James Baldwin - Blood Hound

I roused into a sleepwalk, the body shambling while the mind was trapped within a tight crystal cage. Disembodied, I watched from a distance behind my eyes as a mustachioed man walked up to the pair of us and ordered us forward.

This must be scopolamine, I thought. My body got into the car, and the roar of the engine blurred with the sound of a heartbeat in my ears. Motion had a texture: on the road, my vision was flooded by swirling orange light. At some point, I heard the driver speak, telling me to get out of the car. I felt my body comply with a sense of distant dismay. I was aware and conscious, but trapped. My legs complied with the directions we were given, an airplane on autopilot, steering through a woozy fog. No, goddammit…

Floodlights were shining down on a gravel yard that danced like glistening diamonds. We crunched and bobbed across it, headed towards a squat black cube with a gaping, fanged maw. As my vision rocked in the silence of his heartbeat, I saw the mouth open and close hungrily, large enough to engulf several trucks. No.

The air was a liquid, bubbling around me in a whispering river of sound. It was the strangest sensation, riding in the backseat of my body and walking shoulder to shoulder with Vassily. He was breathing through his mouth, panting with pain, his eyes huge and black in his face.

We were drawn through the yawning warehouse maw. The interior was cold, and it smelled like meat, dust, and bird shit. We were led deep into the heart of the place, past a circle of leering men whose faces distorted into paint smears. Whatever the driver told my body to do, it did. I followed him up and down stairs, into an elevator, along a metal catwalk that chimed under our footfall like music as the three of us walked together in syncopated time. I tried to focus past the hallucinations from my remote position of observation. What was the Manellis’ cover business? I tried to remember, but it was impossible to think backwards or forward in this drugged memetic cage. When I stopped trying, something rushed into my memory of its own accord. Elite Meats. Which meant we were out in Franklin Township.

We were led through stacks of boxes, wrapped and ready for transport, and into a section of factory cordoned off from the rest. And there it was, the Fruit. It roared high in my vision, looming like a gargantuan chestnut over the concrete floor, the assembled men, and a table laid out with tools. I thought I saw purple velvet, the clones of my father’s sledge repeated, over and over again. I blinked, and my vision sliced apart, reformed, and focused. Tools, yes. Everything from axes to saws to a drill.

“Right. Well, idiot, you’ve definitely brought somebody.” Carmine’s sneering voice, grossly distorted, rumbled into my ears like bitumen being laid on a new road, and with the association came the smell of it, the burning, waxen tar. “Problem is, Manny, he’s not the right motherfucking guy! Where’s Vincent, you fuckup?!”

“Guy says he’s got the same set of preconditions. Vincent cut and ran.” From the way he used the word, it was clear he was repeating Vassily verbatim.

There was murmuring that might have been talking, but my inner eye was fixated on the Fruit. It pulsed in my vision, a blue dark enough that it seemed to suck in the light around it. I recognized a faint smell, even through the heightened state, that I could not help but breathe in. It was like the most fragrant peach I had ever smelled. In the back of my throat, it transmuted: the sweetness became aromatic and dizzying. Phi. It smelled like Phi.

“Scopolamine.” One word leapt out from the babble. “Okay, get him on it.”

A knife was thrust into my hand, and I was led forward. The driver, a swirling swarthy mass, his teeth made of light, turned me to face the Fruit squarely. “You heard him. Start chopping, and don’t stop ’til you reach the middle.”

As I advanced towards it, I had a vague memory of someone saying this thing had wiped out several guys. That it had sprayed them, something like that. But I couldn’t stop going forward or stop my arm from lifting and the knife coming down. The blade made its first blow, sinking into the rind like butter, and the smell of Phi became overwhelming. My handler retreated hurriedly and left me alone in my labor as my arm rose and fell, rose and fell, like the piston in a machine.

Excitement turned the voices around me to a spiraling shrill that blended into the rest of the muted talk around the perimeter of the light.

“Fuck off, all of you!” Carmine barked. “I got this!”

His voice wasn’t blurry. My head was clearing. With every passing moment, the drug was fading, and fast. My stabs slowed momentarily but then resumed as I struggled to keep the cover and not reveal the loosening lock on my mind. A door slammed behind me, and Carmine returned. In the sudden silence, Vassily’s wheezing was all too audible.

At one point the knife began to thud and stick. I pulled it free, sunk it in again, and was struck square in the face by a jet of pure blue liquid that burst free under pressure from the pith. The stuff didn’t burn me, and neither did it hit the floor; instead, it evaporated into fragrant steam before ever touching the ground.

The world swooped in a florid arc and then drew in to a point, sharp and clear. My body was mine once again. I chopped at the pith, and this time, the liquid slopped down the sides of the shell.

“Jesus and Mary…”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Carmine cross himself and kiss his ring, muttering in Latin. I changed the knife for my hands, pulling out chunks of soft sky-colored pith from inside the shell. I couldn’t stop. I could have, if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to stop. Elbow-deep in the mystery, I couldn’t stop. What was inside? The woman in my dream, the one who had called me “father”? Nothing? Everything?

I broke through a thin inner skin and forced my arm in past it. It was hot inside the rind, as hot as a freshly cracked chest. I felt through a labyrinth of spongy, pulse-infused tissue up to my shoulder. It put me on my tiptoes, and I pressed my ear in against it as I groped around, searching for anything I could grasp and pull free. The shell reverberated with a low thrum up close, an impossibly huge heartbeat that surged as something unseen lunged forward and gripped my forearm.

I roared in mingled shock and pain, hauling back. Whatever had me held on as I pulled it through the final nacreous layers of the rind. Phi spilled everywhere as a woman—at least six feet tall and as athletic as a gymnast—slid out of the tunnel of the womb and fell on top of my chest in a spill of wet white hair. It was like living paint, a shade so pure it bent and flexed against light to hold its wholeness of color.

“Jesus Fucking… Shit!” Carmine screamed into the echoing hall of the warehouse, flinching away. “What the shit are you doing!?”

The nude woman, dripping blue, levered herself up on deceptively strong arms over my face. I couldn’t breathe. She was the most graceful and powerful and fragile thing I’d ever laid eyes on, and she was powerfully, painfully familiar.

“Thank GOD,” she whispered in Ukrainian. “You made it.”

I knew her like my own face, and without thinking, I reached up to touch her cheek. My eyes blurred. Her name was on the tip of my tongue. “Z–Zar–ya?”

She was crying, laughing, and reached up to clap her hands over my cheeks, nodding when I said her name. Zarya. I had never seen her in my life. I scrabbled back from her, heaving for breath, too scared of her otherworldliness to do anything but react. I ran into Carmine’s shins. Carmine was staring, and without looking down at me, he offered me a hand up. That wasn’t how this was supposed to go, but in the face of Zarya’s ability to exist? It made as much sense as anything else.