Nothing much else could be done about this stalemate since the Pied Piper virus was never supposed to leave the compound. In the meantime, every scientist in the world with any relevant expertise at all was recruited to work on developing a vaccine. This included me, of course, and General Kiljoy arranged a read-only computer network connection so that I would be informed of any significant new developments. He expected me to work twelve hours a day in the compound’s laboratory facilities developing a cure. I welcomed the isolation from the company of my odious employers, but I was not about to do any work.
Thanksgiving came and went, and we dined on a feast of canned turkey and cream-style corn. I joined everyone for the meal, but excused myself when Miss Mary began stringing some Christmas lights that she’d dug up somewhere on the antlers of the once noble and now gaudy elk’s head mounted on the wall. It was the first meal I had shared with them since Halloween night. I join the others only when I must, and spend the rest of my time in my workspace. That’s where I have been writing this account for the past month. I type it on the computer. General Kiljoy thinks I’m working on his problem. He pokes his head in from time to time and asks if there’s been any progress. Since he doesn’t specify to what he is referring, I can always somewhat truthfully reply yes. He caught me smiling at the screen once. Shortly thereafter he demanded a progress report, which was easy enough to fake for a group whose understanding of genetics went no further than how it could serve their ends, like any common killer whose knowledge of pistol mechanics is limited to how to pull the trigger.
Here he is now, sticking his head in and barking, “Do good work!” like some fast-food manager trying to motivate team spirit at a shit job. What a prick. A general deserves respect, certainly, but only to the extent that he defends the lives of those he represents without causing undue harm to others. By these standards, he’s the worst general I’ve ever seen. He oversees the creation of the neutron bomb of biological warfare, infects some of his own countrymen, and kills my dog. Hooray for the hero!
As for searching for a cure for the Pied Piper virus, I didn’t really feel like it. I’d sooner flip hamburgers. In fact, I’d sooner kill myself, as I attempted two weeks after Thanksgiving by swallowing a teaspoon of the urushiol I had stolen from Tynee’s office. It should have been enough to give a hundred million people a scorching case of poison ivy, so I reasoned it should have been enough to kill just one. I suppose I was trying to escape. There was just too much cognitive dissonance in being expected to save human civilization while working for these jerks. They’re not the caretakers of the Earth. They’re the bad guys, the destroyers. As far as I was concerned, the mad flutist was free to prance the children away. We deserve it. We broke our promise.
123 I found myself standing under a tree, a tree identifiable only by the flaming mop of crimson foliage it was shamelessly shedding, liberating each leaf to a slow and seductive pirouette of ecstasy. This was neither vanity nor pride, understand, only delight in its form and colors, thanksgiving through actualization, a realization of potential.
“This sucks,” I groused, then watched from a point neither near nor far as I transmogrified into General Kiljoy. General Kiljoy was in no mood for beauty. General Kiljoy was grumpy, and the perky autumn breeze did nothing to improve his dismal disposition. It only made his digits cold, and he muttered further vexations as he stuffed his thick hands into his tight pockets, grateful at least and at last for the opportunity to adjust himself.
Adjusted, he trudged up a formerly verdant hillside where Mother Nature was now enraptured in a seasonal celebration of self, an autumnal burlesque of Gaian proportions, a liberation of libido, leaves blushing as they swayed enticingly in the lusty breeze. The trees are stripping, the world whispered and whistled, and soon will be naked!
A good woman, Sophia by name, had earlier that morning imagined that it was a fine day to be a leaf. The temperature was lukewarm, the texture silken, and the wind was blustery though not boastful. A sultry, sexy day, she thought, perhaps I will join the nymphs of my deciduous kinfolk in dancing the day away. This she did, and was so doing when she spied old General Kiljoy grumbling up the hill whose top she graced with her presence.
He moves in a way inappropriate to the day, she observed, while twirling slowly in the gusts of the zephyr, arms outstretched, gauzy layers of gratuitous and flamboyant fabric billowing around her form, making a visual display of the air currents, imitating the alluring frolic of foliage around her. The colors of her raiments were many and rich, and she had made it a point in dressing that morning to complement, not compete with, her environment, of which she was only a part, after all. Her mood was as gossamer as her garments, and her awareness of General Kiljoy was as fleeting as brushing a fly away, a momentary disruption of rhythm, an ebb in the flow.
“Hello,” she greeted General Kiljoy when he reached the summit. His hands were still in his pockets, tickling his Twinkie. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she continued, her cheeks as red as a leaf on its last lark as she fluttered by. Windblown locks of hair danced across her face.
“Beautiful?” This gave General Kiljoy pause, as if she had just suggested how peaceful a traffic jam was. “Real beautiful, you fool. All the leaves are dying, and winter’s coming.” He harrumphed and resumed fooling with his flinger.
“And then spring comes again.” Sophia’s skirt relaxed upon the Earth as she bent to pick up a leaf, not the most attractive, certainly, but ravishing nonetheless. She tucked the leaf behind her ear and resumed dancing.
“What are you doing?” General Kiljoy snarled at Sophia as he rustled his ricky. She was again lost in the gyrations of the season.
Turning to him only when the wind permitted, Sophia smiled, her locks dancing crazily behind her, chiffon pressed close against her skin, emphasizing her seductive aerodynamics. “I’m doing what we must, of course!” she shouted since she was speaking into the wind.
“What?”
Sophia eased herself through the currents until she was dancing beguilingly around him. “It’s autumn, silly man. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
“Happy? It’s slippery, slimy, and wet, and all these leaves will turn into more muck. Don’t you see? This sucks!”
Sophia sniggled at the face of discipline before her. “Life is slippery, slimy, and wet. Don’t you know anything about sex?”
General Kiljoy reddened, and Sophia giggled some more. “Now you match the season,” she said as a gust of wind encouraged leaves to leap in increasing numbers, hastening the pace of the striptease and compelling her to twirl away. The wind blew harder, and Sophia fluttered obligingly down the hillside. A stray breeze carried her final phrase to within earshot of General Kiljoy. “This is a dream!” she yelled radiantly. “This is a dream!”
At that, General Kiljoy drew his pistol and shot her dead.
124 “This is a nightmare!” I heard myself scream. “This is a nightmare!” Someone slapped my face. “This is a nightmare!” I wailed insanely, and my face was slapped again.
“This is reality!” It was the bellow of General Kiljoy, and it was his heavy hand that struck my face yet again. “This is reality!” he roared. “This is reality! Wake up!”
I came around at last, bruised, beaten, heaving, and itchy. To my dismay, I recovered from my urushiol ordeal within a few days, and was placed under General Kiljoy’s close supervision. Though his threat concerning the removal of my fingers and toes went unfulfilled, I was made to sleep in his bed with him for over a week. This ceased when he awoke one morning spooning me. The urushiol, clearly, did not work, though it did put me in a delusional coma for thirty-six hours. The bottle of toxin was found near me, and Tynee knew enough to inject me with a massive dose of vitamin C, which neutralized much of the poison. The urushiol was years old anyway, Tynee informed me in condescension, and most of it had broken down into simpler molecular forms.
Everyone suspects I’m still suicidal, which as a matter of fact, I am. I’m depressed. I
’m in a recession of consciousness. My life has been a speculative economy, counting on tomorrow, but it has finally crashed. The bulls were only running because a bear was on their heels. Writing no longer offers me any solace, for not much has happened lately. Life in a fallout bunker becomes routine very quickly. This dullness has spilled over into my consciousness like an overflowing toilet with no plunger in sight, and so the shit riseth, and life is crappy.
I have not slept well since Tynee and Miss Mary first consummated their inexplicable attraction toward each other. My nights have since been colored by the sound of their moaning slapsex right next door. Tynee’s cheeks are invariably rosy in the mornings. On top of my sleeplessness, General Kiljoy wakes me before dawn, gives me coffee and some unidentified hot chunkiness for breakfast, and gets me to work. He makes me take breaks in the observation lounge, where we all hang around watching the boring crisis aboveground. If nothing else, I enjoy the natural light piped into the room, but my circadian cycles have lost their cadence nonetheless. I no longer possess any circadian rhythm. I stumble to the slosh of circadian Muzak.
Earlier this morning, I found myself pacing around the laboratory, clenching my hands, daydreaming about dancing and drumming around a fire until I had stomped my self-awareness into dust that blows to where the wild things are. Freedom to scream, freedom to roar, freedom to swim naked on a moonlit shore. A childish fantasy, to be sure, and not at all characteristic of me. I considered the possibility that I might be going stir-crazy. This worried me, and I tried to reassure myself aloud. But I sounded anxious and apprehensive, and thus only succeeded in making myself paranoid as well.
As I said, the monotony has dulled my motivation to write. My pace has slowed to a few sentences a day, if at all, and upon review amounts to little more than the rambling refuse of an academic recluse. This is also worrisome, since it occurs to me that I write to prevent myself from going mad. Yesterday, in desperation, I even tried doing what I was supposed to be doing just to do something, but that just depressed me all the more. Suicide presents itself again and again at every turn of thought.
Escape is demanding that I pay him heed. The sounds of his desperate cries reverberate through my head, spasmodic screams and primal anxiety bouncing the echoes of pathological frustration around the inside of my skull, kicking the life out of my survival instinct. As a rule, when a situation becomes intolerable, an egress is desired. Thwarted, frustration builds, the spirit expands, driving you to remove yourself from the situation in any way possible, for the spirit will not be confined. Not here, not anywhere.
Polite at first, the voice of freedom becomes increasingly fierce and unforgiving, fighting as it is for the love of life itself. We ignore it at our own peril. It either forces change or it forces death. The spirit must be free, I’ve discovered. It will not be shackled by the concerns and worries of the material world. It will be heard, it will get its way, and it will make us die before it will give up.
125 Things change, we constantly need to be reminded. Today is the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. On this unlikely day my mood suddenly soared, and I realized how fantastically selfish suicide is. Seeing as how life kicks everyone in the shins from time to time, what passing despair could possibly convince one to return the most spectacular gift in the universe? How do our dinky difficulties drive us to dicker with death? What belligerent buffoonery in the face of such benevolence! Suicide? Good heavens, I must have gone silly in the head. I almost deleted the previous passages out of existential embarrassment, but it’s not likely that anyone will ever read this anyway after what occurred today. I write nevertheless.
(General Kiljoy is looking in on me now. He looks afraid, and I strive to look the same. Nothing going on here, just diligent fear and work. I pause to rub the stress out of my temples.)
Why the sudden change of outlook, this sudden gaiety and glee? Aside from the glad fact of existence, I’m specifically pleased that I existed in time to witness what I’m about to relate.
Around ten o’clock this morning, as I sat at my desk trying to think of something to doodle (such were the depths of my crushing boredom), General Kiljoy summoned me to the observation lounge. Once I had joined Tynee and Miss Mary on the sofas, General Kiljoy commenced pacing, nay, marching, to and fro before us, stern and erect, clutching his military discipline with all his authoritarian might. “I have good news and bad news,” he began without a break in his step. “First, the good news. The situation upstairs will not continue. I was informed this morning that the entire quarantined area is to be sterilized.”
“The whole city?” Tynee spoke.
“The entire quarantined area,” General Kiljoy corrected, clinging to his euphemisms like an infant clinging to his mother’s silicone breasts. “The sterilization is scheduled tomorrow night at midnight. A warhead of undisclosed size will accomplish this objective. Everything within a sixty-mile radius of ground zero will be incinerated. The Pied Piper virus will then exist only in the laboratory once again.”
“What happens to us?” Miss Mary demanded, forgetting, for once, her monetary investment in the Pied Piper virus.
“We are irrelevant to national security,” General Kiljoy stated flatly. “We’re safe in this compound, in any case. This is, after all, a bomb shelter.”
“They’re going to drop a bomb, the bomb, on the greater metropolitan area?” Tynee asked, more confused than thunderstruck. “And right before Christmas? How the hell do they plan to get away with that?”
“I’m amazed it took them this long. It is a theoretical possibility that a bird could carry the virus out of the quarantined area. Confronted with the risk of a plague, there has been little resistance to this plan of action. It is generally regarded as unfortunate but necessary by the public.”
“Come on,” Tynee snorted. “The government can’t just nuke a small city and its few hundred thousand inhabitants and expect to maintain legitimacy. What’s going on?”
General Kiljoy paused, hands in pockets, nudging his nubbin. “The release of the virus is being called a terrorist attack.”
“Wow.” Tynee chuckled. “That’s a whopper.”
“Negative. The automation routines of this compound have been thoroughly examined and reexamined. There was no malfunction. Someone is responsible.”
“Terrorists? Did they find something on the videotapes?”
“Nothing that we don’t already know. Whoever is behind this was thorough.”
“So what’s the bad news?” Tynee asked.
“We will be taken in for questioning after sterilization.”
“What? I helped to conceive the goddamn idea!”
“Did you think they’d just give us a hug and say they’re glad we’re okay? This is the worst breach of national security in world history. We may not be publicly responsible, but each one of us is guilty until it is established exactly what happened. For all they know, one of us is the terrorist.”
“Us?” Tynee blurted and sputtered, flabbergasted at the notion. “I’ve been with this project longer than anyone!”
“I’ve already explained that Agent Orange is unaccounted for. She is currently suspect. They’re looking into it. She may be a double agent. She couldn’t have accomplished such an objective without massive assistance.”
“Did you tell them your theory about Captain Down as well?” Miss Mary’s haughtiness was returning with the news of her imminent release and subsequent limitless supply of fresh smokes. She spat a cloud in General Kiljoy’s direction. He deflected the insult with a roll of his eyes and a toss of his twerp.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why not earlier?”
“Things are occurring,” General Kiljoy answered without turning to me. He pointed his remote control at the observation window and turned on the video screen. “The release of the Pied Piper virus on such a massive scale has had consequences unanticipated by our limited observations of individuals and small groups.”
“Meaning what?”
Miss Mary demanded, again concerned about the status of her investment.
“Meaning there is more bad news.” General Kiljoy directed our attention to the screen. “This is an aerial view of the city recorded earlier this morning by a remote-operation surveillance plane. Notice anything peculiar?”
From such a distant perspective the city looked like a massive scab, a clumsily grid-lined, malignant scar on the natural landscape. Aside from that, there was nothing particularly unusual about it. Tynee, however, strode to the screen and immediately pointed to a barely visible line that encircled the entire city. It appeared to be a nearly perfect circle.
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“Isn’t that the outerbelt?” Miss Mary suggested. It would have been my first guess as well.
Tynee pointed to a thicker line, outside the original circle, which meandered its way around the city, connecting to other easily visible traffic arteries. “This is the outerbelt.”
“Good eye, Tibor.” General Kiljoy congratulated him.
“So what is it?” Tynee demanded once again.
“Watch.” General Kiljoy hit fast-forward, and the view of the city became gradually closer as the aircraft descended. Once we could distinguish windows on buildings, he resumed normal playback speed. The view presented by the camera revealed streets deserted exactly like a fresh ghost town. Newspapers and other artifacts of an abandoned civilization lay scattered about like tumbleweed. The stillness was interrupted only once by a pack of five dogs trotting down the middle of the street, utterly mindless of the extreme strangeness around them. “Reports estimate that approximately one-tenth of the city’s residents have perished,” General Kiljoy informed us as if he were relaying baseball statistics. “Widespread panic, random rioting, a lot of suicide. Interestingly, not many died of starvation or exposure. Apparently, finding food and shelter are drives independent of the ability to communicate.”
Just a Couple of Days Page 26
