The Imago Sequence

by Laird Barron

  EXCERPTED FROM THE ACTION 9 COVERAGE OF MIRANDA CARSON BRIEFING (by Rod Jones—6/9/99):

  MC: . . .and in closing I just want to thank everyone involved with the search for Jack. There are so many people who have given their time . . .I thank all of you for the cards and letters. It means so much to us.

  And to whoever is holding my husband: please, let him come home. Take him to a hospital or a fire station. Please, from the bottom of my heart, I beg you to do the right thing. Please let Jack come home to his family. You have the power.

  Jack, I love you. We won't stop looking.

  THE ROYAL ZOO IS CLOSED

  —ENTR'ACTE—

  Sweeney smeared a bloody thumbprint on the refrigerator. He stared at it, studied it, at length. Stared as if he'd discovered a roadmap of a foreign country, stared like it was going to show him the quickest means to apprehend some territory he hadn't thought of—not aloud, not yet.

  He stared at that thumbprint, his thumbprint, but already alien, already drying from red to black. He thought, Why did I think of a map, it's a completely different shape—a cockroach, a butterfly, two butterflies fucking. And fuck me, it's changing.

  Actually, several hundred-thousand thoughts were crashing in the supercollider of his cerebrum; asteroids caroming off a cortex loaded to the steerage with memories of pancakes, prison, premature ejaculations and continental drift. How in the Beginning the whole wobbly volcanic mass had two heads, Laurasia and Gondwanaland, and J. W. Booth was captured in a barn, and how Underdog and Popeye couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag until they'd had their fix. However, it was the Rorschach-eats-Escher quality of his own fleshly warps and whorls in bas-relief that set his synapses ablaze, shot alarm pings across the radar screen.

  Sweeney stepped away too fast, the instinct of a man caught out by a truck speeding through the crosswalk, the convulsive jerk that gives a pious soul pause to genuflect, elicits lips to a crucifix, or a rosary, the antenna-twitch of a bug in the descending shadow of some colossal hand. An orchestra tuned off-key instruments in the pit of Sweeney's belly.

  Just a bloody thumbprint on a white background. Just that. Only the fridge humming and the window rattling from the traffic on the street. He checked the clock, watched it tick into a new hour. He gathered his papers from the kitchen table, stuffed them into his briefcase with the mindless preoccupation of an animal scavenging for winter. Now his heart was quiet in its cage and he was feeling better and also a little stupid. The last time this happened he spent three hours gaping at the filament of the bathroom light, paralyzed with an unshakable conviction that it suddenly represented the last dying spark in a universe of frozen ash.

  He walked out of the apartment and was waiting at the bus stop for the 76 when it occurred to him to wonder how he cut his hand. He flexed his fingers searching for a wound that wasn't there and considered if the department head would buy stigmata.

  Sweeny's portfolio was spattered in blood and probably ruined, but it didn't matter—the machines and the cockroaches would doubtless inherit everything precisely as Hawking always promised. And anyway, this was his last day at work.

  Riding from the University District to downtown in the morning meant crowds. Crowds meant nothing to Sweeney. He was a veteran of the city, the first one off the platform and perched on a seat above the wheel-well, briefcase across his knees. He looked out the window at the skyline, chromatic superstructures strung by blinking lights. Dusty haze coiled within the sunrise. The Needle slid past on the starboard side. Quite apropos, since this city was the West Coast plexus of the Heroin Nebula. Sweeney hadn't bought a ticket to the revolving crown of the famous tower, not in thirty years—and wouldn't ever. Every morning he half-expected to watch it flare like a firecracker and rocket into space.

  Stop and go in the freeway crush lasted twenty minutes. It always seemed like an hour packed tight as olives on the stinking bus with the blue-haired new-wave lawyers, twitching nosebleeds of all sexes on the double to their doctors, and the transients in Technicolor rags, polyester business suits and garbage bags, smelling of ammonia and microwaved meat.

  One guy, a fat guy in a coat and tie with an Adam's apple that truly resembled an apple, a Washington Golden Delicious, muttered a monologue about passenger pigeons. Nobody could shrink away from him, nor escape his encyclopedic recitation; there was no space to squeeze. Sweeney might as well have been trapped aboard a mail train stalled on the outskirts of The Third World, waiting for a smashup to wipe the excess of human cargo from the tracks, except here there were no chickens, no soldiers with fingers inside trigger guards, and the heat wasn't hammer and tongs yet. It was still coming.

  A fire engine revved its klaxon, bullied past them, crawling upstream through columns of stalled metal, and Sweeney considered how in the dimness of his childhood he had wanted to be a fireman, to wear the helm with the symbol, the black and yellow turnout coat, to wield the ax.

  Sweeney wouldn't take the job if they paid him triple. He wouldn't be a cop either. Or a teacher. Christ, he wouldn't set foot inside a high school, they were shooting galleries these days.

  The bus disgorged in the tunnel. Worker ants poured from the barrel, flowed up the escalators into the street. Sweeney led the surge, chin in his chest, striding past the Korean espresso stand, the all-star a cappella rappers, and the heavies with their hats out. A radio sputtered static. Jimmy Swaggart shrieking on full automatic, accompanied by a horn section, the hiss-boom-bah of the hometown coliseum, a cymbal clash. Jesus wasn't dead, just in hiding like Cousin Waldo. Maybe they were shacking with Noriega at a Vatican safehouse.

  Fresh graffiti slashed across green mailboxes, a dog bristled at Sweeney's approach, practically slavered to take a piece of his ankle, but didn't. A bum wearing a Seahawks parka and a monogrammed sock cap he'd likely ripped off called the dog back, gave it a pat with a hand most of the skin had curled from, like scales on the dirt-blacked talon of some large, flightless bird. Sweeney hurried on. He was going places.

  He was thinking and obsessing about the graffiti on the mailboxes, the brick walls of the buildings, and everywhere it splattered and proliferated; a specialized urban life form, human kudzu bred in the caverns of a hive mind that chanted slogans like FREE WILL, and INDEPENDENCE, and REVOLLUTION. And spelled it incorrectly, mostly.

  What was encrypted in the glyphs of the modern age, what did it mean? Certainly a cipher, as was the ancient Cockney, invented as the argot of the disenfranchised, the disaffected, the cant of thieves who crept into darkened homes and ate the peanut butter and drank the beer and put their greasy mitts on your daughter, if you had one, and pretty soon she'd be following them around, learning how to do loop-de-loops on a skateboard, a bullring in her nose, or wherever, a satellite in a decaying orbit. She might wander off to Hollywood, do a tour in the trenches, wind up on the casting coach hoping to become the next Norma Jean bursting from a cake to serenade the knights of Camelot, another domesticated seal; thoroughly modern though, because her tattoos said as much. A cipher by any other name and I'm sorry Mr. & Mrs. So & So, we found her in a ditch. That's where the smart money was in the whole degenerate crap shoot.

  Sweeney, consumed with graffiti, recollected graffiti artists he had known. Jacks of the trade, as it were. The best of them always went armed with a pithy salvo, inscrutable as a ghetto to the sleek banker rolling in an SUV.

  When you're outta crack, the crack of dawn will do, so said a former would-be sumo named Confucius, Confucius Alexander Trey, or Cat for short. A college buddy, a drinking buddy, the one who went the wrong way down the track, although these days Sweeney wasn't so certain of that estimation. Cat was a sure-enough Michelangelo with a spray can or a magic marker and his canvases of preference were the temples of wealth and avarice—as defined by the book of C. He didn't make it far, geologically speaking. He died in '99, shotgunned in the face outside a shelter in Pioneer Square. Closed coffin, open circuit, and there's no apothegm to counter that, so shovel on the dirt.
Karma, brothers and sisters, has a mouth as big as the world.

  Sweeney glimpsed Confucius smirking, here and there, not every time, but with sufficient regularity to warrant suspicion, and it was another thing to worry about. Confucius knew something, obviously. Maybe it was true—the handwriting was on the wall.

  Things were getting too complicated. In the eighteenth century when the Cockney slang was in flower, blokes trundling along Buck's Row weren't worried about Big Bangs or ICBMs pointed at their bedrooms, or String Theories tweaking the chords of high-strung theological violins. They didn't give a fig about Stephen Hawking, or nanotech out-sprinting human evolution to the brass ring, or wristwatches. The world wasn't on its last legs in 1788, wasn't sucking in its last breath, wasn't ready to topple from the roof of heaven into an abyss, even if a few critics thought it might, or that it should. The prophecies were shouted lowercase.

  Today of all days, the graffiti held a message for Sweeney that had lurked there from the beginning, astride the mortar and the calculus.

  Sweeney read HELL between the isosceles, ellipses and hoops. He read EAT OR BE EATEN and THE END IS HERE. He read SWEENEY CALL HOME. And he read no further. He went on his way, wearing the stunned expression of a man who has forgotten something important. A man fumbling in his pocket for keys to a car he doesn't own, a house he's never lived in.

  Sweeney gazed into the branches of the plum trees planted at intervals along the sidewalk. The trees were pleasant; it was much safer than touring the country where animals rustled among the woodwork. These trees were innocent of inhabitants—the rats only lived in them at night. Sometimes earnest dollars amounted to more than a hill of beans in a world of spoons. Sometimes someone had taste. Sometimes someone showed restraint—plum trees, glitzy fountains and the billion acres of grass you're not supposed to walk on under penalty of death. Propriety, decency, common sense were tragically underrepresented, as was exhibited by the Hammering Man looming near the SAM, the pregnant nude bronzed between a library and a Lutheran daycare, or Lenin glowering in Fremont, the self-styled Left Bank, the so-called Center of the Universe. Fremont could have him if they wanted. Stalin too—why not? Grab a shovel; shit isn't always free, just cheap. Sweeney thought they were trying a bit too hard.

  Sweeney was, as ever, early. He ducked into a diner, seized the lone deserted table with remnants of the Last Breakfast—cigarette butts interred in the coagulated gravy, wadded napkins on the floor, pieces of change under a plastic cup. Brand new curses lovingly scribed into Formica, a hunk of gum with veins. He sat on calcified vinyl, watching for the waitress. Sort of a sport.

  MAGGY, said her tag. Everyone was tagged. The fish in the stream, and the polar bear on the ice floe. This was the Information Age. Knowing What's What was half the game.

  MAGGY asked him what he wanted. She did it telepathically, hand on hip, the interrogative frown a trademark of stoics and customer service personnel in any epoch. She'd seen Sweeney every weekday morning of several burned up calendars, and still she made the query, for it was possibly the height of professional courtesy to obey such rituals.

  He said coffee, she poured it and rolled onward, appraising other mouths in the herd. She too was going places. Itzhak Bentov, the esteemed, albeit informal, poet physicist might've commented that she was already there.

  Sweeney tried to read the paper, found his focus dilated telescopically. He couldn't grasp those paragraphs of multitudinous complexity, the small-town soap opera plot of places and events blown out of proportion, intumescent and malignant, somewhat staggering, yet squalid, as a drunk sailor on shore leave, or Saint Vitus wavering in a mural shot through a digital camera in the drunken sailor's paw. The typeset conspired with the graffiti. The implications were cosmic. He speculated for milliseconds what the plan was, couldn't begin to perceive its contours, much less the details, and gave up. He fixated on the pictures. Thus modern man was brought full circle to the chronicles of habit carved by hominids hunkered around tiny fires in limestone dens way back when.

  Across the ocean, a medieval metropolis was catching hell. Domes burned. Thunderheads boiled atop black pillars. Panic. Chaos. Live coverage at 11. A sign read THE ROYAL ZOO IS CLOSED.

  They got a grainy shot of a zookeeper in a dirty turban, face buried in his blackened hands. An emaciated tiger pressed its ribs against a cage door, appeared as if it could slip right through the bars. Its fur as matted as indoor-outdoor carpet, its eyes were sleepy. The tiger licked cracks in the concrete. Bandits had stolen the gorillas, the snakes and the elephants.

  The Coalition couldn't get the water going. There was no power. There was no food. There was, however, plenty of hope. A child on a stretcher lost his parents in the shelling; people were searching for them, and incidentally, his arms had come off and nobody could find them either. He was smiling. In the background, a mob pulverized the Dictator's statue with sledgehammers, bulldozing a plot for the Golden Arches, a five-star hotel, something commercially utilitarian and ineffably American.

  Sweeney flipped to the sports page. The Mariners were in spring training; they would take the West easy. He brought fifty dollars for the pool at the office. Suckers. His coffee was done. Sweeney folded the paper neatly. Like so, and so, and so.

  —IMPREZIO—

  The week before his last day at the office, Sweeney visited the doctor. Sweeney suffered cold sweats, heart palpitations, nausea, a whole laundry list. He was panicky, delusional, irritated, sometimes enraged, sometimes overcome with inchoate grief regarding events he couldn't quite recall and worse to come and it was nearly enough to drive a grown man to tears. Somebody somewhere once told him a good cry was as a lance to a boil. A good cry would set him right as rain.

  Sweeney never cried, never shouted, never stuck a pencil in anybody's neck despite the often overwhelming compulsion to homicide engendered by modern life; nonetheless, things were not remotely copasetic. Of late, that being the last decade, give or take, Sweeney had devolved into an emotional oscillator. From moment to moment he wanted to swig sake and fly his Zero into an aircraft carrier; kick some teeth; flog his dog; flog the noisy neighbor; slit his own throat; start a fire; shoot his boss; quit his job; do heavy drugs, preferably peyote, or maybe mash-Allah in a hash-house in Amsterdam, or an authentic buffalo-skin teepee on the Great Plains and receive a vision quest; quit being a slave to cigarettes; send a letter bomb to P. Morris; get right with Jesus; join the cult of the homeless; screw a starlet, even an ugly one; or say screw everything and go home and hide under the covers until everything blew over. In the vernacular, Sweeney was freaking out.

  The conversation between Sweeney and the doctor went as follows.

  —Doc, I've got problems. I'm impotent, and I think I may be a racist.

  —Why do you assume you're impotent?

  —This woman moved in across the hall. And she's a hottie, see. She prances around in harem pants and a g-string, and yeah I want to, well, uh, know her. Biblically. God, I'm old enough to be her father. But, uh, well, that's not the problem, the problem is this: The attraction is purely intellectual, a friggin' computer algorithm—you aren't hungry, but you see some shortcake, it makes your mouth water and you know you must want it 'cause you haven't had shortcake since Oppy split the atom. I look at that chick in the harem pants and want a piece of shortcake all right, but, uh, nothing's happening with me physically. It's like a psychotic Zen nightmare and I don't even know how to repair a goddamned motorcycle.

  —Stress, Sweeney. It's all in your mind. I'll write you a prescription. Why do you think you're racist?

  —'Cause I'm afraid of foreigners. Not the ones who live here, not unless they're wearing turbans and carrying satchels, ha-ha. I guess what it is, what I meant was, I'm afraid of other countries.

  —Ah. Which ones in particular?

  —I don't know. Which ones got the bomb or are getting it? China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan for starters. Hell, France, Israel, good old U.S.A. A reformed coke fiend wi
th a finger on the button; yeah I get scared of Texans, even the transplants, and their stupid hats, their baseball teams and Brahma bulls. They speak a different language. Call information sometime, you'll see what I mean. I guess it's irrational. Yeah.

  —You're not just a racist, Sweeney. You're a xenophobe. I can help; here's another prescription. Allow me to refer you to a very fine psychiatric professional. I send all the doozies to him. Here's his card.

  —What? No can do, Doc. I read the small print in the insurance manual. They only cover up to seventy percent of the couch time, no promises either. I'll shrink my head next year, when I can afford it. There's one thing though, maybe you can tell me if I'm schizophrenic. Or if I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. Can you be one and not the other, or is it always both?

  —Perhaps you'd better tell me more.

  —I see patterns lately. Everywhere. Clouds with cherub faces, dry leaves murmuring Chinese herbal secrets, paint peeled to make a symbol, a drop of blood trickling counterclockwise from the mouth of a dying pigeon. A car horn confuses me, makes me think big Gabe is blowing his trumpet. Shit like that.

  —Oh, me too, Sweeney. Me too. Take a couple bottles of these, though. Just in case.

  The mantra of Millennial anxiety: Mass Hysteria. Mass Hypnosis. Mass Production. Mass Transit. Mass Murder. Mass Media. Massacre. Mass Exodus. Mass Extinction.

  Pundits said Hitler and Pol Pot gelded the term Genocide. That the Holocaust exhausted the fat muscles of pathos and empathy, unyoked them from their central gravity, sent them chasing after every rabbit, and gave the collective consciousness a callous. After Ted B. and Jeff D. the whole multiple homicide shtick was positively ho-hum. Social outrage was quarantined and relegated to splinter cells, underground presses, leftist political organizations and charities. Humanity was immunized against anguish. Horror was white noise, Misery the Muzak of a strip-mall culture. Everyone was terrorized and utterly fearless.