by Tim Curran
Neither of us knew French, so we couldn’t read the greasy, piss-stinking diary. We got disgusted by the pictures of naked or near-naked Thai boys posed in rice paddies, in muddy alleys, in brothels, coatrooms, and riverbanks. Everywhere this guy went, he must have paid boys to drop trou for a photograph, prologue to fuck knows what. Maybe he paid them in something other than money, for all of them had the same dreamy, vacant expression, eyes drooping shut or fixedly staring up at the contents of their own skulls. I was never so fucking glad I couldn’t read French.
I wanted to go back to LAX and play our favorite game, Spot the Pervert, but he wouldn’t make it easy by going to security. He’d run straightaway he suspected they were onto him, I reasoned, and anyway, I got to the bottom of the suitcase and found the big bottles of weird yellow-gray powder.
Naomi wanted to snort it. I wanted to consult the diary first. Only the thought that it could be cremains, deadly insecticide or uranium, dissuaded us from a trial bump.
And the rest, as they say, is history.... When they don’t want to talk anymore about how the chance discovery became destiny, or whom you ran over on the way.
In less than six weeks, I had learned enough French to know what I had, and what kind of monster I took it from. Don’t believe that I tried to turn evil to good, to redeem it or myself, by going underground and turning the Elixir to a cult deprogramming tool. I could’ve become the greatest pornographer in history or a revolutionary therapist, a salesman, anything.... But I only wanted to learn what people were made of.
Another experiment.
In the interest of science, Naomi and I tried an intramuscular injection of fifty micrograms in solution of the Elixir. That was his name for it.
I don’t remember anything after that. Naomi was gone when I came down. I never saw her again. I freaked out and took off and I hid out here and there and everywhere, shedding myself on the road until I was only the Deprogrammer. I believed that the euphoric migraines that overtook me almost like menstrual clockwork every few months were flashbacks, withdrawal symptoms, but I never tried it again.
Using the powdered Elixir, I delivered fifty-two prisoners of cults and successfully converted all but two of them into reasonable facsimiles of their old selves, minus a traumatic scar or an empty hole that made a cult seem like a good idea. I fixed them.
After four years, my supply of the Elixir was nearly used up. I had a sample tested once and learned it was a fungal derivative, but I’d never successfully cultivated the spores. Nowhere near close to having learned anything real, I was looking at retirement.
Carl came within seconds of my recovering enough to page him. This was because he and his family lived in the motel... and also because his “family” didn’t really exist, except as an elaborate skein of posthypnotic suggestions. (Carl was my first patient. Mistakes were made.)
Nothing like this, though.
Carl let me get it out of my system. Just apologized and said he didn’t see her leave.
Nobody ever escaped from the motel before. An unrehabilitated product would go running back to the cult, which might choose to go to the police. I would have to call the client to let him know his wife was missing with a head full of nameless psychogenic drugs.
Richard Resley, PhD, was a professor of nothing so mundane as one discipline, a postmodern enfant terrible who could never be contained by one campus, let alone one bed. The first article pulled up by a Google search called him the Deacon of Deconstruction. I had to get into the double digits to find things I wished I’d known before I agreed to abduct his wife.
I deployed Carl to look for the product and drove into the city to meet with Resley.
He was being interviewed at the local public radio affiliate, but agreed to give me a few minutes between demolishing colonialist patriarchal dialectics and delineating new paradigms for a chubby ash-blond postgrad who looked ready to jump his boring bones.
He took it well.
“So, she is no longer your responsibility then.” He nodded to me, turned to go. “She is very headstrong. I trust you did your best.”
I took his arm, sure he wouldn’t want his pet coed to hear what I had to say. “I won’t try to complicate the situation any more than it is, if you’ll just tell me why you’d pay good money to have your wife deprogrammed from a cult that you still belong to.”
His face tightened. “I suppose there’s no point equivocating. My interests and Preston’s are still deeply entangled, though I was never as devoted to his philosophy as my wife.” Air-quoted philosophy, the prick.
Resley coauthored three major studies of “psychocultural engineering” with Marble two decades ago, just before he left UCSD and started his sewing circle. Never publicly connected to the cult, but the pattern was there, if you were paranoid enough to see it. “So, you get all the benefits and none of the starvation....”
“My antibiography wasn’t all that long. Preston is doing some extraordinary things with expanding human potential, and I’ve been privileged to witness some of it. Listen, this is beginning to sound an awful lot like some sort of blackmail attempt....”
“It’s not. Your wife disappeared in the middle of a session. She’s extremely suggestible....”
“I could’ve told you that,” he said. “Listen, if you’re so concerned, why not go to the police? I’m sure they’d be very thorough in locating her, once they sorted you out.” Impatiently, he sped up and crossed the street just ahead of a truck loaded with liquid CO2.
I gave up chasing after him. Just stopped and shouted in the street, “Was it you or Marble who turned her onto the French Play?”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Resley whirled and came back up to me where I waited on the curb.
I couldn’t resist. “She dreams she’s acting in it. Says she was in another play, too, where somebody tried to get her to kill somebody—”
He hit pretty hard for a middle-aged college professor. The punch folded me into his shoulder, which shoved me back onto the curb.
His face was frozen milk. I smelled urine, and it wasn’t mine. “Stay the hell away from me or I’ll call my police. Would you like that?”
I watched him walk away. The postgrad skipped after him, looking sideways at me as she followed him to his office.
I could’ve left it alone. Nobody was paying me to press further. I didn’t like being used, but if Ex Libris wanted to play games, they would have been subtler about it. The easiest explanation, that Mrs. Resley had been a plant to spy on my methods, would explain it all if anyone had ever gotten up and walked away in the middle of an Elixir session.
One person had, and I never saw her again. And no one under the Elixir had ever successfully dragged me into their head. And I had heard only once before of the French Play, in the journal I found with the Elixir.
“And the games! Such delightful entertainments our pretty toys gave us... Never has the French Play been performed with such abandon, as my little troupe put on for the Khmer Jaune Festival. Every performance consumed a raft of Cassildas, a platoon of Thales, and taxed my art to its core. Such ecstasies, such wondrous pitiful pain! My dolls laid so bare the veiled face of power and desire that the Pallid Mask wept tears of priceless ichor and the Hidden City beckoned beyond the rotten red moons... We all saw it, and beheld the colorless, cold corona of the Crown of No Nation....”
The King In Yellow was only one more bullet point in an inventory of depravity that yawned at pedophilia and cannibalism. I tracked down and attempted to read it back when I was still trying to find out what I had, but I couldn’t tell you what the big deal was. My memory of it was like a hole in a pocket. I ran down a copy at a Xian Science Reading Room where the curator owed me a big favor.
I put out an underground APB on my car with some contacts in the repo and private security industries. I prowled the Ex Libris chapterhouses in Ocean Beach and Encinitas. I
got nothing and nowhere, and hoped for better news from Carl when we met at a taco shop on PCH. He had ignored my calls all day, so I assumed he was either busy or had lost it. He was always losing things when I forgot to remind him.
He looked like he’d lost a lot more than his phone. He sat down next to me on a picnic bench out front. The surfers and landscaping grunts had all gone and the shop was deserted. On the wall, they had that mural in every taco shop, of the dead Indian prince on the woman’s lap, an Aztec Pieta....
“I found her,” he said.
I lit up. I asked her where, how, why didn’t he tell me on the phone?...
He rubbed his eye, looked absently at the smear of blood on his fingertip. He took out a picture. It was creased and faded. He stared at it, cupped in his big, shaky hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?...”
Where was she? I asked him.
“She’s everywhere,” he said, and dropped the picture on the scarred wood table. It wasn’t Regina Resley. It was a picture of an emaciated, bald effigy that it took me several seconds to recognize.
It was hard to make out just what he was saying. Words didn’t come easy, but he wanted to know what I did to him, to his daughter. Why did he have false memories of another family in the desert, and what was his real fucking name, please?
Before I could think of an answer, he let out a desolate sob and lunged at me, hands around my throat.
Did I leave that part out?
Carl. I didn’t let myself think too much about who he was or where he came from. It was so upsetting, I resented him if I even thought about it, because it never bothered him, and if anyone could fix me so I didn’t remember about Naomi either, than I would have. I was jealous of Carl, because he had someone to fix him.
Carl came looking for his daughter about a month after the Incident. I had split town and was hiding, but he was a retired cop and a widower with nothing else to do. He wanted to know where his daughter was, and since nobody else knew and I was her good friend and had fled right when she went missing, I had a lot of explaining to do.
Instead, I stabbed him in the neck with a syringe of Elixir. I was still haphazardly translating the journal with a big Larousse French dictionary, and I was seriously considering throwing all of it in the ocean and starting over.
But then I had an ideal subject. It was easy to erase memories, but putting something in its place... that took nuance. Starting with Carl, I had gone from something resembling a sleepwalker to someone who believed quite firmly in the fantasy of a normal daily life I had given him, who enjoyed the love of a family in his head every night while he lay alone in a motel room. He was probably happier with my lies than when his wife and daughter were alive.
But try to tell a man that when he’s strangling you.
None of my safewords worked. Not even the nuclear one, the name of his daughter. Breathless, I gasped them in his ear, but he was a me-killing machine. More in sorrow than in panic, I took out the injector pen I’d mixed for Mrs. Resley and stuck it in his left armpit.
He went limp, crushing me on the table. I rolled out from under him and sat down, composing my thoughts. The taco shop workers watched me through the window. Cars passed on the street.
All my work ruined. Her name should have shut him down, but he had found it, and come back for me. I couldn’t accept that my programming had simply come undone.
To rebuild what he was would be impossible... his identity was a patchwork stitched together ad hoc over the last four years. I could leave him blank, but someone would come looking. A man with no memory is interesting, while a man with sad memories can’t be buried fast enough. Far easier to restore him to where he was when I found him, with a few hasty updates to account for the missing time.
You’ve been drinking and drifting ever since you found out your daughter Naomi had died of a drug overdose. But now, it’s time to go home, to pick up the pieces and live your life.
I gave him a little more off the top of my head, then put some cash in his wallet. I asked him who did this to him. Who gave him this picture of Naomi, digitally dated four years ago.
Even under the Elixir, he could not, or would not say. The words he seemed to mouth but could not speak aloud, I could only guess that they were, Your Master.
I spent the next several hours hiding out from the Plot, trying to figure out what to do next. Waiting to see who tried to fuck me up next.
Reading the French Play.
Like naked celebrity photos or instructions for making a nuclear weapon, you can find no end of fakes and fragments of the French Play on the Internet. But all the versions out there are counterfeits, malware or worse. All the printed English translations, burned and scandalized, omitted much, and if an editor only suffered a stroke or a nervous breakdown in the process, he was lucky.
I felt something for Regina Resley that I had not for any of my other products. She was beautiful and smarter than me and she stood at the heart of everything I had thrown away my life to discover. How could I not fall for her?
That’s what I told myself, but I loved her as I loved mystery, and because chasing after her lost me in a story less pathetic than my own.
There’s just the stories, and people weave them to trap a bit of reality and tame it, and people get trapped in the stories and think they’re taming the world and playing it like a game to get what they want, like shaking a gourd and doing a dance to make it rain. Sympathetic magic. Spill blood to make it rain, so it’ll rain blood.
Stories do all that for us, and what do they ask in return?
I didn’t own a copy. But I figured I for sure knew who did. The condo in Hillcrest had three pet grad students in it. None of them were wired Ex Libris drones, just the new crop of coeds from which Resley had once picked Regina. No wonder he didn’t miss her.
I didn’t have to search Resley’s office. It was on the desk in plain sight, nicely annotated with Post-it tongues sticking out of the crumbling, acid-etched pages. He was nowhere to be found, so I sat behind his desk, donned a pair of rubber gloves and started to read. I don’t think I got through the dramatis personae before I blacked out again.
I sat upon a threadbare throne hidden behind a moth-eaten screen as the curtain fell. A river of parchment skin and brittle bones rattled applause out of the void beyond the footlights.
“You were marvelous,” she said. She took the gold-trimmed tails of my cloak and slit them with a straight razor.
My hands went to my face and touched the mask. It wouldn’t come off. Her hand on mine was colder than the razor. “It’s a short intermission. Do you want them to see your naked face?”
I had to search for my own voice. The Lines hung in the air like the promise of plague. “In the... in the last play... your husband hired me to turn you against your master....”
Her hands went to her face. The razor sheared away a wing of her bangs. “Oh, look what you’ve made me do... You’re gnawing at my motivation again.”
“I’m sorry, Regina. I only wanted to know....”
Her eyes went blank and blind. “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters. We don’t ever have to leave... so long as we play.”
She returned to tattering my wardrobe, hysteria whickering in her throat so I didn’t dare press. “All of this to be gotten through... all these scenes... As if any of it matters... But our reward...”
“What do we get? What comes at the end?”
She looked up from her work and kissed my frigid mask. “Why... you do!”
“In the next act... I can’t recall the lines... but you... you’re going to murder someone?...”
“Imagine that! I couldn’t murder my own shadow.... Even when She almost... No, you won’t...”
Agitated, she cast about with the razor. “He’s not going to find me here. You won’t tell, will you? If he doesn’t, if we get to the end, then we can go
and live where everything has already happened, but we’ll remember, won’t we? The black starshine won’t... The sun beneath the sea... It won’t forget us, because we’ll stop it, we’ll never have to be born again and we’ll stop them, the stopping stoppers... stop...” The words seemed to come apart in her mind. She looked at me in alarm, the razor clenched in a white, birdlike fist, her soft white wrists cobwebbed with hesitation scars. “Oh my Lord, I’m undone.... I have forgotten my lines! He’s coming to correct us....”
The screen around us was hoisted into the gallery. The throne withdrew on whimpering casters with me on it, leaving her trembling alone on the boards when the curtain lifted. She threw up her hands and told me to run just before she dissolved in the pale yellow light.
I looked up from the book, my thumb jammed into the last act. He must’ve come while I was... reading? Sleeping? He sat on the leather couch under the picture window overlooking the park. He was wearing the same plum worsted wool suit he had on at school, which was fortunate. It hid the stains.
Resley had no face. Everything from ear to ear, from hairline to chin, was stripped away in a frenzy of slashing, flaying strokes that left only ribbons of gristle dangling from his naked skull. The worst of the mess lay strewn across transcripts of phone conversations with me that lay in his lap.
Two grad students were waiting in the hall. “We’ve called the police. You really should wait here.” They didn’t stop me leaving. They shot me with their phones as I fled the scene covering my face with the French Play.
Marble was slated to speak to a few thousand at the Extensions Festival, a massive New Age, human potential snake oil block party on the Prado, by the zoo. I left my car in the zoo lot and cut through eucalyptus groves and twisting canyons to the backside of Balboa Park.
Yellow-gray clouds draped over the park, clammy fever sheets gravid with rain that couldn’t fall. Shadows seeped up out of the decaying Spanish colonnades, alcoves choked with morbid satyrs and defaced saints, faces gouged off and bearded in graffiti and guano. Hotter in the shady arcades than under the stricken sun.