Zanesville: A Novel Read online

  When at last the spinning stopped, the bodies and the faces had stabilized, and standing over him was a large black woman who, as his eyes began to focus, he came to see was in fact a man, wearing makeup, an aqua wig, and a long African-style robe over sheepskin boots from which a Beretta Cheetah was just visible.

  “We’ve given you some ZENO,” the vision informed him. “Try not to move fast.”

  He was lying in a tent on an old cot. Candles glowed. Through a gelpane window he could see people passing between radomes and tepees. He heard an accordion and smelled marsala. Sparks rose from oil drums.

  “Yo,” a voice behind him said, and he saw it was the tape-mailed figure who’d found him minus the night-vision helmet—a Puerto Rican girl of about sixteen with a pigskin face graft that suggested a dark market burn ward.

  “Who are you?” the large black woman/man asked.

  He tried to focus. He couldn’t get over his long blond hair. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and yet for all the hardness of muscle, his skin was smooth. Except for the terrible burning he felt now on his back. That’s what made me black out, he realized. Pain. Pain from the skin of my back. There was something there but he couldn’t bring himself to think of it. Voices rustled in his brain . . . Last hope . . . Psyche War . . . beneath the sadness of a blues guitar drifting in on the night wind from somewhere far away—or deeper inside himself.

  “Do you know who you are?” the large black woman/man repeated, but he couldn’t answer. Who were these people and what did they want? Where had he been going when he fell out of the whirlwind?

  To meet someone, he thought. To find someone. There’s somewhere I have to be. There’s someone I have to be.

  “That’s all right,” the dark-skinned giant said. “Let’s start with where you are. You’re in New York City. In a part of Central Park that no one but us knows exists. We call it Fort Thoreau. It’s a kind of sanctuary. We refer to ourselves as the Satyagrahi, and I’m Aretha Nightingale.”

  So saying, the speaker brought over a psykter of purified water and poured a cup for him, carefully considering the man’s white-blond hair and tomorrow-staring eyes. There was something intriguingly familiar and at the same time deeply foreign about this night visitor. He was of average height and certainly less than average weight, but he radiated a presence that filled the tent.

  The man drank some water and said, “You’re a—”

  “A drag queen? That’s right, honey, I am!”

  In fact the speaker looked like a former linebacker trying very hard to imitate some forgotten disco singer like Donna Summer.

  “Used to be a lawyer. Lead counsel for the largest insurance company in the world. Lived a few blocks away. Of course I had to keep my private life secret. Then one day I saw I had to get out of the limo and back behind the mule. But that’s another story. That’s my story. Tinkerbell says the Securitors let you skiddo.”

  “Who’s Tinkerbell?’

  “Me.” The PR girl winked, laser-edging a frozen-forged Gerber blade.

  “Is someone after you?” Aretha asked, noticing again how long and blond the odd man’s hair was, how outwardly strained and yet internally resilient he appeared.

  “I don’t know . . . I can’t . . .”

  Aretha picked up a detector and ran it over him. The device recorded an electromagnetic disturbance of an unknown kind.

  “So do you have any idea who you are?”

  “N-no. I . . . don’t . . . ,” the man said, staring around at the walls of the tent, which he saw through the gloom were decorated with chintzy Chinese fans, kimonos, and ostrich feathers.

  “And you don’t know how you got here?” Aretha prodded.

  The blond man thought for a minute. Beyond the crazy idea of falling out of a whirlwind all he remembered was staring at the syringes in the fountain and then being seized with a scorching pain across his back. “No,” he said finally. “I only remember the things on horses.”

  “We’re going to give you a bioscan,” Aretha announced. “The psychometer that Tink had shorted out on you. You had a brainwave reading that we’ve never seen before. Makes Saint Anthony’s Syndrome and Pandora withdrawal look like an attack of the jitters. Is there anything else that comes to mind . . . right this minute?”

  “A song,” the blond man replied, trying to focus. “I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road . . . searching in the sun for another overload . . . I hear you singing in the wires . . . I can hear you through the whine . . . and the Wichita Lineman . . . is still on the line!”

  There was a moment of silence, then into the tent charged a thin young man with tall straight spines of hair. “What in hell was that?”

  “What happened?” Aretha asked, coming alive with a jolt. “Where did you come from, Broadband?”

  “That was a full-force jam!” the young man announced. “Almost blew Heimdall’s signal guard on the entire compound!”

  “Did you do something?” Aretha asked the man with the long blond hair.

  “I sang . . . a bit of a song,” he answered.

  “Did you hear him, Tink?”

  “No.” The burned girl shrugged, sheathing her knife. “Must be trippin’.”

  “Well, whatever it was, don’t do it again,” Broadband pleaded. “We can’t do a shakedown tonight.”

  “All right, Broadband.” Aretha nodded. “We’re cool, here.”

  The kid with the spiky hair stomped out and Tinkerbell followed, baffled.

  “Well!” said Aretha, applying more lipstick. “That puts a whole new light on things. You may not know who you are, but I’d bet my wig that some interesting people do. Y’all wouldn’t mine stripping down, would you, honey?”

  “Why?” the man demanded, and Aretha caught the coiled-to-strike glitter of adrenal cortex.

  “Because we’ve got a lot at stake here,” the drag queen snapped, pressing the STRESS button to alert Flip Flop and Tolstoy. “This isn’t a health resort, it’s the last resort for a lot of people. Now strip down and let me look you over.”

  The blond man got up from the cot and yanked off his clothes. The skin of his back ached. Seconds later he was naked, facing Aretha, whose mouth was open wide.

  Tinkerbell burst back into the tent carrying supplies. “Ooh, shit!” the girl cried, gawking and covering her eyes at the same time. “That’s—”

  “Way too much of a good thing,” Aretha finished for her. “And I think we should leave it right there. Now turn around, baby, and let me see what other surprises you’ve got. You sure could use a sleeve for that one!”

  He pivoted slowly, but even so, he felt his penis flop against his lower thigh with a meatiness that revolted him. My God, he thought, looking down. I’m some sort of freak. How can my own body feel so alien?

  Then Aretha saw the scarring on his back. “Jesus . . . that’s . . . !”

  “Painful,” the blond man said.

  “But it—it’s old!” Aretha cried, looking closer. “Do you know what it says?”

  “FATHER FORGIVE THEM F . . . It’s the third F that hurts the most.”

  He could see the letters burning in the air before him, clearer and sharper than the words he’d seen in the sky.

  “Shit!” exhaled the drag queen. “I want to run some medical tests on you—and then for you to consult Dr. Zumwohl.”

  Aretha handed him a clean Lucron tracksuit and a faded Fordham University sweatshirt and they left him alone to dress. After he’d pulled on the tracksuit and sweatshirt another teenage girl came into the tent. Her face was painted in a tribal fashion and seemed to sparkle.

  “My name is Ouija,” she said. “Have something to eat.”

  His head throbbed. She produced an unmarked tin of food. When she opened the lid, he saw tiny hammerhead sharks, perfectly proportioned and densely packed. He picked one out and swallowed it whole. It had a savory, oily taste and made him thirsty. He ate several more with krispbread and had another gulp of water.


  He kept hearing voices in his head. One was like a talkback radio personality. The others were vague and friendly, like old people telling stories on a porch, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He plucked a couple more hammerheads out of the tin and devoured them. Aretha returned and led him through the door of the tent.

  The scene outside resembled an army field hospital set up in the middle of a gathering of religious pilgrims and a derelict carnival. The darkness was disrupted by torches, campfires and garish neon signs in the shapes of martini glasses, dancing girls and blinking sombreros. Pole-mounted solar modules rose above tents and rigifoam Quonset huts, although there were other more permanent structures, including an IRT train car and a series of ferroconcrete pillboxes, some covered with hubcaps and pizza pans, all laced with cables and wires from which dangled paper lanterns, inflatable Statues of Liberty, and stuffed King Kongs. People of all ages and colors regarded him curiously, peering up from simmering pots of matzo ball soup or Brazilian black beans. Several had improvised prosthetics, baroque lobster arms or carbon fiber legs blinking with fairy lights.

  “GlimmerPoodle,” Aretha remarked, pointing to two muscled women, one bald and white, the other white-haired and black. “And that’s Framegrabber and Little Pigeon. Hey, Ten Beers—how’s that implant?”

  Some people Aretha introduced more ceremoniously, as if they were tribal elders—Yankee Boy and Lady Manhattan, a palsied Jewish couple in their nineties wearing New York Rangers jerseys—and an obese black man called Friar Tuck, who seemed intent on organizing a softball game. Other people leered out of the firelit dark with damaged faces and misshapen limbs. Babies cried.

  “Who are they?” the blond man asked, pointing to four straining men hitched to an old Central Park horse carriage loaded with Indian children.

  “They’re former McDonald’s board members. Penitents now. Took massive payouts when the Vitessa Cultporation turned McDonald’s into McTavish’s.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the uninvited guest said. His mind felt moist and blank, as if he belonged to another world.

  “I rather envy you if you’ve forgotten Vitessa, even for a moment,” Aretha said. “But it will come back to you. They’re the most powerful conglomerate in the world. A political party. A religion. What they don’t control they’re trying to—and we’re trying to fight them.”

  The blond man’s eyes picked out an Amazonian boy with a weeping facial sore. The child had a dead squirrel draped over his shoulder and held a blowgun fashioned from an aluminum tent pole. “You’re trying to fight them?” he asked.

  “Us. And others like us,” Aretha answered defensively. “You’ll remember all of this. McDonald’s was a powerful corporate organism once, but like Disney and Coca-Cola and Microsoft, it got blindsided by the Vitessa Cultporation, which on the whim of Wynn Fencer introduced McTavish’s in its place.”

  The names wrinkled up only shadows and whispers in his brain.

  “Fencer conquered cyberneering, genetainment, and neurotecture,” Aretha continued. “So he said, ‘Let’s take the world’s most uninspired cuisine and make it obsessively popular.’ Overnight the haggis replaced the hamburger.”

  “What’s a haggis?” the blond man asked, sucking in the scene with his eyes. The chicken coops and intensive garden terraces—miniature rice paddies constructed from tanks and troughs.

  “It’s a sheep stomach, honey. With your choice of filling.”

  “That sounds disgusting!”

  “A demonstration of power.”

  “And who’s that lady?” the stranger queried, pointing to a graying woman in a vampire-black robe struggling under a yoke of heavy buckets. Being near these people seemed to ease the searing pain in his back.

  “Beulah Schwartzchild, the Supreme Court Justice and World Court Representative who cast the deciding vote that allowed Vitessa to unify their subsidiaries to become what they are today.”

  “What’s she lugging? Why doesn’t someone help her?”

  “She’s a garbage collector and she works alone. By her own choosing she works—always wearing the judicial robe she disgraced.”

  The woman stumbled, the buckets slopping over. The blond man moved to help. Her clothes reeked. Her hair was matted and streaked with gray. Gently he raised her up and righted the stinking buckets.

  “That’s not done!” a man with a respirator gargled from a salt-eaten Winnebago.

  “I thought you said you helped people,” the blond man flashed, watching as the sad woman shouldered the yoke again and staggered off.

  “There are certain rules and ways here,” Aretha Nightingale replied. “Beulah gave up her wealth and position of her own accord. She’s free to go at any time.”

  “Where would she go?” the blond man asked as she disappeared between a dented pretzel wagon and a cannibalized Dodge Viper.

  Aretha wasn’t sure how to answer and was relieved when they arrived at a large military-style tent. Inside, a woman with long dark hair and very red lips greeted them. High up on her exposed left breast was a tattoo of the Mandelbrot Set.

  “This is Natassia,” the head of the Satyagrahi announced.

  The interior of the polymer shell was devoted to a formidable computer apparatus and a collection of what appeared to be medical imaging equipment. Everything was scientifically pristine except for one shelf on which sat a lilac-colored latex vibrator and a half-empty bottle of Brandy and Benedictine.

  “Let me see your hands,” Aretha directed.

  The man’s skin was remarkably smooth. One at a time, his hands were placed on an I-Dentiscanner. Next, the dark woman with the fiery lips wheeled over an Iriscanner and eased the man’s face into the positioning frame. Her skin gave off a piquant jalapeño fragrance. She noticed a profound swelling in his groin. “Just keep your eyes open and relax,” she said.

  “We’re also going to photoscan the scar on your back,” Aretha said.

  The skinny man called Broadband stuck his head in. Gamelan music wafted in through the slit. “You’re cool to run now.”

  “All right.” Aretha nodded to Natassia.

  The blond man took off his sweatshirt. The woman resolved the scans and entered them, and they turned to face the main monitor. Seconds later, across the screen, stark white letters marched in high-resolution certainty . . . IDENTITY WITHHELD . . . SECURITY STATUS . . . CLEAR.

  “Your identity’s password-protected,” said Aretha. “Go up a level, Nasty.”

  The woman chafed at the nickname but executed the request.

  IDENTITY WITHHELD . . . SECURITY STATUS . . . CLEAR.

  “Try the next level,” said Aretha.

  The same words flashed up. CLEAR.

  “What about Information Sensitive?”

  “Shit,” Natassia whistled as once more the words appeared. “What now?”

  “Time’s running out on the link. Try Unlimited Access.”

  The Tele-Path drive gave a deep, wearied whir. Twenty-five seconds. Thirty. A minute.

  “Five seconds!” Broadband yelled from outside.

  The screen fevered white, then seemed to black out entirely—and then one by one the letters glowed . . . C L E A R.

  “Shut it down!” Aretha commanded, and Natassia disconned. But even with the link closed, the letters remained on screen, as cold and unequivocal as absolute zero.

  “Well,” said Aretha, gaping at the screen—then at the blond man’s mutilation. “We’ve just found out that you’re a very important person.”

  “How so?”

  “Your identity’s secret and you’ve got Master Access.”

  “I don’t understand,” the blond man said.

  “You could walk into the Vitessalith in Minneapolis or any of the international headquarters. Same at the Pentagon. Efram-Zev Pharmaceuticals.”

  “But I can’t remember my name.”

  Aretha stared again at the single white word on the screen and then the cruelly gouged words on the man’s b
ack. “Until you do—we’ll call you—Clearfather.”

  “Clear . . . Father?”

  “That’ll do for now. But I’d bet that you have a password, maybe even a series of passwords that can make that access dance its ass off.”

  “But I can’t remember them,” the blond man sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Just bits of songs. One song.”

  “Don’t sing it. Just say it—as flatly as you can. Wait! Nasty, get Broadband and Heimdall in here.”

  Natassia went out and returned with the spike-haired youth from before and an older man who had no ears. Where his ears were supposed to be there were two input portholes of molded dermplex and veranium, channeled into cochlear implants.

  “Broadband you met. This is Heimdall,” Aretha said. “Director of our network’s security. Listen to this, you two. Go ahead, brother. Speak slowly.”

  “I am . . . the very model . . . of a modern major general . . . I’ve information vegetable . . . animal and mineral,” the blond man recited.

  Silence gripped the tent. Then Heimdall sagged to his knees, shouting, “Bad data!”

  Aretha flinched. “What did you hear, Nasty?”

  “Something about Tutankhamen hunting a golden hippopotamus identified with the evil god Set.”

  “That’s odd,” said Aretha. “What about you, Broadband?”

  “Quand nous ne sommes plus enfants, nous sommes déjà morts,” Broadband answered and burst into a fit of dribbling laughter.

  “Damn!” cried Aretha. “Nasty, get some of the Pythagorean complex—and some hot cocoa!”

  “Make a mistake with the sacred and you get scared!” the earless man screamed.

  “It’s all right!” Aretha soothed. “Just stay calm.”

  Fortunately the cocoa came quickly. And the doses of the anti-hysteric. Ten minutes later Broadband remembered that he didn’t speak French. Heimdall, too, began to settle, and his speech patterns and breathing returned to normal.

  “Neurostealth programming,” the earless one pronounced when he’d fully recovered. “Cryptolinguistic. Where did you pick it up?”