Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Black billows of smoke with vague blue highlights. An awful smell of phosphorous in his nose. And Taylor continued to dream, without light or movement, but it wasn’t like a dream. Whoever was in the room with him—dark insect faces, hard wings and legs scraping at his brain—would not let him sleep. Taylor didn’t think he ever slept, and he knew that those who took care of him weren’t able to tell.

  He knew the teeth he had grown in the dark never slept. It wasn’t like a dream. It was like being alive but still going to Hell. All around him he could hear the other men in the ward moaning in their sleep. They were all still in the jungle, and it was night, and Sergeant Taylor with his brand new teeth was crawling toward them in the dark.

  DANIEL STOOD INSIDE the body of the soldier whose name he did not know at the edge of the irrigation ditch—shocked and numb with despair. He wasn’t seeing it right. The ditch was full of bodies, and drifts of blood like scarlet oil slicks, and yet he could not quite believe it was real. They had faked it somehow. The special effects in this... memory, were remarkable.

  He watched as a lone soldier climbed down inside the lip of the ditch, lowered one arm into the tangle of bloody limbs, and pulled out a small child who had been hiding beneath the bodies of his parents. He gathered the boy into his arms and carried him off to the waiting helicopter.

  7

  DANIEL FLOATED UP through a rising tide of heat, his face flushed, his eyes burning. He didn’t want to open his eyes, imagining the jungle on fire, acres burning beneath sprays of napalm, or maybe the helicopter had exploded, vaporizing everyone inside. None of this was true as long as he kept his eyes closed. Then it could be dream or hallucination, nothing he’d be compelled to feel anythingabout.

  Oncertain days of his childhood, when he’d been ill, feverish, and kept home from school, he’d lie on the couch and watch TV and his mother would bring him soup and fruit and juice. He would never make it through an entire episode of anything; he’d always nod off and wake up halfway into the next show, so that circus personnel would warp into cowboys and then sailing enthusiasts intent on some mystery, and it struck him then how people were all much the same, scrabbling for a living and being with their family and looking for interesting things to fill their days, hoping to find something beyond themselves. Often some crisis occurred. Often you had to start again from square one.

  His mother was at her best during those times of sickness. She’d always been a nervous person, uncomfortable in her skin and with other people, even with her own children. She never knew what to do with him or his sisters. But if your child is sick, you keep him home, you encourage his rest. You bring him food and medicine, and you touch him, you comfort him as much as you can bear. It was pretty clear that she waited for these perfect opportunities to be a good mother.

  Perhaps there were parents who really knew what they were doing, but Daniel had not been one of them. He was as a father as he was in the rest of his life—killing time for months, for years, waiting for the event, the phone call, the conversation that would at last make perfect sense of everything.

  Now, before he’d even opened his eyes the morning smell of the barracks hit him. An accumulation of terror sweat and the stench of sadness. And there were always those who had fouled themselves as they’d tossed and turned under the grip of some past evil. You adjusted to it just enough to be slightly surprised about how bad it could be.

  Nearby, one of the residents struggled to dig something out of the back of his neck. Apparently it was buried deeply, causing the fellow to gouge the skin, his nails breaking, but still cutting flesh, drawing blood.

  “Could someone help me! I can’t get to it! It needs to come out!”

  Falstaff came up behind the man and slapped him on the back. “A button, right? You’re looking for a button. You got it! I saw it pop out—it bounced across the floor somewhere over there.”

  The man visibly relaxed. “Should we go find it? Maybe it’s dangerous, just leaving it lying around?”

  “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t touch it. It’s out, it’s disconnected, exposed, it won’t bother anyone. But still, I wouldn’t go near it if I were you.”

  “Thanks. Oh, thanks.”

  Falstaff walked over to Daniel and spoke softly. “He’s another Charles Whitman. I don’t know what the roaches have been doing back there, but there have been four Whitmans so far today. And it’s not the first time one of them believed there was a button embedded somewhere on their body, and that someone had secretly pushed it, and that’s what turned on the craziness, and that’s why he killed all those people.”

  “I was Whitman,” Daniel said, “but I never believed that.”

  “It’s rare. I gather they did find a small tumor in the real Whitman, during the autopsy. But if it was a button, it was a button that turned on nothing. At least that was the consensus of medical opinion. We’re full of buttons and switches. And we like to hold them responsible, but most of the time they don’t do a thing. They’re just these odd bits of scar tissue, unless you make them active, unless you electrify them, because they seem like they’re the only thing that will lift you out of the emptiness.”

  “Why do the roaches keep repeating the same scenarios? Just during my time here I’ve seen a dozen different Jack the Rippers wake up in this room, not counting my own. A huge number of Hitlers, Green River killers, Albert Fish—”

  “I saw two Albert Fishes yesterday. Have you noticed how, the more recently a character lived, the more their character—absorbs you?”

  Daniel nodded. “Like with Whitman. At first I was a presence in his head—or at least I was aware of having a presence, of being someone with my own mind, and then I just disappeared into him, and his thoughts were my thoughts, and it was me doing these terrible things.”

  “I believe what the roaches can do, they can probe through time, and they can detect past brain activity, and they can translate that activity into a recording of a person’s consciousness, of varying completeness. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  Daniel smiled, laughed. “No, of course not.”

  “You might want to reconsider that position. Because you’ve been spending a great deal of time inside these specters, these ghosts. I don’t know what else to call them. However their personalities have been recorded and received by us over the centuries, as what we’ve called ghosts, hauntings, it’s a process the roaches have amplified with technology—the superstition has become science.”

  “So why do they repeat these scenarios?”

  “Because naturally the signal must degrade over time—to varying degrees there are the inevitable holes. They need the processing power of your human brain to fill in the gaps—you become part of the software, and of course each person is going to process that information differently. At some point they must balance all of that input to get a fuller picture of a Hitler, a Himmler, and how their brains worked.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then they learn whatever it is they’re trying to learn about us. You’ll notice they rarely try to make us into a Caligula, or a Genghis Khan. They lived too long ago. There must not be enough signal left to build a reasonable persona out of.”

  They’d walked to the opening to the hallways. Two giant roaches lounged there staring at them. Something about them emanated disinterest. “And no one’s ever tried to escape?”

  “Where would you go? At least in here you’re fed.”

  “Still, you’d think some people would take their chances out there, rather than continue to endure this.”

  “Really, Daniel? Just imagine brushing up against one of the roaches, touching its body, physically struggling with it, as you would have to do. What do you feel when you imagine that?”

  Daniel drew a blank. He couldn’t imagine it. He just knew it was the last thing he ever wanted to do. He’d sooner peel off his own skin, bite through his tongue and eat it slowly.

  “Here.” Falstaff grabbed Daniel’s hand and thrust it against the
shimmering exoskeleton of the nearest roach.

  Daniel howled, falling to the floor. It was as if his skin had ruptured, followed by a massive invasion of countless small, dark, wriggling things working their way into all parts of his body. Not that he could actually see them, but he knew they were there, and ravenous.

  “That’s why we don’t rebel,” Falstaff said. “That’s why we don’t even try. And sometime you might notice that the more problematic residents, they don’t always come back from a scenario.” He turned and walked away.

  The roaches had disappeared from the hall. He stared at Falstaff’s back, moving away, shimmering. He felt properly punished—Falstaff had made his point. But what troubled him went deeper than the futility of an attempted rebellion—he understood that Falstaff had been here a long time, but still, how did he know so much?

  When Daniel rejoined his group in the barracks he found them gathered around Bogart, who apparently had just awakened from another scenario. He was severely shaken, occasionally crying as he attempted to speak, and the confusion Daniel had noticed previously in his speech had become more pronounced.

  “Hitler, Jack the Ri—ipper, of course those I—I understand, but Picah—ahsso? I’d always thought of him as just a painter?”

  “Even artists can do terrible, monstrous things,” Gandhi said. He was hunched over, his narrow shoulders quivering. He always seemed nervous, or cold, a fleshless twig of a figure. “They’re, well they’re not like the rest of us, are they? They live very different lives. But still, he seems out of place in that list. What did he do, or rather, what did he do in your scenario?”

  “Walter, he had all these mistresses...”

  “Ha, he loved women,” Falstaff said. “Perhaps just too much?”

  “Did he love them?” Bogart said. “I know he thought he did, and other people thought he did. That’s the leg—gend, isn’t it? How much he loved, how much he ob—obsessed over women? He could be quite... pass—ssionate. Dora, one of the mistresses, she’d been young when he met her. He liked to do that, he’d groo—, he’d meet them young. But he beat her; he’d leave her unconscious on the floor. I’m not saying he was any Hitler, or Mussolini, I’m not saying he was anywhere n—near their league, but he still d—did terrible things to them, s—small things on the s—scale of world h—history, but h—huge things on the s—scale of their l—lives. Little evils. I just don’t know why the roaches chose me for this one!”

  “Try to stay calm,” Daniel said. “You’re not responsible, remember? Just keep going—what happened?”

  “Well, and then there w—was Francoise, the one who foll—replaced Dora, he burned her face with—he put a lit cigarette, out, on her face. They either had to be goddesses or doormats to him. There seemed, there was no in between.”

  “Times were different, things were looked at differently,” Lenin said. “But the art! You cannot deny he was a wonderful artist!”

  A raw-throated howl ripped through the room from somewhere below. It was a telling measure of how accustomed they’d all become to the werewolf’s loud protests that Bogart paused only a breath or two, and no one looked around.

  Bogart clutched Falstaff’s arm, quaking. “You said that the roles they—they have us live here, that they have nothing to do with who we are, who we were back in our old li—ives. Just because we play m—monsters, doesn’t mean we are monsters. You meant that.”

  Daniel, suddenly full of suspicion, watched Falstaff’s face. He listened intently to his response.

  “The latter part, certainly, is true. Simply because you play one of these roles doesn’t mean you are them, that you are responsible for what they do. But I won’t pretend to know how these roles are selected, or why any one of us was chosen to be here in the first place. What’s bothering you, Alan? Are you married, in your other life?”

  “I was. I am.”

  “Is it a good marriage?”

  Bogart slowly began rubbing his face up and down, wiggling his fingers slightly, massaging, as if trying to wake himself up, or to cleanse himself of a profound fatigue.

  “I used to wonder,” he began, “what happiness would look like. I should have been—been happy. I was, am, married to a woman I pursued for years. I knew April from hu—high school, although I was never able to work up the co—courage to speak to her then, and I mus—I admit I used to get furious with her sim—simply because I was too afraid to talk to her.

  “I signed up for this biology class in co—college, walked in the first day and there she was. We weren’t lab partners, but we were in the same ai—ai—row, and now and—and then I was able to strike up a conversation. I eventually asked her out, and of—of course she said no, she was dating someone. But I made sure to be where I thought she would be. I figured out her cla—class schedule and I made sure I was there, somewhere along the pa—path, when she got out, even if it meant missing some classes of my own, just so I could run into her. I really wasn’t stalking her—I was ju—just making myself available.

  “Then one day she was pretty upset, and it turns out they’d broken up the night before and well, there was my ch—chance. It still took a while, but even—even—fi—finally she agreed to go out with me. It wasn’t love at first sight for her then—I had to work for it—but maybe that’s best. I mean, that’s always the best, isn’t it?

  “I told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And it embarrassed her that I said it. ‘It’s just too much,’ she would say. ‘You always go too far.’ But I still think she liked hearing it just the same. I told her I—I loved her on the sec—second or third date. Some would argue tha—that’s too soon, but I don’t agree.

  “She became pregnant, although I think we were pret—pretty careful. So it just seemed a fore—foregone conclusion we’d get married. She didn’t seem exactly enthusiastic about it. She seemed, well, she was tired most of the time, so I understood. Now we have two wonderful, two beautiful daughters. I dote on them. She says I spoil them. But they’re incredible, the best thing about my life. A father has a special opportunity with—with daughters, I think. Your love for them, it can be like the p—purest statement of affection between a male and a female. B—because there isn’t the question of sex, or pride, or competition, to trouble you. There’s just this full—fullness of love, and generosity, because you can look at them without all the annoying d—distractions that happen between men and women. You just want them to be e—everything they can be—my g—girls are so smart, so capable—and I can’t stand the idea that they m—might miss out on opportunities because of their g—ender, or m—ale expectations. I’m a great fem—feminist in that way, I suppose, even more than my wife and daughters.

  “I think per—per—m—maybe April had fallen out of love with me by the day of the wedding. Why do—do they do that, go through with something they don’t even f—feel anymore? Is it a p—power thing? Do you know what it’s like to f—feel that lack of affection, to know that her at—attitude has changed, but she still won’t tell you, she still won’t a—admit it? It’s dev—devastating. It was clear she didn’t want to have s—sex with me anymore, although she still a—agreed to it. At least at first.

  “Do you know how to tell a woman’s feelings for you have changed? Every little thing you do a—annoys her, everything you say. It’s like she can—can’t stand you anym—m—more, and you have no clue what you’ve d—done. She acts like you think you m—must know everything, but that you’re stupid and just h—haven’t figured it out y—yet. You’re the dumbest, most pa—pathetic human being p—possible, incapable of the most n—normal things. You’re like this new b—breed of subhuman. You thought you were e—evolved, that you were fully hu-human, but everyone else knew you weren’t, so they either l—laughed at you or they p—pitied you, and you were too d—dumb to recognize any of it.

  “So this isn’t the ma—marriage I was p—promised. Not that she actually promised how it w—would be, but you a—assume, be—because of cust
om and cu—culture that you’re g—going to be p-partners, that she’s going to l—love you and be physically attracted to you and just that there’s this unbr—breakable b—bond.

  “But it hasn’t been like that for us at all, except aro—around the girls. Around the g—girls she could pre—pretend we were this ideal c—couple. She’s never said a b—bad thing about me in front of the g—girls—I’ll have to g—give her that.

  “She stopped having sex with m—me. Oh, for a while she m—made the usual la—lame excuses, she had a headache, she was t—tired, she had to get up early in the m—morning. But the last couple of years she’s just said ‘I don’t w—want to.’ Just like that. No w—wiggle room at all. Doesn’t she re—realize that m—marriage is a contract? And like with any co—contract there are ex—expectations and o—obligations?

  “I star—started thinking about what I could do. I thought about get-getting nar—narcotics, dropping them into her dr—drinks.

  “Still, I n—never hit her. Even when she went w—way out of her way to pro—provoke me. Saying sar—sarcastic cr—crap like ‘Everything about you gives me a headache,’ or ‘You’ve been lying to yourself so long you don’t know how you really feel about anything.’

  “And still I didn’t hi—hit her because that’s n—ot who I am. I’m no Richard Speck or Bl—bluebeard or Jack the R—ripper. I’m not a mo—monster of any k—kind.”

  Daniel nodded in all the right places, but he felt increasingly anxious and not as sympathetic as he’d thought he would. He no longer wanted to be here listening to this little man’s story, feeling himself drawn into his tale of woe. He didn’t exactly doubt the man’s sincerity, but wondered if he had sufficient self-knowledge to even be sincere.