There hadn’t been enough time to develop a test protocol for the healthy. There were never any screening interventions, no case-finding steps. The average member of the population couldn’t be sure whether or not they had the code inside them at all. Falling ill, dying—those were your proof positive. In the absence of good information, the masses panicked. And it didn’t take long for them to observe that the people falling ill were the ones with the palest skin. So the masses decided that the code was strictly correlated with a person’s color, and for a time there were loosely-organized, impromptu internments and relocations of anyone who appeared at all fair complected. He read that they checked skin tone against paint-sample cards from a ransacked home improvement store, and the cutoff shade was Sunrise Beige #S235.
You couldn’t believe every report you saw. But it was clear that there were wholesale exiles happening back on the mainland, all over the world. The displacement of broad swaths of the population. It seemed like a sensible quarantine measure, but the assumptions turned out to be all wrong. The correlation between skin and code wasn’t absolute. Most of the sick and dying were fair skinned, yes, but not all were. It turned out that you couldn’t predict the absence or presence of the mortis sequence just by observing a person’s skin color. The truth was that no one knew for certain who would fall ill, or at least to his knowledge, no one knew before the outages struck.
The last thing Park read about the sickness was from an online forum—a day later, the power went out across the islet and never came back. The name of the site was The Mortis Rigor. Someone had set it up a few days prior, and already there were hundreds of new threads discussing symptoms, the location of safe havens, the possible treatments. Wild theories on origins. The rumors of cures and the debunking of old myths and the propagation of new, better-sounding myths. There was a post at the top of the forum in the Spotlight section that had over twelve-thousand views and almost three-thousand replies, the latest of which was time-stamped only minutes prior. The name of the post was The Disease of European Heritage. Next to the title was an icon depicting a row of blue stars, reserved for the topic with the most activity over the last hour.
The post read like it was written for a different forum. For another time altogether—a lost time—one in which academic scholarship still existed inside towers of learning and was valued in its own right, for its own sake. There was no profanity or use of ALL CAPS. No statements meant purely to bait others into a series of useless back-and-forth exchanges. No sarcasm in it at all.
The post was talking about homo neanderthalensis. The pre-human taxon. How the range of the species included the entirety of Europe below the glaciation line during the Pleistocene. Both East and West Europe, from Siberia to Great Britain, all the way south into the Balkan region, everywhere. Hundreds of fossil samples have been harvested from the continental peninsula, and more are being found all the time in modern Europe, the post read. You can look this up for yourself. These facts are easily verifiable.
The post went on to explain that the genes of the neanderthal have been entirely sequenced from fossil evidence. Its full genome. Chromosomal, mitochondrial, everything. Coding and non-coding both. The resulting data is freely available, the post said, and for you scientifically-minded, here is a link so you can download the record yourself in .bam format.
The post called on you to open the file if you could. Look at the long arm of chromosome number 6. Region 2, band 1, sub-band 5. Examine the locus. If you can’t make sense of it yourself then find someone who can, or just take my word as a professional. This is the exact genetic address of the mortis sequence. This is where it has always lived. It was there all along, buried deep in the inheritance of homo neanderthalensis.
The mortis sequence should have entirely died out, the post said. The sequence should have gone the way of the neanderthal species itself and been folded quietly into the sedimentary layer—it should never have been introduced into humanity. But right now if we were to generate a full genomic data array for every reader of this post, almost every result would show the presence of genetic material from homo neanderthalensis. It would be there in most of you. Somewhere around two or three percent of your DNA would be neanderthal on average. Even more than that if you have European heritage as part of your background—which includes those of you whose ancestors had European heritage forced upon them, by the way. The number could be as high as five percent for many of you. And for the unluckier members of this group, the mortis sequence is included somewhere in that proportion.
The post ended by discussing the remains of a paleolithic child. A small boy. The way his surprisingly intact skeleton was lifted carefully from the limestone bedrock. A passel of shells and anointing red ochre were still evident in the barrow. The boy was thought to have been around five or six years of age. The dig site was located in central Portugal, and the name of the site was Lagar Mortis. You can look this up anywhere, the post said. These are easily verifiable facts.
The post explained the ways in which the boy was unique—his features showed that he was a mosaic, an admixture. The mandible and the basicranium, the dentition, the length and bowing of the long femur bones, the wider shoulders. All of it was evidence of interbreeding between two lineages previously thought to be separate. The boy was proof—his small leathered body, preserved indelibly in the fetal. Its characteristics were hybridized, reflective of both neanderthals and of early modern Europeans. You can find a link to the child’s genomic dataset here, said the post. Examine it if you can. Chromosome number 6, region 2, band 1, sub-band 5. The mortis sequence is there, present in the core of the hybrid.
When Park wakes, the suite is dark. The pleated blinds plume away from the window and then fall back, and the wooden bead at the end of the draw-cord taps against the drywall, metronomic. He sits upright. The aching of his skull, his shoulders. He stretches his arms, and then he examines the top of his bandaged hand, bending and straightening his stiffened fingers. When he feels ready, he moves the sheet off to one side and he stands.
He goes to the door. Through the fish-eye lens, he can see that the hallway is lit by outage LEDs embedded at intervals along the baseboards. A series of blue pinpoint flares. There is no one outside. He listens for a time, and then he unslots the chain and twists the deadbolt knob. He levers open the door.
There is a parcel of folded clothing at the foot of the entryway. A clear plastic shaving kit. A white dust mask with an elastic tie. A ziploc bag with seven or eight saltines and a square of hotel chocolate wrapped in green foil. Park snatches up everything into his arms and scans the hallway before going back inside.
Still standing in front of the door, he drops everything but the ziploc. He tears it open and eats the crackers three at a time, and when he finishes he turns the bag inside out and he sucks the plastic. He holds the chocolate in his palm awhile. He stares, and for a moment he imagines finding a safe place for it, caching it somewhere and keeping it cool and dry to bring back to his wife along with the medicine, possibly zipping it inside the pouch so she could find a precious thing buried there, emerald green, but in the end he unwraps it. He puts it into his mouth and rests it on his tongue and allows the structure of it to melt there, and he tells himself that he needs the energy and that it wouldn’t have traveled well anyway.
He gathers the new clothes from the floor—jeans and a yellow t-shirt with the logo for a local Torluna tavern. There is a piece of hotel stationery attached to the hem with a safety pin. The Jumellea, the note says. It’s the name of one of the conference rooms in the Makoa building, the largest of them. Before the collapse, Park saw a sign for the Jumellea one morning as he exited the elevator on the way to the SpaClub gym, which is almost funny to think about now.
He dresses himself and uses the safety pin to take in the slack of the jeans’ waistband. He loops the dust mask around his neck. He picks up the shaving kit and heads into the bathroom.
The moon coming through a line of frosted glass
-brick windows is enough to see by. Park looks at his mirrored reflection—the first true picture of his face he’s had in months—and he tries to prepare for it but there’s no way to steel himself for this. So achingly thin. The complete set of his bones is visible, angular. The length of his knotted hair and the sallowness around the eyes. His skin has browned by several shades under a constant sun.
He opens the kit and finds a blue plastic razor, a black comb, and a small set of grooming scissors. Toothpaste and a toothbrush, the kind that needs to be assembled, and a throwaway cardboard nail file and two Q-tips. Three ounces of shave cream. A sewing kit with black and blue thread and a red plastic thimble.
He takes the scissors and teases out sections of his hair and blunts them down. He gets as close to the scalp as he can, working his way around the bite marks, and when he finishes he gives the same treatment to the beard growth on his face. He shaves with the razor and cream. He spends a long time brushing every single one of his teeth on all sides.
He goes back to the bed and sits. He works on his nails, dredging out the dirt with a scissor blade and paring down the length and finishing them with the coarse file, and when everything is done, he lies back on the mattress. He watches the trees outside until he nods off again.
Light from the window wakes him the next morning. He goes directly to the door and opens it, but there is nothing new waiting for him. He returns to the bathroom and brushes his teeth again and then his tongue. He doesn’t look up at the mirror at all this time.
He takes the needle from the sewing kit, and with the thimble he pushes it most of the way into the rubber outsole of his right shoe. Just enough of the metal sliver protrudes so that he could pinch with his fingers and remove it if he needed to. He holds the thimble steady on the tabletop and pushes the blade-points of the scissors into the plastic interior, embedding them, using the thimble as a makeshift sheath, and then he pockets the scissors, front-right.
He opens the door of the room, propping it with his foot, and stands in the entryway as he folds the piece of stationery and slips it between the spring wedge and the jamb assembly. He steps into the hallway and eases the door closed, holding the paper in place. There is no click sound. He can see a thin line of window light through the gap.
In the hall, the emergency outage LEDs are the only light source—small blooms along the wall on each side every five feet or so. The black patterned carpeting. Park walks the hallway in the direction of the main entrance, toward the conference rooms.
He listens as he passes by each guest room door, all of them closed, and he hears no movement, no voices. The corridor is silent. There’s no way of knowing how many of these rooms are occupied, if any of them are. He keeps walking until the hallway opens into a small reception area, completely vacant, and there is a bank of lifeless elevator lifts to his right. He presses the call button with his thumb as he goes by, just to remember the feeling of such simple causality.
He passes through the Makoa’s main entrance lobby and follows the signs to the conference rooms. He passes the Hawkmoth and the Cymbidium. Then the Liparis. The Calanthe. Lastly, he reaches the Jumellea on the right. The card-reader mechanism that controls the locks has been disabled. The front panel is open, the electronics exposed, the battery. He opens the door and enters the room.
A woman is inside, one of the women in masks. A faded grey sundress. She is standing beside a teak conference table at room’s center, holding a service tray in one hand, watching him. Black office chairs with casters are spread around the circumference.
There are plates on the tabletop. Silver flatware. The woman pauses for a moment, and then without a word she resumes gathering the dishes and placing them on the tray. Circling the table. She doesn’t look up at him again.
A warm light from the outside filters down through windows built into the domed ceiling. Park walks to the table and he takes up one of the plates and holds it close, inhaling the scent of the residue—the smell of meat, of heated animal flesh—and something about the smell makes his mind slip loose, become untethered. He brings the plate to his mouth and tongues the surface like a dog, and the taste is something he never thought he’d sample again in this accursed life. When he finishes, he sets the plate down hard and takes up another, and then another, and then he goes to the woman and snatches the tray from her hand. She offers no resistance.
When Park finishes with the plates, the woman asks him to sit down, and her voice is thickly slurred under the mask. She brings him a chair. Stay here, she tells him. She exits the room, and he immediately rolls the chair to the side of the table furthest from the door, facing it, and he takes one of the serrated steak knives from the tray and sits back down, holding the knife low in his lap, out of view.
After a short wait, a man enters—the same man who pulled him to his feet the day prior. Strikingly tall and reed-thin. Closely cropped white hair. Chapped and reddened skin, the kind you earn through surviving an endless cycle of exposure to salt water, to sun, to a hard wind. He could be in his fifties, sixties, it’s hard to say.
The man is smiling. His white, squared-off teeth. He is removing a pair of soiled garden gloves finger by finger, and when he has them both off he holds them by the cuffs and slaps them a few times against his thighs. There is a dirt-caked bolo machete hanging from a belt holster clipped at his waist, the same machete the Lavelha garden staff used to carry, beating back the ever-wild Torluna landscape while the guests slept.
No one says anything. The man folds the gloves and pockets them and then approaches the table. Still standing, he leans forward on the surface with both hands. The raised, red welts are visible on his arms, running from wrists to biceps.
“I am glad you came,” says the man.
The man says more than that—going on in his low, droning voice, slightly accented—but Park isn’t really listening to him. Lately his mind is having more and more difficulty catching on to the events around him, almost like a bicycle that keeps slipping gears. Soon Park decides that it would be a good idea to interrupt the man.
“Is there any more?” Park asks.
The man stops speaking mid-sentence. He pauses for a moment, staring. “More what?”
Park points at an empty plate in front of him.
The man smiles. “Yes. There is,” he says.
And Park waits, but the man doesn’t say anything further. There is no offer, no invitation, and Park doesn’t ask again. They lapse into silence.
After a time the man says, “Don’t you first want to know what it is? What it’s made from?”
Park shrugs. “Have you had it before today?”
The man nods. “Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Too many,” says the man.
“And it stays down? For all of you?”
The man looks at him, frowning. “What does it mean, stay down?”
“It doesn’t make you sick?”
The man is smiling again. “No.”
“Then I don’t care what it is.”
“You just want it,” says the man.
“I do,” Park answers.
The man stops smiling. He shakes his head slowly side to side. “You’re hungry,” he says. “I understand that. But you will need to understand what I’ve built here if you want it to feed you.”
The man takes him outside. Park doesn’t want to leave the building, its relative safety, but the man tells him to go, so he does. The man leads him on a tour across the sheltered grounds behind the Makoa building, and as they walk together Park stays several steps back, trailing. The steak knife is secured in the waistband of his jeans, at the base of his spine.
The man is gesturing, making references to landmarks. Pointing to places where he’s seen things happen, things you don’t want to remember but you remember anyway because you can’t help it. At some point the man abruptly stops walking and turns to Park and says that his name is Nil. They shake hands, and Park notices again the lesions developing up
and down the man’s corded forearms.
It’s becoming clear that this man is sick. He isn’t too far along—everyone seems to succumb at their own rate, according to their own constitution. Their own individual capacity to resist. The man is fighting the good fight, but it’s obvious that the mortis sequence is there, active, inside him. The changes in his skin are one sure sign but they’re not the only sign. There is also the way the man moves, stiffly, and the frenetic pace of his thoughts pouring out and the empty expression in his eyes that goes far beyond ordinary hunger. The pure famishment in him.
Nil tells him that he originates from Stockholm—Östermalm district, have you heard of it?—but he’s been in America for almost forty years. Long enough to be more U.S. than Sverige, he says. Then he tells Park that he came here to this islet to find a kind of paradise and that he did; he found it. I achieved what I wanted without even knowing my true want for it, Nil says. How golden can a man’s luck be?
Together they walk the perimeter of the private Makoa grounds, keeping close to the base of the white wall that runs, fifteen feet high, all the way around the hotel Lavelha. Park remembers the way that the private grounds looked before the collapse. Everything cultivated and groomed—immaculate—with a broad lawn area and an acre-wide rare orchid display, for God’s sake. Several white alhambra gazebos with red roofs. A small, open-air, natural amphitheater was once carved out of the earth at the south end, and a troupe of Mirasai women would stage a dance performance for the tourists each Tuesday and Thursday after dinner service. A footpath used to wind through the copse of tamarind trees, and there were small, unobtrusive placards identifying every native plant by its genus. Secluded bowers with canopy swings and wicker benches. But everything is gone now—everything has either been taken apart by scavengers or overtaken by a dense, bristling foliage, like a reclamation.
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