The Normals

by David Gilbert

  Please, leave, Billy tells himself.

  But where?

  Just go.

  And, finally, he crawls out from under indecision.

  A glance into Gretchen's room. She's not there, but Billy basks in the evidence. The bed is disheveled. The TV hums with weather. Socks are curled on the floor like a litter of newborn kittens. Billy departs before his pause can be certified as anything but a casual look-see. Farther down the hall he passes Ossap and Dullick's room. Dullick and Ossap sit on the same bed, Ossap twitching like he's saying no-no-no-no, Dullick obsessively rubbing his left hip like he's got a boo-boo that's lasting forever. "We should go sooner," Dullick mutters. "We need to go sooner, the sooner the better, the faster we're gone from here. I know blah-blah-blah but I'm sorry, we should go sooner."

  "Your arm," Ossap says.

  "What?" Dullick's right arm is slowly lifting in the air, like a question's unsure answer. "See?" he moans. "I didn't feel that. I didn't even know that was happening. We've got to go sooner."

  Ossap elbows Dullick and gestures his chin toward the doorway.

  "See," Dullick answers. "You're a mess, too."

  "No, the hall."

  But before Dullick can turn around, Billy is gone.

  In the lounge RoboCop plays to an audience of seven. Their attention easily wavers—both socially and pharmaceutically—and they talk over the movie to the point where the half-man, half-machine crime fighter is like a hotel bar pianist who only gets acknowledged during particularly jazzy bursts of violence.

  No easy seats available, only scoot-overs and sit-ups and do-you-minds, Billy goes over and browses the board games. All the classics are here. Stratego. Monopoly. Life. Risk. Trivial Pursuit. Stacked together, the boxes are a montage of rainy days and rec rooms, the worn spines holding the abuse of nothing else to do. Clue. Masterpiece. Othello. He wonders if children still play these low-tech games, or are adults the only enthusiasts, inviting friends over for marathon sessions of Scrabble and Boggle while upstairs their kids blow apart a nasty breed of graphically intense zombie. Chess and backgammon are, of course, in attendance. They're like the Old and New Testament of board games—chess for the Jews, backgammon for the Christians. The boards themselves are pressed from cheapo cardboard and seem almost blasphemous. These games deserve jewel cases, Billy thinks. Even worse, on the flip side of chess is checkers, which is akin to a conversion in Scientology.

  Billy takes backgammon from the shelf. He feels like playing himself.

  On the TV, Officer Murphy goes through his transformation into steel, while on the couch, a crew-cutted Karl McKay, self-professed all-American type though his lusterless eyes would make the Secret Service wary, says, "I once did some government work. NASA. Medical-experiment stuff. Not like old Robo here, nothing that extreme."

  "Oh, really," Yul Gertner cuts in. His shaved head is being eclipsed by a crescent of bald-guy hair. "You mean they didn't turn you into a cyborg prototype of a douche bag."

  Nobody reacts to Gertner anymore.

  "I went to Mars. Theoretically."

  "And I went to your momma's anus." Gertner, it is agreed, can only heckle.

  Billy sets up the backgammon board as Karl McKay eagerly explains his work for NASA. "It was at the Ames Research Facility in Moffett Field, California, a superb, top-notch facility. Really the best. Best scientists, best equipment, best food."

  "The best of the best?" Gertner bites.

  "All the real astronauts get tested there."

  "Where do the fake ones go, your parents' basement?"

  "They were looking for normals, normals in good shape, athletic and health conscious and focused, not your random person off the street guinea pig but somebody who in body mimicked the physicalism of an astronaut."

  Gertner tilts his head. "Physicalism?"

  Billy is thinking the same thing.

  "It was a rigorous process just to get into the study," McKay continues—

  "Because of the physicalism, I bet."

  —unperturbed. "Me and five other folks were signed up for a hypothetical mission to Mars. They even had jumpsuits for us. Really cool.

  Our mission was called Harmony Three, even had patches, just like the real deal. Our job was to simulate the physiological effects of zero gravity over an extended period of time."

  Gertner rolls his eyes while Billy rolls the die to see who goes first.

  "They kept us in bed on a six-degree decline so blood would go to our heads like we were floating in space. They kept us this way for thirty-five days and tested things like muscle mass and bone density and experimented with all sorts of ways they might counter the effects of no gravity." Karl McKay nods, which spontaneously fires the antipsychotic muscles in his jaw and causes his chin to jut-jut-jut. "Like they packaged us in these inflatable cuffs that pulled the blood away from our heads. We were like the Michelin men. From start to finish we were covered in gauges and tubes and clamps and electrodes."

  "Anal probes?" Gertner asks.

  "They injected us with radioactive dye; they x-rayed us; they made us breathe through a bag; they had us pedal a stationary bike while still on our backs. Not once were we allowed to compromise the six-degree decline. Six degrees sounds like nothing, I know, but trust me, six degrees is something you feel."

  Billy chooses white for himself and red for him, the him of superhuman backgammon ability, the him of understanding the doubling cube, the him of a vaguely European style of throwing the dice, the him of knowing the odds and fearlessly leaving a piece open and disdaining the easy 3—1, 4-2, 5-3, 6-4 combinations, though the fantasy him will occasionally accept these rolls like a complimentary glass of perfectly adequate gewiirztraminer offered by the lady of the house who watches her husband's high-stakes game from behind the latest issue of Paris Match, the one with the cover of the minor royal jumping half-naked from the bow of the race-car driver's yacht into the turquoise of the Italian Riviera, while the inset picture has her husband, the grand duke, frowning as if this file picture from a 1997 Bahraini royal wedding perfectly captures the future news of his wife's pendulous breasts lifting unenthusiastically toward the sky and surrendering under the noses of two million readers. Billy grins. Maybe it's the drug he's playing.

  "But the thing is," Karl McKay—knee kick—says. "You're really well cared for. You almost feel like a, like a baby, a premature baby in that incubator thing. All these lights surround you, UV lights, sun lamps, though they have the room temperature nice and cool so you're never hot but perfectly cooked. You shit and piss in bed, which you fight for the first few days because it's like steering into a tree on purpose, but once you get used to it and just let it happen and let the nurse clean you up, you begin forgetting about it and you sort of let your body do whatever it wants whenever it wants. They change your sheets twice a day. And the best is when they bathe you. They slip you onto a gurney and wheel you into this stainless steel box. Only your head is outside, like a magician doing that saw-the-assistant-in-half trick. Inside are hundreds of jets, and they start shooting a warm soapy spray, pounding you all over, but gentle. It must be a thousand jets because they hit every pore. Meanwhile your hair is being washed and your face and neck are being sponged, and you're like nothing but pure pleasure. It's not sexual or anything. It's just nice. It's like your mother scratching your whole entire body right before you go to bed."

  "Maybe your mother," Gertner tosses in.

  Billy, in jail, fails to roll himself free, and the him of summers in Maine filled with marathon backgammon tournaments between brothers and sisters and father when father was between three and six drinks scoops up the dice and drops them with the minimum legal amount of wrist. Up comes doubles, ones, which is ideal for closing the board and leaves Billy behind bars—"Nooo," to himself—as the him of failed careers and endless charm brings his boys in from the cold and begins removing them from the board, occasionally glancing toward the imprisoned white piece and almost wishing for the bad roll and the sma
llest chance of comeback drama, this slight empathetic imbalance the cause of a hundred heartbreaking defeats in a myriad of sports.

  "And at night," Karl McKay goes on. "When they turn off the lights, the ceiling has those glow-in-the-dark stars but better than store-bought glow-in-the-dark stars; these are like glow-in-the-dark stars specially made for NASA. The stars are arranged the way they'd be seen from the southern hemisphere of Mars, and in the distance, a little brighter than any other star, is Earth."

  "What'd they pay?" Rodney Letts asks.

  "Four thousand."

  "Not bad." Unlike most of the group, Rodney has never looked better. Regularly bathed and closely shaved and more-than-decently fed, his ID hangs like the interstice between who he was and who he will eventually be again. The temporary turn of appearance has given him a regal flare, as if the most basic comforts are the provenance of kings. Except for his skin. Or maybe because of his skin. His skin is dry, beyond dry, sprouting small wildfires of rash. A nurse has given him his own personal tube of lubricant which Rodney applies with foppish regularity, squirting a dollop into his palm and rubbing his hands together and—aaaaah—hydrating like Munch's famous painting retitled Fast Relief.

  "I lost three inches on my length," Karl McKay says.

  "So that leaves you with half an inch." Gertner high-fives himself.

  "Of height, and I regained it."

  "You're lucky because the government can fuck you up," Rodney says.

  Hyper Stew Slocum nods. His drug-related akinesia turns the nod into an autistic rock, his hips doing the work of the neck. "Yeah, like I heard about this government study," he says. "They inject you with something and then tattoo the sole of your foot. When you die the undertaker will bury rocks in the casket and send your body to a government lab for dissection. For this they'll pay you ten thousand dollars. Hard cash. All they care about is how you are when you're dead."

  "Bullshit," Herb Kolch says.

  "It's what I heard."

  "Have you guys heard about the heart stop study?" Rodney asks.

  "The one in the hollowed-out mountain in Colorado?" Stew asks.

  Herb Kolch practically spit-takes his own excessive saliva. "Oh, come on."

  "Go ahead, laugh, but it exists."

  "The one I heard about happens in Texas," Rodney says.

  "I heard Bermuda," Karl McKay offers.

  Rodney gives them his version. "The one I heard about pays you twenty grand to stop your heart for three, four minutes, so they try this new super-duper heart attack relief medication on you. There's something like a one-in-five chance you'll die, like forever die."

  Billy turns away from the backgammon and the him of you're good, very good, but I'm better. He thinks of Honeysack and his research.

  "What I heard," Karl says, "is that the chances of dying, of real death, are one in three. They stop your heart and submerge you in liquid nitrogen, and it's in Bermuda because the laws are much looser there."

  "Please," Herb Kolch says.

  "What do you call cryogenics?" Karl says.

  "Ridiculous."

  "But it's real."

  "I know it is," Herb says. "But it's not happening in Bermuda, and it's not submerging someone in liquid nitrogen so maybe in the future they can be cured or cloned or whatever. I know what you're talking about. I've heard it myself. It's a twenty-five-, thirty-thousand-dollar study, and that's roughly the chance of not surviving the thing. But this isn't about thawing a person in a hundred years. This is short-term stuff, a half hour, an hour, ninety minutes maybe. They lower your body temperature until you're basically dead, like frozen on the inside with ice water in your veins, and then they can do whatever they want to you."

  Billy imagines himself dead, or not quite dead. Near dead. Floating upward, toward the stick-on stars over Karl McKay's spaceship bed, into the black perithanatic beyond, hoping for some white light in the distance even if the white light comes from some chemicals in the dying brain, those receptor sites sucking in the sentimental end, a voice reaching for him like a hand, warm and knowing, saying come live with me and be my love, drawing him in among the rest and only letting go when the world below kicks in the door and flips on the lights and mutters another good morning.

  RoboCop, full of fury, blasts away at the bad guys in an abandoned factory. The gore is enough to cease conversation in the lounge and refocus attention on the screen. One of the baddies has just been drenched in toxic waste. His flesh is melting; his throat is swelling a tad too graphically. Billy recognizes the actor from another movie, Fame, the sweet curly-haired redhead who sang the body electric, but now he's staggering down the street and pleading for help from his baddie buddies who scream when they see him. Billy can practically feel the impact of the truck as it smashes into the Fame kid and bursts him like a goo-filled balloon.

  Back in his room, Billy interrupts Lannigan crouching near Do's bed. Lannigan is naked and entirely hairless, a primal sort of man. Head, chest, legs, arms, armpits, eyebrows, groin, have been shaved. His prick hangs down without the proscenium of pubes; it seems imbued with the discomfort of possible audience participation. In fact, all of Lannigan, regardless of the nudity, seems too intimate, as if a small army of hair maintains the borders of personal space.

  "I got carried away," he tells Billy.

  "I guess so," Billy says.

  "I couldn't stop." His eyes seem to poke through a mask. "My hair got shorter and shorter until I said fuck it and shaved it. It felt good, all light and cool, like I had lost ten pounds." Lannigan rubs his shower-cap scalp.

  "It doesn't look bad, does it?"

  "No, not bad," Billy lies.

  "Sort of exotic, I think."

  "I'd say 'otherworldly.'"

  "I've always wanted to shave my head. My armpits, that was a bit more random. My head felt so smooth I wanted to see how smooth I could get, the smoothest possible me. I worked my way down. It is amazing," he says, running his fingers over his chest. "It's like I'm underwater." Lannigan hops up and stands as straight as possible, stretching up on his toes and reaching with both hands, looking like an alien reaching for his distant star. "Hey, I'm impulsive," he says, back on his heels. "I shaved my entire fucking body for no reason. I would've shaved my ass crack if Do had agreed to help."

  Do is turned toward the window.

  "What can I say, I'm nuts." Lannigan caveman-walks into the bathroom and inspects himself in the mirror. "Okay, the eyebrows might've been a mistake," he says soberly. "I shaved one and I was screwed." The eyes squint within an endless stretch of forehead. "Do I really look this awful?" he asks Billy.

  "You look like you just shaved your entire body."

  "It would've been fine if I just kept the eyebrows," he says. "That was stupid. I mean, I have Voltimand coming up, and I was hoping to understudy Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Maybe even Hamlet. Why not? I was born to play Hamlet. I'd be a great Hamlet." Lannigan glances back at the mirror, sullied flesh unresolved. "How long does it take for an eyebrow to regrow?" he asks.

  "I have no idea," Billy says.

  "A while maybe."

  "Maybe."

  "What an idiot I am." Lannigan sighs. He could be leaking away an idea of himself, the spontaneous character, the free spirit, leaving behind the person in the mirror who is easily embarrassed. "Maybe I can chalk this up to a side effect," he says.

  "Whatever. But put on some clothes."

  Lannigan remains naked. He hunchbacks to the door and with silent-movie aplomb inspects the hall. "Maybe it's time for some streaking and freaking."

  With that, he is gone, no longer Voltimand, Billy thinks, and never Hamlet, but Tom O'Bedlam, shorn of reason, amphibian in desire, jumping from the land of hot pursuit into the green mantle of the standing pool.

  22

  WHEREVER BILLY goes, the TV follows, and wherever a TV flickers, another bit of Chuck Savitch is revealed. ABC, NBC, w CBS, FOX, PBS, UPN, WB, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FNC, PAX, E! have devoted reporters and precio
us airtime to the story. News programs fly through the night with all the wonderment of Santa's reindeer—come Dateline, come Nightline, come Primetime Live and another Dateline, come 48 Hours, come 20/20, come Extra and Inside Edition—delivering the story, gift-wrapped and bowed, into every home. A&E has rushed into schedule a week of biographies concerning saints, martyrs, and miracles. Tonight, St. Catherine. The 700 Club is on the scene, Pat Robertson and the white-haired black man whose name never sticks recommending their VHS tape on the Rapture ($19-95). All the angles are being covered. Pre-millennial anxiety is mentioned by a gaggle of pundits as a possible culprit, along with OJ and Monica and the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the lowering standards of American journalism which they rail against with rouged cheeks and pancaked complexions, like Shiites flagellating themselves on whips lashed with silk.