“I say that now, and it sounds illogical. But logic has nothing to do with you when you are in that dark world. Everything becomes a matter of belief and, I don’t know, a kind of dark, a so very dark, faith.”
“You sound like you were an interesting person—with all that background, I’m sure you could have talked knowledgably in a number of areas. You must have had friends, and women must have—I don’t want to be too nosy, but if there are people who love you, then to my mind, you’re definitely a success.”
Gandhi smiled at this, but there was something in his eyes that made Daniel feel so sad he thought he might weep. “You’re a very kind man,” Gandhi said, “and I’m sure you were loved, and you’ve told us you had a wife and child, so I know that must be true.” Daniel nodded, but did not want this line of conversation to continue. “But the key thing about love, I believe, is that you have to recognize that it’s happening. You have to recognize that someone is loving you, otherwise it’s no good to you. You miss it, so it might as well not be there. I’d like to think now that someone might have loved me, and that I just didn’t recognize it. That would at least be something. But since I didn’t see it then, I’ll never know.
“I never knew love, Daniel. Wouldn’t that have been something if I had? But I couldn’t quite make it happen.”
Daniel let his eyes wander. Off in the distance there appeared to be more fires than before, a line of them, it must have been miles long. He wondered if the entire city, what was left of it, was going to burn. He wondered if their building, even surrounded with its dead zone, would survive it.
“I did keep trying. I don’t think I really gave up until a year or so ago. Obviously, I wasn’t going to achieve my goals, and I wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything less. I could not let myself remain colorless, anonymous, never to have left a mark on the world. I had to do something. I needed to be thought about, to be remembered. And no, I didn’t do what some of the men in our scenarios have done. I didn’t carry guns into a school and murder children, or try to assassinate some important person or other. I could never have done something like that.
“I did decide to commit an act of violence, but against the sole person responsible for all the disappointments, for all the negative things that had happened to me during my life. Myself. I decided to commit suicide.
“But even after coming to that decision I was at least somewhat hopeful, I suppose. What if no one knew what happened to me? What if I disappeared? I’d be a mystery, a mystery for a lot of people. Nothing nags at the human mind more than a mystery, am I correct? They wouldn’t be able to help themselves, thinking about me. Maybe for years.
“And if they found the body a certain way, well it would make the news, would it not? People would be curious. I’d give people something to talk about. You know, like when they found Richard III’s body under that parking lot in central England?”
“Or maybe you wouldn’t be found at all?”
“Oh, I thought about that. But if I were inside a concrete building like this, I figured it would last two or three hundred years. But practically speaking, they would probably tear it down after forty, don’t you think? Technology progresses faster and faster, and even buildings become obsolete, the heating and plumbing systems, the features, the expectation of new innovations. It becomes cheaper to tear them down than to retrofit them.
“I’d been watching them building a large municipal government complex downtown. They’d build these forms with a framework of rebar inside them. Then starting early in the morning they’d fill them with concrete.
“I’m extraordinarily skinny. And small in stature. A small human being. I always have been. I realize it doesn’t make me the most attractive person. In fact I sometimes wonder if knowing that has contributed to my lack of success. But I wassmall enough to slip naked through the spaces between the bars one night in one particular form. Barely, even with my body well-oiled, and I bloodied myself pretty thoroughly in the process, as well as breaking a rib or two. It was a rather deep form, but I made it almost to the bottom. At least deep enough that I was pretty sure they wouldn’t notice me all the way down there when they poured the concrete. They might, and they might pull out my body and I wouldn’t be buried inside the building as I’d planned, and then discovered a century or so later when they finally tore it all down, but I was quite willing to take the risk.
“But all that exertion and I didn’t break the cyanide capsule in my mouth, until then. I was very pleased to have obtained such a poison. A splendid detail. Very international spy and all that. But I slipped and twisted my arm, popping my shoulder out of its socket. I inadvertently bit down on the capsule. I was in so much pain, you see. Not just physically, but I was cursing the world and everything in it, how existence itself had betrayed me.” He stopped and once again smiled at Daniel with that dreamy, almost unworldly smile.
Daniel stared at him. It had begun to rain, and the drops blown in through the window were softly beating the side of his face. The sensation was soothing, so he didn’t move. He had a vague notion that the sounds of the waves against the foundations below were even louder, and there was a kind of churning noise under it all. “Wait. When did the roaches come into this?”
“I first saw the roaches when I woke up here. In Ubo.”
“I mean before that. What’s the last thing you remember in your old life?”
“I told you. That terrible pain, and then the raging. And I must have fallen unconscious, because I had that dream about the roaches we’ve all had.”
“Well, no, I don’t think that’s a dream,” Daniel said. “As far as I know that’s a memory, however unreliable, of how we were kidnapped, how we were physically carried away.”
“Yes, and then the next thing I woke up in Ubo.”
“But that makes no sense.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it happened.”
“But how did they retrieve you? How did the roaches get to your body before you would have died? The rest of us, everyone I’ve talked to, we were taken from our beds, or out in the street, after we’d done something, or thought of something. The trigger seems to be different for everybody. They snatched us. How could they snatch you, deep inside a concrete form, trapped inside a cage of iron bars, and presumably seconds away from death by cyanide?”
Gandhi blinked, looking stricken. Then he began to weep.
“I knew it!” he cried. “None of it makes any sense! I really must be in Hell!”
14
IT WAS JUST past dawn when they arrived back at the barracks. Falstaff grabbed him by the shoulder and pointed at Gandhi. “What’s wrong with him? He’s almost catatonic.”
Daniel trusted Falstaff even less than before. “We’re all exhausted,” he said. “And him more than the rest of us, I think. All that drama with Henry, it really upset him.”
Falstaff nodded and let go. Daniel crawled under the blanket on his bunk. He’d hardly shut his eyes when the roaches invaded the barracks. He woke up to giant insect parts on his face, black mandibles hovering only an inch or two above his eyes. Huge roach legs churned eagerly, leg hairs the size of drinking straws snagging his blanket and tearing it off the bunk. He panicked, raising his fists to knock them away. Something sharp pinned his arms and his vision went slightly blurred. He was jerked to his feet. All around him the roaches were pulling residents from their bunks and herding them out of the room.
The roaches seemed more numerous than they had the past several weeks, but still there were far fewer of them than when he’d first arrived. They were agitated, antennae waving and wiry legs scrabbling over the broken tiles as they shoved and carried the residents rapidly back into the labs.
Daniel was in the corridor now, several roaches surrounding him. Normally he would have been in the waiting room and they would have come for him, and then there would be this gradual loss of consciousness as he was taken into the labs where they induced the scenarios. Although he wasn’t aware of t
hem giving him anything he’d steadily fall toward sleep until he was almost unconscious by the time they reached the final door. As they pushed him through the door it would feel as if they’d just pushed him out of an airplane without a parachute, his face exploding with light and air, his eyes registering no more than a vague impression of the room itself: shiny metal and glass, fragments of mirror and a distant babble of musical voices. But this time he was fully aware when they hit the lab’s double doors. Had they simply forgotten to do what they had always done before, or was there a problem with the drugs they normally used?
He was fully into the room and they were hurriedly strapping him onto a flat surface suspended within a mountain of spiraling glass, great crystalline stalagmites piercing a shadowy net of webbing and blinking nodes, claws and, if he wasn’t mistaken, human hands making a blur of tunings about him, adjusting something around his skull, tubes the size and shape of prescription bottles attached and humming on his head, then something slipping into his mouth, pinpricks along his breastbone and underneath it all a layering of near and far voices in English and French and German and languages he did not recognize, weeping and angrily spitting out their complaints and ecstasies, their life stories uncleansed and uncensored.
Suddenly there was a rapid blinking. The brilliance collapsed into a complete blackness, as if they’d been swallowed up by the earth, and then there was a hum and everything lit up again. The voices around him were frantic, unintelligible. Then the smell of something burning, a whine, and again a profound darkness. A chitter of voices in the night, the sounds of a frenetic exodus, or was it an invasion? They jostled him, but he couldn’t tell if he was being moved. A weight on his chest and then the room blazed again painfully, as if his eyes were on fire. Shouted commands and fast-moving hands.
With a slap to his head he was gone then, and came out of it swallowed up inside the core of someone else’s life, so deeply embedded he could not detect the sound of his own thoughts, as if he were all receiver with no ability to transmit at all.
The God of Mayhem woke to a new kind of stench. It happened all the time now, and for no reason that he could tell. He stepped outside to see if anything had changed since the day before. The world was an unpredictable place. He sniffed the air. The world was a foul place.
Fires burned in the neighborhood, and fires still burned in the old suburbs stretching far behind him. Some of those were his fires, and some were fires set by others. Some of the fires had a practical purpose. Maybe somebody tried to clean up the trash that lay everywhere. Maybe somebody tried to burn the body of someone they loved who had just died. Murder was everywhere. Burning was the decent thing, with no decent place to bury.
Some were for worship—there were a thousand gods and Mayhem was just one of them. And some were probably just for fun. An explosion went off in his head. He wanted to run as far as he could, run right out of this trash heap city.
Barbed, narrow legs played with his thoughts, hard shell and claw and bodies torn and leaking.
The human rats who worked through the trash every day were always uncovering new stink, a constant clatter and rattle of noise as they picked and traded. He could hear the wild dog packs howling on the other side of that collapsed row of houses, and it was all he could do not to howl back. Sometimes the sourness went so deep he could feel it in his lungs.
They’d made the world a terrible place, God damn them, his moms and his pops and all the ones that came before. The air was full of black bits and all the little kiddies were dying. Even the drinking water stank.
The early morning sky blazed red with the sun peeking through a curtain of black boiling clouds. Down below a paler smoke wrapped the buildings and wandered lost as a ghost through the alleys and streets. Roofs and ceilings fell into wavy stacks with trees growing through. Out front was a bus half-filled with dirt. A churn of filth decorated the rooftops. A fuzzy green border hung from the eaves. Beyond the broken backs of roofs and a scatter of walls was one edge of the flooded and foul Boston Harbor. Three tanker ships sat low in the water on the near side, slowly leaking their dark shadows to wander the harbor. He’d had a notion to set those ships on fire, but didn’t like starting a fire he knew he could not control.
He couldn’t control the weather. He couldn’t control starvation or the invasion of disease. But he could control who he killed and how. The first time he’d killed—a shovel to the back of another boy’s head—it was just to see how it felt. But it hadn’t been an impulse—they were always saying he was impulsive when he was a kid—but he’d been planning it forever.
He could control his fires by how he placed the fuel, and where he started them, and pretty much how they spread. And sometimes who they burned.
Farther south and near the old docks was the quarantine area. “Unidentified Biological Organisms” was the name they used. UBO painted on all the buildings. It meant “If you come here, you will die.” So even if you couldn’t read, you recognized those three letters, and you stayed away. The worst kind of diseases, if they were telling the truth, which was rare. Whole neighborhoods flattened to the ground, and in the middle that big building like a castle on a hill. He remembered it had been a mental hospital for a long time. Rumors were that years ago they kept the worst of the plague victims there. No problem—creepy thing like that, who’d want to go there? What a world. A world that could make something like him deserved to be killed.
The God didn’t think he’d been born to do evil, but it had been too long ago for him to remember for sure.
He let some ash fall on his tongue. He tasted it but couldn’t identify it. One day if he got good enough at what he did he’d be able to figure out the sex, the race, maybe even the nationality of the body they’d burned.
Sharp insect legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his plans. He thought of dead bodies underground shedding their underwear. He wobbled his head to shake the crap out. He’d always been part bug. He had bug needs and bug appetite. That was part of what made him a god.
The trash and the waste was always talking about him, what he had done. But when they saw him they had no idea he was the one. They talked about the fires, and they talked about the murders, but they weren’t smart enough to tell that the same one did both. He thought maybe he was almost as old as time. The bug who would inherit the earth.
He went back inside and stood in his living room with what he had saved over the years. The walls were covered with photographs, none of them of people he knew. Some were of adults he had killed, not that he liked collecting trophies, but just because he thought they should be in his collection. Many were family pictures he’d taken from the abandoned homes he looted: people on vacation, young men in their graduation gowns, couples at dances, family picnics and barbeques, nameless people straining to grin into the camera lens.
All night long the savage shadow people had rioted, beating on their non-working appliances, their motionless automobiles, drinking their poisonous hooch, screaming out their lungs, setting their pitiful fires and dancing until their brains shut down. He’d waited, listening from his thin pad of a bed, thinking about what he’d charge them for his loss of sleep.
Somebody new was inside him, but it was afraid, and had no voice. It made him grin. He’d finally begun to scare his own demons.
Each morning the God of Mayhem rose with the sleepless insect chatter eating its way through his brain. Each morning he could feel the heat spreading through his blood. Each morning the God of Mayhem stepped out into his backyard to see a tumble and a collision of houses falling down the slope behind his home, a collection of closed-down, boarded-up, scribbled-over buildings sitting in mounds of garbage and discarded furniture, housewares, the worn-out and the broken, the last sorry pieces of America.
The ground near the bottom of the hill was soggy with a dark and poisonous-looking liquid. People didn’t live in the houses there. What was left of the police never came around.
Somet
imes swastikas appeared on walls, but it was hard to tell what people meant by them. Sometimes it was just a complaint about everything. He’d seen both the whites and the brownskins painting them.
He pulled on his overcoat and hid his insect eyes under a hat and trundled out the door, jogging down the street narrowed between piles of rubble until he reached the backside of a row of low shacks. He found the one that had made the loudest screaming the night before. Five bodies were sleeping under a window propped open for air. He reached in and grabbed a clump of black hair at random, yanked the head back and drew his knife across the throat. The blade was gratifyingly sharp and the new opening in the body quickly filled with blood.No one even stirred. He jogged back to his house, whistling.
Buried inside the God of Mayhem, Daniel was only occasionally aware that he had ever had his own life. At best his self-awareness was muted—this was a scenario unlike any he had experienced. He’d been swallowed whole and digested.
The God’s gray beard softened his face, made him look less fierce, less brutal. He drew no one’s notice when he moved through the Boston ruin. He’d stoop and limp to exaggerate his age. If anyone did think he was weak, well, he’d just kill them.
But this morning he needed to take care of things at home. He heard the scream close by and ran out into his backyard. He could see the top of the boy’s head above the fence next to the alley. “You! I told you not to come around here anymore!”
He could hear the boy laughing in the alley. Then there was a whining noise, and then another scream. It sounded like a child or a wounded animal. The God of Mayhem moved to his back gate, flung it open, and stepped into the lane. He saw the boy about ten yards down, waving the leash with the empty collar.
“I said stay away!” the God of Mayhem shouted. The boy smirked and turned his back, walked away.
The bloody mess of dog lay in the middle of the pavement. At least the boy didn’t set the animal on fire this time. After considering whether to take care of the corpse or not, the God of Mayhem went back into his house. If this was a message he had no idea what the boy was trying to say.
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