The Man Who Melted

by Jack Dann

  “That's a matter of opinion, and taste.” Then, after a pause, Pfeiffer said, “And I'm certainly not out of touch.”

  Joan laughed and pressed closer to him, which he, quite correctly, guessed to be a gesture of condescension. But she was also overreacting to her claustrophobia. “These boutades are the last of the free,” she said, a hint of irony in her voice. “They own nothing, yet don't have to go hungry.”

  “They'll be counted when they need medicine,” Pfeiffer said.

  “No, actually, most just get sick or die. You see, that's the stuff of which heroes are made.”

  “Crazy.”

  “All of these people are on the dole,” Joan said. “It's a degrading life and they feel it. It gets a bit nasty hereabouts.”

  “Then let's get back on the belt,” Pfeiffer said.

  “That's just as dangerous, and we'll find a pod at Grenelle. We're almost there; I have an access permit.”

  “I think you're paranoid about the belts,” Pfeiffer said.

  “I don't think so. I was gang-raped last year during a rush on a main belt where I was doing a story, for God's sake. I had four technicians with me.”

  “What did they do?”

  “What could they do? They saved their respective asses.”

  “What were you doing the story about?” Pfeiffer asked.

  “The branglers who live on the belts and catwalks. They make up a whole subculture.”

  “Your heroes,” Pfeiffer said sarcastically. He expertly shouldered his way through a tight spot in the crowd. Joan held onto him and tried not to gag.

  “The branglers can't be classified as heroes,” she continued—a true act of will. “Most of them are on the dole. They pass their time on the belts, and barter.” I'm almost there, she thought, looking above the crowd at what she knew was Grenelle Complex. The complex consisted of two risors, each five hundred stories high; the uppermost levels looked down upon the smooth surface of the dome of the Right Bank. In fact, the Casino d'Abbe Bellecour could be seen by a practiced eye from that vantage. “You do know about black-goods barter?” she asked Pfeiffer.

  “Yes,” Pfeiffer said, “I know what's going on down here. I just don't choose to rut about in it.” He looked away from a smiling, toothless man shaking a turd out of his pant leg.

  “Anyway, they pick up the droppings from the belts,” Joan continued, oblivious to the bum as they passed—and lost—him in the crowd. “And, of course, some of them work the belts in tandem. Systemized muggings. Each clan's turf is, of course, clearly demarcated.”

  “I still think we'd be better off on the belts,” Pfeiffer insisted.

  “No need,” Joan said. “We're here.”

  They crossed the avenue to deposit their identification cards into an unmarked door slot; after a short wait, the door slid open and they stepped into a small, foul-smelling cubicle where they were carefully scanned. But once inside the crowded, deteriorating, high-ceilinged station lounge, they had no trouble finding a transpod.

  The pod was a transparent, albeit dirty, egg that swept them through a glassite tunnel and into the grid upon which was mounted the elevated Paris.

  Before them was the dome of the Left Bank, and then they were inside it, past what had once been the Tuileries, past the Rue Saint-Honore, the Place Vendome, the wide, tree-lined Boulevard Haussmann, and the Place de Crieur. Pfeiffer could see no appreciable difference between Right and Left Bank, for the space between ground level and roof dome was filled with the uroboros of the grid network, passtubes, and living modules: it was like looking into the organs of a great glass beast. But here, in the pod, Joan seemed noticeably less nervous.

  The Right Bank was a “safe zone”; its twin on the left was mostly slums. One was reminded of the Great Los Angeles Slums where it was difficult—at least, superficially—to tell the bad neighborhoods from the safe ones.

  All around them was a vertiginous rush of line and object.

  “This would seem the perfect place to make love,” Pfeiffer teased, his mood elevated. “Right here, in the glass heart of the world.”

  Joan let him touch her face and breasts, but she was thinking about Mantle, who was dying, but not for her.

  SEVEN

  Mantle could hear the crowd screaming outside as Pretre fixed the metallic cowl over the dead Screamer's head. Two other cowls lay beside him: crowns for the converts. Mantle had expected to hook-in first—after Pretre, that is—but three others preceded him. Each hook-in was a quick affair, lasting no more than three or four minutes, after which Pretre would remove the cowl and replace it beside the Screamer. After hooking in, the three other participants slumped forward, either unconscious or in some sort of trance.

  You can still get out of this, Mantle told himself, remembering his first Inipi ceremony when he was a child: sitting in the completely dark sweat lodge, listening to the medicine man explain what was to happen; that if anyone couldn't stand the heat to just say “All my relatives” and someone would lift up the tent covering and let you out; that it was no disgrace.

  Roberta took his hand and led him to the Screamer. There was a faint smell of urine and feces. After all, the man is dead, Mantle told himself. Pretre stank, too; it was a nervous sweat, not the clean sweat of an athlete.

  “Do you want me to hook-in with you?” Roberta asked. “It's up to you.”

  Mantle shook his head. I have to find Josiane alone, he thought, unwilling to share his past with a stranger. But I don't want to be alone….

  “All right,” Roberta said, “just sit or lie comfortably, whichever you prefer.” She caressed and calmed him as if he were a child or an impotent lover. “You'd be safer with me.” Mantle turned his face away from her. “You can still back out. It's not too late.”

  Mantle laughed softly and said, “All my relatives.” Roberta gave him a queer look, then shrugged.

  “Okay then,” Pretre said. “We will all be with you.” That said without sincerity. And he placed the cowl over Mantle's head.

  A quick intake of breath, then complete silence, claustrophobia. It's only a machine, you nit, Mantle told himself, then suddenly realized that he had no clear idea of the position of his body. He tried to move his legs, wriggle his fingers, but he couldn't seem to locate them. His thoughts were skeins of thread, unraveling, knitting together, becoming more tangled with every breath.

  Then he had the distinct sensation of looking down at his body; it was a shadow thing of black and silver. He could also see the Screamer's body beside his own.

  He waited, as if an eternal river were purling around him, touching him, flowing on its way, at the same time still and in constant motion.

  Something rasped. The sound jarred him but was somehow removed from him, miles away.

  It's only Pretre talking to Roberta, he told himself, relieved. But then he wasn't sure….

  Suddenly Mantle felt a lurching, and images quickfired through his mind, all silver and black: a little boy lying in a casket, a small boat, a ribbon of beach in the distance, a twentieth-century ocean liner crossing the ocean, a gaming room, and sound of bullets ricocheting, a large stone mansion, The Wizard of Oz—and so the images flicked through his mind, all foreign, meaningless.

  There was only black and silver, dark and darker; slowly, ever so slowly, everything was becoming gray and indistinct.

  The Screamer's memory was going.

  Could it be that dull? Could the play of memory and reflection be that uninteresting? It was somehow ironic, this simple winding down. How much grander to believe that the end will be cathartic, that for those few last seconds colors will be brighter, experience will be compressed, all the juice and pith tasted one last time, one last great sucking at life and then a slow melting into darkness….

  Yet, images still flicked through Mantle's mind's eye: the Screamer was still hallucinating, dreaming. Perhaps if there were at least some color, he thought…and then it struck him that this might be an accountant's examination of a past le
dger, each column of memories being balanced in the cold light of reflection. It was as if he were being guided through a museum of extinct trivia.

  Not with a bang but a whimper, Mantle thought. The old Nazi was right.

  Mantle's point of view shifted again. He felt as if he were outside the tomb; he saw everything as black and silver, shadow upon shadow. The tall, silvery olive trees reached upward into a black as deep as he could imagine. Among the trees had gathered the Screamers, ghosts of the dead. Their thoughts were the darkness, their breath the silver wind that carried Mantle….

  He heard them calling to him, tempting him, and he awakened to them as if they had been talking to him all along but he had been in too deep a sleep to hear them. They were calling him home, telling him that he was part of them. That he was a seed about to blossom.

  Another shift. Now Mantle was looking past the tomb, which was as silvery as the trees, and past the shadow-black congregation of the Crying Church to the guardians of the entrance to the Gulf of Frejus, called The Lion of the Land and The Lion of the Sea—beyond them was the sea, its waves like metal scythes, like blades cutting through the darkness.

  Suddenly there was only darkness and silence.

  Mantle was lost, adrift. If he was in someone's mind now, it was a completely dead mind, which would produce a straight line on an EEG: in the “eternal darkness,” as his father used to call it when the covering of the sweat lodge was closed and everyone plunged into dark. He felt as if he were back in the sweat lodge. It was the same now, and the Screamers talked to him as if they were spirits. Indeed, they were spirits that took on the shape of his father, who now sat before him. “You must come back,” he said. “Give yourself up and come home.”

  And Mantle felt himself being pulled away, gently but firmly: out of the imagined sweat lodge, past the Screamers among the trees, past the tomb and its congregation, past the guardian rocks and into the sea.

  “Father, no,” he screamed, trying to grasp onto something. “Help me.” But he was weightless and powerless, a gossamer thing blown into the water. It was like awakening from a dream and finding yourself in a nightmare. His screams were silent streamers. There was only the sea—undulating, extending infinitely—and just under its surface swam all the hideous creatures of the soul.

  They were swimming toward him.

  It's only a machine, Mantle repeated to himself as he floated, trying to comprehend that he was “really” lying beside a dead Screamer inside a stone tomb. Then he saw Josiane. She was floating just below the surface of the water and staring unblinkingly at him. Although her mouth did not move, he heard her voice: “Give yourself up. Come home and remember.”

  “Josiane, I'm afraid.”

  “The sea is safe and calm as death,” she said. “The creatures you see are your own fears. Leave them behind and come home.”

  “Are you dead?” Mantle asked desperately, but the snapping, silvery creatures closed in on him, swam around and beneath him, separating him from Josiane. “Josiane….”

  Growing bolder, hungry for their prey, they seized him with cold jaws and pulled him under.

  “I'm here,” Josiane said. “Don't turn away from me. Come back.”

  “I'm not breathing. Jesus God, Wakan Tanka….” But there was the sense of the dream, of the self in the dream sensing the self outside the dream. There was also the realization that all the thoughts racing through his mind were not his alone.

  I'm in the tomb beside the Screamer, Mantle told himself, trying to hold onto that and believe it, closing himself away from the voices he feared to hear.

  The sea was gone. Only darkness remained, the hot, sweaty darkness of a sweat lodge. And Mantle felt as dead as the Screamer inside of whom he was trapped. He was afraid of bicameral thinking and schizophrenic breakdown, the melting of the soul; but it was an intellectualized, devised fear, almost mathematical. Indeed, he had left the living.

  I will not die, he repeated to himself.

  He remembered a doctor who had once said that Mantle was hot, that he had the look of someone about to go round the bend, about to be melted down and put together in a different way.

  Again he was burning, melting, but alive.

  “Let me go,” he screamed into the darkness which was absorbing his life. He imagined that he had been passed from Screamer to Screamer, that he was now existing in the deadness between them, in infinite psychic space, all the dark spaces surrounding dreams, the countries of the dead.

  Nothing was important now but light and color and sound, the rasping of breath, and constant knowledge of the small aches and pains of the body, blessed pain, living pain.

  All at once he heard a deafening noise and felt himself falling. He had been held inside the Screamer's mind, inside many minds, and he felt the dark veils, the same dead stuff that he scammed into when he had that bad drug trip. Now the veils were tearing, and Mantle fell through—it was a jolt, coming back to life.

  But he had seen Josiane….

  Roberta pulled the cowl from Mantle's head and shook him. “Come on, try to stand. There's no time.” She pulled at him.

  Cotton-mouthed, Mantle tried to raise himself, but his legs felt foreign; he tried to form words, but could only seem to make guttural noises. Everything was moving in slow-time. Pretre was curled on the ground beside him, his legs splayed on a bloodstained mat, his arm resting on the Screamer's neck as if caught between the bottom portion of the cowl and breastbone. But Mantle could not see a wound; irrationally, he thought it was Pretre's bleeding heart.

  “Come on,” Roberta said, helping him upright, then pulling him to the drop-curtained opening of the tomb. He staggered, stumbling, unable to find his footing. “Josiane?” he asked.

  “Wake up. It's Roberta, not Josiane.”

  He heard a cracking, or perhaps something was popping. “Wh'issat?” he mumbled, surprised at the sound of his own voice. Moronic.

  “Bullets.”

  “Then stay in here,” Mantle tried to say, but his mouth wasn't working.

  Roberta coaxed him to the drop curtain, and he suddenly came fully awake, was finally pulled free of the black and silver world and thrown headlong into electric light.

  “What the hell is—”

  “Raiders,” she said. “Now get out of here. Quickly.” She tried to push him out of the tomb, but he grabbed her, pulled her to the ground and away from the opening. “Let me alone,” she screamed.

  “You can't stay in here,” Mantle said. “Jesus, no one's even killed the goddamm lights.”

  “I'm here for a reason, and it's none of your fucking business.”

  “You're not going to hook-into Pretre or that Screamer. That's suicide. Now move.”

  “I'm staying here. My husband is—”

  “He's dead!” Mantle shouted. “Now get us away from here or I'll kill you.” He pushed her out of the tomb and crawled behind her along the gravelly edge of the dolmen, still unsure that any of this could be real: the rifle shots, the dead bodies, the smell of earth and blood.

  Someone close by called for help, but Mantle could do nothing but crawl on, a living machine.

  I'm sorry, Josiane. I can't go back….

  Mercifully, the moon was hidden behind thunderclouds and everything was darker, as if masked; but it was a living darkness, one without the cold silver of the Screamers’ mind spaces. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the dark.

  There was shouting, moaning, the sharp popping of gunfire, the sucking, wheezing, coughing sound of people dying. Mantle was acutely aware of every sound now, every movement, as he breathed heavily into the gravel and the damp, acrid-smelling dirt. It was all a wash of movement, every sight and sound and smell perceived and then immediately giving way to the next. For every instant, every bead of time was either/or: another few steps to walk or crawl, another few breaths and thoughts or a bullet smashing into tissue and bone. It was a hot, gland-exciting world, an extension of the moment before a suicidal jump or the pulling of a trig
ger; it was a complete compression of life and memory into survival.

  Mantle guessed that the raiders were few but had automatic weapons. Rather than risk danger, they simply fired into the crowd. It didn't matter if some escaped—for the terrorist, it was the act, not the number of dead or wounded.

  Suddenly the shooting stopped and a silence hung over the area, a heaviness that somehow excluded the distant pounding of waves and the occasional moan of the wounded.

  Mantle and Roberta kept near the trees and made their way away from the beach where they might be trapped. But they were exposed, would be exposed almost everywhere hereabouts if the raiders had any kind of sensors. Still, they had to keep moving; the raiders might just be coming in close to clean up and make a neat job of it.

  They came upon two male corpses lying facedown in the soft earth. Hurriedly, they stripped the clothes from the corpses and left, clothes in hand. Mantle swallowed vomit and remembered fighting in Ghana during the UN draft, remembered a night like this when his squad, all of them crazy from killing and hunger, ran through a burned field cutting off the fingers of the Ghaks, prying gold from their teeth, waving the charred bodies by their napalm-stiffened cocks like flags.

  He felt the touch of that night again.

  They stopped in a ragged copse to catch their breath and put on their new clothes.

  “Where do we go from here?” Mantle asked.

  “I know of an old road nearby. It's in disuse; not even the farmers ride it.” Roberta pulled up the collar of the rough shirt and shivered in the mist. Everything was wet, saturated with miasma. Ironically, the clothes fit her quite well. “I have friends who might be waiting for me if they are in no danger.”

  “And if they're not there?”

  “Then we find some good Campagnards to give us shelter or, perhaps, get caught.”