The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  Some other cars had been deserted, their doors wide open, hinting at the panic of nonresidents as unearthly stillness set in. They may have been scrambling around trying to understand the situation, or may have made an intelligent beeline for the border. In any event, I had yet to see an ambulatory soul and didn’t necessarily expect to, any more than I expected that rescue wagon, fire engine, or police were en route to the intersection. Meanwhile, the excuse of distancing myself from this grisly scene lent new momentum to my fool’s errand at city center.

  Fewer vacancies and a higher class of chain eateries and clothiers and druggists distinguished the environs of municipal offices, with tenacious mom-and-pop holdouts like Koerner’s, at least till recently, on side streets. And though City Hall’s front entrance was also on a side street, my knees felt rubbery at the thought of being targeted from the many windows in the wall of former workplace overlooking the main drag. But what made me believe that sentient humans were still in the building? Any more than I should believe the Department of Labor was open, two blocks beyond?

  In my scatterbrained state, the simplest evasive maneuver burst into my head like an epiphany. Why not turn left at the next corner and parallel Commercial till my hypothetical enemies were behind me? Then repeat the detour on the rebound after tugging on the locked door at Unemployment and confirming I’d come here for nothing, on the worst possible day to loiter in Occam?

  The only address to merit a farewell glance on my alternate route was Abdul’s. Better feast my eyes now, since I’d never see it again. Hadn’t sunk in on a gut level yet that all this would shortly be gone. But what was going on in there? The lights were on, and people were moving about. Christ, what did it take to close that place down, if our local apocalypse couldn’t?

  I zigzagged past the several idling cars between me and a clearer view of who was minding the store today. The several guys on both sides of the counter were preposterously overdressed for kitchen work. In three-piece suits, no less, restricted to a tedious Waspy palette of opal-blue, charcoal-gray, black. Whatever these rash folk were up to, I had to prevail on them to bail right now, even if I wasn’t exactly practicing what I preached. Meanwhile, something familiar about their wardrobe’s range of tones was bothering me, and before I’d set foot on that side of the road, the charcoal-gray clotheshorse had spotted me and was barging outside, and all became too lucid.

  Deputy Mayor Nathan Atwood stopped short halfway across the sidewalk and ogled me incredulously. I did pretty much likewise, minus his posture of entitlement. Then his eyes narrowed as if studying me through crosshairs. He’d deceived and betrayed me time and again, yes, but I saw some portion of myself in him just the same, and couldn’t hate him quite yet. And if our alleged kinship made me a passable judge of what he was thinking, its gist must have been, “Why the hell, of 90,000 people in this town who might not be a zombie, did it have to be him?”

  A quick survey over Atwood’s shoulder established that everyone else inside also belonged at City Hall, that Abdul’s sensible employees had indeed lit out, and that self-serving high officials were helping themselves to a free lunch. Not that minor pilfering under the circumstances rated any moral indignation, but it still made for a telling mark of character. I suppose in defending themselves they’d say they couldn’t deal incisively with a dire situation on an empty stomach.

  Our standoff dragged on for a restive while, I with one foot on the curb, he with greasy fingers clutching leaky pita crammed with inexpertly chopped lamb. I toyed with gesturing broadly to encompass greater Occam and greeting him, “Now are you convinced?”

  A smoldering that started in his eyes and inexorably reddened his whole face dissuaded me. His empty hand rose laboriously to point at me in accusation, and as if connections inside him were burning and circuits were shorting out, his brow and cheeks empurpled before he could bellow, “None of this came as news to you! Not at any stage. You had to be in on it. You engineered it somehow. Nobody else saw it on the horizon. Your fault!” He brandished his sandwich toward me. “I’ll see you hacked up in this for what you’ve done, you fucking bastard!” Killing the messenger still counted among the sports of the elite, didn’t it?

  Atwood’s tirade had drawn the attention of his cronies, but they weren’t on the move yet, maybe waiting for him to stop blocking their view of me before they decided how to proceed. Atwood, however, had seized up with misguided wrath, powerless to pull loose from the immobilizing sight of me. Every bird of ill-omen on my watchlist, despite his efforts to ignore them, had come home to roost this morning, and by all indications his sanity couldn’t contain them. Or was the guilt too much? For a few tolerable seconds I peered into his bulging, untethered eyes and grimly marveled, Between the two of us, who’d ever have suspected that successful, straight-arrow Atwood would go off the deep end first?

  As if these stinging sentiments were audible, he spat out a garbled exclamation, flailed unseen chains away, and stormed back into Abdul’s, waving his arms and denouncing me at a volume that bounced off the walls on both sides of the street, lunch still clenched in viselike fist. His audience included Humphrey Westcott in the opal-blue linen, and burly associates in black sharkskin or woolens, with buzz cuts or ponytails, hatchet features or deceptively baby-faced.

  My face-to-face scrutiny of City Hall’s plainclothes goons was coldly reciprocated as Atwood berated and gestured, one arm and then the other swinging vaguely backward at me, raving at the least, presumably, that I’d been banned from showing myself around here, and at worst, that I had masterminded Occam’s catalepsy. His words came muffled through the plate-glass storefront, as did Westcott’s afterward, though the city collector’s murderous glare while jabbing forefinger at me and then contemptuously flinging a balled-up paper napkin left little to speculation.

  Rationally, he’d have ordered that I be captured in fit shape for them to interrogate me on what I’d done and how to undo it. But did anyone in there currently qualify as rational? And even if they did, nobody seemed inclined to ply me with gentle persuasion, and by the time they concluded their enhanced techniques were ineffective, I’d be much less of an irritant dead.

  My tingling throat and weak limbs underscored the shifting feel of this day from bad dream to full-fledged nightmare, as municipal henchmen, with rancor plainly stoked at having to ditch lunches half-eaten, lumbered for the door. In my last glimpse of Atwood, as I began to swivel about, the well-modulated spokesman for fiscal responsibility, for calm and restraint, for preserving normality at any cost was staring holes into me and gleefully cramming messy sandwich into his leering mouth as if already chomping on my flesh inside pocket bread. Now I could say without reservation that I hated him.

  And as I dashed for my life, my uppermost thought was, Christ, what an imbecile I’d been! No one else to blame for persisting in the folly of my march to Unemployment. Despised myself as well for hatching no better exit plan than reaching the car with time to start it and step on the gas before pursuit caught up, pulled handguns from holsters, and blew out my tires. I wasn’t trapped in this nightmare to the extent of fleeing in slow motion, but didn’t need, and couldn’t bear, a glance behind to verify that athletic goons were going to outpace me blocks away from setting eyes on the Taurus.

  Think! At the corner, I’d be turning onto Commercial in the direction of my car, right? In my frantic state, that seemed to be the move anyone would expect, never mind that nobody actually knew where I’d parked. So instead, I charged into the intersection, crouched down, and crept hidden amidst the permanent gridlock. Knew I was continuing up the side street when my crablike scuttling met autos head-on rather than broadside.

  Paused after half a dozen car-lengths to hazard a peek over my shoulder. No heavy footfalls or breathing, no verbal exchanges beset my ears. Too good to be true, this childishly facile escape from professional bruisers. And so it was.

  With fists on his hips, Westcott, from atop the roof of a minivan in the intersection, had m
e squarely in his baleful sights. He comported himself like an overseer of a chain gang and may have been tracking me for a minute or two, content to let me fumble on in false hope till I beheld him and spoiled the game. He let loose an extraordinarily shrill whistle, then affected a broad gesture like an overhand pitch that ended with a finger stabbing at me. I read impatience in his eyes as they followed one and then another of his attack dogs, who weren’t closing in on me soon enough to satisfy him, but who were hurrying with irreproachable stealth, especially for big guys. I ducked low and scurried onward as an aimless end in itself, with even less of a future than racing headlong for the safety of my car.

  27

  Was starting to fixate on the yellow centerline between my feet when a displaced manhole cover eclipsed it and tripped me. I nearly toppled into my salvation and doltishly shrank away before seeing it for what it was. One of two white-and-orange striped traffic cones had been squashed under the chrome bumper of a barge-like Buick partly blocking an open manhole. One tire balanced on the precarious brink of rolling in. Below was my only port in this storm, the only hideout where I couldn’t be cornered. Refused to lift my eyes from headlight level as I twisted about and plunged in feet first. If goons were going to grab me, what good would it do to watch them lunge?

  The overhanging bumper made for a tight fit, but stress inspired once-in-a-lifetime agility. Clamber recklessly, and I might sprain an ankle. Clamber timidly, I’d be dead for sure. The instant my head sank beneath the pavement, two goons were converging on me from around the nearest vehicle. At first I climbed down several iron rungs in a concrete cylinder like a well, and from there a metal ladder propped above the lip of the concrete descended to the floor of the sewer.

  The base of the ladder sat in the muck, braced against the edge of a fieldstone shelf that must have dated back to the original construction. I hopped backward off a low rung and onto the shelf, kicking over the ladder to lie flat in the sewage, where it all but submerged.

  Nobody was coming after me yet. From the most vehement snatches of conflict sifting down, I gathered that Westcott wanted me “flushed out” immediately, but his hirelings were balking because he didn’t appreciate “how much these suits cost.”

  Criminal of me not to make the best of this head start. Invested precious seconds squinting left and right, not trusting in my sense of direction to guide me toward the channel underlying Commercial Street. Grimaced sympathetically as I hustled by four waxen sewer workers whose hardhats, filter masks, overalls, and rubber boots were uniformly tinted by the pervasive “color.” Plastic lantern flashlights had landed at their feet, beams of yellow light crisscrossing randomly and diluted by the sickly ambient glow that rendered them extraneous. Above the fingertips of upheld arms and the naked portion of upturned faces between mask and helmet flickered that combustion of unreadable tone, in sharper outline than back on the ginkgo-lined avenue.

  Maybe the DPW had sent down crews after receiving too many reports of luminous storm drains across Occam, or maybe these men had been performing routine maintenance till the first ubiquitous pulsations of “color” had spooked them toward the ladder. In either case, they’d been enveloped as implacably as citizens of Pompeii.

  The bickering from above grew more heated the farther I receded from it. My progress, meanwhile, was hindered by some unnatural slickness on the damp glowing stones, as if they themselves were writhing under my shoes, pushing up against them, slowing me to a squeamish shuffle. I also had to steady my legs when the ripe, obnoxious funk that went with this territory proved much more rancid, charnel, dizzying away from the manhole. Compelling me to pull handkerchief from back pocket and press it to my nose and mouth for the duration.

  The raging debate around the manhole had escalated into three or four voices versus Westcott, and one shouted down the rest. “He took away the fucking ladder, but here’s what I’ll do for you!” I instinctively flattened against the curving wall, and it too was damp and oily, seeping right through my jacket, and more palpably motile, as if a sheet of moss were exerting itself. Spaced with cold deliberation a heartbeat apart, six deafening gunshots, at the shallowest angle through the half-blocked opening, tore into the muck or ricocheted off my ledge or the ledge opposite. A frustrated henchman, I gathered, was telling Westcott with ammo that he was fed up and really didn’t care if he missed me or killed me, only get off his case.

  Couldn’t decide whether shrieking like a victim was a good idea or not. A moot point, since I could do no more than tremble. As dumb luck had it, I was unscathed, but one of the DPW workers had quaked as a bullet slammed into him. He neither collapsed nor even stumbled from where he stood rooted. No blood oozed out of the exit wound in his lower back. Instead, a pencil-thin beam of bluish light sprang from his apparently hollow shell and dissipated with a weaker and weaker outline into the general glow of nameless color, brazenly violating earthly laws of physiology, optics, physics. I could only hope that he was too far gone to know he’d been punctured clean through.

  My feet began working again as I came to believe the shooting was over. Then a resurgent squabble, trickling through my slowly fading tinnitus from a figurative mile away, showed that Westcott still wasn’t satisfied. He insisted they go and lug me back dead or alive, end of the world or not, screw them if they didn’t like it, he’d have their heads for this, who the hell did they think they were? Their concise answer, after a hesitation just long enough to accommodate a shrug, was one more gunshot, followed by blunt silence. Hardly would have occurred to Westcott that his IQ was worth no more than his respect for a change in the wind. Had he felt otherwise last summer, we might none of us, he included, be in our undesirable positions.

  His dapper thugs’ aversion to stains on the material guaranteed they were staying aboveground. But I plowed forward, equally confident they weren’t above some impromptu target practice if I popped up among them. For now, they were engaged in solemn conference, and before I reached the junction with the more cavernous tunnel below Commercial Street, the reverberant splat of a dead bulk into the sewage made plain what they’d been discussing. I didn’t bother looking back. For reasons of my own, I’d become as callous as they had about ditching certain corpses.

  Before going any distance under Commercial Street, all sense of how far I’d traveled, of any correspondence in my surroundings to street-level landmarks, was null and void. Throwing me off further, the air felt overloaded with the chromatic presence, and I blamed my smothering malaise on its baleful surveillance, weighing on me, pressing more and more of the clarity from my head.

  I had no darkness down here to be afraid of, small comfort though that was, especially as the light by which I navigated was painful and fatiguing as it slid erratically up and down the spectrum. How early had the “color” claimed these sewers for a beachhead, an occupied territory, a staging zone? Where better for its rampant proliferation than in miles of neglected catacombs, where water from the reservoir collected after Occam had the use of it, where human hosts of particulate alien disposed of liquid and solid waste, itself rife with alien passenger that didn’t care if it parasitized organic matter living or otherwise? In fact, relative to the lurid glare around me, the “color” had been astutely secretive, shrewdly inconspicuous in the “surface world.”

  My bunched-up handkerchief scarcely filtered out the carrion stench. Had no great faith in its shielding my lungs from any buildup of gaseous organism. No stopping alien sentience if it wanted to convert me into an inert vessel like the sewer workers. The gash in my finger, from days ago on the Blasted Heath, leapt to mind and nearly triggered a panic attack, despite the illogic of judging it a more attractive target than my wheezing mouth and nostrils.

  But even my least founded anxieties underscored a valid point. I had to quit the sewers at first opportunity. Except I’d need a ladder to reach the bottom rungs in the concrete wells of manholes, and then how to lift a hundred-pound cover, supposing I did backtrack and fish out that ladder
I’d kicked into the filth? Suppose Westcott’s body had landed on top of it? One too many stumbling blocks for my beleaguered brain. I trudged lethargically on. Resigned to letting fortune smile on me in her own good time.

  Meanwhile, every chance look into the sewage helped vindicate my aversion to going back for the ladder. The muck, as it flowed almost imperceptibly toward some faraway treatment center, was in fine iridescing agitation like oil on a windswept puddle. No breeze down here, of course. Just the infestation, yearning vainly to rise skyward. Preferable to dip fingers or shoe into the mere bacterial poison of any other sewage in the world.

  The sewer system, I was discovering, did a poor job of duplicating the street grid, and that was good news. I must have covered several blocks already, but hadn’t had to ford any channels corresponding to side streets above, or else turn 90 degrees to stay on dry ledge, at a cost of plodding ever farther from my car. I still had to watch my step as crusty pipes of diameters from tin can to bass drum broke through the wall at haphazard intervals and spewed waste from corroded mouths to splatter onto my walkway and dribble down shallow runnels into the main flow. Couldn’t tell if chisels or a century’s erosion had carved out the runnels, which sometimes widened into pools where trash formed miniature dams.

  I also had to duck or else bang my head against bundles of PVC tubes, the property of Occam’s utilities, poking from scraggy holes in brick wall or from canker-like irregularities in the ceiling, and following arbitrary angles into other misshapen holes. This was coming to seem less a sewage system than a stupendous jury-rig, and though well aware of which street was overhead, I harbored a morbid suspicion I was lost. And in the broader analysis, I was. I may have overshot the Taurus already, and even if I hadn’t and my intuition started tingling in proximity to the manhole nearest the car, how was I going to break out of here? In the absence of any answers, I shambled on.