Little Cora charged at him, took the ball, and kicked it with impressive power and very poor aim at the nearest wall. It struck the bars on the back window of a pizza restaurant and took a wild bounce toward a motorcycle locked to the fence. The fence separated the alley from the train tracks, and just as Mohammed started berating Little Cora, a train went roaring past obliterating the banter.
Noah grabbed the handlebar of the motorcycle and righted it before it could topple over. Then he went after the ball, which had rolled some distance.
A young man got there first. He stopped the ball, dribbled it a bit just to show he knew how, and kicked it away from Noah and back to his friends.
The man was Asian—Chinese, Noah guessed—and startlingly handsome. Definitely not someone from this neighborhood.
The man said, “Noah?”
And that froze Noah where he stood. His friends moved closer, slowly, protective but wary.
There was nothing threatening about the man. He didn’t bare his teeth, he didn’t move farther forward. He met Noah’s gaze easily.
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m looking for Noah Cotton.”
An American accent, at least Noah thought so.
“That’s me,” Noah admitted with a blend of defiance and indifference. He was a city boy, Noah, bred for wariness.
The American was in his early twenties, tall, especially for someone of Chinese background, thin, immaculate. He wore a long, navy cashmere coat over a dark suit, over an expensive white shirt held at the neck not by a tie but by a sort of white floral pin.
“My name is Nijinsky,” the American said. “I’m a friend of your brother.”
“Nijinsky. That sounds Russian.”
Nijinsky shrugged and smiled, offering a glimpse of amazingly perfect white teeth. “It’s an odd name, I must admit. Most people call me Jin.”
“Why are you looking for me?”
Nijinsky looked down, gathering his thoughts. Or at least acting the part of a man gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “Well, Noah, Alex asked me to look in on you if … if anything ever happened to him.”
Noah’s breathing suddenly felt labored. “Yeah?”
“Yes. Your brother was doing very important but very dangerous work. He had a special talent, you know.”
“He was out of the army. Quits with all that.”
“This isn’t about the army.”
Noah stared at him, and the man looked back with black, almond eyes fringed by girlishly long lashes. His expression was open and frank. Like he was hiding nothing.
Nijinsky glanced meaningfully at Mohammed and Little Cora, who had strayed ever closer.
“It’s all right, guys,” Noah said to his friends. “Too wet out, anyway. Tomorrow, eh? After school.”
Little Cora had never been one to take a hint, but Mohammed was. He grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, then, LC.”
“I’m taking my ball,” Little Cora said belligerently, but she followed Mohammed down the alley and around the corner.
“What happened to Alex?” Noah blurted.
“You mean—”
“You know bloody well what I mean, don’t you?” Noah interrupted.
The outburst brought no anger to Nijinsky’s expression, just compassion. “I know that Alex suffered a sudden, complete mental breakdown. Almost overnight he went from being a normal, if perhaps intense, person to being what people might call a raving lunatic.”
Now Noah’s chest was pounding and he was breathing hard, too much emotion pushing out from where he’d buried it. “I saw him, you know? Twice I went to see him. Right? In that awful place. They have him chained up like a fucking dog!”
Nijinsky nodded. Nothing more.
The rain came on in a wave, rushing down the alleyway. Nijinsky pulled an umbrella from his coat pocket and opened it seconds before the first fat drops hit. He stepped closer, to cover Noah as well, but Noah wasn’t having it. He stepped back into the rain, letting it beat on his bare head and shoulders.
“He’s sitting there in that place, just babbling, just, just …”
“What does he say? When he’s babbling?”
“Nano nano nano. I know, it sounds kind of funny, doesn’t it?”
“No. It doesn’t, Noah. What else does he say?”
Noah shook his head. “Something about a bug man.”
And there, at last, that tightening of Nijinsky’s impassive eyes, that twitch of his upper lip. And the warm compassion flowing from Nijinsky was, just for a moment, a cold front.
Noah had not missed that split second of something dark. Sadness? No, although maybe that was part of it.
Fury. That was it. Fury. But quickly extinguished.
“Anything else?” Nijinsky asked. And now he wasn’t bothering with the mask. He knew that Noah had seen some little bit of truth in his eyes. The bullshit was over. Truth was on its way.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “This word. He started screaming it. Just screaming it like a … like a …” He couldn’t talk for a moment. Too much. Too fast. He pressed his back against the wall, partly shielded from the worst of the downpour.
“Berserk,” Nijinsky said quietly.
Noah’s heart froze. His eyes snapped up. “What the hell does it mean? What is it? And how did you know?”
Nijinsky sighed. “What is it? It’s an organization. I’m part of it. And so was Alex.”
He waited and watched as Noah digested this. And as the truth dawned on Noah. “Are you here to …” He couldn’t finish the question. It seemed absurd, and if he asked it, it would be embarrassing.
“Your brother had a very special skill. A very rare skill. Sometimes it runs in families. If you have this skill, then we may want to talk further. If not, then we will part ways and you’ll hear nothing more from us.”
Noah blinked water out of his eyes. “What the hell?” When Nijinsky didn’t answer, Noah said, “Bug Man. Is that a real person? I mean, is he the person who did this to Alex?”
“The Bug Man is real.”
“How do I … I mean, how do I find out if, you know, I have this thing you’re talking about?”
Nijinsky drew a business card from his inner coat pocket and handed it to Noah. It was a rather odd set of handwritten instructions. Noah quickly shielded it from the rain with the arc of his body.
Nijinsky turned to walk away but then stopped at a distance and called back to Noah. “Tell me something, Noah. Which is more important: freedom or happiness?”
What was this, a game? But Nijinsky wasn’t smiling.
“You can’t be happy unless you’re free,” Noah said.
The American nodded. “Skip school tomorrow.”
(ARTIFACT)
To: C and B Armstrong
From: S Lebowski
Division: AmericaStrong, a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation
Status: EYES ONLY ENCRYPT Read and safe-delete
Gentlemen: You have requested occasional updates on subject Burnofsky’s state of mind. We have been able to penetrate security on his computer files. The following is an extract from a video diary. Despite the fact that Burnofsky appears to be addressing someone, there is no evidence that anyone other than Burnofsky himself has viewed these files.
We assess their condition to be secure.
We make no judgments of subject Burnofsky’s mental condition at this time, but note that he is a heavy drinker and opium addict.
The following is a transcript. The video itself is also available.
ENTRY FOLLOWS:
Let me tell you about the nano. Down there, down in the nano, you see marvels, man. You think you see glory in a sunset or the shape of a tree? No, man, the genius, the creation, the architecture, the fucking complexity, the edges and the patterns and the horrors—oh, yeah, because there are horrors—are down there in the meat.
You want to see God the Creator, the supreme artist? Gaze into the nano. You’ll see your God, and he will scare the shit out
of you.
God isn’t in big things measured in miles, he’s down there. Down there in a flea’s antennae like a hairy tree trunk twitching for blood, and a macrophage slithering along like a shell-less snail come to eat you up, and the cells you see splitting beneath your feet, and landscapes of seething bacteria, and yeah, right there, you want to see God up close and personal?
Come with me into the nano, and I’ll show you what happens when you empty a sac full of staph germs, the hard stuff, the boosted MRSA, the necrotizing fasciitis itself, the true shit, into the ocular orb, behind a man’s eye. Oh, you don’t know that term, that neat Latin? Does the phrase “flesh-eating bacteria” ring any bells for you?
Cut it open—the sac—and dump it out, and it goes right to work. It eats into the eye and into the nerves and into the brain, and you haven’t really seen God’s true handiwork until you’ve seen those little staph balls, down there, down in the meat—they look about as big as cats, maybe, you know? And they’re fuzzy. But no eyes or face, just these soulless rugby balls covered in bumps. And man, you should see them work.
See them turn healthy cells into goo.
See them eat right through the meat, explode cells, grow; double, double toil and trouble, again and again, and eat all the while, those bumpy little balls, and by the time the guy feels the pain it’s way too late.
Yeah. You want to see the face of God the Artist? Get down in the nano, watch a sea of healthy flesh overrun by those microscopic hordes, like murdering Huns.
They’ll eat their way through to sunlight eventually. Through a nose, a cheek, an eye, a skull.
Praise the Lord: the Great and Crazy Artist.
END OF TRANSCRIPT
FIVE
Vincent was also visiting London, but miles away from Noah and Nijinsky.
Vincent was twentysomething, a trim, average-size guy with carefully barbered brown hair and a downturned mouth, and eyes that were brown but with no sense of warmth in them. He had a slightly curved nose and nostrils that flared and a faint scar that extended half an inch above and half an inch below his lips.
He held himself like a guy who wanted to avoid attention, but he didn’t have the gift of disappearing in a crowd. He had the curse of being noticed, no matter how careful he was to keep his eyes down and his face impassive. People still noticed him because there was just an air about Vincent that suggested tamped-down emotion and volatility barely disguised by his careful movements and his soft, almost inaudible voice.
He was at dinner, sitting at a dark table in a nice but not stuffy Indian restaurant on Charlotte Street, picking at a poppadom. The target sat across the room at one of the larger, brighter, noisier tables.
There were five people at that table and the target—Liselotte Osborne—was not the richest or most powerful, so she didn’t sit at the head, she sat halfway down on one side, with her back to Vincent.
Nevertheless, Vincent had an excellent view of her eye. The left one.
A part of Vincent’s mind was in the room, hearing without focusing on conversation punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, seeing the reflection of yellow overhead lights in standard restaurant-grade wineglasses, wondering abstractedly about the choice of art on the papered walls.
Another part of Vincent’s mind was across the room, perched on Liselotte Osborne’s left lower eyelid. From that vantage point Vincent saw thick-trunked trees that grew in impossibly long curves from spongy, damp pink tissue. These trees had no branches; they were like rough-barked brown palm trees, bending away to disappear out of view behind him. The bark was then glopped in uneven patches by a black tarry substance, like someone had thrown big handfuls of tar at the lashes.
Eyelashes.
Eyelashes with mascara.
Vincent’s spidery legs stepped over a pair of demodex, like crocodiles with the blank faces of soulless felines. Reptilian tails of demodex babies protruded from the base of the eyelash. They wiggled.
From his perch between two rough-barked, gooey, drooping eyelashes Vincent saw the vast, wet plain of white stretched out to the horizon, a sea of milk beneath a taut wet membrane. Within that milky sea were jagged red rivers. When he tuned his eyes to look close, he could make out the surge and pause, surge and pause of Frisbee-shaped red blood cells and the occasional spongy lymphocyte.
He was looking out across the white of Liselotte’s eyeball—an eyeball shot through with the red capillaries of a woman who’d had too little sleep, rimmed with black tar, home to microfauna he could see and of course a multitude of life-forms too small even for a biot to make out.
Vincent felt a rush of wind and saw a barrier rushing toward him at terrifying speed. It was an endless, faintly curved wall of pink-gray that appeared to be maybe ten feet tall. It came rushing across the eyeball like a storm front, swift, irresistible. Jutting far out from that pink-gray wall were more of the dark brown palm trunks, curving upward and extending beyond the range of Vincent’s sight. Like a wall festooned with ridiculously curved pikes.
Liselotte was blinking.
Vincent said, “Sparkling, please,” in response to the waiter’s question about what sort of water he would prefer.
“And are you ready to order?”
“What’s the speciality of the house? Never mind—whatever it is, I’ll have it. Extra spicy.” He handed the menu to the waiter, who insisted on telling him the special, anyway.
It did not matter to Vincent. Food generally did not matter much to Vincent. It was just one of many pleasures to which he was indifferent, although highly spicy foods created a sensation that was something related perhaps to pleasure.
Vincent—his real name was Michael Ford—suffered from a rare disorder called anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure. It’s usually a symptom of long-term drug use. Or schizophrenia. But Vincent was neither a junkie nor crazy.
Well, not crazy in the clinical sense.
Yet.
The biot with the functional and not very clever name of V2, tensed its six legs and timed the onrushing eyelid. When it was just a few dozen feet away micro-subjective or “m-sub”—less than a few millimeters macro-actual or “mack”—the biot leapt.
It flew through the air. It spread short, stubby wings that helped it avoid tumbling. It also spread its legs wide in flex position to take the shock. Then it scraped down the side of an eyelash, picked up a smear of mascara, landed, and jabbed six sharp-tipped legs into flesh. The ends of the legs split to become barbs, locking the biot in place.
Always dangerous to use the barbs because if you had the bad luck to be too near a nerve ending the target just might feel the faintest irritation. And just might decide to scratch the itch. Which wouldn’t crush the biot but could sure as hell relocate it and waste valuable time.
The fast-moving upper lid slammed violently into the lower lid. The giant lashes wobbled and vibrated overhead, a sparse forest of palm. It was an earthquake there on the eyelid, but with barbs deployed, V2 was fine.
Sticky liquid squeezed up between the lids and then, when the top lid began to pull away, stretched like chewed gum until it snapped.
Tears.
Vincent had been through a crying jag on another mission and had ended up with his biot all the way down the face and trapped in running snot.
But these weren’t weeping tears, just lubrication.
The upper lid receded, zooming across the icy white and then over the iris. Vincent would have found it exhilarating if he were the sort of person who did exhilaration.
There were many parts of the human body that were disturbing up close. But few more surprisingly so than a human iris. What looked like blue ice from a distance was an eye-of-Jupiter storm up close. Right at the outer edges Vincent saw blue, or at least a gray that was like blue. But it was not smooth; rather it was a twisted, fibrous mess, thousands of strands of raw muscle, all aimed inward toward the pupil, all with the job of expanding or contracting the iris to let in more or less light.
Clos
e up—and it was impossible to get any more close up than V2, perched on the very edge of the lid—the iris looked a bit like layer upon layer of gray-and-orange worms, thinner at the outer edge of the iris, stronger at the rim of the pupil.
The pupil itself swept by below, a terrible, deep, black-in-black hole, a pit. But then if you looked straight down and caught just the right light, you could actually see to the bottom of that pit, down to the random blood vessels and the juncture that was the attachment point for the optic nerve.