Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. Long, short, long, eight short, long, two short, two long, short, then silence. I’d been scratching them onto notebook paper for hours and I’d lost count in the thousands. They knew I was listening, and the pauses that indicated the dots and dashes were too short for even the bats’ ears to hear and they sure as shit all sounded the same to me. The sound carried for maybe a hundred yards, passed on to the crickets at that point, and everything I was doing was relayed back to Hoyle across the desert and west to Los Angeles and I was dead. I think the owl was in on it too. I couldn’t see it, but I heard it. Like a larval black helicopter, the owl didn’t make a sound when it flew but it was hooting from somewhere in the dark, talking to the crickets. Hoot, hoot, hoot. Four short, seven long.
I became incapable of filtering out the excess noise from the signals. My boyhood laid the groundwork for it, having always believed in a God that watched me every time I looked at a woman or jacked off, but rewarded my good behavior with a sound beating. When you could discern a real threat from everything else, it was called caution. When you couldn’t, it was called paranoia. Like someone who heard every noise at the same volume, the sounds were always there, you became crazy when you heard them all at once.
You cannot separate paranoia from knowledge. The more you know, the more possibilities you see. The more possibilities you see, the more possibilities someone else sees. The more “someones” there are, the more “they” there are. It’s a matter of simple math before you realize that They might not like you.
Another hit but the syringe did nothing, and I was running low on them and I couldn’t sleep and I wished I had a gun, a real, honest-to-God, shotgun because I could hear things outside and I held still and I waited. I heard footsteps or a voice or a car tire crunching on the crushed shells in the driveway and I stopped, held my breath and listened, and all I could hear were the crickets chirping. And that was when I realized what they were doing, just as the sun had gone down and the darkness had overtaken.
So, I was outside with a can of bug spray, standing silently and listening, homing in on the chirping. The good thing about crickets is that you don’t have to be quiet. They used to be scattered in fields around fortresses in China, so intruders would set them off. Locusts for an alarm. Next thing I knew, I was back inside, I’d doubled up on the hit, almost a full goddamned gram into the syringe and it was a scary thing to think about when every time anyone you knew has ever been high, it was measured in milligrams, and there I was shooting a thousand milligrams of speed straight into my bloodstream and after the Devil was done snaking his fingers around my heart and down through my chest and grabbing my balls, he was gone in a puff of nothing and in the next instant I had God’s smile warming me from the inside out and I just wanted to fuck someone, anyone. I still had my head about me, and I was outside again, in the dark, with the pump can sprayer of pesticide, following the chirps in the dead of night and letting loose a blast of malathion under the darkness of the new moon until I was choking on the cloud I couldn’t see in the dark and the chirping stopped. Great idea, Hoyle, good messengers, but you’d have to engineer some bugs that didn’t die when you sprayed them. I had always been smarter than you, and I always would be.
Checking the place for traces of me, I set up the UV lights and started scanning. I couldn’t do anything about the dog hair or shit smell. Lights off, glowing purple spot on, the first thing to jump out at me is a glowing orange dot in the corner that moved as soon as I set my eyes on it. Otto had been stoned, marking the bugs with luminescent paint and tracking them at night. I missed him and wanted to slap him both in the same instant. Then another orange dot, then a glowing green and a blue then four yellow dots behind me. The pizza crusts and candy bar wrappers and frozen dinner foil traces were enough to draw them out, and after keeping the lab clean for so long it was a gargantuan cockroach rave, all of them wearing their glow paint for their big blowout party before they’re crushed beneath the heel of God’s jackboot.
The bugs were coming out. These were real. I hadn’t expected them again and I couldn’t help but smile. Little neon green beetles, and another splotch of pink crawling along the baseboard where the walls joined the rotting carpet. I had to forget the noise in my head for a while so I killed the lights and fired up the UVs and it was like lighting a frozen frame of orange, red, green and purple sparks, a dashboard splatter of alien blood from a saucer crash. They were everywhere, a multicolored flashback to Dad’s firefly pictures.
Most of them were orange, so I called them carbon. If I could make the game last long enough, forget everything else, then the black helicopters would get bored and go back to their giant, metal nests, and if I was lucky, any of them empty-handed as far as transmissions were concerned, the queen would tear their rotors off and suck their tanks dry, throw the carcasses to scrap.
Blue was a logical choice for oxygen, which left green for nitrogen, and red for hydrogen. I tossed bits of my sandwich out onto the carpet, let them sniff it out. They moved like a slow-motion rendering of a high-speed switchboard.
That assignment seemed to work, given the amount of luminous red cockroaches that seemed to be balancing the organic chains. As soon as I decided on the assignments, molecules and structures started jumping out at me, like seeing patterns in the ceiling or shapes in the clouds, it was unavoidable.
Some of them were solid amines that resembled compounds already known, others were too unstable or too unworkable with open-ended chains that couldn’t be made into rings without the addition of another nitrogen atom that would throw the electron balance off and destroy the stability. Others were in plain sight, MDMA, LSD, methamphetamine, ketamine, one after the next. I watched a large red roach scurry from one end of the meth molecule to the other, chasing food or a mate I don’t know which, but when it stopped it’d changed the bond completely, and when the others moved, they’d formed MDMA. As the glowing bugs converged on the crumbs, I watched the molecules coalesce into shape—water became oxygen became ammonia became aluminum. I watched a dance of alchemy that man had been trying to replicate for almost a millennium. Gold became lead became chlorine. Lead became gold became skin.
“Wait. Hold it there.” Yes, I was talking to a room full of luminous, spray-painted cockroaches. “You’ve got it. Don’t move.” You had to be there.
The luminous dots had held a random configuration that wasn’t random, but held discrete molecules that had the properties I was looking for. I’d thought about pressing the separate components into a single binder to buy time with Hoyle. But every possible combination had been tried in clubs and elsewhere over the years, but no effects like the ones we were hearing about had ever been reported.
The bugs though, had shown me the molecular bond that seemed so obvious in hindsight, but I hadn’t been able to see it. I had to move another green cockroach beside the pair of red ones, and I knew just how to do it.
They were little atoms running around, maybe they had it, and that was when I felt the big bang again, only without a syringe because that time, I knew I’d got it. The only clean paper I had was the back of your picture I kept in my bag unless I wanted to run to the basement for a clean notebook, and I couldn’t risk it. I sketched as quickly as I could, finishing the last ring before the molecule crumbled then reformed as vitamin A.
I only knew why it worked in pieces, not the whole compound, but I knew it worked. Skin only perceived three sensations, pain, pressure and temperature. The subtle interplay of those very crude sensations could create a symphony of touch that constitute all the physical contact in our lives. And the memory neurotransmitters could be blocked as a side effect or a primary process but in either case, the sense of touch was real, and if the memory neurotransmitters were being blocked, then the sensation of time passing was the same, but the memory of the time that had passed would be totally different.
The original source of the alkaloid still eluded me, but I knew I could synthesize it. The bu
gs had been talking to me and, for once, it was my turn to listen to them.
twenty-two
I’D RESURRECTED SKIN OUT OF THE ASHES AND GLOWING ROACHES, MY PARTING gift to Hoyle. The universe was bright again. I was finished. I could hand Hoyle the keys to a network of laboratories, all six stages removed from everything but his legend, and walk away. I’d become excess overhead and Hoyle would be happy to pay me off and see me gone. One thing I learned from the tables on the Strip, you walk away when you’re hot.
I reached the pay phone at the haunted gas station, sank a pile of quarters and dialed your number.
“Hello?” You said, your voice a sleepy rasp. I hadn’t thought I might be waking you.
“It’s me, baby. Wake up.”
“Eric? Where are you? Where’s Otto?”
“Dee, let’s forget Otto for a minute.”
“What time is it?” Headlights flooded the phone booth. A semi passed on the highway, hauling a load of propane.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s late. Listen, Dee. I’m coming back. The job is almost up.”
“That’s good news, sweetie.” Your lips were half wedged against the pillow, the phone barely against your face.
“No, it’s great news. Dee, I’m a millionaire. It’s why I’ve been working so hard, it’s all coming together.”
“I don’t understand. Eric, honey, can we talk about this tomorrow?”
“No, we can’t. Listen to me, Dee. I need you to come get me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m outside Palmdale, off Highway 138, near Littlerock.” I told you to look for the phantom gas station and hotel, next to a bus stop where nobody ever waited and no bus ever came. “I need you to come get me. Right now.”
“Eric, that’s two and a half hours away. That’s the middle of nowhere. What are you doing there?”
“I can explain when you get here. Now…please. I need you here. Now.”
“Eric, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but after the last couple of weeks, you can’t expect to wake me up in the middle of the night and drive halfway to Las Vegas to pick you up.”
“Don’t start with me, Desiree.” I hit the side of the phone booth with my fist. “You’ve got my car, remember? My car. I’d appreciate a little gratitude. I’ll take you anywhere you want, after tonight. We can drive to Vegas.”
“Not Vegas again.”
“We can drive to Vegas,” I repeated myself, louder, “get a nice room for a night or two, maybe three, and fly anywhere you want after that.”
“Eric, that sounds great. But you’re still scaring me. And Otto’s not here.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. Is that all you can say?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“I thought he was with you.”
“He was, and he ran off. He’s probably coyote meat, by now.”
“Jesus, Eric.”
“Dee, I’m sorry. Please, drive out here. Screw your job. I can take care of everything. Me and the pooch are waiting.”
“You mean you’ve got him?”
“Yes. I told you I had him.”
“Eric,” you said something, the drone of another passing truck drowned you out. “And it’s not funny. You’re supposed to be taking care of him.”
“He’s fine. He’s a bundle of joy.”
“No, Eric, he’s not fine. You left his pills here.”
“He’s all better, obviously.”
“Goddamn you, Eric. Stop playing with me. Stop it. Can you please just once make sense and tell me what you’ve done with him? He’s really sick.”
“What’s the matter?”
“If you had his medicine you’d know. He’s got a tapeworm.”
twenty-three
YOUR HYSTERIA ESCALATES TO PURE SOUND, AN AIRLESS ELECTRIC ANGER stuttering like the shrill shriek of a fax machine in my ear. The film breaks, the receiver blinks from my hand back to the cradle.
New moon black sky of a cold Mojave night, legions of crickets chirping in unison, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, relaying my death warrant at the speed of sound. Your dog had clocked every second of my last three days. Along with seventy-two hours of footage logged in his head, he’d enjoyed unchecked access to my financial records and notes—Skin, its molecular diagram and my initial proposal of its synthesis. Your mutt planned to give me those big, innocent eyes and pine for me to take him back to Mommy, to you, and hand over my work on a fuzzy, brown-eyed platter.
I hadn’t slept in four days or eaten in six, or the other way around, I couldn’t be certain. The phone at the gas station was contaminated and Otto was awol, but your dog didn’t know you’d given him up. I needed to eat, pull my head together and make a plan.
The light hurt, like staring into a brilliant white sun flecked with gold and dried ketchup. Hank Williams crooned from the hole in his heart. A roach darted from behind the napkin dispenser, its shadow fluttered in the corner of my eye then lay buried beneath a mound of sugar and glass shards after I’d swung at it. The waitress dropped the chrome lid of the sugar jar onto my table.
“We’re not going to have a problem, are we?” She was pretty, about forty, the kind of forty the desert makes you. Reptile leather tan and a white apron, a murky rose inked onto her wrist.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m a little jumpy. I’ve been driving and my rig broke down and I had to walk a long way and I haven’t slept.”
A man sitting at the counter laughed. Cowboy boots and a trucker’s gut.
“You gonna order something?”
“I’m with the circus and my rig broke down.”
“Are you going to eat or are you going to leave?”
I ordered a cup of decaf and a tuna melt, made sure she saw my cash. Stuffing the roll back to my pocket, I felt the loose stash of specimens from my earlier scavenging, the Fireflies. The kid had been more greedy than cautious, and he’d parted with almost three-hundred hits which I’d split among my pockets, turning up a few stray Black Widows in the process. My carelessness would get the better of me, land me in jail or worse. Especially the Black Widows. They’d been an experiment and they’d been mean. We never made them again.
My face down, the white tabletop bleaching my eyes, I stared at the menu and each time I heard the chimes ringing against the glass doors, I counted, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then slowly looked up to check for cops.
Above the cash register, a stuffed and mounted elk head kept vigil over the customers, a beast like some cross between a deer, bull and moose. I’d seen them in the high desert, almost hitting one while driving through the hills of New Mexico, rounding a black bend in the dead of night with no road shoulder, no room for error, my headlights hit a pair of giant, almond eyes that lit up and hovered in the dark. Now I knew where visions of aliens came from. I could scarcely imagine the amount of surveillance hardware packed into that massive, alien elk head.
A busboy swept up the sugar and glass, replaced my silverware. Things were falling into place. Your mutt didn’t know you’d given him up. He was only a threat if I served as his courier. I could eat, walk back to the house, grab my notes, retrieve my cash, wipe the place down and disappear. I’d phone White with good news from the diner payphone, rendezvous with him over a tuna melt. With my cash savings and instructions for Hoyle’s product, I could say good-bye to Oz, Manhattan White, Hoyle and the Chain forever.
My food arrived. I smelled methyl chloride residue, used to decaffeinate the coffee. The diner probably held fifty or sixty pounds in their storeroom, enough trace methyl to bind to a hundred different hosts and reinvent the chemical wheel. Nudge a molecule, an atom. The difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is both minuscule and gargantuan, and that guillotined elk head knew it, staring at me from its cedar trophy mount trying to look stupid.
Turning my back to it, I moved to the other side of the booth and dumped pepper onto my french fries
but the Head stared at me in the window’s reflection. Facing me made no difference. The Head didn’t need to see my eyes, all it needed was the proper frequency and minimal interference. Neurotransmitters fire in a symphony code, blood rushes to lobes working in concert to form a given thought, making for cranial hot spots that show up on thermographs taken by black helicopters and stuffed elk heads. A candle is an X-ray, it’s a matter of wavelength. Trying to not think about something, like pinching off a gushing hose, creates more pressure and blasts the thoughts out faster and the place smelled like shit and the lights were too bright and what I could do with all of that methyl chloride and then I got it: the Head heard me.
“I’m not doing a goddamned thing.” Twisted around in the booth to look the head square in its alien surveillance eyes just as the music stopped, so the words sounded louder than I’d intended and now everyone else was staring at me as well. We are going to have a problem. If I paid up, tipped well and left quickly, they’d have no reason to stop me or call anyone.
Forty bucks for a decaf and a tuna melt, one hand on the door and one step to safety.
“I hope that hunter shot you in the ass and killed all your children.” I couldn’t contain myself.
Walking back, I tried calming myself before the fear flushed fight-or-flight juices into my system, sucking the blood from my hands and feet, flaring my pupils, raising my pulse and temperature. That’s what the helicopters look for, helicopters painted the color of a moonless midnight and fueled on the souls of the dead so their rotors pump the air in silence, their scopes checking for heat and they see a glowing head and torso with no arms or legs floating midair, they register panic and come after you, bugmen sliding down ropes dangling from black helicopters churning out silent hurricanes over the dirt.
A firefly blinked in the dark. There aren’t any fireflies out here. As soon as the thought left my brain, the firefly blinked off, stayed off. I walked faster, my sweat freezing in the night air, and it came back, four of them this time, dancing at the edges of my eyes then gone.