by Unknown
25. Later on, these townspeople would meet Aaron-T at an elementary school art show, a firehouse bean supper, or the village store, notice his dirty blond hair, scraggly beard, and the husky physique of a high school running back gone a bit sedentary, and think, I’ve seen this fella before, don’t know where, but I don’t like the looks of him.
26. Aaron-T complained to Chloe that people in this town didn’t seem so friendly. Having grown up in Midcoast Maine, she knew what to expect, or thought she did, and told him it must be his Southern accent, the fact that he was so obviously “from away.” “Give ’em time and space,” she urged. “They’ll warm up to ya.”
27. In fact, she had already found her peer group of stay-at-home-moms and worried about her husband’s apparent inability to make friends in town. She was especially perplexed by the reluctance of Jared’s friends’ parents to send their kids over for playdates. Aaron, ordinarily jovial, became gloomy whenever he came home. Increasingly he found reasons to work late hours at the university, attend functions on campus, or go away on conference or research travel. His constructed front had bifurcated: engaged and well-liked among his peers, resigned to domestic isolation at home, and preferring the former to the latter.
28. “Gotta make tenure,” was all he said to her by way of an excuse. He still torrented from time to time—his research was on comparative graphic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—but now it was in service to the exigent demands of scholarly productivity, not an inner compulsion.
29. One balmy evening in mid-September, a housewife whose name has been withheld by the authorities but who everyone knows was Emma Farnsworth over on Pine Drive came home to find Aaron-H in her son Jeffrey’s first-floor bedroom next to an open window, knee deep in Iron Man underpants.
30. He got out of there right away—in fact he vanished, though everyone assumed he jumped out the window and ran—but Emma got a good look at him. Since Jeffrey and Jared were in the same kindergarten class, best friends really, she recognized the figure as Jared’s father, Aaron. A bit wavy, perhaps, in the lines of his face, but definitely him, she concluded, after about five minutes of failing to convince herself that there was no way it could possibly be. Of course she called the sheriff ’s department.
31. When Sheriff Dunleavy showed up on the Burch’s doorstep asking where Aaron was but being cagey as to why, Chloe assured him that, whatever this was all about, there was no way Aaron could have been involved. “He’s been down in Boston the last three days,” she said. “At a conference. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, so you can ask him yourself.”
32. Unfortunately for the Burch family, there was no such conference. Aaron-T was at a B&B in Bar Harbor, balls deep in Su-Min Young, the new tenure-track hire in his department and a first-generation Korean-American by way of Flushing, Queens, who found his accent and his encyclopedic knowledge of manhwa irresistibly charming.
33. If he had been able to acknowledge this to Sheriff Dunleavy and his wife, he might not have been arrested the next morning for breaking and entering. Dunleavy would have loved to throw the book at him, but he could not find underwear sniffing anywhere in the Maine Criminal Code. The rumors all over town that he had done worse things to other little boys were just that, rumors, and nothing that could hold up in a court of law. All those kids swore it was just a bad dream, a bogeyman, if you could get them to talk at all. As a mere tatemae, Aaron-T had bound himself into an insoluble contradiction between his on-campus front as a friendly lothario and his North Glamis front as a devoted though antisocial husband and father. For more than a year he had lived without a true self to arbitrate his actions, and that honne had dragged him into a situation he found inconceivable.
34. Aaron-T spent the night in jail. Chloe bailed him out the next morning but told him that she and Jared were packed and going to Brunswick to stay with her parents. No, she did not know when they would come back. She did not know if they would come back. If even one of the hundred rumors around town were true, she couldn’t spend another minute with him.
35. “I never laid a finger on Jared or any of those boys,” he swore.
36. “How can I believe that? Where were you?” she asked. In her mind, his silence was sufficient indictment.
37. As Chloe backed her Subaru out of the garage and down the driveway, Aaron-T took a seat in his. Aaron-H slipped in under the closing garage door.
38. Aaron-T started the engine and opened the windows; Aaron-H hovered over the passenger seat. As alarms began to blare in the house, Aaron-T inhaled Aaron-H through his nostrils.
Chapter 1: The President Waited On
1
The date from which the tale is set forth matters little; to begin with the awakening of its protagonist is a mere convenience for the telling. Still, he had awakened just slightly later than usual this morning.
Clinging to the edge of a rusted metal deck one hundred meters above the surface of the sea was a row of tear-shaped sleepsacs, their gnarled and withered hind legs dangling from their undersides.
Nearly all of them were shriveled and dried, and only one, at the rightmost end of the row, yet retained its original form, swelling outward in the shape of a ripened fig. From the muscular tightgate that protruded from its upper tip there sprouted the rather dimwitted-looking face of a worker. Borne forward by the action of lickstrings connected to the sleepsac’s inner membrane, the worker’s slender, naked form was vomited out onto the deck, trailing behind it sticky threads of secretion.
The name of the worker was GyoVuReU’UNN. Although he had no memory himself of having ever been called by that name, there were no other freewalking assimiants at his workplace, so this was not a problem for him.
The worker’s shoulders quivered, and when he raised up his body, it was with movements similar to the curling of a burning piece of paper. His feet were dripping wet with amnesiotic fluid, and taking care not to let himself slip on it, he stood erect on a deck lacking so much as a single guardrail. In his ears, he could still hear the indistinct voices of countless, unknown colleagues whispering to one another.
“Stand up on the deck” / “I don’t want to remember anymore” / “That was an awful sight” / “What’s awful is it’s just like everyone says” / “It’s what they call collective unconsciousness” / “Like they had before” / “I don’t remember that” / “I never seen it” / “Maybe you were just delirious” / “We’ve been really oppressed” / “By the way, I hear the next town over is closed off …”
The worker came fully awake as peeling, rusted iron bit into the soles of his feet. A sweetness and a grainy, figlike texture was spreading into every corner of his mouth. This was the flavor he always tasted whenever he came out of the sleepsac. Although the concentrated sweetness of dried figs was his favorite, the worker had never actually eaten one.
The last of the amnesiotic fluid dribbled out of his ears, a strong cold wind brushed against his eardrums, and the muffled sound of the waves came to him. At the creaking of iron that could be heard between them occasionally, the worker frowned.
Death awaited should he lose his footing. And yet it was always after the danger had passed that he felt most conscious of it. Seeking to ease the stiffness in his neck, he turned his head southward to look across the dark, steel-blue vastness of the sea, into the blur of mists in the distance.
It looked as though the deck were floating high up in the sky. At one time, the worker had been quite sure that it was, but then he was made to help repair the lift one day, and dangling from the edge of the platform had been lowered to about fifty meters beneath it. Or had it been the time he tried to escape by way of the lift? In any case, he had learned that day that the platform was supported by many long, thick steel columns lashed to one another. And on the face of the sea below his gaze, the waves had been crashing against a group of small islands. The steel support columns rose up from the centers of these islands—islands composed of rotting heaps
of flesh: the piled corpses of stringbeasts such as coffin-eels and bloodtide wayfarers that had tried and failed to climb up to the office building atop the deck.
Pinching the left ear that was supposed to have been ripped off as punishment for having tried to run away, the worker looked up at the overhanging cliffs of landfill strata that towered above him on the eastern side. It was not merely a projection of his psychological state that made their striped patterns look different every time he saw them; even now, the willy-nilly counterfeiting of all manner of industrial products from the eidos of each one—and the collapse of those goods beneath their own weight—was ongoing.
Unable to entirely let go of his hopes of retirement, the worker made a visual estimate of the distance to the cliff. Although it looked rather close, he realized belatedly that there was no way he could leap across, and let out a long sigh.
He turned around and before his eyes stood the company building, looking like the tongue of some giant that had been cut out and placed vertically on its end. Skinboard-paneled walls that in the beginning had been breathing now bore the scars of the canvassers’ repeated sales calls, and now covered in scar tissue the walls could no longer breathe easily.
The worker, having completed his commute to the office in only ten paces, set his center of gravity in his hips, slid open an iron door that was more than twice his height, and stepped into the stuffy, humid air of the corridor.
As he was closing the iron door, he felt an unpleasant, oppressive feeling, like being swallowed whole into the gullet of a coffin eel. He turned around and saw a pair of thighs right in front of him, with far too wide a space between them.
The worker’s gaze crawled upward along the ridges of a special fabric knitted from muscle fiber, and sticking out from the wide opening of its collar was an eyeless, noseless, mouthless, semitransparent head whose shape mimicked that of the office building itself. Tiny particles and a smooth, glossy sheen slid across its surface as it looked down at the worker.
“Mr. President!” the worker said shrilly, adding, “Good morning,” once he had steadied his breathing.
Wrapped in a sleeve of knitted meat, the president’s long arm twisted as it curled upward. Four fat fingers—their bones and nerves visible under translucent skin—pointed toward the inner room. Tiny bubbles of air fizzed from the spherical surfaces of his fingertips. When this was apparently insufficient to get his point across, he stretched his fingers still farther outward, and the pressure within his corpuscyte instantly ruptured the shells of the waybugs that lurked inside the digits. He showed the worker their still-beating hearts—about the size of sesame seeds—as they floated clear of the puffy clouds of red now spreading out in his fingers. The hearts continued to tick away with unnerving speed.
It dawned on the worker then that he had apparently come into the office later than usual. Was something wrong with his sleepsac these days? His regurgitation time was lagging.
The president’s featureless face descended until it was right before his eyes. Within its interior, bone fragments, scales, and air bubbles floated, and a morel-shaped organ of unfathomable function bobbed back and forth with an irregular rhythm, managing to shift its position considerably though wrapped all around with winding, branching nerves and blood vessels. In the midst of a face that almost seemed made of inorganic matter, an indentation suddenly began to sink inward. All around the deepening hollow, the face was starting to roil with waves, until suddenly the hollow deepened and began to vibrate.
“GUEVOoOo—UENGuUuUNNuN—GUEPU, VV!”
The piercing cry reverberated all through the building. He was urging the worker to see to his disinfecting right away and get to his seat.
It was not, however, through the comprehension of words that the worker had arrived at this understanding; rather, it was the president’s gestures and tone of voice that led him to that conclusion. The worker sometimes wrote down the president’s words to try to learn to speak his language, but when he tried to say them aloud later, they would come out with a ring that simultaneously resembled the original and sounded nothing like it. Given the structure of his larynx, the best the worker could do was make a noise like a clogged sewer pipe backing up. Or like someone doggedly clearing his throat to expel a mass of phlegm.
The worker threaded his way down a narrow path along which wound a synthorganic digestive tract, and went into the powder room. The space enclosed by its scaly walls was only barely wide enough for one person to stand. Still, being there allowed him to recover a slight trace of his composure.
Standing flush against the wall, he lifted up the grated floor, faced the hole, and let his immature excretory organs do their business into a pit through which whistled a distant, vacant-sounding wind. Replacing the grated floorpiece, he then stood atop it and turned a brass, starfish-shaped handle on the scaly wall. Pure water, filtered through the purification tank, showered down on him from overhead. As beaded drops of lukewarm water drummed against every inch of his body, he grabbed a bar of winedregs hanging from the wall and began scrubbing away at himself, scouring off the filth that his eyes couldn’t see. These dregs the worker had himself scraped from the bellies of winesprites.
A lock of hair got tangled in his fingers, knotted up, and came loose. Its gleam called to mind an image of glass fiber, and the worker stared at it, captivated. At what point had it become so faded and white? He was still too young to have his hair turning silver. He was only thirty-two, wasn’t he? But in the instant that he thought that, he wondered again if he wasn’t fifty-four. And after he had corrected himself yet again—No, I was twenty eight!—he stopped thinking about it. He grabbed a meatpleat that was hanging on the wall and wiped off his dripping body. The intestines of sand leeches formed droppings hard enough to use as bullets, so it was hardly surprising that they dried his skin in no time.
He went back to the corridor and pulled a gray work uniform down off the wall. It was the sort of business suit that an accountant might have worn long, long ago, but that was to be expected; for some reason all the clothes the company provided were a little formal.
When he arrived in the workshop, the president was slowly pacing in front of the faintly glowing dependency tanks, the varied medicine bottles, and the jumble of synthorgans lining the ten shelves that were built along the U-shaped wall.
Stepping forward at what he judged to be the proper moment, the worker slid—or was driven—into one corner of the workbench. When he lowered himself into a leather chair that was deeply stained from medicinal fluids, an IV drip keeping him quasi-alive, all three slabs of slimecake were already spread out on the table, sliced into shapes anticipating the organs they would be sculpted into.
Hurriedly, he slid his hands into a pair of skingloves ridged with stillvein cords. Experiencing the odd sensation of joining hands with some total stranger, he opened his toolbox and laid out the needler, the tube-shaped reaction mirror, and the other implements he would need.
The worker jabbed his needler into the cut face of the slimecake and injected the guidejuice, then the president held out his thick fingers—perfectly motionless—and forced from their tips waybugs about the size of grains of rice. At any given time, about five hundred waybugs were being nourished amid the currents of the president’s body, receiving training according to their specialized functions. No sooner had the waybugs fallen onto the slimecake, they sought out the needle marks and burrowed in, expelling silver thread from their anuses as they tunneled along either vertically or horizontally, each in its turn raising a little ridge in the surface as it went. At last the waybugs emerged from the cut faces at fixed distances one from the other, and the worker touched each with a pair of red-hot tongs. Their shells split open with brittle sounds, and their bodily fluids sizzled as they vaporized.
Every time the worker saw waybugs crawling around like ants, his breath started to seize up. The sight always took him back to the hills of S
tillville, located thirty kilometers away on the mainland. With pointed jaws radiating outward from bodies about the size of a puppy dog’s, the ants there had dug countless tunnels into the coaguland, and because of that, a large group of winesprites, their shells piled up one against the other on the surface, had all at once sunk into the ground. The worker vicariously experienced the torment of suffocating while caught up in the midst of that rescue operation, while the president stretched one arm all the way up to a shelf near the ceiling, grabbed hold of a few things, and tossed them down onto the bench.
There were three different kinds of neurofungi. Their threadlike, raw-white bodies twisted and wrapped themselves around each other, painful even to look at.
The stupid things you come up with! If I died of suffocation back then, who is it that’s handling these slime molds right now?
The worker drove the disquieting memory from his mind. He laid the molds down on a tray where a great deal of powdered dogshell had been sprinkled and turned them over. This step was to prevent them from taking root in the slimecake too quickly.
When he first started here, he had worked barehanded and once let a neurofungus adhere to his fingertip. That had ended with him on the floor, writhing in white-hot agony. But now he was able to braid neurofungi into spiral cords with nimble, experienced hands.