FSF, May-June 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  "Water. Got it cheap, old man. Yank surplus, they practically give the stuff away.” I thought the idea of paying anything for water slightly risible, but said nothing.

  The dank little cellar turned out to be his shelter. It was equipped with folding cots, shelves, a radio, a chemical toilet and an enormous supply of toilet rolls. There was plenty of tinned food on the shelves, but no sign of my tinned salmon.

  "I see you're fond of pineapple chunks,” I said.

  "They cost a pretty penny, old man, but it's well worth it. If only I could lay hands on some custard powder....” He mused for a moment, then continued the guided tour, showing me an exercise bicycle, some handcuffs and sexual paraphernalia, which included several inflatable friends and a Teasmade.

  * * * *

  Friday:

  Started my new job here as deputy assistant head controller in Department M/H/112. What we are actually doing—though I violate the Official Secrets Act by writing it down here—we are designing a new set of postal codes for Mars. So far the Department has only got as far as M4Q H11R 16JKP small-a/7, not very far at all. I've been brought in to speed things along. The extra letters aren't actually necessary, but they do help create jobs at the post office.

  * * * *

  Saturday:

  My first day of rest. Took the family on a narrow boat along the Grand Martian Canal up as far as Baboon Piles Mountain. Had a quarrel with some ass at the lock. He kept insisting his boat had a right to go first just because it had arrived a few minutes before us. I pointed out that a narrow boat surely takes precedence over a hired rowboat. The man was completely unreasonable, so finally I let him have his childish way. Mandy fell into the water once, Jason twice, me once. Later we stopped for a cream tea—rather expensive for tinned cream, I thought—and we came home tired, sunburnt, mosquito-bitten, but happy.

  * * * *

  Sunday:

  No eggs for breakfast, because someone broke into our larder during the night and stole the last few. They also took our bottles of South African sherry, to our secret relief.

  Peregrine talks of giving up school and buying an old American car to work on. I tried to turn the conversation to O-levels and his future. Gave up, finally, and instead read my way through a Rupert Murdoch Sunday paper. What a mess the Solar System is in! I considered writing a letter to the editor, asking why his paper can't print some good news, something positive for a change.

  "Colonel Bogey” pierces my reverie. Two Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. I tell them politely that I am Church of Mars. After they go, I decide to change the door chime. “Loch Lomond” really does sound better.

  Back to the Sunday paper, I read a fascinating memoir by Virginia Sackville-West's maid's great-niece. Perhaps one day these humble jottings of my own will also find such immortality....

  Found the musical saw! It was in with the Christmas things, the crackers and packets of marzipan. I tune up, as the sun sinks behind the B.A.Mountains, and I play some eerie “Martian Chronicles” music. When I stop there's not a sound, nothing but the distant splash of one of the twins, falling in.

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  Novelet: DR. DEATH VS. THE VAMPIRE by Aaron Schutz

  THE UNWASHED MASSES

  Aaron Schutz grew up in Oregon and was always fascinated by the desert there. These days, he lives in Milwaukee, where he chairs the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He says he wrote the first draft of this story three years ago over a sleep-deprived Labor Day weekend for a novel-writing contest. It was his final writing jag before adopting his children, Hiwot and Sheta. After the craziness of going from zero kids to two subsided a bit, he found that within the novel draft lay a full-fledged novelet. Mr. Schutz notes also that his family thought he was crazy when he said he'd be riding home from vacation on a bus instead of driving. You can judge for yourself if his research was fruitful.

  The steady knocking of my head against the metal frame of the bus window woke me from a troubled sleep. Pushing back against the bulk of my seatmate, I struggled to find a more comfortable position. For a moment I didn't know where I was, gazing blearily out at the desolate landscape. The sun hung low in the sky like the end of a smoldering brazing rod. Even through tinted glass, in the rattle of our air-conditioned box, I sensed the heat. Rolling hills of hard-packed earth and gray-green sage swept by, broken here and there by the upthrust of red sandstone cliffs. Lonely junipers hunched above the sage like hags. I had left the lush Columbia River forests behind as I slept and descended into the starkly beautiful hell of the Eastern Oregon desert.

  What a mess.

  Shifting uncomfortably again, I let my head fall back on the headrest. First class, that's what I like—not that I can ever afford it. I can't ever quite get used to the stink of the bus: cheap beer, greasy chips, and generic cigarettes overlaid with a spicy tang of body odor. Every bump in the road shook my queasy stomach and set aluminum seat posts chittering. My ears recoiled against the diesel rumble of the engine, the low mumble of conversations, and the tinny thump of deafness-inducing teenage music seeping around plastic earbuds. A woman in the seat behind me was arguing with someone on a cell phone in an acrid streak of Spanish expletives, but I controlled the urge to tell her to shut her face. At least the fat kid in the seat next to me had finally fallen asleep, snoring quietly.

  Buses are the last refuge of the lost and the downtrodden. Long-haul bus riders are the excrement on the boots of society. Army grunts on leave press in with polite migrant workers in dirty boots and too-clean cheap shirts; single mothers with snotty griping kids annoy old ladies on a last trip to visit their dying brothers; criminals on the lam try to pick up cute college kids; all interspersed with a smattering of almost normal folks who'd waited too long to take the plane. You probably wouldn't pay much attention. But I'm a sensitive guy, you see. This time, the fat kid cut the edge a bit, but it was still horrible.

  I stay away from drugs mostly, although an occasional toke or a pink tab of Klonopin can be nice. Addiction for someone like me always lurks just ahead in the fog. In any case, I wasn't entirely sure I'd made a clean break from trouble in Portland, and I couldn't afford to be less than one hundred percent.

  But I was prepared, as always. Painfully, I managed to force my arm down to the battered leather valise between my legs. Rummaging around in the carefully ordered velcroed pill bottles and vials and assorted tools of the trade, I located a strip of Bonine tablets and a little bottle of ibuprofen. Dry-swallowing the pills, I took a risk, stripping the surgical gloves from my clammy hands for a while. Then I flopped back to try to get a little more sleep.

  But I had woken the fat kid. “Hey, mister,” he said loudly, making me cringe. I didn't answer. I didn't want to encourage him. “Wow,” he said, pressing down on me as he leaned over and looked through the window. “That's really hot out there, huh, Mister?” Then, thankfully, he went back to his Dean Koontz book. But since he had apparently never learned to read silently, I was treated yet again to a mumbling rendition of the latest chapter with the occasional laugh or belch or liquid chomping on his apparently endless supply of red ropes. Every once in a while he'd look up to say, “This is really a good part,” or “Boy, this is good, ain't it?"

  The trick to having a seat to yourself, usually, is to pile your stuff into the seat next to you and then pretend you are asleep. It also helps to look a little scruffy, and I'd rubbed some dirt into my face and mussed up my hair before I got on. So when the driver hissed the door closed after the final boarder, I figured I was home free. I wasn't paying attention, eyes closed, letting the complex sensations of the other riders around me wash through my body as the kid—he couldn't have been more than fifteen—lumbered down the aisle toward me.

  "Mister?” he had asked, “Mister, can I have that seat?” When I didn't respond, he just picked up my valise and dropped it into my lap. “Thanks, Mister,” he said, wedging himself in, managing to thump me in the
face with one of his balloon-man arms before I could do more than yelp.

  "Hey!” I complained.

  But he just came back with a friendly, “Hi, Mister.” Digging into the stained nylon knapsack now perched on his stomach, he pulled out a thick battered paperback, and waved it in front of my face.

  "D'ya like Dean Koontz, Mister?” he asked, and then yanked the book back, ignoring my angry look. “Dean Koontz is the best, I think. Do you think? This is my favorite. You see, there's this neato dog and he can almost talk and stuff and the doctors, they did somethin’ with his head and these bad people are chasing him and this guy finds the dog and then....” Reaching into his knapsack, he pulled out a red licorice rope. “Want some?” he asked, and dropped one into my lap. Then, without any transition, he opened the book seemingly at random and began to read, occasionally stopping to bite a piece off one of the red ropes flaring like anemone tentacles from his right hand.

  Truth was, it could have been worse. Somebody must have cleaned him up, because he didn't smell that bad, which is surprising for a fat kid. All those folds and crannies tend to collect their own little ecologies of oily bacterial soup—believe me, I know all about it. And the kid's Iron Maiden T-shirt had only collected a few stains, so far. There was even something oddly comforting about him. In fact, I soon realized that the kid was special.

  He was a superhero. Well, not really, of course. There isn't any such thing as superheroes. Only almost-superheroes. That's what he was, though. An almost-superhero. What was his special power? Contentment. He was just plain happy. I tried to probe deeper, but unlike most people, he didn't have any layers to him. Everything was surface. With him, what you saw was what you got. Nowhere could I could find the slightest tinge of discomfort or anxiety or depression. You could have cut his foot off and it wouldn't have bothered him that much, although he would have said “ouch.” Like most, his superpower was not particularly useful—most aren't, to tell the truth. But it was the reason I didn't move to another seat, as uncomfortable as I was.

  For me, he was like a blanket of calmness, filtering out some of the dejection of the unwashed masses around me. I even fantasized for a moment about kidnapping him and dragging him around with me like Linus's blanket.

  Every superhero needs a moniker. At least most of the ones I know do. So I dubbed him “Teflon Boy.” Everything seemed to just slip off him without leaving any trace. Kind of like Ronald Reagan. But less dangerous.

  * * * *

  Termination

  Sleep was not an option as Teflon Boy droned on and the woman behind became increasingly hostile and loud. (How long would her battery last?) I thought about reading some more of the little book about the Oregon desert I'd bought at our last stop—key rule: always know your environment—but it just didn't appeal. So I gave in to duty. I closed my eyes and cast my attention out through Teflon Boy's filter into the bus. Methodically, as I had slowly learned at the Farm, I drifted from person to person, starting at the front of the bus and moving back.

  I sincerely hoped I wouldn't have to kill anyone today.

  I am not a telepath. The closest descriptive term is probably “empath,” in that I feel the emotions of other people. But my experience is more physical than empath usually seems to imply. I don't just feel emotions, I feel how others feel in their bodies. I feel their sensations, and through them I understand their emotions. So as I shifted from person to person, I became, for a moment, those people. I felt headaches building up, tension in badly postured backs, the heaviness of the overweight, the pasty feeling of bodies fed on white bread and bologna, the taut muscles of a soldier. And I also delved into the pains and horrors they carried around with them as physical manifestations of the past. While I couldn't link these to specific events or memories, still they gave me a powerful sense of who a particular individual really was on the inside, beneath those layers of resistance that often prevent us from understanding ourselves. (I have those as well—I can travel others but I cannot travel myself. Thus, I understand those around me better than I can ever understand myself.)

  Most of the way through the bus, I didn't encounter much that troubled me. The usual fears and pains, the wheeze of asthma, the inner rumble of diverticulitis, the straining beat of an enlarged and failing heart. And layered amongst the mundane, often ignored sufferings of life, painful articulations of lives of regret, architectures of embodied desires and lost hopes, and touches of calm acceptance and rest alongside the resentment. Sexual abuse has a common sensation, as does alcoholism, meth addiction, etc., etc. If I were a diagnostician—of the mental or the physical—I would be the best. But that isn't my path.

  Then, about three rows behind me, I was sucked into a black hole. Even with my training, I struggled to extract myself from the event horizon of an old woman's soul. Back in myself, I shuddered, and then reached out again more tentatively, lightly exploring the woman's body and skirting around the areas of most intense hopelessness. But it was not history. No. This was no accretion of memories and regrets. Instead, down at the base of her skull, I felt an odd off-centered pressure: a tumor? I became certain of it. I traced its thin tentacles, probing into it. The brain's a hard one, since there aren't any sensory neurons in there, but somehow I can still feel something there if I try hard enough. And this lady had some big uglies in there.

  I sighed. One more complication for a totally messed-up week. The poor old bitch clearly had to die.

  * * * *

  Doctor Death at Your Service

  I'm not a doctor, not really. Actually, I'm a lowly LPN, Licensed Practical Nurse. One step up from a CNA (a Certified Nursing Assistant), my license frees me from the true drudgery of the medical world: bedpans, enemas, urine, vomit—all of the astonishing range of fluids emitted by our bodies. I can't do that much, however. I can draw blood, run IVs, give injections, stuff like that. That's it. But I read a lot. And I pay attention to the doctors. The nice thing about being low on the ladder of expertise is that you are basically invisible, especially if you are a “pool” nurse, transferred around a hospital or nursing home wherever you're needed. Kind of like a cockroach on the wall.

  Even though I don't have much formal training, I'd humbly say I probably know more about human illness than your garden variety GP. And when it comes to the topic of death, well, I'm the expert.

  When I come to a city, I put my name on the on-call nurse lists. With the shortage as it is, and with my willingness to work for crappy pay and crappy hours, there's never a lack of work. But it may surprise you to hear that hospices and hospitals are not particularly promising sites for my craft. Both institutions do a pretty good job of pain management. People in hospitals are getting some help, at least, and people in hospices, well, they're going to die soon anyway, so usually it isn't worth the bother to hurry the process up. Mental health units and nursing homes, well, that's a different story. Rooms filled with the forgotten and the lost.

  But even there I have my standards. I mean, ordinary life basically sucks for most people, I've discovered. And people are pretty capable of killing themselves without any help if they really want to. They aren't my problem. The two key categories eligible for termination are the disabled (the bedridden ancient crones, the drooling wheelchair slumpers, the MS patients who can't even blink their eyes anymore...) and various categories of the insane. We've gotten so much better at treating clearly physical ailments, but with the sickness of the mind—which of course is physical too—even the best specialists are often at a loss.

  Frankly, some of these people are simply dangerous. I've put down a couple of real psychopaths in my time, and a couple of pedophiles too, even though they're outside my area of expertise. Not that I feel that remorseful about it. There are some people who really just don't deserve to use up oxygen. But there's a danger in becoming judge and jury. Most of the time, I just give an anonymous call to the police. And if they don't deal with it, well, look, I can't do everything. And in special cases, the ones the police
won't understand—huddles of nighthawks or nests of vampires or the occasional dominator—I call in the League.

  In the night, I walk the streets in dark clothes on soft-soled shoes. Like a minor god I travel at the center of my approximately hundred-yard bubble of acute perception, participating in the sleep of the snoring obese, children lying awake in fear, the taste of alcohol on a hundred tongues, the rustle and slickness of sex, and, every once in a while, the deep pain of hopelessness.

  You might be surprised at who I kill. Old ladies in houses filled with cats and stacks of newspapers; skinny track-armed drug-users; homeless vets with their jeans stuffed with newsprint against the cold: they're often much more content than you might imagine. Just because someone's life doesn't look like yours doesn't mean it doesn't work for them. We tend to be so judgmental, but mostly we don't understand. No, it's often normal folks who are trapped, in some way, in their powered wheelchairs, in the spinning irreparably jagged wreckage of their minds. To everyone else, they can seem fine.

  In any case, there are more people to kill than I can handle, or than it would be safe to terminate. I have to pick and choose carefully. The last thing I need is a media story about a spike in the number of people keeling over. And you remember those stories of nurses put in jail for killing hundreds of patients? Well, they were simply stupid, probably just as damaged as the people they were injecting. And usually they have some simplistic MO that any idiot could begin to recognize. So, then, two criteria: selectivity and creativity. Don't do it too much and don't do it the same way too often.

  My other job, the one that along with my reports of “special” problems brings me in contact with the League, is recruitment. Although they don't like to acknowledge my service, there are only a few of us who are likely to run across others like us. In any case, there's often a fine line between a superhero and a real wacko nut job. I don't find many—maybe one a year worth (and in need of) rescue. Teflon Boy, for example, didn't really count. He didn't need help, and I couldn't see how he could help us. He was kind of an almost-almost-superhero, you might say.