Tynee shrunk from his statement, drawing his head down and his shoulders up, becoming even smaller, a Tynee turtle. A snicker escaped Miss Mary’s lips like a fart escaping the sphincter of a hot-dog salesman.
“Loses it?” I asked.
Tynee looked helplessly at General Kiljoy, who answered for him. “You’ll see, Fountain. Why don’t we go for a walk?” He looked back toward Tynee and Miss Mary. “Care to come along?”
“I’d rather stay and watch these subjects,” Miss Mary said. “This is my favorite part.” She pointed to the window, where Blip, Brother Zebediah, and Manny were now rolling around on the concrete floor, holding their stomachs, screaming in muted silence. They were either in agony or ecstasy; the two are often difficult to tell apart. I have even heard that fear and love, agony and ecstasy, are the same feeling, and that it’s all a matter of perspective. This makes sense, of course, since everything is a matter of perspective.
“I’ll stay too,” Tynee piped in.
“Make a note of anything unusual,” General Kiljoy ordered them as he walked toward the door. His words seemed odd to me, as I had never witnessed anything more unusual in my entire life. To Tynee and Miss Mary, however, who both nodded impatiently as if to say of course, this was apparently a typical display. “Shall we, Fountain?” He opened the door to the hallway, and I got up and followed reluctantly. General Kiljoy hit his mute button again and restored the sound as we exited. The sudden return of ferocious laughter chased me into the hallway.
“How long do they go on like that?” I asked, my voice resounding back at me off the concrete walls.
“Not too much longer, usually,” General Kiljoy whispered as he piddled with his knickknacks. He led me into the short, dead-end passageway where the two customized golf carts were parked. We crawled into the glass-bubble cabin of one of them, and when the doors were shut, I found we were able to talk without the hellish reverberations of our voices.
“That crazy laughter,” General Kiljoy continued, starting the golf cart, “is symptomatic of the initial onset. It usually lasts a half hour or so, then they’re just a little dazed for a while.” He drove the cart around a couple of corners and down some short passageways.
“What happens then?” I asked. We were humming down a very long passageway, going only a few miles per hour. The narrow hallway stretched farther than I could see in front of us, so that the lines created by the walls meeting the ceiling and floor appeared to intersect at the point of infinity, like a big X on a sheet of paper, connecting each corner to its opposite, and the center.
“All holy hell breaks loose.”
“Holy hell?”
“All holy hell, Fountain. What Tibor was saying back there,” he gestured over his head and behind him, “is that the subjects eventually go stark raving mad.”
“Eventually?”
“Well, it comes and goes. But the subject always relapses, and each progressive stage is longer and more severe. After about a month their symbolic capacity is completely out of commission.”
“Permanently?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell us.”
“But it leaves them insane?”
“You’ll see,” he said paternally, as if I were a six-year-old named Billy on my way to a surprise ice-cream cone. He might have ruffled my hair, if I’d had any. “Anyway, we’re almost there,” he said. I looked ahead, and the passageway no longer went off into infinity. Instead, a bright yellow steel door was emerging and growing out of the center. Something was painted on the door, and as we drew nearer, it took the shape of a skull and crossbones.
“Here we are.” General Kiljoy slowed to a stop, grinning like Long John Silver or some such buccaneer. “X marks the spot.”
70 I expected no treasure behind the door. Perhaps I could say that it was the end result of the desire for treasure that lay behind that door, but then who am I? I’m a greedy man, remember. I sold my soul for ten million greenbacks. You shouldn’t listen to a word I have to say.
Nevertheless, there we were at the gates of holy hell (a designation which seems like it should be better than hell, but somehow sounds more like very hell). General Kiljoy, still looking like Long John Silver, stretched his legs forward and adjusted his crotch.
“What you’re about to witness,” he began, “twelve other people have seen.”
“The members of the CPC?” I asked.
“Affirmative.” He paused, eyeing me scornfully. “Of course, there have been a few other scientists like yourself who have seen this, but unfortunately they ceased cooperating. We had to terminate their contract.”
I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to take his bait, fancying myself the ancient, giant trout of which local legends are made, and General Kiljoy as just another drunk and overweight fisherman trying to snag me for a month’s worth of barroom braggadocio.
“We couldn’t just let them go,” he continued, throwing the worm into the water as a freebie. “Originally we had a nice even set of one hundred subjects, all prisoners who had been sentenced to death. We’ve since added three scientists, plus your sociologist friend and his cellmates.”
“Why did you include the minister and the truck driver?”
“They were a convenient opportunity. Use your brain, Fountain. One hundred death row inmates is not a very representative sample. The Pied Piper virus could conceivably have different effects on noncriminals, although so far their reaction has been standard, just like the scientists.”
“Are there any women?”
“Negative,” he said, fishing into his pocket to tinker with his rod and sinkers. “That wouldn’t be very gentlemanly, now would it?”
I was about to mention that it might be biasing the sample as well, but I didn’t want to give him any ideas. Besides, it’s been common enough in medical and pharmaceutical research to only study men and generalize the results to women.
“All the prisoners are sealed behind unbreakable glass walls, just like in the observation lounge,” General Kiljoy explained as he slapped on a pair of sunglasses. “As an additional measure, we’re hermetically sealed inside this cart, behind the strongest and most resilient polymer yet developed. We’ll pass through a disinfecting airlock before and after our tour. Any questions?”
“Just one,” I replied. “Why do I need to see all of this?”
“Just some additional insurance.”
“Insurance?”
“Doctor,” he grinned roguishly and tossed me a pair of sunglasses. “We want you to see what awaits you if you fail in your task.”
71 General Kiljoy entered a code on the keypad of his remote control, and the doors in front of us opened with a baleful boom, revealing a blazingly bright room and an identical pair of doors just beyond. After the cart pulled forward, the doors clanged shut again behind us. Dozens of arcs of electricity immediately stretched across the room, centering on our vehicle, writhing and slinking across the surface of the bubble.
“Primary disinfection,” General Kiljoy explained. “The ultraviolet radiation destroys microbial genetic material. The high-voltage electromagnetic radiation disinfects as well. It also completely ozonizes the atmosphere, which finishes off any remaining organisms.” After about a minute, the lightning ceased and a mist discharged from the eight corners of the cube we were then enclosed in. “That’s cryogenic helium,” he pointed to the mist on the outside of our bubble. “Near absolute zero. Failsafe security measure. In the event of unaccompanied intrusion, it will freeze all larger forms of life to death instantly. We’ve left nothing to chance. You wouldn’t want to be on the outside of this bubble. At this moment, there is nothing else alive in this room but you and me. The goddamn Holy Ghost couldn’t survive out in that.”
I knocked on the glass tentatively, fascinated despite the larger situation, and feeling very much like a tourist riding through a concentration camp gas chamber in a golf cart.
“Don’t knock too hard,” General Kiljoy cautioned. “Our best p
olymers still become brittle at these temperatures.” I sat on my hands, not relishing the thought of breaking the bubble that kept Jack Frost from nipping at my nose, or perhaps chipping off my nose. I gave an involuntary shiver. Shiver me timbers.
“Come on, come on.” General Kiljoy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as if we were in rush hour traffic. In fact, if I may point out the obvious, we were in an ice cube fifty feet below ground level.
The hissing stopped, and through the fog I saw the Jolly Roger flag in front of us bisect vertically as the doors opened. This caused an immense crackle as the atmosphere from the chamber beyond instantly vaporized the ultracold helium, like young hussy Spring chasing old man Winter out of town. He didn’t stand a chance. In a downhill race between a tricycle and a sled, if the air’s too warm for snow, the red trike will win every time. Spring always prevails.
Lest I mislead you with such a hasty analogy, I should note the ways in which this was not at all like the dawn of spring. For instance, the parting of the pirate flag brought with it not rainbows and lilac bracelets and pan flutes, but rather a very long row of glass cells lit by fluorescent tubes stretching ahead of us. There were no birds, there were no bees, there were no trees. Even if there had been trees, there wouldn’t have been any shadows. The boys were not out at play, but were confined to their bedrooms. Grounded. Undergrounded. And none of them wore shorts.
72 The ectoplasm of the metaphysical universe was frozen stiff. The goddamn Holy Ghost dared not tread the halls of holy hell.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“Holy hell,” General Kiljoy corrected as he pulled the cart forward. What we were both referring to was the spring thunderstorm of shrieks and bellows and howls that filled the aural cavity left by the rapid dissipation of the cryogenic helium. It sounded like a laughing gas party at a dentists’ convention, with just as many root canal patients there, too, only they didn’t sound like they’d been privy to the nitrous oxide.
We sat in the midst of this chaos, in our golf cart with its Jetsons bubble option, for a very long while. General Kiljoy never took his eyes off me, and I didn’t quite know where to place mine. In the cell to my immediate right, two men were slapping out a rhythm on each other’s faces while a third sat clapping frantically in front of them and yelling, “Tofu! Tofu!”
In the next cell, two men were sitting together, weeping with loud, anguished wails, beating their chests, pulling their hair, and sticking their fingers in their mouths. A third was spinning himself around and around and making airplane noises like a child wired on sugar-frosted espresso beans. He continued this for far longer than I would have thought possible, then suddenly flew off balance and toppled onto his lamenting cellmates. Although he kicked one of them in the face and bumped heads with the other, they took no notice of him and continued bawling, even when he began vomiting all over them with the force of a fire hose.
When my ears and eyes focused on the confusion to my left, I was greeted with the peculiar scene of a small, barefoot man wearing his shoes and socks on his hands and rubbing them together while his three much larger cellmates swung their hips in perfect unison, hula hoop fashion. All four were laughing profusely and sweating hysterically.
In the cell next to them, four men were each standing with their faces in one of the four corners, screaming, screaming, screaming, and screaming. Screeching bellows filled with ferocity, fear, or both tore from their throats, straining the ligaments of their vocal cords beyond repair, shredding the sinews until they were spinning and popping apart like a rope with far too much weight on it. Focusing my ears, I recognized that their shrieks and roars were actually extended howls of a single word.
That word was “MOM-MEEEEEEEE!”
73 Blip once told me about a fantasy he and Sophia had. If they were ever to come into considerable wealth, they’d buy a VW Vanagon and go on the road in search of good conversation. When they found it, they’d talk and talk, and if the person was honest and idealistic but capital poor, they would offer to pay for the start-up costs of their dream, but only on the verbal promise that if they succeeded, they’d do the same for others. Then they would disappear on down the road, no name, no thank-you. Until such time, they satisfied this urge by slipping anonymous notes of compliment and encouragement to deserving strangers. They believe such activities spread good cheer exponentially, and are worth the effort just to see the looks on people’s faces.
General Kiljoy liked to see the looks on people’s faces when he showed them holy hell, and it was equally priceless for him. The visage was identical from person to person, he told me, and I was no exception.
“It’s fascinating,” he said, muting the external noise. I hadn’t been aware that he had that power, so I was somewhat awestruck when a wave of his hand caused such impossible pandemonium to cease, like God twitching a pinky to still an earthquake. “It’s an expression I’ve never seen anywhere else.”
“Do I still have the expression?” I asked, feeling the lines of my face as a blind person might, only I lacked such tactile talent.
“No, now you just look confused.”
“How did I look before?”
“I don’t know, Fountain, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s confusion in it, but also surprise, panic, awe, pity, and amusement. It’s an entirely new pattern of contracting and relaxing facial muscles. I’ve never seen it before.” He studied my face inquisitively. “Did I tell you I’m a dilettante physiognomist? It’s a hobby. I study people’s faces for clues to their personality. It helps me professionally.”
“Um.” I became painfully self-conscious of my possible expression. Conversing with someone concerning your countenance is about as comfortable an interaction as discussing the dynamics of eye contact. Consequently, I had to turn away, only to be greeted by the sight of the two formerly weeping men now mercilessly beating the third, the dizzy one who’d fallen and vomited upon them. I turned back to General Kiljoy, but was only met with his physiognomic scrutiny once again. “What’s happening?” I pointed to the brutal violence occurring to our right, attempting to change the focus of attention from my face. “Is that normal?”
“Happens all the time in cities all over the world,” General Kiljoy talked through a yawn. “Seems normal enough.”
“I mean, is that behavior symptomatic of the Pied Piper virus?”
“Hard to say for sure. That’s why we’re interested in some subjects without a history of violent behavior. Anyway, any behavior after infection has to be taken as an effect of the Pied Piper virus, since losing your linguistic capacity must certainly alter the entirety of your perceptions. With these prisoners, anyway, there’s certainly been an increase in violence.”
“Have there been any deaths?”
“I knew you were going to ask that, I could see it in your face. I suppose now you’re going to accuse me of lying to you and start your self-righteous moralizing again. Well, save it for Tibor, I’m sick to shit of it. These men were condemned to death anyway, and besides, I didn’t lie. The Pied Piper virus doesn’t directly result in death, that’s what I said.”
“Why don’t you just say your fingers were crossed?”
“If they were,” General Kiljoy sneered, “it’d have to be good enough for you. Now drop it, Fountain, that’s the end of it.” He jabbed his beefy index finger in my chest. It hurt. “You’re here to do a job,” he continued, mellow but menacing, “and I expect you to do it. Are we clear?”
I nodded, rubbing my throbbing breastbone. I then asked in a professional tone, “I think it’s relevant information for my research, however, to know how many have been indirectly killed.”
“Forty-three, last I checked. Forty-four, if they keep it up on that bastard.”
I looked to my right, just in time to see Dizzy’s head crushed under the boot of one of his cellmates. His skull collapsed as if it had been a mere watermelon, and they continued kicking his now lifeless body. Inevitably, the aphorism “no
sense kicking a dead horse” popped into my mind. Try as I might, however, I could find no wisdom in that adage, for there is even less sense in kicking a living horse.
74 ‘Yep,” General Kiljoy said, droll and aloof. “Forty-four.”
Horrified and disgusted, I began to dry heave.
“Don’t go hurling in here, Fountain,” he reprimanded. “You saw what happened to that guy.”
“What?” I asked between gags.
“You heard me, wonderbelly. You would’ve never made it in ’nam.”
“Vietnam?” I said, swallowing a retch.
“Four years,” he bragged, driving us farther down the corridor. “I’ve had my fair share of skull-crushing, I can say. Strange feeling, putting the heel of your boot through someone’s brain. Both crunchy and squishy. Once, on routine patrol, our platoon was ambushed by some VC. They came at us from all sides, but I’ll never forget, something came over me that day. I went absolutely berserk, pure combat, flawless form. I have thin memories of racing through the brush, hitting every gook I aimed at, completely . . .” He paused. “. . . aware. I couldn’t fail, and I knew it, knew it like I had never known anything before.” He became sickeningly passionate in his description. “I had this grace, this totality of perception. When it was over, only two men in our platoon sustained injuries, and twenty-seven Vietcong lay dead, fourteen or fifteen by me—we weren’t sure who got one of them. I was awarded the Medal of Honor for that, and it got me to the position I’m in today.” He paused wistfully. “I told Tony Temper about that once. He was in my platoon, got into that Buddhism crap after the war. He told me it was a Zen moment. I slugged him for that, joining an enemy religion, I mean.”
“Hmm.”
“The last person I killed that day was only wounded before I ran out of ammo, so I had to stomp his skull in. Tony Temper, he also told me he was psychic, like he could read minds, you know. He told me he knew what the last thing to go through that slope’s Oriental brain was that day. You know what it was?”
Just a Couple of Days Page 16