The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he’d made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her outraged genitalia, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.
No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he’d been, before. He’d never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.
That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.
He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you’re going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name.”
Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him. “Your child? Oh, Howell, you idiot—”
A wash of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the mansion’s outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.
Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.
Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman’s hand went slack and deflated in his grip, crumbled like a sheaf of autumn leaves. Howell’s own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.
The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides come to life: bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I’m sorry you won’t.”
The iridescent wings snapped and beat the stagnant air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body out of its cocoon in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.
And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.
The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to rust and come unhinged inside, all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes.
Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—
Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.
And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff’s deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight.
He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn’t remember his dreams.
He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.
And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.
He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her luminous blue wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he hoped she would come back.
He began to seek out some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—”a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arm,” said the website of the town “named for Dr. E. D. Atwater, of the land department of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad”—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found hundreds of people, streets and companies named Atwater, but nothing that resonated… until he found a listing in a San Diego phone book, and did a search on the computer.
Atwater Transpersonal Institute. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn’t read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.
At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building honeycombed with courtyards huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think I know a woman who is being treated here. I’d like to see her, please.”
The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.
Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.
Howell wanted out, needed in. She’s here, somewhere, it’s all here, it wasn’t in your mind, oh God, it was all real—
“I’ll just get Dr. Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a puppeteer being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.
“Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It’s not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier.”
“What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor’s feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man’s reaction.
“I—my God, what’re you doing out here?” asked Dr. Atwater.
“You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?”
“That’s correct. Maybe you—”
“I have been having bad dreams for a long time, Doctor. About this place.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe if I could show you…” Dr. Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here, liquid
chimes that made him feel sleepy.
“Binaural tones guide the treatment,” Atwater said. “Shamanic cultures use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It’s subtler than medication, and it doesn’t blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets lucid dreams become the patient’s reality.”
“For how long?”
“In my papers, I recommended regimens of three-day sessions over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this.”
Howell stopped avoiding the doctor’s eyes. Against the tanning bed bronze skin, they were cold, faded gray. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?”
Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the tiny cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze. It wasn’t her.
The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.
“One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy, he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He’s been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he’s getting better.”
Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient’s face, Howell muttered, “No, he’s not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?”
Atwater’s eyes flatly regarded him, but he saw the lambent red glow kindling in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a mask of flames. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are you looking for?”
“You know, don’t you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor’s arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!”
Atwater’s eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group… Well, that’s a mystery solved, at any rate.”
As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him into the wall. “Where is she?”
Atwater sighed. “Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They’re very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown autistic.”
“Your dream therapy wrecked her brain.”
“No, my friend, you did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with dripping IV solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.
Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Semi-vegetative autistic from birth, ward of the state. We secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph.”
Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.
“At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated… until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that’s what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn’t I?”
Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped.
“At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms. Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms. Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But you found her.”
Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he’d ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn’t notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.
“His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler.”
Atwater’s shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.
“For so long, I’ve thought of you, Mr. Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured.”
Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.
Protestors lined the steps of the ivy-crusted Veteran’s Hospital. Police pushed them back, but they leaned over the barricades to scream and spit at us as we walked in a line.
On the left, draft resistors called us sheep, but their radical chic tasted like piss in their mouths.
The ones on the right called us cowards. The chickenhawks hated us because they wanted to see us die on TV, and the disabled vets hated us because they had high lottery numbers, and there were not enough of us to go around.
We took a final physical, and signed forms they didn’t let us read. I saw a box that I’d checked had been covered with layers of official stamps. I pointed this out to the corpsman, who got a PR officer. “The family doesn’t want him to meet you.”
Then we went into bright, tiled rooms where we were shaved, drugged and strapped down on gurneys.
I woke up during the surgery. I felt only second-hand pain and cottonmouth nausea. I remember smiling at the blood gushing out as they sawed off my left leg, but the magic trick went on too long. It didn’t feel like my leg was gone, but I didn’t want to look at it. I tried to move my head, but it was wired down tight.
I rolled my eyes around. It was weird how nobody seemed to notice I was watching them take me apart.
I couldn’t talk for the hoses going down my throat and up my nose, but I could look past the doctors and nurses and the armed MP at the door, up the walls of the surgical theater to the gallery. I could see the soldier sitting up there in his wheelchair, looking down at me and crying.
I couldn’t move my arms to give him the thumbs-up, because one was numb, and the other was gone. I think he would have saluted me if he could.
Later, I got to read his file, everything but his name. A private in the 29th Rangers, born and raised on an Iowa farm, nineteen and a proud father of twins. Lost his left leg, both arms and most of his face in a blue-on-blue napalm strike at Esfahan. A Purple Heart, but no valor medals, because America doesn’t drop napalm.
Crying, and he couldn’t wipe the tears from his intact eye. Someone came and wheeled him away, but he saw me looking at him for a second, and we connected together at the dotted lines of our symmetrical wounds, in the seconds before he was gone, and they came for my face.
Even if my country cannot forgive my refusal to fight, I saw understanding in the eye of the soldier who will walk out of this hospital on my leg, and hold his children, and maybe another rifle, in my arms. His war is over as mine begins, but I know that I have already won a battle, without getting out of bed.
Sloane rolls into the parking lot of the Hitchin’ Post Motel and scans the hearses and hatchbacks plastered with bumper stickers i
nvoking the names of the undead. As she parks and climbs out, the music beats at the plaster walls like the last frantic defiance of a premature burial; syncopated bassbin thunder leaks out into the dry, cold night, loud enough to set off car alarms. Even louder: the screams, the manic laughter, the weeping.
“This isn’t the biggest one,” she tells her passenger, “but it’s the most volatile. You better wait in the car.”
Sloane pops open the trunk and goes around to fetch the bags of supplies. An old man lurks in the open door to the office, timid petulance carving his shapeless face. “Tell your friends to keep it down,” he calls out as Sloane makes for the loud room at the end of the row of tumbledown fuck-shacks.
“Have any of your other guests complained?” Sloane barks acid laughter into the auto-exhaust breeze. None of the drunks, junkies, jarheads and whores in the neighboring rooms is in any condition to file a grievance. The manager flips her the bird and retreats to his office.
A shirtless teenage Uncle Fester opens the door after she beats on it long and hard with her fist. So wasted he probably doesn’t know or care that someone scrawled BREEDER across his forehead in black permanent marker. His eyeliner runs in black streams down to his chins.
“Where’s Evelyn?” she shouts over the Godzilla-stomp of a redlined Skinny Puppy track. The breeder shrugs and dives into the crowd, leaving her marooned on the shore of a surly black sea.
She scans the ranks of black dusters and goth-frocks, zombie pancake makeup, silver studs and chains dangling from pierced noses and nipples, a murder of dysfunctional crows. Nearly all at least technically male, except for a few wolfish Vampira types and a brigade of plug-ugly rivethead dominatrixes with a skinhead escort.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 15
