In Extremis

by John Shirley

  Some sick feeling—some bone-deep feeling, resonating from his core—told him that this was no local earthquake. This was planetary. This was . . .

  “It was like a big shared hallucination,” Tanlee was saying, three and a half hours later, in the kitchen of the penthouse where Colin had his temp job.

  They were standing by the microwave, waiting for the little plate of chocolate croissants to heat up, each of them sipping the Peet’s coffee provided by InterReal. An international real estate company–most of its operations beyond Colin’s meager business understanding—InterReal was headquartered in London, but the firm’s chief of staff, Mrs. Koyne, maintained offices all over the world.

  Tanlee glanced at her watch. “I went into my roommate’s bedroom, and I’m all, ‘Linda, did you feel that?’ And she goes, ‘I think I dreamed it—but wait you dreamed it too? No way!’” Tanlee was second generation Asian American with a Southern California accent: she’d grown up in Sherman Oaks.

  The microwave chimed and she turned lithely to take the plate out, put it on the counter. As she did this Colin looked at her tight retro clothes, ironic leopard-pattern capris and sleeveless shell sweater, her tiny little feet in her tiny little black shoes, and tried to picture her modern-dancing—gracefully gyrating, meaningfully writhing, into his arms. She was mysterious to Colin: she could play the Asian Val, but then she’d change direction, and go focused and serious. As now, when she tore off a corner off the croissant, nibbling at it as she said, “Um—Miss Koyne’s going to be here soon. And I’m sort of—scared to be here when she gets here. Do you ever, get that feeling that there’re all these lines converging in your life—like all kinds of things are coming together and when they meet they might . . . I don’t know . . . explode?”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he liked her confiding in him. Maybe one of these days she’d stop making excuses about going out. So he said, “Oh yeah,” with as much conviction as possible.

  “It’s like, I have this theory? That there’re some lines of events that are from your own life? And other lines are from outside? And they have some relationship you can’t see but they are mutually attracted according to some . . . some law we don’t know about?”

  That vapid tone, thought Colin, and making everything sound like a question—she sounded like an airhead till you really listened to what she was saying. It was if she were embarrassed about her intelligence.

  He nodded. “I know what you mean—kind of. Um, intuitively. And that thing everyone felt last night . . .”

  “Exactly. And there’s something about Mrs. Koyne that—” She broke off, glancing at the door. “So how’s your writing coming? Did you finish that play?”

  He was a little taken aback by her shift of topic. Like something had spooked her. She was looking toward the front of the penthouse.

  He picked up a croissant, but didn’t feel like really eating it. “I finished a draft of it . . .” He was embarrassed to be an aspiring writer at thirty-six with nothing but a few literary zine publications behind him, some college drama sketches produced—if you could call that produced. He felt like his own personal drama had stalled. He was perpetually waiting in a green room somewhere.

  Then he felt a gust of cold air that raised goose bumps on his arm—why was the air so cold, coming from the enclosed hall where the elevator was?—and he knew that Mrs. Koyne was in the penthouse.

  That’s when the second shudder went through the world. He felt this one mostly in his intestines, in a way; deep in his gut, but coming from the direction of his navel. It was an invasiveness that made him go up on his tiptoes for a moment—Tanlee did the same, her eyes widening—as the building rumbled to itself. Their centers of gravity—his, Tanlee’s, the building’s—wavered like tops losing spin. His heart thudded and he thought: This really is the Big One—

  And then the shaking was gone. Or—it had moved on.

  He leaned panting against the counter. “What the fuck was that?” He felt close to throwing up.

  “Some adjustments are being made,” said Mrs. Koyne, coming in. “Old accounts being closed.”

  Colin thought at first she was replying to his blurted question but now he saw she had been calmly talking on the cell phone to someone. The headset phone was cunningly worked into her frostedblack coif. Mrs. Koyne was a tall woman, angularly slender to the point of anorexia, with large green eyes in a V-shaped face. She was sealed into a low-cut iridescent designer dress suit, just a hint of a slit up the skirt; smoke-blue Italian pumps, a loose lady’s bracelet watch on one bird-boned wrist.

  She swept with imperial indifference through the small space of the kitchen, so that Colin and Tanlee had to back against the counter. Their employer strode to the refrigerator, got the pitcher of veggie juice drinks always waiting for her, poured green liquid into a tall glass while speaking into the designer mouthpiece arcing like elegant jewelry near her thin, pink-glossed lips.

  “Just tell them that—yes, China too—all the factors are coalescing, the timing is perfect. I have one or two indicators to check but InterReal is already on the move, we’re closing the deal.”

  Colin glanced at Tanlee, thinking to share a look of amazement at Mrs. Koyne’s complete lack of response to the earthquake. But the look on Tanlee’s face—as she leaned against a cabinet, one hand on her midriff, gazing at Mrs. Koyne—was bitter resignation. Tanlee looked so much older and wiser than ever before . . .

  “Exactly . . . right. I’ll see you up there.” Mrs. Koyne switched off the tiny cell phone, turning to Colin and Tanlee.

  Colin wanted to be impressively cool-headed but he found himself stuttering. “Um—maybe we should get down to . . . to, I don’t know, the street or—wherever we’re supposed to go in case of an earthquake?” Then he realized Mrs. Koyne was staring at his hand with distaste. He saw that he had convulsively clenched the croissant during the shudder, dough and chocolate squeezed out between his fingers along the back of his hand and dolloped on the otherwise immaculate tile floor. “Oh jeez, I’m sorry—I just—Christ—” Washing his hand in the sink, cleaning the floor with a wet paper towel. “—I just . . . I was startled by . . . by that quaking . . .”

  “Maybe we should go downstairs, though, Mrs. Koyne,” Tanlee said, watching the other woman closely.

  Mrs. Koyne made a pitying chuckle. “You thought there was an earthquake? Nonsense. A little quiver, is all. This is California, aren’t you used to it by now?” She sipped at her juice and set it down on the counter.

  “Shouldn’t we at least check the news channels?” Tanlee persisted.

  “We’ve no time for pointless fears. This is a critical moment for us. Now come along. Let’s get cracking.”

  Colin and Tanlee followed her, reluctantly drawn in the slipstream of her authority. They filed into the big main room of the penthouse. Taking up most of the top floor, the vast room was organized around a single flat-black desk with three chairs, in the middle of the rust colored carpet, and two dark brown leather sofas facing one another. The sunlight suffusing the room was thinned by polarized window walls on two opposite sides. Three mobiles hung from the ceiling—two Miro and one Calder—but they hung immobile, as if freeze-framed. A big computer hard drive in the center of the desk connected to Mrs. Koyne’s monitor and two smaller monitors and keyboards on the sides. Mrs. Koyne had already laid out sheaves of paperwork.

  Colin felt strange, taking his usual leather swivel chair at the little work station set up on one side of the big desk; Tanlee sat across from him, Mrs. Koyne at the larger chair between. It was strange because he could still feel that planetary shudder echoing in his nervous system—it was like the feeling you get just before the stomach flu comes on—and he was pretty sure they ought to be heading for some earthquake shelter somewhere. Wasn’t there one in the basement of this high-rise?

  But the computer booted up almost instantly, as if in feverish excitement, and Mrs. Koyne’s fingers were already flying over the primary ke
yboard. She clicked on the InterReal multiple-input program and they began the data entry that she’d been guiding them through for weeks, each of them filling out different sections of the same form.

  Somedays Tanlee would go off by herself to do errands for Mrs. Koyne; to fetch the boss’s lunch, to pick up her dry cleaning, to sort through voicemail. Today she and Colin were tapping away like drones to Mrs. Koyne’s ant queen, entering buy numbers, dates, strange foreign place-names, sending form letters for eviction to agencies who were bribed to implement them, transferring money and deeds—or that’s what it was supposed to be, but Colin found it all very cryptic. Just now he seemed to be helping Mrs. Koyne buy an apartment building in Hong Kong, but—

  Suddenly he was aware that she had stopped typing. She seemed to be listening with her head cocked. Then she turned her head, the motion sharp and abrupt, to stare at him, unblinking, her smile condescending and crooked.

  “Tell me about the last thing you remember dreaming, Colin,” Mrs. Koyne said. “I mean—last night. Can you remember?”

  Colin stared at her, and had to make a conscious effort to close his mouth so he wouldn’t be gaping. “Uh—what I dreamt?” From any of his friends, this would not have been an odd question. It was something the bohemian types he hung with would talk about. From Mrs. Koyne it was startlingly unprecedented. “Well—I dreamt I was . . . was being . . .”

  “Accused? Was it accused?” She leaned toward him. Her breath smelled like a burnt-out match.

  And he was astonished that she’d hit it right. “Well yeah. I guess it was—a detective . . . a plainclothes cop . . . accusing me of murdering someone. And embezzling. And the weird thing was when I woke . . . it was like . . . I dunno . . .” He glanced at Tanlee, embarrassed.

  Mrs. Koyne pressed him, “It was like you were—ashamed? Even after waking up, and even knowing you hadn’t embezzled or murdered?”

  “That’s . . . pretty amazing, Mrs. Koyne. Yes. I felt ashamed—though I knew it was a dream.” He tried to chuckle companionably. “You have a bug under my pillow?”

  “Not as such.” She turned to Tanlee. “And you?”

  Tanlee’s face had gone hard, her brown-black eyes brittle. “I don’t recall.”

  “Oh, come. A dream in which you were accused of a crime you never committed . . . and for which you felt ashamed, even after you woke and knew it was but a dream? Yes?”

  Tanlee shook her head briskly. “No!”

  But Colin knew, somehow, that Tanlee was lying. It was in the way she’d fractionally shrunk in on herself, sitting there, as if trying to protect some vulnerable place. She had dreamed something like that. How did Mrs. Koyne know? She’d never spoken to them of any psychic ability—they’d never spoken of anything personal, except now and then she asked about career plans, and family, in a polite, chilly, fill-in-the-blanks kind of way that seemed to suggest she’d rather not know anything more than the minimum.

  “Ah!” Mrs. Koyne said, then, looking fiercely into the computer.

  There was a hard light in her eyes, in her whole face, a hungry intensity Colin had never seen before as she murmured, “Yes—here too, the dreams prefigured the noumenal adjustment—all on schedule . . .” He realized she was speaking into her headset, though he hadn’t seen her switch it on. Who was she talking to? He had never met Mr. Koyne.

  He glanced at her computer monitor—and his heart seemed to squeeze out the next beat, as if barely making it from one beat to the next.

  Mrs. Koyne’s monitor was oozing colors onto its plastic frame, onto the keyboard and desk. It was as if the colors of the software windows, primary colors no longer digital but with an electric tinge—a lot like that ideogram neon outside his window at home—were solidifying, liquefying, running, and then stretching out, twining like yarn, elongating through space to web the room. And within the multicolored strands pulsed something pink, which he sensed was a vital human essence, with now and then a glimpse of an elongated eye slipping through the tube of light; a distended mouth, teeth and fingers rippling by and gone, each liquefied person passing with a sound like an infinitely dopplering moan, a thousand, a million moans layered and overlapping . . .

  Colin was up and lurching backwards, away from the flesh-charged moaning light, so that he stumbled over his chair and fell hard on his right side—and found himself staring at a seeking tendril of fleshpumped colored light coming across the floor, probing right at his face like a sizzling rivulet of hot wax.

  “Shit!” He scrambled back from it—just as another long, planetary shudder rippled through the world. Again he felt the quaking nose through him, as if it had sought him personally, and it knew his name and his whole life, and the feeling made his gorge rise, his muscles convulse, so that he squirmed on the carpet and moaned, his moan sickeningly like the moans still reverberating from the overflowing computer.

  The quaking died down—but this time commenced again almost at once. A little plaster sifted down from the ceiling, and there were shouts of fear from the people in the offices a storey below, barely audible under the collective moaning from the spreading strands of fleshy light. And the mobiles turning jigglingly, up near the ceiling.

  He rolled away from the living, toxic glimmer—he didn’t know how he knew it was in some sense toxic, he just knew. He sat up, and Tanlee was standing over him, bracing herself, rocking slightly as another shaking passed through, and putting out her hand to him. He took it—a small hand, but she was strong and pulled him to his feet. They clung to each other for a moment, as the building creaked and quivered. Where had Mrs. Koyne gone? He could no longer see her.

  A kind of living, weaving tree of light was twisting through the open spaces of the room—he ducked back as it stretched toward him. And there—a crack was spreading through the farthest glass wall, from the lower frame. Crick, it cracked a little farther. A hesitation. Then, crick, a new direction. A waiting. A shiver. Crick crick crick—and CRICK—

  The entire wall of glass shattered and fell away with an in-gust of wind and a symphonic crashing–Tanlee giving a small scream, Colin hissing “Fuck!” They staggered as the air sucked at them. The mobiles spinning, tangling, falling. He realized that if the nearer wall had burst they’d have staggered to fall twenty-three stories down. They steadied one another, and Tanlee shouted something he couldn’t hear over the moaning from the spreading lights, the crackling of flames from somewhere below; the sirens; the rumbling of buildings uneasy in their sockets; the crackle of glass and the sough of wind.

  Another long planetary quiver, and the vibration seemed to roil the living light from the computer, to draw it in a twisting suction toward the window. There was something else, something he thought was like a tornado, in the urban distance, but a whirlwind impossibly big—big as a mountain.

  Tanlee tugged at him and he let her draw him along the creaking, crick-cracking glass wall to their left, toward the corridor leading to the bedrooms and the door out of the suite. Tanlee shouted something in his ear. He made out only part of it: “I’ve known for a while . . . wasn’t human . . . some of them are, and some aren’t . . . I saw into her once . . . she . . . a bottle that could move and there was a thing in it . . . intelligent but not . . . I stayed to find out, to know . . . Those who sent me . . .” A glassy crash and roaring of intrusive air, from behind, drowned the rest of her words.

  The suite’s bedrooms were used only occasionally by InterReal execs, sometimes by Mrs. Koyne—and she was there, he saw, as Tanlee drew him through the bedroom door.

  Mrs. Koyne was rotating in place in the exact center of the large bedroom, the heels of her pumps dangling about an inch off the carpet. It was as if she was on a turntable going a little faster than 33 rpm, but there was no turntable. Something unseen was turning her, upright in space. She seemed quite content, more overtly happy than he’d ever seen her.

  One of the windows had shattered and the gold-colored curtains flapped; another long shudder rippled through the building and
the walls showed a slowly spreading fracture, and an abstract painting fell, its glass cover tinkling into shards, its chaotic imagery celebrating the room’s disintegration. All the while, Mrs. Koyne spun in place, smiling, going fractionally faster now. Colin felt a wave of nausea shimmer through him—it seemed to match the subtle vertical undulating Mrs. Koyne was making with her whole body, as she rotated and moved up and down, a kind of feeding in that motion.

  “Oh . . . motherfucker . . .” Colin heard himself say. “Tanlee if you understand something, anything about any of this . . .”

  “She has begun . . .” Mrs. Koyne said. She paused as she rotated away, speaking rapidly as she came back around, completing her sentences in passing segments. “. . . to see . . .” She whipped around. Came back. “. . . some others have . . .” Gone, back: “. . . far too late . . . I knew . . . they sent her . . . to observe me . . . but it didn’t . . . matter at all . . . We have been here for so long, our roots deep . . . into the organism . . . of the world . . .” Was she spinning faster now? “You must . . . have known somehow . . . years ago . . . when you . . . saw the world . . . despoiled . . . sucked....dry and . . . used up . . . that someone . . . that many . . . from outside . . . were feed . . . ing.”

  The building gave a great lurch, then, and an accompanying tremble ran through Colin, and Tanlee too—somehow he could feel it passing through her as it passed through him—and they had to clutch at the walls to keep from falling. But the walls themselves were falling, the wall behind the bed bending toward them, breaking along the bend. Mrs. Koyne seemed utterly unconcerned—her smile flashed by unchanged.

  “You . . . might . . . go . . . to roof . . . for . . . a . . . few more . . . moments . . . togeth . . . er . . .” Mrs. Koyne said, her voice coming more high-pitched.

  In the whirling blur of Mrs. Koyne it seemed to Colin that some inner verity was unveiled, and he could see a vaguely woman-shaped thing, but with a stretched-out lamprey mouths in a spiral pattern all around its body, and puckered vents issuing giggling pink smoke.