1
APPENDIX J (Narrative Format)
Narrative weave comprised of memory matrices and adjacent actualities extracted from the causal sequence resulting from the insertion encounter {The Moldeaters} ::
INSERTION ENCOUNTER:
: The Moldeaters
ENCOUNTER BEGINNING
: 2.197-5-15-0512 (RT)
:⇔ May 15, 1993, 05:12 (ST)
ENCOUNTER ENDING
: 2.197-6-21-0947 (RT)
:⇔ June 21, 1993, 09:47 (ST)
2.197-5-15-0512
Ryan skipped kinda lazily up the far points of the low, broad steps that wrapped the wide patio fanning off the side of the station. He moved cornerwise from the unlit back of the block toward the glow spilling around the tall, black edge at the front of the building. Although his bag was heavy, and though he’d been working his way through the Straßen along the riverside for thirty minutes or so, he wasn’t sweating at all. Cold air pervaded his clothes, wafting through as he’d walked. Breathing deeply, mouth closed most of the time, and within just a few steps into this trudge away from her door he’d felt the bones and tissues deep in his skull contracting as they cooled, heard little popping sounds inside his sinuses. His lips parted more and more, the air he took in crisped the tips of his teeth and tongue.
The smells of wet concrete dirt, mixed with the smells of discarded shells of shellfish had popped into his awareness along the way. He'd noticed that several homes along that way were already up and cooking. It made him hungry, but there wasn't time, they weren't restaurants, so he pushed the inclination to eat as far away, as best he could.
This sort of chilly, dewlit, predawn air would often trigger a set of remembrances for Ryan, would arouse a timeless sense of commencement. The mornings he’d headed out to hunt for the first time, begun his first real roadtrip, arrived at the airport for a dawn flight, ..or when he’d taken the SAT, ...or later, when he’d gone out to the porch to take a puff and have a smoke after pulling an all-nighter for a Lit or Philosophy paper, back at school in Florida – roommates still conked out, the house they were renting so still, since the rest of them were all still in their beds – these disparate times were concurrent with the existent moment as he surveyed the concrete-square tiles of the landing, ...a businessman’s sharp silhouette broke the bottom angle of glow and darkness down at the front; a tired woman plopped onto one of the lonesome benches Ryan was passing in the shadow of the station, ...cold, but still trying, cuddling up to the steam rising off her small cup of coffee, leaning toward the wisps of heat straying off her pastry wrapped in thin, dullwhite, translucent paper; and further off in the dimness and barely visible, belittled by the tall glow, and passed unseen by the lit businessman, there was an oldish man in grey, overworked clothes, bending down to pick up a pesky butt, using his oldish broom to prop his squat.
These types, these kinds of people, these who must each do something indispensable, and each, something different from one another ..some of them were regularly present, in some form or another at this illimitable instant, and because he noticed them they amplified Ryan’s perception that an alteration was taking place in his own life. He didn’t always know what crucial role each of these people played, but an element of permanence swayed each of their demeanors. They each began their work or commute in this sparse and solemn atmosphere every day, and if they didn’t, if they weren’t willing to do that, then the rest of his world wouldn’t run as smoothly as it did. Each of them made this moment possible for him.
Together, they represented an integral component of society’s functioning, and were, therefore, an immediate element of Ryan’s current reckoning of his own situation. He enjoyed observing this, enjoyed being in that moment with them, a moment easily recognizable as holding some measure of meaning for himself.
Even so.
None of that meaning, its force, nor the weight of its implications were available for him to inspect yet. So, as soon as he noticed enjoying being in that moment with them, he couldn’t help but realize that he was also wasting it, ...already looking forward to looking back, trying to figure it out, without letting it happen yet.
But, the businessman he’d noticed also took note of him as they approached one another. Ryan had come from the remote corner of the patio, headed toward the businessman’s corner at the front of the Hauptbahnhof. They came into each other’s light. He saw that the man had a familiar look, but more importantly, Ryan could see that the businessman’s eyes also expressed a recognition of Ryan. This was a separate phenomenon of perpetuity from the moment itself, and just one amongst an array of other atypical, yet recurrent experiences that had recently become so boring to him ...except for Elke yesterday, not much of that was boring.
Ryan was thousands of miles from familiarity, but there were a few too many people who seemed to be instantly recognizable, in every place he went. This had happened when he first went to college in Florida too–somebody would remind him of some person he’d known back home in Georgia. But, this was a much stranger encounter in England, and even more so as he went from country to country, there on the continent. He’d begun to wonder if humanity could’ve been ignited in not only one, but in several early primate lineages. If so, it was clear to him that certain characteristics of each of those first families were still perceptible in the virile members of their current descendants, and he was sure that members of the same line would know each other as being of the same kind, but from what he’d noticed upon noticing this, ..that wasn’t always a good thing.
In some of these encounters, he’d experienced a detectable menace beneath an increased display of friendliness as the similarities became mutually evident, once they’d each recognized that they were both of the same proto-family ..of the same kind. As though the likenesses were a swift indicator to the other person that Ryan was some sort of familial enemy. Bad vibes. The Other’s Cain to Ryan’s Able.
Or, maybe, it was just that these people felt such brushes to be too close and knowing, ..when they should feel fresh and new – too spooky to handle.. –unable to understand it and threatened by the sudden intermingling of essences with a seeming stranger, their reflexive, cautionary response was to bare their teeth wide ..with a smile.
Unadventurous weaklings. Bad vibes either way. This businessman was one of those kindred adversaries. Eye contact-and-aversion tag-teamed, and built-up a fair amount of time-slowing tension, which peaked perfectly as they passed, both baring their teeth, smiling too widely at each other. And Ryan felt some small relief that he wouldn’t have to meet or spend any time with this one, as he had with others back at school in England, or even back home in the U.S.
As the businessman’s gritty footsteps faded behind him, Ryan’s thoughts quickly went back to the girl he’d met at the Abbey the day before.. ...in the Biergarten at the Abbey the day before. Elke. She’d smiled softly at him several times before they got around to being physically in front of one another. They’d made their way through the clumps of people, and could each tell that they both felt they were being watched by all the rest, as they both kept their eyes mostly on each other, as if their movements and attentions were being tracked by everyone else in the vicinity.
And while they moved, and once they met, Ryan noticed that her mannerisms, voice, the color of her hair, the shape of her nose, and her general way of being were specific to one of the many proto-families he’d encountered. He’d met, and gotten along with this girl’s sister-personae several times, back home, all the way back in high school, all the way back in Georgia. If this idea had any merit, she was evidently descended from a different proto-family than Ryan’s, so he was unsurprisingly, ..naturally, ...needily attracted to her. Animals have an innate tendency to select breeding partners who are genetically different from themselves.
He’d long since realized that the most easily recognizable descendants of these proto-families had inherited very strong genes. Ensembles of genes – this red, wavy hair goes with this shorter, more robust body, and this long thin nose, accompanied by an easy-going attitude, tempered with periodic assertions of authority...just to be safe – genes passed intact from the beginnings of humanity, through and on down to this present body. Her present body. This must be the truest form of royalty. Ryan had always felt that he was of such ilk, and could tell when he met the redhead yesterday that she represented a princess of her heritage, and that the best way to appreciate these facts about each other would be to get it on. When their eyes first met, before they even began to move closer to each other, he believed that she believed this too.
The language difficulties were of initial concern, but only for a few sputtering moments until the two purposefully boiled their communications down to basics. Readily exploiting the efficiently fertile techniques of subtle gesturing with their eyes; of light, accidental, physical contact..her fingertips first, ..brushing the back of his hand, so soft.., so accidentally. Elke. Ryan. Guten. Tag.
As he’d left her apartment in darkness half-an-hour earlier, and they were saying auf wiedersehen, Ryan had the romantic notion that there was enough of a reciprocal attachment to induce a true relationship, that he should not go to Sweden just yet, that he should stick around and get to know–
–Elke’s eyes read his..told him to abandon the idea quickly, to be sensible ...to continue traveling, that they both had other considerations.
Other, commonly thought of as sensible, or real considerations had, on almost all occasions eclipsed this kind of mutually undisputed consonance. Ryan regarded this, commonly thought of as Wisdom, to be a short-sighted, easy way to avoid a Truth that exceeds, and can be Known without verbal communication. Hell, he’d met Elke at a Church that sells Beer. One of the Monks patted him on the back as he walked out with her. Monks are Universally Accepted Representative’s of the Big Picture –people who Know– and that Monk obviously thought it was fine for them to be together, for awhile at least.
They’d spoken no more than twenty words that they both understood and that was enough to bring them as close as two human bodies can ever come, maybe as close as two human souls can get to touching, at least the way they did.
She didn’t think they were a practical consideration.
That’s what her eyes said that morning, when they told him to turn against his inclination, to turn toward the direction of the train station…
..to turn and walk away. Adieu, not auf wiedersehen.
This era of morningtime was expansive enough to also contain another variety of incident immemorial for Ryan --an imbricated sense of loss after his first night with a girl.
His reflective, philosophical mood, reinforced by the misty light of early morning, undergirded by his concept-laden, constant-college mindset, framing his notice of the few requisite characters inhabiting the patio he was walking across at this time of all days, altogether, –it all reminded him that there had always been a bittersweet cast when he left a girl after the first...often the only time. He hadn’t always known that it would be the only time the way he did that morning, and he didn’t know where the sadness came from, but it was always there, and it came in a flash, with all the other first/last mornings trailing quickly behind. He figured that, if he ever told another man about this, his masculinity would be promptly, laughingly questioned.
As he rounded through the glow of the businessman’s corner and stepped into a much more concentrated and glaring light, the slight flurry of mechanical activity terminated Ryan’s stream of detachment, and lines of alacrity threaded through the few people, cars, and that jerky bus moving, stopping, door opening and squeaking for somebody, leaving, coming, and turning out front of the flat, lit facade of the train station.
Only a few things were happening, it was still early, ..but the glare colored this germinal bustle in broad strokes, and some small and hollow, yet leaden echoes of Einsteigen! and Plattform Neun! percolated up from the even brighter depths of the building, reminding him that he might not make his train, and he got a little irritated that Elke hadn’t given a hint about how far she lived from there. The lack of romance in that sentiment struck him as traitorous to his thoughts of her from just a few steps earlier. Maybe the location predisposed him to being overly time-sensitive. Not wanting to look too American, he hurried without hustle to an open window inside, and asked through the bars, as best he could, “Eine karte zum Kopenhagen bitte. Um sechs uhr.”
“Du bist vermutlich zu spät.” A small pause as she slid a blasé glance toward the black circle, rimming the clock on the wall, then firmly met his eyes again before he could comprehend the time, “Zu spät!”
He offered an impressively pleading expression, which drew a smile from her, even though this woman’s eyes continued to explain that he had no chance. He walked lackadaisically to the board titled Abfahrt, and some scatalogical mish-mash with the aura of his dusty, third-grade playground at Sallie Z. Elementary jounced around and briefly hindered his focus on the times and locations displayed beneath that title.
He saw that the departure for Copenhagen was set for 05:53. He looked at his watch, 5:49, and wondered if the woman in the window had too hastily refused him. He’d made trains with less time to spare in recent months, several trains, even later.
The next departure was well after noon, which would have him there by the middle of the night. He wanted to be in Stockholm by then but would instead have to spend the night in Denmark. Not that that would be bad, just backwards on his schedule. It would effectively add an extra eight, or ten...no, fourteen hours to his itinerary. Impatient and enamored no more with his original plan, Ryan scanned the board up: Wien, Stuttgart, Strasburg, Prag, Paris, Monaco, Mailand, Genf, Coblenz, Brüssel, Bonn, Bern, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam.
Barcelona seemed frivolously far away. Prague was enticing, but the stories coming out of that place made it sound crazy and desperate: riots incited with boxes of tampons thrown down on the subway floor; cars traded for pairs of Levi’s. The Wall had been down for a couple years already, but fuck dealing with those people.. at least ’til they’ve caught up a little. Still, ..maybe, ...could be a helluva bunch of fun too. Possibly dangerous. whatever
Everywhere else seemed boring. He’d been to Amsterdam twice already, been all over Italy, Austria, francé...belgian..swish. The names on the board just felt cold, or boring, or done. Barcelona. Barcelona seemed less city-like, more fluidly woven into the countryside, still busy with vitality, he really had no idea though, never been. 06:04. He could do that, but now.
“Eine karte zum Barcelona.” He thought he had better pronunciation that time.
She smiled tightly, shook her head a little while she punched the radio buttons with her thumb, and looked squarely up at him as she handed him the ticket. “Hier ist es. Plattform drei.” Her head twitched down toward the direction of the platform with little show but enough force to jumpstart his motion along the same trajectory. He felt self-conscious as he shuntered down the steps, the stone steps, then the pocked and corrugated metal steps leading to the trainshed and platform, ..he hadn’t said danke that time, and she obviously thought he was a reckless, aimless, American traveler.
Ryan went to the back right corner of the last train car, hoping to not have to sit next to anyone. Still, he nestled in tight with his pack between his legs, jacket bundled atop the armrest, wedged up against the window, trying to not look rude and inhospitable in case someone decided to sit next to him anyway. The impressions that prodded him to go for Spain just came from old movies on TV, a poster or two on the walls of the Language Lab back at college, all of which, as much as he could remember that morning, featured bronze-skinned, healthily-built women with long, straight, fine, black hair, who were dancing in roomy clothing, displaying wholesome, genuine smiles on their faces lit by sunshine.
Maybe that’s all there was to it, the hair.
He felt dumb and tried to reassure himself that what truly attracted him to Spain was that the people in those posters radiated life as a delectation. The living city of Barcelona still, literally advertised a joy that, for instance, the sleepy city of London couldn’t muster.. or ..couldn’t be bothered to. So, still. He’d never been interested in traveling commemorative Europe. The still Europe. He’d come there to learn about people ..not chiseled stone, which changes only to become more dull ...and only grows toward disintegration, however slowly.
He was also expecting the food in Spain to be closer to level with his palate, but wasn’t sure, he’d only ever had Mexican, which he thought probably didn’t have much to do with Spanish anymore. He relaxed his knees, untightened his thighs, butt, lower back, and shoulders, leaned his right arm on the jacket, rested his chin in the crook of that elbow, ...looked out at the people near his window, others on down the platform, ..each moving toward some train car, ...or that one, .toward some other. The smooth slate surface they shuffled across reflected a greywhite, wettish glow, and their faces were gently shadowed by light falling lightly through the skylight shed arching atmospherically above them.
The light of morning that permeates without piercing the mist filled the space of this mostly empty building as evenly and solidly as it did the thick, white outside. People on the platform began to hurry, disappearing into their traincars as his window slid past them and the low, planate opening at the flat end of the immense, metal and glass, semi-cylindrical trainshed began to widen, and the first cars of his own train reached through, out, and under down the way, and the trusses floated overhead behind him.. interfering little with the dewlight pervading the space invested within them.
–Ryan thought he must’ve slept for a couple hours when he opened his eyes, already looking around the traincar. He’d been semi-conscious of others with him when a bump, noise, or announcement brought him up to the shallows of sleep, where bits of the goings-on in the waking world slink down through the senses and into the foremind, bits quickly claimed and blended into the sparkles of near-familiarity adorning the rind of the lurking, slithering jabberwock, who reveals little to its host of it’s vacillating skin, and only at a few small times like these, when it’s back bumps up along the edge of dim sleep, when its back scrapes down against awareness, gathering bits and sparkles of fleeting consciousness to adorn its constant rind...
–Ryan jerk-nodded, then bolstered his posture, opened his eyes wider, inviting as much light in as he could, to burn off the dregs of dreaminess. No one was sitting next to him. He kept still and looked. His ears felt popped, all sound was buffered and blunt, similar to the aftermath of a loud band in a small bar. There were only seven or eight people in his car. Pretty quiet. He looked at his watch. It’d been less than an hour since departure. Damn. He’d fallen hard asleep.
The day was less misty out here than in the city. He could see the river. Rhine. The distant hills and coats of grass rippled, and slugged, sluggishly on by. He was waking up and his ears were brightening up. He grabbed his bottle from the top of his pack, drank some water from the bottle, looked down across the things left there at the top of his pack, grabbed his headphones, wrapped’em'round and pressed the Play button, starting a mixtape of Pavement, Sade, Flaming Lips, and Melvins, drank some more water, and looked through the rest of the stuff on top of his pack.
There were the books, and the camera. He sure wasn’t going to take pictures through the window, how obnoxious. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to read, didn’t want to miss anything outside, but decided he’d likely notice in his periphery if the scenery out there changed in some significant way. Gonna be a long ride. Still, even though the books were diverse, none of them seemed appropriate for the moment.
The to-do-list books were feeling stale or exerting as he looked them over, especially the McLuhan one. He’d seen or heard more mentions of this one than he had of the one he’d already read. And he’d been failing at relieving his mind from constant readiness, constant prep-mode for the next final, the next paper. McLuhan was sorta fun, but still felt like prep.
And, still, shying away from the sci-fi looking thing…ridiculously thick and completely inappropriate for the moment.
A Vonnegut-kind-of-thing,
maybe, hopefully.. or ..no, that could be terrible.
Not-quite-Vonnegut. He wasn’t sure if this was the real deal or not. He flipped it over, didn’t know the genre well, and Greg, who’d told him about it in the first place, enthusiastically believed all the latest news. There weren’t any reviews. The synopsis on the back was brief:
From a small number of people and events, with close observation, we can draw out the larger principles defining Earth’s (Easdfjl’s) historical successes and failures. We can trace mere snippets of human action, and the motivations behind them, and they demonstrate the fundamental nature of human history in a microcosm.
These collected narratives of recent events will remind you of where this planet we share has been. They should also alert you to the many challenges we will so certainly face in the future.
Didn’t really sound too cool. Or Vonneguttish. Big boring talk for a book nobody ever heard of. The cover art made it look like a throwback to Amazing Stories or, and hopefully not, something from L. Ron Hubbard. The author’s name, Nayr Ressel, seemed fakely foreign somehow. Ryan wondered if it was an alias.. ..thought L. Ron Hubbard used aliases sometimes. God, that would suck. He didn’t think this was one of those. He’d be embarrassed if it was~traipsing around Europe with an on-purpose, fiction version of Dianetics under his arm.
He assumed this thing had to be at least a thousand pages, and –according to the back cover– it was only the first of three volumes. Seemed like a helluva commitment. A number popped clearly into his mind, 1215, random images of knights in some generic, illuminated text from the middle ages came with the number, but, no, ..he knew, this was one of those ..so..., ..he had to look. Of course it was. He shivered a little, as he would when he thought he’d just swallowed something that was too old, probably stale, maybe rotten. He threw the 1,215-page book back at the top of his pack and looked out the window. Grass. Rhine. He picked it up, thinking positively, deciding that he could easily put it down whenever he wanted, and it was probably light reading besides.
He scanned the table of contents. The Moldeaters, The No-Lookers, The Star. No chapter numbers listed up front. He flipped through the first one and quickly realized they weren’t chapters. He flipped through, more slowly. All three stories had dates attached to their titles, but none of them had taken place yet. The stories were chronological, and each had its own chapters, some of those chapters even had their own dates. The book was a group of stories, supposed to be some sort of history ...but from the future. Future History. The title page of the first one was printed:
The Moldeaters
(Summer, 2032)
...a little above the center of the page. He turned to the next one..
1.
If all the matter...except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if...we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable...for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. Various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.
Nathan Augustus Cobb, 1914
It was intended to be a practical example of tax dollars at work. Intended to benefit everyday life, ..for ordinary people. It was intended to be a tangible introduction to the branch of Science that had grown down from Mendel and Darwin, ...through Watson, Franklin, Wilkins, and Crick, and finally developed by the labor of multitudes of grunt scientists in their labs studying genetics and nanobiology.
It was, instead, a reaction – a response incompletely considered.
The government intended for it to be the antithesis of what had been suggested by a special episode of Nightfile that revealed evidence of the government “dumping billions into, and taking over several areas of research” into what host Mike Kandel called “‘Nanobiologics’...the manipulation of biology at the genetic, molecular, and atomic levels.” He mentioned “confidential sources”. His most deep and foreboding tones of voice were in force when he detailed the possibility of combining traits of different animals that “God had made ‘separate, each after its kind.’ To allow this will certainly spawn a torrent of hybridization. The results of this experimentation could lead to something miraculous.. yes. But we can’t ignore the possibility that this will instead lead to the mongrelism of Creation.
And it was not good.”
Kandel denominated his speculation, he called it The Chimaera Question, and used the mandatory “It’s aliiive!” clip from the old talky, along with the equally obligatory display of what “Webster defines ‘Chimaera’ as…”
Chi•mae•ra (ki mir’ə) n. [<Gr. chimaira, orig., goat] Gr. Myth.
1. A monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail.
To be fair, he used only the first definition, the one that describes a conglomerate monster. The second definition is simply: An impossible fancy. He didn’t want it to seem impossible, or feel fanciful. Mr. Kandel wanted the monstrous chimaeric possibilities to feel real, to scare the hell out of his massive audience of old folks still clinging to the networks, Kandel wanted them talking about his show in the diners the next day. The old voters talked.
The government’s response to Kandel’s report came soon, in the form of a promise. A promise that this new avenue of biotech had the potential to change the face of the country. This promise was accompanied by the announcement of a product that would showcase the harmless versatility of what they were dubbing Nanoengineered Biologics. The same PR people who’d come up with that descriptor also made sure that they prepared the way with the public before introducing the product.
They quietly underwrote TV specials, which revealed to the shocked grandpublic that chlorine, though likely completely safe for most household cleaning purposes, might be an irritant to children’s bottoms, if used in the tub or on the toilet. They even produced images of two-year-old potty-trainers with blistery rashes on their fannies. Mike Kandel couldn’t have scripted it better.
It didn’t matter that rashes similar to the ones shown in the graphics occurred on only one out of every two-thousand-three-hundred-and-forty-third baby butt, that it had been happening for a couple-hundred years, that it was the result of a lack of care by the adult doing the cleaning – none of that mattered, the grandmother outrage came on cue, and was followed by a general public outcry. Sales of chlorine-based household cleaners dropped, as they say on the News, precipitously. Bathrooms across the country began to putrefy.
This didn’t sit well with the chlorine manufacturers at first, but with some specially-assigned contracts and exclusive patent leases, their industry’s fears and concerns were allayed. The manufacturing facilities that produced chlorine cleaners also had labs used solely for the purpose of growing the very strains of mold that their products were made to destroy. They cultivated those organisms in order to test how effectively they could kill them with various formulations of their chemicals. With a few modifications, these facilities were well equipped to test the government’s harmless, practical answer to The Chimaera Question raised by Kandel’s Nightfile.
---
“Well we have it,” Dr. Faun looked up from the folder he was carrying into the room. “To produce the full amount, we’ll need about two months. I’ll take you to a testing room in a moment, for a demonstration. Is there..uh, are there any questions before we begin?”
“How were you able to finish so fast?”
“We discovered a highly versatile polymerase that enhances the gene conversion mechanism. It’s helped us with everything we can’t do with CRISPR, but we employed that too. This polymerase allows us to copy, synthesize, and bind almost any sequence to another, regardless of which species any of the sequences come from, and with fairly few negative results.”
“Fairly few negatives?”
“Yes, for this kind of work. The main cause of failure is that we’ll put two or more sequences together that contain master genes. If you get more than one master gene in the same segment they can interfere with each other and whole.. ensembles of genes won’t function correctly. The same gene sequence can produce a beak for one species, or lips and teeth in another species if that’s what the master gene tells it to do. Since we’re using gene sequences from different species, it’s harder to be sure that there won’t be a conflict. The instructions get mixed up down the line every now and then, leading to unpredictable results.” He paused for a second, trying to anticipate the President’s next question. “Conflicts happen, but we discover new master genes this way, and it’s easy to see when they’re the cause of failure.”
“Easy?”
“Yes sir.”
The President looked blankly at Dr. Faun.
“Well, let me show you.” Dr. Faun said this with a slight huff, leading the President and his agents out of the room and to an elevator. “We have our own testing labs here. Even though the chlorine manufacturers have done the bulk of the gruntwork, I only gave them the redundancy tests. We do the real research here.”
They descended into the Earth and departed the elevator several tens-of-stories below ground and walked just a few feet through a hallway before entering an unmarked door. The room beyond reminded the President of a college biology lab. He watched his agents move through and around the periphery of the space, checking the door at the back. The lab was lit with bright fluorescent tubes above several blacktop islands, each island equally equipped with a sink, full-screen microscope, touchboard, miscellaneous glass containers, and various metal tools. There was also a server sitting at the back of a blacktop counter, beneath glassdoor cabinets, and a huge rollscreen tacked to the far wall, its bottom-right corner had come loose, and was curling up.
“We’ve finished our work in this lab.” Dr. Faun mumbled as he rifled through a drawer, found some translucent gum, shuffled over and secured the loose corner of the rollscreen back to the wall again, then went through the motions of wiping his hands all over the whole screen, smoothing it as flat to the wall as he could, mumbling about wanting this flimsy thing flatter against the wall, so it looks sharp. He tapped the right side of the screen a couple times until it displayed error text that read Input 2 (ext). No Input Signal. Check external input or select another input.
Faun then went to a cabinet above the server and pulled out one of the hundreds of boxes inside. The box he chose held several trays and each of those held dozens of ordered microscope slides, there was also a single old-fashioned CD, and a paper list. He looked at the list, nodded, took the silvery disk out and slid it through a slit at the front of the server. The lights dimmed slowly, until they were completely off. An image appeared. Dr. Faun went back to the screen, touched and dragged the corner of the image out, ..the other corners of the image expanded proportionally, he moved it around and dragged it out, until he had it filling the screen as perfectly as he could, turned back around and smiled at the President.
“This guy was an early test for locomotion. His cilia, ..uh, the little hairs all over him, ..well, they wave rhythmically, allowing him to move through a fluid...little, uh, hairfins. We wanted to add feet to the ends of all of those cilia, ..to allow him to also move easily in a relatively dry environment.”
The President saw an oblong, translucent, amoeba-like organism covered thickly with the wispy hairs that Dr. Faun was describing as he backed away from the screen and began controlling the imagery..
..Faun’s voice was sharp and self-assured as he used his thumbtap to progress one static image quickly to the next, ..
“Here’s the successful attempt.” He called for the image to switch from that first one to the next, then another.
“Next...next..” The slow, stop-motion animation showed the cilia becoming thicker, then thinner at the base where they sprouted from the body of the amoeba. Their far ends became wider then, and bulbs grew at the tips. The bulbs then became partially flattened on each of their own outer faces. Finally, there was the same organism as before, but there were little ball-like feet at the end of each of the cilia sprouting from its exterior.
“The flat side of those feet is made of hooks, which allow this guy to move across, probably any surface.” The next, still slide showed an electron-microscope image of a meadow that, instead of blades of green grass, sprouted black with recurved shark’s teeth.
“That’s what y’all wanted?” The President was grimacing.
“Yes Sir.
Now..
Here’s a few of the unsuccessful attempts we carried out before we got what we wanted.” The amoeba was back as before, big on the screen, normal cilia only. “Next.” The image changed, stopped, then “Next.” The cilia grew thick, as before, and they split, and split, split again, ..and the cilia had cilia that had cilia of their own until there was just a fuzzy, messy-haired amoeba with curly, out of control cilia.
It started over. “Next.” Just the amoeba, normal cilia. They shrank and shriveled and looked almost as if they’d burned off. “Next. Next.” The cilia grew thick and rounded at their bases, and diminished into points at their tips, resembling the chunky spikes on a cartoon bulldog’s collar, then the spikes changed again, their tips elongated, hairtips waving out, then curling back and piercing the amoeba and coiling up inside its body, murderous ingrown hairs, killing the amoeba.
“Next.” “Next.” “Next,” the cilia shortened, thickened and widened, and became spore-like balls that were over halfway embedded in the amoeba’s surface. “Next. Next. Next. Next.” They grew wider and deeper until there was no amoeba left, just a bundle of spore balls that then shrank, shriveled, and died.
---
Ryan had finished the first chapter, but was ambivalent about continuing to read. The story might have possibilities, and he hoped to be surprised by it even though it seemed obvious to him – what was coming.
But, it was the phrase ensembles of genes that the scientist used in his explanation to the President that had caused the bit of consternation Ryan was currently dealing with. It wasn’t just that the general subject matter was roughly similar to his earlier rehashing of thoughts on human genetics and proto-families on his way to the Hauptbahnhof. There’d been an intact phrase which crystallized those ideas in his mind as he’d pushed toward the train: ensembles of genes.
His thoughts formed in this way sometimes, as intact words, sentences, or phrases. He would often have a silent conversation with himself, in which he outlined and organized his ideas on a subject. Ensembles of genes was a phrase that stood out as he’d done this during his walk earlier, one that caused him to think, again almost word for word, I oughta write that down sometime. Upon reading this chapter he began to feel something akin to deja vu, but a little more disorienting. His perception, his awareness of a connectedness that he shared with the world around him was extending lately to encompass events that seemed fundamentally unrelated to him. He was certain that he’d been noticing more coincidences lately, for the past year or so, but there were, objectively, way too many. The coincidences were mentally, even spiritually ..exhausting. This exact echo of his own internal phraseology immediately reminded him of his friend from home, his real home, Georgia, his friend Josh.. ...who’d died.
Ryan was riding through town with a couple or three of his buddies about six years earlier, smoking cigarettes before school, everybody talking loud at each other in an excited teenage state. Chad was there, and so was Josh. Ryan was thinking a phrase, no words are really bad, they’re just socially unacceptable, which had some bearing on the cacophonous conversation they were having.
And immediately Josh said at everybody, “no words are really bad, they’re just socially unacceptable.”
Ryan was amazed.
But he didn’t call it out because he was trying to figure out the chances that a phrase identical to the one he was thinking would be uttered out loud by someone else, less than a second later. He convinced himself that, since the words were related to what they were all saying – that the conversation had driven both him and Josh to the same thought, – that it was merely a very rare coincidence. Josh had accidentally but precisely echoed, no, ~vocalized Ryan’s thoughts...
Then, a couple years later Ryan had a dream. He was walking with Sara through the woods at night. They saw a car in the trees nearby, headlights blaring off the trunk of a wide tree it was nosed up to, tail lights shining back at them. They saw the make, Sable, embossed across the back of the trunk. Sara said, “there’s his car, but where is he?”
Ryan woke the next morning and drove to work at the pool where he and Chad were lifeguards. They taught swimming lessons early in the morning, before the pool was supposed to be opened. He pulled up, saw Chad leaning against his car in the back lot, smoking, and the look on Chad’s face told Ryan that something was wrong.
Ryan parked, got out, lit a smoke, leaned next to Chad, and waited ..’til Chad finally spoke, ’til he said that Josh had crashed the night before, driving too fast, ‘til he said that Josh was dead.
Ryan said nothing, took a couple drags, dropped his smoke and walked through the gate to the pool, toward the little kids sitting at the edge of the shallow end, their Mamas reclining on deck chairs watching him, not watching their kids, already drinking, an image in his mind of Josh in his Jeep, top and doors off, a smiling American teenager in the summertime sun, one hand hanging onto the roll bar above his head, ready to go have fun. He didn’t...couldn’t process it for awhile, but finally became upset during a break, around lunchtime, after the kids’ swim lessons were done and their Mamas had shuffled them off to the SnackBar.
He got himself together and asked Chad what’d happened, what the details were. Chad said that Josh was driving too fast on the way to his girlfriend’s house, it’d rained earlier and the road was just a little bit wet. He lost control, slid off the road, went into a pecan grove, wrapped the car around one of the trees. Died on the spot.
Ryan asked if Josh was thrown from the Jeep, but Chad told him that Josh had been driving his dad’s Sable. Ryan hadn’t even remembered his dream until that moment, his dream in the woods, with Sara.
He did tell people about this coincidence, about his dream, but those he told dismissed it for many, logical reasons. Ryan alone knew about the experience he’d had before, when Josh had unknowingly parroted Ryan’s thoughts, and decided that these two things together made no sense as being only chance, that together they were evidence of something he wasn’t sure he should believe, something he was absolutely sure that he should never tell anyone else about..
But then, finally, home from college in Florida, just that past summer before he went off to school in England, he was with Sara, always back with Sara when he went home to Georgia. They were driving, like they would every Saturday at home, going to meet his parents at Grandy’s, for barbecue. His parents never cared whether he and Sara weren’t dating, but they seemed to care a lot when they were together. And barbeque at Grandy’s was a requisite engagement. So Ryan and Sara were headed to Grandy’s together, ready to get there, kinda happy about it, even though they both knew it was just a weekend, stuck driving slow, held up, stuck behind a truck.
The truck had an open metal truss over a flat wooden bed. A large, rectangular, concrete container with dirt and roots hanging off it was strapped down to the middle of the bed. The concrete box had a cap, a slab of concrete on top, and roots had obviously entered through the seam between the top slab and the box below it. The truck carrying it was headed out of town. Ryan and Sara turned off toward Grandy’s, talked back and forth, trying to figure out what the truck was carrying, almost settling on the idea that it was part of a septic system. But then, together, they both realized – there was a coffin inside that decaying cement box. Someone’s body was being moved. A body that’d been buried for quite awhile already had been dug up, and was being transported to someplace else. It was unsettling.
Two more weeks went by, and Ryan was back at school, down in Florida, soon to leave for England, talking with Chad on the phone and Chad asked Ryan if he’d heard about Josh. No. Josh’s Daddy moved to Florida after Josh died, ...well.. so.. he’d had Josh’s body moved to a cemetery down there a couple weeks ago. He had him dug up and moved!! What the fuck?! Ryan realized whose coffin was inside the concrete box he’d seen with Sara..
Ryan had stopped reading. Remembering all these things about Josh. Especially the first thing, when Josh had said the exact thing that Ryan was thinking, it was so much like the completely identical resounding of Ryan’s specific thoughts in the words of the book he was reading. Ensembles of genes. Even so, even though that current coincidence had sparked his review of the events concerning Josh, had made him feel distressed and sad, Ryan gave himself a quick jolt of suck it up, this is stupid, crazy, this fucking book doesn’t know you, and it didn’t know you would think about all that shit. He smiled in spite of himself, wished he could smoke a spliff right then and there on the train, but shook it off and went back to reading...
