Skinner pried open the can of fruit cocktail and stared into its murky juice. There were cherries in there, peeled grapes it looked like, mandarin orange slices, peach cubes. He brought the can to his lips and gulped the juice then shook the can to rattle some of the stuck fruit bits into his mouth. Not bothering to locate a utensil, he fished out individual pieces with his fingers. He considered crumpling the can and tossing it into the bushes but instead he smashed it flat with his boot and shoved it into an outer pocket of his backpack. Everywhere around him: forest. More specifically, the North Cascades. More specifically still, an overgrown, twenty-mile trail crazily wending through hemlock, devil’s club, and salmonberry toward his childhood home of Bramble Falls on the north tip of Lake Chelan.
He’d really screwed the pooch this time, hadn’t he? Leaving his family in Seattle, venturing out of phone range, crazy pissed off and confused, not returning to his daughter’s condo to talk it out in a more constructive manner, just racing north, disappearing into wilderness. He couldn’t remember getting here. Couldn’t even remember what he’d said after seeing Waitimu’s clone, though he imagined it hadn’t been pleasant. Partly he expected his wife and daughter to pursue him and, in the act of pursuit, prove their forgiveness, but he suspected they’d been so thrown by his outburst, so startled by his sudden flight, that they’d decided to remain in Seattle to see if he had the guts to return.
Every time Skinner’s mind returned to the awful reality of what Roon had done he slipped into a thought algorithm. First, visceral unease that a member of his family had birthed a clone. Then a more substantial wave of disgust that Roon had cloned Waitimu. At this point his thoughts came to a juncture. He could either relinquish the values of purebred humanism, for which he’d fought as a Christian American private contractor, and allow Roon’s decision to float on by. Or he could reassert his commitment to those values in response to their being challenged. Every time the algorithm played out, he’d chosen the latter. Then, after he had doubled down on the rightness of his convictions, the algorithm demanded he turn his back on Roon and Chiho. Here, twisty guilt crept into the process, which he had to keep in check by further asserting to himself that he was standing up for what he believed in. But just as soon as the guilt was taken care of, his thoughts turned into angry fists. Why had they so thoroughly failed him? The algorithm turned to doubt. Maybe he was the problem. Maybe his were the mistaken values. The algorithm concluded and he started again at the beginning, back at disgust.
Out here with birds and trees the mechanizations of his confused thoughts boiled on in exile. It always astounded him how thoroughly indifferent the grand, natural world was to the agonies of human emotional life. Up towered swaying pillars of alder, turning sunlight green through the veins of their leaves. Most of these trees had sprouted prior to the FUS and would outlive every person now living. A rodent of some sort scurried in the underbrush. In this place the frettings of a father over his daughter fell silent in the terrifying continuity of geological time. At twilight Skinner came to a clearing where he pitched his tent and made a small fire. From his backpack he retrieved a roll of foil, from which he ripped a rectangle. Onto this surface he cubed some potatoes and tossed on a few slices of cheese, sprinkled on some Tabasco, salt, and pepper. He wrapped the food securely and placed the foil packet directly on the embers. Half an hour later he opened the steaming packet and ate.
Next morning Skinner woke, doused the fire with water from a nearby creek, packed up, and moved on, cresting the ridge around noon. This was the tricky part that put his walking stick to good use. In places the trail narrowed to the width of two boots, riding the top of a crumbling, undulating spine. Lake Chelan stretched below like an enormous string bean. Skinner hiked along the ridge for a good two miles before the trail dipped toward the lake, steeply switching back and forth. He steadied himself by grabbing huckleberry branches along the path. On the third switchback he spotted the church steeple through the trees.
Soon the path leveled out and intersected with what used to be a paved road, now a zone of chunked-up asphalt overgrown with waist-high sedges. This was the main road, an isolated stretch going from one end of nowhere to the other in a town accessible only by boat. Bramble Falls seemed to have sprung fully formed from the mind of an omnipotent tourist, with its collection of artisans’ galleries and tackle shops, a magnet for pashmina-clad grandmothers and men wearing hip waders. Visitors used to come here in the summer to stay at the inn or the dozen B&Bs, to kayak and hike, to attend Buddhist retreats where no one was permitted to speak for days. Skinner had lived here with his dad, a retired fisherman and boat builder who’d escaped western Washington to spend the last few years of his life in the mountains. Decades later, walking through the ruins, Skinner wondered if he should remember more of these buildings and business signs. It was a documented side effect that indulging in too many enhanced memory trips chipped away at real memories, those ephemeral, less vivid, frozen moments so prone to distortion. Here was an ice-cream shop, identified with a dead neon sign in the shape of a dripping cone. The rusted skeletons of a few cars sat inert in the street. Trinket stores, the old grocery, a salon offering specials on facials and pedicures—all these places empty. Bramble Falls was a ghost town.
Skinner stood outside the two-story house considering the windows blinded by sheets of plywood, the yard with the tree where the tire swing still dangled from a plastic rope. Nearby a carcass of some sort, maybe a fox, hosted a buzzing convention of flies. Skinner walked to the door and opened it. Easy as that. Inside smelled of mildew and rot and animals. Light seeped through various holes and cracks. Objects that used to be pieces of furniture collected shadows in the living room. From where he stood he could see into the kitchen, where a cookie tin lay on the floor. The floorboards seemed to cry out in pain as he crossed to the stairs. He tested each stair with his walking stick before putting his weight on it, holding on to the railing as he climbed to the second story. Up here sunlight and wind fought their way through a window that hadn’t been covered. Skinner shook as he walked down the hall to his old bedroom. The door was ajar. He nudged it open. The room hadn’t changed. The football-print bedspread was as vibrantly green as he’d left it, books and sports trophies almost too neatly arranged on shelves. A toy fire truck sat in the spirals of a rag rug. This was all wrong. There should have been cobwebs, dust, peeling wallpaper. The place looked preserved.
A naked child with no eyes exploded from the closet.
Skinner reeled back. The boy jumped on the bed, spitting out sounds: “Bzzzzz! Beeezzzz! Bzzzzzst!”
Skinner ran. Down the stairs, out the front door, across the yard, gasping, back to the main road. He fell to the street, clawing at his face as he violently wept. Gradually he composed himself. The sound of shoes on gravel, thirty yards away. In a second Skinner was on his feet, Coca-Cola unholstered. A middle-aged man and woman jumped and exclaimed. Both wore multipocketed khaki vests and shorts, hiking boots, sun hats, backpacks laden with gear. The man bore a voluminous beard streaked with gray. The woman was considerably shorter, her face beaky and startled.
“Identify yourselves,” Skinner said.
“For God’s sake, wise elder, put that firearm down!” the man said.
“I said identify yourselves.”
“We’re doctors, Sal and Rhonda Vacunin.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We might ask you the same question!” Rhonda exclaimed.
“We’re here conducting academic research for a book,” Sal said. “Now please point that pistol elsewhere!”
Skinner returned the gun to its armpit holster. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone else to be here.”
“We heard a commotion and had to satisfy our curiosity,” Sal said. “And now that we’ve given our reason for being here, what’s yours?”
“I used to live here.”
The professorial couple both rose up on their tiptoes with hands aflutter and mouths agape.
“Why, how unbelievably serendipitous!” Sal exclaimed as the couple rushed to grasp Skinner’s shoulders as if he were an old friend. “Rhonda, can you believe our fortune? How grand!”
“How grand indeed!” Rhonda laughed. “Oh, you must join us for supper. There are so many things we’d love to ask you. We didn’t catch your name.”
Skinner introduced himself, a little skeeved out by the sudden affection.
“Ah, like B. F. Skinner, the great radical behaviorist,” Sal laughed.
“Look, thanks for the invitation, but—”
Rhonda said, “Oh, we insist on plying you with wine in exchange for stories of this mystifying hamlet. Do indulge us, please?”
“Wine, huh?”
“But of course,” Sal said. “And merriment as well! Ha! Come, come!”
Skinner followed the professors to the building that used to be the town library. He’d spent many hours here as a child, studying histories of wars and assassinations, lost in action-adventure novels. The building was small but stately, constructed of marble and brass by way of an overly generous grant. The inside was a one-room affair, with high windows letting in dust-filtered light. The Vacunins had been here for some time. In one corner of the room was a neatly made bed. On tables were spread maps, papers, manuscripts, a couple solar laptops, stacks of photographs. Most of the shelves were empty but here and there stood books that had miraculously escaped the ravages of looters and silverfish, every one of them over a century old. Beside the work tables rose a tower of several cases of wine. Rhonda uncorked a bottle, splashing some Baco noir into a glass that looked clean enough.
“Welcome to our humble domicile,” Sal said.
“How long have you folks been here?” Skinner asked.
“Four months? Five?” Sal said.
“Oh, Sal, we’ve been here over a year,” Rhonda said.
Sal laughed. “One loses track of time when engaged in the passions of the mind.”
“Not to mention passions of other sorts,” Rhonda stage-whispered. The two giggled.
“You said you’re writing a book?”
“Indeed,” Sal said. “Focusing on the events that transpired in these parts during the early years of the FUS.”
Skinner lifted the wine to his lips. “Holy—this is good wine! What is this?”
“Bramble Falls Vineyards, FUS 12,” Rhonda said. “You’ll find that the Vacunins only imbibe the finest libations.”
Skinner sat down on a creaky swivel chair. “I shouldn’t be drinking on an empty stomach.”
“Oh, dear man, say no more,” Rhonda said. “We were about to roast the most succulent lamb on the terrace. Do join us!”
Skinner remained sitting and pushed off with his feet, walking the wheeled chair out the back entrance of the library onto a tiled terrace overlooking the lake. A fire pit faintly smoked. Sal tossed on a few more logs and retrieved the cubed meat from a cooler, preparing it with spices and fleur de sel on an old book cart. Rhonda refilled Skinner’s glass.
“I remember this view,” Skinner said. “I used to spend time here, reading, watching the boats. That’s what the summary says anyway. I off-loaded those memories long ago.”
Sal shook his head like he didn’t understand.
“I got rid of them. Useless memories. Stuff that was just crowding my head. They’re not gone, they’re just stored externally. I know the keywords in case I want to experience them again.”
“And you remember the FUS?” Rhonda asked, startling Skinner with her forwardness.
“Sure. The first few years of it, anyway. There are gaps. We followed the news, watched what was happening in the cities.”
Sal slid the cubes of meat onto skewers and placed them on a rack that straddled the fire.
“According to the summary, after my folks died I did my best to empty the liquor cabinet and get the hell out of my own head any way I could. You could feel the panic setting in. We heard about the bombings and public executions, at least at first. It’s when the news stopped coming that we started really getting scared. Once in a while a refugee showed up at the docks in a boat, someone who’d escaped the worst of it. We did our best to incorporate them into the community but you know how it is with a stranger coming to town. Where are they from? What did they do? Who’s following them? Homicides, insanity… Christ, I’m boring you.”
“No, no,” Rhonda assured him, pouring more wine. “Tell us more.”
“After I buried my dad, I was drinking alone, passing out in my bedroom every night. It was a priest who slapped me to my senses and told me I needed to snap out of it. Father Dave. And by slapping me, I mean he literally slapped me. Came to my house, found me puking myself inside out, and hauled me up and whacked me across the face a couple times. According to the memories he told me there were was a band of bad men coming. He asked if I knew how to use a gun. We armed ourselves and fortified ourselves in the basement of the church… I remember off-loading certain memories. I remember disengaging from the console and looking at the card and knowing I had just deleted something awful. But the very memories of off-loading had traces of those horrible memories, so I had to erase the memory of erasing the memory. I remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory of erasing a memory. The original memory must have been something pretty bad.”
“You need another drink,” Sal said.
“I’ll take the whole bottle,” Skinner replied.
The next morning Skinner woke on a chaise lounge on the terrace, a half-full wine bottle still in his hand and several empty ones lying on the flagstones nearby. He dialed up a hangover remedy from the Bionet. When he managed to stumble into the library he found the couple fussing over their folios and notes. Rhonda wore a pair of white gloves and magnifying goggles and was nose-deep in what appeared to be an old phone book.
“We have something extraordinary to show you, Mr. Skinner,” Sal said. “Rhonda, shall we?”
Rhonda grinned. “To the morgue!”
“I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life,” Skinner said, “but I don’t, ah—”
“Relax, Mr. Skinner, it’s not what you think,” Sal smiled, clapping the old man on the back.
The Vacunins gathered a number of seemingly random binders and papers before they all headed to the offices of the old Bramble Falls News. The door had been kicked off its hinges but set back more or less in place in the doorway. Sal moved it aside and beckoned the others into the front office, a clutter of desks and chairs in motey beams of sunlight. Something had made a nest in the couch in the waiting area. The news desks held dead Macintosh monitors, office supplies, and here and there mounds of pigeon dung. Then there was the paste-up area—light tables, a waxer, fax machine, copier, scattered X-Acto blades. Rhonda pointed out the darkroom, a walled-off closet with a cylindrical door. Down a couple creaky stairs they came to the storage room in the rear of the building, where collapsed shelves, busted furniture, and discolored spools of brittle paper suggested a raided tomb. A Formica lunch table occupied the center of the room beneath a dirty skylight. In the far corner was another walled-off room, a little larger than the darkroom. Sal dug in his pocket for the key and beckoned Skinner closer. He threw the door open dramatically and said, “My friend, I give you the morgue.”
Every issue the paper had ever published was preserved on shelves in bound, tabloid-sized volumes going back to 1890. Sal swept his flashlight over the bindings, each numbered by year. The few from the nineteenth century, most beyond salvageable, consisted of little more than brittle brown leaves on the verge of turning to dust. Rhonda noted that only 1899 was really all that readable with the equipment they had. Wearing her white gloves again, she removed that volume from its shelf and laid it on the table. They had photographed more than a hundred years of papers so far, Sal noted, but there was nothing like seeing and smelling actual newsprint spanked with moveable type. Skinner scanned the narrow columns crammed with minuscule words. Property disputes, a gigantic trout caught, a new store selling dry goods. Another losing season for the Bramble Falls baseball team. A barn fire. Marriages, wakes, births.
“Here,” Rhonda said, turning to a March edition. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”
Skinner squinted. A photograph of several dead Indians covered up to their necks in sheets, lined up on what appeared to be the bed of a wagon. Maybe four men and three women, it was hard to tell. A bundle that appeared to be a baby.
“The last members of their tribe,” Rhonda said, “Gunned down by three men from Bramble Falls as they tried to cross to Canada. Certain folks thought the Indians were putting hexes on the town.”
“Bramble Falls used to be part of the tribe’s traditional fishing grounds,” Sal added. “For a couple months this band had been living in an encampment a mile or so from town, fishing, hunting, staying out of the way as best they could. Then one day a teenage boy found one of the women in the woods at the edge of town, near the church. She was speaking in a strange dialect, which the boy described as sounding like a snake. A local priest, a man by the name of Wright, worked the townspeople into a panic and soon three volunteers set out to confront the Indians, leading to their massacre.”
“This is our work,” Rhonda said. “Finding people who hold some trace of that particular genetic line.”
“What’s so important about their genes?” Skinner asked.
“As you know, the Bionet operates according to various permissions levels,” Sal said. “These are all granted and managed by a variety of agencies but essentially it means all of us have read permissions with which we can download prescriptions, limited write permissions with which we can upload our immunities, and some of us—trained medical professionals, mostly—have administrator permissions. But there’s a level that overrides all of these. Super-admin permissions. We believe that these can unexpectedly appear in a person based on certain genetic predispositions. We’ve traced these genes back to this particular tribe.”
Rhonda said, “A super administrator could ensure that the Bionet is never again used to enslave anyone.”
“No more embodiments,” Skinner said, and thought of Jadie.
From the morgue Sal brought out a number of other pre-FUS volumes, issues of the paper dating from around Skinner’s twenty-first-century childhood. They had marked one volume with a scrap of cardboard. The paper in those awful days had printed photos of mass graves and decapitated corpses, images set amid ads for boat repair and chiropractors. And to think Bramble Falls was a small town. Just imagine what the Fucked Up Shit must have looked like in a major metropolis. You could pretty much plug any imagined scenario into the discourse on the FUS and come up with a delusion that somebody would believe. At times it seemed the only way to describe what had actually happened was to reach into the depths of myth. Folks screaming, running with eyes bleeding through canyons of concrete and steel as the sky rained asteroids that uncannily targeted famous landmarks. Shaky, hand-held cameras tracking radioactive Godzillas. Robot militias pillaging retirement communities. Automobiles bursting out of the twentieth stories of office towers. Vampires battling werewolves for supremacy of the night. And so on. Rhonda pointed to a local story illustrated with a photo. An impossibly old Native American man, sitting on a bench outside the drugstore, propping his knotty hands on an equally knotty walking stick, resting his chin on his hands. The story was little more than an expanded caption.
An unexpected visitor strolled down Main Street Tuesday—Joseph Talleagle, a Native American man claiming to be 112 years old. After purchasing a bottle of water at Andy’s Handy Mart, Talleagle regaled a local audience with stories of his journeys over the years. Spry and good-humored, Talleagle claimed to have last visited Bramble Falls in 1899, though when asked for details of that visit the Native American elder demurred. “I got to keep walking,” said Talleagle. “That’s what I do. Walk and walk and walk.” He then tipped his battered leather hat and continued on his way up Two Snakes Trail.
“We’re working under the assumption that this Talleagle fellow is one of the survivors of the massacre of 1899,” Sal said. “And if there are more survivors, or if he had any offspring, the super-admin genes are floating around out there.”
“No more embodiments,” Skinner said again.
A cold wind off the lake dragged dead leaves in circles on Main Street. Skinner imagined Chiho worrying in his absence. She didn’t need his bullshit, though she’d been putting up with it since day one. Their courtship. One afternoon in a sidewalk café, in the days after armistice, Skinner sat across from an agent from Microsoft. Contractor like him, guy with hair like a 1970s presidential candidate and a grin so wide you could have spread a qwerty keyboard across his dental work. Name was Dan Thomas, something nondescript like that. Thomas wanted Skinner to accept an offer to work on the MS private security force. They drank coffee out of ceramics and talked about stock options. Dan Thomas fake laughed at one of Skinner’s half-jokes. Thomas described the benefits, the unlimited free soft drinks Skinner could expect when he pledged to MS. As Skinner opened his mouth to say he still had two years on his current contract with Boeing, the guy’s head exploded. Or not exploded exactly. More like cleaved down the middle as per a machete whack to an upright watermelon. An eye on one side, an eye on the other, in the middle a canyon of brainy gristle. Skinner hit the deck, unsafetied his Fresca, and tried to locate the assailant through the chaos of legs both pedestrian- and furniture-related. No second shot arrived. They must’ve gotten their target. A crew showed up, all bomb-squad helmets and flak jackets, and Skinner was hustled roughly into the back of an armored minivan inside of which he was briefed by a higher-up asshole at Boeing. What it boiled down to was: this Dan Thomas fucker had been about to assassinate him. “We had one of our guys liquidate him,” said the higher-up asshole. Skinner thanked the higher-up asshole and asked who the sniper was. “Classified,” the higher-up asshole said, and they dumped Skinner out a couple blocks from his apartment. One of the crew was so kind as to have retrieved Skinner’s partially eaten blueberry scone from the scene.
Then there was a series of half-seen interstitial memories: raids, bad guys beaten against cinder block walls, Skinner jamming a coat hanger heated up on a stove into an informant’s ear canal. It just got ugly from there, nothing this old man trudging down the main drag of his hometown a century removed from the horrors had any right to be proud of, all these acts predicated on fear, that epic wedge between the virtues one imagines oneself to embody and the barbarity of how one survives.
For a time Skinner kept finding himself in the company of folks who just keeled over in his presence, their viscera suddenly externalized by a silenced bullet fired from a discreet location. Outside a Krispy Kreme as he bit into a classic glazed, an approaching businessman jerked like he was performing a dance move but it was a round passing through his rib cage. While he was in line at a coffee shop, anticipating that cinnamon mocha, a guy came up behind him reaching into his suit jacket for the butt of his firearm when out popped his eye followed by a gurgle of blood. Once, as he walked across the street, a passing car’s windows crinkled and webbed under a volley of rounds; later the authorities identified the driver and passenger as paid killers toting unregistered OfficeMax semiautomatics. In each instance Skinner swallowed hard and scanned the surrounding office buildings for telltale glints of muzzle. But she was too fast, too economical. She had probably already compacted her rifle into its components and blended in with the last-minute Christmas shoppers a block away. Skinner came to consider the sniper his guardian angel and fell in love with the idea of her even though he had yet to discover she was a she. He wanted to believe it was a woman who was saving his ass. As if to extinguish this romantic notion, Chiho one afternoon missed and took a chunk out of Skinner’s left calf.
The scene was a crowded city park, now in full-terror mode, with kids being snatched up by parental types—adults whose legs wobbled as they screamed and fled. Skinner had become intimate with the cobblestones, each one imprinted with the name of a person or organization who’d given the city fifty bucks so it could buy some new playground equipment. And this was a ridiculous detail, but Skinner’s ice-cream cone was melting and upended out of arm’s reach. He was embarrassed that the sniper had seen him walking across the park eating an ice-cream cone with sprinkles on it. Of all the wussy things to eat. Not only that, a strawberry one. (Why were folks always trying to whack him when he was enjoying sugary treats?) But he couldn’t stare too long at that sad and abandoned confection because the assassin, a guy who basically appeared to have bought his outfit at a men’s store called the Assassin’s Clothier—black jacket, pants, sunglasses, white shirt, black tie—anyhoo this assassin’d been merely clipped as well, or rather a round had obliterated his right hand, the hand he typically used to fire his gun, but unfortunately he was ambidextrous and as he reached for his pistol, part of his neck disappeared and it was like anatomy class in the park with the wailing people and the melting high-fat dessert. And don’t forget that Skinner’s calf was spraying blood in a sort of fountainy arc, and dammit he’d really been enjoying that cone! Then, within seconds it seemed, Skinner’s guardian angel descended from her cloud and was hauling him up over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, wearing his 250-lb. body like a stole, sprinting toward the door of a van opened to reveal a couple guys with headsets shouting frantically into throat-lozenge-shaped microphones in front of a wall of surveillance gear. Chiho tossed Skinner inside and scrambled on top of him. He got a good look at her. She had a bob hairdo like the ancient actress Louise Brooks (though Skinner didn’t know to make this comparison himself) and a vinyl catsuit adhered to her body. This woman, this sniper, his future wife, screamed motherfucker this and motherfucker that at the two surveillance techs and it was clear here that the deal with the calf, with the bleeding and the fractured tibia? That had been an accident. Whose accident it was was not immediately clear but Skinner, though in a great deal of woozy pain, just frankly didn’t feel in the mood to assign blame. Then he vomited and there was that to deal with, so long story short, Chiho hung up her sniper rifle and retired, visited Skinner at the hospital, and before you knew it they were watching comedies together and sharing pieces of cheesecake. Then the marrying part, the kids, Arizona, and now this. A ghost town.
I am the reptile brain, acting out my dumb violent shitty themes, Skinner thought, stepping over trash. He came to the house where he’d grown up and passed once more through the living room, muttering, “Please kill me now.” He climbed the steps and pushed open the door to his old bedroom. This time he found only a moldy place where, it appeared, pigeons had enjoyed some good times. Nothing furniture-wise but a dresser. The light-switch cover was shaped like a baseball mitt. Peeling wallpaper. He stepped across creaky floorboards to touch some artifacts collected on the dresser. A baseball signed by a long-forgotten minor leaguer, an empty DVD Amaray case. His hands gravitated to a smallish wooden box. He pulled back the lid. Well what do you know, it was still there. He’d forgotten about it: his first memory kit. Back then these things were only toys, the Apple console an ugly chunk of plastic. Skinner turned it over and found a card still inserted in its slot, a dormant childhood memory. It seemed almost too tidy to him, that he should find a memory waiting for him here, that perhaps the hidden motivation for his journey to Bramble Falls was the retrieval of a pivotal, forgotten event. Perhaps the card stored memories of the exquisitely horrific series of tortures and executions that had twisted him into a warrior for Christian America. Or maybe there were memories of his mother. He couldn’t engage the memory here. Too risky. Plug in a sequence of the killings he’d carried out as an adolescent and his brain was guaranteed to enter a permanently fucked-up zone. He needed Chiho or Carl to sit beside him and manually disengage him if the memory pulled him too deeply into the depths. He stashed the box in his backpack and left the house, half expecting it to go up in flames or crumble into kindling behind him. But it remained silent and inert, a hideout for squirrels.
Skinner mounted the marble steps of the library, lost in thought. He called out the names of the Vacunins upon entering but got no answer. When he entered the main reading room he thought he heard voices coming from the direction of Periodicals. As he rounded a shelf displaying magazines of long-expired topicality, the voices grew louder, more animal. In an instant, he saw the scholars, fornicating. Then, of course, there was the noise, the skin thwack of the man’s pelvis against the woman’s backside, providing a sort of percussive audio layer overlaid with their urgent grunts. This act they performed on a table piled with open tax ledgers, bound issues of regional magazines, topographical surveys, and the guest books of hotels. An open bottle of chardonnay tipped over and glugged its contents on volumes of city council meeting minutes. The Vacunins turned their heads simultaneously and regarded Skinner with slack-mouthed expressions that could have been surprise or simply a midcoital relaxation of facial muscles. Skinner sprinted from the building.
Outside, he leaned against the masonry to collect his breath, complicated somewhat by the fact that he was laughing. As his laughter mellowed into chuckles, he scrawled out a note on the back of a flyer for a long-ago concert, thanking the Vacunins for the wine. Bramble Falls had delivered what he’d come for. He figured he could make it beyond the narrow ridge tonight and set up camp in the woods. Only a few hours remained until sundown so he had to move. He pushed on out of town, up the switchbacks, through pines, the sun molten and rotten over the hills. He came to the narrow ridge and steadied himself with his walking stick, taking it slow. The emotional algorithm he’d been processing when he departed Seattle had lost some of its power over his thoughts. His own problems looked small, the cloning of his son more a curiosity than anything. Every few minutes his mind replayed the scene with the Vacunins and he laughed again. It was while laughing that his walking stick slid out of his hand. Bending to retrieve it, his feet slipped on the pebbly trail and he found himself momentarily suspended in the air. This state didn’t last long. He fell hard on his face. Then, though it took him a few second to understand this was happening, Skinner rolled and slid down the east side of the slope, his descent slowed a little by scrub pines that struggled to stay rooted in the grade. He swore, heard the gear jangling in his backpack, tasted blood on his lips, smelled dirt, and beheld the surfaces of the earth chopped up and spliced together, intercut with bursts of cloudless sky. Coming to rest in a dry gully full of smooth stones, he lost consciousness for long enough that when he woke he was shivering in darkness. He struggled to get to his feet but the lower half of his body wouldn’t cooperate. He slapped his thighs and felt nothing.
“This is some deep shit,” he said aloud. He managed to take off his backpack and unfold his thermal blanket, find his phone. No service. Next he found the first-aid kit and clicked the key fob Bionet transmitter. The little blue light took its time growing to full brightness. He turned his eyes to the night sky, hoping to spot one of those pinpricks of light moving in orbit. He pointed the device south to a section of the sky where he thought a Bionet satellite might hide out.
Within five minutes, the device spoke in a woman’s calm voice. “Welcome to the Bionet. What is your ailment?”
“Paralyzed from the waist down.”
“What is your hoped-for resolution?”
“I want to walk again,” Skinner said.
The transmitter appeared to ruminate on this, modemy scratching sounds issuing from within its plastic shell. After a minute or so, it said, “We’re sorry. We cannot complete your request at this time. Do you wish to report another ailment?”
“Full physical.”
More scratching, like there was a rodent in there working gears. After some time the device reported Skinner’s heart rate, blood pressure, endocrine levels, sperm count, and a variety of other vitals. It all sounded miraculously within the range of normal, but then again this was an old model of transmitter and these things were known to be buggy. He was just relieved to hear there was no internal bleeding. His body produced an ever-present corporeal throb. He asked the transmitter for painkillers and within moments his hands went numb.
“Chiho,” he blubbered futilely in the night.
Skinner pulled his body about fifteen feet to the base of a gnarled little tree and wrapped his thermal blanket tight around his shoulders. Focus, mofo. Comprehend the situation. He was trapped in this alpine divot, its sides too steep to scale even if both legs had been operational. Some sort of spinal injury had shut off the lights below his waist. The transmitter was really only good for menial diagnostics and over-the-counter wireless pharmaceutical dispensing. He figured he had enough food for three days. His phone might as well have been a rock. He could use his thermal to create a lean-to of sorts next to this little tree. He had guns.
The next morning clouds rolled in. Colder. It appeared he had pissed himself. He pulled his boots off, then his socks and pants and long johns. These legs were like dead sausages connected to the living meat of the rest of this body. Hard not to consider this as anything but distressing. He cursed into the transmitter, then was polite enough to receive another dose of painkiller. He plugged the tip of his penis into the opening of an empty water bottle and secured it with duct tape—a poor man’s catheter—then pulled on his other long johns and pants. The whole process left him exhausted and frustrated and sore. He requested and was denied more painkillers. He hurled the Bionet transmitter then crawled to retrieve it, spitting and cussing the whole way.
“Chiho!” he called, her name catching in his throat.
The sun passed behind clouds.
He gathered wood and built a small fire and watched sparks rise and disappear against the backdrop of stars. He faded in and out but the sky never seemed to get any darker or lighter. He remembered the man on the mesa with his refrigerator filled with beer, stacks of books, and stuffed animals. Maybe that place was some sort of Bardo, maybe he’d pass through it on his way to the afterlife. Crazy talk, Skinner. He tried to shake the thoughts out of his head. Because the one thing he wasn’t going to do down here in this gully was die. There’d be no check-in procedure with the great beyond. He was going to get out of here and get back to his wife and daughter and grandson.
“You really think you’re going to see Chiho again?”
Skinner drew his Coca-Cola and thrust it in the direction of the voice. On the other side of the fire an impossibly old man in buckskin and ripped denim, with raven feathers appearing to grow from his long gray hair, poked embers with a stick. His lips curled over toothless gums.
“Identify yourself, old man.”
The Indian shook his head. To speak he just looked at Skinner and thrust the words out of his head with his eyes. “I won’t fight you.”
“You’re Talleagle.”
“I’m a dude passing through. That is what I do. I pass through.”
“I’m dreaming this.”
“You’re in a laboratory.”
“This land, it’s infected with hallucinations.”
“We asked you to reproduce, and your offspring was murdered. Now you’re on your way to screwing up your second chance.”
“Who was that man on the mesa, with the refrigerator and piles of things?”
Talleagle barely shrugged. “The Last Dude. I walk my path, he constructs the message. That’s our arrangement.”
“You need to help me get out of here.”
“Why do you expect me to help you,” Talleagle asked, “when you murdered my kin?” The Indian opened his buckskin jacket to reveal a sunken chest. With a great deal of effort he pushed his hand into his abdomen, releasing trickles then gouts of old black blood. After a moment of struggle Talleagle grunted and pulled out his liver. “Eat me,” he said, handing the organ to Skinner.
“I…”
“In my flesh is the medicine that will make you walk again.”
Skinner took the bloody mass and considered it with disgust.
“If you want to walk, you will eat my flesh.”
Skinner gnawed off a bite from the liver. Talleagle told him to chew and swallow. As soon as the meat hit Skinner’s stomach his nervous system lit up in electric pain. Talleagle’s eyes burst into flames.
Stars. Tears. Aloud: “Don’t fucking kill yourself, soldier. Don’t fucking kill yourself. Don’t fucking—”
The sun rose and the fire dwindled to a cigarette’s worth of smoke. The bottle connected to Skinner’s penis was full of urine. He disattached, emptied, then reattached it. He allowed himself three sips of water and a couple bites from an energy bar. A smattering of rain forced him under the thermal blanket where he shivered and clutched his belongings. After a coughing fit he consulted the transmitter again.
“Bionet. What ails me?”
“You’re getting a cold,” the transmitter responded.
“Well, no shit,” Skinner said. “More painkillers, please. And give me something for these fucking hallucinations.”
“Sorry, that’s kind of out of our area of expertise,” the transmitter said. Did it sound sad? As the pharmacological haze suffused his body Skinner dug through the backpack. The memory console. This would be his treat for getting out of this mess—indulging in some memories from his childhood: a happy trip to an amusement park, a birthday party, building a tree fort with his dad. The beautiful tropes of a boyhood were hidden here, he hoped. When the rain ceased he set the console on a rock to recharge its solar battery. He spent the afternoon watching the indicator light turn from red to orange to green and thought about how useless it was to be angry at anybody about an abstract principle. He’d really fucked it up with Roon, probably for good. All the anticlone propaganda he’d swallowed—what had it left him? How could any idea that drives a man away from the people who love him be considered sound? A rodent scurried across his line of vision. Woodpeckers tapped paradiddles into tree trunks, sending echoes down the walls of the gully.
Skinner unholstered his Coca-Cola and set it on a rock within arm’s reach. “Soldier, kill thyself,” he said aloud, then growled, “Shut up, you sack of shit.”
When night fell the Bionet transmitter died. Skinner smashed it against a rock and tossed the five broken pieces as far as his weak arm could. He added a few more sticks to the fire and ate a meager ration of food, enough to keep his body awake. The rain picked up. He cradled the memory console against his chest, and, suspecting he was about to die, pressed ENGAGE.
The memory was so faint that at first it barely overlaid the physical world’s darkness and fire. Yet if Skinner squinted he could make out faded green grass in a yard, a stuffed bunny with one ear lying on a hardwood floor, a bowl of Cheerios. The memories were choppy, sputtering, not entirely visualized, struggling to connect to his consciousness through the ancient console. The software had a tendency to render memories in greater resolution in response to feelings of empathy and tenderness. He packed his belongings and prepared for a long hike. Wait, he hadn’t moved from this spot under the tree. The packing belonged to the first-person narrative loading before him. Someone else’s memories had gotten tangled with his own. Crap interface. The rememberer shaved in front of the bathroom mirror and said, “Memory console calibration. Remember this now.” The memory card didn’t contain Skinner’s memories at all. These memories belonged to his father.
Skinner watched the courtship of his mother through his father’s eyes. A coffee shop, afternoon light through the windows, the sound of a burr grinder, this woman who would carry him knitting with red and yellow yarn and occasionally sipping from a cup of Earl Grey. The next memory was a moment or two after lovemaking, the stickiness of belly sweat and a house fly butting its head against a pane of glass like a frustrated nugget of static. Skinner watched his parents hiking through an alpine meadow, coming to a ridge overlooking a swath of western Washington, breathing hard. His dad brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes and swept them across the horizon, finding a distant city in flames.
Skinner watched his own head emerging from between his mother’s legs, felt with his father’s hands the warmth of his own seven-pound body, smelled a wet diaper, heard wails coming from the direction of the crib in the next room, then watched his infant self suckling from his mother as snow fell outside. He saw wisps of hair sprout from his head, turn into brown curls, saw his own first steps, saw himself smack wood blocks together and stuff blueberries into his cheeks. Through his father’s memories he witnessed himself vomiting all over himself, eating a pancake, pushing a toy ambulance, feeding a dog a potato chip, pointing at squirrels, crying at a loud noise, tearing apart a magazine, falling asleep in the crook of an arm. He was snoring, crawling, babbling, laughing, drinking from a cup, using a crayon. Skinner watched his father’s hands smoothing, patting, clapping, buttoning the buttons on his clothes, wiping a tear, opening an envelope, maneuvering a spoon into his mouth. As he grew older the memories sped up, a slideshow of skinned knees and sandwich bread, fishing tackle and wood grain. Running to catch a matinee. Learning how to change a tire. Chasing each other with a football. Blowing bubbles with bubble gum. Boyhood! He ached witnessing it again through the eyes of the man who’d loved him most. As the rain came down in an angry hiss, the broken soldier shivering alone at the bottom of the world mouthed the words, My son.