“No, no you can’t get away. I’m too strong. Whatever fantasies you might have about getting away from me are lies. Your imagination, you should have learned to control it better. Your complaints about what we have lost from our past are quite accurate, but that is past—all that you can do now is imagine it—it is no longer real. Now we are in this world—that other is lost forever. It will not return.” He tightened his hands a bit—the man went rigid with fear.
“We always imagine we can have things we cannot have, be things we cannot be. That is the human tragedy. Our imagination is both a cruel bastard and a liar.” He squeezed a bit more and tears rolled out of the desperate man’s eyes. “We should be angry about that. We should make some noise.” Tighter still, and the man began to squirm and kick. “We should tear down some walls and kill whoever we can. Heaven or Hell, is there really that much of a difference?
“Listen to me, little man. You are here, now. You have to take care of the problems we have now. Don’t worry about the past, or make assumptions about the future. You have to knuckle down now. Do you think this is all about us, that we’re the only ones hurting? Why, I hear there isn’t even a Brussels anymore!” The God of Mayhem squeezed harder still, and he began to see veins in the man’s face. “And by the way, I found out that rats will eat anything. I mean anything.” The man began to convulse, his hips thrusting up into the air. “But they especially seemed to like the molasses.” He stopped, looked around. “Do you hear that? I swear it sounds like running water.”
But the fellow was done, and the God of Mayhem was exhausted. People did not appreciate the effort required to strangle a human being by hand, the strength, the focus. He had others to kill here, people who were far more deserving to die, but they would have to wait until another evening. It was strangely quiet, except for that vague sound of bubbling underground.
Somewhere down in the dark of the God of Mayhem’s soul, Daniel felt himself losing hope. He’d never been in a scenario that had lasted this long before, or that had been so aggressively consuming.
A flame flickered in the darkness. “A little fire always makes it better.” The boy held the flame closer to his head, illuminating his face.
“Not tonight, boy. I’m too tired.” But the God hesitated. Much to his surprise, Daniel realized the God feared the boy. “I don’t need to set a fire every day.”
The boy laughed. “You are such a liar! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve been with you since the beginning!”
The God shook his head as if trying to rid himself of an annoying insect. “There’s too much trash around. Always too much trash.”
“But you’re an expert!” the boy cried. “You can set a fire anywhere you want. You’re the master fireman!”
“Just because I can set it doesn’t mean I can always control its spread or its volume. I could burn down the whole neighborhood, maybe even the whole city.”
“So? And what would be so bad about that?”
The God thought seriously about it. “I don’t believe it’s time.”
“There’s nothing more wonderful than a beautiful fire. What’s that you’re always thinking? There’s a purity in the way it cleanses things? It greatly simplifies a complicated world?”
“It does. It does all that.”
“Then see what I’ve found.”
The boy led the way into the darkness carrying his small torch in front of him. They were in an area of collapsing houses, porches sliding into yards, rubbish piles everywhere. Again the God heard the burble of water. He watched the ground, careful of where he placed his feet. “Is this far? I have things to do. Is any of this occupied?”
“Oh, nobody’s lived here in years. Come on, you have nothing better to do. Do you have your propellant on you?”
“A little, I have a little.” He always carried some in a small bottle in his coat pocket. The boy led him to a place where two tall houses had fallen against each other. A shower of siding and shingles covered the piles of junk which looked to have been layering the yards for many years. The God of Mayhem wet his lips. A narrow goat path of a trail ran between the houses. Recklessly he followed it until he was standing beneath where the two collapsed houses connected. He raised his arms over his head, suddenly thrilled, giddy. He looked up—he couldn’t see much, but the available moonlight revealed shadowed angles and daggers and spears of collapse, ready to fall and pierce and crush him. It made him breathless with excitement.
Daniel wanted to scream as he looked up into wreckage hanging over them. The scenarios had taken him into dangerous regions before, but this time he was half-convinced that if the God of Mayhem died he might take Daniel with him.
The God pulled out his bottle and dribbled the contents onto the rubbish on both sides of the pathway, now and then climbing onto the piles in the yards and wetting certain areas. He did it all quickly, at a jog, but he had a pattern in mind, a complex design. Once that pattern was laid down, he ran back around lighting it, activating his scheme as the boy cheered. He wasn’t sure if he’d used the boy’s torch or his own lighter, but in either case it worked, everything started, and over the next couple of hours the fiery forms evolved, and like a machine the fire rose and proceeded to dance with grace and nuanced expression.
The boy jumped and shouted, at times his excitement rising into a hysterical screech. The flames climbed into two swirling, ambitious towers, and then the towers descended, the houses enveloped in hot streamers of crimson, yellow, and blue, the streamers combining and recombining, and between recombinations pockets and tunnels of the deepest black opening up the God was eager to see through to their ends, but they closed much too quickly, and the great shutters of heat drove the tears out of his eyes. Daniel could not deny the raw power of it—the destruction was so fast and devastating that the excitement racing through his body far outpaced any coherent emotional response. The God began to giggle like a brain-damaged ape, and then hysteria swallowed both the God and Daniel.
The fire burned another hour or so. As the geometry of the night dissolved into burning color, trailing smoke, and invisible waves of heat, the God of Mayhem felt calmed and quieted for the first time in weeks. He walked away from there, slowly picking up speed toward morning and home.
Even this early the garbage pickers were out in force, picking up bits, tossing bits away, trading and arguing. Some of them had turned their faces into masks by pasting odd pieces of plastic and other materials onto their skin. This made the scavengers look like burn victims, or atomic bomb survivors. He found them an annoyance, and over the years had killed one or two, but not lately. They weren’t worth the trouble.
Daniel floated out of the God’s consciousness. The God had allowed it, had made it happen. It was as if Daniel was the God’s newly adopted pet.
The God of Mayhem turned and stared at the coastline. He put up to his eye the telescope he’d fashioned out of salvaged metal tubing and lenses. The water was higher than it had been in years. There were areas under water he’d never seen under water before, including much of the quarantine zone, and standing like an island the battered hulk of the old mental hospital. It had the U B O lettering sprayed across the top. Quarantined. Stay away at all costs. Then something shifted along the side of the building, and pieces slid off and into the water, and black smoke boiled out...
DANIEL BOLTED UPRIGHT on the platform. He’d dreamed of drowning, and flying through the air at such speed he couldn’t catch his breath. His head felt swollen. He reached up and discovered a series of cylindrical protrusions pushed through his hair and making a tight seal against his skull. He pressed and pulled on them, but they wouldn’t be budged.
At least half the room had been destroyed. Fragments of glass and cracked appliances, spilled liquids, fried components. Still, portions of instruments glowed and buzzed, and a few digital readouts measured... something. He stared. Ghostly images of past trauma and high emotion overlaid the room. It was as if he were in the middle of a scenari
o but he was awake, fully aware and moving around. Whatever was welded to his head still kept him connected to their machines. He watched as the train rolled in. As they unlocked each livestock car they herded out the Jews. He was part of the crew assigned to drag out the dead bodies left behind, the ones who hadn’t survived the trip. But he wouldn’t touch the dead babies abandoned by their terrified mothers. He’d rather be shot. This time he’d traded the task to another Jewbut what would he do next time? The image swept away as his eyes grew wet.
Daniel pushed open the fractured double doors and stumbled down the corridor to the waiting room. Smoke and debris were everywhere. He could hardly see anything above waist height. Contoured lengths of metal, tubing and hydraulics, electronics, littered the floor, and in one spot a metal contraption resembling a rib cage. The lights flashed painfully—he wanted to cover his eyes. His head felt unwieldy. He didn’t understand. The cylindrical things attached to his skull felt fragile, insubstantial to the touch, and yet he felt he might fall over from their weight.
“Here, let’s get this off you!” Falstaff suddenly shouted into his ear. The alarm was going off, the volume rising with each repetition. It seemed needlessly hysterical.
Falstaff struggled with the apparatus on his head for some time. “It’s no use!” he shouted. “It’s welded to your skull!”
Daniel wobbled his head to shake all the Jews from his skull. They lay everywhere. They had drifted into the corners of the room.
“The character I played, this killer.” Daniel panted. “He knew I was there. He knew I was a witness!”
“There’s a peculiar thing with the scenarios thatare more or less in real-time,” Falstaff said, working to remove the head gear. “A kind of feedback occurs. Damnit! It won’t budge! The character feels the observer’s presence. They become paranoid.”
“But it wasn’t contemporary! It was set in the future. Something bad happens in Boston, in the future!”
Falstaff hesitated, hands on Daniel’s shoulders. “Probably not. You’re probably mistaken, Daniel. The future doesn’t exist yet, so there’s nothing for the roaches’ system to read and record. The farthest they can go is to this moment, today.”
15
“I’LL SEE IF I can find something to get this off you.” Falstaff went away.
Daniel couldn’t quite interpret the frantic activity, the destruction, and the fleeting suggestions of old dramas surrounding him. Unsteadily he made his way to a chair and sat down. The constant movement of the residents made him nervous—too many legs. He focused on the floor, now littered with bits of circuitry, metal, plaster and ceiling tile. He looked at the walls—spider web cracks and small gaps thathadn’t been there before. Sections of the ceiling hinged back and forth exposing the wiring above.
Residents were milling around, going to each other, waving their hands, staring at each other in shock. Fewer of us, he thought. By at least a third. He didn’t see Gandhi anywhere, but Lenin walked by. Daniel grabbed his arm. “Where’s...” For a second he couldn’t think of Gandhi’s real name. “Walter?”
Lenin acted impatiently. “He didn’t come back from his last session. A lot of us didn’t. You heard the explosions, didn’t you? Someone said there was a surge and an overload, then part of the structure failed.”
Daniel nodded. “We have to find him.”
“Maybe. Maybe we can search, if they let us.” The roaches in the room moved around aimlessly, seemingly as confused as the residents. “But I’ll keep asking around, find out if anybody’s seen him.” Lenin left. Daniel heard him shouting Walter’s name, saw shaking heads. There was a blur of ghostly shapes both in front of and behind them. Transparent, insubstantial bits of scenarios.
Most of the residents were on their feet and moving about, but a few were sitting like him, preoccupied. Someone walked in front of him and their scissoring legs tore the air. The figure now across from him was sitting on a different kind of bunk, a dull, greenish wall behind him, bent over, his nose against a broken piece of tile he held on his knees. He snorted, jerked up, white powder caking his upper lip. He rubbed at his nose furiously, grinned, and wiped his finger over his gums.
Then Daniel saw the girlish haircut, or was it a wig? The man had breasts, not fully developed but on their way. The man laughed, winked in Daniel’s direction, looking familiar. It was Richard Speck, the student nurse killer, in prison, his face recognizable even under that wig. The Speck scenario was the one that had disturbed Bogart so much.
Eight student nurses. He’d slept in a nearby park the night before. Tied them up at gunpoint, strangled them. Quieter that way. The knife was just there to scare them. “It just wasn’t their night.” Tearing the bed sheets into strips to bind them. He felt nothing. Born To Raise Hell tattoo. Later he slashed his wrists. But he survived to be this person, whoever this person was.
Daniel was right there inside Speck’s head, so high, so fuzzy, but he was outside the scenario, outside the lab. He wanted to warn everyone that Speck had escaped. But Daniel also had escaped. He was outside his head.
Speck looked right at him. “They sent me in here, and look how I’m living. Like a queen in here. This is me laughing now!”
The room began to strobe. Daniel closed his eyes—he had a flowering headache. He made himself get up. It was one thing to be forced while lying strapped to a bed, another when they followed you into your world.
He walked around the room slowly. Voices echoed from somewhere outside the range he was able to understand. People stared at him. Then he saw his shadow with the swollen head from all the cylinders affixed to his scalp. “What happened to you?” someone asked, but he didn’t answer. He started searching faces, seeking familiar ones. A few he had a nodding acquaintance with, none he knew very well. Where was Gandhi? He couldn’t believe he was gone.
That fellow in the old-fashioned suit with his back turned, talking and joking with the others. He looked completely out of place. The suit looked worn, sun-damaged, as if he had travelled a great distance. They either laughed or nodded at everything he said, but offered up nothing of their own. The man turned his head slightly to the side. Daniel stared. The man apparently felt the stare, turned his head a bit more and nodded slightly in Daniel’s direction. It was Adolf Hitler.
As Hitler turned his head back toward the other men, Daniel could see that they were enveloped by transparent mountain and valley views. The Bavarian Alps. Berghof. Hitler tapped a cane impatiently on the stone floor. There was a woman on the other side of the men, smiling, blinking into the sun, and fading out briefly with each blink. She carried a basket of food. It was a semi-formal sort of meeting, Daniel thought, a summer gathering outside in the fresh mountain air. Eva was laughing now, their dogs barking. It was a typical afternoon at home.
A couple introduced their young daughter to the führer. He smiled, put his palm against her cheek.
Hitler stopped, stood erect. He turned his head toward Daniel again, his nose wrinkling as if he’d smelled a bad smell. The führer’s pupils were like black beads, his face pale as a sheet. Around him the buildings were on fire, the blasted streets. A burn spot grew slowly on Hitler’s cheek, like a spot on a piece of film stuck over a hot projector bulb. The führer’s lips curled. He started to speak. The others leaned forward, mesmerized. The German cities had been bombed, but nein, he would not be visiting. He wore the same look he’d had when he’d ordered the generals to be hung on meat hooks in 1944. An expression of mild distaste. Something rotten had been hidden in the room. Alle meine Frauen Selbstmordversuch, he was thinking. All my women attempted suicide.
Hitler’s large pale-blue eyes were shining. Certain and cold.
Certainty is boring. Certainty means the mind is dead, Daniel thought at the fuehrer. But if Hitler heard him he did not react.
“I submit to fate,” Hitler said. Daniel couldn’t tell if that was directed at him personally. “Ich lege das Schicksal.”
He’d come from ordinary stock, and he�
��d grown up an ordinary man until history had given him his opportunity.
The führer’s eyes widened. Something brushed Daniel’s arms on both sides. He backed away, but they were all around him, running into him, packed so closely together he could not breathe, all the thin men in their blue-striped pajamas, all those Jewish Muselmänner, starved and exhausted, and Daniel could not tell if they were staring at Hitler or if they were staring at him. He squirmed back through the crowd trying desperately not to scream, because if he screamed the rest of the building would come down with the power of his distress. In the distance he saw the windows, and although every emaciated hand seemed to be upon him, every mouth whispering in his ear their truncated story of a life cut short, he managed to reach that singular view of an outside world.
The sky was a silver color streaked with gray. Their usual view of other parts of the building had changed. It was difficult to say how exactly, given that much of that wing had been in ruins ever since he had arrived in Ubo. Daniel tried to make sense of it, then realized that parts of the structure were simply gone. He peered down toward the base of the building and saw the flood waters swirling past, eating at the foundations.
“How are you feeling, Daniel?”
Lenin was standing beside him. The group of men Daniel had interacted with since his arrival had been relatively small, and even among those he would hardly have called any of them friends, although Falstaff had come closest, despite Daniel’s many misgivings. Lenin had probably been the one he had talked to least. “A bit better, I think. Still somewhat fuzzy.”
“Do those—” He pointed at the cylinders attached to Daniel’s scalp. “Does all that hurt?”
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