Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  A cloud, a rosary, a Star of David, a pencil.

  A lion.

  Two lions.

  A statue of Jesus, a sailboat, a pyramid, a starry sky.

  The images started to include videos of people doing things: eating, dancing, singing, praying, walking along the beach, kissing, driving a car, boxing. Animals ran and hunted and slept. Zack waited to see them either humping or tearing apart prey, but there were no images like that. He smiled.

  “What’s funny, Zack?” the tech said, and Zack told him. The tech didn’t reply.

  A building blew up. A speeder was arrested. Two children pushed at each other, their faces angry. Something else blew up, Zack wasn’t exactly sure what. A fire raged in a building. A firefighter carried out a little girl, unhurt. A minister led a congregation in prayer.

  “Hey,” Zack said, “are we almost done?”

  “Just a little longer.”

  It was a lot longer. Anne had told him that the typical imaging lasted about forty-five minutes, but this took hours. By the end, Zack was thoroughly bored. What did describing yet another tree (“Do you know what kind of tree it is, Zack?”) have to do with his non-voices? This was stupid.

  When they finally let him out, he went straight to the nearest bar and got drunk. He thought of looking up Jazzy’s address on his phone and taking a cab to her house, just to see where she lived now, but even drunk, he realized how dumb that was. Instead he took a cab to Anne’s. She’d been waiting up and looked worried, but all she said was, “I walked Browne just fifteen minutes ago, so you don’t have to do that before you go to bed.”

  He thanked her, torn between gratitude and the wish that she didn’t always do everything so fucking right. In bed, with the dog curled against his back, he dreamed that he held Jazzy again, before she pulled away and went into the arms of a dead, bleeding Julian Browne.

  In Dr. Norwood’s office sat Zack, Anne, Norwood, and a Dr. Keller, who looked too young, pretty, and blonde to be what she was. Zack couldn’t remember the term, but it meant a doctor who analyzed and interpreted the scanner results. She looked a little dazed. The room was small, chaotic with computers, piles of printouts, and a lot of equipment Zack couldn’t identify, all interspersed with used coffee cups. One of these was growing greenish mold, which couldn’t be good. Weren’t doctors supposed to be super clean?

  Norwood is going to lean forward, going to clasp his hands on his lap, going to speak—

  “Mr. Murphy, the results of your scan are very interesting. Let me start by telling you what we thought we might see but didn’t, and then what we didn’t expect to see but did.”

  “Okay,” said Zack, unable to think of any other response. The non-voices had been pummeled into silence by two double Scotches.

  “Often when people report sensing a ‘presence’ in their mind, we see increased activity in the temporal lobe, and more than usual wiring to that area of the brain. That correlates with certain kinds of religious experiences, including mysticism and meditation and out-of-body sensations. Neither your responses to religious imagery nor your scan show that.”

  “You mean it isn’t God in my voices. Well, I told you that.”

  Norwood smiled. “So you did. The other usual source of hearing voices is schizophrenia, which doesn’t feature brain-structure abnormalities but does include certain patterns of neural wiring. Your scans don’t show those, either.”

  “So I’m not nuts.”

  “You are not schizophrenic.”

  “They aren’t really voices anyway,” Zack said. “I told you that. They don’t have words. I just call them that . . . because.” Because there wasn’t anything else to call them. He really wanted this conference over, even though he was the one who’d asked for it.

  Dr. Keller spoke for the first time. “What do they seem like, Zack, if not voices?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Presences, like Anne said. Or maybe one really big presence. Only not really. It’s like . . . it’s like everything is there. In my head.”

  Anne said, “Everything? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean! That’s what they’re supposed to tell me! Christ!”

  Norwood said soothingly, “Let’s go on to what your scan does show. We expected to see greater integration among the sensory input areas, the motor areas, and a section of the brain associated with interpreting and responding to people and animals, including the fear centers. We saw that integration, which is what lets you so effectively work with the lions.”

  And with you, Zack didn’t say aloud. The signals coming from everyone practically shouted at him: Norwood’s excited interest, that he was trying and failing to mask; the blonde’s dazed fearfulness; Anne’s concern so strong it was almost despair. Christ, she should lighten up. But none of them were all that different from the big cats. Which was depressing to think about, so he didn’t.

  “Some of your neural profile matches that of highly creative people. Stronger—”

  “Creative? You mean like painters and writers and all them? I don’t create anything.”

  Norwood went on, “Stronger, and more surprising, are other results of the scan. Mr. Murphy, you present a neural profile remarkably like a person who is asleep and dreaming, with—”

  “What the hell! I wasn’t asleep inside that machine!”

  “I know you weren’t. But your connectome and functional data show the pattern of dreams: heightened activity in the oldest parts of the brain, in memory, and in emotion, along with decreased activity in areas governing reason and decision-making. The biggest surprise was how much the scan reflects a dreamlike state usually associated with dealing with internal situations, not external ones. In other words, whatever is going on, and it includes some very unusual neural pathways, you are connecting with something that is inside your mind, like dreams are. But not anything we can name.”

  Anne said, “The unconscious?”

  “In part. But much more than the usual patterns that tap subconscious responses. Somehow the areas of the brain that respond to other people are heavily involved, even when Mr. Murphy is reacting to imagery like trees or rocks or stars.”

  Anne said, “A . . . I almost can’t say this . . . a collective unconscious?”

  The blonde said primly, “That lies outside our purview, Ms. Murphy.”

  Zack demanded, “What is collective unconscious?”

  Norwood smiled. “That’s a good question, Mr. Murphy. But we don’t know the answer, any more than we know what consciousness is. We’re all conscious, we experience the world as ‘I, me,’ but nobody knows how the brain gives rise to that consciousness. It’s the great mystery of neuroscience: What are we experiencing when we think, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ ?”

  Think what? All at once Zack had enough of this. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they could offer him. He glared at them, even Anne. “So what does it mean? Can you cure me?”

  Norwood said, “You’re not ill, Mr. Murphy.”

  Dr. Keller said, “The brain’s incredible plasticity—”

  Anne said, “Maybe meds to completely disrupt everything the—”

  “No drugs to completely disrupt everything!” Zack shouted. He didn’t even know why he was so furious. “I only wanted the voices to stop! You want to take away what I can do? How I make my living? What’s wrong with you people? We’re done here!”

  Anne grabbed his arm. Zack shook her off and stalked out of the room.

  On the plane back to Vegas, he paid for in-flight wi-fi. The flight attendant had already brought him two Scotches. He Googled “collective unconscious” and got “Psychology: in Jungian psychological theory, a part of the unconscious mind incorporating patterns of memories, instincts, and experiences common to all mankind. These patterns are inherited, may be arranged into archetypes, and are observable through their effects on dreams, behavior, etc.”

  Bullshit. If there was one thing his non-voices were not, it was “common to all mankind.” He was the o
nly sap blessed, or cursed, with the Gift. Which even after two drinks and at thirty thousand feet, was growing stronger and stronger. It was like it was trying to take him over, like he could take over the lions. And the doctors had been no help at all.

  He ordered a double.

  All the next day, the thing in his head grew. He had a show that night and didn’t want to risk drinking. He refused to see Jerry, ignored messages from Marissa and Anne, spent the day sitting on the huge terrace of his Las Vegas suite, holding Browne on his lap. The dog was the only thing that made sense to him. Browne didn’t even squirm, only giving one polite bark when he needed to use the poo-pad in the corner. Zack ate nothing all day. His head felt as if it could explode.

  No, not explode. Expand, to take in whatever else was in there. Expand as big as the universe. Almost it seemed to Zack that he could feel—what had Norwood called them?—“neural pathways” multiplying like rabbits in his brain. Ridiculous, but . . . Christ, his head hurt.

  It still ached when he went on stage at 8:00 P.M., but he gave the best show ever, effortlessly controlling even Goldie. He had Fuzzball and Lulu jump over each other, Fluffy fetch a spangled baton and drop it at his feet as if she were Browne. And all the while Zack felt that he was only partly there, or only partly himself. Power flowed through him—but from where? Whose?

  The consciousness of the universe itself.

  The words formed in his mind, scaring him so badly that he ended the show ten minutes early and walked out of the cage. The audience, on its feet and roaring his name, didn’t mind. Even Henryk, the least resentful of the Bajek brothers, glanced at Zack with something like awe. Zack didn’t answer whatever Henryk said to him. He had to get out of there, or his head would explode.

  He took a car right to the MGM Grand and bolted to his suite, locking the door behind him. He hardly knew what he was doing, or why. He put his hands to his head and groaned.

  Everything was there, in his head—everything that had ever existed, or would exist, and he was both its observer and a part of it: the entire universe laid bare in a second. He felt possessed, taken over, even though he knew he wasn’t. But it was too much, the pressure—the pressure!—of everything! It was going to crush him, to burst him apart like a balloon filled with too much air, a wine bottle left too long in the freezer until the wine expanded and shattered . . . .

  Browne, bounding forward to greet him, stopped so short that his feet slid on the marble floor. The dog whimpered.

  “Hey, Brownie, good dog . . .”

  Browne backed away from Zack, tail between his legs.

  It was the last insult to his autonomy, to him, to Zack Murphy, his own person. He didn’t want to be everything, he didn’t want the consciousness of the universe woven through and into his mind. Norwood had said that Zack’s brain had the same cells in it as anybody else’s, just arranged differently and doing different things—did that mean that anybody could be what he was becoming? Well, let them have it! He didn’t want to be everything, he didn’t want to be anything but himself, alone and independent the way he’d always been . . . . Zack screamed in rage, in frustration, in fear. His gaze fell on the foyer table, marble and wrought iron.

  And he saw it. Saw the table so vividly it almost burned his eyeballs, every curve and line of it. He saw the pattern in the marble as if etched into his brain. He felt the flow of the arched iron legs. He saw the table as it was now, and as it had been when new, and as it would be in a few years’ time when someone had scratched it and someone else had stained the top and one leg was bent. He knew what the table would become, just as he knew when Goldie would raise a paw and bat at him. The table was part of him because the same force inhabited it as inhabited him, and in that force, time was an illusion. The past and present and future of the table were simultaneous and they were now, in Zack’s head.

  With the past and present and future of the floor.

  And the vase.

  And the stars in the sky above the terrace.

  And Browne, who cowered before Zack and who was a mewling puppy, a full-grown mutt, an old dog barely able to move his paralyzed hind legs, a small inert corpse, a fresh bit of soil in a grave, even as he continued to romp and play in puppyhood. Time itself possessed Zack, and everything in his head, which was everything that existed, was one thing.

  Just One.

  He screamed and rushed onto the terrace. Above him the stars glittered and below the lights of Vegas glittered, and there was no difference, nor any difference between all that and himself. It was too much, it was intolerable, he would not have it . . . He threw one leg over the railing.

  It’s a long way to fall, Zack.

  “No! No! No! Not me! You got the wrong guy! Go away!”

  Everything, with its past and present and future, filled his head. Zack clung to the railing. Behind him, on the wall of the terrace, a mirror exploded, sending shards of glass flying twenty feet. In that instant, Zack knew he could explode the terrace, explode the MGM Grand, explode Las Vegas. And what else? What else?

  “Mr. Murphy? Mr. Murphy!” Pounding on the locked door.

  “No,” Zack whispered. “Please, no. I don’t want it.”

  He never remembered what happened next. Everything went black. When he came to, the hotel manager and Security were prying his fingers off the railing. Mirror glass had cut his chest, his arms. “A . . . accident,” he gasped. “Go . . . away.”

  They did, or maybe they didn’t. But when Zack woke again, in his bed, it wasn’t the hotel manager with him. It was Jerry, shaking his shoulder and saying, “Hey, champ. Wake up. That must have been some bender last night. You got any idea what time it is?”

  Zack looked at the clock beside the bed: 7:00 P.M. He had been asleep, or passed out, or dead, for twenty hours.

  “You got a show in an hour, kid.”

  “I—”

  “Come on, get dressed!”

  He was wearing clean pajamas. There were bandages over the cuts on his chest. He remembered almost nothing of the night before. There had been a mirror . . . hadn’t there? Moving heavily, feeling as if the air were damp cotton wool, Zack let Jerry get him dressed, get him downstairs, get him into the waiting car. In his dressing room, Jerry got him into costume, the Egyptian pharaoh headdress and the gladiator sandals and ridiculous white loincloth. Zack walked out during the announcer’s spiel, crossing the catwalk to the cage. Goldie roared.

  Anton, on duty, sullenly unlocked the cage door.

  Karoly stood inside, behind the barred shield, holding the CO2 canister.

  The crowd stopped screaming Zack’s name and quieted, waiting.

  Zack looked at the lions, Goldie and Lulu and Fluffy and Fuzzball. No: at Rex, Majesty, Artemis, Lilith. He looked at Anton, holding open the cage door. Zack had no idea what gesture or expression Anton would make next. Zack looked at Karoly, who stared back at him.

  Karoly is going to . . .

  Is going to . . .

  He didn’t know what Karoly was going to do.

  There were no non-voices, no presences in his head.

  Zack looked again at the big cats, at their huge teeth and sleek long muscles and claw tips like ice picks. He looked at Rex’s intent eyes and dark mane, at Artemis’s lashing tail, at Majesty’s poised stillness. He turned and walked back down the catwalk away from the cage, head tipped so far down that his headdress, sloppily fastened, fell off and lay in a heap of shining imitation gold.

  IV

  Winter came swiftly in the mountains. At first snowfall, Zack looked for a shovel to dig out the car. Not that he was going anywhere; he hadn’t gone anywhere in the nearly two months he’d been here. But there ought to be a shovel. It irritated him, and he phoned Loffman.

  “Where’s the snow shovel kept?”

  “It should be in the laundry room, in the cupboard with the other maintenance stuff,” Loffman said.

  “It’s not.”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “Loffman, when I
rent an entire mountain lodge, ten rooms, for three months right in the ski season, I expect there to be a goddamn snow shovel!”

  “I know, but—”

  “No buts, get one up here!”

  Loffman sighed. Zack could picture his whole, tall, stooping, incredibly thin figure shaking with the sigh. Loffman always looked insubstantial as fog.

  “Yes, Mr. Murphy. Oh, and somebody called looking for you. A woman.”

  “What did you say to her? Part of our agreement was that you tell nobody I’m here, that’s what I’m paying your bloodsucking rent for—”

  “I said nothing, I swear. I said I never even heard of you. And someone will bring a shovel today.”

  “They better.”

  The minute he broke the connection with Loffman, the stupidity of the entire exchange hit Zack. He didn’t want a snow shovel. He didn’t want anyone bringing him one. He didn’t want to see anybody, talk to anyone.

  Or had he called Loffman just to hear a human voice?

  That was stupid, too. He’d come up to not hear any voices—not on the TV or the radio or even his cell phone. This third-rate lodge, the same one where Jazzy had once taken her middle-school charges, had no cable, no DIRECTV, no Internet, and cell coverage only in the immediate vicinity of the lodge. Zack was alone, free of anything but himself and Browne, just as he wanted.

  Except for in his head.

  There was no presence, no non-voices. But every time he got out of bed, made a cup of coffee, put on his parka, and went out into the woods, Jazzy’s image was there. Was this, the biggest apartment in the lodge, the same one that the adults had used on that field trip three years ago? Had Jazzy slept in this bed? Opened this refrigerator door? Sat on this chair, staring at this gas fireplace?

  He hated it. He didn’t want to think about her. Certainly not think about her more than when they’d actually been sleeping together. Jazzy’s naked body, creamy chocolate and dark whorly hair . . . .

  He was horny, was all! But he wasn’t going down the mountain to find a hooker. No place he might be recognized, no act that required anyone else. Fuck that. Besides, he didn’t have a snow shovel.