Just a Couple of Days (26 page)

“What the hell are our options, then?” General Kiljoy raised his voice. “Down! Get over here!” Captain Down obeyed, clicked off his phone, and trotted over to where we were standing, near the still-bubbling hot tub. “Okay, let's think. Would you turn this goddamn tub off?” Tynee flicked it off with his remote. “Our priority, it seems, is getting ourselves to a safe place.”

“Can't we just go back underground?” Miss Mary asked.

“Negative,” Captain Down answered. “Professor Korterly has obviously been outside of the observation tank, and thereby contaminated unknown areas of the compound.”

“Shit,” Miss Mary cussed and took a deep drag, holding it as if it were a hit off a joint. “Where are those bodyguards with the limo anyway?” she asked. Smoke drifted out of her mouth and nose as she spoke, which, combined with her raspy voice, made her positively dragonlike.

“That's not an option,” General Kiljoy answered. “The limousine may already be contaminated.” He turned to Tynee. “Get Volt on the phone and find out where he is. Captain Down, do we have any access at all to our underground facilities?”

He hesitated. “We could terminate the experiment.”

A few moments of silence ensued, as if his statement had been an unexpected twig snapping in the wilderness at night. Bold Miss Mary was the first to address the darkness beyond the light of the campfire. “No one is terminating this experiment.” She spoke with the finality of the Supreme Court on Judgment Day.

“This is an extreme situation,” Captain Down countered like some brash young Harvard Law School hothead. “Have we prepared for this contingency?”

“Not as such,” General Kiljoy responded, wearing a face of pensive jurisprudence. “This actual situation has never been contemplated. But we're not wholly unprepared.”

“We have to convene the committee,” Miss Mary asserted, as have countless other worshippers of the demon god Bureaucracy, for whom “convene the committee” is as holy a phrase as the
Sh'ma
. (If you listen carefully, you can hear it chanted over the cubicle walls.)

“There's no time for that,” came General Kiljoy, dictatorial tendencies emerging as they will in times of crisis. “Captain Down is right, we have to terminate, and the sooner the better. It'll be nearly two hours after we disinfect before we can return to the compound.”

“May I remind you, Veechy,” Miss Mary addressed General Kiljoy by his first name, “that I am the greatest benefactor on the committee? I've contributed far too much money to this project to stand by as it's terminated.”

I snorted at this remark, startling everyone, for I had been silent ever since Blip was sighted. “Money is a symbol,” I explained my outburst. “What good is money if people have no symbolic capacity?”

THE BOOK O' BILLETS-DOUX

89
Disinfection, it turned out, involved the same process that occurred before General Kiljoy and I entered holy hell: ultraviolet radiation, combined with electrocution and ozonization of the atmosphere, and a dose of cryogenic helium for good measure. It would take roughly two hours to completely sterilize and ventilate the entire compound. When the air was clear and it had warmed up, they said, there would not be a single biologically active presence down there, not a human subject, not a dust mite in the carpet, not a stray strand of DNA.

Miss Mary, more concerned about her financial outlays than the lives of the human subjects, asked if there was any way
to maintain the subjects' quarters. Captain Down shook his head. “Complete disinfection. From here, we have no way of knowing what areas have been compromised. And Professor Korterly may well have had external assistance.”

Apparently, this had not yet occurred to Tynee. He began to stare at me with the suspicious eyes of a bitter late-night convenience store clerk. I smiled weakly, feeling guilty though I had done nothing, as if I had just walked out of his fat, salt, caffeine, sugar, nicotine, and alcohol store without purchasing something. Tynee disconnected his phone. “There's no answer on Volt's cellular.”

“We're terminating,” General Kiljoy responded starkly, his words as bare as Blip had been, but more pornographic. “It is decided.”

“I agree,” Tynee nodded. General Kiljoy and Captain Down pulled out their remote controls.

“Enter your codes. It terminates with three simultaneous signals,” General Kiljoy reminded them. “On three?” They nodded, and Miss Mary stalked to the windows in a huff, sulking as if her favorite soap had just been canceled. “Three, two,” he paused just long enough for a kitten to sneeze on a dust mite. “One.” At that, they each pressed the big red button on their respective remote controls, and in the space of a second, an impulse that had begun as an idea in their heads traveled through their nervous systems and out their fingers, transformed from an electrical impulse to an infrared signal in their remote controls, converged and converted back into a single electrical impulse at the infrared receiver on the wall, and, fifty feet underground, hell froze over.

 

90
A feeling of surreality crept over me like a sand-filled gust of cool wind, making my skin prickle and tingle and causing me to squint my eyes. Watching the three men in front of me engage one another in an utterly serious conversation about how to stave off the end of civilization was like watching bad actors congratulating one another on their talent. The real seemed unreal, and the severity of the situation commanded about as much of my attention as the understudy of an ingenue. I slipped away from their frantic planning, their frenzied disagreement, discussion, and debate, and returned to the windows. Miss Mary now had the middle window, and so I took the one farthest to the right. Like men at a wall of urinals, I avoided getting too close.

As General Kiljoy, Tynee, and Captain Down busied themselves making phone calls to appropriate heads of government agencies, planning a blockade and an emergency quarantine of the city along the freeway outerbelt, the oblivious masses below were still just drunk and having a generally bad time. The helicopters continued to slap at the atmosphere above their heads, beating out a staccato rhythm accompanied by an unreflecting voice tossing out imperatives with the frequency of department store Santas throwing “Merry Christmas” around. This technocratic symphony apparently passed for music in some circles, and scattered individuals were still trying to find their groove.

But even they ceased their jerky dancing when the helicopters suddenly flew away in opposite directions, taking their industrial celebration of dissonance, the perfect frontispiece for a society as ridiculously inharmonious as our own, with them. They were headed for the perimeter blockade.

A rustle passed through the crowd as people began chattering like autumn leaves before an Indian summer thunderstorm. After a few experimental notes, the musicians again began to play, at first quite dissonant themselves, but gradually evolving into a spirited rhythm of wild drumming augmented by an unlikely harmony of instruments. This had the immediate effect of healing the wound the choppers had cut in the crowd. The sea rushed together once again, drowning any would-be oppressors, and those who had been divided embraced one another like teeth in a zipper, with hugs of a sort only known among survivors of air raids.

And what of Blip, my best friend, the brave naked man who alone had crossed the parted sea? Well, that's a matter I cannot discuss right now, but suffice it to say that he transcended the allegory.

 

91
If I am to describe this crowd as a sea, then I feel compelled to say that a volcano was brewing beneath the depths of its collective unconscious. But why talk of such grand events when a flame beneath a mere pot of water, a simple teakettle, would do the trick? Thus, the heating coils on the electric stove were glowing red-hot and swirling inward toward infinity. Or on the gas range, if you prefer, the flames were licking high and curling around the edge of the kettle of consciousness, scorching the finish, the enamel of language. The shared embarrassment of being busted, the civil inattention paid each other for being stuck at a lame party, for failing in their attempt to make merry, was forgotten like a misunderstanding between true lovers. The party that had been placed on the back burner, nay,
off the stove altogether, was back up front and turned on full blast. The temperature was rising, the molecules were getting excited, vibrating, releasing energy, rising momentum feeding the band and being channeled right back, pushing it further, further, ever further.

The musicians, who had been only mediocre previously, had now found a groove fifty feet deep and were flowing through it like spring melt through a mountain gorge. Loud, dangerous, and beautiful, they tore past the point of no return and plummeted over a cliff, a moment of pandemonium at the edge of understanding, then splashed down, reemerging in a pool of trickling notes that immediately rushed still further downstream. The drummer tapped his cymbals enticingly while the others laid aside their guitars and keyboards and took out their brass. Within moments the insistent rhythms of swing took over, and wild children swung effortlessly around and through one another in impeccable chaos as they roared their approval and hopped in their socks at the Glenn Miller score that ensued.

As any child with spunk can attest, when you are punished by being made to spend half an hour standing in the corner, you don't think about what you did wrong. You mope, pick at the wallpaper, or daydream that your parents will have a change of heart and release you. Such reveries are rarely realized. Even if you are fortunate enough to have parents with the vision to fathom the value of half an hour of childhood and they grant you an early probationary release, you're certainly not let go without a stern warning. This is the same for all those paying a debt to society, from the brat who throws a temper tantrum to the child who eats his boogers, from the shoplifter to the
murderer. We're never
really
convinced that what we did was wrong, not as a result of punishment anyway.

But here, the in loco parentis role of the university had flown off without so much as a slap on the butt or an emphatic “I mean it!” Here, the fantasy had been fulfilled, Ma and Pa Kettle had ruffled their child's hair and all but given their blessing, and it was playtime again. Happy Halloween! A party that had been a kick simply because it was illegal became a party with a real purpose, a whimsical frolic of freedom regained. Things were back in full swing, I say, legs pumping hard, hands pulling back on the chains once again, one childhood fantasy fulfilled, going for another. They danced to the brass and scoffed at the physicists who claimed that it's impossible to go all the way around, that they would inevitably reach a point of free fall at the apex of the swing's rotation, at least in the absence of a push from Frankenstein's monster. Here, it was happening, higher and higher, the world spinning and racing past. Frankenstein's benevolent beast didn't know his own strength, pushing them harder, still harder, until all potential energy became kinetic, and instead of going all the way around, their chains snapped at the apogee, and they rocketed toward the heavens.