Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  “Nope.”

  “Then why would I know you?” the library replied.

  “What is Elysium Grounds?” he asked.

  “Why is the mind so naturally superstitious?” Eleven Jane questioned Billy Boy Thorn, who could only shrug in response, wishing he knew a smart question to ask the library to give him the ultimate answer about who he was and why he was now sitting with two old women, and male and female hippisticks.

  Lady Hatchet answered for him, “Superstition is a side effect of intelligence. Or better yet, the mind. It creates compulsion. Compulsion isn’t all that bad. It’s always nice to have things to do and think about. Sometimes I imagine white unicorns watch over me and love me and protect me and it makes me happy to think that way, so I don’t care. Sometimes that’s all that gets me out of bed in the morning, or keeps me from killing myself when I’m sad. My white unicorns stand at my bedside at all times and tell me to keep going. They are eternal so I don’t have to worry about them ever dropping dead on me and stinking up my room with rot. And they’re invisible so don’t say they aren’t here right now protecting me. Of course they are here now.”

  “Show him the earthquake,” Venus said to the library “That’s something to see.”

  Eleven Jane turned to the playing children. “Who wants to watch the big earthquake again?” They squealed. “Let’s watch it over here where we can all sit.”

  Billy Boy Thorn was ushered to a long couch in front of a wide gray monitor under a painted rainbow. The ceiling that arched high over their heads was painted sky blue and was dotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. The children piled on around him, but cautiously, not touching him. Eleven Jane had two small children in her lap. Billy Boy Thorn was oddly thrilled to see her being touched like that. He wished he could just plop into her lap. She gave him an irritated glance.

  The screen came to light then life, and wildly. The actual earthquake had been well recorded but was difficult to see clearly through the nauseating wobbling, as if all the construction on earth had been put on springs. Waves of dust shot out of the ground and poured off toppling ancient masonry. The old brick and mortar buildings in Memphis tossed down in a few seconds, while other parts of the city slipped down into a myriad of gooey sinkholes. Tall buildings shimmied until they ground their way down into smoldering pancake piles. Water and gas pipes exploded out of the streets. A bullet train, which was stuffed with thousands of people, shot thick waves of sparks up from the tracks as its brakes activated. Then it derailed and shred into tumbling shattering pieces across a grassy field.

  Statistics flashed up on the screen under the images of tumbling architecture: Carbondale as well as Nashville was 80% flattened in minutes. St. Louis, Little Rock and Birmingham became burning trash heaps. Bridges became diving boards making the children laugh at the sight of cars tossing off like toys. Billy Boy Thorn grew sick, knowing people were slamming around inside them.

  “Hush!” Eleven Jane snapped at the laughing children.

  “Cities as north as Quincy Illinois were rattled,” the library read, “and their locks and dams were damaged as much of the Mississippi went backwards for several days. The widespread poisons of radiation and toxic waste immediately blanketed out in a fog, dropping all birds out of the sky.” A sight of rescue workers and military personnel lying dead in the streets of Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington DC and New York caused the children to snicker, again.

  “Thank you,” Eleven Jane commended the library.

  It asked, “Don’t you want to see the shots of the subsequent river floods? They are very important. There were invisible clouds of asbestos in the air that killed many more much later. For decades to come there was a severe plague of many cancers.”

  “Thank you!”

  “But they are!”

  “Thank you!” She repeated.

  “There were the riots!”

  “Thank you! Good bye! Click off!”

  As the movie files loudly clicked off, she turned to the kids and scolded them, “Now my little monkeys, just because you’ve never been to the planet Earth doesn’t mean you don’t have to learn about how big it is and how big some bad things can be and how Earth people are still people, too.”

  Some wailed.

  “Terrible disasters could happen here and we could all be killed just as fast. Smashed, drowned and burning children isn’t only restricted to the planet Earth!”

  They all wailed.

  “Be nice, or you’ll grow up to only be stupid monkeys.”

  “We want to be monkeys in the trees!” a little girl squealed.

  Eleven Jane wagged her finger at them. “Stupid monsters eat stupid monkeys up in the trees.”

  “Monke-e-eys!”

  Lady Hatchet looked at the little girl in a manner that quieted her.

  Venus turned away from them and said to Billy Boy Thorn, “And it was so stupid. Everybody knew the fault was there, yet there was no central government to stop anybody from building there in that way, or from storing such deadly waste.”

  He made a face. “All your horrible news is overwhelming. That was my home, the home of my first memories.”

  Venus shook her head sadly. “Oh dear. You can’t fight nostalgia.”

  Lady Hatchet closed her eyes. “I would like to.”

  Venus stood. “Let’s all go swimming now and work up a good healthy appetite.”

  Eleven Jane gave her a dirty look, “You mean, to show we are all one in the cosmic ocean of space!”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “One in the eternal cosmic ocean of all space for all time!”

  Thorn nodded assiduously. He was reminded of heaven. He looked around and suddenly wondered if this place could be some sort of link to heaven. He wondered if he was wrong to think heaven came after a simple elevator ride. Maybe it also needed a willful odyssey and a vision quest type of an adventure. Maybe the path to heaven was narrow and only a few clever norm moles or strong cops made it all the way in. He looked around but didn’t get any ideas how to proceed. “I’m stupid and unworthy and I don’t know where to go.”

  Venus gestured at him. “Come on, come on! Get some religion!”

  He smiled. “Yes, religion will show me the way.”

  * *

  Eleven Jane walked along a narrow stream to the dark red light of the lake. She took off all her clothes, put her arms out and chanted, “We are all one in light and water. We are all one in spirit and matter. Let us swim in the ocean of space to show how we are all one.”

  Billy Boy Thorn pulled off his shirt as Eleven Jane regarded his tall body. He smiled at her chest. She frowned, turned away, and scooped up a child into her arms. He stared at her butt.

  “Dinosaurs can swim?” Malbri Three said to Venus, as he stepped between Eleven Jane and Thorn, as the men stripped.

  Venus nodded at him as if proud. “I already promised the clone his first good swim outside of a fishtank.” She took Lady Hatchet’s arm and they proceeded to the large square floats at the lake’s edge. Venus first dipped her toes in, and then Lady Hatchet helped Venus tug off her clothes. Venus pleaded to her, “Come swim with us.”

  “I don’t like getting wet. I can be one with you all from up here on the shore. Now git and leave me alone and leave me high and dry.”

  Billy Boy Thorn looked down into the water. He timidly put his foot in. “Fishtank.”

  Lady Hatchet yelled at him, “Don’t be scared big boy. If you see a sea monster you can knock the snot out of it, I’m sure of it. And please do.”

  “A sea monster?”

  “The monkey mob or whatever might be down there. Who knows what’s all in this big toilet.”

  He took a breath and plowed deep into it. He fell into a bath of memory, feeling like a tiny tadpole with messages starting to zing into his brain, stinging it. They were messages he couldn’t hear with his ears but his brain heard them regardless as if there wasn’t a difference. “You have a dog named Alfie,” it said loudly, but
sounding tinny. “You first got him when your adult male dog bred with the neighbor’s dog up the road. They gave you Alfie out of the litter because you needed a new dog. The adult male dog was hit by a car, one night, between your house and the neighbor’s…” and the information went on and on, every detail of Billy Boy Thorn’s life spilled out from a recording from another recording back to the original source from the first brain’s electricity. The piquant boyhood memories of smell sight and sound made him want to cry, but that wasn’t the best thing to do underwater and his lungs started aching so he slowly swam toward the surface. Along the way he remembered months in deep space, as only a brain. It was flattened and frozen. He was packed in stacks with other criminal brains that needed punished. He wondered how he could remember a thing like that. Keeping the brains aware must have been part of the punishment. When on trial, he had pleaded for a life sentence.

  The judge had said, “Your sentence will be for eternity. Or until they tire of the project.”

  He felt as if he was floating in deep space, again, the choir of silence of nothing but black was so deafening that he thought he’d somehow evaporate into it. He saw stars but then realized they were the lights of the city. He came to the surface.

  “There he is! He didn’t die!”

  They were in a panic. Red faced, red-eyed people in the water were gasping. Seeing Billy Boy Thorn they screamed out in amazement, “There he is!”

  “He didn’t drown.” Eleven Jane shook her head slowing in amazement.

  “He didn’t escape,” Lady Hatchet marveled, yelling at them from shore.

  “Of course not,” he said, treading water. “Why would you think that?”

  Malbri said, “You never came back up! You were underwater for a very long time!”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Dude! How did you breathe?” Malbri Three asked.

  “I didn’t. That’s why I came back up to the surface.”

  Eleven Jane shook her head again. “Clones are so weird.”

  “Hippisticks are feeble,” he replied.

  “Let’s go eat,” Eleven Jane said and then she splashed water in his face. “I think we can say we worked up an appetite today. We real people are tired!” She pushed to the shore and they all followed her, wading back up through the narrow stream then around a waterfall to their shanty balloon tent camp in the cave. Billy Boy Thorn thought he’d have a heart attack at the sight of water dripping off her gorgeous hair and skin.

  “Here, dude.” Malbri Three handed Billy Boy Thorn a long snug robe that was similar to his own, simple and brown, sewn up at the sides. After helping him put it over his head, straight, he said, “I see you can’t keep your eyes off Eleven Jane, billy boy. Nobody likes to be stared at.”

  “You can just call me Thorn, I’m not a billy boy anymore. I guess now I’m nothing.”

  “Thorn is name enough. Hey everybody! Now his name is just Thorn! He ain’t a cop anymore!”

  “Phhh, you never were a real cop.” Lady Hatchet went up to him and impatiently redid his belt so it wouldn’t twist the wrong way in the back.

  Then Thorn wondered if only cops got into heaven. His heart sank.

  * *

  Lady Hatchet stood behind Venus and proceeded to comb out her wet hair. “Are your ankles swelling again?”

  Venus kicked up a leg. “No. Damn you, you made me look.”

  Thorn asked her, “Why was the water so warm?”

  Malbri Three answered, “All this water goes through the solar panels outside. They pop out of the asteroid like big silver bug wings. That’s what heats the whole place.”

  “Too damn square to be like wings,” Venus begged to differ.

  Eleven Jane returned with a white towel on her head and a long red kimono completely covering her. Thorn tried not to stare, finding her clothed appearance also intriguing.

  Sitting on the floor at one of many round tables at the back of the cave, Thorn was given food that didn’t look like anything he’d had before in this life, and needed a spoon. “What vending machine did this come from?” He wondered how it would be dispensed and grabbed.

  A woman said, “We don’t do that. We cook.”

  Venus laughed. “You take food from a vending machine and then mix it all into one big pile and play with it a moment.”

  He ate it, happy with it once he tasted it. While being on display, he tried to explain his clone city but he couldn’t get anyone to empathize with him. “And I was a cop…” he trailed off. Food fell off his spoon again.

  “It’s just a robber scientist trap,” Eleven Jane scoffed. “You’ll soon see that this is real and that wasn’t.”

  “My job is very real,” Venus argued. “Clones are my damn job.”

  Lady Hatchet shook her head. “You really are hanging on to damn little, aren’t you, you knackered old tart. Phhh!”

  “And what are you hanging on to?” Venus asked her in return.

  Eleven Jane said, “We all need to hang on to each other in a real community. Creating clones like so many trays of ice cubes is soooo disheartening.”

  Malbri Three nodded. “People need a real feeling of place in a real community or they become sad.”

  “Without genuine community,” Eleven Jane added, “people are filled with dread and all sorts of vague discomforts they can’t quite put their fingers on.”

  “And Metroplex is also not real.” Malbri Three looked towards the backside of the waterfall that was obscuring it from their view. “It’s as fake as the clone hole.”

  “Subco Gibeah.” Thorn corrected him.

  “Clone hole. An unholy hole.”

  Thorn frowned piously. “But we always thought of heaven.”

  Eleven Jane ordered Malbri Three, “Enough talk about that for now, let’s all become one with a bonfire.” She scooped a tiny child off her feet, making her laugh. “What do you say little monkey?” she asked in her ear.

  Thorn looked to the old women in confusion. “What about the union meeting? What about the war? What about my journey?”

  Lady Hatchet waved him off dismissively. “Not today. I’ve done more than enough for one day.”

  Venus smiled at him. “I’m glad you’re impatient to get started.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s hard to have all this new reality always coming at me without warning.”

  Venus rolled her eyes. “We’ve decided we’ve never really known what’s going on, either. Just when you think you do, somebody says something odd and blows it all to hell.”

  Lady Hatchet said to her, “I think he’s talking about something more like an itinerary so he knows what to expect out of tomorrow.”

  “Oh! Well, we’ll try to do that all tomorrow.” Venus smiled at him. She turned to Lady Hatchet. “Did we call in sick for work tomorrow?”

  “Damn no, we’re just not showing up. The clowns can rot.”

  Thorn wondered if the union meeting would be a key to how to get to heaven or give him clues. He wondered if it wasn’t worth the wait and he should just ask the old women what the secret to getting to heaven was, now, to get it over with. “How do I get to heaven from here? I’d like to go to bed tonight in heaven.”

  “You can go there in your dreams.” Venus stood. “Come clone, time for more religion, or ritual, or whatever it is they call what they do, here. Maybe all this religion is what makes a person dream of heaven. Beats the damn out of me.”

  * *

  In a nearby stadium in the cave, festive music took over—a drum jam with hypnotic dancing. Watching the others, Thorn found it easy to learn the basic hippistick moves. After ten minutes of jumping up and down the crowd circled around him and drew closer then began touching him curiously making Thorn feel important. He remembered once on Earth being plopped onto a horse and he marveled at how beautiful she was, seeming like the most perfect creature, the animal only needing to trot around in circles to be perfect. He imagined himself
somehow evolving into a creature as glorious as a horse. The robber scientists were pushing him from clone to clone to that type of graceful powerful animal perfection. The hippisticks backed away and just stood watching him as the movements of his advanced body had become too subtle, intense and complicated. Finally noticing the crowd’s stares, he smiled an apology and backed away, realizing he’d been a buzzkill. He quickly left the arena and sat at a distance on a wall to watch the crowd gradually resume their circular dancing.

  “Dude. You bored?” Malbri Three asked, sitting next to him. “The dance is important. We are all animals. We are all gods. When you dance you feel both at the same time.”

  “Bored? If I have any new thing put in front of my face it might explode!”

  “Sorry.” Malbri Three smiled. “It’s all crazy and new to you I guess. To me it’s just the same-old same-old. You can dance like they are.” He pointed to the crowd. “It’s very easy.”

  “I know. I’ll just watch for awhile.”

  “You tired out?” Malbri Three asked.

  Thorn gave him a dubious glare. “A clone like me can dance on one leg for a week.”

  “I suppose.” Malbri Three looked suspiciously at the clone’s statuesque legs.

  Thorn assured him, “I just have a lot of things in my mind. I just want to watch.” Thorn kept trying to shake from his head the idea that he was a cop and should be hunting these people for wild thoughts. He tried to sort his memories of running horses. He wondered if it had been real somewhere and he really had seen it with his own real eyes, once, or if it had just been some radio waves coming in from somebody else.

  When the music finally lost its intensity, most of the people left the stadium, scattering back to the place where the tents were, softly talking to each other, rubbing their faces as if it was sleep time.

  Thorn grabbed Malbri Three’s arm and walked, steering him past the waterfall and out toward the lake shore. Thorn asked him, “Are you and Eleven Jane lovers?”

  “Just friends.”