Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  7.

  Golgotha Tenement Blues/Counting Zeroes

  (11/15/1966)

  Wait. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Shun a premature narrative, lacking necessary background exposition. Ergo, the future, which will shortly be spoken of as the past, the future of the past (as all futures are), 1973 and the intergovernmental hysteria rightly triggered by the indiscretions at the Watergate Hotel. The steps hastily taken to destroy records of previous indiscretions, and among them the efforts of CIA Director Richard Helms to annihilate all evidence of Project MKUltra. Between the early 1950’s and 1973, the CIA’s secret efforts at behavioral engineering in humans. This fell to the members of the Scientific Intelligence Division, who dutifully employed “chemical, biological and radiological” agents to accomplish their ends, along with a buffet of torture, sexual abuse, sensory deprivation, prolonged verbal assaults, and so forth.

  LSD was popular.

  Had Helms been successful, MKUltra would have managed to disappear. No mean feat, that would have been. But spooks are notoriously fine magicians. Only, Helms was the cut-rate sort of magician who makes a living at children’s birthday parties. That is, if we evaluate him solely on his failure to erase the two plus decades of this project.

  Now. Then. Before.

  Here is a woman named Madeline Noble. One day, she, unwed, will have a child who will be named Patricia Elenore. In time, Patricia Elenore at age twenty, also unwed, will give birth to a daughter to be christened Olivia Estrid “Sixty Six” Noble.

  Link to link to link.

  Dot to dot to dot.

  LSD, amphetamines, barbiturates, ergine, temazepam, psilocybin, mescaline, heroin, 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, et alia. And the researchers were especially proud of their superhallucinogenic glycolate anticholinergic dubbed “BZ.” Words that roll off the tongue like pretty pharmacological poetry. In 1964, Madeline Noble enrolled at Bowling Green State University, undecided on her course of study, though, ironically, leaning towards psychology. Madeline was one of five students unknowingly administered multiple doses of BZ via cafeteria food. Seven doses, over fourteen weeks, culminating in a psychotic breakdown. Solid data for the studious number crunchers and keepers of albino lab rats to mull over. Control the mind, control the will. Control the soul. Render malleable strategic individuals, armies, the populous of an entire city malleable, or insensible. Useful.

  That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tip – a super-evil thing that is exploiting us.

  By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.

  Madeline. Here she is, in a white, white padded cell, kept safe from herself, in the sense that she may not now do herself bodily harm, may not end the nightmare of her life. The hurricane within her amygdala, its inability to imagine an end to the storm and send an all-clear to the medial prefrontal cortex. This cyclone puts the [anti]cyclonic Great Red Spot of Jupiter to shame. She is divorced from this place and this time, thrown forward, backwards, and she watches the sky fall whenever she shuts her eyes.

  Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.

  Never let it fade away.

  Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.

  Save it for a rainy day.

  In every way, Madeline Noble is a success story for the geeks and bureaucrats of MKUltra. She is a shining star, falling or not. Hard work pays off and has been rewarded with manna from Heaven, as it were.

  As she is.

  In her head, the sky falls. There, it bleeds over the waters of Penobscot Bay, above and upon Deer Isle, where her parents have a summer home. Where she spent her summer vacations, before college. When she is visited by psychiatrists from McGill University, happily serving their CIA manipulators, when they question her for voice recordings and meticulous notes, she recites blasphemies written down and published more than four decades earlier, though none of them will ever make the connection with his damned book. How the brilliant are often blind.

  They press the record button, pencils held at the ready, ears perked like alert hounds, and sometimes she will sing for them: “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “Catch a Falling Star,” “I Only Have Eyes For You.” They scribble, and she says:

  “A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s alive in outer space.”

  “Something that big? Wouldn’t we have seen it?”

  “Shhhh, Logan. Don’t interrupt her.”

  Madeline is silent for a moment, glaring at the three men in her cell. And then, again, she says, “A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s alive in outer space.

  “Something the size of Central Park kills it.

  “It drips.”

  “Jesus,” Logan whistles to himself.

  “Showers of blood,” she says. “Might as well be blood. One especial thing, a thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge, as there are vast living things in the oceans, there are vast living things in the sky. Leviathans. Fleets of Leviathans. Our whole solar system is a living organism, and showers of blood are its internal hemorrhages.” There are no italics here because every word she says is emphatic.

  “Rivers of blood that vein albuminous seas.”

  “Dreiser, how do you spell ‘albuminous’?”

  “The phosphorescent gleam seemed to glide along flat on the surface of the sea, no light being visible in the air above the water. Though…disruption may intensify into incandescence, apart from disruption and its probable fieriness, these things that enter this earth’s atmosphere have about them a cold light which would not, like light from molten matter, be instantly quenched by water. They still burn. They can’t stop burning.”

  She names asteroids that have not yet been discovered.

  She describes, in great detail, Saturn’s north polar hexagon, which will not be observed until the year 2005.

  She also describes Io’s volcano Tvashtar, the frozen seas of Europa, the September 18th, 2006 discovery of a supernova 240 million light years away.

  She asks them, “Who are the twins?”

  She asks, “Who is the Egyptian? Have you any idea how long she’s been alive?”

  She asks, “What is the Ivory Beast?”

  “What is the meaning of ‘Black Queen white, White Queen black’?”

  And after a prolonged silence, followed by a fit of laughter that not a man among her watchers does not find disconcerting, she turns her head towards the ceiling. And taking great care to enunciate each syllable so that they will not mistake these words for any others, she says, “Gentlemen, we have arrived at the oneness of allness. A single cosmic flow you would label disorder, unreality, inequilibrium, ugliness, discord, inconsistency.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Logan mutters. “Haven’t we heard enough of this shit for one day?”

  “Don’t make me tell you to shut up again.”

  “Checkmate,” says Madeline. “Because this is the meaning: Black Queen white, White Queen black. A game of chess played in the temples of Eris, the halls of Discordia. There will be murders on La manzana de la discordia. You know, or may learn of Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, not his real name, but let that slide. The gods were not pleased, and so, of course, all were turned into birds. Even the birds will rain down upon the bay and upon the island. Eris tosses the Golden Apple, and the sea heaves up her judgment upon us all. Watch for the Egyptian and the arrival of the twins and my daughter’s daughter. Watch for Strife, who, warns Homer, is relentless. She is the sister and companion of murderous Ares, she who is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven. She then hurls down bitterness equally between both sides as she walks through the onslaught, making men’s pain heavier.

  “The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower – suitable to any occasion.”

  “Be still
,” she says. “The chaos rains around you now.”

  She tells them very many things, and these things Richard Helms will succeed in expunging from the knowledge of man. In that, at least, he will be successful. There are those outside the CIA who will see to that.

  Later, on the flight back to Montreal, Dr. Allan Logan examines their notes. “Thank fuck we know that woman will never have a daughter, much fucking less a granddaughter. Whatever Washington is aiming for, I believe they overshot the mark with that one.”

  “Ours is but to do or die,” replies Dr. Dreiser.

  “That’s not how it goes.”

  “Not how what goes?”

  “That poem. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ Tennyson. It goes, ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.’”

  “Fuck you, Logan.” With that, Dr. Dreiser shuts his eyes and concentrates on the rumble of the Boeing 707’s turbocompressors. He dislikes air travel almost as much as he dislikes Logan.

  But a daughter will be born to Madeline Noble.

  And a daughter to her daughter.

  Eris plays a mean game of chess.

  8.

  Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture.

  (17 Vrishika, 2152)

  She sits on a bench in the main observation tier of the Nautilus-IV, her eyes on the wide bay window set into the belly of the station, the icy spiral of the Martian northern pole filling her view. She being the White Woman. La femme albinos. Ca-ng bái de. Blancanieves. More appellations hung on her than all the words for God, some say. But if she has a true name – and doesn’t everyone? – it is her secret and hers alone. A scrap of knowledge forever lost to humanity. So, her blue eyes are fixed on the Planum Boreum four-hundred kilometers below, yes, but her mind is on the Egyptian – Ancient of Days, El Judío Errante, Kundry, Ptolema – she has many “names,” as well. The Sino LDTC ferrying her is now less than eight sols out. The Egyptian racing towards her. An unforeseen inconvenience. In no way at all a calamity, no, but still an unfortunate occurrence to force the White Woman’s hand. It tries her patience, and patience has been the key for so long that she cannot even recall a time before she learned that lesson.

  In less than eight sols, the transfer vessel will dock, and they will speak for the first time in…

  Ça fait combien de temps déjà?

  She answers the question aloud, “Cent trente-neuf ans.”

  “Vraiment?” asks Babbit. “Autant que ça?”

  When she arrived on the station two months ago, Babbit was assigned the task of seeing to her every need. As has been her wish, he hardly ever leaves her side. The company of anyone is a balm for her sometimes crippling monophobia. A medicine better than any she has ever been prescribed. It doesn’t matter that this tall, thin, towheaded man is only mostly human. Many times, she’s resorted to and relied upon the companionship of splices. Besides, Babbit’s fast borrow capabilities saved her the trouble of telling him all the tales he needs to know to carry on useful conversations. And there will be much less fuss when she orders his death, before her flight back to Earth. Easy come, easy go.

  “Vous n’êtes jamais allé à Manhattan,” she says.

  “Madame, c’était perdu avant que je sois né.”

  “Bien sûr,” she replies, and the White Woman holds up her right hand, absentmindedly running fingertips along the window, tracing the serpentine furrow on the Chasma Boreale. It seems almost as long as her long life, and almost as aimless. Possédé de direction, she thinks, n’est pas être possédé d’intention.

  “En tout cas,” she says to Babbit, “nous étions à Manhattan. Je venais juste de rentrer de la Suède. Il y a si longtemps. Presque au tout début.”

  “Autant que ça,” he says again.

  “Je ne pourrais pas commencer à comprendre ce qu’elle espère accomplir en venant ici me poursuivre comme elle le fait.”

  “Moi non plus, Madame.”

  “Il se peut que le vaisseau soit armé. Ça serait bien son style: une attaque préventive, sacrifier le poste entier et tout le monde à bord afin d’accomplir ses objectifs.”

  “Ces fanatiques sont extrêmement dangereux,” says Babbit.

  “Ce n’est pas possible qu’elle espère argumenter avec moi. Elle ne peut pas imaginer l’idée que nous partageons un concept commun de Raison.”

  “Des vrais croyants, je veux dire,” Babbit says.

  “Je sais ce que vous voulais dire.”

  “Bien sûr, Madame.”

  “Peut-être elle ne souhaite que d’être témoin,” the White Woman says. “Être présente quand le cavalier de mon roi prend son dernier fou.”

  Babbit clear his throat. “Je m’attends à ce que le capitaine aura prévu la possibilité d’une attaque,” he says, then clears his throat once more.

  She laughs. “Il n’a rien fait de la sorte. Il n’y a pas eu d’alerte, pas de préparation pour intercepter ou protéger. Il reste assis et attend, lui, comme un petit animal peureux qui se recroqueville aux sous-bois.”

  “Je ne faisais que de supposer,” admits Babbit.

  The White Woman pulls her hand back from the window, and she seems to stare at it for a few seconds. As if in wonder, maybe. Or as if, perhaps, it’s been soiled somehow. Then she turns her head and watches Babbit. He lowers his head; he never meets her gaze.

  “J’ai considéré retenir le lancement jusqu’à ce qu’elle embarque,” she says to him. “Jusqu’à ce qu’elle soit assez proche.”

  “Alors vous avez pris votre décision? Le lancement, je veux dire.”

  “J’ai pris cette décision avant de quitter Xichang. Ce n’était qu’une question de quand.”

  “Et maintenant avez-vous décidé du quand?”

  No one on the Nautilus-IV, no one back on Earth, no one in the scattered, hardscrabble colonies below, none of them know why she is here. Few enough know that she is here. She was listed on no passenger manifest. They do not know she’s ready to call the Egyptian’s gambit and move her king’s knight. To cast a stone on the still waters. Not one of them knows the nature of her cargo. No one but Babbit, and he won’t talk.

  “Maintenant, j’ai décidé quand,” she tells him, and the White Woman shuts her blue eyes and pictures the vial in its plasma-lock cradle, hidden inside a shipment of hardware and foodstuffs bound for Sharonov. The kinetic gravity bomb will detonate at five hundred feet, and the contents of the vial will be aerosolized. The sky will rain corruption, and the corruption will take root in the dome’s cisterns and reservoirs.

  Wormwood.

  Apsinthion.

  …and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch…

  “Madame,” says Babbit, not daring to raise his head. “Êtes-vous sûre d’obtenir les résultats desirés? Il y a de règles d’évacuation, des procédures de confinement environnemental – ”

  …the waters became wormwood…

  “Babbit, toute ma vie je n’ai jamais été sûre de rien. Ce qui en est en cause.”

  She turns back to the window and can almost feel the wild katabatic winds scouring the glaciers and canyons. The White Woman pulls her robes more tightly about herself. She’s glad that Babbit is with her. She wants to ask him if he might take for granted that she has never loved, if no one has ever been dear to her. But she doesn’t.

  Instead, she says again, “Ce qui en est en cause.”

  “Oui, Madame,” he says. “Bien sûr.”

  9.

  A Plague of Snakes, Turned to Stone

  (11/4/2012)

  It is difficult to believe this can continue much longer. The seasons are not changing. It seems as though it will always now be late summer, earliest autumn, here in Stonington, as though this horror has frozen time. And yet we move through time, and we speak, and our thoughts occur, and that which bears a vague resemblance to day and that which bears a vague resemblance to night comes and goes. We get hungry. We run out of ammunition. We kill. We forage. All these factors assure me there must continue to, at
the least, exist some facsimile of time. It’s like a forgery by an unskilled counterfeiter. God makes a copy, but he gets it wrong. Or, he gets it different. The world I have known is lost in shadow. That shit from the sea, it warps time. Invokes a time dilation that exists between here and, possibly, all the rest of the world. Or – if not a gravitational time dilation, not us beyond the perimeter of a Schwarzschild radius where time comes to a grinding halt on the singularity of a collapsed, frozen star, then a subjective time dilation, happening in my mind. Have I written that already, on some other page? Does it matter if I have? And the stars are black and cold. As I stare into the void. Tonight is tonight, and I sat down and opened my notebook and took up my pen to write about tonight. Today, tonight. Both. About how they have been peculiarly quiet. That happens sometimes, the quiet days. The lulls. In a way, they’re worse than the day-to-day war we are not here waging upon foes we have not come to defeat. Not in the strictest sense. No. Not the way the few remaining survivors of Deer Isle are fighting. The way the military and the CDC are fighting. You, Bête, you will know what it is I mean. And the pain, it’s getting so much worse. There are days now when Sixty Six has to venture out alone. She never seems to resent my inability to accompany her. Is she relieved? Would she rather do her work alone? Can’t say, haven’t asked, won’t even hazard a guess. Stepping outside today, slinking from our attic because we needed to restock our provisions, because somewhere another domino needed toppling to a faraway effect, we left the attic and realized at once it would be a Quiet Day. I walked along behind Sixty Six, keeping up as best I can despite the pain in my legs and stomach. She found two cans of Heinz baked beans and a can of brown bread in the looted shell of the Fisherman’s Friend Restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. This is very close to the public library, and she’d stopped for a couple of new books. We sat at the end of one of the wharves and ate. She read and ate. I only ate and watched the sticky sea which was so still today that it seemed almost to have solidified. How and why do I force myself to observe those waters, bereft of so much as even the suggestion of waves? I do not know, Bête, my love. The tides do not rise and fall here any longer, so the horror holds a greater sway than does the moon. Up there where the constellations shift about, might be there is not longer a moon, or never was a moon. Consider that! But, we sat together, eating. Me, chewing but not tasting. Just grinding my jaws. Her reading David Copperfield, between plastic sporkfuls of baked beans. (I had considered how the things that never happen are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.) There was a cramp, an especially bad one, and I vomited everything I’d swallowed into the sea. No. Onto the sea. My puke spattered across that pearly surface and lay there. Not sinking. I think it’s alive. Have I said that? That I think what the bay has become is alive? I wiped my mouth and stared up at the resilient buttermilk August-September-in-November sky. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened. Sixty Six turned a page. She did not seem to notice I’d been sick, but I am sick a lot. Old hat. Like bullets and blades and blood and ichor. We no longer find the remarkable at all remarkable. I wiped my mouth and said, very softly, “What out there do you miss? Do you miss anything at all?” She continued reading, not raising her eyes from the novel. “What would I miss? No.” I wiped my mouth again and spat. “Where did you learn to shoot?” I asked, and I admit I was talking just to hear my voice. The world here grows more silent every day. “Nowhere,” she replied. She told me how she’d never held a gun before the X came to her and sent her here. “What was there to learn?” she asked. “It’s all mathematics. Nothing but a sort of trigonometry.” For no reason I can now recall, I then recalled that it was Thursday. On Thursday nights there are films in the National Guard armory. Sixty Six likes to go. Mostly they screen – yeah, Bête, this part is bizarre – these fucked-up old Disney cartoons, Donald fucking Duck in the army, in World War II. The Vanishing Private; there’s the only title I remember. Jesus, I’m making less sense than usual, but I had to use more of the dope than usual to so much as sit up and hold the pen. Maybe you know why my being made sick is necessary to this experiment – if that is the word – but it is lost on me. Back to the wharf. Sixty Six sat her empty can aside, and I asked if she were going to the movies tonight. She shrugged. All of this was playing out through the fog of pain and drugs dream-like. I don’t question that sensation anymore. I reached into a pocket of my jacket, the variegated camouflage one I took from the aforementioned armory (no one tries to stop me from doing anything, not here). A small ammonite like the one you wear on the silver chain around your neck, sister. My tiny black Hildoceras bifrons from our trip to Whitby. I held it out to her, its whorl shining dully in my palm. She set her book down and stared at it, seeming truly and totally mystified. “Why?” she wanted to know. Suspicious. “I don’t know. I want you to have it, that’s all. Maybe because you keep saving my life out here.” She took it; I hadn’t thought she would. “People don’t give me things,” she said. “I just did,” I said. “You miss things,” she said. “You miss what you had before, you and your sister. Your science. The fossils.” Practically a sermon, that many words from Sixty Six all at once. It actually made me smile. “Yeah, I do. I miss Bête, and I miss what we did.” Sixty Six let the ammonite tumble from one hand to the other. “Not just the sex,” she said. “Not just the sex,” I replied. Have I mentioned that, sometimes, the internet is still accessible from the island? Just now and then. One of the terminals in the city hall hasn’t been smashed, and I’ve sat and used it a few times. “I see what you read online,” Sixty Six said to me. “You want to go back.” “Don’t you?” “Back to what?” There was a long silence then. I heard sirens off towards town proper. I don’t know why they still bother with those, but the sound was a welcome interruption on a Quiet Day. “Okay,” I said. And then I talked about the last thing I’d read online. Others might have been scouring the web for news of the outside world and whether it has any fucking idea what’s happening here. I don’t. Last time (and Sixty Six was with me, searching through old file cabinets, though I cannot say for what) I read PLoS One and an article on a newly discovered freshwater mosasaur from Hungary, Pannoniasaurus inexpectatus, and sitting on the wharf I explained to Sixty Six that paleontologists hadn’t thought that mosasaurs lived in freshwater. Only, here’s the thing, Bête. You’ll not have read this article, I don’t think. Because this was the December 19, 2012 issue of PLoS One. And we’re back at time dilation. “Look at this,” Sixty Six said, and that she was talking so much, it was starting to freak me out. “Look at this,” and she pointed at the little ammonite in her hand. At the center of its whorl. “It begins here, and it goes round and round and round, and it’s always growing larger from the center. What begins as a point becomes very wide before it ends.” I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. She understands the heart of it, doesn’t she? Every minute action, or omission of an action; every breath we breathe; the shedding of every dead skin cell; every trigger pulled; every man and woman on this island who crosses our path – it all echoes through eternity, growing larger and larger in its consequences as the whorl goes round and round about. Oh, oh. What did I just write? I should not have, should have kept that bottled. I ought to destroy this page. I ought to burn it and swallow the ashes. Don’t follow me, Bête. Whatever happens, don’t follow me. Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la nuit.