Dark Matter (6 page)

My tomb was in fact a museum. The
Metropolitan Museum of New York, nestled on the East side of Central Park.
While asleep I had been
curated
. Or, I should say, archived, along with
insignificant curios and items awaiting the scrutiny of their particular
expert. Alas, there had been no expert for me. Or rather, none that would come
forward.

It was night. I was confused. When at last
I could move silently, I explored. Eventually I escaped via a back way into the
park itself, and soon came upon a trysting couple. Their accents were American.
That was the first clue that the
Reich’s
New Order had failed, but by then it was not their dull vision of a Greater Germany
I hungered for.

I waited in the dark, out of sight of the
couple, the smell of damp leaf litter in my nostrils, its slickness underfoot. I
watched and listened, willing myself to understanding. I was behind enemy
lines, and following that revelation came the fruit of my training. I prioritised.
I first needed food and shelter. Then I would need information.

I surveilled the couple, thinking perhaps
from them to gain all three. I remembered the mantra of the soldier behind
enemy lines: delay is death.

I took the man first. His throat muscles
were strong. The woman’s reaction was unexpected. She did not scream, and she
did not stare at my nakedness. She simply looked at my face, mouth agape, then
fainted.

I got no information from them but took
what I could, the man’s clothes, his wallet, a watch the likes of nothing I had
ever seen (it sent a shiver through me). I rummaged in the woman’s bag and
found little of use. There was a mirror I took, and thankfully looked into before
I entered the streets.

In the mirror’s circle I saw my face, and
it repulsed me. Its skin was like melted plastic, and clinging to it here and
there were threads like coconut husk. My cast-off flesh.

I dragged the man and woman into the cover
of darkness, for prudence and to hide from my reflection. I dressed like a
blind man, and only then sent my fingers searching over my face. I found the
stray fibres and tore them off with that small pain of scabs. Then I closed my
eyes and went searching in the halls of my memory for my face.

I found it, and some intuition prodded me
to concentrate on it, to want it, to want it very much.

It is hard to describe the sensation I then
felt. It was as if my mind was a wheel that suddenly
gained purchase
and
bit
on the image of my face, which was latent just below the surface,
like a statue sunk beneath murky water. As I concentrated on my own visage, the
flesh of my face began to tingle like an arm numbed by pressure. I dared not
touch it, so, motionless, endured the pain. Half an hour later I stole into the
light to see my reflection. I was heartened to see those oh-so-familiar
features.

I wandered across parkland and through
coppices, over a hard place that turned out to be a life-size chessboard, and
past benches on which people slept.

Someone followed me for at most a minute.
Whether it was a man or woman, I don’t know, but I’m sure whoever it was saw
strength in my gait, which my long-dormant frame was gathering, and thought
better of approaching me. My confidence grew with every stride.

I emerged on the southwest side of the park’s
rectangle, West 59
th
 
street. Stretching out
in front of me was the backbone of Manhattan Island, a teeming palimpsest of
life, a stacked, cubic cityscape that obliterated the horizon.

With difficulty I kept a rein on myself.
Yes, the streets were thronged in an altogether familiar way, man on foot, man
conveyed, and above them, man housed. But what clothes they wore! What machines
moved them! What Olympian monuments housed them! (My admiration for hard
technology experienced a little renaissance.) Stunned, I realised I was staring
at the throne of an empire.

I merged with foot traffic, an emperor in
waiting, and, careful not to stare like a tourist, threaded my way into the
city.

I found a hotel in place called Hell’s
Kitchen, and paid in advance with dollars. The room was not quiet. It was small
and smelt of cigarette ash. But it was mine, my own space. I lay on the bed
(you probably think it funny I would lie down after having lain so long) and
fell straight to sleep. I was spent from the adrenaline coursing in my veins.
It had vivified me, but in the process swept away my meagre stores of energy.
Those stores took some rebuilding.

I slept much in the following week. I became
increasingly sensitive to the idiotic rumbling of a bass instrument played by
the tone-deaf occupant of an adjacent room. It was when I broke into his room
to confiscate the guitar while he was out that I discovered the purpose of the
box-shaped object sitting in the corner of my room. He had left his playing. I
hurried back to my room and activated my own.

Television,
das Fernseher
, moving
pictures, many channels, twenty-four hours a day, every day. What a godsend.

With television I could condense months of
intelligence gathering into days. I activated it, ordered food, and absorbed. I
watched until I dreamed in channels, and my dreams had advertisements.

I’ve since heard television called the
idiot box, the masses’ new opiate. Such is human contempt for the familiar. On
the contrary, I learned the importance of white teeth, and that the corollary
of nihilism is youth worship. I learned that man had walked on the moon (though
I mistook this for fiction at first). Crucially, I learned of the global communication
network called the Internet. This was fascinating, because I once met its
inventor, a man, at that time, of broken spirit. There lies a curious irony,
but I will come to that.

When I could watch no more I began to
train. I sat on the toilet in my room’s cramped en suite, and observed myself
in the mirror. I had a magazine—Cosmopolitan?—and flipped through its pages
until I found a model. I began with men. I lay the magazine open on my knees
and concentrated on the man’s face. I remember vividly the first I tried: forty-something,
lantern-jawed, bearing a nose that was pinched inward below the brows. His eyes
were brown, the skin at their corners angled, suggestive of an Asian admixture
in his ancestry. I would do it for you now if our situation were different.

I concentrated on that face as I had on the
memory of my own, days before in the dark and damp of Central Park. My skin
tingled, as before. I glanced in the mirror once, and stared with the
fascination one has when smitten by a disease, marvelling at flesh’s reaction—the
pustules and hives and alien colours. It seemed that, before changing, it was
necessary to pare my features back to neutral, further than neutral, to
something resembling a tailor’s manikin. My face looked all-over bee-stung, but
the impression was not so much of swelling as of the expunging of detail.

I renewed my concentration upon his face.
Pain stabbed me so hard and unexpectedly I passed out. I came to sprawled over
the toilet. I had cut my head on the toilet roll holder and bled on the paint.
(The cut had healed while I was unconscious.)

Apparently moulding bone, tendon, and
muscle required resolve.

I tried again, gently, tentatively. I
approached that face inwardly as one approaches someone with whom one desires
to speak at a dinner party, unsure of what the reception will be, circling,
drawing nearer as if by chance.

By God it hurt. But I tolerated the pain. I
remained conscious.

You would probably be fascinated by the
physiology underlying
the change
. It fascinates me, how it is I am a
man-sized embryo of unlimited potential manifestation, a six-foot stem cell.
Sadly I am unable to operate upon myself to uncover the biological mechanisms,
and other subjects are, predictably, rare. Therefore I can only speculate, by
mapping how the pain shifts location and intensity during the change.

As the agony crescendos early, I gather the
process begins at the deepest level: bone. It is eroded, mined by enzymatic
machines, sluiced along reticulate capillaries to protein-marked sites, where
it is re-deposited, re-fashioned. Working outward, next come the tendons, which
are thinned or thickened, digested or seeded with large-body cells—an
introduced species. By the same method, muscles are augmented or atrophied.
Then sub-cutaneous fat is shifted, its mass shucked and injected elsewhere.
Strangely this has the most effect on the final form. Eye colour is tweaked by
modulating melanin levels. The old hair is truncated, ejected, and hair cell
protein factories are accelerated by orders of magnitude to the desired colour
and coarseness. And for the final touch, the voice. My imagination supplied me
a baritone for my first change, and my body matched it with the finest of
actions upon the muscle and cartilaginous mass of the Adam’s Apple—fittingly
the final deception.

When at last I felt the tremors of that
first change abate, I looked into the mirror and saw the face of the magazine
model staring back. He smiled at me. I was sweat-drenched and shivering from
the change-flux of fluids in my veins. But,
mein Gott
, the euphoria!

Immediately upon completing the
transformation, I learned another lesson. It should have occurred to me
beforehand. The sheer magnitude of the change’s call upon my metabolic pathways
knocked me out. It was a lightning strike on an unprepared grid. I would need
to improve my endurance.

Days later, when I felt up to another
transformation, I used it to solve a problem. Obtaining a new identity was next
on my list of priorities, and more cash. So I took both from my friend, the bass
player.

I waited until the plumbing told me he was
showering (an infrequent event) and broke into his room again. I took with me the
A-string I had cut from his guitar, and now wound its ends around my hands.
When I pushed open the door to the bathroom it took a full second for his face
to register shock. His hands were halfway to his head and lathered with soap.
It wasn’t until I’d wrapped the string around his neck that he tensed. Perhaps
he was drugged?

The garrote choked off a scream and split
the skin beneath his jaw. Blood fountained and turned pink in the suds. It was
a good thing we were in the shower.

I decided that next time I’d try the
thicker E-string (though, it occurs to me, throttling someone with a G-string would
be amusing).

I towelled off and studied his form. The
morph took less than five minutes, but I don’t claim it would have fooled his
mother.

I’m not sure at what point in re-starting
my life I became aware of how long I had slept. I do remember buying a
newspaper and noting the date: March 20, 2008.

I had been asleep for over sixty years.

UPTRAINS

If reincarnation were to be believed,
then in all the earth’s vast tracts there are few places free of the danger of
stepping on an ancestor.

Ants are on par with humans by aggregate weight,
and outnumber us by six orders of magnitude. They build, husband, cultivate,
nurse, teach, learn, govern and fight. All with a brain weighing less than a
milligram.

Rasputin paused to admire an ant pathfinding
on the bricks beneath his folded legs. He watched it careen through the wood
shavings he had dropped, noting how it repeatedly halted with a flurry of
antennae. He tried to imagine himself into its body, to feel the shock of force
as it changed direction. It was exhausting.

He closed his eyes and stretched. His hands
were starting to cramp.

He heard the flywire door rattle open, and
the scuff of thongs. Someone cast a shadow across Rasputin as they moved
through the light from the patio’s only globe.

“Thought I’d find you here,” said Jordy.

“Why were you looking?”

Jordy ignored the question, and said, “I
can’t believe you’re carving the stick. I should have got you a monogrammed
towel.”

Rasputin lifted the black walking cane to
his squinting eye and blew chaff from its grooves. “Bet you’ve never whittled,”
he said, and couldn’t help laughing. “You should. It’s so visceral. Once you
dig the blade in, the wood is changed forever.”

“Sounds violent.”

Jordy lay on the bricks, hanging his legs
over the patio edge. The sun had long gone and the air was cooling. A handful
of stars struggled to shine through haze. The silence was broken only by moths
beating out staccato notes on the light globe.

Rasputin picked up the knife again and
began enlarging a groove in the wood.

“What’s it going to say?” Jordy said.
“Looks like a dog’s been at it.”

“Tyrfing,” said Rasputin.

“
Gesundheit
.”

“It’s a name.”

“I would’ve gone for Barbara. You can count
on Barbaras.”

“I don’t want it baking me scones.”

Jordy sniffed. “People told me not to flat
with an Arts student.”

“Good advice.” As Rasputin ran the knife
down a groove, it skipped out and nicked his finger. He watched the blood bead.
It was not a bad cut. “Do you want to hear the story?”