Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  By the time Seiji leaves for graduate school in California and then in Hawaii, Jiro can drown to his left side or his right, face up or face down, feet first or head first or in the fetal position.

  Peaceful. A sleep and a forgetting, Jiro thinks, remembering lines from that old poem his father so loved. Till human voices wake us and we drown.

  Sometimes it seems as if Jiro is going to stay down there for ever, but he always comes back, eventually. Seiji doesn’t understand it. The voice of the dolphin in air sounds harsh to him—jarring gibbering clicktalk.

  “What’re you doing down there all that time?” Seiji asks.

  “Communing,” Jiro says. “Most of their discourse is non-referential—philosophical poetry, songs, that sort of thing. When I’m around them and primed on Ibogara, though—‘Human awake!’—they just skip language altogether and beam me imagery directly, faster and denser than I can understand, though it’s still all up here in my head somewhere, I think. After they zap me I feel better—much better.”

  “In what way?”

  He pauses, thinking.

  Eternal return. Avalokitesvara. Kwan Yin. Kwannon. Bodhisattvas and saviors do not leave the world but regard its lives and deeds and imperfections with the eyes and tears of compassion.

  “Kind of like I’m being rescued,” Jiro says slowly. “Like I’m being lifted up into the light.”

  Socrates. Jesus. Gandhi. King. Walking Bear. Ohnuki. Eternal return—

  “I can’t do it, Jiro,” he heard Seiji saying tearfully, moving away. “I just can’t let go that last burst of air. I’ve got no more air to give!”

  Jiro felt someone beating on his chest and heard a boat approaching at speed.

  Watch!

  He opened his eyes, unclear as to how he’d gotten here. All he could remember was sitting passionately still at the bottom of a deep sun-filled pool, waiting to surge toward the surface and the light once more.

  “Hey,” said one of Fabro’s Samoan orderlies. “Hey! He’s breathing! He’s alive!”

  “What?” Seiji turned back toward him and saw that it was true. Relief and shock warred in his face, until at last relief won. He shook Jiro’s shoulders as Jiro sat up, somewhat unsteadily.

  “If you’re not dead,” Seiji said, “then I ought to kill you for putting me through this!”

  Jiro looked down and saw his shadow, beside Seiji’s, cast over the edge of the boat and rippling onto the waves beyond. A shadow of a body, but for there to be shadows there must also be light and bodies. Yes, he was still alive.

  Todd Fabro, the pop-music-god-turned-shaman, had arrived in the flesh—on the speeding boat Jiro heard earlier. A slender man clad in white linen suit, boater hat, and canvas shoes, Fabro stood some distance away, on his picket boat, listening to the orderly’s report, shaking the long curls of his sun-danced hair in taut agreement before jumping down onto the boat where Jiro now sat upright, gathering his wits.

  “How are you feeling?” Fabro asked him, crouching down beside him.

  “Saner,” Jiro said. “More ready to face the world without KL.”

  Fabro nodded.

  “Heard you had a near brush with the Big Guy,” he said, his jauntiness not quite overcoming the worry in his voice.

  Jiro shrugged, awkwardly trying to deflect the sunshine of attention away from himself while still continuing to bask in it.

  “That which does not kill us—” he began.

  “—raises everyone’s insurance rates,” Fabro finished, interrupting him. “Death may be a prerequisite for immortality, but that’s no reason to jump the gun. Ibogara isn’t supposed to result in unconsciousness. Our experimental treatment procedure has had no casualties associated with it. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Jiro nodded, thinking again of how he must be weird-wired, then turned to Seiji and the orderly to thank them for saving him.

  “Don’t thank us,” Seiji said with a smile. “Thank them.”

  Jiro’s gaze followed to where his brother was pointing—toward the dolphins that still moved and circled about the boat.

  “That’s right,” said the orderly. “They pushed you up to the surface. We just jumped in and brought you on board.”

  Jiro looked more closely, staring hard at one of the dolphins that was watching him as it patrolled around the boat. It seemed to know something he didn’t—about his past? his future? Whatever that something might be, however, the dolphin remained inscrutable. “Communing” apparently only went so far, even with his rescuers.

  * * * * * * *

  Faith in the Brotherhood of Man

  Mike didn’t see it as a downward spiral while it was happening. Just events, one after the other—yet so many in the last few years. Bad luck. But when had it begun?

  When he left home? When he had his first KL experience? When he dropped out of graduate school? When he partied away the summers with his brother Ray, visiting here to get away from the oppressive atmosphere back home? When he told the Forest Service supervisor on his ignorant, frustrating job in Arcata that it wasn’t “good for him to be around people right now” because dealing with the public made him so pissed off? When he left the job and moved over the border into Oregon? When things went stale with Lizette—after she went into therapy and cleaned up? Or when he tried to impress her one last time, with his “investigation”?

  “I still feel ridiculous about it,” he told the recently KL-free Lizette, when she paid a visit to him at his trailer up in the hills, on her way home from attending a cousin’s wedding in California. “Keeping everything locked up like this when I live in outback Oregon. The nearest town is the mighty metrop of Takilma.”

  He talked at her fast, fast—like someone who didn’t see people very often—but he couldn’t help it.

  “Still, though,” he said, unlocking his trailer, “someone did break into my trailer a couple weeks back. Stole my holobox and sleeping bag.”

  Lizette made noises of commiseration and concern but, as he watched her look around the trailer trying to find an uncluttered place to sit, Mike saw that she couldn’t quite hide the repugnance she felt at seeing how trashed and cluttered his living quarters were.

  Mike cleared off a place on one of the couches, secretly feeling resentment at her revulsion over the way he was living now. He had felt the same thing when she’d pulled up by the gate of his property in her shiny little electric hoversport, commenting on how thin he was looking. And grubby, and unkempt, he thought. She hadn’t said anything like that, of course, but he’d felt it in the quickness of her hug, in the way she brushed his longish bangs away from his face.

  “Since I’ve been absolutely, totally, blissfully unemployed for the last month, however,” Mike said, pushing a stack of old newspapers out of a chair and onto the floor before taking a seat himself, “I’ve had time to turn detective. I hung out in the local scum bars, talked with the patrons, listened to all the local gossip—until I pieced together whodunit. For an amateur sleuth I think I did pretty well. Took only two days to figure out who robbed me. I’m already making a name for myself as a local hero.”

  Mike gave what he hoped was a winning smile. Lizette smiled back—but distractedly, still glancing nervously about the trailer. Obviously uncomfortable as a cat on a rock in the middle of a creek at having to sit amidst his bachelor mess, she said nothing.

  “Just yesterday I turned over to the sheriff’s office the names of the likeliest suspects in my trailer break-in,” Mike continued, although he already felt himself deflating and shrinking in her gaze.

  “Who were they?” she asked, almost interested.

  “Edward ‘Big Ed’ Hilbert,” Mike said. “Martin ‘Mac’ McCurdy, and Wayne Davis. Low-lives with connections to the Mongrel Clones Motorcycle Club. Spiker bikers.”

  Lizette shook her head and stood up.

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea getting involved with that element, Mike?” she asked. “I mean, blue spike makes folks act crazy. Most of th
e people who sell it are the worst kind of bad news. You told me that yourself.”

  “They took my stuff!” Mike said defensively. “I don’t care what kind of scum they are. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. No one has the right to rip off a guy’s sleeping bag, for God’s sake. My holos were the only entertainment I had up here. Something had to be done. I’m not going to live my life in fear.”

  Lizette frowned severely at him.

  “Oh—and you think I do?” she asked.

  “You’re the one who moved back home to Mommy and Daddy,” he said with a shrug, “not me. You said you wanted stability, safety, security. How much freedom are you willing to give up for those?”

  “And your ‘freedom’ is such a great thing?” Lizette said, looking disgustedly around the trailer. “Freedom to be a slob? A loser with no motivation? A gatehead circling the rim? What’s happened to you, Mike?”

  Mike stood up.

  “I stopped running my parents’ program,” he said, staring fixedly at her. “The KL has helped deprogram me. It made me see the biggest of Big Pictures. Sacrificing freedom for the sake of security—the whole damn country is doing it! Government and corporations operating in loco parentis, trying to make us all child-safe and comfort-controlled! We don’t have to live the repressed, bourgeois lives our parents lived, Lizette. They sacrificed everything they might have been, for the sake of family and finances. Not me.”

  “If they hadn’t made that sacrifice,” Lizette said, voice rising, “you wouldn’t be here, you arrogant shithead! You wouldn’t exist! God, you’re out of it. Those stupid cakey dreadlocks of yours—good God! I thought I could bring you back to reality, get you cleaned up and out of your druggie funk. But you’re happy wallowing in your filth and freedom. Someone once made the mistake of telling you how high your IQ is, so now you think the world owes you. The world doesn’t owe you anything! You’re the most stupid genius I’ve ever met. You wear your failure like a badge of honor.”

  “There’s more honor in being a failure my way,” Mike retorted, “than in being a ‘suck-cess’ your way.”

  Lizette headed toward the door.

  “Never try to teach a proud pig to think about his future,” Lizette said from the doorway. “The pig will just wallow in self-pity at how the world isn’t good enough for him—and waste all your time. When you decide to live your life like a modern human being, drop me a line. Until then, we have nothing more to talk about.”

  She banged the door behind her.

  “Go ahead and run on home to Mommy and Daddy!” Mike called after her. “They lived their lives for you, so now you have to live your life for them? That’s not a family—it’s a bunch of time-parasites!”

  She flipped him off without turning around. Getting into her hover down at the gate, she started it up and sent gravel shooting everywhere as she spun the vehicle around and away.

  That afternoon Mike went into the diviest bar in Takilma and got good and drunk, even though his “investigation” was over. He left well before dark, however, to avoid the greet-meat rituals of the evening bar crowd.

  In sunset light he got out of his car to unlock his front gate. Crunching over the driveway gravel to the gate, Mike still felt hollow and hurt by what had happened with Lizette that morning. He was at a loss at what to do now. The only woman he’d been involved with since moving to Oregon was an obsessive-compulsive Accelerando phreak. She made Lizette at her bitchiest look like an absolute goddess of honeyed sweetness.

  An instant after the lock came open on the gate, Mike heard the sound of three shotguns dialing him in. Immediately he thought of the old 9 mm. Sig-Sauer in the glove compartment of his car, which he’d taken to carrying during his investigation. So much for not living in fear.

  Turning to see three figures striding swiftly out of the trees and brush beside the gravel driveway, their hair and lower faces covered with bandanas, Mike knew he would have no time to reach the gun in the glove box. Feebly he raised his fists as his assailants set about methodically bashing in his skull with shotgun butts, turning his world into a blackness of exploded stars, through which blood-red worms writhed furiously.

  “You fucked with the wrong people, boy.” Those were the last words he thought he heard before he blacked out.

  Later, in the hospital CAT scan holos, his disembodied head—close-lipped, shut-eyed, naked of hair and consciousness—turned in space before his, a strange silent movie. Just back of the left temple his cranium dented in deeply, in the perfect impression of a shotgun butt. After he was brought into emergency, the doctors spent fourteen hours picking bone fragments out of his brain’s speech centers.

  He did not ask for any such heroic measures. Barely conscious, moving through a world of blood red, brain gray, and spinal fluid yellow, he remembered trying to grunt out to the doctors his one request as they wheeled him into surgery.

  Let me die!

  His Broca’s area was pretty much gone, though. They couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. The orderlies and nurses thought he was drunk when he was first brought in, his words were so sloppy, slurred, and disjointed.

  “Not intoxicated,” his surgeon, Dr. Nejdat Mulla, said, correcting a nurse several days later, when they both thought Mike was somewhere between unconscious and asleep. “The patient’s head trauma incident resulted in pulpification of a significant section of the left temporal lobe. That damage is the most probable cause of his aphasia and agraphia. It probably also accounts for his early bouts of amnesia. Mister Dalke’s inarticulate when he was admitted resulted not from the consumption of intoxicants, but from the injuries sustained in his head trauma.”

  Even when his eyes were as open as he could make them, Mike noticed that the hospital staff still often spoke about him in the distant third person, as if her were not in the same room with them. Maybe no one who had seen how bathed in blood he was, how badly trashed his skull had been when the ambulance brought him in, could really believe there was still a thinking person inside the shell on the bed—the battered case whose cranium had been stove in, who had been through such long hours of surgery, who lay motionless, strapped into a hospital bed, ensnared in a beeping and chiming thicket of tubes and wires and monitors.

  “No one can tell me who the anonymous caller was,” said one of the orderlies, a heavyset young Hispanic man who was transparently trying to chat up the day nurse. “Who reported the need for an ambulance at this guy’s backwoods address? The only ones who knew about the incident at the time were the patient and whoever it was did this to him.”

  “The patient was unconscious, according to the paramedics,” the thin brunette nurse said noncommitally.

  “And the people who had just finished bashing in his skull,” said the orderly, “well, normally you wouldn’t think they’d be too concerned about his well-being.”

  The staffers dropped their voices and moved toward the door.

  “He’s lucky to still be alive,” the nurse said.

  “If you can call that lucky,” the orderly said with a shrug.

  His Mom, Dad, and brother Ray came to visit him from Wyoming. Although Mike could hear them and understand them, he could not reach out to them, could not respond to them, and that was most frustrating of all. His father looked bewildered and somehow ashamed, muttering about the immoral life Mike had taken up since he left home. Ray, still a teenager, seemed morose and obscurely embarrassed. His mother broke again and again into sobbing hysterical rages against God for His having allowed such a thing to happen to her son, her baby—and had to be removed forcibly from the room three times in as many days.

  Some kind of crisis was going on in the outside world as well, Mike realized dimly. Even in the hospital, computers and monitors in his room were going down unpredictably. The lights kept flickering and the power kept phasing in and out, so much so that the hospital was constantly shifting over to their own generators. The activity of the ward became both heightened and fragmented. To the bustle o
f doctors and nurses and orderlies was added the shouts and calls of frazzled technicians trying to keep systems functioning. It all came to Mike through a semi-conscious haze, like a terrible, vivid nightmare from which he was having difficulty awakening.

  After being assured by the doctors that they would notify his family of any changes in Mike’s condition, Mike’s mother, father, and brother left for home—almost with relief, on all sides—prodded by the great crisis, whatever it was.

  Over the next week, however, not only did the hospital’s power and technology begin to return to something like normal, but Mike’s own condition began to improve markedly—to the distinct surprise of the hospital staff. As it gradually became clearer that there was still “somebody home” in the machine-hooked and IV-ed shell upon the bed, those treating him took pains to tell Mike just how lucky he was.

  “Mister Dalke,” said Dr. Chua, the ever-cheerful therapist who sometimes accompanied the day nurse, “our records show that your temporal lobe seizures—” So that’s what they are, thought Mike, the shuddering waves that felt like grand mal without the release of blackout.... “—are not as frequent as they might be. We have some questions as to whether you will ever be able to speak articulately again, but it says here your pre-trauma IQ was over 150. Our best estimates are that, after extensive therapy, you will probably have lost only about twenty five per cent of your intellectual capacity. That should still leave you better equipped than the majority of the population.”

  Despite such reassurances, Mike did not feel lucky. A social worker—a blonde, chunky, bespectacled young woman—had been assigned to his case. The outlook was not good.

  “You happened to have been between employers and insurers when this unfortunate accident occurred,” she reminded Mike, over the low rubber-jungle noise of the monitors and life-support systems. “You’ve amassed $80,000 in medical bills. You’re unmarried. With the recent infosphere crisis and changes in government, we have not been able to re-contact your surviving family members—”