by George Mann
“I changed my mind,” he said.
The process cost the equivalent of a year’s work, lasted a long weekend at a clinic in Mexico, and ended Eric Swanson’s career. It should have been simple.
“It wasn’t turning off my cock,” Eric said. “It was just damping out that link between my visual cortex and Little Eric, you know? Take off the sexual response. Get rid of that little kick you get when you see a perfect face.”
“Or a perfect rack,” I said, and regretted it immediately. I put down the vodka, resolving not to drink anymore. Eric barely heard me.
“I can’t tell you how excited I was. I was going to see pure movement. None of the distraction, just the form and the sweep. The power and the glory. It wouldn’t even keep me from having a sex life, it was just that looking at women wouldn’t turn me on. They’d have to touch me or talk dirty or, God, whatever. I didn’t care. It was a small tradeoff.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It worked perfectly. I was euphoric. I didn’t cast Auslander. She was good, but her left ankle wobbled. And I was high as a kite. I’d never understood how much I’d suppressed sexual reactions until I didn’t have to work at it anymore. And the bodies. Ah, God. It was like seeing for the first time. I was working twenty-hour days. The poor bastards in the troupe wanted to kill me. It was the best, most innovative, most interesting thing I’d ever done.”
“It tanked,” I said.
“Sank like a stone in the ocean,” he said. “No one liked it. That’s all it took. I had a couple more gigs after that, but it was gone. Dance is apparently all about sex. When you take it out, there’s nothing left.”
I left the apartment half an hour later with a few anecdotes about the scene that I would never use in any story. I’d brought up Fifth Layer twice, and been met with a blank incomprehension that didn’t surprise me. If Eric had been there at the birth, he wouldn’t be eking out a living digging through our ancestors’ trash. He wasn’t a conspirator; he was a symptom.
Back at my own apartment, I sat on my own blue couch and stared out at the sunset. My system played Duke Ellington remixes and boiled a bowl of deep yellow rice. I didn’t drink any more liquor. I was done being careless for the day.
I wondered whether the secret of Fifth Layer’s success could be that simple. A cadre of semi-castrated researchers toiling away without looking down the bar at someone. And the long human tradition of dance was only about sex. Not even sex and something more; just sex. Ballet, tap, jazz, everything was just one long primate fan dance. Take away the dirty thoughts behind it, and it all fell apart.
I didn’t buy it.
“HELLO?” I SAID, not entirely sure why I was speaking.
“Wake up, Jimmy,” Herself said. “There’s a problem.”
I turned on the bedside lamp. It was a little after 2:00am. I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“What’s up?” I asked. I expected her to say that the blinkcasts were down or someone had called in sick.
“The clip of Salvati popped up on a server in Guam. I had it shut down, but there may be other copies. Someone’s pirated us. Are you anywhere with it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know where yet, but I’ve got something. There’s a clinic in Mexico. I’m trying to track its funding, maybe a staff listing, but so far—”
“This is top priority,” she said. “I need you on this now.”
My bedroom seemed small in the darkness. Like the world outside was squeezing it.
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m human. I’ve got to sleep.”
“I’m sending over some sweetener,” she said. Sweetener meant amphetamines this month. I recognized the tone in her voice. She was speeding.
That couldn’t be good. “This story’s not going to take more than a week, is it?”
Sleep when you’re finished or I’ll find someone else to do it. Someone who wants it more.
Fuck off, I wanted to say. It’s my fucking liver you’re playing with.
“Not even a week,” I said. “I’m on it.”
The system made the near-subliminal chime of a voxnet connection dropping. I got up, got dressed, bathed. I was too old to start a new career, and Herself was right. Accretors could sleep. Reporters did what they needed in order to get the story. I was starting to resent my promotion.
The amphetamines arrived by courier, a kid in his twenties with perfectly cut muscles, jittering eyes, and a bicycle built for a war zone. He looked like shit and radiated heat like he was burning. By the time I’d signed for the package, he was twitching to get moving again. I figured he was probably pretty good at his job.
The train took me south and east on a soft cushion of electromagnetic fields. I was a hundred miles from home before the eastern sky paled, the drugs humming in my veins. I felt like a million bucks. I felt smart and sharp and young. I felt like someone else, and I didn’t like it. I stared at my notebook, but my mind was moving in ten different directions. Induced ADHD. Great plan.
I knew it would end with Elaine. Herself knew too, or she wouldn’t have tapped me for the job. Now, with time short, I was tempted to go straight to the source. I pretty much knew what the pedophile was going to be now. He’d had his mind changed too, and been cured hallelujah, amen.
Might as well let him go free, because he wasn’t that man anymore. I had nothing to learn from him.
I could go to her now. Her or Safwan Cádir. Confront them. Get them to crack. The confidence came from the speed, and knowing that made me careful, made me not skip steps. Made me go see the pedophile.
Sex. Beauty. Elaine. Alien technology. The Fifth Layer Look.
There was something there. A rant she’d had, back in the day. I closed my eyes, my mind leaping around in my skull like an excited monkey, and tried to remember.
“You HAVE TO have beauty,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
She cuffed me gently on the head.
We were at her place. The boxspring and mattress were on the floor, nestled into a corner. We were nestled in it. Christmas holidays, and she’d be going back to her family in a couple days. I lay against her, our skin touching, and the soft afterglow of sex fading like the last gold of sunset.
“I don’t mean you you,” she said. “I mean we you. You have to have a sense of beauty or you can’t be... I don’t know. Alive. You can’t function.”
I sighed and sat up. Our clothes were strewn on the thin brown carpet, my jeans and her blouse still twined around each other. Elaine pulled the blanket up over her breasts and stared at the ceiling, shaking her head.
“Still thinking about the art history final?” I asked.
“I should’ve just said that we have to have a sense of beauty. I mean not from a woo-woo spiritual it-makes-your-soul-better perspective. I should have gone all cognitive science on him. I should’ve said that ants have to have a sense of beauty. It’s basic.”
“Yes, because placing the aesthetic impulse in insects with eight neurons would make you a lot of friends in art history,” I said. We were early enough in the affair that my sarcasm was still charming. It wouldn’t always be.
“I even know the example,” she said. “Wait a minute.”
She got up, dragging the blankets with her. The cool air stippled my body, but I didn’t get dressed or move to cover myself, and before long, she was back with a wide yellow legal pad and a black pen and the covers and her warmth. She dropped back to the bed, and I snuggled in while she wrote on the pad. Her skin was soft. That afternoon, I felt like I could have lived with my head against her thigh.
“Here,” she said, giving me the paper.
1, 12
“What’s next in the series?” she asked. I looked at the numbers. We were early enough in the affair that her intellectual gamesmanship was still charming. It wouldn’t always be. I took the pad and pen.
123
She smiled.
“You think the rule is list out the numbers
,” she said.
“Isn’t it?”
She took the pen back. 1, 12, 144
“The pattern could be multiply the last value by twelve.”
1, 12, 23
“Or add eleven.”
1, 12, 122
“Or just tack on another 2 each time. That one’s not as pretty, but it’s just as possible.”
“Okay,” I said. “Got it. It’s a trick question. You can’t pick the right answer.”
She smiled.
“You can’t pick a wrong one either. They’re all right. And almost nothing we do has a right answer. Do you have pasta for dinner or a chicken sandwich? It’s not like you can work it out logically, but you have to make a decision. Same for an ant. If there’s two grains of rice, and it has to pick one of them up and haul it back to the colony, it’s got to decide. If there’s not a logical way to choose, there has to be something else.”
“An illogical one.”
“An aesthetic one,” she said.
“So you think the ant picks the prettiest one?”
“What else would you call it? Making decisions between logically equivalent options is as good a definition of life as anything else I’ve heard. And beauty is the basis of making those decisions. And art is the exploration of beauty. I could have aced it. Instead, I talked about the fucking Etruscans. I’m fucked.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”
She dropped the pad of paper and leaned against me. The wall was chilly. The heater kicked on, whirring and wheezing like an old man.
“I need to get an A in this class,” she said. “The competition for law school is... I need this to be an A.”
“You’ll be fine. You’re brilliant.”
“You’re horny.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I’m naked.”
“Same thing,” I said.
How DO WOMEN pick the men they fall for? Is it the bad boy charm? The good heart? Is it the way a man listens, the way he talks about his mother, the way he treats kids? Is it the size of his cock? The size of his wallet? What really makes a man handsome?
All the studies say it’s height.
“I’M SORRY SIR,” Jude said. I hadn’t had a chance to speak yet.
The facility squatted on the edge of a newly planted forest. The meeting room looked out on thin, pale stalks hardly more than ten feet high that would someday become oaks. Jude—a huge man with a close-shaven skull and a canary yellow jumpsuit—sat across the table from me. When he’d been led in by the guards, his sneakers had squeaked on the linoleum. Now, he looked at me with wide, blue, sorrowful eyes. A basset hound made human.
“You’re sorry?”
“Whatever it was I did to bring you here, I’m sorry for it,” Jude said.
“What do you think brought me here?”
The eyes didn’t harden so much as die. I could have read self-loathing or satanic pride or anything else into his expression, but I only wondered how many times you’d have to sit through confrontations like this before it just became a routine.
“I did something bad to a kid,” he said. “Maybe your kid, maybe your grandkid. Maybe someone you know. I can’t speak to that part. But you’re here to tell me what I done was wrong. And sir, I’m here to listen.”
“Actually, that’s not why I’m here,” I said. “I wanted to talk about the ways you tried to stop.”
It took him a few seconds. I watched the parade of emotions—surprise, confusion, distrust—play out in the shapes of his mouth and eyes. It ended with a slow, slitted reconsideration of me.
“I’m not sure what you’re askin’,” he said. The sir was gone. His voice had changed, contrition souring into distrust.
“You tried to stop,” I said. “Maybe even before the first time, certainly after it. You didn’t like where your mind was taking you. You tried to change it.”
“That’s so.”
“I’m here to talk about how,” I said.
We were silent for almost a minute. I was pretty sure we were going to stay that way for the whole half-hour visitation. Outside, birds danced between the small trees, their wings dark against the sky.
“They don’t all, you know,” he said. “They don’t all try and stop. Most of the guys in here, they’ve bent their heads all up so it’s okay. The kids had it coming or it don’t really hurt ‘em or God said they could or whatever. Ain’t one in ten who can look it in the face.”
“You did.”
“I did,” he said, and the tone was mournful. “I tried cutting my pecker off with a straight razor once. That the kind of thing you’re looking for?”
PEH-kur off. STRAIT RAY-zer. Jesus Christ, what was I doing here?
“No,” I said. “I want to talk about what they did to your brain in Mexico.”
Jude leaned back, his plastic chair creaking. The ghost of a smile touched his lips and vanished.
“That one,” he said. “Yeah. I remember that one. Made me sign all kinds of things, swear up and down not to talk to nobody about it.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe you shouldn’t say then. Might get you in trouble.”
He guffawed, and I smiled. I was in. We were friends now. Rapport, they called it.
“Well, hell,” he said. “That would have been just after my second turn in the state pen. They didn’t know about the kids when I was in regular prison. You don’t talk about it there. Every man jack in there’ll kill something like me. You just keep quiet and make up shit about the girl back home, same as everyone else. Anyway, I got out and back on the street, and I knew there was trouble coming. There was this site they gave me. Anonymous, they said, and maybe that was true. Anyway, I talk to this lady there, and she refers me off to this other site for folks with sexual problems. And they put me in touch with this research fella.”
“You remember his name?”
“Too long ago.”
“Cádir?”
“Nah. It was a white fella. Idea was I’d sign all this paper, and they’d put me in this trial group down in Mexico. Make it so I didn’t see them like that anymore.”
“Them?”
“Little ones,” he said. “I wouldn’t see them like that. I didn’t have much choice, did I? Had to try something. So I signed up and they took me down. It wasn’t much, really. Put me in one of those good brain scanners and showed me some pictures to see what was firing in my head. They didn’t even have to go inside me to cut nothing. Just zapped me with a microwave. Had a fever for a couple days, but that was all.”
“What happened?”
He paused, his fingers laced over his belly, his mouth pursed. Slowly, he shook his head.
“You know what the good thing is about bein’ thirsty?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“If it gets bad enough, you die. That other thing. It can feel like bein’ thirsty, but it just goes on and on and on. Never lets you go. I... well, I won’t go into that. But it didn’t work.”
I leaned forward as the amphetamines shot a spike of rage through me. This wasn’t the breakthrough I was looking for. Where was the cure? The victory? Eric Swanson had put himself under the knife, and it destroyed him. Jude Hammer it only didn’t help. This couldn’t be what Fifth Layer was based on. We were misinterpreting Elaine’s drunken comments. We were seeing it wrong. I was hopped up on my boss’s drugs and six states away from home for nothing.
When he spoke again, I was almost too wrapped up in my own mind to hear him.
“It changed me, just not the right way.”
A pause.
“Yeah?” I said.
“You want to hear about that too?”
“I do.”
“All right. It’s your quarter. It used to be there was a particular kind of kid I was into. After they did what they did to me, I could look at... well, at a kid who I knew in my head was my type, if you see what I’m saying. All the things that used to get me going. But now they looked just like everyone else.”
“That didn’t help?”
“Nah. The pressure built up, just like always. And there were others started looking tempting. I don’t like to talk about that. Them Mexico doctors didn’t change what I do. They maybe switched who I was doing it to. That’s all.”
Something was moving in the back of my head, shifting like an eel in muddy water. The Roswell Hypothesis. The Fifth Layer Look.
“Elaine Salvati,” I said. “Does the name mean anything to you?”
“Hell, yes. Sounds like salvation, don’t she? I thought it was a sign.”
“She was in Mexico? At the clinic?”
“Yeah, sure. She was one of ‘em. She can’t help you, though.”
I blinked.
“Help we?” I asked.
“I know why you’re here, friend. You’re looking to stop it. You’re looking for a way to turn it off.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s not like that. I’m—”
Jude lifted a hand, palm toward me, commanding’ silence. He had huge hands. Strong.
“You don’t have to convince me of nothing,” he said. “Just let me tell you one thing, all right? There’s only two ways to stop it. You get yourself put in someplace like this or you blow your fucking brains out. If you want my recommendation, I’d say the second one. And sooner’s better than later.”
His eyes weren’t soft anymore. They weren’t dead. They were the blue of natural gas. They were monstrous.
“Folks like you and me,” he said, “I don’t know what we are, but we ain’t human.”
SHE SOUNDS LIKE salvation.
There are some men who never drop an email or screen name, a phone number or voxnet node ID. In among their contact lists is the hidden history of their sexual lives. Every lover is retained there, even if they’re never called or contacted. Whenever an impulse for simplification overwhelms them, those names are spared from the purge. Just in case, without ever being more specific. Just in case.
I was one of those. Elaine’s information was still on my system.
I sat in my hotel room, the video file looped. She laughed. Except discretion, she said. Voices came from the corridor. Children whining with exhaustion. A woman’s laugh. The air smelled like artificial cedar and sterilizer. The crap I’d put in my blood wouldn’t let me sleep. I had two messages from Herself queued and waiting to tell me, I was certain, how important this was, and how little time I had to get it right.