Skullcrack City (28 page)

I stuck my hand in the air, thinking Dr. T. might want to give me a high five. He declined. But my arm felt just fine.

“Wait, doc. How’d you know I was running around with this beautiful woman over here?”

Dr. T. stared at me, frowning.

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

“No. There’s seepage.” He reached up and gently unwound a gray fabric turban which was wrapped around my head. He ran a square of gauze across my forehead and displayed it for Dara and me. Dark yellow and red mingled in the cloth. He held the back of his hand up near my forehead, then pulled it away. “We’re going to need a round of antibiotics to prevent the infection from encroaching on the plate border. If that crosses into your brain near the screw intrusion…”

“Will something terrible happen, doc? Because my life’s pretty peachy right now.” And then I was laughing, and it felt good until I realized how restrained I felt as I inhaled. I put my hands up to my chest and shoulders and ran my fingers over crisscrossing straps, and when I looked down at them there was a tugging sensation against the back of my head and I remembered that I should be dead, but something far worse than a miracle had kept me here.

I reached up to the base of my head.

“Careful. You need to wash your hands, first. The entry point is still healing.”

I didn’t care. I had to know what he’d done to me. My hands closed around a cold metallic length of cable, and I didn’t tug because I’d spent enough time with Buddy to know how this worked.

“Is my brain behind me? Is that what these straps are holding onto?”

“No. Much of your brain is still in your head. Nozomi only had time to swallow a few bites before your companion fired the finishing shot.”

Dara had backed up against the wall, terrified that this moment had finally come. “That’s why we had to do what we did. Dr. T. said it could work, that we could connect both portions of your brain. That without it you’d either end up dead or in a coma.”

“Dara, what am I connected to?”

“It was the only choice. You saved me, back at Ms. A.’s. I couldn’t let you die. You…you’re all I have left.”

My head was spinning. I pictured whatever gray matter remained in my head twirling around like a gyroscope, then pressing against my forehead, trying to escape what it had just realized.

“Nozomi?”

Dara nodded.

“You hooked up my brain to a fucking monster?”

I needed more promethazine. I needed Ms. A.’s shotgun back in my mouth.

“It’s a little more elegant and complicated than that.” Dr. Tikoshi’s bedside manner didn’t really exist.

“Oh, I’m sure it is, you condescending prick. You fucking violated me. You should have let me die.”

“I would have. Please understand, I performed your surgery with a gun pointed at my head.” But I could see it in his eyes—he was fascinated. The experiment was everything to him. He didn’t see me. He saw raw materials, a fertile field for his fucked up ideas, and he was getting off on the results. He continued. “Most of Nozomi is back in the laboratory on 45
^th
street, feeding the rats and roaches along with Boudreaux and Buddy. What you have on your back is only the distillation of Nozomi’s true capability, a unique organ which sat just above his stomach.”

I remembered Nozomi drooling over me.
There’s room now.

“So I’ve got some mutant gut bag strapped to my back.”

“I named it the animus ciborium. The whole of it, and its contents, are in that pack, including an organic neural circuit which connects to the external cord to allow integration with the remainder of the brain in your skull.”

I reached up to the top of my head. The first thing which struck me was pain from the infection. The second thing was the cold metal austerity of the back of my head.

“Three titanium plates are in place. Nozomi damaged a good portion of your parietal area. The cavity in your skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which should work fine, as it did for Buddy. The brain has unfathomable redundancies…”

“Buddy?
This is his cord
.” I reached up and grabbed the fiber-optic line connecting me to the pack, and wondered how fast I’d die if I yanked the thing from my skull. “Buddy was fucking insane. Nothing you did for him was ‘working fine.’ He was broken. But at least his brain was his own.”

“You have your entire brain, although my research indicates you needn’t worry about possessing the whole of it. Aside from that, can you not see the potential of what’s on your back? If you learned to tap into your connection, you would have the collective intelligence…”

“I don’t want them in my mind.”

“But imagine all the wisdom you could possess. All of those memories and experiences available to you. Can’t you see the strength in that? And the viral casings in the animus ciborium are built for compression. You could have so much more. There’s a cap on top of the pack, and beneath that, a chamber lock for further data input.”

“
Data input
? You sick fuck. Do you have any idea…”

“Your blood pressure.” The monitor alarm was sounding. Dara was trying to protect me, again. What had she done? I detached my I.V. line, then pulled the pressure cuff from my arm and threw it to the ground.

“Oh, I better watch my BP, Dara. Maybe I should cut back on salt. Or maybe I’m stressed out because I’ve got a backpack full of other people’s brains connected to my goddamned skull, and every once in a while they all forget they’re fucking dead and start yelling inside my head.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I don’t…Please, I need you here. I love you.”

She said it, but I didn’t even feel it, not the way I would have wanted to in any other world, any other time. The promethazine had worn off completely. “You don’t fucking love me. You’re just afraid to be alone.”

“That’s true—I don’t want to be alone. But I
do
love you, for whatever that’s worth. And I wanted you to have a chance, some chance, to save your mom.”

Mom. What would she think if she saw me now?

An echo: Dr. T. laughing at me through bloody teeth.

But mom didn’t pick up, did she?

He knew something. He’d known I was travelling with Dara. He’d found me through gridtracking access he shouldn’t have. He had far more information than he was letting on.

I turned away from Dara and pushed my body up and away from the operating table. My knees almost gave, but I noticed Dr. T. was already backing away.

Dara said, “You need to sit back down.”

“No—this motherfucker knows where she is.”

“That may be. But you can’t beat it out of him. We need his hands. I’m no doctor. I have no idea how to maintain your set-up.”

“What do you think, Dr. T.? Is she right? Or is it just that she wasn’t paying attention a moment ago when you told me about data input.”

“No. She’s right. You’re assuming information and memory are the same thing as fine motor skill. But a surgeon’s hands are decades in the making. I have a long history with the human body. I know the precise level of pressure at which skin yields to scalpel. You’ll die in a week without me.”

“So why don’t you save us both a lot of pain, and tell me where I can find my mother?”

There was a gleam in his eye then—I pegged it as contempt, but later found it to be a mix of Dr. Tikoshi’s two muses: hatred and curiosity.

“I can’t help you,” he said. “There’s nothing left of your mother to be found.”

I’ve tried to picture those next moments the way Dara would have seen them, tucked away in the corner of the lab with her pistol pointed at each of us, knowing that she’d had a part in creating what happened, trying to look away, but too afraid to lose all that she had left.

She could have pulled the trigger at any point.

She watched me lift the autoclave machine and smash it over Dr. Tikoshi’s skull.

She watched me pull his shaking, screaming body to the operating table and strap down his arms and legs and head.

She watched me as I searched frantically through his drawers and located the bone saw and plugged it in and brought it down across the ancient, waxy skin sheathing his forehead.

She watched me as I lifted away the cap of his skull with a soft sucking sound, as I sliced into the gelatin softness of his occipital lobe and bisected his brain horizontally, white matter shining at its core like the wings of a butterfly.

She watched me as I lifted the pack from my back and unscrewed the cap and placed Dr. Tikoshi’s pinkish-beige tissue into the chamber and resealed the top and released the lower lock and heard his mind absorbed into the animus ciborium.

She could have pulled the trigger at any point.

And when she didn’t, I realized that I loved her too.

We raided the lab. Unsure of exactly what the medical needs of a profane aberration might be, we decided to stack the deck in my favor, filling the car to the brim with drugs and surgical equipment.

We found enough dilantin and mannitol to keep cerebral edema at bay, and a comically large barrel of dot-cons ensured pain wasn’t going to be an issue. Dara was worried about the infection along my scalp sutures and wanted to put me back on I.V. for antibiotics, but I told her I couldn’t take one more thing attached to my body. She backed down but grabbed me a batch of azithromycin pills.

Perphenadol was in short supply, but I was fine with that. There was one voice in particular which I was eager to hear.

Dara drove. I realized they must have transferred me around the city in the back seat of the car, because sitting up front was near impossible. Agony shot down my spine every time the input jack in the back of my head brushed the headrest. I leaned forward, cradling the infernal backpack in my lap.

“There.” I pointed to a flat, lime green flea-bag motel.

She went to the front office of the CoZZZy Motor Inn to score us a room. I sat in the front seat, hoping no one would see me, staring at the cap on the pack, wondering how long it would be before Dr. T.’s mind was integrated with mine.

“We will know the truth once you have joined us.”

I whispered to the pack. “I’m coming in there, motherfucker.” Hearing my voice, knowing this was really happening, threw me into hysterics.

When Dara returned with our keys, I was still laughing.

I lay on my right side on the king bed, with Dara across from me. We’d covered the comforter with a blue curtain from Dr. T.’s lab, hoping to restrain the bedbugs which were surely lying in wait. My eyes lost focus and I felt like I was floating on bright ocean waves. Dara taped a fresh strip of gauze across my seeping scalp wound, then ran soft fingers over my face. I did my best to breathe calmly despite the battery of meds buggering my bio-stasis. In for three, hold for three, out for three.

In for three, hold for three, out for three.

I closed my eyes, wanting my sole focus to extend inward.

In for three, hold for three, out for three.

My consciousness drifted, floating above my wrecked patchwork skull.

Bright blue ocean waves rolled forward from beneath my vision. A staircase appeared in the center of the ocean, steps reaching down into a dark corridor beneath the waves.

I descended.

Where are you, Tikoshi? I’m going to build a mansion of memory hallways. I’ll lock these unwanted thoughts and minds behind steel doors. But you, Tikoshi, you’re getting a special spot in the basement. No light. No room to move. I know a thing or two about pressure, and darkness.

You don’t know where I’ve been.

The corridor took on a dull green glow, surrounding me in a cylinder of slow drifting phosphorescent algae. Wherever, whatever my eyes were, they focused on the shifting light.

Not algae. Neurons/axons/dendrites, floating loose in fluid.

Am I at the back of my mind?

The corridor looped beneath me. I followed the swirling path down to the pulsing cage of the animus ciborium.

The voices were there, each of them asserting that they existed, that their thoughts were of consequence, that they must be heard. I focused. I imagined my body as a wall of tympanic membranes, trying to isolate each stream of sound, turning thoughts into structure as the vibrations moved through me.

the egg had fallen from the nest so I thought it might already be dead but when I put it in the fire the shell popped and the baby bird was wiggling there and I didn’t know if it was screaming or if that sound came from the fire and after that I always watched the fires from further away

You are the arsonist, the first to die on 45
^th
. You live here now. I’m closing the door.

so I told the guy sometimes you gotta do one for free to stay fresh to keep the spark alive so it’s not just a job I mean you have to love it to do it right and anyway the laws are so different over there and sometimes the parents are the goddamn pimps and nobody gets the cops involved so I said fuck the clean-up and left her right on the beach with the rock buried in her head and work was so much better the next day