I head back into the thick of town on an old shunt line, sparking along its taut cable. While I wait to pick up another shunt out to yet another of the spots on the printed-out map in my pocket, I decide to kill an hour in the Canberra Mall, buy a cheap lunch in the food court.
From the balcony of the second floor I watch the people pass below me, and it’s like watching microscopic organisms swim across a glass slide. In the seething masses, fleeting patterns of different colored clothing and hair interweave with mock meaning. Or is it mock? I look at the patterns in the floor tiles beneath them, and then at my own feet. How was this design of mostly matte white tiles interspersed with smaller powder blue tiles chosen? Consciously? Unconsciously? Like the scales of some great reposing beast on whose back we walk like fleas waiting to be shaken off when it arises.
In the food court I sit down at a greasy and sticky, crumb-strewn table with a tray full of bad Chinese food. As I sip my hot and sour soup, I stare at a giant bubble gum machine against the far wall, near some kiddie rides. Inside this over-sized globe are oversized variously colored gum balls. Toward the lower left side of the sphere, which looms like a planet in space, is an irregular row of six pink gum balls. Six gum balls in a line, touching each other. The law of averages? Chance? Such a minor thing. But it takes on a sinister insinuation in my current state of mind. Six sinister pink gum balls, like a portent in the constellations. Like a statue weeping blood, a plague of locusts. I am either seeing the world with the eyes of a prophet or a madman, but are those designations really so far apart?
At another table close by I see four white boys of about fifteen harassing a young Choom mother who sits at the table next to theirs. She has a toddler in a booster seat and is trying to ignore their sexual comments but I see cowed fear in her face. Her child laughs, crushing a fried dilky root in its fist. One of the youths unseals his fly and fondles himself under the table, cooing in a falsetto to get her attention but he doesn’t. I wonder where security is even as I realize I’m floating over to their table and standing above them. I feel like a pillar of black in my new coat.
They could well be armed. Probably are. I am not. One of them looks up at me, and then lightly elbows his neighbor. Now they’re all looking up at me. As per one of the latest trends, all four of these unique individuals wears a t-shirt on the front of which is reproduced an enlarged photo of his respective sexual organ in a state of turgidity. Their parents give them the money for such things. They wear sports jackets varying only slightly in their shades of gray. All four are shaved bald except for a monk’s ring, another fad. All four are too tall, too skinny, their features too perfectly smugly even. They are a sinister pattern like six pink gum balls. There is a sickness in the cells of this town, a cancer that extends even into insignificant organisms like these.
Peripherally I see the mother look up at me as well. I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I prepare myself for the insults and arrogance to be redirected at me. For the boys to stand in unison.
They don’t. One mumbles something to another, and they all drop their gaze to what’s left of their food. Gather their drinks. They do in fact rise, but not with exclamations of mockery and hostility. They seem wilted within their gangly height, and skulk off away from me and the frightened mother. Without looking at her, a bit embarrassed for some reason, I walk away myself.
They were afraid of me. Because I’m an adult? I’ve mentioned that there is a squinty meanness in my eyes which – despite my slender build – I believe has protected me from being mugged overly much. But I wonder if it’s more than that. Something subtly more, but something those four animals picked up on with jungle intuition. The fact that I’ve actually killed people now? The fact that I’m willing to kill more? The fact that I’m at war? Even the fact that I am charging myself with knowledge and knowledge is power and I am wielding that power today in something that can only be likened to magic?
I shouldn’t let this go to my head, but then again I should. It effects my stride as I cross the food court, return to the mall proper. I should allow myself to feel strong. I must believe in my own powers. I must feel I’m potent enough to do whatever things need to be done.
Learning about the vastness of the Outer Gods has hammered home to me the insignificance of humankind in the universe. We are as amoebas to them. And yet, one sperm can spark a life. A microscopic virus can spread a devastating plague...
I am the lone killer cell invading the body of Ugghiutu. It is I, now, who is the cancer.
***
I LOCATE A men’s room in one of the major department stores that bookend the mall; I’ve found them to be less populated with toughs and dangerous junkies than the general mall rest rooms. Also, I favor stalls over urinals, and I always lock the door. Maybe it’s this kind of paranoia already in my nature that is responsible for a flight of fancy, an imaginative delusion...this sudden anxiety, as I gaze down at my feet, spread to either side of the toilet’s stained base.
Suddenly I have had the impression – no, the knowledge – that the number of small colored floor tiles my soles cover up has relevance to my life. Actually, relevance to my death. Their number amounts to something...whether it be the month of the year, or day of the month, or the year, in which I will die. Perhaps their number, added, is the age I will be when I die. I don’t know the specific message, except that I know there is a message. It isn’t a message sent to me. It is a message written everywhere, always, that I could just as easily have discovered in the number of veins on one leaf on one tree. But it has surfaced here, through the contact of my feet upon this surface.
I am terrified to move my feet from that spot, as if I stand at a precipice, as if by shifting my soles I will uncover a photograph of myself withered and gray in a hospital bed. Or broken and bloody tomorrow.
Carefully lifting my eyes, and keeping them lifted, I finish my business and hurry from that suddenly terrifyingly empty rest room. I avoid looking directly at the floor as I leave, and I don’t even glance at the mirrors ranked over the sinks, for fear of what other secrets and prophecies might become manifested in the number of my eyelashes or the creases in my troubled brow.
***
FROM THE SHUNT car, racing along its elevated cable, I view the melted blur of the city outside, roaring past like a colossal tidal wave of liquefied concrete and steel, stone and ceramic. Graffiti covers the interior of the shunt like the garish, ugly thoughts – made tangible -- of countless previous passengers. There’s a graffiti of stench in the air as well. Sweat, piss, cheap cologne and perfume, dirty hair and dirty clothes, the reek of filth, of decaying teeth, of bodies rotting on the inside from disease and drug use. We are all rotting, though; even me. I am shoulder to shoulder with strangers whose faces I avoid, except to steal glimpses reflected in the windows, where I see them stealing glimpses of me. Despite being pressed up together, inhaling the molecules that make up scent in an actual ingestion of each other, it seems that we only connect through this reflected remove, as we view others on VT and in movies, fascinated with each other but always separated. Disconnected in a convoluted connection.
I hold to an overhead bar and fight not to stumble but give a little lurch when the shunt pulls up to the platform. As I turn to disembark, I see a Kalian man carried ahead of me in the packed mass of passengers. He glances back at me. But his turban is red, not blue; he’s one of the moderate Sarikian Kalians, like Saleet’s roommate Zoksa.
Still, he looked back over his shoulder, seemed to make direct eye contact with me.
I try to press forward in the crowd but can’t wedge myself any deeper. When I step down to the platform and glance about me, I see no Kalians of any kind.
Walking down a narrow side street to my next destination, a few autumn leaves scrabbling out of my way like large insects, collar turned up and hands thrust in my pockets, I think of what Zoksa told me about her people worshiping the Nameless Ones. The Shadow Gods who imprisoned Ugghiutu.
Wal
king down this narrow side street, two images jostle for my attention on the screen of my brain. Both have their origins in the night before. One image is of Saleet’s wondrous nude body, pale gray as if it’s sculpted in polished stone. The other image is from the dream I had last night, after Zoksa returned from her movie and I returned to my own apartment. I dreamed I was being led on a tour of Alvine Products, the company for which Saleet’s father works. Saleet herself was showing me around, but somehow I got separated, wandered lost until I came to a vast dark hangar-like chamber. In this high-ceilinged room, I approached a long row of genetically engineered animals being grown without superfluous details like heads or limbs. Nutrient tubes snaked into the stumps where heads should have been, and waste tubes ran out of the creatures’ other ends. But as I got close to these animals, which stretched off into the darkness there were so many of them, I noted how small and fragile their bodies were. Then I noticed that not only did these animals have no limbs or heads, but each had an open, bloodless wound on its upper surface. On either side of this gaping wound was a small breast. The animals lay on their backs, I realized, and gingerly I leaned over the nearest of them to peek into the hole in its chest.
I thought I saw a crawling blackness inside, like living shadow moving throughout the husk of the undead body. It was as though outer space itself waited behind that portal...and outer space was a living thing.
“Jelena,” I whispered, even as I woke from my dream.
I emerge from an alley, and ahead is a cemetery dating back to the earliest days of Earth colonization. The fence around it is of black steel, and menacingly spiked as if to ward off grave robbers of old. I near the enclosure, compare it to a picture from my pocket so as to locate the exact section of fence. I’m distracted, however, by an eerie whispering voice and squint at the array of monuments beyond, half-drowned in drifts of browning leaves. At last I settle on a vertical slab upon which I see a woman’s face projected, and she is talking. Telling us something about her life in a message she recorded shortly before her death. Either someone passed by her stone a few moments ago, activating the message, or it is malfunctioning and plays its loop endlessly. (Maybe some jokester placed a flower pot in front of its sensor.) On another stone, but this recording silent, I see an ocean, waves rolling in, a sea bird swooping low. A minute later the same bird swoops down in the same way. These images are like ghosts forced to haunt one place for eternity, living out one small fragment of time over and over, condemned to a Prometheus-like punishment.
Returning my attention to the fence, I think I’ve found the right spike (I’ve aligned it with a tall obelisk beyond, just as in the crime scene photo). There is no stain on that spike, however, where the girl’s right index finger was impaled so as to point heavenward; the cleanup crew must have wiped it down. How to draw my picture here? First a look tossed over my shoulder, then I kneel and reproduce the pattern on the sidewalk directly at the foot of the fence. Best I can do.
“Everything all right, sir?” asks a voice behind me. I can tell it’s no recording this time. I rise up and spin around sharply.
It’s a forcer, in full black uniform and regalia. He even wears a black helmet, though he doesn’t carry any assault engine or heavy armament of that sort; this is the suburbs, after all, the outer edge of Paxton, spread to its thinnest point. You can almost get away with not calling it Punktown, here.
“Ah, yeah, thanks,” I stammer. “I’m all right.” I hold up the object in my hand for him to see. “Dropped my lip balm.” Grinning hugely. Heart punching at me impatiently to finish the all-but-invisible drawing at my feet. I only have two lines left to connect. I can’t leave it like this.
The forcer inclines his insect-like head to look at my shoes. I wish I could see his face, his eyes. What kind of visual enhancements might he be utilizing inside that helmet? Can he see my waxy drawing as if it stands out in fluorescent color? My throat clicks as I swallow and he lifts his head abruptly; maybe his hearing is enhanced right now, too. “Are you going to move along now, sir?” he drones.
“Oh...yeah.” I motion over my shoulder. “I was just listening to that message, the woman, when I dropped my lip balm. Trying to listen to what she’s saying. I thought it was a spirit at first!” I joke.
“What woman, sir?”
I glance back into the necropolis. There is no more whispering. “Oh,” I say. “Well...”
“It isn’t appropriate to linger at this spot right now, sir,” the forcer continues. “You’re no doubt aware there was a murder here recently...”
The murder was not committed here, I want to protest – the murderer simply left part of his victim here. But I don’t want to argue with the officer, despite my irritation with him; in other parts of Punktown more people are being murdered right this moment, and this man is harassing me on his cozy suburban beat. Well, I consider...I am a murderer myself, to be fair. I nod at him obediently. “Really? A murder? Well...no...it was just that I heard that voice. From one of the stones, when I was passing by. But, ah, yes sir...I’ll be moving along now. Thank you.”
He nods, too. And stands there, watching me. He doesn’t move.
“I was just coming this way,” I go on, groping, “because I’m a bit of a fan of, ah...I mean, I have this interest in gravestones. Epitaphs and such. I’ve often thought I’d like to write a book about it. This one here, for instance...” I turn again to point into the cemetery, and in doing so I drop my lip balm again. “Dung,” I say, and kneel down to retrieve it. With my back to the black-garbed law enforcer, I hastily uncap the stick and make two sure strokes, completing the diagram. Rising, I cap the balm as I face the man again. “This cemetery, as I was saying, is probably the oldest one in Paxton to contain the remains of Earth colonists.”
“It is, sir,” the policeman agrees. He steps to one side to look at my feet again, then back up at my face. Does its flush glow extra bright through his special vision?
“Well, it was nice talking to you, officer. Have a good evening.”
“And you, sir.”
I walk swiftly away, pocketing my writing instrument, my magic wand. I can’t resist one look back at the forcer, and he’s standing in that same spot, his featureless face angled to follow me. Did I just hear him speaking softly? As if into a microphone, a transmitter, inside his helmet? I face forward and pick up my pace.
My next stop is a parking lot for a condo complex. Jelena Darloom’s heart was found resting on the hood of a hovercar, but the vehicle is not in its spot now; the owner must still be at work. I crouch down to draw my design on the pavement instead.
One last stop. The sun is beginning to set and the chill in the air has doubled as I pass through the automatic sliding doors of the Clean Machine Laundromat. Open All Night.
It is warm and yellow inside, smelling pleasantly of detergent. Old style machines that still use a water process, ranked in churning rows, dented and graffiti-defiled. I want the second row, third machine down. It was in that machine that Jelena’s disembodied head was discovered.
A homeless man lies asleep across three orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor, like a bundle of filthy clothing waiting to be loaded into one of the machines. Oblivious to him, bachelors pile in or remove their wash. A boy and girl of about twelve neck feverishly in two other chairs. A ponderous and faded mother tends to her chores while her two small children chase each other through the rows noisily. A large vidtank with a graffiti-obscured screen plays above a coffee machine with an OUT OF ORDER message fluttering strobe-like on its front panel.
A story on the VT catches my notice even as I stand with my hands flat on the cool metal hatch atop the machine in which the little prosty’s head was found.
The news spot concerns a new office tower being erected in Industrial Square (where Alvine Products resides), in the place of the recently demolished Mangaudis Crystalens building. I don’t catch what the new building will house, exactly, but footage is shown of the structure under constructio
n. A framework of metal, a looming skeleton, climbs the sky like a ladder, a scaffolding from which to paint clouds. Stretched across this framework is a mesh, a net, a web...charged with a current of low-level energy which stimulates the growth of a synthetic organic material which is likened, in the report, to coral. The reporter explains to us laymen that this semi-alive material will spread across the entire surface of the charged mesh, and thicken to a prescribed and uniform degree, finishing its work within five weeks. It will then be killed by a final week of reversed charge. After that, only its ossified remains will stand...a kind of exoskeleton inside which businessmen and women will scuttle like busy termites.
The lower portion of the building is shown, where the organic material has already begun to rise from where it was first applied at the base of the tower. This surface has a pebbly appearance like cured reptile hide. Though the surface is a pale green, not purple, it puts me in mind immediately of that tower I saw from my office window that time. The one that I never noticed consciously before that day. The one that looked a bit like a larger version of the building in which Mr. Dove had his book store, and Jelena had her brothel. Dove and Jelena...both of them my acquaintances, both of them now dead.
Living buildings, I think. Ugghiutu, I think.
A black, peripheral movement. A glance out the large front window of the Laundromat. I see two forcers crossing the scrap of parking lot, coming in this direction. Both are helmeted. One of them carries a big, two-fisted assault engine that can probably fire half of the projectiles available to firearms.
So, I think, it ends here. This is the last bit of good I can do. Hastily, my guts churning like one of these machines, I start drawing atop the closed metal hatch. It vibrates under my hands.
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