Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  “So why don’t you save us both a lot of pain, and tell me where I can find my mother?”

  There was a gleam in his eye then—I pegged it as contempt, but later found it to be a mix of Dr. Tikoshi’s two muses: hatred and curiosity.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “There’s nothing left of your mother to be found.”

  I’ve tried to picture those next moments the way Dara would have seen them, tucked away in the corner of the lab with her pistol pointed at each of us, knowing that she’d had a part in creating what happened, trying to look away, but too afraid to lose all that she had left.

  She could have pulled the trigger at any point.

  She watched me lift the autoclave machine and smash it over Dr. Tikoshi’s skull.

  She watched me pull his shaking, screaming body to the operating table and strap down his arms and legs and head.

  She watched me as I searched frantically through his drawers and located the bone saw and plugged it in and brought it down across the ancient, waxy skin sheathing his forehead.

  She watched me as I lifted away the cap of his skull with a soft sucking sound, as I sliced into the gelatin softness of his occipital lobe and bisected his brain horizontally, white matter shining at its core like the wings of a butterfly.

  She watched me as I lifted the pack from my back and unscrewed the cap and placed Dr. Tikoshi’s pinkish-beige tissue into the chamber and resealed the top and released the lower lock and heard his mind absorbed into the animus ciborium.

  She could have pulled the trigger at any point.

  And when she didn’t, I realized that I loved her too.

  We raided the lab. Unsure of exactly what the medical needs of a profane aberration might be, we decided to stack the deck in my favor, filling the car to the brim with drugs and surgical equipment.

  We found enough dilantin and mannitol to keep cerebral edema at bay, and a comically large barrel of dot-cons ensured pain wasn’t going to be an issue. Dara was worried about the infection along my scalp sutures and wanted to put me back on I.V. for antibiotics, but I told her I couldn’t take one more thing attached to my body. She backed down but grabbed me a batch of azithromycin pills.

  Perphenadol was in short supply, but I was fine with that. There was one voice in particular which I was eager to hear.

  Dara drove. I realized they must have transferred me around the city in the back seat of the car, because sitting up front was near impossible. Agony shot down my spine every time the input jack in the back of my head brushed the headrest. I leaned forward, cradling the infernal backpack in my lap.

  “There.” I pointed to a flat, lime green flea-bag motel.

  She went to the front office of the CoZZZy Motor Inn to score us a room. I sat in the front seat, hoping no one would see me, staring at the cap on the pack, wondering how long it would be before Dr. T.’s mind was integrated with mine.

  “We will know the truth once you have joined us.”

  I whispered to the pack. “I’m coming in there, motherfucker.” Hearing my voice, knowing this was really happening, threw me into hysterics.

  When Dara returned with our keys, I was still laughing.

  I lay on my right side on the king bed, with Dara across from me. We’d covered the comforter with a blue curtain from Dr. T.’s lab, hoping to restrain the bedbugs which were surely lying in wait. My eyes lost focus and I felt like I was floating on bright ocean waves. Dara taped a fresh strip of gauze across my seeping scalp wound, then ran soft fingers over my face. I did my best to breathe calmly despite the battery of meds buggering my bio-stasis. In for three, hold for three, out for three.

  In for three, hold for three, out for three.

  I closed my eyes, wanting my sole focus to extend inward.

  In for three, hold for three, out for three.

  My consciousness drifted, floating above my wrecked patchwork skull.

  Bright blue ocean waves rolled forward from beneath my vision. A staircase appeared in the center of the ocean, steps reaching down into a dark corridor beneath the waves.

  I descended.

  Where are you, Tikoshi? I’m going to build a mansion of memory hallways. I’ll lock these unwanted thoughts and minds behind steel doors. But you, Tikoshi, you’re getting a special spot in the basement. No light. No room to move. I know a thing or two about pressure, and darkness.

  You don’t know where I’ve been.

  The corridor took on a dull green glow, surrounding me in a cylinder of slow drifting phosphorescent algae. Wherever, whatever my eyes were, they focused on the shifting light.

  Not algae. Neurons/axons/dendrites, floating loose in fluid.

  Am I at the back of my mind?

  The corridor looped beneath me. I followed the swirling path down to the pulsing cage of the animus ciborium.

  The voices were there, each of them asserting that they existed, that their thoughts were of consequence, that they must be heard. I focused. I imagined my body as a wall of tympanic membranes, trying to isolate each stream of sound, turning thoughts into structure as the vibrations moved through me.

  the egg had fallen from the nest so I thought it might already be dead but when I put it in the fire the shell popped and the baby bird was wiggling there and I didn’t know if it was screaming or if that sound came from the fire and after that I always watched the fires from further away

  You are the arsonist, the first to die on 45th. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  so I told the guy sometimes you gotta do one for free to stay fresh to keep the spark alive so it’s not just a job I mean you have to love it to do it right and anyway the laws are so different over there and sometimes the parents are the goddamn pimps and nobody gets the cops involved so I said fuck the clean-up and left her right on the beach with the rock buried in her head and work was so much better the next day

  You are the assassin. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  can I really keep doing this when I’m forty I’ve got to make some moves too much time in the dark staring at the back of Egbert’s dome when I should be the one out there repping

  You are Port. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  he told me he wanted it like that he knew what he was doing it’s not like I talked him into gassing that was his own shit but maybe I held him down too long I should have known when his asshole got so loose but you hate to kill that sprint to the finish and he was going to Dr. T. for materials anyway I knew doc would be pissed about the brain damage so I offered him the body at half price

  You are Hungarian Minor. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  this is a come up for sure twenty grand more and I can get the full mod and ditch the tweeker business and if the boss lets me take the separation rites I’ll be part of The League in weeks this Viking shit will blow them away but do I put the skin sheath on the left or right side of my spine I guess that’s for Shinori to decide after he sees the sword

  You are Egbert. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  it seems cruel that the nurse reminded me that visiting hours are almost over like bitch you know there’s nobody coming to see me/I don’t think I can take another round of chemo I don’t want to tell Mike but if he really loves me he’d understand that this can’t go on right/how is it possible that they don’t have the ICU on generators that’s insane oh God did you hear that that’s someone screaming maybe I can get out of this bed

  You are the patients of St. Mercy. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

  I know I don’t have the best memory but what if just what if I had a flashback or maybe I finally knocked back that yagé and then forgot about it but I wasn’t throwing up I don’t know how else have I been outside of my body so long and why would I have had that nightmare that thing was so huge shoot maybe my spirit animal is a gorilla that eats faces hold on I can feel you watching me are you my body what are you

  You are Huey.

  o
h I know that’s my Anglo birth name but it’s clear now I’m much more than that are you Gaia or a representation of nirvana or something how long have I been here

  You live here now.

  wait Doyle is that you how do you have a voice here are you talking to my body back at the penthouse or

  It’s probably best if I don’t explain right now. I’m looking for someone. I have to close the door now.

  oh okay I get it you’re a metaphor for

  I’m closing the door.

  puncture down find soft egg keep going slide find new man new home find ocean fish cricket hungry

  What?

  warm light there has always been warm light water smells not real water miss float miss sand fish hungry fish man home fish

  No. The words warbled through me, some universal primordial drive my brain forced into language. The sound of the noise, though, was closer to a hum. Or a hiss.

  need out move legs eat jellyfish eat worm wait in pond fish fast now but time is mine bite half of fish slow now floating

  You are Deckard.

  Nozomi did not have a discriminating palate.

  I’m sorry you died that way, Deck. But you’re here now. I’m closing the door.

  this is a slow and ignoble death ugh I can feel the rolls of my belly sweating against each other will you motherfuckers please stop bringing donuts and pizza and cookies in for one day I can’t really stop myself it’s all that makes this place tolerable I’ll die in this job something has to change should I call mom tonight what do I even say besides same ol’ same still she’d probably like to hear my voice we can talk about something funny we both saw on TV and that would be okay

  You are Shenanigans Patrick Doyle. You are me. We live here now. The door remains open.

  we have to be careful I can feel him growing in here he’s connected he knows how this works he built this world he wants to raise a cathedral of bones

  He can’t. This is our mind. We can contain him.

  He’s here he’s here he’s here he’s here

  I felt Tikoshi then, not as a voice but as poison, a seething surge of acidic energy that pushed through my thoughts and smashed against the front of my skull, and I knew there was pain back in the real world, and I wanted to yell to Dara to give me the rest of the perphenadol, please, but it was too late and I had eyes and when I opened them I was inside his mind, and everything I saw was death.

  These are your eyes now. Look at what you’ve done. The brilliance of it.

  No.

  This is your world. You will never leave.

  Give me back my mind.

  This is the beauty of a long life unspooling in loops before you like the steaming guts of a soldier torn by bayonet. You will know everything, and whatever you believed you were will fall in the face of my truth. These will be your memories

  now.

  It can’t be like this. Dara, please, I need the perphenadol. This was a trap. He wanted this. I can barely feel myself in here. He won’t let me out. He wants me to believe I’m him.

  He wants to erase me from my own mind.

  to erase me from

  erase me

  erase

  My life and memories are yours now. This will be all you ever know.

  Ten glorious years at Pingfang, a sea of bodies brought to you by train. War as immunity from man’s laws. Before, you’d worked in the shadows. During the ten years you worked for Division 4 there were no such hindrances. Dr. Masaki ran the inventory, cataloguing prisoners as non-descript units referred to only as “Materials Used.” You preferred to call the prisoners “logs,” each destined for the incinerator after they’d been of use.

  You returned to Pingfang many years later. The incinerator was still burning.

  Waste not.

  You used your materials without discrimination. Russian, Chinese, the rare American. You didn’t concern yourself with eugenics. Far more could be discovered in the commonality of the opened chest, the exposed mind. It is impossible to understand the heart’s strength until you wrap your hands around one fighting its own death.

  You switched arms for legs, ran flesh through long cycles of freezing and burning, attached organs never meant to work in concert. You injected the living with seawater and animal blood to see how long alien matter would circulate. You discovered the pressure levels at which ear drums implode and eyes collapse. Rats and fleas ran vector work. Flamethrowers were fine-tuned for greater effectiveness and shorter screams. Though you had doubts about this actually happening in the field, it was still worth seeing what a fragmentation grenade sewn into a man’s stomach might do when hit by enemy fire.

  You took notes on everything. For science.

  For remembering. You re-read the notes a thousand times. They remained exquisite. And when the war ended, they saved your life.

  Potassium cyanide pills seemed a cowardly way to flee the truth. The kind of knowledge you possessed was of great value. So while others terminated themselves or went to Siberian labor camps, you let it be known that you possessed invaluable wisdom.

  MacArthur granted you immunity in the U.S. in turn for an exchange. They told themselves that they could use the knowledge you attained without carrying the weight of its methodology. The government needed to appear to care about which materials were used, so you learned not to speak of the subject unless you met a kindred spirit.

  But the United States was full of kindred spirits—some in the military, others among the private sector. They taught you the importance of marketing. Proximity to a nuclear blast site might induce a mysterious condition called “housewife syndrome.” Syphilis was “bad blood.”

  The company line—“We don’t know exactly what’s causing these conditions, but we can assure you we’re doing our best to find out.”

  Your wisdom took you around the world—there were materials to be used in Guatemala, Russia, and Africa. Advances in DNA study and microbiology kept the 80’s interesting. The advent of widespread primate testing helped (especially when they didn’t question your demand to have all the monkeys shaved bare).

  Poor Masaki was brought low when he couldn’t put enough distance between himself and three thousand HIV-infected Japanese patients. Your colleagues agreed: a failure of marketing and business structure. The CEO of the chemical manufacturer you worked for joked about it. “Don’t they have paper shredders in Japan, Tikoshi?” Your feigned laughter turned to coughing. You were so weary.

  You were dying. You knew the signs.

  You were furious. Death was for subjects.

  You remembered your compatriot Dr. Shinori, whom you’d last seen at a cosmetic surgery conference. He’d looked so healthy, decades younger. You phoned. He demanded you speak to him in person. You flew across the country, and almost flew right back when he tried to explain the secret to his youthful appearance.

  A cult which could grant long life in turn for services rendered? Blood contracts? It was absurd—anyone who believed that some wolf god could exist in the heavens was not to be trusted. If there’d been any gods at all, they’d long ago forsaken the terra firma and left it to men like you to shape its future.

  But Shinori said he’d been jogging that morning. You’d had trouble with the stairs as you exited the airplane. His skin was bright and yours tore at the slightest disturbance.

  You signed on to work for the Vakhtang. You executed contracts, performed their rituals, and partook of their sacraments, believing in none of it. But there must have been something in the acrid broth they fed you at the base of their ridiculous wolf statue—you noticed the gray receding from your hair as each day passed. Your lungs took in more air. An x-ray revealed your bones had actually increased in density.

  Pharmacology was not your favorite, and hypnotics weren’t nearly as interesting as chemical weapons. However, since the Vakhtang existed in secret, the testing process allowed for the use of materials. They supplied you with vagrants, bored college kids, mentally ill ex-soldiers, and add
icts. Embolisms and heart attacks served as points of interest. If your employers noticed you removing a patient’s legs one overenthusiastic night, they said nothing.

  A decade passed, during which you seemed to grow younger. Then one morning they told you the contract had been fulfilled. You explained that there was still much work to be done. They said they had what they needed. A physicist was being brought in. They’d stay in touch.

  You asked no further questions. You discovered their agents watching you on occasion, but post-work surveillance was probably part of many of your employers’ continuity plans.

  Besides, there were always new opportunities and you’d lived long enough to see advancements in bioballistics, nanotechnology, and viral transfection. There were tools at your disposal now which could render the human body in ways you’d only dreamed of as a child.

  You worked with like-minded scientists on the creation of a soda-borne protozoan whose waste immediately triggered intense hunger, and a face lotion which caused redness and cracking (as well as suicidal thoughts) if not regularly re-applied. This latter was airdropped over small Russian towns, though you never knew whose agenda that served.

  Still, you tired of the subversive micro-efforts and the way they served only to shift money. If you were going to live for so long, you’d need something more.

  The United States’ new cultural fixation on body modification offered respite. Your subjects welcomed experimentation. Some welcomed pain. Watching their faces as you worked was like the slow echo of a beautiful song. Their love of fame made them malleable—you suggested surgeries which couldn’t be survived, and they signed off. You manufactured bizarre champions and internet martyrs mourned for one day.