Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  “A good stink?” Billy Boy Thorn asked. “What’s that? What’s stink?”

  “Oh, my, I should not have used a nose word. I just made you have an illegal thought. I need to reset my own brain.”

  Billy Boy Thorn said, “The nose only breathes. That’s all. What’s stink. Is it a smell? What is smell, again? I forgot.”

  “Yeah right. There’s no such thing as smell. Shame on you for saying such a filthy thing. You cops pick up the worse filth, the trashiest occult gossip.” Nurse Bobbit moved to leave the room but had to spin a few times to orient correctly. “Dirty sparks.”

  “You’re really breaking up. You should take a day off and see a nurse of your own.”

  “Don’t be rude.” The motor wagged all ten rubbery fingers into the air.

  On its way out, Billy Boy Thorn heard another horrifying explosion of static in his head, then a few separate tinny voices just inside each ear. “Send him up, send him up. He’s ready to be iced.” The cop knew that a robot could send radio waves, but how could a human contain a receiver to pick them up and translate them to words? Was his brain growing the ability to do with radio waves what his ears did with sound waves? Or did it always do that in fishtank? He couldn’t recall how that worked since it made no common sense. “Send him up, send him up.”

  Then he remembered. “Oh, yes, that’s right. I listened to the radio in my head in fishtank playpen and that was how I learned everything I know. They had to tell me who I was by some means. How else can you hear underwater?”

  * *

  With no fanfare, Chrysalis Joy came back out and they went to the same spot to sit at the ledge again, letting their legs dangle over the sides. After some silence where they watched the gray water rush beneath their feet, Chrysalis Joy said, “I can’t remember playpen. I know I was there, of course. Everybody was. I was there sixteen years of my life but I can’t remember. It’s all blacked out.”

  Billy Boy Thorn said, “Maybe they zapped you or you were hypnotized or something. The bot told me that they had treatments. That’s why you’re here today, all better. They made you all better. Right? They better have! I was worried sick about you!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t go to an illegal thought.” Billy Boy Thorn jumped up to pace behind his friend. “Let’s think about present tense realness. Let’s repeat the news. That always helps the mind stay present tense. Repeat the news. Where is the war now? The war in is Brickenbad. And they’re fighting for our freedom. And when it comes our time to fight we will… and we will win. We must never lose our freedom. Subco Gibeah will win!”

  “Oh. Is that what happens?”

  “Yes! It’s the right thing so it will!”

  Chrysalis Joy shook his head. “There is no such place as Brickenbad. I’ve never been there or heard of it before. And what is freedom? Really?”

  “Freedom! We are free! We get to… I don’t know… I guess it means we get to walk around and around and talk freely. Like this! We don’t go to jail for stuff. That’s freedom!”

  “What’s jail?”

  “I don’t know. I just remember it isn’t freedom and so we don’t have it. And don’t have a wild thought over that… or think wrong about war. War is supposed to keep our minds focused. Think of the war. The war has expanded… or moved to a new place. The bomb took out the house of the somebody. It blew him in half. Who was it? Remember. They showed the dead body on the news and everybody talked about it for days. You could see his liver! Get mad about that! Get mad!”

  Chrysalis Joy asked, “Why can’t I remember my own past?”

  “I’m warning you. I feel a terrible wild thought coming out of you.” Billy Boy Thorn gave him a hard righteous slap on the top of his bald head, to be proper and distract him, while he felt his own wild thought coming on. He couldn’t remember his own past very well either although he knew he floated underwater in a glass tank and listened to the radio in his brain. The radio taught him to be a billy boy cop. It went on for sixteen years. He rubbed at where his gills had long dried away. “Let’s walk.” He pulled Chrysalis Joy up.

  “Where we going now?”

  “Anywhere. We need to… you need to. Just walk off your wild thoughts.”

  “Oh. Is that what happens?”

  “Yeah.” Billy Boy Thorn pointed at the city and cave around them. “Look at that. And that. That is cool. Look at things while you walk. Let it put you into the here and now. Or maybe it’s just some time that you need. Maybe we just need to give your immune system time to kick in and zap all your wild thoughts.”

  “Oh. Is that what happens?”

  “Don’t be insolent.”

  chapter 2: paradise false

  They walked down the long winding street where all the shops were obvious false fronts bolted onto the cave wall just to make everybody walk more to get past them. Another false “closed for repair” pillplace was there and also a fake dorm that advertised in cracked paint on a sign, “full occupancy”. Up a ramp and across an empty patio that led to a crumbling fake cracker café they entered a lengthy hall. It had an oppressively low mirrored ceiling that eventually led to the birthing pool. “I want to see it again.” Chrysalis Joy pulled him towards it.

  “We don’t belong there, now.” Billy Boy Thorn pulled his arm away. “Let go of me. We shouldn’t be there—not unless we’re invited. Unless I have an emergency to send me there. But I don’t.”

  Chrysalis Joy asked, “Why not just go and look?”

  “We aren’t a part of any welcoming fraternity that says welcome to reality.”

  “Come to the pool and think with me. I want to remember reality.”

  Billy Boy Thorn stuck out his lower lip.

  “Come on!”

  “I don’t think about that kind of thing. I have faith. And we don’t want to go where we can get in the way.”

  “Come on,” Chrysalis Joy urged him again. “Reality is legal. They told me when I was born. They told me what reality was.”

  They went up a flight of blood red stairs to the birthing pool, a whirlpool that spun backwards to flush things up. Red cubes in the ceiling of the circular room lit it. Billy Boy Thorn sighed in relief that there were no dead bodies present. Sometimes a body came up but then got stuck in the intake vents and the poor norm mole drowned. Sometimes a body would come up from fishtank but wouldn’t unplug properly from all the body catheters. It would come floating up with intestines floating on the outside. That was a common birth defect. He wondered if a birth defect was a wild thought. “It looks so peaceful today. Nobody here.”

  “How could we come from there?” Chrysalis Joy pointed to the center of the red vortex.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Billy Boy Thorn smiled. “Isn’t the beginning of life just beautiful? It’s a miracle.”

  “But how? How did we come from there?”

  “Simple,” Billy Boy Thorn answered. “Simple. If you wouldn’t have, you wouldn’t be here to ask about it.”

  “Think about it.”

  Billy Boy Thorn said, “I’ll just tell you the common sense and you tell me what doesn’t add up, if you think you’re so smart. We grow up in the fishtanks of playpen. When we get too big for them we unplug and float up here to live in the city. So? What’s the big deal? It makes perfect sense. It’s what’s natural. How else would we be here? You’re being willfully stupid now just to make me hit you in a place that’ll make you very present tense.”

  Chrysalis Joy rubbed his lips. “Something about that doesn’t sound right. The part about fishtanks in some nonsensical place called playpen. That’s stupid. Are we supposed to think that we’re just born?”

  “Don’t be a literalist. Maybe the word birth is just a word that means growing up in the fishtanks. Don’t press me for obscure etymology, now. I’m far from a library speaker. I was raised to regulate memory liars, not just know this other stuff off the top of my head.”

  “And where do we come from before then, from befor
e we were growing up in the fishtank?”

  Billy Boy Thorn shrugged. “Does it matter? It doesn’t matter where we came from. All that matters is knowing we’re going to heaven. That’s what it’s all for, really. We live here so we can go to heaven… if we think about it right.”

  “It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t feel right to my mind.”

  The cop thumped his chest. “You have to feel it in your heart. Can’t you feel it just seeing the pool? Look! Look how it swirls around. Isn’t that beautiful? Don’t you want to be happy? Why are you doing this to yourself? Why can’t you just try to be nice? You used to be so nice. What’s happened to you?”

  Chrysalis Joy pulled his thin yellow poncho tight across the front of his body as he looked down at himself. “It’s like we’re grown or something, but not in a real way.”

  Billy Boy Thorn laughed at him. “Everything grows, is grown. That’s just nature. It’s called being alive. Metabolism. Eating for the blood. It’s always real. If you are cut you will bleed very real, yes indeed.”

  “It still doesn’t sound right.”

  “Shut up.” He punched him in the arm. “Anymore, and I hit you where it really hurts. I’m a cop. I mean it.”

  They watched the churning water together for a while in prickly silence. Billy Boy Thorn tried to remember his own ascent to the top of the birthing pool. He remembered when he was sixteen and he first coughed his lungs empty. Towels dried him off, which was his first contact with other hands, and fabric. He was taken away to be shaved and to orientation where he first heard and talked with his mouth using spoken words and first ate crackers, bit his tongue and first choked. He had his first cot to sleep on where he felt his first torturous muscle cramps against gravity. The next day he was fully clothed like a man and standing with a crowd. He was in awe as he watched his first newscast. But then he had his first elimination and humiliation. The world to a newborn was full of sensation, mistakes and wonder. The streets seemed so fantastically big back then, instead of a middling loop. In a week he mastered his first billy boy beat and grueling muscle-building workouts. Some newborns couldn’t handle it, grabbed their chests in pain and were dead in days, of heart attacks.

  “I’m having a wild thought,” Chrysalis Joy admitted, again. “Once we’re born here in the city, we… only live four years?”

  Billy Boy Thorn gave a bossy nod. “Yeah, then we go to perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds. Maybe. You have to be good first if you want to deserve heaven. You’re not being good. Watch it. Stop thinking! You need distracted!”

  “Oh. Is that what happens?”

  “Yes it does happen!”

  “You’re a sheep.”

  “What’s a sheep? No, don’t tell me. That’s enough wild thoughts out of you for one lifetime! I’ve had enough of you! You’ve become so perverted!” Billy Boy Thorn angrily took Chrysalis Joy’s arm and roughly pulled him out of the room and back down the red stairs. “Let’s go!” He pulled him to a different cave. “Let’s just get you on your way to heaven before you ruin it for yourself for good!”

  “You can’t send me to heaven before my time.”

  “I’m a cop. I have a lot of power with stuff like elevator rides. And I want to see you in heaven when I get there. You’re my friend, in case you forgot. I want a friend in heaven. Forever is a long time and I want you there.”

  “It’s all made up.”

  “One more wild thought out of you and I’ll punch you in the mouth. I’m a cop and I always do my job.”

  “That won’t stop me thinking.”

  Billy Boy Thorn huffed. “Then we must hurry!”

  They struggled against each other up the seven steps of Jacob’s Ladder into the Eden Room. A wide white chandelier glowed to greet them, slowly sprawling out its pellucid cubes and pyramids to fill the ceiling, triggered by the movement of their arrival.

  “All the men of this city are only four years in age from each other,” Chrysalis Joy said, sliding his feet across the smooth faux marble floor, unable to stop Billy Boy Thorn from manhandling him along. “The city isn’t real. Our lifespan isn’t real. Think about it!”

  “You are a moon bat.”

  “Think about it!”

  Billy Boy Thorn gave him an extra vicious tug. “That’s just being paranoid. That’s easy. Being paranoid and conspiracy theories are sloppy. They’re simplistic and appeal to sloppy thinking. Junk for the brain. Junk trash thinking. Anybody can become paranoid without even trying.”

  Chrysalis Joy tried to pull away. “The roles we play in this city are predetermined. Why have I been the way I’ve been? Why am I walking in circles all day, walking around helping to keep everybody distracted from the truth? I don’t want to be that. That’s been my whole life, my whole life of four years!”

  “You’re a decoyboy. And you should be proud.”

  “Why? Think about it! Think! Remember!”

  “Your acts were sacred! Body rights are sacred!” Billy Boy Thorn hugged him tighter so Chrysalis Joy couldn’t slip out from under his flimsy poncho. “And I don’t have to think about it. I have faith. I don’t think!”

  “And then why the elevator? Why after only four years?”

  “Wild thought! Stop it or I’ll have to go back to pillplace with you! The second time is most dangerous, you know. Could be damnation. If I bring you back there I’ll never see you again, for sure. You won’t go up! People rarely survive being wild. Not when it happens again and again. The red nurses only tolerate so much. They’re so strict, as they should be!”

  “It’s like we’re cultivated,” Chrysalis Joy continued, “and for a horrible reason. I can just feel it! The tiny loop of a city around us just makes it look like everything’s all right but we’re being fooled. Something horrible is really happening to us! Who are we? Why do I feel like I’m not even real?”

  “Stop it!” He punched Chrysalis Joy in the gut. “Present tense, now! Present tense! Mandatory blind faith!” He punched him in the gut a second time. “Mandatory blind faith!”

  After coughing, Chrysalis Joy yelled, “We’re all being tricked and controlled and watched, you stupid idiot!”

  “You are going to go. No damnation on my watch!” At the other end of Eden Room was a mirror to magnificently reflect the overhead chandelier. He put his arms around Chrysalis Joy, from behind, and grabbed his crossed wrists that were in front of him, putting him into a solid basket hold. He walked him resolutely to the where the elevator’s foyer was. “To the wonderful glory of Eden Room”. Billy Boy Thorn started to sing hymns as they scuffled across its mirror floor. Large rings of gossamer globe mobiles sluggishly began to rotate from the slight breezes they stirred up, making the room seem like a shimmering vat of churning halos. “Heaven is your home, Heaven is your home!”

  “Shut up and just listen to yourself!”

  Billy Boy Thorn said, “There, you believe in perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds, don’t you? Look at how beautiful it is just outside its Eden Room doors. Think of how magnificent Garden City, above, must be!”

  “Number?” A calm but important sounding voice rang out from a speaker.

  Billy Boy Thorn gave it his.

  “Authorized. Welcome billy boy authority and guest and welcome to the Garden City elevator. Your guest should be proud for he was chosen from those who could not contain their wild thoughts and you will be Garden City’s next good shopper in the marvelous land of perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds.”

  “But I’m not good!” Chrysalis Joy yelled out at the room. “And I don’t believe in you. I don’t have to. You either are or you aren’t real and I have nothing to do with it! If you have to be believed to be real then you aren’t real!”

  “Oh, shut up.” He pushed Chrysalis Joy past the glitzy foyer, through several sets of glass doors and then through a set of plain metal doors. They entered a narrow but lofty backroom. Still struggling, they almost fell down a flight of concrete stairs that led to a gray platform. The backroom space wen
t up many stories, filled with fat cloth-wrapped pipes and rows of large rusty tanks that were all intertwined by wires and wispy strings of dusty cobwebs.

  On the platform was the elevator. A white frame of lights around the door vulgarly blinked at them. The door sluggishly opened in anticipation, squeaking a bit as if it was wearing out.

  “It won’t work,” Chrysalis Joy hollered, trying to fight Billy Boy Thorn off. “I know it’s all a scam and I’m not going!”

  “It’s not a scam! It’s good! The elevator is right there and it looks happy and you’re going!”

  “Welcome to the Garden City elevator,” the voice continued, now distant, echoing, and hard to understand, sounding oblivious to them and their disrespect. “Just enter the elevator and push the button and all is well. All is well. Perfect bliss in Elysium Grounds is your eternal home.”

  Billy Boy Thorn regarded the elevator lights in reverence, and said, “From the bountiful shaft may all mercy flow from above to down below.”

  Chrysalis Joy caught Billy Boy Thorn by surprise enough to head-butt him, the back of his head soundly cracking him in the nose. As Billy Boy Thorn wondered how he could have allowed that to happened, Chrysalis Joy slipped out of his grip and ran. “Stop it! Or I’ll shoot! Stop, damn it! I can blow your brains out all over the walls!” Billy Boy Thorn tried to sound convincing as he yelled.

  Chrysalis Joy ignored him and ran past the elevator to where the dock ended at a ladder that was bolted to a concrete wall. The ladder led to a catwalk.

  The room kept talking to them, “Welcome to the elevator of Garden City, just enter and push the button home and all will be well.” The elevator began to sing to them, “Going home home home … you’re just going home home home.”

  Chrysalis Joy scrambled higher up the ladder. Billy Boy Thorn fired a shot just above Chrysalis Joy’s head to cut him off. As the flair hit the metal, Chrysalis Joy jolted and fell. A bolt of electricity shot up off the ladder into the loft. It hit a tank. Long wiry bolts of electricity flashed up the rows of tanks. Dust exploded into flames. The room filled with a blast of dazzling dusty sparks. Then there was a hiss and blue flames shot out of a pipe until it exploded violently, pushing aside nearby pipes. They exploded until a bigger detonation behind the loft. That broke a row of the large rusty tanks loose and they fell forward in unison until they crashed against the opposite wall. Breaking open at the seams, their immense reservoirs of water fell out. The room flooded, washing them both inside the elevator. They both sucked up against the grate that was its ceiling.