Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “Tell him, Spak. Tell him what you’ve found for me. The man has, like, an interest in my business. How it works and shit.”

  Spak wore sunglasses with one lens missing and brightly colored medical scrubs.

  “They got . .He was out of breath. He yanked at the neckline of his scrubs. “Someone dumped a whole bunch of these. Found ’em the other night where I was sleeping. We could all wear them.”

  Jord grinned at Bernal. “Not my kind of fashion statement, Spak. Tell us about the Easter Bunny.”

  “I don’t know nothing about no Eoster Bunny.” Spak didn’t want to look at Bernal. “I don’t want to do it anymore, Jord. Don’t wanna do it.”

  “Why not, Spak?” Jord sounded perfectly reasonable. “Doesn’t the extra money keep you in clothes?”

  “Don’t need more clothes. Got plenty of clothes. People throw the most amazing shit out. Like .. . look at this—”

  “I don’t want to look at any frickin’ underwear you pulled out of some landfill, Spak.”

  Spak finally looked at Jord. He adjusted his glasses, as if having one sunglass lens gave him the proper stereoptic view. “People now shoving ... machines, strange shit, out there. Still working. Can hear ’em hum, you put your head right up to ’em.”

  “That what you see while you’re looking for the drugs? You still see it once you find what you need?”

  Spak looked stubborn. “I know what I seen.”

  Jord turned to Bernal. “Since he’s being kind of shy . . . The Easter Bunny. That’s what the street folks call him, her, whatever, anyway. Someone floats around and, get this, gives drugs. Gives ’em out! In, like, a little scavenger hunt thing. Hides the drugs places. Packet of H. A few pills in a baggie. Even weed. All over the place. Well, not in your normal kind of place. Old buildings, like I saw your friend checking out. Abandoned cars. In culverts. Spots people like my bud Spak like to hang out.”

  “Hate culverts,” Spak said. “They flood.”

  “Smart.” Jord was getting bored. “Real smart.”

  “Bad for business?” Bernal guessed. “Too much free product floating around.”

  “Nah. Not so much. Demand is, like, big. A few free samples don’t put a dent in it. But, my question is: who’s moving in? I think that’s my explanation. I mean, some stores, you know, they give stuff away free to get people to come, buy other stuff. You ever hear of that?”

  “Sure. Free samples. Loss leaders.”

  “Loss leaders? Nice. I got some free skin cream the other day. Kind of greasy, though. You use skin cream?”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  “What?” Jord eyed him with what Bernal was startled to see was a new respect. “What do you use?”

  “Skin So Soft.”

  “Skin So Soft. You like it?”

  “It seems to do the job.”

  “I’ll have to try it. Particularly in the winter. But I don’t like that greasy shit. Even though it was free. Got it in the mail, in a little bag. You ever get those? In the mail?”

  “Sure.”

  “I hate all that crap I get in the mail.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Long time, I think. Maybe a year. Someone moving in, they’re taking their sweet time about it. But I keep an eye on it. Through people like my man Spak here. He’s been keeping an eye out for me. But it sounds like he’s finding all kinds of useless shit instead.”

  “I been looking,”Spak muttered. “I ain’t going down the Black River no more. Don’t need those gadgets. Don’t need no frosted bowling balls.”

  Jord sighed, having gotten bored. Bernal wasn’t sure the question of the Easter Bunny had any real interest for him to begin with. It was more a professional concern, something he knew he should keep an eye on.

  “Get going, Spak. Have a nice day.”

  Bernal and Jord watched Spak trot away across the parking lot.

  “Twitches his butt like a cheerleader,” Jord said. “What’s up with that, d’you think?”

  18

  Bernal sat on a rolled sleeping pad and checked images. He’d taken another set of pictures and was now comparing what things had looked like the first day he came into Ungaro’s lab with the way they looked now. If anything had been moved, if Ungaro had snuck back in while he was out or asleep, it would stand out as different.

  Madeline had disappeared from the scene before, sliding neatly out from under Paul’s death, the destruction of her lab. But he couldn’t imagine her just leaving her creation like this.

  She had to still be around somewhere.

  His phone rang.

  “Hey. Charis Fen said you were interested in the Bald Chimps.” The speaker introduced himself as George. He had once been an animal-rights activist but in prison had joined a group called the Sons of Klaatu, some kind of white-supremacist organization. “We got set up. I’ll bet you hear that a lot. I hear it, too. Don’t hear much else, actually. But true, here. We all got set up. We all got ourselves tempted. Without temptation we’d be happy frickin’ campers, singing ‘Kumbaya’ and making ’smores over the campfire. Right?”

  “My chocolate never melted,” Bernal said.

  “What?” The connection was sharp. Despite being locked in a cell in southern Illinois, George sounded like he was breathing in Bernal’s ear. “What did you say?”

  “The chocolate.” Bernal held the phone a little away from his head. “For the ’smores. Never melted. The marshmallow ... I don’t know. Not enough heat. Heat content. I forget the physics. ..

  “Huh. I never had trouble. Next time you try it? Just warm the chocolate over a hot Girl Scout beforehand.” George laughed wetly. “Always worked for me.”

  Bernal resisted the urge to dab his ear with a tissue. “You were an animal rights activist?”

  “Hey. I paid the price for it, too. Try to save animals from torture, and they throw you in prison. Hell of a situation, eh? It’s a brutal world out there. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just that you don’t ...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sound like one.”

  “Like some faggy crunchy cute-animals-with-big-eyes type guy? That what you mean?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “It’s a real genuine moral issue, buddy. Our responsibility to those we torture, kill, and eat. Not some kind of joke. It just tends to attract a bad element. That kind of whiny douche bag element you were just kind of mentioning. So, sure, you get the lames. People with multiple chemical sensitivity. Phobias. Scary weight problems. You run into people allergic to cats who own five, get shots every week, put pictures of them on their Christmas cards, and never put a sock on any of their heads, even at a party. Even for the pleasure of guests. Even though there’s not a decent cat in the world that doesn’t see being abused that way as a sign of true affection. So, I was kind of put off at first, as you would expect. It all happened, though. The mission happened. Following your morals can end you up with all sorts of sketchy types, you see what I’m saying.”

  “So what was Madeline Ungaro working on in that lab? What were you trying to destroy?”

  “Nothing funnier than a cat with a sock on its head. Ever see one back up trying to get the damn thing off?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, okay, so it’s evidence of the fundamental evil of the human spirit and how we should really be extinct so that all the other beasts can start living it up again, laying eggs in our rotting foreheads, whatever. I’ve heard all that. I’m sorry about it, real sorry, but it still makes me bust a gut. Particularly after a couple of beers. They’ll back up all the way around the room. Dumbasses.”

  “I’ll have to give it a try,” Bernal said.

  “Hell, you called to talk about something serious, right? Not some kind of regular fun thing I may never get to do again in my life. Okay. Let’s get ourselves serious. You ever wonder what happened to the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent? And I mean the originals, the Solutreans who came a
cross from Europe in skin rafts, lived in peace with the megafauna, and then went down along with every mammoth, ground sloth, and shortfaced bear when those damn Asians came strutting across the Bering Bridge with their fancy Clovis points. You ever spare a moment to think about their fate?”

  Bernal considered connecting George with the South Dakota mammoth project, but realized that that wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors. “Was this your motivation for setting a fire in Madeline Ungaro’s lab? Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions?”

  “It’s all related, buddy, it’s all related. Peace-loving, animal-loving Europeans are our honored ancestors. Might look weird at first, not like what your prejudices I want you to believe, everyone’s on ‘colonialism,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘slavery,’ all that crap, but it fits. I won’t say all the Bald Chimps bought into that line, though. There was a diversity of opinions. But, actually, you know, I don’t got much time. Lights out is pretty soon, and they can get kind of rough with infractions.”

  “I’ll try to move it along,” Bernal said.

  “One of the guys learned what she was doing in that lab. Experimenting on chimps. On their brains. That makes for good PR, you know, chimps with skulls sawed open, that kind of weird stuff. Scientists.”

  “Chimps,” Bernal said. “What were the experiments? What was going on?”

  “Who knows, really?” George sounded disgusted. “We were going to go in, grab a bunch of stuff, take pictures of the chimps, all that, have a press conference, present the evidence, really get some mileage. But we had some cowboys on the team. They were going to show exactly how much stuff like that disgusted them, so when we got in there, they set a fire. You know, some old files, binders, crap like that, a squirt of lighter fluid, and foof, you got a little fire. I was yelling at them, they were crazy, that sets the alarms off, so that’s what you do last, if you feel like it. Dead last.

  “I think that place was kind of unregulated, if you see what I’m saying. Corners being cut, inspections not being done. Anyway, the alarms didn’t go off. And the fire spread like hell. I mean, isn’t everything supposed to be flame retardant these days? This kinda crap only happens in movies. But the place went up fast.

  “But that’s fine, because there wasn’t anything there, nothing like what we were looking for. No cages, no food, no live-animal gear. Believe me, there’s a lot of it. You got to keep those things alive in order to experiment on them. All there was was a whole lot of stuff that seemed to be cooled with liquid nitrogen.”

  “What?” Bernal said. “You recognized that?”

  “You still think that because I care about animals I must be kind of a moron.”

  “No,” Bernal said. “I don’t think that at all.”

  “Well, don’t think it, because it’s not true. Yeah. Cooling equipment, big humping bunches of it. A line of coolers. And stuff hooked up, you know, wheeled carts, manipulator arms. Robotics stuff, not like you’d expect to find in a place like that at all. And here’s the thing . . .” Bernal waited.

  “I was looking around, trying to figure out where the hell those supposed chimps were, when something touched me on the back of the head. Well, that scared the crap out of me, as you might imagine. I might have jumped. Screamed, even. Don’t know. It happens. No sense in pretending it don’t. And, okay, that might be what panicked the guys. Everyone was already on edge, you know, and they might have jumped the gun on the fire because of that. That’s pretty much what they claimed afterwards, anyway.

  “It was one of those damn arms. It kind of stroked the back of my head. I felt like there was something there. Something watching me. Something real, something that understood things. Maybe that’s me ‘claiming afterwards,’ just like those morons with the lighter fluid. How do I know? I only got this brain, and I’m like inside it, so it’s not like I can go back and run the tape. I’m stuck with the rumors behind the news. Anyway, that’s when things got out of control and we had to bail.

  “We got nothing. And I mean nothing. There weren’t even any chimps there, or at least none that I saw. Just a bunch of stuff. Turned out all the records were there, everything, even the backup disks, the whole works. After it was all over, she’d lost every bit of research, and no one had a damn idea of what she had been working on. Weird, huh? It must have depressed the hell out of her, because she left right after that. Sat up a tree, I hear. A victim of out-of-control animal-rights activists, was the story. There’s always a story. We got pulled in, questioned, the works, they weren’t nice to us, not a bit, but there was no proof. Everything. Everything was destroyed. They had to let us walk.

  “We didn’t get along too well after that, us Bald Chimps. Chimps are aggressive too, you know. Don’t think they aren’t. Kill each other over a nice piece of jungle. So I broke off, moved back to the Midwest, joined a group over at the University of Illinois. Champaign. And that last little mission ... well, let’s just say, I’ve had a lot of time to think things over in this here five-to-ten aftermath. There’s a lot to think about.”

  At the risk of having the lights go out and never hearing the end of it, Bernal waited. George would tell on his own, or he wouldn’t tell at all. All Bernal could do was listen and hope.

  “I did grab something when I ran.” George’s voice was almost inaudible.

  “What?”

  “Oh, shit, wait.” Bernal heard George yell, “Just a second, for God’s sake. I’m learning . .. I’m learning how my old man really died. What? Yeah, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you first.” His voice got closer. “Sorry. Narrative, you know. That’s our main medium of exchange, made up or not. How my dad died is actually kind of interesting in itself. . . .” He paused. “Dog heads. Soviet. I mean old stuff, you’d think it would be something we’d know about by this time. On a VHS videotape. All jerky and out of focus, like the worst home movies you’ve ever seen. And no sound, like they didn’t manage to figure out how to work a mic.

  “Now, people pretty much know that somebody over there used to chop the heads off of dogs and keep them alive, all hooked up to tubes and stuff. But this was about something else, something after that. It had big tanks of some kind of liquid with mist spilling off of them. And down inside you’d see . . . the heads, the dog heads, only with wires coming out, not tubes. Then the scene cut, and you saw some kind of vehicle with tracks. Ugly, welded piece of crap, lousy gas mileage, probably broke down once an hour. It didn’t have a crew. It tore around this field, made turns, maneuvered past obstacles, all without anyone on it. Now, maybe it was radio controlled, like a model car or something. But I think it was that cylinder you could see on some kind of framework above the engine. The one with the mist coming off it.”

  “You think it was a frozen dog head, or something.”

  “Look, I don’t know what I think. But, yeah, maybe these guys figured that instead of messing with a bunch of complex electronics they’d have to buy from us anyway, they’d just take something that was already pretty good at maneuvering across unmarked terrain, chop its head off, and stick that nice little hardware/software combo onto some Soviet crapwagon as a guidance system. If things had turned out different, we might have been facing God knows what across a battlefield somewhere.”

  More voices, someone yelling.

  “Hey, look,” George said. “Gotta go.”

  “Thanks for talking to me,” Bernal said. “The tape ..”

  “Hell. My brother. Frank. Frankie. He wanted to . .. well, he did a video of himself and this girl having sex. It goes on for a long time, and you can’t really see anything, but he taped the damn sex scene across my Soviet cyborg stuff. Nothing left. Just a girl with jiggly boobs bouncing up and down on what looks like a half-inflated sea monster beach toy but is, God help me, my little brother. He pops up a couple of times to take a swig of beer, and if you know him, you can recognize him.”

  “That’s too bad,” Bernal said.

  “Yeah. She keeps yanking up on her boobs, like that will make them ride higher or som
ething. Nothing you really want to look at. I’m glad he found someone, though. Everyone should have someone. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You think about that stuff, in here.” George sniffed. “A lot.”

  “I understand,” Bernal said.

  “No, you don’t, buddy. No way you could.”

  19

  “You think what?” Charis stood carefully clear of everything in Ungaro’s lab and stared at Bernal. Away from any object to give her scale, she might have been a vast statue, miles away.

  “I think Hesketh exists.”

  “I knew that. I knew you were crazy. I just didn’t. . . come on, just say it. I don’t know why I’m asking, it’s really too early in the morning to have my head explode.”

  “I appreciate you’re coming over on such short—”

  “Just say it!”

  She was close to being angry, and Bernal could already tell that he did not want Charis Fen angry. He didn’t believe in what she was doing, he didn’t even trust her, but he realized he needed her. No one else could help him now. Once she got angry at him, all bets would be off.