Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  Billy Boy Thorn grabbed for Chrysalis Joy but his legs slipped through his hands. He watched him swim up the shaft and realized the elevator ceiling had broken loose. Billy Boy Thorn didn’t feel as buoyant so he pushed the one big button marked “home” to follow him up. The elevator chugged heavily and pushed slowly through the water to ascend after Chrysalis Joy. Billy Boy Thorn finally grew impatient, running out of breath, so he grabbed the cables. He kicked furiously and swam up one story, watching a blue glow from above all the bubbles. The elevator door was open, icy slush was pouring through it, and he rode out into a painful metal floor. Looking around he noticed he’d entered the inside of a warehouse freezer. He jumped up, barely preventing his clothes and skin from freezing to the floor. He stepped out of the stream of water as it turned into crackling ice that steamed heavily into the air.

  “Where are you? Hello!” He wondered why the elevator had stopped off in such a horrible place and hadn’t taken him all the way up to eternal paradise. Desperate to find an exit, he hurried amongst the many rows of ice pillars. He stopped. He noticed that the ice pillars had a man frozen inside each one of them. He swore, in shock. He slipped and almost fell down.

  At the end of a row of them, with a loud snap, a metal claw pulled a long black mold up off a fresh clear pillar of ice. A man was inside, his arms were to his side as if forced there. Billy Boy Thorn slid close and saw that it was Chrysalis Joy. The dead man’s eyes were stuck wide open in arrested astonishment. Aghast, Billy Boy Thorn’s feet swiftly slid out from under him. He painfully scrambled back up, briskly rubbed his palms together to try and warm them, as he skated over to some of the other pillars. He looked at the frozen men and they all seemed identical. He realized they all contained a Chrysalis Joy.

  “It can’t be!” he cried out aloud. “A hundred Chrysalis Joys!” Hearing a loud clank and pop, he turned and saw a panel in the far wall slide away. A back row of ice pillars pushed toward it in a slow orderly fashion. The ice pillars plopped indelicately onto their sides and slipped down a chute into a cloud of steam. Another claw appeared from the overhead tracks and clanked towards him. He reached for his gun but it was gone. He didn’t see it anywhere on the floor and wondered if it was under the tall pile of ice that was still pushing out of the elevator door, slowly smashing the entire elevator shaft apart. He looked about for a place to hide. Shivering wildly, he scanned the walls for a way out and noticed a square spot on the far wall. There, the ice shimmered in an odd flimsy manner. He skated to it and found it was a door covered in dangling silver plastic strips that were animated by a breeze blowing from behind it.

  He pushed the fringe aside and entered a corridor. Then he spotted another claw. A huge three-fingered hand of tatty metal and skin rolled across the ceiling toward him. Billy Boy Thorn halted. The hand stopped just above him. A red light blinked in the wrinkled hinges of the palm, like an eye. It blinked as if it was thinking. After a few moments, the light went out and the claw jerked away. It disappeared through a trap high in the ceiling. Billy Boy Thorn moved again and cautiously walked toward the end of the hall. The huge metal hand popped out of the ceiling again and raced towards him. Billy Boy Thorn stopped. The hand stopped. The red light blinked and seemed to think again, and then it went up into a different trap door in the ceiling. Billy Boy Thorn stood motionless for a full minute. Then he ran away as fast as he could, running to the end of the hall. A flap opened, the hand popped down and clawed at him but just missed him.

  Billy Boy Thorn ran out a door and down into a flooded room of icy water that splashed up past his knees. He splashed along until he found steps that led him up into a room that opened to a long wide white hallway with an endless orange stripe down the middle of the endless carpet, with plain white metal doors here and there along the way. He pushed on a few of the doors and they were locked.

  He walked the meandering hallway for hours and hours, trying to find some bearing. He wanted to walk so far away that he’d find the war. He’d join up on the side of freedom and then he’d certainly earn an elevator ride the rest of the way up to heaven.

  On one door he saw a drawing of a dragon and over it was a bat, done in blue marker. He couldn’t remember their names but their creature shapes were oddly familiar from some past memory. He tried that door. He knocked. It was locked and all was quiet behind it. He walked on and finally grew so tired that he fell to the floor. He started to cry, “Chrysalis Joy, what happened? How did we get this way so fast, when we’d all been doing so well just a little while ago. We were friends. The city was good to us. We did our jobs for the city. It’s all gone now. What happened? Where am I, what is this really weird place, and where am I going?” As he tried to figure it all out, memories came to him of the day before.

  chapter 3: a billy boy beat

  He remembered being an important senior cop on the clock, and now he was just glad that he’d soon be off his beat. Until then, there was still some messing to do with slipshod minds. He pushed a big square button to reverse the direction of three swooping escalators. That would cause a small amount of chaos to help keep the crowd present tense and thinking legal. There was an electrical short in the metal and it zapped him. He tripped off his feet. Bright dots flashed in his eyes as his mind flooded with repressed thoughts. A voice shouted through his head, sounding almost like his own, “You’re an insane man!”

  “Am not!” he argued.

  “Insane man!” the voice yelled back.

  “Wild thought!” he urgently warned himself. “And wild thoughts keep us all from the elevator ride to heaven.” He leapt up and resumed his dignified pose, then looked around in alarm. Nobody was out on the concrete balconies to point and laugh at him for having this accident.

  The voice jostled him again. “You’re insane and you were sent away for it!”

  Billy Boy Thorn pressed his fingertips against his eyelids to cause pain. He wanted to bring his thoughts back to the outside of his skull where they’d be easier to control and stay pure. But he was thinking about driving a big black car at top speeds, fighting to re-control it from override, stomping the fuel pedal as the wipers flapped to clear away the smears of blood. “You’re only a tiny criminal and nothing more,” the voice that was almost like his own shamed him. Then he remembered he was blasting into outer space in a fake skin of strong bubbly cells. They pushed his nerve endings into pain, making him too delirious to think about anything. Then he was sliced apart and his dots were dissolved into a multitude of warm fishtanks of many Billy Boy Thorns.

  He made himself snap out of it again. He knew he’d have to stay legal at all costs, especially since, as a cop, he was the bellwether of morality. Billy Boy Thorn quickly scanned the stratum of balconies again, feeling guilty. “I’m an idiot ready for pillplace,” he said to himself. He wished Chrysalis Joy would just happen by to wave him down. His witty company would keep his mind here and now.

  Another cop stepped up to him and pointed at the escalators. “Are they not working again? They haven’t been working very well lately. Everything is turning into junk.”

  “Now you tell me. They have an electrical short, too. Have you seen Chrysalis Joy?”

  “It’s fine by me if the steps don’t work. The norm moles are all lazy enough as it is. Let them walk. They’ve floated long enough.”

  “Have you seen Chrysalis Joy? I’m looking for him. I haven’t seen him in awhile.”

  “No.” The cop smiled so politely it looked facetious. “It’s a big street. Won’t any decoyboy do for a chat? I have to get to the gambling tables and count everybody.”

  Billy Boy Thorn slapped the man’s shoulder. “I was looking for just him.”

  “Don’t get picky with your friends. Not in your old old age of twenty, old shit. Or you won’t make it to heaven.” He pulled out his gun and stuck it into Billy Boy Thorn’s belly. “Do I shoot you now or wait until you’ve failed at pillplace?”

  Billy Boy Thorn forced a casual laugh. “Don’t worry abou
t the morals of the likes of me.”

  “We always worry this day and age.” He kissed his gun before he put it away. “There are wars. There’s lots of worry. Something’s not right…”

  “I’ve got lots of friends to always pull me out of myself,” Billy Boy Thorn bragged. “And let the gambling tables take care of themselves. The mind is always present tense when there’s greed.” The cop gave a polite smile again, play-punched Billy Boy Thorn’s arm, and then he strolled away.

  Billy Boy Thorn walked beyond the last of the sidewalk to the end of a long dark hall of rusting grates. He climbed some scaffolding to a vent near the ceiling where he wondered if the customary ghosts above were chatting, or whatever it was that they were. He had no explanation for what the pair of voices that occasionally wafted down could possibly be. The odd faraway high-pitched voices didn’t sound like young men, which was impossible. There was nothing else in the whole wide world that sounded like it. He pushed his nose deep between the cold slats and listened.

  “You old damn slog. Roll that clown into alley B, today, so we can go on break before my new bladder bursts. I don’t think replacement parts are as good as the originals. I don’t care what they say. I don’t feel sixteen. I’d be glad to feel seventy again. I can’t stand on my damn feet for hours on end like this anymore.”

  “You’re fine. Our one hour isn’t up yet.”

  “It’s a dinosaur bladder. I don’t care if it’s all grown just for me from my own damn dots. I feel old.”

  “Yeah, your ankles are swelling again.”

  “Damn no. Damn you. Made me look.”

  “I’ll roll this clown over your ankles if you confuse me again. Everybody knows the clowns who die before twenty go down there. There. Damn.”

  “Oh, I thought he was a twentyer.”

  “Does he look twenty to you?”

  “They all look like babies to me. So young.”

  “Oh, phhh, you knackered old tart. Then, why don’t I just roll him over there. Who cares? I don’t think they pay that much attention. They’ll peel his gizmos off and look at it all, anywhere.”

  “The union cares. Ha! Or pretends to. They could pretend better. Why don’t we just find them damn robber scientists and ask them when this’ll all be over, ourselves. I used to want to go home. Now I just want to retire and watch the damn stars.”

  “As the stars ignore you and your sprawling seat? Are you going to be a rusted old slog your entire life? Go then and retire. I won’t miss you.”

  “You will too. You’ll cry.”

  “Will not.”

  “Will too. You’ll cry until you drop dead.”

  “Are you talking in the mirror again to a bad wig? You can’t be referring to me.” They both bawdily laughed.

  Billy Boy Thorn rubbed his shaved head in confusion as words girls! girls! girls! flashed before his eyes in bright pink neon lights on a street of violent crime, in a past life. A beautiful creature in dainty heeled shoes and blowing silk fabrics took a flower out of long soft black hair and sniffed it. Why did it sniff? Oh! There were more senses, once! And more kinds of people… there were men and there were… petite soft angels? He bristled, pushing away from the grate, not wanting to ruin his chances of heaven by thinking too much. He suddenly thought of carefully pouring olive oil on a wildly twisted pile of white strings of food. Wild thought—there was no such thing. In a real world everything was crackers. Food was orderly crackers, naturally, and eaten with fingers. He climbed down the scaffolding and hurried away.

  Stepping through a low-hanging cloud of steam wafting from a sauna door, he noticed all was calm at the cafeteria vending machines. He snarled at the men. One could never tell what a norm mole was really thinking. “Hey billy boy,” a man called up to him from a trench below. “Did anyone win the Cracker Barrel lottery?”

  “You still have a chance. Think greedy and you’ll go to heaven.”

  “I’m lucky today, I just know it!” He pushed past others and ran.

  Billy Boy Thorn quickly turned away and hurried up a corridor of peeling yellow paint, thinking how his best bet for the rest of the beat was just to try and stay as present tense as possible. He was supposed to think he was walking the beat of a nice normal town. “I’m in Subco Gibeah,” he firmly told himself, “the holding-pattern under glorious heaven, Garden City.” He spelled it out for himself in the rote memorization of his personalized playpen fishtank radio waves. “I’ll patrol here for four years to keep mental order over the communal slobs and then finally take the elevator up and live forever. I earned it. I deserve it. It’s only fair. It’s only common sense. What else could there possibly be?” He dared not think about that. “No! There’s only this life and then eternity in heaven!”

  He paused at a series of mirrors and gazed curiously at himself again. He noticed a spider on one of them. Seeing a spider was supposed to be good luck. It was the wildlife. On the reflection, the creepy crawly seemed a part of him. He blew on it to make it go away but it fell. Then he realized it was dead.

  “This billy boy looks born to be a billy boy.” Born? He wondered if that was a wild thought. To wonder probably meant it was. “I was educated first in a fishtank,” he calmly reminded himself. “And then I was born. And that’s nice.” He touched the mirror. He gazed in admiration at his long legs as if they weren’t really his own but belonged to some superior man he’d been made into and given birth to. Wild thought. He pinched his lips. He ran his hands over his shaved scalp and remembered once being a person who had black hair. But that made no sense because everybody shaved. He looked into his cold black eyes as if he was looking at somebody else. “I used to not look so good,” he remembered. “I was another person, entirely. A scrawny dork.” He squeezed his ample bicep. “This arm really isn’t mine. Not… all the way mine.”

  “Wild thought! Wild thought! Wild thought!” his reflection in the mirror yelled at him.

  He hurried away. “Time: 326,” he punched into his wrist as he headed for the small billy office off Blue Carpet Street to sign away for the night. Night, he thought, although most of the city was always this dark, always night, always a cave. “But not all of it has carpet,” he complained, and then he went to a dorm to go to bed. He quickly fell asleep.

  He dreamt. Hundreds of neon green gyro bikes sped in wide circles up the walls of the zero gravity well in the humongous bright silver bubble room. Billy Boy Thorn didn’t gyro bike. He’d never been invited on one, being a cop, so in the dream he just floated in the room’s dead center. Several black elevators slipped by, so he swam after one and it went up into a long dark shaft that led to a vast bright factory. Hundreds of ashen bloodless men were lined up, frozen in long tubes of glistening ice. “Freezer burn!” a shrill voice screamed out over the sounds of loud chiseling and metal sawing.

  Billy Boy Thorn jolted awake. He was shivering so much he had to wonder if his bloodstream had stopped. He sat up and looked around, feeling lost. Then he realized he was just in a dorm he didn’t stay in often enough to know well. Out over the rows of beds he saw a flashing red light far away on a far cave wall. It was over a window. He wondered what it was for and thought about where that window went as he tried to fall back to sleep again. He didn’t want to think about that strange frozen factory place. His dreams usually frightened him. Sometimes he had dreams so strikingly bizarre they were far stranger than any legal fiction. Thorn was an emotionally unstable repeat criminal. He killed twelve wombs that night. Wombs… not men but the wild thought people. They were the smaller people who were like gazelles with singing voices like… he drew a blank. He was going to run over as many as he could in his big powerful car that he stole. It was to prove to himself that he was a somebody. But the plastic lightning hit him before he even realized it and his car went off the top level of the bridge, its auto off-on switching back and forth so fast that the motor wasn’t able to think straight. If he’d been lucky he would have crashed and burned into oblivion. But a certain corpo
ration had designs on his rescued brain. It was blasted to a secure lab in space. The G forces made his eyeballs feel as if they wanted to push into his mouth, though those unnecessary body parts had been physically left behind. Then they sliced and grew a whole new body many hundreds of times over and he went into meaningless infinity like mirrors facing each other, with a bug caught in-between.

  “Total wild thought!” a bullhorn screamed down at him from a news parade. Billy Boy Thorn sat up, waking up, and rubbed his sleepy eyes, still vaguely remembering when violent accelerations wanted to push them deep down his throat.

  He hurried out of the dorm, quickly skittered through the narrow labyrinth of various pounding showers and stepped off a shallow sudsy waterfall onto the blasting driers. He wanted their rude noise and thunderous palpitations to take his mind away from ruin. Fresh, sterile and shivering, he bolted out into the street. He punched numbers angrily into his wrist, pushing aggressively through a band of more men who were in his way. He wasn’t sure the number he was punching in was correct but his wrist would fix it, so he wondered why he needed to log anything in at all. He angrily started punching in all sorts of numbers as he hurried to the laundry across the street for his sturdy billy boy cop uniform to be glued to him, still warm from the oven. He badly wanted the heavy cop boots on his feet to help him feel powerful.