Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  He loved clay. His cattle. His herd. The fruits of his labor.

  She knows me well.

  One day, perhaps, he could find a body for her. She could stand beside him and drink from the well of dreams as he did.

  An ecstasy made of imagination.

  Dawn was approaching, the horizon bleeding a diffuse palette of burnt orange, when he found a particularly rich vein of hope, a stream of dream stuff that excited him to greater heights. Rarely did he continue into daylight hours when the sun grew hot and the air sticky. But this would be worth it, however long it would last. He felt a quiver in the back of his throat and thought perhaps he had overindulged.

  It was a presence behind him.

  Marcus

  The old man was uncomfortable.

  Misery had been with him every moment since waking. The knee, the neck. He was old. And now he identified with the misery.

  Clay. I’m clay.

  There would be no immortality for him, no flawless autoimmune system, no control of his nervous system or manipulating thoughts. For the old man, it would be this way for the rest of his life unless he did something about it.

  The bed poked his back and buttocks. Was the thing stuffed with hay? He fidgeted onto his side and tried to remember the last time he had even gotten out of the wheelchair. Had he been sleeping in it?

  Someone was panting.

  His eyes snapped open. Blades of grass waved over his face. Beyond, a deep blue sky was littered with puffs of clouds. The grass was parted by a stick and a long black nose. A German shepherd watched him while a string of drool landed on the old man’s arm.

  He didn’t move.

  He traced his memories, searching for an explanation. He had been in the laboratory on the second floor. All the needles were laid on the bed. He wasn’t about to ram one into his head, but there were auto-searching ones—needles that analyzed the forehead and gray matter, needles that would punch through at the correct depth and synchronize with the brain.

  Did I use that? He couldn’t remember.

  He searched his forehead for evidence of a needle or a hole, but only felt folds of worry on an otherwise unpunctured forehead.

  “Do you want the truth?”

  The old man pushed up on an elbow, wincing at the sharp stabbing pain in his knee. The dog stepped back and Marcus saw who said that—a woman kneeling beyond his feet, seedheads tickling her arms.

  Raine.

  Paul stood behind her, arms crossed.

  “Where the hell am I?” the old man blurted.

  “I asked if you wanted to know the truth?” she repeated.

  “What is the meaning of this?” He tried to sit up, but the pain was too great. “What have you done to me?”

  Raine was dead. She never escaped the Settlement, lost in transport. But there she was, glowing like a newlywed, her face full and healthy. He searched for an answer. Above the grass, there was the top of a cabin.

  “You are responsible for the death of millions,” she said. “Your life is littered with broken lives and selfish disasters. You harassed those you couldn’t control. You murdered the ones close to us. You came to the Settlement looking for a greater truth. We will show you.”

  “I got you off the Settlement,” he exclaimed.

  “There would be no Settlement if not for you.”

  “I brought Jamie back.” He shook his finger at Paul. “You couldn’t have done that without me.”

  “She wouldn’t have died if not for you,” Raine said.

  “This is ludicrous, damn you.”

  Paul remained solid and unspoken. There was a cross of sticks between his fingers, reminding him of the crucifix he had seen in Raine’s cabin.

  The one her son made.

  Someone shouted from a distance, maybe beyond the cabin. The dog bolted off with the stick, plowing through long green strands of grass. He recognized the voice. It was a man he’d once known.

  A shiver cut through him.

  “In a perverted way, I must thank you,” Raine continued. “Would I even exist without you? Would there ever have been a dreamland without biomites? A chance for me to become a wife, a mother or grandmother? All these things are my life again. All the misery brought me here, and I have you to thank for that.”

  It can’t be.

  “I won’t bring Nix over here,” she said. “I won’t let him see you, won’t let him know you were ever here. He won’t be as forgiving, Marcus. He remembers all you did to him and his sister.”

  “Where the hell am I?”

  “Do you want to know the truth?” she asked.

  “What have you done to me?”

  “All your questions will be answered. You will know who you are and why, Marcus Anderson. You’ll know the powers-that-be; the search of your lifetime will be fulfilled. Are you ready?”

  Their stares were locked, each daring the other to blink or move. He wanted to know the truth, but something about her, about Paul, kept him from answering. Even if his body hadn’t betrayed him, if he could stand and run, if he could harness the power of his mind and overpower them, he knew, somewhere deep and honest, it would do him no good. The truth was waiting.

  And he didn’t want to see it.

  The dog returned with a different stick and nudged Raine with it. She scrubbed the dog’s ears then reached up. Paul pulled her to her feet. They held hands, squeezing until the tendons sprang on the back of her hand, the knuckles whitened.

  “You owe me,” the old man said. “Jamie… all of this… it’s because of me. I don’t know what you’ve done, but we can make it right again. We can work together. One… one to lead…”

  A silent nod between Paul and Raine, a knowing glance, and then she walked off.

  No longer the hesitant woman weakened by pain and suffering, loss and fear. She swaggered from view, lithe and confident. The setting sun warm on her bare shoulders.

  “Where are you going?” Marcus shouted.

  Paul took a knee where the dog had been sitting. The old man tried to roll away.

  “What do you want?” the old man said.

  Paul paused. Vengeance was not in his eyes; bitterness did not scar his face. After all the old man had done, he looked down on him with warmth, sorrow. Compassion.

  He snatched the old man’s wrist.

  The cold of deep space burned his thin skin, shattering his brittle bones with a bolting ache.

  Paul was gone.

  The old man was back in the wheelchair. But not in the tower.

  ______

  It was night.

  Stars blurred a dark sky, the carnival ride slowing to a stop. For a moment, he believed it was a dream, that he had fallen asleep in the wheelchair where he now found himself, but it wasn’t the lab around him. The sky was above and grass was below, grass that was short and cared for, a lawn manicured.

  A resort was before him, an enormous wall of luxurious brick and mortar. Path lights glowed with warm light; treads along sweeping staircases led up to a wide portico. He had seen this expanse through the security footage but, like the rest of the island, it was empty.

  Another glow was above him, something like the Northern Lights was creeping across the sky in milky threads. Marcus reached for one of the wheels and painstakingly rotated the chair, following the lunar threads until they coalesced and fell in a thick, ropey column on someone at the end of the dock.

  He was nude.

  Arms spread, head back.

  A lunar luminescence engulfed his pale body, shimmering with ecstasy—thighs quivering, buttocks clenched. The air seemed to quake, shockwaves rippling the water beneath him.

  The old man thought, perhaps, this was a dream. Raine, Paul and now this… what else could it be?

  The naked man, sensing Marcus, turned his head. The old man’s eyes were too poor to see his features, but felt he was familiar. It was his posture, the delight that seemed to grip him.

  The effervescent strands of light evaporated.

&
nbsp; The water settled, the air calmed.

  They were bathed in darkness. The nude man’s body was still a pale, sickly glow; he stooped over for the pile of clothing, sliding on a loose pair of pants one leg at a time, appearing to watch the old man as he buttoned the shirt. Barefoot, he strolled toward the lawn.

  The old man rubbed his face, working the heels of his hands into the hollows of his eyes. What was approaching was surely a dream.

  A younger version of himself stepped onto the grass and stopped several feet away. Hands on his hips, the man searched the space around them then regarded Marcus with a distant fascination, disbelief that didn’t quite reach the old man’s own level of surprise. And then a smile.

  “What the hell is this?” Marcus said.

  “How did you get here?” the man exclaimed. “You weren’t supposed to leave your tower, old man.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Most clones are more in shock at first sight. You are a resilient one. Always have been.”

  “I demand to know the meaning of this.”

  The man threw his head back; laughter deep and rich reached the stars. He paced back and forth with his finger and thumb pinching the bridge of his nose, grinning. When he stopped, tears wet his cheeks.

  “You are me, old man. But I am not you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am what you seek.”

  “No.” Marcus fumbled at the wheels but wasn’t strong enough to push through the grass. “This is impossible.”

  Vertigo put the world in a blender. The ground opened and swallowed him; a never-ending plummet filled his chest with panic. He clutched the wheels, his mind careening into a black pit of madness.

  “That’s the shock, right there,” the man said. “A bit delayed with you, old man. But there it is. It is natural to lose grip on reality when you see the truth. And the truth you see. I am what you have sought all these years.”

  He threw his arms out.

  “Welcome home, my son.”

  The laughter returned. As Marcus’s mind continued its unraveling descent, the man reveled in the moment, snapping his fingers, summoning something back at the resort.

  “I sent you into the wilderness to live a life, to become your own person. There are thousands of you out there, old man. You are all my clones seeking your own way through life… mechanics and butchers, schoolteachers and homeless. So many paths, so many lives. But in the end, you all come home to know the truth. You all do. But you, old man, you rose above the rest.”

  The man shook his finger.

  “You have always been my favorite. Your journey has been quite exceptional.”

  Several figures moved around them, a semicircle formed. The men were dressed as servants, a variety of formal butlery and disheveled janitorial attire. Some of them were balding, others slightly hunched.

  All of them Marcus.

  “It has been such a pleasure watching you grow. And it makes my heart heavy to bring you home. But you needed to be healed. Do you know what I’m talking about? Do you know who infected you?”

  Marcus looked from face to face, all of them him. Exactly him. They were his brothers, his clones. And in that realization, the earth stood still. There was just the ocean breathing. Just the night sounds, the cool caress of a dewy breeze.

  And Marcus began to laugh.

  A guffaw burped from his cracked and tired lips and erupted into a madman’s hysteria, crumbling between fits of wet coughing. Dream or not, this was how his life would end.

  The truth is not what you expect, Marcus. It is often quite inconvenient.

  Mother told him that. She knew this was what he would find. And she abandoned him to fall into this absurd truth, to drown in the irony. Helpless, afraid, and alone.

  So he laughed until tears fell.

  The others did, too.

  The man took half a step back and joined the hilarity, his laughter rising above the rest. “No one has ever found the beauty of this moment.”

  There was no beauty for Marcus. He laughed at the divine justice. Do you want to know the truth? Raine had asked.

  In that moment, his life was emptied of meaning. All he could do was laugh.

  I deserve this. Of course I do.

  The man snapped his fingers. One of the servants, an elderly Marcus wearing white gloves, delivered a plastic tub of water. He placed it at the foot of the wheelchair.

  “You have been an utter disaster, my son. A beautiful utter disaster. You have ruined lives, sought delusion and grandeur, taken the world to heights it never could’ve reached without you.”

  The man kneeled before him, took one of his bare feet from the chair’s stirrups and placed it in the warm water. The crowd of Marcus clones gathered closer as he washed his feet.

  “Your journey has been long. Share your disasters so that I know more, that I may be more. Now that you know the truth, give yourself to me.”

  The soapy water was warm.

  The man took his other foot, the bad knee biting the nerves, Marcus’s eyes filling with tears. His life, once filled with purpose, drained into the sea.

  He didn’t want this. Didn’t want any of this.

  I am a clone. An insignificant clone. A copy of this man.

  Did that make him nobody? Or was he more than that? Was there no separation between them? Was he a god that wanted to know himself, to be lost and now found?

  The man looked up. He would take the salt of Marcus’s life, absorb him like the ocean. Own him like the ones around him.

  Yes. It is a fitting end.

  More clones joined them. Marcus saw them just outside the semicircle. They were three deep; they were waiting for it to happen. Is that what they all did, too? Did they go into the world and return to be emptied? To serve?

  The man stood.

  The grains of discomfort trickled out of Marcus. A numbness took hold, filling him with apathy. He no longer cared about truths or lies. He would give himself. Give it all.

  There was no choice.

  The smile that appeared bright across the man’s face suddenly collapsed. For a moment, he appeared troubled. A ripple of discomfort shot amongst the clones, a fidgeting itch that caused them to dance.

  Arms darted from behind the man and latched across his chest, a stiff hug, a locking embrace.

  And then he was gone.

  A blank space was left in the semicircle, the grass matted where the man’s bare feet had stood.

  There was time for the clones to look around before they collapsed. Marcus felt a smile grow. In the moments before the world would fade around him forever, a sense of divine justice filled the empty numbness.

  Marcus was indeed the son to be, but who was the one to lead? The one to dream and bleed? They had all bled. Now they all see. They would all lead. Maybe he wasn’t the son to be.

  Regardless of the prophecy’s meaning, he realized in that final moment that he served the world after all. He found the truth. He served God.

  Divine justice, he thought. Indeed.

  Archetype

  What…

  That was as far as the archetype’s thoughts went before the sharp edge of the horizon flipped into the curved line of desert sand. Somehow he had crossed into another reality, one of endless sand.

  Steel bars locked across his chest. A warm breath on his ear.

  The archetype had not experienced surprise in recent memory. He knew all. He saw everything.

  But this he did not see.

  A small worm of excitement turned in his stomach. This was something new, something he could discover. The palatial resort had vanished. The lawn, the servants, the old man… they had all dissolved. The archetype was the eater of dreams, the consumer of dreamlands. But crossing into these dreamlands, to actually exist in them rather than absorb the essence of their reality, that would be something entirely new. The possibilities would be endless.

  The worm continued to dance.

  The desert gave way to mis
ty plains of the prairie laid out in golden waves. The archetype reached up to feel the clasped hands of the steel bars that embraced him from behind, the grip of a man determined never to release. Is he carrying me?

  The prairie transformed into the rainy streets of a city. The goliath skyscrapers shrank into rows and rows of farmland across land as flat as the ocean.

  The scenes continued flipping, worlds shuttling past in colors that never existed, realities on the fringes of the familiar. There was no sense of falling, no motion or vertigo. He was a traveler of dreams. The man behind him turning the dial.

  There was a moment that stretched out longer than the others, a place on the side of a modest hillside overlooking pastures and fences, barns and horses. It was that moment that perhaps the archetype could have stopped him, could’ve broken the grip, willed his way back to the sand and surf and island… but he was soaring in the eternal cosmos, seeing the endless realities that interpenetrated all existence.

  And he had grown so tired. So bored.

  Dreamlands continued.

  The cold, craggy white peaks of a snow-dusted mountain range were before him.

  The bottom of the sea, red deserts, titan forests, mountains of ice, glassy cityscapes, spiny creatures, cold space, blue suns, white moons, craters.

  Faster they flipped. Further he went. Until it all blurred. It all turned gray. Gray that stung his flesh. Gray that ate his bones.

  It was the gray between channels, the static that hissed. The gray where nothing existed.

  In his last moments of sentience, before the archetype dissolved like an ink drop spit into a mad, churning sea, he recognized this nothingness. He remembered this place called nowhere, a corner of the universe where nothing existed. A reality, he thought, where they had sent the souls of boys.

  And then he returned to the primordial soup of the universe.

  Paul

  It wasn’t clear if the archetype could feel Paul behind him, but there was no reaction. So absorbed with the old man, he didn’t hear Paul approach, didn’t feel him throw his arms out. It was only when he locked his hands did he know something was amiss.