Normal

  Adam cracked the door open. Two orderlies ran past. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t about Adam.

  Adam left his room and followed them. They had already stopped running. There were three more orderlies at the end of the hall, banging on a door. One of them turned to the new arrivals, and said, “You bring the persuader? Asshole left his key in the lock and he’s not answering.”

  “You sure he’s not out in the fucking woods again?”

  “We already checked the corridor cameras. He went in at curfew and never came out.”

  The smaller of the two orderlies who ran past Adam produced something like a shorter version of the old spiral ratchet screwdriver his dad used to use when he was building things in the garage. Adam walked up to watch. They were all too busy to pay any attention to him.

  The orderly put the device, which Adam presumed was the “persuader,” to the lock, grasped the handle, and pumped it. Its mechanism clicked and spun and the lock barrel was kicked clean out of the door. He pulled a thin, pick-like tool out of the top of the persuader’s handle and applied it inside the hole left by the lock. There was a loud snap. The orderly looked at his colleagues, and then gave the door a gentle push. It opened soundlessly.

  He said, “Mr. Mansfield?” The door swung wide.

  The orderly said, “Jesus fuck,” and backed off. Adam stepped in to see.

  The bed was host to a black and heaving mass of insect life. So was the floor around it. So were the walls, and the window. There was no sign of anything human in the room. The mound on the bed was just a horde of bugs.

  Behind Adam, Clough coughed, squinted, and glumly observed, “I’ve fucked worse than that.”

  PART TWO

  Adam Dearden hadn’t realized how many people worked at Normal Head until Mr. Mansfield disappeared from his room. Half an army of orderlies, doctors, and security guards manifested from nowhere and filled the halls.

  The patients had been woken or retrieved and placed in a large canteen space to be counted and held. Adam was sharp with shock, the fog blitzed away by the last half hour of panic and the unexplained. They weren’t being told anything, and Adam had been specifically admonished by half a dozen extremely tense strangers to not say a word about what he’d seen until directly authorized to. Like an NDA, only scarier, because the people issuing it had access to medical equipment and he was trapped in a hospital in the middle of nowhere with them.

  And yet. Mr. Mansfield had apparently either executed a daring midnight escape or received a thrilling rescue, leaving nothing but a pile of insects, presumably gathered and stacked while out in the woods, in his Houdini wake, as some kind of arcane insult. And nobody had any idea yet how he’d done it, because there were no cameras in the bedrooms at Normal Head. Only in the corridors, the public, and the outside spaces.

  Adam sat down, on the northern edge of the room, as far away from the huddle as he could get. How had he done it?

  Adam looked at his hands, and discovered they weren’t shaking. The red, amber, and green capsules must’ve been some good stuff. Because—and he quietly, gingerly tested this on himself for the first time, letting the thought crest like a shark’s fin in his mind—the whole event had a little bit of a Windhoek vibe for him. The night of the riot.

  Those capsules, he decided, looking at his still hands, were the shit.

  Adam turned his eyes up and cast them around the room. He supposed this was the entire strength of Normal Head, every single inmate. There was a different separation than earlier, though. Two large groups, dividing the room, yes. But there was a smaller group at the back, working hard to sit apart from everyone else. Adam twisted in his chair to get a better view of them. People were looking at them, but they weren’t making eye contact with anyone but each other. And they all had wet shoes or slippers. They’d come from outside. Adam supposed they could be the “Staging” people—still inmates, but in preparation for release into the outside world.

  But the others were split as before, right down the middle of professional demarcation. Being able to give them a proper once-over now, he began to recognize faces here and there, on both sides. He was scrupulous in avoiding any acknowledgment of recognition with any of the strategic foresight people. Not that many people in the room had the mental fortitude for direct eye contact anyway.

  “All communication is dangerous,” said Clough, plummeting into the empty chair beside Adam and knocking free his personal cloud of fossilized sweat. “Just fucking looking at someone constitutes communication. Especially if you want to shag them.”

  “Hello, Mr. Clough.”

  “Just Clough. It’s a good bloody name, Clough. Honest name. Not like names these days. There are probably kids in this room called Wheat. Or Skylar. Or Skyler. Because it turns out they made a name up and never decided how to fucking spell it. I’m an economist, you know.”

  “What side?”

  “Foresight strategy, pal. Nonprofit economic think tank in Eindhoven. Fucking field economist, I am.”

  “How does that work?”

  “I go to big conferences and get important people so drunk that they can’t shit straight, and then ask them evil questions and write down the answers.”

  “That,” Adam offered, “doesn’t sound so bad, really.”

  “It’s bloody great,” Clough agreed. “Except that when you get these bastards shitfaced they tell the truth. And it’s fucking horrible. Over and over again. That last recession? That was practically fucking victory condition. We teeter on the brink of world financial ruin and a return to the days of trading fucking seashells for food, every fucking day. Worse. It wouldn’t even be like Mad Max. Do you even comprehend how sad that is? Nobody runs Bartertown. That’s the thing, lad. It’s a runaway process. The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.”

  Adam looked around for Dickson.

  “Tits,” Clough emphasized. “It just dangles tits out everywhere. And tits will hypnotize a man. He’ll just grab at them and suck. Unless,” he reflected, “they like cocks. In which case just imagine a whirling thresher of cocks. Tasty ones. People just want a taste. And when they’ve had it, they want more, and bugger tending or directing the machine after that. They just crawl all over the thing, trying to drain it of its juices. Its terrible fucking juices, lad.”

  Adam spotted Dickson, who looked very harried and sweaty. Adam tried to look a little scared as he waved. Dickson saw it and changed his trajectory.

  “Did you know,” Clough continued, in a broken voice, “that more than half of the top nought point one percent—not the One Percent, the Nought Point One Percent—of the highest-paid people in America are financial professionals? Tits. I’m telling you. Draining the brake fluid out of a spinning machine that’s going to shred the planet. I’m a fucking economist, me.”

  “Mr. Clough,” said Dickson.

  Clough wiped his eyes with trembling fingers. “I’m all right, son. I’m all right.”

  “If you need some help, just flag someone down, Mr. Clough. There’s no shame in it. Everyone here is in the same boat, remember?” Dickson nodded at Adam and resumed his course.

  “You’ve got it together pretty well,” Clough remarked. “You were a crying zombie last time I saw you.”

  “I think it’s the pills,” Adam said.

  “Yeah? Not the adrenaline, then?”

  “No. The pills. I’m not liking this. Or being kettled in one place with all these people.”

  One of Clough’s grimly untrimmed eyebrows rose. “Kettled. Spent some time in the field, eh? Done a riot or two?”

  “Yeah. Don’t really want to talk about it.”

  The street-protest checklist. Phone in a rugged case, in the front pocket of the jeans, screen turned inward. Slip the wristwatch off before you go outside. Enough adhesive bandages and painkillers (ibuprofen and acetaminophen) to share.

  Fog. Fire. The s
tink of frightened people stampeding.

  “What were you doing in the corridor?” Adam said. “When they were opening the guy’s door.”

  “I don’t sleep much,” Clough said, breathing through whatever pain had been sharpening itself on his bones. “They’re okay with me going for a walk so long as the sun is up. Which it is, just fucking barely.”

  “So why were they trying to get him up?”

  “Everyone’s on a different schedule. They’re pretty good here, the staff, you know. If you get up with the sun and go to bed with it, they’ll do their bit and come and get you at dawn and put you to bed at sundown. He might well have been one of them. God knows we never saw him around much. Aye aye,” Clough said, nodding at the door. “Here we go, then. That’s the Director.”

  A small, lean man around forty, who was evidently quite convinced that keeping his hair very short was hiding his male-pattern baldness. Stubbly and jittery, and yet bound inside a buttoned suit that was slightly too small, a look that bespoke his intention that everybody should know that he went to the gym a lot. He was flanked by medical staff, half of whom had clearly been rolled out of bed, all of whom were substantially freaked out. He showed a small limp as he moved to the front wall and faced the group, his staff fanning around him like courtiers in white coats and green scrubs.

  “Your attention, please,” said the Director, in a wobbly whistle of a voice. The room quieted. Glasses were adjusted, bodies leaned in. A few notebooks came out.

  “Just after dawn, according to his personal schedule requests, staff attended the room of one of our guests, a Mr. Mansfield, for his wake-up call. As you know, we consider the privacy of your personal rooms sacrosanct, and so they didn’t, as many of you are so fond of claiming, just barge in. A few of you may have been woken by their attempts to waken Mr. Mansfield. Eventually, according to protocol, they attempted to gain entry to the room. The door was locked and could not be operated. Again, according to protocol, the lock was defeated. My staff then discovered that Mr. Mansfield was missing.”

  He paused. Adam watched his jaw work. The Director was grinding his teeth.

  “The grounds,” he continued, “have been searched, and the security footage has been reviewed. Mr. Mansfield is gone from Normal Head, and there is no record of his transit.”

  The Director let that settle upon the room like fallout snow. The silence crackled.

  “The room was locked. The windows were sealed, and the seals are still intact. As you know, we don’t have cameras in your rooms. But outside your rooms the camera coverage is enough for us to be relatively certain that nobody intruded into our grounds and nobody left. This, however, leaves us with our central problem. Mr. Mansfield is missing. We presume Mr. Mansfield to be either abducted or deceased at this time. If our security was in fact somehow porous enough to let one person in, it may prove porous enough to let two people out.”

  “Why do you presume him abducted?” came a voice from the back, a man from the Staging group who’d arrived swaddled in seven layers of winter clothing. “What if he just broke out?”

  “We are operating on a basis of information sequestration at this time. We have reasons for the hypothesis. That’s all I’ll say right now.”

  “Why?”

  The Director sighed, and looked at the speaker as if he was a child whose mother drank toilet cleaner during her pregnancy. “Because it remains entirely possible that someone in this room was involved with the crime.”

  There was a rumble across the room.

  “Come on,” said the Director. “You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this.”

  The medical staff stared at the Director in outright horror.

  “What?” the Director snapped. “Am I telling stories out of school? Was it a secret that I preside over a large sweaty pile of people in a useless fake profession who somehow didn’t have the mental fortitude to play pretend in return for paychecks all day? While I, Chief Asswiper to the Thought-Leader Elite, have to pay for three evil children, two shitty houses, and one supposed woman who stopped fucking me five years before she threw me out, literally, onto the street, where I was hit by some fat neckbeard on a Vespa so now in addition to all of the above I have to pay for five stupidly costly medications prescribed just to stop me from shrieking like a stuck pig all fucking day. And your issue is what? That I am revealing to people who piss their pants if they see a TV remote that they are in fact so damaged that they piss their pants if they see a TV remote? Eat shit and die. One or some or even maybe all of our precious inmates lifted another patient out of his room in the dead of night and probably fucking ate the poor bastard. Well, it doesn’t matter. Normal Head is on lockdown and in the morning we are calling out for a specialist investigative team. Staging privileges have been pulled. Go to bed. Tomorrow we begin working out exactly who decided to ruin my life.”

  The Director left as soon as his last word bounced off the back windows, at a fast limp.

  “He might be the most mental person here,” Clough observed.

  There was a lot of outrage and discontent in the room. Adam tuned it out. He replayed the pertinent parts of the Director’s rant in his head.

  Obviously, he knew what had been redacted from the statement. That awful roiling pile of insects that some comedian had left on the bed. But, even though they were spreading over the bedroom when Adam got his look at the scene, he’d never seen under that pile.

  Adam’s vision blurred, and his hearing began to wow like a distorted vinyl record. That seemed to be the end of his allotted thinking time. Everything started to get foggy around the edges. He jerked his head upright, trying to keep it above water and in full consciousness. Clough stood up and then leaned into Adam, seeing that something was wrong. But all Adam could see was someone looming out of the fog at him, and he started screaming, just like he did in Windhoek.

  * * *

  Adam Dearden found himself back in his room, in his chair.

  Clough was sitting on the edge of Adam’s bed. Lela was sitting on the floor opposite Adam.

  “You fell down the abyss again,” she said. “Shitty thing to have happen on your first night here, I guess.”

  “They let us sit with you,” Clough said. “They’ve got their hands full. Lots of people are losing it.”

  “And,” Lela added, “we’re among the healthiest people here. We totally would have been moved to Staging soon. At least, I would.”

  “Except that they’re going to pull Staging’s privileges in the morning,” Clough chuckled. “They’ll lose their internet connection, and might even be made to move back into rooms in the main building. That tossed a big fat cat among the pigeons. They can cause trouble, and taking Staging away is one less incentive for people in here to stay on their meds and work through their issues. I would say the people in Staging are going to go nuts, but they already are.”

  “That’s not true,” Lela said. “Most of them just aren’t ready to go back outside yet.”

  “You’ve met Colegrave. Tell me he’s not insane. Tell me Bulat isn’t insane.”

  “Hi,” Adam said.

  Lela glared at Clough, as if to say That was all your fault, and then put her attention on Adam. “How are you feeling now?”

  “I should probably take some more pills?”

  “No, lad,” Clough rumbled, standing up. “Get some more sleep. This can all wait ’til breakfast. Which is probably in five fucking minutes, but still.”

  “It was nice of you to get me back here. Thanks.”

  “Can you answer a question?” Lela said.

  “I can try.” Her undiluted attention made him nervous. It was like having his movements studied by something fast and poisonous.

  “Clough doesn’t know you. I dimly recognize your name. But when we picked you up and started walking you out, someone from the other side called you b
y name.”

  Adam rubbed his eyes, faked a small yawn to buy a few extra seconds to search his memory. The other side. She meant strategic forecasters.

  “I dunno,” he said, pulling up the most well-worn weapon in his deflective arsenal by pure habit. “I’ve done a lot of conferences. I mean, we all do. I’ve done some cross-pollination things that had corporate attendees. I probably got recognized because of one of them.”

  “You gave materials to spooks? You can’t do that. You can’t talk about what you do and think. You can’t publicly publish real stuff. That just gives them new tools to bring to bear on the streets. Every word out of your mouth to those fuckers can help cause pain to thousands of people. They give it all to the intelligence state. They do.”

  “Hell, no, I don’t do that,” he said. “You just go and listen. Those things are usually about operational security. The Chief Technical Officer of the CIA shows up with a slideshow, people theorize about Firechat and the blockchain, and you sit and listen and make notes, you know? And if you talk to people in the bar afterward, you just tell them you’re writing a book or something. It’s not a big deal.”

  “I don’t do those conferences,” Lela said.

  “Well, you’re a specialist,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t be in a place where you talk to authorities about how cities work. I’m more of a roving field researcher. I don’t have a specific expertise I can be trapped into giving up.”

  That seemed to Adam to almost satisfy her. Almost.

  “I need some sleep,” Adam said.

  “Yeah,” Lela said. “Right. I’ve got things to do too.”

  Adam pushed himself up and over to his bed. “Yeah. We all do.”