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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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The morning commute is always murder, always more cars than road to hold them. The radio buzzes in the background. There’s been an accident, overturned Beetle and a lot of blood by the side of the road, not blocking traffic, but distracting drivers.
Head’s been hurting lately. Seems worse today, and yet, with it seems to come some clarity. I remember loving the crispness of the morning air, it used to bring that same clarity and purpose. I turn off the radio to hear myself think; I can’t remember how long it’s been since I wanted to hear myself think. And my first thought is that I like feeling clear, that I’d like some of that crisp morning air, so I roll down my car window. My nose isn’t met with the soft scent of morning dew, but by the pissed off exhaust of engines refused their craving for motion. I roll up the window and smile to myself; the first cogent thought in a while and it’s a stupid one; at least I can laugh at myself. But what comes out is a wry chuckle, far from the amusement I’d felt only a second ago, because there’s something else. Beneath the surface there’s a feeling, panicked and hurried, like the thoughts of a child held underwater: get it out, get it off, tear it out, get loose. It’s a chorus, repeating, but growing and falling as if the consciousness were bobbing to the surface then silenced again by black, smothering waves. Maybe I’ve been working too hard; I realize I can’t remember my last vacation, God, maybe some trip to California with my family when I was a kid- half a lifetime ago. I'm late to work, and I'm not ten steps through the office doors before the guy who sits in the cube next to mine says, “We're in a grumpy mood this morning, aren't we?” I want to punch him in the face; what's strange about it is I can always remember disliking him for some reason, but it's always been buried before behind a forced, “G'morning.” I work through my first break, since I've only been there forty minutes by the time it rolls around. By lunchtime I know it's a lousy day; I just can't can't bring myself to work well with others today, be a team player, my supervisor usually calls it. But today I can’t give a shit about the team; they could drown in their morning coffees for all I care, because my head hurts, and my evaluation is coming up, and my boss keeps giving me that look that says he's going to come over and make my life uncomfortable, just not quite yet. I grab a bagel and stare at it for ten minutes before realizing I'm more nervous than hungry, but that I'd be less nervous if I was back at the desk working instead of wasting time hiding in the cafe. I don't even get my bagel onto a cleanex on my desk before my boss taps me on the shoulder. “We need to have a conversation.” He motioned towards the copy room; how long had it been since we'd gotten rid of all the conference rooms? I shut the door behind me. He sets his “World's Best Boss” mug down on the copy machine. All of the managers have one, team leaders, too. Really, everyone above the standard office drone seemed to get one from the company, who seems blissfully ignorant of the irony in that. And when he speaks it's in that same, familiar monotone, one that, if you don't pay attention becomes a hum. “We aren't happy with your attitude today. We feel that your performance has been slipping, that this is part of a pattern of behavioral and performance issues. And we're becoming concerned.” I'd been here before; it seemed like increasingly I couldn't focus on my work, and what was more, couldn't understand what it was that management seemed to want from me. They couldn't articulate it to me, but until recently they didn't have to. We'd lost our synergy. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, the way a father does to establish a physical bond with his son. “We're beginning to fear you're not well, that you're not longer one of us.” I felt noise in my head, like static, and my vision pulsed, and suddenly I felt it, at the base of my spine. I shouldn't have felt it, and it realized I had and tried something to make me forget, and when that didn't work a single thought flashed over my whole brain, an animal mechanism: bite. Suddenly there was pain in my spine. It was so intense I collapsed, and hit the back of my neck against the copy machine. There was an almost metallic crunch at the impact, and by the time I hit the floor the pain in my back was gone, and so was the headache. My boss started to reach down, “Are you-” then he stopped, and his mouth gaped in horror. “I can't feel you,” he whispered, and I understood what he meant. I couldn't feel him either; it had been growing weaker for months; I thought I was becoming depressed, or maybe just isolated, but now I recognized that what I'd been feeling, what I now no longer felt, wasn't natural, wasn't normal. I hadn't felt that way when I was a kid, and I couldn't remember when it started or why I had simply accepted it. My hands groped at the copier for purchase to pull myself up, but what they found instead was his “World's Best Boss” coffee mug. I knew the horror on his face was only temporary; I felt it, as the thing in my neck screamed its isolated horror into my brain, and I felt it turning to thoughts of action. I swung the mug into my boss' temple, and the mug cracked like the Liberty Bell. He fell onto his knees, his hands reaching across the floor to escape the same way his mind was reaching to understand what had happened. I hit him again, every conscious fiber in my brain demanding that this alien thing be disposed of- it was the same way my mother used to react to spiders. I brought the mug down again and he collapsed. I raised my hand again, because I didn't trust it to stay on the floor, only to realize that the mug had already broken away, leaving me only the handle to hold. I stopped. I don’t know how I knew it but I knew it, just under the skin, under a layer of scar tissue, was an insect. They don’t control us, exactly, they just make us feel more cohesive, more together, more dependent on society, more subservient to its needs. And that might not be so bad, but the insect is just a larval parasite, feeding off its human host. It keeps us docile while it gestates. I dropped to one knee and ran my fingers down my boss' spine, tracing along what a memory from childhood told me should have been three inches thinner, and that I should have felt the ridges of the human spinal cord, but my adult brain seemed to be weakly telling me to ignore. I could feel the thing's exoskeleton, thought I could even feel a weak heartbeat through its carapace. Then it sent out a buzzing message I felt in my eyes: They're coming. There was excitement at the base of my spine, but my parasite couldn't be sure whether to be pleased that they were coming, or worried that he would be damaged when they came for me. It seemed to decide, at the end, that it had spent enough time alone that its loyalties lay with itself, or perhaps it was simply goading me into a trap when it told me: run. I didn't make it far. They were waiting a few feet outside the copy room, men in suits I didn't recognize, but what set them apart were eyes slightly too large for them, and the thing in my spine told me what they were, and that I was fucked: Drones. Too late. I tried to make a run for it, but the first one was fast, and grabbed me. He was bigger than I'd realized, because I'd been distracted by his disproportionate eyes. And I could feel it, the totality of their collective thoughts, not just the two of them, but all of them, in the cubicles around me, in the business complex, in the entire city, pushing a thought through my spine and into my head: We are not amused. But it all ended abruply, as the drone who grabbed me began to speak to the other. “The larva will have to be extracted and studied; extraction always kills the host. Pray it’s a developmental mutation or a varroa destructor infestation. Drones produce identical sperm, so if one is firing bad rounds, it could impact thousands, even millions of us. Pay attention; he could be from your brood.” It was obvious he was the senior of the two; the behavioral clues were subtle, but the other one was giving him deference, listening and watching. He twisted my arm behind my back. Something animal in me wanted to flee but I couldn't, so it told me to fight, to cause pain wherever I could. I grabbed him where he's holding my arm and I pull with everything I've got, and come back with a handful of genitals and keep pulling. There's a sound like walnuts cracking and fabric tearing, and I'm holding exotic looking junk in my hand, with its assorted organs trailing behind it. It's got a prong that makes it look like a little Cupid's arrow, and before I even think I jam it into the rookie's guts just far enough the prong'll catch. He doubles over, and I punch him hard across the face. There's panic in the office now, as most of my co-workers and the things that live in them have gotten up to gawk, but they can feel the pain of the drones; I don't think it cripples them so much as chastens them against trying to stop me as I grab my coat and run for the exit. I get in my car and drive, and I don't stop until I'm miles outside the city. The air out here is cleaner, clearer, but I'm more confused and angry and disgusted than ever in my entire life. I need answers, and I'm desperate and I'm pretty sure there's only one source, anyway. I realized how stupid it would be to try to talk out loud to an insect burrowed under my skin, so I think at it as hard as I could: Are you dying? Its response comes slowly: I... can't think well. I swear. Because whatever else that means, it meant it was going to be a crappy judge of what was going on. But it was also the only one of its kind that was talking to me. I realized something, too, and think at it some more: Wait. The headaches. The incompetence. I've been piggy-backing your brain damage, haven't I? Likely. More: And are you going to keep pumping stupid-toxins into me? Are we both going to go brain-dead together? There was a pause, and then it made a sound that, after a moment, I realized was its species' equivalent of a shrug. “Well, shit,” I said. |
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