Unpossible

by Daryl Gregory

  Petit Mal #2: Digital

  Sometime after the accident, Franklin woke up to realize that his consciousness had relocated to his left hand—specifically, the index finger of his left hand.

  Before the accident, which is to say, his entire life until then, his conscious self seemed to reside just behind his eyes, a tiny man gazing out at the world through a pair of wide windows. He’d never considered how odd this was, and how arbitrary that location. Was it because humans were predominantly visual? He supposed so, but that didn’t explain why his self had been lodged there. Why not behind the nose? His sense of smell was quite keen, especially when it came to beer: he could tell a Belgian Abbey ale from an American microbrew knockoff with a single sniff. His taste buds were highly trained. If he had become a professional taste-tester, he wondered, would his consciousness have migrated down to his tongue?

  His wife, Judith, could not seem to understand what had happened to him, even though he tried repeatedly to explain. "I’m down here," he told her, waggling himself to get her attention. He could not move his arm because of the cast that covered him from palm to shoulder. He’d broken his wrist, sent a hairline fracture along his ulna, and torn his rotator cuff.

  Judith looked distraught. "It’s the stroke, Franklin. I told you you were working too hard. Now you’ve suffered a stroke."

  Perhaps that was the case. He’d been standing at the top of the stairs, reaching out to the banister, when suddenly he felt dizzy. Sometime later he awoke, face down on the parquet landing, his arm trapped beneath him. He felt suffocated, as if he were buried in an avalanche. When the EMTs rolled him onto his back, he moaned in pain, but at the same time experienced a profound sense of relief when his hand came free. Daylight! Air! Though of course he’d been breathing perfectly well the entire time, and he could see fine. What he could not decide, even now, was this: had the accident caused the shift in consciousness, or had he become dizzy because his self was on the move down his arm?

  "Don’t tell the doctors," he said. "They’ll think I’m crazy."

  She patted the back of his hand and he flinched. "I won’t if you don’t want me to," she said. Her fingers were stubby, which she tried to disguise with long, brightly painted nails. Liar’s hands.

  That afternoon, the doctors stormed his room to interrogate him. They shone pen lights into his eyes, wheeled him off to MRIs and CAT scans, tested his vision, speech, and cognition. Except for some awkwardness rearranging wooden blocks during the motor coordination exam, the fact that his self was now nestled 30 inches southeast from its old location seemed to make no measurable difference. He was perfectly capable of performing from his new mental home.

  "Let’s see if the feeling persists," the most senior doctor said, and handed Judith a dozen prescriptions to fill. "Call us if you experience anything odd, such as—" And here he rattled off a list of alarming neurological and physiological symptoms.

  "The important thing," he said to Franklin, "is to avoid stress."

  After eight weeks, Franklin returned to the hospital to have the cast removed, and then returned again a few days later for the first of a several physical therapy sessions to restore motion to his shoulder. His therapist’s name was Olivia. She had lovely hands. She kept her nails trimmed, but they were painted with a clear gloss with white tips—a French manicure. Her long, delicate-looking fingers were quite strong; when she dug into the knotted tissue of his shoulder she could make him cry out. Whenever she touched his left hand, however, she was exceedingly gentle, which convinced him she’d been told about his mental condition. But on the third visit, when he worked up the courage to mention, casually, that his consciousness had migrated to the peninsula of his index finger, she seemed genuinely surprised.

  "You feel like you are ... " She nodded toward his hand. "There?"

  "The funny thing is, I’m not even left handed."

  She frowned, not disapprovingly, but in a curious, scientific way. "What’s that like for you? If you don’t mind talking about it."

  There was nothing he wanted to talk about more. Judith found the topic distasteful. "Close your eyes," he told Olivia. "Imagine yourself as one great finger. Picture a long arm extending from your back that stretches up to a gargantuan body."

  She closed her eyes and he watched her, moving his gaze from her white-tipped fingernails, to her face, and back again. The image was transferred from his retina to his brain, and there down his arm to his pulsing index finger. He curled against his palm, suddenly embarrassed by his thoughts.

  "And up there," he said, "at the top of the body, is a huge, remote head like a planetoid. A bony house for the computer of your brain. It tells you things, but it’s not you."

  She concentrated for a few moments, and then opened her eyes. "I wondered why you kept looking at my hands."

  "Sorry about that."

  "It’s all right." She lifted one finger, flexed it, and laughed. "Hi there."

  He raised himself up and waved back.

  She said, "Does it feel ... odd in there? Cramped?"

  "It feels like the most natural thing in the world," he said. "I’d always been a person who lived in my head, who kept his feelings contained. Now I can’t imagine living any other way. I feel free."

  He was worried that his confession might alienate her, but at the next session there was no strangeness between them. As they worked on his muscles he talked easily of his new life, the new insights he’d gained. "Have you ever noticed how careless people are with their hands?" he said during one visit. "The other day my wife grabbed a pan from the oven, burned herself, and then she stuck her finger in her mouth. She didn’t even wash afterward." And: "I wonder if Helen Keller was hand conscious?"

  He wanted the visits to go on and on, but his insurance ran out after only three weeks. At the end of the last appointment, he said, "You’ve helped me so much, I’d like to thank you somehow. Can I buy you lunch? You said you liked Thai food." Ever since she’d mentioned her love of pad Thai he’d been thinking of chopsticks moving in her fingers.

  "I don’t think that’s a good idea," she said, not unkindly. She glanced down at his hand. "You’re wearing a ring."

  "But she doesn’t—" He wanted to say, She doesn’t understand me like you do. But that was going too far, extending himself in a way that would only lead to embarrassment for both of them. "She doesn’t like Thai food."

  His wife entered his study without knocking. On his computer screen was an ad for a ladies Rolex. Judith looked disgusted. The hand modeling the watch was beautiful, though a little too perfect for his tastes: the wrist was improbably narrow, the fingers obviously airbrushed. Fortunately, a few months ago he’d found an internet forum where people exchanged pictures of the best hand models.

  "I’ve made an appointment," Judith said. "With a specialist." He told her he wasn’t interested, but she would not be refused.

  They drove to a clinic only a few blocks from the hospital where Olivia worked. The doctor wasn’t a psychiatrist, as he’d feared, or a neurologist, but a family practice MD who’d written a book about alternate states of consciousness. He was bald except for a gray ponytail, as if his hair had given up on general coverage and decided to specialize. The doctor seemed inordinately excited by Franklin’s condition. "We must nudge the mind out of its cul-de-sac," he said emphatically, "and return it to its former home." He rambled on for some time before Franklin realized that his proposed solution was to amputate.

  "It’s the only way," the man said. "Sudden Egotic eviction."

  "Are you insane?" Franklin said. "You could kill me!"

  "Your hand is up in the air again," Judith said. And then to the doctor she said, "He does that whenever he feels defensive."

  "Marvelous," Dr. Ponytail said. "May I see your hand? Your finger looks inflamed."

  "Get the hell away from me!" He curled into a fist and charged out of the office. He did indeed feel hot, like a lawn mower engine revved beyond its specs. Outside he uncurled and sa
w that he’d turned red as a thermometer, his self-finger seeming to pulse like a rubber bladder. He cried out.

  "Franklin? Are you all right?" It was Olivia’s voice—Olivia! He spun his arm to reach out to her, and then the world continued to spin, and he collapsed to the sidewalk.

  When he awoke, he was alone in another hospital room, and the feeling of suffocation he’d experienced on the stairs months ago had returned. He looked down, and saw that his left hand was encased in white bandages, from wrist to fingertips. His other arm was restrained by IV tubes, but he bit and chewed at the bandages until his fingers were free.

  The index finger was still there. It had turned pale and shriveled, as if it had spent too long in the bathtub, but it was whole.

  Something was wrong, however. The finger looked utterly unfamiliar to him. Had he really thought that he’d been in there, in that pointer? More alarmingly, the suffocating feeling had not dissipated.

  At that moment, Olivia and Judith came into the room. They were holding paper cups of coffee, and it looked as if they’d been having a heart to heart discussion.

  "It’s all right," Olivia said, "You’re safe now. You just passed out."

  "Try to calm down," Judith said. And then she saw the scraps of bandages and frowned. "I suppose you’re still ... "

  "No!" he said. "That’s over! I’m—" Where was he? He was drowning, and he could feel his giant body above him, his voice thundering from far away.

  "What do you need?" Olivia asked.

  He closed his eyes, concentrating. This little piggy went to market, he said to himself. This little piggy stayed home. And this little piggy ...

  "Here!" he said, kicking up at the sheet. "For God’s sake, get this sheet off of me!"

  The women pulled up the linens, and at his pleading, removed his socks. He lifted his right foot into the air.

  There he was. Third toe from the right. He was slender, with a thick, healthy nail. A single hair sprouted from his knuckle in a Superman curl. Yes, just a middle toe, but at last he felt completely at home: surrounded, supported, unstubbable.

  Message from the Bubblegum Factory

  The guards, Dear Reader, are kicking the shit out of me.

  The first few steps of my plan for breaking into the Ant Hill were simple: Drive through the outer gate in my rented Land Rover, brake to a halt well short of the second gate, and then step out of the car. I thought that once I’d assumed the posture of absolute surrender—prone, hands on the back of my head, stillness personified—that they wouldn’t feel the need to stomp me like a bug.

  Unfortunately, no.

  The subsequent intake process, however, is everything you’d expect of the world’s only Ultra-Super-Max prison. They carry me under a half-lowered blast shield that looks nuke-proof, then through a vault door, and finally into a series of cold, concrete rooms where I am fingerprinted and photographed, palpitated and probed, swabbed, scanned, and scrubbed, deloused and depilated. They keep me naked. My head throbs from the pounding I took at the gate, and my stomach feels like it’s been turned inside out.

  The paperwork is stunning. They even make me sign for the lime green jumper they throw at me.

  The warden comes in as I step into it. Judging by the demeanor of the guards and the way one of them cracks me in the ribs when I don’t zip up fast enough, this is an honor of some kind. One millionth customer, maybe.

  The warden looks like a ... does it matter? He is the warden. Supply your own visual.

  He frowns at me. "You’re the mascot."

  "That’s kind of offensive."

  "The sidekick, then. The nut job who went crazy on TV last year."

  "Now you’re just being mean."

  He looks me up and down, taking in my skinny arms, my puffy eye, my pot belly. He shakes his head in bewilderment. "How the hell did you think you would get in here, much less out again? Look at you. You’re out of shape, you have no weapons, no powers—" He gives me a hard look. "Do you?"

  "Not really," I say. "Well, one."

  The four guards in the room suddenly tense. I hear a subtle but bracing sound: The double creak of a leather gloves pulling back metal triggers.

  "I can’t be killed," I say.

  I smile. "I mean, not because of anything I can do. It’s just—look. When I was hanging out with Soliton and the Protectors, I must have been kidnapped once a month. Held hostage, used as bait, snared in death traps. They especially liked to dangle me."

  "What?"

  "Over tubs of acid, piranhas, lava pits, you name it—villains are very big on dangling. Twenty years of this, ever since I was a kid. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been shot at, blown up, tossed into rivers, knifed, pummeled, thrown off buildings and bridges—"

  "You don’t say."

  "Oh yeah, half a dozen times at least. My right ear drum’s still perforated from being chucked out of a plane." I lean forward, and the guard puts a hand on my chest. I ignore him. "See, here’s the thing. I should be dead a hundred times over. But the rules of the universe don’t allow it. I’m not bragging—that just seems to be the way it works."

  The warden smiles coldly. "Cold" is the only form available to him, the sole version taught in Sadistic Warden School. "That’s not a super power, Mr. King. That’s a delusion. One shared by every teenager who doesn’t wear a seatbelt."

  The guards’ guns are still aimed at me, but I no longer seem to be in imminent danger. The warden opens a manila folder. "You went missing from St. Adolphus Psychiatric Hospital in Modesto, California six months ago. No one’s seen you since."

  I shrug.

  He flips through more papers. "Where have you been, Mr. King?"

  "Does it matter?" I say. I wait for him to look up. "Really. Are you at all interested? Will it make a difference?"

  He considers this. "No, as a matter of fact." He closes the folder. "I’ve already called for a helicopter to take you out of here and back to your doctors in California. This is not a hospital."

  "I’ve heard that."

  "People like you, even famous people, are not in my remit. You are not what this institution is for."

  "But what about my crime? Don’t you want to punish me?"

  "What crime is that?"

  "Assaulting a federal officer." And then I kick him in the nuts.

  I’ll give the warden this: He doesn’t go down. He staggers back, red-faced and wincing. He gets his breath back while the guards whack me like a piñata until the candy comes out. And by candy, I mean, not candy.

  After a while the warden kneels and lifts my head off the floor. "You win, Mr. King. You get an overnight stay." He taps my forehead. "You’re going to talk to my men, and you’re going to tell them everything—your deepest fear, your favorite color, your grandmother’s social security number. You’re going to tell us where you’ve been for six months, why you’re here now, and what you thought you would accomplish. Everything."

  I make a sound that ends in a question mark.

  "Yes," he says. "Everything."

  Picture it from above, Dear Reader, say from a huge, invisible eyeball floating above the plains. From 10,000 feet, the Ant Hill is a gray dot in the middle of a huge blank square on the North Dakota map, a cement speck surrounded by half a million acres of treeless prairie. Drop a few thousand feet. You make out a single road heading toward the heart of the Ant Hill. And then you make out concentric rings that the road pierces: the outermost ring is just a chain-link fence, easy enough to drive through, but the next two inner rings are taller, reinforced, with sturdy gates. The road ends at the innermost ring, a cement wall twenty feet tall. Inside the ring is an oval of cobalt blue, a manmade lake. Beside the lake is a gray cooling tower like a funeral urn, then the cement dome of the reactor building, and half a dozen smaller buildings huddling close. The familiar shapes of the tower and dome, repeated in nuclear power plants across the globe, have always put me in mind of mosques.

  The Antioch Federal Nuclear Facility
was built in the ’80s, designed to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium for the hungry guts of America’s ICBMs. A few months after Soliton’s arrival, however, a freak accident shut the plant down. (Freak accidents became a lot more common after the Big S touched down, and we would have had to stop referring to them by that name if they hadn’t created so many freaks.) Before the plant could reopen, Soliton’s adventures had (a) ended the cold war, and (b) provided a need for a new kind of jail.

  So they renovated. You couldn’t see much of the work on the surface. But that’s the thing about ant hills.

  The guards drag me through approximately 3,000 miles of tunnels. I could be wrong—they’d smacked me around quite a bit. I’m just happy that I haven’t blacked out or thrown up.

  They toss me into the cell. I’m expecting a sarcastic line from the guards—"Welcome to the Ant Hill," perhaps—but they disappoint me by merely slamming the door.

  I pull myself up onto the bunk and lay there for awhile. There’s a toilet, a sink, and a cardboard box holding a roll of toilet paper. There don’t seem to be any cameras in the cement ceiling—I’m too low a threat for the expensive rooms.

  My stomach rumbles.

  "Jesus, hold on a minute," I say.

  I pull myself into a sitting position, put my hands on my knees, and take a deep breath. "Okay," I say. "One, two—"

  My stomach lurches, and a ball of peach-colored goo flies out of my mouth and splats against the floor. It looks like Silly Putty, but it gleams with silvery veins like snail tracks. It’s still connected to my gullet by a long, shiny tail, and I can feel the stuff shifting in my belly. "Gahh!" I say. Which means, roughly, Hurry the hell up.

  The long stream of putty reels out of my stomach and out my throat like a magician’s scarf trick. The glob on the floor grows as it absorbs mass, becoming a sphere about ten inches in diameter. With a final, discomfiting fwip! the last of it snaps free from my throat. The sphere starts to quiver like a wet dog, flinging silvery flecks in all directions.