Within the vial, a transparent liquid.
The tiniest of tubes runs through the cork, siphoning liquid out into the network of conduits.
Tom takes hold of the vial and lifts it out of the machine.
Carefully, he pulls free the tiny straw. The vial is disconnected, and he holds it up to the light.
A moment later, Grayspool’s knocking is interrupted by Tom flinging open the door.
“Hey,” Tom says.
Their eyes meet, and Grayspool, for a moment, looks over Tom’s shoulder. Tom glances back; they both take in the deconstructed helmet.
“What have you done?” Grayspool says. He sees the vial in Tom’s hand. “What is that?”
“Work without hope,” Tom says, “draws nectar in a sieve.”
Grayspool, frowning, swivels and begins to follow Tom toward the stairs. “Tom, I don’t understand. What are you—”
“Coleridge,” Tom says. “One of your guys.”
As he sets foot on the first step, Tom pops the cork from the top of the vial. “I can’t really run Pangea, Grayspool,” he says. “I’m not the right person. I mean come on. Look at me.”
Tom starts to climb again. Grayspool hustles up behind him. “I’d prefer if you’d just slow down and tell me—”
“Let’s be honest—I mean really honest. The drinking alone would probably bring down the whole thing a lot faster than any assassin, than any fucking…mercenary. I’d like to think I could stop, but I honestly just don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s impossible. Once you go far enough along.”
Reaching the top of the stairs, Tom turns, looks back at Grayspool. It’s not happiness, not quite, whatever it is that he’s feeling. But he does feel the peace that comes with resolve, with certainty.
“She’s dying,” Grayspool says. He’s reached the top of the stairs; the two stand side-by-side, feet from Eliza’s door. “There aren’t any other options.”
“No,” Tom says. “She’s not dying.”
He holds out his hand. “Goodbye, Grayspool. I liked you right away.”
Grayspool, out of breath and eminently flustered, warily takes the hand. They shake.
“Where are you—”
Tom turns, takes a breath, opens the door to Eliza’s room. The morning sunlight angles across from the window, lighting both Eliza’s still body and all the machines beside her bed. She looks peaceful. Her linens all look clean.
Tom puts the vial to his lips, closes his eyes and drinks.
He has time—a second or two—to make his way to the bed before he begins to feel it. At first gust a glimmer of Grayspool and his annoyingly English reserve standing there behind him, arm on the doorframe. Soon, though, Grayspool’s mind is washed away by Eliza, who is lost, adrift atop a sea of drugs and pain, which he must first sink down through before he gets to something more real. Tom got pretty good, back in Chicago, at dealing with other people and their minds. He has to admit. They’re all mazes, but there are common turns, common architectures. Dealing with both Grayspool and Eliza at the same time feels doable. At first.
But Tom drank the whole vial, all of it. A thousand times the strength of the wand and the helmet, when all is working properly. Because that’s what the helmet is, isn’t it? You can see that. Not a focusing agent but an object to retard the strength of everybody else’s thoughts and heart. The liquid inside—it’s too powerful. The helmet around it is for control. It won’t be just Eliza and Grayspool, Tom knows. Eyes closed, he rests his hand on Eliza’s bandaged forehead. And
there, it starts, he begins to feel the pain. How many are there on the first floor? 30? He feels them all, one by one, but at the same time, all at once. The rush is overwhelming; the rush is slow. It’s as though he’s a man on a beach, looking out, and a tidal wave had risen up and struck him, leaving him there on the beach in no hurry, dripping but not washed away. Still, though, in that crowd, in the congestion of all those minds, Tom tries to stay focused on Eliza. He begins to gather up her pain.
As he does this, the radius is all the while expanding, sweeping out across the island, and Tom now senses the moods and minds and histories of hundreds, then thousands—this when the radius reaches
Douglas, when the weight of an entire city’s people crushes him, and he can barely breathe amidst each distinct life, of so much pain, of so much consciousness. There’s more pain than joy out there, Tom sees, but is that a surprise? He tries to stay focused on the one. Even as England and Ireland and Scotland and Wales hit him, geometrically larger waves, he stays standing on his shore, rooted. He feels as though he’ll be ripped apart, or crushed, or both at once, and he
concentrates on her, on the bomb, on each burnt nerve ending, each ruined cell of skin, each neuron in her mind that relined and overloaded when the explosives ignited. He pulls her pain into himself. He’ll feel it instead. He can take it from her. She’s better than him, better in almost every conceivable way. He feels the pain of the burns spreading out across his face as they recede from hers, feels his skin dissolving away. He even feels the individual, still-smoldering fires hidden across the charred skin of her shoulders. He feels her mind becoming aware of him, too, beginning to feel relief the more he takes away. He feels her coming out of her hiding place. He couldn’t have imagined the pain. Something in him is screaming. He might be screaming. Still, the radius is expanding. All across Europe, now? Maybe over the ocean, and Tom goes further down, still. He continues drawing out all the poison he can locate in her body. He puts it into himself. Sure, he’ll take the bioaccumulation, too: the mercury, the lead, the pesticides, the polychlorinated biphenyls, the cadmium, the Teflon, the brominated flame retardants, whatever—he’ll take them. Fuck it. There are too many—and they’re in everyone, too. Will it even matter that he takes them from her? Perhaps the world has already ended. Hasn’t it, if this is inside of us? We’re all dead already, right? He finds shrapnel in his stomach and he puts it in his own. He takes every iota of pain he can find until he’s nothing more than a pyre kneeling beside her, overcome with so much agony that he finally—after how long?—feels himself slipping. He tries to hold on. He doesn’t know where the radius is anymore. Maybe it’s gone all around. But he can’t see now, his eyes aren’t really working. Eliza. Eliza is sitting up. She has a hand on his cheek, he thinks, and Tom feels tremendous relief. He’s not sure if it’s his or hers, as he can no longer tell the difference. He feels, briefly, her surprise and her confusion, trying to understand what he’s done. He feels her shock when she looks at him. She sees how all her wounds have transferred onto his own face.
He collapses.
“Tom,” she says, is saying, her face hovering over his. But is he in her? He sees himself now. She looks down into his eyes, concerned. He sees himself through them. He does not look good. But Tom can’t talk—he’s down at the bottom of a well, looking up, “Tom,” she says, is saying. Softly, though. Not panicked. No need to say a thing. Go on, my friend. Go further down.
Tom goes further down.
“Tom.”
She’s better. The bandages are off. He can see that she’s better.
“Tom.”
She’ll be better, Tom knows. Better for the world than he would have been. In lots of different ways. Tom has no ideas anymore, not really. Tom’s never had a whole lot to give. Tom learned how to take well, sure, but he knows he’s not the type to have new ideas, to generate something that makes the world better. People like Eliza can do that. You have to care a lot and not care at the same time. It never felt quite right, did it? Alive in his own skin? That may have been the problem all along, but of course you can’t see that about yourself, you can’t see the deepest of the flaws, what started so long ago that it is now transparent to your eyes. Never quite right. He could point to some good moments. But never quite right.
“Tom?”
Now she’s just a voice.
She’ll do well. She’ll scare billions, which will be a nice shake of the shoulders. Mayb
e that will be all she does. Shake shoulders. Knock on Earth’s forehead. That’s good. Wake up! Eliza will say.
Tom has drifted down. Going down is okay.
He’s so far down the well that he can’t even feel the pain anymore, neither the pain nor the other people.
There are so many other people.
So much pain.
But there’s a small chance, too.
Knowing this, relieved and a little sad, Tom lets go.
Acknowledgments
This book is an attempt at answering a handful of worrisome questions. Like a lot of people, I began to wonder about these (admittedly abstract) questions in my twenties and could never shake their hold. And not to be annoyingly mysterious, but I hope there’s no need to restate the questions themselves here; if they’re not somehow in the book already, there’s a problem, and it’s my fault completely.
However, due to my furtive ways in and around academia and the slow, piecemeal development of this book, many of the kind people I want to thank have no idea who I am. No matter. I’m thanking them anyway.
To various philosophy, cognitive science, and sociology professors scattered across the country: I was the one sitting in the back, probably not qualified to be in your class, listening with keen interest and occasionally asking non sequitur questions about poetry. Thanks to David Lindberg, Hannah Ginsberg, Richard Boyd, David Grusky, Ronald Kline, Shimon Edelman, Aaron Lambert, and many others.
Thank you, too, to the wonderful, talented, and oft underappreciated science-fiction and fantasy writers who painted my formative reading years with so much unusual and perfect color: Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Paul B. Thompson, Tonya C. Cook, Douglas Niles, Timothy Zahn, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Doug Naylor, Rob Grant, Ursula K. Le Guin, R.A. Salvatore, and Troy Denning. Troy, The Amber Enchantress got me three detentions from my eighth-grade Spanish teacher. I was reading it under my desk.
And finally, thank you so much to all the people I actually do know who helped with this book along the way. First and foremost on that list is my wife Alexis, who actually abides my presence—amazing. Tremendous thanks as well to Zach Dodson and Jonathan Messinger, legitimately insane co-founders of featherproof books, no explanation required. And more thanks to many others, too: Gina Frangello, Emily Tedrowe, Thea Goodman, Maggie Vandermeer, Dika Lam, Betsy Crane, Roy Kesey, Jami Attenberg, Mike Fowler, Brettne Bloom, Oliver Haslegrave, Reagan Arthur, Ben Warner, Steve Somerville, Lee Somerville, Sara Prohaska, Cecilia Phillips, Mark Rader, Rob Funderburk, J. Robert Lennon, Alex Kostiw, Audrey Niffenegger, Sam Axelrod, Allison Burque, and okay, dude at the CVS, guy walking down the street with the white poofy hair, Melvin Jones Bukiet, dickface at the kayak rental kiosk in Ithaca, tatted-up girl at the coffee shop. Whether you meant to or not or even knew I was there, you all helped in some way. Books are funny like that.
About the Author
PATRICK SOMERVILLE’s first book of stories, Trouble, was named 2006’s Best Book by a Chicago Author by Time Out Chicago, and his novel, The Cradle, was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He has taught creative writing and English at Cornell, Northwestern University, Auburn State Correctional Facility, and The Graham School in Chicago. He lives with his wife in Chicago.
1 Some departments and programs at Pangea U: The Department of Meaningless Projects; Anti-Gravity Fucking; Murder Studies; Sweetness; Earthquake Prediction, Prevention, and Manipulation; Finally Ending Bull-Fighting, Which is Awful; The Department of Large-Scale Global Revolution (and Fomenting Coup d’etat); Ponerology; Fishies; The Department of Anti-Science; Cetacean Role-Play; Carbonated Beverage Studies; Bomb-Sniffing for People; The Department of Postmodern Submersion; Trash Heaps; Voyeurism Studies; Creating Propaganda; Eddy Van Der Paardt; Escaping Propaganda; Ghouls; The History of Dirt; Methane; BP Destroyed a Huge Part of the Gulf and They Will Just Change Their Name; Methane Bubbles; The Department of People Flying; Getting Back Mastodons—Now; Understanding Joy; Giving Gifts; Gifts; Gift Giving.
Copyright © 2010 by Patrick Somerville
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for review.
Versions of the following stories have previously been published:
“The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” in American Short Fiction;
“No Sun” in New South; “Vaara in the Woods” in Time Out Chicago;
“Easy Love” in Storyglossia and Ghost Town; “The Peach” in The Madison
Review; “Hair University” in Barrelhouse; “Confused Aliens” in Five Chapters;
“Pangea” in ACM; “People Like Me” in Five Chapters. Thanks to the editors.
Published by
featherproof books
Chicago, Illinois
www.featherproof.com
Library of Congress Control Number 2009944043
eISBN : 978-0-982-58089-9
Design and Illustrations by Zach Dodson at Bleached Whale Design
Except Figure VB7009 and the faces of The Abacus by Rob Funderburk;
Figure 24.7k8 by Mark Rader; Helmet, p. 259 by Alex Kostiw
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Page 27
