Health Agent

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Only moments after he was bundled into the black sphere, Black lost consciousness, watching the door come down and the sky disappear.

  *

  “Where am I?” Clichéd questions didn’t come into existence for no good reason. Black did have a damn good idea, however. The real question should have been, “Why am I here and not in a hospital for humans?”

  “You are still with us. You have been examined and treated for your injuries.” The human-headed, black-robed being by the door was a woman. The red wavy hair that covered her black skull plate was obviously a wig but helped a great deal anyway. She was waxenly attractive. Her eyes didn’t seem to be quite on Black, however. He was strapped to a cot in a white, undecorated room with one window covered by a metal plate. His first irrational idea was that they were going to make him into one of these beings like the red-haired woman now addressing him. “You have the virus called mutstav six-seventy—are you aware?”

  “Yes—what have you done with my friend?”

  “The tiny one aboard the destroyed tran is dead. The human is alive but in need of further care.”

  “Vern’s alive? Thank God! Look, let me go, I’m no fucking saboteur—he left a booby trap! The man I’m after—Toll Loveland! You must have heard of him on the news; he did this, not us! Why would we blow ourselves up?”

  “An accident, perhaps, while setting a greater explosion, having fabricated the story of the teleporter and having previously installed the teleporter so as to gain admittance here. That was our…”

  “It isn’t true! Call my boss! Look…”

  “As I say, that was our first assumption, for the sake of caution. But the device on the table beside you is a human truth scan, as you can see.” Black twisted his head to look. “It indicates that you are telling no lies.”

  “Then let me go!”

  “Of course. Pardon our security measures.”

  A Bedbug entered the room and unstrapped him, removed the truth scan’s sticky disc from Black’s forehead. Black swung his legs over the side of the cot. He’d been given a heavy painkiller, felt cloudy but pleasant. “Thanks for helping my friend and me. Can you please summon an ambulance to come get him immediately?”

  The redhead chittered. The Bedbug scurried away. “It is done. We must now speak with your police force.”

  “Good idea. Tell them what happened. I’ll go downtown and fill out my own report with the Health Agency.” Black risked standing.

  “Very well. We must be kept informed of your findings.”

  “Of course. What are my friend’s chances?”

  “Chances of survival?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fairly promising.”

  “I got him into this. I did this to him. It’s my fault.”

  “Then you confess that you are a saboteur?” It didn’t sound alarmed, but telescoped an inch or so taller alertly.

  “No, no…I mean…I feel guilty. I convinced my friend to help me. I confess my guilt.”

  Black’s pallid, black-frocked confessor offered him no absolution.

  *

  He wanted to look in on Vern but couldn’t afford the time. Black left the administration complex in a sphere piloted by a Bedbug, with no one to translate for him. He told it “thanks” anyway as it let him out through the gate.

  Inside his black rental car, Black folded his arms across the console and laid his cloud-filled forehead on them. But then he heard the ambulance. He sat up straight. They mustn’t catch him. They’d come after him now, with Vern in their hands…there could be no question of his activities. The Bedbugs had his name to give the authorities. He must not go home.

  He didn’t know where to go. But the ambulance was coming—so he went.

  TEN

  His left fist knotted in his sheet, the unfeeling pillow squashed beneath him, Montgomery Black vomited off the side of his bed into a plastic basin. He may as well have been vomiting into the void, which seethed all around this bed, so vertiginous was the combination of nausea and the sleep the nausea had wrenched him from. He clung to the bed for all his worth, even hooking his feet off the side. The tornado would subside, the bed would lower. Already it was slowing, casting the last of his dream’s debris out of his reach.

  His throat was seared, and the last loud retches produced nothing; it was like gargling up his shattered rib-cage. The effort brought tears to his eyes and the front of his skull filled up with the fluid of agony, heavy and pressing against his brain and down on his eyeballs. Black curled at last into a naked, trembling fetus which had just narrowly survived another attempted abortion.

  He shook with low, mindless sobs of self-pity, degradation and fear. The fetus had no one. In his extremity Black might have called out for his mother, but he was not close to his parents, might as well have called out for the computers which had educated him, so even in his delirium it didn’t occur to him. One person’s name waited to be said, however, and he didn’t so much want to call out for her to help as to beg to be forgiven. This pain, also, was ever growing…

  Vern, too. He remembered what he’d done to Vern. Dirge—well, he hadn’t known him but it was extra weight he didn’t need.

  It was all too much. He might have remained there in bed, crawled back into his dreams to escape, but he had already slept for twelve hours by the clock on the side table. And he must take something for this headache, he really must. Yes, definitely. In a minute, when he could regain some strength.

  After an hour of lying in his sweaty womb of pain at last he let himself onto the floor and stood up.

  God—the cramps. They stooped him. He had to shamble to the bathroom. The only light came from in there. He kept it lit at all times for emergency needs, though now he seldom rushed for it when his basin was near.

  The mirrored cabinet was already wide open, the mirror turned to the wall. Black shook out two pills for his headache. He had stopped taking the stronger pills which kept headaches at bay for a week or a month or more at a time, depending on the strength level; they aggravated his nausea and thank God he’d purged the last one out of his system by now. These mild things deadened it sufficiently without too much nausea, and without fogging his brain…though he’d had to take six over the course of the day, a few times recently, and that left him nauseous enough.

  For the nausea he had a half-effective syrup he’d bought at a local pharmacy. Without a prescription his resources were limited; he didn’t even dare check into a street clinic. No—no way. If he stepped into one of those they wouldn’t let him step out. You didn’t need to administer a test now to see.

  Black shut the cabinet, morbidly, to see for himself. Masochistically. How much more degraded could it make him feel?

  Still, he shivered nakedly, almost drew back, as if—in gazing out a window into a graveyard—a corpse had raised its head to peer back at him, nose to nose. The white-green fluorescent wasn’t kind. He hadn’t looked at his face for several days, though he had brushed his teeth and hadn’t neglected shaving—a mindless fastidiousness he recognized for its irony. But he did have to go out occasionally, after all. And he bathed at least every other day—womb-warm bubble baths, for hours. Sometimes reading a novel someone had left in the apartment, sometimes sleeping. The tub too small, luckily, for him to slip under the water level. Hours of floating tranquility, like a drug.

  But now, confronting his face, he felt a surge of desperate fear that was almost panic. He wanted to give up, to die then and there. He also wanted to burst out into the street, run and yell for help, run and scream, run and sob, run. But he stood mesmerized by himself, gripping the sink for support.

  His already prominently-boned face was cadaverous, eyes sunken into sockets so purple he might have been beaten recently. The yellowness of his skin was unmistakable even from a distance. He could scarcely close his mouth; even to suck lukewarm soup through a straw was a misery. The sores had spread past the borders of his cracked and bloated lips, caked hard with blood and dried p
us and scabs. They had spread up to his nostrils, which were red, inflamed. He had nosebleeds, even now the blood a rocky crust in there so that he had to breathe out of his mouth.

  “You need a shave, fucker,” he mumbled, the effort further tearing lips ripped by the vomiting. Black reached in the cabinet for his shaver, this time watched the foolish, meaningless ritual. Today he must confront some things, he told himself. But then, he always told himself that. And then went back to bed, or filled his bath.

  He wouldn’t put on his lip ointment—that was it. Maybe the pain would keep him on his toes…if it didn’t bring him to his knees.

  Today, he told himself.

  It had been a month and three quarters since he had left the Bedbugs, withdrawing all his money from his bank account and renting this tiny apartment. Directly after withdrawing his money he had made just one quick stop to the apartment of Vern Woodmere with its pillars and black and yellow tiles, using the tools from his trunk to gain admittance. He had worn gloves, for all that was worth. He had taken all of Vern’s weapons for safekeeping. Anyway, he was doing Vern a favor; he wouldn’t want the forcers to find that collection.

  Vern’s huge orange and yellow slug with the red blossom on its back was contentedly glued to the tiled wall of Black’s shower stall.

  *

  The Canberra Mall was a ten-minute ride from his apartment, and had everything he or anyone in Punktown could need; it was the largest and most popular shopping area in town. Black remembered it from his boyhood as the Canberra Circus Mall. It had covered less area then, though still being five floors in height. The ground floor had the carnival rides, games and sideshows, the second was an immense arcade and billiards parlor, floor three was a parking mall, four had a movie theater, shops and gift stores, a few bars, a legal gambling parlor and a legal brothel. The top floor with its domed roof window had a more upper-class version of the floor below, with a cocktail lounge, nice restaurant, swimming pool, saunas and a better quality movie theater where plays and concerts were also performed. Over the years the stores and shops had greatly proliferated, and the legal brothel and gambling den had been done away with.

  As a boy he had come here with his friend Dover and Dover’s parents and older sister and her friends. Black had liked Dover’s parents very much, had envied him their warmth and patience. He was drawn to the sideshows but would find their inhabitants following him to his bedroom that night in dream form. Even today he could envision, as if those specters had taken residence in the carnival of his mind, the rather pretty woman whose face looked out of the huge mouth of another, insensate giant head with hair growing out of its nose and eyes. A black man who was nothing but a huge human head, yellowed eyeballs as big as Black’s fists were now, ever drooling, with only two feeble arms to drag itself about. And the Lava Man, who looked like a figure from Pompeii that had come to life, naked and stiff, cracked and breaking away at the joints from what little movement he could manage. Later Black had felt guilty for staring so directly. But next time he’d stare again. Despite the guilt, despite the hauntings. Despite the fear. Because it was also the fear that made him look. The unspoken philosophizing of children. “Flesh is clay,” he might have said to himself if he’d been able to articulate his feelings. “This could have been me…”

  The pet store was his first stop. In the wild, the slug’s red blossom attracted flies, the flower opened and consumed them, but there weren’t enough flies in his apartment to leave it at that, and he had consulted this store a month and a half ago on what to feed the creature. The first box of pellets, one hand-fed to the slug’s flower-mouth a day, had lasted this long. Black was more attentive to the slug’s feeding than to his own.

  He couldn’t help himself from gazing in at the puppies. The various rodents and such he didn’t pity so much—they were indifferent to humans, it seemed, but the puppies made him feel guilty for not taking all of them home. He could imagine any one of them as his pet and companion, and was even a little tempted now, half out of pity for them and half out of pity for himself.

  One cage had a sign boasting: PUPPY OF THE WEEK! HALF PRICE! The “puppy” filled the cage, gnawing innocently on a plastic bone, apparently not as concerned for his fate as Black suddenly was. He beckoned to a woman who worked here, she came, when he spoke she withdrew a little. His breath told of the dying of his body.

  “What happens if you can’t find homes—do you kill them?”

  “They go to animal shelters—I wouldn’t work for this place if they did that.” Her answer was brusque and she moved away.

  Yeah, Black wondered, but do the animal shelters kill them?

  He let some kittens in a stinky cage bite and seize his index finger through the mesh. If I wasn’t gonna die, he thought. But what good could he be to them now? They should feel sorry for him.

  At times—at times—he could even look forward to death…like now. He wouldn’t have to worry about all the pain of living things, wouldn’t feel this intense impotence.

  He left the pet store.

  He was in a vast, high-ceilinged single chamber, divided on either side into shops of seemingly infinite variety. This would be as great a heaven as many people could imagine. Even as they thronged here to yearn for all that they couldn’t afford or even contain, they seemed to take pleasure simply in their proximity to it. This was their culture encapsulated; they were closest to themselves here. In his new state, Black felt like an alien to this culture…he could step back and view it from a new perspective; the perspective of one who didn’t dream of new furniture to buy, new clothes, better toys, because soon he wouldn’t be here. He already felt like a spirit, without a body (except for the pain), moving amongst the living, observing their ways for a short while.

  This immense cathedral with its neon and laser signs in place of stained glass was sufficiently dark to lend Black this feeling of ghostly anonymity. In the bright pet store he had been nervous, too revealed. Not to mention that bright light made his eyes burn and water. Stupid to have left his dark glasses in the car—they could have hidden his sockets, also. He would pick up a new pair in the pharmacy when he went for fresh drugs.

  The girls. Everywhere; he didn’t know where to look. The Canberra Mall was a favored youth hang-out. As many milled about amongst the stores as in the arcade and carnival areas still in existence here. Boys of eight to thirteen with ridiculous, elaborately spray-molded pompadours (when Black was a boy he had hated to even comb his hair, had feared having his hair cut), affecting sulky Elvis-like expressions to match their coiffures, zoomed about overhead on hoverboards, endangering all. Their colorful costumes repulsed Black; unrefined, erratic, an anarchy of color and design. How much more obnoxious could children look, short of wearing vests made of rat heads, and that was a fashion in other parts of Punktown.

  But the girls weren’t hard to look at. Hard not to look at. Black would follow one with his eyes as long as he could, afraid to lose sight of her, only to hitch his eyes suddenly to another, and on. Leotards, tight jeans, tight skirts, some in skimpy bikini-type bottoms. Round smooth horse-like haunches, tiny tight child-like asses. Smooth, hard-skinned fruit without the sag and ripples and dimples of age—glowingly smooth and hard. Apple-skinned youth. Eyeing them, Black felt vastly old. He was rotting, his rot slowly oozing out of every orifice. With age the doors of the body were flung open to accept every vile invasion. Black’s doors had been wrenched open early and the rot had been quick to come live here, to be fruitful and multiply, maggots in his apple.

  He felt ashamed of his decay, of his lewd voyeurism, prematurely old man that he was, his slimy stare defiling young buttocks. When a long-haired teenager caught his gaze on her lovely peach-skinned face as she stood chatting outside a music store with friends, she scrunched her nose at him in disgust like she could smell him coming, smell his filthy stare. Black lowered his head in shame as he passed her.

  As old as he felt, it also seemed decades since he had last had sex. Sex. That im
perative hunger had gotten him into this nightmare. Well, Toll Loveland had, but aside from the obvious. The nightmare wouldn’t have spread without the hunger. And still he hungered. He had to force his mouth to eat but his penis needed no prompting. Why did the urge seem even greater now than before he’d become sick? Because he knew he couldn’t have sex? Certainly. But was it also the primal biological urge to procreate, more urgent as his own extinction drew near? The narcissistic aspiration to fleshly immortality by leaving a part of yourself alive to eat, and fuck, and buy things when you no longer could? Black had never much thought of being a father. Lately, though, several times, he had regretted not having children. Was that vanity, instinctual…or, less cynically, the sadness of not having experienced all the wonders life had to offer?

  Better this way, he thought. No children to mourn him.

  How sad, he thought. No children to mourn him.

  He wandered, putting off his errands. Especially the major chore to be done. In a men’s room he broke down and, hidden in a stall, smeared ointment on his lips. The agony made him lean his forehead against the cool stall wall, tears streaming down his cheeks—not just from the harsh light—before the welcome numbness came. While it lasted he went out to buy a coffee to carry in his wanderings. He could wander here all day, despite the temptations and regrets. Though he couldn’t be part of this society much longer, he felt soothed by his proximity to it.

  I’m dying, he thought. No cure will come in time. There’s no hope, no reprieve. I will die soon.

  There was no chance of his catching Loveland. No attempt was worth the effort; he was out of time and ideas. Others would have to do it. But for him, Loveland had won. And he had to accept that.

  To rest his wobbly legs he bought a newspaper and sat on a stone bench under a basin of giant ferns. New movies, new wars, new marriages and divorces, birth announcements and obituaries and every day a new paper. It’s not like I’m the first to die, he thought. I’m not special. I haven’t been married or had children. So what? On page nine it said a ten-year-old girl had been killed in the crossfire of a youth gang war.