Something fell out of a tree. Something hard wrapped in something soft. It collided sloppily with a brittle tin roof from the burned-out settlement on the bank, voiding the night of birdsong with its clamor. Burtson crouched reflexively, breathlessly, hugging the rifle to his chest as he hunched in the muck. Toshikazu went on cutting through the water like nothing had happened. This was pretty much the way Toshikazu operated. One morning, Burtson had awoken to the sight of a translucent orange scorpion perched on Toshikazu's face. "Hey man," Burtson had whispered, lightly gripping Toshikazu's shoulder, "Hey man, I don't mean to alarm you? But there's something on your face." Toshikazu opened his eyes, trained them on the insect, and quickly stuffed it into his mouth, chewing fast. All the while, his features were as calm and composed as a white wooden chair. When he'd finished chewing he rolled over and his face went slack almost immediately, weighty with sleep.
Scorpion on his face.
The swamp deepened without fanfare. The water rushed up to his chest, roiling up into the trough of his armpits, suddenly and outrageously cold. He smallened.
"What's this? How much deeper will this go?"
Toshikazu did not respond.
"So that's it? Once we're in the thick of it, you ignore me? You certainly had a lot to say back at base camp. You certainly had a lot to say during that impromptu session of baccarat. Remember the fleecing you gave me? Remember the noogie? I do. It's still right here, pulsing at the back of my head. Just like you were giving it to me still."
Toshikazu turned around abruptly. "Simmer down."
"What? What was that? Could you repeat yourself? I could hardly understand what you were saying-you know why? Maybe because you were actually using language."
Toshikazu launched a stare, something hard and remote, so that Burtson wished he hadn't said anything. "You want to know why I don't talk to you out here? You're an embarrassment."
"No disrespect? I know a certain ball team, a well known team of young black men, a team of men that I own, all of whom would disagree with you."
Toshikazu paused by a felled, half-submerged tree and climbed silently onto the warped trunk. "Look there."
Up ahead they saw a tiny square of light flickering in the dark humidity.
"That's it? That's the stronghold?"
"No. That's a trap."
"How can you tell?"
Toshikazu hefted a small rocket launcher to his shoulder, aimed, and fired a purplish, whiffled sphere, which made a bright howling noise as it tore through the black shrubs. The house from which the light emanated lit up for a moment from the incandescent spray of the rocket-it was a boxy, pitched-beam hut, nailed in with tin sheets and old traffic signs. Then it exploded in a wild, thudding ring of gas and wood chips.
Burtson fell back without realizing and got a mouthful of swamp. The inside of his skull went green and bright.
He floated in place on his back, his jacket snagged on a broken branch. Toshikazu crouched at a distance, poking carefully at the rubble with a twig. Burtson struggled briefly to uncouple himself from the branch but he couldn't reach far enough behind him to unhook his collar.
"Please don't do that again," he said when Toshikazu finally waded back to release him. "Please don't blow anything up. That's not necessary."
"There were bodies in the rubble."
"Come again?"
"Neither of them were your son. Let's keep going."
Burtson crawled up the outcropping and poked at the charred hunks of wood with a long branch. "Hey could you-I mean, I'm just wondering you said there were bodies? In that rubble? The rubble that you, essentially, well, caused?"
Toshikazu was off already, his arms lifted above his chest as he sank deeper into the swamp. Burtson tugged at the cord-his desk was wedged between two half-submerged root balls. He quietly conjured a plume of regret for having overpacked.
It was dark, so dark that even the still things seemed to heave and quake, their outlines no longer registering-the border between the objects and the indefinable world beyond hopelessly blurred and blackened. The night always made him think of Alan, of the terror the moon brought. Marion insisted Alan sleep in their bed as a baby instead of in a crib, so that when he grew too big to fit, he was incapable of sleeping on his own. In order to wean Alan from the master bedroom, Burtson stayed awake night after night, escorting the boy through the nameless hours as they advanced and ebbed with monolithic fury. He read the boy to sleep, literally bludgeoning Alan with language until the words took him out of commission. He burned through all of the books on the boy's shelf, and when he'd read them again, and through a third time, he began to read from his own collection, books about power and influence, how to broker a deal, books on military strategy, books on the construction of factories, of networked enterprise systems, of team leadership and supply chain management, of ancient battleships and the gray'd, stoic men at their helm. He read until his voice went flat and wisped, until the thought of words was so unbearable he couldn't read any more-like there was a man standing behind him, stuffing his mouth with dry paper towels each time he flexed his jaw. He'd gag and spit; unable, suddenly, to concentrate on anything else. By the time dawn flickered, he felt nearly drowned. He longed for the moment when the light through the window finally overpowered the light from the boy's nightstand, but when it came, he couldn't help feeling that something was being taken from him as well. Those hours he shared with Alan were his-those interminable vigils during which he could truly believe that he was keeping the boy from something.
Now the boy was reading on his own-material he was never meant to read. Now, in this part of life, Alan was doing all the talking. What had happened? How had the boy taken Burtson down like this? He couldn't remember when Alan lost his terror of night. It must have been slow, gradual, imperceptible as evolution itself. But suddenly the boy was out there, acting on his own recognizance. Burtson had expected rebellion, sure. But this betrayal-he could very well have handed the company over to Alan at some point. All the kid had to do was hang in there. Now he was blowing the secret to the world's most successful branded snack cake?
Toshikazu set up a tent on the bank of the swamp, next to a hideous decaying trunk. The tent was low to the ground, so you had to get on all fours to enter. It was barely big enough for the two of them.
"This is how they do it these days?" Burtson said, running his finger along the tent fabric, which was gauzy and light, right up against his face.
"Keeps in the heat. Keeps a low profile."
"Last time I camped, the tents were canvas."
Toshikazu turned over.
"You have anyone?"
Toshikazu opened one opalescent eye. "Once."
"Really? A wife?"
"Yes."
"Tell me about it." Burtson turned, propped himself up on an elbow. His head made a zipping sound against the tent fabric.
"It's not something you want to hear."
"Sure I do."
"No."
"Come on-we're out here-might as well burn off the night."
"You asked me, and you are only American," Toshikazu said, breathing lightly, "So I will tell you what happened. It's an interesting story. My wife and I moved to America shortly after we married. We didn't know much about the country. We just flew to America. It was something we both felt we needed. We didn't have a plan-we just rented a car at the airport and started driving. We drove until it started to snow, and when it snowed so hard we couldn't see, we turned off the highway into the parking lot of a family-style restaurant. The restaurant was in a shopping mall, which was surrounded by deep, man-made moats. It was difficult to navigate through the parking lot of this mall because of all of the lakes and moats, the man-made waterways, what have you. The whole parking lot was blanketed in snow. We drove very slowly, hoping to navigate by feel. I thought about our old house, how I had rigged up all of the lights inside to turn on automatically whenever we were away, to give the impression that we were still home. I thought ab
out those lights, coming on at dusk in the empty house. It occurred to me then, and never before, who was I creating this display for? Who were we trying to fool? I thought too hard about this, because I drove us into one of the man-made lakes. There was a horrible grating noise as the car plowed through the ice ringing the lake's perimeter. The car floated out into the middle of the lake, sinking slowly as it did. I managed to get out of the car through the driver's-side window. I climbed on top of the car. It was so quiet out, I could hear only the snow falling on the parking lot. It was loud, like the cheer of a thousand fans at a soccer match. But there was no other sound. The city was choked off."
"Your wife-"
"She was caught inside. I was on top."
"But couldn't you-I mean could you not help her?" Burtson conjured the words as a scold, but they emerged more plealike.
Toshikazu blinked twice. It was the first time Burtson had seen him do this. "I don't know. I felt like only one of us was going to make it. I might have let her die there."
"That's nonsense. You wouldn't be able to-to do that. No one could let someone die like that."
"Now that you know what I am capable of, I would like to get some sleep." Toshikazu drew a section of sleeping bag up over his head and turned over, facing away from Burtson.
THE NEXT DAY they had to climb a sheer cliff, which took longer than it might have if Burtson had not taken along his desk, which was heavy, even though it was only imitation mahogany. The rolltop kept opening up, jettisoning a cloud of yellow legal paper, which tumbled wildly, scatteringly down the face of the rock. Every time this happened, they had to secure the desk to the cliff face using spikes and rope, and Burtson had to climb down and retrieve each piece of paper.
In the afternoon, Toshikazu grew tired of waiting and picked up a healthy pace. He set up camp along the ridge, sauteing mushrooms while attempting to zero in on Alan's transmissions using a squat red crank radio. Burtson threw a leg over the edge for balance and asked Toshikazu, "A little help?"
His face was purpled and splotched, spattered with dirt and mucus. His hands were trembling so that he could barely grasp the nylon cord. Toshikazu yanked the desk up over the ridge while Burtson collapsed next to the fire. His eyes stung with hot sweat. He could barely open them-he had to struggle, like at the end of a dream when suddenly things go dark, and it takes all of one's strength to move inches.
"Just set it up over there," he said, motioning lamely to a dirty clear spot by a stand of trees.
Toshikazu put the desk down and returned to the fire. "You made me burn the mushrooms," he said, staring evenly into the smoldering pan.
"Good," Burtson said. "I don't go for mushrooms. Humans weren't meant to eat dirt."
"I'm afraid that's your only choice tonight."
Burtson palmed the dry soil before him. He bunched it up, cupping the mound in his hand, as if it were a breast.
"I still don't understand why you would let her die like that."
"I don't know that I let her. It's just that I didn't let her live."
"Are you going to kill my son?"
"Isn't that what we're here for?"
Burtson turned over. At the horizon, the sky was a raging, red cloudmass, like the throat of an old desert lizard. But up above, he could see stars punching through the navy impossibility of outer space. "I want to offer him a chance. Just one."
"Your staff will kill him if we don't."
"I know, I know. I'm just thinking that I could ship him off somewhere. Put a sombrero on him, a false mustache, send him down to Argentina. Isn't that where all the Nazis went after the war?"
"They'll find him. There is no Argentina."
Toshikazu scrolled through the stations on the shortwave. There was a popping noise, and then a sort of phased, intermittent tone, and then a voice. At first it seemed to be running backward, generating a childlike nonsense language. But Toshikazu homed in on the voice, setting the dial so that it was crystal clear. It was Alan, listing with a patient and even tone the ingredients of the Whatever!?!Round.
"Dextrose-okay, listen carefully to this one. I'm going to try to pronounce it and then I'm going to spell it out, because I don't really know how to pronounce this one. `Maleodexetrine Sulfate'? Does that sound right? M-A-L ... Apparently, you inject 200 cc's of this substance into the slurry-E-O-D ..."
Burtson crawled over to the speaker of the shortwave and held his ear very close to it, listening very carefully, as if, in getting closer, he could actually approximate himself geographically to his son. It was an action he knew Toshikazu found pathetic. Burtson would find it pathetic as well, if he were watching from anywhere outside his own body. Unduly and egregiously sentimental. But the voice was arresting, dark and melodic, possessed of an assuredness he hadn't imagined Alan capable of. He could hear, in the brief intervals between breaths, or in the throat clearing, or during the pauses to keep the microphone from falling over in the wind, a tuneful, barely perceptible cough, one Burtson knew from those early years, the pre-KraftMark years, a time of unsustainable pressure, in which he was working late into the nights, away from home, high up on the twenty-third floor of an office building that, at night, might as well have been the bridge of an enormous spacecraft, adrift in deep space, all the city's lights like distant stars, his son the inhabitant of a planet he could barely remember. He'd come home and shuffle, on his knees, to the side of Alan's bed to tender him into sleep. The boy would twitch occasionally, shifting in the sheets, making that coughing sound, like the cough of a vole or some other burrowing rodent, an animal that wanted nothing more than to go unnoticed.
"He's transmitting from a mountain top," Toshikazu said, rising to scan the horizon, his voice suddenly fraught with tremors.
"Know what?" Burtson said, "I'm fine with this. I'm good. He's not doing anyone any harm. He's just crazy. Let him stay here, that's what I say. Let the crazy kook live up here on the mountain. He's not hurting anybody. Let's head back to base camp."
Toshikazu looked back sharply. "Don't do this. Allow your son the terminal dignity of dying by your own hand. Don't let them do it. They'll tear open his nutsack and scrub out his genes with a wire brush. They'll staple his hands to his buttocks and throw him out of a helicopter into the main square of some remote village. You want that for your son?"
"Nobody wants that."
"Pick up your things and let's go."
Burtson heaved himself up, scraping open a kneecap on a toothsome mound of jagged black rock. He wished for an aerosol can of Secret Skin, the kind he used to spray over Alan's playground injuries. He attached the nylon cords from the desk to his harness and lurched forward, following Toshikazu at a lame, distant pace.
As the night overtook the sky behind them, pressing at their backs like a suffocating tarp, Toshikazu spotted a silhouetted figure seated on a ridge. He crouched behind a stand of weeds, pointing the figure out to Burtson, who couldn't make anything out. It was all just jaggedness and splinters against the red flush of the dying sun.
"This is the end of my job," he said, squinting at the distant point.
"How do I do this?" Burtson's shoulders started to gyrate uncontrollably. He crossed his arms, pressing his palms against his ribcage, but he couldn't hold back the twitching muscles that hijacked his torso.
"Just like we did in the training sessions." Toshikazu slipped the rifle from its polyester case.
"Those were dummies. Those were stuffed dummies."
"The human body is really just a moist, complex version of those dummies." He loaded the magazine and powered on the infrared sight before handing it to Burtson, who held it like a candy bar.
"I think you're a little out of line."
"Nobody on this mountain is anything more than a brilliantly designed sack. The only distinguishing feature is what others have crammed inside us over time."
"An interesting take. I wonder what your wife would have thought about that."
Toshikazu pressed the knuckles of his right ha
nd up into his top teeth.
Burtson held the rifle in front of him, as far from his chest as he could reach. "If you don't mind, please remind me how to aim this thing. I'd like to get this over with."
"Figure it out. Figure it out your goddamned motherfucking self." Toshikazu turned away and dropped down from the cliff edge in a swift, deliberate arc.
Burtson hefted the rifle. It was all trigger, all form factor; it fit into the crook of his arm like a newborn. There was a scope, larger in diameter than a baseball bat, and it looked like it needed to be turned on. He turned it over in his hands again and again, but it never made any more sense. He decided to give it a shot anyway. There was a sort of raised fin on the nozzle, so he used this for aim. He heard Toshikazu behind him. "That's not-look, you're going to hurt yourself."
He felt something surge up in him, something heavy and luminescent. It rose up in his chest cage, topping off at the back of his throat. It was a feeling he remembered not in his conscious memory but in the larger memory everybody shared, the memory of the flattened, husky humanoids who knocked around in squat forests in the years before time mattered, making a dim impression in their respective tribes by killing up whole herds with insensate panache. The feeling made sense-he was aware, fully, maybe for the first time, of the extent of his body's capabilities. There were no more illusions-he knew he was not a superhero-he knew he could not burst through a brick wall or kick a man's balls up through his chest. It was a sober, rational summary of what he could do with his body.
The Apocalypse Reader Page 6