Ubo

15

“I’LL SEE IF I can find something to get this off you.” Falstaff went away.

Daniel couldn’t quite interpret the frantic activity, the destruction, and the fleeting suggestions of old dramas surrounding him. Unsteadily he made his way to a chair and sat down. The constant movement of the residents made him nervous—too many legs. He focused on the floor, now littered with bits of circuitry, metal, plaster and ceiling tile. He looked at the walls—spider web cracks and small gaps thathadn’t been there before. Sections of the ceiling hinged back and forth exposing the wiring above.

Residents were milling around, going to each other, waving their hands, staring at each other in shock. Fewer of us, he thought. By at least a third. He didn’t see Gandhi anywhere, but Lenin walked by. Daniel grabbed his arm. “Where’s…” For a second he couldn’t think of Gandhi’s real name. “Walter?”

Lenin acted impatiently. “He didn’t come back from his last session. A lot of us didn’t. You heard the explosions, didn’t you? Someone said there was a surge and an overload, then part of the structure failed.”

Daniel nodded. “We have to find him.”

“Maybe. Maybe we can search, if they let us.” The roaches in the room moved around aimlessly, seemingly as confused as the residents. “But I’ll keep asking around, find out if anybody’s seen him.” Lenin left. Daniel heard him shouting Walter’s name, saw shaking heads. There was a blur of ghostly shapes both in front of and behind them. Transparent, insubstantial bits of scenarios.

Most of the residents were on their feet and moving about, but a few were sitting like him, preoccupied. Someone walked in front of him and their scissoring legs tore the air. The figure now across from him was sitting on a different kind of bunk, a dull, greenish wall behind him, bent over, his nose against a broken piece of tile he held on his knees. He snorted, jerked up, white powder caking his upper lip. He rubbed at his nose furiously, grinned, and wiped his finger over his gums.

Then Daniel saw the girlish haircut, or was it a wig? The man had breasts, not fully developed but on their way. The man laughed, winked in Daniel’s direction, looking familiar. It was Richard Speck, the student nurse killer, in prison, his face recognizable even under that wig. The Speck scenario was the one that had disturbed Bogart so much.

Eight student nurses. He’d slept in a nearby park the night before. Tied them up at gunpoint, strangled them. Quieter that way. The knife was just there to scare them. “It just wasn’t their night.” Tearing the bed sheets into strips to bind them. He felt nothing. Born To Raise Hell tattoo. Later he slashed his wrists. But he survived to be this person, whoever this person was.

Daniel was right there inside Speck’s head, so high, so fuzzy, but he was outside the scenario, outside the lab. He wanted to warn everyone that Speck had escaped. But Daniel also had escaped. He was outside his head.

Speck looked right at him. “They sent me in here, and look how I’m living. Like a queen in here. This is me laughing now!”

The room began to strobe. Daniel closed his eyes—he had a flowering headache. He made himself get up. It was one thing to be forced while lying strapped to a bed, another when they followed you into your world.

He walked around the room slowly. Voices echoed from somewhere outside the range he was able to understand. People stared at him. Then he saw his shadow with the swollen head from all the cylinders affixed to his scalp. “What happened to you?” someone asked, but he didn’t answer. He started searching faces, seeking familiar ones. A few he had a nodding acquaintance with, none he knew very well. Where was Gandhi? He couldn’t believe he was gone.

That fellow in the old-fashioned suit with his back turned, talking and joking with the others. He looked completely out of place. The suit looked worn, sun-damaged, as if he had travelled a great distance. They either laughed or nodded at everything he said, but offered up nothing of their own. The man turned his head slightly to the side. Daniel stared. The man apparently felt the stare, turned his head a bit more and nodded slightly in Daniel’s direction. It was Adolf Hitler.

As Hitler turned his head back toward the other men, Daniel could see that they were enveloped by transparent mountain and valley views. The Bavarian Alps. Berghof. Hitler tapped a cane impatiently on the stone floor. There was a woman on the other side of the men, smiling, blinking into the sun, and fading out briefly with each blink. She carried a basket of food. It was a semi-formal sort of meeting, Daniel thought, a summer gathering outside in the fresh mountain air. Eva was laughing now, their dogs barking. It was a typical afternoon at home.

A couple introduced their young daughter to the führer. He smiled, put his palm against her cheek.

Hitler stopped, stood erect. He turned his head toward Daniel again, his nose wrinkling as if he’d smelled a bad smell. The führer’s pupils were like black beads, his face pale as a sheet. Around him the buildings were on fire, the blasted streets. A burn spot grew slowly on Hitler’s cheek, like a spot on a piece of film stuck over a hot projector bulb. The führer’s lips curled. He started to speak. The others leaned forward, mesmerized. The German cities had been bombed, but nein, he would not be visiting. He wore the same look he’d had when he’d ordered the generals to be hung on meat hooks in 1944. An expression of mild distaste. Something rotten had been hidden in the room. Alle meine Frauen Selbstmordversuch, he was thinking. All my women attempted suicide.

Hitler’s large pale-blue eyes were shining. Certain and cold.

Certainty is boring. Certainty means the mind is dead, Daniel thought at the fuehrer. But if Hitler heard him he did not react.

“I submit to fate,” Hitler said. Daniel couldn’t tell if that was directed at him personally. “Ich lege das Schicksal.”

He’d come from ordinary stock, and he’d grown up an ordinary man until history had given him his opportunity.

The führer’s eyes widened. Something brushed Daniel’s arms on both sides. He backed away, but they were all around him, running into him, packed so closely together he could not breathe, all the thin men in their blue-striped pajamas, all those Jewish Muselmänner, starved and exhausted, and Daniel could not tell if they were staring at Hitler or if they were staring at him. He squirmed back through the crowd trying desperately not to scream, because if he screamed the rest of the building would come down with the power of his distress. In the distance he saw the windows, and although every emaciated hand seemed to be upon him, every mouth whispering in his ear their truncated story of a life cut short, he managed to reach that singular view of an outside world.

The sky was a silver color streaked with gray. Their usual view of other parts of the building had changed. It was difficult to say how exactly, given that much of that wing had been in ruins ever since he had arrived in Ubo. Daniel tried to make sense of it, then realized that parts of the structure were simply gone. He peered down toward the base of the building and saw the flood waters swirling past, eating at the foundations.

“How are you feeling, Daniel?”

Lenin was standing beside him. The group of men Daniel had interacted with since his arrival had been relatively small, and even among those he would hardly have called any of them friends, although Falstaff had come closest, despite Daniel’s many misgivings. Lenin had probably been the one he had talked to least. “A bit better, I think. Still somewhat fuzzy.”

“Do those—” He pointed at the cylinders attached to Daniel’s scalp. “Does all that hurt?”

“Not exactly. But they make my head feel bigger… heavier. Although I wouldn’t think they’d weigh that much. But it feels as if my neck is likely to snap if I don’t balance things correctly. I feel like the Elephant Man, afraid to lie down normally, my head about to crush my spinal cord. John said he was going to go find something. I don’t know where.”

“How are they attached?” He reached to touch one of the cylinders.

Daniel pulled away. “Better not—I don’t know if it’s safe. I don’t know how—I assume they’re stuck to the scalp.”

“I don’t see any burn marks or—sorry—melted skin. But the truly strange thing is the way they go right through your hair. Your hair isn’t flattened, cut, messed up in any way. In fact it looks perfectly combed. Don’t you even get—what is it they call it?—‘bed head’? What are these things anyway?”

The state of his hair seemed a trivial concern, but it strangely disturbed him to think about it. “The cylinders appear to be part of the equipment transferring the scenarios into our heads. I don’t understand much about it, but I think they place them on our skulls, and they’re the devices that deliver the information. But they’re not supposed to be attached. They’re wireless.”

“Was that a result of the explosion?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t really hear the explosion—I just woke up to the results. Were you in one of the labs?”

“No—they didn’t take me this time. They took Walter, and I guess they took John—at least I didn’t see him around for awhile. I’m sure John will figure out something to help you.” He sounded less than convinced. “Or maybe the roaches will just remove them when they send us all home.”

Daniel was shocked. “You really believe we’re going home?”

“I had a dream I went home. And I have faith. You have to have faith, Daniel—it’s too hard to live without it. Didn’t you say you have family? You have to have faith you’re going to see them again.”

“We don’t even know for sure how much time has passed, do we? What if we’ve traveled through time? Our families may be dead.”

“Why would you even think that?”

Suddenly the God of Mayhem was standing there between them, reaching out to touch them from his devastated Boston. Daniel couldn’t even guess how far in the future they were. The God’s seemingly compassionate eyes peered down from the separations in the multicolored layers of cloth. He might kill either of them simply because he had an impulse. Daniel turned his head, brought it back, and the image broke into scattered pieces. How was he going to tell Lenin about any of this?

“I don’t know, Charles. I just have a feeling.”

“It’s okay, I get—I don’t know—notions, myself. Because of the scenarios, and I think just because of being so far away from home and in this strange, unfathomable place. But evil will lie to you, you know that, don’t you? And everything about this place is pure evil and of the devil.”

“We can agree on that.”

“So tell me, tell me about your family, and how you came here. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

Daniel told Lenin then about his wife, and Gordon, and Gordon’s congenital heart disease and what it had meant, and how it had worn them all down.

“It was constant worry, constant self-examination. Were we being too protective and ruining his quality of life, or were we not being protective enough and putting him at serious risk? Most of the time we were just exhausted, getting him ready for another surgery, trying to convince him that the clear liquids we were feeding him were for his own good and that he shouldn’t cheat. He was just a kid, so of course he blamed us for not giving him the foods he wanted, and we’d tell him to be brave about it when he whined and then later we’d feel so terrible because why should a kid be asked to be that brave?

“They kept telling us to ‘treat him normally,’ but how can watching your child for signs of heart failure, developmental delays, and giving him all these medicines—how can that be normal? And if he throws up his medicine do you give him some more, or are you going to create an overdose? Or if he gets upset and spits half of it out? Sometimes I’d just want to shake him when he pulled a stunt like that.

“Neither one of us was getting enough sleep, and if his monitor went off we’d practically kill ourselves getting to his bedroom. And he hated going to the dentist, but some of the meds were pretty hard on his teeth, so he had to go more than most kids—he couldn’t afford an infection. And he’d get mad, and yell at us, and even though we shouldn’t have, sometimes we yelled back.

“His blue spells were the worst, when he couldn’t get enough air, and he’d start grunting, and we were both convinced that would be it, he was going to die on us right there.

“And at our lowest, I’m ashamed to say, we’d blame each other—things in our families, our genetics, things she might have taken during the pregnancy, early signs we might have missed—and the marriage deteriorated. Once she said we should have divorced before he was born, and at that moment I thought she was right—we never should have had him.”

“But a child, any child, is a gift. He wasn’t—you can’t look at your son as if he’s a broken toy.”

Daniel tried to keep the flash of anger to himself. “Of course not. Haven’t you ever weakened? Especially in a moment of great pain? You have to understand, I grieved for my son for years—for his pain and for what I knew would be our eventual loss of him—while he was still alive and it felt like more than I could take. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when he was actually gone.

“But I became worse than that. My imagination, sometimes it could be such a hateful, evil thing. I’d see other people’s children, and I’d hear them playing, their voices joyful and excited, and-I don’t know, I’d imagine a car running them down, or I’d imagine them falling out of a tree, and it wasn’t a fearful image for me, it was an image of justice being done, because why should we go through this and not they? I imagined that if my boy was taken, someone else’s child needed to be taken as well, otherwise the world wasn’t right.”

“Daniel!”

“I know. I’m not proud of it. In fact I became so ashamed of myself I decided I shouldn’t be near my son or my wife anymore. They deserved better. The day the roaches took me I was sitting in an airport with a plane ticket that would take me to the other side of the country. I hadn’t boarded yet, but I think I probably was going to. I just needed to think about it some more. So I sat there while the others boarded, and they were calling my name, and I was thinking about whether I should stand up or not, when suddenly I was gone, and then in some giant insect’s horrible embrace, and on my way here.”

“Maybe you would have stayed. In fact, Daniel, I have great faith that you wouldn’t have gotten on that plane.”

“What difference does it make? My wife and son will never understand. As far as they know I just ran away like a coward. They will never know what happened to me.”

The lights flickered. An electrified twitter travelled through the residents. A great rumbling sound filled the space and more pieces of the ceiling fell. Then the lights went out with a rapidly descending whine. Residents began to scream. It sounded unnatural. It sounded like a screeching of metal.

After the initial shock Daniel knew he could not be seeing them as they actually were. It was a scene from the end of the Second World War, and the concentration camps had been liberated. Several men were being helped out of a building, impossibly emaciated, skin stretched across the sharp edges of skeletons, the eyes looking huge in near-fleshless sockets, and on each broad bony pelvis where the narrow legs dangled, genitalia displayed as if stuck on as an afterthought. Many of the survivors would die within weeks from disease and malnutrition.

Then his vision cleared and the skin vanished from the skeletons, leaving metal armature arms, articulated rod hands, and cages of metal ribs, pivot joints and wheels, cables, tubing, metal pan skulls with artificial blinking eyes, snapping jaws with teeth attached. Lengths of gray human skin and pale muscle had been fastened to the frameworks in seemingly random arrangements.

The metal and flesh automations charged around the room in a panic, grabbing at each other, chattering and screaming in eerily human voices, their mechanical eyeballs jerking spastically as they acquired new glimpses of their changed realities.

“Daniel, Daniel, what is this?” The metal skull with the disturbingly alive eyeballs yapped in front of him, the mouth with all the wires and plastic and metal pieces used to articulate it.

It was Lenin’s voice. Daniel reached out and touched the Leninbot, felt the metal bits, the tubes, and the squishy bits he assumed to be flesh, but he was too squeamish to look at what he touched. “Charles? Is that you?” He noticed an alpha-numeric label on the metal piece which emulated a clavicle, and other such labels—maybe the same label?—on the upper left arm, and on one of the flat metal ribs. “What’s happened to you?”

“You, too, Daniel. Daniel, look at yourself.”

Daniel lifted his arm. The rods that made up the various phalanges, the hinge joints, the larger metal lengths where the radius and ulna should have been, responded minutely to commands he wasn’t aware of issuing. The arm turned, the fingers wiggled at him. Packed inside the arm’s framework were tubes, wires, heavier cable, junctions. And, etched onto the radius piece, the characters A-7713.