Normal

  Lela was standing by Clough at the door when she registered what Adam had said. “What do we all have to do?”

  Adam laid himself out as if being fitted for his coffin. “We have to find out what happened in that room. Or else we’ll all be trapped here forever and everyone will think that all of us died.”

  * * *

  It was late morning when Adam made his way to the patio. He’d only stopped and cried once on the walk there, and didn’t even feel insulted as he saw the shoes and slippers of people just walking around him as he kneeled with his head on the thin carpet there. He watched an insect, some kind of tubby louse or beetle, crawl ahead of him on the plastic skirting board, its sectioned back fairly rippling with the thrill of beating one of the giant things that haunted his world at a footrace. Even as Adam shook and curled there, he found himself wondering what the journey was like for that fat little object. Humans must be so vast that they were difficult to focus the beady insect eye upon. Towering blurs of things, terrifying and unpredictable natural disasters on the move. Finding yourself inside one of their buildings, like being trapped on a prison planet, the grubby polystyrene sky almost within scaling distance if you were prepared to give up a significant part of your life to such an insane task. If the creature made it outside again, it might be like emerging into orbital space, the next building as far away as the moon. It would take a human nine years to walk from the Earth to the moon. Wind as cosmic rays. Rain as meteor swarms.

  He found an empty table, far toward the edge of the patio on the foresight side. Normal staff were very present. Adam watched them move among the tables, touching people on the shoulder, dipping their heads to speak quietly, offering smiles, writing in notebooks with gel pens when complaints were raised, passing out corn-plastic bottles of juices and smoothies and water. The intent was to provide reassurance on several levels, blatantly so. The staff didn’t even care that it was unsubtle. The staff wanted the patients to know that they were available and that they could see all the patients at all times.

  Adam was shortly brought two bottles himself, one of some beige solution and one of water, both dewed from a refrigerator. He wasn’t remotely hungry. He opened the bottle of beige stuff anyway, on the assumption that the medication needed something to work with. The experimental sip didn’t go well. It was gritty, and had, at the very least, been processed near some almonds, dates, and generic laboratory vanilla flavor, even if active doses of same had never made it into the finished food-substitute product. He wondered if it was Ensure or Soylent. The label on the bottle claimed it to be fresh-pressed, but there was no indication of the year that that was supposed to have been committed in. He began picking at the corner of the label. He thought about eating part of the label, in case it contained more nutrition than the beige muck. He didn’t, because he thought it might make him look crazy.

  Lela appeared in the chair on the other side of the table. “What do you mean, we have to find out?”

  “What?”

  “The last thing you said before you slipped into a coma. We have to find out. Or we’re all going to be trapped here. What did you mean?”

  She hadn’t changed her clothes.

  “I don’t know,” Adam said. “Paranoia. Cynicism. They’re going to have to put together some kind of investigative team, which will mean some level of cooperation between all the people who fund this place, and I don’t even know how you begin to investigate something like that anyway. On top of that, whoever did the thing may already have what they wanted.”

  “You mean removing that Mansfield guy?”

  “I mean Staging privileges have been pulled. And according to you, those Staging huts are the only places where people other than the staff have internet access.”

  She sat back. “Wow,” she said. “You are paranoid.”

  “No. Well, maybe. But I work differently than you. I’ve seen your presentations.” He took another small sip of the beige stuff. His stomach spasmed.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

  “No.” She had those raptor eyes again, and she tapped claws on the faded plastic tabletop. “Say what you mean.”

  Adam twisted the cap onto the beige muck and decided to open his water. “You have a bad case of dataism. You assume that data constitute a miniature of reality. Data as the only way to measure any given state or event.”

  “Oh my God,” Lela said. “You really are crazy. Thank Christ they brought you here.”

  “No more crazy than what you did in Brussels in 2012. All that work you did on waste transportation. You captured an entire city’s sanitation process from goods purchase to landfill. You gathered all the data, and then what did you do with it?”

  “I gave it to the city, of course.”

  “And what happened after?”

  “No idea. My job was to gather the data. It’s not like I was hanging out with spooks.”

  “Except that it wasn’t really a job. It was a university grant. But you turned over all the data and your conclusions to the city authorities anyway. Because all you cared about was making your miniature of reality. Something someone could hold in their hand. You were blind to the before and the after. Big old case of dataism. Fuck me, this water is disgusting.”

  “It’s high alkaline. It reduces inflammation.”

  “I think I’d rather be inflamed.”

  “Clearly. What is it that you actually do, Adam Dearden?”

  “Field research. Other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “What’s missing from your miniature of reality in this instance, Lela?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Did Clough tell you what we saw in Mansfield’s room?”

  The idea of an absent datum made Lela’s brow knit. “No.”

  Adam leaned in, lowered his voice. “Some funny bastard thought it would be a good joke to empty a bag of insects over Mansfield’s bed.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “What I said. Don’t ask me how. Someone, or ones, spent God knows how long stuffing ants and spiders and cockroaches and other fucking creepy-crawlies into a bag just so they could upend it over Mansfield’s bed before they left. We saw the lock to Mansfield’s door get punched out, and we saw them open a room, and we saw insects all over the bed and walking all over the room. I saw it. Clough saw it. Okay?”

  Lela let the idea dance around her like a boxer, weaving in her seat. She took Adam’s water from his fingers and stole a gulp.

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “I’m paranoid, remember?” Adam smiled.

  “Indulge me, crazy person. Since I’m an inflexible Puritan who only listens to the data. Tell me the news from Crazytown.”

  Adam took his water back. The bottle’s rim had that odd warmth of another person’s mouth that made him think of telephone hygiene supplies. He considered how to frame his response without exposing too much of himself. He reminded himself that everyone here was a little broken, and that made them all dangerous on some level. Also, that his own relative calm was a chemical production that could close its curtains at any point.

  “Psyops,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, leaning back with his water bottle, out of her reach.

  In some form of abstract retaliation, she took the bottle of beige shit. “I’m having your smoothie,” Lela said.

  “You’re welcome to it.”

  They stared at each other. It became a staring match. Sociopolitical virtual arm-wrestling.

  “Psyops.” Lela smirked. “Really.”

  “Do you know anything about it?” Adam said.

  “Do you? Or do you just listen to the tinfoil-hat brigade spout about it on internet radio? You sound like one of them,” she said, nodding at the other half of the patio crowd. “Which brings me back to why one of them knew you by name. Crossing the aisle
is seriously not appreciated here, you know.”

  “There you go,” Adam said. “Binary thinking. It’s either inside your field of measurement or it’s not.”

  “You are really starting to piss me off,” Lela observed. She took a drink of the smoothie, which, it turned out, she actually liked. “I’m so glad they have Buoylent here.”

  “Buoylent?”

  “You know what Soylent is, right? The powder mix that gives you all your nutritional requirements? Half of the Bay Area’s been drinking it for years. They make their own custom versions of it here. Buoylent is like a medical version for mood management. Tastes better than Soylent, too. Much less like drinking a hobo’s sperm.”

  Adam drank off half the remaining volume of water in the bottle in one gulp, gasped, and said, “They hand out lithium smoothies at Normal?”

  “Please,” Lela said with a curl of her lip. “This is the twenty-first century. They’re not going to poison us with lead any more than they’re going to stick leeches to us. Although, it has to be said, leeches are used these days as artificial veins during surgical reattachment procedures. It’s all about the continuing capture and processing of data, you see.”

  Adam gave her a slow clap as she smiled. “Oh, well played, madam.”

  “I’m going to Staging soon,” Lela said, smoothing the planes of her jacket down. “I’m an urbanist. I understand processes.”

  “You’re not in a city,” Adam said. “You don’t know where you are.”

  “Oh, go on, then, new crazy person. Indulge me. Where am I?”

  “You’re in an asylum that’s been turned into a combat theater.”

  “Really. What kind of combat?”

  “Psychological operations.”

  “Bullshit. Someone disappeared, is all. Everyone’s freaked out, but—”

  “No, this is how modern psyops works. Like this. Cutting a man’s head off on camera and uploading it to YouTube. That’s not just a killing. The killing is, in some ways, the smallest part of it. It’s the theater of cruelty. It’s an emotional contagion. The victim’s family and friends know about it. They can’t help but know. They know that people are watching it online. They know that even when the video gets pulled, stills from the whole thing will circulate. There will be TV and newspaper stories. They know, walking down the street, that anyone they pass could have watched that person die. The terror of interpersonal engagement and communication. All communication becomes dangerous. The impact spreads, becomes sociocultural. Friction in the area they live in. Police and social services get involved. And the windows rattle in the halls of power. Retaliation is considered, and perhaps even enacted, but they’re striking against asymmetrically posed forces that are highly mobile and indistinguishable from the air. Air travel is the vector of infection. It gets harder to use planes. Free movement becomes difficult if not impossible for certain people and regions. Innocent people get killed. Innocent people lose freedoms. The contagion spreads and spreads and nobody can disinfect it. And just when you think the fever is breaking and the infection is dying down—there’s another beheading. Another weaponized psychological outbreak. On and on. And the material cost to the attacker is a knife, a phone, and a minute’s worth of internet connection. Or an abduction and a bag of wildlife. Abduction, the disappearing of people, works in the same way. You see where I’m going with this? A missing guy, a locked-room mystery out of Agatha fucking Christie, and a pile of insects. And you didn’t know about the pile of insects. That information was withheld. But you know it’s working on their heads, the Director and his staff and whoever they’re all dealing with right now. And the first impact result is that we’re now an electronic island. Who benefits from that? Who’s happier knowing that the staff are paralyzed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt and that the presumably far-saner-than-us people who work in Staging now can’t speak to the outside world in any way? You want to go at this from the perspective of dataism? The fact that Mansfield’s body was apparently magically swapped with a stack of wood lice is a datum that was so fucking weird that the staff had to withhold it from the patients, and so until five minutes ago you had an incomplete model of the event and could not begin to process it correctly. Your little fucking miniature train set of the world had some missing tracks and plastic trees. Which it always does, because the world is not a train set, and dataism is bullshit, and you are as much of a threat to the world as anyone over there on the strategic foresight side because you don’t actually know what you’re fucking doing. You might think they’re evil, but they think you’re dangerous.”

  Lela grabbed his hand. He stopped talking. He discovered that he was shaking, and that he couldn’t stop it.

  Adam forced a trembling laugh. “I thought you didn’t do touching of other people yet.”

  Lela looked at their hands. Her mouth tightened. She was making herself squeeze his hand, forcing herself over some kind of personal wall. “You looked like you were about to fly apart at the seams. I recognized the way you were talking because I still do it myself sometimes.”

  “Why are you here?” Adam asked, quietly.

  She faked a rueful smile, and pulled her hands away. “Bad case of abyss gaze.”

  It would have been cruel of Adam to push. But he found that he wanted to be cruel. Just for a minute. Just for a tiny bit. Just enough to see a wound open and see a little blood. He wanted to hurt Lela, to graze her. To see if he could, and to toss a coin’s worth of payback into the conversation for the times her tone and attitude had made him feel bad. Adam knew it was childish, but he rationalized it in this way: carelessly harming other people was a decent stand-in for baseline human interaction.

  “I’m guessing that that’s what we all say,” Adam said. “What really did it? What broke you and put you here, Lela?”

  “I’m not broken,” Lela said.

  “But you’re here. You were staring into something that got you locked up here. What was it? Did the data fail you?”

  “No.” Lela’s hands whitened around the bottle of Buoylent. “The data never fails me.”

  “And that was the problem,” Adam said, working the tip of a knife into that tiny, nearly-but-not-quite-healed nick on her heart.

  “That’s the problem. You spend all day thinking of cities as machines for living in. And as the data piles up, and you realize the scale of the problems that cities are intended to solve, you start thinking of the city as a suit of armor to survive in. I mean, in theory and practice, that’s exactly what it is. That’s why cities used to have earthworks and walls around them. A city’s supposed to have everything in it that its citizenry needs to live. If I’m sick, and I live in a city, it’s almost certain that the care I need is closer to me than if I lived in a house in the country, because all the hospitals are in big towns and cities. People in what we think of as a basic Western city simply live longer. Basic, not, you know, collapsing or feral. Basic. Which means they fill up with old people. Huddled up against the health services they need and can afford, and all the other civic machinery that keeps their spaces livable.”

  Her voice was speeding up, and taking that flat, affectless tone he heard yesterday. Adam put his hand on the table, where hers had been, open. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to go on.”

  “I do, though. I do need to go on. Because you need to hear it. Everybody does. I have to track shit, to do my job. Literally. I literally had to track the passage of shit through pipes in five major cities for six months, at one point. The way we move shit around in cities is fucking vital. It affects the condition of the urban environment, the volume of humans that can be supported therein, the quality of the water and the state of the ecology outside the city. At least. And then, yes, I had to hand over my data to the city authorities, because that’s what I was hired to do. I don’t get to make the decisions. All I can do is overwhelm them with data and reports until they have no choice but to do the right thing. But they don’t, because nobody can hold the right thing in their head
s. It’s too big. It’s too big and it’s too deep.”

  “Lela, don’t,” Adam muttered, looking at the table.

  “You know what I’m talking about. They”—she cast her hand across the gathered mass of people on the patio—“all know what I’m talking about. I got sent to New York. Fucking New York. They pump more than thirteen million gallons of water out of New York every day just to keep the fucking subway running. So that people can perform ten thousand felonies a year on it. And that’s the small number. New York needs to pump another two hundred million gallons of water out of four thousand five hundred acres of city every single day to stop the city from drowning in its own piss and bathwater and the sea creeping up to grab at the ankles of the two million people south of Seventy-First Street. That is one system. Only one. And just in Manhattan. The five boroughs have to process more than a billion gallons a day. Remember Hurricane Sandy? Sandy took out half the pumps and almost all the treatment plants in a fucking second. And it was just barely a Category One hurricane when it hit. A thirteen-foot surge over the wall by Battery Park. That released ten billion gallons of raw sewage into the city and the surrounding waters. Shit. Big storm comes and we can’t protect ourselves from our own shit. That’s the future, Adam fucking whateveryournameis. City-states rammed with aging people huddling up against hospitals and looking up in terror for the big storm that will come and go and leave them floating facedown in thirteen feet of shit. And I can’t do anything about it.”

  Adam was hunting Dickson with his eyes, which, if nothing else, kept him from accidentally making eye contact with Lela.

  “None of us can. We just look at this stuff, we look wider and deeper, and then just deeper and fucking deeper, and all we can see is everything getting smaller and darker until it’s this infinite black dot of compressed shit and horror. And we get paid for that. That’s the amazing thing. We get paid to stare down the black silo of the future and gaze at the pebble at the bottom that’s nothing but the crushed remains of the species. That’s where we all end up. That’s all we do. And there’s a dollar value on that. We get given money for it. It’s like we’re the sin-eaters for the entire fucking culture, looking at the end of human civilization because it’s supposed that somebody should. I’m fine, by the way. Stop looking for a nurse. I’m going to Staging soon. I’m going back to work. Society needs people to stare at a ball of shit at the end of the world all day. It’s a living.”