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Page 31
The rest of them always get it right. So much being right, everywhere. Even Darren does screwing-it-all-up right. I’m the only one who can’t get it right, who’s wrong, but I can’t help it. So much getting it right, even in the self-sabotage department... I don’t know why, but I’ve just got to do it wrong.
Clare fell asleep, and forgot to close her eyes.
*
Clare hasn’t called me in days. I find I’m not jealous. In principle, I should be imagining everything from a sudden change of heart, to offense at some slight I dealt her without knowing it, to a yearning for reunion spoiled by unavoidable obstacles. Instead, I sit steadily in a chair in some building or other—they’re all the same—doing nothing. I don’t even stare. I look around naturally enough. Every now and then, Loring comes by and stares at me through the window. He’ll lean in until the window itself, or the eaves or something, shadows his features, and only the top of his head and his brow can be seen. Peering at me for hours, no doubt speculating as to what gambit of mine this might be. Soaking his head in shade. At least once, although it might have been more than once, he suddenly rushed away. It didn’t take a moment’s thought to realize he’d been struck with the suspicion that I’d set something in motion somewhere else, and sat here motionless myself in order to decoy his attention away from that. In time, he came back, looking wary and sour. As his vigil wears on, he becomes less able to hide his impatience.
“Do something!” he explodes finally. Fog stains the glass in front of the dark oval mouth.
Loring storms off with a contemptuous wave of his arm.
Sure, do something. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? Of course, he might be satisfied with my inaction, and could be only pretending now, but somehow I don’t believe he is.
Finally, the sound of Clare’s chime wakes me. It takes a bit of searching, but she waves me impatiently into a darkened booth, one of many along the walls of the gallery. An exhibition of art by Operationals. Clare is already in her underthings, and I’m transfixed by the neck ribbon she wears, so straight and so black.
“What’s going on?” I ask, in a harsh whisper.
“What, this? Part of their... I mean, I think they feel obligated to.”
The art I’d seen was terrible. The artifact. The camp. Workers working on the artifact. Rows of sleeping workers in the barracks. They look like washed-out illustrations from a birdwatching manual.
“Hurry!”
*
Odd rumors are circulating about Loring. They say he’s holed himself up in the infirmary by himself, and barricaded the windows and doors. Not that his medical condition has deteriorated—quite the opposite. Frustration with my obstinate refusal to do anything has evidently driven him to witchcraft. Operationals report seeing Loring scoot in and out of the building at all hours, thickly swaddled in shawls and a pointed hat on his head. They say he chuckles and murmurs to himself in a manner that is distinctly unpleasant to hear, and that his comings and goings often take him in the direction of shunned glades where revolting mushrooms grow, glistening with syrup, in weird luxuriance, or, toward the burying grounds. His voice can be heard inside the infirmary at all hours, evidently reading long passages aloud in a sing-song, incantatory way. No one has yet recognized any of the languages.
As time goes by, the gossip gets loonier. One person claims to have observed a moth flutter into the shadow at the back of the building and suddenly, like a heap of collapsing laundry, tumble to the ground a full-grown person, who slithered at once underneath the infirmary. Moments later, Loring was overheard in conversation, and the second voice never rose above a velvety whisper. Maria claims to have witnessed Loring burst from the exhaust pipe at the peak of the roof and fly away with a broomstick between his legs, barking with laughter and snapping his fingers. Whether or not these rumors are true, his injury and his persistent cold don’t seem to be keeping him from living any.
I begin to notice furtive motions in dark corners, and along the eaves of the barracks as I pass. A hairless cat with long, bony forearms and hands, wearing a kind of black bonnet tied under the chin. A bloated bat with two pairs of dangling frog’s legs nearly blunders into me as I slip from one building to another. A snake with a shark’s head, and all made of some hard, black, ridgy material. And there’s a whirr in the air that tells me when Loring is near. I pop the bag into my mouth and crawl toward the artifact on all fours. Something tells me that Loring’s familiars will be reluctant to approach the artifact.
An obscene lobster with an owl’s head watches over the last open stretch, just beyond the reach of the artifact’s lights. I toss a stone to distract it and scrabble for cover. That whirring comes in hard behind me, but when, having reached what I hope is safety, I turn around, Loring is standing there plain as can be, no water bottle, no thermometer.
“Nice night,” he says, and saunters by with his hands in his pockets.
“Is this all really necessary?”
I don’t feel well. There’s a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. That’s when I realize the bag is gone.
Loring is already out of sight. How did he get it? I never let it go for a moment! Jogging after Loring, I’m doubled up with nausea after only a few paces. Cold shivers run down my legs.
I’ve blown it.
I’ve completely blown it.
I’ve had this feeling before. Only now is it beginning to dawn on me—I’ve swallowed it. This is the same special nausea I used to feel every time I’d have a look at the spells, shelved now firmly in my midsection. Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve stuffed my fingers down my throat. No good. I gag, but I can actually feel the bag resisting my reflex action. Back propped against a block of concrete, my legs out in front of me, I hold my stomach, panting.
It won’t go away. The spells are strictly three-dimensional objects, someone told me. Centuries ago. No more than three dimensions, I think he said, if it was a he, and that means the spells are outside time. Now, if that’s true, then that probably means they can’t move, because motion needs time, so that means—is this the time for such discoveries? why didn’t I ever ask myself this stuff before, when it could have done me some good, but then again when have I ever—that means the cosmos must actually revolve around these spells, which would be therefore at least relatively stationary.
Is this why the Stationery Office wants them? So if the whole universe is revolving around my thorax then that might very well explain how insanely lousy I feel. Man is the only animal who insists on knowing why he’s suffering. It must be because logic is such an excellently complete distraction, too bad it brings itself to an end. Having the whole universe revolve around you is not what it’s cut out to be. That phrase, “cut out,” exerts an alarming fascination.
*
Now it looks as though my strategy of having no strategy, not even that one, and of doing nothing, or not being able to do anything, is paying off after all. I’ve received a summons to appear before the panel. They meet in a building like any of the others, with plank walls and floors, in a part of the camp that has no special significance apart from the fact that this building is there. Guerrero sits to my left, facing Vissi Sislelemmy and Maria, the inspector. Other persons come and go in other parts of the room I can’t see from my seat at the table, which forms the base of a U with the tables of the others. Clare is behind Guerrero, half in the shadows in the corner, watching me with eyes that reflect the light that falls on the floor.
My stomach turns over again as I come in. Nausea and pain. A chill washes over my collarbone, up my throat and down my chest. My blood feels thin. I hurry to reach the chair set out for me, but sitting down doesn’t give me any real relief.
The chills just change course, and I hear myself breathing shakily.
“Mr. Thanks,” Guerrero says, looking not at me, but at some papers.
“Yes?” I reply, too hastily. If I beg out of this meeting, there may never be another.
“During your time with us he
re, we’ve had occasion—more than one occasion—to make note of your qualifications, and we think it’s time we offered you a permanent position.”
“Oh yes?”
“SBJ-13 are setting up a... small, department, whose task would be to conduct an investigation and come up with a report detailing what the purpose of the artifact is, and we think you would make a good chief inspector in that department.”
“Gee, thanks!”
“You look a little green,” someone says. “Are you all right?”
“Fine!”
I expose my teeth. The room smells like cats.
“Yes, well, this won’t take too long.”
Leaning forward, I clasp my shaking hands together under the table. Of course, there’s no cloth.
“We just have some routine questions to ask you.”
The light from a window almost directly before me falls across Guerrero, dimming him.
“It spares you having to fill out a form, and spares us reading it.”
A pearly little smile appears there, barely visible, and a sound like the audible counterpart to a smile of understanding and amusement. In time, I manage to stop myself trying to add to the sound myself—
I give them my name, my age, my sex with more amusement, the names of my parents, my grandparents, all the while that feeling of abominable sickness pours itself into me. The questions go on, getting into things like identification numbers and savings and past earnings, and I answer each one immediately, making up everything. I tell them I used to work in a tree with algebra for a salary, that I used to be a woman and owned a driving school in the ocean and I keep repeating I’ve never ever been institutionalized, insisting they write it down more than once.
Through the window, the sun rises. My eyes contract violently. It’s been months and months of darkness up until now. No one else seems to notice. Vissi Sislelemmy turns to me and asks,
“Tell me again about your first place of emp-POMM-POMMM-POMMMM—”
Her face splits doubles redoubles her voice booms, she rotates inside her own outline trailing her own luminous edges as her voice drags slow, cavernous syllables. The sun jumps—Guerrero, Clare, everyone is turning toward me within their own outlines, droning at me. The nausea inside me is suddenly ten times worse, so that I groan aloud and the sound booms in my ears strangling in cold slime...
Despite the noise, I hear the three preliminary tones distinctly. In the air directly in front of my solar plexus, there are two parentheses of grey light. I stand, the chair tipping against the back of my knee, my hands rising in the air. The nausea doubles. My right leg pushes me one step back. The two secondary tones sound distinctly, and the second pair of parentheses appears within the first.
My next step sends me through the wall backwards and I’m engulfed in splinters and broken glass my feet dipping and plunging before me like a pair of runaway horses. I can’t stop. It’s like teetering over backwards down a steep slope; I can’t stop. Something crashes into me from behind and the shock is distributed over my entire body as if I’d been turned to iron—splintered lumber, glass, canvas, rope, spurting concrete and blocks of rubble, pipe and wires. The sun suddenly bursts into view again, only to vanish in smoke as something huge and black and round goes rolling over the top of me. And again timber, glass, rubble and metal and pipes, smashing—a second sun rises and burns in my face, trailing the first one.
Hands grab hold of me, but I am and am not there. Something huge and black and wreathed in smoke rolls over us both, and I’m there struggling with this other who claws at me savagely, so that I become savage: my nausea and weakness turn painfully into rage, the other self of me is somehow inside the operation of the artifact and moving back and forth through the regular ranks of its honeycombed system in convulsions.
The two of us plough through more wood and canvas and rubble inside a force capsule or something and though they punch and claw at each other they still keep flying backwards.
A third sun rises, a third figure, the same one again, attacks now one and now the other and something huge and black and wreathed in smoke rolls over them.
Then the avalanche of wood and concrete and pipes, a fourth sun, another one fighting, something huge and black and wreathed in smoke that has widened rolls over them and looking up I recognize it is the planet itself rolling over us as we spin around and around it upside down and backwards.
Wreckage dashed to either side like snow by a snowplough, a fifth sun, a fifth me fighting all the others. the planet rolls over us.
Wreckage, a sixth sun, a sixth me, the planet rolls over us.
A seventh sun, an eighth, a ninth sun, wringing me out inside the artifact’s machinery and then, shouting with triumph, some me or other splattered with blood holds up the dripping bag: except that all of them are, every last one of us—
There is a jolt against I don’t know what. Startled, my grip on the handle of the bag loosens for an instant. The bag plummets away from me. I grope for it in despair. It is already out of reach. It is miles away. It’s gone. The momentum leaves me, and the next moment I am tumbling head over heels along the ground.
*
The bandages protected me. It only felt as though there were cracks in all my bones. I did lose a tooth, one of the big ones toward the rear of the jaw. Now I can’t stop tonguing the soft spot where it once was. Amazing I didn’t bite my tongue. Used to be I couldn’t lick a postage stamp without biting my tongue.
My clothes are in pretty bad shape, without being reduced actually to rags. Lost a fingernail, too, I see now. Right ring finger. Completely gone. I tear a bit of loose fabric hanging from the remains of my left sleeve and wrap the finger tip with it. It aches, but the real pain must have come and gone without distinguishing itself in the generality.
The landscape is dry and the weather is windy. Clouds of coherent, pastel-colored smoke rush by close to the ground like weightless, silent airplanes. The sky looks like Jupiter. As I blunder along, vaguely heading away from the velvetty mountains on the horizon, I pass little shrubs shaped like turbines, getting their energy from the wind rather than the sun. The weird, fitful light, which varies in both intensity and color, must be given off by the clouds.
A dark shape whips past, high over me. Then two more in quick succession. Flying backwards and upside down, with their heads between their legs and their gliding membranes flung out. They’re big animals, for fliers.
I keep the wind at my back. The pressure is so steady and so strong I can just about make a walking mattress out of it, lean back into the soft push and let it swing my legs for me. After a long while frog marching with the wind until I’m practically sleepwalking, I realize again that I ought to be paying attention to my surroundings—especially with respect to water.
A head is watching me. A giant head, protruding from the ground. I freeze, and the wind nearly blows me over. Is this the same one? It looks the same. The main bulk of it is an armadillo-hide globule spinning inside a vegetable frame; the skin is pleached up in gill-like flaps that catch the wind and keep it turning in place. Massive roots, smooth and fibrous, bend out from the body like centipede legs and sink into the ground. This is a factory, and a kind of dead god’s head sticking up out of the ground, and an outcropping of jungle luxuriance in the midst of an arid smoking table land like an oasis in the desert. The ball spins and generates power like the turbine shrubs. What does this factory make? It seems to be making gazes, the gazes or mazes that spread in all directions like ominous, endlessly sustained music. It stares at me without paying attention to me, the way a tree would. I’d been a part of it once, if it is the same.
Dread grabs me. I turn and run from the thing in blind panic, the wind shoving me steadily on one side. I fall down and all my many injuries sing out. Getting back up again is not something I can try right away. Rolling on my side I look again toward the factory thing. A dull cone of icy fear pushes into my chest. I knead my eyes and push my face down against the sand.
The wind erases my footprints almost in the same moment as I make them. I don’t really have any way of knowing from what direction I came or how far away I was when I dropped the bag. I might have lost it on the other side of the mountains, for all I know.
Toward the artifact. The bag is gone. The bag is gone.
*
Three of them. They are about fifteen feet from me, watching me, I think. Despite my pain, my thirst, the worthlessness of me, I watch back, my mind a blank. Their presence does not include me, but I feel it there, separate from me. Their presence for each other. Their legs are rigid, spread in a horseshoe shape, and they move on the ground by squeezing the horseshoe and then letting it pop back out, stabilizing themselves with their great shaggy, gorilla-like arms.
The heads are mostly flat and bulb-shaped, like a sloth’s, but the shape changes. They’re all made of braided tapes, like magnetic audio tape, which lengthens and shortens as they adjust themselves. The tapes rattle in the wind, forming a long black horizontal pelt. I smell their maple-syrup smell. And they occasionally make brief noises at each other, like snarling chords.
I leave them, and go back to marching to nowhere. There’s no transportable meaning to take away with me from the encounter. I don’t learn anything. I can only say that I’ve been near them and seen them. They did not accept or reject me, notice or ignore me. We only were in the same place at the same time, at close quarters, that’s all. I feel I’ve been changed forever, but I don’t know that I believe the feeling. There’s nothing to say or think about.