The Last Bender, Chapter 49

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

          My room was located not far from St. Claude’s suite, on level 1, which he shared with Evalyn. It was a plain glass chamber with only one head. The ambient light was the usual deep blue to turquoise, with a brighter radiation in one corner, above a white cushion. This brighter radiation was like a small sun, bright enough to read by if I were right next to it, but not so bright as to prevent sleep. A small fountain pulsed in the opposite corner.

          It was a cozy enough room, if you don’t mind the feel and look of crystal, and the sight of eyes bulging out of a pickled face. On the floor was a simple sleeping mat and a cotton blanket. I hid the gun under the mat. There were books to read and a bowl to drink from.

          I wish I had arrived there earlier, because I felt like I was collapsing cell by cell into myself. But before taking me to my room St. Claude insisted I complete his tour of the dome. He had a funny way of insisting. It was actually a way of getting you to want to do things that he wanted you to do. There was no coercion involved that I could detect. He was on the upswing. In the dome, all things flowed toward St. Claude. Of course, on the downswing things are different.

          Ceilings, walls and floors were all alike: refractory, intersecting, vitreous planes. I soon got the hang of it. Four levels connected by a single spiral staircase. Light and water flowed up and down the staircase like a spine, each level divided into lobes. Different lobes performed different functions, but all were interconnected and any part could learn to perform the function of any other part.

          Level 2 housed the labs. Here they conducted experiments and turned the crystal into panels that either circulated fluid or light. The white nerve panels circulated light. The blue and red capillaries circulated seawater.

          They lived and slept on Level 3. The sleeping lobe was supervised by a healthy contingent of rather severe looking heads. They slept on thin black mats. Here they also prepared food and played chess.

          Level 4 was what he called ‘the stem’. It was a spore and crystal factory and harsh. Here the salt grew taller and smarter than the people. They were tunneling into the bedrock and smelting it into seed crystals, which they grew in vats and formed into sheets. The people appeared to be huge visors illuminated by a dim, lava like emanation from the ground. The air was sulfurous, unlike the other levels, which smelled like dawn in April.

          The spore lobe was too weird and dark to understand visually. Two technicians in white tended to heaps and piles of a dirt-like substance, on which grew a crystalline fungus which they carefully brushed into flasks. The flasks then went into incubators. This they refined into Botrytis.

          Behind these two lobes was the hydra lobe. They cloned these giant hydras for basic nerve cell material and used them to circulate throughout the dome, performing various menial tasks.

          Behind the hydra tanks was the tunnel out.

          After the tour St. Claude said, “I like plants. They’re beautiful and unpretentious.”

          I lay down on the mat expecting to go to sleep but I could not do it. When I shut my eyes I got the distinct feeling that the head was watching me. And it wasn’t just alone. My head was connected to all the others. Through its eyes all the others saw me. And they didn’t see me, see my face, my ass, my hands. They saw my heart, my thoughts, my desires. They knew me, they didn’t see me. I examined this head then, looked at it so that I might know what went on inside. But it was just flesh floating in water. It had black hair and a smooth forehead. The eyes were brown and the nostrils were a little pinched. The lips were parted as if to speak. I shut my eyes and begged for the sleep to come. But the crystal was cold and hard and the constant activity in the walls agitating.  When it did come, I wished it hadn’t. It wasn’t sleep, it was torture–falling endlessly through some horrific landscape of rotten death. The heads were no longer in their blue water world, they were cured and hanging up like old hams. These heads were carnivores, with the stench of blood and offal on them. Ripe heads and spines, draped in decay, flew through the sky like birds of prey, swooping down to raven my heart and liver and peck my eyes out. Their cries echoed across the black chasms and harbors of the night. The heads arranged themselves in a gallery, like a grand jury. They sat in judgment, summoning all my crimes before me. They dropped my mother’s burning corpse down a well and hurled my father’s cancereaten body to a pack of dogs. Then they were instructing me to do something. I stared into the hollows of their eyes, which the worms had picked clean and yet still burned with life. I couldn’t look away. Whatever it was they wanted me to do, I would do it. If it would stop them from looking at me, I would do it. My hands were on fire. The heads wanted me to go to the lab and take the Botrytis. Then they would migrate back to the sea, to the mind. I was dragging them into my carnal nature, warping the enterprise of the glass brain. My job was to become one of them and restore order to the dome. That’s how I understood their instructions. I bolted out of bed and found the stairs. It was primal now. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would stop the torment of the walls’ constant chatter. The inaudible noise of thought conducted in nervous whispers. I ran bare foot into the lab area. It looked like a space sliced into planes by razors of dark and light. The walls warmed as I passed by searching for supplies. 

          I stumbled on a glass box with about a hundred vials of Botrytis in it. I stuffed handfuls into my pockets and dropped some. The little glass vials bounced a few times and shattered, with a splat on the floor. Shit. The light in the room changed. I turned around. Evalyn was there. The light shined in her hair. Her eyes looked like drops of water on a branch. We stood inches apart. The light had an opalescent quality, like moonlight. It suffused her skin. I could barely breathe. Then she kissed me. A chill passed through all my nerves. Suddenly I didn’t care about Botrytis. I didn’t want it. I wanted Evalyn St. Claude. I kissed her ears and her neck and her nipples. I grabbed her hair. She yanked at my pants and dropped the robe off her shoulders. I fell down to my knees. I kissed her cunt and wanted to die. It was like merging with the moonlight. Then we started to fuck. We fucked right there on the floor, sliding across the glass, barking and yelping. We couldn’t stop. Nothing could stop us. We were totally gone.