While still sprawled on the ground, I reached around my back and yanked the 9 mm from its makeshift harness. I waved it about, not really pointing at anyone and not able to see anyway, and the kids took off.
I stuck the gun in my pocket. I rolled over, pressed my hands against the dirt, and propped myself up on all fours. I glanced to one side, where I saw Molly staring down at me. She was still in her puffy dress, tight rings of hair covering the sides of her face.
“Are you some kind of animal? All you had to do was close the damn window.”
And there I was, nothing more than one of her retarded classmates. So I hoisted myself onto my wobbly feet and slunk away without a word.
* * * *
I leaned against the window in the men’s room, wondering if I’d done all this before. Anything was possible, once Abdera got a hold of you. Until now I’d assumed that the panic attacks were counterfeit memories which the colony had forged, but maybe they were real. And maybe it’s time I explained what the Abdera Cipher is.
The Jain religion tells the story of the blind men and the elephant. One touches the tusk and says it is a spear, one touches the trunk and says it is a snake, and on it goes. They’re all wrong. In our world, electronic media bombard us with news, ads and ten thousand other things. Our mushy brains don’t stand a chance against it, and most enthusiasts of cybernetics want to multitask the way a machine can. With this delusion in hand, they think they can compete against the almighty digital thinker. But they’re still moving from one part of the elephant to another, only faster. When I first went to Abdera, it was because Spectrum had filled my mind with hallucinations. The Abderans claimed they could use the power of the machine to help me see - not illusions - but the story inside reality itself. There was nothing “under there”, nothing “behind there” – no fucking magician behind a curtain. To see clearly, I had to put together each flickering image and then let all that is extraneous drop away until only the truth remained, the truth which each part contains but only the whole can reveal.
Together, flames become a fire.
Abdera was made of colonies of ten or twenty people, and each member of a colony chose a “story name” for himself or herself. Like a grammar school French class. I was Osiris. With that name, I plugged into the Cipher and let it help me search the eddies of radio, electric wire and hard scrabble reality for my unique purpose. And yet, I discovered it was just one more hallucination, this time dressed up for a night out in emperor’s clothes.
My mind snapped to. Across the street, I saw a concourse linking two office towers. Beneath it stood the point of a slate-colored steeple. The steeple met the body of a sullen stone chapel, cowering beneath the legs of a shimmering giant.
“You gotta go see him, George.” I said.
I went to the chapel. It was empty. Darkened lanterns hung from chains. The ceramic tiles at my feet were shiny enough to produce a reflection of my face. I ducked into an alcove by the lectern and opened a heavy door. The stairwell below twisted and deposited me in Father Don’s office. It had a desk and a couch shoved to one side, and tables and shelves overflowing with papers. The man himself sat on his couch smoking a weed pipe. He needed it to ease the pain in his legs, which he stretched out in front of him. They seemed to extend clear across the room. He looked up at me and gestured to a spot on the couch.
“The lights were out.” I said. “I was afraid you were gone.”
“Dead?” He said. “How long do you think I might lay here before anyone found me?”
I laughed, “Are you trying to scare me, you geezer?”
He jabbed the tip of his pipe at me and said, “It’s you that scare me.” He replaced the pipe and mumbled, “Any young person interested in my old religion scares me. Ah, but your mother went to church, and she died when you were so young. Of course, you just want to remember her. Forgive me. About the lights, I’m saving money. Most Sundays, I haul my body up to that lectern and preach to the pews.”
I was never one to show up on Sundays. I loitered. The place was something familiar from my childhood. Despite Major Tuck, I needed it – the echo of clicking heals and the smell of aged wood from the pew backs. And I came to chat up the old man. I slipped a bill from my pocket, and he stared it down as if it were a doctor’s needle.
“Keep it. What have I ever done for you?”
“You listen without asking for anything in return.”
He slapped his legs. “I can’t run away, you nitwit. Besides, there’s always the chance that I might get a juicy confession. There are fewer of those these days.” He surveyed the room and its mountains of stacked papers. “But the slowdown in business does give me time to work on my book.”
He always called it his book, even though there had to be enough paperwork to fill thirty or forty volumes.
I said, “I’d like to read it sometime.”
“No you don’t! Not until I’m finished with the first draft.” He poked a giant bony finger at me. “If I let you read it, you’ll talk to me about it. And that will make me go back and revise it. I’ll get my old brain lost and never even finish the first draft. So are you going to tell me what you’re doing in my office?”
“I almost bit a kid’s nose off today.” I said. “Not a kid really. I mean, not a child.”
He took a long drag on the pipe, smacked his lips, and turned to me again.
“Doesn’t surprise me. Who were you trying to rescue this time? Another old man too near his grave to be worth it?”
“Who?”
“You don’t remember?”
I was struck by how little I remembered from the time before my departure from Abdera. Like so much else, I’d chalked it up to my long emergence from the tunnel they’d dropped me in. It was just another symptom of the conditioning. My first week into Abdera everything had seemed clear to me. It has been like finding a lost key that had been hiding in front of me the whole time. I had stumbled upon it without looking for it, and I’d felt stupid for not seeing it before and so grateful that I had it now. And yet, that feeling was a chimera, a mental security fence around the colony. I got out, and today everything was reversed. It was hard for me to think of how it had all been so cogent to me back then, when now all my memories of what I did and who I was were little more than lurking shadows. Now it was these past few weeks that were clear and unburdened, as if they were the whole of my life. But if that sensation could happen once and it was a delusion then, why couldn’t it be one today? These are the things that drove me nutty, despite how happy I’d been.
I said, “I’ve got something to say.”
“Very well. Do you mind if we stay here? It’s not because I don’t want to go upstairs. It would be struggle, but I’d do it for you. Only thing is, I’ve started storing some of the earlier volumes of my book in the confessionals.”
“I don’t have a confession. It’s that I don’t remember how we met.”
He nodded. He pushed himself off the couch with a tremendous groan, and ambled over to a bookshelf behind his desk. He took a shiny candle stick off it and handed it to me.
He said, “Does this look familiar? They got away with the other one.”
I turned it in my hand, and I saw a line of brown blobs down the sides. I passed a fingertip over them; they were flat and smooth. They weren’t dried wax. They were blood stains.
I had a vision of Father Don on the floor in sanctuary’s center aisle, a wire wrapped around his neck. Coughing up blood. I stood behind the Father’s attacker, with a candle stick in one hand. There were two of them. There was one with the wire garrote and another with the silver collection platters and the other candle stick. I glanced at the mirrored floor, and I saw myself, hiding in the doorway near the lectern, half into the dark. The guy with the loot saw me and ran. The other guy looked up. I rushed him, and swung. He fell. Dead? I couldn’t tell. His face was full of blood. I knelt down and helped the father up.
My mind returned to the present and I looked up at h
im.
“I’ve had nightmares about it. In them, I was the one choking a man. I saw someone else’s reflection and I was terrified that I’d been found out. But that’s not how it was, was it?”
The Father sat again. A clumsy smile rolled across his big face.
He said, “I’ve been patient.”
“I can’t trust myself. I half suspected that I was a monster and that I’d killed someone.”
The Father snorted. “Don’t kid yourself. You’re no killer George. I can tell you that much.”
“With Abdera, you start to think anything’s possible.”
“But you’re no killer. And welcome back.”
“I like you, Father, but I’m not joining another church.”
“I never said you were.”
* * * *
I stood on the chapel steps again. The streets were busy now with morning traffic. That time of day reminded me of how detached I was from the usual rhythm of daily life. I slept a few hours here on one day and different hours on another. Class times differed on Thursdays versus Fridays, and work times differed on Mondays versus Wednesdays, and on through varying intervals that I filled with chores and eating. I was a thread woven through the waking world, often surprised at where I poked out of the fabric. I stopped and I stared at the suited professionals descending the escalator from the train. And there was an old woman, tubes yoking her face to an air machine, hustling change for herself and her seven children. Last time it was five. The tank was a cheap prop; I’d seen her assembling it once at the beginning of a shift. I’ll never know how such brilliance comes reduced to pan-handling.
I bounded up the stairs to the train, passing the tired legions going the other way. I took an outbound train to the Berm. It was as empty as the first one I’d taken – and absent the red-haired fellow traveler. I watched the stops go by, and then I found myself counting down – not to the Berm – but to the Forest Look stop.
“No.” I whispered to myself. I sat on my hands.
But I couldn’t take it. Forest Look came and I bolted out the door. I was on a platform that ran along the top floors of warehouses and tenements. The brick faces sported ads, some stretching from building to building, each peeling around the windows that interrupted them. I climbed onto one of the roofs at a point where they came close to the tracks and I sat in the trestle beneath a water tower. It was a good vantage point for the windows of the next tenement over.
Molly’s blinds were drawn, but from this angle I could see alternating stripes of vinyl and skin. The sound of a jazz trombone reverbed against the window panes. Molly’s voice reached just above it. She was preparing her shower, completely starkers and singing along to the music. Then the phone rang. She listened, said nothing, and slammed it back into the cradle. She was still. She hung her head and pushed her palm hard against her brow. She was trying not to cry. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.
I know that watching her was wrong. For a moment I had the pistol out again, pressed against my chin. I was toying with it, or maybe Major Tuck was. It didn’t matter; the damn thing wasn’t loaded.
“No, Tuck.” I said to myself. “This isn’t addiction. Think of who might’ve called her.”
Was creepy okay, if I looked out for her? Whatever was on that phone line was worse than me. Does what I did matter here, in a city of 12 million, where you have to expect that someone might witness even your most intimate moments? Where in every shop and at every bank machine and at every intersection there’s a camera broadcasting your every move to god-know-where? With patience, a clever hacker could piece together even my own irregular schedule. But all those watchers were anonymous. Who knew what sat behind those millions of glass eyes?
I wasn’t anonymous.
* * * *
When I got back to the Berm, there was a cop car parked outside my building. Three cops approached, none of them Healing. One was plain-clothed and on either side of him was a uniform.
He said, “I’m detective Wes Balder. First, let me assure you that you’re not under arrest.”
He held his hand out as if he expected me to give him something. He waited. He gave me that look that told me he knew that I knew exactly what he wanted. So I pulled the pistol from my jacket and gave it to him.
Then he said, “Second, if you come with me, I’ll tell you why you might be – but you’re not.”
I sat in the front seat of his car, and he took me to his office.
He closed the blinds, sat me in a chair, and leaned against his desk.
Balder said, “I’m sure you’ve heard about this jimmy the press are calling the Berm Butcher. I know. I hate the name too. Anyways, we got a partial DNA clip the first time he struck. It was from a bit of burnt skin, so there was some corruption. But we ran the part we had and got a match. It was you. Do you follow? We had to be sure, so we stalked you.”
“Healing.” I said.
“Healing? No. Healing’s an impotent little half a scrotum. You know Healing?”
“He’s a friend of a friend. But he’s been bugging me.”
“Hmm. I’ll be sure to take that one up. But the point is, we no longer think you’re the killer.”
“Okay.”
“Another victim popped into the lab this morning. This time, our mutual friend was careless. He left behind a finger print and skin cells with full DNA. The DNA from the skin matched you 100 percent. But not the prints. And you, George, do not have an identical twin.”
We didn’t speak for a minute.
Then I said, “This means exactly what?”
Of course I knew; I’d been studying this stuff all semester. It was my future job to know.
I said. “You think I have a clone. A serial killing clone, of course.”
Balder rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Clones are rare - and serial killers? I’ve never seen a real one in my career. But yes. Maybe.” He held up his hands. “Sorry to bring it up this way. I see it wasn’t for the best, but you understand that this sort of thing’s outside of my emotional jurisdiction, as my wife calls it.”
I blurted, “Do you know much about Abdera?”
“Ah shit. You’re one of those. So that’s how you know Healing.”
“I used to be one of those. I’m clean. But maybe you’ve got some idea about the kinds of problems that makes for me. The whole experience inoculated me from the bizarre. So there’s not much that can shock me.”
“It should. I’ve scanned videos from around the estimated event times, and turned up no one that matches your cute mug. I surveyed your environs and also found no one – besides you. It’s possible the butcher commutes to work, but that doesn’t fit the profile. I’ve also got some reasons to believe he’s altered his appearance. Point is, he knows he’s a clone and he doesn’t like it. The shrinks tell me he’s got this overwhelming need to be unique.”
“Or he’d rather I take the fall for him. Most clones that make it out of whatever slave market they were sold into survive as criminals. They can’t get real jobs, they’re invisible, and their donors can take the fall. Most donors don’t know they have clones. Like you said: it’s rare. People don’t think of it.”
“So what – you’re some kind of expert?”
“I study genetic law at State U. It comes up.”
“Okay.” said Balder.
Then he was quiet. He nodded his head and smiled. I felt embarrassed that I’d volunteering the info so freely. Balder was thinking that it was going to be easy to use me for whatever he wanted to use me for. I’d spent so long in isolation that it was too easy for me to ramble on.
I said, “You don’t want to take my prints, do you? So I can show you I haven’t changed them?”
“I’ve lifted your prints at least a dozen times. You know how it is; you leave them on everything. That’s good – you’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Glad we’re on the same page.”
“On that topic, I’d advise y
ou to leave that girl alone. It’s creepy. And it doesn’t make you look good, you know, when you’re trying to distinguish yourself from a killer. Do you follow?”
I looked at my shoes, feeling like a total halfwit. But then I gave it second thought. I couldn’t tell if was Major Tuck this time or just my own frustration with this mess, but I stared him down and said,
“You’re a cop, Balder. Tell me you haven’t done it yourself. It’s your job to spy on people – isn’t that most of what police work is these days? Have you ever taken a peek that wasn’t exactly obligatory?”
“Sack it, George. Here’s the thing. We need your help to find him. I’m sure he knows who you are, so you’ll hook him for us.”
I paused. Then I said, “This morning I was on the train and the only other passenger was a guy who watched me until I left. But he didn’t look like me.”
Balder nodded. He flipped a blurred photo at me. It was the guy.
I said, “So you’ve got him. What am here I for?”
“You’re not afraid of this dude? Knowing what you know?”
I didn’t respond. Balder took the photo back, but as it went away I noticed something odd about it. One side of the man’s face drooped. The man on the train hadn’t been that way, so this photo was either more recent or older. My brains searched for theories, and it came up with this: the deformity indicated a botched surgery. Balder had made him a suspect because he knew “our mutual friend” might’ve attempted to alter his face. And this alteration was clearly a back alley job.
I stood and said, “Go find him now.”
“It’s not simple. As you say, these chaps are invisible. We canvassed homeless shelters and employers known to harbor illegals. Nothing. Here’s my hope. The docs say the suspect changed himself about two weeks ago, to cover up an older injury or surgery.”
Right. Clone farms implant time-release hormone capsules inside their products. Clones grow up fast. Even if my twin’s two-dollar face job was just a couple years old, his aging face would make it disintegrate and require repairs.