Her heart does a little thud. Is this just some wild coincidence, or is Bossephalus talking about the woman who clicked her heels and took her love to Oz?
She passes a screen that shows a massive backup on the bridge. She doesn’t look directly; her eyes roll out to the side. The bridge camera swings from the long view to the short view. It’s a jackknifed tractor-trailer, as usual. “Why is it always a tractor-trailer?” she asks, trying to make it a joke. “Shouldn’t they be outlawed?”
“The Bridge and Tunnel Authority!” he shouts. “We own the Bridge and Tunnel Authority! Between that and the construction jobs, we hardly have enough staff. Well, construction doesn’t actually need staff once they put up the orange cones, do they?” He’s pleased with himself.
Then he puts his hand on her shoulder. At first it’s just a slight touch, but he adds weight to it. They turn a corner and there are four people standing there, as if they’re waiting.
“The membership committee,” Bossephalus says easily. “Come to greet us. You, actually.”
There are two men and two women, all in white lab coats. They stand in front of a door marked Accidents. The women smile at her politely, the men move behind her and she can’t see their faces, but she can feel them.
“What’s this?” she asks, her mouth dry.
“We’ve been thinking about what job would be best for you,” Bossephalus says. He’s very happy.
“Who’s ‘we’?” She tries to sound tough, but it comes out faintly.
“Think of us as a service organization,” he says. “Only we serve ourselves.” He points to his ear, which has a small device in it, like a hearing aid. “I’ve been getting reports on you all along. Let’s go this way.” They take a left down another corridor, which has stacks of filing cabinets pushed to one side. “We’re digital now, of course,” Bossephalus murmurs. “Computers, chips, cameras everywhere. Look it up, nail it down. We keep track of millions of people above us, we visit them, we live among them. And we play a little.” He laughs. “We play a lot. We’re scientists.” His eyes roll toward a sign. MEDICAL RECORDS. She doesn't like the sign.
“Is this where you work?” Lena asks.
“Me?” He laughs. “No, no, no. You haven’t figured it out yet? You can’t guess what my job is?” He stops to watch her think.
She looks at the four people who surround them. Each one is looking in a different direction—at the walls, down the corridor, into the rooms that flash with computer screens. “Sometimes I feel that there’s a plan,” she says finally. “When things go wrong again and again. I keep telling myself it’s just bad luck.” This isn’t the kind of thing she admits. Not normally.
He smiles. “The plan keeps changing,” he says agreeably. “Something we do seems good, and we do it; and then someone comes along with a better plan. For the little people,” he whispered. “For the pawns. Isn’t that how it feels?”
She nods. But she resents it.
“You see, you were never called here. You simply don’t belong here. Another accident? Do you think so?” He pats her on the shoulder. She thinks, for a moment, that it’s a friendly pat, avuncular.
She can hear names being called out in one of the rooms. Just names, no emotion, then a list of diseases. “Heart attack. Lung cancer. Malaria. Stroke.” She steps into the doorway and looks inside. People are standing at whiteboards, where they write and then erase diseases, as if to keep track of trends.
“Food poisoning!” a worker cries. “How about a funeral?”
There’s an instant crescendo of agreement. She turns back to Bossephalus. “You’re with security, aren’t you?”
“Head of,” he says cheerily. “Specializing in break-ins. We don’t see them too often, we’ve got a good system of checks and counterchecks. The guards don’t look too intelligent, but that’s deliberate. If someone is interested, they’re going to get in, and it’s best if we get them at our own convenience.”
“So.” She takes a deep breath. “So what happens now?”
He grips her shoulder again and leads her to another room. “It’s not so bad,” he says in a reassuring tone. “We’re going to put you back where you belong. But you won’t be in any danger, and neither will we.” He waves her forward, over to the main desk in the room. “Shayton,” he says. “Lena Shayton.”
“Ah,” the woman at the desk says. “Got her right here.” She turns to the computer screen and starts clicking away.
Lena’s hands begin to perspire and she feels a lump at the back of her mouth. It’s so big she has trouble swallowing. Bossephalus’s hand moves up from her shoulder and he spreads his fingers hard around her ear. “Right about here, maybe,” he says. “Though I’m not a doctor. But right where the speech centers are, the communication centers.”
“Got it!” the desk person calls out. “Here we go!”
“Stop,” Lena says. “Fot are ye doon?”
“Not just the sounds,” he advises. “Make it the meaning, too.”
“Croon wizzes, who saw that blucksbin. Terrible blucksbin!” I try, I try, she thinks.
“That’s it!” Bossephalus cries. “That’s exactly what I mean. Give her lots of words without meaning, make it almost make sense.”
She can eel her tongue twisting, he says, “Goo.” She can’t find things, sharp or thin. Is it in her turn? Maybe she can write, with a spit on the knee, so they’ll wonder highways and believe then, get a gooseberry rhythm.
Lena Shayton, boom boom, ready now? Upsy upsy.
Whirlybanging all over bingo next Tuesday too. Please please bing she think. Words, she say words.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
Escape from Spiderhead
George Saunders is one of America’s leading satirists. Before becoming a writer, he was a geophysicist in Sumatra. His work includes CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, and Tenth of December: Stories. Saunders has won many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Story Prize, the Folio Prize, the PEN/Hemingway, the PEN/ Malamud, National Magazine, and World Fantasy awards. He has also been nominated twice for an O. Henry Award and twice for a Bram Stoker Award. A regular contributor to the New Yorker and GQ, his work has appeared in the series Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Science Fiction. His story “93990” is reprinted in The Secret History of Science Fiction.
Originally appearing in the New Yorker in 2010, “Escape from Spiderhead” asks many questions regarding the moral issues of scientific advancement and the human condition as they relate to inventive pharmaceuticals.
I
“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.
“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”
Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.
I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verba
luce™ began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.
Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didn’t feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce™ feel to it.
“What’s going to be cool about that one?” Abnesti said. “Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But there’s some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?”
“That will be cool,” I said.
“That’s ED763,” he said. “We’re thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire.”
“Those are both good,” I said.
“Thanks for your help, Jeff,” he said.
Which was what he always said.
“Only a million years to go,” I said.
Which was what I always said.
Then he said, “Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2.”
II
Into Small Workroom 2 they sent this pale tall girl.
“What do you think?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“Me?” I said. “Or her?”
“Both,” Abnesti said.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“Fine, you know,” she said. “Normal.”
Abnesti asked us to rate each other more quantifiably, as per pretty, as per sexy.
It appeared we liked each other about average, i.e., no big attraction or revulsion either way.
Abnesti said, “Jeff, drip on?”
“Acknowledge,” I said.
“Heather, drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” Heather said.
Then we looked at each other like, What happens next?
What happened next was, Heather soon looked super-good. And I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it, how cute the other one was? Luckily there was a couch in the Workroom. It felt like our drip had, in addition to whatever they were testing, some ED556 in it, which lowers your shame level to like nil. Because soon, there on the couch, off we went. It was super-hot between us. And not merely in a horndog way. Hot, yes, but also just right. Like if you’d dreamed of a certain girl all your life and all of a sudden there she was, in your Domain.
“Jeff,” Abnesti said. “I’d like your permission to pep up your language centers.”
“Go for it,” I said, under her now.
“Drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
“Me, too?” Heather said.
“You got it,” Abnesti said, with a laugh. “Drip on?”
“Acknowledge,” she said, all breathless.
Soon, experiencing the benefits of the flowing Verbaluce™ in our drips, we were not only fucking really well but also talking pretty great. Like, instead of just saying the sex-type things we had been saying (such as “wow” and “oh God” and “hell yes” and so forth), we now began freestyling re our sensations and thoughts, in elevated diction, with eighty-per-cent increased vocab, our well-articulated thoughts being recorded for later analysis.
For me, the feeling was, approximately: Astonishment at the dawning realization that this woman was being created in real time, directly from my own mind, per my deepest longings. Finally, after all these years (was my thought), I had found the precise arrangement of body/face/mind that personified all that was desirable. The taste of her mouth, the look of that halo of blondish hair spread out around her cherubic yet naughty-looking face (she was beneath me now, legs way up), even (not to be crude or dishonor the exalted feelings I was experiencing) the sensations her vagina was producing along the length of my thrusting penis were precisely those I had always hungered for, though I had never, before this instant, realized that I so ardently hungered for them.
That is to say: a desire would arise and, concurrently, the satisfaction of that desire would also arise. It was as if (a) I longed for a certain (heretofore untasted) taste until (b) said longing became nearly unbearable, at which time (c) I found a morsel of food with that exact taste already in my mouth, perfectly satisfying my longing.
Every utterance, every adjustment of posture bespoke the same thing: we had known each other forever, were soul mates, had met and loved in numerous preceding lifetimes, and would meet and love in many subsequent lifetimes, always with the same transcendently stupefying results.
Then there came a hard-to-describe but very real drifting-off into a number of sequential reveries that might best be described as a type of nonnarrative mind scenery, i.e., a series of vague mental images of places I had never been (a certain pine-packed valley in high white mountains, a chalet-type house in a cul-de-sac, the yard of which was overgrown with wide, stunted Seussian trees), each of which triggered a deep sentimental longing, longings that coalesced into, and were soon reduced to, one central longing, i.e., an intense longing for Heather and Heather alone.
This mind-scenery phenomenon was strongest during our third (!) bout of lovemaking. (Apparently, Abnesti had included some Vivistif™ in my drip.)
Afterward, our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
We cuddled with a fierceness/focus that rivaled the fierceness/focus with which we had fucked. There was nothing less about cuddling vis-à-vis fucking, is what I mean to say. We were all over each other in the super-friendly way of puppies, or spouses meeting for the first time after one of them has undergone a close brush with death. Everything seemed moist, permeable, sayable.
Then something in the drip began to wane. I think Abnesti had shut off the Verbaluce™? Also the shame reducer? Basically, everything began to dwindle. Suddenly we felt shy. But still loving. We began the process of trying to talk après Verbaluce™: always awkward.
Yet I could see in her eyes that she was still feeling love for me.
And I was definitely still feeling love for her.
Well, why not? We had just fucked three times! Why do you think they call it “making love”? That was what we had just made three times: love.
Then Abnesti said, “Drip on?”
We had kind of forgotten he was even there, behind his one-way mirror.
I said, “Do we have to? We are really liking this right now.”
“We’re just going to try to get you guys back to baseline,” he said. “We’ve got more to do today.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Rats,” she said.
“Drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” we said.
Soon something began to change. I mean, she was fine. A handsome pale girl. But nothing special. And I could see that she felt the same re me, i.e., what had all that fuss been about just now?
Why weren’t we dressed? We real quick got dressed.
Kind of embarrassing.
Did I love her? Did she love me?
Ha.
No.
Then it was time for her to go. We shook hands.
Out she went.
Lunch came in. On a tray. Spaghetti with chicken chunks.
Man, was I hungry.
I spent all lunchtime thinking. It was weird. I had the memory of fucking Heather, the memory of having felt the things I’d felt for her, the memory of having said the things I’d said to her. My throat was like raw from how much I’d said and how fast I’d felt compelled to say it. But in terms of feelings? I basically had nada left.
Just a hot face and some shame re having fucked three times in front of Abnesti.
III
After lu
nch in came another girl.
About equally so-so. Dark hair. Average build. Nothing special, just like, upon first entry, Heather had been nothing special.
“This is Rachel,” Abnesti said on the P.A. “This is Jeff.”
“Hi, Rachel,” I said.
“Hi, Jeff,” she said.
“Drip on?” Abnesti said.
We Acknowledged.
Something seemed very familiar about the way I now began feeling. Suddenly Rachel looked super-good. Abnesti requested permission to pep up our language centers via Verbaluce™. We Acknowledged. Soon we, too, were fucking like bunnies. Soon we, too, were talking like articulate maniacs re our love. Once again certain sensations were arising to meet my concurrently arising desperate hunger for just those sensations. Soon my memory of the perfect taste of Heather’s mouth was being overwritten by the current taste of Rachel’s mouth, so much more the taste I now desired. I was feeling unprecedented emotions, even though those unprecedented emotions were (I discerned somewhere in my consciousness) exactly the same emotions I had felt earlier, for that now unworthy-seeming vessel Heather. Rachel was, I mean to say, it. Her lithe waist, her voice, her hungry mouth/hands/loins—they were all it.
I just loved Rachel so much.
Then came the sequential geographic reveries (see above): same pine-packed valley, same chalet-looking house, accompanied by that same longing-for-place transmuting into a longing for (this time) Rachel. While continuing to enact a level of sexual strenuousness that caused what I would describe as a gradually tightening, chest-located, sweetness rubber band to both connect us and compel us onward, we whispered feverishly (precisely, poetically) about how long we felt we had known each other, i.e., forever.
Again the total number of times we made love was three.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 28
