Vitals

by Greg Bear

  We watched him walk down the street to his beat-up brown Plymouth, a diminishing figure in the perspective of the walls and windows of the warehouses.

  “This is stupid,” Lissa said. “Where will you go?”

  “Wherever, I’ll be on foot,” I said. I started walking south. The engine of Banning’s old Plymouth coughed. I smelled its blue smoke.

  “Right!” Lissa shouted after me. “No money, no car—just your goddamned shoes! You are so incredibly stupid!”

  I stopped. Lissa stood on the broken sidewalk, wrists corded, fists clenched, face tight and splotched with red. She was furious and frightened. My resolve, not the strongest to begin with, weakened.

  I had been alone for so long I had forgotten how much I despised it. But Banning could go, and I would never for a moment miss him. Let’s face it; I did not want to turn my back on Lissa. There’s an instinct in most men that keeps us tied to beautiful women.

  It’s a real, honest-to-God weakness, and it’s part of what makes us die younger.

  “It cannot end here,” she said. “I don’t want it to end this way.”

  I swore under my breath and jogged past her to the Plymouth. It took a while for the car to warm up. Banning rolled the window down a crack and gave me a wary, sideways look.

  “Nothing funny, now,” he warned.

  “Did you pack the can opener?” I asked. “May I take it?”

  He drummed his fingers on the wheel for a second, then said, “It’s in the box in the trunk. Just pull the wire poking out of the lock hole.”

  I rummaged through the box of canned goods and found the can opener, then slipped it into the valise beside Rob’s papers. I shut the trunk, slamming it twice before it caught.

  “Found it,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He rolled up the window and pressed down on the accelerator. The Plymouth chugged north and turned the corner.

  Lissa drove us past the airport, heading south, it didn’t seem to matter where. For twenty minutes it was enough to be in the car and going. If we started asking questions, the tough decision would be, where to begin? Pull on this thread, would it come out short and loose, or would it unravel the whole mystery? So far, every pulled thread had revealed nothing but fuzz.

  “Someone pretending to be Rob called me last night,” I said.

  “Rob is definitely dead,” she intoned, as if repeating a mantra. “They were messing with you.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever.”

  “That’s why Banning was so glad to leave. He thinks I’ve been tagged.”

  “All right, being tagged, what does that mean?”

  “Slipping bacteria or something in your food. Mind control.”

  “That’s Banning’s craziness. Banning drove Rob to think such things.”

  “Did he? Rob wrote about what he learned in Siberia, and it’s pretty damned scary.” I opened the valise and lifted the envelope. “There was a Russian program in the 1930s to develop bacterial brainwashing. Certain kinds of special bacteria, laced in your food, could change your behavior or make you suggestible. Someone could then run you. Control your mind. You’d be tagged.”

  “Do you think they control your mind now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? They—whoever they are—sound ever so powerful. They scared Mrs. Callas.”

  “I’m on antibiotics,” I said. I’d been mulling that over for a couple of hours. As a hypothesis, it was definitely interesting, but it didn’t cover any number of details—my trancelike state the night before—and it didn’t explain how I’d escaped the madness on board the Sea Messenger.

  “Antibiotics? That’s all it takes to escape from the grip of Dr. Mabuse?”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Mabuse,” Lissa said. Mah-`boos-ah. “Fritz Lang made a movie about an evil criminal mastermind named Mabuse. Supposed to be a symbol for Adolf Hitler.”

  “Oh.” Clearly, I had spent too much of my life buried in journals and lab manuals.

  “Wouldn’t these masters of the universe have thought about antibiotics?”

  “There were very few antibiotics in the twenties and thirties. Just sulfa drugs.”

  “So Dr. Mabuse has this little trained flea circus of master spies, except they’re bacteria,” Lissa said. “And antibiotics knocks them for a loop-the-loop on their little trapeze. They shout ’Mein Gott’ and their eyes—do bacteria have eyes?—turn to little x’s. How convenient.”

  I smiled. “’Bozhe moi’, if they’re Russian. We’ll see, after another eight days,” I said. “I’ll run out of pills by then.”

  The conversation was so desperately loopy that it couldn’t help but cut some ice. Lissa raised her arms and stretched as much as holding the wheel allowed, then yawned conspicuously, not tired, but to relieve stress.

  “Rob gave the envelope to Banning, to give to you?” Lissa asked suspiciously.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure it’s Rob’s?”

  “I know his handwriting. You can read the papers if you want.”

  “You’ve decided to trust me?” Lissa asked, her expression somber. She kept her eyes on the road. The traffic was bunching up and getting herky-jerky, requiring her full attention. A red Honda with tiny tires carrying three young men in reversed ball caps zipped in front without signaling. She tapped the brakes and the horn at the same time.

  “Trust doesn’t amount to a hill of peanut shells,” I said. “If what he wrote about happened, if I’m putting two and two together properly, if what Banning says makes any sense, or what AY said—”

  “AY?” Lissa asked.

  “Rob didn’t tell you much about his work, did he?”

  “Not at the end. I just couldn’t stand watching him fall apart. What kind of antibiotic?” she asked.

  “Integumycin. It’s new.”

  “I’m surprised any antibiotics work now. So many resistant germs. It’s like they have it in for us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “Right now, it’s eleven o’clock, we’re stuck on the 101, and we’re going nowhere,” she said.

  “I have Rob’s keys,” I said. “And I have a map.” I slipped the map out of the envelope and unfolded it over my lap. A picture on ancient browned newsprint slipped from between the folds. It showed a line of smiling officials decked out in sashes, cutting a long ribbon with an outsize pair of scissors. Over their heads hung a banner:

  SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA

  NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES

  The caption read, “California’s newest tourist town welcomes visitors.”

  On the map, two circles had been marked in red pen, one around a small dot with no name east of Livermore, the other around San Jose.

  “Do you know anything about a place called Thuringia?”

  “No,” she said. “Sounds like a sausage.”

  “How much do you want to get involved?” I asked her.

  She gripped the wheel tighter.

  “Lissa?” I leaned forward to catch her eye and force her to answer.

  “I want to feel at peace sometime in this life,” she murmured. “If you’re going to do what Rob did . . .” She glanced at me, and I knew instinctively that she was seeing Rob. My brother and I had diverged little in appearance in almost three decades. Rob had been dextro, I am levo—right-handed and left. Adroit and gauche. His hair had curled deasil, my hair curls widdershins. He put on his shoes first right, then left—me, the reverse. His left eye had been tilted a little, my right eye is tilted a little. Different fingerprints, retinal patterns, of course; embryos have some autonomy when they develop.

  But the very same genes. The very same.

  We had speculated, during our first and last run at cooperative dating, that disastrous eighteenth summer, that it wasn’t technically unfaithful for one twin to sleep with the girlfriend of another. No difference in the old evolutionary game. We had learned otherwise.

  Now I was the o
nly one.

  “There’s something in Thuringia, and there’s an address in San Jose,” I said. “Shall we go open some doors?”

  “Why?” Lissa asked.

  “I think my brother’s having one last joke on me. He gave me just enough evidence to tweak my interest, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and solve a mystery. I’m thinking if I succeed, I’ll know why he was killed, and maybe I’ll be able to recover my life.”

  That didn’t sound convincing even to me, but how could I explain a masculine game of chicken between a dead twin and a live one?

  “Maybe he’s warning you, stay away from these places.”

  “By sending a map and a set of keys?”

  She gripped the wheel even tighter. “Hungry?” she asked.

  “Famished.”

  “Tell me where we should eat, and what,” she said with just a hint of tartness. “You’re the expert.”

  I picked out a Denny’s. We would be powerless against any organization that could control all the fast-food restaurants in California.

  Lissa had a bowl of clam chowder. I had a cheese omelet with sausage. Everything was thoroughly cooked.

  25

  THURINGIA, CALIFORNIA

  We missed the turnoff twice. I looked at Rob’s map and determined that Thuringia—if that was the unnamed dot in the red circle—lay between two little towns, Gillette Hot Springs and Cinnabar, about five miles off an old stretch of highway now used as frontage road and for backcountry access. But all we found east of Gillette Hot Springs were rolling brown hills and an abandoned restaurant complex with a decrepit green-and-white Dutch windmill.

  We stopped for directions in Cinnabar, not much more than a gas station and a trailer park. The attendant at the station, a sixteen-year-old boy with long black hair and a torn LA RAMS T-shirt, had never heard of Thuringia.

  “This is the most boring place on Earth,” he confided as he pumped gas into the Toyota. “Nothing but old-timers. Even the dogs are old.”

  Lissa was clearly unhappy but kept her mouth shut as I swore and fumbled with the map.

  Finally I decided we should backtrack and stop at the old restaurant. We pulled into the weedy parking lot. I got out and peered through filthy and broken windows into a ruined interior, counters ripped up, trash on the floor. Around in back, in an angle of shade, I found a large, warped plywood sign leaning against two battered trash cans. I flipped it with my foot and it fell over. In faded green mock-Deutsche letters, outlined in powdery pink, the sign proclaimed:

  PEA SOUP THURINGIA

  I shaded my eyes against the sun and walked across the cracked asphalt. A barricade, splintered and bleached by the sun, blocked a side road that ran straight off into the hills.

  “Bingo!” I called out to Lissa in the car.

  She did not share my excitement.

  The road to the hills had been turned into a washboard by years of sun and rain and neglect. Lissa pushed the Toyota along at about thirty miles per hour, our teeth rattling. “What do you hope to find?” she asked.

  “I don’t hope to find anything,” I said. “Except maybe that it’s all a dream.” Utility poles lined the road. Power lines still served Thuringia, but it was no longer named on the map.

  Lissa slowed to drive around a particularly deep pothole. “You think there’s something bad here?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. But the words on the banner in the newspaper photo haunted me: SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES. I could picture ads in the back of National Geographic and Sunset in the 1950s: mail-order fruit and nut boxes from California.

  “What if he made it all up?” Lissa asked hopefully.

  “Then we’ll just turn around and go on to San Jose. Confirm that Rob was wacko.”

  Lissa seemed to take what I said as a cue. She spoke rapidly. “The last trip we took, before we separated, Rob wanted to show me something in San Francisco. We drove all the way from Santa Monica to a salt farm in the South Bay. We took the Dumbarton Bridge and ended up on a dirt road on a levee. All around us were these big, square lagoons filled with purple water. They were drying ponds for salt. Rob told me they were filled with bacteria, halophiles, he called them.”

  “Salt-loving,” I said.

  “I know that.” She scowled but did not take her eyes off the road. “We stood by the car on the levee and it stank and there were flies everywhere. I wondered if I’d ever be able to use salt again. You know what he asked me?”

  I could have sworn that she was leading me on, as if cross-examining a witness; that she already knew. Perhaps Rob had told her more, and she was trying to gauge the depth of my own knowledge. I shook my head.

  “He asked me if I ever wondered what was the oldest mind on Earth.”

  “Oh, really?” I said.

  “He pointed to the ponds. ‘There it is. I wonder what it’s thinking right now,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it’s mad at us?’ That scared me. A long drive just to stare at some stinking ponds. We had a huge fight that night, and broke up a few weeks later. But I wasn’t the one who filed for divorce. Rob did.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What did he mean?” she asked.

  “I suppose he meant that bacteria talk to each other.”

  “That’s stupid,” she said, then looked doubtful. “Do they?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But not the way we’re talking now. They swap genetic material, plasmids, chemicals.”

  “Like in a brain?” Lissa asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Doesn’t that scare you? It scares me. If they hate us, there are so many of them, they’ll win.”

  I shrugged. “Too many things scare me now,” I said. “I try not to think about all of them at once.”

  Lissa braked the car abruptly and put the transmission into neutral. Ahead, in a flat stretch between the sun-yellowed hills, lay a low, brown, cornhusk of a town.

  “Behold, the tourist mecca of Thuringia,” I said.

  The engine and air conditioner whined a precise Japanese chorus in the central valley heat.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Lissa said, and her face was pale, her upper lip damp with nervous sweat.

  “You can stay here, I’ll walk in,” I offered.

  She thought that over. “No,” she decided.

  “We’ll do it for Rob,” I said.

  “I’ve done a lot for Rob,” she said, with a bitterness I hadn’t heard before.

  We both stared through the dusty windshield at the line of buildings, laid out in random clumps like a herd of drought-stricken cows.

  Lissa put the Toyota back into drive and moved us slowly down the last hundred yards of rumpled asphalt. She pulled off and parked beside a chain-link fence held up by iron posts set in concrete and wrapped, for all we could tell, around the entire town. A sign clamped to the fence announced, in white letters on a red background, NATURAL POLLUTION SITE—OFF LIMITS. The fence crossed the road. There was no gate.

  “What’s that mean?” Lissa asked.

  I puzzled it over. “The town east of here is called Cinnabar. That’s an ore of mercury.”

  “Mercury is poison,” Lissa said.

  “Pretty nasty stuff,” I agreed. “But I don’t see how it could pollute a whole town. There’s no factory or mine.”

  “Are we sure of that? I think we should turn around and go back.”

  It was a reasonable suggestion, but something told me the sign wasn’t warning about mercury. “You stay here. I’ll go look,” I said. And added, “I promise I’ll wipe my shoes off when I get back.”

  “The hell with that,” Lissa said. “I’ll go in with you.” She tried to put on a brave face.

  It wasn’t difficult pushing through the old chain link. I found a rock and battered aside the link tension bar, then kicked it until there was a hole big enough to admit us. I slipped through without difficulty and decided to keep the rock, just in case. Lissa, in her dress, had an aw
kward moment that showed more thigh than either of us was comfortable with.

  She straightened her clothes while I looked down the main drag of Thuringia. It resembled a ramshackle set for a cheap Frankenstein movie. Boarded-up buildings on either side had false fronts in European village style. The paint had been sunned down to a few hints of red and blue and green. The street was covered with dried mud and shallow gulleys from past rains and scattered with tumbleweeds.

  “Tumbleweeds come from Russia,” I said to Lissa.

  “So?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. We walked a few paces apart down the center of Saxony Boulevard. Some of the buildings had been marked with graffiti, but surprisingly few for this part of the country. To our left, down Bohemia Way, more ghostly shop fronts made old, phony promises.

  We stood under a flaking golden kringle marking a Danish bakery. This shop had not been boarded, but the windows were long gone, and the interior was a dark, dusty ruin of bare shelves, exposed pipes, and electrical conduits poking out bare, dead wire.

  Inside the display case lay a rain-wrinkled model of the town, all the color gone from the warped cardboard buildings. Next to a ripped-out void on the north side of the model, a curled paper label read, THURINGIA BADEN BADEN: MINERAL SPRINGS AND SPA, Natural Healing Waters From Deep in the Earth.

  “Hot baths,” Lissa said. “Bubbling death by fumes of mercury.”

  “Not funny,” I said.

  Two doors down, delaminating plywood covered a real-estate office window. Ye Olde Alpine Village Realty, announced quaint chiseled letters above the plywood. Blue-and-red trim, gingerbread with edelweiss cutouts. White America, with so shallow a history, was always looking for affirmation from more rooted cultures. Anywhere else it would have been simply ludicrous. Here, it made me grit my teeth.

  “Had enough?” Lissa asked.

  “Four or five more streets,” I said.

  For the next fifteen minutes, we walked through all the sad, desiccated dreams of a small and unsuccessful tourist town, reduced to bankruptcy and memories as bleached as the posters.

  A bandstand stood in a small village square. It didn’t take much to imagine oompah and polka music rising in the long summer nights.