Immobility

by Brian Evenson

  He felt a sharp stab of pain in the center of his spine; then Rasmus said, “We’re in.” A pressure began to build, which translated into flickers of pain running up and down his spine and growing stronger and suddenly bursting in his mind. And then he was screaming, bellowing into the desk’s metal top. Crazed with pain, he managed to get his hands under him and pushed off with all his might. The brothers were crying out now, hanging on to him as he was clutching at them to keep from falling, twisting between them. He caught a glimpse of Rasmus, a frightened expression on his face, the syringe hanging in his hand, its needle discolored with blood. He struck out once with his forehead and broke Oleg’s nose, then again in the other direction and both brothers collapsed, leaving him with nothing to hold on to. He came down hard and lay writhing on the floor.

  * * *

  IN TIME THE PAIN FADED. He lay there exhausted, panting. Rasmus was pressed against one wall, unhurt, looking down at him but keeping a safe distance. Oleg lay groaning and slumped on the floor, holding his face, blood oozing through the gaps of his fingers. Olaf was unconscious, a dark bruise already starting to show on one side of his face.

  “I warned you it would hurt,” said Rasmus in the same tone one might use to scold a child.

  “Seems like it might have hurt them almost as much as it hurt me,” said Horkai, trying to keep the pain out of his voice.

  “He’s a monster,” whined Oleg, his voice muffled through his hand. “We shouldn’t have woken him.” It was strange for once not having one brother speaking immediately after the other.

  “Hush,” said Rasmus. “He didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “He just didn’t know his own strength. It was the pain that did it, not him. Aren’t I right, Josef?”

  “Probably,” said Horkai. He pushed his splayed legs straight, started to drag himself back to the wall.

  “There’s no reason to be like that,” said Rasmus. “We’re on your side, Josef.”

  “And what side is that?”

  “The good guys,” said Rasmus, and offered his toothiest smile. “We’re the good guys.”

  Olaf was groaning now. His brother crouched over him, shaking him slightly, dribbling blood on him.

  “All for the good of the cause,” said Rasmus, following his gaze. “Though let’s try not to have the same thing happen next injection, hmmm?”

  But Horkai didn’t answer. He was busy thinking. When he finally did speak, it was to ask, “If I’m really paralyzed from the waist down, why did I feel that in my legs?”

  Rasmus just held his gaze. “You didn’t,” he claimed at last. “You just think you did.”

  5

  YOU DIDN’T. YOU JUST THINK you did.

  They had left him alone in a room with a bed and little else. He was lying there in the dim light, trying but failing to fall asleep. You didn’t. You just think you did. Either Rasmus was telling the truth or he was lying. But he didn’t know Rasmus well enough to be able to read him properly.

  If he was lying, it meant that he, Horkai, had actually felt something, that there was some feeling left somewhere in his legs. That might mean the nerves could be repaired, that there was hope he might regain his ability to walk. Or it might simply mean that though the legs were paralyzed, the paralysis was not as extensive as Rasmus had been led to believe, that Rasmus wasn’t so much lying as simply unaware. Which wasn’t to say that Horkai’s immobility wasn’t progressing, that he wouldn’t lose, as Rasmus said, more and more feeling and finally become completely paralyzed. Only that it hadn’t progressed as far as Rasmus believed.

  So, one hopeful and one not-so-hopeful possibility. But if Rasmus was right and he hadn’t felt anything, though, it was more discouraging. It meant he couldn’t trust his own senses, couldn’t trust what he was feeling and, by extension, couldn’t trust what was going on in his own mind. The mind is a great deceiver. He might be experiencing a feeling that was real and he might not be—how exactly was he to know? Which ultimately made him wonder if the whole of his reality wasn’t suspect. Was there anything he could know for certain?

  Perhaps I’m still in storage, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. Perhaps something has gone wrong and I’ve begun to thaw and I’m dreaming. Perhaps this is all a dream.

  He pushed his thumb against his leg. He felt nothing in the leg itself, only in the thumb. He pinched the skin hard, and then harder still, until the skin was broken and the cut began to seep blood. Still nothing. And so he lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to find some reason to believe that the world exists.

  * * *

  BEFORE THAT, DIRECTLY AFTER THE INJECTION, he was with Rasmus, propped up again on his chair as if nothing had happened. Olaf and Oleg had left, doubtless to seek medical attention. His spine, where the needle had gone in, still throbbed slightly. It was not painful now, more a dull ache.

  “Are you wondering why you’re here?” asked Rasmus.

  “No,” said Horkai, still irritated. “I don’t much care. You’re the one who woke me. Tell me why or put me back in storage.”

  A flicker of irritation passed over Rasmus’s face but was quickly smoothed over, hidden. “Of course,” he said. “Josef, there’s something we need that only you can give.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Something’s been stolen from us. A cylinder. We need you to find it and bring it back.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why you? Because of what you used to be.”

  “And what, in your estimation, was I?”

  “You don’t remember?” said Rasmus, and shook his head. “Maybe it was a mistake to wake you after all. You were once a fixer,” he said.

  “A fixer,” said Horkai.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell? It means just what it says,” said Rasmus. “You were called upon when nobody else could solve a problem. You were willing to use any means necessary to make things right.”

  Horkai waited for the words to sink in, hoping for memories to return to his mind. But nothing came. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t sound quite right.”

  “I only know what my father told me,” said Rasmus quickly. “But why would he lie? You were a fixer, a detective of sorts. You are our last resort. The choice is yours: Either you can lend us a hand for a few days or we can put you back in storage. But if you don’t help us, the chances are good there won’t be anyone left to get you out of storage later on. We’re the ones who can keep you alive, and we’re the ones trying to find your cure. Do you want to risk losing us?”

  “I’m listening,” said Horkai.

  Rasmus smiled. “That’s all I can ask,” he said. He opened one of the side drawers of the desk, removed a rolled piece of canvas. He unfurled it, spreading it on the desk to reveal a crude map.

  “This is us,” he said, pointing at a black circle, the word ovo written over it. “We’re all that’s left of what used to be there, our numbers spread through what’s still standing of some of the university’s research facilities. There’s the lake, just to the west, and the mountains, just to the east. You’ll follow the mountains north about thirty-eight miles, through the ruined towns, and pursue the remains of the freeway across what they used to call the Point of the Mountain. You’ll pass the old state penitentiary and then, near the bottom of the slope, the remnants of the highway. Take that up the canyon eight miles or so, and you’ll find it.”

  “Find what?”

  “The place where they keep the cylinder.”

  “How will I recognize it?”

  “The cylinder? Red letters on the side. It’ll almost certainly be kept in a subzero environment. At least let’s hope so. It’s no use to us if it isn’t.”

  “No, the place, I mean.”

  Rasmus grinned, showing the tips of his teeth. “You’ll recognize it because of the huge hole bored in the side of the mountain.”

  “And how do I get in?”

  “They don’t know you,” said Rasmus. “The rest of us they’ve seen. But you,
you can pass, they’ll be willing to let you get close. They may even invite you in. After that, you’ll have to improvise.”

  “What do you mean, improvise?”

  Rasmus scratched the back of his skull, shrugged. “People have been murdered,” he said. “That’s what you risk,” he said.

  Horkai nodded. “And once I get there, I just find this cylinder and take it?”

  “You’re the fixer, Josef. Figure out how to make things right by any means necessary. Kill them if you have to. Kill them before they kill you. The cylinder is important, much more important than a life or two. Particularly if the lives in question are theirs.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” said Horkai. “Why did they take the cylinder?”

  “I’ve told you everything we know,” said Rasmus.

  After a long moment, Horkai said, “Another question.” He thumped one of his legs with his fist. “How am I to get there? I can’t walk?”

  Rasmus shook his head. “You’ll be taken there,” he said.

  “What’s in this cylinder?” asked Horkai.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Rasmus.

  Horkai shook his head. “I won’t go after it unless I know.”

  Rasmus hesitated for a long time. “Seed,” he finally said.

  “What kind of seed. Wheat or something?”

  “Yes, basically.”

  “What makes it special?”

  “It’s special because it’s been kept safe since before the Kollaps. It’s undamaged. We need it to start over.”

  Horkai nodded. “Who’d they kill?”

  “These people are ruthless,” Rasmus claimed. “When we had the cylinder, we had two technicians working on it. They were tied up and killed, their throats cut from ear to ear.”

  “And you want me to find out who among them killed the technicians and bring them to justice?”

  “That’s not what this is about,” said Rasmus, waving one hand. “Their deaths are something we have to live with. We don’t need revenge. What we need is the cylinder.”

  No, thought Horkai, there’s still something wrong. Why would grain be kept in a subzero environment? It doesn’t make any sense.

  Or maybe that was a method of storage, a way of preserving it that he simply wasn’t aware of? Hadn’t he heard stories of wheat grown from seeds found in the stomach of a man frozen in a glacier? Why did details like that come back to him and not the important things? Maybe there was a reason for freezing it, maybe even a reason Rasmus himself wasn’t sure about.

  In any case, the choice was clear. Either he could go along with it and try to figure it out himself or he could simply go back into storage, to the nonlife he’d been living for the last thirty years. What other choice was there? Illness or no, he didn’t particularly want to be frozen again.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m in.”

  Rasmus smiled. “I thought you’d see it our way. Get some rest. You’ll leave in the morning.”

  PART TWO

  6

  MORNING AND AWAKE AGAIN and after a moment of panic relieved to find he was still himself, still able to remember his name. Horkai, Josef. His doubts, his nightmares, held at a distance, at least for now.

  He lay on the narrow bed, staring at the bare and glowing concrete walls crumbling in places to reveal a network of dark rebar. What had the room been before? A large supply closet, maybe, or a small office. What time was it? In the artificial light, it was impossible to tell. He reached over and ran his finger along the wall; when it returned, it had picked up some of the luminescence. Some sort of phosphorescent bacteria or mold.

  He pulled himself to sitting, then forced his dangling legs to hang off the side of the bed. There was, beside his bed, a kind of makeshift desk: a metal shelf attached to the wall at hip level, a chair slid beneath it. He sidled down the bed until he was closer to it, could make out in the poor light a pad of paper and a dark stick, perhaps a pencil. There was nothing else in the room, not a single book.

  After moving to the very end of the bed, he found he could reach out far enough to grasp the door handle, which proved to be locked. Am I a prisoner? he wondered. Perhaps he had locked it himself when he reached for it; he looked for a button or some other device on the knob, but no, it was locked, and locked from the outside.

  Fair enough, he told himself. He’d nearly killed the technician, almost without thinking about it. He’d sent both Olaf and Oleg to the infirmary. There was no need to read anything into it. Perhaps they were just being cautious.

  He scooted back along the bed until he could reach the chair, pulled it next to the bed, heaved his way onto it. He could feel the jolt in his back and spine, but it wasn’t the same intense pain he’d been feeling before. His body was already adapting, learning to dampen out and process sensation, blot out pain. Soon he’d be more or less himself again, more or less human. And then maybe his memory would come back as well.

  Moving the chair over to the desk proved much harder. Without functioning legs, he had no way to scoot it along. At first he could push against the side of the bed and slide the chair away, but soon he was too far away to get any leverage and his own weight kept the chair from actually moving. In the end, he had to fall out of the chair and then drag it and himself along to the desk and then pull himself up into it.

  By the time he was sitting in the chair again, he’d bent one edge of the desk-shelf and cut his forearm. He felt exhausted. How would it be possible to travel forty-six miles like this, even with help? he wondered. Without legs, how could they expect him to go anywhere?

  What he’d thought was a pencil was a pen. He toyed with it, twirling it between his thumb and forefinger, and then lined up the pad of paper and wrote. The lines of ink, when they came out, glowed softly:

  What I Know

  1. I was stored for thirty years.

  2. I have been woken up to perform a task.

  3. Something is wrong with my memory.

  He stopped, then with his thumb brushed over the words “with my memory” until they blurred and became a glowing splotch. Something is wrong. He stared at the wall in front of him. With his memory certainly, but it was more than just that: there was something wrong with the world at large, and something wrong here as well. The locked door suggested as much. He stared at the wall and tried to see, on it or through it, something—some scene, image at least—from his past.

  At first nothing came. He closed his eyes, sighed. And then an image flitted through his half-dozing imagination that made no sense at all. He caught a glimpse, as if he were standing inside it, of a dome supported by pendentives, rising over a large rectangular space. It was made of stone, probably granite, and lit only from outside, by small slotted windows high in the dome itself. He could hear a sound like muffled laughter but when he turned toward it, it stopped, starting again once he turned back to the dome itself. The pillars, he saw, were moist, covered in a viscid gray substance that glistened where the sunlight struck it. There were paths of the same substance in the dome above as well, he saw, like snail paths, and there, at the very top of the dome, a rubbery agglutination the length and thickness of his forearm that, suddenly, moved.

  He opened his eyes, shook his head. Probably just fragments of a dream, he thought, no reason to think it was a memory. It didn’t make any sense as a memory.

  When he looked down, he saw his hand had been busy with the pen and had gone on doodling without him. On the pad below his list were several glowing sets of legs, independent of any bodies, each one carefully circled.

  * * *

  HE HAD TRIED TO BRING the image back, but it wouldn’t come, at least not with the vividness or clarity it had come the first time.

  He must have dozed off in the chair for a while, for the next thing he knew, he was startled awake by the sound of the door opening. It was Olaf and Oleg. They both looked resentful. A large bruise had spread over the right side of Olaf’s face, and Oleg’s nose was taped, both e
yes blackened and bloodshot.

  “He’s awake already,” said Olaf.

  “Probably not too eager to sleep after being stored so long,” said Oleg, and smirked.

  “What do you want?” said Horkai.

  “We want you,” said Oleg.

  “Time to go,” said Olaf.

  And then they were taking hold of either side of his chair, starting to lift it up. Olaf was, anyway, nearly tipping him out of it—Oleg had turned to the desk and was looking at the paper.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “That’s nothing,” said Horkai.

  “If it’s nothing, you won’t mind if he takes it,” said Olaf as Oleg tore the sheet off the pad and folded it up, put it in his pocket.

  He opened his mouth to protest and then thought, What does it matter? Without objection, he allowed them to carry him out.

  * * *

  RASMUS WAS WAITING FOR THEM, standing beside his desk, hands clasped behind his back.

  “You didn’t have to bring the chair,” he said.

  “He was already awake,” said Olaf.

  “And in the chair,” said Oleg.

  Rasmus shrugged. “Put him down over there,” he said brusquely, “and go fetch the mules.”

  “Mules?” said Horkai.

  “Hmmm?” said Rasmus, half distracted. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Good morning, by the way. Mules. They’ll take you there.”

  “Two of them?”

  “You’ll ride one and then you’ll ride the other.”

  He thought again of how difficult it had been to get from the bed to the chair. How would he manage to get from one animal to the other?

  “Will they have a handler?” he asked. “A, what’s the word, a drover?”

  Rasmus looked confused. “A what? What’s a drover, and why would you need one?”

  “Will I be at least given a map? Look at me,” said Horkai. “I’m a paraplegic. How am I to control two animals?”