Book of the Dead (35 page)

Since setting down the basket she’s been backing toward the airlock. The man comes forward. Instead of picking up the basket, he glances at the roof of the habitat.

“No one’s going to shoot you,” says Marly. “Just take it and go. And don’t come back.”

He lifts the basket and backs toward the El Camino. The girl is already behind the open passenger door, and now she eases into the cab. He sets the basket next to her, gets in, and shuts the door.

The man studies Marly. He nods, slowly. He starts the car and backs out. He backs up until he is out of the parking lot, then turns around and drives away.

For several minutes Marly watches the settling of the receding rooster tail raised by the car, and then she goes inside.

“Just who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m one-eighth of this station, same as you, and I grew that food as much as anybody else did.”

“You defied a direct order—”

“From someone with no authority over me. You know as well as I do that the hierarchy depends on the nature of the crisis.”

“We put it to a
vote
, damn you—”

“Nobody asked for mine. How about you, Grace? Haiffa? Leonard? Bonnie?”

“Did you give any thought whatsoever to the repercussions this might have on us? You’ve just sent ripples through a very small pond.”

“For Christ’s sake, Bill, I gave them enough food to last them three
days
—if they’re careful.”

“We’re not much more than three days from food depletion ourselves.
Every
change affects
all
of us. You of all people should know that, Marly. The experiment can’t continue if outside—”

“The experiment ended over a
year
ago, Bill! Along with the rest of civilization! Why don’t you fucking wake up!”

“All the more reason for us to hold out. Maintaining this station
is
maintaining civilization.”

“But not humanity.”

“Hey, Marly—the guy’s just tryin’ to say that, y’know —sometimes hard decisions have to be made. I’m sure he didn’t like turning them down. Did you, man?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh, Christ! Look, I’ll
skip
a meal a day for three days, to make everything nice and even, all right? Will that make you happy?”

“
I
thought we should give them some food.”

“Yeah, Bonnie. But you didn’t do shit.”

[6]

“
Motherfuckers
.” Sailor has the pedal to the metal. “Those mother
fuckers
, man. I thought we’d just grab some food from them, you know? As an excuse to case the place. See how many of them are left, see how good their security is, all that shit. But, goddamn, I never thought they wouldn’t give us any food. Fuck,
we’d
have given us food, I know we would’ve. We’ve
done
it before! Sons of fucking bitches.” He bangs the steering wheel. “They wouldn’t feed a goddamn
baby
, man!” He glances at Sweetpea. “You
believe
that?”

Sweetpea is holding the baby at arm’s length, staring at it with loathing. “It was chewing,” she says dully.

“Of course it was chewing; it’s a goddamn—”

She drops the baby and begins batting her hands about her as if fighting off wasps. “It was
chewing
, it was
chewing
, it was trying to
eat me through my shirt
, its
mouth
was on me, oh, God, and it was moving, and I thought, that poor baby, and then I
realized
—”

Sailor grabs her arm and yanks. The El Camino swerves. “Calm down. Calm fucking
down
.”

She stares at him wide-eyed. On the floorboard the baby paddles air like a roach on its back. Half out of its swaddling, the skin around its neck blues where the make-up leaves off, its left arm missing, ripped from the socket some unknown time ago. Its right arm reaches; its toothless mouth opens and closes. Its eyes are like flat plastic.

Sweetpea pulls her legs up to the seat.

“We have to drive straight out of here,” says Sailor. “We can’t give them any reason to think something’s not right. Just stay calm until we get over the rise, there, all right? All right?”

“I want it out of here.”

“In a minute.” He seems amused at her revulsion. He snorts. “Just close your eyes and think of England.”

Huddled on the seat, she turns to look at him. A mile later she says, “You wanna know why I fuck all the others and not you?”

Sailor gives her a you-can’t-be-serious look. “Because I don’t
want
to fuck all the others?” he asks innocently.

She ignores him. “Sometimes the others are nice to me, you know? They give me things, they show me things. They take me where good things are. You give me the fucking creeps. You’re like a fucking deadhead; you live inside your brain all the time and hardly ever come out, and when you do, it’s fucking creepy. You got maggots in your brain, or something. I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last man on earth.”

“Well, gosh,” Sailor says meanly. “There can’t be many more to go.” He sighs. “Maybe someday…”

She slits her eyes and he laughs.

They top the rise. On the other side Sailor pulls off the road and fishes out his .45 semiautomatic from under the seat. He works the action and turns off the engine. He takes the keys, not about to leave them with her. He goes to her side and opens the door. He picks up the baby and turns to face the desert.

Its head lolls. Its mouth works. Its single hand grabs gently at the hair on his forearm. Its mouth opens and closes, opens and closes.

He holds the baby at arm’s length, puts the barrel of the pistol against one unblinking flat-plastic eye, and fires.

[7]

     hands: remember other hands of other food that touch and make the hunger go without the need of food from her a her i remember but the hunger and without her now the hunger still but her hands

[8]

Marly takes soil samples from the savanna. She must determine whether the recirculated air is percolating properly throughout all the environments; she suspects blockage in places.

Dieter leans against a mangrove tree, arms folded, left leg crossed over right.

“Hey, I’m not saying that you did the wrong thing,” he is saying. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I mean, from Bill’s standpoint, you’ve violated the integrity of the Ecosphere. You risked possible contagion; you depleted a carefully regulated—”

She stands with a metal scoop and a dripping, mud-filled plastic baggie in hand. She turns away from him and squishes toward another section of mangrove. She squats and gropes in the stagnant water.

Other than their brief sexual liaison in the first months of the station’s operation, Dieter and Marly have something in common: They both helped design environments for the EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Florida. Under contract from Kraft, Marly worked on a pavilion called The Land, which raised its own crops in various experimental ways, including hydroponics and alternate-gravity centrifuge environments. Dieter helped stock a million-gallon, walk-through ocean called The Living Seas, complete with sharks and dolphins.

Marly wonders how ol’ Walt Disney World is faring these days. The personnel and guests probably look and act pretty much the same. Down & Out in Tomorrowland, same as her.

Now, a week after reality so rudely impinged upon their own little world, Marly is trying to sever all connections with Staff as best she can, under the confined circumstances. She has slept in a tent in the desert every night. She has eaten only food she picks and prepares herself from the Agriculture wing. She does not report for morning exercises with Bill, psychiatric consultation with Grace, the weekly Staff gripe sessions, or the twice-weekly operations reports. She receives all environmental updates from the computer. She stands night watch on the monitor screens when scheduled to—a duty increased since what she has come to think of as the Food Incident.

So now Dieter stands around, dragging the Incident out into ridiculous academic discourse, and the jissum of his mental masturbation falls all over her. She wants to spill his alleged brains with her garden trowel, but what she does is continue working and ignore him. It’s not very difficult. Thinking about it, Marly realizes that she’s already spent over a year in solitary with these seven people.

For the others it’s life as normal—as normal as they can make it, which is very normal indeed, if you apply a now-anachronistic standard. The Food Incident was simply an unplanned-for contingency; they tap its pertinent minutiae into their data banks and schedules and allotments; they compensate, and adjust, and otherwise act as though it were no different than any of the other minor inconveniences that must be dealt with to keep the Ecosphere going.

Marly knows better. She knows their heads are in the sand. She knows that, one day, the real world will show up and kick them in the ass.

But Marly also knows that it’s a lot easier to get by in here than Outside. She is torn: she certainly does not want to leave the station, but she is not sure how much longer she can tolerate these whitebread martinets. Self ostracism is her temporary compromise. She’s on hold. She is a weather vane, shaping herself around the direction of the wind.

[9]

“Again.”

Florida turns on the flashlight. Sailor watches as Jo-Jo’s hands, knotted in the T-shirt (
HE’S DEAD, JIM
), extend before him. Jo-Jo trudges toward the source of the light like Frankenstein’s monster.

Florida clicks off the light and Jo-Jo stops. He looks confused. Through the fence Sailor extends a broom handle from which dangles a fresh piece of cat. Jo-Jo grabs it and begins gnawing, string and all.

“How are the others coming along?”

Florida shrugs. “Not as good. Jo-Jo’s still smartest. We can get ’em to go for the light, though, as long as we give ’em munchies after. They’ll follow a piece of meat anywhere, particularly if it’s alive. It’s got so that every time they see a light, they expect food. But Jo-Jo’s the only one you can get to carry things. Got him to open a door, a couple times.”

One deadhead (
SHIT HAPPENS
) trips over a lounging deadhead whose shirt proclaims that she is
BORN AGAIN
.

Sailor shakes his head. “Pretty fucking stupid.”

Florida nods. “Don’t see what good all this is gonna do us.”

“They taught pigeons to run machines by pecking buttons. Deadheads are as smart as pigeons.”

“Not by much.”

“No,” Sailor agrees. “They’re like plants that turn to follow the sun. Only they follow live meat. But we can redirect that impulse to get them to go after something else if we give them meat as a reward. Clustered stimuli and delayed gratification. They used to do the same thing to get people to quit smoking.”

Florida laughs and scratches a muscular arm. “Dead? Call Schick! But Sailor, what do we need ’em for? We do all right by ourselves.”

Sailor shrugs. “I want to use them,” he says simply.

“You’re still pissed at those techno-weenies out in the desert? Fuck ’em, bud. Let ’em rot. Ain’t nothing those peckerwoods got that we can’t get ourselves.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Sailor mutters.

“You’re taking this pretty personally,” says Florida.

Sailor turns on him. “They wouldn’t feed a fucking
baby
.”

“Sailor, it was a deadhead.”

“They didn’t know that.”

“So what? What possible difference can it make?”

“Aw, man, fuck you, all right?”

At the fence, finished with his bit of cat, cyanotic-tinged face against the broad steel mesh, Jo-Jo watches. Beside him now are the others, carnitropically attracted. They jostle and vie mindlessly, like teenagers before the gate at a rock concert. The upraised elbow of a deadhead (
PARTY ANIMAL
) strikes the temple of a skinny woman wearing a blank T-shirt that has a bumper sticker slapped onto it:
I EAT ROAD KILL
.

Sailor and Florida turn at the sound of approaching music. Cheesecake has a ghetto blaster the size of a suitcase on his muscular shoulder. Run D.M.C. are demanding that sucker emcees call them sire. How Cheesecake can walk and dance at the same time is a mystery to Sailor, whose musical taste always ran to Tangerine Dream and King Crimson anyhow. Well-ordered, high-tech music. White-boy stuff.

Cheesecake’s eyes glint in the light from the building the others are burning down across the quad. His irises are bright, mirrored rings.

“Fuck,” whispers Florida, and reaches for his holster.

Sailor stops him with a hand on his elbow. Florida glances at him, and Sailor shakes his head.

Cheesecake stops before them and sets the ghetto blaster down, dancing jointlessly.

“I thought you’d gone deadhead,” Florida says mildly.

Cheesecake dances. “Say what?” The music is pretty goddamn loud.

“I nearly shot your nigger-brains out!” yells Florida.

“Wha’ for?”

Florida and Sailor glance at each other and laugh.

“Oh, man…” says Florida, shaking his head.

“Hey, you like these?” Cheesecake points to his eyes. “They bad, or what?”

“Where’d you get ’em?” yells Sailor.

“I dunno. Some building.” He waves across the quad, where the building burns.

“Optical sciences,” says Sailor.

“Yeah.”

The song changes; the beat doesn’t.

“You’re gonna get your ass shot off with those on,” yells Florida.

“Say what?”

Florida shakes his head and turns to Sailor. “I don’t think the others are gonna be too enthused on coming down on that place, Sailor,” he says. “No percentage in it.”

Sailor nods. “Figured.”

“I have to tell you, too.” He watches Cheesecake dancing. “Sweetpea thinks… well, she wants some of the guys to split up, you know, and come with her. You aren’t exactly Number One on her hit parade.”