Broken: A Plague Journal (19 page)

Hunger has a special memory of its own.

Home to her was the taste of livers. Her own baby sister, dead just hours, put to the carving knife. What precious little flesh left hanging from the emaciated form roasting over one of the encampment fires, the smell and sting of bubbling fat giving voice to her empty stomach, rumbles inaudible under the night sky of combat. When the fuels ran out, even that fell to uneasy silence.

Fuels and missiles, bullets, poisons: none were renewable there, the planet just a mining outpost, the only ore of value shiny and gray. Craftsmen had worked it into jewelry once.

Tender and juiced, an arm pulls from torso, skin splitting and black. Chewing and swallowing: a denial of that child she’d held when her mother had died, attempted to nurse from pre-adolescent breast buds. The animal farms had been raided long before.

Those base desires in times of hunger and blood become base realities. She’d been a viable replacement fuck for her father and brothers after her mother’s death. She’d killed them each eventually, wondering what of her was left on them, in them, of the four babies she’d given them, the last a screaming mistake that had entered the world just long enough to exit in blessed suffocation. She’d wrapped its umbilicus around its neck and killed it to stop the noise. She tossed the lump of flesh to the eager onlookers, even helped them coax the afterbirth from her; some lapped blood from her lips and thighs.

After she’d first bled at age ten, she’d never stopped.

Home? For Maire, it was pain.

They knew he’d see them. It didn’t matter which he; he did. They all did.

The bell on the door rang from behind to signal their entrance. The patrons of the Cafe Bellona went about their business of coffeehouse intellectual discourse. There were so many of them. All blended and faded, became distinct, swam back into the moments. People overlapped.

Berg was the first to release the necksnap of his hardsuit. Leif and Roman followed his example, followed him to an empty table at first, then populated by two, three, seven for an instant. They sat and ghosts flickered. They became the sole customers of that table.

“We’re locked in. ME tether’s steady.”

Roman was the first by a blink to notice his new apparel: white lab coat, thick glasses. Clipboard on the table before him. Is this really how they looked to him?

“It’s amazing.” Leif, the youngest by a decade, let the eagerness and wonder of his age leak through.

“Not amazing.” Berg grumbled the words out. “Just a merge. Let’s get to work.”

Berg, Leif and Roman were the three best quantum-X physicists Judith had left. They’d been promoted and pressed into service after Benton’s death. They’d been kept a secret from the author because of the what and how of their inquiry.

The answer was, of course, Seattle.

“It’s true.” Leif poured over data presented to him on the papers bound by his clipboard. “It’s right here, right now, all of it, converging.”

Rumble from the sky; Paul, Benton and West ran past the front entrance of the coffee shop. The phase flak needled from the sky. They were just blocks from Helen Windham’s small apartment that she shared with her son and his teddy bear.

“Let’s get some samples.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

“Sorry, didn’t notice you come in. What can I—”

Leif grabbed her forearm and stabbed it through with a metallish instrument he’d withdrawn from his lab coat. She gasped and exhaled, built up to a scream and

“Got it. Checking for—”

“Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

“Sorry, didn’t notice you boys come in. What can I get for you?”

“Three coffees, please.” Berg’s eyes met hers. She was warm; her smile caused a bullet-hole dimple. “Worked here long?”

“About a year. Have I seen you here before?”

“I don’t think so. Are you a student near here?”

“Yeah. Art major at Cornish, just down—”

“Sample confirms. Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you come in. What can I—”

“Know any authors?”

Her smile dropped. “Excuse me?” Exquisitely sculpted eyebrows furrowed.

Leif looked over the people in the shop. An older version of the proprietress came out from the back room with a small package wrapped in gift paper. The man sitting at the counter unwrapped it: Marlboro 100s, now banned decades.

“Don’t look around, boy.” Berg shook Leif from his voyeurism. “Bad for business.”

“Let’s order some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air. A spectrum of proprietresses smiled and walked to the table, smiled and wiped the counter, frowned and ignored him, walked toward him, walked toward him and tripped, tripped and laughed, tripped and died, walked out the door, started screaming, aging, dying right there, then and then, a spectrum of everyones.

“Want some coffee?” The young blonde with the dimple put pencil to her pad and anticipated.

Paul saw them. He realized that Judith would assemble a crew of quantum-X kids to figure out that great hole in his thought.

He didn’t know why the Cafe Bellona had forced itself into everything of substance he’d ever written. Now that Judith had brought him in to repair the forevers he’d broken, he’d had to sit down and think it over, which is what he was doing right there, a cup of black coffee on the table, an unread newspaper and two packs of smokes in need of an ashtray.

He knew Berg, Leif and Roman from the hidden chapters of his existences. They were the team who’d eventually unraveled the silverthought lattice. Far in the future, they’d been able to crack the deadlocked omni-DNA code residue left behind in a ship named Gary after the second War of the Jaguar. A beautiful young brown man named Michael Balfour had based his forevership design on the Berg/Leif/Roman Lattice.

Paul watched them, all of them, across that dive. At the counter, older versions of himself and the coffee shop owner held hands. A mid-twenties future-version of the waitress served BLR coffee. Joseph Windham got down on one knee to propose to his Helen. Maggie Flynn and Simon Hayes talked shop over
Demian
and
Deus ex Machina
. Judith and god talked shit over Formica. There were others, so many others, but they were hidden to him, just blurs, all a spectrum of silver. He averted his eyes from the brilliance of that overlap.

The door jangled and he saw the enemy, in present form, a scruffy drummer with corduroy pants, Kente cloth sewn up the seams. Paul swallowed hard, scrambled for a smoke. The enemy kissed the young waitress. Paul smoked, looked out the door into the rain, into the sunset over the still water, over the lances of phase flak and the sight of himself and West and Benton running.

It was that moment, that moment, that moment forever, all moments in one, all thoughts pressed together into a tangible damnation. He reached into his pocket and didn’t find a marble. He did find some cash, which he placed on the table. He found a handful of silver coins, which he placed on the table. He found a wooden puzzle piece in the shape of Michigan. He found a pin: World’s Best Wife! He found absolutely nothing at all.

He had had enough of the Bellona Merge. He waved half-heartedly to BLR. They returned the gesture with guilt. They knew he hated being watched.

As he opened the door, she called to him from behind the counter: young again, standing alone, wiping dry a coffee cup. He saw paint stains on her hands, knew that on one finger he’d find a scar from when they’d removed a tumor from her bone, knew her scent from across the cafe, mixed with rain and smoke and blood, that spectrum, that spectrum, and for an instant, he remembered the way she tasted. Then it was gone.

“Come again!” Her smile widened to be polite, fell from her face when she realized who he—

Paul shut the door behind him and

       threw the door open to Jud’s chamber.

“Stay out of my fucking head.”

The twins were there, Alina, the bear: a symmetrical arrangement: Alina flanked by the girls, the bear on her lap. Jud Indian-legged on her chaise; her words ended upon his entry.

“Guess you saw the boys.”

Paul scoffed, paced beside the window that looked out upon the birthing fields below. “Lab coats? Yeah, I saw them. Stuck out like an ingrown toenail. Try harder next time.”

“Sorry.”

“Fuck you. Bring her back.”

“You know I—”

“Bring her back!” Alina and the children flinched at his voice. The bear’s smile faltered. “You expect me to work with these?” He indicated the silent onlookers.

“Hope’s dead. Her code’s lost.” Jud shrugged. “Sorry.”

A breath and he was over the god. Lifted. Strangled. She grimaced, her face turning black from her suffocation. Paul walked her to the window, slammed her against the frame. A slizzle and his blades leapt forward, opening her chin to pubis, through flesh and bone.

He tore the silver ball from her heart and threw the corpse through the window. Glassish shards fell miles below to babies, babies.

Screams: Alina and the children.

He squeezed the marble in his right hand. It started to blacken.

“Find a way to bring her back.”

He tossed the marble to the chaise and stormed from the room.

Al did her best to comfort the sobbing girls. Honeybear frowned to himself.

The thick gurgle and flicker of silver, flesh, blood. The Judith ME sculpted a new body over the marble. Flash, snap to grid: Jud stretched and sat up.

“He’s broken.”

that savage transition back to the merge, the tickle and strain, dull beating behind my eyes, the pins and needles stippling up the spine and neck, around my head to settle at my temples, and West was there, all shoves and fists, beating me to the pavement, a knee on my chest: I felt ribs crack.

“Don’t you ever fucking do that again.” He got off me, extended a hand. I accepted and he pulled me up.

I wheezed through blood. “But—”

A swift crack across my face. Index finger extended. “Don’t do that again. I don’t care. I miss her, too. But it’s not Jud’s fault, not Alina’s. Not my daughters’.” He reached and wiped blood into the front of my shirt. “I loved her, too.”

We stood in a silence. The merge had flattened for the moment: one existence, no fragments or echoes. I knew it had been raining; the sidewalks reflected the emerging moonlight.

Jingle. Jangle.

I pulled West into the alley beside Cafe Bellona. I knew the door had opened and was now lazily swinging shut. She laughed, and four feet tapped paths past our hiding spot.

West’s eyes narrowed. He looked from the couple to me: lock. He’d known them.

“Welcome to the merge.” I felt my whisper had been too loud, but they didn’t seem to notice us.

“Simon and Maggie?”

“Yeah.” I looked out from the alley. They were much too focused on each other to notice me. “Let’s get out—”