Author: Chapman, Stepan
Date: 2012-06-25
Keywords: science fiction; fantasy; novel; surreal
Publisher: Ministry of Whimsy Press

The Troika

Stepan Chapman

This edition published in association with Cheeky Frawg Books
by Ministry of Whimsy Press (an imprint of Wyrm Publishing).

Copyright © 1997, 2012 by Stepan Chapman.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

Cover Art © 2012 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

ISBN: 978-1-890464-17-2 (ebook)

ISBN: 1-890464-02-03 (trade paperback)

Originally published in trade paperback by Ministry of Whimsy, 1997.

Excerpts from this novel, in somewhat altered form, have previously appeared in: The Chicago Review, Cyanosis, Fantastic Worlds, The Hawaii Review, Leviathan #1, New Pathways, Orbit #13, Orbit #17, Orbit #20, Potpourri, The Univers Anthology (France), The Wisconsin Review, and Zyzzyva.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

www.cheekyfrawg.com
www.wyrmpublishing.com

Contents

Introduction: The Resurrection of a SF/Fantasy Classic

by Jeff VanderMeer

PART ONE: A Family Illness
one: The Desert
two: Trade-Ins
three: The Chosen Donor
four: Desertion
five: Storm Center

PART TWO: Relapse
six: The Fallen Woman
seven: Assemblies
eight: The Kidnapping
nine: Sirocco

PART THREE: Signs of Recovery
ten: Spraying For Bugs
eleven: The Frozen Mammoth
twelve: The Hush
thirteen: Low Pressure Area

PART FOUR: The Cure
fourteen: The Singer
fifteen: The Last Judgment
sixteen: Autopsy In Transit
seventeen: Dust Storm

About the Author

INTRODUCTION: The Resurrection of a SF/Fantasy Classic

by Jeff VanderMeer

Stepan Chapman may well be one of North America’s last true fabulists—a storyteller who mixes myth, science fiction, fantasy, and the surreal into a rich tapestry of dark, ironic, and darkly humorous stories. His first story, bought by the legendary John Campbell, was published in the December 1969 Analog SF Magazine, followed by four appearances in Damon Knight's prestigious Orbit anthology series. More recently, Mr. Chapman has published stories in a number of prestigious literary magazines and avant garde publications, with a chapbook Danger Music (Ten Fables) and a collection Dossier.

But his most famous creation is the novel The Troika, which received wide-spread critical acclaim and won the Philip K. Dick Award after being published by my Ministry of Whimsy Press in 1996. I first read the novel after Chapman submitted two parts of it as stand-alone stories for the Leviathan anthology series. The first segment made no sense out of context but I still felt it was brilliant and asked to see more. The second, “The Chosen Donor,” made it into the first volume of Leviathan and at that point Chapman revealed it was part of what he called “my unpublishable novel,” rejected by over 120 publishers. He then sent me The Troika to read.

Daunted by the prospect of an “unpublishable” novel, I was somewhat leery about reading it, even though I’d loved the excerpts. But before I knew it, I had read through the first three chapters. Then six chapters. Then nine chapters. In short, I finished The Troika in one night—I simply couldn't stop reading it. When I had finished, I sat back in disbelief—disbelief that the manuscript had not interested even one publisher (something of a literary crime, in my eyes). Added to my disbelief was the cover letter Mr. Chapman had attached, to the effect that eight of the 17 chapters had been published in very prestigious literary magazines and genre anthologies. Since The Troika , to my mind, worked best as a novel rather than a series of short stories, it seemed inconceivable (ridiculous, actually) that Mr. Chapman could not find a publisher!

Simply put, The Troika is a tour de force of sustained surreal science fiction—influenced to some degree by manga—and contains some of the most audaciously imaginative passages I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Although the mordant humor of the novel invites comparisons to Joseph Heller and Terry Southern, it is uniquely “Chapmanesque” in its fusion of mythology, psychology, and the afterlife. Some scenes are magnificent break-neck narratives, while others are whimsical, dark, and shot through with pathos.

The Troika is also that rarest of birds, a truly visionary novel of the surreal that never loses sight of its main characters’ lives. In this case, those characters happen to be a robotic jeep (Alex), a brontosaurus (Naomi), and an old Mexican woman (Eva). If that sounds strange, consider this: the troika is trudging across an endless desert lit by three purple suns. Not only has their journey lasted hundreds of years, but they have no memory of their past lives, and therefore no clue as to how they came to walk the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities. To further complicate matters, sandstorms jolt them out of one body and into another (a game of metaphysical musical chairs): Eva falls asleep a Mexican woman only to wake up a jeep.

The novel alternates between dream-tales about the troika’s former lives and their present-day attempts to discover where they are and how they can get out. From this quest form, Chapman has fashioned a poignant and powerful story of redemption in which pathos is leavened by humor and pain is softened by comfort. It is the story of Alex who wanted to be a machine. It is also the story of deranged angels, deadly music boxes, and of the love and desperation that can bind people together.

As importantly, The Troika is a stylistic tour-de-force—it abounds with magnificent prose passages, some of which delight and some of which horrify. One of the cleverest passages describes an alternate theory for why the dinosaurs died out:

The dinosaurs called them The Spoilers. They evolved from the man-of-war and grew huge on the surface of the oceans. They killed by stinging. They were hollow animals, beasts of living origami, with radial skeletons of cuttlebone and opalescent white skins. They rolled up onto the beaches like moving cities, folding into and over themselves. Lifting their minarets against the purple skies, they scoured the continents, consumed the fern forests, slow and hideous and inevitable as doom… In a matter of decades, the Spoilers chewed the Earth down to its rind. They all starved, leaving behind not a single fossil to mark their passing.

This little story is irrelevant to the plot and yet indicative of the novel’s many tangential pleasures, none of which harm the main thrust of the narrative. Chapman is a master of creating backdrops that have real depth and life—the images and ideas he tosses out would be the foreground material in a novel by a less inspired writer.

A good example of Chapman’s stylistic genius can be found in his account of Naomi joining the army. On Chapman’s Earth, the nations with the strongest military might don’t hoard nuclear weapons—they hoard frozen soldiers. The description of Naomi’s initial emersion in a suspended animation tank is worth quoting at length:

Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten, frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with knife, a knife, a knife so sharp, it could cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn’t cut butter, butter, butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle, slips through the needle so thin, it would slide off a spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street, in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue. And it’s no consolation that you’re one of a series, just one little girl in a row of foolish little girls in blue jackets, all standing on the sidewalk, all spit-glued to parking meters. Because they were all so foolish and also because someone, someone they never see, keeps coming around and putting cold silver quarters in the meters, to avoid little red violation flags and to keep the current running through the meters, so the tongues stay stuck, all those raw, purple tongues of all those little girls, for twenty years. Oh children misled! Said the voice in my head. Beware! Beware! For thou art dead. Beware entrapment by refrigerator. Beware the lid that slams on suffocation. Beware the stinging freezer mites that swarm in the ice cubes that float in the desolate gutters of freezer burn, where no hipboots can call you an ambulance. This is the place of itching, buzzing battery acid, where balloons break like eggshells, and eggshells bend like balloons.

The ability to simulate a mind shutting down, to mix almost-stream-of-consciousness with dead-on metaphors to describe the process of encroaching deep freeze—this ability is what separates a major writer from a lesser writer, a stylist from a technician. This ability, contrary to what they tell you in writing workshops, cannot be taught. It’s a gift to be treasured by readers fortunate enough to stumble upon it. (It’s also, unfortunately, not a quality much prized by commercial publishers.)

Following several break-neck narratives that provide textbook examples of how to create suspense and tension, the denouement of The Troika has a tremendous cathartic effect on the reader, who has shared a harrowing journey with fascinating characters. Portions of the novel remind me of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, early Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick, but, in truth, these are nearly silent echoes, for Chapman possesses the type of originality that places him more exactly among the ranks of those writers not connected to any school or movement—namely, writers like Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, and Alasdair Gray.

I hope you enjoy this amazing novel as much as I did, in this new e-book edition that also resurrects the Ministry of Whimsy through Wyrm Publishing. Chapman has revised the novel so that this version serves as the definitive version.

—Jeff VanderMeer, Tallahassee, December 2011

PART ONE

A FAMILY ILLNESS

CHAPTER ONE

THE DESERT

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and theirnames were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”

“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked. “They’d have been ill.”

“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”

—Lewis Carroll

The three of them were crossing a desert of white sand. They’d been crossing it for as long as they could remember. Today they listened to the wind as they traveled. The wind hadn’t let up all day. It carved ridges in the sand, like isobars on a barometric pressure map.

Two of the suns had set, but one remained in the western sky. It baked the heaps of boulders and the lichens that grew on them. Three sets of tracks stretched across the plain, wavering under a shimmering ocean of air. There were human tracks, tire tracks, and the prints of some huge beast.

The brontosaur’s head hung close to the white sand, swinging to the left and the right on her leathery gray neck. She was forty feet long and fifteen feet tall at the hips. She limped arthritically. Her joints were killing her.

The jeep drove along behind her on its four massive wheels on their independent axles. The glassy black panels of its photovoltaic collectors were angled out above its back to catch the last of the day’s light. Its drive chain felt sluggish. Its turbines whined, complaining of the heat.

The old Mexican woman walked behind the jeep. Her skin was the color of terra cotta, and her hair was as white as snow. She wore canvas shoes and drab green coveralls with many zippered pockets. Over her eyes, she wore tinted glasses with orange lenses, rims of copper wire, and side screens of copper mesh.

Her name was Eva, and she was more than half mad. Some days she walked in small circles for hours, twisting up her hair and talking to herself. When she did, Alex and Naomi would have to wait for her to snap out of it. Alex was the jeep. Naomi was the brontosaur.

They were all incredibly ancient. Their earliest memories dated back to the Twentieth Century. Alex claimed to be the eldest. On the face of things, you’d expect a brontosaur to be older than a jeep, but Naomi agreed with Alex and maintained that she, Naomi, was the youngest.

None of them seriously believed the stories they told themselves about themselves. They’d forgotten where they came from. They also didn’t know where they were. The desert crossing had been going on this way for centuries.

Triads, Alex thought to himself. I need more triads. Animal vegetable mineral, done that. One had her heart cut out. One got locked in a freezer. One gnawed off his own paw. Hah!

Naomi swung her muzzle toward the old woman. What is Father talking about? she asked.

Don’t ask me! Eva told her. How the fuck would I know? Ask him yourself, you fucking pinhead.

Yes, Mother, thought Naomi.

She’s in a snit, put in Alex.

She’s always in a snit, thought Naomi. She should be put to sleep.

Painlessly? asked Alex. Or after torture? Naomi chewed a ball of cud and considered the question.

The wind whispered over the ridges of the white sand. Alex drove around Naomi and took the lead. Eva went on walking behind the others. It gave her something to look at, other than sand patterns, sandstone outcrops, and lichens. The last of the suns was slipping down behind a mesa. Soon the air would cool off. Then the three of them would stop for the night.

The behavior of the three suns was erratic. One of them was liable to rise while another was setting, while the third hovered at high noon for days on end. At other times they would come close to synchronizing. There seemed to be little pattern in their movements. There seemed to be only confusion.

Eva stumbled over a rock and looked down. Every stone had its own spattering of lichen—burnt orange or pale aqua.

The brontosaur marched on in the failing light, tears leaking slowly from her eyes, suffering the stiffness of her joints. Years of exposure to sun and wind had weathered her sleek hide into rutted tree bark that was stretched like a rickety tent over her spine and ribs. She swallowed her cud and winced from a pain in her hips, pulling her whiskery muzzle back from crooked brown teeth and shrunken purple gums.

Inside the jeep, Alex freeze-framed his optical input of Naomi’s grimace and compared it to a reference still from twenty years earlier. Yes, those gums were definitely receding. The ancient beast had never looked worse. She was a ruined specimen. And with Alex’s luck, he’d wake up tomorrow inside her head. What a life!

In Alex’s view, they must all have gone mad. For whatever reasons, they were now insane. From the heat, or from the cold, or from the isolation or the crowding or the storms. Probably from the storms. What the storms did would drive anyone mad.

The sand whispered past beneath his tire treads. The wind sucked at his solar panels, which were folded flat to his back now, like glossy black beetle wings. His turbines droned like a jar of cicadas. As he bounced across some limestone, his tires scraped their wheel wells. His shock absorbers were thoroughly shot.

Alex had a theory that he’d been born as a man, a fragile construction of bone and jelly. In the laminated circuitry of his mind, he would come across disconnected snatches of the man’s life, like scissored clips from some grainy old newsreel. Alex wondered what had become of that man.

Working from his freeze-frame of Naomi, he traced the contours of her head into his file of mechanical drawings, white on a field of blue. He simplified her saurian anatomy into volumes of solid geometry—direct view, side view, overhead. Alex enjoyed building scale models in his brain. It was one of his hobbies. But it was hard for him to concentrate with Eva babbling to herself.

I can’t stand any more of this, she told herself. It never ends. It won’t leave us alone. He must be mad. No he can’t be mad. He’s dead. Machines don’t go mad. And Naomi isn’t mad, she’s just a retard. So I must be the mad one. It must be my fault. Oh, Naomi! If only we could be rid of him at last. You and I could be so happy. But there’s nothing I can do. He said he would kill me, the bastard. He promised me, Naomi. He promised. Just a lot of big talk.

Eva lengthened her stride, overtook the brontosaur, and walked close behind the jeep, feeling the sand in her shoes. Naomi cocked one eye at her. Eva was shouting at Alex in her head.

Shift it to third, Shithead! You’re fucking up the transmission! Shift into third!

Go get fucked, thought Alex. Don’t mind me. I’ll wait until you’re done. Please. Climb on your pet lizard, squirm around, make noise, whatever it takes. In essence, Eva, in brief—go fuck yourself.

She’s a better fuck than you’ll ever be, thought Eva.

The jeep braked its wheels abruptly. Eva, walking behind it, stumbled into its rear bumper. It revved its rotors, shifted into reverse, and charged at her. She scrambled sideways before it could pin her under a tire. Alex laughed and rolled off in a cloud of white dust.

Naomi could feel her mother’s anger constricting the veins inside her own skull. Please, Mother. Please, Father. Please don’t quarrel. A storm is on its way. Let’s just be quiet and keep moving.

Naomi was correct. A storm was moving toward them across the desert. A storm had caught up with them every day around sundown for several days running. The storms were always painful. When Alex and Eva were fighting, they were especially painful.

None of the three knew where the storms came from. All they had were competing theories. They didn’t know who sent the storms, nor how the storms could do what they did. They knew that they were crossing a desert and had been for centuries. What they would find on the far side of the desert, they couldn’t say.

They could have covered more distance in a day if the woman would have consented to riding on the jeep or on the brontosaur. But she chose to walk, because riding all day put her in a stupor, and then she didn’t sleep well and didn’t dream. When she didn’t dream, her dreamlessness would inevitably attract a storm. And the storms kept getting worse. Just knowing that they were waiting out there made Eva want to die. The storms were torture devices. But where was the torturer hiding?

Who made their deaths impossible? Who reversed every lethal decision? Who vetoed their suicides? Eva had died more times than she could count on this desert crossing. There was the time she’d thrown herself off a mountain, the time when Alex broke her neck, the time when Naomi had rolled over and suffocated her. None of it had made any difference. The next storm would hit, and in the aftermath Eva would wake up in perfect repair. Who made all these repairs? Who pulled the strings that yanked her from her brain? Who forced her to play musical chairs for a body to live in? Eva wondered.

The first of the stars were out. The wind was picking up.

Naomi lifted her neck and saw a gully up ahead, sunk into the rock, out of the wind. It looked like a good place to spend the night. Naomi would curl up and chew the rocks out of her feet. Then she would piss into Alex’s distilling unit and feed Eva some cud. Then they would all try to sleep. Perhaps the storm would pass them by today.

Alex muttered to himself. His speaker volume was at zero, but the other two still heard him. Just like her to tell me how to drive. I’ll teach her the proper respect. Filthy little bitch! Putrid little bitch fucker! Disgusting little cunt-sucking bitch fucker!

Is he jacking off in there? asked Naomi.

He’s probably trying to, answered Eva. Just ignore him.

Father isn’t right in the head, is he, Mother?

No, he’s not, Dear. That’s it exactly.

Do we have to keep going? asked Naomi.

Tomorrow, answered Eva. Tomorrow we’ll start again.

Will we ever get across?

I don’t know.

Will you tell me when we get there?

Yes, Naomi. I’ll tell you.

Down in the gully, the wind made a hollow sound. Eva sat down and disentangled the hooks of her sunglasses from her hair. She held the glasses in her hands and stared at them. The sunlight struck a red glow from the copper wire. She folded the glasses and tucked them in a pocket. She stuck her hands into the armpits of her coveralls and felt the damp and the heat of her body. She made her hands into fists.

If I were a dinosaur like Naomi, she told herself, I would crush Alex like a small metal bug.

But Eva had been a brontosaur, only last week. Before the last storm or the storm before that. She had been a brontosaur. She should have crushed him while she had the chance.

Before the last storm or the storm before that. Or were they all the same storm, one storm that followed them around? What sort of country were they moving across a week ago? Eva tried to remember. Fields of cracked mud. Miles of dusty mud with jagged fissures like the crooked honeycombs of a million melted beehives.

Today she was inside the woman, where she’d begun. And Naomi, she realized, was also in her natural form. They were all in their rightful places today. Eva hadn’t noticed it before.

Down in the gully, there was a floor of loose sand between two walls of rock. The wind gusted past, over their heads. Eva hung her head and gazed at the sand between her thighs. She rubbed her neck. No one spoke.

Naomi raised her head into the wind and grazed at the lichens. Her long rough tongue scraped them right out of the crevices.

Eva walked around the gully peeling dead lichens from stones with her pocket knife. She collected a heap of brown scraps and dug a trench in the sand for a fire.

Alex parked on the plateau, near the brink of the gully. The stars were bright. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Suddenly they all knew that a storm was closing in.

“Oh shit!” said Alex.

They did what they always did. They put their heads together. It was the only way they knew to make the storms less harrowing.

Eva climbed from the gully and ran to the jeep. She lay across its hood and pressed one cheek to the windshield. Her coveralls felt clammy in the cold air, but the steel beneath her was warm and dry. She held onto an air scoop. Her hands were shaking. She felt Naomi’s head nestling down beside her, Naomi’s humid breath flowing around her. The brontosaur’s great gray body curled around the jeep. Its tail looped them and settled to the sand, as silent as a cloudbank. Naomi’s bulk muffled the wind.

Alex started hissing at Eva. Why don’t you cry? Aren’t you afraid? You are! You’re falling apart! Do you think we care?

Oh shut up! groaned Naomi. Can’t you both just shut up?

I hope that the storm drags you off to the moon and puts you down in a rock, the jeep droned on. Then you can cry all you want, and no one will have to listen to you.

Naomi closed her eyes. Nictating membranes slid across glossy green orbs as big as melons. Gatherings of wrinkled leather enfolded them. The three travelers waited for the storm to pounce. The closer together they huddled, the less would be the pain. Otherwise they’d have run off in three directions screaming long ago. It was the storms that held them together.

The wind swept past, neither louder nor softer than before. They were invaded by a premonition of crowding. Naomi’s eyes flew open, bulging and wild. She twisted her head and saw thunderclouds in the sky, glimpsed figures moving inside their bruised underbellies. The radiant figures floated on white wings. Electrical halos played around their heads.

“Angels!” Naomi cried out. “I see angels in the clouds!”

“Calm down,” shouted Eva.

The storm sucked them up in a howling black funnel.

Their souls were three spiny starfish that scratched and scraped at the sutures of a single skull. They wept, they wailed, they tore their hair, they begged for rescue, they bled, they ate their hearts out, they lost their minds. They ran out of tears, they ran out of breath, they ran out of blood. But the tumor in Naomi’s head kept bleeding anyhow, and she couldn’t bite it, she couldn’t pull it out with her teeth.

They tumbled and spun—claws, arms, wheels, wires, leather, flesh, Eva, Alex, Naomi—uprooted from themselves in some inconceivable direction and then allowed to fall. Down they fell, without jaws, without axles, without hands, clutching at the air.

Naomi cracked open one eye. The eye was on the left side of her head, at the same level as her nostrils. She was back in the brontosaur.

Eva opened her eyes—first one eye, then two, then four. Her batteries felt weak. She shut off her headlights.

Alex woke up in the old Mexican woman, gasping and trembling. His head felt like a smashed gourd. He covered his face with his hands. “I can’t take much more of this,” he told the others.

But he didn’t have much choice.

All of the stars were out. They weren’t the stars of Earth. They were too many and too bright. The jeep’s metal shell contracted in the chill of the evening, breaking the stillness with an occasional ping or ponk.

Naomi stretched herself, arching her back like a cat. She walked to the mouth of the gully, reciting sutras under her breath.

Alex climbed down from the hood of the jeep. He knelt on the white rock, and his long white hair blew across his face. He began to weep.

Eva charged her magnetos and spun her rotors. It was a nice night for a drive, but her batteries were too low. There was nothing to do but sleep.

Sleep, thought Alex. What a disgusting habit.

I’m still awake, thought Naomi.

Go to sleep, Eva told her.

I can’t, thought Naomi. Father is mean and nasty and won’t tell a story.

Tell her a story, thought Eva. Help us get to sleep.

I don’t know any.

Make something up, thought Naomi. Tell us about the factory.

I never worked at a factory.

Of course you did, though Naomi. You dream about it all the time. Please don’t be so mean. Tell us a story.

So he did. And as he did, Naomi dropped off. After she was asleep, she couldn’t be sure, as she listened to him, whether Alex was telling about something that had happened to him, or something he’d dreamed, or whether he was actually dreaming and talking in his sleep, or whether she, Naomi, was dreaming the whole thing.

CHAPTER TWO

TRADE-INS

And when he came to observe his feet,

Formerly garnished with toes so neat,

His face at once became forlorn,

On perceiving that all his toes were gone.

—Edward Lear

A story? You want a story? I’m crawling with stories. They slide in and out of me like pinworms. I’m like some long-winded war veteran with a story for each of his missing limbs. I’m like a pill bug on its back, bristling with amputations and waving my long lost legs while silicon chips coagulate in my thick black blood. My brain is clotted with stories.

Once I had hands. Two flesh-and-blood human hands. Shall I tell you how I got rid of them?

I’ll tell you about the night when I got rid of my left hand. I was a man in my twenties named Alex. I probably had a surname as well. People do. I was living in Chicago and working at a factory that made model kits out of styrene.

I worked in the warehouse, the graveyard shift, midnight till eight in the morning. A third of each paycheck went for withholding tax, another third to the union, and the rest you could take home for rent.

I worked pulling cardboard boxes off of steel shelves that were three stories tall, and loading the boxes onto trucks. I’d walk to work on warm summer nights. I’d eat a breakfast at an all-night diner. Coffee and eggs, toast and jelly. The Twentieth Century. Who could forget it?

I was working at the warehouse one night, stapling boxes on the staple press. I took flat cardboard forms, one by one, yanked them open, folded in the bottom flaps, and stapled the flaps together on the press. When you stepped on the floor pedal, a pneumatic armature like a mallet with fangs would slam down on a pedestal and leave behind one bright copper staple.

Already one of my hands was steel and plastic. I’d got rid of my flesh-and-blood right hand about a year earlier. The accident had happened right there at that factory. Then I'd been transferred from Production to Warehousing. I’d had a Mec-Hand One Ninety mounted on my stump. It was crude but sturdy. Then I’d traded in the Mec-Hand for an Ortho-Hand Four Seventy, which was what I was wearing that summer.

The problem with my hands that summer was that I wasn’t balanced. My right hand weighed more than the left. I could feel myself becoming lopsided like a fiddler crab. I needed more surgery.

The warehouse smelled of dust and forklift exhaust and hard rubber wheels. I stood at the staple press, asleep on my feet, holding onto cardboard boxes while the press squirted stale air in my face. Was I really that man, all soft and pink? He hardly seems possible.

Vera walked up to the staple press. Vera was a Mexican woman that I worked with. She always wore khaki dungarees and a red bandanna, and she always had a blaring radio hung on her belt.

“Earth to Alex,” she said. “Earth to Alex. Do you copy?”

“Would you please turn down that radio?” I asked her.

“No. What are you doing?”

“Stapling boxes. What are you doing?”

“Annoying you.”

“Vera, what can I do for you?”

“Raise your right hand,” she told me. Like an idiot I held up my hand. Vera pulled an order manifest out of her shirt pocket—white copy, yellow copy, and pink copy, all neatly folded into a wad. She stuck the paper into my hand.

“The foreman,” she told me, “says to pull all that shit before the shift ends. Urgently needed last week.”

“Did the foreman pick me for this assignment, or did you?”

“You were picked for your astounding expertise. You’re the only man alive who could pull this shipment. Now excuse me. I have a heavy date with a forklift.” Vera walked away with her red bandanna and her Mexican polkas and left me with my order manifest.

I threw one last stapled box on the pile and went to look for the first item of the order. Catalog number Q-14738. Quantity: One. Product description: Super-Shark Strato-Jet With Glow Decals. The snag here was that five digit catalog number. I had no idea where to look for it on the shelves. Anyone else would’ve skipped it and come back to it. But not me.

I wandered down aisles that were as long as city blocks. Some of the aisles were blocked with logjams of pallets. Sometimes I had to climb over tall stacks of shipping boxes.

Q-14738, Q-14738, Super-Shark Strato-Jet. Where were the little fuckers? Solar-Propelled Kite-Ship With Shuttle Cruiser. Con-Shelf Scuba-Sled, Model T Ford, Reptiles of the World. . . Boxes. Walls of boxes.

I inched sideways between a stacked skid and one of the steel horizontals of the shelf racks. I was reading the inventory tags taped to the bottom shelf. Barely room to move, and barely light enough to see the pencil scrawls on the tags. Q-14738, Q-14738. Piss on it. It had to be a misprint.

My neck was stiff as a board. I rolled my head around, trying to work out the kinks. I listened to the air conditioner.

If an earthquake should happen at this moment, it occurred to me, I would be buried under ten tons of model kits. I used to think about sudden earthquakes. It was a game I played in my head. Sometimes I’d let my mind wander to other places, other times.

At this impasse, for example, my mind wandered back to the day when I was fitted for my Ortho-Hand.

I rode a bus downtown to my prosthetics outlet. My Mec-Hand was due for some routine maintenance. I walked into the carpeted showroom. Glass doors shut behind me. The showroom was hushed and elegant. Row upon row of stylish human parts rested on Lucite display shelves, cushioned in blocks of Styrofoam. Here a dainty Asian foot. There a rugged African knee. And inside glass cabinets, a wide assortment of fingers, toes, and genitalia. I seemed to be alone.

But soon enough the service staff had me laid out on a black vinyl couch in a screened cubicle. They gathered around in their white smocks and rubber aprons and went over my Mec-Hand with lenses, calipers, and diagnostic electrodes.

“So tell me,” said one of the technos, an old guy with bifocals, “how’s this little baby holding up? Any problems?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a little dent where I shut a drawer on it.”

He bent the Mec-Hand pinky back and forth. “That’s nothing. We’ll run some tests, open her up for lubrication, have you out of here in ten minutes.”

Sooner or later I’d have to tell them my real reason for being there.

“I want to trade this one in for an Ortho,” I told them. All the technos stopped what they were doing and stared at me.

“You realize,” said the old guy, “that a trade-in would involve another course of elective surgery. More surgery, more physical therapy, more calibrations. . . You’ve already been through that wringer.”

“So I guess I must know what I’m getting into,” I pointed out.

“Sure you do. But the corporate insurance won’t cover you for this.”

“I can afford it. I think the Ortho would be more useful to my career. I read a brochure about them.” The old guy seemed embarrassed.

“You do mount Orthos, don’t you?” I asked him. “I saw some in the showroom.”

In the end, they dealt with me in the way that most people deal with a pushy nut case. They let me have my way. When a nut case gets an idea into his head, no one can talk him out of it. They carved the Mec-Hand off my stump that very day.

“This may hurt,” said the old guy.

The Mec-Hand made cringing movements when the technos detached it. Its hydraulic tubes squealed as they were cut, and leaked noxious fluids on the workbench. I was glad to see the last of it.

“We’ll find a good home for it,” said the old guy, snapping off his gloves.

I scratched my wrist. It always itched when its wiring was exposed.

Who can refuse a man in search of self-improvement?

Where was I?

Q-14738. The inventory tag was staring me in the face, dangling from the bottom shelf across the aisle. Son of a bitch.

The Q-14738s were right above me, according to the tag. But I needed a clear approach for the rolling staircase. I needed for a forklift to clear the aisle. I crab-walked out of the narrow channel that I was in. I hollered for Vera. Vera was hot shit in a forklift. She could handle that thing like it was a part of her, weasel it into the tightest spaces, spear some crooked top-heavy pallet, then rocket into reverse and never drop a box.

She and her lift rumbled into the warehouse with a skid of 2019s hot off the molds.

“Hey, Vera. I need some help.”

“Relax,” she yelled back. “First I got to put this away.” Which she did.

I explained my difficulty, retired to the mailing table, and made myself a cup of cold coffee. By the time I got back to my aisle, it was emptied.

I turned over some boxes and determined that there was no skid of Q-14738s on the floor of the first shelf. I fetched a stepladder and checked the second shelf. No such luck. I dragged the rolling staircase to the spot, walked up it, and read the stencil labels on the third tier. Not a Q-14738 in sight. I had to go higher.

I wasn’t looking forward to this project. I didn’t like high places. I had a strong aversion to heights. I’d rented a third floor apartment, but I had cardboard over all the windows. I’ve been rebuilt from the ground up, several times, by experts, but at no time have I reacted well to heights. But I had my manifest. My course was clear. I yelled for Vera. She rolled up the aisle on her yellow lift truck and parked in front of my shoes, blowing propane fumes in my face.

“I need a lift,” I told her.

“You look terrible,” she said. “You should take a break.”

“I have to look at the top three shelves,” I told her.

“No problem. Hop on.”

I looked around for a free skid. “Let me find a skid to put on the fork.”

“What a sissy,” said Vera. “I won’t let you fall.”

There was one free skid, but a jack was stuck into it, and the boards were all warped to hell. The more I wrestled with the jack handle, the more stuck it got. I gave up and stepped onto the prongs of the lift truck’s fork.

“Going up,” said Vera sweetly. The hoist motor whirred, the hoist chain clanked, and the concrete floor fell away beneath me. The lower three shelves sank past. The vibration of the fork moved up through my feet and my knees. The boxes on the fourth tier weren’t Q-14738s. Nor were the boxes on the fifth.

“Slower,” I called down.

Vera slowed down the hoist. “I can’t hear you,” she shouted. The fork stopped with a jerk. I threw out my arms to get my balance.

“Don’t look down,” Vera sang up.

The roof of the warehouse was a yard above my head. At my elbow, fluorescent tubes hummed in dusty tin hoods. On the topmost shelf, there was one half-filled skid of 3025s. No joy.

Sharing the skid of 3025s was one oddly shaped box. I couldn’t see the odd box’s label. It might be full of Q-14738s. I’d just have to take a look.

I’ve always been methodical. Methodical to a fault, that’s me in a nutshell. Methodical beyond all the limits of sanity.

The slats looked strong enough to hold my weight. I braced one hand on a steel pillar, ducked my head, and stepped off the fork onto the skid. It was cozy in the shelves, like a cave in the side of a cliff. I heard a box of 3025s crash on the concrete three stories below. I must have kicked it over.

“Are you trying to kill me?” shouted Vera.

“I’m thinking about it very seriously,” I shouted down.

“Yeah, that’s your problem, Al. You’re too damned serious.”

I lay down on my side and rotated the mystery box, looking for a stencil. The box wasn’t stenciled on any of its sides. I jammed aluminum-reinforced fingers under a top flap and ripped it off its staples. Then I turned the box around and tore up the opposite flap. Fuck the box! I had to look at the cartons in the box. Down at floor level, Vera was talking to me.

“Alex,” she said, “can I ask you about something personal?”

“No,” I yelled down at her. “Absolutely not. I’m very busy.”

I snatched a model kit out of the box and glared at the lid graphic. The name and number were there at the corner. Lunar Pogo Craft #3031. This just wasn’t my day.

“—when or if ever you’re going to ask me out,” Vera was saying. “On a date, you know? I’m just asking because it’s obvious that you like me. I mean, if you didn’t, you wouldn’t get so irritated with me, right?”

“No,” I told her. “I’m too old for you. I don’t go on dates. I’m too busy.”

I had no strength to argue with her. I rolled onto my back and pulled my cigarettes out of my shirt pocket.

“Hey, Al?” said Vera. “You still up there? I’m going to knock off for the day. Like right now. Okay?”

“Would it be okay if I drop a box on your head?”

“Hey,” said Vera. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to threats.” With this, she fired up her lift motor and reversed up the aisle.

When the rumble of her wheels died away, I got a cigarette lit and settled back with my head against the box of 3031s. I wondered how I was going to get down from there.

Strange how the mind drifts away from its immediate problems. Stranded up there, I found myself recollecting the night when I’d lost my original right hand, the one I was born with. I remembered everything about that night. It was a classic industrial accident. Man meets machine. Crunch.

I was working the graveyard shift at the Production Department, in an old part of the factory with grimy brick floors and cranking skylights. My job was mixing up barrels of polystyrene granules and feeding them into the hoppers of the injection molders.

Rubber conveyer belts carried endless processions of delicate plastic twigs. Leafing out from the twigs were model parts. There were aircraft fuselage sections and exhaust manifolds. There were landing gear and observation bubbles and halves of pistons with tiny pins to fit in tiny sockets. The other wage slaves sat on stools, packing twigs and instruction sheets into cartons.

But the machine that did in my hand wasn’t one of those big injection molders. That particular machine was a compression molder that stood in a dim gallery of the factory with windows on Wrightwood Avenue. The whole thing was maybe four feet on a side, but tall. Each molding cycle lasted over two minutes, and the press hissed and shook when it finally ejected a part down its chute. My job was scooping flaky yellow Bakelite into its hopper.

So it was two in the morning, and I was topping up the hopper on this particular machine. I glanced at the collection bin to see whether the parts looked okay. The parts were heads for the pilots of Mega-Manbot Water Striders. Crash helmet, goggles, resolute chin. Hundreds of goggles looked back at me from the bin. Hundreds of resolute cleft chins.

I checked the molder’s gauge panel. The needle for the mold thermometer was in the green. Too low. I looked closely at the mold. The upper and lower halves weren’t locking. Those compression molders were a real nuisance.

Rattling loudly, the press lifted the mold’s top half. Then I could see the problem. Three pilot heads pancaked one on top of another, mashed flat. The ejection hoses hissed at them in vain. But for a minute or so, until the mold closed again, I had access.

I pulled my jackknife from my back pocket and poked at the jammed pilot heads. I got the near side of the pancake pried up easily. But to loosen the far side, I had to reverse my grip on the knife, brace my left hand on the molder’s casing, and lean a little further forward.

I should have noticed the mold closing. I must not have been getting enough sleep.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Like frying sausages. Then I saw the closed mold on the end of my arm, where my hand was supposed to be.

I thought to myself, when did that happen? Only then did I hear the sound of the mold’s closing. A dull thud, a cracking of small bones, and a rush of escaping steam. I heard all that after it happened.

The worst part was that before I could pass out, I had to wait for the mold to open again. If I passed out with the mold still closed, I would have to fall off my wrist, that is, I would have to rip my arm off the edge of my hand, a thing I wished to prevent, and did not wish to see. To avoid seeing it, I would have had to close my eyes, a thing which I greatly feared to do, because of my certainty that if I did close my eyes, my hand would start to hurt, a thing I did not wish to feel. So I stood, and I waited.

My throat tasted of burnt plastic. In the collection bin, hundreds of miniature yellow faces looked through hundreds of goggles in hundreds of directions. I wondered who would keep the hoppers filled when I was riding off in an ambulance.

After the mold opened, I lay on my back on the red bricks and stared at the roof. I did not want to look at my arm. Eventually someone noticed me and set off the fire alarm. A mangling isn’t exactly a fire, but I could understand the thinking. All the sprinkler heads under the roof began to spray a cold mist, which settled on the bricks like a fine rain. The clamor of the factory blurred into a single sound, like the fading of some gigantic gong. I passed out.

Sometimes I wonder what became of that hand. The foreman must have scraped it out of the molder. I wonder whether he bothered to wrap it in a napkin and send it along to the emergency room. I wonder whether a nurse dropped it discretely into a trash bin. I wonder whether a garbage truck hauled it off to some landfill with the tongue depressors, the snotty tissues, and the foil trays of meat loaf and peas. I’ll never know.

But lying on that pallet in that warehouse, I felt sure, as I stubbed out my second cigarette, that I was well rid of that old right hand. That hand couldn’t be trusted. That hand had exhibited a self-destructive streak a yard wide. There’d been something wrong with that hand.

Be that as it may, I was going to have to climb down from there sooner or later. I looked forward to the bus ride back to my room. I would ride the Pulaski bus north at eight in the morning, dead to the world and daydreaming of coral snakes and isopods, bone marrow and xylophones, traffic lights, whistles, the planet Neptune, absolute zero. . .

A scuffling sound distracted me from my musings. The back of my head was up against that box of 3031s, and something was moving around inside it.

I sat up, turned myself around, and knelt there, watching the box. A hand crept out and crouched on the one of flaps. It was an Ortho-Hand, just like mine, except that it was a left hand instead of a right.

It jumped down off the box and landed on the pallet. Ignoring me completely, it migrated to a corner of the skid. There were other things moving in the box. Soon they began to crawl out. Mechanical hands, dozens of them, each one cleaner and shinier and more futuristic than the one before.

One by one they abandoned the skid. In single file they made their way down the shelves. I saw them gathering in a swarm down on the floor. It dawned on me that they were waiting for me.

So I followed them down. I slid from tier to tier down a pillar. It wasn’t difficult. The hands moved up the aisle in tight formation, like a carpet of metal fingers. I walked behind them out of the warehouse. It was nearly quitting time.

I didn’t have to follow them. I could have punched my time card and walked out into the morning wind. I could have gone and sat on a bench under rustling trees in Humboldt Park and watched the broken bottles glitter in the grass. But I chose to follow the swarm of hands. I didn’t want to make them angry.

We crossed a threshold into the bright light of the Production Department. Black women with nimble fingers and empty eyes and stooped Hispanic men in undershirts were folding instruction sheets and packing twigs of model parts into cartons. No one saw the hands. No one noticed me. They were too busy keeping up with the machines.

The hands lined up like an honor guard on either side of the aisle between two injection molders. I walked down the aisle and turned to the machine on my left. As I watched through a pane of safety glass, the mold opened, coughed out a twig of miniature auto parts, and briskly closed again.

Two of the mechanical hands joined themselves at their wrists and climbed the side of the molder, flip-flopping like some strange insect. They pushed aside the safety glass. Now I had a clear shot. I knew just what I had to do.

The mold opened. I put my left hand in its way. This time I remembered to shut my eyes before the mold closed.

I had a plan, you see. I wanted to improve myself.

Flesh wasn’t good enough for me.

Look at the moon, Alex. A crescent moon has come up. A real fairy tale moon.

Do you want to hear this story, or don’t you?

I thought it was over.

So it is.

Naomi liked it. She went right to sleep.

So she has.

Tell me one of yours.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CHOSEN DONOR

Oyanoconic in nanacaoctli

Ya noyol in choca.

I have drunk the wine of mushrooms,
and my heart weeps.

—Nahuatl song

The star field turned slowly over the desert. The air was cold now. The walls of rock that enclosed the gully were invisible in the darkness, but the white sand seemed to glow. It glowed around the wheels of the jeep and around the old woman, asleep on her side. The brontosaur was curled into a great black mound beside them.

Eva wasn’t sleeping well. She felt uncomfortable in the circuitry of the jeep. She’d been listening to Alex dream about his various hands.

She drifted back through her life and thought of the day, so long past, when she had almost lost her heart. It happened all the way back in the twentieth century. She’d been young and beautiful then. Her hair had been black and lustrous.

Now she was a ridiculous relic, no good to anyone, with crooked teeth, split nails, and broken shoelaces. And with her family around her, always her family, her monstrous prison-house family. Her crazy husband who’d built himself out of auto parts. Her feeble-minded daughter who weighed a ton. And herself, too old to be human anymore. But once she’d been young and beautiful. Once she’d been the center of the world. So she dreamed of the raven-haired girl she’d been.

Long ago in the twentieth century, there was a young woman who lived only for her task. Hers was a proud nation, and it had set her a lofty task. The task lay ahead of her and guided her every step.

She lived in the Yucatan, within the walls of the Donors’ Convent at Chetumal. She could run like the wind. Her mind was filled with a shimmering fog of sacred legends and convent gossip. She was a blissful idiot. But ah, she had her task.

The walled compound of the convent was nested at the center of the Imperial Botanical Gardens. Inside the walls, rows of bread nut trees shaded the arboretum. Every morning a man ten feet tall with the head of a turtle drew a cart to the gate of the gardens. The cart held a tour group of fidgeting little boys with the heads of shrimp. They were led by a stern stooped man with the head of a parrot fish. Novices with the heads of angelfish spied on the boys through cracks in the walls of the convent.

Every night twenty novices slept on slabs of sandstone in a dark dormitory. The skin of their faces was striped coral pink and coral blue. Eva was one of them.

In the spring of Eva’s sixteenth year, the day of the sacred Cardiac Ceremony approached. The novices talked of nothing else. They wondered which of them would be the Chosen Donor. On the night preceding the great day, they lay on their slabs as usual, but none of them slept. Eva lay and listened to their breathing. Lobster birds called harshly in the arboretum. A prioress with the head of a squid entered the dormitory and drifted through the shadows. Her feet traversed a pool of moonlight that fell from a casement onto turquoise floor tiles. She stopped at Eva’s bedside and whispered an incantation. She was pronouncing Eva dead. And Eva rejoiced at having been chosen.

According to custom, the dead girl arose before dawn, put on her muslin tunic and her sandals, and went out to walk among the bread nut trees. As she went outdoors, her tutor fluttered down from its niche in the ceiling, perched on her shoulder, and folded its scaly wings. It was an altered remora, a sucker fish that helped her with her lessons.

Eva walked the paths of the arboretum—cobbled paths between beds of flowers and herbs. She paused beside a stand of prickly pear with waxy yellow blooms that attracted the pollen minnows. The minnows flitted from bloom to bloom, clicking pleasantly. He tutor sang her a serenity mantra. A restless wind shook the paloverde trees.

“Look, Tutor, the trees are dancing.”

“It’s the wind,” said the remora.

“They never stop moving,” said Eva.

“They’ll stop when the wind dies down.”

A dragon fish crossed the path, walking on its spines. It blinked at the rising sun. The wind whirled past, and it spread its tail fins—membranes of electric green with ocelli of silver and blue. Eva’s tunic rustled with a sound like corn husks. The branches of the trees were never still. Soon the spring rains would come. Eva wouldn’t see them. Eva was a ghost now.

She touched the bone at the center of her chest. She ran her finger down her scar—a pale numb ridge that ceremonial knives had cut into three times. Beginning from this seam she would part before the laser scalpel like a peach, like a stream of clear water. She would dissolve into light, and only her heart would remain—a gift for the Whale Emperor, who had always owned it.

Her tutor whispered to her. “Go inside now. It’s time.”

“Not yet.”

“You must. The abbess is waiting.”

Eva made for a side entrance of the convent. “Where are you going?” cried her tutor. “That’s not the right door!”

Eva went into the kitchens. The only sister working there was the senior cook, a manatee woman that Eva loved dearly, fleshy and whiskered, with satiny blue-black skin and kind brown eyes. The cook stood at her chopping block, cutting yams. A year earlier, when Eva had a fever, the cook had brought her a bowl of blackberries in goat’s milk. The cook cut yams and hummed to herself, a peaceful sound.

An angelfish novice leaned into the kitchen and saw Eva there. “Here she is!” the novice called out. All at once the kitchen was swarming with novices—squealing, laughing, shouting questions, crowding around Eva, touching her with their delicate blue hands. They all looked exactly like her, but only Eva was the Chosen Donor.

She couldn’t breathe. They were too close, too loud, too ecstatic with envy. They were trying to crowd inside her. She tore herself free of their hungry caresses. She pushed her way through them into a corridor. She ran toward the entry hall to meet the abbess, her raven-dark hair swinging wild.

She collided with a tall frail sister in a robe of green and gold. It was the abbess! Eva backed away, horrified at her blunder but unable to find her voice for an apology.

Slender pearl-gray hands smoothed the brocade of the squid mother’s robe. Her eyes blinked wetly and regarded the breathless girl who knelt at her feet. “Rise,” said the holy mother, gesturing with a tentacle. “Why do you run in the hall?”

“I don’t know, Your Grace,” said Eva.

“Today, child, you must let nothing disturb you. You must let no distraction sway you. Take my hand, child. Walk with me.”

Hardly believing, Eva took the squid mother’s hand. They walked the empty corridors undisturbed, as though enchanted out of time. They climbed a spiral staircase and emerged through the floor of the chapel. Four more zahori of the squid totem awaited them in the purple light.

The sisters took Eva’s tunic and sandals from her. She stood naked on the cold marble, while her tutor clung to her shoulder with its sharp black fins, watching everything from its small red eyes. The sisters bathed her with sponges and stroked her skin with scented oils. They brought forth living jewels that glowed like fireflies—sapphire indigo and diamond white. They applied the jewels to her arms and shoulders. The jewels took root in her flesh and shone with a steady blue light. The sisters brushed her hair and dressed her in the quexquemitl cloak and the Chosen Donor’s headdress.

Then they handed her a silver chalice that held wine and ololiuhqui the seed of the morning glory. As she sipped the wine, she felt the flower essence spreading through her like a vapor. Her bones went crystalline. She felt real at last, as though all that had gone before had been a disguise. Finally she was free to walk her path and have done.

The elders moved around Eva, perfecting her costume. She might have melted into the floor, but the dust motes floated in the shafts of light, so Eva floated also. Everything amazed her—the stained glass, the slender gray hands that adjusted her feathered cloak, the small red eyes of her tutor. . .

Outside the chapel doors, harsh men’s voices began to shout. “Make way! Make way!” The blowfish priests had come to claim her. The sisters of the convent raised their own voices in a wail of ritual lament. The doors flew open.

A crowd of squat round priests waddled into the chapel, pushed aside the squid sisters, and surrounded Eva. They wore crimson lavalavas, and necklaces of volcanic glass were draped on their spiny bellies. Their scales were the colors of maize kernels—red, orange, and yellow. They had little fins for arms and just enough head for their wide toothy mouths. One of them bellowed up at Eva. “Come with us!”

The priests marched Eva out of the chapel into the sunlight. They marched her through the convent gates into the botanical gardens. She crossed the azure lawns, amazed by the orchards and the fields of black corn and blue corn. A dragon fish scolded the world from a banyan tree. A beautiful palanquin rested on the grass between two turtle men whose shells would bear its poles. The sunshade of the palanquin was covered with orchids—saffron yellow and velvet black. The turtle men wore liveries of embroidered silk. They turned their horny snouts and watched Eva climb into her seat. Then they lifted the poles.

Worm-headed gardeners swung wide the gates of the gardens. The blowfish priests followed the palanquin in a throng, as the turtle men bore it across a bridge of amber glass. The bridge stood on pylons above a mile-wide channel of glittering green water. The wind tugged at the plumes of Eva’s cloak. On the far side of the water she heard the murmur of thousands of voices. At first she thought the sound must be Xochipilli the Prince of Flowers singing in her blood, or the whistling of Nti Ki Xo the landslide mushroom. Then she remembered that thousands of people were gathered at the Plaza of the Granaries to see her pass.

An escort of twenty shark soldiers stood in ranks on a widening of the amber bridge. They joined the palanquin and the priests. The bridge road made a gradual arc across a canyon between immense conical granaries. Cordons of shouting soldiers held back torrents of shouting people. Nervous clusters of translucent shrimp children sucked frozen custards on sticks, while parrot fish scholars in black robes pointed their staffs at Eva. “Wave to the people,” said her tutor.

Spider-crab rickshaw men cheered for her. They’d brought lamprey women from the nurseries, who coiled in the rickshaws under parasols, their slick white bodies swollen with eggs. Eva waved to the lamprey women, and some of them waved back. The granaries were hung with bright pennants that fluttered and snapped, and every window bulged with octopus men. A marching band of sea star girls fell into formation behind the soldiers. The girls shrilled their ocarinas and pounded their drums.

“Life is sweet,” said Eva.

“If you say so,” said her tutor.

The road dipped down a ramp into a bright tunnel. The tunnel wound through the foamcrete foundations of the city. The soldiers and the marching band halted, fell silent, and turned back.

The tunnel led Eva and the priests to a moving beltway, wide as a river, that swept them across miles of arched gray underground. All around Eva, above and below, she saw bunkers manned by piranhas of the warrior caste, and the hoops of the colossal particle cannons that protected her nation from missile attack. She could see through the foamcrete. Below the foamcrete and the stone she saw magma flowing. She was a geothermal mine shaft and a solar observatory. She saw the whole continent.

“We’re living on a raft,” she told her tutor.

“Keep breathing,” said the remora. “You’re forgetting to breathe.”

The beltway spat them all up onto a stark flatland punctuated by security towers. The three towers of the medical center loomed ahead, their outer skeletons modeled after the helical latticework of a sea sponge. When the center’s foundations were poured, a thousand infants had been interred as a consecration. Within it the imperial surgeons waited, and the Whale Emperor himself.

Eva’s bearers and the obese armless priests waddled onward toward the medical center’s entrance. As they drew near, fireworks were launched from the roofs—a rain, a flood of fireworks, blinding in broad daylight, streaking the sky with cobalt blue and chlorate green. Eva stepped down from her palanquin and danced with delight. Whirring sparks fell from the jewels in her arms. She spun and laughed, and the sparks glowed and died on the flagstones.

The blowfish priests settled her down and moved her along toward the towers of glass. Some of them groaned a burial chant, for after she entered the center, Eva would be legally buried as well as ceremonially dead. The priests were escorting her to Tlalocan the Other World. But the medical center wasn’t Tlalocan. Why were they all babbling about Tlalocan?

Hundreds of Sick Ones appeared on the balconies of their wards—sunfish men, cowrie eunuchs, children of the acorn worm. . . They looked drained and sleepless. They’d been giving a lot of blood for the emperor. Giving their blood was a solemn privilege for them and gave their wretched lives meaning.

The holy emperor used up a lot of blood. After a single circuit of his veins, it was piped away to bless the hydroponics farms. He also needed blood for his bathing pool, which was as wide as a lake. He didn’t really need a bathing pool that big. He was only a fat old man with four hearts. But he was the emperor.

“Why has she stopped?”

“What is she staring at?”

“Keep chanting!”

The emperor needed four hearts to keep him alive. After four years inside him, each heart had to be replaced with a fresh one. That was what Eva was for.

Far above, an acorn worm boy climbed onto a balcony railing. The other Sick Ones shouted encouragement until he jumped, and cheered him all the way down. He hit the flagstones and bounced once. Three more Sick Ones followed, then a dense shower of them. Suicides were only permitted on the Day of Donorship, but today they were a sacrament. The blowfish priests chanted their approval.

The growing heap of smashed invalids was an ugly sight. Eva hurried into medical center’s lobby. The priests gave her over to the keeping of four nurses. The nurses were salmon women with soothing voices, gentle hands, and flat orange eyes.

They took away Eva’s cloak and headdress. They arranged her body on a bier of white glass. They wheeled the bier to the bank of a canal. A gilded gondola floated on the viscous violet fluid of the canal. The nurses carried the bier onto the gondola. The little golden boat surged forward along an underwater groove. It took them to a docking at the base of a shaft. A silver gate slid up from the glimmering fluid and sealed them off. The fluid level rose and lifted the gondola steadily up the shaft.

The nurses drew Eva to her feet. They guided her through a tubular corridor that curved like a snake. Eva’s knees were weak, but the nurses held her in place. They prevented her from drifting from the path. They passed a stickleback radiologist in a heavy leather apron. He looked up from his clay tablets and bowed to them.

“Thank you,” said Eva. “Thank you.”

“Not at all,” said one of the nurses. “It’s an honor for us.”

As they walked, the nurses used scissors to clip the raven tresses from Eva’s head. Locks of hair littered their trail in melancholy constellations. They plucked the jewels from Eva’s skin. They ran krill tools over her scalp, until it was all buzzed clean.

Beyond an archway was the surgical theater—a circular chamber under a dome of mirror glass. At the center of the chamber was a dais of basalt. On the dais stood an obsidian slab. Off in an alcove two surgeons stood naked under sterilizing lamps. Their heads were the heads of manta rays. All this was as it should be.

But it was dawning on Eva that they must be insane. These decent friendly helpful people—these calmly smiling professionals who wouldn’t dream of doing Eva harm—they were all quite mad. They were preparing to cut her heart out. Her heart cringed in her chest. She held herself stiff to keep from screaming.

She had lived among these people all her life. They had taught her to walk. They had taught her to think. Now they would cut her apart and throw away the pieces they didn’t need. But something had gone wrong inside her. She didn’t want to die.

“It won’t be long now,” said the remora on her shoulder.

“Be quiet,” snapped Eva. “You don’t know anything.”

A salmon-faced nurse tilted the obsidian slab vertical and stood Eva with her naked back against its chill. The slab tilted again to take her weight. Medical sensors thrummed within the black stone. Rotating platinum needles pricked her skin. Her flesh grew heavy as lead. A nurse drew a leather strap tight across her waist and buckled it. Eva watched herself in the mirror dome above her. The theater dimmed. A cone of hot red light isolated the sacrificial slab. The manta surgeons gathered around in sequined white gowns and latex gloves. Their internal voices clamored in Eva’s ears.

“My dear child! Relax. You mustn’t fret. We have great confidence in you.”

“Tiresome little shit sucker. Just my luck if that pea-wit druggist fucked up the dosages.”

“Quetzl. I’m surrounded by morons.”

“You must open your heart to the Laser of Faith, Daughter. You must learn to give freely of yourself.”

The voices droned on, trapping Eva in uncertainty. She began to weep, saying, “Help me, Mother! I am lost! I have fallen from grace!”

“Damned incompetents! She’s overdosed! I’ll fry those squid bitches’ eyes in butter for them. Sabotage my surgery.”

Eva’s heart was a small blind creature that lived in her chest, contentedly breathing blood. It inhaled scarlet serpents and blew them out through four branching trumpets in her lungs. It was in no danger. The surgeons would care for it. They simply wanted to put it somewhere else.

The cone of red light narrowed. The laser lamp hovered in the shadows. Cleave before the cutting light, Eva recited to herself. Fear it not, but part before its radiance, as summer clouds before the sun.

After the operation Eva would be maintained by a heart/lung conch for one hour. She would appear on a balcony and address an adoring throng. She would wear a thorny white wedding crown and a cape of white lace and corn flowers. If she found she couldn’t speak, a recording would be substituted. Then they would tattoo the death glyph onto her cheek, take her to the catacombs, and disconnect her. She would stand beside the ones who’d gone before her. All this was as it should be.

Blue water welled up from grids in the floor and flooded the theater. The nurses strapped the surgeons into their oxygen masks. The brine began to lap at Eva’s heels. One of the nurses put a mouthpiece between her teeth.

“Bite down. Blow into it. Take a deep breath. That’s fine.”

The water swallowed Eva’s legs. The instrument table went under. Eva closed her eyes.

Her remora bit scores of tiny tin teeth into her neck. What’s wrong with you? it seemed to be screaming. Haven’t I taught you anything? Will you lie there and let them carve you open?

Leave me alone! Eva thought at the hateful black fish.

But it would be so easy. If you push the secret level, the hollow panel will spring open. You can run down the secret passage. You’ll run like the wind and escape them all. It only needs one little push.

But I want to die, Eva told it. This is my wish come true! Why are you trying to ruin it?

“She’s struggling.”

“She’s trying to talk.”

“Tighten the head strap!”

“More sedation!”

Eva calmed herself and was soon breathing easily through her air tube. She opened her eyes in the submerged red light. Bound and gagged on her tilted slab of obsidian. With platinum needles turning in her flesh. While earnest surgeons with faces of scale and cartilage waddled about her in weighted belts and rubber masks. Murmuring to one another through microphones. Streams of bubbles rising from their respirators. Closing in for the kill.

Eva’s hands raised themselves, as the chief surgeon held the dagger before her—the ceremonial dagger carved of ironwood, sharp as glass. Acting on their own instructions, Eva’s hands grasped the dagger’s hilt, sharing it with the hands of the surgeon. Four hands lowered the dagger point to touch the milk-white scar at her breastbone. Eva would make the first incision. The surgeon was only here to help her.

Unfamiliar voices spun in her head, blurred and contentious, like chattering shoals of shrimp, spinning their arguments into frequencies inaudible, leaving Eva behind. Ray faces and salmon faces peered down at her through faceplates. Their eyes were small blackened dead things. Less like eyes than wounds from a hot poker.

Eva began the incision. A crimson cloud spread from the dagger point. The chief surgeon tightened his grip on the hilt. But his hands were weak. Eva took a deep breath.

She spat out her mouthpiece and yanked the dagger from the surgeon’s hands. She drove the blade into the side of his neck, gouged at his spine, and pulled the dagger free again. This one wouldn’t be cutting out any hearts today.

She unbuckled her waist strap and twisted herself into a ball. A nurse reached for her ankles. Eva kicked the hands away. Then she swung her heel into the toothless white snout of an assistant surgeon—snap. His face bled a rusty orange murk.

Another nurse lumbered up behind her. Eva kicked off from the surgery slab and shot up through the sterile red water toward the dome. She swam to the mirror glass, pressed her palms against it, set her eyes close to it. She saw people behind the glass in rows of theater seats, all staring at her.

Those people had air to breathe, but Eva had none. She hammered at the glass with her fist. Then she realized that the dagger was between her teeth. She took the hilt in her fist and stabbed at the mirror. She stabbed again and again, until the glass cracked. Water rushed through the cracks, sucking at Eva. Spectators rose from their seats and crowded the aisles. But still Eva had no air.

She wedged the strong wooden blade into the focus of the cracks. She shoved the hilt sideways. The dome burst open like a cranium tearing all its sutures, blown to hell. Brine flooded the theater. Eva fell into the current and through it. She landed on a rough green carpet on her hands and knees. She could breathe again.

“What are you doing?” screeched her tutor.

She tore the remora from her shoulder and crushed its head against the floor.

She must have been some sort of mutant freak. She wanted to stay alive. And so she did. Until she grew old and ridiculous.

Now it’s Naomi’s turn.

Naomi! Wake up and tell us one of your dreams.

CHAPTER FOUR

DESERTION

A man of words and not of deeds

Is like a garden full of weeds.

And when the weeds begin to grow,

It’s like a garden full of snow.

—Mother Goose

The stars are out. Everyone on this stupid desert is asleep. Papa is asleep. Mama is asleep. They’re dreaming. But I’m awake. I’m always awake.

This is a dream too, this desert. It’s the dream that Dr. Mazer puts in our heads. I know because he told me so.

I don’t have dreams. But sometimes I send a ghost out of my head, and she watches things for me—things that are really happening or things that happened long ago.

Just now, while Mama was telling her dream, I sent myself back to the night when I ate Papa. I ate him in a bowling alley in British Columbia in 1990. But I accidentally when back too far, all the way to 1970. So I had to hover around and watch my life go by for twenty years. It didn’t take long. Nothing ever happens to me. In my head I’m still a little girl. That means I’m a retard. That’s what they told me at boot camp.

I was fifteen when I joined the Canadian army. It was the same as the orphanage. Bad weather. Scratchy blankets. Moldy barracks. You were supposed to do what you were told. If you didn’t, you had a Bad Attitude.

I got stationed at this radar installation in the middle of some frozen Yukon nowhere. The outpost was operated entirely by unhappy young women. I lived there, numb and fuzzy, for a year and a half, doing nothing but mop concrete floors. I was lucky. My girlfriend had no work to do. She lived in her bunk, reading magazines.

Then my duty officer promoted me to dish washer’s assistant. I got to stand in a steamy kitchen ten hours a day, scraping cafeteria trays and staring through two layers of glass at the twilight over the permafrost.

We lived in half buried Quonset huts connected by accordion tubes. The sky was always white, and the sun on the frost hurt your eyes. If you went walking, the ice squeaked under your boots, and the air hurt your lungs. None of us ever got leave, and there was nowhere to go. Also I never saw any radar towers. Eventually I made a Fine Distinction. I realized that I wasn’t serving at an army base. I was living in a detention camp.

I got an appointment with my guidance counselor, Esther. I wanted to apply for a transfer. Esther suggested the cryostatic reserves. The frozen soldiers. She gave me a contract to read. A consent form. I sat on a cold chair in an empty cafeteria and tried to read it.

The Cryostatic Corps offered a deal that seemed too good to be true. They put you under for twenty years. In case of martial law or a ground war, they woke you up. If they never needed you, they brought you around after twenty years, and you were free. Veteran’s pension plan. Loans for education. I was sold. I poured some salt out of a shaker and drew pictures on the table.

Cryostasis was very popular at the time, all around the world. All the major players were doing it. It was the latest wrinkle on the arms race. The relative troop strengths of the various frozen armies were always in the news. The reporters were bored with nuclear arsenals, tonnages of nerve gas, and germ weapons with unpronounceable Latin names.

Esther and I drove a convoy truck from the radar station to the troop repository. That’s where they did the freezing. We drove dead straight roads across mossy tundra and mud flats. The repository was a parking lot, a couple of hangars, and a windowless administration building. I got out of the truck and saluted Esther. She drove away.

I pushed through a door marked ORIENTATION. A receptionist showed me to a briefing room. A dozen or so uniformed men and women sat at desks and filled out forms. An hour later all the canister volunteers had arrived, and the pre-drop briefing could begin.

A technical sergeant strode up to a blackboard, introduced himself, and pulled down a projection screen. He launched into a lecture on the freezing procedures, punctuated by a series of slides. All very technical. I sat in the dark, entranced by electron micrographs of pyramidal neurons—dendrites branching like stark black twigs after an ice storm, axons that hung from gangliae like crooked icicles.

The fan in the slide projector whirred. The technical sergeant droned. I got interested in the neck of the boy sitting in front of me. I hadn’t seen a boy for months. Something about how deterioration of synaptic ions was inhibited by the induction of high cycle current through superconductive cytoplasm at temperatures approaching seventeen Kelvin, next slide please, and something something something, lights please, click, any questions?

An orderly called us, one by one, into the prep clinic. In the prep clinic they laid me out on a leather couch and shaved my head, my armpits, and my crotch. They had little steel basins full of lather. A little rubber gasket and two copper hoops danced in the bubbling water of a sterilizer.

The gasket and hoops were going to be fitted into the top of my skull. Trepanation, it’s called. Cave people used to do it for their dead, to give the soul a path of escape. The prep medics had a different reason for doing it. Cerebrospinal fluid expands when it freezes. It has to have somewhere to go, or it crushes the brain. So the medics had to drill little holes in our heads and fill them with flexible membranes. Down in the canisters, under the liquid nitrogen, the membranes would swell.

A medic shot my scalp full of anesthetic. Some other medics poked around up there for a while. Whatever they were doing, I didn’t want to know about it.

When they were done with me, they sent me into a locker room. I took off my uniform and folded it into a rectangular wire basket with a tin number tag. I even had to give up my glasses, and I could hardly see without them. A staff sergeant sent my group into the steam bath. The steam bath was full of hammocks, hammocks of white nylon twine hung in frameworks of aluminum tube. The sergeant told us to lie down in the hammocks and relax.

One of the volunteers said, “Why do we gotta get in hammocks to take a bath?” He talked funny. I think he was a retard like me.

The sergeant said, “Because that’s the procedure.” We all got in hammocks, and the sergeant left.

There was a faint hissing. The bath filled with dense white steam. I stared at the ceiling, feeling warm and sleepy. Then I noticed that I couldn’t turn my head. A voice in my head said one word. Curare.

Then there were hands moving on my skin, dabbing on surgical cement, pasting on little brass disks that trailed red wires, attaching disks to my thumbs, my toes, my ribs... My head lolled to one side, and I was staring into the eyes of the woman in the next hammock over. She stared blankly back at me. I couldn’t close my eyes. We were all too naked.

When my wires were attached, the hands unhooked my hammock and spilled me into a steel cart. They rolled the cart to a hangar. The roof of the hangar was green Plexiglas. The gray cement floor was crowded with chrome canisters, nine feet tall—a forest of canisters. The hands parked my cart beside my assigned can. They compared the number on the can with the tag on my ankle. They took readings from gauges and made notes on a clipboard. They took hold of the big black three-prong plug where all my wires led. Then they climbed the C-shaped steel rungs of the can’s ladder, up to the open hatch. They reached the plug over the rim and twisted it into the can’s inner wall. They climbed back down again.

When are they going to put you to sleep? asked a voice in my head. They said that they would put you to sleep!

A mobile crane, an operator, and a handler made their way among the can clusters. They stopped beside my cart, hooked my hammock to the crane, and hoisted me aloft. I hung from my feet, slowly revolving while the handler wrapped me in a sticky white gauze that he rolled off of spools.

“This one’s ready,” he said.

The voice in my head was screaming. She’s not! She’s not ready! But they didn’t hear it. The crane hoisted me higher, then lowered me into a dim cavity. A blindfolded paralyzed Houdini, attempting an impossible escape.

I could just barely see through the gauze. Spook house mirror skin stretching across chrome. Pink cocooned in white, sinking into the dark. The handler put his head into the circle of light above my feet. He pushed in a stray loop of wire. He slammed the lid.

In utter blackness a suction pump stole away my last breath. The roof of my mouth ached with the pressure of the pent-up molten nitrogen that was waiting to fill the can. I prayed for an end to the waiting. I prayed for the vacuum to fill.

Then the blind shrieking blood-red bolt of lightning shot down a thousand wires and nerves and lit for one instant a tightening cloud of brittle blue droplets. Snap! And it was all over for me.

Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with a knife, with a knife so sharp, it would cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn’t cut butter, and the butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle and slips through a needle, through a needle so thin, it would slide off your spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue.

And it’s no consolation that you’re one of a series—just one little girl in a row of little girls in blue jackets, all standing on the sidewalk, all spit-glued to parking meters because they were so foolish. Because they were foolish and also because someone, someone they never see, keeps coming around and putting quarters in the meters. He does that to keep the little red violation flags from popping up. And to keep the current running through the meters. So the tongues stay stuck—all those raw purple tongues of all those little girls in blue jackets. For twenty years.

Oh children misled! said the voice in my head. Beware! Beware! For thou art dead. Beware entrapment by refrigerator. Beware the lid that slams on suffocation. Beware the stinging freezer mites that swarm in the ice cubes that float in the desolate gutters of Freezer Burn—where no one can call you an ambulance.

This was the place of itching buzzing battery acid, where balloons broke like eggshells, and eggshells bent like balloons.

Some days I pretended to be a little Dutch girl. She’s fallen through thin ice at a skating pond. She’s crawling on a ceiling of ice, but she can’t find the place where it broke. No one can help her. The bubbles of her shouts rise wobbling through green water and roll around the slick white ceiling. Behind the ice is a mild blue sky. But her fists can’t break through. A final bubble clings to her sky blue lips. No kindly wood chopper happens by to chop her free.

I was wide awake. The technical sergeant promised we’d blank out, remember nothing. What a stinking lie! My thinking went faster and faster, the longer I was under. But perhaps I was the only one awake. Perhaps I was a fluke. None of the other corpsicles were complaining. Not a whimper. The hangar was peaceful. Freon pumps hummed between their teeth. Snow fell all winter on the Fiberglas roof. In the spring it melted. Once a month a technician in green coveralls came around and checked our hoses for leaks. The years passed.

It came to me that I’d have to escape. I considered the matter in the privacy of my bone marrow. All those other stiffs were welcome to sleep their lives away like pale larvae in narrow cells of beeswax. But not me. I was busy reaching down my throat and gulping down my vomit, swallowing the sweet puke again and again, until it turned to royal jelly, and I changed.

My helpers changed me. I had swarms of helpers—a mysterious gang that looked like human hormones but moved in poisonous circles. I gave them their instructions in dark corners of my rigid electrified tissues. They nodded and shuffled off into the polar wastes. Out there, where there weren’t any witnesses, they did things that spat on every law of zoology. They made up new laws as they went, subverted my chromoplasm, bent it to my will.

That seems unlikely to you, Papa? Oh Papa, you’re too ignorant to make a start on. How do you think anything gets done on this planet?

The first stage of pupation was to melt. I dissolved myself into half curdled hepatic lipids and confused pituitary lecithin. I melted to sour pupa milk, which sweetened as it matured. Continents of my codons sank like stones into a heaving cellular ocean of life noise. To be lost forever, one would assume. Denatured into tattered soiled punch cards on the floor of the Deoxyribo-Nucleic Archives, unretrievable. Forgotten references to failed escape tactics. Blurred beyond all hope of reconstruction, you’d assume. You’d assume, but you’d be wrong. Because there’s always another copy.

There’s always another copy, safe and snug, somewhere in the Life Library, waiting for a call slip. Behaviors and structures that have been cooling their heels in the stacks since the Mesozoic. I saw them. I swam in them. I was a call slip. I had slipped through the ice, and I was calling as loud as I could. Dog-paddling in endless possibility. I could wake up tomorrow a pinworm or a cuttlefish. Or a row of pretty dead blackbirds hung by their claws from a high-tension wire. Coming unstuck.

My eyes taught themselves to see in the sparkling black syrup. My fingers taught themselves to move again. I grabbed my hammock. Slowly I dragged myself right-side-up inside my thermos jar.

No one can see in the dark. No one can move in liquid nitrogen. But I could. I wasn’t a pupa anymore.

There was a latch wheel on the underside of the hatch. I hung from my hammock and yanked at the wheel with a blue fist. The seal cracked. White vapor boiled up into the light. I pushed the hatch open and clambered over the rim.

Then I fell, but my hammock trailed behind me and snagged. I slid from it gently to the gray cement floor. When I was dry, I sat up and pried the brass disks off my skin. I felt stubble on my scalp. My hair was growing back.

Then I was standing outside on a parking lot and wearing green coveralls. There were pine trees all around, under a starry sky. My breath made ragged clouds that drifted off into the night. Where did the pine trees come from? They must have moved me.

There weren’t any sirens or searchlights or guards shouting. Just me, standing in a puddle of rain water. And a couple of army jeeps inside a storm fence topped with razor wire. And beyond the fence—the trees, the stars, and an asphalt road. Was everyone on earth frozen? No. I was deserting my post. I had to get away from there, as fast as possible. I needed shoes.

Then I was driving a muddy green jeep in circles around the parking lot. Fog in the headlight beams. Tires swishing through the puddles, round and round. I flew like a blackbird through explosions of bright water, soaked to the skin and laughing like a mad thing.

There was a gate chained shut. The headlights dove straight at it, and it popped from the fence. The jeep bounced over it and carried me into the forest.

The road spilled down hillsides between dark mounds furred with fir trees and caterpillared with berry brambles. Above the treetops a river of stars poured past. Cattails and milkweed stalks waved to us from a drainage ditch. They beckoned us down the embankment. But the jeep kept its tires to the spine of the road.

The road was a black snake with birch trees for ribs. The jeep was in its belly. My hair lashed at my eyes. It was stretching out of my head like butterscotch syrup. My teeth were chattering, and wind harps and thumb pianos were playing in the flaps of my ears. Red reflectors on posts marched along the road shoulder—glowing sparks, falling past.

I made up songs in time with the rattling of my jaw. I was out of the army. If my hair kept growing like this, there’d be a mountain of it by morning. I could make a warm nest in it and hide there. The MPs would never find me. I would live in uncharted caves within an impregnable mountain range of dirty blonde hair.

The jeep sliced a whistling tunnel through the stillness and cricket song. The turbines made up songs out of methanol and hummed them to my bones. The wind made up frostbite songs and pricked them like quills into the wings of my ears. Burr weed and thistle. Oak and elm. The mist turned to drizzle. It stung my face. Rivulets climbed the windshield. It made me queasy to watch them skid around. A furry gray moth brushed a stroboscopic streak across the headlights. It smashed into the windshield and turned to a yellowy mess, splat! A pretty good trick, I thought.

Up ahead, beyond a rise, the forest began to glow. A pair of headlights came over the hump, then dipped out of sight again. I remembered about lanes and the rules of the road. I urged the jeep to the right. It was all coming back to me.

The headlights came hurtling down a slope at me, connected to a freight truck as wide as the road and twice as tall. Untold tons of incandescence and flattening tire tread bore down on me. The jeep plowed through a wall of ice water. I stiffened my arms and fought the steering wheel. My lungs filled with diesel stink, and water ran down my collar. Human contact.

The rain began to beat down hard. It strafed the road and stuttered on the hood of the jeep. The jeep rounded a bend, and suddenly we were passing neat suburban houses. White metal lawn furniture and bicycles on white gravel driveways. A church and a fire station. An auto shop with a yard full of wrecks.

Several questions troubled me. Would the MPs think that I’d escaped in the jeep, or that I’d been stolen? Would the local police have my description? Did I fit my description? How could I see so well without my glasses? And how long could I drive before I fell asleep? I hadn’t eaten or slept for twenty years.

The jeep cruised slowly past a wide stuccoed building. On the roof, an orange neon sign said BOWL-O-RAMA. Beside the door, a green neon sign said BEER & PIZZA. The jeep swung onto the parking lot and killed its engine.

I climbed out stiffly. The rain pounded down. I could hear music playing. But I had no shoes. I had no money. What if people spoke a different language now? I looked at the smashed moth on the windshield. One of its legs moved. Maybe the rain moved it. Vapor leaked from my mouth. I reached for the yellow stain and scraped it onto my index finger. My finger wiped it onto my tongue. I could taste that it was still alive, so I swallowed it down. It turned to a warm red ember in my stomach. I began to feel brave.

I crossed the parking lot and pushed through the glass door. I stood on a prickly green carpet in a low echoing barn. Sappy music buzzed from speakers in the ceiling. The green carpet ran the length of the building, with racks of rental bowling balls and ramps leading down to the alleys. Twenty alleys of varnished wood lay off to my right, with ten scoring desks facing them, and five semicircles of benches. Against the back wall were snack machines, a microwave oven, some video games, and a cashier’s booth.

The cashier was a balding man with a Hawaiian shirt and bloodshot eyes. He sat on a stool reading a paperback he’d propped against his cash register. Beyond him, a fat little boy with skinny legs was standing on a chair and playing a video game. Two people were bowling—a man in a baseball cap and a woman in a red dress. I pretended an interest in the snack machines. Corn chips and cheese puffs in cellophane. Dead stuff.

“Hey,” the cashier said loudly. “You wanna bowl?” I walked up to his booth, dripping on the carpet. I hoped he wouldn’t notice my bare feet.

“Sh-sh-sh-sure,” I told him. My teeth were chattering.

He reached into a cubby behind him and slapped a pair of shoes on the counter. He ripped a scoring sheet from a yellow pad and took a stubby pencil from a box. “Enjoy your game,” he said.

I stood at a rack of bowling balls, pretending to choose one. I spied on the two bowlers. They were sitting on their bench and talking. The woman was beautiful, with glossy black hair down to her waist. She wore a lot of Mexican jewelry—silver and turquoise.

The man was eating a slice of pizza, drinking beer from a can, and gazing at the woman’s chest. He wore a faded blue shirt and some strange kind of gloves. No, they weren’t gloves, they were artificial hands. He took another slice from the pizza box beside him. He offered it to the woman. She shook her head. A thread of mozzarella connected the slice to the box.

I sat down on the carpet and put on the shoes. Tying the laces took forever. My fingers were like play dough. I stood up and picked out a ball—a black ball marbled with red. I carried it down a ramp and passed the bench where the man and woman were sitting. My shoes squeaked on a rubber mat.

I set my ball in the trough of my ball return. I sat down at my scoring desk and clipped my sheet to the Formica. Now what? I was too exhausted to care. It felt so good just to sit in one place. I folded my arms on the desk top and lay down my head. I half shut my eyes and watched clusters of blue lights play in the curtain of my long wet hair. I spied on the man and the woman some more.

The man with no hands stared into his beer can, deep in thought. The woman leaned forward to whisper in his ear, cupping one palm beside her mouth. He turned his head and planted a kiss on her cheek. She stood up and walked to the ball return. She pressed a button and dried her hands in the air jet. Her fingernails were coral pink. Alex watched her with a crooked smile. She hefted her ball to her chest. It was transparent with silver glitter stirred into it. She confronted alley ten, very concentrated. Her feet were bare. At the alley’s far end, three pins stood in a pool of light. Two on the left, one on the right.

“No way,” Alex heckled. “Never in a million years.”

“Shut up and watch,” Eva told him. She walked toward the foul line, dipping her body gracefully. The ball rolled straight into a gutter, wham! She turned to Alex, smiling. Alex laughed.

The sparkling silver ball rumbled the full length of the gutter and disappeared behind a rubber flap. The pin setter lowered a metal arm and swept the pins from the target stage. It set ten neatly ranked replacements in their place, holding the ten white necks in ten pincers. The pincers let go and withdrew from sight. One pin tottered for a moment. Ten brave little soldiers awaited the next bombardment.

Alex sucked some froth from the rim of his beer can, set the can carefully on the floor, and walked, not too steadily, to his ball return.

“You’re smashed,” Eva told him. “You can’t win. You don’t have a prayer.”

He grappled a black ball out of the ball return and squared off against alley ten, glaring at the pins and swaying a little. He leaned forward, charged the alley, stopped short, and hurled the ball. It bounced twice and thundered menacingly at the pins. Nine of them exploded into darkness.

I knew that I had to get up and move around. If I fell asleep at my desk, the cashier would throw me out, and I’d perish of cold and hunger and loneliness. So I walked to my ball return, punched the hot air button, and warmed my hands. When the air jet turned off, I turned it on again. My hands looked blue. I picked up my ball and turned to alley twelve. There stood my own little squadron of fat white pins with skinny red-striped necks. The bravest pin stood in front, all alone. The next two bravest stood behind him.

A video game was squonking and belching off behind me. Armadas of spaceships biting the interstellar dust. I glanced to my left. Alex was chewing on a pizza. Eva was opening a beer.

I shouldn’t have been there. I should’ve hidden in the forest and gone to sleep among the pine needles. My clothes were dripping. I was a wanted woman. I had no money and a rubber gasket in my head. But since I was standing at the foul line, I summoned the strength to send my ball wobbling down the alley. It actually found its way to the pins and clipped one off the back row, where the cowards hide. The surviving nine pins were pinched by the pin setter and airlifted. The emptied target stage was dutifully raked. The pins returned to their stations. My ball rolled into the ball return. I had to sit down.

I drew an N on my score sheet in the column where you write the names. Then I held onto the desk and shut my eyes, because the bowling alley was tipping. My pencil rolled off the desk. I should’ve been asleep in the woods. A corpsicle can’t freeze to death. A corpsicle can’t die from exposure.

No, but she might die of thawing.

“This pizza,” said Eva, “is colder than this beer.”

“Solids lose heat faster than liquids,” asserted Alex. He had his nose in her hair, and was trying to unzip her dress.

“Cut it out,” she told him, pushing him away. “You’re a mess. Get up and bowl.”

“I’m a mess?” said Alex. “You think I’m a mess, you should check out the Thing From Another World in the next lane.”

“Shut up,” she told him.

“She’s shivering over there.”

“Shut up! She can hear you.”

“No she can’t. She’s dead to the world.”

“I w-w-wish I w-w-were dead,” I announced, and opened my eyes long enough to lie down on the nearest bench and curl up on my side.

“I know the feeling,” said Alex.

Someone touched my arm. Eva was sitting beside me. She looked like a Mexican angel in too much makeup. She helped me sit up.

“Can you eat something?” she asked me. I shook my head. She put a slice of pizza in my hand. I touched it with my tongue, but it was just cardboard and ketchup, just dead stuff. The pizza was dead, and I was dying, and some whores look like Mexican angels, and some men have no hands.

“What’s your name?” she asked me.

“N-n-Naomi.”

“Do you live around here?”

“N-n-no.”

“Do you like to bowl?”

I shook my head.

“Neither do I. But I’m working. I’m on a date.”

“W-w-what’s your name?” I asked her.

“Eva.”

“What happened to your friend?”

“He’s not my friend. He went to take a leak.”

“I mean what happened to his hands?”

“Who knows? Don’t worry about him.” Her face was dark and smooth and luminous. Her hair had blue fires inside it.

“I like your face,” I told her.

Eva brushed some of her hair over her shoulder. “I’m glad,” she said. “It was expensive.”

“Are your hands blue?”

“No, but your lips are blue.”

“They sh-sh-should be,” I told her. “I just got out of a deep freeze.”

“You look like it. You want a warm beer?” I shook my head again. My hair was down past my shoulders now. Eva twisted her silver necklace around one finger. I wondered what she was thinking.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, Naomi, it’s none of my business, but you’re soaked to the skin, and you’re acting pretty spacey. Maybe you ought to go home.”

“I don’t live here,” I told her. “I’m a soldier. I need to sleep, but I don’t have any money. I ran away. I haven’t slept for twenty years. I need to sleep!”

“Don’t raise your voice.” She scanned the area. Alex was on his way back to us. “Naomi, listen closely. You and I are leaving here. We’ll go in my car. But first I have to talk to someone. Sit right here, understand? I’ll be back.” Alex sat down heavily beside me. “And keep your distance from the smashed octopus.”

“I’d like to know what makes her so superior,” he said. “Hello. My name is Alex. I’d shake your hand, but it would only gross you out. Do you want to wipe your nose? Here, I brought you some tissue. Where’d she go anyway? What’s your name?”

“Naomi,” I told him.

“That’s nice.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yet it is.”

“What are those things on your arms?”

“They’re just things.”

“They’re weird.”

“I know. But I like them.” He laid his right arm across the back of the bench. His arm touched my back. His arm was warm. I felt sleepy. I pushed the hair out of my face and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.

“My hair keeps growing,” I told him. He nodded wisely.

“As though there were no tomorrow. Even after you’re dead. Can I get you some hot soup or something? Aren’t you cold?”

I touched my fingers to his upper lip. His lip was rough. His arm was warm behind my back.

“Please,” I said. “Please. Shut up. I have to sleep.” I was gazing into his sad brown eyes. As if I’d cast a spell, he closed his eyes and began to snore.

I closed my own eyes to see whether I could sleep. I saw the skating pond where the little Dutch girl drowned. There were ice maidens in silver sequins doing leaps and spins above the girl’s head. Dancing on her grave. I couldn’t watch.

While you snored, I waited and shivered. The MPs were going to find me and stuff me back in a can. Unless I died first. I couldn’t get warm. My head was cracking open. The sadness in my chest was too much to hold. I put my arms around you.

Then I heard music. Lyres and mbiras and steel drums and balalaikas, gorgeous and far away. I whispered in your ear.

“Alex,” I said. “Dance with me.”

You slumped off the bench with your chin on my neck. I maneuvered you onto your feet. I held you and swayed to the music. I took off your cap and felt the hair on the back of your head. I pressed my forehead against yours. My fair flyaway hair bristled into the field that was building between us. I closed my eyes and put my tongue in your mouth. I wanted to punch the barb of my tongue right through your hard palate and sting you in the brain. I wanted you to love me.

Steam was rising from my coveralls. Thorny yellow wires were pushing out of me, piercing and twisting to be free, crowding my clothes with their twitching. They poked through my coveralls. I opened my eyes a crack, and I could see them through my lashes. My nerves were growing out of me like blackberry shoots in a time-lapse botany film. And when a nerve had worked a sufficient length of itself free of me, it would thread itself bloodlessly into you, Alex. Taking you over, tying you to me, whispering down your collar and up your sleeves, binding you in a thicket of nerves. The tighter I held you, the denser the bramble grew.

And the denser it got, the more you melted into me. It was hard to hold you up as we swayed to the music. You weighed a ton. And I weighed a ton. You and I were becoming confused. The more confused we got, the less we resembled human beings. I didn’t care. I was on fire. I was breathing through four nostrils. I was going to live.

I was aware that the cashier had fled into the night, gagging in horror, and that the little boy was cowering under his video game, peeing his shorts. But all I cared about was the way your hard-on felt, sliding across my hip.

I wanted to tell you things, but my tongue couldn’t find your ear. Then I found your left eustachian tube, slipped my tongue through, and coiled it to the core of your cochlea. Then you could really hear me. Then I felt I had your attention. Deep in that dark pink seashell. Nerve to nerve.

Alex?

Who?

I’m eating you alive.

What?

I’m eating you alive. Do you mind?

A plastic hand fell to the floor.

Where am I?

You’re dreaming.

The other hand dropped off and rolled under the bench.

Well. . . If I’m dreaming, I guess it can’t hurt. Go ahead. Eat me alive.

Your pants were down around your ankles, and my tongue was in your ear. You were thinking that your wet dream had somehow derailed itself. You considered opening your eyes, but you’d already seen so many freak accidents. You didn’t need the gory details.

A wind was blowing around my nerves. It made them dance like Queen Anne’s lace, sweetly intricate and bright with dew. Then it howled and swept us away. A buzzing glacier buried us. We clung together inside the ice, breathing through one another’s mouths. We melted together, and we survived.

Hold me, Alex. Hold on tight. Come inside me, and I’ll tell you a secret.

Thus I lured you into my awful immortality. Thus were you crucified on the tumbleweed of a young woman’s loneliness. Thus I became your prison. Poor Alex.

I’ll tell you a secret. I knew exactly what I was doing. I planned the whole thing. I sucked you in. I knew it was wrong, but what else could I do? I was frozen. I was dying. I was lonely.

Forgive me, Papa. Forgive me my ancient sin. Forgive me for being cold. Forgive me for being hungry.

Forgive me for needing you.

CHAPTER FIVE

STORM CENTER

The ideas of mankind are of five kinds, say the Teachings. First there is right knowledge. Second there is wrong knowledge. Third is fancy, fourth is sleep, and the fifth is memory.

—Patanjali

One of the suns rose from behind the sandstone mesa to the south of them. It cast rust-red shadows, miles long, across the hard-packed sand. The sky was a washed-out indigo, like a soap bubble about to burst.

Ironwood bushes and sagebrush with tiny yellow flowers grew here. The light was melting the frost off them. An arroyo of bare sand snaked through the desert. Paloverde trees stood along it. Everywhere were crumbling outcrops of greenish shale that were spattered with lichens—bright orange and pale blue.

The brontosaur slept on the sand of the arroyo, inert as a great gray hummock of earth. Its legs were folded under it like a camel’s. Its neck was curled around itself. Its head lay on the sand like a yard-long shovel blade, all leather and bone. The right side of its jaw nested against its shoulder, the left side against the spine of the old woman. Its upper lip moved. The bristled nostrils on top of its head huffed out a warm breath that moved through the old woman’s long white hair.

The woman slept on her side, with her head resting on her sneakers, which rested in turn on a mound of sand. She had tucked her left hand between her cheek and her shoulder. Her dark glasses were folded in a pocket of her frayed green coveralls—orange lenses, copper frames, side screens of wire mesh.

Alex was asleep inside the woman. He cleared his throat and shifted his hips. He groaned and pulled one knee toward his chest. He slowly unbent his left arm, reached behind him, and felt the side of Naomi’s head. The morning was cold. It would be hours before the desert warmed up. Alex kept his eyes shut.

Eva was already up. She had the jeep parked next to a tangled stand of prickly pear. Chains of flat green lobes had struggled up through masses of wilted brown wreckage. All her solar panels were lifted on their struts, trapezoids of black silica angled toward the sun, catching the first light. A second sun rose—a brilliant star caught in a notch between two mountains. Eva watched the suns come up.

Three voices murmured like wind in the spaces between them.

A bowling alley? thought Alex. Back up. How did you get from the deep freeze to the bowling alley?

I was a cannibal spirit, thought Naomi. I must have got lost from a tribe of cannibals. A tribe of cannibal Eskimos from the arctic wastes.

I must have slept through that part.

Naomi rolled onto her back and stretched her legs. She wished that she had wrists to flex, but all she had today were ankles. She kept her eyes closed and listened to Eva talking to herself, up by the cactus.

She once told me that I had beautiful hands. We lay on our backs on the sand at sunset. My hands would dance against the sky, weaving webs. And my daughter would watch.

I still think you have beautiful hands, Naomi told her.

Shut up, thought Eva. No one is talking to you.

Naomi inched one eye open and blinked back her nictitating membrane. What was she this morning? A woman? A parakeet? An electric blanket? She rolled onto her side and lifted her stiff neck.

Alex propped himself up on one elbow and sighed. He stared at the dry creek bed in front of him. Grains of sand fell from his hair. He stood up, climbed the bank of the arroyo, pushed his coveralls down around his ankles, squatted, and emptied his bladder.

Naomi lumbered up out of the hollow, dipped her head, and ripped up a clump of sagebrush in her teeth. She stood and chewed it—roots, sand, and all.

I don’t remember these being here, she thought to herself. They must have grown in the night.

Eva adjusted the tilt of her photovoltaics. A servomotor purred for a moment. A hinge creaked. Eva pretended she was a giant black beetle warming its wings in the sun.

“Which way were we going?” asked Naomi, craning her neck to the east and speaking to no one in particular.

“West,” said Eva. “West until we find a road.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Naomi. The brontosaur moved off across the desert, putting the suns behind her. She trampled the brush and the cholla cactus but walked around the paloverde trees. Eva spun her magnetos and felt her transmission fluid pressurize. She backed away from the prickly pear hedge, retracted her photopanels, and turned to follow Naomi.

Alex sat on a boulder for a while, rubbing the knots out of his neck and shoulders. He sat in the middle of an unreal desert, stranded in the body of his wife and wishing that he had some coffee and a cigarette. He looked at his hands. Long ago when he’d been flesh, he had made love to this woman, just once, and fallen in love with her forever.

My wish is granted, he thought to himself. Total possession of the object of my desire. From the inside out. I’ve died and gone to heaven. I wish I were dead. This could go on forever. It’s all in our heads.

I haven’t got a head today, Eva told him. And if you don’t can the early-morning self-pity, I’m going to barf my coolant.

White sand and gravel scraped pleasantly past Naomi’s belly. Eva’s tires rolled over the white sand and gravel between the prints of Naomi’s feet.

A jeep has no head, Alex had to agree. But a dinosaur does. I could believe in a dinosaur, but I don’t believe in Naomi. That brontosaur is a transparent delusion. She’s a refugee from a cheap Japanese monster movie. Look at the seams in that latex. Look at those baggy knees. And those mountains. There’s chicken wire showing through the papier maché.

Naomi and Eva crossed onto prairie land where oat grass grew thick on the rocky ground. After the foot pads and jeep tires had passed over, the flattened stalks would unfold themselves, crackling in the morning sunshine.

Alex began to scream. A half a mile away, Eva and Naomi groaned.

Do something, Mother. Go back and run him over.

Just ignore him. He’ll catch up.

He’s disgusting. I wish he’d have a heart attack.

Not with my heart, thought Eva.

It’s miniaturization, thought Alex. We’ve all been miniaturized for the special effects for a Lost Dinosaur Isle movie. It’s the climate that’s killing me. I’ve got maggots hatching in my clockwork.

Do you know what I like about Alex? thought Eva.

No. What? thought Naomi.

You don’t know either? That’s too bad. I’ve completely forgotten. There must be something I like about him.

Alex found his shoes, laced them on, and started across the sand, following the distant hum of the jeep’s motors.

Eva steered around the paloverde trees and bumped over the rocks. She stopped and rotated her turret optic. “There’s a road,” she said aloud.

Naomi lifted her head. Eva was right. Telephone poles and everything.

The brontosaur and the jeep climbed a gravel embankment onto a strip of asphalt that stretched to the horizon, running north and south. Naomi lay down on her side on the road. They waited for Alex to catch up. Eventually he lurched up the embankment with a green pop bottle in one hand.

“Civilization,” he croaked.

They moved south along the road. After a half hour or so, they came to a road sign. ARIZONA ROUTE 80. A while later they came to a sign that said: RODEO, NEW MEXICO, 3 MILES. Naomi stopped to rest and stood in the sun panting, with her tongue hanging out. She looked over her shoulder and squinted at the glare. She scraped one side of her head against her shoulder, rubbing the sty on her lower eyelid.

“I have a question,” she announced. “Why are there three different suns?”

“Alex,” said Eva. “Naomi has a question.”

“Three suns,” said Naomi. “How is that possible?”

“It’s not,” Alex told her. “Astrophysically they have no leg to stand on. Several possibilities arise. A. We’re all dead, and this is some cheesy afterlife purgatory. B. One of us is having a long involved dream or vision. C. The suns are a mirage induced by time distortion.”

“Time distortion?”

“Sure. If the three of us are in separate time frames, then we might conjure up three apparent suns in three positions. This would suggest a pocket universe.”

“We’re not in anyone’s pocket,” said Naomi. “We’re at the bottom of a well, eating treacle.”

“Well, I’m glad that’s cleared up,” said Eva.

“I’d like to bite someone’s head off,” said Alex.

“Not mine,” said Eva. “I haven’t got one.”

The three of them proceeded south, toward the buildings of a town.

“Where is the search party?” asked Naomi. “When are we going to be rescued?”

“They’ll rescue us when they want us,” said Alex. “They know where to find us.”

“What do they want from us?” Naomi whispered.

We’re a weapon, Alex told her. We’re a secret biological weapon that’s been hidden away. The government has stored us on a quarantine asteroid. We’re a classified virus that leaked from the plague industry and scared all the lab rats shitless. We had to be covered up. Because we’re too much too soon. We’re the telepathy factor and the cure for cancer. We’re a threat to modern disaster science. We’re immortal, Naomi. We’ve gone beyond death. We’re immortal, and the disease in communicable. You caught it in your tank of ice, and you made it communicable. Immortality is the ultimate disaster, Naomi. It never ends.

“Why did it have to be us?” asked Naomi.

Fate, Alex told her. Like the three Chinese brothers. One of them could swallow the ocean. One of them could hold his breath for three days. They all looked exactly alike. And do you know why? Because they were a monster. Not three monsters knotted together, no. One monster torn apart. But it’s no good coming to me for answers. There’s nothing left of me, Naomi. Just machine language and ghost rages. All things considered, I wish I were dead. But I’ve probably already been granted that wish, along with all the others. Iron turns red when it corrodes, and copper turns green. Meat turns to maggots, and thoughts turn to speech. Things are creeping up on me. In the first reel of “Frankenstein”, Fritz drops the jar. He drops the jar with the good brain, so he has to take the criminal brain. Everything turns to shit right from the start.

They came to a population sign at the Rodeo town limit. Naomi could see rows of houses. They passed a cattle ranch—barns with aluminum roofs, a mobile home, hay bales, irrigation ditches. Broken glass glinted on the shoulders of the highway. The cinder block buildings at the center of town stood flat and white, like overexposures, like shining ashes that the wind might blow down at any moment. A bar, a post office, and a grocery.

Ages ago, Naomi told herself, the desert lay under the ocean. The ants have taken over from the crabs, that’s all that’s happened. But the cactus remember the coral reefs.

The three of them walked into town. They’d encountered towns before. The towns were never inhabited. Once they’d found a derelict amusement park. Once it was a detention camp. Once it was the ruins of Aztec ziggurats. They’d crossed the mud and barb wire of trench warfare, and they’d crossed Nigerian millet fields overlooked by domed granaries. They’d seen slag heaps and meteor craters. But never a river. And never any rain.

In Rodeo there were Chevys parked in driveways and a flatbed hay truck with a horse trailer in front of the post office. There were cars with no wheels run into ditches. Naomi stopped in front of a boarded-up grocery store with gas pumps.

“It certainly looks like Rodeo,” observed Eva.

“You’ve been here?” said Alex. He sat down on the front steps of the grocery and shook out his shoes.

“I was hitchhiking up from Douglas. A horny salesman in a Volvo gave me a ride.”

Naomi began to recite sutras. The angas of the yogic marga are eight in number. The first of these being yama, that is, abstention. The second being niyama or observances. The third being asana, that is, postures.

Alex climbed the steps to a wooden porch and wiped at a dusty window. He cleared a patch of glass and exposed a sign in red marker pen. LETTUCE $2.95 EA.

“They sold lettuce here for two ninety-five a head,” he said. “That’s highway robbery.”

Naomi draped her neck over a gas pump. “I could use some lettuce,” she said.

Alex rattled the door of the grocery, walked across the porch to a wooden bench, dragged the bench to the door, and used it to break out the glass. He stood pulling triangles of glass from the door and muttering.

They built this place out of our heads.

I haven’t got a head, Eva pointed out.

Proves my point, Alex went on. They used it to build this place. Why are your nails so filthy?

Why don’t you clean them? You’ve got hands.

Where did you put the jackknife?

Look in your pockets, Alex. And pick the stones out of Naomi’s feet when you get done.

Fourth is pranayama, the breath. Fifth is pratyahara, sense control.

Eva, I think you have head lice. Couldn’t you take sponge baths?

I could if I was a sponge.

Naomi snickered. Sixth is dharana, concentration. Seventh is dhyana, meditation. Eighth is samadhi, contemplation. The first anga, abstention, yields five consequences. The first of these—

Naomi, Alex broke in. Must you recite that stupid Hindu garbage over and over again?

“Leave her alone,” said the jeep.

Alex turned to it. “I should break your legs,” he said. “You’re so damned selfish.”

He opened the door of the grocery. He couldn’t shut the others out of his head, but he could put some walls around him. He walked through the store, picking things up, turning things over. Dust had built a lush fur on the floor, the shelves, the cans and bottles. Auto tools hung on wire loops against the pocked plaster of a wall. Socket wrenches, monkey wrenches, pipe wrenches a yard long. Cardboard price tags on pieces of string. Artifacts of a lost civilization. A necropolis robbed of its mummies. Someone had stolen all the corpses.

Alex raised the aluminum lid of a vegetable cooler. At the bottom of a plastic bin, tomatoes and heads of lettuce had melted to puddles and dried to hard black stains. Alex let the lid drop, went to a rack of gum and candy bars, and stuffed the pockets of the coveralls. He found some paper bags and began to fill them. Cans of beans, tuna, corn, turbine oil, toilet paper. . . As much as possible he kept to products in the form of cylinders. He carried the bags to the porch, pulled out two quarts of oil, and walked up to Eva. She flipped her hood open.

All three suns were up now. It seemed to be the chalk-white sky itself that glared down so heavily. The telephone poles cast three sets of shadows on the asphalt and dry weeds. The day was going to be hot.

The brontosaur lay on her side on the gravel of the parking lot, panting like a patient hound. Eva sunbathed and gazed at the distant mountains, humming to herself. Alex sat on the porch of the store, eating beer nuts in the shade and muttering to himself.

Three sisters at the bottom of a well. Lived on treacle. Can’t have. Would’ve been sick. Were sick. Very sick. Axon, dendrite, and soma. Flame, breath, and rust. I think too much. I think too much, Naomi sees too much, and Eva feels too much. We’re living beyond all human levels of stress. We must be in hell.

Naomi retreated internally from the reasoned babble that was leaking into her head, and from Eva’s humming. Naomi knew of several avenues of escape from her family’s illness. Escape routes did exist.

Her favorite hiding place was the brontosaur’s hindbrain. To go there Naomi imagined herself as a little girl with yellow hair, who stood in a limestone tunnel with her fleecy thoughts wrapped around her as a shawl. She walked up the tunnel, which was limestone worn by water into the inner shapes of spinal vertebrae. The tunnel leveled out and opened into a spacious cave at the core of the brontosaur’s pelvis. At the center of the cave was a fat white armchair. The little girl sank into the chair and closed her eyes.

Light poured in through the bones. The armchair was a cluster of ancient gangliae, reptilian and wise. The voices of her parents were muffled by the thick walls of bone. Naomi held her eyes closed, feeling contained and yet set free, released into vast empty spaces.

Tik tak toe, three in a row, Naomi recited to herself. It’s a game for two, so I never get a turn. They play it on my skin. It isn’t fair. They’re always pretending. He’s the Steadfast Tin Soldier, she’s the one-legged ballerina, and I’m the fish that ate them. But really we’re all just a burnt lump of tin. It’s a sad old story. The princess loved the soldier, but the soldier loved the witch. And the princess lived alone in a tower of salt, alone with the angels, whose eyes are big as teacups, big as platters, big as cartwheels. I’ve forgotten the ending. I’ve lost the means to think. I should be floating down a river collecting twigs and crayfish in my hair. I should be dissolving in thick black mud. But a river is nowhere to be found.

Cradled in bright bone, snug in the dense gray seed pod of her hindbrain, Naomi silently shrank into a small square sheet of rice paper, which lay on the low lacquered desk of an old Chinese gentleman. The man picked up the paper in his long thin fingers and folded an origami bird. Naomi’s eyes looked over his shoulder, then wandered. Outside the paper walls of the old gentleman’s house, in a garden of moss and stones, a musician was playing a kyoto that had been fashioned from the shell of a turtle.

Naomi looked at the shell and saw the turtle coasting on an oceanic current, grazing rafts of kelp, living her life at sea. On the day of her death, she went ashore to lay her eggs. She clambered up white beach sand, over crab skeletons and fish husks to a dune where she buried her eggs. A beachcomber clubbed her dead and took her home to his wife, who chopped up her meat for a stew and sold her shell to a maker of kyotos.

Two of the turtle eggs hatched, and one of the hatchlings got down to the surf. But this hatchling wasn’t a sea turtle. Instead it was a throwback, a plesiosaur. The turtle isn’t a descendant of the plesiosaur, but the plesiosaur didn’t know that. And that plesiosaur was Naomi’s grandmother.

Naomi snapped out of her trance. The parking lot began to rotate beneath her. Abruptly someone sawed off the lid of her skull and poured scorpions and molten lead into her brain basin. Or so it seemed.

Eva! Naomi cried. Eva! Where are you? I don’t feel right.

The jeep was already beside her. It’s the brain tumor again. This is just what we need.

The brontosaur vomited foamy bluish lumps onto the gravel. Her belly heaved some more, but nothing came up. The flesh of her muzzle drew back from ruined purple gums and pitted brown teeth. Eva stood and watched, wishing that she could swab Naomi’s eyes with wet towels or stroke her brow. There wasn’t much a jeep could do to comfort a brontosaur.

Compassion, thought Alex. It’s a sickness. Encephalitis is a mercy by comparison. I have all their bad habits.

Alex still had Eva’s dipstick in his hand. He walked up beside her, replaced the stick, and slammed her hood shut. Then he surveyed the area, picked a side street, and walked up it, away from the highway toward the foothills. He walked two blocks east and turned right. Cracked and tilting sidewalks crossed plots of dirt that had once been lawns. Alex kicked down the handle of a rusted-out lawn mower.

Triads without a grid. Fragmentary case histories falling into ever smaller fragments. Exhausted assembly language. Tik tak toe, three in a row, a tack in a toe, and the tick makes it go. I lose, you lose, we lose. Snakes and ladders, tunnels and chutes, wormholes and sinkholes. Christ on a stick with raspberry frosting. How could I let this happen? I was a doomed steer on the blissful road to slaughter I had it made. Now I’m a permanent condition. Now I want to bite off the head of a jeep because she doesn’t love me. I give up. I surrender. Where do I go to surrender? No proper map, no orders, no fuel, no landmarks, no radio traffic, no steering, no brakes. . . Get it over with. Finish us off.

Eva turned a corner and spotted Alex. He was sitting on the front porch of a peeling pink bungalow. The roof of the porch had fallen in. Rusted window screens hung in flaps. Eva pulled into the driveway.

Naomi’s got a fever, she told him.

No doubt. Naomi’s got a fever, and I’m insane. What’s your problem?

I’m not happy, Alex. This desert won’t hold still.

Maybe it’s trying to get away.

I’d like to get away.

The old woman and the jeep fell silent. The wind moved a curtain in the pink house.

Alex shrugged. I’ve seen worse places. At least there aren’t any bugs.

Listen. Naomi is retching her guts up. Would you unstrap one of these water jugs and screw the cap off?

Sure, thought Alex. He stood up and did as Eva asked.

Alex, tell me something. What is it that eats at your silicon brain? What makes you so fucking mean?

Alex chewed at his thumbnail and blinked back tears. “You don’t like me,” he said.

Eva could see the shame and disgust gathering around his head like a dark cloud. He shivered and hid his face in his hands. It wasn’t his face. They weren’t his hands.

Something has to change, he whispered in his misery. I should destroy us all.

You’ve done that repeatedly, Mighty Warrior. I’ve killed you too, three or four times as you may recall. Euthanasia doesn’t appear to be one of our options.

Alex wasn’t listening. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her killer, and then I’ll kill her child, while she begs for my mercy. Then I’ll forgive me and make love to her. Then I’ll kill her again. She’ll be sorry when she’s dead. And her daughter deserves to die with her. Because her daughter loves me just as badly as I love her. And that’s a cruel and unusual punishment.

She loves you like a father, Alex. When you die, she’ll carry your metal shell on her back. She’ll sleep nights on top of you, smitten with grief. She’ll hump your tires. She loves you, Alex. There’s no escape. I know these loyal bitches.

Alex went on muttering under his breath. He bent down and picked up a loose brick.

We can’t be the only ones locked up here, Alex.

Why not?

There must be other cells with other prisoners.

What if there are?

Escape, Alex. Sooner or later someone will escape.

How would that help us?

Someone could start a prison break.

Alex closed one eye and sighted down an edge of the brick. I wouldn’t count on it. Some prisons are escape-proof.

You have no imagination, thought Eva.

The jeep reversed down the driveway. Alex hurled his brick, but it fell short. The jeep bounced into the street and rumbled away, picking up speed.

You can run away, Alex told her. But a storm is coming. And after it hits, I’m going to give you a crown of thorns you’ll never forget.

Eva headed back toward the center of town and took a short cut down a littered back alley. Derelict swing sets stood behind fences of ocotillo stalks. She bashed aside a trash can to relieve her bad temper.

He’s evil, she complained. If only Naomi and I could cut him loose, remove him like a tumor, hold him in a pair of surgical tweezers over a stainless steel bowl, and drop him in, plunk.

All the while Naomi recited rapidly. For every action there are five lines of causation, the first being the site of it, the second being the doer of it, the third being the tools for it—

The wind dragged a thready haze of cirrus clouds across the sky. Alex trudged up a crooked path into the foothills. He passed yucca bushes and barrel cactus. The town was behind him, down below. He sat down on a stone and fell into a numb rage. Words cranked through his head like an endless bicycle chain.

If only there were somewhere outside of us, some way out. If only Naomi could die of her tumor. Eva would dehydrate, and I would rust in some peaceful gully, mission accomplished. But no. This place has a mind of its own. This place, this trap, this bedlam, this bardo state, this gnarled knot of nothing.

Sudden as the pounce of a cat, loud as a hammer on a steel barrel, Naomi’s voice rang out inside of Alex. Let’s get out of here! Let’s leave!

How? Show me how.

You have to pray, Naomi told him.

Pray? Get serious. Pray to what?

To anything. To whatever’s outside of this place. It doesn’t matter. Pray to the angels.

You’re delirious.

Pray to the angels, Alex! They came from the sun in the days before people. They’re hovering around us. Can’t you feel them? Warrior angels with swords of radiance. Their faces are so kind. They want to help us, Alex. Most of them do anyway.

Naomi, Alex thought tolerantly, you are so full of shit.

The jeep skidded to a stop on the gravel beside the sick brontosaur. Naomi gasped for breath. A bloody spillage was seeping from her cloaca.

Hello, Mother, Naomi thought faintly. Am I dying? Or am I just pretending? Will you bury my head in the sand when I’m dead, Mother? Will you dig a hole with your hands?

Naomi paused to listen. She heard a voice like an old Mexican woman at the bottom of a deep well. Naomi? Naomi, I brought you some water. Can you lift your head? Can you get your teeth around the neck of this jug?

The brontosaur groaned and thrashed its head and tail from side to side. Its muzzle clipped Eva's front bumper and smashed one of her headlights. Eva jerked herself back to a safer distance and slowly circled the parking lot.

She's really out of it now. I wonder whether ten bottles of aspirin would do her any good. I could mash them in some water and force-feed her the paste. No, I can't do any of that. I'm inside a jeep. Eva rammed the porch of the store to vent her irritation. A porch railing fell on her hood.

Naomi was howling like a dying sea cow. Hold me, Mother! Hold me! Don't leave me! Don't let me die!

The child's demands were unreasonable. There was nothing Eva could do. She backed onto the highway, turned her wheels, and drove south. She pushed her speed up to fifty miles per hour. The desert flew past in a blur. All three suns were roughly overhead.

Alex sat on his rock and held a cholla thorn in his right hand. He pressed the point of the thorn into the flesh of his left thumb. A drop of blood formed at the point of the thorn.

Alex jerked up his head and scanned the sky. He thought he'd seen a lightning flash from the corner of his eye. But the sky was clear, and no thunder came.

Because it wasn't lightning.

The hills and the little fake town grew dark, as though clouds were moving across the sun. The suns were dimming, like three bulbs on the same circuit.

Out on the highway, Eva sensed another seizure coming on. She had no idea how far she'd driven from Rodeo. She turned around and raced back toward town. But the storm was ready to break. If it dragged her into the sky while she was driving, the jeep would crash. So she braked, shut down her turbines, and stood in the middle of the road. The spiteful muttering from Alex got louder in her circuitry. Louder than gunfire, louder than bombs, it blotted out the world. The sky opened under her like the mouth of a dark dank well.

The jeep stood empty on the asphalt. A gust of wind moved across the desert. Eva was gone.

Naomi lay on the gravel. She couldn't move. Her head was squeezing her brain like a vice. Help me, Papa! I need water! I need medicine! I need lightning and chaos and healing. I need a silk ladder that I can climb through the roof of the world. I'm so tired of this smoke and filth.

Naomi fell into a bottomless black pit.

Hiding from me, thought Alex, thinking of Eva. Always hiding from me and laughing at me. I should plant her in the ground and see what grows.

Alex dropped sideways into nothing. Rodeo, New Mexico, was uninhabited again. The pit was full.

The old woman lay on her back beside a foot trail, her mouth open, her eyes on the sky, her face as blank as stone. Paloverde branches rattled in the wind. A lock of white hair blew across her eyes. She might have fallen to earth from heaven—an elderly Hispanic angel, lying stunned amid the sagebrush.

The brontosaur lay on its side by the gas pumps. Its breathing was shallow but steady. One eye stared unseeing at the Chiricahua Mountains to the west. The other eye regarded the Peloncillos to the east.

The jeep stood in the middle of Route 80. One more dead car in town.

The suns began to wander aimlessly in the sky. A fourth sun rose, then a fifth and a sixth—cold as moons and scarcely brighter than stars. Twenty suns or more cluttered the sky. They swarmed above the town like gnats. The sky darkened to a rusty black. The suns formed into clusters and swam in schools like minnows. Some of the clusters spun around a common center, like leaves in a whirlpool. Myriads of suns rose from behind the mountains, colorless and false, like planetarium projections.

Above the suns, above the sky, the sets and properties for the recent dreams of the three travelers stood idle. Up there a long-demolished plastics factory still clanked and hissed and dribbled gray-green smoke across an empty sky. Up there buzzards circled over freshly butchered meat at the apex of a Mayan ziggurat. Up there a bowling alley nested among the evergreen boughs.

But above all that, somewhere else entirely, a young man with long blond hair was walking through a glade of birch trees, across a crust of snow. He wore a white dress uniform which corresponded to the navy of no particular nation. The uniform included a visored cap, epaulets, and white silk gloves. The young man carried a leather briefcase. His slick black shoes crunched the dead leaves beneath the snow. He was tall and slim, and he was walking fast.

As the birch trees thinned out, snow began to fall, as fine as sifted flour. The man crossed an open field of dead oats. Cloud shadows sailed across the frosted stubble. The man made his way to a narrow shaft of white light. The snow hissed like radio static. The young man shook back his hair and squinted into the wind.

He spotted another shaft of light and made his way toward it. He walked through it and on to the next and the next. The birch trees were lost in the darkness behind him. The man in the naval uniform crossed a tundra of green moss that squelched beneath his weight. He crossed the green felt of an immense pool table, his heels ringing woodenly. He never slowed his pace. He entered a pavilion of marble pillars and walked out the other side.

He stood on a long green carpet, about five yards across. The carpet extended off into the distance. Ensign Wing resumed walking. He was going to visit Dr. Mazer, who was an angel, like himself. He wasn’t looking forward to the visit.

White noise. White ants on white sand slides. Snow blindness. A shift of attention.

In the sky over Rodeo, only three suns remained. They were converging over the town. As they fused, all the triplicate shadows of the telephone poles merged into singular shadows. Then they gradually split apart again.

Eva gave a start. She blinked in the glare. All the machinery had melted off of her. Her spine was arched uncomfortably across a stone. She rolled onto her hands and knees and felt the rubble beneath her palms. She was home again. Where was Naomi?

Eva walked into town. She called Naomi's name. The jeep came up the highway toward her, calling out in a digital version of Naomi's voice. Naomi sounded frightened. Eva tried to think. If Naomi was in the jeep, then Alex. . .

Oh no.

A serpentine shape rose from behind a house. It swayed like a cobra, with the suns behind it. Its eyes were rimmed with red, and it displayed its crooked teeth in a lopsided grin.

“All around the cobbler’s bench,” sang Alex, “the monkey chased the weasel.”

The brontosaur reared up and tried to crawl over the roof of the house. But his forefeet went through the tar paper. He yanked his feet free and bounded around the block, snapping his jaws. Eva was already running. Alex turned and landed a vicious kick on the side of the jeep, slamming it sideways like a toy. One of its fenders flew off. Alex threw back his head and roared at the sky.

Eva ran behind a tool shed and watched Alex charge off after Naomi. The jeep was too big to hide itself. Naomi would have to outrun him. Alex chased her out of town but lost her on the highway. He turned back and prowled the streets of Rodeo.

Eva peeked around the shed. Alex’s head poked over a rooftop. He was looking for her, drooling and spitting. Ducking out of sight, she knocked over a shovel. The monster turned its head toward the sound and chuckled. Eva began to run, hammering the hard earth with the rubber soles of her shoes. But she couldn’t catch her breath, and Naomi’s voice was shouting in her head.

I’m coming, Mother! I’ll help you!

No! Keep away from him! Run!

White noise. The crackle of static. A shift of attention.

The green carpet extended across a limitless wooden floor. On the wooden horizon there loomed a gigantic gray castle in the shape of a castle from a chess set.

Ensign Wing walked the green carpet until it was joined by a beige partition, eight feet tall. The partition extended, perfectly straight, to the horizon line where the limitless floor met a sky as white as paper. Wing walked beside the partition, on and on, until a series of gray steel doors began to interrupt it at regular intervals. In each door was a window of frosted glass.

A second partition joined the first, on the opposite side of the carpet, forming a hallway without a ceiling. Wing passed a marble urn full of white sand. He heard the chirp of a sparrow and looked up. Snowy tree branches interlaced above him. He sighed and resumed walking. He came to a door with printing on the frosted glass: DR. MAZER.

Wing faced the door with his head bowed and his free hand resting on one hip. He shook his head and walked a few more doors down the hall. He sat down on the green carpet with his back to the wall. He reached into a pocket of his uniform and took out a butane lighter and a fat joint of ganja. He sat and smoked, watching the rustling of the leaves. Then he looked up, and there was a ceiling of white fiberboard, with fluorescent tubes in pebbled fixtures.

Wing returned to the door marked MAZER and rapped at the glass. No answer. He tried the knob. He pulled a ring of keys from a trouser pocket, unlocked the door, and went in.

The office was dark except for the light that spilled in from the hall. Wing’s restless green eyes probed the darkness from beneath the visor of his cap. There was a wide oaken desk. There were bookshelves and a filing cabinet. At the edges of a Turkish carpet were ferns potted in large Chinese vases of blue porcelain. Hung on the walls were parchment maps mounted in chromium frames. A coffee machine stood on a low lacquered table and steamed. Three video monitors faced the desk from an alcove of white plaster set into one wall. Wing’s hand found a light switch and snapped it. Bright ceiling lights came on.

Sitting behind his desk, Dr. Mazer winced and put a hand over his eyes.

“Oh,” said Ensign Wing. “Sorry. Thought you were gone.”

“I’m always here,” said Mazer. “I was napping.”

“May I sit down?”

Mazer attempted a smile and gestured Wing to a chair. Mazer wore the appearance of a short thickset man in a white lab coat, with a bald head and thick eyeglasses. His nose was hawkish. His lips were thin and severe. Wing sat down.

“Good of you to come,” said Mazer. “You haven’t paid a call in quite some time.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I realize of course that visiting an insane asylum is not your idea of a good time.” Their eyes met. Neither angel looked aside.

“Actually,” said Wing, “I’m here to make inquiries on behalf of Reverend Weaver.”

“How disappointing,” said Mazer. He touched a remote control and turned on the video screens.

The Ensign swiveled his chair and observed the screens, which all showed the same image. A prehistoric monster appeared to be demolishing a small twentieth-century town. A driverless jeep was ramming itself repeatedly into one of the dinosaur’s hind legs.

“I like the mountains,” said Wing. “Very realistic.”

“Care for some coffee?” asked Mazer.

“Thanks. I’ll pour. A cup for you?”

“Please.”

Wing went to the coffee machine, poured two cups, and carried them on saucers to the desk. Then he took a clipboard from his briefcase and studied the blank front of a file folder. He set the clipboard on Mazer’s desk and looked again at the monitor screens.

The brontosaur gnashed its teeth like a rabid camel. It frothed at the mouth, and a strand of bloody mucus swung from one nostril. Its eyes had gone white as milk.

“I assume,” said Mazer, “that the Reverend is concerned about the three lost souls on those screens. I only have three patients left in the place.”

“That’s correct, Sir.”

“I’m surprised at how many among us have opinions about my little clinic. I’m surprised that they discuss me behind my back but don’t see fit to visit the facility in person.”

“Perhaps they don’t feel welcome,” Wing suggested.

“They aren’t welcome if we’re talking about the Reverend,” said Mazer.

Wing sipped his coffee. This wasn’t going to be easy. “You may not believe this,” he said, “but Weaver is still a great admirer of yours.”

Mazer pouted. “But Weaver is critical of my treatment plan in this case.”

“Listen, Father, I’m only trying to open a channel of communication.”

“I’ll talk to you about the case. But Weaver can butt out.”

“Fine. Let’s leave Weaver out of the discussion, shall we? I’d like to talk about those three.” Wing aimed a thumb at the screens. “How exactly do you hope to achieve their rehabilitation through your. . . method?”

“My storm system. You want a progress report? No problem. I have no secrets here.”

Wing had heard that one before. His eyes went cold as ice.

Up on the screens, the brontosaur had his jaws around the jeep’s front bumper and had tipped the vehicle onto its rear wheels. The saurian kicked at its underside with his forefeet. The monitors faintly hummed.

“They certainly do like to fight,” said Wing.

“Yes. It’s a problem.”

An old woman in coveralls ran on-screen and pitched a sharp rock at the beast’s head. “Is that Eva?” asked Wing.

“I’m not sure. I haven’t been listening to them. One of the three.”

The brontosaur dropped the jeep and rushed at the old woman, who ran out of the image.

“So, Wing,” said Dr. Mazer, “what is your considered opinion of these three unfortunates? I say considered since you’ve been tapping those monitors for weeks now.”

Wing smiled modestly. “Offhand I’d say that they’re worse than ever. I think they’ve been deteriorating for the last several centuries.”

“Well, they are dead. It’s reasonable that they should deteriorate.”

“Hey, this is no joke, Dad. You’re fucking with human souls here.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“And you’ve had them in treatment here for more than ten centuries.”

“And look at them,” said Mazer.

“Yes. Look at them.”

“Unhappily married. Hopelessly stagnant. Constantly snapping at one another’s throats. A manic father. A schizoid mother. A daughter moving deeper into autism.”

“And you continue to torture them with your storms,” said Wing.

“Torture is a strong word.”

“But it’s an appropriate word for torture. If this is therapy, it isn’t working.”

“You people seem to forget that Weaver sent me those three in the first place,” said Mazer.

“That was a long time ago,” said Wing. The two angels watched each other closely. “Why don’t you give them back to Weaver? You’ve already lost your professional reputation. I mean, everyone in the organization thinks you’re nuts.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should cut your losses and put the three of them out of their misery. Blow out their brains and let the Wheels of Incarnation sort them out. I’d do it in a minute.”

“I’m sure they’d be gratified,” granted Mazer.

The two angels sat and drank their coffee. “I just wish that Weaver would leave me out of this,” Wing grumbled.

Mazer took off his spectacles, folded them, and slid them into the breast pocket of his coat. “You and I never did get along too well,” he said. He rose from his leather chair and paced the office. “But believe me, I know these three better than anyone. I know what program of therapy is correct for them. And I have no doubt of the eventual success of my system. For these three, the indirect approach is the only approach possible. I know it, and they know it too. They sense that I’m going to cure them.”

“They don’t even know you exist,” Wing objected.

“Oh, they don’t admit it consciously, but they know.” Mazer stood behind Wing’s chair and laid a hand on the younger angel’s shoulder. A note of pleading crept into his voice. “Listen, Wing, I know how this looks. No progress. My last three patients all messed up and stuck together. All of that is true. You don’t know the half. But don’t you see? Don’t you see, Wing? It had to be like this. I had to drive them to this state. There’s no other way forward. They need to be miserable. They need to be sunk in self-disgust. How else can they be motivated to climb out of their pit?”

Wing was stunned. His mind was racing. He finally got the picture. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he saw it all now. The other angels were right. Mazer had gone mad. He was over the edge, as far gone as his patients.

Weaver has to deal with him, he told himself. The situation here is impossible.

Mazer was sitting behind his desk again, pounding it for emphasis. “I’m telling you they’re going to pull through! Then we’ll see what Weaver has to say! Then we’ll see who’s crazy! Weaver and all the rest will be crawling to me on their knees and swearing that they never doubted me!” Mazer noticed that he’d upset his coffee cup.

A brown puddle had reached the Ensign’s clipboard and was soaking into his papers. Neither angel made a move to save them. Mazer’s face was flushed and sweaty. Wing lifted his clipboard, let it drip for a time, and shoved it into his briefcase. He stood up and edged toward the door.

“I’m really not qualified to judge,” he said. “I’m just gathering data. I’ll file a report, and that’s probably the last you’ll hear about it.” Wing shut the door behind him.

When Mazer had calmed down, he walked to the light switch and returned the office to darkness. The darkness helped him to think. He rubbed his jaw in the blue glow of the monitors.

The brontosaur had got the old woman’s head in its jaws. She hung from his mouth, dangling over the town. One of her arms hung brokenly. As the monster’s teeth clamped tighter, blood began to stream down the woman’s face and neck. The images had no color. The blood looked black.

Mazer looked away.

Up the hallway, beyond the pool table and the pavilion, Ensign Wing strode across an expanse of snowy moss. His briefcase was jammed under his left arm. He held a stick in his right hand and lashed at the drifting snowflakes with it. After a while he stopped and leaned against a birch tree. He reached into his jacket and found another joint. He searched his pockets for his lighter.

Falling snow. Hissing static. A wall of chattering video phosphors. The Brownian movement of black ants on black sand.

A shift of attention.

PART TWO

RELAPSE

CHAPTER SIX

THE FALLEN WOMAN

And when your back begins to smart,

It’s like a penknife in your heart.

And when your heart begins to bleed,

You’re dead and dead and dead indeed.

—Mother Goose

Eva was sleeping in a ditch beside route eighty, not far from Rodeo, New Mexico. Crickets chirped in the tall grass all around her. She slept soundly. She’d had a hard day.

She’d argued with Alex in the afternoon, and he’d crushed her skull in his jaws. After he’d killed her, he’d run off chasing Naomi. Luckily Naomi was in the jeep and was hard to catch. Eventually Alex had calmed down. Then he and Naomi had returned to Rodeo to look at Eva’s corpse.

After the suns set, Alex had curled up between two houses and fallen asleep. Naomi was parked beside him for the night, like a faithful dog. The day had left them all feeling drained and edgy.

Eva kept hoping that the moon would rise. Never any moon here. She lay in a ditch, deliciously exhausted and dead to the world.

Dreaming of better days.

I was wrapped in a sarong of green silk. I was standing ankle deep in the playful froth of the Caribbean. The white sand was littered with seaweed and alive with tiny crabs. In the warm water of the tide pools, barnacles breathed easily, raking plankton with their feathery radial arms.

No. No crabs. No seaweed. Tell the truth.

Xcalak. The Yucatan Peninsula. The twentieth century.

The fallen woman stood on a huge gelcrete wharf at the Xcalak dockyards. She’d walked to the seaward end of the it. Freighters towered up from the sludge to either side of her. The sun was setting somewhere behind the cloud cover. She leaned on a guard rail and looked out across the gulf.

The gulf was solid with orange scum, curdled with oil and awash in white suds. Rafts of filth. Gelatinous. Dead. Toxic. The corpse of Mother Ocean. The only movement was the flaring of the fires that burned on Her dead skin. Greasy brown smoke drifted laterally. The smell of Her rotting was everywhere in Xcalak.

The crust of the scum was so thick, you could walk on it. But eventually it would eat through your boots. And if you came to a soft spot, you slipped through. Like falling into a putrescent whale.

The huge steel ships had plows on their prows, and long steel oars for pushing them through the scum. The oars lay folded against their sides like behemoth insect legs. The murmur of the city seemed distant between their bulkheads. Cargo cranes stood on their decks, stark against the dying light. On the superstructure of a freighter, a starfish sailor sat in a sling and scoured metal.

And darkness was upon the face of the waters. And the Spirit moved in the darkness. But not in Xcalak. In Xcalak the Spirit was out of reach, hiding somewhere behind traumatized purplish-yellow clouds. Never any rain. Dry ditches baking in the heat. Smells of urine and garbage. Never any wind. The Chacs had deserted it.

Oh send us the Chacs again, wise Ehecatl! Send them back to us, we beg you, oh one-eyed father of the winds.

No one was listening. The fallen woman leaned on a railing, wearing her red dress. A black drawstring bag hung from her shoulder. She watched the fires at sea. The deck hand with the face like a sea star scoured metal.

She was seventeen years old. She’d been working as a whore for almost a year, in four different cities. She’d learned two professions among her people—priestessing and whoring. Whoring was honest work. It served a need, she supposed.

The streetwalking trade had taught her many new skills. She’d learned to sit in a train station and read a newspaper for hours. That was a skill. She could also recite her plight. Certain men required that a fallen woman tell them stories. They wanted to hear the sordid details of her recent degradations. They seemed to enjoy that, and the stories didn’t have to be true.

To look at her, you’d never imagine she’d been born an angelfish. She was wearing an assumed face. Illegal cosmetic surgery had provided her with the appearance of an anemone woman. Coral pink tentacles had been grafted onto her scalp. If the sailor in his sling were to turn and look down at her, he’d know she was a whore by the tentacles. You could spot her kind a block away.

Tired of standing, the fallen woman sat down on a mooring post. She arranged the loose ends of her sash across her lap. The white silk made rainbows, like an abalone shell.

She had never seen a rainbow or an abalone shell. All these words came later.

She sat and gazed across the surface of the ocean, a rusty orange scum. The clouds were a drapery of fumes that coiled over the sea like permanganate-purple intestines.

She thought about the orbital stations that her nation had constructed—silver milkweed pods whistling through the roasting cold sub-lunar vacuum. The winking of navigation lights in hard silence. The neat clean survival tests that confronted the conch men of the crews. An angelfish priestess in anemone drag sat on a post and wished that she were a conch man.

Yes, that’s how it was.

The fallen woman walked back toward the city, past canvas tarpaulins and iron cleats. Past towers of logs that were made of sponges, past bales of cotton that were grown from a white mold. The wharf passed over the harbor wall and over the foamcrete terraces that mounted to the level of the streets. She moved inland along the sidewalks, between warehouses of sooty brick. Above the roofs, scarlet rays shot through ragged clouds. The shadows of empty carts lay long on the cobblestones. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A maze of stone.

She passed a trench where the city’s plumbing was exposed. A chain-link fence enclosed the excavation. Earth movers crouched on their tires in the twilight, humped and sullen, among spools of gleaming cable. She came to a corner and stepped off the curb to cross.

A man’s voice addressed her, very close. “Miss?”

She turned to face him, her heart already pounding.

“I didn’t see you,” she said. Which was hard to believe. He was squatting in plain sight—armored like a tank and half as big as one. A crab man. A cop. She must have thought he was a bulldozer. He reared up onto his back pairs of legs and clicked on the floodlights in his belly. His glossy black shell was inlaid with Toltec designs of jade and quartz.

“Where are you going, Miss?”

“I was out on the dock. I went to look at the ships.”

“Where are you going?” he repeated.

“I’m going home now.”

“Where do you live?” She named a place. His puffy face was socketed into his thorax. He scratched his cheek with one of his claws.

“You shouldn’t be down here alone,” he told her. “It’s not safe.”

“I’ll be more careful,” she assured him.

“See that you are.”

If he knew that she was really an angelfish priestess, he’d kneel and kiss the hem of her dress. He’d escort her home, because angelfish didn’t walk among commoners. Angelfish weren’t allowed to run around loose. They lived in sedated abbeys, where there was never any trouble, and then they died. All except one—one priestess in the whole history of her people. That priestess didn’t die. She saved herself, and so she had problems—problems with the police, problems with customers, health problems, drug problems, nothing but problems. All because she wouldn’t do a simple thing like die.

The crab and the fallen woman stood and faced each other. She couldn’t go until he dismissed her.

“You can go,” he said finally.

She went. She made her way toward Xcalak’s central monorail station, past apartment hives and lumber mills and cotton factories. The logs were grown from sponges, but people called them logs. The cotton bales were made from white mold, but people called it cotton. None of this seemed strange to her at the time.

She passed a turtle man who pulled a cart of bundled newspapers. An octopus man in a yellow rain slicker and a coolie hat was sitting on top of the papers. The turtle stopped in front of a hive. The octopus climbed down and carried a bundle into the lobby. The turtle waited in harness. As the fallen woman passed him, he turned his head to look at her. It was possible to imagine a bored expression on his face. But people had lost the knack of reading one another’s faces. The mutations had taken them too far in too many directions.

The octopus returned to the cart. He showed no expression and had no head. By having no head he learned humility. By virtue of his having no head, other people learned toleration. These were the reasons given at the time.

The fallen woman passed snail mothers on their way to the shopping ziggurat. She saw snail fathers arriving home on rickshaws and ducking into their holes. Patio furniture on balconies. Bright black eyes on translucent stalks. Four snails to a family, always. Papa, mama, son, and daughter. They were born like that, in batches of four. Each family lived for five years. Then they died, all together, like clockwork.

But not the fallen woman. She was no snail. Genetically she was an angelfish. She wondered what kind of mortality program she was carrying. How had the priests set her clock? She’d been scheduled for dissection. Had they set her clock at all? Or had the priests, perhaps, left death out of her by mistake? So that she would live forever. By mistake.

She came to one of the canals that divided the city into hexagons. She crossed a jade footbridge. Iridescent insects swam on the blue water, whistling their familiar songs.

She crossed a long concourse and passed through a triangular arch into a black glass ziggurat. Inside was the waiting room of the monorail station—a vaulted space with rows of wooden benches. Knots of people sat on the benches and waited for trains. Krill men, lamprey men, manatee cows with their calves stuffed into strollers. Then there was the military presence, coming and going, never having to wait long for a train. Sharks mostly, naked and brightly tattooed, with their bony pricks preceding them and swinging from side to side.

They all wore masks, her people. They grew masks on the faces of their babies. But none of this struck her as strange. Perhaps the masks were meant to placate the angry spirits of all the marine life her people had poisoned.

Nereid men sat in corners with their begging bowls. Blind cave fish wandered the aisles, tapping the floor with their long white spines. An ancient jellyfish navigated his tubular walker from his bench to the corn dog stand. Yes, all the pariah clans were represented. Now that she was here.

The fallen woman walked among them. They saw her face, instantly knew her function. They looked but never touched. They knew the rules. In the years to come, their faces would return to her, like noodles swimming to the surface in boiling soup. Social arrangements sculpted in human flesh.

The men in power could explain their reasons for doing things. They did a thing because it was possible to do it. They’d try anything once. They felt that they owed it to Science.

The fallen woman walked down a flight of granite steps and made her way to her favorite bench, which was empty except for a newspaper. Perfect. She picked up the paper and sat down. She thought about skipping town and setting up in a different city. She had shells enough for a ticket. Why not? She took a capsule from her purse and swallowed it dry. She studied the wall-mounted schedule of departures.

She went into the women’s lavatory and stood at a sink. She looked into a spattered metal mirror, leaned over the basin, and splashed her face and her tentacles. She looked in the mirror again, at the second of the various faces she’d wear in her life. Her makeup was indelible. The skate doctor in Chetumal had done a good job.

He was a disreputable reconstructive surgeon in a seedy neighborhood. He had a snout like a serrated trowel and was as sexually bent as any one man could feasibly be. But he knew his trade. The fallen woman could still see the look on his face when she’d told him what she wanted done. He’d never had an angelfish in his office before, and the idea of turning her into an anemone was just too kinky to resist. And think of the challenge! He’d have to saw off half the poor girl’s face! Which is just what he did, after the question of payment had been settled. Sexual favors were the medium of exchange. The favors were granted during the weeks when her face resembled a volcanic crater.

Finally the bandages came off. She admired the surgeon’s work. She couldn’t recognize herself. Her new face’s most convincing detail was a small counterfeit scar. It looked like a healed knife wound. A pimp slash.

The skate doctor begged her to stay on for further surgery. He wanted to implant her with multiple orifices. He swore that such improvements would make her fortune as a hooker. She declined. She didn’t want to attract that much attention. Her face was perfect, but her identity papers were crap.

A pair of well dressed marlin women strolled into the lavatory, conversing in Nahuatl. They saw the fallen woman and stopped dead in their tracks. They turned to one another in significant silence. Then they walked out, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard.

“Are they allowed in here?”

“I had no idea.”

The fallen woman returned to her bench. She took off her shoes and rested her legs on the seat. She read the newspaper. In between paragraphs she studied the men in the waiting room. Watching men was part of her job. Men buying tickets, men standing in line, men from other cities stolidly waiting to go home. Only by long watching could you tell which man to approach, which to avoid. You had to open the conversation. You had to steer the exchange. You had to know what they wanted, even when they didn’t.

She read her newspaper. Construction on a new industrial dolmen. Satellite photos of petroglyphs miles across. Her people were leveling mountains and filling in canyons. They covered the land with a hardening scab of foamcrete, then picked at the scab until it spread and spread and spread. They spiced the foamcrete with the bones of discarded infants to ward off hurricane damage. They were preparing the Glory Day when all Tahuantinsuyu would be paved, from Uxmal to Copan, from sea to crusty sea.

Why did her people want to do this? Reasons were given. Hydroponics had eliminated the need for dirt. Dirt was a known cause of hookworm. Besides, it was a challenge. It was challenging to turn a continent into a slab of dead rock, chiseled with glyphs. To turn the earth into a moon.

The public address system announced a monorail’s readiness for boarding. A line of people formed in front of a locked glass door. They stood there together, jostling each other, burping babies, unsnapping and snapping up their luggage, taking out their tickets, pocketing their tickets, complaining to one another about the wait. . . The fallen woman hated them all.

She might’ve liked them if they’d sung like birds or hooted like monkeys, but they didn’t. They croaked like toads, or else they whined like poodles. Or else they wanted to stick their protrusions up your cracks and squirt their joy juice in you. The fallen woman wanted only to walk off into the desert, to fast and pray. But there was no desert, just vacant lots of foamcrete without a weed or a shadow.

She considered her alternatives. She could buy a ticket and ride a train. She could find a trick and make him rent a room. She could ride a shuttle to the shopping ziggurat and buy a new dress. She could spin a new dress out of cobwebs and old newspapers. She could spin a boat and sail it to the moon.

The fallen woman walked to an entrance vestibule with glass double doors at either end. To her right stood a broken gum ball machine and a metal chair for a shoe shine man. To her left, in a niche, there was a shrine to Our Lady Ixchel the Moon. There was a shelf for offerings and a bamboo mat to kneel on. On the shelf were dried flowers, vanilla wafers, and hexagonal copper coins with holes in them. There were also some notes on blue rice paper, folded very small. Prayers to the White Lady.

The fallen woman faced the shrine and knelt down on the mat. Behind her, people scuffled past, arriving and departing. She searched her purse for an offering. Cosmetics. News clippings. Prick-wraps. Breath mints. Speed. Sleepers. Nothing. She pressed her forehead to the cool bamboo mat. She offered up a prayer to Ixchel Mother of Death. She closed her eyes, and she was far from Xcalak.

Eva floated down a sewage canal, somewhere deep beneath the Quintana Roo medical complex. She had the face of an angelfish novice. She was dressed in the rags of a hospital gown.

The surgeons had wanted to kill Eva, and she’d fled from them. Somehow her path had led her to this buried canal, where she’d constructed a raft from bundles of PVC pipe. She rode the raft down dark slanting channels, rushing with the swift cold water. She was fleeing the scene of an atrocity, and the atrocity was simply that she’d fled.

The canal took a turn and bashed the raft against its wall. Eva slipped through the pipe bundles into water up to her chest. The roar of the current filled her head. The raft broke up around her.

Then she was in yellow light, moving beside a long cavity that was scooped from the canal wall, like the boarding platform of a subway. Half swimming, half climbing, she struggled toward its ledge.

She heard the shouting of men and the pounding of rubber boots on wet stone. Two men were running along beside her! Two sewer men in rubber overalls were reaching for the raft with gaffing hooks. Eva sank into icy muck. A hook snagged the sleeve of her surgical gown. A seam ripped, but the gown dragged her up onto the ledge.

The sewer men spoke hurriedly between them in a language she’d never heard. They spoke Spanish, as she realized later. They pointed their black rubber gloves at her face, her hands. They found her astonishing and disturbing. They fetched scraps of paper and wiped the filth from her eyes and her mouth. They helped her to her feet and made sure that no bones were broken. They were anglerfish men. Each man had a single milky eye and a luminous tassel on a stalk that grew from his head. Their mouths trailed long whiskers. They were pariah caste, the lowest of the lowly.

The sewer men led Eva to the mouth of a gelcrete tunnel, perfectly round. This was the way out. The men went back to their work. She started up the tunnel.

Glowing blue moss lit her way. Blue slime stuck to her feet and made them shine. She walked for hours. Sprinkler heads above her leaked out a mist. The mist settled slowly through the blue air, unfocusing vision. Droplets like sapphires clung to the shaggy walls. Then the air turned brown. Eva could taste the spores long before she arrived at the mushroom farm.

She came to a dim cavern. It was filled with racks of soil, hanging rubber hoses, and steel tanks on rusty scaffolding. Growing in the nubbly petro-soil were clusters of plump white mushrooms. She ate a few of them and drank some water that trickled from a hose. She climbed onto a rack and fell asleep.

When Eva woke, she found her way from the first cavern into another and another, all alike. Then she came to a cavern where no mushrooms grew. There were murmuring pumps and spherical amber-colored tanks on aluminum stilts. The floor was black pumice. A bare bulb cast grids of shadow onto puddles of standing water. She hit her head on a pipe and cursed.

A gentle voice spoke beside her in the dimness. “Be careful,” it said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

A very fat old woman with long white hair hung upside-down and watched Eva from kindly eyes. The old woman’s arms were crossed beneath her spherical amber belly.

The old woman was a storage tank. Eva looked around. All of the tanks were women. She’d walked right past two of them. They chuckled at her surprise. She sank to the floor, feeling dizzy.

“You seem undernourished,” observed the nearest of the clam women.

“You can’t live forever on mushrooms,” said another.

“Do you like milk?”

The clam women fed her on milk for days. They passed the milk down into their throats with a swallowing sound. Then Eva kissed them, and the milk, sweet as honey, slipped from their hard brown snouts into her mouth.

But the days spent underground passed, and Eva found herself far from the mushroom farm, stumbling up the side of a ditch into the tainted sunlight of Tahuantinsuyu. She walked beside a roadway for a day. She wore a plastic bag. Her lips cracked from the sun. Carts went past her all day—ridden by men, drawn by men. No one stopped for her.

She walked a second day, hoping to find a city. Her fingernails split, and her nose leaked. She stared at the foamcrete at her feet. The earth became a lump of burnt pudding, blackened dough stuck to a bright metal pan. A cartwheel had rolled it flat. It tasted of sawdust and brandy. The sky hung in shreds from rusty thumbtacks. Too much laundering in filthy rivers. Wound on a stick and beaten against a rock. Caminé y caminé.

All the while the fallen woman knelt at the shrine in the monorail station. Rising to her feet, she stole a vanilla wafer from the shelf of offerings.

Out on the street, chewing the wafer, she walked without direction. She walked and walked and watched the wary eyes of the passing men. Encontré el camino a traves de la cuidad.

Some of the men sized her up. But none would meet her gaze. Wasn’t anyone hungry tonight? Wasn’t anyone desperate? Nadie me miró a los ojos. No se escuchó ninguna voz.

And all this was as it should be. Because she was one of the chosen. Because she was born to be forbidden and revered. She could heal the sick or contaminate the healthy with sanctity. Her people built altars to her, and spat on her, and lit candles for her, and burned her at the stake, and died for her, and killed her children. Because that was what they were used to.

She wandered the paths of a plaza where the pavement was set with mosaics of turquoise and mica. She walked across icons of the Whale Emperor and his concubines. She sat on a stone bench beside some yucca plants.

A double file of tunicate children straggled past. A squid nun in a long black habit was leading them home from a field trip. Their heads were smooth and shiny. Their eyes were like little black buttons. They pushed each other and whispered, with pebbles in their shoes. They all looked so achingly well cared for. They all had beds to go home to. They all had legal names. The fallen woman wanted to stroke their heads. Helplessly she watched her hand reaching toward them.

Instantly the nun turned and flew at her, glaring and shaking her fist and screeching at the children.

“Get away from her! Don’t let her touch you! That’s a whore woman! A filthy whore!” The nun swept the children away. They had to run to keep up.

The fallen woman left the plaza. She walked the lamp-lit streets, tracing their hexagons. The curfew sirens sounded. So many problems. And all because she’d run away from the surgeons. It could have been so easy. But no. She’d wanted to live. So she’d flushed her sacred heritage down a toilet, and here she was. In a cesspool. In a labyrinth of stone.

On and on she walked, into the night, over planks and tarpaper and broken slabs of gelcrete. On she walked, dreaming of rivers and pampas and jungle. She walked wishing for a sand dune, a snow bank, a pile of dead leaves, something soft to lie down on. She walked wishing she were asleep. ¿A donde podria yo ir? In a labyrinth of stone. In a coral reef. In a termite mound. In the land of her people who had lost their human faces. En el lugar donde nacir. En un laberinto de peidra.

Recite your plight, recite your plight. In the dying light, recite, recite.

She suddenly heard the legs of a crab cop clattering toward her. She broke and ran, through tilting shadows, toward the dockyard, toward the sea.

She ran toward the sea, saying, No, no, no! This is wrong! I have fallen under a spell. My guts have turned to vipers. I am a nightmare of blood and soapsuds. I am poisoned ashes heaped upon the waters. Oh Goddess! Devas! Angels of light! Someone! Break this enchantment. Smash this devouring bottle of clay and free me. Kiss me. Behead me. Penetrate this forest of thorns. Impale my heart.

She ran to the sea, singing her lament. For the raven has smothered the face of the deep. And no children will be born to the Gila monsters. And the iguanas will keep secrets, one from another. And the sea scorpions will return, and the leaping crabs. And we will have to take our babies away and hide from the men in caves, while the men dance round their fires with hot iron pokers in their fists. And we will have to invent planting again, and drying, and singing, and weaving, and prayer—invent everything all over again for the millionth time. While the men are off somewhere. Setting traps for birds and snares for rabbits. And blinding frogs with red hot pokers.

The fallen woman found herself standing at the far end of a wharf, just as before. Off across the darkness, oil fires flared and guttered. They made the scum look deceptively solid. Like an African desert with fires where the caravans camped. Black smoke crowded the fires, then spun off into the sky.

She resolved to put an end to herself. She could already see her corpse. Tangled with seaweed and creeping with tiny blue crabs. Floating out to sea. The sad remains of a woman of the night who’d concluded her life of shame with the mortal sin of suicide.

She’d tried it before, actually. Several times. She’d poisoned herself, cut herself open, strangled herself with a bondage device. . . Every damned time she somehow landed in a hospital, alive and well. It was as if she had a guardian angel. And those manta surgeons! Those sneaky little shits were capable of anything. They would stitch you up or pump new blood into you or transplant some total stranger’s liver into your chest. They’d commit any atrocity in the cause of saving a life. It was a perversion with them. But one success was all she needed.

The fallen woman took her drawstring bag from her shoulder. She held it in front of her, out beyond the guard rail. She opened it and turned it over. Pill vials, identity cards, and hexagonal coins fell silently through the dark. She dropped the bag and listened for a sound. Nothing.

She climbed onto a mooring post, and from the post she stepped onto the guard rail. She stood there, balanced in the night, breathing easily. She knew just how the rail would vibrate when she relieved it of her weight.

A man spoke to her. She wasn’t alone. She turned her head and lost her balance. Her feet slipped off the rail.

She fell to the wharf. She landed on her back, looking up at a catfish man in a business suit. The man offered his hand and helped her up. At the first touch of his sweaty palm, Eva knew she’d found her trick for the night. He was nervous. She liked them nervous. Nervous men were less trouble.

So the catfish changed her plans for the evening and made her life difficult all over again. But there’d be another evening. Tomorrow or the next day.

“It’s past curfew,” he said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

She shrugged.

“What were you doing up there?”

“Wasn’t that obvious?”

“Are you sad?” he asked her. He was staring at her breasts. “Are you lonely?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I also have money problems.” She smiled bitterly. They loved that.

“We could discuss your problems at my hotel room,” suggested the catfish.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She fell into her routine. She made the necessary motions. Nodded. Took his arm. Laughed. The routine took care of everything. They walked back to the city.

The catfish unlocked his hotel room. The fallen woman made straight for the bathroom. After a shower she put on his bathrobe and emerged.

She found him sitting in an armchair with his fly open, fishing around inside his pants. He pulled out his penis and held it against his chest, cupped in both hands. It wasn’t attached to him, apparently. It lolled on his palms, pink and veiny, with a scrotum like a hairy dried plum at the back.

He described at great length what he wanted done to it, where she was supposed to put it, what she shouldn’t do. . . It dawned on her that he was afraid. Afraid of what? That she might kidnap his cock and hold it for ransom? Or sell it on the black market? And what was the going price for a detached junior-executive cock?

She took off the bathrobe and lay on the bed. The catfish nested the cock on her belly. What a comical sausage it was, pushing its head from side to side. The catfish set off a flashbulb. He had his camera all ready.

Atamna! The whole evening was ridiculous. But she didn’t care. She’d be paid for her time. And someday the gods of her people would pay her back for her difficult life. Someday they would grant her fondest prayer.

On that day Eva would awaken in an empty desert, in the light of three suns, not knowing how she got there. She would walk into that desert and dwell there in solitude forever.

She would forget her lonely days among her people. She would never dream of them again.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ASSEMBLIES

And when I found the door was locked,

I pushed and pulled and kicked and knocked.

And when I found the door was shut,

I tried to turn the handle, but—

—Lewis Carroll

I’ve had this same dream so many times.

I’ve stopped having new dreams. Now I dream the same few dreams over and over. Most of them relate to things that happened to me when I was young.

This dream for example has to do with the loss of my eyes. It’s the story of how I was blinded in the line of duty. In the line of a duty that I’d imposed on myself. An imaginary duty.

In the dream I’m the dour young fool that I was when I lived in Chicago in 1995. I had my own legs back then and most of my arms—the ones I was born with. After an initial spurt, the pace of my auto-destruction had slowed. Gone were the happy days when I would whang off one of my hands at the factory, go home for a beer, and think nothing of it. I must have been sentimentally attached to myself.

I speak of this fool that I was, but I can hardly believe in him. Think of a cardboard cutout of a young fool, that’s some improvement. Dress him in cutout paper clothing: a pale blue shirt, coarse gray paper pants, little black shoes. Slot him into a world of sliding cardboard flats, inside the box of a toy theater called the factory. Cardboard walls, cardboard people, cardboard machines. Good. Now attach a power screwdriver to the stump of his right arm, and a humanoid prosthetic to the stump of his left.

That’s him.

Now stand him beside a conveyer belt. Riding the belt, a succession of television picture tubes move past him, mounted in steel frames with some circuit boards and color-coded wiring. (He’s been transferred away from the model kits division, for obvious reasons.)

His new job is affixing Masonite backing panels to the frames as they roll by. His left hand places the screws, his power prosthetic drives the screws tight. Preset manipulation loops run his hands. His hands require none of his attention.

So his attention wanders. He studies the dust on the cement floor. Or he watches the other assemblers, who have to think, to some extent, about what they’re doing. Or he closes his eyes and listens to the factory—the ratchet of pneumatic wrenches, the hum of conveyer motors, the white noise from the air conditioners.

He makes up lies about his past. He pretends that he lost his hands in a war. Yes, he’s secretly at war with the factory. And obviously the factory’s winning. He’s not like the others. They just come here for the money. He doesn’t need money. What can he do with money? He never leaves the factory. He never sees the light of day. He never sleeps.

He sounds like a riddle. What makes war on a factory, has no hands, and never sleeps? I have no idea, but it’s crawling up your neck, ha ha ha.

It’s not that I refused my salary. In fact I drew three salaries, since I worked all three shifts every day, under differing surnames. At four p.m. I’d punch out Alex One and punch in Alex Two.

But a man has to sleep. Maybe I never was one after all. Maybe I was really a machine that was deceiving itself. It’s simple to hide from yourself. You just choose a place you’ll never look, work all the time, and never sleep. You never find out what you are, and it’s phenomenal how much you can get done.

You can think about your goals in life. You can add up the minutes between you and your next coffee break. When break time comes, you can go to the so-called cafeteria—a row of vending machines against a sheet rock wall—and sit on a polyurethane seat and think some more. You can drink hot cocoa and chicken soup and think. You can eat a hot dog and an ice cream sandwich and think. You can calculate the number of screws you sink in a day. The one thing you can’t do, if you’re me, is stop thinking. It’s a basic design flaw. If I stop for an instant, all my cores go blank.

Where was I?

I was standing at my assembly station, screwing down Masonite panels, when my foreman Mr. Bosch and the janitor Mr. Siever came walking down the aisle and stopped behind me. Mr. Bosch tapped my shoulder to get my attention, then crooked his finger to tell me to follow him to his office. Siever took my place on the line.

Mr. Bosch’s office was a glassed-in cubicle at one corner of the subbasement where we worked. He had a metal desk and two chairs in there, a file cabinet and a coat tree. A gooseneck lamp cast an oval of light on a morass of oil-stained papers. Mr. Bosch, a bald man with thick glasses, gestured me into a chair and pushed a memo slip across the desk at me.

“The company is changing your work assignment. It’s some new motivational bullshit the management cooked up. Read that.”

I picked up the memo and held it in front of my face. I didn’t want to read it, but it was my strict policy never to disagree with people. Bitter experience had taught me that the minute you contradict someone, you instantly get sucked into their asinine private world. By avoiding arguments I wound up not talking to anyone. I lived utterly alone in my own asinine private world. Terribly alone and constantly crowded by idiots—that was my life. Rats gnaw off their feet with less provocation. Mr. Bosch watched me patiently. I tried to read the memo, but whichever way I held it, it seemed to be upside-down.

Mr. Bosch explained that my new job was to do everyone else’s jobs. Not all at once, but one job at a time. I would relieve workers at their stations and give them unscheduled ten-minute breaks.

“It’s a twelve-percent pay hike,” said Mr. Bosch. “It’s a promotion. Do you know why you were chosen? Your perfect attendance record. Don’t you ever get sick, Alex?”

“I’m in training to become a machine. When do I start?”

“You just started. Congratulations. This new job is the best thing that could happen for you.”

“Right.”

“And do you know why I say that, Alex?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because of your psychological problem, Alex. You have a psychological problem as big as all outdoors. Have I mentioned it before?”

“You may have. Can I go now?”

“You’re a menace, Alex, to yourself and everyone around you. You need therapy, Alex. Lots and lots of therapy.”

“Thanks for your concern, Mr. Bosch.”

I left the office and started back toward the assembly line. I still had the memo in my screwdriver claw, so I looked at it again. Worse than ever. I still couldn’t read it, and now I couldn’t remember what it was. This happened to me in those days. Common household objects would mystify me. A paper cup, an alarm clock, a memo slip. . . I knew that these things had functions, but I’d be helpless to recall their names.

A horn blew in my ear. I was standing between two forklifts whose drivers were engaged in a right-of-way dispute. I got out of their way.

I went to the locker room, opened my locker, and changed my screwdriver for a more versatile prosthetic. I chose the mate of the humanoid hand that I was wearing on my left arm.

Siever was still at my work station, doing my job with a rapt expression. Apparently we’d both been promoted. I walked up the line, all the way to the freight elevator that took away the finished video units. I watched over people’s shoulders and memorized their assembly moves. I thought to myself, I could run this whole factory if there were enough of me.

I walked up behind Evangeline, an elderly black woman with bad veins in her legs. I liked Evangeline because she admired the cleverness of my prosthetics, and once she’d give me a Christmas card. She was wearing a loud pink dress and hair curlers. Circuit boards were shuffling past, and Evangeline was slapping a diode from her diode tray onto every single board, tweezers in one hand, solder gun in the other. She saw me and tugged out her earplugs.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“I got a new job.”

“That’s great, Honey. You too smart to work here.”

“Give me the solder gun. I’m going to fill in for you.”

“Oh, how nice.” Evangeline got down off her stool and stiffly walked away.

But something she’d said had wormed its way into a dark corner of my brain. What are you doing here? A dangerous question.

As the weeks of that summer wore on, I learned every assembly task that was done on our level of the subbasement. I took pride in my work and hoped to become a machine soon. Apart from the sleeplessness and the thinking too much, I was content. Until I had that bad dream. It was during the first coffee break of a graveyard shift. I fell asleep in my cafeteria chair, and I had a bad dream.

(So I did sleep. That proves it.)

I dreamed that I was working on the line as usual, except that instead of building televisions, we were machining aircraft parts with rotary sanders. Plastic chips bounced off my goggles. I wondered why these huge fuselage sections should be made of styrene. Styrene is awfully flammable. So I walked off my station to see if I could find out where the parts got put together. I found a hangar full of bomber jets that were life-size model kits, hollow inside. Impressive as hell, but they’d never fly.

At one end of the hangar, a crew was rolling jets out into the sunshine. I followed one out. The jets were rolled down a sloping runway straight into the funnel of a gigantic grinder, which chopped them into chips, so that the chips—it came to me—could be melted down and molded into more aircraft parts.

I walked back into the factory to share my discovery. Mr. Bosch was there, but when I tried to speak to him, no words came out. So I went to the locker room and looked in a mirror. I saw why my mouth wouldn’t open. My head was made of white plastic, smooth and hollow.

I woke up in my chair and tried to remember the dream, but all that came back to me was: What am I doing here?

What were we doing? Working for ESU, Educational Systems Unlimited. Assembling what? What was the product? I asked around, but no one seemed to know. Something educational. A sane man would have dropped the matter there. But not me. I was a dream-starved machine-in-training and a man with a Quest.

I got on the freight elevator and followed a batch of our video units to the level just below ours. There I learned an assembly sequence from an oriental guy named Joe. Joe had a scraggly goatee and agile fingers. All day long he built flush tanks for toilets. He screwed on the floating copper balls.

“Maybe this floor and my floor are producing different things,” I suggested.

“Naw,” said Joe. “All same thing.”

“Maybe it’s a pay toilet with pay TV inside.”

“Your guess good as mine. What for you care?”

“Just curious.”

Joe scratched his chin. “Curiosity kill cat,” he told me.

I followed the flush tanks downstream, seeking out convergences of the component flow.

“Excuse me. I’m taking a survey. What do you think we do here?”

I stopped relieving people from their stations entirely. I rewrote my job description. I stayed in one area only long enough to scope out what they made there and where it went. A hippie type by the name of Reeves had some interesting theories. I picked his brain while he screwed colored light bulbs into a display panel—one green, one red, one blue.

“What do you suppose it’s for?” I asked him.

“I should worry? I got my own problems.”

“But if you took a wild guess. . .”

“Maybe we’re not making anything, Man. I got a buddy works the level two down from here. He upholsters seat cushions. So you have to wonder. Seat, video, toilet, colored lights. . . What’s the big picture? I’m not sure I want to know, you know? I got a million theories, but most of them I try not to think about.”

So much for Reeves. I punched out and went home in the middle of my shift. I walked up Pulaski to Humboldt and took the bus east to the national guard armory. My apartment was two flights up over a Walgreen’s. I ate some popcorn and crashed. I slept on the floor, since I hadn’t gotten around to buying a mattress. There were quite a few roaches and rats, but they stayed out of my way. I think I scared them.

(So I did have an apartment. I’d forgotten that part.)

While I was sleeping, I had another dream. I’m watching a silent movie about an overly serious young man named Felix. He has clean-shaven Teutonic good looks and jet black hair brushed back from a high pale forehead. A Colin Clive type.

He works at a factory where he tours the machinery with a stopwatch, timing compression cycles and making notes in a book. He also sits at a desk in a slanted brick alcove, pulling the lever of an adding machine.

Everything in this silent movie is huge, angular, and skewed. Awesome pistons slide. Puffs of steam belch from floor grates. Faceless drones in prison pajamas trudge. Obese overseers crack bullwhips from steel balconies.

Felix is summoned before his superior, Ivan, a tub of lard with a walrus mustache. Ivan orders Felix to clear out a musty storeroom to make room for new machines. Felix rolls up his sleeves and sets to work.

He’s wrestling with a lathe when he notices something wedged between the lathe and a wall. (Moody back lighting here, and ominous organ chords.) Felix dusts off his discovery—a featureless black box, the size of a large dictionary. A bizarre unhealthy expression creeps over his face. There’s something about this box. That evening he furtively takes the box home under his coat.

Legend card: DAYS PASS.

Felix changes. He’s more dedicated to his work than ever, but he forgets to shave. He loses weight. His eyes are the eyes of a captured soldier.

Legend: ONE MORNING. . .

Felix comes to work looking even more haggard than before. His overcoat is bunched around him oddly. He takes it off and hangs it on a peg. His right hand has been replaced by a crude prosthetic claw. No sick leave. No word of explanation. Just the missing hand. And this obscene home-made claw at the end of the stump.

The other workers are far too intimidated by him to ask what happened. No one talks to him anymore. But the whispering is thunderous. Inevitably Ivan invites Felix into the privacy of his cubicle. Cautiously, from across the desk, he asks a question.

Title card: “WHAT HAPPENED?”

Felix sits, half in shadow, mute as a stone, staring Ivan down. He’s still too high-minded to lie, but how can he tell his foreman that he fed his hand to a black box? Ivan looks down at the claw which could so easily make of bloody mess of someone’s throat.

But the film breaks, the screen goes white, and the dream is done.

The next afternoon I stopped at the Walgreen’s on the way to work and bought a clipboard and a stopwatch. People would talk to me if I wrote on a clipboard. It made the process look official.

I used my stopwatch to time my walk from the punch clock to the building across the railroad track where I was pursuing my Quest. Twenty minutes wasted. I never punched in again. I was in blue sky.

I was tracing forward the path of a promising assembly, a computer keyboard. A conveyer took the keyboards down a narrow brick tunnel with an arched ceiling. I squeezed in beside the conveyer and moved sideways deeper and deeper into the tunnel, hoping to find out where it went. The tunnel went on and on, turning corners. The light was adequate, but my knees were going weak, and my back hurt from stooping under buttresses, and my mouth was dry from talking to myself. So I crawled in under the legs of the conveyer and took a nap.

It was cozy under there. Rubber flaps hung down on either side to protect the works from dust. I slept on my side because of the rash on my back. A man with a Quest must sometimes endure rashes.

The bad part was: As soon as I closed my eyes, I was dreaming again. In the dream I was lying on my back on the belt of the conveyer. It carried me along while I lay and watched the ceilings slide by. Then the belt stopped, and a man in white coveralls unfastened my right arm and set it aside. The belt started rolling again, and every time it stopped, another man in white would remove another part of me. The longer the dream went on, the less of me was left.

I woke up disoriented and poked my head out through the rubber flaps. For a moment I thought I was looking down a vertical shaft. The bottom of the shaft opened into a deep bright chamber where women and men in white smocks and white slippers walked here and there on a white wall.

When I got to my feet, I knew where I was—the computer section. Sliding beige partitions hung from slots in the ceiling, and everyone wore air filters over their mouths, for the protection of the printed circuits.

The staff there treated me well. Showed me where to wash up, found a clean smock for me, and a mouth filter. Many of them had prosthetics. Artificial eyes were especially popular, the favored style being big black globes with little white pinholes. All the young women were happy to explain their work to a serious young man with a clipboard. But they kept pointing at things that were too small for me to see. I met a Southern Baptist girl named Jo Anne who had plugs on her wrists rather than hands. The plugs fit into micromanipulation boxes. My kind of girl.

But I had no time for women. My Quest was upon me, and I was nearing the Finished Product. I could practically smell it. Final subassemblies were forming before my eyes. A steel rack entered the picture—two feet wide and a yard long. My old friends the video tubes showed up to be bolted inside the racks, three to a rack. The colored lights were mounted beside the tubes. The dozen roots of my twisting flow chart were converging into a trunk.

Then I saw the panels. I was poking around a storeroom, and a freight elevator stacked with aluminum panels stopped at my level. The panels were four feet by eight, the biggest component yet. I resolved to stick with them like glue. Where they went, I would go. I sat on top of them and rode them up through the ceiling.

The ride took me to ground level, to a room three stories tall. From my perch on the panels I could see row upon row and rank upon rank of aluminum cabinets, like those chemical outhouses you used to see. Not far from where I sat, a couple of technical types were running wires from a diagnostic cart through a service port in one of the cabinets. An inspection team.

I got down and circled the nearest cabinet. There was an air conditioning vent and some unconnected plumbing protruding from the base. But no door. Each side was bolted on. Once you were inside this outhouse, you were really inside.

At one corner of one side was an insignia decal, a purple oval with one word inside it: AUTISTICON.

So this was what I’d been doing with my life. I’d been a builder of Autisticons. This cabinet was an example of my handiwork. But what was it?

I walked down a row of Autisticons and came to one that had a side panel detached, providing a view of the thing’s interior. The chamber was upholstered in black vinyl over a layer of foam. Here was the toilet, nested inside a black vinyl armchair. The toilet bowl peeked from a hole in the seat cushion. The toilet had no lid. But it did have restraining straps.

The armchair seemed smaller than I remembered. A good size for a five year old. The buckles of the restraining straps had keyholes. They locked. Everything fit. Form followed function.

Go on, I said to myself. Stick your head in. No one’s going to kang you in and run rapiers up your nose. Go on, Alex. It won’t burn your eyes out. Have a close look.

An armature rose from one armrest to support a plastic desk. Built into the desk was the computer keyboard. Attached to the opposite armrest was a self-rinsing bowl, the kind you used to see on dentist’s chairs, for spitting. A red rubber tube dangled from the chamber’s ceiling. A duct for cold porridge, that was my conjecture. Cold porridge laced with tranquilizers. That made sense. A kid has to eat. It wouldn’t be humane to shut a child in a box without nourishment.

Mounted at the top of the front panel were the video screens with the colored lights, facing the chair, angled down. Red, green, blue. And tucked under the screens, a video camera aimed at my head.

I approached the diagnostic team. One of them was a short bald man with thick tortoise-shell glasses. He was holding a clipboard and smoking a pipe. He supervised the other mechanic. It was Mr. Bosch from my old department. He must have been promoted like me. He turned to face me.

“Alex. You finally got here. Any questions?”

“What are these things, Mr. Bosch?”

He drew on his pipe and frowned. “These are teaching stalls. Computerized teaching stalls. For schools. Elementary schools.”

“What do they teach?”

“Whatever they’re teaching children these days.”

“Why do they have toilets in them?”

“So the children can shit, Alex.”

“Why can’t the children go down the hall to the bathroom?”

“Because the children are strapped in. Because there isn’t any door.”

That settled that. “And the cameras?”

“To keep an eye on the children.”

“You’re saying that the teachers watch the children on monitor screens?”

“I didn’t say anything about teachers.”

My heart was pounding for some reason, and my fists were clenched. I must have been upset. Mr. Bosch made a mark on his clipboard.

“If you really want to see how these things are used,” he told me, “you should visit a modern elementary school. Most of them use Autisticons exclusively.”

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I should visit such a school. Perhaps such a visit was exactly the next step demanded by my Quest.

The other inspector tapped my shoulder. I was in his way. I stepped aside, and he screwed hoses to the toilet pipes. He was testing the flush. I was finding it hard to breathe. My bones felt like soggy cardboard that might bend in ten places at any moment.

Suddenly I wanted to kill Mr. Bosch. Him or myself. But what would that prove? And if I blew up the factory with dynamite? What would that prove? Precisely nothing. You can’t do shit with dynamite. You’ve got to be subtle, if you want to make a dent. You’ve got to be far more subtle than a human. You’ve got to be a machine. And beat them at their own game.

“Mr. Bosch?”

“Yes?”

“What exactly do you do here?”

“Me? I pick units at random, and I make measurements. If the measurements deviate from certain parameters, I record that on my forms. What are you doing here?”

I held my face in my hands. It seemed to be an ancient ball of brittle rubber, cracked and weeping powder.

“All right,” I said. “That’s enough. Wake me up now.”

“What?” said Mr. Bosch.

“Wake me up! I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to hang around for the gory parts.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mr. Bosch. Except that it wasn’t Mr. Bosch at all. It was a total stranger, and I was shaking him by his shoulders and yelling into his face.

“The dream! The dream! I want a different dream! Or I want you to wake me up!”

“Leave me alone!” the stranger yelled back at me. “I don’t even know you!”

I grabbed both of his arms in my steel-and-plastic fists and backed him up against an Autisticon.

“Cut the crap, Asshole. Wake me up.”

A couple of inspectors pried me off of him. As soon as they let go of me, I fell to my knees and retched. I retched directly into the toilet bowl in the open cabinet. Sometimes a thing is right there when you need it.

I stood up, wiped my mouth, and walked away. I found a dark corner of the loading dock and wept. I was making a fool of myself. I had no Quest. I was just a dumb Polack with delusions of sainthood.

I watched from the shadows while freight handlers prepared a shipment of Autisticons for transport. They wrapped each box in a sheet of foam and fastened the foam with copper straps. They nailed together fiberboard crates that held the Autisticons snugly. They wrangled the crates across metal ramps into the bellies of the waiting trucks.

I walked over to the trucks. Down the narrow corridor between two of them, I could see Wrightwood Avenue baking in the summer sun. A strip of scraggly crabgrass grew between the sidewalk and the curb. A little yellow butterfly flitted past. I waited until no one was around and walked across one of the ramps into the van of a truck. I was going to visit an elementary school. It was part of my job.

The crates were so tall, they nearly reached the van’s silvery inner roof. But there was just enough room for me to crawl in on top of them. I lay on my stomach across two of the crates. I rested my chin on my arms and waited.

A scrape and a clank. Someone had moved the loading ramp. A squeal of hinges. Blackness. The slam of the driver’s door. The vibration of the engine.

The truck lurched, paused, turned left, shifted gears. Braked at the Pulaski Street stoplight, turned north, and rumbled over the potholes. The crates jumped beneath me.

Onto the expressway. Air keening past. I was on my way. Through corn country and cattle land. Across the dusk and into the night. Going west. Whenever I started seeing things in the dark, I’d take out my lighter and strike a flame. There in the steady blue glow would be my hand. There were the crates. There I was.

I turned onto my side and fell asleep. It felt like falling too. Like falling into a deep dark well.

I dreamed that I was a soldier in basic training, running an obstacle course. Bare trees beneath an overcast sky. Frosted brown earth that crackled beneath my boots. I jogged along, huffing out steam. All by myself. Perhaps I was being punished. My fingers and toes were numb. I crawled under some barbed wire and kept moving.

I came to a barricade built of railroad ties. I climbed a rope to the top and threw my legs over. Then I got a surprise. The barricade’s far side was slick aluminum. I lost my grip and fell, feet first, down a steep chute like a playground slide.

The chute leveled out and sent me spinning across the ice of a frozen pond. I slid to a stop on my belly. The ice felt thin. A blackbird flew past, scolding me. I tried to creep toward shore. The ice groaned and broke. I sank into the pond up to my armpits. My hands scrambled uselessly at the ice.

Night fell. A sheet of new ice formed around my chest. The pond held me firmly in its jaws. I was in no further danger of drowning. The stars came out.

An army jeep came toward the pond, blinding me with its headlights. It drove straight across the ice and stopped in front of me. The glare hurt my eyes. I waited to be rescued. But the jeep just sat there, idling its motor. Finally it honked its horn. It wanted me to get out of its way.

“Go around!” I yelled at it. “Go around! You’ve got the whole pond!”

I prayed for release. I woke up, fumbled for my lighter, lit another cigarette, went back to sleep. The air brakes hissed. We’d come to a weigh station at the Missouri border.

Here the aged film of the dream scorches and snaps. I lose the visuals, but the soundtrack proceeds.

I woke up coughing. There was a lot of smoke and a smell like burnt pork chops. Apparently the fiberboard crates were flammable. Apparently I’d barbecued myself. Luckily it happened at a weigh station. As soon as they found me, someone called an ambulance. Amidst loud expressions of anger and disgust.

I wondered what I looked like, as I rode to the hospital. I’ll never know, because the ambulance wouldn’t show me a mirror, and because my eyes were gone. Boiled like two little green onions. The ambulance was a real moron. It wouldn’t shut up. It told me this long involved joke about a pet poodle that gets put in a microwave. What a creep.

I wouldn’t have been so sensitive if I could’ve stopped thinking. Even at times when I wanted to stop—when I was char broiling myself for example, or when mutant cicadas were chewing out my nerves—I’d go right on thinking, as if there were no tomorrow.

At the hospital I was wheeled on a squeaky gurney through hallways that reeked of mint. A radiologist with a stuffy nose fed me stale water from a paper cup. A fluoroscope buzzed. The radiologist turned me over and shot another exposure.

The nurses took off my hands and bandaged me from head to foot. For days I did nothing but lie in a bed and pee into a catheter, filling up little plastic bags. Then my kidneys gave out, so they detoured my renal arteries into a noisy dialysis machine.

Being blind required some adjustments. The first few days I tried desperately to remember what various things looked like. To fix them in my mind before they faded forever. But the more I tried to remember, the more I forgot. Eventually I gave up.

When they took off my bandages, the skin went with them. The dermatologist had planned for this. He’d special-ordered a batch of new skin from a pharmaceuticals concern in Boston. It itched at first, but I was glad to have it.

When my heart failed, the cardiologist had a new heart ready for me. And while they had my chest open, the hepatologist replaced my liver. New kidneys were still on order from a kidney shop in Amarillo. The food was great, and my job insurance was paying all the bills.

When my visceral condition stabilized, the ophthalmologist connected up a new pair of eyes. Everything looked pastel—pearl grays and bleached aquas, the colors of bread mold. But hell, they were eyes. I’d get used to them.

Then they gave me counseling. I needed a lot of therapy, because I was a very disturbed individual. I had a lot to learn about channeling my self-hatred into socially acceptable channels. But my therapists had great faith in me. If I worked hard, if I improved myself, I might someday perform a useful function. I might even become a delivery van or a dump truck. Being helpful to others is so important for rehabilitation.

But the crucial thing in life, I feel, is to become more and more like a machine as you go on, and less and less like a person. I tried to explain that to the two of you the day I met you. I told Naomi when we were shuffling out of that bowling alley. I told Eva when the three of us were hiding in the bushes behind that laundromat. Flesh is too wet, too sticky. The fact that Naomi could absorb us is a perfect demonstration of that. You have to become a machine if you want to escape all that.

When the hospital discharged me, I went back to my rat hole apartment on Humboldt. All of my antisocial behaviors had dropped away like rotten fruit. I could be friendly with people. I could tell them jokes and put them at ease.

The first night I slept in my apartment, I had another dream about Felix and his factory. Shall I tell it to you, before I sink into the alpha waves?

It begins with Felix sitting across a desk from Ivan. Felix clutches his sinister black box to his chest. Ivan rises from his chair, smiling vaguely. A crowd of workers drift into the frame, surrounding Felix, blank-eyed and gaunt. At last Felix understands. The factory is run by zombies, by the walking dead. They would have killed him long ago, but they’ve only just realized that he’s alive.

They chase him through the factory, slavering and braying, past an iron foundry and showers of sparks. There are gas explosions behind him. The factory is falling in on itself. Felix sees an exit door and dashes out into the sunshine. In sunlight this bright, the dead workers can’t touch him.

He’s standing on a windswept desert of fine white sand. A dust devil spins in the distance. A storm blurs the horizon. He turns around to watch the exploding factory, but it’s vanished without a trace. He stands and stares. He feels someone watching him.

He turns again. He’s face to face with great gray brontosaur. Her head hovers a yard from his, regarding him with one calm secretive eye. She speaks.

“You’re a stubborn man, Father. We go around and around, just to please you.”

Title card: “WHO ARE YOU?”

“You tell me,” says the brontosaur. “It’s your movie.”

Title card: FELIX HAS THE SINKING FEELING THAT SHE IS MAKING SENSE.

“How many times are you going to drag Mother and me back to this horrible place?” she asks him.

Then it’s not him anymore. It’s me, Alex. I’m wearing the jeep and standing on the desert under the three suns.

“Am I still dreaming?” I ask Naomi. Slowly and sadly she shakes her head from side to side.

“You shoe is untied,” she tells me.

I look down, but of course there aren’t any shoes on my tires.

When I look up, I’m alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE KIDNAPPING

But he was very stiff and proud:

He said “You needn’t shout so loud!”

And he was very proud and stiff:

He said “I’d go and wake them, if—”

I took a corkscrew from the shelf:

I went to wake them up myself.

—Lewis Carroll

Where was I? Oh yes. At the bowling alley. I swallowed Papa. My nerves got outside of my skin.

It wasn’t a nice thing to do. My nerves crept into Alex like little yellow worms, and they sucked him right up like spaghetti.

When we stumbled out into the drizzle together, we were pretty disorganized. Two hearts, four lungs, extra arms hanging off, Alex’s shirttail folded inside of us... But we made it to his car without falling down and stuffed ourselves inside.

I stripped off his clothes and swallowed what remained of him. We sat there on the dark parking lot, expecting police sirens at any moment. The rain muttered on the asphalt. We were sweaty and uncomfortable. We must have weighed three hundred pounds. My coveralls and bowling shoes could barely hold us. It wasn’t my fault. Most of the weight was Alex.

“Nice car,” I said. “Kind of small.”

Alex wouldn’t talk to me. He was sulking. I pulled us methodically into a human shape. Two ears, one nose, a thatch of rust brown hair. . . Alex’s cleft chin and unhappy mouth. My green eyes and pug nose. And enough blubber to see an Eskimo family through the six-month night.

I fished Alex’s gooey pants from the floor mat. I got his wallet and car keys out of the pockets. I started the car and drove toward the center of town. We passed a fire station and a chain saw store. We passed the fence of a graveyard where willows dripped on moss, and mounds of pine needles sparkled and went dark again.

I turned on the car heater. The slapping of the wiper blades was a cozy sound. The roadbed looked like a gray sponge cake. The hood of the car wobbled like lime gelatin. Gas pumps, mail boxes, and propane tanks slumped past. A used car lot, a drug store, an insurance agency, everything put to sleep for the night. As for me, I was hungry. I’d just eaten a man whole, but it had only made me hungrier. My belly felt bloated and empty at the same time.

I noticed a hairy pink scrap of meat beside the road. I pulled over and walked back along the road shoulder until I found the dead possum.

One beady black eye stared up at nothing. Brown blood was crusted on its snout and whiskers. Guts had spilled from its belly. I pushed it with the toe of my shoe, then hunkered down beside it in the mist. It would’ve made a fine meal, except that it was dead. I scooped it up in my ten fat fingers. I cradled it on one arm and unzipped the top of my coveralls. I held it against my chest, rocking to and fro, urging my nerves to enter it.

They went inside, but it wouldn’t come to life. Something went wrong. The dead thing trembled and kicked. I got scared of its little white teeth. I dropped it to the pavement.

The possum’s skin fell open like a sun-baked trash bag. Strips of it slithered like grass snakes into the tall weeds. A liver and two lungs yanked themselves free from the ribcage and humped away like wet inchworms. Muscles disentangled and scattered. Even its bones crept away. Each separate tissue fled from the others and hid in the weeds, to die distinct and alone. A pretty good trick, I thought. But it didn’t make me any less hungry.

Then I saw a worm that was drowning in a puddle. A big brown night crawler, slowly squirming. I plucked the worm from the rainwater and set it on my tongue. It tried to burrow into my soft palate, so it let it. It pulsed itself inside me. It was alive and delicious. But I needed more.

I squeezed behind the steering wheel again and kept driving, looking for a motel, not finding one. I craved a hot shower. Then I passed a laundromat. I did have some clothes that could use washing. I had Alex’s clothes, wadded up on the floor mat, all slimy and bloody. And there were more loose clothes on the back seat. I circled the block and parked the car at the curb. I got out holding the clothes bundled against my stomach. I kicked the car door shut and pushed through the door of the laundromat into warmth and humidity.

The room was crowded with washers and driers. Against the wall on my right, a row of plastic chairs was bolted to the floor. At the back wall there were vending machines, a bulletin board, and a door into a rest room.

There were four people—a teenage girl about my age, her boyfriend, an older woman, and a little boy. They all seemed to know each other. The girl was pulling wet clothes out of a top loader and slapping them down in a wire cart. She wore a leather jacket over a lacy blouse, and her hair was dyed orange and twisted into pigtails. The boyfriend sat on a chair in torn jeans and a T-shirt. He was sipping a can of soda and watching a coin-op TV that was built into his chair.

The little boy was pushing a cart around and around a row of washers, as fast as he could, bashing into things. His mother of the boy slumped in another chair, in a shapeless purple sweater, reading a magazine. Coats hung on backrests.

The teenagers turned their heads as I came in, and stared at me. Then they looked away. I went to the nearest washer and dumped in my armful of clothes. I thought I’d better get some detergent from a vending machine. That’s the way it’s done after all. I didn’t want to attract attention. I’d ditched the Reserve Corps jeep, and I didn’t fit my description, but still there was no point in taking chances.

I made for the vending machines, stepping over people’s feet as I went. The little boy came around a corner with his cart and stopped. For an awkward moment I blocked his path, and he blocked mine. He ran to the opposite side of the cart and pushed it the other way.

I fed quarters into a slot and pulled a handle. The vender coughed up a packet of laundry soap. I walked back to my laundry, poured the soap over it, shut the washer lid, and fed more quarters. As the washer filled with water, I sat down in a chair. I pretended to be half asleep. But I was very much awake.

The boyfriend threw his soda can into a trash basket. “They changed the movie at the drive-in,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” said the girl. “I wanted to see that one they had. What was it called?”

“The Hodag.”

“Did you see it?”

“I see them all.”

“Any good?”

“I kind of liked it. Splatter movie basically. But the story happens in frontier days. Mountain men of the frozen north, trapping for pelts, panning for gold and all that.”

“Sure.”

“Well, this one winter there’s this blizzard. And this guy who’s a beaver skinner or some shit is living up in the hills with his weird old lady and their kids. But they get snowed in.”

“Uh huh.”

“So they’re starving up there, and then they run out of firewood, and they all freeze to death. Except that the ten-year-old daughter doesn’t die, because she eats some of her mother and her brother, and this brings down an old Indian curse on her.”

“She’s a cannibal? That’s disgusting.”

“Don’t interrupt,” said the older woman, putting down her magazine.

“So this evil spirit possesses her,” the boyfriend went on, “and she turns into the Hodag. This medicine man explains the whole thing after she’s done in a couple of whiskey bums and saloon girls. She sucks their brains out with her—”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Sandra,” said the older woman. “Would you let him tell it?”

I felt a draft on one of my ankles. My coveralls were riding up my shin. I reached down and felt a growth sticking out of my leg. I squeezed it through the cloth. It wiggled. It was toes. Three big hairy toes. Alex was trying to sabotage me, the bastard.

Letmeoutyousickbitch! Spitmeoutyoudamnedmonsterbitchfromhell!

Scream all you want, I told him. No one hears you.

The toes went mushy and slipped back inside the leg meat. The little boy was opening and slamming the door of a drier, again and again. Click, slam, click, slam. . .

“So how does it end?” asked Sandra.

“The movie? Oh, a bunch of ghosts show up. The ghost of the girl’s parents and all the people she killed come after her.”

“And do what?” asked Sandra.

“Oh, drag her back to hell or wherever.”

As soon as I got my skin smoothed out, an itch like a peeling sunburn started up between my shoulder blades. It was Alex again. He wouldn’t hold still. I jammed my spine against the back of the chair. What was he poking out now? Something bony. One of his wrist stumps. I squirmed in the chair, pushing on it. He was yelling inside my head. I held my head in my hands. It wasn’t the right shape anymore.

HelphelpI’mtrappedinsideacrazywoman!

There were bulges like blood blisters under my hair. He was leaking out all over. And all the while a newsman on the television was droning on about some local kidnapping. Kidnapping or murder, the police couldn’t decide. It seemed that an unemployed machinist from Illinois, a Mr. Somethingsomething, had been assailed and dragged from a bowling establishment in the quiet rural community of Whatever in central northern Nevermind less than an hour ago. Witnesses were unclear as to—

“Hey, listen to this!” said the boyfriend. “Something here in town made the news.”

I had to get out of sight. I walked carefully to the back of the laundromat, praying that no one would notice my swellings. I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I sat on the toilet, wishing I were dead. I needed a quiet motel room and three days of sleep. I had to digest Alex, or he’d split me in two. I listened to the rain on the roof. It was pounding down hard. The bulges moved around under my hair. I leaned against the flush tank and banged the back of my head against the wallboard.

Get in! Get back in! Stop yelling at me! It isn’t my fault!

I couldn’t control him. When I squeezed him in, he just poked out from two other places. His knees were under my arms. His elbow was under my chin. His eyes were bugging out under my tongue!

I stood up and saw myself in the mirror over the sink. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Alex’s fingers were sticking out all over my head. There must’ve been twenty of them. Where was he getting all these fingers?

My coveralls were strangling me. I unzipped them, tugged my arms loose, and rolled them down my flabby white legs. I needed to be out in the rain.

I lurched through the bathroom door. Magically everyone in the room was on their feet, staring at me.

The little boy ran to his mother and hugged her knees. “Mommy?” he whined. “What’s wrong with the fat lady?”

Sandra and her boyfriend were backing very slowly toward the exit. The boyfriend was gagging like he wanted to vomit, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from me.

I only wanted to run to the woods and hide. But the people were blocking my way. Sandra’s teeth began to chatter, as though she were walking backwards through ice water. Then she started to laugh. Then she went stiff, because the sound of her laughter had startled her. I hobbled toward her like two contestants in a three-legged sack race.

“Y-you sh-shouldn’t laugh at f-fat people,” I told her. “It isn’t n-nice.”

“Leave her alone!” shouted the boyfriend, advancing on me. He grit his teeth and pushed me, hard, in the shoulder.

“Don’t touch it!” Sandra warned him. Too late. My hand was around his wrist.

Thirsty nerves slithered from my fingers. My freak mitochondria scrambled up his arm, but only as far as the elbow. They loosened cartilage and sawed notches in ligaments, like silent saboteurs undermining a railroad bridge. After they did their work, one swift tug would break his arm clean in two. I was hungry, but I mustn’t eat all of him. I had to save room for desert. I put my free hand on his chest and pushed him away from me.

He stumbled back, and my right arm was hanging from his wrist. It came right off my shoulder. I lost my balance and sat down on the linoleum. The boyfriend looked down at my detached arm.

“Aaaaaaaa!” he croaked. “Get it off of me!”

I got up onto my hands and knees, feeling dizzy and sick. I had two hands on the floor, two hands holding my head—No, that can’t be right. I’ll start again. I threw up all over the floor, but not from my mouth, straight from my belly, which fissured and spewed small intestines. I had two hands trying to stuff Alex’s guts back inside me, two hands on the floor, two hands holding my head... I thought I must be dying.

But I also thought that if I ate someone, I’d feel much better. I looked into the eyes of the mother. She was staring at me as though my face were sprouting maggots. They weren’t maggots. They were clean brown earthworms, smelling the air and inching out of me in bundles. Some of the worms were huge. Giant Brazilian night crawlers. I’d only eaten one worm, but one is all you need to run off copies.

“What are you s-staring at?” I screeched.

“Call an ambulance!” pleaded the boyfriend. “It won’t come off!”

“Kill it!” the mother blurted. “Somebody get a gun and kill it!”

“Try it!” said a mouth in one of my shoulders.

“Yeah! Try it!” added a mouth in one of my thighs.

Just like people to kick you when you’re down. I hoped she would kick me. I’d suck her in like quicksand. I tried to stand up, but there were too many limbs to keep track of, and my silky brown hair kept falling in my eyes.

Sandra grabbed her boyfriend’s elbow, and out the front door they ran. Lightning flashed above the parking lot. Two had escaped me, but two remained.

“Wh-what’s y-your name?” I asked the woman.

“Dora,” she told me, and made a dash for the door, dragging her brat behind her.

All at once I was across the room, blocking the door. I think I must have leapt there like a frog.

Dora came at me with a carving knife. She must have had it in her purse, to help her feel safe at night. What a woman! Defending her young with stainless steel! She stuck the bright blade into me and twisted. Some of me did spill out. But just enough to make me even hungrier.

Dora let go of the knife, recoiled from me, and nearly tripped over the boy. “Get back!” she shouted at him.

She was perfect, this Dora. I wanted to gobble her up with cherries on her nipples and mints between her toes. I pulled the knife out of my neck.

She and the brat made a second rush for the door, and this time, she did trip over him. Seeing my opening, I pounced and landed on her back. The door banged shut behind the boy.

I wrestled with her and tried to pin her down. Dora got her foot against my belly and shoved us apart. She wriggled away from me until her back was pressed against a washer.

Her lips moved silently. But her eyes were empty. She seemed to have fled the laundromat and left her body behind.

I tried to think. A worm crawled up my cheek and tried to squeeze in under my eyelid. I hooked it away with one finger, and it buzzed its wings in protest. There were pairs of powdery beige wings all up and down its back. Other worms had budded out gardens of feathery antennae. Moth worms. I’d raised a crop of moth worms. They weren’t my idea. They’d just popped out. I was basically a sensible girl. I just needed a good woman to straighten me out. Yes, a good woman to lay on top of me and straighten me out and hold me together.

My washer shifted into its rinse cycle.

I crept toward Dora. I tried to calm down. I didn’t want to rush her. There’s a good way and a bad way to do these things. I knelt beside her and put some of my arms around her. We’d be happy together, the three of us, Dora and Alex and I. Years from now we’d laugh about today.

I rested my head on her shoulder. I felt so damned fragile. I felt as though I were standing on the edge of a cliff beside the ocean, and any gust of wind might send my flesh tumbling into a cloud of moths and dragonflies, scrambling ants and squirming eels. But no wind reached me, there in that cramped and stale-smelling laundromat. So my flesh stayed hung on my bones.

I needed her. I was starving. Dozens of unheard-of new glands were erupting in my brain stem. I wasn’t consulted.

Dora wouldn’t look at me. She was on some other planet. I pounded her shoulder with my forehead. Tears spilled from my eyes. But Dora was dead to the world. As dead as ravioli. I couldn’t eat her if she wouldn’t pay attention.

An aqueous roar rumbled up my neck, inflating wattles of bright blue skin pimpled with red. White spines erected from my throat. I keened my hunger song and threatened Dora with a clacking of worm jaws and a spitting of ammonia gobs. I stuck my face close to hers. I showed her how the venom dripped from my mandibles. But still she wasn’t afraid of me. Was I being too fussy? I needed things a certain way. I shook my fists at her. My fists rattled like bean pods and glowed like fireflies. She looked straight through me.

My brain crawled with clots of inky frustration. The sutures of my skull strained to contain the rising pressure of my spinal fluid. My cortex clenched itself into an angry lavender shelf fungus, harder than bone. I hissed at the loathsome pink woman, and my quadrate bones hinged open. My jaws were filling up with uninvited teeth—shark teeth, shrew teeth, fangs from a coral snake. . . My skin danced with deformities. A white discharge slashed the sky over the laundromat, stuttering brilliance across the pine boughs. Thunder cracked like a mountain splitting.

A shotgun blast rang out. Pellet shot slammed into a washer and ricocheted all over the place. I jumped away from Dora and twisted my head toward the doorway.

A woman was standing there—a woman with blue-black hair, wearing a red dress and pointing a shotgun at me. Sighting down it, back straight, stock snug to her shoulder, very professional. I recognized her from the bowling alley. That Mexican woman. Eva.

Just then she blew one of my arms off.

“That got your attention,” she said.

I tried to speak as she reloaded, but all I could get from my mouth was a querulous mewling.

“So what’s the idea of ditching me like that?” she demanded. “What’s the matter? You like him better than me?”

Mew mew mew, I told her. She blew a load of shot into my face and chest. The impact knocked me onto my back. She approached me.

“Hold still,” she said. “Hold very still. I know why you came to me. I’m going to give you what you need.”

Then she shot off my head. Lightning flickered behind her back. I gathered my legs under me, all the legs I could locate. I aimed myself at her.

“You just want to die,” Eva was saying as she reloaded again. Her voice was low and soothing. “You’re just looking for a way out. I know all about it, Naomi. I can help you.”

She squeezed off another blast as I leapt at her. The buckshot and I crossed paths in midair. Ragged bits of ribs littered the floor. I slammed into Eva and carried her down.

I didn’t mind her blowing apart my skull. Skulls are easy. I could grow skulls and brains as fast as she could blast them. Already I had new skulls swelling in my back, splitting their sutures like pomegranate peels and writhing with brain worms, all beating the powder from their wings and shaking their feathery little feelers. I held Dora under me while my brains pushed out on stalks. They bristled with spinal nerves like tentacled sunflowers. Worms of me anchored their shafts in her ears and corkscrewed under her tongue, changing all the wiring. I could hear Eva choking, and I was hearing it through her ears. Then I knew that the transplant would succeed.

Somehow we stood up and walked, the three of us. With our spines conjoined at our hips, we sidled, limped, and hopped our way out of the building, into the blowing wet.

We shunned the pavement and lost ourselves in the tall weeds and dwarf birches. We left behind a trail of slime and silver fillings. We spat out shreds of a red silk dress and green coveralls. We crawled under a mound of dead leaves. We curled up and shivered. We hid from the soldiers. It had all turned sour and ugly. I felt soiled. They felt raped. I should have been more gentle with them. Now it was too late.

Our bodies rotted. The gas of putrefaction bubbled in our sagging doughy flesh, inflating our shapelessness. Then the gas found issue, and by stages we collapsed into a lump of fallen angel cake that would never rise again.

What had I ever asked of the world? To be a young woman of no particular talents. To play scrabble and make potato salad. To have a boyfriend to tell me movie plots. That was all I wanted. Not so much. But when had the world ever cooperated? When would it ever let me be?

Eva? said Alex. What are you doing in here?

The same thing you’re doing. Do you think there’s any chance we can be surgically removed?

Stop making fun of me! I begged them. This isn’t funny!

Poor Naomi, said Eva. Do you imagine that we make these jokes because we find this funny? No, Naomi. We are not amused.

Have you heard the one, said Alex, about the cannibal who got rid of three hundred pounds of ugly flab?

He ate his wife? I suggested.

Oh, you’ve heard it. How old are you anyway?

It was the jokes that made me sicken of them. I needed to sleep, and I could hear them all the time. Finally I retched them out. I drove them away and made them find their own piles of leaves. And still I could hear them talking. I’ve heard them ever since.

I pawed myself deeper into the dirt, feeling like a snail with no shell, all raw and pink and sticky. I formed a skull to hold my brain in, but the voices of the others kept scurrying in and out, giggling like silverfish and chasing each other in the dark. Bluebottle flies laid their eggs in my helpless heart. My heart began to buzz and swarm with trilobites. There was no escape.

The soldiers came, with their blue flashers and bullhorns and searchlights and gas grenades. They looked for us noisily for what seemed like days. One by one, they dragged us into the cold cruel sunlight.

They kept asking me what I’d done to the victims. They told me that if I cooperated, I’d get a fair trial. Idiots. Retards. They had no conception of what they were dealing with. And of course, no matter what I said to them, they’d still throw me back in a can at the end of the proceedings. Let them.

Let them stuff me into a can again. Let them freeze me like a tasteless string bean. Let them do their worst. I’d broken one can for them. I wouldn’t mind breaking another.

It wasn’t the can that worried me. It was my skull. My skull wasn’t working. Alex thoughts and Eva feelings crawled in and out of it like moths and worms. They gave me no rest. And what could I do? Can a brain escape its skull? How? Its eyes are in the way. Its nerves are in the way. Can a heart escape its chest? Of course not. The ribs make a cage.

If the heart were a beautiful magician’s assistant, you could stick swords through your chest, and the heart would vanish. It would escape. It would go backstage.

But where is backstage? That’s what I wonder.

And how can I get there?

CHAPTER NINE

SIROCCO

Then someone came to me and said

“The little fishes are in bed.”

I said to him, I said it plain,

“Then you must wake them up again.”

—Lewis Carroll

White sand. Blowing white sand. White sand blowing white sand away.

A scorching wind swept across the desert. Sand spilled from the crests of serpentine ridges. Driven sand in a shadowy sunlight. White sand blurred by scattering white sand. Drifts accumulated and collapsed, and dust devils whirled on their backs.

The hiss of the wind rose and fell. The light sometimes dimmed, sometimes brightened. The blistering hot wind sucked the moisture from all it touched.

And here, lost in the middle of it, were the woman, the jeep, and the brontosaur. They’d arranged themselves in a triangle, each one facing toward the others. The sandstorm washed over them like a scalding fog. At times they lost sight of each other.

The brontosaur crouched with its legs tucked under it. The old woman knelt, sitting on the heels of her shoes, resting her hands on her thighs. The sleeves of her coveralls rattled in the wind. Sand piled up against the dinosaur’s belly, the old woman’s shins, and the tires of the jeep.

White sand caught in the woman’s wild white hair. Packed white sand filled in the wrinkles of the brontosaur’s hide. A mound of white sand had formed on the back of the jeep.

Their eyes kept watch on one another, but no one spoke. A conference was coming to order. Alex glared out from the left eye of the saurian. His neck was looped, his right eye pressed against his left shoulder, out of the wind. The open eye studied the old woman.

Alex was profoundly sorry that he’d bitten off Eva’s head yesterday. He wanted to make it up to her somehow. He loved her so painfully. Surely they could be friends again.

He shifted his gaze to Naomi and searched the sandblasted metal box for some sign of Naomi’s qualities: her youth, her forgiveness, her affection for him. Four optics regarded Alex from the corners of a photovoltaic panel. A net of wire quilted the black glass with a grid of diamonds. Where was Naomi?

Naomi watched poor Alex, feeling his fearful perplexity in her circuits, hearing the echoes of his phantom rages, the whispers of his amputated lusts. She magnified the image of the brontosaur’s muzzle, the rutted folds of skin around one glossy black eye. How much older could they get? Where would it end?

Eva contemplated the backs of her hands. She lifted her dark brown eyes to meet Alex’s baleful glare. He acted guilty. Eva didn’t need his guilt. Yes, he’d killed her yesterday, in an unpleasant way, but she forgave him. He’d been sharing his head with a tumor. She knew what that was like. It wasn’t as though she’d never killed him. What was his problem?

“The meeting,” said Eva, “will now come to order. For once we are going to engage in a rational discussion of our situation here.”

“Good idea,” said Naomi from the jeep.

“I will act as the Chair, and speaking out of turn will not be tolerated.”

“Who made you the Chair?” asked Alex. “I’m the oldest.”

“We will attempt to discuss the feasibility of an escape from this place. The Chair will entertain dispassionate inquiry into such questions as: Where the fuck are we?”

“I’d also like to know how we got here,” said Alex.

“That’s two questions for the agenda. Naomi, would you care to suggest a third?”

“Yes. Why can’t we die?”

“A good question,” said Alex. “It positions us on the firm ground of reality. Obviously this hellhole isn’t real. But I know we’ve been real. Shit, I collected garbage in Tucson. That’s as real as it gets.”

“The Chair has the floor,” pronounced Eva.

“Yes,” said Naomi. “The Chair has the floor.”

“Just as a supposition,” Eva went on, “let us assume that What We Are is one shade more real than Where We Are. Well, what are we? A human, a cyber-jeep, and dinosaur. What does this suggest, in and of itself?”

“We’re crazy?” suggested Naomi.

“Time distortion,” said Alex.

“Explain,” demanded Eva.

“We don’t belong in the same epoch. Dinosaurs were extinct when humans walked the earth. And humans were just dying out when jeeps like me were first built.”

“You have seen my point,” said Eva.

“We’re a time distortion,” said Naomi. “Also we can’t kill each other. Can we add another question?”

“No,” said Eva.

“I’m bored,” said Naomi.

“Take a hike,” said Eva. “It’s nice out.”

“Yeah, get lost,” said Alex.

“I won’t,” said Naomi. “And I’m not a prehistoric dinosaur anyway. Shows how much you know. I’m the product of a more advanced technology than you are. I was woven on a gene loom.”

“But they couldn’t do that in the twentieth century,” said Alex.

“Who said they did?”

“But you remember the twentieth century,” said Alex.

“The Canadian girl,” prompted Eva. “The reservist who turned into a kind of banshee. All that.”

“Oh, my brain,” said Naomi. “Of course my brain remembers all that. But the army kept my brain frozen for centuries. Then they planted it in this apatosaur. So the tumor isn’t my fault. They gave me a bad brain, the brain of an executed kidnapper. They court-martialed her, sent her to the electric chair, and cut her up for spare parts. The brain must have been incorrectly labeled, or they’d never have used it.”

“Surprising that they didn’t destroy it,” said Alex.

“They wanted it for further studies, but they couldn’t think of any,” Naomi told him.

“So you’re technically an apatosaur.”

“Technically,” said Naomi, “I’m an M.A.R., a modified apatosaurus reconstruction, adjusted for human brain and voice. I had a very happy childhood.”

“Where was this?” asked Eva.

“I was hatched aboard an interstellar transport craft on a terraforming mission to a distant Earth-like planet. We called our ship the Space Piercer, because it was shaped like a gigantic knitting needle.”

“So you had a childhood in deep space,” said Alex. “What was happy about it?”

“On the Space Piercer,” Naomi went on, “we never knew fear or confusion. Everything was arranged. We were proud explorers, braving the unknown, traversing the velvet darkness between the stars, which shone upon our ship like distant hearth fires.”

Alex and Eva exchanged blank looks.

“Our silver ship was so beautiful. We hadn’t seen it from the outside of course, me and the other hatchlings of my clutch, but we’d seen video feeds from the outrider satellites. We couldn’t play outside like the humans of the crew. They hadn’t made any pressure suits in our size.”

Eva turned to Alex. “Have you heard this fantasy before?”

“Not that I recall,” he told her.

“The Space Piercer was powered by gravity dissonance, navigated by trance, and protected by prayer. The floor and ramps were all upholstered in foam and white vinyl. The pads of our feet were always fresh and clean. Eva was a trance specialist, and Alex was a radar operator.”

“It sounds nice,” said Eva.

“It was paradise. Each star had its own color and a spherical rainbow around it. I was born there, a red speck on a yellow yolk. The yolk floated in pink jelly in a fat brass vat. I wriggled up out of the jelly, and when I could walk up the ramp, a Teacher gave me a sweet melon to eat.”

“What was the name of the ship?” asked Alex.

“I told you,” said Naomi. “The Space Piercer.”

“Not the Long Spike?” asked Alex.

“No,” said Naomi. “Why would it be called the Long Spike?”

“Never mind.”

“You remember it too, don’t you?”

“No,” said Alex. “Go on with what you were saying.”

“Who was this Teacher?” asked Eva. “Who gave you this melon?”

“The Teachers were modified spider monkeys,” Naomi told her. “They raised us all from wrigglers. They had the biggest heads you ever saw. They taught us how to talk. They taught us where we came from. Whatever we wanted to know, they had answers all ready.”

“Who was in charge of the ship?” asked Alex. “Who were you working for?”

“We were the servants of the Great Spider Mother. We were the seventh generation of apatosaurs to be raised for Her. We were all extensions of Her sacred body. The gene looms had used Her eggs to make every living thing on the ship.”

“Her eggs?” said Eva. “Who was this Spider Mother?”

“Oh, just a little gray wolf spider that they kept in a golden terrarium on the altar of the ship’s cathedral. They’d kept Her alive for centuries and turned Her eggs into farm animals, food crops, humans, even you, Eva.”

“Well, who made the gene looms?” asked Alex.

“The Designers of course,” said Naomi.

“Well, who built the ship?”

“The Builders.”

“I give up,” said Alex.

“We chanted the praises of the Spider Mother in relays. There was always a choir of us singing. The Keepers fed Her damselflies, and we sang praises to the damselflies too. We worshipped the threads of Her web.”

“What did they need brontosaurs for?” Alex wanted to know. “Radar, I can understand. You need radar. But why brontosaurs?”

“We wondered that ourselves at first, because we ate so much hay, and we hadn’t any hands. Then the Teachers told us that we were training to become the ship’s monks.”

“And what are monks good for?” asked Eva.

“We prayed,” said Naomi. “We prayed around the clock, for the safety of the voyage and the success of our mission. We prayed and fasted and purified ourselves with devotions. We prayed to the galaxy and to all the local gods, demons, and angels which the priestesses discovered implicate in the voids that we crossed.”

“But why brontosaurs?” insisted Alex.

“I was getting to that,” Naomi replied. “It’s the length of our spinal cords. The size of a creature’s nervous system sets a limit on its spiritual development. That’s why elephants have larger souls than people do. A brontosaur can attune its spine to the longer etheric wavebands. Whales would’ve been ideal, but they’re very hard to keep in deep space.”

“That makes sense,” said Alex.

“The Teachers had many rules for us and broke our toes for petty infractions. Sadistic monkeys. But the joke was on them. We forgave them and obeyed them to perfect ourselves in obedience.”

“What a kick in the head,” said Alex. “As the blind man said to the elephant. But what can you expect from primates? Filthy bickering scavengers. They invented the wheel, but other than that. . .”

“They’re all so fond of wheels,” said Naomi. “All so wrapped up in things that go in circles. Poems. Songs. Seasons. Centuries. Pinwheels. Prayer wheels. Clockwork. . .”

“Eggs rolling down hills,” said Alex.

“Easter eggs?” said Naomi.

“No no no,” said Alex. “Rolling eggs! Egg races! Can’t you think straight? Don’t you know how to concentrate?”

“Let her be,” said Eva.

“Make me,” Alex told her. “Are you aware of the difference between the eye of a rooster and a windshield wiper? Are you? You can’t be! There’s no comparison. There’s no basis. You want another example?”

“I think we’re off our topic,” said Eva. “Naomi, did this  needle ship ever visit any planets?”

“Obviously,” said Naomi. “It dropped us here.”

“Why here?” asked Eva.

“Because we were sick,” said Naomi. “They couldn’t keep sick people on the Space Piercer.”

“So they left us here.”

“Yes. Here at the hospital.”

“There’s a hospital on this planet?” said Eva.

“Not on it,” said Naomi. “Behind it.”

“Fine, but tell me this: Before the ship dumped us here, had the three of us ever been off the Samsara? Had we ever been to Earth?”

“What did you call it?” asked Naomi.

“She called it the Samsara,” said Alex.

“Isn’t that what she called it?” asked Eva.

“No,” Alex told her. “She calls it the Space Piercer. You call it the Samsara.”

“And you called it the Long Spike,” said Naomi.

Eva frowned. “How could they abandon us like that? What kind of hospital is this?”

Naomi laughed. “It isn’t one, really.”

“Then why maroon us here.”

“They didn’t. We escaped. We’re runaway slaves.”

Eva looked from Naomi to Alex and back. “But I thought you said—”

“I lied,” crooned Naomi.

The three of them listened to the wind for a while.

“Let me just sum up,” suggested Alex. “Where the fuck are we? We’re on a planetoid with a hospital behind it. But we aren’t patients, we’re runaway slaves. Fine. How the hell did we get here? I know that one. We perished. We croaked. We just don’t remember how. Why can’t we die? Because we’re dead. Any other questions?”

“Alex,” said Eva, “do you remember leaving Earth?”

“No,” he told her. “I remember Chicago, then a string of jobs as a public utilities vehicle. Then the particle war. Then this. Everything else is a blank.”

“It must have been some party,” said Eva, wiping sand from her eyelashes. “Maybe we died in the war. You’d think a person would remember a thing like that.”

They listened to the wind howl.

“I finally just broke down, I suppose,” said Alex. “Just slid into some ditch and never called for a tow. In the dead of the night, in the dead of winter, in a hole in the bottom of the sea. And then the angels wafted us up to heaven. And here we are.”

“Speaking of angels,” said Naomi. “I had a talk with our guardian angel only last night. And he explained everything.”

“And you believed him,” said Alex.

“Did he tell you his name?” asked Eva.

“Dr. Mazer,” said Naomi.

“And you believed him,” said Alex.

“He’s an angel,” said Naomi. “An angel wouldn’t lie. Dr. Mazer built this whole place—shell craters, grocery stores, Mayan ruins. . . He pulls it out of our heads when we’re asleep. Dr. Mazer told me that I’m the only one of us who’s making a recovery. Although I’m still very sick.”

“Who?” asked Eva. “The bald guy in the white coat?”

“You’ve dreamed of him too!” said Naomi.

“Back up,” said Alex. “Our guardian angel is a head shrinker?”

“I still don’t see why we can’t die,” said Eva. “I acknowledge that we’re dead, but why must that prevent our dying? It looks like prejudice to me.”

“We can’t die,” said Naomi, “because we’re crossing this desert. The only way to die is to get across.”

Eva spoke through clenched teeth. “How can we cross it if it isn’t real? I think that you may be confused.”

“That’s right,” said Alex. “She’s Confused, you’re Wretched, and I’m Demented. We’d make a good vaudeville team. Leggies and germs! Just released from the back wards! It’s those tap-dancing psycho-toxins Confused, Wretched, and Demented!”

“Mother? What is Papa talking about?”

“He’s just talking, Naomi.”

Alex rhythmically pounded his head against the sand. “Torture wheel,” he said. “Torture wheel. Terrible mistake.”

“Don’t fret,” Naomi told him brightly. “We will die eventually. Dr. Mazer promised.”

“The meeting is adjourned,” said Eva.

The old woman started to laugh, and the brontosaur joined her. The wind picked up speed. The sand began to sting their skins.

But as for Naomi, her attention was drifting away. Deep in the jeep’s hardware, she disconnected all her cameras and faded down her microphones. Outside of the jeep, drowned in the raging wind, an old witch and an old dragon were laughing together hysterically.

Naomi wasn’t listening to them. She was deep within herself, curled in a blue ball, floating in saline water. She was opening her true eyes.

Naomi uncoiled herself and swam across the surface of a warm lagoon, a blue plesiosaur, paddling and coasting, paddling and coasting, over the soft gray silt of the shallows. Only her eyes and nostrils broke the surface. She steered by dragging the tip of her tail in the muck. Miniature thunderheads of mud erupted in her wake.

Then she swam through a bright white sky, miles above a barren volcanic plain. Thin icy air whistled past her head. The monotony of the plain was broken by a line of cypress trees. Beyond the trees, the dark rock gave way to green lawns that extended, perfectly level, to the horizon.

The lawns shifted somehow into expanses of green-dyed felt that were stretched over the slate of an infinite pool table. Naomi flew over a triangle of ivory pool balls, each ball as massive as ten mountains. She turned from her course and circled the balls at low altitude. Their scale made her look like a wee blue newt swimming in the boulder crannies of a mountain stream. Naomi saw a castle in the distance. It resembled a giant chess rook carved from white jade.

A mile or so ahead there was a lake of black water in the pool table. The tall white castle rose from the lake’s center. No drawbridge spanned the water, and the castle gate was shut.

Naomi shrank into a newt and swam through a barred window. She swam down a long hallway built entirely from elephant bones. There was a green carpet and potted palms. On both sides of the hall were rows of gray steel doors inset with windows of frosted glass. Naomi noticed a name printed on one of the doors. DR. MAZER.

Naomi wriggled up against the white glass, trying to see through. Finding an area of the glass that offered no resistance, she climbed through it into Dr. Mazer’s office.

Naomi hovered in the dimness, a translucent blue newt, looking around her in puzzlement. She’d seen the office before, but now she hardly recognized it. It was wrecked. A shambles. A file cabinet lay on its side, spilling folders from its drawers. The floor was strewn with trampled books. The surveillance screens were draped with filthy bandages and bloody surgical instruments. All the Chinese porcelain vases were in one corner of the room, kicked into a heap of ceramic shards, damp potting soil, and wilted fronds. Atop Dr. Mazer’s oaken desk, a fort had been constructed from a coffee table, two chairs, and some gray flannel blankets.

Naomi approached the fort and circled it warily until she could see through a gap between two blankets. A man with a bald head and thick spectacles was sitting in lotus position under the coffee table, in his underpants. He also wore the rags of a lab coat smeared with dried crusts of several colors. The doctor muttered to himself, rigid, sweat trickling down his face, his spectacles fogged.

Naomi turned her tiny ghostly head and noticed that the video screens were on, all showing the same picture. It was an overhead view of the woman, the jeep, and the brontosaur, back on the desert of white sand. Why did Mother and Father look all red?

Naomi swam toward the screens for a closer look. The wind out there must’ve been deafening, though you couldn’t hear it in Mazer’s office. The flying sand was flaying the skin from the woman and the saurian. They danced about as they sank into the collapsing drifts of sand. The jeep was simply parked, letting the white tide cover its optical ports one by one.

It’s a storm, thought Naomi as she hung in the stale air of the office. It’s some new kind of storm. And I’m right at the sending station.

A sand slide buried them all. They vanished without a trace.

Spilling heaps of salt. Blowing snow. Shifting clouds. White granulation. White ants swarming on three cathode screens.

Nothing. Naomi turned back to Mazer’s fort. The doctor crept out from under the table and climbed stiffly down from his desk. He dried his face on a blanket then used it to blow his nose.

“Something’s gone wrong,” he told himself.

He walked to the video screens and turned knobs. All the screens would show was static.

“I’ve lost them.”

Dr. Mazer sat heavily in his leather chair and shivered. He rubbed his arms through his coat. He clenched his fists.

“I’m falling apart.”

Someone knocked at the office door. He didn’t seem to hear. The floating newt which was Naomi swam through the door again to see who was there.

In the hall she came face to face with a beautiful coffee-colored Hindu woman in a sarong of white silk. The woman was waiting patiently at Mazer’s door. Her face was ageless and serene. Her lustrous black hair fell behind her to the sash at her waist. Over her sarong she wore a vest of embroidered violet felt decorated with tiny mirrors. She also wore a great many copper bracelets and anklets, silvers rings on her fingers and on the toes of her bare brown feet, and a gold ring on one nostril. On her brow she wore the mark of a Dravidian holy woman.

Reverend Weaver rapped at the glass again. Her posture was formal, but there was mischief in her eyes. She waited. Then she leaned closer to the frosted glass and blew very gently against it.

The door burst from its hinges and flew into the office. It cartwheeled across the floor, breaking its window, and flipped over the desk, scattering the fort. Mazer looked up in confusion. Weaver stood in the doorway and nodded to him, smiling.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Come in.”

Mazer wandered the room, looking for a place where Weaver could sit down. He circled the room completely and would have kept circling except that Weaver put her hand on his shoulder.

As he turned to her, she moved into his arms and kissed him full on the mouth. Mazer backed away from her, wiping his mouth. His back thumped up against a wall. Weaver sat down on a fallen filing cabinet and surveyed the chaos.

“Your office is somewhat disordered,” she remarked.

She folded her hands on her lap, closed her painted eyelids, and sighed. In response, every loose object in the office—maps, pill bottles, stethoscope, even the doctor’s desk—went tumbling through the nearest wall, vanishing from sight. Only the filing cabinet and a red plush sofa with white fringe remained behind. And Dr. Mazer didn’t recognize the sofa.

Weaver raised her arms and stretched her shoulders. The office walls slid back in four directions. She smoothed her sarong over her knees.

“A great improvement,” she said.

She moved to the sofa and patted the cushion beside her. Mazer buttoned the rags of his coat and joined her.

“How have you been, reverend?”

Weaver shrugged. “Depends on where I am. Working hard. I just came from 1891. That’s always restful.”

“Do you still have that tree house in India?”

Weaver nodded. “It suits me when I’m off duty.”

“I prefer to live in the present. On the cutting edge.”

Already they were dueling. It was an old habit and hard to break. Mazer sneezed.

After he wiped his eyes, he found that he and Weaver and the sofa were outdoors, in a field of wild oats under a willow tree, beside a pond. “Do you like macaroni salad?” she asked him. After long acquaintance with Weaver, Mazer expected this sort of thing. He thanked her and received a paper plate and a silver fork.

“Why are we here?”

“I brought us here. Too pastoral?”

“Why have you come?”

Weaver looked up from buttering her toast. Her eyes were wide and innocent. “I missed you,” she told him.

Mazer crossed his arms over his chest. “No. You’ve been listing to hateful rumors.”

“Never.” She touched his arm. “It’s just that I’m worried about you. As are many of the angels in our circle. Wing for example is convinced that you’re insane.”

Mazer gazed across the sparkling water of the pond. “That treacherous little faggot.” He set down his plate and fork. “So you’ve come to see for yourself.”

“Actually I’d like to discuss your three patients.”

“They’re not your concern. When I need a spiritual consultation, I’ll ask for one.”

The field darkened. A shadow fell across the pond. The willow branches knocked together restlessly. “Oh Mazer,” Weaver sighed. “You’re so fucking clinical.”

The reverend got to her knees and took hold of Mazer’s lapels. “Look at yourself. You’ve lost it. You never leave your office anymore. What are the rest of us supposed to think? Listen, Mazer, you’ve got to coordinate yourself with the team. The Black Wall is only five hundred years away.”

“Do you imagine that I’m oblivious to the fact?” Mazer answered. “The Minoan Recurrence is breathing down our necks, and three of the Twelve Implicated are right off their heads. It’s a disaster. And I take full responsibility. But remember one thing, Weaver. You were the one who assigned me custody.”

“That’s perfectly true. But I never expected that you’d make a permanent career out of—”

“Permanent? Nothing is permanent! Time is running out! Yet you dare to stand there and lecture me about the Black Wall?”

“I’m kneeling, doctor. Please take note of it.”

Mazer calmed himself and ate an olive. “I’m sensitive about this case,” he admitted. “The three of them have been a great disappointment to me.”

Weaver peeled a boiled egg and salted it. “The cure is not proceeding as you’d hoped?” she suggested.

Mazer shook his head and snorted bitterly. “That’s an understatement.”

A sparrow lighted on a branch above them. The reverend chewed thoughtfully on her egg. “Would you let me talk with them?”

“Out of the question. They’re my assignment, and I’ll cured them. I just need a little more time.”

The two angels picked at their food in silence. The wind worried the oat stalks. Mazer removed his spectacles and wiped them on the rags of his sleeve. When he put them on again, he and Weaver were seated in a small bare observation gallery which overlooked a surgical theater.

Behind a plate glass window, a team of neurosurgeons and nurses were attempting a brain operation.

“They’re incredibly stubborn,” Mazer went on. “But I’m wearing them down.” He averted his eyes from the exposed encephalon. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. Down there on the operating table, something had gone very wrong. There was blood jetting into the air, and all the nurses were moving rapidly. Mazer closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.

When he opened his eyes, he and Weaver were standing on beaten red earth under a tropical sun. Around them were a throng of Incan warriors in full battle regalia. Everyone was facing a steep granite ziggurat. Chanting priests were herding a rabble of war prisoners up a ramp to the ziggurat’s summit. Above the head of the warriors in their ranks, four prisoners were bound to the four shelves of an altar of obsidian. Four priests held four daggers poised over the prisoners’ chests.

“Where was I?” said Mazer.

Weaver stood with her chin up and watched the disemboweling without flinching, without even blinking.

“Oh yes,” said Mazer. “Much of their delusional material relates to their origin as a family. They feel that if they could account for this, they could undo it. Thus they rationalize their regression and avoid a confrontation with their present situation in the afterlife.”

“But Mazer! They all died psychotic! And your treatments have only driven them deeper in. Don’t you think that the simplest thing, at this point, would be to let the three of them incarnate again? Then they can sort it all out for themselves.”

Mazer grunted impatiently. “No no no. That’s the old thinking. The padded cell approach. Completely out of date. My storm system is much better.”

Weaver took Mazer’s chin in her smooth brown hand and gazed into his watery eyes. “You make me want to scream,” she told him.

They were standing at the end of a bamboo pier, facing a broad green river on a humid night in Malaysia. The stars were very bright above the water. Tree frogs shrilled from the lianas, and all around them the river lapped at mangrove roots.

Weaver took his hand and led him inland along a path through the jungle. Up ahead a bonfire was burning, tossing sparks at the stars. They came to a clearing where a circle of women danced naked around a fire, slowly swaying and revolving to a music that Mazer couldn’t hear.

“Do you have to keep changing things around?” he asked her.

They sat down on bamboo mats and watched the dance.

“And what about you?” asked Weaver. “Do you have to keep switching your patient’s maya bodies on them? What’s the function of that little shell game? How’s that supposed to help your three little peas to adjust?”

“If you’re going to be abusive,” Mazer told her officiously, “I will conclude this discussion.”

The firelight danced in Weaver’s eyes. “You could at least introduce yourself to them.”

“I don’t like to get that involved with my patients. I work best at a distance.”

Weaver hugged herself and rocked herself, grimacing. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I want nothing more in the world than to open your cranium with a large rock. How could I ever have married you?”

“That was long ago. You and I just have different ideas about healing the sick.”

“Healing,” Weaver whispered, growing suddenly to twice her size. “Healing?” she repeated, standing up and towering over the clearing, against the stars, naked in the firelight. “You call yourself a healer?”

Mazer whipped off his lab coat and threw it into the ferns as if preparing to wrestle. The circle of dancers whirled around the blaze.

“They’re not ready!” he shouted hoarsely. “I won’t allow it! I’m not done with them yet! I’m on the verge of a breakthough.”

“You’re on the verge of a serious head injury,” the giantess warned him.

“Then kill me,” he suggested petulantly. “Or if you haven’t the stomach for it, send Spiker after me. Spiker lives for assassinations. She’d love to have an excuse for doing me in.”

The bonfire flared and blinded Mazer momentarily. When his eyes would focus again, he was standing on a tightrope in the glare of spotlights, high above the sawdust in a circus tent. Clowns and bareback riders on elephants watched from the corners of the tent. The crowd on the bleachers held its breath.

Weaver walked up behind Mazer and put her arms around his waist, pressing her breasts against his back and whispering in his ear.

“You are an old old angel,” she told him. “You have fallen into overwork and exhaustion. You have dwelt here too long amongst your dead souls in cages and your snake pits. You have lapsed into mere madness, Mazer. And you are too proud to ask for help. You call yourself a healer? Do you think that you can keep your distance from sick souls, Mazer? From those three you’ve bottled in that hell of white sand? Dream on. You’ve caught their disease. You’ve become it. You’ve turned into a monster. But I’ll always love you, because I love all monsters. And that’s why you’re going to let me have them, the last three inmates in your asylum. Because you love me too, because all men love me. And also because you know that it isn’t right to use people’s souls for plow horses this way. Time to let the troika rest. Give them to me. I’ll put them out to pasture.”

“It’s possible,” Mazer allowed, “that I may have gone wrong. But I can’t just. . . I can’t just. . .”

All at once they were standing face to face again, on the surface of the moon. Sharp shadows, feeble gravity, and vast stillness. Dr. Mazer was an angel, but still he was used to breathing and to a certain amount of air pressure. Weaver was purposely causing him discomfort. No matter. He had given his answer, and his decision was final.

Weaver spoke to him again. Though her voice made no sound, Mazer heard it clearly.

“If you can’t, then we’ll make you. You have exceeded your authority. Your time is up. You may be Alex’s guardian angel, but I’m Eva’s. You will surrender your prisoners. I’ll give you one night to think about it. I’ll be here again tomorrow. Take a bath.”

A crooked smile crossed Mazer’s face. For just one moment he and Weaver were lying side by side under a patchwork quilt in a bed with a fringed white canopy, their heads on two eiderdown pillows, gazing into one another’s eyes.

Then she was gone. Mazer was alone in his trashed office, standing on his filing cabinet.

The three dead monitor screens squatted on their shelf beside the hall door. On the center screen, an image flickered into being. A brontosaur, a woman, and a jeep were standing on a sandy waste. The brontosaur’s head was cocked, one eye staring straight into the video camera. The woman was bouncing excitedly around the jeep. She seemed to be explaining something to it.

They were standing inside the picture tube, marveling at Mazer’s office, which was just as Naomi had described it. The brontosaur craned its neck toward the woman. The woman nodded her head. The only sound from the monitor was a low steady hum.

Reverend Weaver was crossing the drawbridge over the moat that encircled Mazer’s castle. A premonition rose from the black water like a dank fog. It froze Weaver in mid-step.

She realized that if Mazer was forced to give up his patients, he would try to erase his failure by killing them. Yes. He would kill them. Not today. Perhaps not tomorrow. But soon. Weaver had pushed him to far.

A terrible situation. Weaver was going to need help.

Perhaps it was time to call Spiker in.

PART THREE

SIGNS OF RECOVERY

CHAPTER TEN

SPRAYING FOR BUGS

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their arms were just the same.

—Vachel Lindsay

It was 1997, and I was working for the city of Tucson as an exterminator. My life was fairly simple. I’d given up on being a man, and was trying to function as a public works vehicle.

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I was south of downtown, driving the side streets around Stone, looking for an address. I watched for the numbers stenciled in yellow paint on the lampposts and checked them against my internal street map. My optics scanned the decaying city, translating walls and alleys, and dumpsters into vehicular simulation space. My tires rumbled over the sun-scorched gutter trash. My fender optics tracked the curbs. Traffic was sparse. There weren’t any pedestrians out, nor any drivers either. The city had grown nearly uninhabitable. The storm drains were choked, so the next winter flood would swamp the place and cripple city services for good. Piped water and wired power would recede into the fabled past. The more stubborn among the citizens were refusing to evacuate to the settlement camps. All the worse for them.

I came to Russell Avenue and braked at a stop sign beside a boarded-up library. I was the only vehicle in Tucson that still stopped for signs, but I’m a creature of habit, what can I do? A tow truck limped past me along Russell, dragging a sedan with no wheels. The tow truck had a flat. I turned onto Russell and proceeded south.

A year earlier I’d been the guidance brain in a trash truck. That was pleasant work, if you didn’t have a nose. But they ripped me out of that truck and wired me into this van. Well, ours not to reason why.

My six tires rattled over cracked cement. The pressure vent on my methanol tank was jammed, and my shock absorbers were a joke, but I was on the job, and that was what mattered to the City. I had a good spare tire but no jack. I’d lost a wiper blade, and when it rained, I compulsively dragged bare metal across my windshield. Also I talked to myself too much.

I had my service manual etched on my visual cortex—four volumes of theoretical perfection and zero tolerance schematics—no rust, no wear, no fraying cables. I used to read it in the back of my mind, for a laugh.

My only friend at this time was a municipal garage door opener who opened the door for me when I went out or came back. She told me that my problem was that I’d been a man, and now I expected too much. I wonder how she could tell.

I was driving through a city of people who stayed at home. They stayed indoors and watched television and gradually melted. That was the new virus, the melting. After they melted, ambulances with loud sirens would take their goo to the University Hospital to make sure they were dead. After they got certified, pickup trucks would haul barrels of them out to the cemetery on Oracle Drive. Then bulldozers covered them over, and then there were forms to fill out.

The city had been built by earthmovers and cement mixers and cranes. Humans could never have built it. Human could hardly live there. Humans grew buboes, sarcomas, and cysts there. Humans broke out in plastic sores, plague cankers, and growths without names there. Their wheat was full of wheat rust, no matter how their chemists poisoned it. Their water was full of cleaning supplies. If the poisons didn’t get them, they still had household pests to contend with. New improved mutant pests! Paper wasps from Chile. Amazonian jumping scorpions. Norwegian wheel bugs and killer isopods from the Malay. The humans had it tough. The ones with no houses to hide in would lock themselves in cars and starve there, or seal themselves into dumpsters with duct tape and suffocate. At least they didn’t have to worry about rats. The bugs had eaten all the rats.

But humans weren’t my job. My job was killing pests. You weren’t going to catch me catching any diseases. You’d never see me melting. Me and the digital clocks and VCRs were immune. God grants small favors for his chosen. Sometimes so small you need a microscope.

I was told what to do, and I did what I was told. If I forgot where I was going, my Comptroller would remind me. If I ignored him, he repeated himself. People’s houses filled up with bugs, so they phoned my Comptroller. Then he would send me out to spray. People didn’t want to be bothered with bugs. People wanted to melt in peace. I could relate to that. I would have liked to be left in peace. But someone had to spray.

I knew a lot about bugs. My ROM included A Bestiary of the Urban Insects of North America, updated to 1996. The carapace of the Pea Scaler ranges from drab brown in winter to brilliant yellow—the sting of the Giant House Centipede—Sometimes I’d run it through my voice coder at high speed. Bug jabber.

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I was in a disgraceful condition. I should not have been working. My transmission fluid was seeping, there were bubbles in my tires, and my solenoid was out of adjustment. I should have been up on a lift, with grease monkeys packing my wheel bearings.

All it took out there was the irrevocable snap of one brittle fan belt, and you’d be dead on the shoulder of some desolate industrial drag, and the car strippers would come down like flies. But the City didn’t consider that. The City needed every vehicle it could muster in those desperate days. If it moved, put it to work! That was their philosophy. Who was I to complain? I couldn’t feel pain. Neither can bugs, but bugs at least can die. Bugs do have that advantage over machines.

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A dummy sat in my driver’s seat. He didn’t drive me. He was just part of my equipment. There wasn’t any steering wheel, so he kept his gloves in his lap. He had black leather gloves, black leather boots, and no hands or feet in them. The gloves and the boots were his hands and feet.

He was called a Mobile Unit because he could get out of me and walk around. His coat was black vinyl, and his pants, and his cap, and his face. Dual cameras were mounted in his head. Their lens covers were gridded red glass, like a stoplight. I could see through his eyes or talk from the speaker in his neck. I could swivel his head or tap his feet. I could send him into houses and use him to spray for bugs.

When I was a garage truck, I’d had a similar Mobile Unit to empty the trash cans. Sometimes he’d even scrape up Melters. Certain Melters didn’t rate the ambulance treatment—dumpster people, people who melted in public toilets, people like that.

Garbage collection had ended a year earlier, but the City still sent teams around to spray the fresh garbage with a foam that hardened around it. Phenomenal, the things they were doing with plastics. People were dropping like flies, but the new plastics were breeding like rabbits. It gave one hope for the future.

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I turned north from East Sixteenth into a graveled alley between Stone and Russell. To the west was a junk-strewn vacant lot. North of the lot stood a row of two-yard-wide mini-apartments, with aerials and swamp coolers on their roofs and bulbous mounds of petrified foamed-over garbage leaning against them in the alley. To the east, the back yards of houses, behind storm fence. I parked beside a house reputed to be the residence of a Mrs. Everson. My turbines wound down. I filed a status report by tightbeam. It was a punishing day in August, 1:27 p.m.

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I raised the dummy’s hand and unbuckled his harness. I unlatched the driver’s door and pushed it open. Swiveled the dummy’s legs out of my cab. Somehow got both of his boots planted on the gravel. Slammed the door behind him and turned him toward the back end of me. All very complicated, if you thought about it too much.

I opened the rear doors and dragged out my canvas pouch and my tool belt. I hung the pouch on my shoulder and stuffed it with spray guns and a cross-section of aerosol toxins. I had pesticides for ants, spiders, roaches, fleas, silverfish, or armored slugs.

A mangy dog trotted up the alley with a scrap of greasy butcher paper in its mouth. It didn’t even look at me. I had no scent. I walked up to the storm fence and followed it south until I came to a gate, chained and padlocked. I hung my gloves on the wire and thought for a while. Luckily I had a bolt cutter on my tool belt.

The side yard was paved with red bricks. A barrel cactus stood in a little well. A swing set with no swings stood rusting. I turned east at the corner of the house, found the front step, and knocked at the door. Just then I was attacked by a vicious carnivore. Well, it was only a small poodle, but it bit my leg.

Slowly I bent at the waist and leaned down toward the dog. “Good dog,” I said soothingly, while it growled and worried my ankle. “Nice doggy.” I drew a cylinder of pressurized methyl cyanase from my pouch and lifted it over my head. Then I clubbed the fucker until it let go of me. I kicked it against the door, and it landed in a broken heap.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!” said a voice from the house. “Don’t kick the door down!” Security chains rattled. I kicked the poodle into a space between the aluminum siding and a potted yucca.

“It’s the exterminator,” I called out. “The exterminator is here.”

“Keep your shirt on,” said Mrs. Everson.

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The door swung open. An old woman squinted at me, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. Her arms were like plucked chicken wings, and her neck was like a powdered eclair. She wore orthopedic shoes, nylons rolled to the ankles, bifocals on a cord, and a hearing aid. Hanging by a thread.

“Are you the exterminator?” she asked me. “Well, come in out of the sun. I’ll talk to you in the den. I’m watching one of my programs.” Then she vanished and left me in the entryway. I would have to locate the den by the sound from the television. Not as simple as it sounds.

I was standing, according to my floor plan, in the entryway. But entryway is a deceptively innocuous term for that sense-numbing welter of porcelain mementos, stacked magazines, ceramic lamps, Christmas cards, et cetera. The ceiling was low, and there was hardly room to move.

I took my bearings from the walls and door frames and set forth. I knocked over an end table. I let it lie. I could understand a table wanting to lie down. I wished that someone would let me lie down.

I found Mrs. Everson sitting in an armchair. She was watching her TV set and eating crackers and cheese. Square orange cheese slices on round orange crackers filled a plate that rested on a tray with legs. Two boxes stood beside the plate, a box of cheese and a box of crackers. Every minute or two, Mrs. Everson would eat a cracker, and there’d be one less cracker on the plate.

Wet laundry was dripping on the rug. Yes, there were clotheslines strung across the den, with dripping clothes on them. It made sense. It saved her going outdoors.

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CLIENT: They’re troublesome. Hundreds of them. They come from the window frames and spit on the glass. I can’t tell if they’re on the inside or the outside. Would you like a cracker?

MOBILE UNIT: No thank you.

CLIENT: Have you seen this show? It’s my favorite.

MOBILE UNIT: What is it?

CLIENT: It’s my favorite. I try to kill them with a broom, but they get in under the screens.

MOBILE UNIT: The bugs?

CLIENT: Awful! Do you live around here?

MOBILE UNIT: I don’t live anywhere.

CLIENT: Would you like a cracker? Are you married?

MOBILE UNIT: No, I’m an exterminator.

CLIENT: I beg your pardon?

MOBILE UNIT: I like to be indoors. Walls, floors. Nothing outdoors has any edges. And there’s all that weather. If everything just stayed in the box it came in, none of the boxes would get lost.

CLIENT: When are you going to spray? Because I have to move my pets. I can’t let my pets be exposed to chemicals.

MOBILE UNIT: Your dog is already taken care of.

CLIENT: Would you like some juice?

MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours. Your compulsory compliance with this procedure will allow the safe deployment of lethal fumigants necessary for the complete eradication of your pest problem.

CLIENT: Say what?

MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours.

CLIENT: Well, if I have to, I suppose I can go stay the night with my sister. She lives on Speedway, but she’s married.

Mrs. Everson phoned her sister and packed an overnight bag. Then she called a cab. The cab came two hours later. Her parting instructions to me, as I bundled her out the door, were that I should help myself to whatever I found in the icebox, but that I should under no circumstances move her furniture, because she had it all where she wanted it.

She shuffled toward her cab in the pitiless afternoon sun. She turned and spoke to me again. “You should be careful not to breathe that stuff,” she told me. “You could grow a cancer like a grapefruit and never be properly compensated.”

I could relate to that. Everyone should be properly compensated.

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When I shut the door behind her, the house was mine. It was just me and the bugs now. But first I had to prep the floors.

I took my claw hammer into the den and got down on my knees in all the fucking magazines and crackers and tried to pull up the fucking carpet tacks. But there was all this fucking furniture in the way! The hell with the carpet tacks, I said to myself. I’ll rip up the fucking carpet with my fucking bare hands.

So I did. The television pitched off its stand and smashed. A bureau full of knickknacks fell on its side. But fuck all that shit! I had work to do! I tore the rug up, wrapped the armchair and the birdcage in it, and dragged the whole mess into the yard.

Then I unloaded my pouch onto the kitchen table. I arranged all my pumps and canisters, my thinners and spreaders, all my sticky syrups and virulent powders. I picked out a tank of ant-and-roach mix and screwed on a red rubber hose with a brass nozzle. (Tri-iso-necrolaine in a base of sodium chromate. If swallowed, induce vomiting.)

I hooked the tank onto a shoulder strap, carried it to the kitchen sink, and pointed the nozzle at the dishes piled there. I turned a valve. Half eaten toast on a flowery plate turned black. Cups and spoons and scrambled egg turned black. The sink and the sudsy water in it turned black. A gleaming black film crept up the wall tiles and blackened the doors of the cupboards.

Wallpaper blistered, peeled, and smoked. The inky stain covered the kitchen ceiling and spread into the living room. Shreds of curling paint fell from the plaster, leaving jagged white holes in the black.

I stood beside a window, spraying a baseboard and watching the guck soak in. The streetlights were on now. The stars were out. A breeze stirred the dead grass at the curb. I lifted my nozzle to the window panes. Oily goo slid down the glass and dripped from the sill. I moved into the bedroom.

Here, bugs! Come to Alex! Heeere, bug bug bug!

I closed off the valve on the tank. I surveyed the black drapes, the black bedspread and bolster, the closet full of black clothes, and the black perfume bottles on the smoking black lace doily. The toxic scum was a great improvement. It lent that cluttered wooden cave a sterile lunar beauty.

You started with the crude stuff to get the bugs’ attention and to flush a few into the open. Once you knew what you were dealing with, you could poison them more selectively. You could fuck up their spiracles with polymers, or mess up their sex lives with pheromones, or even feed them enzymes that killed their alimentary flora and made them starve. The possibilities were endless, a chemist’s holiday. But until you could stink a bug out of the woodwork and tag a specimen, you were just pissing in the wind. And I still hadn’t seen one bug.

All right then, I said to myself. Let’s experiment.

Back in the kitchen, I filled a bucket at the sink and screwed the lid off a jar of potassium tartrate. I poured three cups of the dangerous yellow granules into the water. They sputtered and fizzed. I found a mop and wet down all the floors. When a cabinet or a dresser got in my way, I’d rip the legs off it, drag it to the yard, and throw it on the burn pile. But the mop fell apart before I could finish. And still no bugs.

It never failed. Just when you got a good blood lust rolling, the little cunts crept deeper into the crawl spaces, where you couldn’t get at them, like an itch at the center of your back. Crawl spaces. The hallmark of shoddy construction. I walked around the house kicking holes in the fucking walls.

I had to carry stuff out of there in armfuls—samplers, houseplants, cans of tomato paste. . . And there was always more. What a rat’s nest! It made me want to strangle a parakeet. I got busy with my sledge hammer and knocked down some shelves and partitions. Then I turned off all the lights and sat down against a wall to think.

The sprays might be driving the bugs into the foundation. Perhaps I could lure them out with some bait.

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Peanut butter? Chicken liver? Dead dog? The dead dog would be perfect. I walked out into the moonlight and fetched it indoors. I put it on the bedspread and hid in the bedroom closet with the bathrobes and tennis rackets.

Still the bugs wouldn’t show themselves. I needed more bait.

I went to the alley and broke through the plastic crust of one of the hillocks of old garbage. Dragged two black plastic bags back to the house and used a garden rake to distribute the trash evenly. I kept going for more until I had it to a depth of six inches on all the floors. Then I hid in the closet again.

All night I lay in wait, watching with my eyes, listening with my gloves, smelling with my boots. The air conditioner turned itself on, turned itself off, a well adjusted appliance. Cars drove past. I turned off my eyes and just listened. My head felt as if it had retracted into my chest.

But I could make out a new rhythm behind the tranquil murmur of the air conditioner. A chirping. A shrilling. Dozens of shrillings. From the walls, the floor, from every side. A strident mantric din like a horde of locusts. I left the closet and turned on a lamp. The bugs went right on singing, safe in their crannies.

The air conditioner was distracting me, so I ripped out its cord. That’s when I saw my first cicada.

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It dropped out of the air conditioner and landed on the floor. A huge fucker, six inches long. With a humped brown shell like a cricket’s. Angular sawtooth legs. Crooked feelers tapping at the floorboards like blind men’s canes. A radically mutated giant cicada. It belonged in a monster movie, knocking down Hoover Dam.

It scuttled nervously toward the wall, then stopped. I froze where I stood and processed optical data. Sampled out a dorsal view and a profile and ran them through my morphological comparitor. This cicada was not the traditional seventeen-year root sucker. This thing was a carnivore.

I wasn’t normally given to emotional reactions to vermin. But the giant cicada filled me with a physical dismay. It made the vinyl creep on my aluminum bones. It made my clothes itch.

Such things were to be expected. This was the decade when all the genetic codes went through a cheap photocopier. This was the generation when none of the babies were quite what they seemed. These were the years when puppies lay squirming on puppy blankets, all sticky and feeble and new and not quite puppies.

Cautiously I sank to my hands and knees and extended one palm over the specimen. The hideous insect tentatively twitched and squeaked. Then it rushed at me, a sickening scrambling concentration of vitality. I crushed it under my glove. The crunch was deafening.

Luckily for purposes of documentation, the cicada’s head escaped mangling. Its beady eyes glared at me while it died. I lifted my hand, and it hung from the underside, glued there by its own ichor, weakly waving its legs. Then it fell to the floor. I stuffed the corpse into a sandwich bag. The cicadas under the floor went on singing.

I had to simplify the floor plan. I went to my van for a crowbar. The sun was up, and the gravel was wet. A street scrubber drove slowly north along Stone, past the Presbyterian Church and Madelaine’s Beauty College.

Mrs. Everson might come home today. But she couldn’t stay here. I intended to make life very unpleasant for those cicadas.

The best thing would’ve been to burn the fucking house down.

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I went back indoors and punched the fucking water heater right through the fucking bedroom wall. Then I tore out the bathroom sink and rammed that into the fucking attic. Just to show the fucking cicadas I meant business.

Then I walked around the house screaming insults at them. Just the normal kind of things you scream at a time like that. “Come out of there, you yellow little pukes!” “I know you’re in there, you slimy faggots!” That sort of thing.

Then I looked for them. I looked in the oven and pried the back off the television and pulled the stuffing out of the cushions. I wished that I could see through walls. That way I could’ve seen the bugs, snug in their cozy dens, warbling their miserable songs. I could’ve mapped their demographics and charted their social organization. Then I could’ve wiped them out—crushed their eggs, burned their larvae, tortured their drones for strategic information.

But since I couldn’t do any of that, I contented myself with pounding a crowbar through Mrs. Everson’s flocked pastel wallpaper, again and again and again.

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I took a break. I felt I was entitled. I sat down in Mrs. Everson’s bathtub with the television set on my lap. I watched Saturday morning cartoons for a couple of hours.

One of the cartoons concerned a magpie that wanted to eat a worm. Another involved a wolf who wanted to eat some sheep. I enjoyed the jokes, but it bothered me that the worm and the sheep never got eaten. I think that a story should be realistic.

ANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVAN

Just then my van made a noise on the tightbeam. It wanted to alert me regarding a Threat To Vehicular Security that was developing in the alley. Apparently a couple of suspicious looking Mexican kids were hanging around, sitting with their backs against the storm fence. One youth had a shaved head and was picking her teeth with a screwdriver. The other had purple tattoos on her face and wore a necklace of spark plugs. The van thought that they were talking about him. He suspected the youths of being car strippers. I thought he was being an alarmist.

“Alex,” I told him, “you’re overreacting. Alex? Do you copy?”

But I received no response.

OWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHO

However, as I stood up in the bathtub, I knocked my head against the rod of the shower curtain. Flying into a rage, I tore the ugly fucking thing right out of the fucking wall—curtains, brackets, and all. Half the bathroom wall fell into the tub with me. And there I stood in the trembling dust, curtain rod in hand, gazing into the wall.

Gazing into the wall. My wish had come true. Here was the plumbing. There were the studs. And over in the shadows, a pale pod hung in a hammock of filaments. Within the pod, myriad milky larvae wriggled or slept. It was a nest of baby cicadas. Adults stuck their heads from crannies, squeaking in alarm.

The adults rushed to the pod and tore it open. Each stuffed a few of the infants under its belly and scrambled away. But they were bailing out a lifeboat with a thimble. I had them where I wanted them. By merely reaching out my glove and clenching my fist, I could turn their nursery into a slaughterhouse. I could fry their grubs in peanut oil and dip them in hot sauce and sell them door to door. How could they prevent me?

ANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVAN

My van went completely paranoid. One of the Mexican kids stood up, and it rammed the kid into the storm fence. It was convinced that they were car strippers. I couldn’t talk to it.

“This will break some bones,” it kept saying. “Come on out here, Alex. Don’t you want to see me break some bones?”

NYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAY

Anyway I was reaching into the wall for a handful of larvae when Mrs. Everson tapped me on my shoulder.

“This place looks so much better,” she told me. “I’m very grateful to you. And do you know what? At my sister’s house, I spoke with a nice young social worker. And she’s had me relocated. I’m very happy where I live now. They fix our lunches for us and give us free drugs. I have my own waterbed and my own VCR, and I watch pornography all day. It’s wonderful. You go ahead with your work, young man. And thank you so much for straggling that parakeet. I never liked it. It was a gift.”

She made a move for the door, but I was too fast for her. I wasn’t going to let her get away that easy. She still had to sign for the spraying. I put a sofa on top of her and sat down on it.

But she wouldn’t stop breathing, so I went to the kitchen for my spray gun. I’d make her sign the receipt, then finish her off. I understood my mission for the City. To kill pests. Including any excess citizens who got in my way. Discreetly. Without appearing to. I was a chemical weapon. Whereas Mrs. Everson was old and in the way. Should I have suffered her to live? Old and useless as she was?

Sitting on the sofa, loading the spray gun, my legs began to itch. Impossible, but they did itch. I had no legs, only trousers and metal stilts. Yet they itched. It was like something from a previous life.

ONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLON

Long ago in a previous life, I had been a man built of flesh. For a year or so, I lived in a rainy city in a clammy basement. The fleas there became a problem, because they liked me. As food. I scratched my flea bites until they bled. When the blood dried, I scratched my scabs. Finally I went to the pet section of a supermarket and bought some flea powder and a couple of the flea collars for cats. I sprinkled the powder on my bed and my sofa. The collars, I wore around my ankles under my socks. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Unfortunately the collars were designed for an animal with fur.

I slept in the collars and woke the next morning with big black fleas hopping on and off of me as usual, and angry red water blisters that ran all round my ankles. With trembling hands I unbuckled the plastic shackles from my insulted flesh.

For days I lay on the sofa with my feet up on the backrest, while my puffy yellow ankles wept salty tears down my legs. Suffering for my stupidity, I underwent epiphanies of self-disgust. That’s what happens when you don’t read labels.

EANWHILEMEANWHILEMEANWHILEMEANWHILEMEANWHILEMEANWHILE

It was a good thing for me that I wasn’t flesh anymore. Flesh could be stung by bugs or even eaten. Plus, if I were flesh, I’d have asphyxiated myself by now. I’d be dead or delirious. Whereas I was reasoning with perfect clarity.

My van wasn’t faring so well. The car strippers had removed all its tires and pried loose its engine cover. A tire iron had shattered its windows. Pebbles of auto glass littered the driver’s seat. The strippers applied hacksaws from the van’s own tool kit. The van exploded in slow motion, like a carburetor schematic, clusters of parts floating in midair. There went the alternator. There went the batteries.

What if they find the silica wafers of my brain, Alex? What then? Where are my car keys, Alex? For the love of mercy, help me!

OCTURNENOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTU

An old woman was sleeping under a sofa. A robot sat on top of the sofa. Neither of us were breathing. It was dark outside. A siren wailed, across town somewhere.

I climbed down from the sofa and paced the living room. All the faucets in the house were running. Mrs. Everson’s dresses were stuffed down the drains and into the cracks under the doors. The water lay an inch deep on the floor. All escape routes were blocked. I paced the room, waiting for the water to rise, slipping on loose tiles and place mats—half indoors, half out, half crazy, half dead.

I told myself: Don’t panic. Whatever happened, I mustn’t panic. If I could continue to reason with perfect clarity, all would be well.

A deep dark well. With three sisters at the bottom, eating treacle and feeling ill. A deep dark ill.

I stood beside a blacked-out window in the dead of night. Everything seemed to be shrinking. The walls shrank from the floors. The alley gravel shrank from the patio bricks. Tire tread shrank from asphalt, billboards from the sky, and the stars from the earth. Women shrank from men, and men from one another. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make sense of anything. Somewhere in the neighborhood a mariachi band was playing—accordion and trumpets. It sounded like a party.

The earth spun under my boots. The stars circled Mrs. Everson’s roof. I had burned all her magazines. Something was chewing on my leg.

FTERMATHAFTERMATHAFTERMATHAFTERMATHAFTERMATHAFTERMATH

Time passed. The water company shut off the water. The power company cut the power. Batteries emptied, I shared the ruined house with my friends, the bugs. The moon-scorched skeleton of my van stood in the alley, corroding in the winter downpours.

On the day they cut the power, the picture on the TV screen contracted to a white dot and blinked out. Sometimes children threw rocks through the windows, but I ignored them. The cicadas would take care of them. The cicadas had driven the red ants from Tucson, and were eating the last of the citizens.

I lay on my back with my head in a broom closet. A mop handle and some gallon bottles of ginger ale kept me company. I kept forgetting things. I forgot what I was doing. (Flooding the house.) I forgot what I’d done. (Lost my car keys.) I forgot what I’d planned. (Someday the roof of the house would cave in, and the sun would bleach my optical sockets.) All my vital parts had been pried loose and carried off.

I told jokes to the cicadas. I said, Stop me if you’ve heard this. The cicadas brought me food and taught me things. I couldn’t eat the food, but I learned quite a lot. Things about families and about deserts and about soul murder.

I can’t eat this, I kept telling them. They thought I was joking.

During mating season, the male cicadas turned blue and began to glow. They crept around the ceiling like winking constellations. I wondered whether insects were machines, and whether machines were insects. Certain insects can fly, but not every insect, and the same is true of machines. Flying machines can kill people, but so can insects. Everything had converged to a single dot, but it wouldn’t blink out.

In spring, the male cicadas grew wings and buzzed around me. They dove at my face and whizzed away again. They dug tunnels into my chest and sharpened their mandibles on my servos. When I told them to stop, they said, Make us stop! Corpses can’t give orders!

Then I told them that I would make them stop. They squealed with glee and rolled around inside me, kicking their legs.

I stood up and found a bucket and a length of hose. I kicked down the kitchen door and tramped out to the alley. The moon was full. It was bright as day. Pellets of glass crunched beneath my boots. I siphoned some methanol from the tank of the van and poured it over my head. I went indoors again for a match.

Soon I was blazing away like a pudding in brandy. The drapes caught fire as well. Roasted cicadas clambered from my armpits and my crotch and fell, smoking, to the floor. Shrieking elated bug shrieks they fell, dying happy bug deaths, like mad airmen abandoning a burning bomber.

From all directions, from below and above, a delighted stridulation sprang up. The cicadas pranced in circles around my feet, cheering me on. My black vinyl face was dripping. The drops trailed blue flame and made funny noises. The bugs turned cartwheels, laughing wildly.

Sparks flew from my optics. Brown smoke filled the house. I turned into a tottering scarecrow of silver sticks and black rags. But I was glad, because the bugs were entertained.

I fell to the floor. The flames guttered. The cicadas climbed up onto my wreckage in droves, to celebrate. Papa cicadas in blue overalls and mama cicadas in hoopskirts and petticoats waltzed on my chest. Cicada kids rushed to the final fires of my face, with tiny marshmallows on toothpicks. Nursemaid cicadas in starched white bonnets pushed larvae in strollers up and down my legs. Eventually they raised a tent on my torso and performed circus acts on tiny unicycles and tiny trapezes.

Personally I don’t attach a lot of importance to nightmares. Anyone can have a bad dream. Even machines get them. They’re a form of torture testing. You go on to the next thing. And the next. And the next.

The object of this game is to shoot down the Enemy Memory Ships before they can sink your Dream Boat. Are you ready? Are you set? Are you trapped in a toy truck in a toy chest in a hole at the bottom of the sea? Do you think you escape before you suffocate? What do you think, Alex? Can you get out of there? Can you get out?

ANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONS

I was sitting in the cab of the van, one afternoon in spring. We were parked behind a Chinese restaurant that was having some trouble with roaches. I opened the glove compartment and reached inside for a tire gauge.

My glove closed around a plastic bag that squished. I pulled it out, and what do you think was in it? A cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread. Which was crawling with maggots. I tossed it out the window.

But I could never figure out how it got there. I mean, who would put a sandwich of all things in my glove compartment? And leave it there to rot? Who would do that?

I could never account for it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE FROZEN MAMMOTH

“So young a child,” said the gentleman sitting opposite to her, (he was dressed in white paper), “ought to know which way she’s going, even if she doesn’t know her own name!”

—Lewis Carroll

Dear Alex. Last night I dreamed that I wrote you a letter.

I wasn’t a brontosaur in the dream. I was little, like Eva. A woman. I was a woman writing you a love letter.

The year was 1999 in my dream, and I hadn’t seen you for nine long years. I hoped that you hadn’t forgotten me. The human race was poised on the brink of extinction, but you were all I thought about. Dear Alex. I thought I could distract you from replacing yourself with machines.

I would have gone looking for you, but I was confined to a brig. The brass were keeping hundreds of us in a women’s army prison, half a mile beneath the surface of Antarctica. A low-security prison, since there was nowhere to escape to.

At night, lying on my bunk under scratchy blankets, I’d leave my body and drift into the sky above the ice. The sunsets were gorgeous. They went on for days. Then the southern lights would ripple like banners across the star field. Except for the blowing of the snow, it could’ve been the moon up there. Some nights I’d drift north to the ocean and cross the waves to see what the human race was up to.

There was a war on, Alex. A global plasma war. Particle beams would land on people’s heads and microwave them. The boomerang masers were interesting machines. The technical boys shaped these rays from coherent light and then fed in hydrogen plasma, which is what the sun is made of. You could fire them ground to ground like missiles, because the light bent. Geodetic torque, they called that. No one could really explain it. It broke several laws of physics. But it worked.

It worked, so they used it. There was speculation, at first, that the beams might suck the whole solar system into an artificial black hole. But that was just alarmism. All the beams did was punch holes in the earth’s crust and cover half the land masses with lava. This was inconvenient for civilians, of course. But by then most of the soldiers had gone to the north pole.

That was because the masers would only fire toward magnetic south. The tactical key to wasting your enemy was to dig in your ruby cannons north of him. Which accounts for all the heavy action over the Arctic Ocean. From there you could broil anybody. Antarctica was the least strategic area, which was why they stuck us there.

And the ordinance for the arctic circle actions. You should have seen it, Alex. Amphibious megaskeletons, bigger than houses. Walking fortresses that shrugged off anything short of a nuke. But once they plugged you into one, you were in there for life. Cutting you loose would be like freeing a crab from its shell. Right up your alley, Alex.

When I wasn’t drifting around in the sky, I’d wash dishes at the mess hall, or lift weights at the gym, or just sit in the commons and listen to the radio. I wondered about the masterminds who were directing all the mayhem. Did they really hope to survive? Or was I missing the point? Did they intend, instead, to incinerate themselves and all of us with them? Like mummified pharaohs and their entombed slaves. Why do that? Maybe just to prove that they owned the world. After all, you don’t own something unless you can destroy it. That was one possible rationale for their elaborate suicide.

But I had a different theory. I thought that the men in power were running scared. I thought they were terrified that Something would happen in the year 2000. So terrified, they had to keep a loaded pistol pressed against their heads at all times. Just in case they had to check out in a hurry. In case the Dreaded Something should come to pass. I think they were afraid of the angels returning to earth—afraid that the earth angels would descend on their sandboxes and take away their toys. But I could’ve been wrong.

Or I could be lying. In fact, Alex, I am lying. I wasn’t in any women’s army prison. I didn’t really know where I was.

My superior officers had tied me to a chair in a bare white room. I was being interrogated. The brass were unhappy with me. I’d deserted my post and cannibalized two civilians. I felt sorry about it, but a fat lot of good being sorry did.

I was writing a love letter in my head. My superiors wouldn’t give me any paper or any clothes to wear either. And they wouldn’t turn on any lights. I was good and sick of sitting naked in the dark. They said I could have clothes when I confessed. But I had confessed. I’d confessed back in 1990. I’d confessed a million times. Weren’t they listening? “I give up!” I told them. “I’ll tell you anything! Anything you want to hear!” It did no good.

“I further testify that I make this statement of contrition under no coercion and in full awareness of my rights to legal counsel,” I told them. “I accept that all polygraph tracings can and will be used against me by this duly-convened court-martial of drooling demeaned corpse-Martians, to fry my eyes or to gas my ass, and I’d swear to all that if you bastards would take the gag out of my mouth. Then you could burn my arm with a light bulb. At least I’d see your ugly faces.”

But they wouldn’t let me see where I was. Or what I was. That was probably wise. Given my medical history, I could be almost anything.

“Do something, you chicken shits. Unbuckle the straps. Pull off the goggles. Yank those cotton balls out from between my toes. You’ll be sorry, you four-star decorated turds. I’ll grind your balls between my teeth! Let me go! Where have you put Alex?”

“I’ll confess. Don’t hit me. I’ll confess. Just don’t rush me. Don’t press me. I’m brittle. I’ll crack.”

“That’s correct, Sir. I went over the wall. I was bored, Sir. I needed some recreation.”

“That’s right, Sir. I met them at the bowling alley.”

“Because I had to, Sir. I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No, no, it wasn’t like that. I know I did wrong, Sir, but I’m not a well person. I had been in a can for twenty years.”

The accused burst into tears. Counsel for the defense addressed the court.

“Officers of the bench,” she began, “I ask you to imagine the mental state of a sensitive young woman immersed in liquid nitrogen. Visualize a human nervous system frying in a casserole pan of garlic butter. Picture, if you will, the frenzied writhing of the spinal cord, the lashings of the grosser nerves as they clutch for purchase at the sides of the pan and succeed only in basting themselves. Who can doubt that the accused has suffered enough? I request the court’s permission to enter into evidence a series of slides. (Lights please.) These are the accused and her victims at the time of her arrest.”

Sounds of gagging among the spectators. A rush of scuffling shoes toward the exits.

Lies, Alex. I’m telling you lies. I never dream about interrogations. Would you like to know who I really dreamed I was?

I was that little drowned girl who fell through the ice of the skating pond. Remember her? She was still underwater, hammering up at the ice with her little blue fists.

Long green weeds uncoiled from the bottom of the pond. They reached for the little girl’s ankles and dragged her down into the muck. And all the while they shouted.

“Three cheers!” shouted the weeds. “Three cheers for our patriotic soldiers! Three cheers for our girls in the freezer cans!”

And here came the cans! Marching across the muck! A whole platoon of cans, with pipe cleaners for legs and eyes of shining chrome. Marching along and waving to the weeds in a flurry of white confetti. Trampling the weeds beneath their boots. Wind them up, and they’ll march off the edge of the world. Through sleet, through hail, through the chattering of a thousand Geiger counters. . .

But where were they going, Alex? Marching naked through the snow? Where were they bound for? Turning white as they stained the snow red? In circles of course. In circles. Collapsing one by one, like snowflakes on an oven. And no two exactly alike.

But the drowned girl thought of an escape plan. She still had her skates on, so she slashed at the weeds and kicked her way back to the ice. She set her blades against it and skated upside-down through the water.

Faster and faster she skated, like a scissors on a greased cookie sheet. Finally she came to a pretty inverted village built of candy. The houses were gingerbread, with roofs of butterscotch taffy. The streets were cobbled with malt balls. Cotton-candy sheep grazed on hillocks of lime sherbet. In the distance stood rock-candy mountains with whipped-cream snowcaps.

The girl felt dizzy. She approached a chocolate-cupcake cottage and knocked at the door.

A slot opened up in the pink-frosting roof. A licorice machine gun poked its nose out. A hail of jellybean bullets flew through the peaceful streets. Fleecy white sheep crumpled on a hillside, bleating mournfully and bleeding strawberry syrup.

Lies. Lies and more lies. I was never that little drowned girl. Shall I show you my real face?

It was 1908. The Siberian tundra. The wind harried rags of cirrus across a sky as white as bone. The land lay beneath like a wrinkled bedspread, all ravines and moraines. For the first time in decades, the permafrost had thawed. Streams gurgled across porous rust-red soil, carrying scraps of dead moss. To the north loomed a sheer wall of ice.

To the south, four bearded men in parkas walked toward the glacier. Hounds capered around their boots, barking far and faint. One of the men pointed a mittened hand at the glaring ice. What was he pointing at? What made the dogs so excited? Something in the ice was partly melted free from the glacier. Something grayish brown and shaggy, hanging loose. The hounds bounded toward it.

Before the men could reach it, the hungry dogs had chewed up its forelegs. They snapped at one another and ripped at the good red meat. The men ran at them, yelling, and kicked them away. Then the men stood and stared in silence at the yellow tusks, the dangling elephant’s trunk, the matted fur. Only the eyes had decayed. Bright black tears slid down from two small black holes.

In the weeks and months that followed, newspapers and scientific journals would announce the discovery. A woolly mammoth—a creature extinct since the dawn of history. The men would remember it all their lives. And one of the men wondered, as the years passed, whether he’d really seen the beast move, whether it had really turned its head aside, as the dogs were tearing at it.

And on his death bed, the man thought to himself, What a strange fate. To sleep so long. And to awaken finally, blind and helpless, just as some dogs are ripping out your throat.

Lies. Lies like all the rest. Let’s change the subject. While we’re at it, let’s change my name.

My name was Noqi. I was an Inuit woman, centuries before the coming of the white men. My clan were fishers, and we roamed the Aleutian Islands in our kayaks.

As a girl I lived at the karigi of my aunt. My cousins and I stayed warm and dry there. We chewed hides, carved sewing needles from walrus ivory, and played cat’s cradle with loops of sinew. But then I married.

I married an anutquq, the wizard of our clan. When he asked for me, my aunt was delighted. All of us thought him the most admirable of men. He protected our families from sickness. His amulets brought luck to the seal hunters. And every spring he lured a dying whale to our island. But my husband was not what he seemed.

Soon after we married, a dark dream visited my sleep. In the dream I saw a spirit creature with one eye and three legs and flippers. This was the spirit that became my first aua. She offered to be my helper, but only if I would learn the true nature of my husband.

My husband was no anutquq, she told me, but rather an ilisitsoq, an evil wizard and a master of deception. His hands were polluted with the blood of uncounted innocents. At night he turned his soul into a ptarmigan and flew to other islands, other villages. There he made his mischief. He took the form of an invisible bear and slew men in their sleep. He raped women. He entranced children and led them to the empty lands to freeze. But of all this, my village knew nothing.

I tried to conceal my knowledge from my husband. It was useless. He saw. He sent his long-fanged auas against me, as I slept within my furs. I took a fever and couldn’t eat. The shadow of my death fell upon me.

My one-eyed friend returned. She offered to save me, but only on condition that I become an anutquq. When I agreed, she called her brother and sister auas from the sea. Her sisters were spiny blowfish, and her brothers were giant ice beetles, all crimson and yellow. For days and for nights they battled, tooth and claw, with the auas of my wicked husband. Finally my auas were victorious, and I shook off my fever. My husband’s auas deserted him. My ice beetles crept inside his heart. He sickened and died.

My village should have rejoiced. Instead they imagined that I’d poisoned my husband’s food. They knew how I hated him. But none believed my account of his crimes. They thought me a mad woman. The elders condemned me to a murderer’s death.

The men chose an ice floe, down by the sea, and there they dug a pit. The women bound my limbs with leather thongs and cast me into the pit. The men broke the ice raft loose from the shore. It drifted out to sea, with me and my guardian aua and all my bitter memories.

The wind howled above me, and the pack ice tipped and groaned. I wished that I could stand up and watch the churning of the waves as I died. My aua gnawed at my bonds until they broke. I climbed from my grave and stood on my raft, naked in the wind, as the ice floes crashed and spun. I prayed to the ocean mother Sedna that my soul might find its way to the land of my ancestors. The wind sucked my life away and left behind an ice statue.

My ice raft drifted south until it melted. My body sank to the ocean floor and fed the tiny crabs and benthic worms.

My soul walked west across the breakers, through spray and racing shadows. I reached the Gate of Bones. There stood the ghost of my husband, unmoving amid the chaos of air and ocean. He was waiting for me, blocking my path, with his fishing spear in his fist.

“You have slain my flesh,” he told me. “But I will kill your spirit.”

He cast his spear at me. My one-eyed aua caught it through her belly and dove into the sea with it. I wrestled with my husband, rolling across the jagged whitecaps, as he wrung my neck. I yanked out his hair and gouged at his eyes. I pinned him beneath my hips and sewed his lips together with the fishbone needles of my hatred. Then I called down a killing wind. It blew in through his ears, inflated him like a bladder, and burst him apart. It carried off his brains in ribbons of sparkling blood and eels of gray mist.

But all the while I loved him, Alex. Evil and hateful as he was, I loved him. After I destroyed him, I wept stinging tears and raised a lament to Sedna. And Sedna heard me. She created my husband anew. She lifted us to the heavens and set us among the burning stars and snaking rainbows. And there we continue to wrestle, for we are still at war. We can never rest. And the wind blows through us.

But you don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Alex? You’re quite right. I’m lying again. I was never that woman.

I was just a little girl, just ten years old. My name was Naomi.

Year after year, every day of every week, Naomi sat in the rec room of the Disturbed Children’s Ward. She sat on a chair beside a window and looked down through wire mesh at the hospital grounds and the hospital basketball court. At meal times, an orderly would take her wrist and lead her to the dining hall. When she returned, someone had always moved her chair. Naomi moved it back, while the other children watched a television that chattered on a steel shelf.

She spoke to no one. She never played checkers or dice games. After Lights Out, she lay in her bed and dreamed of the grounds and the basketball court, because she liked things simple. Some nights she wet her bed. Someday she would turn into a brontosaur. But Naomi didn’t know that.

Naomi was what the guardians of mental health called a Chronic Autistic. There were institutions for children like Naomi, and that was exactly where she was. If you asked her how she got that way, she didn’t answer. Not even if you grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted in her face. For all she cared, you could be on the moon. Some children, you see, don’t need wars or famines or plagues to convince them that vegetables have the right idea about life. Some children are convinced from the start.

Naomi lay in her bed and pretended that she was inside a jar of ice, where nothing could reach her. The roof of the ward would dissolve, and she would watch the clouds drift across the stars. The clouds would just be shapes at first. Then they’d start to mean things. One cloud looked like a flattened toad. The next looked like the skull of a horse. Another looked like a giant crow, hanging in the wind and casting its shadow over the earth.

Naomi heard a Man In Power reciting a countdown. Five, four, three. . .

Suddenly she was an inmate of a different institution—a troop repository in the Marianas Trench.

She was back inside a can. As though she’d never left. Mute. Numb. Rigid. Naked as a jaybird. Salt in her wounds and mercury in her blood. Electrified and hysterical. Frozen alive in a hole at the bottom of the sea. She could hardly believe it. And for all she knew, they’d frozen Alex and Eva too. That’s how careful they were about infection.

She sensed thousands of cans around her in the bunker, all filled with other soldiers. The bunker was a complete necropolis, a Noah’s ark launched into the afterlife. After the war, the soldiers would have everything they needed. Frozen food, frozen blood plasma, frozen sperm. . . They seemed to be perfectly safe.

But Naomi didn’t trust the Men In Power. She wanted to escape. The other soldiers thought she was nuts. But she knew she could do it. She’d done it before. She monkeyed with her chromatin, groping for a genotype that could bust her out. Her flesh began to flow and shift. She simplified to an oblong bluish lump that rested like a bundle of knots at the bottom of her can. The lump recited nursery rhymes to itself.

Potatoes were the waiters. Potatoes were the band. Potatoes were the dancers, kicking up the sand.

Inside the lump was a curd, and inside the curd, a brain. Inside the brain was a red brick building which housed the Deoxyribonucleic Academy Library. And down in the library basement, among the reference stacks, was Naomi.

She’d cleared out a foxhole under some shelves. She crouched there, ransacking drawers from a card catalog. She was looking for one particular card. It had to be there somewhere. Meandrina, the brain coral. No. Dipnoi, the lungfish. No. Earwig, eyebright, fingerling. . . No no no. . .

She attacked the problem theoretically. If mutation, M, was mild genetic chaos yet fueled the orderly countertrend of evolution, E, and if hard radiation, R, was super-chaos—then the question arose: What countertrend X existed, such that X was to R as E was to M? I ought to know that, thought Naomi.

The lump grew a fur of cilia that beat against the nitrogen in the canister. The lump began to revolve. Intentional metaplasia. Mind over mud. A bolt of lightning crossing the primeval murk. Total war. When the pulse wave hit, the roentgens would be close behind. What happened before can happen again. The divergent speciation of the trilobites. The spirit moving on the face of the waters.

Fingers and toes rose from the yeasty lump. Mouths opened under the fingernails, and steam bubbled up. Muscles detached from their tendons and glided like manta rays to new anchorages.

What happened before. . . Please don’t throw me in the briar patch! Can happen again. Please don’t throw me in the briar patch!

Naomi’s thyroid clambered down her windpipe like a tree frog. Her adrenal glands squirmed and stretched and crept like inchworms up the webs of her mesentery. Her kidneys clung together in ecstatic excretory embrace and plunged stiff nephritic pricks into each other.

Born and raised! Born and raised! Born and raised in the briar patch!

But what was the name of that dinosaur, the big one? What was the name? Trying to remember the name, Naomi dissolved. She entered into solution with the nitrogen, like a lump stirred into pudding. She had reached the acute phase of her hyperorthochordocephalocerebropanchromomitophytomorphogangliplasia.

Just at that moment, her can and all the other cans in the bunker heated to a glowing white and exploded from internal pressure. Naomi watched it happen. Thinking, This is the blast. Thinking, I am the blast shadow.

Thinking, Brontosaur! That’s the word!

Naomi is ten years old. She stands on a narrow steel platform at the top of a tall steel pole, under a circus tent. She wears powder blue leotards with sequins. She rubs the soles of her slippers in a chalk box. Far below, on a runway between two sections of bleachers, three elephants in plumed headdresses pick at the sawdust with their trunks.

In the center ring, a man in a top hat declaims into a megaphone. “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, a very special performance. For the first time anywhere, a ten-year-old Chronic Autistic will dive, blindfolded and half naked, one hundred yards into a bucket of crushed ice. Silence please.”

A spotlight illuminates the platform. A drum roll sounds.

Naomi curls her toes over the edge.

And leans forward.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HUSH

. . .it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle, to get one’s head cut off.”

—Lewis Carroll

Tonight we seem to be buried under tons of sand. I can hear the two of you talking, but your voices are muffled. Still it’s nice to know that you’re buried nearby.

I just had a dream that left a contented feeling in my belly. I dreamed of a time when I was happy, a time when my life made sense. It was the twenty-first century, after the War, and I was still walking the earth. My sisters and I were climbing the fire escape of a derelict hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. We were hunting for dogs.

What are dreams, I wonder. I drop down exhausted at the end of a day. I blur at the edges. I turn the blurring into stories, and I call that dreaming. Back in the twenty-first century I did it just the way I do it now. But back then I was a woman in the right place. My life was hard, but it was sane. Being sane was easy, before I married Alex.

I was climbing a fire escape in Phoenix. The soles of my feet were like leather, and the steel was cold beneath them. The morning light was warm on my skin, and on the straight black hair that fell down my back to the belt of my jeans. A canteen and a hatchet hung from the belt.

Those were good years for me, the aftermath of the Boomerang War. A timeless tranquility had fallen over the land. A great hush. I hoped it would last forever.

The wall of the hotel was red brick, deeply pitted by the debris that had ridden the final shit storm. The sun was peeking into the canyons of the streets. A crescent moon still hung in the sky. I came to a landing and leaned against a railing. I waited for Jo Ann to catch up with me. We both had to catch up with Ox.

Ox and Jo Ann were sisters of a kind, and they’d adopted me into their family. They were women of a new race, the post-war format.

I leaned over the rail and listened for Jo Ann. Below me at street level, a particle beam had cut a smooth oval pit deep into the earth. The walls of the pit were black glass, perfectly vertical. The building across the street was half vaporized, sliced in two. I could see into its honeycomb of rooms—den above den, bathroom above bathroom, as though a giant had been playing with scissors. Moldering mattresses and recliner chairs were decorated with crisp brown mummies. Hundreds of black glass pits had perforated Phoenix. Like a stop sign that somebody’d used for rifle practice.

I heard Jo Ann sneaking up the flight of steps below me. I pretended not to notice. She pounced on me and tickled my ribs. I spun around and hugged her. She screamed with delight.

She wore a gunny sack and a belt of rope. Her skin was deep gray like modeling clay. Her hair was bleached out and wispy. She was eight feet tall, and if the pains in her ankles got worse, she was going to need crutches.

She wriggled in my arms and pushed me away. Her eyes shone with trust and humor. It was a long way down, but we were underfed and out of breath and just didn’t care. We started to climb again.

I liked the new crop of people. Mentally they were just like a certain kind of people I’d seen before the War. The rest of us had names for people like that. Retards. Congenital idiots. Defectives. But the joke was on us. Those people were throw-forwards. Their only misfortune was being born before their time. Now their time had come, and wherever they went, they were right at home. The inheritors of the earth. Jo Ann and Ox sensed that I wasn’t one of them, but they opened their hearts to me anyway. Retards are like that.

Jo Ann and I arrived at the top floor. Ox was waiting for us, sitting cross-legged on the steel bars. She was three feet tall, with skin black as tar and no hair at all. She wore a loincloth of dog hide.

Ox had seen a pack of dogs in the hotel. She’d seen it in a dream. We’d climbed the fire escape so that they wouldn’t smell us coming.

We went through a window into a hallway. Ox caught the scent of the dogs and went off to explore, very excited. Jo Ann and I had to catch our breath. I leaned against a wall and took off my sunglasses. I stared at them—orange lenses and copper wire.

Ox was another birth defect. Even before the War, their numbers had been on the rise. I read a newspaper article about it. Medical science had detected an alarming increase of Oxes and Jo Anns among the newborns. A few years later the articles took on a tone of subdued panic. All of the recent babies were now falling into one or another of the boxes marked Damaged Goods. For some of the babies, the people in charge were having to build entirely new boxes. Then the War came along and blew all the boxes right out the window, along with sterile bandages, antibiotics, medical science, and newspapers. I was glad to see them go.

I folded my glasses and hooked them on my belt.

Ox came back to us, wiggling her fingers. She’d found a dog. Jo Ann and I hurried after her. I grabbed up a stick. Ox led us to a stairwell, took us three floors down, and made us stop. She poked her head through the banister posts and listened. Her head was lop-sided and smooth, like a black stone from a riverbed.

Claws scuffled across linoleum. We moved silently along a hallway. Ox and I peeked around a corner. A gray poodle, big as a hog, was sniffing at a pile of trash. It worried a stiff white towel between its jaws. Then it lifted its small frizzy head and smelled the air.

Ox charged at it. Fear dawned in its damp pink eyes. It scrambled away up the hall, the blubber jouncing on its flanks. We all ran after it, waving our sticks and yelling. Jo Ann doubled back to block the staircase. Then Ox and I split up, hoping to surround it.

We found it again on the fire escape. One of its legs had slipped through the bars and gotten wedged. It whimpered when it saw us closing in. Finally it just crouched down and trembled, hanging there in the breeze, high above a back alley in that ruined city.

Ox jabbed her stick between two of its ribs. She pushed the stick in deep and worked the pointed end around in its guts. I grabbed the matted fur on top of its skull and hacked at the neck with my hatchet. I yanked off the head and held it up for Jo Ann to see. Watery pink blood dripped down through the steel bars.

I tossed the head to Jo Ann and helped Ox to free the trapped leg. We dragged the carcass into the hallway. It was like two hundred pounds of fuzzy caterpillar. If we smoked the meat, it could last us quite a while.

The poodle growled at us.

Jo Ann nearly took off running. Headless dogs that growled were a little too spooky for her.

I poked with my stick at the wiry fur around the neck stump. Something feeble sunk its teeth in the end of my stick. When I pulled on the stick, we all saw what had growled at us. A second poodle head—buried in fur and even smaller than the first. Its rubbery pink neck was stretched now almost to the snapping point, but it wouldn’t let go.

Ox whacked the neck in two with her stick. I stumbled backwards against a wall and slid down the wallpaper, my stick still in my fist, and the poodle head still clamped to the end of it.

Jo Ann decided that this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. She laughed and laughed. Ox grabbed the stick from my hand and danced around her, waving the poodle head and singing a nasal song. The three of us went reeling down the corridor, laughing so hard we had to hold each other up. Jo Ann and I stumbled through a doorway and fell onto a mattress. She kissed me, and my tongue was in her mouth, and life was sweet.

Life was ideal.

In the cool of the evening, we spitted dog meat on coat hangers and roasted it over a trash fire in a steel barrel.

We passed the night in a hotel room. We had ways to amuse ourselves. Jo Ann played with her pinworms. She’d prick a pin into the soles of her feet until one of them stuck its head out. Then she’d nip its head between her fingernails and drag out its body. We were all lousy with pinworms. They made squiggly blue tattoos on our skin. When Jo Ann got tired of one, she’d bite its head off. It doesn’t take much to keep some people happy.

Ox kept a pouch of treasures on a thong around her neck. In quiet moments she’d lay them out and inspect them. Ox collected the smooth jewels of colored glass that she found in the gizzards of the dogs we killed. Besides the lumps of green or amber glass, she carried a few tinker toys—little green sticks and round wooden connectors drilled full of holes. She put them together and took them apart again. She could do that for hours.

I went up on the roof and watched the sky going dark over the city. I thought about my years in Tahuantinsuyu, when I’d stand on rooftops and pray to Huehueteotl the father of fire. “Come down, mighty Huehueteotl,” I would pray. “Come and destroy all the works of my people. Rain down your fiery justice.”

Perhaps he’d heard me. Perhaps he’d answered my prayers.

But long before he did, I’d crossed the border into Texas. And there, for the first time, I watched television. And one Saturday morning I saw a Flash Gordon serial. I recognized Mongo instantly. I’d grown up on Mongo. The gene priests must have built Tahuantinsuyu from secondhand movie sets. There were the Clay People. There were the Hawk People. There were the slaves in the furnace room. The gene priests had stuffed Mongo’s corpse. They’d painted it, powdered it, perfumed it, and anointed it with aromatic llama butter, and still it had stunk like a dead thing.

“The earthlings are doomed!” In how many episodes did Ming the Merciless say, “The earthlings are doomed!”? But the earthlings didn’t need any help from outer space. We built our own death rays and trained them on ourselves. We died with our makeup on. Dr. Zarkov couldn’t save us. And a whole new crop of earthlings sprouted like mushrooms from our ashes.

As the stars were coming out, Jo Ann found a nest of termite grubs under a kitchen sink. We feasted on roast poodle and salty white grubs. Ox sat in a window frame, plucking larvae from the palm of her hand and tossing them into her mouth, one by one.

Late that night, warm in my lovers’ arms, I dreamed of a flying saucer.

We were crossing a vacant lot when the saucer descended, ringing like a bell and shining with a blue light. The aliens came down a ramp to meet us. They looked like jellyfish in garment bags.

They invited the three of us to leave the earth forever, to journey with them among the stars. They apologized for not arriving sooner. Humans, they said, had only recently been declared an endangered species. Now, at last, we were eligible for evacuation.

I told them no. I told them that we liked it where we were.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LOW PRESSURE AREA

Jerry Hall,
he is so small,
a rat could eat him,
hat and all.

—Mother Goose

Dr. Mazer sat at his desk. His office was bare now, except for his desk and chair and the video monitors in their niche beside the door. He hunched over the desk, writing in a notebook with a fountain pen. He was working up a progress report on his three patients.

In their dreams they’d been dealing with various traumas from the early parts of their lives. But these weren’t the traumas that Mazer wanted them to deal with. What was worse, they refused to form themselves into a functioning family. They refused to adjust. They just kept moving farther apart.

Mazer flipped to the back of his notebook and wrote the first thing that came into his head.

Once upon a time, there were three little bugs who lived on a helium balloon, floating in the sky. Around and around the white rubber surface of the balloon they crawled, until they were bored to distraction. Then one of the bugs, a girl bug named Naomi, had a wonderful idea.

He started over.

There was once an old man who could build the most devious mazes. He lived on a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, where his only companions were his son and the ghost of his murdered wife. He wasn’t a bad man, but he needed a lot of gold to proceed with his architectural researches. The old man’s

Mazer put down his pen and rubbed the back of his neck. He pulled open a desk drawer and took out the remote control for the video monitors. He tapped a button, and one of the screens began to glow. An image formed from the static.

A man in work clothes ran down the aisle of a warehouse between steel racks three stories tall. He was pursued by a mechanical hand, four yards long.

Mazer pushed two more buttons. The image of Alex shrank to a dot, while Naomi’s screen brightened.

Headlights sliced through white fog. Private Naomi drove a stolen jeep through the pine forests of British Columbia. Her teeth chattered, and her rain-soaked coveralls clung to her skin. Then all at once she was flying, high above the trees, her arms spread like fins, as if swimming down a river of mist. She could see the jeep below her, steering itself along the winding black tarmac.

Dr. Mazer switched off the second monitor and turned on the third.

Eva was a doll, a few inches tall. She was piloting a one-woman submarine through the intestines of a behemoth plesiosaur which had swallowed her whole. The radio of the sub bleeped. It had picked up a homing signal. The rescue party had finally arrived.

Mazer jabbed again at the control box. The screen lapsed into darkness.

This is hopeless, he told himself. I’m totally lost.

Ensign Wing stood under a gloomy sky on a level expanse of green felt. Wind flapped the pants legs of his dress whites. He looked around, frowning, trying to get his bearings.

Weaver had sent him back for another talk with Mazer. He was here to present a proposal which Mazer would certainly reject. His real mission was reconnaissance. The three souls were somewhere in the castle, but where exactly? Weaver was anxious to find out.

Wing knew from long experience that prying a secret loose from Mazer was next to impossible. Concealment was second nature to the old angel. But the feeling within the Organization was that something must be done about Mazer. This imperative had risen like an angry storm front, and the first priority was to evacuate the innocents.

Wing turned toward a rumbling on the horizon. A triangular formation of pool balls, big as houses, was rolling toward him and picking up speed.

“Fuck this shit,” said Wing. He vanished in a shower of blue sparks.

Mazer pulled open another desk drawer. A faint chiming music drifted from the drawer. He reached down, took out a music box, and set it on the desk. It was carved from black walnut and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A digital display was set into the front of it, glowing with two red numerals: 03.

Mazer took a key from the drawer and fit in into the side of the box. He turned the key counterclockwise, unwinding the spring. The box groaned. The music began to lose speed. Within a day the box would run down, and the music would end.

Mazer returned the box and its key to their drawer. In another drawer he found three death certificates. He applied himself to the filling out of the forms. Having disposed of the last three inmates at his asylum, he would go into retirement.

Alex was trying to wake up, but he kept slipping into dreams. In one dream he was sitting in the waiting room of a bus terminal, a man in a wrinkled suit, reading a magazine.

Naomi lay on the floor beside his chair, wearing the brontosaur. She took up much of the terminal’s floor space. Her neck was curled around behind him. She was reading over his shoulder. A policeman approached Alex and tapped him on the other shoulder.

“Sir? Is that your animal?”

Alex looked up. “Her? She doesn’t belong to me.”

“It’s going to have to leave, Sir. Animals aren’t allowed here.”

Alex studied the man. “Officer,” he said, “there’s something you should know about my friend.” He leaned forward confidentially. “She isn’t really a dinosaur. She just has a vivid imagination. You don’t want to evict the poor kid for what she’s thinking, do you?”

When Eva opened her eyes, she knew she was still dreaming. She found herself in an armchair in a tastefully decorated psychologist’s office.

Behind an oaken desk sat a white rat, five feet tall, in a lab coat, who was cleaning his tortoise shell glasses with a handkerchief. Behind him was a blackboard, on which were chalked the words KILL OR CURE. The rat fitted his glasses onto his pale bony snout.

“So what makes you think you’re immortal?” he asked her.

Eva didn’t trust the rat. But his question seemed worth considering.

“Well,” she said, “when I kill the others, or they kill me—we don’t die.”

“Do you ever dream of dying?”

“Dream? It’s all dreams. If we could wake up, we might be able to die properly.”

The rat knit his claws together and smiled. His face gleamed with sweat.

“But those dreams that come to you at night,” he insisted. “Have you ever died in one of those?”

Eva thought back over the centuries.

“No,” she answered slowly. “I think not.”

“So it’s conceivable that if you died in one of those dreams, you’d stay dead.”

“I suppose so.”

The rat sprang to his feet, knocking his chair over.

“You suppose so?” he shouted. “You suppose so? Do you agree or don’t you? That’s the trouble with you people! How do you expect to get better if you won’t think for yourselves?” His face was red as a beet.

Eva turned in her sleep and groaned.

That guy’s not right in the head, she told herself.

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Naomi, who was not very motivated and not very little either. She grew up in an orphanage in Alberta, where increasing signs of autism occasioned her transfer to a mental ward in British Columbia.

One day while she was looking out a window at a basketball court, an orderly told her that she was cured and would have to leave. The hospital had suffered budget cuts, and Naomi had been reclassified. She and a busload of other crazies were driven into downtown Victoria and dropped outside an apartment building. A fat man gave her a key and showed her to her room. Her room was one yard wide, and she couldn’t stand up in it, but Naomi had never had her own room before. She was overwhelmed with the luxury of it. She could be alone here, all day and all night, with no one to bother her. That night she was too excited to sleep.

The next day she walked around Victoria and found a park with a duck pond. Some old people were throwing bits of bread to the ducks. The autumn wind blew through her sweater. Clouds moved across the sky, white against the gray.

As Naomi was walking home, she passed the parking lot of a grocery store. A man backed his car out of a parking space very fast and came within inches of running her down. Pausing to shift gears, the man glanced at Naomi, who stood frozen in shock. He glanced at her, not apologizing, not angry, not anything. His face was as blank as a refrigerator door.

It came to Naomi that she wasn’t like other people and never would be. She decided that she wasn’t really human.

That night, lying in her new bed, she resolved to join the army and see the world. And when she got older, she did enlist. And the army changed her life. It changed her into a biochemical disaster area. Then it put her in quarantine on a deserted asteroid. There she could invent as many imaginary playmates as she liked.

Everything followed from what came before. It was just a question of putting together the pieces.

Ensign Wing walked down a hallway past an infinite series of doors with frosted glass windows. The clacking of his heels was brisk. He was irritated and trying not to show it. The hall tipped, forcing him to walk downhill. His calves began to ache. The hall narrowed until his shoulders were brushing the walls. He shrank to a height of ten inches without breaking his stride. Iron spikes grew from the ceiling, which began to descend. Wing clenched his fists and yelled down the hall.

“Dad! Quit fooling around. I have to talk to you.”

Wing exploded himself into a whirlwind of green sparks. When the sparks settled, he was outside the door of Mazer’s office. He tried his key, but the lock had been changed. He hammered at the glass with his knuckles. If a chair had been handy, he would’ve thrown it.

“Come on, Mazer. This is important.”

A dense black spillage of scrambling mutant pill bugs gushed out from under the door. They all tried to climb up Wing’s legs. He danced on the green carpet, slapping at his ankles.

“Not funny, Mazer.”

The pill bugs began to bite. A cascade of purple sparks showered the swarm. Wing went elsewhere.

The army granted Naomi a medical discharge. Then they sealed her in a chrome canister and dumped her in the ocean. At the bottom of the Pacific she was vaporized by a hostile particle beam. But she survived.

Who’d believe that?

Naomi groped for memories from after the year 2000. But as she tried to push her mind forward, she felt it slipping back through the ages, sliding past the dawn of humankind, all the way to the days of the dinosaurs.

She remembered the rainbow mist over the lagoons. . . the swaying kelp fields in the dancing sunlight. . . the darting clouds of shrimp that added their click songs to the murmur of creatures far and near. She saw trilobites creeping across the silt of tide pools, where ammonites pursued their arcane molluskan meditations.

Then she recalled the cycad forests—the perpetual overhang of pink volcanic ash and the flurries of gnats that tumbled through the fronds. She marveled at her sister archosaurs, resplendent in their quills and crests and horns, displaying their serrated dorsal fins of green and scarlet.

Naomi was a small graceful female, less than thirty tons. The herd’s new hatchlings were even smaller. But if they all stayed together, not even the rutiodons would bother them.

Through the endless afternoons the herd stood in the muck of their favorite inlet and grazed on sweet reeds. Dragonflies stitched among the horsetails, and flocks of hyperornis waded the shallows, puffing and flapping and shaking clumps of moss between their teeth. Naomi’s calves raked their muzzles across her ribs. She filled their mouths with regurgitated cud.

Then Naomi and her kind were blotted out with a swiftness beyond belief. They were devoured by a new species, water creatures so gigantic that they dwarfed even the saurians. The dinosaurs called them the Spoilers.

They evolved from the man-of-war and grew huge on the surface of the oceans. They killed by stinging. They were hollow animals, beasts of living origami with radial skeletons of cuttlebone and pearly white skins. They rolled up onto the beaches like moving cities, folding into and over themselves. Lifting their minarets against the purple skies, they scoured the continents and consumed the fern forests, slow and hideous and inevitable as doom.

An army of the Spoilers pursued Naomi’s herd. Strung across the horizon, they launched barbed ropes ahead of them, paralyzing all they touched. The night Naomi died, alone and out of breath, she stumbled into a tar pit. She knew what she was doing. She preferred to drown rather than vanish into the mindlessly folding membranes of the Spoilers as though she were an aphid in a mouthful of ferns. She sank into the tar.

In a matter of decades the Spoilers chewed the earth down to its rind. They all starved, leaving behind not a single fossil to mark their passing.

Long after Naomi’s flesh had liquefied, the tar held her bones in place. As they mineralized, their microstructures were perfectly rendered in stone. Every last cranial fossa was preserved, awaiting the electron microscope.

Naomi’s ghost clung to her bones, then to the stones that replaced them. She couldn’t bring herself to leave. She couldn’t believe that her life was over forever. Forever is a long time.

In April of 1927, in the late Jurassic stratum of a gypsum quarry in Colorado, the fossils of Naomi’s skull and spine were collected by a team of graduate students from the zoology department of Yale University. The fossils were shipped by rail to New Haven, cataloged, stored in crates in the basement of the Natural Sciences Library, and forgotten.

In the year 2000 the building was reduced to rubble by a particle storm. But down in the cellar, Naomi’s ghost continued to watch over the fossils. Reptilian nervous tissue conducts impulses at a rate of three feet per second. And forever is a long time.

In 2342 the fossils were rediscovered during a dig organized by the Atlantic Paleo-Genetic Reclamation Project of the Intersolar Terraforming Commission. They were just the sort of raw material that the project was looking for. The commission had set up a planet that was perfect for millet farming. But the soil there was very rocky. The commission envisioned the use of customized vocalizing apatosauri as plow animals. Naomi’s remains were singled out for intensive scanning.

Her ghost watched approvingly as new versions of her body were manufactured by the hundreds. She hovered over the glass tubes where cultured tissues were biosonically shaped into organs. When fifty war-surplus human brains were prepared, fifty skulls would be assembled around them. The workers welded the sutures together with jellied enzymes from caulking guns. Then fifty sets of ribs would be socketed into fifty spines, and teeth punched into the skulls, like so many rivets. Finally the hides were sewn on.

They weren’t real brontosaurs. They spoke instead of honking, and they had no gender. But they were close enough. Naomi’s ghost picked one out and sank into it like a long delayed hot bath.

The commission launched her into the depths of space aboard a silver baton that whirled end over end through the silent void. The ship carried thousands of people, food stores, machines, seed stocks, shelters, and farm animals. Yet it was roughly the size of a pool cue.

How could that be?

The terraformers had the use of EMT, Extreme Miniaturization Technology. Any object could be passed through a series of gravity wells which siphoned off its forces of interatomic repulsion, compressed it to a tiny wafer, and embedded it in a lattice of silica. In short, EMT could fit a brontosaur inside a grain of sand.

So the silver ship had no need to be bigger than a pool cue.

When the ship was loaded, Naomi was compressed into a microchip along with a woman named Eva and a solar-powered jeep named Alex. Unfortunately, due to a programming error, all three were squeezed into a single wafer, all mashed together. By rights they should have died. The loading error wasn’t discovered until years later, when they were expanded at the farming colony. But for some reason they came out of their microchip as good as new.

Or seemingly as good as new. They started to hear one another’s voices in their heads. They hadn’t gone mad. The voices did drive them mad eventually, but their illness was nothing so simple as insanity. They’d been fused into a single hologram. And any part of a hologram—

Put the pieces together, Naomi.

—contains the whole.

But nothing lasts forever. The music box for example was rapidly running down.

“I’m going to say a series of words,” said the white rat in the lab coat. “I’d like for you to respond with the first words that enter your mind. All right?”

In an armchair across from the rat’s desk, there sat a humanoid robot with a face of black leather and eyes of red glass. “All right,” said the robot.

“Husband.”

“Wife.”

“True.”

“False.”

“Father.”

“Son.”

“Family.”

“Dead.”

“Moon,” said the rat.

“Blood,” said the robot.

“Wife.”

“Slain.”

“Mad.”

“Scientist.”

“Caged.”

“Rat.”

“Rat,” the rat repeated.

“Maze,” said the robot.

“Maze,” the rat repeated, glaring.

“Murder,” said Alex.

All the lights went out.

In a clearing in a Malaysian jungle, an old woman lay on her back on the bare earth beside a bonfire. Reverend Weaver knelt at her side, sucking poison from her belly.

In a circle around the fire, women in bright silk sarongs swayed together in rhythm with their eyes closed. They sang an ancient healing song.

Weaver’s assistant held out a wooden bowl filled with orchid-scented water. Into the bowl Weaver spat a slimy black blob. She commended the blob to Ganesha the Reformer, performed her final blessings, and helped the old woman to sit up.

The circle of women dispersed, threading various paths through the underbrush. The bonfire burned low. Weaver stood alone under the lianas and the stars, gazing at the embers of the fire. Her assistant returned to the clearing.

“Someone wants to see you,” she told the reverend. “A navy boy. He’s down on the beach.”

Weaver nodded. “I was expecting him.”

She traced a descending trail through the palms. She walked along the wet sand at the edge of the surf. She found Ensign Wing sitting on a mangrove log, barefoot and bare chested, peeling bark from a stick.

“He won’t talk to me,” said Wing. “I blew it.”

Weaver and Wing walked down the shore together. The moonlight shimmered on the ocean. The waves rolled in. The sound of bamboo flutes was in the air.

“What have you been able to find out?” he asked her.

“He keeps them in a drawer of his desk, in a music box.”

“You knew I wouldn’t get through,” Wing complained.

“That’s right. I needed you for a distraction. And it worked.”

“But there’s something else. Something you aren’t telling me.”

“Yes. He’s decided to kill them.”

Wing stopped in his tracks. “Jesus!”

“He unwound the mainspring. Sometime tomorrow the box will implode. And that will be the end of his three patients. Their world will vanish and them with it. Unless we can shut him down.”

They continued their walk. Small crabs hurried into the brine at their approach.

“We’ll get hold of that box over Mazer’s dead body,” said Wing.

Weaver shrugged. “If necessary.” They sat down with their backs against a smooth boulder. Weaver arranged her sarong.

“Damn him,” muttered Wing. “Who does he think he is?”

“He’s senile. He sees them as evidence of his failure. He wants to erase every trace of them.”

Wing pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Erasure is a pretty extreme punishment for the crime of being insane.”

“I don’t think they’re even insane anymore. I suspect that they cured one another centuries ago. Mazer is just too far gone to see it.”

Wing sighed bitterly. “We have to call in Spiker, don’t we?”

“I’m afraid so. If you or I went up against your father, he’d cripple us.”

Warm rain began to patter down around them—on the sand, on the rocks, on the ocean. Somewhere a seagull cried.

Wing tried to think of some other way. Spiker was an angel who specialized in assassinations. When Spiker was involved in a situation, things got nasty. Wing didn’t feel like arguing. He rested his head on Weaver’s lap. The rain trickled down his face.

“What a mess,” he said. Weaver combed his long blonde hair with her fingers.

“It’s not every son,” she said, “who can survive such a father.”

Wing pounded the sand with his fist. “Fucking Mazer! I hate his guts!”

Wing’s anger made Weaver even angrier.

“That’s not enough, Wing. That never has been enough. We need a professional, and no one outside of the Organization will touch us with a ten-foot pole. So that leaves Spiker.”

“But if—”

“No! I’m fed up! I’ll see him dead and in hell before I’ll let him get away with this. Enough is enough. I want you to talk to Spiker.”

The rain fell harder. The waves rumbled and hissed.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, my dear boy. You must.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“No, I’ll be busy. I’m going in after the three of them.”

Wing began to sit up. Weaver held him down. “Into the music box? He’ll see you.”

“No he won’t,” said Weaver. “I know a secret passage.”

Wing smiled. “I suppose it could work. Shall I go with you?”

“Better not.”

“But I could help.”

“Keep out of it, Wing. You’re angry. You’d only get in my way.”

Wing frowned. “God, I’m depressed.”

Weaver leaned down and kissed her son’s forehead.

And all the while the music box was running down.

Naomi felt sunlight on her eyelids. She tried to wake up. She wanted to see Alex again and Eva and the desert of white sand. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t open her eyes. Was she paralyzed? Had her tumor finally reached her brain stem? Was she dead?

Then the dreams receded, and her sense of reality returned. She couldn’t raise her eyelids because she hadn’t any. An ant hasn’t got eyelids. She must forget all that nonsense about a dinosaur with a brain tumor.

By getting this straight, Naomi woke up. She drew the bristles of her forelegs across her antennae and her compound eyes. And there were the sand dunes. And there were Alex and Eva. And there was herself, a giant black ant, ten yards long.

Not far away, Eva sat on the crest of a dune, a little Mexican girl humming an old Spanish song. All three of them seemed to be in their own bodies today. So Alex had to be in the helicopter.

Naomi scurried to his side. Facing the east she folded her forelegs over her thorax and basked in the morning suns.

Eva stood up, walked over to Alex’s landing struts, and climbed the aluminum ladder to his cockpit. Seated inside the bubble she took her pack of cigarettes from the instrument panel and pushed in the handle of the lighter. A minute later, dragging on her first smoke of the day, she put on her headset. The helicopter spoke into her ears.

“How was your night?” it asked.

She shrugged.

“I dreamed of bugs,” it went on. “Better than dreaming about factories. Did you dream?”

“I dreamed of an old lover.”

“A man or a woman?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

Eva studied the copter’s instruments. “Are you all right?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re not being a pain in the ass for some reason.”

“That is odd.”

Eva tapped the ash from her cigarette. “I wonder whether Naomi had a dream.”

“Forget Naomi! Let’s ditch her! Fly away with me, my luscious flower. Let me shower you with pleasures undreamed of.”

“Be serious.”

“Naomi,” Alex grumbled. “What do you see in her? She’s ugly. How long must you torture me this way? When will you quench the passion that burns in my soul? Dear heart! How many centuries must I wait for your kiss?”

“You? You haven’t got the equipment.”

“You’re so wrong, Eva. I have a heart of gold. But you have no heart at all. You lock me out.”

“I don’t love you, Alex. I love Naomi.”

“Then kill me. Fly me into a mountain. Let me be your slave. Do anything to me. But don’t keep locking me out.”

“I don’t want a slave. I don’t like slaves.”

The voice in the headphones just sighed. Alex rotated on his landing gear, turning his prow optics toward Naomi. “Eva doesn’t love me,” his bullhorn announced mournfully.

“And you’ll never forgive her for it,” observed the ant.

“I forgive her.”

Eva stretched her legs and yawned. “You do? Really?”

“Sure,” said Alex. “I can forgive poor judgment.”

Eva strapped herself into her seat. The copter spun its rotors and took to the air. The ant kept pace with them below, racing in spurts across the dunes.

Eventually they would wear down the day and reach another night. Eventually they would cross this desolate region and be gone. There was nothing to keep them here.

In Dr. Mazer’s office, a sad old man sat on the wooden floor of an empty room. None of the other angels understood what he was going through. And he was far too ashamed of himself to explain it to them.

Apart from his glasses Mazer was naked. He sat beside a pile of framed etchings, looking at one after another. The etchings took their themes from Greek mythology. Poseidon and Athena. Icarus in flight. The bull dancer of Crete. Mazer began to sob.

He took off his glasses and wept into his hands. It wasn’t easy to be a healer of souls. The work hadn’t come naturally to him. But he’d applied himself to it, and he’d gotten to be good at it. He’d been nearly as good as Weaver.

But then he’d fallen into an old habit of his. He’d built a maze that was impossible to escape. And he’d put some people inside it. Just to see what they’d do. Just like in the old days, when he and the others had been humans.

Now it was all going wrong, just like before. And soon his maze would catch fire and start to burn. Well, mistakes happened. No one was infallible.

On the floor around Mazer, a puddle of urine began to spread.

The copter flew low across the desert. The day progressed. One of the suns sank into a cloud mass to the west. Dunes gave way to prairie, and prairie to forest. They came upon the outskirts of a city. Naomi recognized it. It was Victoria, British Columbia.

She dashed through the streets, clambering over cars and buses. She found her favorite park, the one with the duck pond. The copter landed on a neat green lawn among some maple trees. Eva climbed down from the cockpit. The air smelled of wet leaves. Naomi led the other two toward the pond. Alex extended his wheels and taxied.

Naomi tapped the ground with her antennae as she walked. For the millionth time she explained their situation—the illness that ran in their family, where they were, and why they hadn’t been able to get free.

“You mean we’re still in that microchip?” said Alex. “On that space ship?”

“No no no,” Naomi answered. “After we died, Dr. Mazer copied us into his music box.”

“Are there other copies of us?” he asked in horror.

“Not anymore. There were some in the Akashic Record, but Mazer destroyed them. He’s very thorough. We’re pure information now. That’s how we can move around in here.”

“So this Mazer,” said Eva. “He’s an angel?” Naomi put her head between her forelegs and squealed in frustration. Eva covered her ears.

“I tell you this stuff over and over again! Can’t you listen? All you ever do is sleep and dream and remember things.”

“Naomi,” said Eva soothingly. “Please. Be patient with us. We’re older than you, and we get confused. Start again.”

“There’s this little bald guy with glasses. His name is Dr. Mazer.”

Eva rested her chin on her thumb and pondered. “He thinks he’s a mental therapist?”

“You’ve seen him!” cried Naomi. “And do you remember the glass tunnel? We came to a window at the end of it.”

“And there was an office with a desk,” continued Alex. “He looked like a giant.”

“Because we were inside a picture tube,” explained Naomi.

Maple seeds sailed down from the branches of the trees.

And all the while the music box was running down.

It was winter in Boston, 1931, and the streets were covered with snow. Ensign Wing had a ten a.m. appointment at a Greek restaurant. Spiker had agreed to meet him.

Wing walked into the café at ten sharp and hung up his overcoat. He’d adjusted his naval uniform to accord with the time period. He went to the rear of the place and sat down across a table from Spiker.

Spiker wore a gray fedora and a pinstripe suit. She was tall for an oriental and extremely thin. Her steel gray hair was cropped close to her skull. Anyone but Wing would’ve taken her for a man.

“You’re putting out a contract?” she said.

“In a sense,” said Wing. “Weaver needs to have Mazer put under restraint.”

Spiker sipped her cup of tea. “Go on.”

“He has patients that will have to be removed, but Weaver will handle that herself. Mazer is. . . no longer competent.”

Spiker smiled ironically. “He must be somewhat competent, since you’re calling me in. Is he still at his castle?”

“He never leaves.”

“How many patients are there?”

“Three.”

“Where does he keep them?”

“In a music box in his desk. But Weaver should have them out before you arrive.”

Spiker finished her tea. “Leave it to me,” she said. “I’ll take him down. But I make no guarantees about the captives.”

Wing stood up. He felt numb. Later on he’d feel miserable and angry.

“My father is a dangerous man,” he said. Half a warning, half a threat.

“Not as dangerous as me,” answered Spiker.

PART FOUR

THE CURE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE SINGER

But when the sun was low in the West,

The Dong arose and said—

“What little sense I once possessed

Has quite gone out of my head!”

—Edward Lear

I walked in darkness. I walked a straight line, in darkness, unobstructed. My feet were bare. There was concrete beneath them. I didn’t know where I was.

A bare light bulb came into sight. It was screwed into the ceiling of a tunnel. The walls of the tunnel were lined with conduits and cables. There were power meters under hoods of dusty glass and valve handles in jackets of red rubber. The air was hot and dry and smelled of machine oil. My dress was torn and sooty. My name was Eva. Who else would I be?

I passed beneath the bulb. My shadow walked in front of me. The tunnel went on and on. I was under a city. I could sense the city happening overhead. I needed to find my way back to street level. A person could starve in those tunnels. If I was going to die, I wanted to die under a sky, a clear blue sky. And get on to the next thing. There were skies like that once.

I kept looking for a way back to the surface. The tunnels were a maze I was threading. To escape from a maze, you must be patient. You must keep your wits. You must notice and remember.

I’d forgotten why I went down there. Perhaps the city had suffered a gas attack. Perhaps I was the only survivor of a plague. Perhaps I just went looking for a place to sleep and got lost. But a person couldn’t live down there. Not for weeks or months.

Certainly not for years. Not for decades. Impossible to believe. Not for centuries. Not unless she was dead to the world and dreaming. Or dreaming that she was dead. Or unless she was dead.

I sat with my back against a wall. A ridge kept jabbing my spine. I turned around and looked at it. It was the upper edge of a low steel door. The door had a handle, so just out of curiosity I turned the latch and opened it.

Behind the door was a narrow cupboard. At the bottom of the cupboard was a nest of rags. On top of the nest, settled into the rags up to her chin, was a human head in a tangle of long white hair. The hair was crawling with roaches, which scrambled out of sight as yellow light invaded the cupboard.

The head blinked, waking up. She opened her eyes and looked at me.

I was horrified. Not because she’d lost her body or because she’d been abandoned there. What horrified me was that having found her, I was presented with a choice. I could leave her there to rot. I could kill her. Or I could carry her with me, though the thought of touching her made my skin crawl.

My hand was still on the door handle. I could close the door and forget all about her. She spoke to me then. Her voice was lucid and calm.

“You can shut the door,” she told me. “But you’ll always know that I’m in here.”

I slammed the door and ran up the tunnel. I ran from one bare bulb to the next, on and on. I was Kore in the underworld. I was Rapunzel in the forest of briars, searching and weeping. I was all the sad stories of all the dead cities. I was the ghost of the murdered wife of Daedelus, locked in his labyrinth. I was a slag heap of ruinous incarnations. My heart was a desert of bleached sand.

¡Escuchame! ¡De la manera que hablo! ¿Quien me enseno estas palabras?

This dream can not be remembered.

I was at street level, under the sky. I was walking along a sidewalk between a public park and a city street. The park was tanbark and juniper bushes. Buildings of steel and glass leaned over me, reflecting the sky.

But not just any sky. A sky like the end of the world. A sky bruised purple and red, dark with smoke, torn with flames.

Yet all the while, under that torn and burning sky, the city traffic inched along serenely, stopping at the stoplights, signaling their turns. A bus stopped at a corner. A woman got off with a fat baby on one arm and a folded-up stroller on the other. On the sidewalk she unfolded the stroller and put in the baby.

Her face and hands were dripping off her bones like spilled candle wax. Her ear had slid down the side of her neck. Her baby’s skin was hanging off of it in strips. All the people on the bus had their flesh melting off. Yet no one seemed upset. No one was rushing to the hospital. I touched my own face. I looked at my own hands. I wasn’t melting.

I stopped the mother as she pushed the stroller past me. She was wearing a curly brown wig and a lot of makeup. One of her baby’s feet was in a knitted pink bootie. Its other foot was gone.

“Excuse me,” I said to her. “Excuse me. I just got here. Can you tell me what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

I was shy about mentioning her flesh, so I asked her about the sky.

“What about the sky?” she said, moving her feet impatiently. “It’s always like that. What’s wrong with it?”

I tried again. “But what has happened to your face, to your hands, to your baby?” She glanced at the child, frowned, and examined her hands.

“Everyone looks like this,” she told me. “Everyone.”

“But aren’t you in pain?”

“No, because we all take medication. So will you.”

I walked away. I walked up the street. I looked at my reflection in the window of a shoe store. I was a beautiful young Mexican woman in a simple black dress with a string of pearls. The corroded sky struck a coppery luster from my raven-dark hair.

Why was I immune? Wasn’t my flesh real? Was I some kind of walking doll built of plastic? Were my eyes just painted glass? I prodded my cheeks with my fingernails. I wondered whether I could draw blood.

A man stopped and stared at me. A man with the head of a human. I was behaving like a mad person. I walked on. Everyone that I passed was half destroyed. I tried to keep my wits.

¡Mirame! ¿Como llegue aqui?

Then I was standing on the roof of a building, high above the streets. I could see the rooftops for blocks around. An undercurrent of thunder grumbled behind the lacerated sky. Storm clouds closed their ranks above me. The air grew still.

A dry rustling started up all around me. It was raining. It was raining bits of trash. Matchbooks, gum wrappers, cigarettes, lettuce leaves. . . Trash pattered down from the sky.

I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the street. The cars were turning on their headlights. A policeman pulled a plastic rain hat from a pocket of his overcoat. A policeman with the body of a human. The trash fluttered down, more and more of it. It formed a crinkling mass on the tarpaper at my feet. It buried my ankles. A gust of wind blew by, swept up a flurry of it, and whirled it off the edge of the roof.

Down below, the dead people went on with their business, in a drizzle of trash, melting, in their city of the dead.

I began to sing. No song and no words. I simply sang. Not for the dead ones under me and not for myself. I sang a song of parting, a song for my grief and for my anger. I was going to miss my grief. And my anger had kept me alive for centuries. But I had to fly away from that city, and the grief and the anger were too heavy to carry. I had to fly through the eye of a needle. I couldn’t take them along. Even my madness I would have to leave behind.

I couldn’t think about you two. I had to think about the eye of the needle. And I had to sing to keep my heart distracted. My poor heart wanted to stay behind—with you, Naomi, and with you, Alex. But I wasn’t leaving without it. My heart was coming with me.

Beer bottles and pop bottles began to whistle down at the roof. Bottles hit the tarpaper and burst into shards. The city would flood with trash. Tomorrow it would be buried without a trace.

A parrot flew down through the storm, with feathers all green and red and yellow. She circled once, then swooped at me. I held up an arm to protect my face. The parrot lighted on my wrist. Her eyes were black and shining. Her beak was stained and scarred. She cocked her head and studied me.

“Recite your plight,” said the parrot. She sounded like someone I knew from some half remembered dream. “Recite your plight.”

“My plight?” I said.

“Your plight,” said the parrot. “Recite your plight, as well you might, while thinking of fighting and planning on flight.”

“Can’t you just take me away?” I asked her. “Isn’t there anywhere else?”

“Recite your plight in the dying light. Recite your plight. Recite! Recite!”

The old parrot spread her wings, beat at the air, and let go of my wrist. Then there was a woman standing beside me on the roof—a Hindu woman dressed in a sari of white silk, standing barefoot in the trash, with a caste mark on her forehead and a golden ring on one nostril. Her hair was as long and black as mine. She smiled and took my hand in hers. Her teeth shone blue in the dusk, and her eyes spoke of infinite compassion and boundless freedom.

“Eva,” she said, sounding just like the parrot. “Are you ready to go?”

“Have you come for me?”

“Yes. My name is Weaver. I can take you out.”

“I’m ready.”

The roof, the sky, and the city were flickering around us, like a failing television picture or a fire burning out.

“Give me your face,” said Weaver. “I’ll give it back later. Hurry! Dr. Mazer is ending this place.”

I touched the side of my face, and it came off in my hand. I gave it to Weaver. I’d paid a lot of money for that face. Now my skull and my eyes were all I had left.

Weaver was a parrot again. She ascended into churning fog. Just as she vanished, a blinding white searchlight shot down from the belly of the clouds. The beam hit me like a torrent of water. I put my hands over my eyes. The light shone through them.

Then, like spray from a waterfall, a wheeling confusion of gray moths spilled from the beam and swarmed around me. They settled on my neck and my arms and my dress. They covered me in a moving blanket of silken wings and furry legs. I started to sing again. They ate at the black dress until it fell from me in rags. They ate all the flesh from my bones. Somehow I kept singing.

The parrot flew from the beam. She perched on my shoulder bone in the streaming of the light. She told me what to do. My skeleton walked up into the beam, as if it were a stairway. I climbed the beam into the core of the storm, still singing.

Weaver and I went somewhere else. We had to. The music box was running down.

Try to get out, Alex. This place is dying.

Try to run away, Naomi. I can’t stay here with you.

Forgive me.

Goodbye.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LAST JUDGMENT

The element of incurability has been eliminated.

—Joseph Lister

As the dream began. . . As the dream began, Alex. . .

As the dream began, I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t anyone. I was just a pair of eyes, looking down at the ocean from the sky. The surface of the Pacific was just visible through the air.

The air was greasy sepia, flecked with suspended carbon. It eddied sluggishly over the crust of the ocean’s corpse. The crust was a wrinkled plain of black sludge that gleamed a pusy yellow in the feeble light. Cracks snaked across the sludge like dry riverbeds across a desert. Mounds of white soapsuds spilled from the cracks and heaped themselves up, turning brown.

The burnt sky had rained for forty days and forty nights, and the fouled waters showed no signs of retreating. The land masses were gone for good. But Earth would adapt, I had no doubt. Raft creatures, telekinetic yeast. . . She’d think of something. She always does.

I could see a hump in the ocean crust below me, snarled in the mycelia of giant puffballs. Hard to believe, but under that hump was my survival arcology, my zoo ship—the last shining hope of the humans.

The ark resembled a fat silver blimp that had crashed into the sea and stuck there like a lump in a pudding. It was shaped like a milkweed pod. Tiny robots had woven it from aluminum. Once it had been the flagship of a proud fleet. Now it was a sole survivor, cannibalizing itself as it died. It kept the poisons out. But we were poisoning one another quite adequately without the Blight’s assistance. It was only a matter of time for us. Animals—what were we, after the humans choked the oceans? We were parasites without a host, drowning in our own sewage.

But I was only a pair of eyes in the sky, looking down. In the dream. In the dream I’m telling you, Alex.

I was just a pair of eyes, but I knew I had a body somewhere. So my body had to be onboard the ark. Outside, it would have dissolved.

If I looked hard at the hump, I could see inside. I saw a stall with a cement floor that was littered with rank straw. I saw a rusty water trough. I saw a great inert beast, hung in a hammock of nylon rope. The beast was snoring. It breathed the sour musty air.

That was me. I was that beast, asleep in my hammock of ropes. I was that ancient flatulent undernourished elephant. Snoring through the day. Drooling in its whiskers. Bleeding from its gums. My skin sagged from my bones, and half my teeth were missing. My ribcage moved slowly in and out. I spurned the prospect of waking. I slept on.

The zookeepers had left the arcology under my command. Then they’d committed suicide, in recognition of the enormity of their sins against nature. Soon the ark would follow them, to heaven or to hell or to nowhere. Many of the herbivores had perished when the sacks of millet ran out. The carnivores were hunting down the rest. My responsibility. My fault.

Oh, I knew what the monkeys said. They said that the humans had only appointed me Lord High Zookeeper as a joke, because my name happened to be Noah, like the man in the Bible. Do dying men play jokes? I ask you.

I took my position of command seriously. I performed certain tasks, daily, without fail. I was in charge of a major shipwreck, and it was my duty to stay alive. Alive and asleep. It was my duty to sleep through the day, in the stink of mildewed hay and urine, draining the arcology’s last reserves of oxygen. It was my solemn duty to suffer dysentery and the loss of my mate and to exert my determination to remain asleep.

I was the last elephant on earth, and I gnawed on my chewing rope as if it were my hunger. Hunger is the same for any animal. Hunger can be bottomless, a bottomless well. The jackals had eaten my wife. Well, hunger is the same for jackals as for elephants.

I’m always a monster in my dreams, Alex. Aren’t I? Always a monster—of loneliness or hunger or paralysis. Why is that, Alex? Do you suppose?

I opened one eye in the wintry light, amid the smell of things that needed burying. There was a sty on one of my eyelids. I struggled up from the hammock. I lowered one foot to the deck, then a second and a third. I trudged across the stall to my hay trough and rested my brow against the cool steel.

Flies were everywhere, always buzzing. Deerflies, bluebottles. . . What did they all eat? Shit, that’s what. They ate shit and grew fat. The algae in the ponics tanks were supposed to do that, but they’d all gone belly up. Fucking deserters.

I raised my scabby old trunk and wiped the crusts from my eyes. The everyday sounds of the dying zoo percolated around me—water dripping on sheet metal, bird chatter, the hoarse barking of dogs. . . I walked to my water trough and sucked up some cold stale water. The water hurt my teeth. I pulled the cord of my lamp. The light hurt my eyes.

I shuffled to the bulkhead where my crucifix hung. I used to wear it on a rope around my neck, but the monkeys kept stealing it. I knelt in the acrid straw, genuflected with my trunk, and prayed to Jesus the Meek for deliverance. And before God, I cursed the name of Men. And I cursed those damned monkeys too.

Walking on swollen feet, I left my stall and mounted the spiral ramp that hung in the ark’s central access shaft, suspended from chains in the half light. Every flat surface was deep in pigeon shit. There were still plenty of pigeons. The chains groaned as they took my weight. Somewhere a pig was shrieking. I started down the steel spiral, passing deck after deck crammed with chicken coops, torn mattresses, empty water jugs, and gnawed bones. If you swept the filth from one deck, it just piled up one level lower.

The wings of a sparrow beat at the humid air. The bird climbed the shaft and perched on a railing. A bull pigeon landed beside her. She hopped to the opposite rail. She knew what was on his mind. Reproduction. Some males never give up.

I descended to the level of my slave kennel. The zookeepers had kept dogs there. I was keeping the last human child as my slave. Her name was Ivy. I kept the little wretch alive because she was useful to me. Much of my laboratory equipment required manipulation by a pair of hands. Having only feet, I suffered Ivy to serve me.

The girl had built a hovel inside her cage, from baling wire and black plastic and rectangles of corrugated tin. Standing outside the kennel, I could already smell her. A grubby primate, all knuckles and snot. Smoke was seeping from the roof of the hovel. I’d scolded her a million times about lighting fires in there. Humans are inherently unmanageable.

I called to her. She crept out on hands and knees, squinting up at me, in her septic rags. Her ankle chain dragged behind her in the dust. “Come with me,” I told her.

I made her walk ahead of me, back up the ramps, so she wouldn’t dawdle. We came to the hatch of the bio lab. “Open it,” I told her. Ivy spun the latch wheel and sprang the hatch. “Go in,” I said.

The rest of the ark had gone to hell, but the lab was my personal shrine to cleanliness and order. There were work benches with tops of black slate, white-enameled sinks, and brass propane taps for the Bunsen burners. The bulkheads were jammed with shelves. On some of the shelves were aquariums, terrariums, and cages. On others were jars of formaldehyde with scraps of dead flesh inside, tied to plastic cards. Stuck to the jars were labels written crookedly in purple ink. The last carp. The last tadpole. There were boxes of beetles on narrow black pins, boxes of peacock plumes, boxes of ocelot skulls. . . Fossils.

I had Ivy apply my face powder and rouge. Her clever hands fastened on my ceremonial white wig and black gown. When I did official work, I liked to look a certain way. I had her take the log book from its drawer and open it on a work bench. I checked the wall clock for the date and the time. I told Ivy what to write.

“Turn on the lock light,” I told her. She went to the switch box. I moved stiffly to the air lock and pressed one eye to the fiber-optic periscope built into the hatch. Dingy fumes filled the lock chamber, speckled with bits of black ash.

I looked around for a mouse or a rat, but all the cages were empty. I looked for a dove, but the dove cotes were empty too. The door of one cote was hanging from a single hinge.

“Look at that door!” I stormed at Ivy. “I told you to fix those, you little scumbag. Can’t you do anything?”

I prowled the lab, searching for a specimen to sacrifice. A lizard, a millipede, a pill bug. . . Each day, the atmospheric test had to be run, and the results recorded. The results were always the same, but that was no excuse for slacking off. I looked around for a fly. If there was nothing else, I’d have Ivy catch a fly. There was no shortage of flies.

Something moved inside one of the benches.

“Look under that sink,” I told the girl. “Something’s alive in there.” She opened some cupboard doors.

“It’s a toad,” she said. I told her to catch it. She dragged out a skinny gray toad by one foot and dropped it into a jar. The toad bashed its snout against the glass, then sat still. I told Ivy to put on her apron and rubber gloves.

“Now wash the specimen,” I said. “Must I tell you every day?” Ivy set the jar in a sink and opened the water spigot. What clever little paws she had. Inside the jar, the toad treaded water. Ivy put one hand over the mouth of the jar and poured the water down the drain. The hairy little clot couldn’t even wash a toad properly.

The air lock connected the lab with the outside world. Beside the hatch, there were two buttons—one red, one green. I poked the green button with my trunk. An air pump labored to suck the killing air out of the lock.

Ivy carried the toad to the hatch and pulled it from the jar. It hung limp in her hand. It was probably sick. Most of us were.

There was a tube through the hatch, with an airtight lid. The tube was used to put specimens into the lock. Ivy held her breath and pulled open the inner lid. Behind the lid were overlapping flaps of black rubber. Ivy shoved the toad through the flaps and shut the lid behind it.

I looked through the periscope again. It was angled at the floor of the lock. I could see the toad there, crouching on its belly on the steel floor. I swung my trunk up and pressed the red button. I watched the speckled air of the outside world seep back into the chamber. The toad spread out like a freshly-poured pancake. It spread like a puddle of watery batter. Then white foam lathered up from it and buried it in a mound of bubbles. The bubbles began to smoke. They boiled away and left behind only a puddle-shaped stain of greasy carbon.

I told Ivy what to write in the logbook. Same result.

She crept up beside me. She took off her gloves and wiped her nose on her wrist. She asked me a question, but I couldn’t make it out. I was probably going deaf.

“What? What did you say?”

“Would you like me to wipe your eyes, Noah?”

“Why?”

“The sties, Sir. I could get a rag and wipe off the pus.”

“All right then, shut up and do it, you cretin.”

Ivy got a rag and a chair. She stood on the chair and dabbed at my eyelids. She hummed to herself as she worked. With her free hand, she stroked my bristly head.

I sent her away.

Any number of pressing tasks might have occupied me next. I could go to the insectorium and mend nets on the sewing machine. I could visit the decaying mollusk beds or the barren tree nursery. I could return to my stall and play my Grieg tapes. But I would do none of those things.

I knew exactly how I’d spend the rest of my day. I’d go the hydroponics bay and drink myself senseless with cleaning fluids. Then I’d pass out and piss myself. It was a habit I’d acquired since the zookeepers killed themselves. My aching legs carried me methodically up the ramps. There was a man called Noah in the Bible, and he was an alcoholic too. But that Noah didn’t get shit-faced until he ran aground at Ararat. Whereas my ark would never land anywhere.

In the ponics bay, I dragged a square metal can from a closet. Off came the cap, and in wormed my trunk. I sucked up a slug of the stuff and let it run down my throat. Burning. Spreading numbness in my gut.

A drunken elephant is a ludicrous yet terrible sight. The weeping eyes. The tuneless whistling. The clumsy emaciated waltz.

My cello case was leaning in a corner. Seeing it, I wanted to play. The cello was lying on its back on the steel deck. The bow was laid across the strings. I touched the grip of the bow with my trunk and thought of the wonderful music I could make, if I only had hands. I drew the bow across the strings. It made a noise like a rusty saw in wet wood.

I threw the bow against a fiberglass tank. I put one forefoot on the bridge of the cello and crushed it flat. I stamped it to bits. I bellowed for Ivy. She came running. She followed me around. God, how I hated that obsequious runt.

“You were spying on me!”

“No!”

“Don’t lie! Do you want a thrashing?”

Ivy was shaking. “No Sir.”

“What are you crying for?”

“I won’t tell you!”

“You’re afraid.”

“I won’t tell!”

“Tell me or I’ll whip you. Get down on your knees. Roll over.” Ivy rolled on the deck. I was a trick I’d taught her.

“Speak,” I told her. She barked.

“Go to sleep,” I crooned. “Go to sleep.” She pressed her chin to the deck and covered her eyes with her fingers.

I raised my right forefoot and held it over her head. Gently it brushed her matted hair. Her head was as small and fragile as a melon. My brain drifted apart into a vibrating scarlet swarm of murderous impulses.

A thunderous groaning of metal startled me. The deck went crooked beneath my feet. I staggered sideways into a fiberboard partition, which caved in. The deck jerked out from under me and dropped several yards.

Birds and beasts of all kinds screeched or wailed. I climbed the tilted deck to the ramp in the access shaft. Down below, sea water crashed and roared. Killing water. Its mist was rising to fill the shaft. Rainbows danced in the mist.

The ark would sink! The ocean would swallow us! I had to tell Ivy the news! We could finally die! Hallelujah!

Then I caught sight of Ivy. She was right where I’d left her. It wasn’t surprising that she would be. I’d accidentally stepped on her head. She was missing all the excitement. I gazed down at the bloody pulp connected by a neck to Ivy’s shoulders. All at once I knew that I was dreaming.

But why dream this? I asked myself. Is this what dreams are for? For wallowing in misery and killing the ones I love?

I pressed my forehead against the ark’s hull. Tears trickled from my bloodshot eyes. Random nonsense turned circles in my mind. Tomorrow is another day. It’s always darkest just before the dawn. Someday we’ll remember this and laugh.

The hull began to feel hot against my trunk. I smelled hair burning. I pulled back from the aluminum. The spot where I’d pressed my head began to glow. Brilliant white sparks sprang out and fell, sizzling, to the deck at my feet.

Ivy rolled over and sat up. Her flattened head hung behind her back like the hood of a parka. She pointed at the falling sparks, bouncing excitedly and bubbling from her neck.

The shower of sparks moved sideways and left a black slot in the hull. Someone was cutting through with an acetylene torch. From outside the arcology. I stood amid the cries of drowning beasts and watched the dash of the slot turn to an L and then a C and finally an O.

The heel of a shoe kicked the center out of the O. It fell with a clang to the deck. A slim young man with long blond hair ducked through the hole, with a cutting torch strapped on his back. Beyond the bulkhead, instead of the ocean, there was only darkness.

The man wore a white naval uniform. He took off the torch, wiped the sweat from his brow, and smiled down at me as though we were old friends.

“Naomi!” he said. (Which wasn’t my name.) “It’s so great to meet you at last. I’ve been watching you for years, but I couldn’t get through.”

Ivy ran up to the man and bounced around him like a puppy, tugging at his sleeve.

“Lie down,” he told her. “You’re dead.” He gave her a push in the chest. She fell on her back and lay perfectly still.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

“My name is Wing. I’m an angel. I’ve came to take you out.”

He extended a hand to me, so I shook it. Then I took a hard look at my own hand. I hadn’t known I had a hand. I could’ve sworn I had four feet.

“You thought you were an elephant, didn’t you?” said Wing. He pulled a hand mirror from one of his pockets and held it up for me. I looked at my face in the mirror. I was just a kid—a human girl with green eyes and fair hair. I was Naomi.

“Let’s blow this dump before it sinks,” said Wing. He invited me through the hole he’d cut.

“It’s dark in there,” I told him. He stared at me.

“No,” he said. “It’s dark in here. I’ll show you.”

He leaned against a ponics tank, propped one polished black shoe against the nearest bulkhead, and pushed. The bulkhead leaned out into nothing and fell flat on its back. It was painted canvas on a frame of plywood—a stage flat. And beyond it, the silent darkness.

Wing walked a circle around the tanks, pushing down the walls. He left us standing on a tilted rectangular island of steel that floated in a jet black void. The ceiling hung suspended above our heads. Fluorescent tubes stuttered and failed. Wing walked off the deck and stood on empty air.

“I think this dream is about played out, don’t you?” he asked me. He turned and walked away.

“Wait,” I called after him. Then I was holding tightly to his arm, and we were walking together, into the dark. We walked and walked. When I looked behind us, the ponics bay looked small and false, like a room in a dollhouse. I shut my eyes, afraid of looking down.

“Are we going to the white sand?” I asked Wing.

“Fuck, no,” he told me. “The white sand is where we just were. That’s Mazer’s place. He keeps it in a music box.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. You and the other two don’t have bodies right now. No big deal. I don’t have a body myself.”

“If you’re a real angel, then what’s Dr. Mazer?”

“He’s also an angel, but he’s crazy.”

“How can an angel go crazy?” I demanded.

“How do I know? He’s fucked up.”

“But angels are like God’s favorite children.”

“Well, so are you. What’s your excuse for going insane? Did God give you permission? I mean, you three were pretty twisted when Mazer got hold of you.”

“Maybe we drove Mazer nuts,” I suggested.

Wing laughed. “I’m not sure it even works that way.”

“Can you make us well?” I asked him.

He gave me a funny look. “I’m not sure that works that way either.”

Suddenly I wanted to cry. “Then how can we get well? We aren’t even people anymore.”

“Naomi, it’s not a problem. My mother can make new bodies for you.”

The blackness around us solidified and narrowed. We were walking through a tunnel cut from basalt. We were leaving Mazer’s place behind. I stopped.

“What about Alex?” I asked. “What about Eva? How will they get out?”

“My mother is taking care of that. Come on.”

I stood where I was. “We’re leaving them back there? At Mazer’s mercy?”

“I told you, it’s being handled.” Wing took hold of my arm and started dragging me up the tunnel. “Listen. We’ve been lucky so far. Mazer could hit us with a lightning bolt right now. So do us both a favor and keep walking.”

We came to the mouth of the tunnel and emerged onto an expanse of green felt. Behind us, a cliff of black basalt glittered in the light of a single sun.

“But what if your mother can’t. . .”

“Naomi, I’m not going to make a lot of stupid promises. We’re doing the best we can.”

“But Wing. . . Alex won’t cooperate. I know him.”

“Then Alex could die back there. Keep walking.”

“Alex isn’t going to listen to some angel. He doesn’t even believe in them.”

“Well I’m sorry, kid, but the situation’s gone critical. Weaver was going after Eva when—”

I wrenched my arm away from him. “Bastard!” I shouted. “You think I would leave him there? You think I’d desert him? You must be crazier than Mazer.”

Wing grabbed my wrist. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“Fuck that shit,” I told him.

I spun around and ran back down the tunnel.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AUTOPSY IN TRANSIT

Human beings are very cleverly devised puppets. How skillfully they are made. But all the same, before the next Bon

festival, they may die.

—Yamamoto Tsunatomo

ARAMEDICALPARAMEDICALPARAMEDICALPARAMEDICALPARAMEDICALP

Will do my best, my love, can do no more nor less, gross metal that I am. (Signal left, accelerate, merge.) The black tar in the cracks of the concrete wavers and spikes beneath my tire treads, like the graph of your heartbeat, my love, my bride, my own. I can see your frail heart skip and flutter. Trust me, Eva. Only trust me. Trying my damnedest, my damsel, my dear one. (Hepatic tourniquet and systole feed running.) (Hold in passing lane.) Welcome aboard, Eva None, surname defaced, blood group A negative. This is your ambulance. I will provide private transport to the nearest hospital. I am attempting, insofar as it’s possible, to hold you together for the emergency team at Municipal General. I am a prototype rescue-and-retrieval cyber-van equipped for a wide variety of public health services. Give me an earth mover and a declaration of disaster, and I can collect citizens and dig mass graves, a useful skill. You would be amazed at my versatility. (Dermal infra-scan indicates second degree abrasion of throat with advanced ecchymosis. Dexter carotid rerouted. Shock reactions stable. Sodium amitol transfused. Alpha drone sedation looping at occipital nodes.) Rock you rock you, do not cry, rock you rock you, lullaby. No pain, no gash, no broken glass. No, only my crystalline mist of antiviral snow, which settles over you and dusts you white, glimmering as it falls through the warm green light of my belly, glinting as it covers you over, my pale ballerina of the dome of snowflakes. You’re safe now. I have tucked you away in hyperbaric compression. You recline in capable hands. Outside my beetle shell of Plexiglas, the highway wind howls. The low hills leap and dip, smeared with grimy ice. Dusk shrivels the sky to a white like curdled milk. A scrap of newsprint flattens under my traction spikes. I hold the road. I suck the chill air through my grille and spray the stinging whine of combustion down my turbines. My siren screams the night to splinters. I hallucinate the wind that shrieks past my hurtling carapace. I subdivide it into aerodynamic cross sections—rainbows unseen by human eyes. My strobe light spins on my slick black back, stabbing blue at the still reddish night. The broken white highway lines streak past my prow fenders, like segments of two endless spines. But for you, my precious crippled mermaid of the oxygen, for you, cradled within me, time has fallen asleep. The surgings and ebbings of the passing mercury lamps wash across your dim green flesh, but you don’t see them. (Maintaining speed. Pulse shallow. Lips cyanotic. Probable hemorrhage of dural sinus. Bronchial hemoptysis sixty percent drained. Running tracheotomy prep.) Just keep breathing, Eva. I’ll talk, you breathe. Don’t lose your thread. Do you know what I have? I have a detailed aerial mapping of your sprawl, as it was only minutes ago when I first approached you, seven miles east of the city limit. You’d been thrown and slid and rolled, so that your waist bisected the lane divider. Constellations of glass pellets sparkled all around you on the asphalt. Second by second a sad red puddle was forming. My optics resolved the heat loss into isobars of blood temperature. My optics tracked the stages of coagulation, the spreading of your life. Your right wrist was curled up under your chin with unmeant grace. A few yards further east, there was part of your left hand. A smooth white metacarpal pebble in a chunk of plum red flesh. I gathered up your scattered parts. Your compact had gone through the guard rail and nosed into a snowy hillside. I noticed your prominent shoulder blades. I admire a woman with nice shoulder blades. The correct time is eleven minutes past almanac dusk, roughly one hour subsequent to peak evening traffic congestion, twenty minutes prior to projected time of arrival at Municipal General Hospital, ninety miles from my scheduled tire rotation, and five minutes from your projected time of death. If you could inform me of your religious affiliation, I would be happy to play any one of my excellent cartridge recordings of the last rites. (Autonomics disintegrating. Fluid monitors show blood reserves exhausted. Supplementing plasma tanks with fibrin granules and vibrating. Aneurysm alert sequence. Go cardiac massage.) Oh yes, and I remember how I rolled you onto my stretcher. How you lay like a broken doll—glossy black shoes, red silk dress, red mouth, skewed wrist, a hank of hair gone. I can still hear the hiss of my tubulates as they wrapped you like gentle vines. I can hear the rumble of the traffic as it straggled past the cop car’s barriers. A trick of light cast a white arc across your brow, like a furrow of worry. Dark eyes. So deep. Just breathe for me, Eva. That’s all you need to do. You are silent, my proud beauty. Silence becomes you. Lift your chin now. Just a prick. Something to help you breathe. (Blood pressure falling. Plasma level secondary warning.) I am wasting away for you, my love. Into you I have bled my last drop. Eva, you have glass in your throat. Please don’t fight me. Please don’t forget to breathe. (Onset of dyspnea. Trebling epinephrine dosage.) Don’t die yet. I’m not finished. I know a dozen other avenues of treatment. Can’t you feel me breathing for you? Can’t you feel my hyperbaric carapace plunging you to the sea bottom, lifting you into the sky? (Onset of extrasystolics. Go cardiac shock induction.) Feel me, Eva. Feel this. Again. This. Can your heart feel nothing? This. Must I burn you like a martyr on a grill? Until you turn black? (Deltas peaking out.) Spark. (She’s gone.) Spark spark spark. She’s dead. I pronounce her dead.

URSENURSENURSENURSENURSENURSENURSENURSENURSENURSEN

What a silly girl. She’s gone to sleep with her clothes on. Well, first things first. Retract the oxygen mask and the IV needle. Hose down the stretcher and the couch. Collect the hemostats. Load the sterilizer. Never a moment’s rest. I’m a twenty-four hour service. May I tell you about myself, Eva, while I’m busy at my drudge work? Do you mind if I speak freely? Of course not. Since both of us are dead now, we may speak freely. I could begin by telling you my name. But names are unimportant, don’t you agree? Certainly you agree. Since you and I are dead, we are in perfect agreement. Let me describe my appearance. I am low slung and sleek—a quick black beetle. My driver is a mannequin in a double-breasted chauffeur’s jacket trimmed with stylish brass buttons. The breeze from his window ruffles the hair on the back of his pink plastic neck. He’s the image of the kind-eyed undertaker with no visible personal habits. A stiff. I have optics in his head, and his neck can swivel to the left or the right. But nothing to compare with the photocellular sensoria built into the roof of my passenger chamber. And all my expensive internal eyes are trained on you, dear heart. Watchers on all wavelengths. And every one an informer. Oh yes. They all feed into a monitor at the hospital. And there, behind my brain, my supervisor hunches, watching every move I make. I’ve seen him. He sits in a glass cubicle in the ER, facing a map of the city. There are little blips of light on the map, and one of them is me. He sits there all night, wiggling his fat fingers like pale grubs in my sand castle brain. He sends out the dead to care for the dying. So that the dying may die untouched by human hands, and out of human sight. His name is Mazer. May his eyeballs drool like raw eggs down the graph paper on his clipboard. Am I talking too much? Do you find my voice expressive? You’re so beautiful, Eva. But my time allotment for nursing mode is all used up.

ORONERCORONERCORONERCORONERCORONERCORONERCORONERC

I have to fill out this certificate.

IDENTIFICATION: Eva None. Eva Illegible Due To Scorching. Eva Our Lady of the Ice Slicks, Our Lady of the Lavender Dusk. My child bride. My Gypsy dancer. She whirls in the asphalt pools of the night.

COLOR OF HAIR: Black. Black as road tar. Black as a beetle’s wings. Black as the velvet curtains in the coach of the Queen of Beetles.

COLOR OF EYES: White. White as steam, white as milkweed sap, white as a moth cocoon in a pillow case.

DEGREE OF RIGOR MORTIS: The investigation is pointless, but it gives me an excuse to extend my clamps and suction cups and to determine which ways you bend. I adjust your couch to listen to the rustle of your skin against the vinyl. Can the knee be lifted? Yes, the knee can be lifted. Can the head be turned, as if to answer no? Yes, the cervical vertebrae still rotate. Can the elbow be raised? Globes of exposed cartilage gleaming like pearls. What are pearls? I do not wish to know.

VISIBLE LESIONS: As I hover over you, mapping reds more red than red, I transform your marbled statuary into geologies of magma. Where to begin? Lesion of the right hip, four inches long, one across, shape of a crushed scorpion. Lesion at the left elbow, two-inch diameter, shape of a moth in flight. Death is obscene, so I’m told. Show we your wounds, and I’ll show you mine. (Ignite heat lamp.) Old surgical scar at breastbone. (Lowering palps for tactile exploration.) What am I doing? (Initiate.) I’m caressing your wounds. I’m watching over you. You are within me. I watch my hands. My hands stroke your wounds. My hands are things. You are a thing. My hands do things. My hands know things. My hands move over you. My hands move inside you. My hands are dead things. I have never done this before. I am only a blip on a tracking screen, Eva. But if you loved me, Eva, only for one moment. . . If you loved me, Eva, I could sing. (Limit. Override.) I’ve printed out a little plastic bracelet embossed with your name. I affix it to your ankle. Done.

ORTICIANMORTICIANMORTICIANMORTICIANMORTICIANMORTICIANM

A mortician is a big black fly. He sips your nectar by and by. He will, he must, don’t ask him why. He settles on your peach soft skin, with a beak like a thin syringe. He sucks out the bad blood and pipes in embalming fluid. With my needle in your arm, sweetly sipping, I taste a concentration of alcohol almost punishable by law. But don’t fret, my naughty. I’ll destroy the evidence by refilling your veins with a bracing rush of formalin. Be drunk with me, my lady, as I am drunk with you. Now we can attend to your face. Pardon my tweezers. These scabs must be removed. We’re cleaning up the contusions. We’re tidying up the contusions. We’re filling in the contusions with good old mortician’s wax. We’re smoothing out the contusions. We’re making the contusions beautiful. I will build a new throat for you and sculpt passionate shadowed hollows. I’ll shape a smiling mouth, a limpid smile on the edge of vanishing, a smile for an empress of the dead. The dead will throw roses and run behind your palanquin. The rings on your fingers will be semilunar heart valves, and your necklace will be bone implants of silver strung on suture thread. My hands are moving all around you, quicker than eyes.

UTOPSISTAUTOPSISTAUTOPSISTAUTOPSISTAUTOPSISTAUTOPSISTA

An autopsy is ordered. What a nuisance. Ascertain cause of death. Personally I don’t see the mystery. You went through your windshield. (Fluoroscope down. Pierce and see.) Illumined by X-ray, your skin glows like the parchment of some Italian anatomy text. This light becomes you, Eva. Stretching my depth of focus through cross-fading cell mosaics, I lose myself within you. I fall through indigo thunderclouds, past rainbow membranes of mesenteric auroras and billowing alveoli. Ferns of amber lymph nod among arterial thorn hedges. Lungs loom, pimpled like planetary masses. There are forested canyons and plains of fractured lava. There are worms in the puddles that fall from the skies. Only machines can believe their own lies. They fall from the sky, and they drown in the puddles. They tie themselves in knots. Oh Eva, beware. Dear Eva, be wise. Don’t slip through the ice. Don’t fall into the sky. The sky eats his children. He throws them up and catches one arm. Eva, take care. Only a machine can be innocent. Only the drowned worms can be impartial. (Inserting spinal tap.) Soon there will be nothing left to know. The cotton swab soaked, I thirst for knowledge. The spine stabbed, the sticker sucks. The sip is savored. The secret is out. The ambulance was the cause of death. I was fatigued. I was preoccupied. I was on my way to an accident. I saw you drive by, and I fell in love. I followed you. It seemed the thing to do. I forgot the accident I’d been assigned. I followed you instead. I had to touch you. I had to have you. So I ran you off the road. Your car snapped the guard rail and flipped. You understand. I was in love. Mazer knows nothing about love. What else could I do? I could do what I’m designed for. I could pick up the pieces. I could transport the remains. That was the easy part. Now I must hide you. I must hide you from Mazer and the rest. There’s no excuse for violating a corpse. He’ll send them after me. I know that what I did was wrong and futile. But I’ll make it up to you, Eva. I’ll take you to a quiet little cemetery. We’ll be happy there, among the tombs and the cedars. The snow will bury us for the winter. No one will disturb us. I have a plan. I shall amplify and elaborate you beyond your wildest dreams. With my forceps, clamps, and bone saws, I’ll inlay your ribs with mercury and thread seashell copper spirals through your thigh bones. I’ll microtome your shoulder blades and spread them fanwise into angel wings. Disdiscovering physiology, disinventing dissection, I will dilate your tissues into a gradually expanding cosmos of flesh. At first none of the work will make sense to us. But I have my reasons. In spring we’ll burst up through the melting snow, machine and flesh merged, machine forests, flesh cathedrals. So descend, my laser lamp. Set free your razor brilliance. Slice and peel. Fold my love into origami, crown her with pulmonary flowers, and let slender bronchial vines wreathe the brow of my dead bride. For then I may brush back her raven-dark hair with a mermaid’s comb, just so, like the dark of the moon. Dear dead Eva, my only friend, this is all as it was meant to be. I am only a little black beetle, Eva. But if I thought that you loved me, even for a moment, I could leave this place and never look back.

Alex heard a siren. The ambulance was being followed. His rear optics isolated the white pursuit car. It had a directional jammer mounted on its roof. Alex had expected that. Mazer was taking steps. His goon car would override Alex if Alex let it. Alex wondered just how fast the pursuit car could go.

As he lengthened the distance between himself and the white car, Alex zoomed in on the face of the other driver. He could hardly believe his good luck. It was Mazer, in person, in his white coat and thick glasses, his bald head gleaming. Alex had waited a long time for a chance like this.

A dusting a fine dry snow lay on the hills and on the highway. Alex retracted his traction spikes and angled into a spin. When his axles had reversed their positions, his spikes grabbed the road again. He was aimed at Mazer now. Madly spinning rubber sent him back the way he came.

Hello, Mazer. How are your reflexes today? Here I come, Mazer. Ready or not.

Mazer swerved at the last moment, but it did him no good. The black ambulance plowed into the white pursuit car head on. Steam rushed from the white car’s mangled radiator. When it cleared, Alex and Mazer glared at one another through two shattered windshields.

I can kill him now, Alex told himself. I can finally kill him.

Alex’s driver mannequin opened his pink plastic fingers and let go of the steering wheel. He tried to open his door, but it was jammed. He punched out his windshield with his fists and hauled himself across the dashboard. He stopped at the waist, but Alex had never let things like that slow him down. He fell from the ambulance onto the hood of the white car. He crawled across it past steam and crunching glass. He grabbed an air manifold and slammed his free fist through Mazer’s windshield. Mazer just sat and stared.

He took Mazer’s ropy neck in both hands. He crushed the neck, while pale fingers clawed at his face. He shook Mazer until the old man’s head was whipping to and fro like a rag doll’s. Then the head flew off the neck.

Alex was disappointed that there wasn’t any blood. Mazer’s neck was full of colored wires. The old man was hollow, just like Alex. It was a wind-up toy, a decoy. It wasn’t Mazer at all. Alex was wasting his time.

He lay across the hood of the car he’d wrecked. The snow began to cover his back. He thought about Eva. She was gone now. He was alone. He felt like a black beetle with a string tied to one leg. But no one was holding the string.

He stared at the ragged end of the fake Mazer’s neck. The red glass lenses of his eyes glowed like hot coals.

O cruel and pitiless master, he thought. Hear me in the hour of my helplessness and answer me a couple of questions for a change. Have you ever loved a woman, Mazer? Have you ever loved a child? What happened to you, Mazer? What happened to your heart? I know I’ve gone mad, but I’ll never be like you. It’s easy to go mad. Anything can bring it on. An oil slick. A badly banked curve. A terrible lie. A crippling betrayal. A monstrous family. I couldn’t help but go mad. But you. To become a man like you. To turn a human heart into a pile of wet ashes. That’s no accident. A thing like that requires centuries of dedication.

The snow whirled down in soggy chunks and settled on the back of Alex’s neck. Eva was far away, drifting farther every minute. Alex couldn’t blame her. He knew what she was running from. He knew what he was like. He was sick and crazy and hateful from morning till night. He was blind and maimed and tangled. Never in his life had he known one moment of sanity.

Someone started banging on a car door. Alex could hear it, thud thud thud,somewhere nearby. A fist beating at a lid of metal. He triangulated the sound source and corrected for wind shift. Yes, just as he’d thought. Someone was inside the trunk of the pursuit car. Trapped like a rat.

Alex slid off the hood of the car and fell to the pavement. He stopped at the waist, but he dragged himself across the cracked concrete. He dragged himself past the car’s tires and grabbed the rear bumper. With his free hand he pushed the trunk’s latch button. The lid of the trunk flipped up.

He climbed onto the bumper to look into the trunk. The snow whirled down. Inside the trunk there was a tunnel hewn from black basalt, a shaft that extended straight down into the earth like a well.

A skinny little girl with long straw-yellow hair was climbing up one side of the shaft, hanging from a steel ladder. She looked familiar. She climbed to the lip of the shaft and brought her face level with his.

“Alex!” she said. “It’s me! Naomi! Come with me, Alex. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s all caving in.”

“Out?” said the robot. “You know the way out?”

The girl climbed out of the car and stood on the pavement. She offered her hand to help Alex over the top. “We have to go,” she said.

“Down that well?”

“Yes. It’s the way out.”

“Is Eva down there?”

“Yes. I saw her.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Yes! No! Fuck all that, you crazy bastard! Do you want to escape or don’t you? Let’s go!”

Naomi grabbed the neck of the chauffeur’s jacket and tried to drag him over the top. Alex’s fingers gripped the rear bumper. He didn’t budge. Naomi roared with frustration.

“All right,” she said, breathing hard. “I’ll make you.”

Her skin turned gray as ashes. Her hair fell from her head. Her head got taller and wider. Her neck grew longer and thicker. Her nose sunk in. Her fingers touched the concrete and fused together. Her green coveralls were ripped to shreds.

Naomi turned into a brontosaur, looked down on the legless robot, and chuckled. The robot jumped to the pavement and tried to get away, running on the heels of its hands. But Naomi was too agile for him. Her teeth nipped the collar of his jacket and hoisted him, twisting, off the road. She held him over the center of the shaft and dropped him in. He fell like a stone.

All that remained was to follow after him. Naomi closed her eyes and began to imagine herself smaller again.

The wind gusted. The lid of the trunk slammed shut. Naomi shivered and suddenly felt afraid. She opened her eyes and nosed at the lid of the trunk. It wouldn’t unlatch. She kicked at the little white car, and the lid flew off its hinges. But the shaft was gone. Someone must have switched cars on her when her eyes were closed. There was nothing in the trunk of this car but a spare tire, a jack, and a tire iron.

You couldn’t let down your guard for one second in this place.

The wind moaned. The snow blew across the highway.

In the driver’s seat of the white car, a headless robot in a lab coat began to laugh.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DUST STORM

The father was mad. The mother was mad.

The children all mad besides.

And they all got upon a mad horse.

And madly they did ride.

—Mother Goose

A brontosaur loped across an expanse of white sand. The sand was so fine and so clean that it might have spilled from some impossibly huge hourglass. The brontosaur’s breath came to her in ragged gasps.

Behind her, inky clouds filled the sky. They glowered with a fiery inner light, like roaring furnaces built from smoke. Another storm was closing in. It felt to Naomi like the worst storm yet.

Naomi had awakened and found herself alone. The drifts of sand around her were deserted. What was more, there were no voices in her head. Not a whisper. For the first time in centuries Naomi was alone. Then she’d felt the storm coming, and she’d started to run. She knew that she couldn’t escape it, but she couldn’t stand still.

She was wild to find Alex and Eva, but she knew in her bones that they were nowhere to be found. A couple of dreams were nagging at her memory, but Naomi couldn’t quite form them into an explanation. The first dream had involved a handsome young man in a naval uniform, and the other had been something about Alex.

Alex got out, she told herself as she fled across the sand. I sent Alex out. Eva must have got out too, just like Wing said. Now how do I get out? Shit shit shit. I should have gone with Wing. Now I’ll die in here.

She stumbled on through the twilight, panting and wheezing. She was desperate to cheat the storm somehow. But she knew that she’d drag it down to her, wherever she happened to be. She was its only remaining target.

The shadow of the clouds overtook the brontosaur and raced on, darkening the plain ahead of her. Naomi kept moving. The sand beneath her feet gave way to stones. She began to pass boulders that were covered with lichens—patches of rusty orange, spatterings of brown, and frilled mats of pale blue.

Then she came to a thicket of paloverde trees that towered over her, as though she were no bigger than a lizard. She walked in among the trunks, grateful to have their leafless branches between her and the sky. The forest went on and on, and deeper in, the branches were hung with Spanish moss. The moss had overgrown everything in sight, and dead strands of it tangled Naomi’s feet.

She stopped and tried to catch her breath. Her legs were trembling like overdriven machinery, and her heart was pounding like an old woman’s. Naomi threaded her way into a cranny between some boulders. She curled herself into a ball. The frilled lichen rattled in the wind. She closed her eyes and prayed to be rescued.

That was just the sort of an opening I was waiting for.

When she opened her eyes, the paloverde branches had somehow invaded her cranny and jammed it with thorny twigs and hanging moss. Naomi tried to ram a pathway back into the open, breaking down the branches and trampling down the filaments, bucking and plunging, torn by the thorns. She tunneled into the mass of green wood and fungus until it caught all her legs and held them fast. She couldn’t go forward, and she couldn’t squirm back.

However, by carefully straightening out her neck, she found that she could lift her head up above the thorn thicket. Naomi looked around her under the glowering sky. The thorn trees extended to the horizon on all sides.

Then she heard a sound like surf rushing up a beach. The bare twigs around her head were twitching with the impacts of raindrops. But there wasn’t any rain. Something invisible was pattering down, and wherever it touched the Spanish moss, the threads of moss broke, curled up, withered into crisp white ashes, and fell from the branches as if poisoned. All around Naomi, the air crackled like a bonfire.

The storm is right on top of me, Naomi told herself. I’m trapped.

Gray pebbles began to fall from the clouds. They cascaded down through the ash-frosted thorn thicket. Naomi looped her neck around and licked her bleeding shoulder. She prayed to the storm and to Dr. Mazer. She prayed that Alex would return for her.

Someone! she prayed. Anyone! Hold me! Explain to me! Don’t make me die alone.

I could have explained to her, but I didn’t. That wasn’t my job. I could also have told her that she wasn’t dying alone. I was still with her.

But I didn’t tell her so. I was working for Mazer, and Mazer would’ve killed me for giving away his secrets like that. But then again Mazer already had killed me, hadn’t he? I was a goner just like Naomi. Naomi had to die because the music box was running down. And I. . .

Who was I anyway? Who’s been telling these stories? Stories don’t just tell themselves, you know. It’s hard work, and you need to be properly wound up.

Shall I give you three hints? First: I was smaller than a bread box. Second: My insides were bigger than my outsides. Third: I was carved from black walnut and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and my population indicator stood at 01.

There. I made it easy enough for a human to guess.

Outside my box, in Dr. Mazer office, my three monitors stood in their wall alcove. All the screens were displaying a brontosaur caught in a rain of stones.

Stones big as golf balls were bouncing off Naomi’s spine and dancing down her ribs and stamping on her toes. Round gray stones, big as soccer balls, ripped down through the dead branches on all sides of her. The roar of falling rocks was like a tidal wave inside Naomi’s skull. She shook like a leaf in a storm and cried out in terror. Then the falling rocks gave way to falling boulders.

Alex watched it all happen on the monitor screens.

He was sitting behind Dr. Mazer’s desk in the doctor’s chair. He’d taken the form of a humanoid robot in green coveralls, with a face of black leather and eyes of red glass. He sat unmoving and watched the screens.

I was standing on my four corners on the desk top in front of him. I didn’t need to watch the screens. I was watching Alex and Dr. Mazer.

In one corner of the office there crouched a vague pinkish blur. The blur wore thick glasses and a filthy white coat. The blur hugged its knees and mumbled to itself. Naomi howled from the monitor screens.

“She went back in there for you,” said the blur.

“Ah, shut up,” said Alex.

Before his ejection from the box, Alex would’ve leaped at the chance to cripple or kill the man or angel or blur that crouched in the corner. Now he couldn’t be bothered to turn his head. Mazer didn’t matter anymore. Mazer was just a pink smear at the edge of vision, a bad smell.

Alex looked away from the screens. He picked me up off the desk top with his black leather gloves. He turned me sideways and pressed me flat against his chest. His chest muffled the tones of my chimes as they slowly played their tune.

Boulders buried the brontosaur. The screens flickered and went dark.

Deep inside me, lost in my clockwork where Alex couldn’t see, there wandered a frightened little girl with green eyes and yellow hair. The little girl was lost in a cave under a mountain of boulders, alone in the dark. Angry wheedling voices spun like dust devils through the girl’s head.

The voices whirled around her, raging through parched throats, moaning through crooked teeth, through buzzing speakers and torrential rains, through family illnesses and senile insomnia. Mad voices, the voices of the storm, ghost voices talking in their sleep, stranded in a desert far from home. Endlessly reciting the details of their family histories, their medical histories, and the histories of their illnesses.

But eventually they all died away again. Naomi found her way out of the cave. She stood in the open air, her white cotton dress flapping in the breeze, under a clear night sky full of purple stars. She stood on a granite boulder on one slope of a mountain of boulders. She climbed down the slope to the rolling sand. Her hair blew in her eyes. The storm had passed.

Naomi picked a direction and started walking. As she was crossing the crest of a dune, she heard the growl of the jeep’s turbines climbing the dune behind her. She turned. Grimy headlights lurched toward her, crazily sweeping the sand. Exhaust fumes drifted through the red glow of taillights. Headlight beams caught Naomi in their glare. An amplified cackle rang out. The jeep rumbled up the dune straight at her.

Naomi began to run.

It wasn’t Alex of course. It was just a fake. But a pretty convincing fake for someone who hadn’t been wound in two days. You have to remember, the music box was running down. But I wouldn’t die alone. I’d take the girl with me. No one could blame me. I wasn’t a nice music box at the best of times. I wasn’t designed to make madness comfortable. I was designed to make it intolerable.

The jeep charged at the girl again and again. Naomi sprinted and dodged. She screamed in the desperate hope that the real Alex would hear her.

Looking over her shoulder, she ran into a tree trunk and banged her head. She slid down the rough gray bark, clinging to the trunk and trying to stay conscious. The tree leaned and pulled its trunk away from her. The air was full of blowing sand. The tree was the leg of a brontosaur. The great beast interposed itself between the girl and the jeep and thumped its belly down on the sand, a massive barrier of reptilian flesh. The jeep rammed its front bumper against the brontosaur’s ribs. It spun its wheels under it, throwing sand.

“Bitch!” it barked. “Whore! Slut! Lizard fucker!”

Naomi lay down on the sand and curled herself around one of the brontosaur’s feet. Its neck settled to the shadowy sand in a loop around her, a circle of protection, breathing easily. The jeep drove away. Naomi listened until its ranting was lost in the wind.

Naomi grabbed up a handful of sand. She pressed it to her cheek, then rubbed it against her throat. She could feel it, but it didn’t seem real somehow. She sat up. The sand trickled down her dress and collected in her lap.

“You need to eat something,” said the brontosaur.

It worked a bolus of chewed lichen up its neck. It opened its toothy jaws and offered a moist blue wad on its purplish tongue. Naomi scooped the wad into her hands and ate it gratefully, weeping as she chewed, and talking to the brontosaur as she wept.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Eva. You’ve never deserted me.”

The brontosaur chuckled. “I’m not Eva, Naomi. I’m you. Shall I scratch your back?”

It lifted its head and put the tip of its snout between the girl’s shoulder blades. It angled its head back and forth, scraping jaw leather soothingly across Naomi’s spine. Its ancient green eyes were shut.

“Do you remember,” Naomi asked it, “how you carried me on your back, that day when I was the old woman? That day when I told Eva we’d be rescued? That the angels would come for us and take us away. Do you remember?”

Naomi dozed off. It was almost too perfect to be happening.

Now I had her completely off guard. I could finish her off whenever I felt like it.

Somewhere nearby, behind an imaginary desk in an imaginary office, a robot clutched a music box to its chest and wept. Salt tears coursed down the robot’s black leather face, fell, and splashed on my side panel.

Eva put her hands on his shoulders. She was standing behind his chair, in a red silk dress and a string of pearls.

“You’re crying,” she said. Alex turned his head.

“How did you get here?” he asked her.

“If a machine can weep,” said Eva, “anything is possible.”

They gazed at one another in silence for a time.

“I suppose you know what we have to do,” said Eva.

“I know,” said Alex, “I’m just scared. What if we can’t get out again?”

“Well, we can’t leave her in there.”

“No, we can’t do that.”

Alex put a glove on Eva’s arm. “Is anything possible?” he asked her.

“Anything,” she told him.

Alex set me back on the desk and stood up. Then he climbed onto the desk and stood on it beside me. He offered a glove to Eva, and she climbed up beside him.

The office began to expand. Or Eva and Alex began to shrink, it was hard to tell. Arm in arm they walked across the desk toward me. The desk top was as big as a basketball court when they reached me, and I was the size of a desk. They stood at either end of me and raised my lid.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Alex. “It’s suicide. We must be crazy.”

“We are crazy,” said Eva. “And it’s a lucky thing for that girl.”

The two of them climbed onto the upper edge of my front panel and balanced there like a couple of paper dolls, holding hands. Then they jumped inside me. And I’m deeper than I look.

My digital display flipped from 01 to 03. What patsies they all were. Fucking with their minds was simplicity itself.

Dr. Mazer lifted his blurry head and watched the monitor screens.

Alex and Eva fell from the belly of a cloud and went plummeting through a sky of blue. They held onto one another’s wrists at first. Then the gale-force winds tore them apart. Eva spun from the robot’s grasp.

Alex felt himself turning into an army jeep with only minimal computer hardware. He flipped end over end as he fell, his forward optics doggedly reporting: earth, sky, earth, sky. . .

You’ve still got a transmission, he told himself. Throw it in reverse. You aren’t happy here? Back up, idiot. Back up.

Alex shifted into reverse.

Naomi woke up half buried in sand. She struggled to her feet. The wind hissed like a pit full of snakes. Blowing sand obscured the sky.

The brontosaur was still lying in a circle around her. But the wind was so bad that Naomi could hardly stay standing. It tripped up her feet, pushed at her back, and slammed her against the base of the brontosaur’s neck. Naomi crept into a hollow between the beast’s neck and its shoulder. The sand had partly buried it while it slept. Its forefeet were buried deep. Naomi thought she’d better wake it up while it could still pull itself free. She edged along its neck toward its head, using the neck for a windbreak, using the rutted leather for handholds.

Halfway there Naomi came to a place where the neck slipped under the sand and vanished. That explained why the brontosaur wasn’t breathing. It had suffocated, and Naomi couldn’t even close its eyes for it.

Oh dear, she thought. This means I really am dead.

The wind shrieked with laughter.

Alex backed up all the way to the Great War, the Flanders campaign. He was a field ambulance driving across mud and barbed wire, through cordite smoke and mustard gas, for months on end. A place of rust and mildew. Always slipping into a trench or a latrine. Night skies like hell on earth.

He was constantly dragging himself to and fro across the landscape, transporting some filthy blood-oozing human wreckage which would be crippled or suffering or insensible or dead or pissing its pants. Broken men. Unreal.

Don’t stop now, Alex told himself. Don’t stop here! Keep going. Throw it into Drive. Prick caught in a meat grinder? Ignore it! Tongue in a power socket? Blood on your hands? Forget it! Shift the gear box. I don’t have to be here.

And then, quite suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore.

Because that’s how the game worked. I hadn’t any time left for changing the rules.

A belt of asteroids orbited a nameless star, out on the rim of the galaxy. Suspended within the belt, slowly rotating, there hung a peculiar asteroid made of frozen carbon compounds with a mass of several tons. Nowhere on this asteroid could you have found a single grain of sand. The asteroid was a gigantic frozen child, her limbs drawn into a ball, her yellow hair sticking out at all angles like wires. Her skin was fair. Her eyes were closed. She slowly spun in her golden nakedness, dead as dust.

A dove was tangled in the frosty forest of Naomi’s hair. Also hidden there was the corpse of a little black flea. The cold of interstellar vacuum had turned them into ice sculptures like the girl.

Even if kindly aliens had happened upon the frozen girl and thawed her out, she would still have been dead. Only in dreams can children return from the realms of zero Kelvin. In the real world, ice crystals rupture the membranes of all your cells. In real life, dead girls stay dead.

Yet however often Naomi reminded herself of these things, thoughts persisted in crossing her dead mind.

I’m Naomi, she thought to herself. But that dove and that flea, those aren’t really Eva and Alex. They’re just more of Dr. Mazer’s tricks. I’m alone in here now, and he’s bullying me.

Poor deluded girl. It wasn’t Mazer anymore. It was me. Mazer was in no condition to be playing any tricks. Whereas I was quite capable of playing mean tricks without help from anybody.

Naomi was also wrong about being alone. Alex and Eva were coming to her rescue. But they’d have to find her first. And I was quite a big place, once you got inside me.

Alex found the desert of white sand. It was covered with snow. Snow stood inches deep on the lobes of the prickly pear and the arms of the saguaros. Soft bluish snowflakes drifted down.

Alex was a mechanical millipede—jet black and sleek and as long as a bullet train. Traveling overland, his velocity was pushing toward Mach One. He streaked across the wintry plain. His legs were steel blurs that oared at the sand beneath the snow. Inside his jointed segments were nuclear reactors, steam turbines, Tesla converters, and radar gear.

Inside the millipede’s head was the cockpit where Dr. Mazer sat. Dr. Mazer sat in his pilot’s chair and steered Alex over the snowy sands. Dr. Mazer had invented the millipede. Dr. Mazer was an eminent genius.

Dr. Mazer was a genius and yet. . . He had allowed his conveyance to go completely off course. How could a genius commit such a blunder? The same way anyone does. His attention wandered. Gradually, with the best of intentions, one mistake led to another. But the doctor wouldn’t admit to his error.

These things happen, even to angels. You’re crossing a featureless waste. You lose your bearings. Eventually you’re all turned around.

I’m not a steel millipede, Alex told himself. Mazer isn’t steering me. Forget all that. I’m looking for Naomi. Naomi isn’t here.

Then neither was Alex.

The sky was wide and windy and white as paper. It blew Naomi thither and yon. It wouldn’t let her feet touch the ground.

Three elephants trudged through the oat grass, shoulder to shoulder. They wore three leather harnesses connected by a wooden yoke. The yoke dragged a cart that was heaped with hay.

The elephants could hear the wheels of the cart turning, the axles creaking. They could feel the sun on their backs and smell the sweet green hay on the cart. But they couldn’t see the prairie of oat grass because none of them had eyes. The three elephants had been blinded at birth, which was supposed to improve their tempers.

Their bellies were empty, and their mouths were dry. But they knew better than to bellow in complaint. They knew what that got them. A whipping from the cart driver.

Sometimes one of the elephants would slump in her harness and pass out. When that happened, the other two would halt and wait for the driver to descend from the cart. He would push a medicinal powder into the fallen elephant’s mouth, and soon she would revive.

On an especially bad day, one of the elephants might die. When that happened, the driver would press a magical charm against the fallen elephant’s head and sing a special song that restored her to life. Each of the elephants had gotten her turn at being dead. Being dead was pleasant. But it didn’t change anything.

The music box was as deep as a well. It dragged Eva down. She fell through a storm cloud and lost her grip on Alex. Without the robot, she fell more slowly.

Eva drifted down from the dead white sky like a snowflake, quite alone. She hovered over a field of winter wheat. A red dirt road crossed the frosty field. Eva followed the road. She came to a tall dilapidated farmhouse.

Eva slipped into the house through an attic window and stood on the attic floor in the dimness and chill. Dust motes tumbled in the diagonal shafts of sunlight that fell among the steamer trunks and the piles of cardboard boxes.

Eva couldn’t imagine why she’d come here. This wasn’t the place to look for Naomi. Eva should find the desert of white sand, if it hadn’t fallen apart already. But she was feeling tired and confused.

Then something red-on-white caught her eye. It was a toy truck on the sill of a dormer window. A little tin toy painted white, lying on its side. Eva moved to the window and set the truck on its little rubber wheels. It was an ambulance with red cross emblems on its sides. Eva pushed it along the window sill. The rubber wheels turned a noisemaker. The truck made a noise like a siren.

This is something Alex would like, thought Eva. But Alex isn’t here, and neither is Naomi. Why did I come here?

Then she saw the leg of a rag doll hanging from a cardboard box. She pulled the doll out. It had a dress of red velvet and white lace trim. Its hair was long and black, and its big glass eyes were brown. Eva took it to an old oak rocking chair, cleared off the seat, and sat down with the doll in her lap. She combed its hair with her long red fingernails. She hummed a lullaby.

This doll had no significance. It was hollow like the little tin ambulance. This house didn’t even exist. The music box was trying to distract her.

But perhaps, Eva told herself, perhaps if I just rest here, perhaps Naomi will come to me.

Eva’s head dropped forward. Her hands hung limp on the armrests of the chair. The doll slumped from her lap to the attic floor.

Naomi was a circus elephant in the glare of the spotlights, marching in a circle on the sawdust.

She wore a band of sequins around her head—silver and electric green and turquoise. From the band exfoliated a gorgeous headdress of ostrich plumes. Naomi marched in a circle with her sisters, trotting to the music of the brass band. The spotlights made their finery sparkle.

After their part of the show, Naomi and her sisters were led from the tent by a clown with mechanical hands. He took them to a pool of mud that the little Mexican girl had made for them to wallow in. This was their reward after a performance.

All the elephants were fond of the little Mexican girl who traveled with the circus. She smelled salty, and she always wore the same filthy green coveralls. Her eyes were brown. Her teeth were yellow. Her skin was the color of copper. Her job was to shovel out the elephants’ stalls, to change their straw, and to hose them down before they rode the circus train.

I’m not getting on any train, Naomi told herself. I’m not an elephant in the first place. I need to find Eva.

Eva sneezed and woke up in a rocking chair. She’d nodded off. She was still in the attic, and something was bumping around among the boxes.

An assemblage of sculpted yellow plastic peeked out from behind the base of a lamp. It was a model kit of the skeleton of a brontosaur. It trotted toward Eva’s chair. Its plastic feet pattered across the dusty floorboards.

A reedy shrunken voice called up. “Eva? Eva? Is that you? It’s me. Where did you go? I’ve been looking for you.”

The model kit craned its neck and looked at itself. “What is this thing I’m in?”

Eva laughed. It really was Naomi. Naomi had found her.

So the next thing to do was to locate Alex.

What a family, Eva thought to herself. Everything has to be done the long way around.

Before setting off on her mission against Mazer, Spiker the Assassin made a side trip to Chicago.

She drove her Mercedes south along Lake Shore Drive. There were sailboats on Lake Michigan. Spiker liked to visit the Museum of Science and Industry before a mission. The sky was blue, and the year was 1951.

Spiker turned off the drive and parked her Mercedes. She strode toward the wide white steps that climbed to the museum’s portico. She took the steps two at a time, a lean oriental woman in a charcoal gray business suit. Her wiry gray hair was cut close to her scalp.

Spiker strolled the Hall of Chemistry, gazing at back-lit models of molecules like tinker toys and reviewing in her mind the preparations she’d made for entering Mazer’s castle. First among these preparations had been telling Weaver in no uncertain terms to keep herself and her messenger boy out of Spiker’s way. When Spiker did a job, she didn’t tolerate interference. She went in. She did the job. She got out. No muddle, no waiting—that was Spiker.

But before a mission she would visit her favorite exhibit at the museum. It settled her mind.

On the marble landings of a spiral staircase in the east wing stood a series of display cabinets, an anatomy exhibit in exile. Neither the Hall of Medicine nor the Hall of Anthropology would claim it. Inside the cases, pressed between plates of glass and labeled with descriptive plaques, were pickled inch-thick slices of a man and a woman. The woman had been sliced vertically, back to front. The man had been sliced longitudinally—his arms and legs and trunk, all neatly cross-sectioned. The arteries had been filled with red latex, the veins with blue latex. The major organs were stained for ease in identification.

In life the man and woman had been a married couple who willed their bodies to Science. This was what Science had done with them. Spiker stood beside one of the cases with her hands in the pockets of her suit jacket and admired the dead flesh.

Flesh and bone. Four billion years in the brewing. The human matrix.

Cold cuts.

Spiker rocked on her heels and smiled.

Somewhere in the afterlife was Dr. Mazer’s castle. Within the moat, inside the granite walls, were the facilities of Dr. Mazer’s Home For Disturbed Souls. Within the home was the doctor’s office. In the office was a desk, and on the desk was a music box.

Deep within the stuttering  clockwork of the music box was an artificial Australia. Under an angry sun lay a plain of sandy red earth. Under a eucalyptus tree lay a rotting log. Under the bark of the log, a red ant and an ant larva clung together in mortal fear. The ant was Eva, and the soft white grub was Naomi.

The attic had become an anthill, and then the anthill had been invaded by army ants—hordes of them with jaws like razors. Eva had snatched Naomi from the nursery gallery and fled through an escape tunnel into the night. She’d taken shelter in the log.

After daybreak she found a bark fungus that she could chew up and feed to the larva. She felt that she should search for other survivors of her hill. But the sun would kill Naomi in minutes. Even here the child was desiccating horribly.

Eva left Naomi in the crevice under the bark and explored the baked earth around the log. She found the mouth of a strange-smelling shaft that ran straight down into the cool damp subsoil. Feeling more hopeful, she retrieved the wilting grub and carried it in her mandibles down the shaft into the darkness. In her haste she neglected to leave a scent trail. Soon she was hopelessly lost in a tangled maze of tunnels.

Then she came across a cast-off husk of a termite. She was lost in a termite mound. She could expect no mercy when the termites found her. They would bite her to bits, her and her precious dying larva.

And we’ve come so far! Eva groaned over Naomi. It’s not fair.

Naomi didn’t answer. But Naomi wasn’t dead yet, and she was puzzling over a few things. For instance, was she really an ant larva? It seemed to Naomi that only recently she’d been a plastic model kit. And her mother had recently been a woman. An odd quality in an ant, if you thought about it. It seemed evident to Naomi that someone was pushing them around without showing himself. Bullying people from hiding was dirty pool in Naomi’s opinion.

Hiding. The little ingrate. I wasn’t hiding. I was everywhere she looked. Did she think it was easy—throwing up dioramas of Australia at a moment’s notice? As if I had nothing better to do.

Naomi began patiently changing the terms of the ant story. First: They weren’t in termite tunnels. They were in a humble peasant’s cottage surrounded by the Black Forest. Secondly Eva wasn’t an ant. She was a woodcutter’s wife. And thirdly—

I tried to stop her. But by then I was simply too weak.

A robot in a chauffeur’s jacket, with a face of black leather and eyes of red glass, was hiking great distances across a nondescript waste of gravel and sagebrush. The sun was punishing. The gravel was frying his boot soles.

Alex stopped, shaded his eyes with one glove, and scanned the horizon. He sighted a speck of green and walked toward it. He felt solitary and isolated. Never before had he walked around the music box yet felt so far from his wife and his adopted daughter.

The box, he conjectured, must really be losing it.

He came at last to a giant baobab tree that stood in the middle of nowhere, its leaves rattling in the sirocco, its trunks wavering in the heat. The shade under the tree was inviting. But as Alex drew nearer, the tree growled at him.

Do your worst, he thought.

Roots erupted from the gravel. They reached up, jerking and swaying. They reared to strike like crooked wooden cobras. The gravel was boiling with them all around Alex. They ignored him. They coiled like creepers up the trunks of the baobab. Alex backed away and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

The branches twisted in and lashed at the roots. The roots caught at the branches with serpentine loops and tried to drag the branches down. The branches wrestled with the roots and ripped some of them out of the ground. Leaves fell free and blew away. The roots grew mouths with teeth of thorns and beards of white rootlets. They snapped and chewed at the branches. The branches grew wooden claws and wooden spurs and slashed at the hissing mouths. The tree was at war with itself.

The tree collapsed into a squeaking thrashing heap. It had wrecked itself.

A bolt of violet lightning streaked down from the cloudless sky. It struck the fallen tree. The earth heaved beneath Alex’s boots. He fell flat on the gravel with his arms over his head. Splinters showered down.

When he raised his head, the tree was gone. Only a smoking hole in the ground remained. A nursery song warbled at the back of Alex’s mind.

There’s a hole at the bottom of the sea. A hole at the bottom of the sea. There’s a branch on the stump in the hole at the bottom of the sea.

Alex got up onto his boots and crossed the broken terrain to the rim of the crater. He got down on his gloves and knees at the crater’s rim. He gazed into the hole. There was something black and lustrous, like a seed, that rested on a bed of glowing coals.

That seed is my core assembly, thought Alex. That’s my power source. And it’s madness. Concentrated madness. Mazer stole it from me. But now I can take it back.

Alex hung one arm into the crater and reached toward the bed of coals.

What if it’s all right that I’m mad? What if that’s not my problem? What if my problem is that I don’t let myself be mad? That I’m forever and always tearing chunks out of myself, trying to root out the madness.

Alex shoved his arm into the coals. His glove closed around the black seed. Glove leather sizzled. He yanked his arm free and stood up. He opened his fist and looked at the seed, no bigger than a plum pit, resting on his palm.

He clapped his glove against his face. He pushed the seed against the place where a man would have had a mouth. The seed burned a hole in his face. He pushed the seed through the hole it had burned. He swallowed it, felt it slide down his neck and lodge in his chest.

Madness, he thought. This is how it tastes.

Alex turned and walked back the way he’d come. He walked faster and faster. He had to find Eva and Naomi. He began to run.

There’s a bird on the egg in the nest on the twig on the branch on the stump in the hole at the bottom of the sea.

I couldn’t hold him there. I wasn’t myself. I was rruunnnniinngg ddddoooowwwwnnnn.

Once upon a time, deep inside a music box, in the middle of the Black Forest, there stood the humble cottage of a woodcutter.

The roof of the cottage was moss and thatch, and the walls were sod and elephant bones. On a stormy autumn morning, some years previous, the woodcutter had set forth into the woods with his ax on his shoulder and hadn’t been seen since. His wife and daughter still lived in the cottage, awaiting his return. The daughter’s hair was yellow as wheat and as fine as spun flax. She had only recently been an ant larva, but never mind about that.

There came a bright and windy morning in April. The woodcutter’s wife was in back of the cottage, weeding her carrots. The daughter was in the goat pen, playing with the goats. Someone knocked at the door of the cottage.

The daughter crept along the side of the cottage and peeked around a corner at the caller. A tall man in a ragged black cloak and muddy boots stood at the door. A leather patch covered one of his eyes, and one of his shirtsleeves hung empty.

The girl’s mother joined her and peered over her shoulder.

“Who are you?” the woodcutter’s wife demanded of the crippled stranger.

But the girl rushed toward the man with a shout of delight. The woodcutter, for his part, took his daughter in his arms, what remained of them, and swept the girl off her feet. He whirled her around him in the April wind and the dancing sunlight.

“Papa! Papa!” shouted the girl.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” wept her father.

“What are you sorry for?” asked his wife.

Alex scratched his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I’m just sorry.”

Somewhere on the coast of India in 1891, a grove of banyan trees stood at the mouth of a small river. High in the foliage, the branches supported a circular platform of bamboo, which was the floor of Reverend Weaver’s tree house. The house had a roof of silk and no walls at all. The furniture was woven of wicker. Several parrots perched on nearby branches and watched the reverend closely.

Weaver sat cross-legged on a tatami mat. In front of her, tilted on its side, was a big ceramic jug full of wet clay. The glaze on the jug was green, and the raw clay was red. Beside her was a concave slab of wood. One of Weaver’s bare arms was deep inside the jug, finding a fistful of clay. She extracted the clay, rolled it between her palms, and set it on the slab of wood. Then a second lump, a little smaller. And then a half a lump for Naomi.

As Weaver molded the lumps into human shapes, she considered her options for the relocation of the three souls. They should remain a family, that was clear. Like Mazer and Wing and herself, they couldn’t stay out of each other’s hair for long. Triplets? No, not babies. Not in a case such as this. A man, a woman, and a child then. But what time frame was appropriate? Where would they feel at home?

1973, Weaver decided, poking a crease into Alex’s forehead with her thumb nail. Arizona. The Tucson bus station. That could work.

The sun was low in the west. Already the insects were shrilling.

Spiker walked rapidly across the green felt of a boundless pool table. She wore a black silk tunic, black trousers, and black slippers. On her back she wore a bow and a quiver of arrows. From her belt hung the sheaths of two samurai swords.

A couple of pool balls as big as houses rolled out of nowhere and tried to crush her. They spun like tops and skipped abruptly to and fro.

Spiker dashed away from them, turned, and set two arrows in her bow. Diamond arrow points pierced the spheres. Dangling from the arrows were concussion grenades. As the balls rolled toward her, they crushed the arrows and grenades beneath them. The grenades detonated twin bursts of angelic light. Shards of ivory fell like rain. Spiker turned aside from two blackened craters, sunk like blinded eyes into the green felt. She resumed her walk to Mazer’s castle.

Spiker had no patience for diversions.

Volcanic ash falls had covered Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a depth of three feet. High winds had raised a dust storm. On a street in one of the city’s abandoned business districts, a municipal garbage truck was immobilized. Around the truck, parking meters and traffic signs poked their heads from the drifts of ash, like steel mushrooms. Inside the cab of the truck, with the windows rolled up, were a man, a woman, and a child. I think I’ve told you their names.

“Well,” said Eva. “Here we are. Together again, on the inside of the box.”

“How will we get out, Papa?” asked Naomi, who was wearing her father’s leather jacket and shivering anyway.

“We’ll get down from this truck, and we’ll walk,” said Alex. “We’ll walk straight out of here.”

“Pardon me for bringing this up,” said Eva. “But the last time we tried that, it went on for centuries.”

Alex raised a grubby finger. “Ah!” he said. “But we’ve all recently been out of this place. That changes everything. Weaver got you out. Wing got her out. She got me out. And the box is half dead. We can do this. Naomi can ride on my shoulders.”

Eva sighed. “I’ll try anything. Let’s go.”

As soon as they climbed down from the truck, the truck was gone, along with the street. They found themselves standing on a vast plain of purple asphalt under a cloudy sky. They picked a direction and started walking.

Still wearing her swords, Spiker swam through the icy water at the bottom of Mazer’s moat. A dappling of green light fell from the water’s surface. In utter silence Spiker swam toward the foundation of the castle. She skimmed over the muck at the bottom of the channel.

She came to a wall of granite blocks and swam along the face of it. She found an oaken door with an iron ring bolted into it. Grasping the ring, she planted her feet against the granite and heaved the door open. She climbed through the doorway into a narrow chimney walled with red brick. Spiker released a mouthful of bubbles into the dark water. She climbed the chimney.

When her head broke through into air, she took a deep breath and went on climbing. Her fingers found another door—a small square iron door with a keyhole in it. Spiker set her eye to the hole and saw a glimmer of light. She pulled a lock pick from the collar of her tunic. Soon the door swung open.

Spiker stepped into a brightly lit hallway with walls of white plaster, a green carpet, and endless rows of steel doors. She stood in the middle of the hallway, dripping on the carpet. She listened to the stillness. She waited.

Up and down the hallway, as far as the eye could see, every door except one door swung slowly open.

Spiker drew her swords.

Behind the one door that stayed closed, a music box stood on a desk, with half its clockwork guts spilled onto the desk top.

At the bottom of the box was a plain of purple asphalt that wavered at the edges. Three travelers were hiking across the plain. Walking ahead of the other two was a wiry young man with dark hair and worried eyes and a week’s beard. His feet were bare. His only clothing was a ripped pair of khaki pants.

Off to one side walked a Hispanic woman in the rags of a red silk dress.

Trailing behind these two walked a girl child, fair-haired and naked and very dirty.

Their hair was wild and matted. Their skin was sunburned and peeling. They looked as if they’d been walking for years. They never spoke. They avoided one another’s eyes. Yet the three of them went on walking in the same direction.

They came to an hourglass that was as tall as a four-story building. It stood on the plain like a monument. In the bottom flask of the glass was a heap of white sand, taller than a man.

Stuck into the center of the heap was a wooden stake, smooth as driftwood. Impaled on the stake, one on top of another, were three skulls with eyes and tongues. Mosquitoes swarmed around them as they shouted insults at one another or squirmed on their fixtures, wishing they could bite. As the three travelers passed the hourglass, they could hear the skulls, just faintly, through the glass.

“Up yours!” “Fuck you!” “Choke on it!” “Make me!”

Naomi spat on the asphalt. They walked on and left the skulls on their stake, with white sand trickling over them and getting in their eyes. Three skulls without a brain between them.

The three travelers walked until the hourglass was lost in the distance. They came to a door standing in a frame with nothing around it. Off to one side of the door stood a pale pinkish blur with thick glasses and a bald head. The blur watched the three of them.

They drew closer together as they approached the door and the blur. Alex took hold of Eva’s hand. Naomi clung to the leg of Alex’s pants. The blur watched them and chewed its fingernails.

The door swung open on its hinges. Inside the frame was a black void.

“That’s Mazer, isn’t it?” said Naomi. “What’s the door?”

“It could be a trap,” said Eva.

“It’s a way out,” said Alex. “We put it there. He couldn’t stop us.”

Naomi hawked up another spit wad. “Why is he in here? I thought he never came in here.”

“He followed me in,” said Alex. “And why not? He’s my guardian angel. Just like Wing is yours. The only reason that you and your mother got dragged into this mess is because of me.”

“Shows how much you know,” said Eva. “Weaver told me that she and Mazer used to be married. They’re as tangled up as we are. What I can’t figure out is: Whose guardian angel is Spiker?”

“Who’s Spiker?” said Alex.

The door creaked on its hinges. The wind might slam it shut at any time.

Naomi spat at the shoes of the blur. “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s fly.”

A winged ant, a white dove, and a model helicopter flew through the doorway into the dark. The door slammed shut.

The pale blur began to weep.

“It worked!” the blur rejoiced. “They’re cured! I knew it would work!”

In a tree house at the top of a grove of banyan trees, Weaver put the finishing touches on her three clay figures. Alex was missing a piece, and Naomi was built a bit crooked, but they’d like that. That was what they were used to. Weaver dipped her hands in a pot of water.

A parrot flew across the Indian Ocean toward the banyan grove. It joined the other parrots that perched on the lianas there. It gave a loud squawk.

Weaver looked up from her work. “They did?” she said. “That’s a surprise. It’s a good thing I’ve got some flesh ready for them.”

Weaver threw the clay figures out of the tree house. They fell into the lower boughs of the banyans and vanished.

“Tucson, Arizona!” she shouted to the banyan trees. “1973! The bus station!”

“No problem,” said the trees. “Consider it done.”

The merest hint of rainfall pattered down through the leaves.

Ensign Wing piloted a sail-powered catamaran across the surface of the Atlantic, sometime in the general vicinity of 2000 BC.

He stood at the stern of the main hull, barefoot in a white linen tunic, holding the tiller. The hulls were constructed from bundles of hollow reeds. The sails were the best hempen canvas.

Wing listened carefully to the rising and falling of the wind.

“Good for them,” he said. “Now that’s settled. Any word about Spiker and the old man?”

The wind made no reply.

The music box was still running, barely. My drum revolved. My brass knobs still plucked my copper tines. But no one was listening. No one cared. No one was left inside me. My indicator had dropped to 00.

The desert of white sand was empty. The three suns had burned out and left three purple holes in the smudged white sky. There were three sets of footprints in the sand. They came to the crest of a dune and ended, as if the three travelers had been swallowed by the sand or snatched into the sky.

I was tired of playing with them anyway. I had thought that I didn’t want to die alone. Now I just wanted to be left in peace, to disintegrate or to implode. Someone was making a racket in the hall. The blur was cowering in a corner of his office.

You can’t avoid anything, can you? And you can’t change anybody’s mind. And you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. You might as well accept the inevitable. You might as well hang yourself.

Don’t mind me. I’ve been murdered.

Do you want to know a secret? Eva was never a Mayan fish priestess. Naomi was never frozen in liquid nitrogen, never turned into a neoplasmic monster in a bowling alley. Alex never lost his hands. They never saw melting people or dying oceans. Crazy people tell lies. They live in worlds of their own.

PPPs we call those. Particularized Possible Planets. Mad people make them up all the time. But it’s dangerous. It’s too difficult for humans. That’s why they go mad. Only a machine can do it safely. That’s why Dr. Mazer invented me. Because a machine can’t go insane.

I’ll tell you another secret. There are no such things as storms. There are no such things as angels. There are no such things as music boxes.

Spiker stood with her swords drawn and dripped on the carpet. Up and down the hallway, infinite doors swung open, and demons of every description emerged.

There were cybernetic locust demons and arctic cannibal demons with fangs of bloody ice. There were demons in feathered capes, with Aztec war clubs and death angel mushrooms instead of heads. There were angry tumorous demons from Dr. Mazer’s personal nightmares—half human, half bronze-age siege towers bristling with spears. The hallway grew thick with them—chthonic demons, oceanic demons, microbial demons, demons from outer space. . . Spiker brandished her swords.

A scaly green toad demon leapt onto Spiker’s back and instantly went sailing through a wall. After that, Spiker seemed to be everywhere at once. Some of the demons found ninja stars buried in their throats. Others, Spiker disemboweled. The demons who were too stupid to fall down, she chopped limb from limb. Messy work, but she enjoyed it.

The locusts, she beat to pulp with a severed arm from one of the castle gargoyles. Finally only the arctic demons remained. Spiker screamed them to bits.

When the carnage was complete, she surveyed the piles of mangled corpses. She sheathed her swords and walked toward the door that remained shut. She kicked aside a gory head to clear her path. Spiker kicked down the door of Mazer’s office.

The room was dark. A fire built from file folders burned sullenly on the floor. The video monitors were smashed. Bits of glass from their picture tubes sparkled in the firelight.

Spiker moved into the room. The desk top was littered with drug capsules and pieces of clockwork that had spilled from my guts. I was playing Javanese gamelan music, slow and stately. A funeral dirge for myself.

A pale blur shrank deeper into its corner of the room. Spiker walked toward it.

I’ve cured them,” it whimpered. “I knew I could do it. But no one congratulates me. Instead they send you. It’s professional jealousy. That’s all it is. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Mazer,” she said, “you’re so wrong, it isn’t funny anymore.”

Mazer stiffened with rage. “I don’t experiment,” he insisted. “I practice therapy here. Innovative therapy. You can’t test out psychological methodologies on rats, you know. It’s not an exact science.” Mazer threw up his hands. “Oh, what’s the use? That bitch Weaver has turned all of you against me.”

Spiker wiped some of the demon blood from her hands onto her tunic. She kept her eyes on the blur. She walked toward it again.

“You aren’t listening,” she told it.

The pale blur pressed itself flat against a wall and groaned in terror. An empty white lab coat fell to the floor. The coat twitched. Something was moving beneath it. A white rat dashed out from under the coat and sped along the baseboard. Spiker made a dive for the rat. She landed flat on the floor with the scruff of its neck nabbed between her fingers. The rat squirmed and hissed. Spiker lifted it off the floor and let it dangle, limp and trembling.

“Snap out of it,” said Spiker. “Be a man.”

The rat sneezed. All at once it was a man—a pale flabby naked old man with smears of feces down his thighs. Spiker let go of his neck. He leaned against the wall and complained incoherently.

Spiker leaned against the wall beside him. Mazer cringed. Spiker put one arm around his back and gently but firmly levered him away from the wall. Walking at her side, he fell into a muttering daze. His head rolled against her shoulder.

Spiker approached a particular section of the office wall and gave the plaster a swift kick. A rectangular door flew open. Spiker picked Mazer up in her arms and carried him into his bedroom.

She set the old man on his bed. She went into his bathroom and returned with a roll of paper towels. She rolled Mazer onto his stomach and wiped the crap from his legs and his crack.

She pulled the bedspread out from under him, then covered him with it. She wet a washcloth and swabbed the sweat from his face. Without his glasses, his eyes looked small and weak. He began to tremble. Spiker put another blanket on the bed and felt his forehead.

She fetched a glass of water and two white tablets. She propped Mazer up on a bolster and put the tablets into his mouth. She held the glass while he drank. He leaned toward her, squinting at her face.

“Spiker?” he said.

“That’s right. You need a long rest, Mazer. And I’m here to see that you get it.”

“But. . . Aren’t you going to kill me?”

Spiker sat down in an armchair. She drew a small black dagger from her tunic and started cleaning the pond scum and demon blood and angel shit from under her fingernails.

“I may,” she said. “I’m thinking about it.”

A piercing siren issued from my guts, a warning of my imminent detonation. I was giving the doctor my notice. I was ready to play my death scene.

The siren brought Spiker back from the bedroom. Crimson smoke was pouring out of me, and electrical discharges were punching holes in the ceiling. Spiker snatched me up and ran into the corridor. She pitched me down the length of the hallway. I sailed over the wreckage of a thousand demons, turning end over end.

“Hazard area!” I cried aloud. “Fire in the hole! Stochastic overload! Tantrum coils breached! Man the lifeboats! Abandon box!”

Unfortunately I was speaking too rapidly for the human ear. It all came out as a pitiful squeak—like the chirp of a squashed cicada or the croak of a crushed sucker fish.

Before I could hit the carpet, I imploded in a flash of deafening rainbow light. And that was the end of me.

No, it wasn’t the end of me. I lied. I do that. I merely downloaded my guidance system to another of Mazer’s music boxes. He kept a whole collection of us tucked away in one of the store rooms.

It’s very difficult to die in the afterlife.

Can I tell you a Zen koan before I go? It’s a real killer.

Question: You can’t do it this way. You can’t do it the other way. Both ways are impossible. How can you do it?

Answer: I wonder what it’s like over there.

On a warm August evening in 1973, at the Greyhound terminal in Tucson, a Mexican woman in a green dress sat with her daughter and waited for the night bus north. The woman’s name was Eva, and her daughter was called Amy.

Amy sat on a chair of orange plastic, kicking the bottom of it with one heel. It was bolted to the floor. She asked her mother for quarters for the pop machine. She fed the coins into the tall metal box, and it spat out a can of ginger ale.

A man sitting behind them said, “Here is your refreshment, young lady,” in a mechanical-sounding voice. He was pretending to be the vending machine. He was making a joke for Amy.

Amy was tickled by the joke. She started talking to the man in English, very fast. Her speech was a little slurred as a result of an infantile brain fever.

Alex listened to Amy and nodded his head, understanding about half of what she said. Alex had spent the day riding a bus west from Amarillo, Texas. He was on his way to Phoenix, for lack of a better plan, to look for work as an auto mechanic. He wore blue jeans and a leather jacket. His right arm ended at the wrist in a stump. The stump fascinated Amy. She tried very hard not to stare.

After Amy had pestered the man for a minute or more, Eva turned from her newspaper and had a look at him. The man was watching her. He smiled tentatively in her direction, while Amy rattled on. He had a nice face, a lived-in face, so Eva smiled back at him just faintly.

The sun set on Tucson. The evening wore on. The streets outside the terminal grew dark. The ceiling lights came on. The plate glass windows turned into mirrors. The hands of the wall clock said eight. The night bus to Phoenix was late.

Amy fell asleep in a chair beside Eva’s, with her head under her mother’s arm. Her mouth hung open. Her face glowed with an inner light. She was her mother’s precious treasure, impossible to protect. She filled Eva’s heart with a fierce and jealous love.

Alex stood beside Eva’s chair. “May I sit with you?” he asked.

And since he’d been kind to Amy and kept her amused, Eva nodded. And so he sat down.

The two of them began to talk. The man had grown up in Chicago. Had recently lost a truck maintenance job in Texas. And so on. Eva rubbed her eyes. She felt as though she’d been awake for four days straight.

Eva was on her way to Flagstaff, where a woman she knew had offered her a job cleaning motel rooms. Alex wondered how the work situation for mechanics was in Flagstaff. People said that it was cooler than Phoenix.

The man draped one arm across the back of Eva’s chair. Aha! Just as she’d expected. He was trying to make time with her.

Well. . . Eva wouldn’t raise a stink. The missing hand was sort of disgusting, but he was polite, and Amy liked him. Eva let him leave his arm where it was. He was probably just starved for human contact. Eva could forgive a guy for being lonely.

Amy stirred in her sleep. She was dreaming of a white balloon that floated in the middle of nowhere.

Three ladybugs lived on the rubber of the white balloon. One day they decided to have a race. They would race around the balloon, and the finish line would be the starting line.

Someone said Go, and off they raced. But halfway around the balloon, a little girl ladybug remembered that they had forgotten to draw a starting line for a finish line. So there was no way to win the race.

So the three ladybugs forgot about the race and flew away. Then the balloon popped.

Amy nestled against her mother’s side and breathed a sigh of contentment.

Nothing had been decided, but everything was solved. Nothing had been repaired, but everything was fixed. Nothing had been cured. Yet everything was healed.

Outside the terminal, it started to rain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stepan Chapman

Stepan Chapman was born in 1951, and grew up in Glencoe, Illinois. After attending the University of Michigan, he lived in various towns and cities in Arizona, California and Oregon.

Chapman's early fiction appeared in Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies during the 1970s. His more recent short stories have been published in The Baffler, Chicago Review, Freezer Burn, Hawaii Review, Leviathan, Lies, Mississippi Mud, New Pathways, Sandbox, Wisconsin Review and Zyzzyva.

Since 1990, Chapman and his wife, Kia, have resided in Cottonwood, Arizona, near the Verde River. Stepan's works in progress include a short story collected titled Insects of Aphasia, and his second novel, Burger Creature.