400 Boys and 50 More (69 page)

“I am the only official here,” the man said slowly. “Now give me your passport, Mr.—”

“Doctor,” Joseph said. To make a sweep of his arm toward the man’s face would have been seen as a hostile gesture; he dared no such thing. He rolled his thumb alongside the cap of the vial, sealing it for the moment.

“Doctor?”

“Perhaps you have heard of me.”

As he reached for the passport in his inner pocket, his other hand found the vial of Mome-scent and loosened the cap; he pretended to cough, putting both hands to his mouth, and in an instant slipped the vial into the hand that held the passport. Presenting the papers, he fanned them slightly so that the scent would carry. Surely, he thought, the memory of loyalty to the old Emperor was not far beneath the surface of this Fombeh’s mind; to reach down and call upon that allegiance would be to contact a powerful ally.

“Doctor Kmei Dodo,” the man said, and he looked rather stupefied. “You, here?”

Joseph prayed the scent was strong enough to convince the man—but suddenly he had no idea of what he was trying to convince him. Dodo and Mome were antagonists. What had he done?

The scent had some effect. The official blinked, eyes watering, and wiped his nose. He walked around the counter, flattened the passport, and stared at it from a distance, still blinking as though trying to clear away the tears.

“Is something wrong?” Joseph asked. “Can I help? I am a doctor.”

The official straightened quickly, snapped the passport shut, and thrust it back at him. “Nothing is wrong, Dr. Dodo,” he said brusquely, still twitching as though a flea had gotten up his nose. “I have never seen you here before, that is all. I would think the President’s plane suits you better. But I will speak to the pilots. If I can’t give them money, I can promise bullets.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Joseph began as the man wheeled away, shoulders jerking like those of an ill-handled marionette. “Why don’t you stamp my passport?”

The far door banged open, the fat Kaak ran in hauling a man in a shapeless, sleeped-in uniform by the wrist. “He’s over there, you talk to him. He’ll tell you, he has money.”

“Everyone tells me they have money,” the pilot began.

“I have something better than that,” said Joseph’s interrogator, raising his machine gun barrel toward the pilot’s face. The pilot stopped dead, eyes bulging, then started to back away.

“No, no,” cried the Kaak. “None of that!”

“The plane is leaving!” someone shouted. There was a rush of bodies, not away from the confrontation but toward it. “I have a ticket!” “The plane is leaving!” “Go, go!” Others shoved in from outside, crowding the room further.

The officer came out from behind the counter and pushed back at the crowd, jabbing with his gun. His face was bland.

“No shoving,” he barked, and the gun coughed once.

A boy crumpled, clutching the rags of his belly. The rest turned away in a crushing mob, squeezing into the corners of the room; some limped, wounded by bullets that had passed through the boy. The official turned back to the pilot, who was halfway through the door now that the other guards had moved toward the crowd.

Joseph leaned against the counter—or caught himself as he staggered. His eyes lingered on the still body whose life had deserted it in a rush, a torrent. He reached for the only thing that mattered to him now, the chest full of essences; he started sliding it across the counter, toward the far door. The soldiers were intent on the shrieking mass of bodies that was trying to pour in one piece through the doorway. A window shattered, then another, as the trapped people found other exits and clambered through broken glass to be free. Out of the wailing and clattering, he heard one clear voice that made him stop.

He looked to the front door and saw a figure in the crowd, her arm upraised, a delicate lace handkerchief waving from her fingers to catch his eye.

“Angelica,” he said.

She could not move against the press of the crowd, her eyes were hopeless, shining out between the terrified masks that overwhelmed her. Why had she come back? What was she telling him?

Then, louder than the mob, he heard the roaring of jeeps and the chatter of machine guns from outside the terminal. The crowd reversed, surged back into the room, this time bearing Angelica along with it. He held fast to the counter so that she could find him.

“They’ve come, Joseph,” she cried; her words were isolated from the screaming, she might have been speaking to him in a private silence. “We saw them on the road and I had to warn you. Get on the plane, Joseph. It will go now.”

She shouldn’t have come, he thought, but there was no way she could go back now. He forged toward her while the mob stood paralyzed, packed tight as beans in a jar, trapped between the soldiers in the terminal and those that had just arrived.

“Give me your hand,” he said. Her touch was hot; he could not pull her from the vise of bodies. “You must come with me now, Angelica.”

“All right, Joseph. Yes—”

He tugged but her hand slipped away, carried by a tidal shift in the crowd. His box of attars snagged, holding him back; he lifted it free, held it aloft, and started after her.

“Angelica!”

He searched for her among the many heads, but it was a different face that he finally recognized, at the same instant he saw her between him and the doorway. Miguel stood at the threshold. His grin was simultaneous with Joseph’s groan.

Angelica did not see Miguel, but he spotted her. “Here!” she cried, looking straight at Joseph.

Miguel shouted a command and soldiers pressed in around him. Joseph fell back, but he could not bring down his arm for a moment; he could feel himself losing his grip on the chest. As he jerked forward to keep it balanced on his palm, the crowd parted miraculously, leaving an empty corridor down which Miguel—or Angelica—could walk to him. It was not a miracle, however: it was the guns.

She rushed toward him.

“Down!” he cried, too late, and threw himself sideways, abandoning the box of essences, reaching for his life.

Everyone fell.

The shooting went on forever.

Mass burial, bodies still writhing, presided over by the deific voices of the guns pronouncing death for all. He crawls through a tunnel of flesh and nails on a floor slick with blood. Broken glass cuts his hands, his blood joins the rest, but in such insignificant quantities that he wishes he could laugh.

Then he sees Angelica’s face, cooling eyes and tattered throat, and screaming he drags himself backward, though never far enough. Everywhere he looks, he sees her face. Deeper into the nightmare now, he sees the scattered vials, all shattered, distillations mingling with the vital liquids of the dead and dying. The perfumes blot out the smell of blood, bringing a whiff of heaven, or delirium. A woman with half a skull sits up laughing, ripping at her hair, overcome by the stench of rapture. Someone howls an ecstatic prayer. Miguel stands over his men, regarding his handiwork, while over his face parades a chaos of conflicting emotions: pleasure, anger, innocence, malevolence, flickering and disjointed. Then, as the cloud of scent-molecules becomes thoroughly combined, and as Joseph holds his breath, every emotion in the air comes into Miguel’s face at once. It should be a phenomenon like the joining of a spectrum’s colors into unity, into brilliant white light. But it is not at all like that. No matter how many attars Joseph had captured, he had by no means forced the whole range of humanity into his bottles; critical things are missing, essences he’d never had time or thought to distill.

It was not white light that came pouring from the soldiers' faces: it was pure madness.

Joseph worked his way backward, head bowed, breathing through his collar. The dying crowd had begun to roar.

A hand fastened on his sleeve and he pried it off, gasping at the sudden bite of nails; the involuntary gulp of scent provoked a kind of fury, gave him the strength to tear himself away, to keep moving.

He sipped the air slowly but it was too much; he wanted to take in huge draughts. Now he exhaled, fighting the tide of atoms streaming in against his olfactory nerves, hoping that he could hold onto himself an instant longer. It might be long enough.

The guns held a brief conversation. He glanced up as the soldiers at the rear door toppled; the customs official stared at him as he crept past, though his eye was not in his cheek.

His heart beat against his ribs, clamoring for oxygen. Only when he had reached the far door did he look back, and all he could see was the dead. Miguel and his men lay staring, heaped around the door they had been so eager to enter; his cousin’s face was fixed in madness, as he would ever remember it.

Then he was outside, inhaling great breaths of the warm dusty air, absorbing the whole of the night.

Ahead of him he heard a metallic whining and saw a row of bright lozenges floating in the air. Long moments passed before he realized that it was an airplane. He shouted. A figure appeared in the doorway, hurrying to pull the door shut, and he screamed again at the silhouette. The person stopped, uncertain.

“Wait for me!” he cried, on his feet and running. “I’m alone, please don’t go, wait for me.”

The short run took an age; the night had made distances deceptive. The stairs were a mile high, or the scents he’d inhaled made them seem that way. Now all he could smell was blood. It soaked his clothes, engloved his hands. The door full of light was before him; he tumbled in and heard it shut. He lay on his face, hearing voices above him, feeling the plane begin to move slowly, jostling. He knew the instant it left the ground because he began to sob with relief and terror, grieving for Angelica even as he gave thanks for his own survival. Most of the emotions passing in the flood were unfamiliar to him. Very few had mixed with the blood on the terminal floor.

“Can you hear me, sir? Can you get up? We have a seat for you, you’ll be more comfortable.”

He rolled over weakly and saw a black face looking down at him. Ife or Nmimi or Fombeh or Kaak, he couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter which. It was simply another face, a human face, a living being. He reached up to take it in his hands.

“Your name, sir? Can you tell me your name?”

“My name?” He choked, almost laughed, remembering in time not to give himself away.

“I’m afraid if you’re injured there’s not much we can do. We have a first aid kit, but no doctor aboard.”

“No doctor?” he said. “Yes there is, yes there is. I’m a doctor, my friend. Doctor Dodo, that’s me.”

* * *

“Mad Wind” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in
Century #4
(Jan./Feb. 1996), edited by Robert K.J. Killheffer.

TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT

(An Excerpt from
Mock-Up
,

An Abandoned Novel)

When Morris was seventeen, he didn't see much of his parents. His stepfather was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying with his customers in those same tubs. Morris's mother had accompanied her husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband's behavior—though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times—had uncovered some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral pharmaceutical companions.

Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in search of something he would know when he saw it—in search of some magic that might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the radio spewed Barry Manilow ("At the Copa—Copacabana. . .") and Eddie Money ("I got. . .two tickets to paradise. . .won't you. . .pack your bags and we'll leave tonight,") and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him—as if the dream of packing his bags for paradise were something his spirit yearned for. He nearly drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into oblivion.

Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys and Copper Pennys and 7/11's, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise unremarkable Holiday Inn: "Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!"

He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer, and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie Walker Red (his stepfather's drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and then a third time before braving the party again.

He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him he vaguely recognized from the jackets of novels he had glanced at, if not actually finished. The faces seemed to swim and bob around the room, so he was less than eager to approach any of them, until two came rather close to him. A woman and a man, both like enough to have been brother and sister, with similar hair long and curled, although the woman was tall and very thin, while the man was quite short and plump. Hers was the deeper voice; his was very faint and distant, almost indistinct, as if lost in his thick moustach and bush of beard just shot through with a few strands of grey. Her hair had much more iron in it, threads that stood out like white wire, unruly hair that was held in place with a unicorn pin, which made him think of virgins, which Morris still was. Their eyes were the same shade of green, but that didn't necessarily mean they were related; it might have been only the reason they had been drawn together. Morris's own eyes were green, after all, and now they had been drawn to him.