Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Watching the last fume tendrils rise to the fan, Drew mourned the woman. He mourned himself.

  He felt like a ghost of himself...as though it were he who had committed suicide.

  PINK PILLS

  The tiny ball rolled playfully under Marisol Nunez’s fingers, as if they chased it in circles, around and around, but with no way for it to escape her flesh, or for her fingers to catch hold of its slippery perfection. It was perfect, wasn’t it? She was the lumpen, disorganized mass of pulsing membranes, writhing organs, fluttering valves. She was the oyster and her tumor was the pearl.

  Sitting on the train, she rested her jaw in the cup of her hand and no doubt looked merely exhausted after a long day of work, which she was, but there was more than exhaustion below the epidermis of her thoughts. The fingers of her cupping hand kneaded the base of her jaw, on the right side. It was almost a sensuous, soothing motion, only partly conscious. She had discovered the ball there last week. She had cried on that night. This evening, her eyes were dully dark and more distant than the train’s last stop. A young man, holding the overhead bar, his crotch swaying near her face, looked down at her and told her she was pretty. She ignored him, and thankfully he got off at Rumford Park. But after he’d gone she belatedly and internally answered him: “Am I? Will I be? A year from now. Or less?”

  The hovertrain continued on...burrowing through the guts of Paxton, a vast city established by Earth on the planet Oasis but since colonized by numerous other races as well. Even the Chooms, who had lived here before the first Earth people, had come to refer to the city by its nickname of Punktown.

  Along the glossy, reptilian tiles of the tunnels snaked cables and conduits and sewerage pipes in a complex circulatory system, a convoluted digestive tract. Some pipes, cracked or burst, released billows of steam the train plunged through, as if they flew through clouds. She saw some wires raining molten sparks onto a maintenance catwalk. By the intermittent service lights, she saw the huddled shapes of people sleeping or dying on those narrow walkways. A train passed them the other way, and in the windows she saw streaking faces so smeared and haunted she couldn’t tell whether they were human or alien. Across the walls of the train’s interior ran animated advertisements in endless loops. A trailer for the latest serial killer movie. An ad for a gun store chain. An ad for a drug to alleviate depression. An ad for a drug to squelch addiction to other drugs. Kill and cure. Yin and yang. Whatever made you feel balanced. Vicarious violence. A pistol under the pillow or a hand full of pills. Were those to preserve one’s own life or take it?

  The subway train whispered to a halt at the underground stop for Mercy Hospital.

  Marisol pressed her smooth forehead to her window to watch the boarding and departing of passengers. One day she would be debarking here. For the last time.

  She pitied those she saw leaving the train, as if they had stepped off Charon’s barge. And these passengers boarding...they must be those who had been grieving over the dying, or those granted a brief reprieve from their own deaths. Death was inevitable. It was nothing unique, special, or else every morsel of steak she devoured would be a tragedy. Though maybe it was. And I’m only twenty-six, she thought. I’m only twenty-six and I’ve never been married. She had never miraculously grown another life within her. Except this bastard pearl...this immaculate misconception.

  Marisol watched an elderly man cross the platform in a slow, ungainly fashion, and her heart cowered behind her rib cage. She followed him as he mounted the few stairs to enter her train. She flinched back from the window, and in so doing, confronted directly her wide-eyed reflection. It was as if her own reflection was what had inspired this expression of horror. But she was so pretty, as that passenger had said. She was small, doll-like. An explosion of dark tendrils gathered back into an unruly ponytail. Huge blackly lustrous eyes under arched heavy brows. A small, almost haughty pout. And skin like ivory. All the gifts of blind Nature. Not engineered, not cosmetic. Accidents, purposeless. Flukes. But the tumor; she could almost sense a sentience to it, a sinister cognizant determination. Like a demon that meant to possess her. Replace her.

  Marisol turned slightly in her seat to watch the old man enter her car; afraid to see him this close, but masochistically unable to resist.

  He had the same sort of tumor that her PCP (primary care physician) had diagnosed in her...but his was in its advanced stages. It grew squarely between his shoulder blades, bent him like a hunchback under its weight. They could grow anywhere. She had looked at photos on the net. One child, eight at the most, had one growing in the orbit of his eye. A pink sphere as big as a tennis ball, swirled with white, like a pink planet viewed from space, streaked with clouds, glossy as if made from marble, like an orb broken off the pinnacle of a grave monument. But the thing was, you never grew more than one of them. Just the one. But the other thing was, it could not be excised (exorcized, she thought). At its base: a nest of filaments so widely spread throughout the body, so intricately interwoven like ivy through a trellis, so blended into the nervous system even on a microscopic level that they were impossible to weed out except, with great effort, postmortem. To sever the parasite at the base would kill a live host. Its ingenious design, a sort of self defense mechanism, had led to some calling it an alien life form, a sort of being, but it wasn’t, her doctor had assured her. It was mindless. And that made it more frightening. It could not be reasoned with, appealed to.

  Even her tumor, as small as a marble, would already have rooted its poisonous arms like those of a jellyfish into her own body, pretending they belonged, invading her tapestry with its own thread, becoming one with her new self. Wired into her complex nerve web and thus, through that, into her brain.

  Why can’t it be screened out with teleportation? she had pleaded. This is why, said her PCP, though his explanation was too vague or too technical for her to assimilate.

  Why can’t it be poisoned in such a way that its nerves die but mine stay alive? That can be done to an extent, her PCP told her, to delay the process...sometimes for many years...but not all the tendrils die and they ultimately regenerate. And it wasn’t possible in every case; in some, the disease advanced much more aggressively than in others.

  Marisol was lucky she was no longer a temp; she had full insurance through work. She was scheduled for her first poisoning treatment—at a clinic, not Mercy Hospital, not that place yet—in two and a half weeks. But even by then, how much further would the pearl have integrated itself with her body?

  The elderly passenger was too doubled-over to hold the overhead bar. With an impatient sigh of disgust, a young man in a five piece suit stood up from his seat so the old man could use it. He half lowered himself, half fell into it.

  His tumor was like a cannon ball that had been fired into him, sunken deeply but halfway breaking through the skin, pushing aside his loose collar, exposing part of itself to a few gawks, mostly from children, but most didn’t even glance at it. It wasn’t an uncommon ailment. There were worse things in Punktown, and people didn’t bother to look at most of those, either.

  Bigger than a cannon ball, though, bigger than a pink bowling ball dropped from a height into gelatinous flesh. It was as big as a basketball, easily. She had seen a photo on the web, a dead woman on a slab, naked, with a vast belly as though pregnant but it was in fact a tumor, almost entirely free of her skin, glossy smooth and even beautiful, hard as bone, and this tumor weighed two hundred pounds. Most didn’t live long enough for them to get that large. Thank God.

  This man, she realized, didn’t have use of his left arm; it was folded at the elbow, clenched up tightly against his chest. And every half minute, his tongue spasmed between his lips. That crushing weight on his spinal column, but the real damage done on a microscopic level.

  The old man lifted his eyes and met Marisol’s.

  His eyes were very tired. And though he was so old, and his tumor was visible where hers was not, not yet, and he was a man and she was a woman, they recognized t
he same look in each other’s eyes as though reflected, and he smiled at her sympathetically. His smile was as bad as the doctor’s confirmation had been. Marisol denied, if only for this moment, any fellowship between them. She tore her eyes off him, wanting to cry, to scream, but too numb...as if, already, her nervous system had been hijacked and reprogrammed, shifted from her control.

  * * *

  The tech who scanned her prior to her first poisoning session was youngish, and offered Marisol his first name: Jay. Jay Torrey.

  “How do you catch this thing?” she asked him as she lay back on the scanning table, dressed only in a flimsy white gown through which Jay’s scanner would be able to see. And through which, thus, he would be able to see. He would see beneath her very skin. See inside her. Her voice trembled with her vulnerability and she wished Jay wasn’t so cute. It made her feel so ugly. He would see to the rotting core of her. Even the sexiest lips, hugely magnified in lipstick ads, looked to Marisol as creased and repellent as an elephant’s anus.

  “They haven’t figured out yet,” he told her, standing near her bare feet, adjusting controls on his scan console. “But it isn’t confined to human races. It first appeared on Anul. In fact, the doctor who’ll be administering your poison session today is from Anul. They seem to be the most adept at fighting it.”

  “Some people say the Anul brought it with them. That it’s their fault.”

  “Shh.” Jay smiled over his shoulder at her. “Don’t be prejudiced, now. You’ve just been reading too many conspiracy theories on the net.”

  “I’ll tell you another one, then,” she said. “Some people think it’s a secret weapon from an enemy race.”

  “Nahh. It works too slow, in most cases. It’s too unevenly spread through the populace. Can’t be a bioweapon.” He gestured at her feet. “I like your toenails.” As on her fingernails, she had a photo of one of her own eyes reproduced on each nail. Her right eye on all the right finger and toenails, her left on all the left. It was a current fad. “But it makes me nervous that you’re looking at me like that,” he joked. He cupped his hands over the ends of her feet as if to blind those unblinking eyes. His palms lightly touched the tops of her feet; she took this as flirtation, and it both excited and dismayed her.

  “Some people decorate their tumors when they break the skin,” Marisol noted. “They paint them. I saw a guy a year or so ago who painted a face on his.”

  “It must help them deal with it. Make a little joke out of it. Some levity to lighten the load.”

  “Yeah? I think it’s sick, myself.”

  Jay had seated himself to commence his scanning, though his body blocked the screen from Marisol’s view, for the most part. She tried to lift her head to look but he cautioned her not to move. What she glimpsed didn’t make much sense to her, anyway. Were those her cells or the cells of the tumor’s lattice or both, blended on a nearly molecular level, like linked chains in the mesh of her composition?

  “Has your PCP got you on pinks?” Jay asked, without looking around.

  “Yeah. One a day.” It was a pill, pink in color like the tumors that had been nicknamed “orb weavers”, after the spider with its intricate web. The pill was a small dose of the same poison with which the Anul doctor would infuse her body after Jay had completed the scan for him. “For what it’s worth,” she added. She wished she didn’t sound so bitter. He’d think she was too gloomy. And then she asked herself why she should care what he thought. What were the chances that he would be interested in a diseased woman? What were the chances that she’d even let him be?

  “Everything that helps, even in some small way, is worth trying.” The young tech swivelled around to smile at her. “There. I’ll go send in Dr. Fald now. Any more questions before I do?”

  “Not that immediately comes to mind.”

  “I have a question for you, then. Do you like films?”

  “Films?”

  “I was hoping you might go to one with me, sometime.” His grin became embarrassed. “I know it’s not professional of me to ask you, but...I understand if you’d rather not...”

  He’d seen within her, seen the hard seed of corruption that even she hadn’t seen, and yet he was still asking her out...

  In a small, uncertain voice, but without hesitation, she found herself telling him she would.

  * * *

  During the poisoning session, Marisol slept. And dreamed.

  In the dream, she was walking barefoot through a vast factory, wearing only that thin hospital gown. She was following a great conveyor belt along its river-like course through the chambers of the factory, through billowing steam clouds jetted from valves, through walls of buzzing and clanging noise, through nearly unlit hallways as silent as a subterranean labyrinth of tombs. At the beginning of the conveyor, naked people had been standing in a queue and were stepping up onto the slowly moving belt, then lying back upon it with their feet together, their arms at their sides. Some of these people looked quite normal, but in most, their orb weaver tumors were bulging beneath their skin, or even broken bloodlessly through the skin to expose their hard smooth surfaces like the enamel inside a conch shell.

  The conveyor carried these bodies onward to a point where guillotine-like blades whooshed in from either side, severing heads from necks. The belt, the floor, the walls became splashed with explosions of blood...but no one as they neared the swinging blades sought to scramble free...and the decapitated bodies did not flinch or convulse. It was as if the procession was passively sedated by the pink pills they had been handed back when they were waiting in line.

  The headless bodies were transported into an enclosed area that Marisol could not see within, so she continued along outside the covered conveyor, padding along a narrow catwalk because the floor had dropped away, lying she couldn’t tell how far below because of the gulf of blackness. Toward the end of the covered section of the belt, ahead of her she saw white shapes being ejected out of a chute to plummet into the void below. As she drew nearer to the chute, she saw what these ejected forms were. Headless, bloodless corpses. And each had a black hole drilled into it, but the hole was in a different spot in each cadaver. Also, the hole might be very small or a gaping crater. She knew what had been extracted through these holes, even before she saw the conveyor emerge from its enclosing cover.

  On the belt now, the blood having been sprayed from it, rested orb weaver tumors where the bodies had once been. Some were so tiny as to be nearly invisible, while others were too large for a person to get their two hands around. One, she guessed, had to weigh at least as much as she did. And all so perfectly round and smooth—could anything be more perfect?—glossy pink with white striations like cirrus clouds.

  The floor returned. Marisol stepped off the catwalk and followed the conveyor until it entered another closed section. From within it came a deafening grinding sound, so high-pitched she imagined her ears would soon trickle blood. Despite the cover over the belt, a fine pink dust misted the air, which Marisol couldn’t help breathing in. She knew it coated her lungs.

  The belt was drawing toward its terminus, passing through the bodies of various loud, vibrating machines...

  At the end of the belt stood a queue of nude people, old and young, male and female, human or nonhuman. Marisol stripped her light gown up over her head, then added herself to the end of the line. She turned her head to watch the belt again. From the last of the machines through which it passed, she saw what the belt now carried forward, its final product. Evenly spaced, tiny pink pills. Like the others in line with her, she reached out and took one, popped it into her mouth and swallowed it dry.

  She could feel the forests of tendrils emerge from the pill as soon as it hit her belly. And she saw that the belt did not end, after all. It had completed a circle as perfect as the tumors were round. It was an endless cycle.

  The man in front of her in the shuffling line wasn’t human. From the rose pink hue of his skin and his bony mallet-shaped head she could tell
he was an Anul. He turned his head around to look down at her. The tumor that had broken through the flesh of his shoulder, as big as his head, swivelled in its socket as if to look at her, too. “Miss Nunez?” he said.

  * * *

  “Yes?” she said groggily, slitting open her eyes, and seeing the face of Dr. Fald leaning over her.

  “Your session is finished. How do you feel?”

  “Tired,” she grumbled.

  “You can convalesce in here for a while, and then a nurse will be in to assist you and check you out of the clinic.”

  Dr. Fald had no tumor, as in her drugged dream. Because she had never seen an Anul up close before today, his face hovering so low over her own face disturbed her greatly; she wanted to push it away or at least close her eyes again. The being’s huge head, supported by two thin necks, was like that of a hammerhead shark, but with no eyes at its ends; no eyes visible at all, in fact. At the base of this bony mass, which was thinly coated in a shiny pink skin, was an imposing lipless mouth filled with rows of oversized molars in a constant, skull-like grin. The offworlder did not wear a translator clipped to its uniform, but Marisol wore a common translation chip in her skull which deciphered the being’s speech as if telepathically.

  “How did it go?” Marisol mumbled.

  “Well, it appeared to go well, but we can never be sure, Miss Nunez...the orbs are an inscrutable foe. But the poisoning should inhibit its development...”