“Whom,” Mr. Skald said.
“We don’t want you to waste anybody,” said Mr. Crane who’d recovered sufficiently to speak.
“I’ll do the talking, Bart,” Mr. Skald said. He didn’t sound happy. “As I was explaining, this is a courier job—”
“A courier job?”
“Yeah. Like, you carry shit from one place to another,” Mr. Crane said bitterly. He sucked a lemon wedge.
“You want me to mule?” Manson said. “I don’t mule.”
“But we don’t want you to mule.” Mr. Skald loosened his tie. His cheeks flushed.
“Okay, what do you want?”
“We want you to be a courier.”
Manson bounced the pen.
“There is a man in New York…”
Manson smirked. There was always a man. Occasionally a woman, but usually a man and usually it was Manson’s job to kill him. Manson preferred it that way because she preferred simplicity. Simple business was safe business.
“You must go to this man and acquire something from him. It’s important.”
Manson said nothing. Obviously it was important. Or at least important to them. Otherwise, why were they wasting time in a titty bar talking to a denizen of the lower kingdoms?
“So…can we do business?” Mr. Crane said.
“Yeah. We can do business.”
They talked business in an abstract manner, on the remote chance someone had worn a wire or sneaked a bug under the table. The fee was named and arrangements made. Everybody had a few more drinks and went home happy.
*
Unfortunately for the lads, in the course of performing due diligence (which included digging up a lot of dirt on the parties involved), she encountered several individuals who clued her in to the true nature of her assignment. In light of this information, she decided to put paid to her association with Skald and Crane and switch teams.
Eighteen days later, Mr. Skald and Mr. Crane were ash and Manson maintained possession of a locked and sealed space-age cylinder that contained the secrets of the cosmos. She went looking for Isaac Creely, Man of the Pearly White Teeth and a Thousand Excellent Suits.
Interlude: Doomsday Variations
NARRATOR TJ (UNIVERSE GAMMA) RECORDING 1:
Dad and his cronies call it the Rorschach Engine. That’s the code name, anyhow.
The final product is half a decade from market, minimum. They’ve recently graduated from baboons to terminal cancer patients. That’s how I make the list. Also, Dad’s a big wheel and he’s desperate. He shouts at Mom. Repeats “inoperable.” One day they argue in the kitchen and he smacks her in the eye. Mom picks up her marbles and says adios, muchachos.
The gang of whitecoats goes to town.
They stick me with needles. Load me into a coffin and hammer on the lid. I watch videos. Cartoons and warped stuff that starts out like cartoons, then changes. Giant cockroaches. Bloody piles of maggots. Soldiers blown to smithereens. Babies starving. Sharks churning the water red. Driver ant swarms over men staked to the ground. Tsunamis. Volcanoes.
Nightmares afflict me. The ocean is a source of terror.
The doctors hit me with inkblot flashcards. Reams of cards. They ask questions about what I see. They ask me to draw pictures. I draw black holes; find out later that the entire test population drew black holes. Proves Dad’s suspicions about unified consciousness, I suppose.
I get more nightmares. Cumulus clouds join my expanding list of phobias.
Dad tries to explain what a nanoprobe is, how it can be designed to self-replicate inside the body and ordered to repair damaged cells. Nanogenics, melanoma, quantum mechanics. Whatever. Somebody please explain what’s up with my cartoons.
My brain tumor shrivels and disappears.
I still have migraines and nightmares. Something bad happens with another patient. Then another. Hush-hush, of course. I never meet any of them. I never find out exactly what the problem is. Dad mentions a 20 percent survival rate, but I’m too young to understand the implications. Nobody on the research team volunteers an explanation. We plow forward, business as usual.
Even after I’m cured there’s work to be done. Could be a relapse. Could be unforeseen side effects. Could be subsidiary applications to the procedure. Could be a pile of money to be made. And we know what eventually came of those grandiose schemes…
RECORDING 1 CONT:
…the only surprising thing about the Rorschach Project getting shut down is the fact nobody is indicted. The program never stood a chance. Beyond the abysmal success rate with human test subjects there is the appalling rash of suicides and cases of insanity among the staff. A couple unrelated disasters overseas involving nanotech drive a spike through its heart.
This unpleasantness coincides with outside pressures no one could’ve foreseen. After decades of argument, Congress repeals a ban on stem-cell cloning. The competition beats Dad’s team to the punch with a cheap, low-risk procedure to correct defective genes that cause certain types of cancer and Alzheimer’s.
The nation is enduring its worst economic recession since the 1980s. This problem is exacerbated by the costs required to maintain the new Martian colony. Defense against global terrorism siphons away the remaining funds.
Dad’s ruined. Because of the project’s shady reputation, nobody will touch him with a ten-foot pole. Last time I see him alive, I’m slogging through my junior year in Stanford. He texts me out of the blue, demands a face-to-face; somehow discovered through the grapevine I’ve been asking questions about the project. We have our squalid showdown in a filthy coffee shop on the waterfront.
Dad’s a drunken wreck, interchangeable with the bums fishing for cigarette butts in the veranda ashtrays. He wants sympathy, he wants forgiveness. Mostly he wants me to forget I ever heard of the project much less was its star attraction.
To tell the truth, I’m more than slightly fucked up at this point in my life and I don’t have a drop of sympathy to spare. I suspect he’s done something horrible to me and he doesn’t deny it. Can’t deny it, not knowing the origin of his miracle cure as he does and how the research team got their grubby hands on it in the first place. Be a while before I learn the sordid details, yet I’m intuitive. Oh, my, am I ever. I don’t need the whole story to recognize a hose job when I get one.
I’m at college on a full scholarship and I got the scholarship because I’m a freak of nature. So we spit the inevitable epithets—he’s a monster, I’m ungrateful, blah, blah, blah. He starts bawling and I realize the lump in his coat pocket is a handgun, and also the impression its bullets are intended for me except he doesn’t have the guts to finish what he came to do. The combination scares me out of my pissed-off adolescent shell enough to listen quietly when he blubbers he doesn’t care if I hate him just don’t go poking around the project. It’s dead, I’m alive, count my blessings and amble on. Dad says he gives the world a decade and a half, tops. Nukes, plagues, climate change, asteroids, a rogue supercollider, invading aliens—one or more of these impending scenarios is going to fuck us over. He honks his nose on his sleeve and lurches out of the coffee shop. Soon after, he’s in the belly of a rosewood box.
Poor Dad. Just a victim of his good intentions. Will Rogers’ heart and Oppenheimer’s instinct for destruction. Oh, you motherless sonofabitch!
His prediction is off, too. We only have seven years left.
It’s okay. I’m on the job. Shortly after his funeral, I realize something has changed—a pinhole opens into my subconscious. A pinhole, then a doorway. I can see for miles and miles, doo-dah. Years and years. Centuries. Light years and light years.
An organization called Limbus is to thank for these revelations. If you’ve never heard of this group, don’t be surprised. It’s older than dirt and human superstition. I’ve a hunch Limbus played an important role in making sure that the first amphibian crawled from the primordial slime. Don’t quote me; it’s only a hunch.
Limbus entered my life at a crucial moment and showed me how t
o control the Rorschach Engine, how to step through the doorway and survive. You might say they introduced me to my true self…selves.
There are so many worlds, so many imperfect versions of myself trying to do good by doing evil. So many imperfect versions of T.J. playing the fool, playing the victim.
Each woman is prey to the beast.
Each world has a problem unique in its particulars. Death by fire, death by ice, death by any number of methods.
The one true iteration of T.J. lies in a stupor at the heart of the shattering kaleidoscope. Could she save us if we woke her? No, not even Limbus’ unimaginable power and resources can stop what’s coming.
Besides, Limbus doesn’t care whether a particular Earth, or universe, lives or dies. The heat death of the universe is inevitable, as is its eventual resurrection. Time is a ring.
For them, the journey trumps the destination—they move a pawn here, a knight there, and every victory or loss is a footnote in their master thesis. Acquisition of knowledge for the sake of knowledge is their sole aim.
I’m playing a different game.
END RECORDING
Chapter 3 (Thom)
Because she’d dwelled alone since the infamous split with the famous R&B singer, no one had a chance to ask Thom J. Easley why she decided to commit suicide. She would’ve shrugged and said, I am sad. Unbearably sad and unbearably tired.
Before she burned the photo albums (along with the house), she rolled a White Widow blunt and had a good long look at her wallflower self from high school. Under the influence of million-dollar modeling contracts, magazine covers, perfume and jewelry endorsements, and a cavalcade of super-hot pool boys, she’d forgotten Plain Jane.
Who could blame Thom for letting Plain Jane slip her mind? Plain Jane’s face, at its most defined, was the face of any number of girls you’ve seen in a yearbook or a newspaper spread of serial killer victims. The crime essay pictorials where hookers and coeds and young housewives blur together.
She loved her cat; she planned to get a cat; she loved her boyfriend; she fully intended to land a boyfriend. Her parents missed her, although Dad didn’t cry during the news conference after the cops recovered the body from the river or the landfill, and Mom dabbed her eyes even though there didn’t appear to be much need. She was a good girl, she loved her cat and her boyfriend.
Clad in bra and panties and sandals, she swayed out the front door of a three-million-dollar mansion. Flames burst the windows and bits of glass shattered on the steps during their slow motion saunter to the car. A scene eerily similar to a perfume commercial she shot in ’08 before her star waned in the pop culture firmament.
Sleeping pills washed down with a flute of Cristal would’ve been easier.
The sharp highway bend near the house isn’t named Deadman’s Curve; it’s a nameless part of the Angel Hills access road. There’s a cliff on the other side of the guardrail and a forty-foot plunge to rocks and surf. Jane punched their Birkenstock into the accelerator and sent the Jaguar over the edge and into the great beyond.
“You’re so vain,” said the woman in the passenger seat. A younger, stolid version of Thom. Plain Jane made manifest. “You probably think this is your idea, don’t you?”
Time crystalized. The sun coagulated until it became a stone lodged in amber and shone no more.
*
Thom didn’t snuff it on a whim. She put in plenty of work beforehand and came to the decision honestly. Her arc formed a neat circle.
She’d arrived at a few esoteric conclusions at the end of this particular rope. The tabloids were right more often than one might suppose. The conspiracy-theorists had a better batting average than they’re credited as well. Thom’s brother signed on to the Young Earth Christian movement in high school. He swore the Moon landings were fake; a guy in his church said the Van Allen Belt would cook astronauts unless their rocket had three feet of lead plating. Didn’t make a lick of difference that Van Allen tried to explain how rockets overshot the belt in an arc. Brother Ted’s tinfoil hat bullshit made Thom laugh. Anymore, she wasn’t so smug. Charles Fort, Edgar Cayce, Ramtha, Alex Jones, the Warrens…It may be I owe you guys a big fat apology.
The world was a twisted, screwed up hothouse. Take her circumstances: The child beauty pageant star who allegedly got murdered. Raped and strangled, found stuffed behind a boiler in the basement of her parents’ home. She grew up to become a supermodel under an alias. According to celebrity death truthers, her murder was one of many hoaxes routinely perpetrated by the federal government to achieve murky goals.
Conventional wisdom says her row to hoe should’ve been easy. She was the youngest of three kids. The baby. Mom and Dad were over the notion of babies, though, so she didn’t get the usual perks. Brother Ted was the eldest. Tina a year and a half behind him. Then Thom after a gap of six. Nobody ever accused little Thom of being an accident, but she had to be. When she showed up in the oven, Mom had signed with her old corporation and begun making inroads toward a second act of life comeback. Thom’s arrival derailed that narrative.
She suffered a personality deficit prior to her third (and final) year in college—as in she didn’t possess one of her own. This wasn’t an indictment of her family or fallout from a gas lighting boyfriend or an expression of low self-esteem or self-loathing; it’s a straight fact. She existed in a state of permanent disassociation. Nothing stirred her blood. Politics, fashion, entertainment, sex. None of it. The prevailing winds carried her where they willed. She bent like the reeds to the dominant opinions of more outgoing classmates and peers. She blended in. Active camouflage became second nature, and eventually, primary nature. Thom didn’t know why it took so long to come out of her shell. Deepest part of her had been waiting, or sleeping, and one day it awoke to the flicker of a photographer’s fearful eye.
Thom had drunk half a bottle of wine when she found a strange business card in her purse one afternoon. Few were aware of her burgeoning habit (which included several pills daily and way too much grass) and she scarcely acknowledged it to herself. Although this day was different; this day she’d sunk closer to the muck at the bottom of her life and she stared at the card as if it were a revelation from a god or a devil. A company called Limbus offered jobs to the downtrodden. Toll free, act now.
She might’ve set aside the bottle and dialed the number. No way to be certain—several hours went missing from her memory banks. She recalled waking in the stairwell of the apartment complex, her eardrum ruptured. As a consequence, she was haunted by weird aural hallucinations (whispers and static) that persisted for a week. A veteran of blackout drunks, Thom promptly discarded the incident and the card.
*
The official legend of Thom Easley’s miraculous discovery as “the next hot thing” went like this:
Grant Jensen shot freelance photos for indie magazines and modeling companies. He met Thom at a Halloween party. Thom had put on a top hat and a ridiculously elaborate silk vest and he snapped her as she made a wry (and according to her classmates, uncharacteristic) kiss at his lens. Jensen later sold that semi-candid pic for a quarter million dollars and a ticket to the big leagues.
Thanks to his fortuitous snapshot, the world soon learned a secret. Thom Easley proved to be a perfect chameleon, or a pristine slate. Drabness was her social camouflage, her intrinsic genius. She inhabited whatever role her handlers and clients proposed. A smudge of eyeshadow, some gold jewelry, and green screen Pyramids as a backdrop, and she became an Egyptian Queen; apply furs, prop broadsword, and a chainmail bikini and she was a barbarian princess. Regency lady, Lady Godiva, nude Celtic goddess, the smoking hot girl next door, whatever the character, she came alive in a way that caused the fashion industry’s collective pulse to race. Thom sold it in photographs and she sold it on tape. The costume of the moment constituted her identity to the atoms of her bones.
As for the matter of day to day existence, those moments when the cameras zeroed in on her essential, mundane self, she solved the
problem by simply erasing vanilla Thom (aka Plain Jane) and assuming the role of an international star. Voila.
*
Thom blacked out when the Jag hit the water, its nose vertical, like an elevator with its cables cut. She torpedoed through the windshield. Riptides are common along that stretch of ocean; one swept the wreckage into the depths. Nobody witnessed the accident, although the police hunted for her after they discovered the mansion burning to the ground. The Coast Guard joined the operation, to no avail. She was listed as missing and presumed deceased.
“You died, lady,” said the beach bum who eventually fished Thom’s waterlogged corpse from a tidal pool about ninety miles south of the accident. He carried her to his shack where he administered a cure-all of bread crusts dipped in wine broth. She remained semi-comatose for three days.
“I used to be somebody in the world,” said the bum whose name was Jules. Tanned and lanky and gray, although only middle-aged. The whites of his eyes swam with busted veins. He wore a Panama hat, a Woody Woodpecker shirt with most of the buttons lost, cargo shorts, and mismatched flip-flops. “You were somebody in real life. I’ve seen you on a poster at the bus station.” He smoked a generic cigarette.
A town sat in from the beach behind the cliffs. Jules swept the boardwalk and emptied trashcans at the tavern. The proprietors repaid his labor with pocket change, six packs of Natty Light, and cheap cigarettes. “You died. You were dead. A dead mermaid.”
“Some mermaid,” she said.
“Magical. You were unearthly. You glittered like a rainbow trout in the sun. I thought some deep-sea fish had floated in with the tide. Your skin was actually gray. Like a dead seal. I saw how gray when I came closer and the light changed. An oil slick on the surface…Must have been oil.”
Thom, still bedridden, checked herself in a chipped hand mirror—the crusted slashes would heal with possible scarring. She was gaunt (even at the high-pressure zenith of her modeling career she’d maintained a voluptuous figure) and pallid as kelp. She didn’t recognize the cold glint in her own eyes and that was disturbing. The swimsuit calendar tacked to the door claimed she’d been in the water for two and a half months. Two and half months? Her post-crash memories were of bone-numbing pressure and a green gulf that blackened into infinity as it pushed into her eyes and flooded the sockets. Then, being reborn on a cot as the ghosts of bathing beauties regarded her with frozen smiles.
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 35
