Taylor could always tell a Transplant. It didn’t matter how long they’d been in, or how Anti-Social they tried to act. They had this air of detachment about them, which most of the natives mistook for arrogance, but Taylor knew it was something else. It faded over time in the Zone, but they never really lost it completely. Taylor could always spot it, anyway, from the way they talked, or looked at you sometimes. You got the sense that somewhere, deep down, no matter how long they’d been inside, some semi-conscious Normal part of them believed that, really, this was all just temporary, and that someday they’d be going back home to their nice little houses, families, jobs, streams of Content, flavored condoms, and all that other Normal shit. Long-time Transplants, like Adam and Sarah, who’d both been designated in their teens, learned to blend in and went unnoticed, by most people anyway, but not by Taylor. Recent Transplants, as well as the unfortunate few who’d been designated later in life (over the age of thirty, say), who could never completely make the adjustment, might as well have been wearing big red TRANSPLANT signs around their necks. Some of them didn’t fare too well. They tended to get egregiously violated, often in a violently sexual manner, usually by the gangs for sport, or else by some predacious sicko. Other simply turned up “missing,” as in they never made it to their housing assignments, or showed up to work at their factory jobs, and officially nobody knew what had happened to them. Unofficially, their bodies were rotting in some dead-end alley off Muybridge Lane, or they were down at the bottom of the Dell Street Canal, or else, if Meyer’s theories were right, they’d joined the Anti-Social Underground, dropped off the radar and got lost in the Zone, which Taylor surmised was the story with Sarah, who was definitely living off the radar. **
Nobody really knew for certain what the corporations did to the Transplants’ brains before they transferred them into the Zone. They probably used some variation on electroconvulsive shock or something. Whatever it was, it left them kind of scrambled and foggy for about a year. It didn’t erase their memories as much as mix them all up, or estrange them somehow, such that they couldn’t be sure anymore whether something they thought they remembered from their childhood had actually happened or had been implanted, or was just some totally random scene their brains had copied from some stream of Content and used like putty to plug a hole in the leaking wreckage of the stories of their lives. Meyer Jimenez reasoned they’d have to zap the whole brain (repeatedly, probably) to fractionate all those long-term memories, which weren’t so easy to locate precisely. Which would also explain the tics, fits, and speech impediments some of them suffered, which involved a lot of blinking and snorting, which fortunately Sarah had mostly been spared ... except when she melted down in bed and was sucked down into The Pit of Despair and Uncontrollable Sobbing for extended periods. However they did it (whatever they did to the Transplants’ brains before they brought them in), it didn’t appear to affect their ability to think in general or to form new memories, and the longer they spent inside the Zone, the less it mattered what had happened outside. Life went on. New things happened. The continuity of their narrative shattered, the shiftless traces of the past they had lost, and could never recover, lost their luster, were gradually eclipsed by new events, and finally just slipped away forever.
That was how Sarah described it anyway, like the image in your mind of a house you once lived in, the one you thought you would spend your life in, the rest of your life in, and the person you were there, and how it all fades, that image, that person, and is imperceptibly written over, until one day you can’t even remember the color of the walls of the bathroom, or where the soap went, or the bed you slept in, or what you dreamed there.
According to Sarah, she and Adam, prior to being designated, had (assuming these were accurate memories) been deeply involved with some underground network that operated out in the Normal Communities, which neither one of them could clearly remember, and so possibly didn’t actually exist. This alleged network they had been involved with (assuming they had been involved with anything) may or may not have been connected to the larger, definitely more clandestine, and probably purely apocryphal network the Normals referred to as the N.I.N., which few in the Zone had ever heard of (outside of the A.S.U., of course), and which Sarah claimed was actually just a catch-all name the Normals used for any type of organized resistance that didn’t already have a name, or a sinister-sounding three-letter acronym. They hadn’t known each other as Normals, or at least they didn’t believe they had. Based on what details they could remember, they had grown up in different Residential Communities. They’d both been designated late in their teens, Adam for aggravated vandalism to some Corporatist statue, or icon, or something, and Sarah for attempted falsification of historical records and literary Content. She couldn’t recall all the details, of course, but she thought she’d been involved with some cell (i.e., part of this probably fictive network, not the network she was now involved with, which was also not the N.I.N., she stressed) that sabotaged the official Content the Normals were perpetually brainwashed with. This Content, Sarah was quick to add, was not so much intended to fill their heads with lies as just fill their heads, as the corporations were intelligent enough to recognize that deceiving people was much less effective than unrelentingly bombarding their brains with irrelevant nonsense.
Taylor didn’t quite follow all that, or get the actual point of their mission, the mission of Sarah’s former network ... it was something to do with attention spans, and with the Normals’ almost total inability to think through anything that didn’t immediately synch up with some other thing they recognized.
“The fuck are you trying to say?” he said.
“We made shit up,” Sarah clarified, “people, places, historical events, and slipped them into the official records, online histories, wikis, whatever. We changed the dates of things that had happened, invented things that had never happened, some of which looked like falsifications of other made-up things we’d invented, which then, by virtue of having been falsified, appeared to be what had actually happened.”
“Why?” Taylor asked, confused.
Somewhere off in the northern distance, a Public Viewer was playing a rerun of Brandon Westwood’s third Immersion, The Long and Winding Road to Valhalla, not the fully-immersive version, the one you could watch on a Public Viewer.
“What is today?”
“What? The date?”
“Mm hm. ”
Taylor had no idea.
“I don’t know. January something.”
“Hadley Corporation Standard Time.”
“Right.”
She started to roll a cigarette.
Taylor post-coitally farted.
“And where are we now?”
“Here. At Carla’s.”
“Where is Carla’s?”
“Here, in the Zone.”
“And where is the Zone?”
“You want the coordinates?”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
She licked the edge of the cigarette paper, sealed it, tore the ragged ends off, and lit it with the stub of the bedside candle.
“Where did the information come from?”
“What information? It’s fucking geography.”
“Is it? How do we know for sure? You’ve never been out of the Zone in your life. And I can’t remember where I’ve been. How do we know this isn’t Siberia? Or somewhere in Europe? Or the South fucking Pole? Do we even know which continent we’re on?”
“We’re on the North American continent.”
“Why? Because you saw it on a screen? Because you saw a picture with some words at the bottom? An interactive map or something?”
“The fuck were we even talking about?”
“Don’t change the subject. Stay with this. Where did the information come from?”
“The Normals get in planes, all right? They fly across the Atlantic ocean.” Taylor made his hand into an airplane and flew it across
the Atlantic Ocean. “They land in Oslo, or Leicester, wherever. Cities that have been there for hundreds of years.”
“How do they know that Oslo is Oslo?”
“Give me a fucking break, will you?”
“What if Oslo is actually Hanko? Or was Hanko? Or there was no Hanko? What do the Normals actually do? They ride to the airport. They board a plane. The plane takes off. They look out the window. They see an ocean, a coastline, houses. They land in some other so-called Region that looks exactly like the Region they left. The weather is the same. The Private Communities, office towers, malls, everything. What’s the largest historical city in Northeast Region 709?”
“Magog.”
“A name, on a map, on a screen.”
“So what are you saying ... it isn’t there?”
“All I’m saying is, how do we know? How do we know that Hadley Time remotely resembles what they say it does?”
Taylor reached over and took her cigarette.
“What if this isn’t the Twenty-Seventh Century? What if this is the Twenty-Third Century? Or the Sixty-Sixth Century? How would we know? What if even they don’t know? What if they just made it all up ... invented timelines, dates, and facts? The wars, epidemics, migrations, the shifts in climate, did they really happen?”
“Yes.”
She took the cigarette back.
“Maybe the planet was always like this.”
“It wasn’t. They wouldn’t have built like this.”
“And what about all these animals they worship, the Thompson’s gazelle, the giant rice rat, the tongo bongo, the Siberian tiger, the curlew, the snipe ... did they really exist? How do we know?”
“Who gives a shit?”
“What if I told you we made up animals, falsified biological records, detailed data, photos, everything.”
“You did, or they did?”
“What’s the difference?”
“All right, whatever.”
“No. Not whatever. We made up cities. Companies. People. Family histories. Births. Deaths. We hacked them into the official records. We wrote whole books on popular subjects, and attributed them to authors who never existed, then created references to those books by other authors who did exist. Scholars based their research on this. We made up archeological digs ...”
Taylor got up from the bed abruptly.
“Where are you going? ”
He didn’t know where he was going.
“Why?” he asked, for the second time.
“Because it’s all made up ... it’s just stories, Taylor. You go online. You read the news. Look up something on the history sites. You sit there and read it as if it were true. Why? Because someone with money wrote it? Because it has some corporation’s name on it? Why don’t you believe in the Autonomous Zones?”
“Because there’s nothing out there.”
“How do you know? Because they showed you some pictures? Told you some stories? The people in suits?”
“Look, I get it, all right?”
“No, Taylor. You almost get it. You’re still thinking in terms of lies and truth, as if there were some kind of actual truth that someone who knew it was going to tell you.”
“It’s just fucking words. It doesn’t matter.”
“Everything matters, or nothing matters.”
“Is there some little book of these fucking platitudes?”
Sarah laughed.
“What? Big word? I know a few more. They’re fucking words.”
This was the type of convoluted, obscurantist Transplant crap that Sarah had been subjecting him to, relentlessly, for going on the past two months. His head was reeling from all this malarkey, from her pseudo-profound ontological riddles, aikido-conversationalist tactics, and all the other manipulative strategies she could not have been more blatantly employing to get him to (a) accept her offer to let her smuggle him out with the baby, and (b) attain satori, or whatever, some sort of spiritual and political awakening, and surrender to her unnameable something. Taylor thought he had made it clear that he wasn’t about to surrender to anything, and certainly not to some sketchy-sounding non-god God of Multiplicity, which Sarah sometimes referred to as “Mystery” and at others times as the “Being of Becoming” and at still other times as the “Archon Abraxas,” which was some kind of neo-Gnostic hooey which Sarah was welcome to blow out her ass. He wished, when the Normals had zapped her brain, before they brought her into the Zone, that they’d zapped the region some pretentious clown had filled full of all this magical thinking, or neo-post-structuralist epistemology, or hermeneutics, or whatever it was, because whatever it was, his head was full of it. ***
By the time he got back to Mulberry Street, his brain misfiring from lack of sleep, and from going around and around and around with all this stuff, and getting nowhere, the sun had been down for over an hour, so the daytime heat was finally breaking. The dickwad on the Public Viewer said it felt like it was 38C. People were out on their stoops getting drunk, and smoking, and generally smelling like oxen. Herman the Wino was making his rounds, bumming cigarettes and assorted change. He had picked up another pair of Watchers (Taylor had, not Herman the Wino) as he’d turned southeast off Transammonia and onto Collins into Sector B. They’d followed him down to Clayton Avenue, where he’d stopped for his evening beer at Gillie’s. He left them out there while he drank his beer, knowing they’d never set foot in Gillie’s (for fear of testicular amputation, and so on), then he came back out, waved them over, started down Ohlsson as he usually did, then cut through a series of service alleys that looped back around and promptly lost them. Sarah had ordered him to ignore the Watchers, and not to jerk them around like that, but he couldn’t help it. He was sick of the Watchers, and of being followed everywhere he went.
Actually, now that he thought about it, ascending the staircase to Apartment 2E, the list of things he wasn’t sick of, or getting sick of, was shrinking quickly. He was sick of Cassandra’s endless bitching, and crying, and her fits of paranoia, and of emptying out her plastic bucket, and her lack of interest in his lack of sleep. He was sick of Sarah and all her bullshit, her Transplant pipe dreams, her deviant sex, which wasn’t even all that deviant, really, and her states and levels, and all the rest of it. And the Watchers. He was seriously sick of these Watchers, these bozos in their fucking rubber rain-boots who couldn’t have tailed their own bowel movements if their useless lives depended on it. What else was he sick of? He was sick of meetings. General meetings. Action Updates. D.A.D.A. updates. And Security meetings. And every other type of A.S.U. meeting. He was sick of sitting around in basements and lofts and attics, and wherever the fuck, listening to Adam, or Jamé, or whoever (Dorian was one of his particular favorites), pontificate in their obtuse argot to congregations of twinkling Transplants who were stupid or just ass-ignorant enough to believe that they were part of some coming revolution that would save the human race from extinction. But mostly, or at least at the moment anyway, the thing he was feeling acutely sick of, the thing he was sick to fucking death of, was not deviating from normal routine, and leaving everything to Adam and Sarah, and not taking any independent action ... for example, to identify, and exhaustively question, then take somewhere dark and egregiously violate, whoever the fuck was cooperating on him, and had put these fucking Watchers on him, because he felt like ... well, like hitting someone, like hitting someone hard, repeatedly. Also he needed to get some sleep. He desperately needed to get some sleep.
He hauled himself up to the second floor landing and stumbled into Apartment 2E. The door was standing open, as always, in a futile attempt to ventilate the kitchen. Meyer Jimenez was cooking his famous andouille pigeon jambalaya, which was basically Meyer’s pigeon paella, except when the markets were out of saffron. Taylor had been avoiding Meyer, who he knew was somehow in league with Sarah, and was probably part of her overly garrulous network of baby-smuggling Terrorists. He hadn’t come out and asked him directly, because Meyer would have just denied it of course
, but Meyer was the one who’d sent him to Sarah, and he’d found those maps and that 12-page excerpt, and Taylor wasn’t a total moron. He hadn’t been home for several weeks, except to change T-shirts, and sleep, and bathe, and to peer into Dodo Pacheco’s alcove and verify he was still not in there.
Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were twitching like fiends at the kitchen table. Their protruding eyeballs locked onto Taylor.
“Fifteen minutes,” Meyer announced.
Taylor dug into the pocket of his chinos, and came up with IZD forty and change ... enough for a black market hit of Plasto. **** Some ancient jazz recording was playing. He handed the money to Alice Williams.
“Fucking Tay!” Rusty Braynard sputtered, watching Alice Williams count out the money, “Fucking lifethaver! Ith that all you got?”
“I’ll have more tomorrow,” Taylor said.
They leapt to their feet, spilling their beers, and dashed down the hall like Olympic sprinters. Meyer stood there, sweating profusely.
“You couldn’t have waited until after dinner?”
Taylor shrugged.
“Sit. Eat.”
Taylor sighed.
“I need to sleep.”
“A person also needs to eat.”
Taylor was also sweating profusely.
“It’s like a fucking sauna in here.”
Meyer had been cooking for several hours.
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