Dermaphoria (8 page)

I’
D SAY THE BUGS ARE MOCKING ME BUT THEY’RE NOT PROGRAMMED FOR THAT.
The fuzzy logic of mockery doesn’t justify the engineering cost. Instead, they record everything with heat-sensitive cameras and motion-triggered microphones. They’re programmed to eat wallpaper paste, grease stains and bread crumbs, to shit into carpet, drop eggs into baseboard cracks, and they’re built for speed. I’ve only caught a few.

The autopsy project has taken on a life of its own as I take the lives of more bugs. Specimens lie splayed onto cardboard dug from the trash, stripped and pinned with paperclips and thumbtacks. I’ve checked antennae polarity between every possible configuration, without a spark, an arc or a hint of current.

These weren’t built with silicon circuits. All the foil in the world won’t stop these bleeding-edge, bioengineered organisms because they’re bred, not built, for transferring data the same way they’ve done for millions of years through dances, wing-flutter code and antenna semaphores. They spread news of food, danger, a new nesting location, my running solitaire statistics and bathroom habits.

Their engineering evolves with each generation, the progeny faster and their camouflage better. They hide in the fluttering shadows thrown by swaying power lines outside my window, or the shimmering reflections from a glass of water. They can look like patterns in the hallway carpet, red diamonds with yellow highlights, black squares like
processor chips or irregular blobs from coffee stains or blood. Snap on a light and instead of scattering, they freeze where they’re crawling and disappear.

They move in the dark, legions of them on every surface of my room and my skin. Sometimes I’ll think I’ve stepped on a slippery pebble before the exoshell cracks like an apple skin and there’s something wet beneath my foot, something else scurrying over my toes. They whisper to each other, monitor my sleep, fluid intake, pulse, temperature and record my conversations. The ones I’ve killed by accident or design are bigger than the rest, relay points or data backups, so they’re easier to catch. Their system is rife with redundancies, so the death of one messenger doesn’t derail the flow of data. My recent specimens flutter inside an empty baby food jar, awaiting the cockroach chop shop. They climb atop one another, scrambling for the punctured lid and fall backward like marbles rattling against the glass. The noise keeps me awake.

I pull the sheets from my bed, tie the corners together and throw the bundle out the window. I tear open a box of Borax, dumping it into every corner and crevice I find. Someone knocks and I have a small heart attack.

I answer the door in my underwear, my body dusted with boric acid.

“Have you been talking?” Suit and tie. He looks familiar.

“I’ve been cleaning.”

“You were supposed to call me with an address.”

“Are you an exterminator?

“I’m your lawyer.” He steps into my room without invitation. “We have business,” he says. “While you’re housecleaning, Anslinger is burying you. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t stop working. He’s a machine. Do you understand me?”

My memory comes into focus. Morell.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask. “Water? I have a sink.”

Decades of junky sex and a contract hits have stained the mattress with dark Rorschach shapes. One looks like a dog, another a clown. Morell sits on the bare corner beside a burning nun, his briefcase in his lap.

“What have you been using?” he asks.

“Boric acid.”

“No, you. What have you been shooting?”

“Nothing. I’m clean and I can prove it if you’ve got a coffee cup.”

“No, you are not clean. And I can’t help you unless you are.”

I thrust my arms out, wrists up, dotted with the cigarette burns. My bites aren’t as advanced as those on Jack and the Beanstalk. They must be scratching too much.

“Insects. They’re eating me in my sleep. The place is crawling with them,” I explain, and at night they’re everywhere. Most of them are too fast for me. I slap at the night table corners and shadow specks on my bedspread, but they’re gone before my palm hits. I thought they were planting tracking chips, but they’re not mechanical. They’re marking me, like cats pissing on furniture, so the squads assigned to a different detail don’t monitor the wrong target.

“Let’s move you somewhere else,” says Morell.

“They’ll follow me. Or signal others. I think they work for Anslinger.”

“I’m going to assume you haven’t recalled anything helpful.” Morell sighs, staring at the cockroach chop shop. “Here’s my card. Again.” He stands, reaching into his pocket. “Check in with me in two days, whether you remember anything or not. And if you do consider moving, let me know this time.” He leaves.

“They can still track me,” I say to his back.

The drones in my head explode into a furious, flapping cloud. This
must be what a brainstorm feels like. Like missing the first bug hidden in plain sight, I had been looking everywhere except under my nose. A stretch of bites covers both forearms, a finger’s width from a vein. Big, small, small. Small. The different-sized bugs make the different-sized bites, unless I’ve picked or scratched and inflamed one of them, which destroys the sequence. Small, small, small. Small, small. Small, big, small. Small. Small. If they can track me, I can track them.

They could be sex toys or time machines as much as pipes, lined up on shelves labeled “Not for Sale to Persons Under 18 Years of Age” like rows of sleeping, mutant genies below a mural of Jimi Hendrix. Smaller pipes, along with scales, mirrors and scores of paraphernalia are spread beneath glass cases like alien medical instruments.

A display of makeup sits atop a jewelry case. I grab a bottle of nail polish the luminous yellow of a school crossing sign. I hand it to the white kid with dreadlocks behind the register and ask for a black lightbulb.

I can tell my room is different. Everything is shifted so slightly.

T
HEY PREACHED
A
RMAGEDDON, THE COMING RACE WAR, THE OVERTHROW OF
our Zionist-occupied government and they stank. I see balls of fog in lieu of faces, like my jail-cell mirror reflection. They were target practicing in their living room with a pellet gun. The row of shredded and tattered stuffed animals is on my right, then my left, and the walls change color as one time and place bleeds into the next, the details slipping from beneath my memory like mercury.

You stroke my wrist, back and forth, the way you did when you couldn’t sleep, so you wouldn’t let me, either.

Their nicknames fit them too well or not at all. Pinstripe, Gash, Flash, Joker. They sounded like dwarfs, or candy bars. Ashtrays, cheeseburger wrappers, razorblades and hamster pipes on the coffee table, scorched foil and dried blood in the bathroom sink. A mound of underwear below the empty cardboard spool soaked up the toilet overflow. Iodine stains on the ceiling, the stench of brake fluid and road flares, the burn marks outnumbered only by their excuses for the damage. Silence drooled from their open mouths when I asked them the molecular weight of carbon, the vapor pressure of toluene or the
flashpoint of diethyl ether.

The Chain was going about it all wrong, I’d told White, trusting amateurs scattered among unconnected labs. Amateur cooks don’tfollow formulas as they should. They don’t master the basics and think they can improvise. They create emergencies, which create problems for everyone.

“You will work in teams of two,” I explained. “One team will tear strikers from the matchbooks—“

“Can we use matchboxes?” one of them asked, cutting me off.

“Yes. You can use matchboxes. Two of you will tear strikers from the books.”

“Or the boxes.”

“Or the boxes,” I paused, waiting for the next interruption, which never came. “And two of you will sand the strikers with a Dremmel.”

“What’s a Dremmel?”

“Don’t mind him, he’s new,” another one said.

“You’re all new.”

“Nuh uh. I’ve been doing this shit for years.”

“Not my way, you haven’t.”

“You need to relax, man. I can handle this.”

I hadn’t driven that distance to take shit from some toothless tractor-pulling tweaker.

“Explain that.” I pointed to the scorch mark on the coffee table.

“It was an accident.”

“And that?” The rust-colored fog stained into their ceiling was from evaporated iodine. “How many accidents have you had?” I kicked a glass bowl, already cracked from sloppy handling and coated with the residue amateur cooks leave for cops to scrape up. That seemed to end it.

“This is a Dremmel.” I held up the cordless drill, fitted with a sanding bit. “Do a five count,” I said. “Five strokes, all the same direction.
Not too quickly, but not too hard. You don’t want the strikers getting too hot, and you do not want to drop them, whatever you do.” I demonstrated the slow, gentle strokes for removing the dust from the matchbook striker.

This crew was going to harvest phosphorus. Other crews would do likewise, others would purify iodine or harvest another precursor. Each lab would specialize in a single ingredient, producing far more of an individual precursor than their previous yields of finished product with fewer procedures so a reduced risk of an accident. Labs would be linked by coyotes who transferred cash, materials or finished chemicals between specific points. Each pair of runners would have their own set of codes and signals. None of the crews would know who or where the other crews were. Anyone caught had nobody to roll over on. If anyone went missing or was more than five minutes late, the crew was to cut and run.

“We keep your crews,” I’d told White. “None of that changes. We split the duties. We assign each crew a specific job. The same group can produce at least twice as much precursor as they can product.”

“And the product?” White asked. “What about it?”

Everything converged at the first house Otto and I had set up, Oz, where we’d take care of the final manufacturing. Hoyle got his More, but with less money and less risk. I got paid, got White off my back, and had more time to work on my own.

“We do the final synthesis at Oz,” I said. “In the mean time, the guys you have in place are doing fewer operations with fewer solvents and less equipment. There’s less risk, and in the event of an accident, less damage to product and gear, less likelihood of detection and less to disperse in an emergency.”

The monotony posed the biggest threat. Guys like these took their payment in product, so they did things like sort garbage bags full of
hole-punch confetti according to color when they weren’t working. They’d fixate on details, like sanding off matchbook strikers. They’d lose sight of the bigger picture, like the growing pile of dust and the errant sparks. The flash hit someone’s face or lit their hair on fire. They tripped over a bucket of acetone. One thing leads to another, another being the lab in flames.

The collected dust looked like anthills made from red dirt and glitter and was so fine it stained your fingernails. If you didn’t wear a mask, you’d sneeze blood.

“No more than a quarter ounce at a time should pile up,” I said.

“How much is that?”

“Twice as much as you have here.” I indicated the reddish brown pile built up on the worktable.

“How can you be sure?”

“You got a scale?” My patience was gone.

“You took our gear,” he said.

He was right, I had. Starting from scratch, my way or no way at all, with White’s backing.

The pause gave the impulse whisper an opening, and I struck a match. The pile flared into a plume of sparks and rotten smoke. The four of them recoiled like cavemen before their first thunderstorm. The flames die down within seconds. I normally wouldn’t be so reckless, but I had to make an impression.

“Too much piles up,” I said, “and you’re risking a fire. A spark from the Dremmel or dropping a hot striker is all it takes. You guys have nearly burned this place down a dozen times, but you still cowered like a bunch of schoolgirls. That happens, you knock something over or catch yourself on fire, whatever, everything goes up in flames.”

“You still took our scale. How are we supposed to know when we’re done?” With that, he left the room. He’d thrown the last word and left
me hanging. I couldn’t afford doubts from the rest of them.

“You guys want out?” I surveyed their faces, mute and slack from the fire. “Say the word. No skin off my back. I pay you now, you walk and you stay walked. Or, you do it my way and stay for the long haul.”

For effect, I pulled out the fat roll I’d been saving for Otto. He was too eager to hit the tables, sometimes.

“We’re cool,” said the new guy. The other two nodded.

Which name went to which face, I don’t know, except Pinstripe, who was either nineteen and drug weathered, or thirty-five and hormone deficient. He had beard stubble but his teeth were small and spaced apart, like he’d never lost his first set. He had the wide eyes and button nose of an infant with the overgrown ears of an old man. His face is more vivid than the rest because he was screaming while I dumped baking soda onto his shivering naked body to stop the muriatic acid from burning him any further. His top layer of skin fell away in wet strips, the skin beneath it showing red and slippery like an oiled sunburn. Clumps of hair had melted together around one of his ears, which had swollen into a knot of blistered cartilage.

“I was going to give it to you for your trunk.” He was sobbing as he spoke, trying to snow me with some cheap excuse like some eight-year-old while spitting out a stream of expletives with “hospital” thrown in every three or four words. Two jugs of acid lay on their sides, the bedroom carpet beneath them melted into lumpy plastic. He’d been out of my sight for more than an hour since he stormed out of my earlier session. The spill made no sense. There was no sign that he’d been cooking on his own or trying to hide materials from me, which meant it was the kind of senseless accident that happened regularly with White’s hand-picked crews.

“Hospital means jail, which means prison.” I said this to the others, then to Pinstripe, “you’ll get help but you’ll get it my way. New guy, tell
me you’ve got something for him.”

“What something?”

“Something for his pain.”

“Yeah, we got something.”

“Get it. Now.”

After Pinstripe chased three Valium with a quart of warm beer, he lay shivering like a prison quarantine victim, covered in white powder like he’d been treated for lice.

“Just sit there. New guy, it starts to burn again, douse him with more baking soda.” I took my keys from my pocket.

“Where you going?”

“Getting him help.” Any medic in these parts would know what muriatic acid burns meant, since it was clear Pinstripe hadn’t been cleaning pools or been near any water for some time.

“You can use our phone,” said one of them. “We got one in the kitchen.”

“Not anymore.”

The highway off-ramp was a truck-stop oasis in the middle of nowhere, with two diners, two gas stations and four motels advertising the low room rates that indicated their proximity to a prison. I stopped at one of the diners, asked for a cup of coffee and a roll of quarters then called for White from a pay phone. The number I dialed wasn’t for White, but the pager for the anonymous someone who paged him in turn. It changed monthly, as did the four-digit code to signal the callback. I waited for three minutes before the phone rang and White said, “Go.”

“I’ve got a Wicker Man,” I said.

“How bad?” White sounded amused, enjoying the prospect of pinning a misfire on me.

“Alive,” I said. “And smokeless. That’s the last of the good news. Otherwise, it’s serious and he’s screaming for a doctor.”

“You had this under control.”

“You hired the amateurs.”

“Where are you?”

“The Lighthouse.”

“I’ll be there in three hours.”

I hung up, knowing those were going to be his last words and that maybe I got the drop on him.

By the time I returned, Pinstripe had been doused with more baking soda and lay curled into a fetal ball from the cocktail of shock and Valium, his eyes closed and mouth open. The crew was hard at work, and ready to learn.

I didn’t trust these clowns with heating solvents, so I opted for slower, room-temperature methods. We dumped the striker dust into sterilized glass jars filled with denatured alcohol, which had been prepared at another lab, and lined the jars of foggy, brown liquid on the kitchen counter. They were instructed to agitate them every five minutes for half an hour, then double filter the mixture and let the alcohol evaporate. Two extractions with two different solvents followed, yielding three ounces of pure, red phosphorus. These guys could produce four pounds each week if they did as they were told.

Before we’d finished, Pinstripe was in the front seat of White’s van, Toe Tag in the back playing with a pair of naked, plastic action figures, his face stained with fruit punch and chocolate.

“You can take care of him?” I asked. White chewed on a cuticle. “Right?”

“Stupid question for such a smart guy,” he answered.

“Remember that the next time you recruit a bunch of your son’s classmates.”

“Right. Here’s the good news. Hoyle wants an increase in production.”

“I am increasing production. That’s why I’m out here.”

“You’re out here so you can give yourself more playtime with your chemistry set.”

“Yes, and so I can toilet train this battalion of idiots you’ve got scattered between L.A. and Texas.”

“Hoyle’s looking for a quadruple increase in quota,” White kept on, as though I hadn’t said a thing and he were addressing a mass audience. “And he’s looking to you.”

“No,” I said, White’s bullshit stank more than he knew. “Hoyle’s looking to triple. You upped it.”

“I’m with you on this, Eric.” White smiled. I’d nailed him, cold. “I’m taking care of problems, trying to free you up to do what you do best.”

“The whole point of the setup I proposed was to cut me loose.”

“You want to play mad scientist. In a facility, Eric, which we paid for.”

“Which will earn itself back after thirty days, White. And yes, I want to be left alone. To work.”

“And do what?”

“I’m not sure yet. That’s why it’s called experimenting.”

White rolled his eyes. I counted to three. Raising my voice would alarm Toe Tag.

“You know anything about synthesizing new analogues of known alkaloids?” I asked. Once again, White took to grooming his nails with his teeth. “Or do you know—”

“Whatever you do in there,” White cut me off, “we own.” He buckled his seat belt.

“Tell Hoyle we’ll triple production at a third of his current cost.”

“You can promise me that? More importantly, can you promise
Hoyle that?”

“The production increase is a favorable estimate. The costs are certain.” If he argued with me in this arena, he couldn’t win. He knew that. “The only variables are whatever clowns you’ve given me to work with at the other sites. After today, I’d suggest you wait by your phone.”

“Are you prepared to answer to Hoyle should the increase not occur?”

“The increase will occur. Give him that estimate, and as we’ll very likely exceed it, we’ll make him even happier. And if you’re so skeptical, why did you give me a higher number?”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right. Do something about Pinstripe. I have work to do.”

Hoyle wanted more of what made people want More. I didn’t. Too much More and the customer shoots out the ass end of a twelve-day jag a pistol-waving, fly-swatting zombie. Someone in the distribution chain landed in a trauma center getting a screwdriver pulled out of their chest and the doctor filled out a report. Hoyle didn’t care if someone got hurt; Hoyle cared when someone else asked questions. When that happened, Toe Tag put down his pudding cup and came out of his playroom.

A bone-deep craving is its own sales pitch. The club drugs couldn’t compete with that, so I took my cues from the people who sold blue jeans, wristwatches and sneakers, the experts who convince everyone they need More when they don’t. The experts had a formula, and I was good at formulas. The formula called for selling ideas before things, and the ideas were only as good as their labels. Otto had it right all along, the best batch in the world won’t go anywhere without a good name.