Filaria (23 page)

The voices again. To his relief, one was a woman’s. These were not dark gods, waiting to trap him. This woman was talking, in low, placid tones, with what sounded to be a child, though it became evident to Tran so that the child might be chastising or instructing the woman. Odder still, the younger voice rang with tones of familiarity. Unable to hear clearly any of the words, he shimmied a little closer to the grille, trying to be as silent as possible.

Soon he was able to peer over the lip:

He discerned little, except glare. He managed to rub the corners of his bleary eyes with dusty knuckles, one at a time, and, as his vision cleared further, he saw a room beneath him, a sleeping area, similar, yet more opulent and spacious than those he knew back in Hoffmann City. There was one large bed, covered by a thick red duvet and red fitted sheet. Plumped up by the ornate headboard, two red pillows. The entire structure of the bed was elevated off the floor, and the walls were decorated with designs that moved and undulated as he watched. How he wanted to bust out of the grille and lie supine on that bed, limbs outspread.

Despite the decadence, Tran so detected a general patina of age over everything down there, an overall yellowed tone of disuse and neglect.

Positioned directly over the bed, Tran so could not see the full extent of the room, nor could he see the persons — if they were indeed people — who had been speaking. He thought he heard them moving, but they were no longer talking.

The floor was a pale brown shag. Tran so had seldom seen carpeting before; it was a luxury where he came from, a sign of wealth and corruption —

The woman came into view. Bent over the opulent bed, she brushed at it with her hands. Looking down, Tran so could not see her face, but he knew immediately that she was young, and beautiful beyond words.

Just the cant of one arm, as she flattened the duvet, the shape of her leg as she placed it down to steady herself, was too much. Mingled with arousal was a familiar, bittersweet sadness: pining for Minnie sue, for vanished passion, for concepts as great as his own aging and mortality.

She was twenty years old, at most. Black skirt and black top, with a white apron over it all that had seen better days. A uniform of some kind? He thought at first she was also wearing a helmet but soon realized netting had been tied around her brown hair, containing it, holding it away from her breathtaking neck.

Tran so Phengh saw no one else in the room. Unprepared to move his head out too far over the opening for fear of being seen, or maybe moving dust or other debris forward with his body so that it rained down on the girl and gave his position away, he watched as best he could for a long while.

Her collarbone, exquisite, her smooth skin flawless and translucent. He imagined her body, lurking in the clothes that only hinted at its form.

Could she perceive him, he wondered, even if she did happen to look up from whatever strange toil it was she performed down there, to that soft bed?

He was getting a hard-on. He had not been aroused by a woman other than Minnie sue for a long time. He squeezed his eyes shut and mouthed a silent apology to his dying wife, yet grinding his own body against the ductwork all the while.

The woman below started to hum an innocent tune.

Scents he had earlier detected wafted up again. These were coming, he saw now, from a tube that the girl gripped in her left hand. He had not seen this apparatus at first but he regarded it clearly now as she raised it to spray, in a fine mist, the red linen of the bed. This dispensing hose led back to a tiny buggy on wheels, which she pulled now, and the buggy creaked farther into the room.

Tran so’s eyebrows cocked upwards.

“Can you smell the mildew?” the girl asked, her voice throaty, oozing a sensuality that intensified Tran so Phengh’s arousal. “I don’t think it’s much better. It only masks it, you know.”

She straightened to push at her back with the palm of her free hand, so that Tran so finally saw her features: she
was
gorgeous. As he had sensed. So beautiful that he caught his breath and his eyes moistened with longing —

“Just you wait a minute,” the trolley said. “Let me adjust the lavender ratio.”

Evidently, the trolley was some form of minor god. Tran so had not seen the likes of it before. But the trolley was not the speaker he had heard earlier, the one with the child’s voice. There was someone else in the room. Human, or god? He wished he could see more than just a rectangle of the chamber below, wished he could see more of the girl —

“Freeze, sir.”

In that instant, with these two words, the mystery of the third voice, and of who — or what — owned it, was solved. And he comprehended, in that same instant, why the voice had sounded familiar. This time, it had not issued from beneath him. Before he looked up, across the grille, to the other side of the duct, he knew the voice belonged to a crawling god. Out of context, but unmistakable. Funny how his mind hadn’t made the connection earlier. Preoccupied with the girl, perhaps.

He lifted his face.

There were two of them. Identical to gods of loose ends and traffic infringements, squatting there, in the duct opposite, they watched him intently with their compound eyes.

“Hello,” he said.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Deciding to tell the truth — or at least, the partial truth — Tran so Phengh said, “I am seeking answers to questions.”

“Questions? What questions?” The crawling god on the left scuttled closer so that one pointed leg, glittering in the light rising up from the sleeping chamber, rested on the brink of the grille. “To me, friend, you appear to be spying on my staff.”

“Your
staff
?” Again, Tran so Phengh looked down at the girl, whose face was upturned now, listening. His gaze fell into those eyes: beautiful and warm and brown.

When he reluctantly lifted his head again, to explain, the crawling gods had gone. Silently vanished. Squinting, he tried to locate the deities as they ran off down the dark tunnel —

There came a popping sound.

And the duct fell out from underneath him.

Tumbling once through the air, glancing off the softness of the bed, he crashed heavily onto the brown shag carpet. On his back, he lay in pain at the girl’s feet in a settling cloud of dust and pattering debris.

She smiled at him.

He groaned. After a moment, he moved his arms, his legs. As he lay there, trying to breathe, reassured that no bones were broken, that incredible face kept looking down at him.
Smiling
.

Crawling gods came across the floor toward him, from an open doorway. At least six of them. They held position in a semi-circle around him as he managed to sit up.

“You could have killed me,” Tran so wheezed, glancing toward the ceiling panel through which he had fallen: it swung, creaking, back and forth on its hinges. Another crawling god clung upside down to the tiled ceiling. As he watched, this deity vanished, moving swiftly into the hole and out of sight, dislodging detritus with its scrambling legs; something sharp landed painfully in Tran so’s left eye and he groaned once more.

“You are trespassing,” one of the crawling gods explained. “This area is for paid guests only. And staff, of course. But not just any staff. This is not a free-for-all. We run a tight ship here in the Department of Hospitality. Go tell your boss that.”

Tran so rubbed at his injured eye. “Hospitality? You don’t know the meaning of the word. And I don’t have a boss.”

“Renegade, eh? Well you are interrupting our new employee training. It sure seems you missed yours, in whatever third-rate department you skulked away from.”

“I am not a
new
employee,” the girl said, bemusement flickering across her face. She glanced coyly at Tran so. “There
are
no new employees, sir. I’ve been doing this job since I was born. I certainly don’t need training.”

Tran so got to his feet, brushing himself off. Crawling gods scuttled anxiously, as if he might bolt. His eye watered profusely. The same eye, he realized, the parasite had been in.

“I’d like to clarify something.” He looked at the girl. “I wasn’t spying.”

Shrugging, and tugging at the hose she carried, so that the little trolley squeaked closer to her leg, she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

“My name is Tran so,” insisted Tran so.

“Sir,” the crawling god called up to him, “you’ll have to come with us.”

He could have kicked them all aside, like crabs, and run away, but what would be the point? He wanted to stay in this room. He wanted to talk to the girl, to learn her name, to touch her hands and feel her neck, hot against his lips. He might never see her again if he fled.

But the damned gods would not let him stay.

“Where will you take me?” he asked them.

“Anywhere but here. We’ll take you to our supervisor’s office. He’ll give you what for. And he’ll contact your boss.”

Tran so nodded. Most of what the little gods said made no sense, but the lake god had called itself a supervisor. If the supervisor of these lesser gods was a step further up their ladder of divinity, perhaps he had regained the trail he needed to be on. Mysterious ways, indeed. Would he get an audience with the god of all gods? Would he meet the network?

The girl, he saw, wore a nametag.
Hello. My name is Sandra
. Such a wonderful name. “Listen, Sandra, I can’t help but think we were meant to meet.”

The crawling gods actually laughed at his line. The girl, however, paid him no attention whatsoever. So he let his hand, which he’d held out, drop. He did not know what else to do. Should he actually touch her, hold her arm?

“Sir, please come with us.”

At a loss, he let himself be escorted from the room.

Underfoot, the gods crossed his path hither and thither. He glanced back surreptitiously; Sandra was not looking at him, as he’d hoped. His ego withered.

They escorted him down a long hall.

Love had been so difficult, over the past months, to retain for Minnie sue. Ravaged by disease, she no longer really existed, outside of memories. Was he expected to remain at his wife’s side the whole while she wasted away? When Minnie sue woke from her comatose sleeps, she called him atrocious names, hurt him in every conceivable way, screaming the Red Plague’s obscenities at him. How many times had he knelt by Minnie sue’s futon while she raved and cursed and spat at him?

They passed dozens of rooms. In most, busy women cleaned, dressed in black skirts with white aprons. None, of course, were as charming or as pretty as Sandra. But there sure were a
lot
of rooms. A
lot
of women.

And minor gods, too, dashing from doorway to doorway, giving out instructions as they went, barking out annoying orders, watching over the staff as Tran so was led past.

These hallways, like the sleeping chambers, were carpeted. A rich, decorative layer that altered tones of deep reds and burgundies covered the walls. Lights, mounted in the walls, set in sconces between each pair of doors, illuminated hemispheres of warm amber over the ruddy carpeting and over him as he followed the minor gods. It became apparent that the entire place was a series of similar halls and rooms. Difficult to find his way back to where Sandra worked. Nonetheless, he tried to memorize the layout.

But the vistas were confusing and the proximity of all these women distracting.

Secondary hallways led off, either side. These also were doorlined. Some doors open, some doors shut. More rooms, more women, more gods. He heard the various droning sounds of mingled voices and the laughter of people trying to deal with tedium, and an ambient humming overall. He thought about Sandra, her voice, her smile. He wondered what it would be like to fuck her, and he wondered what had happened to make him so obsessed. Had it been the spray? His heart pounded. He felt strong, alive; he had not felt like this in years.

“Who sleeps in all these rooms?” he demanded. “What are they for?” No response. “Why are all these women cleaning?”

Again, no answer.

At the end of this hall was a device about the same height as Tran so, a great block-shaped thing residing under a sign that said simply ICE. At first, he thought this block might be a primitive yet inert god, but as he neared he could tell it had never possessed sentience.

Beyond was an opening, a wide doorway into a large room. Lined, on three walls, with plush couches. Tran so stopped at the threshold and the crawling gods bumped into his calves and scurried around his feet. There were pictures on the walls of this room, what looked to be lakes, and beaches, but these were so clean, reposed under blue ceilings set impossibly high, that he knew they were no location in this world.

Against the furthermost wall to his left ran an elongated counter behind which, waiting motionless — so he had not seen it at first — was a god on treads standing erect, almost exactly like a god of dispensing. Ludicrously, the deity was dressed in illfitting clothing. Tran so saw it blink, and knew it was activated; he immediately walked across the room. “Where is the network? I wish to speak to the network.”

The god stared at him with tiny, cold eyes. One of the crawling deities quickly mounted the counter and scurried between them. “You are addressing a fulltime clerk,” it said to Tran so. “This clerk is in need of repairs. Once again, you harass our staff. The supervisor is in the chamber beyond. Please cease all questions and do not leave our side again without clearance.”

Tran so Phengh noted the door that the crawling god had indicated: large, green, unassuming.

The clerk said, in slow, affected tones, “Welcome to the nostalgia suites. Do you wish a room for one week? For two? Are you single? Do you have a family?”

“A
family
?” Tran so stared.

“Yes. Are you a family man?”

With one sweep of his arm, Tran so knocked a small bell from the counter to the carpet, where it rang dully. “I stayed with my wife longer than most people would have,” he hissed. “And my son is dead.
That
is my family.” The rage was whirling inside him, eddying, ebbing. He felt tension in his limbs —