In the Courts of the Sun (26 page)

“I’m going to start the TMS on your left hemisphere,” Lisuarte said. She meant transcranial magnetic stimulation, which confuses the electronic events in a selected part of the brain. This supposedly encourages other parts to work harder and fire more often, and that would make their structures more visible.
“Okay, let’s have a little privacy here,” Marena said. “Thanks.”
Taro and everyone cleared out of the room. For the next few hours it would be just Marena, Lisuarte, and me in here. Although of course the others would all be outside watching on video, and probably providing wise-ass commentary.
“Okay,” Marena said. “You want to start?” I said sure. I’d asked for her to read the cues instead of Lisuarte. The CTP team—that stood for Consciousness Transfer Protocol—had voted on it and decided it was all right because, as I think I said, all this was mainly for my benefit anyway. Although they did want to run the new field equipment once before the main event. But the thing was, of course, if it didn’t work, that wouldn’t really tell us anything. It might just mean that Sor Soledad was too sick to move or something. And if it didn’t work, we’d just move on with the project anyway. However—according to Warren’s team of crack shrinks—if it did work, the psychological benefits would be huge.
I sort of settled myself into the cot. Lisuarte put a thin blanket over me, I guess on the theory that it would relax me. Hmm. Actually, I was already feeling a little floaty. I focused on the crucifix, trying to get myself into a medieval mood. The plastic JC had a pretty big basket going on in his loincloth. Writhe for me, you hot, hot divinity. Take it up the rib cage. Take it up the metatarsus. Take that tree up your ass, you sacred slut. You’ve been a
bad
god. Suck my sponge, King of the Kikes. Ooooooh! My God, my God. The earth doth quake, and the graves do ope, and the dead saints’ members do rise and swell! Oooh, I am rent in twain! Top to bottom! OOOO
OOOOH! OOO—
“Okay, let’s go,” Marena said. She was chewing her nicotine gum, but she talked around it well enough not to be disgusting. “Can you tell us what you did yesterday?”
I told her.
“Okay. What’s Samarkand the capital of ?”
“Kazakhstan.” On the screen a silent green snarl of anvil-crawler lightning flashed between the thunderheads of my ventromedial cortex.
“What time is it?”
“One eighteen.”
“What’s the date today?”
“March fifteenth, 2012. 7 Cane, 6 Dark Egg. In the Chinese calendar it’s the twenty-third day of the second—”
“Okay, what’s in the news today?”
“Well, the FBI arrested those Hijos de Kukulkan people. Which I guess takes care of the ‘shoulder the blame’ thing in the Codex.” HDK was a new sort of pseudo-Zapatista group from Austin, sort of a Maya version of the Nation of Aztlán. Supposedly they’d claimed responsibility, in a rally, for the Disney World Horror. On the other hand—according to No Way—this guy Subcomandante Carlos, who was kind of the head of it and who used to be in Enero 31, had told him the HDK hadn’t had anything to do with it.
“Yeah,” Marena said. “What else?”
“Uh, a bunch of the glowb—I mean, about eight thousand persons who were exposed to polonium particles—have gotten out of the quarantine camps and they’re camped outside D.C. And the White House is saying they’re going to intercept the marchers and keep them from reaching the Great Lawn. Uh, let’s see . . . they’re saying that they estimate there’s about five hundred pounds of polonium 210 in the No-Go Zone, so there’s no way anyone’s going in there for a long time without protection. Except there’s this shortage of shielded responder suits because most of them are in Pakistan, and eighty percent of the suits that are still in the U.S. are defective. Uh . . . there’s all this video of dead bodies coming out, and the government’s trying to close down YouTube because they don’t want people to see it, and the ACLU filed a suit yesterday to make all of it public. And some of it really is pretty . . . it’s pretty gruesome.” I was thinking of this one video of people at MegaCon. It was from the main display floor in this gigantic hall. Somebody’d cleared the booths out of an area in the center, and about two hundred of the conventioneers had died there together in this big sort of heap, because sick people tend to seek human contact. Like most of the bodies they were all contorted and open-mouthed or grimacing, but they were also, it seemed, uniformly overweight, and about half of them were still in costume as orcs or Hyperboreans or Klingons or whatever, and it all gave the whole thing a medieval feeling, like some mountain of slain foes that, say, Tamerlane would have left on the steppes, except it was all in that flat green fluorescent light, and then as the videobot waddled closer you could see that a lot of them were holding things in their hands like Harry Potter wands and Sith amulets and other sorts of talismanic trinkets, and then it got so close that you could see how puffed up they were, and you could see the flies on them and practically smell the putrefaction through the screen—
“What else?” Marena asked.
“Oh . . . well . . . a lot of victims’ families, they’re demanding that they get the corpses out, but the authorities and public opinion were sticking pretty firmly to the other side, that if they did it would spread polonium 209 around, and that they should send in some robot backhoes and maybe a few priests and whatever in Demron suits and bury all the bodies at some site inside the No-Go Zone.”
I paused, but she didn’t say anything, I guess because the people at the Stake were seeing enough new regions of my brain lighting up that they didn’t want to put in a new stimulus.
“So, and then there were some whistleblowers at the EPA,” I said. “And they were saying that even that would kick up too much dust and the best thing to do is leave the whole area unchanged, with all the buildings standing, as a monument, and then there was another faction that I guess wants to at least bulldoze the buildings and cut down all the trees because if there’s another fire in there it’ll spread more of the polonium, but I guess now the idea is to keep enough Forest Service planes on hand to put out any new fires. And with the bodies, now there’s a bill in the Florida state legislature for what they’re calling the Pompeian solution, which I guess is they’re going to send in teams of EMTs in special suits, and they’re going to plastinate the corpses with some kind of von Hagens process, and I guess spray them with gold paint or fix them up somehow and just leave them there, and then once there’s no more particulates in the wind they want to take the families for flyover funerals in blimps. Although that sounds kind of ridiculous to me, but—”
“Okay, what else?” Marena asked.
“Uh, the Ayatollah Razib says the attack was, uh, foretold in the Koran. Ted Haggard says it was to punish us for the federal gay marriage thing. The official death toll on the combined poisoning and rioting and fires, it’s getting close to forty-five thousand. About a third of the southeastern U.S. is still under martial law. A whole bunch of people got mugged for their blood last night in Tampa. I guess they woke up all pale and drained and everything, with—”
“I mean what else is in the news other than Disney World?”
“Oh. Uh, let’s see . . . there’s a civil war in Bangladesh. There’s that terrorist, Hasani, that they caught last month, he’s terminally ill, supposedly, and the public is asking for a torture sentence. Right? And today the president signed a waiver of the Geneva Convention, uh, protocols, so it could go forward. Right? And July corn contracts are up thirty percent, and spot gold’s about sixteen hundred dollars an ounce. And—”
“That’s fine. Good. I mean, that’s not all good, but you’re doing fine.”
“Thanks.”
“Right.” She looked at her phone. “Okay, what’s the square root of nineteen?”
“Four point, uh, hang on, uh, three five nine.”
“I think it’s so sexy that you can do that.”
“Huh? Oh, thanks.” Hmm, what was that about? I wondered. Was that a flirt? Huh. I wouldn’t mind beaming into
her
transversable wormhole. Or was that part of the idea? Get me a little embarrassed, a little turned on? Probably. Gotta watch these people. They’re tricky—
“What was Kiri-Kin Tha’s first law of metaphysics?” she asked.
“What?” I asked.
“What was—”
“Wait a second,” I said. “I remember, uh, nothing’s not real. Or something.”
“Nothing unreal exists,” she said.
“That’s it. Heh.”
“I’m going to give you that series of nouns,” Marena said, “and we want you to remember them and write them down when you’re in place.”
“Right, I know.”
“Shoe . . . eraser . . . goldfish . . . skull . . . balloon . . . wheelbarrow.”
“Got it,” I said. I also had a message to myself in mind, something I’d just come up with, had never told anyone about, and had never even uttered aloud: Houdini’s afterlife code,
Rosabelle, believe.
“Okay,” she said. “So, now we’re going to turn off your view of yourself and show you some pictures.
“Okay, here’s the first image,” Marena said. A still of Ronald Reagan in
Stallion Road
came up on the screen in glorious organic-LED detail.
“That’s scary stuff,” I said. My amygdala was probably flashing DANGER DANGER DANGER.
“Now, just answer when I ask.” The picture changed to a video of baby geese walking in a line behind their mother. “What color socks are you wearing?”
That one nearly stumped me, but I think I got it right. Not that getting it right mattered. In fact, you often get more flash, that is, you get more neuronal routines to fire, when you don’t know the answer—
Whoa. On the screen a big brown weasel or stoat or something had slunk into the shot and had already torn apart four out of six goslings. The mother flapped around the little killing field, honking in despair. Hell.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go through the message one last time.”
I said okay. For the hundredth time we went over what to write down, what to write it on, and where to leave it.
“Good,” she said. “Okay. Tell me about the Desert Dog.”
What? I thought.
Whoa. How’d she know about that? I’d never told anybody about it. Maybe I’d mumbled it in my sleep during one of those long EEG tests at the Stake. They’d probably dosed me with sodium ammitol or something. Bastards.
“Jed?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I haven’t, uh, that’s not, uh—”
“I know,” she said, “it’s a surprise question; please answer it anyway.”
There was a pause. Fine, I thought. I started to tell her how my stepbrothers had caught the dog, how he had no front paws, just scrappy stumps with strings of cartilage trailing out, how his eyes were bulgy with fear, and how when I’d been out there by his cage for a little while the fear had lessened, and how I’d tried to solve the combination padlock and couldn’t do it, and then to jimmy it and couldn’t do that, and then I’d tried to bend the thin bars back. Somehow I was going to get them together again so that my stepbrothers wouldn’t know it had been me. But I was only eight and didn’t know how to do anything mechanically serious, and the crate was some sort of heavy-duty industrial thing made for pigs or whatever. Desert Dog had known what I was doing, and he seemed to trust that I’d get him out. It wasn’t easy at first, telling Marena about it, especially since I despise sentiment, and my voice was getting hoarse and monotonal, but maybe something in the pharmacocktail they’d given me loosened the tongue, because I kept going. I told her how I’d brought a can of Mountain Dew, and how I poured it into a little pool on the zinc and how he practically dove for it and lapped it up, resting on his elbows, and then looked at me with this grateful expression in those kind eyes dogs have, with almost even a dampness of hope in them, how I gave him a snack-sized bag of Rold Gold pretzels that I’d rubbed the salt off of, and how he’d loved those, and how he wagged his threadbare tail and shook his gold earflaps, and how I’d given him the rest of the Mountain Dew, and how happy he was getting it, looking at me with that doggy feeling of trust, how I could tell he thought that for sure I’d do the right thing, that I was powerful and would let him out when I wanted to, that he’d come along and be my lookout, that he was saying he could still get around fine even without his paws, that he’d come along with me and be a good friend, how soft his snout was when he licked my hand, with that compact sort of coziness in his doggy head, how his spongy nose was dry and hot but not so dry as it had been, how his tongue flicked over my bruised fingers as I tried this and tried that, I tried bending the ground plate with a piece of metal and couldn’t do it, and how finally I just lay back crying, looking at my bloody hands and seeing I’d scratched my fingertips and knuckles in several places, and knowing that if I didn’t get back to the house and get to work with my wound plasters I could bleed too much, and how I scratched Desert Dog under his soft flaps with my fingers and told him that I had to leave but I’d be back, you wait, you good dog, and how I walked back home across the vacant lots in the white highway lamplight, frustrated beyond the strength of the word
frustrated
, like I was biting on the rock of the universe. It was one of those moments when you see with just a sliver of clarity, just one little finger-melted dot on your frosted goggles, just how terrible existence is, how it’s all just the disappointment of innocents, transmuting their hope into shit at a headlong rate, and how much the torturing just has to somehow stop. When I got home I could still hear Desert Dog crying across the highway, not so much in a canine whimper but more just sobbing, like a two-year-old human with an earache. And another—
“Uh, okay. Good,” Marena said. Probably Lisuarte had told her over the headset that they’d finally gotten enough activity out of my limbic cortex. At last, Jed Mixoc de Spock shows some real feeling. “Now we’re going to start some stims.” She meant neuronal stimulations.
I said fine and closed my eyes. There were ten seconds of normalcy and then a flash of green light.
“I see green,” I said.
“Good,” she said. There were another few seconds of downtime and then the sound of raindrops.
“I hear rain,” I said. I was also noticing that someone had lit a stick of sandalwood incense. Then I realized it was probably just one of the stims.
“Incense,” I said.
“Right,” Marena said.
Sounds, smells, and images flashed up and faded. I heard violins in G minor, a bar of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2. I smelled cinnamon and burning rubber—somebody’s messing with my temporal lobes, I thought—and then, all at once, a sweet woodsy smell like wet old books. I saw Silvana’s face. I felt itches on my chest and a jab in my ribs. I saw the faces of people I didn’t remember but must have known. I saw my mother’s face. She smiled. I saw a scary pattern of wood grain on the door of our room in the Ødegârds’ house that I’d thought looked like a devilish goat in a bow tie. I remembered an orange Tonka backhoe I’d dug out of a landfill and played with for hours and days, thought about one of the first fish I had, a