The Young World

by Chris Weitz

  Kath: “You love him, don’t you?”

  I don’t feel like showing myself. But what the hell. It’s all over anyway.

  Me: “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Kath: “Me too, I think.”

  Me: “So that’s one thing we have in common.”

  I could swear she smiles at me, and I smile back.

  Me: “Maybe in a better world, we could have been frenemies.”

  She laughs.

  I curl up on the floor and close my eyes.

  When I wake up, she’s gone.

  There’s no way she could have escaped. They must have taken her away when I was asleep.

  The next face I see is Brainbox’s. I’m doing yoga—kind of a girlie version of the part in prison movies where the dude gets crazy buff doing push-ups, I guess—when I happen to look up and see him staring at me through the square plastic window in the cell door.

  I can’t figure out how he got loose.

  I want to shout, but I’m afraid they’ll catch him. “Brainbox!” I hiss. “Open the door!”

  But he just blinks and, in a second, is gone.

  Maybe I imagined him.

  Time stretches. Actually, I’m stretching, not time. Time is just doing its thing. I’m the one whose mind is going thin, elastic, full of holes, ready to snap, like an overchewed piece of gum. The darkness takes on colors, swims like grains of sand in a violent wave. I fall out of sleep and try to find my way back in.

  Somewhere in this I am visited by my mother and father. In the afterlife, they are together and all is forgiven. They apologize to me for having done a lousy job. And I see Charlie. He’s a young man now, clear-eyed and straight-backed. He tells me that it’s all for the best—we don’t belong on the earth; it was a mistake. God repented; that’s what he says. We couldn’t be trusted. So he made another flood. I wish Peter were here, I think. He could explain this to me.

  I open my eyes, and instead of the sun or the moon, there is only the sickly green rectangle lit up by the corridor outside. I stand up, my joints complaining about the hard floor and the damp.

  I hear nothing but the distant laughter of the Islanders. I call out to my friends, but nobody answers.

  Finally, though I’m ashamed, I call out to the Islanders. Anyone to talk to, anyone to recognize me as a fellow creature. Nobody comes.

  CHAPTER 37

  SO THIS IS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO DIE, I guess.

  Everyone takes this trip, but only once, and there is nobody to tell you what it’ll be like. Of course, that hasn’t kept people from writing speculative travelogues.

  People think Buddhists don’t go in for that stuff, but it’s not true. Sure, the Buddha wasn’t big on the afterlife. When he died, he attained nirvana, which isn’t heaven but a state of nonbeing. By then, he wasn’t attached to anything—not possessions, not friends, not family, not life itself. Having passed on his teachings to his disciples, thereby giving the gift of freedom from suffering, he had done his job and was finished with the work of being.

  His disciples, of course, were majorly bummed, and the way they expressed it, when writing about the Buddha’s death, was to say that the earth shook and the heavens trembled, the sort of stuff that the Bible says happened when Jesus was crucified.

  And right there, you can already see a philosophy turning into a religion. The seduction of myth. They also transmuted mental suffering into “hell”—they have a bunch of hells, actually. The kind of hell you end up in depends on the kind of desires and attachments you have. Greedy people go to the hell realm of the hungry ghosts and whatnot. This is handy as a metaphor—if you’re greedy, you are always hungry, in a way. But people tend to take these things literally, so there are entire schools of Buddhism that cultivated these dogmas, this whole cosmology that isn’t that much different from Catholicism or Islam or whatever and that seems to be about punishing the bad and rewarding the good and what have you.

  The school of Zen Buddhism my father followed rejected all that stuff. To them, it was just a load of hooey, mental stuff, cheap gaudy decorations that cluttered up a beautiful, sparse room.

  Still—there’s this idea in Tibetan Buddhism I always thought was interesting. It’s called the bardo. It means the intermediate state between dying and living. The idea is that after your body dies, your spirit is kind of hanging around for a while before it gets reborn. And you go through all these ordeals, these terrifying hallucinations, and basically the way you handle them determines the way you are reborn, or even if you are reborn at all. So you have to have your shit together or you could be catapulted into some crappy incarnation. To prepare for this, you have to master the ability to meditate through the bardo. Which is a pretty tall order, given that your body has just died and you’re kind of floating around like a ghost.

  Maybe it’s the martial arts aspect of this idea—like, you’re training up so you don’t get your ass kicked or whatever—that appealed to me. Anyway, as the Sickness infiltrates my bones and I lie here on the concrete floor shivering, I get ready for spiritual combat.

  The first thing to do is to let go. Like, basically, to give up.

  This may sound like a totally loser thing to do, and I guess if this were a movie or something, I would look like a pretty crappy hero. In movies you’re not supposed to give up. But looking at my situation, it seems kind of like the smart choice. Exhibit one: Nobody has survived the Sickness. Well, it looks like the Old Man did, but he’s one in—what—seven billion? Anyway, whatever he did to survive it, or whatever he was in the first place, he seems to have gone totally nuts. And he clearly hasn’t found a cure. Given that, it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to cure me. Which means that I’m going to die.

  This sounds terrible until you realize that we’re all going to die anyway. I mean, if it isn’t now, then someday I’ll find myself realizing that it’s today, or soon. And sure, under different circumstances, I’d have more time to do stuff. But really, who ends up thinking he’s had enough time?

  Then why did I want to cure the Sickness in the first place?

  I guess I don’t need to be all modest when I’m dying anyway. I didn’t just do it for me. I wanted everyone to live. I didn’t want people to suffer anymore. I thought maybe we could start again.

  Maybe do better than the last time.

  As for myself, did I want to live? Sure. That’s human nature.

  Still. I have to let go. I have to realize that I’m going to die. That I won’t see the sun, and I won’t taste food, and I won’t feel anything or hear anything or even think anything.

  When my father was dying—this was before the Sickness; I’m glad he didn’t have to die from that—he fought. He was always a fighter, you see. The war never really ended for him. He had taken on the Germans, and now he was taking on death, and he wasn’t going to surrender. In those last days, I saw all his Zen go out the window. Not because he was weak. Because he was strong. He loved life and he loved us, and he refused to let go.

  So he scrapped and he fought and he went to the canvas, and in the end, he was beaten. And I kissed his cold forehead, and I told him that he didn’t need to fight anymore. And I told myself that I would give up when my time came. I wouldn’t have to be torn away from life. And I would enter the bardo with a clear mind.

  But as this disease finds its way into every pocket of me and the fever runs, I find that I can’t let go. And it’s not the kiss of the sunshine or the taste of the air or the touch of music.

  It’s you, Donna. It’s you that makes them drag me into the middle realm calling out.

  The space between life and death is filled with voices and static, beeps and hoots that roll from one to the other like stations on a radio.

  I break the surface, back in life like I’m coming up sputtering from underwater. Brainbox is looking at me curiously.

  I’m at the business end of a syringe, which he pulls out of me. I’m just back from the bardo. At least that’s what I’m thinking, so it takes me a
while to say, “What are you doing?”

  “I just injected you with adrenaline,” he says.

  Which explains why I feel the way I do, as if my veins are pumping liquid metal.

  “How?”

  “Oh,” says Brainbox. “How did I get here? I made a deal.”

  I sit up. I’m agitated, angry. I can tell it’s partly the drug, but that doesn’t change it.

  “What?”

  “I made a deal with the Old Man.”

  “You made a deal? You made a deal with that—thing?”

  “Yes—my life in exchange for my assistance.”

  “Your life?” I say. “What about ours?”

  Brainbox looks away. “I couldn’t do that. Without you, there wouldn’t be anybody we could experiment on. The subjects need to be old enough to be losing steroid hormone-binding proteins. So… you understand.”

  “No, I don’t understand. All of a sudden you’re, like, working for him?”

  Brainbox shrugs. “I’m not working for him. I’m working for us. For our idea. That’s bigger than me or you, isn’t it? If you could die to save humanity, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know, Brainbox. I’d rather save it without dying, given the choice.”

  “Well…” He shrugs. “I’m kind of the only one who’s not expendable. You see, I think I’ve figured it out.”

  “Great—so let’s get out of here.”

  “No, Jefferson. We need to conduct more tests.” His eyes are hard.

  “You’re conducting tests on your friends!” I try to get up, but then I realize that I’m shackled to the wall.

  “It’ll be all right. You’ll see,” says Brainbox. “I can do this.” He seems to be trying to convince himself.

  “You don’t need to do this. Please. Help us.”

  “But I am helping you,” he says. “I’m helping all of us.”

  “Is this because of SeeThrough?” I’m desperate. Trying to push any button I can.

  He stops fussing with equipment for a second.

  “Her name was Chu Hua,” he says. “It means ‘chrysanthemum.’ When they moved here, they called her Jenny, because people couldn’t be bothered to remember her real name. But nobody even called her that.”

  He’s looking into the middle distance now. I realize that he’s broken.

  “Brainbox—Andrew,” I say, using his real name, “don’t do this. Help us. Help us escape. We’ll figure this out. All of us. Nobody has to die.” I’m definitely not ready for the bardo anymore. A few sips of air, a little hope, have done that for me. Screw nonbeing.

  “You’re wrong,” he says. “People do have to die. Some people have to die so that other people can live.” He takes another syringe out of a plastic sack. Jumbled in the sack, next to a bunch of vials, is Brainbox’s useless crank radio. I’m thinking about the voices and the sounds I heard when he leans in with the needle.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “It’s something I’m working on. Well, something we’re working on. He was close,” he says. “We just needed the right cocktail of hormones. It’ll change some things in your system. Make you more like the Old Man.” He leans toward me.

  “More like him?” I reach out for him, grabbing hold of his shirt before he can pull away. He sticks his foot in my gut and kicks, then calls for help.

  The Islanders come and hold me down.

  Time passes over me, hoisting me up and lowering me down on its swells. I hear sounds from down the corridor, chatter, the phlegmy, throaty sound of adult voices that must be coming from the video games they endlessly play. Sometimes I hear coughing, screaming, blows.

  After many wakings from the dark, I begin to get the sense that my body belongs to me again. First I can move my fingers, then my arms, and at last I can stand up. The fever that possessed me is gone.

  I see Brainbox’s eyes peep through the door; they narrow as he sees me standing there instead of laid out on the floor. The anger of the adrenaline has burned itself off, and I feel only sorrow.

  Five minutes later, he is back with some of the Islanders.

  “You’ll come peacefully?” he says after they’ve heaved the door open.

  “Where?”

  “The Old Man wants to see you.”

  I walk with Brainbox, my eyes filming and searing in the half-light. Again the little blond girl opens the door of the Old Man’s laboratory. He’s at his table, injecting himself. The helmet of his rubber suit hangs down his back, like the flayed head of an animal. When he sees me, he puts down the syringe and smiles.

  “I don’t believe it,” he says. He turns to Brainbox. “Andrew, well done. Mine is crashing, as per usual.”

  “You were heading in the right direction,” says Brainbox. “You just needed fresh eyes.”

  The Old Man walks up and grasps Brainbox by the hand, then hugs him. Brainbox gets a happy look. It’s strange on his face.

  Then Brainbox looks at me again. At a glance, the Islanders have a dozen hands on me, and they force my naked arm out so that the Old Man can stick me with another needle.

  “Don’t struggle, Jefferson,” says Brainbox.

  “You’re not dying—you’re giving life,” says the Old Man.

  This time the Old Man doesn’t inject me. He fills tube after plastic tube with the blood that he draws from my arm, until I’m too weak to struggle against the children. I sink down to the ground, and finally the Old Man pulls the needle out of me and they let me collapse.

  Blood in hand, the Old Man leads Brainbox away to a table where a bunch of machines are whirring away and starts to question him.

  That’s when I see Kath. She’s laid out on a table, barely covered with a sheet. Her body is pale and still, and at first I think she’s dead.

  The Islanders don’t seem too worried about me; they lean against the wall, squat on the ground, and start messing with the impotent cell phones they all seem to have. I drag myself over to Kath, my head ringing.

  There’s a trail of dried blood out of both corners of her mouth. Her eyes, when they open, are rimmed with red.

  “Jefferson,” she says. Then, “You look good.”

  “So do you,” I say.

  “No, I don’t,” says Kath. Her face spasms and pink tears roll from her eyes. “I look awful. I look like I’m dying.” She lifts her hand toward her face but doesn’t have the strength to reach it.

  I wipe the tears from her eyes.

  “You’re not going to—”

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t. I know it. I know I’m dying.” Her cheek falls on my hand. I keep it there.

  “Donna…” she says.

  “What about Donna?”

  “She thinks I don’t love you. That I was just… that it was just…”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  She doesn’t seem to hear me. “But look—look what I did. They came, and they asked for one of us. And she was asleep.”

  “You volunteered? For her?”

  “Not for her, for us,” she says. “Here we are, together. And you love her, don’t you? Well, maybe you’ll both make it through. Hold my hand.”

  “Kath…”

  “Do something for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “Tell me you love me,” she says. “And sound like you mean it. Nobody has ever done that. They said it, but they never really meant it. I could tell.” Another tear leaks out. “Tell me you love me and sound like you mean it.”

  It’s not even a decision.

  I say, “I love you.”

  She grips my hand tightly.

  “I knew you did,” she says.

  And she goes out of focus.

  “Bring him over,” says the Old Man to the Islanders. Not wanting their hands on me again, I walk over on my own.

  “Amazing,” says the Old Man, looking at me with a smile. “Like new.”

  “Congratulations,” says Brainbox. “You’re going to live.”

  He means me
.

  “You are going to live a very long life,” says the Old Man.

  “Well,” Brainbox says, “we need a few weeks’ course, to eliminate the virus. After that…”

  I point to Kath. “Her. Give her the vaccine.”

  “It’s not a vaccine—” says Brainbox.

  “Give it to her,” I say.

  “She’s too far gone,” says the Old Man.

  “She’s ready for the junk pile,” says Brainbox.

  The Old Man laughs—a quickly restrained little explosion of breath.

  I don’t understand what’s become of Brainbox. I don’t know how he could say something like that. But the Old Man looks at him with affection and trust.

  “That’s a bit harsh, Andrew. But”—he turns to me—“essentially he’s right. Her treatment was not effective.”

  “I’ve prepared your steroid dose,” Brainbox says, handing him a hypodermic.

  “Thank you,” says the Old Man.

  “I’ll get the next subject,” says Brainbox.

  “Maybe that’s best,” says the Old Man. “Your friend needs a little time to calm down. You’ll be all right?”

  Brainbox nods and hefts a squat black device in his hand—a Taser, I think. He and Blue-eyes head toward the cells. Then Brainbox turns around and looks back at me.

  “Remember, Jefferson,” he says, “some people have to die.”

  A little smile flickers on his face, and then he turns and leaves.

  “Sit.” The Old Man gestures toward a metal folding chair.

  I shake my head.

  “Oh, come on. You look like you’re going to fall over.”

  I make my way through the thick air and fall into the chair.

  “Do you know what a historic moment this is?” asks the Old Man.

  No.

  “This is the beginning of the way back. When we duplicate these results—your results—humanity will be saved.”

  I have nothing to say.

  “Not to mention the fact that you will live a natural life.”

  “Natural life?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says the Old Man. “We’ve saved you. You might at least say thank you.”