Immobility

by Brian Evenson

  Horkai winced at their touch, groaned.

  “Awake, then?” asked one of them, a ruddy man with a wispy beard and a pockmarked face. He didn’t wait for a response.

  They balanced him on the edge of the table a moment, muttering back and forth to one another, then gathered him up more securely. The ruddy man came around behind him. He worked his arms under Horkai’s arms and locked his hands over Horkai’s chest. The other two made a kind of chariot for his hips and legs. They were larger than the ruddy man. One was black haired and the other brown haired, but otherwise they were seemingly identical in appearance: brothers, maybe twins.

  “Still getting your bearings?” the ruddy man asked from behind him, his breath warm against Horkai’s ear. “Can’t imagine what it’s like to be frozen for so long. Nor what it’s like waking up.”

  “It’s terrible,” Horkai said.

  “Of course it is,” said the ruddy man affably. “But you’re awake now,” he said. “Oleg, Olaf,” he said. “Might as well do this. He’s not getting any lighter. Down to the end of the table and off it on the count of three.”

  Horkai braced himself, but it didn’t seem to lessen the pain when they lifted him. The ruddy man’s arms felt like they were cutting him in two, each line of contact like a band of fire. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. How can I make it stop?

  “Knus, get the door for us, will you?” said the ruddy man, his voice abrupt with effort. “It’s the least you can do.”

  “All right, Rasmus,” the technician said, and Horkai watched him pull the door open. The others, grunting, lumbered awkwardly across the room, maneuvering him through the door and out.

  Beyond the door was an access hall. It was wide and long, the floor made of concrete that was weathered and cracked. The walls, concrete as well, were falling apart and roughly patched, holes covered with warped half sheets of plywood smeared with tar. The ceiling was also plywood, a series of layered sheets, the gaps filled with something that looked like tinfoil but had a bluish sheen. It was propped up here and there with lengths of pipe, some still gray with grease, others mottled with overlapping ovals of rust.

  “Doesn’t look much like it used to, does it, Josef?” said Rasmus. “We’ve done our best to keep things going, but I’m the first to admit it hasn’t always been easy.”

  “We’ve kept up the important things,” said either Olaf or Oleg.

  “The things that matter,” said the other brother.

  “Time, the great destroyer,” said the first. And both brothers laughed.

  “How long has it been?” asked Horkai.

  Rasmus’s steps stuttered, and Horkai dipped in the brothers’ arms as they tried to compensate, the jostling causing him a fresh burst of pain.

  “Knus didn’t brief you?” asked Rasmus. “He was supposed to.”

  Horkai had to wait a moment for the pain to subside before he could respond. “Knus and I had a bit of a misunderstanding,” he admitted.

  “I heard you tried to kill him,” said Oleg or Olaf, raising an eyebrow.

  “We all heard that,” said Rasmus. He smiled. “Should we be worried, Josef?”

  He acted as if he were joking, but there was an undertone in his voice that made Horkai wonder. But why would they be nervous about me? he wondered. I’m paralyzed.

  The hall ended in a sort of garage door painted brick red. The paint had peeled away in places to reveal bare metal. A large hand crank was to one side.

  “Olaf, help me hold him,” said Rasmus. “Oleg, take care of the door.” Rasmus inclined his head to Horkai, gave a tight smile. “Josef, we’ll have to go outside. It’s not as bad as it was before—not here, anyway—and in any case, we won’t be out long. But we’ll still have to move quickly. There’s no reason to be nervous.”

  “Why would I be nervous?” asked Horkai.

  “Each minute out there is a day we won’t live,” said Olaf.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Rasmus, but whether to him or to Olaf, Horkai couldn’t say.

  He might have continued to question them, but at that moment the black-haired brother let go. Olaf grunted and planted his feet, while Rasmus tightened his arms around him and pulled back. Horkai screamed and passed out.

  * * *

  WHEN HE CAME CONSCIOUS AGAIN, it was to hear Olaf say:

  “—not so tough now, is he?”

  “Looks can be deceiving,” Rasmus responded.

  Oleg had managed to roll the door up five feet or so. He rolled it up another foot, then turned around. Horkai groaned, as if just regaining consciousness.

  “Awake? As time goes on, you’ll probably feel less pain,” Rasmus said.

  “Probably?” Horkai said.

  Rasmus smiled. “No promises,” he said. “To be honest, we don’t know all that much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Door’s open, time to go out,” said Rasmus. “Action not words, friend. Olaf, you’ll have to walk backwards. I’ll let you set the pace. Oleg, close up quickly and then catch up with us.”

  They moved forward and through the opening. Outside was a ravaged landscape, ruin and rubble stretching in every direction, the ground choked in dust or ash. Remnants of buildings, mostly collapsed. The sky was bleak with haze, and a wind blew, hot and indifferent. All of it was pervaded by a strange, unearthly silence. Olaf, Horkai suddenly realized, was holding his breath. Looking up, he saw Rasmus had his mouth closed tight, too. He heard a crunch as the metal door slid down behind them, then Oleg’s footsteps as he came rapidly alongside Olaf, helping take Horkai’s weight.

  They traveled maybe fifty yards, maybe slightly less, Olaf and Oleg moving backwards crablike and quick, Rasmus pushing them forward until they came to a web of metal girders and shattered glass. Beside it, behind a broken stretch of pediment, was a hole and within it a set of granite steps leading down into darkness. It was into this that they took him, down to a thick metal door and through it, down a winding rusted iron stairwell and into the remnants of an old library, mostly a wreck now.

  The bottom level was lit by a strange glow, an artificial light of some kind that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. The light was pale, just enough to see by but little more. He saw a crowd of perhaps two dozen people, all middle-aged, who began to whisper back and forth as they came in. Rasmus nodded to them, but quickly moved past and to a scorched wooden door on the other side of the chamber.

  The room inside was the same, the walls aglow, though perhaps more feebly so. It contained a desk with a single chair behind it. Three chairs faced it.

  They carefully deposited Horkai in the chair behind the desk, and he spread his palms flat on the desktop to keep from falling. Then they took the three chairs facing him.

  “Comfortable?” Rasmus asked. In the dim light, he looked odd, his outline fuzzy, his eyes pooled in darkness and barely visible.

  “That’s not exactly the word,” said Horkai, his discomfort only slowly receding.

  Rasmus nodded. He looked to Oleg, then turned to look at Olaf. “Where should I start?” he asked. And then he looked at Horkai. “Knus didn’t tell you anything?”

  “Who is Knus?”

  “The person who woke you up,” said Oleg. “The one you tried to kill.”

  “Can’t you keep anything in your head?” said Olaf.

  “Now, boys,” said Rasmus. “He’s been asleep a long time. It’ll likely take him a while to find his bearings.” He turned to Horkai expectantly.

  Horkai started to shake his head, stopped abruptly from the pain. “He just tried to make me guess my name.”

  “And did you guess it?”

  “We didn’t exactly get that far,” said Horkai. “I don’t like guessing games.”

  Rasmus sighed. “Knus was just following protocol,” he said. “He was doing his best to help.”

  Horkai didn’t say anything. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Oleg and Olaf smirking at each other. Or at least he thought it was a smirk;
in the low light it was hard to be certain. Meanwhile Rasmus had his fingers tented beneath his chin and, attentive, was staring at him.

  * * *

  “I SUPPOSE YOU’RE WONDERING why we woke you, Josef,” he finally said.

  “Among other things,” said Horkai.

  “It’s simple,” said Oleg. “We need you.”

  “For what?” asked Horkai.

  “All in good time, Oleg,” said Rasmus. He turned to Horkai. “Yes,” he said, “that’s true. We do need you, Josef. But that’s hardly where we should begin.”

  “Do I know you?” asked Horkai.

  “Excuse me?” said Rasmus.

  “Is that my name? Why do you keep calling me by it?” asked Horkai. “Are we on a first name basis? Do I know you?”

  “No,” said Rasmus, dragging the word out. “I don’t exactly know you. Or rather, I was introduced to you years ago, but I don’t exactly remember that. It’s something my father told me about. You used to know my father, back when he was in his thirties. He talked about you sometimes. He trusted you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lammert,” Rasmus said. And when Horkai didn’t answer added, “Last name, Visser. He knew you,” he said. “He found you.”

  He turned the name over in his head. Lammert. Did the name say something to him? Could he picture a face? No, not exactly, but there was something there, some resonance, a glimmer. “Of course I remember Lammert,” he said to Rasmus, not lying exactly, but not exactly telling the truth either. Rasmus nodded, still watching him. “How is he?” Horkai asked.

  “Dead,” said Rasmus. “But, then again, most people are. He’s been dead for a long time, ever since I was a child. He would have been sixty-three this year.”

  “How long have I been stored?”

  “Thirty years. Give or take.”

  “Thirty years?”

  Rasmus nodded. “That’s why your memory’s faulty and your nerves are off—they haven’t been in use for three decades.” He looked curiously at Horkai. “How much do you remember about storage?” he asked. “Is that part of your memory hazy, too? Storage isn’t meant to be long term, is normally just a few weeks or months, rarely more than a year at most.”

  “Why would you keep me under for so long?”

  Rasmus looked at him strangely. “What do you remember?” he asked.

  “Most of it,” Horkai lied. Why did he feel compelled to lie?

  “Such as?”

  “Just begin from the beginning,” said Horkai cautiously. “As you say, I’ve been stored a long time. It won’t hurt me to hear even the parts I already know again.”

  Rasmus looked at him for a long time, then slowly smiled. “All right,” he said. “As you wish.” Placing a large hand on each knee, he began to speak.

  4

  “DO YOU REMEMBER THE REASON you were stored?” Rasmus asked.

  Horkai didn’t bother to answer. Rasmus swallowed. He seemed nervous somehow. Why? wondered Horkai. What am I failing to understand?

  “Obviously there’s something wrong with you,” said Olaf.

  “Your legs, for instance,” said Oleg.

  Rasmus nodded. “The legs are a part of it,” he said. He licked his lips. “I learned all of this from my father,” he said, his eyes flicking momentarily away. “And many years ago at that, when I was very young. If I get some of the details wrong, that’s why.”

  “All right,” said Horkai.

  “At some point you were exposed,” said Rasmus. “I’m not talking about a minor event, about brief ambient exposure like we just went through outside. According to Lammert, you were close enough that the light must have shone right through your skin. Close enough that by all rights you should have died.”

  “But you didn’t die,” said Olaf.

  “At least not completely,” said Oleg.

  “Be quiet, you two,” said Rasmus. “Let me do the talking.” He turned back to Horkai. “What did happen,” he said, “was that you lost all your hair, every last bit of it. On the side facing the blaze, your skin was charred to a crisp. And then you lay there. For how many days and nights, who can say? Until someone found you.”

  “Your father,” said Horkai, thinking at the same time, Did this really happen? What really happened?

  Rasmus nodded. “Lammert. He thought you were a corpse at first, but you moved. He was sheathed, but still couldn’t stay out long if he wanted to stay alive. But there you were, half your body blackened, exposed for days, unconscious, but still alive.”

  “And then he—,” started Oleg.

  “Shut up, Oleg,” said Rasmus, then turned back to Horkai. “He stood you up and shouldered you and carried you back is what he did. He installed you in a secure ward—we still had such things in those days,” he said, turning to Oleg and Olaf. “He attached you to an IV and waited for you to die.”

  “Only I didn’t die,” said Horkai.

  “Not exactly,” said Rasmus. “In a way, you didn’t die. In another way, you died over and over again. Your throat would fill with fluid. Your breath was at first sticky and then rattling and then it would stop completely. Sometimes for hours, apparently. And then, minutes later, hours later, seemingly dead, you suddenly would cough up dark clots of blood and start breathing again. It was terrible to watch, my father said. It was like death was toying with you, killing you and then bringing you back again. He used to describe how he watched you, how once he even went so far as to drag your body away to dispose of it, only to find, once he was already well on his way down the hall, that you were no longer dead.

  “And then, after days and days of this, weeks of hesitation and fumbling along the border between life and death, something changed in you. It terrified him. Over the course of a few days, your ruined skin sloughed away to reveal unblemished, hairless pink flesh beneath. A day or two later, you opened your eyes and spoke, just as if nothing had happened.”

  Horkai nodded. “What did you think?” he asked.

  “Me?” said Rasmus. “I didn’t think anything. I wasn’t there. I was just a child.”

  “What did your father think?” Horkai asked.

  “My father was surprised,” said Rasmus. His cadence was like that of someone telling a well-rehearsed story. “He thought that at the very least all that exposure should have ruined your mind, that if nothing else, it should have made your brain sizzle in your skull and driven you mad.”

  “But your mind wasn’t affected,” said Olaf.

  “You were fine,” Rasmus admitted. “You seemed to be doing all right.” He looked down at his hands. “Had this happened now instead of then, you would have been in trouble. You would have been decapitated or burned. But my father wasn’t superstitious.”

  “There were explanations,” said Olaf.

  “Science can explain anything,” said Oleg.

  “Or could,” brooded Rasmus. “Nowadays, who knows? Science doesn’t really exist anymore, at least not like it used to. It was designed not for this world but the world before it.” Rasmus grabbed hold of the chair’s arms, straightened up. “Where were we?” he asked. “Oh, yes. In time you seemed fine, okay, as impossible as that was. But even early on there were slight signs, nervous twitches, moments when you stumbled, when you lost feeling in your feet and toes.” He looked again at Horkai. “I learned this all secondhand, of course.”

  “You can’t blame him if he has some of the details wrong,” said Olaf.

  “It’s been thirty years, after all,” said Oleg.

  “Shut up,” said Rasmus, turning to them. “You both talk too much.” He turned back to Horkai. “Does any of this ring a bell?” he said.

  Horkai thought. Did it? No. The past was a blur, hard to make out. But, ever cautious, he nodded.

  “I wasn’t there,” said Rasmus again. “Don’t blame me if a few of the details are a little off. And above all, don’t blame the messenger,” said Rasmus. He licked his lips. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “You sur
vived a blast that you shouldn’t have survived, but you’re suffering from a degenerative disease. It started with tingling and numbness in your toes and then progressed to an absence of feeling in your feet. Then you lost control of your feet. Slowly it crept up your legs. Eventually you’ll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility.”

  “Why was I stored?” he asked.

  “For protection,” said Oleg.

  “To save you,” said Olaf quickly.

  “That’s right,” said Rasmus. “We’ve been storing you, for your own good, to save you from being paralyzed. We’ve kept you stored, waiting to make some progress toward curing you. Before we thought of storing you, we gave you injections in the spine to slow the progress of the nervous degeneration. It’s a necessary process, but also painful.”

  “Exceptionally painful,” said Olaf.

  “It couldn’t hurt more,” said Oleg.

  “I’m afraid,” said Rasmus, “that for your own good we’ll have to give you an injection soon.”

  Then there was silence, Rasmus waiting, staring expectantly at him.

  “You’ve woken me up because you’ve found the cure?” asked Horkai.

  The two brothers laughed.

  “Not exactly,” said Rasmus. “I wish we had, Josef. I really do.”

  “Then why wake me up at all?”

  “Because we need you,” said Olaf.

  “We have a problem,” said Oleg.

  “There’s something we need you to do,” said Rasmus.

  “What?”

  “All in good time,” said Rasmus. “But first things first. He reached into his pocket, came out with a syringe. He broke the plastic casing off the needle. “I hate to do this, but it’s necessary. Let’s get it over with.”

  * * *

  BEFORE HE REALLY UNDERSTOOD what was happening, Olaf and Oleg each had him by an arm and had dragged him from the chair to fold him over the desk, pushing his face down flat against it. Rasmus’s hand was groping at his back, dragging up his shirt.