Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  “Why now?” I ask, the tension in my body easing as I accept oneness with the ground.

  “You don’t know?” she says. “My mother spent her entire life trying to become a god. Gods don’t grow old and decrepit and slip into a state of pleasant dementia. The infirmed cannot be worshipped. Like Jerry said, people will remember Ascalon and forget Akira. I’m here to make sure they remember Akira.”

  I don’t know if I buy that. “She was still sharp,” I say. “She was only my age. She had so much time.”

  A laugh as the blue tail passes in front of my face. “Time for what? The world has been saved, has it not?”

  I think about the iE snapshot of that blue teenager. I remove the tat dye, the hair, in order to picture the person standing above me, but can’t quite get there. “Not necessarily,” I say.

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “What she would’ve become. Every true god needs to be martyred at the end. I’m the force that has ended my mother’s reign.”

  And there it is. She wanted so much to matter in Akira’s life that she’s spent her own plotting this.

  “You’re crazy,” I say. She’s stopped pacing, and I feel her warmth now, still close behind me. “That old guy on Vomit Island. Was that—”

  “Did you see how her body slid apart?” she interrupts, whispering. “Wasn’t it beautiful? The most iconic thing in history. Jerry Caldwell saw it and didn’t understand. She, of all people, should have. She’s the artist. But instead of appreciating it, she threatened me.”

  Jerry’s holo art flickers on. At first, it’s too bright. I squint and wait for my eyes to adjust. Each of Jerry’s images has been replaced with pieces of frozen Akira. Arms separated from shoulders. Calves from knees. Head from neck. Torso from torso. They play on loop until I’m numb. I struggle again to see who I’m talking to. I somehow manage to get to my knees, but it’s as high as I can go.

  And suddenly, there she is, squatting in front of me in an onryō white kimono. One lidless eye a glimmering yellow. Her face quilted together like stained glass with grafted skin, some patches blue and others a pale tone, the same as her mother’s. An arched, reptilian mouth, as if someone grabbed the skin on the back of her head and pulled. Her hair is no longer pink, but a glossy, untamed black. It’s all so unfinished, I don’t know if she’s in the process of turning herself into a normal-looking person or the other way around.

  The rest of her looks so young, though. Athletic. Maybe years sleeping in an AMP chamber and out at the gym. She has, in a brilliant way, made herself inconspicuous. She is noticeable, but a person whose appearance causes such discomfort that a stranger would immediately look away, like a carnival freak of old.

  “Don’t you see?” she says again. “It’s our job to protect Akira’s legacy.”

  “And Jerry?” I ask. I look into black pupil of the yellow eye, which is clearly the replacement one from all those years ago.

  She sighs, sounding regretful for the first time. “Jerry was a mistake.”

  “What happened?”

  She stands and walks around me. I try to twist to keep her in sight but can’t. “I built this security system for Jerry Caldwell. We’re in a room full of her priceless art, and she wanted to protect it.”

  “Is this painting a glue trap?” I ask.

  “Bio-engineered suction cups, like you would find on the arms of an octopus or squid, but of course, far smaller and stronger.” She circles around me and squats again. She looks so much like her mother, but distorted.

  The sharp tip of her tail splits like a lizard’s tongue. It slithers toward my face. She watches me steadily with her yellow eye while the points extend and move to my nostrils. I try to pull away, but she plunges the prongs up my nose.

  I’m hyperventilating now. Frozen. Prone. The painting suddenly releases its hold on me, and the floor beneath me rises to form a bed. Or maybe a sacrificial altar. Ascalon Lee stands at my bedside. “Akira Kimura wasn’t the first great Japanese scientist,” she says.

  I flail, trying to regain control of my breath.

  “For example, Hanaoka Seishū was the first person in history to administer general anesthesia for surgery. He created a substance called tsusensan. That’s what’s flowing through your veins now.”

  The name rings a bell. Akira mentioned him once. Seishūū used tsusensan on his wife. She went blind.

  “I can fix you,” she says. “Make you what you were before.”

  For the first time in my old age, I do not want to feel younger. I do not want to be as fast as I was, or to be able to see and do as I have done before. I try to say something but can’t. I just want to survive this, but I doubt that’s gonna happen.

  She slowly lowers her head toward mine. I’m afraid one of those lidless eyes will come rolling out of her face and plop on mine. She presses her forehead against mine. I feel something seep from the seams in her skin.

  “Do you feel sorry for me?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. And I mean it.

  She drives the points of her tail further up my nasal cavity. I snarl as my eyes begin to tear.

  The anesthesia she dosed me with is probably the only thing keeping me alive. I can barely feel anything except vibrating anxiety for when it stops working. “There is hardly the living organism in this world that I haven’t dissected,” she says. “Taken apart, pieced back together for the better. Your sight, for example. Yes, I’ve been watching you for years. I know about that.”

  Despite the anesthesia, the pain under each eye is blinding. “Curious, isn’t it? The pain you’re experiencing now feels closer to your eyes than your nose. The brain is magnificently complex.”

  I expect a fog of green to rise before me. It doesn’t. “I don’t see it,” I say. “I don’t see green.”

  “Correct,” she says. Her head snaps away from mine. “You don’t see it. You smell it.”

  A projection beams from her eye and settles on the ceiling above. It’s a nose. My nose. The lights dim. The image splits, and the nose is pulled inside out. Now, the ceiling is specked with green and magenta. The image stretches from 2D to 3, and the specks begin to take shape into something galactic looking. I close my eyes and think about the ambergris all those years ago. I smelled it before I saw it. A scent so vivid that to this day, I feel like the perfume is here in the room. I open my eyes and am forced to stare at the perinuclear colors.

  She continues. “The eyes and ears detect waves,” she says. “The nose detects particles.” The holo above me is magnified. Now, all I see are two crooked strands, one green, one magenta, that bulb at their ends.

  “Every particle in existence is chemical,” she says. “From the sun to blood to excreted hormones, it’s all chemical matter. Don’t you understand?” The image pans back to the neural panorama. “The relationship between murderer and victim is revealed on a particle level. It’s entangled. You can sense this. It’s what makes you remarkable. The fact that you see it instead of smelling it is simply a result of your synesthesia. That you are colorblind makes it more distinct. Let me ask you—when was the first time you sensed it?”

  I stare up at lit scatter and begin to see patterns. “If it’s chemical,” I whisper, evading her question, “I can be fooled.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Now. I need my mother’s iE.”

  This request puzzles me. What the hell is she talking about? “Akira didn’t have an iE. Never has.”

  The prongs go further up, and I resist the urge to scream. “Don’t lie to me. Do you really think she just sat around and did nothing for the last four decades like you?” The 3D image of my nose flickers back on. Not the microscopic view, but a much simpler one that expands to more than just my nose. It’s a floating MRI of my entire head, my own lidless eyes staring back at me. “Do you see, there?”

  The prongs probing my inner nose glow, as does a spot o
n the holo. “I can pierce straight through to your prefrontal cortex. Taking into consideration your former occupations, I imagine you know what that would do. Now I’ll ask you one more time. She had an iE. You’re the only person she would give it to. Where is it?”

  I grit my teeth. “I’m not lying. She didn’t have an iE! She would’ve told me.”

  A pause follows, both of us in quiet stillness. Time stretches. Unlike any of my own targets, I’ll see the bullet coming. What was it that I told the chief when I found Akira’s body? At least she succeeded. At least she did well in life. I can’t say the fucking same.

  Time snaps back in an instant. I gasp as she withdraws her tail from my nose and the holo MRI flickers off. Now I’m able to turn away, which I do, praying that I’ll wake up if I pass out. Only I turn the wrong way. I fade to unconsciousness as Akira is cut up again and again on Jerry’s installation, the only god I know being sliced apart on repeat.

  20

  When I come to, the first thing I see is the glimmer of the 1911 on the bar. I roll off the bed, grab the gun, and struggle to stand. The second thing I check is whether my iE is online. It is. I breathe both suspicion and relief. Next, I touch my nose. It feels normal. No pain. Was it all an illusion? Nothing about the encounter on my iE history. I try to get my bearings. I look up at the shelves of liquor. Each one is aquarium-tubed, subtly backlit, and filled with a convoy of tiny glow-in-the-dark jellyfish. I snatch the opened bottle off the bar and take a swig, hoping it will calm me down.

  But I’m still here.

  Lightheaded, I look up at the chandeliers, each one a real tree stunted and trained to hold giant bulbs containing genetically engineered fireflies. I grab a clean towel from behind the bar and wet it, then press it against my face. I wonder if these things, the shelf tubes and chandeliers, were here the last time I came to visit Jerry. I’m not sure. As usual, I wasn’t paying attention. But as I see these now, I think about how looking at nice things has a weird effect. At first, you admire them. Then you start wanting them. By the end of the day, you start thinking you deserve them, even if you ain’t worked to get them. That woman who just crammed her tail up my nose. All her life, she watched her mother. And apparently me, too. She feels I owe her something, and I can’t give it to her because it doesn’t exist. Akira Kimura never had an iE—she hated the things. What the hell is her daughter after?

  I recall more of what she said, trying to piece the whole encounter back together without external replay. Is it really smell that makes me see these reds and greens? I’ve just been coming up with half-assed theories most of my life, never having anyone to ask or bounce ideas off of because I was so afraid to share what I saw. She’s probably right—she’s certainly qualified to theorize. What was it that Enrico Fermi once said while frying a bunch of onions? It would be nice if we could understand the sense of smell, he said. I laugh inside. This coming from the genius who built the first nuclear reactor.

  I look down at the bar and see something that wasn’t there before. It’s a real book, paper and all. I open the leather-bound cover with my shaking hand and see the title.

  There it is, meticulously handwritten, like a medieval monk-scribed bible. Some letters boxed and emblazed in gold. I think that I should be seeing all kinds of green and red floating up from this thing. Or smelling them, according to Ascalon Lee. But I don’t see or smell any of that. All I see is the title right on page one.

  The Book of Ascalon.

  She’s got her mother’s handwriting. I take the book and head to the hover. Trembling, I ping Sabrina. No answer. I ping her again. I touch my nose and wonder if she planted something inside me. Some kind of surveillance device or an explosive. I crawl into the hover and lift off. The wind knocks into the vehicle, and I almost crash into the building. Steady, old man, I say. Steady. You’re alive. I take a breath and ping Sabrina a third time. Again, no answer. I bank and head full throttle to the ocean. For the first time that I can remember, speed scares me. But I’ve gotta get back quick. I take another breath and keep the hover going at full speed. I ask my iE to run through the basics on our sense of smell. There are about four hundred different receptors on the surface of olfactory neurons, which dangle from the brain like tentacles. It’s the only part of the central nervous system constantly exposed to the outside world. I dig for more and am slung over to reality and theoretical evolution. Some theorize that the brain may have evolved to hide the true nature of reality, not reveal it. Like an interface—widgets that simplify so that we can interact with something more complex. The water is lit up with city lights beneath me. For some idiotic reason, I’m relieved I can still see green and red. It’s probably just the general relief of being alive. I glance at my iE. How the hell can we make this device and the underwater sprawl below us, but not know how our own noses work, these things literally attached to our faces? I fly above the saddle between the two great mountains and pass The Savior’s Eye. It’s turning dark, and it begins to snow up there.

  After I land, I stumble out of the hover and run to our unit. I’m stripping things off along the way: the 1911, my coat, even my iE. Anything she could have cursed with her scientific magic I drop into the ocean. The last thing I have is the book. I think about tossing it, but I can’t bring myself to do it. No, she put too much work into this. It’s not gonna self-destruct. I hope this applies to me as well, especially after being manipulated for days and framed for two murders.

  I get to the door and bust through it, nearly falling on my face. My body responds to the sudden imbalance well. The last thing it wants is to be stuck on a floor again. I look around. Everything is like I left it. A holo plays dimly in the living room.

  A gun muzzle presses against my temple.

  It’s Sabrina, her cop’s finger still well trained. The finger never on the trigger unless she’s about to fire. “I tried to ping you,” I say.

  She puts the gun down. “I was putting Ascalon to bed,” she says. “She had me playing her a holo vid for the last thirty minutes.”

  I look over at the holo vid in the center of the room. It’s one I’ve seen before. I turn up the brightness and sound. It’s talking about how some scientists believe that we all started off as bright pink microorganisms so great in number that we tinted the ancient oceans and could be seen collectively from outer space. The image of the pink and blue planet is beautiful, and it makes me wonder what the fuck happened to us. The vibrant pinks of our existence have darkened, and we’ve become so shattered that we gaze at each other’s chipped reflections to make excuses for being so dark and ugly. We’re cut from the same master glass, which can never be fixed. Or maybe that’s what Sessho-seki was supposed to be. Our reset button. Our way back to becoming the breathtaking, swirling image I see on vid.

  “She was watching this?” I ask.

  “Yeah, she liked the colors.” Sabrina touches my face. “Where’d you go?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  I take The Book of Ascalon out of my pocket and hand it to her. She reads the first page. “My god,” she says.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Did you read it yet?”

  “Didn’t get the chance,” I say. “I was worried.”

  “Let’s read it together.”

  We grab a couple of chairs and drag them to Ascalon’s door. Sabrina armed and vigilant. We sit side by side and open the book. Sabrina’s hair brushes my cheek. Then she tilts her head slightly away, leaving the feel of something pleasantly phantom on my skin. I finally feel alive again. My entire body hums with energy at an eighth octave C. I try to settle down.

  Sabrina’s iE hovers above us and beams down light. Sabrina reads the first page out loud. I begin to calm. We read the second page silently together. I think I’m okay now. I turn the pages while she points at certain words or phrases and gasps. It’s just the two of us, hudd
led outside our baby’s room under a dim wedge of light.

  21

  The tale of Ascalon begins some sixty years ago with a young pregnant scientist and a man in the mountains preparing for a live water birth. It was a long-abandoned technique, passed down to him in family stories. No hospital, no certificate, no confirmation. Just life jettisoned into a pond cleansed by a waterfall, the flowing hair of some forgotten goddess. Why the young woman agreed to such a birth, the man had no clue. He was just happy she had. So they hiked the mountain, him carrying blankets, towels, and such, her toting a basket filled with envy apples and local ginger. Shortly after they arrived at the secluded spot, she went into labor.

  Ascalon came first. A beautiful, healthy baby girl. The woman handed the man her first child, and he attempted to swaddle her in a blanket. It was his first time trying to swaddle a baby, so he struggled as the baby’s cries frazzled his nerves. When he finally finished, he noticed that the woman was quiet. She had, in fact, been quiet the entire time he folded and re-folded. There was a second baby in her arms, this one neither beautiful nor healthy, but twisted, tailed, and eyeless. The woman looked up at the man and put the quiet baby underwater. She twisted its neck to speed up its death. At first, he objected. But the woman reminded him that when it came to deformity, his people used to do this, too.

  She stepped from the pond and rinsed herself in the goddess’s flowing hair. The man, still holding Ascalon, stepped into the pond and scooped up her dead sister. He cried and called the woman mad. She stepped over to him to take Ascalon. He told her she would have nothing to do with this child. He didn’t trust her. She was a murderer. If she challenged his wishes, he would tell people about the dead child he was holding alongside the living one. She agreed to leave both of them. These are the sacrifices this woman made, as told to Ascalon by her father. A loving, devoted man. But ultimately a weak man. He wanted his daughter to hate her mother. The first time he took Ascalon into the ocean, she feared it. The tug of its current, its unthinkable depth. “Just like your mother,” he said. When the girl taught herself to read at two, the father looked on, furious. He imbibed every night after the last tourist departed, and on one of these nights, when she was three, a sweltering September afternoon filled with dead wind, he told her the story of her drowned twin. She nodded. Somehow, she already knew. She had always felt incomplete, not just from her mother’s absence, but from something else. Her father cried as he told her about her eyeless, twisted, tailed twin. The girl felt a prickle in her tailbone.