Chapter Thirty-Nine: Is That All There Is?

Bryson arrived back at the lab at 3 am. Felix was flat on his back in the muted light. Monitors ticked and scanners hummed, a dull green glow came from the analog displays. He was producing the steady, coordinated activity of Penumbra. She examined his drone and it was invariantly odd. In the first weeks she thought it was the equipment, or her or Boyle. There were so many sources of energy but they could easily filter the data to zero and then it remained right where it was, a thrum, a beat in permanent syncopation. It was beautiful, actually.

She pulled up a chair and fell back into it, awake, and finally sober enough to feel. The warm night air, the clean, muddy smelling breeze crossing over the stinking canal, had helped to clear her mind. She decided if she couldn’t sleep she would get some work done. She opened his dream journal. It was recorded by hand in a book of paper with a pen.

In the garden, thoughts are actions. Sammael, the angel, and I walk down to the river. The water rushes by, turquoise with whitecaps. Today he has breasts and a tail and looks like a reptilian orangutan. Veronica stays behind in the bushes. Sometimes she is a bird crossing the lake but today she is alone and Sammael tells me to be kind to myself and not worry.

Met Veronica in the primeval place. We live here mostly. Jains say in the Age of Great Sorrow, or the Kaliyuga, men and women will look like dogs and eat raw turtle meat. Today, tomorrow, perhaps always, this is our fate. We have blue dog faces and fuck like dogs. We sniff each other’s butts and run with abandon in the fields after rodents. Then we come to a place of palms and hills perforated with caves. The water purls and the air is cunty. I follow her through the forest till we come to a stream and take turtles that we smash against the rocks and eat raw.

Veronica in flight. I sun myself on hot black sand. Deep, fishy tasting kisses under the willows. Sammael is in the likeness of a man. He complains of too many people. Vision is a gate to the garden. The heart too has a gate into the garden. Where the genitals touch the mind there too is a gate into the garden. Those who come without imagination are seized by their own animal desires and eaten. Those not ready, go back before time was and disappear from creation. There is a great, transforming oscillation at sunset. We make love, briefly. It is so intense I almost vomit. Check penis for blood. Ivory, gold and silver moths fly out and flutter around the sun, dropping in flakes of cinders. It is time to leave and Veronica takes my hand and says, ‘You must come back.’

My only thought is death. Death in the beginning, death in the end. In between, thoughts of dying. Life is suspended in death. I only know the dying but it is a sea without a shore. A cliff I am climbing at the edge of paradise. This is a dream I have of transition. Milton at the gates with flaming swords.

Outside of the cave I examine her vagina minutely, eyes like microscopes. I could do this for hours. Veronica’s vagina is more interesting than time. We eat fruit, walk along the stonewall beside what I assume to be a building but which I have never actually seen. Have seen a tower and lights flashing off of windows. Here the shadows are cold. I feel the presence of a great and terrible lord and am fortunate to be beneath his notice.

My penis continues to fascinate her. When I lie back in the sun she takes it up, lifts it, examines my testicles, perineum. Squeezes and pokes and asks what I see. Starfish bursting in three dimensions, polychromatic entrails blooming in the deep. She sticks it in her mouth, her vagina and her ass. Except for the beginning we haven’t flown together. The higher I jump the heavier I feel. 

I prowl at dusk. There are dangers defined by the light that fade and become more menacing in the shadows. My vigilance is instinctive and necessary. We watch each other defecate. The shit hangs down and drops to the ground where people in the shape of beetles devour it.

A procession of the dead. Beetles, ants and emerald cockroaches watch the robed skeletons pass by, beating on black tambourines. A tall toad standing upright croaks on the side of the path. A man holds his weeping head at his side by the hair. My neck is sore. We are sad now even though it is the garden. There are candles burning, fat bee’s wax tapers the color of dead flesh. The night swallows me up and I feel suddenly so good till I spy my body below, in a lab on a gurney. I try to fly away but the higher I jump the heavier I feel and spin slowly downward like a lazy propeller into my body. Stranded here, waking up is the most awful thing I know. Please, Veronica, don’t let me go back there. Her hands aren’t strong enough. 

Scrolls. The poet Shelley has come. We see him cross by Ozymandias and he gets off of his horse and walks away chasing a skylark. He comes back with vials of liquor clear and sweet. He says that the scrolls are kept in a lacquer box in a deep recess of her odorous dwelling. Sounds folded in cells of crystal silence, such as we hear in youth, that die before we are aware and the regret they leave like trash from a receding tide remain alone. The vials are opened one by one, cork stoppered bottles of cut crystal, by Sammael, and ministered drop by drop as I lay thinking. Like a bat she hovers beating her vans against a floating net, woven by love and sick laments.

One hope within two wills, one will beneath

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death

One heaven, one hell, one immortality;

And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of love’s rare Universe

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

That is no dream. I stood full waking and the words of Shelley came and so I wrote them down. The poem is Epipsychidion.

The words of the journal blurred. She could feel herself entering in and out of the words, even as she was aware of his long slow breaths coming and going. He breathed the words in and out of her lungs and her eyes faded in and out of the page. Outlined against the night- lights was his body, recumbent, barely stirring with each breath. Now she could smell his thick, exposed flesh. She stared at his profile, the features totally relaxed, at the curve of his chest and then the sheet draped over his body, just below the nipples, down and over the feet, like a marble garment. His brow, his nose, the full lips and chin. She felt a free floating arousal then, but it wasn’t sexual, it was something else, it had to do with the beauty of his form, the beauty of form itself. The body had always been sexual to her, beauty had always to do with physical desire, means and end were one. There was a pleasing simplicity to it. But she became entranced by the shape and color of his skin and features. Human being. Life configured in this shape, this knot of matter, the build of muscle and bone and skin. The arc of his pectorals, the adam’s apple punctuating his throat. Her breath became heavy, her eyelids slid down over her eyes. She wanted to have him, to absorb him, to be one with that form. To touch his body. She lifted the sheet gently off of him and discovered his flat belly. The flesh was warm. She felt it vibrate with heat beneath her hand. The cock was hard, even as he slept. She took it in her hand, felt its soft head, held the shaft, stroked it. He lay so still, so gleaming, muscles defined. She pulled up her dress and rolled her underwear off and started to rub her clit. She was already wet, her whole soul was at a pitch, it had melted inside her and rushed down into her belly and groin, and in a daze she climbed up on the table and it gripped him. She couldn’t stop now, she straddled him with her knees, rubbed his cock back and forth over her clit down and up again, each time dipping in deeper till she was ready to bear down. She grunted quietly. The gurney squeaked. She had to put her hand down for support, finding the strength to move harder, up and down. Waves of contractions trembled through her, but she kept at it waiting for the wave to knock her flat on his chest. She lay there, panting. As she recovered she looked at his nipple. It was erect. She put her lips around it and sucked. A few sweet drops of milk filled her mouth.

Psyche Report contin’d

Subject’s most persistent delusions and suicidal tendencies are traceable to prolonged, unresolved grief over the death of his wife. Revenge fantasies, suicidal thoughts and actions, persistent and vivid dreams about the deceased, are all consistent with this diagnoses, which is also supported by neurophysiological data. Problem: All of these symptoms are supposed to be substantially alleviated if not eliminated by transcryptasine but at these doses they appear to be induced by it.

Physically the subject is more than healthy: he exceeds every measure we have for bone, organ, muscle and nerve function as well as sensory perception which is particularly acute. Ejaculate is 5% above normal volume with unusually numerous and motile sperm. Hormone levels are that of a pregnant adolescent and brain cell development and tissue and organ repair are that of a young child. Overall then the subject’s physical sense of self and world ought to be one of high satisfaction and well-being, but it should be noted that he is extremely hostile and alienated.

The night she betrayed him began as always. He stood on the path beneath the flowering trees. The air was loud with bird song and everywhere he looked life flourished. Strolling along the path, he paused now and then to watch the squirrels race around the trees. He picked and ate a few cherries, the hot skin breaking between his teeth and the sweet flesh dissolving on his tongue. She was not in the courtyard by the fountain so he walked over fields and through a dense forest of pine to the lake. She was not there either. Then he headed for the river and leaned against one of the plane trees, feeling restless. There was a worrisome void in the garden, it was empty of contentment and he began to miss her, fiercely. He always knew that one day he would come to the garden and she would not be there.

It was not far from the river to their primeval haunt. He passed through the autumnal zone. If she were in the cave then everything would be fine. By the river and the lake she was simply there but among the rough old grottos and streams they played and laughed as lovers. It was their ancient world, their umbilicus. But she was not there.

The words lost and out of sorts belonged to the world, not the garden. He was like a child then lost in a crowd. Instinctively he headed to the plain where others gathered. It was a field bound by woods and stonewalls and on the far side by the cliffs and crags from which he had watched the grinning angel swoop down and take off with a writhing human. Beyond lay the mountains. Here he once found a few shepherds piping, swapping rhymes while four nude women with long hair danced. It was also where people came to die, run down by a lion. There were eruptions of savagery and violence. Rough dwellings were built on the edge of the field, beneath moss and lichen covered apple trees.

No one was about. He crossed the open field of lavender, sage and heather, beneath a hot sun in a cloudless sky. A falcon circled overhead, its shadow passing over the ground. He sat down by one of the huts on a rock. The apple trees shaded him from the sun, and there was a wall of brush, flowering shrubs and vines.

He sat there for a long time thinking. He wanted her always. He never wanted to leave. But he was tired. There had to be a reason why he came to this field. But the reason was nowhere in his mind. He was simply alone, in an empty world. Perhaps not alone, longing was there with him, longing for another. That was how it all began, with desire. The universe, no matter how sweet and beautiful, was silent. There was no answering thought, no touch and to touch; himself (which he now did) did not create the relation, it completed nothing.

He heard a rustling not far off and looked up. Something was in the bushes. Felix stood and warily walked towards the sound. Anything could materialize. He was not to assume that, since it was paradise, the noise would be friendly. It was part of the drama of the garden. The bushes, tall and sparsely covered with clusters of scarlet flowers, were moving back and forth. Then he saw a long tail and a pair of greenish brown haunches protruding from the leaves and branches. It was an angel. As he got closer he saw, concealed by the heavy hips and hind legs of the angel, a human buttocks and legs. The feet were digging into the ground. They were grunting. The angel was fucking the human from behind. He stopped to watch, entranced. The angel prick slid in and out; he saw flashes of red. He didn’t know whether to be amused or embarrassed. The longer he watched the more he saw and knew. It was Sammael! Felix began to laugh. Sammael was screwing a human in the bushes and thought he was concealed. This was very funny. He laughed harder and harder till he had to sit down on the red dirt.

His laughter disturbed the couple. The fucking stopped. The big reptilian haunch grew still and the tail swished back and forth in the dirt. The human’s feet relaxed and it let out a loud orgasmic cry, shuddering into silence. Felix stopped laughing. Now he really was embarrassed but he couldn’t move. He just kept staring, feeling he had seen something he was not supposed to see. Where the hell is she, he thought. And then he knew. He was there because Sammael was his connection to Veronica. He would show him the way when he was done fucking the human, or eating it.

In paradise there is no shame. They could not be hiding. The shame was in Felix.

Sammael pulled out and stood, his long, thin, red prick swinging. He turned around and looked at Felix with a broad smile, becoming in the process human. The haunches shrank into thick legs and the tail vanished into his spine. Now the prick was pink and fat.

“I’m sorry to laugh,” Felix said.

Sammael shook his head. “Sorry?” he asked. “How odd.”

The woman emerged from the bushes and Felix looked at her, curious. It took a moment to understand what his eyes saw right away. The moment was a long, vertiginous one, the kind of moment that both contains worlds and annihilates them at once. There was a hot flicker in his gut. The whole freight of abandoned feeling, everything banished from paradise into the world burrowed into his heart and exploded.

“Veronica?” he said. “Felix, you’ve come.” “What’s going on?” he asked. Sammael and Veronica looked at each other and smiled.

“Nothing,” she said. Sammael shook his head.

“But you were,” Felix swallowed spit but had no stomach to receive it. A terrible rage had engulfed him from within. There was a whirlwind of fire in his gorge. His eyes filled with tears and he screamed, “God damn you! Fuck!”

“Felix,” Sammael said, with a placid smile, “What’s wrong?”

“You fuck my wife and ask what’s wrong?”

Veronica’s face fell into confusion and said, “Felix, calm down.”

“Betray me? With that homosaurian monster? Go fuck yourself then! I don’t give a god damn!” He stomped his foot and at the instant when his foot struck the ground he felt the universe invert, like a pocket pulled inside out.

He found himself lying face down on the ground. His back was blazing hot. Sweat poured down off of his forehead. His mouth was dry, his throat was sore and his lips were salty and cracked. A painful thirst reached up from his stomach to the top of his head and he was crawling towards a pile of red rocks, which cast the only shadow he could see. When he reached the shade of the rock he rested a minute to catch his breath and then sat up. In every direction, horizon to horizon, was a barren red waste. The sun was straight overhead, small and distant, but intense. There were no clouds. In one direction, on the horizon, was a chain of snow-covered mountains, exactly like those that bordered the lake and the field in the garden. What wouldn’t he give to be lying on the shores of that lake, watching Veronica fly out over it with the kingfishers, laughing, loafing, swimming. He rubbed his eye and sand and dust fell across his fingers. He felt like he was made of sand and dust and when he rubbed his skin he was rubbing himself away. The ground was hard and flat, covered with tiny rough stones the color of rust, hot to the touch. Occasionally there were lumps of bigger, rough stones.

His eyes adjusted. There were piles of rocks, stone outcrops, boulders. It was a world of stone and sun. And there were plants. Cactus and mounds of sharp, spiky grass. Crawling on these spikes were tiny red ants. A few crossed over his feet and stung him. Ow! he screamed. His voice evaporated into the hot, endless sky. There was a lizard with brown dorsal spikes and grey dewlaps eating black scorpions with flicks of its forked tongue. The shade of the rock was small comfort. His skin was blistered and peeling and his feet were covered with wounds and bloody sores. His nails were cracked and dirty from crawling.

He decided two things. One, he would rest till the sun went down. Two, he would try to reach the mountains. If he could reach them he could find the gates, which he would enter. Then he would apologize, make amends for his jealousy.

It was a long wait. Nothing ever seemed to take as long. It gave him a lot of time to consider what had happened. He was contrite, but the contrition was intellectual. In his gut he wanted to murder her. In his gut was nothing but hatred and burning fire. He shouted from his mind, no, but the no had no currency there and burned up along with every other thought he had. The sun never moved. The lizard never moved except to flick its tongue. Each flick was mindlessly precise and the writhing scorpion, stuck on the sticky appendage, zipped into the lizard’s mouth in less than a second. But the second played out like a day. There was no wind, no sound, no commotion, just the red ants crawling on his skin. He brushed them away and still they came, each sting like the prick of a needle. The stings then formed a welt that itched. Soon he was covered in these. Ominously, his hand, as if under the control of someone else, went up to scratch. He knew it was the wrong thing to do but then the whole day had been one of acting out things he shouldn’t do. He was under the compulsion of a wayward force. He tried rubbing the coarse hot sand into the bites but it just slid off of him. He had no spit. The sweat stopped. Sky and sun, lizard and ants and scorpions swam in and out of his eyes, wobbling in heat waves. Time didn’t pass and nothing changed.

He decided to walk. A little way off was another pile of stones. Slowly and painfully he made it to them, cursing Veronica whenever the pain ceased long enough for him to think in words. The bloody cracks on his feet filled with dirt. He didn’t care now. He had no past or future, no wife, no crimes. There were no desires or regrets, only pain. He curled up in the shadow of the stone. There was no lizard here but plenty of scorpions and ants and he thought that he saw the tail of a snake disappear into a hole in the ground. He was swollen, bloody and filthy. Without water it would end here. He had only himself to blame. There was no other. He was the ultimate cause. He shut his eyes and the rage in his belly grew still. It was dark. He felt a comforting presence then, an absorbent nothingness that felt cooler and cooler as he entered it. He was being emptied out into the lab. This he could see now, distantly, like stars in the sky. There was a haze. The lab lay beneath him. He was weak, too weak to remain free of his body, which lay there beneath him, naked and healthy, feeding a steady stream of data to the machines arranged like walls around him. He wanted to be back in himself. He was his own and only womb. He had never been so happy to return.

Dr. Bryson slept in the chair next to him, his dream diary on the floor as if it had fallen from her hands when she fell asleep. He watched her through eyes like apertures; the image entered, his brain processed the visual information, but he felt nothing, knew nothing. Not even the absurdity of life, his life, his self, was apparent. The world was an object, a picture, without dimension or meaning.

The thirst lingered; his feet were sore. Pain gradually spread over his body and he began to relive every bite and sting, every blister. Then he saw Veronica and Sammael fucking. Over and over he saw his long red prick sliding in and out of her, pulling it out till the head just touched the outer lips of her vagina, his hands around her waist, one stretched forward to play with her breasts, hanging like udders beneath her, then driving it in. And as his rage and jealousy and hatred began to consume him again he realized that this was exactly how he had taken Promethea and Moises, and how they had taken him and each other. There was no escape. Every move he made was preceded or followed by some awful cause or effect. Everywhere there was a massive failure of intention. The harder he tried the worse things got. Even giving up had yielded nothing.

Bryson was the ultimate cause then, not him. He had done nothing at all but follow the rules. It was craven to see himself as the author of the trouble; he was the author of nothing at all. Nothing he could accept. That was his due in the world and he would take to vacuity like a pig to shit. But Bryson, Bryson was the one. He looked at her long haggish white hair, her large head tipped back, sensuous mouth open and boozily snoring. This mundane, sarcastic woman in a lab coat who was testing him like a lab rat and was the cause of all his misery was lying there, asleep. All he had to do was seize hold of her throat and throttle her. He could crush her windpipe, cut off blood and oxygen to the brain with his hands. She would struggle just enough to make it feel like a fight. All at once he would be rid of her, of Monozone, and go off somewhere. But where would he go? And how would he escape the building? He needed clothes first. He couldn’t just kill her and leave; he needed a plan of escape.

Felix sat up on the gurney. Something smelled like sex. It was very odd. He hopped down and walked around the lab, looking at the equipment, opening cabinets. He had been there for weeks at least, maybe months. Yet it was like he was seeing it for the first time. One of the screens showed a long, branching pink tunnel with blue entities covered in curved spikes tumbling through and little yellow polyhedrons bouncing off the walls. He touched his head, feeling for lumps, and headed for the shower. There had to be clothes somewhere.

Probably they’d come after him. If he could get to midtown he knew he could disappear there. If he tried to access his money they’d know, so he’d have to find work. Work off the books; if state found out they’d be notified too. He’d have to keep moving. Maybe go upstate to Iroquoia, pick up work on a salvage crew. He could steal enough Paregane from the lab to keep going back to the wasteland till he could reach the mountains and reenter paradise. He’d deal with the flaming swords when he got to them. The important thing was to get out of this place and back to the garden.

There were no clothes anywhere that would fit him. He couldn’t wear her sweats or dresses. The suit he was brought in wearing was vile; it hadn’t been cleaned and was stuffed into a sack.

He checked under her bed and found a drawer. The drawer was locked, but he found the key in the top drawer of her desk and slid it open. In there he found his bag, with Veronica’s ashes! The sight of the little coffin filled him with a warm longing. He pictured her, healthy and alive, not in the garden but as she had been when they were young, when they were for each other. Her voice was inside of him, trying to tell him something, what, he couldn’t be sure of, but it sounded like, I’m coming, I’m coming.

He dressed in his own clothes, put the bag down by the door and walked over to Bryson. She was still sleeping. He felt some resistance but no, he was going to do it, he was going to get it over with and kill her. Nothing could be clearer in his mind than that she deserved to die. He reached out and touched her throat. It was soft. Her neck and throat were soft in his hand. Her hair fell down over his fingers. He could smell her, her human smell of soap and food and glandular secretions. He pressed his hands against the throat, felt the corrugations of her windpipe, interlocked his fingers behind her head and started to squeeze. She gasped. Her eyes popped open. Confusion, panic, terror. Cobalt blue, almost black in the dim light. A dry hissing noise came up through her lips. His hands gripped tighter and then he felt Veronica again, her voice, saw her young in their apartment, reading by the open window and smiling when he handed her a cup of coffee. Tears washed over his eyes. Life, he thought, so tenacious and always at the edge of death. So easily snuffed out and yet it never lets go. Life, omnipotent, particular, rare. A single breath dwelling in a single body, lost to the air. All that ever was or will be, gone. The immense dimension, the tiny spark, the aspect of all that is and all that is reflected in a spark and that this is all we can know. Veronica spoke to him. Her voice was clear. He squeezed the throat to stop the voice; it was Veronica’s throat he was squeezing and her voice hissing, NO. He paused to argue and then his arms dropped to his side, he let go and sat on the gurney. NO, he thought. There’s more to me than this. Bryson gulped for air and fell. Felix, as if he’d been in a trance, stared at her in alarm. He got off the gurney and bent down to her but she scuttled away with a shout, gasping and coughing at the floor. “No!” she hissed. “Boyle, help!”

“Please,” Felix said, chasing after her. They knocked into a tray of instruments that smashed to the ground. “Please, Dr. Bryson. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it.”

She cowered under the chairs, stared up at him, rubbing her neck. “Of course you did,” she panted. “It’s what you’ve wanted to do from the start.”

“No.”

“Yes. Christ,” she covered her mouth and choked up. “I can’t,” she coughed and gargled and wheezed. All of her limbs trembled and her eyes jerked back and forth between Felix and the floor. He wanted to help her up, he wanted to make it stop, go back, but she was right. There was no back to go to because he had wanted to throttle someone, murder someone, hang the whole thing around someone’s neck and hers was it.

Boyle burst in the room. Seeing the damage, the forceps, tweezers and metal swabs scattered on the floor, the overturned chairs, Bryson rubbing her neck, disheveled, and Felix squatting down beside her, he charged Felix whom he intended to disable with a single blow.

Felix turned on Boyle. Without thinking, he crouched back on his legs and leapt through the air, bringing Boyle to the ground. Boyle, pinned on his stomach, head flailing, kicked and screamed. Felix took hard breaths. Adrenaline jolted his limbs. He bit Boyle on the back of the neck and tasted blood. Inflamed, Boyle thrust upwards, throwing Felix off balance enough so that he could stand, Felix clinging to him piggyback, teeth still sunk in his neck. They thrashed together. Boyle grunted and barked, punched and kicked and slammed backwards against the counter. Felix’s grip broke.

Bryson stood unsteadily, and, as her mind cleared, in dismay, shouted Stop! at the wheeling blur.

The two men turned toward each other and growled and cursed. “Fucker, I ain’t givin’ you a break,” said Boyle, pounding Felix into the counter with roundhouse blows. Felix grabbed him. “Fucker! Let go!”

“Fucker? You little fucker, no!” Felix shouted back, digging his fingers into Boyle’s face. Boyle bit his hand and punched his gut and then they were apart, circling each other, dripping blood and sweat.

“Stop, I say!” Bryson threw a chair. It crashed across the floor between them.

“I ain’t lettin’ this freak killya, doc.”

“I’m done being your pin cushion,” Felix said.

“You’ll do as you’re told,” Boyle said. He grabbed a syringe off the floor. “I’ll stick you with this. I’ll pump you full of air, you fucking little guinea pig.”

“Try it. Come on. Try it,’ Felix said, taunting him with his fingers. “Kill me if you can, get it over with.”

“Stop,” Bryson said again. She touched Boyle’s shoulders. “He’s all right. I’m fine.”

“He ain’t backed down, doc. I can see it in his eyes. Those eyes is screwed with murder.”

Felix panted. Everything crowded in on him. He flashed through a dozen sensations, each worse than the last. He knew nothing, he saw with perfect clarity. He wanted to die, he wanted to live. He blew wildly about in contrary thoughts till it seemed that the walls and the people were closing in on him tighter and tighter, the focus unbearable. He was known and unknowing, he knew and was unknown. Cracks of clarity obliterated with murderous desire. He searched the room for a weapon, measured the distance to the door, calculated his chances. In a trembling voice he said, “I want out. I’m all done.”

“Please just calm down, before security comes,” Bryson said.

“I ain’t backin’ down till he does.”

Felix looked at the syringe. “Drop the needle and I will.”

“Do it Boyle, please.”

Reluctantly, without taking his eyes off of Felix, he dropped the syringe. He rubbed the back of his neck. “What are you, anyway? You fucking bit my neck.”

Felix spit blood on the ground. “I don’t know what I am. I’ve been nothing for so long it feels like home.” He looked at Boyle. He looked at Bryson. He backed into a chair and lapsed into a near catatonic state. When he could speak again he said, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m not in control anymore. All I want to do is die and yet I fight like an animal. It makes no sense. Please,” he felt fire and yet he was begging. “You’ve got to understand. I can’t go back there anymore. I can’t go back to the garden.”

Boyle’s eyes narrowed. “I never trusted none of you Paregane freaks. It ain’t natural to want to die. I don’t like the looks of you. I don’t like the way you smell. You’re like, like the spooge-man or something.” He rubbed his neck and winced.

“Let me dress that,” Bryson said. “Don’t touch each other, now,” she warned. The two men sat facing each other. Bryson cleaned the bite with WoundEx and dressed it with NuSkin. “Now, guys, we have to talk. Boyle, can I trust you?”

He scowled. “It ain’t beyond question?” She didn’t understand. He clarified. “You’re the boss, doc.”

She looked around. She’s afraid, Felix thought. There was a dimension to this he didn’t understand. The lab, the building took on a different aspect. He didn’t even know if the door worked for him from the inside. He didn’t know where he was. All he had for things were names. Bryson, Bradlee, Monozone, Boyle. Bryson looked at him. The whites of her eyes were speckled with burst capillaries. Her throat was bruised. He could see the shape of his fingers, a yellow and purple stain. “Listen to me very carefully. Bradlee will kill you as soon as he thinks you’re of no use to him. You know too much. We have to get you out of here, and it won’t be easy. I need to think up something. We can fake it for a few days. I’m working on a report. When that’s done, when I’ve taken care of a few things, we’ll get you out of here.” She looked at Boyle. She took a bag out of an inside pocket of her lab coat. “This is eight million dollars worth of jewels.” She pulled a gold disc out of her side pocket. “This is the proceeds from stock sales. It’s in jewels too, free and clear. There’s enough here for you to get away. Just give me a chance.” Felix had never seen so much money before. He looked at Boyle. Boyle looked at the disc and the sack of jewels. His eyes widened. “Eight million bucks won’t bring back Veronica, I know. But it’s enough for you to start over somewhere. When the report’s done, you can go.” She turned to Boyle. “I know you work for Bradlee. But there’s enough on this disc to send all your kids to school and pay for my retirement in Iroquoia, if you help Felix get away.”

Boyle looked around, calculating. “I guess so. I know a guy. Bradlee will be pissed.”

“I’ll handle Bradlee. He’ll never know you helped.”

Boyle rubbed his mustache and sniffed. His neck stiffened. “Doc, I don’t think I oughta hear nothin’ more. I got your back, but be careful. There’s things I can’t protect you from. Bradlee’s a big man. When dogs hear his whip crack they jump, got it? Don’t forget, I got Laraby on my ass too.” He stood up.

“I won’t be a problem, Boyle,” Felix said.

“You already are,” he replied, sauntering out the door.

When it was closed Bryson picked up her computer and clacked at the keys.

“Is that the report?” Felix asked.

“No. It’s an order for a key. My way out.”

“What will be in the report?”

She smiled. “The truth.”

“That’s all I want,” he said.

“Well, you’re about to get it,” she said.

Report Summary:

Felix Clay, age 42, a man in good health.

Unfortunately, transcryptasine was released before extensive studies could be completed. The following report is based on a comparison of three double blind studies of 1,000 likely candidates for transcryptasine therapy conducted before August 2180, observations made of individuals who frequented a ‘Lucky Day Parlor’ located in a Midtown Manhattan nightclub previously known as Gametria and who were confirmed transcryptasine abusers, and a careful, comprehensive study made of a single individual abuser, Felix Clay, a healthy male subject aged 42.

The initial mortality rate for transcryptasine use was 10%, based upon a single daily dose administered to severely depressed, dysfunctional individuals in immediate danger of committing suicide. It increases to near 100% when taken four or more times a day. With the exception of Mr. Clay, all inmates of the ‘Lucky Day Parlor’ observed over several months from winter 2180 to spring of 2181, died. Autopsies conducted on the bodies revealed no obvious cause of death. Moreover, though transcryptasine was found to be non addictive, without withdrawal symptoms or cravings, all evidence indicates that self-medicating patients under normal circumstances will escalate the dosage beyond the recommended level, desiring to prolong the Euphoric Effect. Given this mortality rate at higher dosages and the evident compulsive self-medication involved, it is doubtful transcryptasine could ever be widely used outside of highly controlled, therapeutic settings. Even the safety of this limited use is in question and should be subject to future trials.

Mr. Clay was studied with the hope of finding in him some

Conclusion

Ordinarily, even with a low daily dose, transcryptasine affects a ‘harmonic convergence’ of the various scannable electromagnetic waves of the human brain. Its function is homeostatic in nature, recalibrating tubules on the one hand and stimulating an initial pulse wave in a group of cells located near the pituitary gland known as the alpha group. This pulse then resets the drone wave, which has been shown to be variant in mentally ill, alienated, unhappy, depressed individuals. By restoring the drone wave to an ideal frequency the other waves adjust as well and broadcast and reception improve with an overall dramatic reduction in feedback, white noise, and wave interference. The patient sleeps and enters immediately Umbra, a state of great contentment that carries over to other states. Penumbra and Vovulos dreams are vivid, Flat is productive of increased spiky sexuality, Deltaic yields consistently more uniform data transformations, Tributary sensory activity is < acute, Permutation drives exceed known possible standards, Chiasmus is reduced to a manageable level of productive feedback. The only states unaccounted for are Sphere, Umbra, and Grembo, for obvious reasons. Yet Umbra, as a gateway to Grembo, would appear to be the key to the mortality rate.

In this subject even with very high dosages drone wave parameters remained highly variant and he consistently entered Grembo where all activity ends. Indeed, drone wave is off both the Zapruder and Heinmach scales exceeding anything researchers have documented in this research team’s forty years of work. The conclusion is that subject’s resistance to transcryptasine induced mortality is congenital and does not suggest immediate, obvious ways of modifying transcryptasine in such a way as to decrease its mortality or achieve the goal of an over-the-counter Euphoric drug.

The recommendation of this report then is that transcryptasine be used as an experimental drug, highly restricted, with strict procedures of informed consent and that this conclusion be released immediately to national and international medical authorities. It is this research team’s conclusion that it should be withdrawn from mass production immediately and that all existing stocks be destroyed, accept for a small quantity to be confined to legitimate, controlled research facilities until such time as its safety can be guaranteed. Until the properties of transcryptasine are better understood, in a context of improved quantum neurophysiology and quantum psychiatric knowledge and theory, transcryptasine must remain a tantalizing and in the end, failed, instance of mind-altering pharmacology.