What the Hell Did I Just Read

15. SOY SAUCE

I reached for the vial, but Chastity yanked me back up to my feet. Damn, she was strong. She screamed, “LET’S GO!”

John saw what I was reaching for, and lunged for it. He accidentally kicked it away instead, sending it rolling across the pavement. A running biker stepped on it, causing him to trip and fly backward, breaking his neck when he landed awkwardly on a parking block. This caused the vial to roll forward again, right toward Amy, who picked it up in stride.

We all went stumbling away from the chaos. We were cut off from both of our vehicles, which were parked behind the bizarre three-way maelstrom behind us. We ran across a row of Harleys and without hesitation, Chastity jumped on one and kicked the engine to life.

John stopped, saw what she was doing, and straddled the next bike over. He started it, yelled at Amy to jump on behind him, and she did.

I do not know how to drive a motorcycle.

John peeled off down the street, and yelled back at me something that sounded like, “BEANIE WIENIE!”

Chastity turned back to me and said, “What are you waiting for? Get on!”

I did.

We dodged through the sparse nighttime traffic and I thought I was going to die. The raindrops were cold needles on my face. We followed John out to the industrial park, not too far from the ice factory where all this bullshit had begun. I knew where he was going. There were several vast buildings in the neighborhood that belonged to businesses that hadn’t survived the economic downturn this town had gone through about seven economic downturns ago. One was a former beans-and-wienies cannery, a sprawling, gray structure with giant, rusting metal letters welded to the front that said,

BEANS

WIENIES

in a bombastic font that made it look like the slogan for a dystopian totalitarian dictatorship. John’s band had played a concert here years ago; at the time the entire second floor of the abandoned cannery had been repurposed as a living space for a hippie artist commune. Back then, twenty or thirty people would drift in and out, living off the grid (though considering they were stealing power by splicing into nearby utility poles and getting city water from unmetered valves, they were actually very much on the grid—they just weren’t paying for it).

Then, one day, a kid died of a heroin overdose and the company that still owned the land decided it was too much of a liability issue. They ran out the hippies and hired a security guard to drive around the place a couple of times a day to kick out homeless people who came in to drink and get out of the rain. Fortunately, said security guard was Tyler Schultz, a friend of John’s. When we pulled up to the length of thin chain that served as a gate, Tyler dropped it and waved us past.

We pulled the motorcycles inside the building to shield them from view. The cavernous structure was a clammy, drippy space, and much of the artwork that had been left behind by the commune was ruined. There was a faded spray-painted mural on one wall depicting the Statue of Liberty covered in blood, underneath it were the words WAR KILLS. I passed a fiberglass Mickey Mouse with dollar signs for eyes and the word GREED spray-painted across his chest (I don’t know what that was supposed to symbolize). There was a creepy concrete snowman with a misshapen face and a single arm made of rusty rebar.

John led us upstairs, toward the quadrant of the second floor that had been devoted to the living area—the roof didn’t leak in that particular spot and four old sofas were positioned facing each other. There was still a pair of refrigerators in the corner, and a sink.

Chastity glanced around quickly, then went and stationed herself by a window.

John said, “As far as safe houses go, this is pretty much the last one in town that I’ve got access to.”

I said, “I don’t like it, the artwork out there is freaking out my worldview.”

Chastity said, “It could be worse. Can see approaching vehicles from right here, six ways out of the building if you’ve got to make a run for it.” She pulled out a roll of cash wrapped in a rubber band.

She peeled off three hundred-dollar bills and said, “You got twenty-five in change?”

Amy said, “Keep your money. You didn’t get Mikey back.”

“Stop with that. This isn’t about charity or having a good heart. I don’t pay you, maybe next month one of my bosses assumes he don’t need to pay me. Maybe that becomes the norm, everybody pressuring each other to turn down their paycheck in the name of courtesy. Then nothin’ gets done, because people know they won’t get paid and underneath all our generosity bullshit, it’s incentives that make the world go ’round. You did the work, you took the risk. You got twenty-five in change or not?”

John did.

Chastity said, “I had a ‘go bag’ in the trailer, now I’m kickin’ myself for not grabbing it when all this started. Too risky to go back there, assume the Range Rover is a loss, too…”

She was muttering all of this to herself, working through it. It was pretty clear she wasn’t asking our advice.

I said, “You’re leaving town?”

“You’re not?”

Amy said, “We have to stay and see this through.”

“And what does that entail, exactly? Seein’ it through?”

“Well for one thing,” said Amy. “We have to warn Ted.”

I said, “About what?”

“About Maggie.”

“Why would—oh, fuck. You think she’s like Mikey? Like she never even existed?”

John scrunched up his brow. “Wait, no. They had a photo. Remember? Ted pulled it out of his wallet, looked like a picture you’d have taken at Sears.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No … but, you know, just because Mikey was one doesn’t mean Maggie is.”

Chastity said, “If she is what Mikey was, then you’ve got to take it out. And I’m guessing the parents are still under the spell, thinkin’ it’s their kid. So good luck with that.”

Amy said, “If they are still ‘under its spell,’ why did it work on them but not you?”

“I got a theory about that. See, I think it’d work on you, too, but it wouldn’t work on your man there. John, I don’t know him well enough. Could go either way. You, well, you seem like the kind of girl who’d wake a guy up at three in the morning just because you forgot to say goodnight.”

“I guess I don’t get it.”

Chastity shrugged. “People can either feel unconditional love, or they can’t. Depends on what you had growin’ up, I think.” To me she said, “I expect your parents weren’t in the picture, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Mine, neither. Grow up thinkin’ love is somethin’ you earn based on performance, and you dole it out just the same.” She said to Amy, “I bet when you and your man fight, you get madder and madder, while he just gets quiet, and kind of dead inside. You get more and more upset because you’ve got that love for him that can’t be undone, no matter what, and that strain pressing against it tears you up. David there, I bet he just gets cold. Same as me. Can’t fake that shit. Well, with that unconditional love comes blind spots. That’s what they depend on. So, Mikey started acting all crazy, my memories of him got all jumbled up, it didn’t take too much to sever that connection. But a lot of moms, they’d die first. That love, that unquestioning love that pours out of some people, just wipes out all the wrongs. Make you overlook anything.”

I said, “It’s using it as a survival adaptation.”

“You could say humans do the same. One thing we do know—they’re real eager to get us to go to that mine. I assume something big and nasty is gonna jump outta there if somebody clears those rocks, right?”

John said, “That would probably be the best-case scenario.”

“Well,” said Chastity, “I do wish you luck. I’m gonna go someplace peaceful, and try to remember who I was before a monster rewrote the last eight years of my life.”

Amy said, “You don’t even feel the slightest urge to stay and help?”

“Sometimes the best ‘help’ you can offer is to get your own self to safety and not add to the pile of victims somebody else has got to clean up. Problem isn’t that there’s not enough heroes in the world, problem is too many dumb people assume they are one.”

I said, “Wait, one last thing. What was your connection to the motel, back there? How did you know the Christ’s Rebellion people?”

“Did some business with Lemmy, he owes me a favor or three. And no, it wasn’t drugs or whores, nothin’ like that. I repair motorcycles, that’s one of my several jobs. Why?”

Amy said, “The Knolls had connections there, too. Trying to figure out what it means.”

“You could ask Lemmy, but I’m thinkin’ he didn’t survive getting splattered across the parking lot back there.”

John was turning the Soy Sauce vial over in his hands.

Chastity said, “What’s that?”

I said, “That there is the Soy Sauce. The container that Amy chucked into the river a few weeks ago. Found it on the ground in the parking lot of the Roach Motel, six inches from my feet.”

“Well, that don’t sound like luck.”

I said, “In this town, it’s not just good and evil. Behind the scenes, it’s all these competing agendas. Those agents, the ones you rescued us from, they were convinced there’s something that wants us to win.”

Chastity scoffed and shook her head. “You people are cutting wires on the bomb and hoping you got the right ones. Promise me you’ll give me a couple hours to get out of town before you blow it up.”

John said, “That’s why we have to take the Sauce. We need to understand what’s happening.”

“Uh-huh. And this isn’t the kind of ‘understanding’ you get from peyote? Where you sit there and stare at the wallpaper and think it holds all the secrets of the universe, drool runnin’ from your lower lip?”

I said, “Well … not usually.” It’s actually hard to succinctly describe the effects of Soy Sauce, in the sense that it’s hard to succinctly describe the effect of a gorilla on a child’s birthday party—it can go several ways. I said, “You ever play video games? Probably not. Anyway, one time, John and I were playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games, and our character glitched through the floor and wound up in some foggy netherworld full of floating random objects and distorted characters locked in these broken, looping animations. I think Soy Sauce is kind of like that—it reveals the nature of the game by breaking it.”

“And you’re going to try to convince me to take some?”

I said, “No, I’m pretty sure it would kill you immediately. Amy, too. With John and I, it, uh, isn’t exactly pleasant, but once we come down we usually have a clearer idea of what needs done. Here’s all I ask. Stay here with Amy while we take the Sauce, when we come back, we might just know something that will help you, too. Even if your plan is to run.”

She watched the window. “One hour. If I see them coming before that, I’m gone. So what you’re gonna do, do it now.”

John was already twisting the cap off the Soy Sauce vial. You might have noticed that no one who examined the vial before now noted a cap, but that’s how it works—it opens when it wants to be opened. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure that a group of guys with a diamond saw, a jackhammer, and that huge green laser from the Death Star wouldn’t so much as smudge it.

John tilted the bottle toward his mouth. A single drop of pure black goo formed at the lip of the vial, dripped, then swerved as it fell. It completely avoided his face and splattered directly onto his crotch.

“Son of a—”

The Sauce ate a hole in John’s pants. He slapped at it as Chastity looked on, bewildered. The Sauce vial tumbled out of his hand and landed on the tiled floor. John spasmed into a fetal position, clutching his groin. Then, a few seconds later, he stopped struggling.

The Soy Sauce took him.

John stood up, nodded thoughtfully, and said, “Okay, they are going to find out we’re here in thirty-seven minutes, twenty-four seconds. Unless we take measures. Yes. Measures.”

Then he sprinted across the room toward a window and dove through the glass.

We ran after him, arriving at the shattered window to see John running across the parking lot below.

Amy yelled after him, but I said, “Just let him go.”

I walked back and kneeled down to grab the vial. A thin little stream of the Sauce ran out onto the tiles, inching toward me. No … crawling toward me. Like a little thread-thin worm. Acting with intent.

The tiny black worm writhed and then curled, as if sniffing the air. Then it flicked up toward my face, right at my left eye.

Pain exploded through the back of my skull.

And then, the world was gone.

* * *

My surroundings vanished from sight. This was not an uncommon experience on the Sauce. Instead of kneeling on the linoleum floor of the Beanie Wienie cannery, I found myself shambling aimlessly around a barren landscape in which it looked like everything had been eaten by locusts—all was dust and leafless trees and little sprigs of vegetation that had been gnawed down to the roots. The sky was an acrid, cancerous ruin.

As I wandered, I came upon what looked like a floating worm. It hovered about three feet off the ground; at its base was a pile of coiled loops that led up to a twitching bulb the size of a football, then a single segmented tube that extended upright until it ended in an opening. It turned toward me. At the top was a human mouth—the “worm” was a disembodied esophagus and digestive tract, ending in the bundle of small intestine. At the bottom it possessed an anus and, in the front, a six-inch-long erect penis.

The mouth opened. A guttural song emerged.

Soon, I saw another one—a digestive and reproductive tract, floating free of whatever body it had been attached to, this one with female genitalia at the base. Its mouth opened and out fluttered a high-pitched song, as if in response to the other. I backed away, but they were not pursuing me—they were pursuing each other. The two pulsing bundles of offal met, the mouths locked together in a kiss and soon the penis was pumping away, the wet tangle of intestines falling to the ground and thrashing against one another in ecstasy.

I soon encountered another such pair, and another, and another. Then I crested a hill and below me was a massive pink pile of the intestine monsters engaged in an orgy, the mass rippling and throbbing. All around the perimeter were tiny versions, little bundles that inched along the ground like knotted earthworms.

Then I blinked and it was gone. Or rather, I was gone.

I was now in a makeshift classroom, with small desks and a big sign on the wall bearing a Dr. Seuss quote (“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive, who is youer than you”). The room was vacant except for a single rough-looking woman who was standing in the front, screaming and screaming into the empty room.

Then I blinked and I was standing in my apartment, in my bathroom. It was nighttime and I could hear the faint drum of the rain. In walked Amy, who closed the door, lowered the lid on the toilet, and sat on top of it. She stared straight ahead, in silence, covering her mouth with her hand. She was wearing her work clothes—a clean white button-up shirt and navy pants. The ceiling was dripping right into her hair but she didn’t seem to notice.

And then, very quietly, she started crying.

I moved toward her, reaching out, but of course I wasn’t there, and this wasn’t happening, not right now, anyway. Soon she got up, dried her eyes, and left the room. I followed her, through the living room. She swung her red raincoat onto her arms and headed out of the apartment. I followed—drifting, like a movie camera on a rig—as she walked across the street to the convenience store, jogging through the rain with her umbrella. At the door she wiped her eyes again, then went in and bought the last blueberry muffin from the little case on the counter. And then I blinked and …

I had a body again. I was lying in a filthy room that looked like it had once been a hospital. I was on a gurney, and I was unable to move despite the fact that I could see no visible restraints.

I craned my head around, trying to get a sense of my surroundings. There was a huge cockroach crawling up my shirt, toward my face. That’s what it most resembled, anyway; it was fully two inches long and had tiny pincers like a crab. I tried to kind of shake my chest, to knock it off, but I couldn’t even move enough to do that.

I heard a voice say, “You’re awake,” and I saw Nymph step out of the shadows. It was that fit and well-to-do version of myself, only instead of a suit he was wearing the same clothes I had on (stained jeans and an old T-shirt that said CHICAGO BEARS, 1984 SUPER BOWL CHAMPS around a navy-and-orange-clad Dan Marino). As if to mock me.

I said, “Is that actually you? Or is this just more hallucination bullshit?”

He didn’t answer. Just smiled.

I said, “Because if it’s you, I have a bunch of questions. But I’m not going to bother if it’s just some symbolic bullshit meant to teach me something about myself.”

“Tell me,” said Nymph, “if I asked you to eat that insect on your shirt, would you?” I didn’t answer. What was the point? He continued, “What if I left and came back a week from now? Would your hunger be such that you would be willing to eat it then?”

The bug was scaling a wrinkle in my shirt just above my nipples. It had yellow eyes. It blinked.

“The answer is forty-six,” Nymph said, before I could answer. “That’s how many hours without food you could go before willingly eating a living insect. At any given moment you are less than two days from abandoning all dignity in the name of desire.”

Next, he gestured to the corner and said, “What about that corpse of a small child, lying over there?” There was in fact a little boy there, lying still in a fetal position. Dark skin, maybe Hispanic. “How long until you would eat him? I know the answer, but I’m curious to see how far off your own estimate is. I also know what that number would be if the boy was alive.”

I said, “The thing in the old coal mine, your ‘Master,’ what is it? What does it want?”

He cocked his head with a look that said, Are you seriously asking me that?

I tried again, because why not? “Why is it trying to brainwash people with the idea of fake offspring? What’s the point? Is it all just a game? Did the Master get bored?”

Nymph took a few strides my way and stopped next to a rusty metal tray attached to the gurney. “Look.”

On the tray were three objects:

A surgeon’s scalpel;

A hunk of black rock that had been chiseled into a crude blade, like something you’d find at an archaeological dig;

A hunk of black rock that was still in standard rock shape.

“Obsidian,” said Nymph. “All three, I mean. Did you know that the sharpest blades in the world are made from obsidian? This scalpel has been sharpened to an edge just thirty angstroms wide—one hundred millionth of a centimeter. A razor’s edge is twenty times thicker, by comparison. So, let me ask you—which of these three tools would you like me to use to remove your face?”

Since we both had my face I actually wasn’t sure if he was talking about removing it from my skull or his. Not that it mattered, since this was all some sort of vision and wasn’t actually happening.

Are you absolutely sure of that?

The bug had reached the top of my shirt, standing on the elastic neck band. There was a soft hissing noise and I realized I could hear the thing breathing. Labored, like its tiny lungs had asthma.

“How about this,” Nymph said. “I will ask you a question. If you answer correctly, we move on to the next round. If you answer incorrectly, I make a single circular incision beginning behind your right ear, looping around under your chin, behind your left ear, and across your forehead, meeting back at the right ear again. Then I simply peel off your face, like peeling an orange. Here is the question—which of those three is a naturally occurring object?”

I had trouble understanding how I was going to get any useful information this way, but it didn’t seem like I had any choice but to play along. I looked over the three objects. Which is naturally occurring, he asks? Well, the scalpel was obviously man-made. Of the other two hunks of obsidian, one looked untouched by human hands, owing its shape to wind or erosion or whatever. The other had clearly been chipped into a blade, maybe by an ancient caveman. So, it was made of stone, which is naturally occurring, but the “blade” shape was man-made. Seemed like a semantic argument to me.

The man with my face said, “You have thirty seconds to answer, and then I start cutting.”

“There is no right answer. You could make the argument that both the…”

And then it hit me.

“Okay,” I said, “I get it. All three are naturally occurring.”

“Please explain.”

“Because humans shaped the stone blade and manufactured the scalpel, but humans are naturally occurring organisms. So anything we build or create is also naturally occurring.”

“Correct! Erosion by flowing water and chiseling by human hands are both just atoms moving atoms. Molecules grow into cells and cells grow into brains and organs and limbs to shape the stone. A colony of fungi, an anthill, a human city—all are a convergence of particles and forces that alter the landscape. In fact, any substance or occurrence that is not naturally occurring must, therefore, be supernatural in nature. So, that leads us to the second question. Of the two cutting tools you see before you, which was made by choice?”

“I see where this is going.”

“Do you? The crude blade there was made five hundred thousand years ago by a hooting, stinking creature you would in no way recognize as human. So, when that hairy primate fashioned this blade for the purpose of slicing meat from bone—the same purpose I intend to use it for—did it choose to do it? Or was it just following its animal instincts, the way an insect will scurry from the light?”

The wheezing bug on my chest had crawled off my shirt, and I could feel its feet tickling my neck.

He said, “Twenty seconds.”

“I don’t know, man, ask a scientist. Maybe it was just hungry and had a dead animal in front of him he couldn’t bite into.”

“So, you’re saying that hunger was the inventor. Why, then, is that different from the scalpel? Otherwise, you would be suggesting that there is an energy that allows you, as a man, to defy the simple mechanism that causes the tree to grow toward sunlight or the insect to flee from it. An energy that lets you defy the physical chain reactions that govern the behavior of literally everything else in the universe, from subatomic particles to the grunting ancestor who made this blade. An energy that exists only in modern humans.”

“Then none of them were made by choice. That’s the answer you want, isn’t it? So there you go, that’s my answer. We’re all just … fucking animals or whatever. How is that relevant to the situation at hand?”

“Final question. If you are correct and we are not able to make choices, and are just following the same impulses as the insect, then how do I have the choice to not peel your face? I would be driven along by impulse, as beholden to them as that insect.”

The bug was scaling my chin now. It was breathing hard with the effort. I thought I heard it curse under its breath.

I said, “What you’re saying is that you’re going to peel off my face one way or the other. Which is irrelevant because this isn’t actually happening. Right?”

“You tell me.”

Nymph snatched the scalpel and climbed up on the gurney, straddling my chest. He grabbed my face, but then things got confused and suddenly I was the one on top, the struggling man’s face in my own grip, the scalpel in my hand. It was John on the gurney, not me. The blade pierced skin and I pulled it across his jawline …