by Larry Doyle
Squatting in the center of the ovoid office was a cadaverous old man, naked but for a long white ensnarlment of hair and beard that grew to his lap. He was avidly picking one of his three-inch toenails with a five-inch fingernail.
His introduction to the Civics viz had been recorded some time ago.
“The President?” J!m asked.
The general, stony: “He’s been under a lot of stress.” The President also had an advanced case of Camusian sisyphysilis, an obstinate xenereal disease he’d contracted from a Leonine showgirl in the fifties, which had colored his view of alien relations and eaten the choicest parts of his brain.
“This explains a lot,” Johnny said.
The general tapped on the glass.
“Mr. President?”
The President grunted and looked up with black eyes. He ambled toward them, half sideways, retreating twice, before coming right up to J!m and glaring at him for a very long time, from a variety of angles.
He blurted: “When is it?”
“When is what?”
“We’re not sure,” the general said.
The President became agitated, hopping up and down, his beard flapping up to reveal he was an excellent advertisement for the use of condoms.
“When is it?!” the President asked again. “When is it?! When is it?! When is it?! When is it?!” he followed up.
“When is it, Andy?”
“This is Jim, Mr. President,” the general corrected him. “His father, Andy, was killed trying to escape ten years ago. You remember.”
The President processed this, stroking his chin. His fingers became caught in his beard, and he shrieked several times, tearing them free. By this time he had forgotten all about J!m and was focused on Marie.
“Is it clean?”
“We believe so, Mr. President.”
He approached tentatively.
“Is it clean?”
He smooshed his face against the barrier, his clap-blackened tongue swirling slowly on the glass.
Marie looked at him vacantly, but directly. “Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” she said.
“She-demon! She-demon!” The President scampered to the back of his enclosure, to the refrigerator.
Something dark smashed against the glass, followed by a splash of yellow, mixing in a most unsavory way.
The general turned to J!m.
“We’ll have to reschedule.”
pfc. haskell marched them down a low, narrow passageway, J!m stooping under overhanging pipes and beams, the facility in dire need of interior decoration.
The soldier stopped at a heavy iron door, placed his eye up to a scanner next to it. It opened with a clank.
“Welcome home,” Pfc. Haskell said, helping J!m inside with the butt of his weapon. “Pleasant dreams.”
Chapter 30
Builds to a Thrilling Climax
j!m couldn’t sleep, though he had never been so tired. He didn’t want to dream.
He was propped against the dank wall of the cell, water dripping on his head from a pipe above. A rat scuttled along the pipe, dropping a little something else.
Zombie Marie lay in his lap, eyes wide open. J!m stroked her face but felt no emotions, heard no thoughts, only nothing.
Johnny, in a light coma at J!m’s side, went Eep, moving his legs and arms, hunted by Deputy Furry in a pith helmet. J!m took his hand to calm him, and felt that agony and ecstasy, the exquisite pain he always found whenever he touched Johnny, and for the first time he understood it, because for the first time he was not trying to understand it. He was simply feeling it.
He was turning into his mother as well.
The rat, or another one, climbed up on the rim of Jelly’s bucket. It sniffed, unsure of whether the contents were edible, and poking its nose deeper inside, lost hold with a scratching flurry, and tumbled in. There was thrashing, followed by a rude burble.
“Jelly?”
At the bottom of the bucket there were now two pints of goo, with Larry Sweeney’s face.
“Jim!” he exclaimed and, hearing the plasticky echo of his container, eyed sideways. “Hey, where’s the rest of me?”
Krlank.
The cell door opened, waking Johnny and alerting Marie. J!m put the bucket down.
In the frame was a strongly backlit Pfc. Haskell.
“I need the girl.”
“She’s not available,” J!m said.
“What do you care?” The soldier sauntered in with the cocksure grin of a well-armed man. “You’re not using her.”
Jelly slid out of the bucket and flowed up the wall.
Pfc. Haskell took Zombie Marie by the arm and hauled her up.
“C’mon, girlie,” he said, “it’s time for a cleaning.”
“Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”
“That’s a swell moan. You should do that for the President.”
Johnny was on his feet. A short plasma blast and he was not.
“You don’t have to be kept alive,” Pfc. Haskell pointed out.
The soldier began to drag Zombie Marie toward the door.
J!m rose unsteadily.
“But I do.”
The private, aspostrophic: “Only alive.”
A plasm to the chest, dissipating pleasantly. J!m straightened up.
“Thank you. May I have another?”
The private had a dilemma. He had two orders, and would not be able to accomplish one without violating the other.
Fortunately, he was soon absolved of that responsibility.
A sloppy substance plopped on his head, oozing over his ears. Roy Haskell panicked for a short interval, then his gray matter was gone along with all his worries. He dropped to the ground, where, for the sake of decorum, the next twenty or thirty seconds will go undescribed.
The private’s boots and uniform lay in a puce puddle on the iron floor. The puddle rose, filling the clothes, forming a smaller, redder version of Jelly.
“What the fuck?” Johnny inquired.
Jelly, defensive: “I was hungry!”
“You ate a human being!” J!m said.
Jelly’s grin met in the back of his head.
“And it was gooood,” evilly glinting, then, sensing their abhorrence:
“C’mon, the guy was a dick.”
for a military installation it was distressingly unregimented, a warren of unmarked passageways leading nowhere but further down.
The few signs were cryptic and uninviting,
for example, which did not specify paper or flesh, or
J!m had maintained a mental map since they had arrived and calculated they had been traveling on a twelve-degree downgrade, tracing a Fermat spiral. If that was correct, they were nine rotations down and soon would arrive at the bottom and center, where there would either be an exit or Satan imprisoned in a sea of ice.
“Uh,” Jelly asked, “is there a plan here?”
“Keep it down,” Johnny said. “And no.”
As somewhat predicted, the corridor came to an abrupt halt at an unmarked door. J!m tried it. It was locked. Johnny tried it. It was very locked.
“Guess we should go back,” Johnny sighed, “the way I said.”
“We have to go in there.”
J!m looked hard at the door. It did not open.
“Good thing I saved this!”
Pfc. Haskell’s left eye floated up into Jelly’s head. A tendril pushed it out of his forehead and up to the scan. The door opened.
“Now who’s revolting?” Jelly raised his arm for a happy slap, but J!m walked right by him and into the blue light.
an electronic cathedral flickered in bluish black-and-white, hundreds of bulging picture tubes in a circular array ninety feet high, displaying entertainment viz, surveillance of public and private spaces, energy output and usage charts, documents, data, the totality of existence.
This was the PLEX.
Before the screens was a labyrinth of illuminated pipes, surrounding what appeared to be the most elaborate church
organ ever built. A bony gray creature hunched over the keyboards, playing a melancholy serenade that J!m had never heard but knew. The images above changed with the melodic and metronomic changes, as if the organist were playing the whole world.
The player abruptly arpeggiated, ending the serenade yet increasing the melancholy; the chamber hummed in blue.
J!m didn’t move, and the others remained in the hall.
“Hello, Son,” I said.
Chapter 31
Your Heart will Pound...
“come in, come in. before they shoot you.”
J!m’s friends pushed past him and closed the door. I clapped and the lights came on. An obsolete technology, but a delightful one.
“There. Better?”
J!m wasn’t coming to me, respect for elders clearly out of favor these days. I hobbled over to him.
“Please excuse my appearance. Haven’t had natural radiation in years, and they keep me on low power down here. They prefer me weak.”
J!m said nothing, not a shock there. I had him at a disadvantage. I had watched him grow up, first through the cameras at the Guest Suites and later through the PLEX, and had been privy to his thoughts since he was eight, those polio shots quite more miraculous than promised. I had transcribed the entirety of his life, with a specificity and sensitivity far beyond any official obligation, recording every lost appendage, every unusual fluid or odd morphosis, every taunt and prick. I was there through this whole long dark journey he had sent himself on, and from which he would soon emerge, I knew, because I knew my son.
And he had never met me.
“You’re taller than I expected,” I filled the conversational abyss. “I suppose I’ve shrunk. You’ve your mother’s eyes. Pity. Mine have infrared.”
He looked at me with hate and hurt, in a three-to-two ratio, a later check of the records confirmed. Peculiar, considering how often he’d dreamt of this occasion, on average once every fourteen days. I never did understand how adolescence was conducted on this planet.
“Interesting story about this cane,” I gabbled on. “The French, rest their souls, gave it to Ben Franklin, who bequeathed it to George Washington. The gold knob here is a Phrygian cap, representing—”
We were all spared my further ditherings by an improperly fingered and inappropriately instrumented Jim Croce number.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind . . .
Jelly sang, splattering the keyboard. “Look at me. I’m playing the PLEX!”
“That’s just an organ,” I said. “And you can stop now.”
“Sorry,” Jelly said.
I elaborated: “The PLEX runs itself, mostly. Don’t tell anyone or I’ll be out of a job.”
J!m was at last ready to speak, the edge in his voice forty percent anger, thirty-five contempt, fifteen fear and eight confusion, with trace amounts of unquashable love.
“After everything they did, you built this for them.”
“No, J!m,” pronouncing it correctly, with the subsonic accents. “I didn’t build it for them. I built it for you.”
J!m did not like that answer, because he didn’t yet comprehend it.
“But why?”
“They presented me with unattractive options.”
I let him process that, and carried on with the social niceties.
“Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like your brother?” I asked Johnny, forgetting myself. “I suppose not,” I expeditiously moved on. “And you must be J!m’s lovely girlfriend.”
“Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
“She was dead, and so Jim . . .” Johnny wiggled his fingers. “. . . sorta . . .”
“Son,” I said, “come here.”
I took J!m’s hands, dosing him with more unconditional love than he wished to accept. He jerked his hand away.
“I could do it, but I think it would be better if you did.”
Again taking his hands, I positioned them on the sides of his undead girlfriend’s head.
“Go back in.”
The blue worms, more properly phalangeal probosces, slithered into her brain.
“Gee-ross,” Jelly said.
J!m was utterly lost in there.
“Stop thinking about her biology.”
He gazed into her eyes with bottomless sorrow, not the sort of absorption that was needed.
“And stop thinking about yourself. Be her.”
J!m closed his eyes and tipped his head back, a bit showy, and thought about Marie:
her excessive righteousness and silly insistence that all things were possible in a democracy;
her unshakable belief in goodness, despite every rattle and roll to the contrary;
her patience with him, all these years, as he turned surly and solipsistic, much less a friend than she remained to him;
how much she—
He found her.
She flowed into him, her thoughts, feelings, dreams, desires, the whole lot whirling through his mind, sweeping away some of the uglier plaque up there. His probosces did the necessary repair and put her back, slightly better than new.
When J!m opened his eyes, Marie was already looking at him.
“Hi,” she said.
“I love you, too,” he said.
Marie frowned, smiled, frowned again.
“That is not fair.”
Johnny chose to celebrate in the adolescent manner, with lighthearted verbal abuse.
“Jesus, Freak, you couldn’t have said that a few days ago, before I got shot?”
J!m put his arm around the ape. “And you, too, Johnny.”
Jelly, left out of the love nest, darkened.
Marie reached for him. He accepted her hand and slid over, no longer bothering with legs, and blanketed them in a thick, gummy hug.
“I love you guys!”
It was a moment they would all cherish for another four seconds.
“Hey!” Marie yelled, peeling Jelly off her. “You’re eating me!”
“Only dead skin cells!” Jelly huffed, with uncharacteristic ire. “I was giving you a facial! You should thank me.”
if it hadn’t been for the alarm, there might have been a lot of hurtful things said. Instead, it refocused everybody on more immediate concerns.
“We need to get out of here,” J!m said.
“Where’s here?” Marie asked, having been brain-dead for the last twelve hours.
“We must hurry.” I shambled over to a poster on the far wall, a pinup of my wife, standing on a subway grate with her dress blowing up. Funny how irate I got at the time. I rolled the poster down slowly, uncovering a nasty rust stain. I tucked the poster under my arm.
“All-righty,” I said, as two soldiers burst into the room, firing indiscriminately, in violation of a memorandum I sent out at least every six months.
“Good God, man!” I shouted at them. “No discharges in the PLEX Center. Can’t you read?”
The soldiers kept at it, with J!m shielding his friends, absorbing the plasms like a champ, and only stopped firing when they noticed they were sinking.
They went down rather quickly, and Jelly rose in their stead, wearing the bigger one’s overextended trousers. He was much larger, bordering on humongous, and approaching magenta.
Marie had missed Jelly’s first man-eating, and was distressed. “Larry Sweeney! How could you?”
“It’s what I do.”
Jelly punctuated his apothegm with a tremendous belch, the smell of which was unprecedented and all the more impertinent since he had no biological need to do so.
“Not much time,” I said, padding over to the keyboard. The first thirteen notes of Für Elise opened a passageway in the wall.
Johnny: “You said it was just an organ.”
“I’m unreliable,” I admitted.
I thought I had made some progress with J!m, bringing back the love of his life, etc., but his paternal issues were persistent enough that they required airing at thi
s most inopportune time.
“You could’ve escaped whenever you wanted?” he asked, incredulous and calculating all the birthdays, holidays, school plays, first molts and other childhood milestones he assumed I had missed.
I touched his forehead. “You mustn’t be so cross all the time. It uses fantastic amounts of energy, and you’ll overheat.”
Marie passed us, dragging her finger across his chest.
“Listen to your father.”
She’s a good girl.
the passage led up to the sewers, which were nippy this time of year, and dark and wet, of course. It was a necessary vile, though, these being Manhattan’s least monitored thoroughfares, and so we trudged for miles, knee deep in whatever anybody didn’t want in their homes for one second longer.
Disagreeable as it was, our toilet walk offered an opportunity to catch up a bit. I provided J!m with a credible explanation for my behavior, leaving out details he needn’t concern himself with, and assured him that while his mother knew the government had scapegoated me, she did not know I had been alive all this time, and wouldn’t she be pleased to see me? J!m did not accept or even believe my story, let alone forgive me, but it lowered the overall tension down there.
Jelly excepted.
“I’m feeling a lot of rage,” he growled, hulking in back. “It must be someone I ate.”
He reverberated with remorseless mirth, eerie even when not coming from behind one in a dark sewer.
Seeking to lighten the mood, “Funny, that,” I said. “All these species, and variations, from all across the galaxy, and their shite all smells the same.”
“Except for the Curucu,” J!m said.
“Lord, yes.”
We shared a laugh.
“Mr. Ra’,” Marie said.
“It’s not a surname, dear. Andy will get you in the least trouble.”
“Andy, do all Regulese speak with such charming British accents?”
“No, no. I picked it up on the trip over, listening to the BBC. We don’t speak at all, actually.”
“I knew it,” Marie said. “Getting Jim to talk is completely impossible.”
“Yes, we’re more the strong, silent type,” I said in deference to my son, though in point of fact I adored talking, and was quite the raconteur back when I had an audience. The mutability of human language and capacity for misunderstanding fascinated me, so many words meaning the same thing and others meaning so many things, the play of it irresistible. Puns, I’m afraid, were a weakness.