The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  “Listen, what’s the matter with you?” he finally asked. “I don’t like what’s happening to you lately. You’re letting this whole foolish matter assume more importance than it deserves. It’s unhealthy to pay so much attention to these dregs and scumbags. Who cares what’s happening at some crummy flophouse?”

  Mark said nothing, and Scoon leaned forward, elbows on the table, as if to fix Mark with his intensity.

  “Did you take my remarks last time as some sort of challenge? I never meant them as such. You know my way of talking better than that.”

  “No, it’s nothing you said,” Mark admitted reluctantly. “It’s something that’s been building up in me for a long time. I don’t particularly like my job, or my life. I feel guilty all the time, like an impostor or hoaxer. Why do I deserve what I have, when others are so bad off? I can’t explain it, Harry. It’s just what I feel. Maybe it’s what all these other people wandering the streets went through before they hit the skids.”

  Scoon sat back and lit a cigarette, puffed and considered. “This is what you do. Take a vacation somewhere out of this fucking city. Having that bum die on you was enough to shake anyone up. When you come back, I promise I’ll have the answer to this place. I’ll use all my connections to find out about it. When you see that’s it’s nothing but another Salvation-Army-type setup, you can dismiss it from your mind. You’ll see there’s nothing there for you.”

  “But it’s closing,” Mark said. “It’ll be too late.”

  “Just do what I say,” Scoon said.

  Mark suddenly deflated, all energy gone from his shaking frame. He nodded in submission.

  But he and Scoon both knew he lied.

  * * *

  In front of the Plaza Hotel, limos pulled up and disgorged men in tuxes and women in furs. The Park’s horse-drawn carriages clattered by, bearing tourists to snapshot immortality. Late-shoppers poured from Bergdorf-Goodman bearing boxes and bags.

  Mark walked through the night along Central Park South, heading west. Wearing jeans and a leather jacket, he felt out of place among the well-dressed crowds pouring from the hotels and restaurants along the street. Had he come down here any other night, he too would have been costumed as they were. But not tonight.

  Tonight he had another destination, impossibly further than any they could conceive.

  Cutting into the Park, Mark wandered down paths ill-lit by the stray unbroken lamp until he came to a cluster of benches that held a serried rank of slumped shadowy shapes.

  He flopped down at the end of one bench, prayed that his day’s worth of stubble and ratty running sneakers looked convincingly streetwise.

  No one spoke to him, or took overt notice of his presence. Mark sat in unconscious imitation of the others, legs extended into the path, shoulders hunched against the cold.

  For six hours or more, no one spoke. There sounded only the wracking phlegmy coughs indicative of untended ills, and the rumble of empty guts.

  Mark had plenty of time to think.

  He found he had no thoughts.

  At last, around two in the morning, the forms on the benches began to move. One by one they came to their feet and shuffled off toward the west, never bunching or clumping, which would have attracted undue notice.

  When Mark’s turn to rise came, he found his legs stiff as bowling pins. Somehow, he endured the pain and stood. Hurrying to keep the man ahead of him in view, he moved on his awkward legs through the deserted Park.

  At Columbus Circle, his guide went south, around the Coliseum, then picked up Fifty-ninth at Ninth.

  Gradually, they left all mundane crowds behind, moving with agonizing slowness down meaner and meaner streets.

  Now the number of people all heading in the same direction became apparent.

  When they reached the huge dirty grey brick ConEd generating station at Fifty-ninth and West End Avenue, its tall stack like a prophet’s finger pointing to a just heaven, the multiple threads of streetpeople from all over the city had gathered into a writhing knot of unwashed flesh.

  Mark couldn’t tear his eyes from the crowd ready to submerge him. There was a giant black man wearing only vest and running pants, his hair in matted dreadlocks. There were bagladies toting tattered shopping bags from designer boutiques. A teenager in ripped Army jacket and camouflage pants leaned against an old man with rheumy eyes and a hacking cough.

  And still they poured into the intersection, swarming, Mark knew, from all over the city which had turned its back on them. From the restrooms in Penn and Grand Central Stations they came. From Central Park and Morningside Heights, from the Lower East Side, the Bowery, Bryant Park and Washington Square. From Grand Army Plaza, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, Chelsea Park, Union Square and the Port Authority Terminal. Every rough grating moist with life-giving steam and rubble-filled doorway that cut the cruel wind had given up its inhabitants for the night.

  For a fraction of a second, Mark hesitated before plunging into the reeking, shivering mass. Then he abandoned all conceits of difference and surrendered himself to their herd-warmth.

  How long, he wondered, would it be before a police-cruiser came by, and the riot started?

  Movement surged through the crowd, and Mark was borne along with it. Straining on tiptoe, he saw that he was being carried toward the fence enclosing the Conrail yards. Surely they didn’t intend to scale that vicious razored barrier—

  When Mark reached the fence, a portion of it simply wasn’t there. An irregular opening gaped, its edges melted as if by heat.

  The crowd surged through the portal, fanned out across the grassy acreage, heading toward the river.

  The Hudson. Thirteenth Avenue.

  Mark followed, his will no longer his own.

  Behind, the last of the homeless had come through. Silently the fence reformed in a blast of light.

  Not a car had come by during the whole time, as if the traffic lights had conspired to hold them back.

  Stumbling blindly across the unlighted, rock- and rubbish-strewn lot, Mark knew he liad to reach the river, although he couldn’t have said why.

  He crossed with the others a maze of tracks, cinders whispering unintelligible truths beneath his feet.

  By the weedy riverbank he stopped, a line of his fellows extending to left and right. As he watched, each of them was enveloped in a scintillating golden nimbus. Looking down at his own limbs, he saw himself similarly encased.

  Then they entered the river.

  Their new skins gave them negative buoyancy, and they walked out along the sloping riverfloor to the center of the Hudson. They turned north, forming a line like an amber necklace threaded with black water, and continued walking.

  Their glowing integuments allowed them to see for some distance around them. Wrecked and weed-wrapped cars, some with skeletal occupants, littered the bottom. Trash of every description—girders, washing machines, slabs of concrete—impeded their progress, caused them to scramble and weave. Still they wended their way upstream, human fish heading for ancient spawning grounds.

  Mark felt neither happy nor sad. All emotions had been temporarily denied him.

  In the distance, a grouping of lights appeared. As Mark neared it, it assumed the form of a fiery castle or arcane vessel, mired in the riverbottom muck. Its myriad windows glowed with radiance unlike any he had ever seen before.

  The line entered through a seemingly solid wall, their bubbles merging through the side of the building-ship.

  Once he was in, a sense of wellfed healthiness pervaded him, a suffusion of good spirits that banished all cares. He felt sane for the first time in his life, as if all his mad past had been cut away by an invisible knife. It struck him as such a wonderful thing—him, who knew lesser comforts as a matter of course—that he wondered how the miserable streetpeople could stand the joy. At the same time, he felt his body dissolving, his corporeal self melting away with the bodies of all the rest. All his senses fled: vision, touch, hearing. He was a disembodied presence
floating in a primordial soup, having surrendered his constituents, his carbon and water and trace elements, to the needs of his new benefactors.

  How his self still existed, he couldn’t imagine.

  After a period without measure, he came to sense the selfhood of all the others. They began to blend with his in a spontaneous meld, each one giving up his loneliness to share in the general happiness.

  Mark’s senses returned, but now they were located in the skin and interior of the castle-ship. He felt the cold water of the Hudson brush his sides, saw through the murky waters right up to the stars that glowed above. Access to an inner clock informed him, impossibly, that it was still the same night he had entered.

  A glorious piping music began to fill his new ears. The communal voice of the human meld began to soar in song. From some former part of their new self came the thought: Hamelin, and the rats.

  Mark thought back agreement as he felt the ship begin to lift from the riverbed, ascend toward the sky.

  Right. But this time the rats are being left behind.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the late 1980s, I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time in New York City, with nothing to do but walk the streets in search of knowledge and adventure. I was accompanying my partner Deborah Newton on her assignments as a freelance editor at Vogue Knitting. During her office hours, I occupied myself with these expeditions, till I had traced my paths in ballpoint ink on a sweat-wrinkled map to the point of tattering the document. The knowledge gained from these pleasant peregrinations was invaluable and omnipresent. Adventures such as the one in this story were less easily found, and so had to be contrived on the page.

  PS: Another period alert: people once actually could smoke in public establishments! And Times Square really was exceedingly seedy.

  I KANT CUZ I’M TOO JUNG

  “Do you remember,” asked Pennypacker, “the thumbless children?”

  “Indeed I do,” Jearl replied. “And a good thing we ditched them before the University found out.”

  Sitting in Pennypacker’s office, drinking something noxious and green from bell-shaped flasks, the two men presented a glaring contrast: Pennypacker tall and cadaverous, looking like a puppet assembled from the bones of a dozen species; Jearl thick and lumpy, as if constructed from poorly mashed potatoes. Each man wore a white labcoat on front to rear, the buttons in back misdone, causing the garments to ride up crazily.

  “I can’t forget what high hopes we had for that one,” Pennypacker continued. He seemed nostalgic today, as if contemplating past glories that would never come again. “We were going to settle once and for all the role of an opposable thumb in the development of man’s intelligence. We set up the orphanage with some of our grant money, and you hired the staff from the Salvation Army residence halls.”

  “Very tractable they were, too,” Jearl said. “As long as they got their daily shots.”

  “A few discreet whispers among the indigent members of the city, and the children began pouring in. I feel it’s a shame, by the way, this lack of morality among the young today, thinking nothing of rutting like guinea pigs, and relying on science to handle the consequences.”

  Jearl burped agreement.

  “In any case, we had our subjects. Once we reached a critical mass, so to speak, of infants, it was the work of only a day to dethumb them. Then, it would have been a simple matter of sitting back and observing our little community, to see whether they developed intelligence as we define it.”

  “But the police came,” Jearl said morosely.

  Pennypacker pounded a knobby fist on his desk. “How were we to anticipate one of those hysterical young women might want her baby back? What nerve! Laymen have no conception of what true science demands. Luckily, our hands were clean in the whole affair. Imagine if we hadn’t taken those precautions I insisted upon— Where would our careers be today? As it was, they came damnably close to catching us. The newspapers didn’t let the story fade for a whole year. Reporters sniffing even around the campus.”

  Jearl shifted his lumpy bulk uncomfortably in the visitor’s chair. Pennypacker’s mood had infected him now too. “It seems that the era of great science is past, Pennypacker. Imagine Pavlov or Mengele struggling under these conditions. Begging for funds, complying with the EPA and genetic-engineering watchdog committees, lecturing pointy-headed proto-yuppies, whose vision extends no further than a six-figure income. How are men of our insight and daring supposed to advance the cause of science with such petty restrictions?”

  The two men sat silently for a time, contemplating injustice and the fickleness of the world.

  At last Pennypacker slammed his desk again. “We can’t despair, Jearl! The future stretches before us, beckoning. Don’t we have our minds, our hopes? Surely there’s territory left to conquer. Let’s reason about this.”

  “You know my feelings about reason, Pennypacker. It’s never gotten us anywhere. It’s our instincts we have to rely on. As Jung said, ‘The great decisions of human life have as a rule more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.’”

  “Don’t quote that charlatan in my office, Jearl. My thoughts on the subject are fixed. Reason and logic are what separate man from the animals. Take a supreme rationalist such as Kant—whom you would do well to study, Jearl. What did he recommend? Intensive scrutiny of one’s every action, to determine all its consequences. ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ A fine mess we’d be in if I had let you rely on your instincts with the orphanage. ‘We should appear on television,’ you said. ‘Publicize ourselves.’ Hah! We would have publicized ourselves right into a jailcell.”

  Jearl composed his crevassed face into lineaments of hurt and distress. “Get in touch with your shadowside, Pennypacker, and you won’t be so miserable to be around.”

  “Bah! Rubbish! Look at your actions in the light of the Categorical Imperative, Jearl, and recognize your flaws.”

  “I’m sick of this argument,” Jearl said petulantly. “We always have it when we’re in between experiments. I wish there was some method to settle it, one way or the other.”

  Pennypacker shot to his feet, as if his strings had been pulled. “Jearl, you’ve hit upon it! Our next conquest! We’ll answer the question that has plagued mankind since it crawled from the slime. Which approach to life is more beneficial? Brain or heart, thought or feelings, rationality or instincts!”

  Like pudding, Jearl rumbled up excitedly out of the chair. “Classical or jazz, Asimov or Vonnegut, PBS or ABC!”

  “Exactly!”

  Jearl’s smile faded then, and he asked, “But how?”

  Pennypacker advanced to his friend and put a bony arm around a suety shoulder. “The brain is an open book today, Jearl. Out of a hundred neurotransmitters, surely we can adjust a few to achieve a person who relies solely on either rationality or instincts. Then, we monitor his life, and objectively determine which way brings more success.”

  Jearl looked skeptical. Pennypacker bent low and whispered, “Dopamine.”

  Wistfully, Jearl said, “You hope o’ mine.”

  “Serotonin.”

  “Got me moanin’.”

  The two joined hands and began to dance around the office, knocking furniture and files.

  “Norepinephrine.”

  “Causes such a scene.”

  “Acetylcholine.”

  “Gets you nice and mean.”

  “GABA.”

  “Makes me jabber.”

  “Glycine.”

  “Could turn me lean!”

  Laughing, the two collapsed into their seats.

  First to recover, Pennypacker said, “Let’s get busy.”

  Three weeks later, they sat once more in the office. On the desk between them stood two vials filled with clear fluid. One was marked with a black label, the other white.

  “That d
idn’t take too long, did it?” Pennypacker said. “Without the computer simulations and molecule modeling, we’d still be at it. I suppose this decadent age has a few benefits. Now, we need to decide who runs the first trial. I nominate your serum for the initial test.”

  “Not so fast,” Jearl said. “You’re hoping something goes wrong, and I have to discount my results. No, you go first.”

  Pennypacker shrugged. “You wound me, Jearl. That was not my intention at all. I have faith in my chemistry, even if you don’t. There’s no advantage to going last. I’ll be proud to begin this experiment.”

  “Aren’t we forgetting something?” said Jearl.

  “What’s that?”

  “The subject.”

  Pennypacker waved his hand. “Not to worry. Remember the words of one of the greatest science popularizers of all times, Jearl.”

  “Which are?”

  “There’s a subject born every minute.”

  * * * *

  Kirsten James walked briskly across the campus, her mind beset by problems. If her problems could have been objectively ranked—always a doubtful proposition—the top three might have been:

  1) Arthur.

  2) Money.

  3) Grades.

  But not necessarily in that order.

  At least, she thought gratefully, as she reached the steps of the biology building, money won’t be a problem much longer.

  After all, the ad in the campus paper had promised a thousand dollars for just two weeks work.

  She hoped fervently that she would get the position. They only needed one subject, though. But a friend on the staff of the paper had tipped her off in advance, and she was certain to be the first applicant.

  Tripping lightly up the stairs, Kirsten wondered what the nature of the work would be.

  On the third floor, she came to the office mentioned in the ad. Two silhouettes—one tall and skinny, the other short and lumpish—moved on the frosted glass as if in a dance. Kirsten supposed it was a trick of the late afternoon sunlight. She knocked. The shadows stopped abruptly, separated and disappeared. A shuffling of chairs sounded. A voice came: