Three Moments of an Explosion

  It dangled, all ruined, dropping bits into the water as it rose in chains.

  A public meeting was organized. I heard it was confused. No one was sure why they were there.

  You heard a lot about the stag in the estate those days, of course. It took about a day before everyone was claiming to have been there. Everyone had a different story about how they’d heard where to be, when. No one really knew anything, though a fair few bullshitters, if the topic came up, would get a faraway look, maybe insinuate that they’d had some ideas what to expect, maybe tap their noses as if they were in on something.

  So I thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. About a month later, the office of the government’s head vet, something like that, held a press conference. They wanted to discuss the results of the postmortem.

  The undersides of the stag’s hooves, they said, had been coated with an epoxy like dense rubber. The antlers had been saturated in something bituminous, long- and slow-burning. Except where they protruded from the skull and skin: there they’d been treated with retardant, to slow the downward creep of fire.

  The animal’s blood was full of a ketamine derivative of unknown sort, cut or altered in ways the scientists didn’t fully understand. But they were confident it closed down pain sensors, numbed flight-fight instincts.

  It had been made into a deer unconcerned that its antlers were on fire.

  It had been dying the whole time we followed it, in a poisoned stupor, burning alive.

  The OBYOSS posters promising urban renewal faded. No one took them down. I looked for Dan in the flat that had been his family’s. It had been empty for years. “He’s gone back to Cornwall,” my neighbor said. “That’s what I heard.” I walked past a laundrette and a teenage boy opened the door and came out in a fug of dryer smell and said, “I seen you was looking for the Dan man. I’ve got something for you.”

  “You want this?” he said. “You want this yes or no? It’s a hundred.”

  He had a short length of blackened antler. It smelled of burn. “Put that in your garden, it makes your plants grow. Put it in your house, it gives you money.” He gave me more reasons I should buy it and I did. It was surprisingly light. I put it on top of my TV, as he also suggested. “Makes your reception perfect,” he said. “Check Channel 4 tonight.”

  The footage was of the rolling of the fiery barrel or whatever, some harvest festival in a market town. “Look at you,” I said, as if the man on-screen could hear me, as if the footage weren’t months old.

  It was Dan. He was one of those hoisting a burning thing onto his shoulders, carrying whatever it was, wherever.

  There’s been very little regeneration on the estate. Two months after Dan disappeared, in Birmingham and then in Glasgow, burning-antlered stags sauntered down main streets as long as the drugs held. In Birmingham, someone in the crowd shot the deer with a bow, then a gun. The arrow hit its left leg, the bullet killed it and the crowd dispersed. The one in Glasgow died all by itself.

  A huge albino animal, its head under a corona of fire, went walking in a run-down neighborhood of Montreal, to be put down by terrified cops. A stag set off in a Parisian banlieue street at midnight followed by awestruck youths but something was wrong with its preparation and it collapsed and started dying almost immediately.

  No one’s ever been caught preparing or releasing any of the beasts.

  In New York two days ago, someone let scores of hares loose on Roosevelt Island. They went racing everywhere, jumping, feverish, boxing each other, all sinewy and pugnacious in the waste-ground. There was something glinty and wrong with their ears. I saw it on YouTube. Within a few minutes they started to die. They weren’t afraid of the locals who tried to grab them, and sometimes, disastrously, succeeded.

  Running the length of each of the hares’ ears was a knife. They slashed people’s hands. They were like straight razors, one end driven through the fur into the hares’ skulls. The blades protruded, sutured to the ears with fishing wire. Mostly, the clots and bloodstains resulting from these alterations had been wiped away or bleached invisible, but if you held the dying things carefully and looked closely you could see the joins.

  They’re building a new playground. I looked at the plans: it’s going to be much better. I saw diggers and men in overalls getting ready to uproot the plastic fox and all the others. “What’ll happen to them?” I asked, but the landscapers shrugged. I keep imagining those garish animals in a landfill, under the earth.

  KEEP

  Anna Samson had not slept through the night for a long time. She mentioned this to her boss and he asked if she was having difficulty with the project.

  “Yes. What do you mean?” she said. “What kind of difficulty?”

  “Ethical.”

  “Well, I mean, he is there against his will.” She didn’t say that she had been insomniac months before she arrived.

  “I don’t blame you feeling weird about it,” Olson said. “No one enjoys seeing him in there.” He hesitated, a better epidemiologist than manager. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Anna was excited to try the orange pills he left in her cubbyhole later that day but they were no more effective than the Zopiclone of which she was a regular user. Still, she took them sometimes because she discovered that the watery dreams they provoked interested her.

  “I was in a corridor—” she said to Daniel during a video conversation.

  “You spend your life in corridors,” he said. She changed the subject and he didn’t notice. Later she told the whole dream to Sarah instead. Sarah asked her if she was eating enough.

  When Anna went to ask if he could provide her more of the medication, Olson was gone. “You’ll be reporting directly to me now,” said Colonel Gomez. He looked at her sadly and she knew why the other man had left.

  Anna was forty-four, with dry blond hair she never did much with, so it framed her exaggeratedly pleased or fretful face in a look an old friend once called “haute harried,” which Anna half-enjoyed. The soldiers in the base checked her ID every time she entered, though she knew they recognized her by now.

  Olson had wanted her to live on the base but she had insisted on renting in town. It was a few miles from the military compound, a spread-out cluster of five hundred inhabitants in ugly bungalows. Her little house overlooked a dried-up swamp bed, a hollow surrounded by tree remains. She could walk in the basin on hard dirt that had once been muck thriving with frogs. She kept off the slopes beyond, where brush stretched out four miles to a little abandoned airfield. The shopkeeper told her there were ticks.

  “You’ll be working at the base, I guess,” he said the first time she went in.

  His sign said he opened at eight a.m. but Anna usually found him sitting at his open door a little after seven. They would drink coffee together.

  “They closed the school,” he told her. “The kids now, the ones still here, and they ain’t many, they do distance learning. On the computer. Where you from?”

  “Troy, New York.”

  “My kids are gone. My girl to San Francisco, my boy to Sacramento. We don’t talk, though, me and him. I can’t believe it’s raining again. It ain’t usually like this, you know, not this late in the year. You think this might have anything to do with … you know?”

  Whenever it rained while she was in his store she would buy a cheap umbrella. “You know they’re reusable, right?” he said.

  “Easy come,” she said.

  “Why don’t you come closer?” the subject said.

  “Don’t I come close enough?” Anna said.

  “Actually, you get closer than most of them,” he said. “You not scared? You should be scared. Your boss got sick, didn’t he? Sick like me.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Don’t I look it?”

  “You look tired,” she said, “but mostly you look OK. You have a complaint to make?”

  “Fuck yes. You know how long it’s been since I saw the fucking sun?”

  “
You know what’ll happen if they give you a room aboveground. You have to be on the lowest level, you know that. And you know how quarantine works. Didn’t you just tell me you were sick? Don’t you think you’re too sick to leave?”

  “Well, I’m too fucking something.”

  “If it’s you,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “What if it’s not you that’s sick,” she said. “What if it’s the world?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to understand.”

  “And how’s that going, Doc? Doc, your suit’s not done up.”

  “Nick,” she said. “Can you turn all the way around?”

  “You want to see if anything changes, don’t you?” he said. “It doesn’t. You know that. Just keep walking around me. What’s that?”

  “A fiber-optic camera I’m going to put down.”

  “Good, because I was thinking, where’s she going to stick that tube ?”

  “You know I’m not that kind of doctor. You’re not my patient.”

  Most days at sunup Anna took a walk before she drove to the base with books scattered across her backseat. Whoever was on duty would always take a moment to look them over. A first set of rumble strips marked the end of the public road. Beyond it several hundred yards of dusty ground had been cleared of even the stubbiest succulent. At their end were more strips and the start of the base.

  The morning after her interview with Nick—Anna wouldn’t call him Subject Zero, not even in her head—she woke early, abruptly. The phone was silent but she felt certain the air still shook with an echo of ringing. When she dialed for the last incoming number it told her no one had called for hours.

  Anna had already started to sweat. She was sweating more here than she ever had before.

  Coming home from the base in the afternoon she saw that the intersection where the shop was located had been blocked off with police tape. Standing in front of it was Marsh, the town’s police officer, nodding to an army sergeant she recognized from the base. There were other soldiers, making notes and taking pictures. They got in and out of the building across a thick plank laid where the stoop had been. The front step was crumbled and gone.

  “Oh fuck no,” Anna said, but she saw the shopkeeper come out. He was haggard. He came to her.

  “It weren’t me,” he said. “Did you think it was me? You looked kind of worried. I didn’t know you cared,” he said, and tried to smile and looked up at a circling hawk. “It was Mrs. Bolling. You know her?”

  She shook her head.

  “OK, well. She’s a nice lady but she was pretty old, and I guess when it started she got confused.”

  “What happened?”

  “She got into the shop. Hell, I don’t always lock up, you know that. It must’ve been in the middle of the night. And then she must’ve stood right there in the middle of the room there, just stood there till it finished going around, and—” He indicated the ruined step.

  “There’s a basement?” she said.

  “She fell right down. It ain’t that far down but she was pretty frail anyhow. There ain’t hardly a floor left in there.” Anna peered and through the sunlight on the shop window she could see a big darkness in the center of the floor.

  “How long will that take to replace?” she said.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know, it don’t make any difference to me no more,” he said. “I’m gone.”

  They watched a thickset young soldier come out of the shop. His boot caught the flapping end of the police tape and stretched it and snapped it as he walked away. The whole boundary sank slowly to the ground.

  “I mean we never thought it wasn’t going to come here, right?” the shopkeeper said. “Least I didn’t.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “OK then,” he said. Well. Want to buy a store? It’s floorless.”

  She didn’t smile.

  Colonel Gomez was hunkered over a display in the briefing and control room with a man Anna did not know.

  “Dr. Samson,” Gomez said. “This is Stuart Perry.”

  Perry looked up briefly and shook her hand. He had an earphone in one ear. He was perhaps a decade younger than she, handsome, smartly turned out. He would not be wearing that suit for very long, she thought, not here, no matter how well it went down in the capital.

  “I’m bringing him up to speed,” the colonel said. “Before she was here Anna was in London.” Perry looked at her again, now with more interest.

  The screen showed Nick straight on, standing in the cell between his chair and his small bed. He was gesturing at the opaque window that took up one wall.

  “When was this?” Anna said.

  “Yesterday,” said the colonel. “After you saw him.” He was a dark, lined, still-muscular man, with stubble on his scalp the color of cigarette ash. His subdued tone always surprised her.

  “How long have you been here?” Perry said. He glanced down at something Nick said. Anna, earphoneless, heard nothing. “Damn, he’s bratty.”

  “A few weeks,” she said. “I’ve been testing soil samples. I don’t get to talk to him that much. What’s your field?”

  “History,” he said. “Does he give anyone the time of day?”

  “He’s an angry young man. Misses his friends and his girlfriend and the wind on his face.”

  Nick was tall and a little overweight, undignified in the hospital gown they made him wear. They had crew-cut his hair.

  “I haven’t seen it yet,” Perry said. “Can you show me from above?” The colonel pressed buttons and switched to the feed from the room’s ceiling camera.

  The screen showed the bed, the chair, and the gesturing figure of Nick himself. Surrounding him in a rough circle, its radius about six feet, with him in the center, a trench was gouged in the white ceramic of the floor.

  It was more than three feet wide. Its edges and inside sides were rough and irregular. Anna could see mud, clay, stones in layers below the thin top of splintered tile. Between the cut and the walls was a rim of room just wide enough to walk on.

  “We can’t stop it,” said Perry.

  Anna and the colonel shook their heads, though it was not a question.

  “And we can’t speed it up.”

  “He special ops?” Anna said. “What’s he here to do?”

  “He’s keen,” said the colonel. “He’ll bury me, that’s all I know. You think they still tell me shit? Don’t give him my private number.” Gomez had given it to Anna her third week on the base, telling her to call him if she had a breakthrough, to wake him, whatever the time.

  “All I’m doing is accumulating information,” she had said. She knew she should sound embarrassed. “I don’t know that it’s anything we can use, exactly.”

  “I’ll take it,” he’d said.

  Through the observation window they watched Perry shrugging under the weight of his biohazard suit. A bored soldier, in the same coveralls, stood watching from a corner.

  “Do some star jumps for me?” Perry said. “Stars. Stars!” he said. He stood just beyond the trench, looking down into it. Anna would test her scrapings again, but she knew they would register only as the earth they were, indistinguishable from any other earth. “As close to the trench as you can,” he said. “Can you come and stand just across from me?”

  From the center, the ground they called the nucleus, Nick watched him with sour dislike. “Please run around your bed,” Perry said.

  Nick did so, jogging just at the inside edge of the cut. He ran and ran and sped up and abruptly jumped, clearing it to land by the door.

  Instantly the soldier raised his rifle at him. Anna tensed. She had read the files; she knew this was not the first time Nick had done this.

  “Come on, Nick,” said Perry. He sounded calm.

  The soldier did something and his weapon clicked. The colonel hissed. Beyond the glass Nick made a sulky face and jumped back over to stand by his bed.

  “I’m going crazy,” he shouted. “You won’t let me
out; you won’t let me talk to my friends.”

  “It’s only a matter of time before he tries again,” Gomez said. “I don’t blame him, Samson, is the truth.”

  “You want to know about it,” Nick was shouting to Perry, “ask them. Or just go down.”

  “Have you been down?” said Perry. “What do you think it is?”

  “Yeah. It’s a hole.”

  “Except it’s not, is it?” Perry said. “It’s a trench. Or you could say it’s a hole with a not-hole in the middle. The nucleus. Right where you are.”

  “He’s been going through all the subject’s files,” Gomez said. “All his diaries, photos, of Lai, Sharon, Terrell, that fucking Hacky Sack crew he met while he was finding himself. And all the photos we have from their accounts too.”

  “I did that when I got here,” Anna said. “We had to.”

  “Yeah, OK, that’s Perry’s job. He’s been going through my files too. And yours.”

  “Ask Lai,” Nick said. “Ask Birgit. They’re the ones who were talking about all weird stuff, before anything even started. You think they don’t know things?”

  “You know we can’t, Nick,” Perry said, and Nick’s face scrunched up in pain. “You’ve told us about your girlfriend before.”

  Nick had been in hiding when things started to change. He had seen what was happening, and knew he was part of it. It had taken him a little over a week, after he was brought in, to name his erstwhile companions, to mention hints they had made, to talk of Birgit like someone struck by religion.

  “She said there were chambers underground,” he said. “She said something would start. She was looking for things. Full of old stories.” He both wanted and did not want to talk about her.

  Anna could see the acquisitive and calculating way Perry was staring at the hole. She turned away and made no effort to disguise her distaste from Gomez.

  “You still not scared?” he said. “Of being in there with him?”

  She gave him a small smile.

  The trench in its gradualism, she thought, in its shape and the specifics of its depth and dimensions, in its particularities, would seem to chafe against service to death and the state. That implied something, she thought. That seemed to hold forth some promise. Of what, she could not say.