“Thought this wasn’t a tour,” he said, ignoring her use of present tense. “Now where’s the way out?”
“One captain fights the Kraken and wins. He sells its tentacle to the opium dens.”
Justin reflexively laughed. “What for? Sushi?”
“No, these are the Chinese,” Sarah said.
“Oh, so they smoked it.”
“Or they shoot it up.”
“I was kidding.”
From the darkness ahead, moans surfaced, like a dozen people writhing together in nightmares and wet dreams. The smoke thickened until Justin could taste it, a fishy flavor, smoothed with opiates. Light from computer monitors flickered. Shadows moved.
In another small chamber, Sarah briefly illuminated more PCs and old servers of dust. Justin glimpsed network cables and, entangled, a ribcage.
“This makes no fucking sense,” he said.
“That’s the point. Look…” The ghostly smoke dissolved in the beam of Sarah’s light, and the orgiastic groans of pain sounded now like old pipes shutting off.
In one corner of the tunnel, an opium den had been slapped together decades ago. Above the top bunk, an iron-slatted window disrupted the masonry pattern and grout, which, horizontally, was perfectly parallel, yet vertically offset, giving the parallel lines the illusion of a slant on their peripheral ends.
“Here’s the foundation of Specht’s building,” Sarah said, slapping the wall under the grate.
“This isn’t the way out,” Justin said. “Tunnel’s a dead end.”
Sarah said, “His basement is the seal.”
“Wait—the what?”
“Where he keeps the women.”
“Keeps?” Justin raised his eyebrow, hoping she’d clarify her tense. The second question came a second late, so he didn’t ask it. He just skipped to the part where he called Theresa’s name through the bars.
Darkness answered back.
With more cunning than Beatrice was able, Sarah pick-pocketed him. He only realized what she’d done when he heard the cell’s opening tone.
“Hey!” he said, and he swiped it back from her. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She said, “Did you Google yourself?”
“None of your business.”
“Google Theresa Van Ravenhorst.”
Justin narrowed his eye.
Sarah said, “Seriously, that’s her last name.”
He didn’t want to be the butt of her joke, but had to be. In case Theresa was somewhere close. So he typed.
The GPS searched briefly before locating her in Specht’s elevator. She wore only her panties, and some tears. As if she had just run out of her navel-gazing. As if Justin were still running down the stairs to catch her.
In a blue arc, the cell phone zapped Justin’s palm. He yelped, dropped it face-up. Its speaker began to crackle and whine like a fax machine, and in the beam of cellular light, the atmosphere curved into the top of an hourglass. Dust particles and Justin’s very skin cells spiraled down in galaxies.
He couldn’t run. Not that he didn’t want to. Just that the force altered the very chemicals of human instinct.
The phone’s Bluetooth icon switched on and Justin felt himself draining into the hourglass, grain by grain.
On screen, in the elevator, days ago, Theresa dropped her phone, which was ringing.
XI
She gasped and stepped back, covering her breast with her hand. Justin caught his balance in the elevator and almost vomited. It moved in unexpected diagonals and spins.
“Where are we going?” he asked, not quite sure what he meant, as if he were finishing a conversation that he didn’t remember starting.
She turned to him, and he saw that tears had wetted her breast. “To see a doctor.”
“But Specht’s upstairs.”
The elevator whirred and wobbled around them, and Justin could tell it was falling. The lights flickered, and their shadows on the walls cast interpretive patterns.
With a tear, Theresa said, “Beatrice was right about you.”
“No, you were,” Justin said, finally gaining some equilibrium, but not quite centered enough to say the right things.
“We’re not meant to be together.”
“Hey, look—”
“That’s why he separated us at birth,” Theresa continued.
Justin’s brow flinched.
“You were the lefty.”
“What the hell are you—?”
“I was the righty. And he said I would never be symmetrical because I’m a woman. So he cut me off.”
“That’s bullshit, what—”
“Here,” she said, and picked up her phone. She navigated through a flash of menus, then held up the device for him to see. A movie played, in black-and-white twitches and tics.
Specht, not a day younger than he already was, wore a lab coat and a goggle over his eye. On his examination table, a man with utterly black skin lay sliced like a mushroom. The doctor sampled the man’s brain cells, also infinitely black.
Then in leaps and starts, he moved across the room to a petri dish fruiting with some kind of human tissue.
The dish was labeled Chaos - pluripotent.
With a scalpel, Specht sliced the petri-dish flesh, drew the symbol for infinity in it. The symbol inked with blood.
Into the symbolic incision, the doctor dropped the dark man’s brain matter. Through his microscopic lens he watched it latch onto the lacerated experimental growth, watched the whole mess metastasize in time-lapse photography, black entwining pink like a tattoo. The pink divided itself into separate cells that would soon deviate from symmetry and gender like some sort of deformed Rorschach.
Soon, two distinct human fetuses formed, but conjoined, one with the blackness on its chest and arm, the other fused to the blackness by the side of its face.
“Beatrice calls it the sisterhood,” Theresa said. “Mom and Henry never…she was just a test subject. But it happened the second he fertilized that dish: she had the twins, Sarah and Beatrice, without ever getting pregnant.”
Justin said, “You’re a freak.”
She said, “And what are you?”
He had no comeback.
“Remember Mom’s saying about holes?” Theresa asked.
The elevator gyrated and Justin almost grabbed for the handrail. He dropped her phone, which clacked on the floor.
“Holes don’t exist, she said. So she could eat as many as she wants.”
Justin shook his head. “I don’t remember that—I don’t remember any of that.”
“Oh right. The boy who only remembers Christmas.”
“All I remember is doctors and tests,” he said. “Lasers, scanners—fucking biopsies. That’s it, that’s all. Yeah, maybe a kid or two would sing a Christmas carol with tinsel on his wheelchair, but I never had any parents.”
“Yet you have a bellybutton.”
His eye found the blank spot on her stomach.
“My navel’s up here,” she said with the same sarcasm as a women diverting a man’s eye from her breast. Instead of suggesting eye contact, she pointed to the black tissue he knew to be hidden beneath her bangs. The bangs of her wig.
“I’m the seal,” she said. “That’s what he needs me for.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m what seals the spell.”
The car shook, fell, moved horizontally. “Fucking stop this elevator!” Justin cried, and for no other purpose but convenience, it stopped.
The indicator light illuminated the symbol for infinity, which had once been pi.
“He’s going to make the universe symmetrical,” Theresa said, and she stepped through the opening door.
“Wait!”
He caught the briefest glimpse of the dark space she was entering. Specht’s eyeglass gleamed once in the light. His scalpel gleamed too. Justin heard the sound of drums and flutes.
Then Beatrice knocked the wind out of him and shoved him into the handrail a
t the back of the car, all with one kick.
He crumpled to the floor.
Beatrice’s hair had fallen out in patches. Her left eye bulged. Its pupil dilated an abnormal black.
In squeaks and croaks, she said, “Hey there, Righty Tighty,” and then she reached into the elevator and slapped the close button. She withdrew her webbed fingers as the door slid shut.
Jostling and flickering dark, the car started to move again. Justin, trying to breathe, scrambled to the door and banged on it. He stepped toward the console to punch the emergency stop, but he stepped on something plastic.
Beneath his foot, Theresa’s cell phone came alive. The GPS showed her in Specht’s basement, letting the doctor slice off the black part of her face, which he then grafted onto Sarah’s burn marks and Beatrice’s scars, so that the self-inflicted sigils trapped it, bound it, though the black pieces tried to wriggle out.
With the squeals of a fax machine, the cell phone warped the air into half an hourglass. It began to suck Justin down, and again he couldn’t leap away, was compelled not to.
As he dematerialized into the hourglass, now gone, the elevator opened on the lobby. The phone—just from the force of disconnecting—jolted, slid, and caught in the door as, days ago, Justin emerged from the stairwell to find the cell, but no Theresa, who was gone.
Ding!
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
—A Zen Koan
He woke in the opium den to the smell of the sea drowning him. Immediately he felt turned around.
Over the edge of his bunk, he regurgitated, but wore some kind of mask, which, at first, had felt like his face—until it filled with vomit to the gill.
He tore it off. Some kind of Nazi gas mask. One bug eye, like Specht’s. Some kind of long, fleshy proboscis siphoning from a hookah, the scummy fishbowl of which featured coral castles, seaweed, and murky brine.
On the other side of Specht’s wall, drums beat in no particular rhythm. Women screamed like nonsense flutes.
Any birds of flight in Justin lay sedated, and he felt his bunk floating calmly overseas, wooden creaks and cracks.
He vaguely wondered if he was meant to recognize one of the screams from behind Specht’s wall, but quickly forgot when someone on the bunk below him moaned.
Rocking, tilting, Justin hung over the edge, not even proud enough to wipe the bile from the gray in his beard. He barely noticed the reek and oil of his body odor, let alone his nudity.
The person below him, a man, did not wear a gas mask. He texted on a phone, his eye blank with the glow of LCD. The man had recently soiled himself. He wore an earbud connected to the cell. Under the music from Specht’s altar, the headphones emitted metarhythms and riffs.
Justin lost his balance and tumbled out of his bunk. He felt as though he’d fallen upon a mattress instead of wooden edges and dirt.
Rolling onto his back and laughing quietly, he exhausted his breath, then chuckled dryly on nothing more than the flexing of his diaphragm.
Cradling his stomach, which had started to seize, he stood up. He stretched and patted his bunk, searching for something. Strange, to have no clue what he was looking for, but to know that it was there and that he would recognize it immediately.
His hand bumped the hookah, which he pulled off the bunk. The fishbowl was empty. No tentacle.
He patted his bunk again. Tried lifting himself up for a better view. He fell, doubled over by a clenching abdomen.
He began to shake and sweat.
“[sic] fhtagn,” he said. “[sic]…”
He couldn’t find the jar. The jar with the tentacle.
His bunkmate remained transfixed by his cell. Justin searched around him, moved him, shoved his stupid leg. Nothing but excrement, dusty as a rat’s.
Justin stole his bunkmate’s phone, and the man’s arm fell with a clunk on the wood. He lay in sleep mode.
On Justin’s right arm, the inky design began to cringe and tighten and stretch the entire blackness tattooed across his chest, his genitalia. The lazy eyes in it openly wept.
Justin stumbled out of the den, into the tunnel, off to find more jars, more tentacle, more fhtagn. “God—[sic]…fhtagn…”
“Fhtagn, fhtagn,” the extra mouths of him chanted, and he punched the word into the phone without care.
Did you mean fhtagn? the search engine asked.
Justin pressed Yes.
The phone located some of the drug, but couldn’t zero in on it. He tried to configure the view, but it only offered turn-by-turn instructions. Staggering, dizzying, he followed the map.
He barely felt the shattered glass beneath his feet, just felt the hot wetness of blood.
Along the tunnel, women sat in cubicles, clicking mice and stroking QWERTY keyboards, their faces blank and backlit by brand new plasmas. Onscreen, all manner of activity flickered. One woman watched a journey through the Mandelbrot Set, the strange bulbs repeating along pixilated antennae.
Another user stared at a live MRI, the many Rorschach inkblots throughout an abnormally bilateral brain.
The cell phone voluntarily showed Justin blueprints of the computer kiosks, of diagrams and setup tutorials. A user manual showed how the cables—all black and pulsing—plugged into the humming machines, and how they plugged into the users as well, into the self-inflicted symbols that covered their bodies.
To demonstrate the wiring harness, the phone showed an exploded view of a woman at her computer, her brain and nervous system veined black like some foreign cheese, the same black as the cord in her belly. As if the blackness had grown along the skeletal shell of her.
Farther down the tunnels, and around twists and turns, the black cables hung in teats and cocks for suckling; men and women tugged to draw strange fluids. They were all naked and plugged into every port of each other as well, a web of bodies and limbs shuddering in a single network.
Justin stumbled over legs and heads and polyps, around strange pillars where humans had melted together into the black flesh, forming cysts of tissue, teeth and hair.
A machine, like some kind of industrialized Freddy-Krueger glove, raked at the flesh. It raked up blood and screams.
Pistons, red-hot, hammered, burned, and released the horrible stink of charred skin.
Suckling here and there, Justin swam through the fleshly intranet, wherever the phone would lead. His patch of inky skin, his tattoo, stretched into flagellum and he swam through the petri-dish smear.
Particles of him dispersed and squiggled around the culture, only to be eaten and excreted by hydras. Foreign particulates squished through the very fabric of him, his very matrix, like sand separating toes, only enmeshing with him through and through.
The organisms streamed like gelatin through a hole in Specht’s wall. Justin, too, flagellated under the irregular archway of brick, the many pieces of him.
Here in the doctor’s basement, the sea of flesh blackened to the color of the teats and cocks and computer cables. Dermoid cysts chewed on their own slimy hair.
An intense light suffused the murk and brightened its pink mottling. Perfectly circular and bright, the brilliance radiated from somewhere below.
Justin found Sarah first.
She floated in suspension inside one of the wooden cells where, once upon a time, men had broken women’s spirits. The sea of black matter had bonded to the alien sigils burned into her skin; in fact, had been bound by them.
The right-hand wall of her prison—her right, not his—featured a mirror and Sarah’s reflection, in which the black matter had been bound as well. Bound in mirror symmetry.
Sarah danced and screamed to the cacophonic percussion. Her body and reflection morphed, amoebic yet parallel.
Following the phone toward fhtagn, Justin swam on. He ached for the sweet seawater smoke of the drug, and the sweet dreams. The encompassing dark culture ached for it too. It cringed when he cringed, gagged when he did.
Parts of him began to evolve. Into plankton. Into minno
ws with black fins.
A woman who he thought to be Beatrice floated in the next wooden cell, next to a mirror of her very own. Her face had scaled, narrowed. Her eye bugged out like a frog’s on one side of her head, and on her reflection’s head too. The wattle on her neck lay in folds, or gills.
Like Sarah’s, Beatrice’s scars—her sentence fragment—had healed to the black tissues that filled the basement. Ligaments and membranes tried to tear free from her, but couldn’t, were fused.
Beatrice’s eye shot open, and her scaly arm latched onto Justin. He tried to tear away, but black nerve endings wormed toward him, suckered onto him, and then spread beneath his skin in creepy-crawlies. He felt the tingles and pricks of foreign tendrils interfacing with his cells.
His tattoo grew and interconnected with the growth, until he was a black, spastic ganglion through which neurons fired and filled him with sensory data. He felt the industrial claw in the tunnel, raking at the bodies, felt the intercourse and the sodomy out there too. He saw what the computer users saw—saw screens and screens of sacred triangles and tetrahedrons and tori of electromagnetic fields. Camera-phone footage dated 2012, 2011, 2010, and so on, people recording their talking heads or their skateboard tricks or their child’s birth, or a girl taking a shower in a stall outside. So much footage that nothing was unique except for the variety of mutation in everything—from moment to moment nothing the same but nothing unique: cellularly, spatially—slice a mushroom and it is no longer whole but infinitely dissected.
Justin, through his new neural network, even absorbed the chemical chains of fhtagn, which men and women smoked somewhere out in the tunnels and exhaled into vents like gills. He tasted the phantom of ocean and fish and tentacle, and he felt the general anesthesia of it numbing everything except the digressions of his mind, the collective consciousness, the dreams of a billion mouths gnashing meat and teats for milk. He traveled light-years on neuron nebulae, and lit infinite universes with single flights of fancy.
Some kind of giant scalpel cleaved the surrounding ooze, sliced him from its fibrous connectors and freed him. Tweezers, so gargantuan he couldn’t see the end of them—so long that the end of them blurred into the far distance above—they pinched him gently in the middle and extracted him, lifted him up and out, and into Specht’s museum of dissected, plasticized copies of a single man. The Mushroom Man.
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