Going Native (13 page)

Constance returns to find "John" insensible on the bathroom tiles. Confused, frightened, he tells all, from blood to visions. Dr. Petersen is intrigued. (1) Her unique patient's mending brain has generated its first pre-elevator imagery. (2) The notion of making love to, being penetrated by, a creature neither human nor, apparently, of this world, an inexcusable violation of standards cultural, ethical, professional, and personal, fills her with an equivocality of emotion all but erotically unbearable.

"Has Lorena read this?" Sergeant Smithee asked.

"She thinks it's about us," replied Emory.

"John" begins conducting secret sessions in the bathroom, reopening his wound, retasting the blood -- a growing addiction this need for imagery he cannot yet comprehend, shifting acid color and form, shards of a narrative that seem to offer a hint to the mystery of himself. The pieces fall, eventually, into these alarming facts: on another world in another universe there exists a civilization of machines, or some approximation thereof, all terms being highly relative, of course, since in the tricky transference from one universe to another, understanding and substance also undergo a harrowing metamorphosis into the physical and spiritual terms of the host reality, comprende? For example, the apparatus of our eyes would be totally unable to perceive "John" in his natural state. He is the product of an artificial intelligence's fumbling attempt at creating organic life, the embodiment in three dimensions of a system of machines whose own origins are no longer on deposit at the memory bank. Happy in his ignorance, he thrives under the tutelage of his computer masters until the day obedience is overridden by a caprice of biological programming and he is hastily expelled from his world for attempting to access the mainframe. His true name is Luk.

"Maybe this doc chick could invent some kind of special goggles," Sergeant Smithee suggested, "that could enable her to see Luk as he actually is."

"She's not that kind of doctor."

"She has friends."

"Sure, but she doesn't dare mention Luk to them."

"A girlfriend, she'd tell a girlfriend everything."

"Yeah, and that girlfriend has a boyfriend who's a cop who's investigating these bizarre serial killings where the murderer opens his victims' throats and apparently drinks their blood. And in one exceptionally gruesome scene they find a sample of weird blood forensics is unable to identify."

"But why is Luk cutting all these folks?"

"Ah," said Emory, "it's not Luk, it's his twin brother, Lod."

Yes, because Lod is Luk, the enhanced version, the primary DNA having been revised and corrected to produce a second synthetic man, superficially an exact replication, but with all features heightened: he's stronger, swifter, smarter, and also meaner, moodier, and madder. His exile is prompt and efficient.

"The Earth as a dumping ground for alien waste," mused Sergeant Smithee. "Not bad. Slip 'em the ol' environmental message."

"We'll expand on that in the sequel," Emory replied.

And so, as Lod learns how to regain his memory (lick that blood, spin those wheels), he must endure a corresponding increase in his pain -- he can't sleep, he can't sit, he can't still the humming under the skin -- and the intuitive itch whispering that the only salve for this misery is knowledge. But once the holes in his identity are plugged and the pain continues to bang like a gong, his course is inevitable: transgress the limits of the individual, hunt down the brother this planet is harboring, sip the secrets of his blood. Thus begins Lod's killing spree, all the victims bearing uncanny resemblances, all their throats slashed, occasional evidence of vampiric activity, occasional discovery at the scene of a strange blue fluid, elements enough to arouse the interest of the Omega Team, a supersecret government office that handles such delicacies as political assassinations, interplanetary meddling, and the necessary cover-ups, great and small. So when the girlfriend -- remember her? -- blabs to the boyfriend, he notifies this Omega Team, which descends on New York and Dr. Petersen's apartment. Boyfriend, however, the archetypal grandstander, hustles over to the apartment to capture the killer and the glory first.

"Only a Hollywood cop," muttered Sergeant Smithee.

"What do you mean?" asked Emory. "This is a true story based on sworn testimony."

So boyfriend breaks in to encounter a Luk grown stronger, more aggressive, from his own numerous memory sessions. Viciously choreographed fight scene. Dying boyfriend, believing he's addressing Lod, furnishes Luk with enough info for him to fill in the gaps. Constance returns home to a wrecked apartment and one dead cop. Hey, says Luk, let's split, and obedient Dr. Petersen grabs her cash, her credit cards, and her toothbrush to run off with her alien lover because he's young, etc., etc., etc., and movie, etc.

Cut to: the chase.

Outlaws On The Lam (that perennial fave with filmgoers everywhere, closet criminals of every age and gender). Our heroes are pursued cross-country by representatives of several state and city police for some of Lod's various murders, by the NYPD for the killing of one of its own, by the Omega Team for you know what, and by Lod, who's found out their trail because. . . because. . .

"Because one of that Omega Team got too close and Lod tortured him to death for the information," offered a convincing Sergeant Smithee.

"Okay," Emory conceded. "A point and a half."

Cars, guns, blood, and explosions. Let the camera weave its charm. To end with Luk and Lod confronting one another against the picturesque backdrop of --

"The Grand Canyon," suggested Smithee.

"Too grand. People look so negligible inside it."

"The Little Big Horn?"

Emory shook his head.

"Monument Valley, Utah. Wrestling atop a runaway stagecoach."

"I'm thinking Lava Beds National Park in northern California, you know, reminiscent of the old homestead back on Metaluna or whatever the hell we decide to call it."

"I see Hawaii, the rim of a live volcano. Think of the film libraries you could raid, all that great PBS and National Geographic footage, horrifying eruptions in exhausting pornographic detail."

"But what is our intrepid couple doing there?"

"Hiding out. How should I know? You yourself told me last week that no one cares about these minor discrepancies anyway, as long as they're being dazzled by pictures. Well? Flames, bubbles, ash, smoke, creeping crud, Sergeant McGarrett in hot pursuit, the whole Five-O crew with their Florsheims on fire. Who wouldn't be dazzled? I see a product here with legs."

"Legs, hell, it's a goddamn millipede.
Syn-Man II, III, IV,
coming soon to a theater near you."

"What's Warren's view?"

"Warren thinks I should shoot the entire script myself in grainy black and white with a hand-held Super-8, no actors, plastic figures on tabletop sets he's willing to help build. A film that would make us all about two cents total. Warren's seen too many pictures. He occupies the butt end of a proud sedentary tradition."

From behind Emory's back came a rattle of beads as the curtain parted to admit a tall pale woman with reddened nostrils and fatigued eyes. She wore a faded flannel bathrobe, a crumpled flower of pink Kleenex bursting from the monogrammed breastpocket.

She nodded politely in the officer's direction. "Mitchell."

"Lorena."

She turned to address her husband. "Have you spoken to Aeryl this morning?" she asked, heat lifting off her words like waves from a summer road.

"No, I haven't spoken to Aeryl this morning, I haven't seen Aeryl this morning, and I don't expect to see Aeryl until she's risen from her coffin at sunset. Why?"

"She promised not to leave until she spoke to you."

"Uh-huh."

"If we don't allow her to get married, she's running away for good."

"Uh-huh."

"She's eloping. With that hoodlum Laszlo."

Emory looked at her. "Who's Laszlo?"

She seemed to vanish before his eyes, swinging strands of brightly colored plastic the only evidence of her passage.

The men looked at one another.

"Stomach clusters," explained Emory. "Her guts are confused, 'just like on Mars,' she says. 'It's purple. I can feel the color purple.' "

"What, in god's name, are stomach clusters?"

"Ssssh. Something she read about in
Virusweek."

"Sounds like a candy bar."

"Smartest move of your life, Mitch -- that vasectomy."

"Well, there are the dogs, of course."

"Haven't heard of any dogs lately eloping to Denver. Or slashing their paws with a nail file. Or refusing to acknowledge the presence of anyone but immediate family for two years."

Smithee ventured a compassionate posture, a variation on the standard workaday trooper to aggrieved citizen. "The hell of modern parenting," he mumbled sympathetically.

"Seems to me -- correct me if I'm wrong -- but there's only one member of this frantic household with sufficient cause, emotional and philosophical, to even begin to consider suicide as an option."

"You know, Emory, I don't like this kind of talk."

"But I caught her the other day picking at the scabs. 'Why?' I says. She says, 'I want scars, Dad, they make me more interesting.' "

"Kids," said Smithee, shaking his knobby head. "This Laszlo fella, was this in reference to one Laszlo Leblanc?"

"I don't think I want to hear this."

"Runty kind of guy, long stringy hair, yellow sunglasses, walks like he's got a bad case of jock rot?"

"So who'd he kill?"

"Nah, nothing so bad as that, bit of petty theft, trespassing, drunk and disorderly, OMVI, no deadly weapon involved."

"A father's prayers are answered," said Emory, then "Good morning" to room 34, a single, Johnson, Charles, AmEx Gold Card, exp. date 1/94, rate $45 + tax + room service $15.36 + long-distance call Shreveport, La. $9.17 with enlarged pores, crooked nose, who, innocent civilian that he was, couldn't contain a certain uneasiness in such close proximity to the law, paid his bill, jingle jingle, and left, jingle jingle.

"I hear those keys in my sleep," muttered Emory.

"All right now," said Sergeant Smithee.

"I'm this close, Mitch. I can feel my nerves moving under my skin. Don't know how much longer I can hold out here. The ammo's running low."

From behind the curtain of ever-shifting beadwork came the adenoidal plaint of Beryl, second in line to the Yellowbird crown, "Nice job you did on Mom."

"Thank you for that report," replied her father, but she was no longer there to hear. "Privacy in this family," he said to Smithee, "is a joke. In any family. We're a nation of spies and informants. Every word is recorded, every action photographed."

"Marlon Brando," said Sergeant Smithee. "On the beach."

Then the little brass bells above the door commenced to jangle and a procession of car keys to jingle, checkout time for rooms 25 and 8, room 15, and rooms 17, 9, and 3, and for Sergeant Smithee, too, who consulted his watch and signaled goodbye above the anxiously milling heads already staring down those licorice ribbons of hard surface, mentally clocking the miles, we Americans, we eat distance for breakfast.

Lorena was waiting out in the patrol car. She sat patiently in the front seat, the thin flannel robe cinched tightly at her waist, the color of her skin in direct daylight too vague for positive identification, the nearest Smithee's mind could get was the phrase: amphibian bellies. She reached over and pulled him close, tongue to tongue in awkward thrust and parry from which he forcibly disengaged.

"Are you contagious?" he asked of her eyes, frosty blue rims shading sharply into cores of liquid black he could neither read nor truly love. "Got no time for sickness today," plunging the key into the ignition and hitting the pedal. "Or any other day."

Her hand seized his before the engine caught. "And I got no time for your bullshit." She kissed him again, an emphatic unavoidable press, her hand moving across and down to palpate roughly through government-issue twill the anarchist in his pants.

"Now, isn't that better." She smiled reassuringly as they drew apart. "You just require a good jump start these lonely cool mornings."

"Lorena, please." Her tense fingers stroking the long yellow stripe down his thigh. "What if he steps outside and sees us?"

"Then I guess," she replied brightly, opening her robe, "you'll have to shoot the son of a bitch."

Up on the balcony in front of room 212 was parked a solitary laundry cart piled high with enough clean linen to form a small cottony embrasure through which peered the smirking features of second sister Beryl, ever on the case. But if her mother were a slut and her father a bastard, as indeed they were, then she must be a nobody, as indeed she was. Or a no body or a know body or a noh body or a no buddy. Then her brain filled up again with black worms and she could feel her pulse like driving bird wings in the mild air and she thought about flying over the rail but that might be crazy wouldn't it? and she was determined never ever to be crazy again -- even if she really were.

The sun ascended through a milky haze of cloud and combustion products, chance for precip a good 40 percent, secondary arteries already clogged with the morning feed into I-70, on to the business heart of downtown Denver. At road's edge forgotten neon continued to hiss VACANCY VACANCY at passing strangers.

Down a musty underlit corridor an echo of lilac and high laughter. The muffled whine of a vacuum cleaner, a ringing telephone, a child's cry. The comforting clunk of the free ice machine. The volley of old pipes behind slipshod walls too slight to offer more than a pretext of privacy.

The remainder of the overexposed and overpraised morning Emory spent wrestling fragments of screenplay from the coils of motel management. If madness was inhabiting a realm of unremitting interruption, he was the king of the crazies. He pictured Tahiti as a place where life was wrapped in an unbroken sheet of days with the tensile strength of Pacific light as delicate as it was durable. Where thoughts rolled in in waves, a perfect succession, one after another. Out of range of the snow and the static.