The Last Bender, Chapter 47

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

          I lowered the gun. His eyes made me do it. They were sunken and dark, but very clear. In their light I felt ashamed. A middle-aged man clipping grass with a little silver scissors is hardly a threat. He had a basket on his arm. In it were mushrooms, bundles of the grass, and some sort of a sprout that actually looked like a green-headed sperm with a long white tail. It smelled like semen.

          “Where’s Stronghole?”  

          He smiled and put down the basket. “You must be Jack, then. I’m so relieved. I thought you were from Laraby or Watts.”

          He didn’t look any different now that he was relieved. “I’m from so many different people I don’t know what’s up. Where is he?”

          “He’s O.K. I can bring you to him.”   The light glazed his vile jellies like lamps on a rainy street. “The dome is quite unique,” he said, leading me through the reception area and down a spiral crystal staircase that wound beyond where I could see. And all of it was of glass, light and water.

At the next level we went into a hall. There were no right angles. Water pulsed in a stream through glass conduits at eye level. It fell from the ceiling to the floor in corners, around stands of six-foot ferns and ivies in crystal pots. The walls radiated light, flaring orange and fading back to blue as we passed. Between each sheet of glass was a network of capillaries, arteries and veins, finely etched in blue or red. Other panels formed a network of white nerves.

          He led me into a room. Water cascaded down one wall, collected in a small pool lined with balls of colored glass and ran out through a hole in the floor. There were three rocks covered in moss. Along one wall was a shelf of books. On another a painting of a black square on rice paper.

          The third wall was a glass tank full of rising bubbles. I followed them all the way up to the ceiling, where they curled around a human head. The lips of the human head were parted in an enigmatic smile. Its eyes bulged slightly. Extending down into the glass was the spinal column, cleansed of meat. The head was clean-shaven. There was life in the eyes and lips. I cannot say what it felt like to behold this thing in its tank, its grim and intelligent eyes and scarf of skin hanging off the neck. Maybe I was a little excited, I don’t know. Wherever the eyes looked, the crystal brightened.

          “This is my suite. The others live together. That’s where Stronghole is now. He’s a new arrival.”   I looked through the floor. I could see two floors down, where the tops of heads walked across floors of refracted light.  

          “Let’s get something straight St. Claude. The best thing for you is to give up Stronghole.”  

          “Is something wrong Jack? You don’t look good. Have a seat, please.”   He pointed to a white cushion on the floor. I sank down. “It was inevitable someone would propose a counter argument, but I never thought it would be David. All that you see here is as much his work as mine or Stani’s. The glass project was his idea. And then he betrays us. I don’t understand that. But, to tell you the truth, it has me feeling kind of fatalistic. There is a pessimism in me these days that wasn’t there before. I even regret staying behind. I fear I have become a mere caretaker of trophies.”   His voice was soft, but not devoid of nuance. It came with a touch of something. It’s hard to say what. It wasn’t contempt. Maybe it was just a single thread of irony woven into everything he said. “I am indeed honored.”   He sat down across from me. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

          I was hungry and exhausted. My clothes were disgusting. I felt dirty. “I could use a drink.”

          “Would you like hot tea, or a glass of wheat grass juice?”

          “I don’t like tea. I’ll take the juice. And water, if you have it.”

          A woman brought a glass of emerald juice and a bowl in on a tray. He hadn’t called her or anything. It was like watching a picture develop. She emerged from the blur several walls away. She had thick skin and a thin neck. The white tunic and drawstring pants looked like a sack. She neither looked to the left nor the right but stared straight ahead.

          I took the glass and drank it down. It tasted like liquid lawn, minus the herbicide and fertilizer. Then she brought the bowl over to the pool of water, filled it, and set it before me, dripping and cold. I drank it down and for the first time in my life I really knew the meaning of the word slake. The water poured out of the corners of my mouth and over my chin. This pleased St. Claude enormously. He clapped his hands and laughed. “I’m sorry, but it’s like having a monkey.”   He sniffed the air and frowned. “One unpleasant side effect of Botrytis is abnormally acute senses. I can see your pores, hear your pulse and smell what you had for dinner last night, digesting in your bowels. Why do you think I cut off heads and live in a glass house? Wouldn’t you?”

          “Why’d you double up Laraby and Watts? Why this? It doesn’t make sense. You could have had anything. Even Laraby would shell out a fortune for a set up like this. I can see him now as Director of Security. But the way you played it is all wrong. You played it so everyone is pissed off, they all want a piece of you. You’re a smart guy and you didn’t see it coming. Why?”

          “I guess brains aren’t everything, Jack. Is that how you’d put it? They wanted to call it MycoSoph. There were long meetings about it at Monozone, and even longer undercover ones with Urizen. Middle of the night affairs out in Grassmear. Watts and Laraby. I’d just had it. That sort of thing is for bugs. MycoSoph. They just wanted to burn our lab out on stupid moneymaking crap that no one needs. Watts with his paralytic implants and liquid restraints. He wanted industrial drugs to run a chemofactory, using designer moods to boost productivity and domesticate the work force. Those aren’t even bug thoughts. Believe me, I looked into bug thoughts for a while and they’re certainly more interesting than that.”

          My head felt heavy. “I don’t feel well. Did you drug me?”

          “No, I gave you water. You look exhausted. Your clothes stink of blood and vomit and your fingers smell of vaginal fluid and semen. Why don’t you bathe and eat something, and I’ll take you round to your friend.”  

          I stood. He led me down a level. People walked busily about, ignoring us. They read on benches or lay stretched out on the floor, talking. There was a constant bustle of men and women carrying containers of one kind or another in and out of the doorways. “We only eat raw foods, mostly water,” he was saying. “It’s not out of a conviction really. I just found that eating meat was like chewing on a rope made of dead things. The more I chewed the deader it got. And cooked food never seemed to cool down enough to eat. Once a food is cooked it retains its heat regardless of refrigeration. It was the same with sex and then, even riding in a car with other people seemed dirty. I think you will like what we do with mushrooms and sprouts though.”  

          We entered the baths. I looked around for heads. There weren’t any. The room was like nothing I had ever seen before, a garden of giant ferns and palms set among rectangular baths. Against the far wall ran hot and cold waterfalls.  There was a towel and a piece of soap on a glass block, and some linen clothes folded neatly beside them. “This suit is unacceptable to us. I’m sorry.”  

          There was no use getting offended, I didn’t like it either. And the water looked so good, its surface reflecting violet and orange from the walls. I wanted to get into that water like it was fucking for the first time.