Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Always that little bit harder to pull the trigger on one of your own, but Nineteen did it for Polly when the knife flashed again in the junkie’s hand.

  There were no more targets. One of the dropped jugs was open and sloshing its contents onto the floor. There was no mistaking the smell of gasoline.

  “They were gonna torch it,” said Nineteen.

  “Canton?” asked Polly.

  “Hurts! Can’t fucking talk right.” His consonants weren’t connecting through the wounded meat of his jaw.

  “Quit talking,” said Polly. “Nineteen, get him downstairs.”

  Nineteen was a type three. She was young, plus three or four, slender in all the places Polly had managed to thicken out with muscle and fat in her plus eight. Number names were always lucky, so Polly liked to have her around. Nineteen helped Canton to his feet, and they disappeared back up the hallway.

  Fetch was a type two. Young face, just plus one, but an old cop. He still had some of that past-life arrogance. He came swaggering through the hole and stood beside Polly, strapped down with all his cop gear, radio on his hip squawking away. He checked his spore detector like a cowboy eyeing the watch clipped to his vest. Polly could smell it too. Strong enough to catch a whiff through the gun smoke and spilled fuel.

  The apartment they entered was a reversed mirror of the one they’d breached coming in. They were near the kitchen, sink full of the sort of cheap pots, pans, and copper tubes used in small-time cook houses. Straight ahead was the door out. To the left was the living room full of more flops. There were too many mattresses to belong to just the people they’d already encountered.

  “What’s with all the dolls?” asked Fetch.

  Polly slid the shooting glasses from her eyes and dropped them across the curve of her helmet on their elastic band. She approached the pile of toys. They were ugly and cheap, American made from Undercroft plastic and dressed in mismatched outfits. The tangle of limbs unnerved her.

  It was unusual finding anything for kids. Maybe in the shanties, maybe up in Carson or Torrance, where the ever-creeping fingers of Bishopville mingled with the old suburban housing of the snowflakes, but the worker blocks were the heart. No kids. Nothing but dupes.

  Kids being here meant unspoken rules were breaking down.

  “Check your fire,” said Polly. “The last thing we need is a flake getting her skull ventilated.”

  It mattered when the flakes died. Snowflakes had families and people who cared. The Gardeners didn’t haul off the leftovers. Their little snowflake bodies didn’t come gurgling back out of a tube in the Pit. Polly didn’t like to think about it. Didn’t like to think about the families.

  “Over there.” Polly directed Fetch to the gaping hole broken into the next-door unit.

  They stepped over the bodies and approached the dank entrance to the neighboring apartment. The detectors began to glow yellow, orange, and then a flashing red. They chimed warning tones that grew louder and more urgent with each step they took toward the wound broken through the wall. Polly tasted the chalk of the spores in her mouth. She tried not to breathe it in too deeply. If she were a flake, she knew, she’d already be dead.

  Unseen lights glowed faintly blue in the neighboring unit. Polly ducked her head beneath the jagged edges of broken wood and nearly fell straight into the hole through the floor. The entire floor was warped by moisture, descending from all sides into a conical depression where the carpeting and floorboards had given way and collapsed into the level below. The light was coming from down there. She shuffled as close as she dared to the sloping edge and leaned down over the softly glowing pit.

  “What is it?” Fetch was hanging back from the edge. “They got the distiller down there?”

  They did have a distiller down there. A monster cobbled together from an industrial pressure washer and steel flasks. She hardly noticed. She wasn’t sure how to explain what she was seeing to Fetch. “It’s bad. It’s the caps. All ... all of them. Alive. These are the growers. It’s a grow operation.”

  Fetch said something else, but she couldn’t answer or even really hear him. It was as if she looked upon the surface of another world. Soil was piled in a mound, and fungus grew in pale stalks that branched out near their tops and ended in the fat, luminous fruit of the caps. She had never seen them alive, only cut and dehydrated in the bins distillers kept. The round fruits glowed blue and pulsed, light to dark, in gentle, eerie patterns of synchronization.

  She stared at the pulsing light for seconds before she realized the stalks were growing out of the mossy white bodies of children. Men and women too, but Polly saw the children clearest. They lay half-buried in piles of fertilizer, their limbs sticking out, patches of visible skin pale and gaunt, their eyes milky, and their open mouths furry with the spore grass.

  A little girl, her head half-submerged in the loamy black soil, still clutched a Betty Brighteyes doll to a gingham dress with her tiny hands. The threads of the fungus pierced her flesh and sprouted from her shoulder and neck. Her head was tilted forward, chin against her chest, and her skull opened as if the caps had burst from within her brain. The girl’s face was lit by the sweeping pulse of the fruiting caps. The segmented white body of a millipede slowly traversed her cheek.

  “What is it?” Fetch asked again.

  She ignored him and struggled to operate her radio.

  “Twelve ... ah, twelve-ten, this is seven-ninety. I’m going to need the meat wagon.” Her throat was painfully dry. “I need ... there are a lot of bodies in here.”

  “Say again, seven-ninety,” Jensen’s voice crackled back over the radio. “Casualties, you say? We got Canton coming down. He’ll be all right.”

  “Are you okay, Foster?” asked Fetch.

  “Snowflakes.” She tried to count them. “There’s, ah, fifteen.” She shuffled closer to the precipice to count them more accurately. “Sixteen. Maybe more. I can—”

  The warped floorboards creaked and shifted. Polly cried out in panic as her boots lost traction. Fetch reached for her, but he was too far away. She plunged face-first into the luminous fungal carpet. The soft, degraded bodies of the children cushioned her fall. The stalks broke, and the caps split open and smeared her with oils of phosphorescent sapphire.

  It was raw bliss, unrefined and undiluted. Her skin went cool. She shuddered out of sync with time as the ecstatic milk of the fungus began to melt through her flesh.

  Polly screamed. She knew in some dim recess of her overwhelmed brain that she was overdosing. The pleasure burned through her and coruscated against her skin. She tore at her collar. She arched her back and kicked her legs. Her sense of connection with the flow of time was unraveling.

  Her body tensed and released, and she reached a plateau, attained and inescapable, pulsing and radiating in time with the luminous blue fruit. It was pounding in repeat. Echoing. The strobe-lit faces of the dead children. Fetch, blue-faced, peering down and shouting something too slowly to be understood. The hiss of spores bursting into the air. The beat of an invisible heart, again and again for one hundred years.

  She kept screaming long after Jensen’s men loaded her into the ambulance.

  Wesley Bishop’s hands were shaking. Sweat beaded his forehead, and an hour of frustrated tugging had deconstructed his hairstyle into a mad scientist’s crown. Difficulties? Yes, of course. Bad news? He handled it. The haranguing was what made it all so intolerable.

  He slammed open the door and exited into the parking concourse. It was jammed with limousines and dark sedans. Chauffeurs raised their heads like dogs at the sound of a whistle. Bethany followed Bishop from the air-conditioned monolith of the Nationes Unies and into the sticky Copenhagen summer. She was composed and fashionable, blond hair in a clockwork French twist, expression unmoved by the drama.

  Schumacher, the diminutive man from the State Department, was chasing after Bethany’s clicking heels. He was doughy, pale, pushing glasses up his nose, slicked-back hair curling instantly in the humidity—t
he North American jelly-backed bureaucrat emerging from its aboriginal forest.

  “Get my fucking car,” said Bishop.

  Bethany was already dialing her pocket telephone. She held the device to her ear and searched the long-bodied Citroens and Daimlers for an American-made vehicle.

  “It could be worse,” said Schumacher. “The French might have refused to use their veto in the Security Council and forced us to stand alone.”

  Bishop chose not to look at Schumacher. He snapped open his cigarette case and pinched a gold-banded Bravo between his lips. A deep inhalation did some to steady his nerves. His shoulders relaxed, he leaned against the granite façade of the UN building and exhaled a stream of smoke. It lingered, limpid in the heat. He put on his sunglasses before finally turning to Schumacher. The wonk from State was fiddling with a piece of chewing gum.

  “You didn’t warn me Beverin himself was going to be there. You let them ambush me in there. Half the fucking world just watched the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet call me the devil.” Bishop took another drag from his cigarette and flicked it away into the concourse. “Literally. He called me the devil.”

  “Loose translation,” said Schumacher. He winced at the sound of his own voice.

  “I’m a proxy for all the duplicates, a straw man, and they’re trying to use us as a pretext to invade the United States. Why are you so calm about it? If you don’t work for me, and you don’t, then you at least work for your country. Show some backbone.”

  Schumacher folded the piece of gum into his porcine mouth and tossed aside the foil wrapper. “You need to take the deal. Let their inspectors—”

  “Private business is not subject to UN law. I didn’t sign their treaties.”

  “We’ve been over this, Mr. Bishop. I spoke at length with you and your lawyers. They’re demanding inspections. We can block this nonsense with the peacekeepers—that’s just posturing—but you have to relent. Cooperate with them. It will be a small team, UN, not Russian or Chinese. Show them what you need them to see, and let them write up their reports. Those things always fall into an area too gray to be acted on.”

  Bishop said nothing else. The car was rounding the concourse to pick them up, and his mind was already moving on to the evening’s distractions.

  “The needs of the American people and the needs of your company are not exactly concordant. You have to give a little in a situation like this,” said Schumacher.

  Bishop communicated his disagreement by slamming the limousine door in Schumacher’s face.

  Later, deep in the interminable night, ensconced behind walls of Nyhavn hotel glass, Bishop sprawled on the bed with a prostitute named Miael, his cheek resting on the dark, flat drum of her belly. The midnight harbor congealed beneath the mast lights of antique ships. Aromatic hints of the slow sea—salt, old fish, ropes wetted and dried a thousand times—mingled with the exotic spices of Miael’s skin, the chrome finish of the furniture, leather of the chairs, and oiled timbers of the ceiling.

  He stared at that ceiling with one eye, unwilling to lift his cheek or turn his body. In the darkness between recessed lights he sensed the presence of the apex. There was the moment of greatest achievement, a black snake of shadow, only revealing itself incrementally, finally, as he plummeted away from it.

  There were declines before, troughs to every wave, but he could sense the difference. Final acts were beginning. Waves of pestilence. Forces aligning against him, transnational and growing in power, rising to the drumbeat of a new sort of war. Peacekeeping, they called it in the UN, but he knew what war looked like. Even if Berezin’s vitriol was posturing, the world was ready to sink its hungry jaws into the United States and tear out the beating heart of Bishop Unlimited.

  And on top of it all, the drugs were wearing off.

  “I am falling,” he said, feeling it literally, vertiginous sensations of his crumbling high, incandescent, breaking apart into the night like a meteor in the sky. Flashing in his vision, erasing the serpentine shadow. He needed more, something stronger, something that wouldn’t give up on him midstream. When he needed it most. “Any bliss?”

  Miael didn’t know what he was talking about. She shook her head and smiled, then ran her long fingers over his forehead and into his salt-and-pepper hair. Bliss. He’d seen pictures of it. Tantalizingly different. Poisonous to the flakes. Precious. Glowing. Pictures of what it did to people, to dupes, killed them in a way so ugly that it only increased his desire to sample the drug.

  No bliss. Not for him. He opened the leather satchel Patrice, his bodyguard, had left him for the night. Bethany knew about the bag and forbid him certain indulgences. No more opiates. No more speed; it made him do stupid things on the telephone. Patrice knew better.

  He settled for tranquilizers designed for animals. He broke them up and snorted them from a one-of-a-kind table made from a twist of yellow glass. When he felt them begin to deaden his limbs, he forced himself up and staggered out onto the tiles of the suite’s promenade. Music and car horns mingled with the soft, lethargic murmur of the harbor. Miael tried once to pull him away from the balcony, but he leaned over it, laughing down at the cars and pedestrians a dozen stories below.

  He clambered up onto the railing and swung over to the other side. His toes caught the edge of the balcony, and his hands were clinging to the polished stone railing.

  “If I let go,” said Bishop, “it won’t matter.”

  Miael pleaded in French for him to come back onto the balcony. He teased her by jerking his arms and pretending to lose his grip. She screamed, lunging uncertainly forward and back, finally collapsing in the doorway, sobbing in the gossamer of the billowing curtain.

  “Let someone else have it,” said Bishop, dangling by one hand. He’d taken someone else’s place. He’d dissolved the shareholders’ board. He’d made himself, once more, the sole proprietor of the world’s largest corporation. He swung by a single handhold, hair blowing over his face, his smile showing white in the darkness. “I’ll go see the bottom. Let some other maggot put his hand on the tiller. Any one of us could preside. Any one of us.”

  He shouted again and again down at the cars. At the lights of ships. Some of the pedestrians were pointing up at the lunatic hanging from his balcony. He decided it was time to let go, and so he did, expecting to meet the pavement below and begin it all over again.

  Patrice caught Bishop by his wrists and heaved him over the balcony railing. Bishop’s naked back scraped painfully on the stone. The big Acadian dropped him on the tiles, barked an order in French for Miael to leave, and summarily ended the night’s festivities. When the girl was gone, Patrice stood over Bishop and smiled, not unkindly, the specifics of his expression camouflaged by the tiger pattern of a Creeptown face tattoo.

  His long, tanned arms were corded with muscle and embellished with more tattoos and scars. He was leather, denim, and snakeskin forming a man. A flake. The gutter-bred antipode of the security professionals imported to rarefied Copenhagen by the diplomatic corps.

  “Ya, you got bit by dat babette, podnah. Make Miss Bethany turn red, she know I gave you dem pills.” Patrice carried him to the suite’s oversize bed. “Gwon getcher head down on de pillow an forget about dis place. We home to Los Angeles in de tomorrow.”

  “Don’t ever ...” Bishop swallowed back the growing lump in his throat. “Don’t ever let me come to Copenhagen again ... or I’ll ... have you ... killed... .”

  “I give dem Gardeners knots in dey belly if a try an’ chew on my bones.” Patrice folded his arms over his chest. He watched Bishop’s head weaving drunkenly.

  “Maybe ... you’re right... .”

  Bishop emptied the contents of his stomach across the bedspread and rolled onto the floor. He began snoring almost immediately.

  Later, rinsed and dressed, somewhat less ill, Bishop found that the foggy gray of morning suited the humorless architecture of the Lufthavn. He waited in private runway enclosure D smoking cigarettes, buttoned too tightly into
a designer raincoat and sweating. Still early, still not quite boiling, but it was going to be another hot and humid day. Patrice was asleep on his feet. Bethany was talking on her pocket telephone. The jet—his jet—was approaching slowly through the misting rain, toward the boarding stairs, the reflected taxi lights trembling in the puddles on the runway.

  “Something is happening in San Pedro,” said Bethany. “A Rapid Response action is ongoing at Tower Thirteen. Milo says they have found a grow operation for bliss.”

  “Isn’t that what they were looking for?” Bishop didn’t care about the source of bliss, he just cared about tasting it, but Milo’s recent obsession was discovering how it was produced.

  “Things have gone wrong, and a number of snowflakes are dead on the scene. The Gardeners are already there. Milo says there’s a problem. You should talk to him.”

  “Tell him to clean it up,” said Bishop. “We can talk about it when I get back.”

  Her conversation with Milo was consumed by the whine of the approaching jet engines. The plane rolled to a stop, and ground crew began to position the boarding stairs by hand. Patrice pushed the luggage cart toward the aircraft. Though eager to be on his plane and away, Bishop waited, unwilling to brave the blowing rain until the last moment.

  “He’s insisting I ask you again,” said Bethany, leaning so close to Bishop that he could taste the bitter flower of her perfume. “He says that a cleanup will be very ugly.”

  “Milo Gardener”—Bishop started out into the rain, holding his hat on his head against the jet wash—“is already extremely ugly.”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell him to do whatever it takes,” said Bishop. “I don’t care if he has to wade through an ocean of shit. And get Schumacher on the telephone. I accept his deal. The UN can send their people to California, and we will be very accommodating.”

  Bethany’s response was lost to the noise of the plane. He was very much looking forward to a handful of sleeping pills and dreams of blue phantasms. Visions of a milky white Pool lit by bliss. Maybe he would finally learn firsthand the lure of its pleasures.