Without Mouths
SOME DAYS Henry thought exclusively of the evening to come. He would walk around the city, doing his upkeep on his buildings, blinking in the sun, and he would tremble with dread.
He could manage, most days, to redirect and distract. Five weeks went by, and he got nothing. They have finally left for good, he thought, then stopped, retracted that. He had become fervent in his superstitions. Every thought, every move seemed to require a countergesture just in case.
He lay on his bed and nothing came. He rigorously avoided dark thoughts. He watched television. He dropped into sleep, or at least a tossed, soporific stupor, and then he woke with a start to an extra-loud infomercial, his shoulders mangled into the couch, his throat parched.
He felt fear at a distance first, and then more intensely as it had a gaming, even playful approach. Don’t look at the clock. Just turn off the set and go back to sleep.
But as he got up off the couch, he glanced at the wall clock: 3:00 a.m. He couldn’t find the remote, so he pushed the power button directly on the television. The room abruptly went silent. He felt a creep of adrenaline as he listened into the night. He tried to laugh it off — just don’t start listening for things.
He felt his heart beating faster. He felt the silence of the house overcome by a multitude of tiny midnight sounds, just like how the dark outside will fade as your eyes get used to it until gradually you can see the thousand stars, the trees, and the moon shadows on the ground. He heard the hum of his refrigerator kick in. He heard the rain tack against windowpanes and roof. He heard the furnace die down.
He woke again with another start at dawn. He felt relief: not only could he not remember any dream of any color but there was the blessed weak sun and all the glorious diffused light of a Northwest sunrise. He lay back on his pillow feeling at a great distance from all his worried ruminations during the night. Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly, he felt an odd breeze — a tropical, slow heat blow languidly across his face.
Shit.
Henry is in a narrow street. He smells nothing of the palm trees he passes, nothing of the hot pavement he walks on. He smells instead a monolithic bludgeon of a smelclass="underline" an oily-yet-astringent, froggy formaldehyde smell. He turns in to a doorway. It is the Saigon hospital. But it is Ho Chi Minh City now, and he is there for a reason.
He walks down a corridor to a special division. It is quiet. He pushes open a swinging door, and he steps inside.
The smell of formaldehyde is acute now; he puts his hand to his face to no avail. He sees, in shadows at first, then more clearly, rows of large glass containers. There must be two hundred of them. Then his eyes adjust. He sees the forms suspended in fluid. Flimsy, fetal, tiny beings. The doubled forms with one body half-grown into the other. Faces without mouths. Limbs without digits. Mono-eyed stares. The formaldehyde smell continues, and the bodies have a translucent cast in the bottles. There is no constant among these catastrophes except why they are here, in these jars, and what they signify.
When Henry stopped he wasn’t puking, or even crying. He stared at the sunlight in the room. What can sunlight do for me? He knew, if not today, or in a month, he would again smell that viscous formaldehyde in his nose and throat, right in the light of day.
What else frightens Henry:
Chloropicrin gas smells of apple blossoms.
Hydrogen cyanide agent smells of toasted almonds.
and
Asphyxiants, vesicants, lacrimants.
and
The things that must be answered for are without end.
I’m with the Bandwidth
“JUST MAKE yourself at home.” They had been together for a few weeks, but things moved slowly. This was the first time Miranda had been invited to his house (actually his parents’ house). Josh went straight to his computers. He owned two gleaming flat-screen monitors with protoplasmic, translucent gray-blue casings and sleek, silent keyboards, ergonomically contoured in the middle. He had no mess, no clutter. No loose papers.
“I like keyboards that click,” she said. He looked at the screen. He seldom touched the mouse but used everything on programmed key command.
“I don’t like squishy keyboards,” she continued. He checked his e-mail. It looked like he had about two hundred messages. He opened one from the list and scanned it quickly. It was strange that Josh lived in suburban splendor in Bellevue. He stayed a couple of nights with her in the city, sleeping over but still not having sex (not completely anyway, which was somehow mutually acceptable to both of them though they didn’t speak of it). She didn’t mind that he didn’t stay much past dawn. Or that he preferred his room at his parents’ house.
“Let me just reply to this. Give me a minute.”
“Too soft and squishy…” Miranda turned away from him. She couldn’t really be surprised by anything Josh did — he was deliberately full of surprises, which naturally became anything but surprise.
She had to admit that when she finally got here she felt a pang of longing for spotless suburbia. After she stepped over yet another kid at the Black House. Or just the odor from the fridge. And Josh’s house was the highest realization of suburban splendor she had ever seen. His room was very large. Past the desk and entryway a carpeted step led down to the area where the bed was. The room was done in shades of gunmetal gray-blue. Sleek and spotless. No pictures of Che, no volumes of Noam Chomsky. In the corner of the sunken area, a large double bed, neatly made, and beyond it two door-sized windows that led to what looked like a balcony. Above the bed, a skylight. To the right a door to his private bathroom. This was the sort of contemporary home in which there were at least as many bathrooms as bedrooms.
“Okay, done.” He turned to her on his swivel seat. He reached in a drawer and pulled out a small bag of pot. He started to roll a joint.
“You just keep it in your desk, out in the open?”
Josh smiled. “Oh yes. They would never look in my drawers without my permission.”
Miranda shook her head.
“I mean, does this look like the room of a pot-smoking loser?” he asked.
“No, it doesn’t even look like the room of a human being.”
“That is lesson number one. You control what people believe to be true about you. All of it is subject to manipulation. You can avoid interference very easily. Most people are quite shallow about their judgments. Even parents.” Why, Miranda thought, does everyone think I need lessons all the time?
He sat on the floor by the balcony, careful to blow the smoke out the open door. She noticed a small symbol affixed to the wall above his desk. Slightly to the left of the monitors. It was a small linocut print of a cat, stylized in futurist blocky black-and-white. The sabot cat, the anarchist symbol for sabotage. It looked creepy and unsettling here among the titanium laptops and infrared mouses.
She sat on the floor beside him and took a hit. The long light of the fading sun crept into the room as they smoked, making the metal grays almost rosy silver, glittering and glowing with reflected warmth.
Josh also had a tiny tattoo of the sabot cat on his chest. Miranda noticed it every time she undid the buttons on his shirt, revealing the smooth, nearly hairless chest, the white, clear skin and the small tattoo, sharp and black. It impressed her and reassured her. He had been this way for a while. He was committed. This was how Miranda measured commitment: the will to etch permanently your beliefs in skin. Here he was, in a development of three-car garages, cathedral ceilings and fifteen rooms, here he was with his two hundred e-mails and his clinically precise manipulations, already in possession of a genuine secret life. She thought of these things as she pulled him toward his bed.