by Nick Mamatas
Then Raymond called back and the phone rang and went to voice mail. Then Raymond wrote down Lamberson’s number as it was recorded by his phone, muttered his thanks to God that it wasn’t just labeled “Private Call,” called the police and told a sleepy officer what had happened. He fell back to sleep and was awoken again at 7 a.m. by the first media inquiry of his long, long day.
Lamberson’s suicide brought Julia back into the media eye, and Raymond as well. The latter was easy enough to deal with—a reporter of indeterminate ethnicity met Raymond in the freight elevator he took in the hope of avoiding the media while on his way to his office at City College, and asked him about his theory of penis panic and how it related to his ex-wife. Raymond was pleased to look into the camera as if giving a lecture and sketch out his theory: a psychologist (he did not mention Liz) may diagnose Julia with brief psychotic disorder, but the ragged band of followers that emerged in the wake of her murder of Fishman suggests a culturally bounded phenomenon.
Penis panic happens across much of the developing world, where men are anxious about their historically superior position in the culture. In a culture where everyone is depositioned, one need not have a penis in order to panic. Indeed, having a penis is rather an obstacle to panicking … except in Lamberson’s case. He then apologized to and expressed sympathy for Lamberson’s family, as he too knew what it was like to lose something. Someone, someone, he corrected himself. Not something. Then he looked away from the camera and down at himself.
Once the video hit YouTube, several moments later, nobody was interested in talking to Raymond anymore. The video of him took his place, became him in the media ecology. “Penis Guy” was a very popular search item for several days, and Raymond’s video even managed to crawl to the top of the heap within, breaking through the thick clouds of the pornosphere.
Julia we made ill with sufficient venom to keep her bedridden and delirious. She would lose weight, perhaps lose some hair, not be the hard-eyed woman in the grainy license photos or the dancing blur turning Fishman’s head into a fountain of purplish-red on three different cell phone videos, but someone else again, weak and bent over like the defeated heroine of a short story after her miscarriage and a husband’s affair with a first-year co-ed.
Who we missed was Liz. Liz who felt for Raymond, much the same as we did and do, and who wished to please him. She let herself in to his apartment with a plan to make some dinner, but she saw the books and was inspired. She went down to the streets and bought a disused phonograph machine and a long tubular lampshade of the sort Westerners read as Oriental, and used Raymond’s work lamp for the light source. Our little body in the little room felt that quake within, the quake we feel when Hymenoepimescis sp. begins to work within us. The drive to build a warped and twisted web, not for ourselves, but for the horrid asocial other, the beast that is nothing but a machine of reproduction and slaveries, and the fear that that body has turned against us, that we spin our own suicide, that is what we felt.
And Liz, who is never graceful and not very handy, but also not squeamish, crushed us before we could bite her, before we could stop her. This thirteenth chapter, so unlucky for us.
14
WE do not know, but we can assume, that Raymond’s late rebuff of the normal run of social and natural sciences was due to the rejection of his penis panic thesis. Further, we may conclude that perhaps he had read a few novels in his day, and remembered some connection between latah, amok, and koro—those culturally bound disorders of the anxiety and the lash—and the pseudosciences of the mid-twentieth century. We can guess that when Raymond climbed the three stories to his apartment and was both relieved and aggrieved that no news crews were waiting for him, he did what he would normally do: put the key in the top lock and unlock it, then put his second key in the door lock and unlock that, then withdraw the keys and hold them between the fingers of a clenched fist as he nudged the door open with his shoulder. This is what he’d learned to do when the city was unsafe, and what he still did decades after it had become a landscape laminated for his protection.
And he opened the door not to his usual ramshackle order, but to slices of light painting orbits along the wall, to the dream machine grinding away and Liz peering into it with slit eyes and a twist of lips. And he kicked the door shut with his heel and kept the keys in his fist so they would not jingle, and he sat down on the kitchen floor and joined her.
There, on the floor—and this is just induction, mind you—he began to understand. Julia, the Julia of his mind and body who was nothing but a doll made of knotted complaints and betrayals, unraveled. A madwoman, a murderess, an amoeba on the slide. There are no uncaused actions, so what might have caused the change in her behavior? What caused the change in his behavior? The woman across from him, Liz, was both cause and effect, as was the dream machine. As was Julia. His mind gave way to the machine and its cycles of spin. There was a machine, he sensed, causing Julia, just as the machine in front of him was causing himself, causing Liz.
Liz. Yes, yes. What was it Liz said? Rats that don’t fear cats. Little specks of life and urge within them change their behaviors. Was Julia pregnant, or could she ever have been? Thick with his seed? No, the idea was repugnant, it felt wrong in his mouth like a tomato on the verge of turning rotten. Something else. Stung by a wasp. Then, we do know that Raymond opened his mouth to say something to Liz, but instead he jerked, spasmed, and slammed his mandibles onto his tongue as the brain completed its circuit and triggered an episode of photosensitive epilepsy. Liz was up and at his side immediately, forcing Raymond’s jaw open. She kicked the phonograph’s power cord out of receptacle, sending the whole contrivance tilting to the side. She held Raymond’s head close to her breast and muttered something to him. In a few seconds it was over. He opened his eyes in time to see us drifting down our silks, our shadow the size of a fist against the wall.
“Are you all right?” Liz asked, carefully annunciating each word, trying to fill Raymond’s vision with her mouth.
“No …,” he said softly, his tongue hurting. Then he just waved her away, his gesture so reminiscent of the gesture surrounding the movement. He tried to get up, using Liz as a brace but couldn’t until she stood and heaved. He took the two steps to the fridge and wrote on the small whiteboard on the door, “LONG ISLAND.”
“What? You’re going to Long Island? Your mother, yes? But now?” Liz said. Raymond pointed to his pained mouth in response and shrugged apologetically. He said “wasp,” but it came out “vizzp.” He went to write on the board again but dismissed it and led Liz by the hand to his bedroom. On the laptop he did a few quick Google searches on wasp and alter behavior and eventually came up with a popular article about a scientific study of our plight: Hymenoepimescis sp. and its parasitic methodology for reproduction. It enslaves us, makes us spin a web-cum-abattoir for their pupating offspring. We build our own gallows for the sake of the murderer’s child.
Raymond’s tongue was feeling better, well enough for short sentences anyway. “Remember, Julia?”
“Wasp, yes. She was bit by one, I remember. But these wasps are Latin American and they don’t affect humans,” Liz said.
“Latin American things can find their way north,” Raymond said. “And maybe they do affect humans.”
Liz shrugged. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. We don’t know much about parasitic neuromodulators.”
“Or the human mind. I had a mystical experience with the machine. It all came to me.”
“Mystical experience is it!” Liz snorted.
“I’ve had them before, just never in my house. Or in the U.S.. Anyway, this is what happened to Julia. She was doing something, something big, setting up some set of circumstance—”
“For the benefit of the wasps?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s just bad programming. What happens if you try to run a Windows program on the Mac operating system?”
“Nothing, Raymond,” Liz said. “In the overwhelming majority of cas
es, nothing happens. Apple and Microsoft make sure of it, after all. It’s a matter of design.”
“And nature,” said Raymond, “isn’t a matter of design. Look, it’s also something else. I’ve seen Julia.”
Liz just raised an eyebrow and folded her arms across her chest. “In the flicker?” she said finally.
“On the streets. Here and there. Looking different, acting different, but still her. As if she were in the witness protection program.”
“And the wasps did that as well, hmm?”
“Probably not,” Raymond said. “That can just be a coincidence. Maybe Fishman was a mob guy. Probably was, anyway. I can find out though; I just need to find the wasps and find Julia.”
“And I just need to finish my thesis by the morning and entirely revolutionize the way we conceive of behavior and the mind, and then we can all stop thinking about economics or sociology or ethics because I’ll have it all sorted,” said Liz. “I mean, surely your mother would have called an exterminator, and if the authorities could not find Julia—”
“The authorities could be the ones hiding Julia,” Raymond said.
“Be that as it may, how are you going to do it?”
“Let’s set up the dream machine again. I’ll clench a spoon between my teeth in case of troubles again.”
“I think I’ll go home instead, Raymond.” She stood up and walked out of the room with purpose. From the kitchen she called back to Raymond, “Don’t let me stand in the way of you reuniting with your wife.” The door slammed.
15
THE next morning, Raymond went looking, not for Julia, but for Alysse. He went to the Starbucks where he had encountered her before, presuming that she was a regular and would need a coffee before work, but she was not there. He asked a barista if she was a regular—“You know, short girl, elfin features, boyish haircut?”—but the barista, who shared many of those features, was wary of giving an older man with brown skin and well-chewed lips information about a young female. Raymond didn’t realize how he must have looked to the barista until the same strategy failed with the nearly identical barista at the Starbucks across the street. Then Raymond remembered that Alysse had told him that her boyfriend had blogged about him. His Blackberry was sufficient—not too many eyewitnesses had blogged about the shooting as it was more of a “Twitter thing” (as Raymond mumbled to himself even as he ran his search) and Williamsburgist.com came right up. So too did a scan of an early anti-Fishbowl flyer with what was obviously a home phone number belonging to “Davan and Alysse.”
Forty minutes later, Davan buzzed someone into the building and waited to see who it was behind the open but still chained door to his apartment. “Holy shit!” he said too loudly when he saw the top of Raymond’s head. He nearly shut the door, but Raymond peered up the well of the steps and shouted, “Please, wait!” and ran the last three flights.
“Davan,” Raymond said. “Is that right?”
“Yeah,” said Davan. “Uh, come in.” The door shut, then opened again. “Please.”
The apartment was tinier than Raymond’s, and crammed with books spilling from milk crate bookshelves and spools of well-insulated cable littering the floor. Davan picked his way past some of the junk and Raymond followed as if stepping in new snow. The apartment smelled of supermarket doughnuts. “Alysse, better get out here!”
Alysse opened a door that appeared to be for a closet. “Oh!” she said brightly when she saw Raymond. “Hey.”
“Listen,” said Raymond, “I’ve been rehearsing what I want to say for the entire subway ride, and I still don’t know what quite to say, or to ask, but I need help. I even rehearsed this part. And saying that I rehearsed this—”
Davan put a hand up in front of Raymond’s face, “I’ve been stuck in one of those rhetorical loops myself. Just take a second to reboot. Want a hard lemonade?”
“I want to find Julia. She’s my wife.”
“Who doesn’t want to find her?” said Alysse.
“Lots of people, I’m sure,” said Davan.
Raymond looked around for a place to sit. Alysse sat on the coffee table, moving a laptop aside with an expert bump of her hip. She patted a space next to her and Raymond gingerly sat down next to her.
“We think she’s in India,” said Alysse.
“I’ve seen her several times in New York. Recently.”
“I’ve talked to her on the phone. She was working in a call center in Bangalore, I’m sure of it. She was faking an Indian accent.”
“Well,” said Davan, “why would she need to fake an Indian accent in India?”
“You’re just starting that again because you think he’ll—” Alysse said, nodding with her head towards Raymond, “agree with you.”
“Forget India for the moment. Or don’t. Has Sans Nom ever tried to locate Julia?”
Alysse twisted her hand in the air, both the reference to the movement and a way of expressing indeterminacy. “Yeah. Kind of. We put up videos—”
“Hacked Julia Roberts’s bank accounts—”
“We were planning something for July. Dunno what it is yet.”
“Well, I have an idea. Why not just go around knocking on doors?” said Raymond.
“Like Jehovah’s Witnesses?” Alysse asked.
“Yes. Or campaign fundraisers. Mormons. Trick-or-treaters.”
“That’s totally random,” Davan said.
“So you’ll do it?” Raymond said. “Even though it might actually work?”
“Yeah, sure.” Alysse picked up her laptop and opened it on her lap. “We’ll get right on it.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Raymond. He stood up. “I have to go. This is just one stop. Things are going to change now. I can feel it.”
“Are you going to knock on doors on your way down to the street?” Davan said.
“Should I?”
Davan peered at Raymond meaningfully.
“Okay, I will,” Raymond said, but when we walked down the steps he didn’t bother knocking on even a single door.
16
STONY Brook is the second-to-last stop of the Port Jefferson Long Island Railroad line. On weekdays, in the mid-afternoons, few people other than train conductors and unfortunate nap-takers make the entire trip. Raymond did, however, to visit his mother and, he hoped, the wasp nest in the basement. There was simply not enough humanity for us to blend with, so we could not send a man of indeterminate ethnicity to track him, to stop him. Plesiometa argyra followed along, to let us know when Raymond would be returning.
We met Raymond on the way back to New York City, joining him as he transferred at Jamaica to the LIRR train to Penn Station. Though the train was somewhat crowded, the passengers gave Raymond a wide berth as he was carrying a heavy wooden box from which issued occasional flapping and buzzing sounds.
“Hello, Raymond,” we said, sitting down across from him.
“Do you have Julia?” he asked the man of indeterminate ethnicity.
“She doesn’t want to hear from you, and truly you don’t want to hear from her. She’s safe. She’s enjoying her life. If you find her, then what? The authorities would seize her and arrest her for murder. She’d be imprisoned, perhaps institutionalized, perhaps even executed.”
“Or maybe she’d be put on display on Alcatraz, eh?” said Raymond. We chuckled as his comment was an invitation to do so.
“So, who are you?”
“We oppose the expansion of Hymenoepimescis sp. populations out of their native habitat.”
“Department of Agriculture?”
We had a cover story planned. It was not necessarily an excellent one, but it would have done sufficiently well to lower his guard—he’d pressure us and we would agree to allow him to meet Julia. We would have shuffled him off into the Simulacrum, and tossed the box in the East River. However, the box was not a very strong one and a wasp escaped. We were stung.
Our man with indeterminate ethnicity tried to hold it together but could not. He burped and twitched
and I, hanging from the ceiling, felt my blood burn inside me. Then it all made sense again.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I told Raymond. “Those wasps warp human history. Akhenaten! Zhuangzi! Napoleon was a victim, Hitler as well. For the Plesiometa argyra, it’s fine. Not fine, nothing like that. It kills us; you’ve read that, I know. We’ve been spying. Plesiometa argyra, that’s us. This form you see is something we make, a cocoon of sorts if you will, controlled by the collective intelligence of hundreds of thousands of spiders. You see, we chart the course of world events; we are everywhere or mostly so anyway.” Raymond was looking perplexed so I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “You have to understand, this is all for your own good. It’s us and only us standing between you and total war, endless genocides, a charnel house world!”
The guy who looks funny starts messing with Ray and his box with the wasps and there’s a pain in my back and I want to spin a big ol’ square thing and rest and sleep drifting and dreaming on the train yeah and then Raymond gets up and my guy gets up too and grabs him and then Raymond does this judo move and a lady starts shouting but most people are just really into their newspapers and iPods but a couple guys are standing and shouting for Raymond to kick that guy’s ass and Raymond is
the ARM he’s got my guy’s arm all twisted in his hands that Raymond didn’t believe a thing till the arm starts to untwist and melt into webbing and the train is about to stop and here comes the conductor
17
THANKS to the disincorporation of a man of indeterminate ethnicity and the swollen face of the conductor one of our number attacked, Raymond was able to flee the train when it stopped briefly and the doors opened. The police were far more interested in the conflicting reports of assault and a sudden spectacular explosion of spiders crawling on the walls and chairs of a train car to care much about a man, even a Latino, who pushed back when pushed.