Lizard People

by Charlie Price

  Marco realized he was able to understand the walker’s speech without the translator wires.

  “As soon as I recognized you, I alerted the grid. I’ll show you. Try to back up.”

  Marco attempted to step away but was unable to move in any direction.

  “Please don’t be upset. The Venerable Gila knew it would take time for you to adjust, no matter when you returned, so plans for your reception have been in place for years.”

  “What year is it?” Marco asked, growing increasingly alarmed.

  “4030. Please don’t worry.” The walker put the middle two fingers of her left hand to the center of her forehead, like Gila had done earlier. “We are at your service, and you will be free to move about at your discretion, as soon as the Venerable Ones have spoken with you.

  “Look.” The walker made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “Isn’t it beautiful? All these trees, the stone glide paths, the flowers. All these are the work of the Venerable Monitor, the founder of naturalism. So much has changed, thanks to you!”

  Marco was again at a loss for words.

  “Do you notice the excitement in my voice? A broad range of expression is now encouraged in our culture. For hundreds of years, emotionalism was biochemically dampened to discourage the furtherance of classism, nationalism, and war. Now we are free to bloom again, like our flowers.”

  “What happened?”

  “That is not really mine to tell you,” the girl said, blushing. “I have probably already spoiled some of their surprises. But I don’t think Venerable Gila will mind, Though she is not my primary, I thank her daily for my liberation. Her founding of Emofirst has given us all richer lives.”

  Marco was feeling a pressure to move to his right. He found himself resisting, not only because he didn’t know what was causing this pressure, but also because he was interested in this girl and her explanations, and he was reluctant to leave her.

  The pressure was not painful, but it was strong enough to push him into a step and then another and another to keep himself from falling.

  “Will you come with me?” he asked, looking over his shoulder as he moved away. “Can you?” he yelled back at her.

  He could see her smile as he was herded by the constant pressure toward the boulevard at the edge of the park. Did she even hear him?

  The pressure stopped at an access to the stone path. A stone at the edge lifted to hip height. The top half opened like a lid and showed a blue LED screen and a keypad. Something, possibly a remote from some other location, typed onto the screen. The writing was similar to before, lines, dashes, and dots. No translation was provided. The lid closed and the stone returned to the ground, nestling unobtrusively among the others.

  Marco felt a pressure to move forward onto the path. As he did, he found himself flowing—was that the right word?—to the right, toward buildings that looked like those he had seen before. When he reached the street, he felt himself gently turned and propelled along the street in the direction he remembered. He wasn’t moving his feet but he was … gliding along without standing on anything he could see. Was this part of Inspector Anole’s new technocracy?

  At a rose-tinted building shaped like an enormous stylized teardrop, he was gently edged off the street and moved to the entrance, where a panel opened and he continued to be guided inside. When the panel closed behind him, an opaque shield in front of him lifted. Standing only a few feet beyond it was a group of people in glittering metallic-colored clothes: coppery blues, bronzes, subtle greens. In front of the group stood three people Marco recognized. Monitor, Gila, and Inspector Anole. They were smiling and posed in that fingers-to-middle-forehead salute position. When the shield was fully opened, they released their salute and stepped forward.

  Marco tried to step back, instinctively wanting more space until he could figure out what was happening. Whatever it was wouldn’t let him.

  “Let us welcome you appropriately this time.” Gila was the first to speak.

  Marco wondered if this was some kind of elaborate trick.

  “Your bravery has brought forth a renaissance.” Monitor said.

  Anole stepped forward, closing the small distance, and reached toward him.

  Marco flinched but could not retreat or duck to avoid her touch.

  Using one of her finger rings, she gently extracted the stabilizer from his shoulder.

  He had totally forgotten about it! But he quickly found he still couldn’t move. Miniaturization, he remembered.

  She stepped back to stand with the others.

  “There is so much to tell you,” Gila said, “so much gratitude to convey, so much to share with you. Please come with us and let us start.”

  The lobby, or whatever it was, was filled with humming and clicking.

  It was a pleasant sound. Maybe it was applause.

  There was a very brief ceremony right there in front of the small crowd of people who wore stripes and medals and looked like officials of some kind. Marco smiled to cover his confusion. After he had been thoroughly greeted, Anole, Gila, and Monitor escorted him in a glass elevator to the second level, an open area that looked like a pie cut into thirds. There was a central desk or reception area, and a broad hall going off in each direction. A mercury-colored symbol hung above each entrance.

  Inspector Anole stepped forward again. Took Marco’s arm. Gently. “Why don’t you come with me first?” she asked him, but she was looking at the other two.

  He could see they agreed.

  “Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be in my office,” Monitor said.

  “Likewise,” Gila said, “and I’ll wait as late as necessary.” She smiled.

  Inspector Anole led him down the leftmost of the three corridors.

  Her corner office was huge, the outdoor walls all windows. A big woman needed a big office, Marco guessed. In the middle was a thick, many-colored carpet with cushioned chairs around the edge. When Anole pointed, two of the chairs moved to the center of the carpet, facing the windows, talking-distance apart. Every gesture seemed theatrical, grand, as if the constable had grown an ego to match her height and girth.

  “As you can see,” she said, “everything now follows the discovery you facilitated. Every design is subservient to natural beauty and the state of Flow that it engenders. Transportation, security devices, communication aids are all either invisible or cloaked. In daily living, we wish to have our observations be informed by aesthetics, not distracted by machinery. Form follows nature, or vanishes! Is our world not a great deal more beautiful in just thirty years?”

  Of course, it was still the very same week to Marco, but he didn’t tell her that. He wondered if she had already planted more invisible controllers on him when she touched him earlier.

  “All is possible, young man,” she said, smiling. “With Fusion, all is possible.”

  Deep Ancestral DNA

  “Marco, Marco, Marco,” Monitor was smiling broadly, expansive, but he remained seated behind a console that actually seemed to be growing its own leaves. “The man of the century,” he said, clasping his hands and smiling. “It may be hard for you to believe that we had completely eschewed nature by the year 4000. By 2800, of course, we, mankind, had not only conquered nature, but eliminated most of it. Natural gas, petroleum, even aquifers had been gone for at least two hundred years. The greenhouse effect and global warming had made weather hopelessly chaotic and completely unmanageable. After the ozone disintegration, we had to keep our heads down, so to speak, until we were able to artificially reconstitute a UV absorption screen. Even so, everyone’s skin darkened. The remaining bits of nature, plants and the like, seemed troublesome since we manufactured our own oxygen and no longer needed their contribution. We had a holographic record of pretty much every living thing since the twenty-fifth century, so we simply projected the nature we wanted, clouds, trees, and so on. Never have to prune a hologram,” he said, chuckling.

  “It took our trip to your time to show me what we were missing
. The smell, the textures, the variation, the entire living process. Inspiring really.”

  Dr. Gila was standing in her familiar pose, hands together in front of her. Her office, like the other two, was very large and full of sunlight. Is it really sunlight? Marco wondered. Along with the two walls of glass, there was a wall of cacti, many in bloom, blood-orange knobs and deep red fluted stalks leaning out over the spines.

  “Now, the least we can do is answer your questions,” Gila said, “and I believe the first had to do with a cure for mental illness?”

  “Yeah,” Marco said, “and the University. What’s the University? And the Lizard thing. What is going on with the Lizard thing?”

  “Actually your last question is the easiest,” Gila said, looking out the window, as if the answer were inscribed on a cloud. “Emotions are primary. They override cognition and reason. In 4000, we were all taking supplements that assisted in the suppression of feelings. When we had to use extrasensory communication, that particular neural configuration brought a flood of emotions to the surface, different than, but similar in effect to, adrenaline. Fight or flight. The emotional brain, the reptilian brain, the primitive brain, would break through. The unfortunate side effect of reengineering and suppressant use was that, with the emotional breakthrough, inevitably came a momentary swelling, plus pigmentation and skin configuration disruption. As you saw, for seconds at a time, we began reverting to very deep ancestral DNA.”

  I got up so fast my chair went over backward. I wanted to throw something. Why was he laying this on me? Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he was cruel. Crazy. Into some ugly mind game. I couldn’t figure out what to do. Marco stayed as still as a rock. After a minute, Mrs. Onabi flashed in my mind. Get back to class.

  I righted my chair and sat.

  “As to the University, the University is the governing body that controls the supplements, provides the genetic engineering, and conducts the experiments that inform future decisions regarding our species’ psycho-physiological structuring. Thanks to you, as the creator of Emofirst, I am now president of that University.

  “And your last question … sadly, I can give you very little to cure mental illness in 2007. You do not yet have the neuropsychological inventions to change the nature of illness, and your epoch’s government lacks compassion for social support. Families in your time are left to fend for themselves.”

  I didn’t realize the yelling was mine. I knew the rage was. I stomped out to the dining room.

  When I pulled myself together, Marco was gone.

  I walked through his house looking for him. Like before, no furniture, no people. But I realized something else. No parents’ bedroom. No bed. No dressers. His mom’s a decorator? No way. No tools, no books, no … I went to every small room and checked every closet. No clothes. Kitchen? Cabinets empty.

  Nobody’s living here. Marco sleeps here.

  Maybe.

  Take-Down

  Driving home, the sadness left me but the rage stayed. I thought about going fishing for an hour or so to settle down, but I was too restless.

  My wrestling coach always said, “Never get mad in a match. All the blood goes to your arms and legs.” It leaves your brain, in other words, and you get stupid and make a mistake, and then you’re upside down on your shoulders and the ref is counting you out.

  It took running a stop sign to wake me up, and then some deep breathing to calm me down. It would have worked, too, if the Monte Carlo hadn’t been parked in front of my house.

  Vinnie was there on the couch with Mom when I walked in our front door. He stood and stepped out from the coffee table, and I hit him with a running tackle, butting him in the solar plexus, and we slid together across the wood floor into the bottom of the recliner Dad used to sit in. While he was gasping for breath, I hit him in the ear. I knew that hurt. I’d had it happen to me. I found the knife he carried in a Kevlar sheath on his belt, and put it in my pocket and stood up. He was curled up. I stomped on his foot. I don’t think I broke it, but his groaning got louder. He would have yelled if he’d had any breath. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him across the wood floor toward the front door. Did he have a gun in his car? Could I find it if he did?

  The doorbell rang. Geez, what was Betty Lou going to think?

  But it wasn’t Betty Lou. It was Man-mountain Dullborne.

  He looked down at Vinnie, then back at me. “Looks like you’ve apprehended a parole violator,” he said, pulling the handcuffs off his belt.

  Now I could hear Mom screaming. I’d forgotten all about Mom. Sounded like she’d gone back to her bedroom.

  I heard Dullborne yell, “I’ll put him in the car and be back!” I shouldered open Mom’s door, realizing at the last millisecond that she might be behind it. She wasn’t. She was standing on her bed, with her arms out like wings, making a terrible sound. Her face was twisted by the noise she made, her teeth were bared, and her eyes were volcanic.

  I began talking to her softly, wondering if she could even hear my voice over the sound of her tantrum. I held my hands out, fingers down, disarmed. I was saying, “Easy, Mom, easy, it’s going to be okay.”

  I got to the side of the bed and looked around to see whether there was anything Mom could grab and swing at me if I reached out for her. She was breathing so hard her chest was rattling.

  I snuck up behind her and hugged her tight, hoping that would help her get control of herself. “I love you, Mom,” I was whispering. “Don’t cry!”

  Was that what Mom was doing? Was that crying? She sounded like Jurassic Park.

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Mander,” Officer Dullborne said from behind me. “We’re all going to stay right here and make sure you’re safe.”

  I don’t know if it was my hugging or Dullborne’s words, but Mom stopped screeching.

  In a few minutes, she was willing to let me give her a Klonopin. She lay down and told us to leave her alone. Whatever force had animated her was gone. She looked completely exhausted, could hardly hold her eyes open. Officer Dullborne and I went to the living room.

  He took rubber gloves from a pouch on his belt and stretched them onto his hands. He produced a resealable plastic bag from another pouch and swept the mirror and blade and powder off the coffee table into it.

  “Can Vinnie, uh, Rupert, get out?” I was coming down from the anger and feeling wiped out and more than a little worried.

  “No,” Dullborne said. “It’s a cage car, like a mini-jail. But I’m going to check on him right now to make sure he’s conscious. I need to get him to the hospital. We’ve had some of these meth guys die after using and fighting. Heart gives out.”

  “Are you going to release him soon?” I thought Vinnie might shoot me or … I didn’t want to think about it.

  “Nope. He’s down for a stretch. Solid time. Years. Breaking parole with drugs, plus whatever he has in his ride … likely a gun, there or in his crib.”

  That reminded me. I handed over the knife.

  Dullborne bagged it. “Running his name, I saw he’s wanted in Oakland for popping two guys over a dope burn. South Bay wants him for questioning on an armed robbery. He goes back for the five years left on his sentence, and the Oakland thing would be his third strike. Years and years. Where’d your mom meet him, anyway?”

  I didn’t know, but I had to wonder if he had spotted her somehow at Mental Health and thought she would be easy pickings.

  Calls and Whimpers

  I had already decided I would skip school until I got things worked out here at home. Getting Vinnie out of the mix gave me new resolve. I stayed home that night and made sure Mom took her evening meds right. Mom looked exhausted, probably coming down from the meth, along with the extra benzos, or maybe she was just wiped from all the excitement. I was upset and restless, but I made myself fix us some sandwiches for dinner and got Mom to sit with me while I watched TV, until she conked out sometime around midnight.

  The next morning I left a message for Betty Lou telling her
we needed a family conference and asking if she could stop by right away. I knew she had fifty or a hundred other clients, or more. I hoped she could make it soon, but no matter, I was going to stay home as long as it took to make a workable plan.

  Betty Lou called back and said she’d be by in the late afternoon and for me to phone every relative I knew about and see whether any would be willing to take care of Mom for a few months, like you would do for an ailing father or mother.

  I started with Mom’s two sisters in Utah. They each said no right off.

  I remember Mom saying her half brother and his wife in Manteca were “do-gooders.” I should have started with them. He, Arvin, said yes after a fairly bad argument with his wife, most of which I caught over the phone. If I heard right, the promise of a new car and some remodeling swung the deal. I had never met him or his wife, and I did my best to prepare them for how Mom was. He said he didn’t think it would be an impossible problem because his wife was very involved in the temple, and she and her friends were always looking for a project that would help someone.

  By noon Mom was up and in the kitchen, eating some toast and drinking fruit juice. I told her we were going to have a family meeting later today, and that I’d wake her if she was asleep. She avoided my eyes. I thought I heard her say, “I’m sorry,” as she shuffled back to her bedroom.

  When Betty Lou came, I gave her the half brother’s name, address, and phone number.

  “Isn’t your mother still married?” she asked.

  “Yeah, to Dad, but I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  “He won’t interfere with this plan?” she asked, watching me closely to see if I was pulling a fast one.

  “Dad?” I may have snorted. “He took himself out of the equation a few months ago. He gives me money, but he said he’s never coming home again. He kind of washed his hands of the whole problem.”

  “Well, he didn’t get them very clean, did he?” Betty Lou said, frowning.