The Antarcticans (26 page)

“Demons?”

“It’s a figure of speech.” She rolled her eyes. “I forget you’re a priest.”

“Pastor!” he corrected her.

Joshua was in the room alone. There was an additional empty bed next to him. His eyes had been unwrapped, and Gavin saw the smile in them when he walked into the room.

“Dad?” a voice came through the suit, muffled and excited.

“I’m coming to help you, bud.” He beat his chest like a gorilla.

Joshua laughed. Gavin used to imitate King Kong when Joshua was small; he had watched the movie and was obsessed with it.

“Joshua, I need to talk to your dad about a few things before we start the procedure,” Dr. Cristofari said. “It’ll increase your chance of success if you don’t hear what I’m going to tell him.” She patted him on the leg.

“Yeah, okay. See you guys kinda soon.” He picked up the control pad for the video game he was playing.

Gavin followed Dr. Cristofari into her office. She sat down in a white leather chair behind her matching composite desk. Gavin followed her lead and sat across from her. The office was small, and there were stacks of papers and pictures on every available surface. The walls were lined with framed electronic pictures that changed in unison every couple of seconds, which gave the feeling that the whole wall was being swept away and replaced by something new. It made Gavin nauseous.

“Sorry for the mess. Things have been insane with the catastrophe and its aftermath.” She waved her hand in the air.

The separate photos on her wall merged together into a large display. Gavin saw a three-dimensional image of a brain assembled with a spectrum of primary colors. The bottom of the display read, “Patient: Joshua Pennings.”

“This is Joshua’s brain,” Dr. Cristofari explained. “You see the area that’s highlighted in green? That’s what we’re trying to alter. Today’s procedure is divided into two separate stages. First we’ll need to pinpoint the exact area where the manifestations are arising from so we can stop new personalities from being created. Then we’ll need to emotionally detach Joshua from the current personalities that have manifested. That’s where I could use your help. The last part, which will be a much longer process, is to destroy the individual personalities one by one. We’re trying to get Joshua to a state of quiet, one where the only voice he hears in his head is his own.”

Gavin nodded as she went through the image and explained what she hoped would happen in the procedure as well as his role in it. “Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

“Once,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It’s not a good comparison.” She looked away from him.

“What happened?” Gavin said more insistently.

“The parent acquired the personalities of the child.”

“Well, how the heck is that not a comparison? Aren’t we doing the same thing here?”

“The parent had her own history of mental illness. I shouldn’t have attempted it.”

He let out a frustrated sigh. “So it’s never been successful.”

“In medicine we don’t always succeed on the first try. But we learn from our mistakes. From my standpoint, there’s nothing else I can do for your son, except medicate him into a stupor so that the rest of his life the hallucinations aren’t so extreme that he wants to injure himself.” Her voice was soft but sure.

Gavin shook his head. “God, I wish Noila was here.” He let his body sag against the back of the chair.

“You don’t look so good. You feeling okay?” Dr. Cristofari got up from her desk.

“Just a lot going on.” He straightened up and pushed his hands through his hair.

“We can wait until tomorrow to start this. I don’t want you going in without a strong mind.”

“No, no, we can do it today.” He stood up, clapped his hands together, and looked at the door. “Okay, let’s do this.”

Dr. Cristofari eyed him suspiciously but then stood up as well. She took off her white coat and led Gavin to a small room with a blacked-out glass door across the hall from Joshua’s room.

“This is our prep room. I’ll get us ready in here, and then we’ll go in.”

The room was small, and built into the wall were bays large enough for a person to stand in. Each one had a clear outline of a human body, ranging in size from a child to an adult.

“You have to take your clothes off then step in here,” Dr. Cristofari said. “Then I’ll close the cover, and the process will start. You won’t be able to see anything for a few minutes, and you’ll feel a strange sensation, but it won’t hurt. You’ll be able to hear me throughout the process.” She stood there and looked at him expectantly.

He stared back at her awkwardly.

“You need to undress,” she said.

“Well, can I have some privacy?”

She shook her head. “No, I need to situate you in the machine, and then, like I said, I have to be here throughout the process. I’m a doctor—I’ve seen thousands of naked men.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.” Gavin gave a little laugh then unbuttoned his pants.

When he was fully undressed, he stepped in backward and leaned up against what felt like glass on a winter day. The shape of the body imprint didn’t fit him well, and as he leaned back, he was misaligned with the imprint on the door. A shiver ran through him.

Dr. Cristofari went to the wall and pushed a few buttons on the control panel. Gavin felt what he was leaning against conform to his body. A sheet of the same material came down from the top of the machine and fit tightly against the front of him, forming a tight seal. He couldn’t move, but he was perfectly comfortable. Something bubbled above his head, and the scent of salty marine air and classroom chalk filled the small spaces in the mold.

“Keep your mouth closed,” Dr. Cristofari instructed. It sounded as if she were whispering in his ear.

Room-temperature liquid dribbled down Gavin’s head and over his body then pooled at his feet. Two tubes emerged from the glass and gently inserted themselves in his nose. He felt them brush past his nose hairs, but neither of them touched the sides of his nostrils. The thick liquid covered his face and filled his ears then ran down and coated his whole body. The sound of his breathing through the two tubes was the only thing that filled his head. Then came heat, a bright light, and the smell of blistering asphalt. His whole body felt so warm. He relaxed and wondered whether this was what a spa heat treatment felt like. Small drilling sounds came closer to his ears, and then he felt whatever the salty, chalky liquid was, being suctioned out of his ears.

“Make sure you’re supporting your own weight,” Dr. Cristofari softly told him.

Gavin stood up straighter. He felt a light suction inside the mold, and then the panel in front of him moved back from his body. He stood still; although he couldn’t see anything, he heard the familiar sounds of the room and the ship and could tell the door was open.

“You can talk, but you’re not going to be able to see for a while, so let me help you down.” Dr. Cristofari took his hand, and he stepped out of the machine. She led him into Joshua’s room and helped him get into the second bed that had been placed in the room.

“You’re in a temporary suit that does the same thing as Joshua’s wrap. Joshua’s is made to withstand weeks of lying in bed, with some other additions to make that tolerable for him. Your’s will be partially rubbed off when you’re done with this session. But don’t worry—it works the same way.”

“Is that you, Dad?” Joshua asked.

“Yeah, Josh. I think I’ve been mummified,” he said jokingly.

Joshua laughed at his dad’s corny humor.

“Everyone ready?” Dr. Cristofari asked.

They both mumbled, “Yes.”

“Just relax and accept what’s happening. I’ll be running the program from my office.”

Joshua settled in to the bed. “It’s not so bad, Dad. After a while, you think the simulations you’re seeing are real. It’s kinda cool.”

Gavin reached out to give him a reassuring pat, but he couldn’t find him, and he didn’t want to risk falling off the bed. Dr. Cristofari’s voice came into his head: “Put your arms down at your side and close your eyes. If you leave them open, you’ll try to see through your eyes, which will end up straining them and give you a headache.”

Gavin followed her instructions, and everything went silent and still. Suddenly he noticed the humming of the lights and machines, the idle background chatter in the hallway. The slight motion of the ship, however, was gone. He was in a void. He tried to open his mouth and say something to Joshua, but his lips wouldn’t move; his words stopped in his mouth, and as his brain manufactured more words, they backed up in his throat. His arms and legs were restrained from making even small movements. He struggled to move then settled in with an unresolved tension. Every small movement he normally would have—the twitch of a finger, the blink of an eye, the itching of his earlobe—didn’t work. His thoughts began to slow. His internal monologue was losing focus, and his awareness of the room around him had vanished. He was lost in a black nothingness. Finally his thoughts stopped, and his body relaxed.

Dr. Cristofari watched his arm limply fall to his side as his head listed, unrestrained. His blood pressure dropped, and his brain’s electrical activity fell to deep-sleep levels. She turned to her assistant, who was standing over her shoulders and watching the display. “Okay, I’m sending him in.” She made some adjustments to the 3-D neural map below the screen in which she saw Gavin and Joshua lying in bed. When the modification was complete, she waited to make sure that Joshua’s brain accepted the pathway she had opened, to insert Gavin into. His brain image stabilized, and she looked at her assistant to confirm she was thinking the same thing.

Dr. Cristofari reached forward and pressed a small green virtual button with a “2” on it.

An electrical shock rammed into Gavin’s brain, launching him from the sticky black void into a free fall, his back breaking a rushing wind that he was able to focus on like a shallow meditative breath. His mind ground out the words it was holding, and his mouth blurted a stream of gibberish that made him sound like the homeless, mentally ill vagrants he often passed on South Beach. The relaxing darkness was fading. He was beginning to see a light coming up from behind him with the rush of the furiously cold air. He hit the ground hard. His head slammed against the packed desert earth; his back shattered; and his legs went numb. He groaned, tasting coppery blood in his mouth. He slowly opened his eyes; an outline of a woman stood over him. She had black, frizzy, unkempt hair that poked out of a red-and-white bandanna. Her eyes looked like fiery-red coral, and her hands were on her hips. She looked like the desert sun had cooked her for years.

“What the fuck ya doin’?”

“Ugh, wha…” Gavin squinted up at her and pushed himself into a sitting position. He felt as if his insides had been rearranged and were completely out of place. The pain, however, had vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

She kicked him down onto his back. “You can’t just come here and not ask me, motherfucker. You gotta show some respect. Ask to come up in this shit.” As she turned sideways and took a few steps, Gavin noticed something jutting from her backside: three black, large flaps of leathery skin with long bristly hairs sprouting from their edges.

“What are those?” Gavin’s said as he pointed to her back.

“Somethin’ you’ll wish you had in a few minutes.” She looked hard into the distance. “This isn’t gurin’ be good. Whose are ya?” She glanced down at him.

“Gavin.” He maneuvered his feet and rolled onto his side, ready to stand up quickly.

The woman reached down and grabbed his arm and, with an unnatural strength, yanked him up. “No. Not ‘Who are you?’ Whose are ya? Why you here?” She rolled her eyes, and one of the flaps thrust forward and whacked him on the back, forcing the wind out of him and making him cough.

“Nevamine, dumb humaan. You see dat?” She gestured in the direction she was looking.

Gavin followed her fingers, which were long, with pointy nails painted with crosses. The desert patch he was standing on stretched out for a distance before coming to a butte and jutting up into the sky. Just beyond the rocky ridge, black-and-tan clouds swirled violently, reaching down to the ground and throwing up the rocks and shrubs that dotted the landscape.

“That’s a bitchin’ storm, and it’s gonna tear you to shit if you don’t get somewhera.”

Gavin looked around for shelter. Other than small boulders, there was nothing that appeared to be able to weather him from a storm. Screaming and yelling were coming from somewhere in the distance.

“Where can I go?” He was starting to panic.

The cloud was coming down this side of the butte; small gusts were approaching and kicking up dust and sand into his eyes and mouth.

“I know a place for ya, humaan,” she yelled, then latched herself underneath his shoulder and lifted him off his feet. She ran in the opposite direction of the storm, the flaps beating behind her, propelling them both rapidly toward a small collection of trees. They seemed out of place in this desert landscape. She pushed him past the first line of thick evergreens and under the canopy of the dense forest. Gavin noticed a small doorframe a few paces ahead.

“Go tha.” She pointed.