says nothing. “Pretty bad, huh?” She shrugs noncommittally as she reaches to a counter behind her and picks up a plastic squeeze bottle. “What does Dr. McCoy have to say about this?” If she gets the joke, there’s no sign; she unwraps a straw, sticks it in the bottle, and gently places it in my left hand. “Thanks, Nurse Chapel. You can send in the guy with the ears now.”
“Thank you, Marie,” says a voice from the door. “I’ll take over now. You’re excused.”
I’m hardly surprised when the pink-eyed John enters the room. Every time anything significant happens, he’s always just a step behind. Big Nurse—perhaps I should call her Big Doctor—nods and quietly slips past John as he walks to my bed.
Same old John: dour expression, observant pink eyes, white cowl raised over his head, hands folded together within the sleeves. Give him a rosary and a smoking censer, and he could be a medieval monk come to exorcise the room of dark spirits, or at least an extra from an old Hammer horror movie.
“John, my main man. How’s it going, dude?”
He stands over me for a moment without saying anything, perhaps to give me time to remember that I’m supposed to give him more respect. When he doesn’t receive it, he slowly lets out his breath as a disappointed sigh.
“Alec,” he says at last. “My dear, clumsy Alec…”
“Alec Tucker. William Alec Tucker III. You can call me Alec, though. Most people do.”
The most lukewarm of smiles. “You recalled that a long time ago. Remember? I was there for the event. No need for such petty insolence.” A pause. “Insolence. It’s a word. Ask your associate to define it for you if that’s necessary.”
“No thanks. I know what it means.” I raise my head a little to sip cold water; it tastes great, but even with the straw I manage to spill a little on the sheets. “Hey, do me a favor and crank up the bed a bit, willya?”
“Adjust Alec’s bed to three-quarter recline,” John says, and without any fuss or bother the bed moves beneath me until it becomes a comfortable chair, with one arm remaining horizontal to support the tube on my right arm. I try not to look startled, but John isn’t fooled. “Nice trick, eh?”
“Doesn’t suck.” Fact is, I want to try it myself. “Neck’s a little stiff though. Hey…uh, com
puter? Adjust my…I mean, adjust Alec’s bed so his head isn’t so high.”
Nothing happens. The bed remains frozen in place. “Alec says his neck is a little stiff,” John says softly. “Make him comfortable.”
The part of the bed just behind my head moves ever so slightly, and again John smiles down at me. A little lesson in who’s still the boss around here. “So…” I gulp down some more water. “Guess I banged myself up real well back there, huh? How bad was it?”
John triple-blinks and murmurs something under his breath, then I hear Chip’s voice: “The olecranon in your elbow and your humerus suffered compound fractures. Chronic muscular lacerations to your brachial and round protor…”
“Whoa…speak English.”
“Your associate is speaking English,” John says, “but I’ll simplify it for you. Your arm was broken at your elbow and upper arm, and the major muscles and ligaments on that arm were either torn or stretched. There were also considerable bruises on your rib cage, hips, and lower thighs. You had cuts on your forehead and legs, and you suffered a major concussion that left you unconscious for the past fourteen hours. So, yes, I’d say you were pretty banged up.”
I raise my left hand to my forehead. My fingers don’t find a scar. My ribs and legs feel weak, but otherwise undamaged. I can’t move my right arm, but I’m able to wiggle my fingers without any pain. I don’t even have a headache.
When I was sixteen, my dad shipped me off to the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, the second prep school to throw me out (this time for smoking pot). It was a dismal place and I was only too happy to be expelled, but while I was there I made the varsity soccer team as the goalie. Eight weeks into the fall semester, during afternoon practice, one of my teammates kicked the ball straight into my chest from six feet away, breaking two lower ribs. I spent an afternoon in a Shelbyville emergency room and two more days in the school infirmary before I was able to move again, and only then with bandages wrapped around my chest and walking with a crutch. I was still feeling crummy five weeks later when the Prefect Council gave me the boot for seeking my own form of general anesthesia behind the library.