Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Bower of Coincidence

Transitions were never clear. It was not a matter of two incommensurate states. Rather he was where the edges of many clouds merged. In the old days he would doze off in the garden, or stand transfixed by a light beam, and awaken gently in his own bed, suffused with warmth and light and a lingering euphoria that lasted till the next excursion. The ripples from the garden moreover rewrote everything in such a way that he relived life as a fantastic story in which defeat was always narrowly avoided. The rose was eternity knotted into coral echoes. The rivers of paradise were liquid sapphire, ruby and emerald descending from a diamond fount, infinity bent by existence into the arc of the rainbow. Since taking to his hut in the woods he had a sense of conscious return. He flew up in the garden towards the canopy, where he entered a liminal zone free of specificity, whence he gazed down upon his sleeping form. He felt in control of this state and could zip around with a giddy abandon above Central Park before finally crashing back into his body. But that was only sometimes and he couldn’t ever be sure if it had really happened. At any given moment he was merely where he was and the other moments, provisionally considered to be past or future, were a problem. And of course there was the disappointment waking brought now. His only object in going to the garden was to remain. Paregane was a tantalizing promise. He was always looking into one distant land or another and never getting there. And the bed he had now was neither warm nor dry. His existence was physical. His brute strength prevented his death on earth. What prevented it in the garden, he couldn’t say.

When he entered the gritty transitional zone between garden and earth and descended upon his body, he noticed immediately it was in a peculiar place. Perhaps, he thought as he plunged downward, this is death. Maybe he was dying, but not into the garden. For a bitter moment it seemed as if the whole thing had been a hoax, a tortuous bardo experience. He had followed all of the wrong lights, each a wormhole into a different demon dimension. This one of steel gurneys and dripping IV bottles. Another of ivy and trees in battle, his body consumed by flesh eating flowers or stung by bees. Multiarmed, androphagic Scats with flaming tusks and dorsal fins of azure and beryl, teeth dirtied by the plaque of rotting meat sinking slowly into his belly, and clouds of carnivorous locusts obscuring the sun. He sought extermination and found only an excess of wounds. Finitude was the illusion. He hit his body with a thud and opened his eyes. He wasn’t in the garden. And he wasn’t in his hut. There was a weird chemical odor. The air was cool and the light was dim. Over him hung a giant unlit light unit. There were instruments. Into his field of vision came a face. Before he could think he screamed, a loud, piercing, terrified scream that filled the room and resounded all the way to the garden, shaking the trees and water there. He tried closing his eyes to the face but they wouldn’t let him. It was a woman, a white haired woman with ginger colored skin and awful blue eyes that seemed to swim in from another, more chemical world. They were like planets, gas giants with a crushing gravity that would not release him. She was beautifully murderous, her eyes like scalpels, her lips sensuous, amused and mocking. Then a second, ugly face joined hers. He stopped screaming. This man must be the demon assistant. That explained things. He had seen faces like this in Midtown. Scarred, small, obdurate.

His silence pleased them. They were smiling now. Breath came rapid and hard. He decided not to move or speak. He would lie there patiently until it was clear what his status was. He might be dead. Maybe the police had seized him. Whatever dead felt like this felt like life. His heart pumped so hard it hurt; it hurt in his ears and chest. Sweat swelled into beads on his forehead and rolled down into his ears. His bowels burned.

The man said, “You awake now?” in a coarse voice.

Felix said nothing.

“He doesn’t know where he is,” the white haired woman said. She moved her face closer to his and smiled. “You’re in my laboratory, Felix. My name is Bryson. I’m a doctor. This is Jacob Boyle. We want to save your life.”

“Why?” Felix asked. It was that word again, the one no one ever could answer.

“Because you’re a very special person who can help us save other lives.”

He laughed weakly. “What’s the point?” He turned his head away from her and looked at Boyle. “Most people are better off dead.”

“That may be,” she said. “But you’re useful to us all the same.”

The two heads floated around above him. “May I sit up?” he asked.

The man disappeared and returned. “If ya try anything I gotta plug you with this.” He held up a red gun. “It won’t kill you, so don’t get any ideas. It’s synthetic–what?”

“Blowfish toxin. You’ll be a zombie, Felix.”

He sat up. The room swam around woozily. He had vague memories of a fight. There was a man in armor. His knuckles hurt. Everything hurt. “Who the fuck, where the fuck?” He rubbed his eyes and looked around. His bag was on the floor. “What happened?” He was in some sort of a lab, with black counters, sinks and desks, surrounded by machines, big boxy things with dials and meters and throbbing pulse beams. There were tents of electraweave and BioWatch units. His legs dangled off the bed. The doors were not far off but he eyed the red gun and decided he wasn’t ready to bolt yet. As the picture came clear he felt his teeth grow sharp and saliva fill his mouth, bitter and digestive. By the moment he grew more vigilant, taking in details of the room, the number of spigots, their color, the images on the computer screens, the streaming data, the light oscillators, the portable cloud chamber, the glove box. There was a virtual room.

“Let’s have a seat, shall we?” Bryson asked, indicating that he should hop down off the bed. The room rocked back and forth a few times. He followed her, Boyle at his back, into her office. Boyle sat on the edge of the spartan black bed, staring at him with mean, narrow eyes, and he sat down next to her desk on a comfortable chair.

She sat down at her desk and said, “We’ve selected you for a number of reasons, Felix.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Fingerprints. But we’ve been monitoring you for many weeks, ever since you showed up at the lucky day parlor, Gametria.”

“I know you,” he said slowly. “I saw you in Cafe Bereshit in Midtown once.”

“You’re–” She hesitated, seemed afraid.

“What frightens you?” he asked. He stared into Bryson’s eyes, feeling his strength build. He looked around for a clue as to where he was. “Where am I?”

“When did you start taking transcryptasine?”

“Whom do you work for? You don’t look like the police.”

Boyle snorted. “Just answer the fucking questions and don’t be a nose bag.”

“Relax, Boyle,” Bryson said. “It must be a little confusing waking up here in our lab.”

“I thought maybe I was dead.”

“Surely you’re not disappointed?”

“Surely I fucking am. Although,” he rubbed his lips and arched his eyebrows, “I was not planning on this particular dementia. My wife-” He decided against going into it. “I have some place important to go, let’s say. You people, whoever you are, are screwing up my plans.”

“Tell us about yourself.” She touched the screen and mumbled Felix Clay.

“Why should I?”

“Am I gonna bust your face, or what?”

“Try it,” Felix growled. “You’re the man in the silver suit. I beat you down once and I can do it again. We’ll see who’s dead first.”

“Calm down, both of you. This doesn’t need to be confrontational.”

Felix looked at her in a state of incomprehension. “If you knew what I’ve been through!”

“Well,” she said, rubbing her eyes and folding her hands in her lap, “My guess is you were under psychiatric care of some sort, or a malcontent at work, an unhappy person who was prescribed transcryptasine and became an abuser. As you probably know, most people at your level of abuse die very quickly. You did not. We’re here to find out why.”

“Do you think any of what you just said to me is reassuring? Again, who the hell are you?”

“Monozone,” she said. “It’s our drug. I invented it. My pur-”

“Monozone!” he roared, standing up. Boyle pushed him back into the chair and gripped his ear with one hand and the fleshy part of his hand with the other, which he squeezed till white lights flashed in his eyes and he cried out OW.

“Please!” Bryson said. The men stopped. “I’ll release you Felix if, after you’ve heard me out, you still want to go.”

Felix stared at her with a hatred so vitriolic it killed every other sensation in the room. No other thoughts remained. “You killed my wife! You did this to me. I was happy.”

“Were you?” she asked simply. “I don’t think so. No one is. Maybe abject idiots and alcoholics are for an hour or two but even orgasm can’t be defined by the word happy, no, we call it a little death. The swoon without finality. You strike me as a being far too intelligent and obstreperous for happiness. How did you come to use transcryptasine, Felix?”

“Are you gonna behave?” Boyle asked, relaxing his grip.

Felix looked at him and smiled. “Getting tired, Boyle?” Boyle’s dead eyes didn’t leave his. He turned to Bryson. “My wife was sick. Suicidal. She tried to kill herself and the doctor prescribed Paregane. That was last summer. In the fall I started to use it with her. She died and I lost everything.”

“Did you initiate legal proceedings against us?”

“Who are you trying to kid? I got a lawyer right away.”

Boyle laughed. “Max Mbeke?”

“How do you know?”

Boyle made an ambiguous gesture. “We squashed the lawsuit.”

“Now you just want to use transcryptasine and die in paradise. Is that where your wife is?”

Felix shook his head and stared at the floor. He felt himself capitulating to a wave of weakness. “I can’t die though. Something always goes wrong.”

“That’s exactly what interests us. Will you let us study you, Felix?

You’ll be quite comfortable here. All you have to do is take transcryptasine whenever you want and we’ll monitor you. You can do that till you die or we’re done with you.”

“Then?”

“Then you can go end your life however you please.”

He looked around. “She was my only joy.”

“I’m sorry, Felix.”

He was crying now and covered his face with shame. It was all he ever desired, the destruction of whoever or whatever had killed her. But now that chance and choice were one he didn’t cry out like a cock, no, he collapsed into tears. “How could you let this happen?”

He wiped his face and looked at her. Her stark, alien features had softened. She blinked and shook her head. “I was weak. I’m trying to put an end to it. Will you help me, please?”

“Once it’s started, what’s the point of trying to return? This country of ours, in this time and this place, has lost all sense of significance. Everything swims in a universe of strict equivalence. We have no art, no feeling. All the music has been drained out of life. Paregane opens your eyes to it. Everything becomes clear. And it shows you the way out. I wish I had never seen. I would rather have dreamt on about hovercraft and Lucy revivals and clean air systems and CarParks. You opened my eyes, Bryson; and now the world is in ruins. But I’ll stay. I’ll stay because it doesn’t matter one way or another if I do or I don’t. And I’ll stay for the free Paregane.”

Boyle smiled and life flooded his eyes. “I didn’t think you was no dummy,” he said. “And I even forgive you crackin’ me in da ribs there in da park.”

“And, of course, we will pay you for your time,” Bryson said, turning back to the computer.

“My accounts are all empty. I’m not really a man anymore. I’m a node in a shadowgraph.”

“Don’t worry. We can reactivate the accounts or pay you in cash or jewels.”

Clearly there were forces at work opposed to his will. He had tried to go one place and ended up here. There was no reason but there was probably a cause. It didn’t matter one way or another. He was a sort of stooge in his own eyes, a ridiculous man living a ridiculous life. He was even more absurd than the world! Its very emptiness was more appropriate than the ludicrous dreams of freedom he fed himself now. Those he loved most died hideous deaths and all his efforts to join them were thwarted. The wild man attacks him and instead of yielding he beats him to death! Some of these opposing forces appeared to be resident in his own body then. Whoever he was, the Felix, was only nominally in charge. Was he in a lab; was he in a tenement in Midtown, or a car bound for Alaska? The nude woman driving wore sunglasses. At the park the spirit of Veronica took the form of kingfishers skimming the pond. Well, here, anyway, he could be with Veronica all the time. He wouldn’t have to go to Gametria, or chase after money, or sell guided tours of paradise. This then was the best of all possible worlds.

“So, when do we start?” Felix asked.

A man came in, tall, suave, and grey, with sad eyes and a weary expression. “Well, well,” he said, in a melodious voice.

“Hello, Bradlee,” Bryson said with an inflection of sarcasm that

Felix read as a past between them. “We’ve brought in Mr. Clay.”

“Shall I call you Felix or Mr. Clay?”

“Felix is fine. So what does testing mean?”

“Ah, so you’ve already agreed to our proposal. Excellent.”

“He has,” Bryson said brightly. “I was just about to do the intake and then send him down for the work up. You’ll go to a Monozone medical team for a complete physical inventory, fluids and such, and then we’ll do some work here. I’d like you to keep a dream journal.”

“I don’t dream,” Felix said, smiling at her confusion.

“What do you mean, you don’t dream?”

“I mean, there are disordered transitions between the two bodies but I don’t consider them dreams. They seem to me to be recollections.”

Slowly she squeezed her lips together and nodded. “You don’t go to the garden then?”

“Certainly I go there. I’m in the garden all the time. Except of course when I’m here. I used to sleep my way in but lately I’ve been flying.”

“Well, whatever you want to call it, will you record events that transpire there and any, er, transitional experiences you have?”

Felix nodded. “And what do I do all day?”

“Nothing else, unless you want to.”

“I’m used to a certain amount of exercise.”

She looked at Bradlee and said, “Maybe the Monozone gym–” Bradlee shook his head grimly. “I’ll have weights and a treadmill brought in.” He tipped his head almost imperceptibly. “You’ll maintain your four times a day dose, go even higher if you like.”

“For how long?”

“Until you die or we know something.”

Bradlee spoke. “You’re doing a great service, Felix.” He smiled and pet his mustache like a cat.

People in green paper gowns, eyes above white masks, hair in paper hats, with latex gloves, swarmed over him. He was naked, like a polyp, seated in a shallow ceramic tub with a drain and jets of water pulsing around. They bathed him in blue liquid, scrubbed his body with a stiff brush, scoured his cavities by hand, washed his hair and hosed him off with warm water. Then he stood in a stall under hot red lights and a blower. The space was vast. Figures in white suits with hoods attached to corrugated hoses bustled in the distance. His area was brightly lit, with chairs, and an exam table. Inane, peaceful music played. The team of doctors were silent, indicating what he should do with nods of the head and hand gestures. They moulded him like hot composite and his body responded as if by training. He sat, stood, turned over as they took their samples. He peed into a jar, coughed up phlegm, spit. They swabbed his cheeks, his throat, his nostrils, eyes and ears. They fired rays into all of these places. They plucked hair from his head, nose, chest, groin and anus. They scraped his armpits, attached a sucking probe to his nipples. He filled five syringes with his blood. They gave him a nasal spray and he got a hard on. He jerked off. They swabbed his urethra and colon, took a prostaglandin read. They drew lumbar fluid, scraped beneath his finger and toenails. Then there were reflex tests and photon diffusion scans of his retina. He stood beneath a screaming light for twenty- five seconds and coughed while they pulled on his balls. Someone looked at his tongue under a microscope. Then they scoped every other orifice. Computers imaged his body. There were bone and muscle scans, nerve inventories, hormonal resonance graphs. He ran on a treadmill, breathed into a tube full of a substance that looked like egg yolk. He looked at dots and named colors. He pointed to the ear in which beeps and whines struck. He opened his mouth and said ahh. He ate a cracker and drank orange juice and they scanned him again. He walked across a sheet of CellPack and spoke to a computer.

“Say Ah,” said the computer.

“Ah.”

“Say EE.”

“EE.”

“Say OOO.”

“OOO.”

“Thank you Mr. Clay. Now, give me a complete medical history.”

He had always been healthy, so to each question he answered no, until it got to the contextual history, whereupon he had to recount the illnesses, mental and otherwise, of everyone he had ever known. Each of Veronica’s diagnoses and medications was recorded, as well as his father’s and mother’s dengue fever, malaria, shingles, parasitic infections whose names he couldn’t remember, stroke, insanity, suicide.

He put on a green gown. An orderly wheeled him back to Bryson’s lab. The way to and from was without orientation. They took a concealed lateral, went up and down. The walls were of an oozy, nonspecific color and texture, as were the ceilings. He was wheeled through a tunnel subject to alteration depending upon mood and space. Others were there who could not perceive their passing. They entered and exited one-way mirrors. The air was cool and the smell more sophisticated than that diffused in most places but it could not conceal the burning, industrial core of it nor did the cool air feel fresh. Bryson opened the door for them.

“You don’t have to sit in that stupid thing,” she said. “Follow me.” He followed her into her office bedroom. That room was more intimate than the lab space where he had awakened. She had nothing personal in there to speak of but her presence was in some way comforting. There was the coffee mug, the tray of herbal tea and the small stack of books by the bed. Even the scent of soap, normally repellant, made the room human, for humans used their soap to clean. He could smell the blue flush liquid and stale tobacco. “Sit down.” He sat in the chair next to her desk and she spent a minute setting her computer up. “Put this on your left hand.” She handed him a gold electraweave glove. “Put this on your right foot.” She handed him a copper electraweave sock. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and tell you to think about some things, O.K.?” As she spoke to him she was focused intently on the screens, eyes roaming up and down and back and forth, fingers flying over the keyboard and touching while her voice dropped to a mumble between words addressed to him.

“O.K.”

“Think about sex.”

He tried. He thought about Veronica but it was Promethea’s flesh he kept imagining, her body sweating beneath his, and Moises’s face blown out in ecstasy. These then metamorphosed into the terrifying final chrysalis of bloody corpses, empty eyeslits and the lifeless trunk flung against the wall beneath its exploded head. “I can’t.”

“Oh come on, most people can think of nothing else. You loved your wife? Did you sleep together?’

“Of course.”

“Not married long?”

“Almost twenty years.”

“Hmmmm. How many affairs?”

“None.”

“And you found sex with her to be enjoyable?”

“Still do.”

“So you do dream. Think of having sex with her in a dream then. What do you typically do to get started? Fondle her breasts? Kiss her ears? Squeeze her ass? Foot massage? Erotic foot massage is quite popular. Maybe you begin with furtive moves in the hallway, frottage, or intercrural intercourse.”

“What’s that?”

“Thigh fucking.”

Felix blushed. “Not since high school.”

“You get the idea though? Think dirty. What’s the dirtiest, weirdest thing you ever did in bed?’

“I won’t say!” But then he began to remember all of their encounters, in his eyes and ears, in his mouth and nose, synaesthetic love making, gently in the morning, half conscious in the middle of the night, outrageous, violent fucking on cocaine, blow jobs in the shower, cunnilingus in the woods, abject, noble, transcendent, brutal, efficient, lingering, random, purposeful, staring up from all fours at her vagina, standing over her supine body, breasts and nipples, magical, carnal, transformative, the human animal, divine, time destroyed, time redeemed, dripping cocks and cunts, the taste of cum on her tongue, pissy smells, perfumed hair, wet lips slicked together, penetrations without cease, smashed chakras, screwing, fucking.

“That’s just perfect, Felix. Now, what about food? What do you like to eat? If you could eat anything right now, what would it be? A greasy hamburger? A bowl of clear soup? Sushi? French fries with mayonnaise and a Belgian ale? Mussels steamed in white wine and garlic? Clams in black bean sauce? Prime rib with horseradish and Yorkshire pudding? Corn bread? Beans’n’greens? Dhal? Souvlaki?”

“Souvlaki. At night there’s a vendor on 38th and Eighth who roasts lamb on this giant skewer and slices off thin browned pieces which he mixes with grilled onions, lettuce, tomatoes and tahini in a soft pita.”

“Beautiful. O.K. What makes you want to vomit? I mean visceral, violent vomiting. Doesn’t have to be a food. It could be an image–”

“Veronica!” He gasped and tears flooded his eyes. “Lying half dead in the bathtub. She’s covered in blood and vomit.” He began to sob. Damn, he thought, trying to stop. He couldn’t stand being so close to the surface.

“Well, that works for sad, not disgust. But that’s o.k. Try disgust. Less personal. It’s a taste in the mouth. I remember once seeing a man in the street who smelled so bad the molecules diffused on my tongue and I could taste him.”

“Bleu cheese crumbled with bacon and sour cream on a baked potato after drinking cheap red wine all night in Yonkers…. Timmy Blaire puking it up on the back stairs.”

“Beautiful gag response! Now, happy. What is joyful?”

“Driving.” They drove along in their Studebaker over hundreds of winding miles in New Jersey, no track, no programming, taking turns at the wheel, gunning it to a hundred on the straightaways, april sun hot on their heads.

“You like to drive?”

“It used to be a dream of mine, to own a car. I even studied how to repair them. We were going to drive to Alaska.”

Bryson stopped futzing with the computer and looked into his eyes. “You and Veronica?” she asked.

“Of course.” She stared into him and moved her head thoughtfully. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

After a pause she said, “No.”

Something wasn’t right with her. “Do you like to drive, Bryson? Do you like just being out there moving, nothing to keep you back? I used to live for that and then, slowly, my world got smaller and smaller. Remember those old movies where the walls of a room close in? Before she died in the flesh we had been crushed to death. Do you ever feel like that?” Her expression was impossible to read. He felt something coming off of her, a sensation, but it wouldn’t resolve.

“Everyone ages Felix. You and Veronica were just becoming middle aged. You would have had kids. Done all the things families do and then in retirement bought yourself a cheap little car, which you would have taken on long drives out west. The walls crush you with boredom and responsibility. In the end, no one is free. There’s always someone or something, an expectation, a fear, an enemy forgotten or a commitment made before you were competent to make it that will call you and crush you. The only defense is delay.”

“If I’m to be crushed it won’t be by an illusion.”

“Then what kind of a man would you be? Some new species perhaps.”

“Do you drive, Bryson?”

“No. Not really. When I was a girl. Sometimes Bradlee lets me take his car out of the parking lot. But it would have been my answer too. The locomotive, as a category, is one of the very few answers people give to the question of Joy.”

“What are the others?”

“Oh, various forms of exercise, music, babies, spring. Mountain climbing and swimming are big. Very, very, rarely sex or food.”

“It’s hard to separate Joy from the rest. From relief for example.”

“Emotional and sensual synaesthesia. We know and define things by comparison. To conceive of spatial distance we think of how long it takes to travel across it; to conceive of time we imagine a road, a physical distance to be traveled. I like to think of Joy as a rapture beginning when all want is satisfied. One never selects a PCP or amphibatrain as joyful, it’s only a journey without ultimate goal or purpose that brings joy. What terrifies you?”

Felix didn’t know what terrified him. He was living his terror. And what was he living? A solitary life. “Isolation,” he said.

“Angry?”

“You. This place.”

“And comfort?”

“The dark. Nothingness.”