Filaria (7 page)

“Cease that behavior immediately,” Mereziah said, but really though, what did he care if passengers pissed in the pods? He never intended to clean one again. “You might ruin the machinery under the floor. Or even get a shock yourself, should you piss on something live. I’m not qualified to repair the arcane systems of man.”

The passenger stopped peeing, shook his penis dry, and reached out his grubby, damp hand. Splayed fingertips touched the window from the inside, inches from Mereziah’s nose. Mereziah stared past the whorls into those tiny, dark eyes. Somehow, he saw familiarity there, pulling him in, and he swallowed hard, managing to finally look away.

“Uh,” he said, feeling a little dizzy, holding onto the netting while his stomach lurched. “From, from where have you descended? Have other attendants helped you get this far down?”

Shockingly, sudden tears filled Mereziah’s eyes. His vision blurred. He swayed, wiping the tears away, astonished, hoping his brother would not wake up at this moment and climb up here to find him crying like a baby. What he had seen in those eyes was entropy and decay. Inevitable that all things come to pass. He had seen his own demise. He had seen the end of the world.

“Did you come for me?” he asked weakly. “Fool that I am, I thought your descending pod might arrive with news of a more pleasant nature. I even imagined a, well, a companion. One other than yourself.” A quiet sob racked his long frame. “You see, when we were young men, my brother always talked about women. Women coming from up above. It’s embarrassing to admit, but for a
second
. . .” He tried to smile but it would not come.

“Life, to me, seems to have been some sort of bad joke. I didn’t have many experiences as a youth and I told myself there was always time and opportunity. Adventure, travel, maybe even a family, all that anyone might dream of, without asking too much, even for a man in my position. But I’m one hundred years old today and nobody cares and the world has gone to shit.”

The man inside the pod seemed to be listening.

“My parents have been at the bottom of this shaft, waiting for me, for over eighty years. The Red Plague killed them. When my brother and I were still children. Do you know what the Red Plague is? There’s not much of it around now. At least, I don’t hear much about it these days. But maybe that’s because we see less and less people down here — maybe it killed more than I suspect. Did it ever reach the level you’re from?”

The passenger’s fingers described delicate motions on the steamed window.

“It’s a terrible disease. Horrible,” Mereziah whispered. “My father’s and my mother’s insides turned slowly to liquid and drained right out of them. They coughed up blood for months. They shat out blood, if you’ll excuse me saying so. In the end they shat out little bits and pieces of themselves. And, shortly before they died, chunks. They shat their guts out. During it all, as they went crazy and their minds fell apart, they said the most awful things to each other, and to me, and to my little brother. They accused us, well, let’s say that if someone you’re close to contracts this ailment, it’s a blessed relief when they draw their last breath and finally plummet down, out of sight.”

Mereziah had not mentioned his parent’s death in decades, not to anybody, not even Merezath, and as these words left his constricted throat he felt a sense of unburdening building inside him, as if he might actually be able to float away from the wall and rise up, possibly even to the top of the world. In shaky tones, he continued, expecting rapture now, epiphanies, redemption.

“My, my brother and I were too young to be left alone, but we knew the meaning of duty — we had been well trained, if nothing else — and even though traffic has never been heavy here at our station, we attended every pod that ever stopped. And we sent them on their way. Most of them. Some we had to refuse and send back up, or down, as the case may be: underage passengers without a parent, or those who appeared infirm or unable to make a lucid choice of their own — ”

Mereziah broke off; this passenger’s mental state was obviously similar to the ones he had begun to describe and he did not want to upset the man inside the pod, should he — by some means unapparent as of yet — understand what Mereziah was saying and consequently become belligerent or otherwise hard to deal with.

“We were children,” Mereziah said, removing his torque wrench from his belt and getting a good grip on the pliant handle. “
Children
. We knew the meaning of responsibility, of duty, and we quickly learned the meaning of loneliness. But there were times — ”

He reached behind the pod and fumbled with the wrench until he heard the head mate wetly with the reversal nut. “There were times, it’s true, when Merezath and I turned to each other for comfort. Boys will be boys, after all. Now he’s a crusty old bastard and I despise him.”

From the netting below, as if Merezath had heard his name, rose an ululating wail; inside the lift, the mad passenger quickly pulled his hand back. When Mereziah surveyed below, he could not see his brother. He waited, holding his breath, one hand in the netting and the other on his wrench. There was no second shout but soon he did hear another noise, a quiet noise. From within the pod. Looking through the window once more, he saw the passenger’s lips move. The man repeated something, barely audible, his expression belying urgency. The words Mereziah made out when he put his ear close to the speaker were,
the engineer
,
the engineer
. . .

Mereziah torqued the wrench. He did not unfasten his safety belt from the lower rings of the pod, though they struggled feebly and tried to convince him to do so. He held his cable in place until both rings surrendered. Coming free, the reversal nut made a squelching sound and the entire pod quivered, rumbling.

Oddly, it came as some surprise to Mereziah when he fully understood what it was he intended to do: break the sacrament of the attendant, the first fundamental rule.

The lift began to ascend.

Below, Merezath called out again. Perhaps he assumed that Mereziah had fallen to the bottom of the shaft. Was there a slight chance he was looking up, watching the red glow of ascension as the pod cast its broadening hemisphere of light against the darkness? Possibly, in that case, he might even distinguish the form of his older brother, hanging under the pod as it crept slowly up, up, away from their lonely station.

Generations ago, the lake god made multitudes of healthy fish, but now it was sick, like the people, and produced only a few small fish, these being weak, thin, and spotted of flesh. The lake god made even fewer crustaceans. Regardless, every morning, after kissing his feverish wife on the cheek, Tran so Phengh made his way down from the communal shack where the couple lived to his adopted place on the beach, to sit there, rod in hand, spending the daylight hours fishing and staring out over the cluttered, receding waters of Lake Seven.

The ailing god, it was said, lived under the surface, in a large tank. Some citizens believed that this deity — maker of fishes, crabs, and aquatic plants — was actually
dying
, but Tran so could not imagine how any god could stop living. He could not imagine what might become of society if gods ceased providing altogether.

Semi-reclined, eyes half closed, Tran so Phengh saw a great crescent of the beach, extending away from him, out of sight, in both directions. Mists curled the periphery and gave an illusion of infinity. Before him, on the water, coracles, rafts, poorly made junks, and every other conceivable type of homemade vessel bobbed and creaked and rapped against each other. Some, in those vanished, plentiful times, had been fishing boats. Others, floating homes. Most were now abandoned wrecks. Masts and ribs of sunken vessels poked up from the bottom of the shallows like bones. Flotsam filled gaps between the vessels. Over the years, as the level of the lake had slowly dropped, Tran so often imagined a day that he might walk across the entire lake, to the far wall, without ever once touching water.

He would see the god’s house then, if it existed, and he could knock on the front door.

Calling this place where he sat a beach was a misnomer. Not at all like the black, sandy land along the banks of the trickling rivers and streams that cut through Hoffmann City, sharing the same name, this place was a sloped, smooth embankment, made out of the same hard material that the rest of the world’s foundation was made out of. Rimming three sides of Lake Seven, hemming it against the far wall — which could at times be seen from where he sat, misty in the distance — it emanated both a foul smell and a constant churning sound that almost drowned out the susurrus of moans and chatter from the barrios behind Tran so. It was slippery, coated with algae and dark green weeds that had sloshed ashore and rotted, or had been exposed as the waters dropped. At the waterline, stained with mineral deposits, detritus rolled and tumbled in sluggish waves as if trying to escape from the lake. Chunks of wood, foam, spent food paks, spent prayer cards, spent remedy capsules: all rolled ceaselessly on the slick-covered swells, striving to reach up, to overcome the land or at least regain the ground they had lost. Sometimes Tran so watched this motion. Mostly he stared ahead.

His wife, Minnie sue, was not well.

Not well at all.

This morning, however, he allowed himself to consider that he might have reached a point pivotal to his ill fortunes, for upon arriving he had received a sign that he might be commencing a streak luckier than that which he and most of his fellow citizens had been recently hurtling down. Today he had plucked a crab from the waters of Lake Seven. Although the beast’s shell was soft and illformed, the capture guaranteed meat for this evening’s meal. Tran so and Minnie sue would eat the contents of the paks supplied to them by the gods and supplement the bland gel with
actual crabmeat
. Imagining the taste now, Tran so’s mouth watered.

Of course, he had to assume that Minnie sue would be awake, able to eat, and that the meat might make her feel a bit better. Even though she had not had a
grand mal
or broken out in a rash in over a month — and her coughing had subsided — the claws of her ailment still dug deep, ruining her appetite, her waking hours, causing her once-beautiful mouth to say the most horrible, hurtful things to Tran so, things she could not possibly mean.

Diverting his reveries back to the crab, and to possibilities of better times ahead, Tran so wondered again if the catch could truly be prophetic. Might this be a turning point in life? Was it absurd to allow a moment’s hope?

He frowned. When Tran so had first lifted the dripping crustacean from the water, it had pleaded, “No kill! Please no kill. No eat, man, big luck! I help. Big luck!”

But should he believe it? Foolish to trust crustaceans, he knew, but maybe just this once a crab might be telling the truth. If he believed enough?

The creature struggled feebly in the holding net. Surreptitiously, Tran so watched it, glancing once or twice over his shoulder at the shacks of Hoffmann City, and the few people milling about. No one paid him or the crab any attention. Tran so Phengh kept a knife in a scabbard, at his waist. He used it to defend these rare catches. He also used the knife to clean fish, but had not drawn it, for either reason, in a long time.

There came an approaching rumble. He looked up. Along the breakwater, atop the slope of the beach — where the water level had once been when Tran so was a kid — trundled a god of dispensing. Stopping at the brink, it watched him from on high. He glared at it. The god nodded, an almost imperceptible motion.

“Can I help you?” Tran so Phengh asked when it became clear the god was not going to speak first.

“I merely bid you a good morning, sir. How’s the fishing?”

“Terrible.”

The god continued to stare with its tiny, unreadable eyes. “Sorry to hear that. But I see you’ve caught
some
thing there?” Indicating the disturbance in the water with a short arm, which emerged from beneath its tarnished shoulder plate. “What is that? A crab?”

“Yes,” Tran so said. “I’ve caught a sick crab.”

“Excellent. And would you like a food pak, sir, to go with it? I’m coming from the depot. They’re nice and fresh.”

“Fresh food paks?” Tran so Phengh almost smiled. “I don’t need any right now, thanks. Larders are full.”

“Well, how about a vial for copulation? Keep your cock nice and hard.”

“No.”

“Perhaps a dose of the remedy then?” Holding up a capsule, shaking it so the contents sluiced about. “Makes you feel right as rain in no time.”

What angered Tran so about these encounters was the naively positive attitude of the dispensing gods. Each time he wondered if the deities truly believed in the products they pushed or if they were all just good liars. “I am immune,” he said.

“Sir?” Unsure, the god paused, still proffering the capsule.

“I am not able to contract the Red Plague,” he explained, slowly. “My wife has it. And my friends have it. My infant son had it. He took your remedy every day, twice a day, with his milk, until he died. I, however, cannot get the sickness. As much as I try.”

The dispensing god clearly did not know what to say, remaining still for a moment, blinking. Finally, it rocked back and forth on its treads. It put the capsule away. “I see,” it said, nodding again. “You have no faith.”

The god seemed genuinely hurt but it did not want to argue. Gods and men both had tired of that. Turning away, the deity moved off; Tran so returned his attention to Lake Seven. Gods of dispensing, he decided, were too polite and not so smart. How intelligent would the lake god be, out there in its tank? At least there was only one of them, he believed, as opposed to the numerous dispensing gods. Perhaps a deity apportioned a finite amount of intellect throughout its representatives: the more entities of a particular variety, the thicker in the head they became.

As Tran so pondered this theory, the crab managed to pull itself onto a piece of floating garbage and, half out of the water — but still pinned under the wet net — it called out in a feeble voice. Tran so did his best to ignore the cries but when he thought he heard his wife’s name in the quiet, damp tones, he hunkered down and yanked the dripping net up to eye level.