“I was Megan Riley,” I said carefully. “I’m not really sure anymore.” Can a thing still be itself when it’s removed from all context? Maybe I had died out there in the gray, and this was the afterlife. That would explain the clean white walls and the sweet smell of bleach. I was dead, and this was paradise.
“Your identity is enough, Dr. Riley,” said Colonel Handleman. “I’m glad we found you. It is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for treason against the former United States of America, the former nation of Canada, and the former United Mexican States.”
Ah. I knew this had been too good to be true.
• • • •
There were some questions after that — where had I been, what had I been doing, how much of Project Eden had I been aware of — but I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to answer them. I was exhausted, I was broken, and I was done. If they wanted to arrest me, let them. If they wanted to put me on trial for what my people had done, let them do that too. It was no less than I deserved. Maybe mine hadn’t been the hand that held the test tube, but I had been the one who approved each procedure and test. The team had falsified data, and they had died for their crimes. I had believed their lies. Who was to say that my crime wasn’t just as bad as theirs?
I don’t know how long I was asleep. When I woke up, I was still in the white room, with the smell of bleach hanging in my nostrils. There was another smell underneath it, a deep, earthy smell. I wrinkled my nose automatically, rejecting it. This was the safe place. This was the clean place. There was no room here for smells like that one, which made me feel like spiders were running across the soft folds of my mind, looking for places to spin their webs.
“Ah, good, you’re awake.” Commander Handleman sounded almost cheerful. Maybe having someone to try for treason had improved her day. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. See what I’ve got for you.”
I didn’t want to. But she had been willing to talk about Nicole before, willing to remind me (of the gray, the gray eating away at her, my little girl, her skull clean and polished and smooth in my hands) what had happened to her. She didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to know the details. Anyone who had access to my files would be able to figure out that my wife and daughter were the most important things in my world. Rachel had died early. If Nicole wasn’t with me, then she was dead too, and it was my fault, because I had been the lab manager for Project Eden. This was all my fault.
I opened my eyes.
Commander Handleman was dripping with mud. It was splattered liberally all up and down her uniform, but was thickest around her feet, where it was packed on so thick that the fabric was no longer visible. Tracks led back to the door, marking her progress across the room. She smiled when she saw me looking at her. Then she lifted her right foot and calmly, casually, stomped it on the floor. Mud splattered off of her in thick sheets, dark and terrible.
A high, keening noise sliced through the room, like a teapot announcing its contents were boiling. I realized belatedly that it was coming from my own throat. That didn’t mean I could stop myself from making it.
“I’ve read all your files, Dr. Riley,” she said, still smiling as she stomped her other foot and sent more mud cascading to the floor. “You always did an admirable job of managing your OCD. One of your colleagues — Henry Tsoumbakos, I assume you remember him — left a full confession before he succumbed to the R. nigricans infection. He attempted to absolve you of blame, said you hadn’t been told about the contamination because of your disorder. He said you would have shut down the project over hygiene concerns. Wasn’t that kind of him? He wanted to clear your name, even as the monster he created was stripping the flesh from his bones one cell at a time.”
“Please stop,” I whispered.
“So we looked a little deeper. This has been your personal hell, hasn’t it, Dr. Riley? Did the death of your wife upset you as much as the sudden untidiness of the world? Mold everywhere, and nothing that was capable of killing it. Nothing but fire, anyway, and since there have been no reports of uncontrolled burns from the area you were known to be in, it’s clear that you didn’t take that route.” Colonel Handleman abandoned her smile for a look of exaggerated, insincere sympathy. “Couldn’t you find any matches?”
I didn’t say anything. Asking her to stop wasn’t doing any good, and if I opened my mouth again, the taste of mud would clot my tongue and stop my breath. It would kill me, I knew it would kill me, and I also knew that it would do no such thing, and that didn’t matter. My pills had been gone for months. Nothing to put a fine pharmacological veil between me and the mud that was falling, in splats and blobs, to the floor.
“It’s interesting. Most people with your sort of disorder fear germs, or obsess on little rituals. You got hung up on cleanliness. Everything had to be just so around your lab, every protocol had to be followed, every rule had to be observed. It’s no wonder your people decided to stop telling you anything. Working under you must have been like following a preschool teacher to the ends of the world.”
“There’s no one true way to have OCD,” I whispered. It was an old argument, one I’d been having over and over again since I was in high school, usually when some teacher wanted to say that the concessions I required were just me being a prissy little princess, and not a genuine function of my mental health. I didn’t count. I didn’t have a lot of really obvious rituals. Most of mine involved thinking of the right sequence of numbers when I dropped something, or always eating my food in a clockwise direction, no matter what sort of terrible food combinations that entailed. It was about separation, cleanliness, order, because when I failed to be perfect, that was when the walls would crumble, and the monsters would come.
I had known that simple fact all the way down to my bones for what felt like my entire life, even though I hadn’t been formally diagnosed until I was eleven: if I slipped, even for a moment, if I allowed one speck of disorder to enter my life, then everything would fall apart. People had been telling me I was crazy for what felt like just as long. Well, guess what? I had slipped. I had allowed disorder to enter the world, and everything I loved had been burned away and buried in the gray. I wasn’t crazy.
I was the only person in the world who was genuinely, unforgivingly sane.
“Maybe there’s not one true way to have OCD, but you’re the one whose mental issues were indirectly responsible for the creation and release of a bioengineered super weapon.” She stomped her foot again. Another fat clot of mud detached from the leg of her uniform and fell to the floor with a sickening plop. I groaned.
“Anyone else, I would think you were afraid the mess would breed R. nigricans in a formerly safe environment. This mud has been thoroughly sterilized down to the molecular level — but you don’t care about that, do you? All you care about is the mess. The nasty, awful mess.”
“Why are you doing this?” I couldn’t stop my voice from coming out broken and small, like the voice of a child. I wanted to scramble away from her, ripping the IV out of my arm and retreating to a place where the smell of bleach could still overwhelm the smell of wet, terrible earth. I didn’t move. I was weak and she was strong; she would follow me, and she would grab me with those muddy arms, and she would hold me where I stood. I would die if she touched me. I would die.
“Because you seem to have given up, Dr. Riley, and I’m afraid that simply isn’t an option. Less than two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and enzyme expression to resist the fungus. Immunity is very, very rare, and I suppose it’s only poetic justice that saw it running through your veins. There are a great many people I would have saved in your place.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Then again, I suppose that’s true for you too, isn’t it? You would have saved your wife if you could have. You would definitely have saved your daughter.”
“Don’t talk about her.” I glared from the safety of my bed, resisting the urge to shrink even further away from th
e mud that was covering the floor. “She’s not for you. You don’t talk about her.”
“No? How about I talk about my three sons, instead? The eldest was about to graduate from college. He was going to be a high school teacher. I told him not to, told him that he’d never pay off his student loans on a teacher’s salary, but he was determined. He wanted to help people. Isn’t that nice? Wanting to help people? He tried to help a little girl who’d fallen on her way into the shelter. The scrapes on her hands spread your science project all over his skin. He died screaming, and he took his baby brother with him. Randal never could stay away from David when he thought his brother was in trouble.”
Colonel Handleman took another step toward me. Her eyes were cold and hard. “My middle son, now, he was a special case. That combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression that makes you so unappealing to the fungus is found almost entirely in the female population. Two percent of those exposed turn out to be immune, and ninety percent of those with immunity are female. But we didn’t know that at first. Walter was exposed, and he was fine, and we thought he had won the same lottery that you had . . . that I had.”
“A maternal parent with immunity can pass resistance to their offspring.” My voice was a broken whisper, dry and desiccated and empty. “I’m so sorry.”
“He stopped being careful. He thought he was safe — I thought he was safe — and so he stopped being careful, and he cut his finger. When the mold appeared, I thought he would fight it off.” Colonel Handleman took another step forward. “It took a full week for R. nigricans to steal my boy from me. He died in his sleep. He couldn’t even cry. There was no moisture left in him.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Sorry doesn’t bring my boys back, Dr. Riley. It doesn’t bring your girl back either. You knew about the resistance, didn’t you? You watched her die.”
Images of Nikki, shrouded and swaddled in mold, danced across my mind. I tried not to focus on them. If I looked, if I showed them how much I cared, they would never go away. (The black dog in the gray world, and Nikki, mermaid Nikki, with her tail of growing gray, beckoning from the shadows of the U-Haul that had been her tomb . . . )
I swallowed. My mouth was dry as dust. “Yes,” I admitted. “She got . . . she got sick, and I thought she was finding . . . finding equilibrium with the mold. I thought she was fighting. It was just eating her slower.” So much slower. So slowly that I had had the time to remember what hope was, how it tasted on the tongue.
It tasted like ashes and failure and regret. Hope was the cruelest thing in the world.
“I won’t say I’m glad that you had to live through that. From one mother to another, no one should have to watch their child die. Certainly not like that. A slow, cruel, inhumane death that I wouldn’t wish on a dog.” Colonel Handleman took another step. She reached out her hand and, before I could fully register what she was about to do, ran her fingers down my cheek, leaving cool wetness behind. She stepped back again.
“We’re all dirty here, Dr. Riley.” She smiled as I whimpered, and her eyes were cold, and there was no forgiveness there. Maybe there never could have been. “You made this mess. You made it. Every speck, every smear, every fruiting fungal body, it’s all yours. It belongs to you. Now what are you going to do about it?”
She turned before I had a chance to remember what words were, walking calmly back to the door. She let herself out. The bolt clicked a moment later, and I was alone with the mess she had made, here in the ruins of the world I had destroyed.
The mud was drying on my cheek. I couldn’t move. All I could do was sink lower into the bed, and close my eyes, and wait for the end to finally arrive.
• • • •
This is the thing about OCD: everyone remembers the “compulsive” part. They remember the cleaning, the counting, the tapping, the little rituals that construct a scaffolding for a life that never seems stable enough to be real. When I first started dating Rachel, she seized on the way I always sorted my cafeteria fruit salad onto separate quadrants of a paper plate — grapes here, watermelon chunks there, strawberries somewhere else altogether, and pineapple in the remaining quarter. The sad bits of cantaloupe and honeydew had remained at the bottom of the bowl, slouching together like naughty children.
Rachel had stabbed her fork at them and asked, “Why?”
“Why what?” Even then, I had been helpless before her, a mere mortal stunned by the presence of a goddess. We’d met at a mixer for the school’s LGBTQ association. She had spoken passionately about the need for more asexual and genderqueer representation, before asking me if I wanted to have pancakes. I had basically fallen in love before the syrup hit our plates.
“Why aren’t you eating the melon?”
“Oh.” That was the moment where all of my previous attempts at relationships had fallen apart: over something as small as a few chunks of melon in the bottom of a bowl. “They’re too superficially similar to separate, but too different to eat together.”
Rachel had blinked slowly, taking this in, before she’d asked, “So you don’t eat them?”
“I don’t eat them,” I had said, and paused, waiting for her to tell me that I was too strange, that I was being unreasonable, that I was wasting food. I had tried countering all those arguments in the past. I had pointed out that everyone had food preferences, and that it wasn’t my fault that the only fruit salad came with chunks of interchangeable melon. I had explained that I was afraid of developing an allergic reaction to one and identifying it as the other, which would make it impossible to keep my medical history straight. I had done all those things at one time or another, and all of them had failed.
Rachel had thought about this for a moment longer before she said, “I guess I’ll be eating double melon.” Then she had dipped her fork into my bowl, and I had seen the future unspooling in front of me like a beautiful dream. It had taken another three years before I could convince her to marry me. It had been worth every single day of trying.
Rachel had understood that for me, the compulsions were always second to the obsessions. I knew, in the place where most people know that gravity works and the atmosphere is unlikely to be sucked off into space, that if I made a mistake — just one — it would be the end of everything. I had known it since I was a child, when I had accidentally skinned my knees on the playground and ruined my new jeans, and my parents had told me they were getting a divorce that same night. I wasn’t the most important person in the world. I wasn’t special. I was just the one whose mistakes mattered more than anyone else’s.
And here was the proof: the all-consuming softness, which had spread from the lab I managed, consuming my wife before it went on to satiate its hungers on everything else. The mistake had been mine: I had believed that my people would trust me, that they would tell me if something was going wrong in Project Eden. But like so many others before them, they had seen only the compulsions, only the cleanliness and order. They had seen me as the end of their grand experiments, and they had stayed silent.
If I had reviewed their work more closely, I might have been able to spot the holes where they hadn’t fully documented their research. If I hadn’t trusted them to trust me, my wife and daughter might still have been alive. All my life, the whispers in my head had said “you will destroy everything you love.” And they had been right. They had been right all along.
My tears dampened the mud, but they couldn’t wash it away. That was only fair. In a world that had sunk into a mess of my own making, I never deserved to be clean again.
• • • •
Time was an inconsequential thing in this well-lit, semi-sterile room, with mud on the floor and the machines quietly, contentedly whirring along behind me. As long as I didn’t open my eyes it could have been an hour, or it could have been a lifetime. The IV was keeping me hydrated, which would stave off death by dehydration. As my veins began to re-inflate and remember what it was to be whole, the rest of my body began sendi
ng signals that I would have been happier to ignore. Starvation had been my constant companion since Nikki left me, held back only by (the black dog, running, gray strands on its fur, so trusting, so condemned) what little I could scavenge out of the gray world. I had eaten more out of penance than out of hunger. I didn’t deserve to die before the soft could claim me. If I waited long enough, if it ate enough of the world, it would find a way to swallow me as well.
All I’d needed to do was wait. But now here I was, and the gray was far away from me, and my penance was denied.
The IV fluids had restored enough of my bodily equilibrium that all the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for the past few months were leaking out at once. They kept the mud on my cheek from drying completely, turning it wet and terrible as they fell. Every time they stopped I could feel it harden and crack, and then the tears would start again, until it started to seem like the IV was a useless affectation: I was pumping moisture out faster than I could possibly have been taking it in. Everything was white and bright and terrible. I had grown unaccustomed to hard lines and clean edges, spending my days walking through the soft gray world. I didn’t know how to handle them anymore.
(“I’ll be eating double melon,” Rachel had said, and she’d dipped her fork into the bowl, and I had been so consumed with loving her — so eaten alive by my own desires — that I hadn’t stopped her, not then and not ever, even though I knew the melon was cursed. I had allowed her to cross so many lines, to break so many rules that I knew would lead to ruin. It had all begun with double melon. It had ended with the death of everything I’d ever loved.
I should have seen this coming. I should have known there would be consequences.)
I had no way of knowing how long I lay there, crying but failing to wash the mud from my face, so overcome with hopelessness that the very idea of movement seemed like a cruel joke. At least if I had died outside I would eventually have gone into the gray and been reunited with my family. But I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon; I hadn’t stopped her, even though I’d known there would be consequences. There were always consequences. My first and greatest mistake had been believing I could somehow avoid them forever.
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