Glimmering (49 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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“The dead. You’ve seen them, too.”
“No.”
“Yes. You saw her—the girl, downstairs—”
“I knew what she was. You recognized her. Who was she?”
He said nothing. After a moment he forced out the words, “Jule’s daughter. She was hit by a car and killed four years ago on Christmas Eve. He—before he killed himself, he told me that he had seen her. He said she didn’t forgive him.”
“Of course not.” Nellie’s voice was dreamy. “That’s why they’re here—because they don’t forgive us. That’s why we can see them.”
Jack felt a chill as though a window had been thrown open, in that place with no windows.
“It’s true.” Nellie’s voice rose and fell in a sort of chant. “They’ve come to take it back. This is the world of the dead now. We gave them Verdun and Auschwitz and Chelmno and Sarajevo and Montreal, we gave them the forests, we gave them the oceans. We gave them fucking Antarctica. And now we’ve given them the sky, too . . .
“We killed everything, Jack. We made this world a dead world, and now the dead have come to take it. It is Ruto’s world, now—”
She got to her feet, stumbling. She was holding the staff and the wooden mask. “Ruto is the Sami goddess of the plague. She takes us from our beds and brings us to Tuonela, the Land of the Dead. She crosses Pohjola the wasteland and brings us to our graves.”
She turned away. Jack tried to stand, but before he could she looked back again. The gaping mask was gone. A slight dark-haired woman stood there, eyes shining as she began to sing.
Nothing will grow but stones and thorns
Nothing will fall from the sky but as blood from a wound
They will cease not in their laughter until the end
They will watch as women suckle the dead
They will watch as enticing magicians are performing;
Fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga
Fear the end of the end.
 
Jack staggered to his feet. She reached to steady him and he took her hand, frightened yet comforted by the sense that something in the room was real.
“It’s all really happening, Jack,” she murmured, as though she read his thoughts.
“That’s how it works, when it doesn’t kill us. We become gates.”
“Gates?”
“This.” Her hand fumbled at her jeans pocket. When she held it up again he saw a small bottle there, brown glass, rubber dropper-bulb, white label with black letters—Fusax 687.
He dug into his own pocket. His fingers closed around the familiar vial, drew it out. He stared at it in terror, then at her.
“Yes.” Nellie nodded. “Me too. And more—more of us than you can imagine.”
Jack shook his head. “But—how?” he whispered.
“Leonard Thrope. Among others. He travels, he gives them to people he meets—”
“But why?
Why
?
”
“So that we can change. Petra virus, hanta virus, AIDS, torminos simplex—they change our bodies and make us vulnerable. Even exposure to UV light can do it. It all makes us
susceptible,
Jack—do you understand what that means? It means we are capable of taking, of
receiving.
The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside. They kill us—usually, depending on what we have—but sometimes they make it possible for other changes to happen—”
“Fuck you. AIDS is not a fucking
gate,
this is not some fucking—”
Nellie smiled, maddeningly.
“Fusax
is what makes us gates, Jack. Do you know what it really is?”
He stared, desperate, trying to remember what Leonard had said about the drug, dredged up nothing save the image of a grinning demon who held a staff impaled with human skulls.
“It’s a type of bacteria.” Her hands moved as she spoke, drawing circles in the air. “A kind of spirochete: a symbiotic microbe. We all have remnants of them inside our brains. These particular spirochetes—the fusarium—once they were just simple bacteria. But millions of years ago they attached themselves to us. They merged with our brain cells, they became neurotubules—part of the passageways that transmit thought and sensation, part of our neurochemistry. And now they’re part of us—all of us, not just you and me. They orchestrate the way we think; they may even be what gives us consciousness.
“
Fusarium
is a mutation. An independent researcher discovered it, and then he decided to share it, with people here, in the States. And in Japan. At first they thought it might keep the petra virus from replicating. Because in the right individuals—people whose body chemistry has been altered by cancer, or UV radiation; people whose immune systems have been damaged by AIDS or petra virus or chemotherapy; in people whose immune systems have already been changed—the
fusarium
attach themselves to proteins and—”
“You’re fucking nuts.” Jack stumbled backward and bumped into the wall. “This is crazy, you’re—”
Nellie shook her head emphatically. “No. It
works.
It threads itself inside us—within our brain cells, within our neurochemistry, our immune systems. There’s no one place where it happens. The immune system is like a cloud, it’s everywhere inside us. Like consciousness. It’s not just in our lymph nodes, or liver—it’s there, too, of course, but the immune system can move, just like consciousness can move. That’s why people die from a broken heart, or depression. That’s why sometimes we live, even when we should die: because our emotions and T cells, our thoughts and our blood are all woven together. There are things dancing inside us, Jack—cells and bacteria and bits of light. They make a cloud, they form a web. And now, with
fusarium
, this cloud of—of knowing—it can move outside us. Our consciousness can move between us. Over great distances, between the living and the dead.”
He shook his head.
“There are doors opening everywhere, Jack. The world has changed. We must change, too, or die—and that’s what the Fusax does. It changes us. It doesn’t always work, but when it does—it’s not crazy, Jack. It’s evolution.”
“Get the fuck away from me! You’re a fucking lunatic
—
how would you even know
—”
“It’s everywhere, Jack. It’s on the street, in IZE. Do you know about ice?” Her voice dropped. “GFI holds the patent on the IT discs. Without IZE they’re just 3-D TV. But with the drug—” She hunched her shoulders, shivering. “It’s incredible. I did it a few times, before I met Leonard. The chemical effects produced by the fusarium aren’t addictive—but IZE is. GFI owns the pharmaceutical company that developed it. It’s not a street drug at all. GFI owns it; GFI has made it addictive; they’re making it available now, through drug cartels. Eventually, once everything’s restored, they’ll market it. They’ve got the sky stations repairing the ozone layer, so they’ll be able to continue broadcasting. They’ve got the IT technology to tie into TV and the web. And they’ve got IZE.”
Jack stammered, “But—why?”
“Why not? It’s not a conspiracy. If GFI really can repair the atmosphere, the rest will fall into place. Everyone will just pick up where they left off. The technology exists to retrofit televisions for IT, and GFI has already invested in front-end manufacturing sites in Malaysia. It’s not such a big deal, really. Except that an incredibly powerful new psychotropic drug has been introduced all over the world, as part of a multinational corporation’s five-year plan,” she ended. “So you see that Leonard Thrope is just a very small messenger—”
Jack struck her hand. “How do you know all this? Who told you, who started it,
how do you know?”
She tilted her head toward the door. “The movie. The documentary materials.”
She ducked from the alcove, out of sight and back again. “Here.” She handed him a stack of legal-sized papers. “Look.”
A rusted paper clip clamped them together, that slick heavy mimeograph paper he hadn’t seen since childhood. He glanced at the top sheet. Japanese, but there were scattered English words in there too, amidst tiny smudged photographs—
! !URGENT DOSSIER!!
[[ WAR CRIMES DIVISION ]]
II: UNIT 909
::
//UN. 731//
:CODE: CHERRY BLOSSOMS AT NIGHT
UNIT 731
 
 
He turned the page, scanning down columns of unreadable text until he found a list of Japanese names printed in English. One name seized him—
KEISUKE HANADA
 
 
He heard Leonard’s voice, saying,
“He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war
. . .
H
e
had set up this sort of laboratory
—”
“Oh my God,” breathed Jack. “He’s a fucking war criminal—what the fuck are they doing?”
Nellie crouched beside him. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he’s making amends. Because this drug could be a fantastic thing. Some day we may all think of him like Louis Pasteur.”
Jack thought of invasive bacteria that did not respond to antibiotics; of viruses that replicated hundreds of times in a heartbeat. He drew a finger to the inner corner of his eye, felt the faint encrustation, grains of emerald sand.
Nellie nodded. “Blue Antelope, all those fundamentalists—they think we should all just die—”
She touched the scarred aureole. “They think
that
would be making amends. They’re wrong. I was with them for a while, but not anymore. When I first got sick, I just wanted to kill people—do you know what I mean?”
Jack stared down at his hands. “Yes.”
“But then Leonard contacted me about the documentary, and after we met he gave me the Fusax. And after a while I saw that it could be different. That it
was
different.”
She reached for the ripped T-shirt at the edge of the futon, plucked something from it. A needle. “Look—”
She took the bedsheet, held it so that he saw the candlelight through it, showing the fabric’s weave. “Here—”
She gave him one end of the sheet to hold. She began piercing the cloth with the needle. Tiny perforations appeared. In one spot the fabric grew weaker, thinner, until a small hole gaped there and the flame glowed, as though it had burned its way through the cloth.
“Do you see?” said Nellie. She took the sheet from him and held it taut, moved it back and forth to make a shifting cloud of light and dark against the candle glow. “Where there are enough of us—people like you and me, people who’re taking Fusax, or ice—it can be like this. Our consciousness can weave itself together. We can make a new web, a new pattern; even if we are making holes in the
old
pattern. See?”
Jack shook his head. “No.”
But it
did
make a kind of sense, as though he could intuit her meaning on some submolecular level, without intending or wanting to. Which angered and frightened him; because he did not see a web, but legions of alien creatures swarming in his body, microbial threads corkscrewing themselves into his brain.
It sickened him.
“I’m dying,” he said, and looked up at Nellie. “I’m dying.”
“We all are,” she said. “I know, everyone always says that; but it wasn’t until I got sick that I really understood.
“It’s like we all have two jobs: living, and dying. We just don’t like to think about the dying very much. There’s music that people have recorded, of what it sounds like to die—What it sounds like when your body starts to break up, when the cells all begin to decay. Leonard played it for me one night. And when I heard it, I freaked. Because it wasn’t new to me. It was something I’d heard before. It sounded like the wind, or the sea. Or like after you’ve been running and you hear your own pulse in your ears . . .”
She touched his hand. “It’s not something to be afraid of, Jack. We are inside the engine of the end, you and me. It doesn’t heal us. All it does is change us. But maybe change will be enough.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders, gently pushed him down upon the mattress. He felt as though he were choking, this mass of unbearable knowledge being shoved at him—
“Hush,” murmured Nellie. She began tugging at her jeans, until she sat beside him, naked. “I’ll help you, let me show you.”
He shook his head.
But then Nellie touched a finger to his chin and rested her hand upon his knee. Her touch grounded him; that and her voice, wordless yet reassuring.
He had not been so near a woman since he was fifteen. Her body was small and compact, narrow-waisted and wide-hipped, her skin the color of amber. “Do you feel better?” she asked.
“No.” His voice caught as she moved closer to him. Her breasts were full, dark-tipped, the nipples almost indistinguishable from the cicatrices left by petra virus. Displaced wonder settled upon him: why had he never noticed how lovely petra’s scars were, the tiny furrows where disease had harrowed flesh, what might they engender?
He looked away. “Please—leave me—”

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