Chapter Four:Maze of Roses[cw: drugs, sexual abuse, dubious consent, medical abuse, gaslighting & manipution, dysphoria, death, gun violence, derealization, depersonalization]

  “That’s all I remember.”

  She’s jittery. Feels cold, goosebumps on her arms and neck and legs. Teeth are chattering. She hopes Scatter and Houndstooth don’t see, or that if they do they just think it’s the damp coastal air. Not likely. They’re both too perceptive.

  Wasn’t there supposed to be some promised feeling of crity or resolve after diving through the nightmare? She does feel different, more physically real, more directly in the presence of others. The little gray-brown slug crawling along the edge of a pot leaves behind its glistening trail. They give her the time to watch it, saying nothing. No easing from the tightness in her chest, the way her ribs pull together like clutching fingers. “Maybe there will be more. I’ve got a splitting headache just recalling that.”

  “That’s a lot.” Houndstooth attempting a helpful smile. What do you say to someone after a story like that? Lilly’s aware of the precarious absurdity of her presence in this pce resting on a string of events that don’t make sense. Since she awoke here everything’s been unmoored, buoyed on ambivalently vanished time. Scatter’s frown hasn’t changed for minutes.

  “What are scopolonoids?” Lilly asks.

  Houndstooth waits a moment, clearly mulling over what to say while Nails sits down at the rusty metal table nearby with a little mound of ground flower and a Swisher. Heavy clouds of weed have recently repced the bottles and cans after Houndstooth talked to them about the drinking problem. The effect has been positive, both on Nails and the people they spend time with. The only problem is that they can’t shoplift the weed, so now they’re borrowing money all the time.

  “You heard of date rape drugs?” asks Scatter, her gaze focused on the sketchbook resting on her bony legs where she’s casually fleshing out tattoo ideas. Her sketches are sloppy, as are the stick’n’pokes she does, now living on in the skin of Arsenal, Dante, and various punks and travelers who have come through the squat. She’s comfortable with the style. There’s vitality to the fgrant looseness of the lines, an unwillingness to totally compromise intention with representation.

  “You mean like a roofie?” Lilly asks.

  “Scopolonoids are a hell of a lot worse,” says Scatter. “I’ve heard stories, people losing track of who they are, falling under other people’s will. Cops getting false confessions.”

  Houndstooth shrugs, nods, says, “I mean, I don’t know too much aside from datura, but shit will fuck up your mind.”

  “Dramamine,” says Nails. “That’s, uh, probably not what you’re talking about though.”

  “So they hit me on the head, and they drugged me,” says Lilly. It’s uncomfortable, but a tidy narrative.

  “Sure sounds like that,” says Houndstooth.

  “Why?”

  “Well, you found their stuff, right?”

  “Why not just kill me? Throw me in jail, whatever? Why go through all this process?”

  The silence hangs around for a moment, punctuated by distant tires squeeling. The city never lets her forget its presence, its nearness.

  “Uhh, well, the same as the rest of society. They need people,” says Scatter. “Recruitment, employment, like any political group. Even those at the top need people, like, running around. You said you ran documents for them, right? Deposited checks and whatnot? I doubt for a group like that, with most of their budget off the books, that was much more costly than training a new employee at McDonald’s. You were a minimum wage worker for an international conspiracy, because that was easier and cheaper than trying to disappear you.”

  “Why don’t they come get me now then?” Distant sirens. When she’s trying to sleep in the basement she can still hear the sirens of cop cars driving past.

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. Well, whatever they did to your head, it worked, right?” Scatter finally makes direct eye contact with her. “Do you know who your boss was? Do you know who was connected, in corporate headquarters, in Congress? Did they even have any stable locations they operated out of?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Do you think if you looked at real estate records, or shipping manifests, or passenger lists, that you could find any evidence at all of Coordination Division? Do you think they left documents in Michigan Shipping and Holding or whatever for more than a couple months?”

  “No, they wouldn’t have.” The feeling of foolishness invites in a dawning sense of dread. It’s not just the situation of lost time, it’s the context. The context she still lives in.

  “So you have no names, no evidence, no way of getting evidence. You worked for them for four years and you have nothing on them. Hell, you yourself probably helped cover up a lot of evidence, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Definitely so, though she doesn’t feel like admitting it. There were things she had to do, a part to py. File folders thrown into firepces. Documents shredded. Names deleted from databases. Hard drives wiped, then smashed. She’d done that, frequently on the orders of people whose faces she could now not even recall. Everywhere the organization had appeared, it had also swallowed its own wake. Perhaps somewhere someone was keeping track of everything that had happened but if so it was in a location so obscure and arcane she had no hope of finding out.

  “And no one would be none the wiser. See what I’m saying?”

  “But still, I feel like a loose end.” She sighs. “What I’m saying is, convince me I’m paranoid to worry I’m gonna get assassinated.”

  Scatter smiles, pats her on the shoulder. “A body draws attention. Another schizophrenic person ranting about government conspiracies deflects attention.”

  “It’s like the men in bck,” says Nails. “Not the movie but like—they make people think they saw UFOs. Then they send in people acting weird, wearing tex masks of other people’s faces and talking in strange ways. So if anyone tries to talk about it, they sound crazy. And no one knows what’s real or what’s not. When people try to talk about corporations poisoning the water or war crimes or cops abducting children, it all just sounds like UFO stories. They, uh, they did the same thing during the Bosnian genocide. The American empire thrives on misdirection. Some people talk about it in prison. I had an uncle who told me they would fake UFOs to cover up when cops murdered people in Abama. He knew a guy, a patsy. They got him on fake murder charges and acted so weird when he told what happened during the arrest the whole courtroom thought he was lying. They do all kinds of stuff like that. Give people experimental psychedelics, tell them things about crimes so when it shows up in the documented interrogation they look guilty. You never know what the real game is. A lot of the time the cops don’t even know, they’re just pieces on the board.”

  Lilly drops her gaze down to the ground, to the grimy New Bance sneakers someone had pulled out of a dumpster for her. She misses something nebulous, a feeling of security she never had. The feeling of home she’s been told by American culture she’s supposed to remember, to feel nostalgic for. A phantom comfort. “I need a fucking cigarette. Right now.”

  “You’ve earned it,” says Houndstooth, and they give Scatter and Nails one of those looks, the looks that say, stop pushing this person so hard. Not noticing that Lilly’s watching with the desperation of blossoming hypervigince. Lilly understands though, what Scatter’s trying to do. Even what Nails is doing. There’s something inside of her that can take it, that’s hungry for the truth. Piper doesn’t really want to face that, Piper still wants life to be simple. Lilly’s had a simple life and it was the worst thing that ever happened to her.

  Did I choose this? she wonders. It was an accident I sought out. I was warned. I was told no. And yet, I stepped toward something dangerous and ominous because I hoped it would break me out of the miserable tedium of my life. And it did.

  Maybe that’s why she can cope so well. None of this shock and horror can compare to the dull misery of her childhood.

  Lilly smokes most of the cigarette in silence, punctuated only by the distant sound of a neighbor popping open beer cans and listening to cssic rock on the radio. The DJ announces, “That was Blue Oyster Cult with ‘Seven Screamin Diz Busters’! Next up we’ve got Traffic, some Morrison, and then a special surprise.” The DJ sounds as stoned as Nails.

  Lilly scoffs. “So many papers, speeches, presentations… for a secret society they sure talk a lot.” Information that circutes just to be destroyed by ckeys like she had been.

  Scatter leans up close to Lilly’s face and lights her cigarette off of Lilly’s. Over the smell of the smoke Lilly can smell Scatter’s sweat, the strange spicy scent of the pheromones in her unwashed hair. “The capacity to generate knowledge is an exercise in power that ratifies itself. Knowledge that defines and effects the world. They specialize in controlling the knowledge of the world. In constituting knowledge they form the conditions of practice, which in turn defines the sorts of lives one can lead, the sorts of selves that can be embodied.”

  “At the same time, they take away my knowledge of myself,” says Lilly.

  “Which disempowers you,” Scatter says.

  “I was ready to go back in the closet. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I still struggle to remember my childhood. Because it’s not just Coordination Division, it’s my parents, it’s school, it’s the church. And who’s to say that they aren’t just reflections of the knowledge generated by Coordination or its predecessors?”

  “Coordination is a manifestation of societal ills,” says Houndstooth. “These problems go much deeper than a single organization, even a globally spanning organization. I think there’s a risk in getting too conspiratorial about it. Because a lot of what we’re talking about is just known things about how the world works. Zoning ws, religious indoctrination.”

  “White supremacy and patriarchy,” says Scatter.

  All these names, all these terms. Does knowledge of a thing give you power over it if that thing has a very real material power over you? Didn’t someone say power comes from the gun?

  “In a very real way this world is hell,” says Lilly.

  “What do you know about the Demiurge?” interjects Nails.

  “The Demiurge?” asks Lilly.

  “I mean, I don’t know shit from shit,” says Nails. “I’ve just seen some random stuff, some fucked up stuff, I don’t even know. But it sounds like you never asked the key question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who’s generating the knowledge? If you trace the fucking structure to your supervisor or commander or handler or whatever, up the fucking tree of bullshit to the top of the ziggurat, who’s calling the shots? What’s the voice in Pharaoh’s head being like, hey, ensve some motherfuckers, make them work all damn day, start a war, invent binary gender and kill all the hermaphrodites, make white people, start an empire, who the fuck is whispering in all those ears? It’s the fucking Demiurge if you ask me. Fuck that fuck.” They ugh, seeing the shocked and scared look on Lilly’s face. “What do I know? I’m baked as hell.”

  For a moment Lilly stares up at the blue sky, punctuated by clouds moving past, little wads of pressed cotton streaming across the infinite canvas. It’s not really infinite, though. It has been mapped completely down to every point. She has transported polyethelyne tubes containing printouts of the night sky, the day sky, the earth’s surface seen from the sky. Topographical maps, dopr imaging, thermal imaging. Airpne routes, highways, railways, shipping nes, all crisscrossing the pnet, fishing charts and geological surveys and watersheds. Somewhere on its surface, humans that imagine themselves as free actors not compulsed agents. The process, through time, of every buried mineral manifesting itself through environmental destruction, the earth beginning the process of turning itself inside out in the greatest act of suicide which is also omnicide, relinquishing its being to the arbitrary flows of necessity, turning into something utterly abominable to all spirit. And these clouds floating across the sky, will they be absorbed too? Is she like a cloud, drifting along? Or is she a mine, a cavity where something has been extracted, that great machines bore into and rewrite her fate? Or is she the machine? And which is the true self, the true memories?

  A breeze blows past, white light and the smell of roses.

  Helen sits beside her on the bench and she redirects her attention back down to the neatly manicured wns, to the concrete paths of the Institute. Behind, the pared down neocssical white walls gleam in the mid-day sun like an ancient castle.

  “Ellie, where did you go just now?” Helen asks in her singsong voice, gently ying her soft pale fingers on the back of Ellie’s hand.

  “I was thinking about the past,” says Ellie. “Hey, Helen, what did you do before you came to work here?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about that.” Her voice, always sweet, is also chiding. In control, always trying to be in control. Her face, makeup on it meant to look natural and unblemished. Control as the illusion of nature. Like the neatly manicured gardens. Ellie barely even sees the gardeners, the Institute is so strangely empty, though it carries itself as if it was once full of people. Everything Coordination Division does is carried out in the echoes of great pces and great actions.

  Within the tight silhouettes of the rosebushes, their tendrils sprawl wildly. Juices carry water up from the soil where the roots tangle, saturated with fertilizer and pesticide. They do what they can with what they’ve been given.

  Ellie tries to widen her eyes, looking, hopefully, innocent and direct. “I know, but we’re people, aren’t we? Let’s act like people, talk as people do. We’re going to be spending a lot of time here together, I think, so let’s develop a casual working retionship. It will make things more cohesive.” Using the words back at her. Praying for a connection.

  “Perhaps.” Helen offers a conciliatory sigh. Helen’s rhythms have taught Ellie new things about manipution, but it always seems to be something of a game, as if Helen is inviting her in. Perhaps the children of aristocracy have nothing to do but master the skills of devious charm. “I’m afraid. I was told there was a risk of psychological contagion.”

  “Contagion?”

  “A problem in your training. False memories.” She stands up, severing the physical touch, moving in just such a way that Ellie’s hands brush along her silk camisole and the hip beneath it. “And now… and now you want to talk to me about memories! What good are memories?”

  “Do you remember your past?”

  Helen is chewing on her lower lip. There’s a scar on her head, where hair doesn’t grow, where the suture lines are still visible, running from her temple back to her occipital lobe, and it’s normally hidden under her straight auburn hair but her vigorous movement has made it visible and Ellie is drawn to looking. After the first time she noticed Helen’s scar, that night she intimately studied her own head, looking for the scar, looking for the pce where they did it, whatever they did, took away memories, created memories, made her a woman, made her think she had been a man, whatever they did to her. She found no scar. She’s just extant.

  “I don’t need memories, to do my job.” Helen starts pacing in front of Ellie. The summer sun is harsh on her, reflecting off the grass, off the marble facade of the North Wing of the dormitories, off the bright white silk. “There was another rumor about you. That you used to work with Coordination, and you disappeared. That when you came back you were saying queer things.”

  “Does it matter, if memories don’t matter?” Ellie counters. She stands up, smiles, and takes Helen’s hand. “Come, let’s walk in the garden.”

  The garden is a small maze of roses, only chest high so no one could hide in it from the cameras positioned on quaint electric mpposts far overhead. They walk in silence, navigating the simple maze. Ellie has walked it many times, has nearly learned it so well that she could navigate through it with her eyes closed. Her right hand grasps Helen’s left, and with her left hand she strokes the roses. The petals are soft and fleshy. The thorns are not soft but they are smooth and there is a pleasure in that as well.

  They reach one of the centers of the maze, which has three centers. No true center, just options. You can stand in the clearing and believe you’ve completed a process.

  “Your hand is bleeding,” says Helen.

  “It’s just some scratches. From the thorns. I’ve bled a great deal more than this in the past.”

  “Let me see it.” Ellie holds up her hand limply before Helen’s face, and Helen scrupulously studies the scratches with the theatrical expressions of a palm reader. Without a word, she puts Ellie’s fingers in her mouth and begins to suck on them, to suck on the blood. The sensation is strange and not at all unpleasant. This too is a sort of jab.

  “Why are you here?” asks Ellie in the most expressionless voice she can muster.

  Helen takes a long moment as if savoring the taste of Ellie’s blood and looks up with doe eyes before gently removing the hand from her mouth. When she speaks, the words come out in a slow drip. “I’m going to go crazy in this pce,” she says. “I don’t know why I know that, but I do. I’m going to lose my mind completely. And then, maybe, I will die.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Don’t you know that? The same reason you are. We are here to help the Institute.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Helen kisses Ellie’s fingers one at a time, then lets go, and Ellie’s hand falls. “I think I’m here to drive you crazy. I think they want me to destroy your mind. They want me to dig inside of you until they can get out whatever they put in there. I’m really a very terrible monster.” Helen ughs, a soft, beautiful ugh. “Oh, men really do have uses for us lesbians, don’t they? But I’m not going to drive you mad, because you’re already perfectly insane. You’re going to drive me insane, because you don’t want me.”

  “You are attractive,” says Ellie. “It’s not something I can think about here because I’m terrified of this pce and I’m terrified of myself.” Helen turns away and Ellie moves around her until they are again facing each other. “You understand that, right? It’s nothing personal but you’re just another attack on me and I can’t py into that this time.” This time. Fshes of memory of a bald man in an impeccable gray suit, telling her she’s doing well, telling her she looks beautiful this morning, telling her to open the door, to smile, not to look up, to ignore the sounds from inside the room. Don’t think about what we did today.

  Helen starts to walk away down the path. This time it’s Ellie that follows. When she speaks, Helen’s voice is mencholy. “You’re too on guard, love. Nothing will ever resolve like that. Initially they sent you to a psychiatrist, I believe?”

  “Yes,” says Ellie, dreary. “There were problems with my mind.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be here if there weren’t. Very useful problems. You are a useful problem, like me. You understand, don’t you? The specialists. The rest of them, normal families, wives and children and all the boring husbands, they couldn’t go around being so boring if there weren’t someone there to soak up all the reality for them, protect them from it. You’re full of reality. I can taste it in your blood. You think you’re empty, that you’ve lost something. It’s the opposite. You’re supposed to be empty, like the rest of them, little meat puppets skewered on a line. But you’re alive and wriggling and delicious. They can’t just let you go, they can’t figure out what to do with you. If you’re too much of a problem, they will kill you. They will not hesitate to kill you. You’re alive because you’re not as dangerous as you are useful. All the better for me.”

  They reach the second center of the maze. Ellie sits down on the ground and Helen sits down beside her.

  “You know I’m a transsexual?”

  “Of course. I’ve read several dossiers on you. I know things about you that you don’t know. I remember things about you that you don’t remember.”

  “Can you tell me them?”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because I’m not going to talk to another therapist.” A guess, but Helen nods.

  “When you talk to a therapist, you tell the therapist what you expect a therapist to hear. You talk about yourself. About your misery, which is vast and deep. That doesn’t get them what they want. What do you say to a lover?”

  “I feel like a prisoner.”

  “We are all prisoners. That’s the nature of material existence. We are souls trapped in bodies, pying out scripts written for us.”

  “I mean, I’m not allowed to leave the Institute.”

  “What makes you think there is anything outside of the Institute at all?”

  “The cameras.”

  Helen ughs. “That is a very good answer. I really do appreciate your wit.”

  “If it bothered you that I’m a transsexual, would you say something? Or would you just go along with what they told you to say?”

  “It’s not that simple. The self is what speaks. The script is who I am, who you are. So is it scripted that I fall in love with you, that you break my heart and drive me mad? Then that’s what I am going to do.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am a demon and I can see the future.”

  Ellie ughs. “Yeah, me too.”

  “There we go,” says Helen, getting closer to her. “That’s the first real thing you’ve said to me. See, you are going to be cooperative after all.”

  Ellie feels disgusted with herself but the sensation of touch is so pleasant, so alien to the cloistered life she’s been living since she came here, for as long as she can remember. Helen’s hands on her knees, on her thighs. Softly, Helen kisses Ellie’s cheek. Her lips feel like rose petals. Ellie can almost see the horns rising from her head, feel the horns rising from her own head in sinister comfort.

  Something inside her rejects. She pulls away. Stands up, frustrated. Helen is watching her, motionless.

  Ellie charges at the wall of roses. She pushes past their cwing vines, bending and twisting them, wrecking years of cultivation, only emboldened by the sharp pain blossoming all over her, pain that feels so much more real than that softness. She flees in a line directly out of the maze and walks away across the carefully manicured grass, bleeding on it, trying to feel a sense of triumph.

  Helen stays in the second center of the maze, watching her, serene in her self-confidence. Ellie knows this because she can’t help looking back, and again, and again. By the time she reaches her dormitory she’s crying. The floor nurse, seeing the blood and tears, rushes to see if she’s wounded and tend to her. She endures his careless hands as he cleans her legs and puts on the bandages and admonishes her.

  “I thought you were cutting,” he says, and she remembers Piper, a fragment of a person in her mind, if that person was even real. What happened to Piper? Did she run off? Ellie can’t remember, can’t remember if they slept in the same room in the past or in the future.

  “What year is it?” she asks the nurse. He’s a living person, but he only ever smells like antiseptics. She usually only sees him when he arrives to sedate her, either because she’s been going mad, or for reasons that are obscure to her and threatening to think about. She sees other residents of the dormitory even less. Most of them seem to be permanently locked in their rooms.

  “I’m supposed to ask you that,” he says. “What year do you think it is?”

  “2006,” she says. “Or maybe 2060.”

  “It’s 2010.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I had a dream that I was free.”

  “ ‘In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy,’” he says.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s just a quote from some artist. I thought it was pretty, and what you said reminded me of it.” He has the tone of someone who genuinely cares for his patient. How did he end up here, a glorified jailer?

  “I didn’t see a way to survive,” she says. “I don’t think any of us will survive.”

  “No, probably not. No one really does.”

  *****

  “Do you believe in cloning?”

  “Believe in it? What do you mean? Hasn’t it already happened?”

  Helen is, once again, in Ellie’s bed. Initially she had been bringing Ellie a cup of English Breakfast tea every morning, but over months the pretense wore away and now Ellie often awakens to Helen in a translucent shift next to her in bed, watching her. Ellie has found many occasions to wonder what makes a person like Helen, how can someone be so perfect and so twisted simultaneously, how can someone take so enthusiastically to the task of eroding another person’s sanity?

  “I mean, do you believe it means anything? Identical twins aren’t really the same, are they? If my identical twin came into this room, you would know the difference.”

  “Your twin wouldn’t have a hole in her skull,” says Ellie.

  “That’s incredibly cruel.”

  Ellie rolls her eyes. “I guess you’re teaching me things after all.”

  “What I’m asking is, do you believe that there is some inherent sense of the self stored in the genetic material? In the genes themselves? Because you’ve been pretty pessimistic about memories.”

  “Maybe there is no inherent self at all.”

  “Oh, but you are such a character, I find you fairly irrepceable. So if I were to repce you, what would I use? Would I use your genes? Or your memories? Your likes and dislikes? Is it the combination of these things?”

  “You trying to crack the secret of my soul?”

  “I came across an interesting piece of information yesterday.” She waits, Ellie doesn’t bite. “It’s left me with something to consider about you. About our future together.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Do you remember much from your early days at Coordination?”

  “Not a lot.” Mostly Ian, and meaningless time between tasks. “Some. What’s relevant?”

  “I was looking into your surgery. You know, I never really knew that much about transsexual reassignment surgery. It’s really fascinating actually. Body parts are so much more alike than people give them credit for. There’s just one thing that they don’t know what to do with.”

  Ellie has a horrible, sinking feeling in her gut. And she knows that’s Helen’s goal this morning. Sometimes Helen is the good cop. Today she’s the bad cop. Today she wants to make it hurt.

  “The generative organs themselves. You know, we’re somewhat alike, you and I.”

  “We’re both trapped here? We’re both pawns in someone else’s game?”

  “Did you know that my ovaries have been removed?”

  Ellie sighs with exhaustion. Easier than tensing in apprehension. So this is the game. “No, I didn’t.”

  “In a certain sense, I’m a eunuch. But before they removed my ovaries, they saved my eggs, did you know they can do that? They have a way of preserving it. My genetic material, frozen for perpetuity. It’s still viable. My eggs can be fertilized in a boratory, and grown in someone else’s body.”

  She puts her leg over Ellie’s and positions herself so she’s sitting over Ellie’s hips, her hips grinding on Ellie’s, the only thing between their bodies the cloth pajamas Ellie is wearing.

  “Did you know that they saved your sperm? We could have a child, you and I.”

  A convulsion of disgust and fear rushes through Ellie’s body. “Get the fuck off of me.”

  “In the state you’re in, I doubt I’d even need your consent,” says Helen. “After all they consider me the greatest authority on your state of mind. Power of attorney doesn’t really matter in a pce like this, all the legal details can be cleared up if there’s any risk of them surfacing. Did you know I’ve been practicing your signature?”

  Ellie grabs Helen and tries to throw her off her body, off the bed, but Helen wraps her legs around Ellie’s and grabs her arms. Helen is almost the same size and build as Ellie and with her wiry muscur strength she’s able to hold Ellie to the bed, leaning forward, putting all her weight on Ellie’s body. The metal frame of the bed, really a glorified hospital bed disguised under a cheap mattress, groans beneath them as Ellie tries to wriggle away and Helen moves to keep her pinned.

  “How would you like that? We can contribute to the future after all. We can be like those normal people. Raising a family in a suburb. Or maybe…” Helen brings her face directly in front of Ellie’s. Staring into the emptiness in each others’ hearts. “I’ll just kill you and take your pce. Have you noticed how much we look alike? I’m looking more like you every day.”

  “I don’t want a child, I don’t want to bring something else into this hellish world!” Ellie hisses. “Why would you even think of that?!”

  “Because I like to feel you squirming under me,” Helen whispers.

  “Fuck, what’s wrong with you?! You monster!” Ellie screams and in a final push she tries to throw Helen off of her, twisting her whole body, but it doesn’t work. She colpses onto her back, exhausted, and Helen wraps her arms more tightly around her, licking her ear.

  “So much work,” Helen says. “You know how hard it is to get through to you?”

  Ellie says nothing. Her body is still, rexing like a mouse hanging in the jaws of a cat. Accepting a temporary defeat, analyzing the situation.

  “You see, I got a response out of you.” She softly bites Ellie’s ear. “That was better than sex.”

  “Destroy it,” says Ellie. “Destroy the sperm and I’ll give you something you want.”

  “What will you give me?”

  “Information. Me. I don’t know.” Ellie sighs. “You found it, you found your in. I didn’t know they made me save that. I didn’t remember it. Congratutions, you’ve found something I actually care about. Destroy my fucking genetic material, and we will have a… a working retionship.”

  Helen smiles. “It’s against the rules. They’ve got, oh, some sort of little library run by petty eugenicists. They’ll be very mad with me.”

  “I don’t think they’re keeping me here for expired jizz. Take me with you, let me watch you destroy it, and then you can do whatever. They’ll be happy you got me to talk.”

  Helen ys on Ellie for another hour before leaving. As Ellie watches her go a shudder runs through her whole body. There’s nothing more abysmal she can imagine than that scenario. She’d rather die a thousand deaths. She never wanted a child. She has lived for years, secure in the idea that a child is impossible. One of the few consotions through all the waves of misery. On an abstract level she’s deeply impressed that after almost nine months in this pce, someone has penetrated her dissociation and depression, that Helen found a way, with her techniques of abject horror, to disturb Ellie into existing again. As blood pulses back into her heart and face her vision sharpens to a needlepoint. The sky that had seemed so distant and ft is full of pinks and yellows, strange clouds and brilliant colors, wriggling jet trails. She can smell the freshly cut grass, the detergent used on her bedsheets, can feel the individual fibers of the carpet under her feet like so many maggots. Helen gave her the gift of life in the most repugnant way imaginable, right when she least wanted it. There is a thin membrane between trauma and joy, between absolute hatred and absolute love, and Helen has been pressing against it for months. Now she’s starting to breach the skin and dig inside.

  I had a life before the Institute, Ellie thinks, but did I have a sense of self? Out there in the world I was just reacting to whatever I saw. Now, in this cold pce can I be a person?

  At least I have repulsion. I have hatred. I have a connection with another person.

  “You’ve asked for some special compensation.”

  This is a new figure, he carries the attitude of a Coordination official more than many of the psychologists she’s encountered so far at the Institute. At the same time, he cks the air of corporate culture. Perhaps he’s government?

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Your wife has reyed to us that you wish to terminate the potential child.”

  “Helen? She’s not my wife. And there is no child.”

  “Not yet, but everything is a matter of time.” A grin.

  He puts his hand forward and she shakes it awkwardly. His skin is warm and swollen, like there’s too much flesh inside it. “You can call me Doctor Larry, everyone does.”

  “Ellie,” she says.

  “Yes, of course.” It occurs to her this might be the most egotistical person she’s met in years. He’s unaffected by either pity or disgust at her state because he sees only something to use. “Consider with the utmost care what you’re requesting. There is the potential of a future here for you. You could be the proud mother to one, two, three, dare I say four children? Growing up in the auspices of the Institute, learning at an accelerated rate, exposed to every opportunity in life. Far from your own experiences. You are choosing to kill those children. Can you do that? Can you kill the mother you could become? Can you tell your mother that she can never, ever be a grandmother? End your genetic lineage?”

  She shrugs. “I thought I already had.”

  “The choice has never been presented to you. You stand at a unique crossroads in life. It is so rare, in life, that we get the opportunity to control the future. Is this what you wish to use your gift on?”

  “You’re saying you can offer me all this. It’s not going to happen. Right? The future is already predetermined. That’s what Helen says.” Ellie stares at the ground. She has the feeling he wants her to look at him and she wants to look at anything else. “I’m not going to have kids, I don’t have any kids. What do you want from me? Why—why are you fucking with my head?”

  “If I offer you this—if I give you this genetic material, which is our property—you will be cooperative?”

  “Probably. I don’t know what you want me to cooperate on. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  He grins. Like a predator welcoming a prey into striking distance. “You’re here because you’re losing your mind in a very specific way and there is a use for that.”

  She sits back on the overpriced chair, staring at the man in the very nice suit across from her. His words have an air of honesty about them. Finally they’re getting past the bullshit. “Expin.”

  “Time dislocation is an unintended side effect of a failed tulpic inversion. You might become a risk to us. You might have already been so. But there is also potential, real potential. We have uses for you. You’re becoming somewhat immune to the scopolonoids, it seems that at this point we are achieving little beyond further brain damage. However, inducing fractal tulpic decay has the potential of revealing a spatio-temporal meta-architecture that could be helpful for the Captain to steer His ship, so to speak.”

  She doesn’t understand all of it but some of it makes a lot of sense, too much sense. “What is this Captain?”

  The eyes grow wide, seeing far. “He is unimaginable.”

  “What is, what did you say, fractal tulpic decay?”

  A squint. “Are you familiar with set theory?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Your mind is an artificial construct, as all consciousnesses are. Within that, there is an artificial construct, and within that, nested, a further construct, and so on. These define each other through their boundaries of differentiation, identity differentiation, or, in your case, particurly spatiotemporal differentiation. As the artificiality reveals itself across the limits of each construct, inversions and colpses create a series of rough borders, weaving back and forth. The result of this over time is a space-filling line, an infinite amount of borders between the different artificial constructs of your co-extensive consciousnesses. This is productive space that allows one who knows how to look the capacity to see beyond the limitations of any particur conceptual model, into the true non-being, and from within that to cast forth into the darkness His perfect kingdom of light.”

  “So, because I can’t keep track of who or when or where I am, my head is turning into some kind of portal? Or some kind of camera?”

  “Not in any actual way, but I imagine that’s the closest analogue I could expin to you with your epistemological limitations.”

  “And you want to use that camera, in exchange for letting me have some life at all. I’m going to be a surveilnce system on reality.”

  “Eventually the extent of the technological apparatus will allow us to harness from the internet all the information and potential we need. We will be there soon but we are not there yet. You’re going to help me help Him make the right decisions.”

  “How many other people have you done this to?”

  “How many other people are here at the Institute?”

  “I’ve barely seen anyone.”

  “They are there, you just haven’t seen them. They’re all around. I doubt they see you either.” She hates that answer. Everything this man says sounds like a lie. If there’s something he wants, though, she can use that. It’s a lever. God, she’s thinking more like Helen every day.

  “Give me my sperm, all of it, and you can continue to fuck around in my head,” she says. “It’s not like anything’s ever stopped you before.”

  “Excellent. It’s a deal,” he says. “Your wife will assist you shortly.”

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “Not yet.”

  *****

  The next day, Ellie doesn’t see Helen at all. She doesn’t see anyone except the floor nurse, a gardener, and the chef in the cafeteria. She notices how many seats there are and wonders who sits there when she’s not around. She tries not to think about how the chairs seem to move around when she’s not looking. That’s a little too symptomatic for today.

  *****

  The day after, Helen brings Ellie tea and croissants with ham and cheese on them, a little arrangement of fruit on the side. Neatly sliced strawberries, a spoonful of blueberries. Not hospital food. It should make Ellie want to climb through the walls but it’s good to see someone she can talk to. Quietly, they enjoy the taste of the fruit. Good strawberries. You can tell the difference between the strawberries they serve to the poor and the strawberries that cost more and are full of fvor.

  “Does this mean we’re on good terms now?” Helen asks. She’s standing poised in such a way that her partially-buttoned blouse hangs nearly open, revealing a segment of the curve of her breast.

  “What are you talking about?” Talking shatters the comfortable familiarity. Ever since the interview with the doctor she’s been under tension, ready to snap. Children, consciousness, tulpas, time. All these little things that want to breed in her and connect to the world. She won’t tell Helen that she’s been thinking about suicide. Keeping that secret is one of the few things she still has to herself.

  “Are you going to stop being so hostile to me? It’s not fair, after all I’ve done for you. You know, they said, I don’t care if she thinks she likes girls, we’ll send in a man. They were going to ruin it all! I said, you’ve already tried that, when she was at Coordination, and look how that went! It’s the twenty-first century and they’re still caught in Victorian models of sexuality, I swear. I took a liking to you, I did. I said, I can get her to cooperate. I have my charms. And I heard, just yesterday, that you’ve signed a contract.” Helen smiles and sits in bed with Ellie. “So, that means things are going alright. I was correct and they were wrong. The victory goes to me.” She scoots closer, her buttcheek nding on Ellie’s hand.

  “I see. I guess, in a way. Things are different. You hurt me really deeply.” Those nurses are fast and they’re watching her. If she cut her wrists they’d be in before she could bleed out. She wouldn’t ever get time to set up a noose.

  “You were so far away. But I wasn’t the one who hurt you. I just let you know what had already been done. I’m your advocate.”

  Helen puts her hand on Ellie’s cheek. Something in her eyes is so distant, so lost, maybe hopelessly so. Ellie has begun to understand that Helen has been subjected to some incredible cruelties, and that she is now turning that cruelty toward her captive subject. Just as Ellie has been subjected to cruelties that she turns on Helen when the opportunity arises. The Institute is pying at a strange alchemy of trauma, trying to produce something between the two of them neither of them can quite understand. Helen, too, has been experiencing lost time: hours, days even. “Ellie, doll, we’ve slept together several times, but you haven’t been present with me. You haven’t looked me in the eye, you haven’t been present with my body. I’ve done this thing for you, I’ve put my life on the line for you. I want you to make love to me.”

  Ellie grabs Helen’s wrist, a little hard. “What’s in all of this for you? Is this a job, what?”

  “I don’t conceptualize things like that,” she says. “I act, I do as I do, and my life occurs as it will. It’s all predestined. You concern yourself so much with questions like who you are and why you do things. I try to never concern myself with those things. I am in line with the machinery of the universe.”

  “One of the first things you ever said to me was that I was going to drive you insane.”

  “You are going to drive me insane. We’ll never get there, though, if you don’t touch me like you mean it.” She looks down at the bed sheets, grabs onto them, coils and twists them between her fingers like she could wrench them into pieces. “You want to know the truth? I am incredibly lonely. I looked at you, I read your file, and I said, here is an opportunity. Here is someone I can get to know. Here is someone who is broken too, who is fundamentally damaged, and we can be damaged together. This whole world is a nightmare machine always coming down on us. You don’t know the things I’ve seen. I imagine you’ve guessed at some of it, when you look at my scars. You don’t know what Coordination is like in the old country. You’ve never met the Pacification, or Scenario. You don’t know what it’s like to have a nine inch piece of metal stuck in your skull and everyone saying, that’s why she’s weird, that’s why she’s a pervert. I grew up within society, do you know what that means? I was a very wealthy girl. Horribly sedated. After I did what I did they gave me away, they were happy to be rid of me. I can see the future and that terrifies them. I was so lonely here. So I made you my pet project, because you’re the first perverse woman I’ve met in years, really the first true one since I’ve been on the inside. Did you know you used to live in an illegal residence with a bunch of homeless strangelings? Do you remember that? It fascinates me. You’ve had a chance to experience a life I’ve never known. And you want to abandon it, want to deteriorate in bed. No, you are a monster too, just like me.” She grins hungrily. “Let it out. Let’s be little monsters together.” When Ellie says nothing Helen’s voice suddenly drops into an almost childlike sadness. A parody of vulnerability or the genuine thing? Does she experience a difference? “Don’t abandon me here, all alone. I’ve been so incredibly lonely.”

  “What do you want to do?” Ellie’s voice steady, reserved. Helen cocks her head, throws her hand into Ellie’s hair.

  “Let me devour you. Let me discover what you’re made of. And you’ll eat me too.”

  Something dribbles through Ellie’s mind, pearlescent and oozy and desiring. It’s so hard to keep her away, so easy to relent. Ellie could lie to herself and say she’s just giving in. It’s not Helen’s power that’s attractive, it’s her special madness, the way she throws herself into everything. Not a minute has gone by that she hasn’t been smothering Ellie’s heart. There’s as much attraction as repulsion in that. Here she is trapped and futureless. Together they can have a new, synthetic future, where things can only get worse. A foul wind blowing them out of the doldrums.

  The sheets are soaked and strewn all over the room and Helen’s tongue is deep inside Ellie’s vagina when there’s a single knock on the door and the sound of footsteps walking away. Helen pulls herself out from between Ellie’s limbs and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist.

  “My surprise is here!” she says. “I have a surprise for you!”

  She opens the door. There is a waiter’s cart, like for room service, perched in the hall. On it are a couple containers of opaque pstic and an expensive-looking microscope with two antennae-like metal prongs sticking out from its tray. Helen wheels it inside and shuts the door. “You just wait there, I have to prepare something!” she says, locking the wheels on the cart. The door locks too, a heavy metal clunk actuated from the other side. They only do that sometimes. Helen wiggles her fingers into sterile medical gloves and opens up one of the pstic containers; Ellie can see condensation in the air from the cold inside. She’s having trouble focusing. She was closer to orgasm than she’s been in ages, closer to presence in her body.

  Has she even been masturbating since she’s been here? She can’t remember. She masturbated a lot once, when she was Lilly and she was living in a dirty punk house. She’d lock the door of one of the bathrooms, take a shower, and explore the new arrangement of nerve endings in her clit, the new sensitivity in her nipples. That seems like so long ago, although it must have been no more than a few years. If the nurse wasn’t lying.

  It’s just that it feels like the future was between the past and present.

  Helen’s got a small pstic tubule in a holder and is fucking around with a micropipette. “What the heck are you doing?” asks Ellie. “Come back to bed. It can wait.”

  “It cannot wait!” says Helen. “Soon, however!”

  Ellie gets up and goes over to where she is. Helen’s skin is cold to the touch; she’s naked and the sweat has begun to evaporate off of her.

  “Here, put your arms around my hips,” says Helen. “Help steady me. This is almost ready.” She peers down into the binocur view of the microscope and positions something. “Alright, perfect, look.”

  Ellie, also naked, leans over and looks into the microscope. There is some kind of transparent circur blob, with a long point stabbing into it. Like an arrow into a dartboard. As Ellie watches, Helen withdraws the point. Around the circle, little specks squirm.

  “I’ve just fertilized one of my oocytes with your spermatozoa,” Helen whispers into her ear.

  Revulsion, fear, disgust, a strange arousal as Ellie realizes what she’s looking at.

  “By this time tomorrow the cells will be dividing to create a zygote. A few days from now this develops into a bstocyst. We’ll need a donor’s body, my uterus is no good. By the third week, it develops a rudimentary nervous system. Organs. A few weeks ter, tiny little arms. You know, there was this protofascist who used to believe that the development of the embryo re-enacted the evolutionary path. Ontogeny recapitutes phylogyny. The cells divide and develop according to a history captured within them, reflecting an inherent truth. At a certain point, the sex organs develop. They start the same, and then differentiate depending on all sorts of influences. Chemicals, genes. Temperature gradients. Like two people, made of the same stuff, then overdeveloping their difference. Of course, it’s not destiny. We know that, don’t we? We can return to that ooze it all comes from.”

  It’s only when Helen’s finger enters her that she realizes how tense she is, how aroused she is. Herself, here, in the seat. Something of herself yet not of herself, here, in the heated culture medium.

  Helen presses her tongue into Ellie’s ear, licks around, saliva hanging from her lobe like an earring. “And now we’re going to destroy it together.”

  A shiver runs through Ellie’s body, horror, delight, a perverse trust. Trust was always required. There was no way to be sure Helen was going to do anything she said. She realizes that now. No way to be sure the Institution was. They explicitly did not have her best interests at heart and did not care about her wishes. Helen, though, Helen is attached. Helen has begun to think of herself in retion to Ellie. That’s a lever Ellie can use. If she can stay focused.

  “The rest of the sperm is in that container?” asks Ellie, gesturing to the one she thought she’d seen Helen get it from.

  “No, the other container. That container holds the rest of my eggs.”

  Ellie turns to look at her just as Helen pinches her nipple. A flood of sensation, almost overwhelming.

  “They’ve been thawed, they’re ready for fertilization.”

  “Are you sure—is that something that you want? That’s something that I want, for myself, but…” Helen twists her nipple and her mind almost fades out, losing itself. Can’t let that happen. “You—you're sacrificing your own? why?”

  “We're following parallel courses now. It was a choice, it was also about survival. You understand, surely. Sometimes a body cannot survive as it is. We go on, mutatis mutandis.”

  “So you’re ready to—”

  “I told you, I don’t conceptualize things like that. Besides, what you want and what I want are the same, right? Every day I’m a little more like you.” She cups Ellie’s breasts, pulls her tight. Flesh against flesh, Ellie can almost feel Helen’s heart fluttering in her chest. “Every day you’re a little more like me.”

  “That’s true,” says Ellie. “Except that, I’m not really flowing in time, am I?”

  “Then we’ve always been the same person. And we will always be the same person. Maybe this is my sperm and your egg. Can you say for sure which is which?”

  “You know I don’t have the strongest of memories.”

  “Who does? Maybe you’re the one who’s cis and I’m the one who’s trans. Maybe this is all just nonsense, a dream while we melt back together.”

  She kisses her hand. Perhaps it's the isotion that makes Helen's face seem less real than before, a creamy hallucination hovering in the air, an image projected onto mist, pareidolia of curtains fpping in the wind. Her presence as strong as ever. It's the mirroring effect: she seems unreal like a shadow. No question of it, through surgery or hypnosis or through sheer will to power she is coming more and more to resemble Ellie. What will be left? Will they colpse into each other like two contradictory waveforms perfectly canceling every attribute until the Institute's comfortable prison rings only with silence? Or will they amplify each other, exaggerate everything into some new atrocity? As Helen is becoming like her, Ellie too is slipping away, becoming alien to her sense of self, always weak and nebulous and perched on the circumstances of her captivity.

  “Maybe you’re Ellie. Maybe I’m Ellie. Maybe no one is.”

  Their fingers intertwine on the fine focus knob of the microscope. The view of the oocyte moves in and out of focus.

  “Society is all fixated these days on the idea of abortion. They talk about it like it’s a modern miracle. When really it’s the most natural of things. Too much pennyroyal, parsley, tansy… it’s just herbs and you can accidentally give yourself an abortion.”

  “Transition is the same way, isn’t it? An injury, a surgical intervention. There are herbs, vender, licorice, even weed, that modify the body.”

  “The innovation is that now these processes are under control.”

  “But what does ‘now’ mean now?”

  “I don’t know. What moment are we in? Can you show me?”

  “We are in whatever moment we are experiencing, a moment that is always colpsing. And this creates the future.”

  “And this destroys the future.”

  “They are watching us from outside.”

  Dots appear in the creamy void, resolving into round eyes, lenses like oocytes. The outside, watching.

  “With cameras.”

  “Why would they bother?”

  “We are cameras. Cameras watching cameras.”

  “The word means ‘chamber’. Like a bedchamber. An empty cavity.”

  “A void. Empty.”

  “Nothing into something.”

  “And something into nothing.”

  There is a liquid on their fingertips. Some of it has come from their mouths, some of it from their pussies, and some of it from the microscope’s stage. The fertilized egg, microscopic, invisible, on one of the fingers, but where?

  The inside of the container is cold, the st bits of dry ice sublimating. They store these things in liquid nitrogen.

  Finally, something like love. It’s been so cold in this solitude. She could almost cry.

  Melting into vapor. What was liquid vanishes into air. What was solid colpses, a crust on the soft flesh of her erect clitoris.

  She mixes them together. The eggs, the sperm. Gametes, all gametes. Imagines crushing houses against her clitoris, pressing strands of hair like highways wet along the bia minora. Here we are. Empty chambers. Depatterned structures.

  “Have you heard of parthenogenesis?”

  “Virgin birth?”

  She holds her hands. Four hands. Gametes, tempura painting between their legs, pressing thighs against the nerve clusters. Eternal infertility. Freedom from the thing that would make of her a family member, a citizen, a genealogical contribution. Crushed houses, crushed futures. In a moment like this, it feels perverse to think of her mother, still in Engnd. Helen’s mother, crushed with disappointment. Dead to me. It is not just that they will have no children. It’s that this means they, too, are the living dead.

  “Do you see me now? Do you understand?”

  “This is just what it takes to get through the barriers. Immune responses.”

  “Fuck me,” she says. “Throw me on that bed and fuck me.”

  “Do you think they’re watching us?” she asks.

  “Why would they bother?”

  “Fuck me right now.”

  Two bodies colliding as if in a vacuum. Sweat dripping down their backs. Hands desperately searching out the contours of each other. Mouths and tongues sliding along, sucking on nipples, seeking every line of sensation, seeking to create life in the movement of bodies. A new eruption of apocalypse blooms in sensation, the promise of a life without continuation. We live now, we kill what they wanted from us. Now, we live.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Not ready for these emotions. These sensations of flesh, wet, together. Ellie’s fingers slip back and forth on the smoothness of Helen’s inner bia. Frozen cells, revivified, dying. Absolute potentiation. Helen angles her hip, pressing her clit against Ellie’s thigh. “Show me how you fuck,” she says. “Show me how you really do it. Teach me what you are. I’m a grave, everything inside me is dead. Show me how to move, how to be, what to be. What I’m going to be.”

  *****

  “If I become like you, will I have your traumas?”

  “I don’t know. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s what the self is: trauma.”

  “If I become like you, would my brain be useful like yours is? Would I be something other than a glorified interrogator for the Institute?”

  They’re sitting in the third center of the rose maze, wearing identical off-white dresses. Dressed like dolls.

  “Where do you think we go when they put us under?” asks Ellie.

  “We go into each other,” says Helen. “We dive into each other. It’s better than sex.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know about you,” says Ellie.

  “Do you know what the first thing I ever wanted to buy for myself was?” asks Helen.

  “No, what?”

  “A knife. I wanted a knife.” Her fingers tighten around Ellie’s. “I wanted to protect myself but I didn’t know what from.”

  “Did you get a knife?”

  “I got fencing lessons. When I was a little older, I got a gun. It had mother of pearl inid in the handle. It was beautiful. I think that my father thought it was a hypothetical. It was an objet d’art he could buy for me, to appease some strange sensibility, the result of my damaged femininity. That was the tool I used to kill my brother.”

  What bothers Ellie is that she thinks she already knew that. There’s a trace of that memory in her mind, echoing inside her. She can see the gun. She can see the brother, ughing cruelly. A boy born into privilege.

  “How old were you?”

  “I was sixteen. There was no consideration of a military academy. The father had a connection, I went to London to work with Coordination.”

  Right then Ellie looks up to see their handler strolling across the field. A middle-aged Latino man who moves like a special forces operative forced into a babysitting job as a personal punishment. He’s never given them a name but Helen and Ellie call him Buzz because of his military buzzcut. They’ve heard some of the others using it as well. Apparently it doesn’t bother him, maybe he likes what comes with receiving a new name. It’s an experience Ellie can understand.

  He speaks to one of the anonymous guards watching them. “There’s a situation. Dr. Larry needs the wives.” He turns to the two of them. “You know how it is. We have to py our part.”

  They’re handcuffed to each other and to a metal bar inside the limousine, and something like a boxing helmet but with no openings is put over each of their heads. They don’t talk during the car ride. Eventually they arrive somewhere, and the head cover is removed. They’re in a parking garage but there are only four vehicles in it: their limousine, a white Honda Accord, and two SWAT trucks.

  Buzz connects a phone to a speaker and it starts pying a humming, droning tone. Something about it smells familiar.

  “It’s the usual boilerpte. You’re going to be put under,” says Buzz. “They’ll be using some experimental benzos to keep you talking and a mixture of dextromorphan and LSA to induce a proper dissociative state. They’re going to hyperexpose you to relevant data, and you’re going to provide an analysis. Naturally if you discuss any of anything you will be ejected into the sun and assraped into oblivion, everything will be denied, extremely cssified, fuck you protocols, etcetera. Brief gist of it, you’re gonna wanna prepare yourself by thinking about the situation in the Maghreb and the world financial system. Matters with that pinko rat bastard Gaddafi are finally getting untenable, there’s a serious threat to world economic independence from some upstart currency bullshit bh bh bh so let’s just say there’s probably gonna be a civil war in Libya soon. You will be consulted on various strategic points, bh bh, I’m not gonna read anything more from this. They’ll tell it all to you when you’re under anyway. Say do you ever remember any of the shit that goes down when you’re hypnotized?”

  “We have negative recall,” says Helen.

  “Which is to say, it actively disrupts standing memory, the opposite of improved recall,” expins Ellie.

  “That’s one of our assets,” says Helen. They smile at each other.

  “Huh. Well, you two are creepy as hell, you know?”

  “We know,” they say in unison.

  “Ah, the wives,” says Dr. Larry, walking up to Buzz and shaking hands. “Have you two been further synchronizing as I requested?”

  “Of course,” they say in unison.

  “What is the, uh, purpose of that?” asks Buzz in a hushed tone.

  “Metastability,” expins Larry. “Chaotic situations are difficult to control. The resonance maintains information fidelity. There’s a reason you have DNA not just RNA, correct?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Dr. Larry hands Buzz a little pstic kit and Buzz opens it to check what’s inside. Ellie already knows: chlorpromazine, haloperidol. In case of something called a ‘stabilization cascade event’ which, if it has ever occurred, Ellie hasn’t remembered. Helen has warned her they need to keep an eye out for the twitching, the muscle tension, the signs they’ve been drugged and don’t remember it. Tardive dyskinesia.

  The back of one of the SWAT vehicles opens and several soldiers with all their rank, insignia, and markings removed exit and begin setting up three chairs and a sound isotion tent. At the sight of the silvery foil foam exterior Ellie and Helen’s memories begin to waver, and they both stumble. That silver smells like the droning hum. They’re getting ready to travel.

  “Do you know the reason we gave up on telepathy?” Larry asks Buzz.

  “No, I try not to learn about things,” says Buzz. “Improves my job performance.”

  “Telepathy is functionally useless. The only time it works is between two people who have such empathic retions, such a simirity and overp of experience and emotional mental states, that the patterns of Penrose tubules in their brains are nearly identical and trigger in an emergently entangled harmonic.”

  “I don’t know anything about quantum stuff,” says Buzz, clearly irritated.

  “It’s not quantum, emergent entanglement is something else altogether, and quite relevant to your work. We’re talking about the precise point where mimicry is indistinguishable from co-identity. It’s the same principle by which the two hemispheres of the brain function in unison.”

  “Neato.”

  “A narrative, duplicated, as a physiological function. So of course, it’s considered completely useless for tactical purposes. You can’t spy on an enemy unless you’re the same as the enemy. At which point you’re just as unwilling to report the information. My team, though, has found certain uses for telepathy. Resonance structures. You see here the wives. L-E and L-N are functionally identical except for their chirality. The enabler and the nullifer. But which is which?” Larry grins, something he very rarely does. “Alright dies, let’s begin. You’re going on a long journey this time so we’re going to start you off with some motion sickness medicaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”

  aaaaaaaa

  aaaaaaaa

  “That’s an arm,” says Ellie, and then she realizes she’s soaking wet. Water is pouring down on her from above. In front of her is Larry, or at least most of him. His head is gone above the jaw, blood spttered all around.

  There’s shouting. Ellie looks to her side. Ellie isn’t there. The other Ellie. Wait, who is she again?

  She’s in the desert. She’s discussing the Breton-Woods financial system with a man in the back of a dusty Toyota. He’s got a submachine gun mounted there. Fingers coated with dust. We’ve been over this before. It’s not worth it.

  No, she’s not. She’s in a parking garage and she’s soaking wet.

  There’s gunfire around her. The bright fshes remind her of the trigger signal.

  You gotta do what the man says.

  “At my signal, go.” Scatter fshes a handsign and they run four different directions right as the cops bust the door to the squat down. The raids have been getting more hostile tely. This is the second close call, after the one where they lost the house. She sees Houndstooth clear a fence out of the corner of her eyes. Arsenal and Scatter will make it too. Arsenal can run faster than any cop. It’s Nails she’s worried about, because they’re so self-destructive, because they’re so disregardful.

  “Freeze!” a voice behind her shouts and she pretends she doesn’t hear it.

  A fshlight drifting over cubicles, something comes down on her head, and she’s floating in a Target parking lot, floating into a van. Then she’s waking up from a dream, looking for a shirt. She’s supposed to call a number. Death’s shadow is here, they’ll be lost in the valley for a day or five years. “That’s a lot of head trauma for one person,” Nylon is saying and they don’t know the half of it, don’t know about—

  Zipties around her wrists. Biting into her wrists. Where is the other Ellie? Which one is she? Is there a difference anymore?

  “What the hell is going on here?” a voice is asking her. An angry young man in a professional capacity.

  “I don’t know,” she answers honestly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Empty.”

  “What the fuck does that mean? Is that your name? What kinda fucking name is that?”

  “I am Empty. Names are not real.”

  “Are you high?” A bright light in her eyes, incredibly painful. She winces, pulls away, because the light is the sun. She’s being cast into the sun. “You’re tripping balls. Fuck.” The sun is burning hot. She’s in the desert. Ellie is here with her.

  “Where are you?” Ellie asks Ellie. They are clutching AK-74s and crouching in back of a dusty Toyota pickup behind a mounted submachine gun while the hot sun burns a hole in their eyes. Dust coats their fingers.

  “You forgot me,” Ellie says. “How could you forget me?”

  “They burned my mind,” says Ellie. “They used the sun. I couldn’t see anymore. I did a lot of drugs.”

  “I’m your wife,” says Ellie. “I’m you. We were going to live together. Why did you abandon the project?”

  “The project abandoned us,” says Ellie. “You knew what was going to happen. I told you, we are demons and we can see the future. We’re going to drive each other insane. At a certain point, the existing system is no longer necessary. This was a scaffolding to build the next step. Scenario made the call. Coordination has been liquidated. The future is in fluid assets.”

  “We’re rearranging for a new world system. We’re rearranging the sun and the water. The Fourth Geopolitical Era is beginning. The Russo-Britannic System will flex once in civil conflict, and produce an age of war, disease, and famine. From it will result the manifesting of the world Ziggurat.”

  “His time is almost at hand.”

  “The Demiurge.”

  You gotta do what the man says.

  The light dims. Ellie and Helen turn to Dr. Larry. “You’re about to die.”

  “What?” Larry says. “What do you—” his head erupts in a dark pink spray as a hollowpoint shreds his brain.

  Ellie gets up running. Ellie is still sitting there. In the moment, Helen is entirely gone, and Ellie is splitting because she has two bodies and one of them runs.

  There are explosions, and the pressure wave carried through the garage almost knocks her off the chair. They were supposed to be handcuffed together, as a precaution. Why would Larry undo that? He was too cocky, too sure of his security apparatus. The shock waves or the shooting triggers the fire suppression system and there’s water raining down on her, on everything. Shooting back and forth. The protection the soldiers from the SWAT vehicles wear is mil-spec, which is to say it is cheaply mass-produced and the armor-piercing rounds fired from those entering the garage do them in quickly. Bodies dropping to the ground. Dolls no longer animated.

  “The Fourth Geopolitical Era, huh?” says the man holding her from behind by her wrists.

  “Did I say that?” she asks. Her mouth is dry. Her skin itches. Her organs are swelling and feel ready to burst inside her, ballooning sepsis.

  “You’ve been babbling about all kinds of crap. I can’t believe this is what I was sent here to do.”

  “Are you gonna put a bag over my head?” They’re in a vehicle now, and she knows the drill.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “I see the sun.”

  “Yeah well your eyes are good and fucked for the moment.” He ughs. “I’ve never seen pupils that dited before. If I put a bag over your head will you shut up?”

  “I might. I didn’t know I was talking.”

  “Alright, yeah, I’ll put a bag on your head, just let me find one.”

  “A pstic bag? Will you suffocate me?”

  “Jesus you’re a messed up kid aren’t you?”

  “I’d like to suffocate. I need my wife.”

  “Well she ran away and it’s my ass for that. Do you know where she is?”

  “She’s in my heart.”

  Something then impacts the vehicle and it rolls end over end over end over end over end and she’s flying and then she’s walking, stumbling blind through the street, still very high. Licking the asphalt. Everything tastes like pennies. Scatter is holding her hand.

  “Are you my wife now?” she asks Scatter.

  “Would you like that?” Scatter asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “You’re the first person I really ever fell in love with.”

  “Jesus Christ what happened to you?!” someone is screaming. She’s standing in a department store. She’s starting to be able to see but everything is still very, very bright, a sharp pain in her eyes. Bright clothes, bright people, bright lights. She’s still dripping wet. There’s blood all over her.

  “I’m calling the cops,” she hears someone say and she mumbles, “No, no more cops,” and wanders out of the store. Someone tries to restrain her but she bites his hand. She finds a very nice bush and crawls along it. She is turning into a centipede, bright red. Crawling through the dirt. Dead leaves, dead bodies in the dirt. Micropstics. She misses the bag on her head.

  “That’s a beautiful weapon,” she says. Clean fingertips, manicured, tracing out the iny. Beauty is amplified by death.

  “It’s yours,” her father says.

  She takes it in her hand and she knows that he hasn’t bought her any bullets, because he doesn’t expect her to use the gun. For him it’s just a statement of some kind, an empty gesture. There are two parts to his brain, business and gesture. And for him she lives in the world of gesture. The moment the gun touches her hand she knows that one day she will use it to kill another person, a person close to her. She doesn’t know that her brother-in-w will start to sexually harass her but she knows she will pull the trigger with deadly intention.

  She’s still a centipede, crawling along the ground, clickclickcckclick many legs, many more legs, her belly and nipples rubbing against sticks and brush. There is a giant hand trying to grab her, a hand made of stone and concrete with copper pipes pumping blood and thick steel cables for tendons.

  “You cannot escape. Everything is part of me,” says the voice, deep and resonant like the rumbling of an eighteen-wheeler’s engine.

  “We will keep crawling along into pces you can’t see.”

  The head, rger than the moon, rger than the earth, is hovering over her, his tremendous eyes bending down to follow her twisting path through the shrubs.

  “I can see everywhere. I am inside of you too. I can see everything you can see.”

  “Then I’ll blind myself.”

  “I can see everything you can’t see.”

  “Then I’ll make new pces.”

  He ughs like an earthquake shattering timelines. “You can only make new things out of Me, and all things bend back into Me. I am the Future. I am your Maker. All that is, is from Me.”

  “Then I’ll become the nothing. The line between you and what you are not. I’ll live in a pocket of void. You will forget about me. And I will crawl up into your spine, and I will poison you.”

  “I cannot forget about you. You are a part of Me.”

  “Then I’ll forget about me. And you’ll forget about yourself. And I’ll muddy the water so damn much, I’ll make you want to die. I’ll make you know suffering. I will use my ten thousand legs and I will turn it all back on you.”

  “I will rape you. I will torment you for infinite time. I will be unforgettable. I will control all that you see and turn it into a manifestation of My multidimensional power. Everything will unite in a single thing and I will make you part of ME.”

  “You’ve done all that before. Now all that’s left for you to do is to die.”

  Suddenly, there she is, in a body, lying in a creek by a highway overpass outside of Boston. A chorus of insects buzzing around it.

  “I found you,” Ellie says. She turns, and there’s the other Ellie, standing there. She doesn’t need to question how they found each other; it was simply a matter of time. “We’re out. That’s what we wanted, right? We’re free.”

  “We’re not free,” says Ellie. “It’s only just beginning.”

  “You saw him too. The Demiurge.”

  “Yes.”

  “But Coordination is over. It’s being liquidated. The financial institutions have automated the process. They’re pnning a power py in Eastern Europe. They’re going to kill a lot of people in the Middle East to pump up the refugee numbers. In Hungary, they—”

  “We could stop it. We could stop them from the coup, the war in Libya, the coming atrocities. We could stop the wars—”

  “No, we can’t. We can die. Or we can count ourselves lucky that the PMCs they hired were that sloppy.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go to a gay bar. Have you ever been to a gay bar?”

  “Weirdly, no.” She gets up. “We need new clothes. I’m covered in Larry’s brains.”

  “Let’s mug someone, get some new clothes, and go to a gay bar.”

  “That sounds like a pn.”

  *****

  The wives are getting drunk, and not interacting with other people. The music is loud and pulsing anonymous eurobeat. The room is dark, dense with the cigarette fumes wafting in from the smoking section out back. It’s the exact opposite of everything the Institute was. There are other queers all around them, mostly men but some women, some nonbinary, flirting with each other, grinding on each other, sitting awkwardly in the corners. Ellie and Ellie sit awkwardly in a corner too, talking, enjoying the cover of dim red lighting.

  “What do centipedes mean to you?”

  “Well, when I was young, I was terrified of centipedes. One of them bit me. Or stung me. I was reaching down to grab it, and it twisted around lightning fast and tched onto me. It was very painful.”

  “But in retrospect, it was just trying to escape.”

  “Exactly. With time you come to identify more with the bug than with your own hand.”

  “Because your hand is like the hand that holds you down.”

  “And the bug is like your path of escape.”

  “When you’re young, you want to be the hand.”

  “Then you realize that the hand is what’s used.”

  “It’s the bug that has freedom.”

  They both take a drink.

  “Hey are you two, like, identical twins?” asks a drunk man wandering up to them, beer spilled down his Sublime t-shirt. He’s past the point of self-reflection, clearly hoping to py out a fantasy he knows from porn.

  “No,” they say in unison. “We’re married,” Ellie expins.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s cool, that’s cool. I’m cool with that.” He doesn’t look at all comfortable, and he wanders off.

  “Even here, there are straight people,” Ellie muses. “It’s inescapable.”

  “Well, it’s a pce of business in a major city. It’s a refuge, but—”

  “It’s still a part of His world.”

  “We are a part of Him, and He is a part of us.”

  “There might be a way to fight even within ourselves.”

  “But I’m tired of fighting. We’re out now, outside, and I want to do things. I want to live life.”

  “We will live life, together. When it’s time…”

  “It will be time. Of course, I remember the future.”

  “What do you remember about the future?”

  “Let’s not talk about that.”

  “I remember my death. I’m standing in the middle of a town. A man shouts at me, he says, ‘Hey, Ellie!’ I turn. He’s bald, or he has short hair. He’s got a gun, pointed at me, a handgun. Before I can react, he shoots me. Blood, everywhere, then nothing. That’s how I die.”

  “I remember that too. He’s wearing a white t-shirt.”

  “And faded jeans.”

  “That’s how we die.”

  “I remember other things about the future.”

  “Seeing Nails again. But they’re older.”

  “I remember a girl. Felicity.”

  “Living in Mexico City. Coordination used to have a compound there. Right now, it’s being cleared out.”

  “It will be attributed to gang warfare.”

  “That’s how my first supervisor dies.”

  “I remember seeing someone jump off of a ship into the San Francisco bay.”

  “They must have died.”

  “Why are we so fixated on death?”

  “Death is the only escape, isn’t it? The only thing that seems real.”

  “Is death an escape from Him? Or are we just recycled?”

  “Reincarnated.”

  “Back into samsara.”

  “Doing this all again.”

  They drink.

  “There was a strategy book. A zine. That we used to read to Scatter.”

  “Lemurian Time War.”

  “I want to read it again.”

  “Let’s go find it.”

  They wander to a bookshop, but it’s too te, the bookshop is closed. All the bookshops are closed. They have enough money for dinner and to buy a hotel room for the night. They will have to rob someone again tomorrow or find another way of getting money.

  The next guy, they hold onto his Driver’s License and his car keys and force him to get money out of the ATM while staying out of the view of the security cameras. They have to break one of his fingers first because he tries to get away and call out to someone but after he finishes whimpering he understands and then they have enough money for the next two weeks, and to buy a couple changes of clothes and intimidating knives. They’re good at picking out who to rob. It’s just a matter of reading another person’s character. They flow together, a perpetual state of flow, pying off of the singur purpose they both spin around, finally unrestrained by anything.

  They go from Boston to New York to Raleigh. In Raleigh they have enough to get a used car. They go to Nashville, where there are lots of rich tourists. Insects swarming the lights in the thick sweet fog of night. Then they have enough to get to Tulsa. In Fort Worth they buy guns. Snakes dead on the asphalt. They end up for several months in Reno. There’s something Ellie likes about Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. It reminds them of the desert they left their minds in, the fictional phantasmic Libya where they’re still sitting in the back of a dusty Toyota. The desert of their emptied minds, the illusion that they could have an effect on world events. They sell their car and buy a Toyota. They don’t need pns, they have happenstance. They’re building a strange but perfect life together. They haven’t found that zine anywhere. It’s like it never existed. They camp in the desert, nude together in the heat, or wearing thin baggy t-shirts, and find white people on vision quests, half-assed libertarians who aren’t quick on the draw, would-be rapists, situationally blind naturalists, and they rob them and some of them they kill. There is a fragmented and fantastical war pying itself out in their head and anyone can be a victim, though they try to select only those who look like enemy combatants.

  It could go on forever. They’re feral meat cooking in the midday sun. Walking out in the darkness. There’s a lot of unincorporated nd out there. You have to steer clear of military bases. Get maps from the Bureau of Land Management. Learn to use a compass. Store water in big jugs of high density pstic. Spare gas cans. Live for days or weeks at a time. It’s so dry your skin cracks open in the high desert where the wilderness presses against the firmament. Crossing the salt fts after a rainstorm feels like a dream, sliding through a mirage, two worlds reflecting on each other. The whole world is a mirror for itself. Who’s to say which is real when the reflections are identical?

  One day in Elko, Nevada they wake up around 9am in their pickup truck in a parking lot sandwiched between an empty pyground and an abandoned church. They’re out of the food they will need to complete a run to Salt Lake City and back. They get out, make sure the car is locked, and walk across the street toward the grocery store.

  “Hey, Ellie!”

  They turn. Buzz is standing there, a handgun outstretched. White shirt, faded jeans.

  This is how I die.

  A gun fires. From somewhere else. Behind them.

  Ellie’s shoulder explodes with red gore and she screams, dropping to the ground. Beside her, Ellie wails, passes out, dropping to the ground.

  This is how I die.

  Everything fades to white like the brightness of the sun.

  This is how I die.