Steve Tem - Ubo

DANIEL BOLTED UPRIGHT on the platform. He’d dreamed of drowning, and flying through the air at such speed he couldn’t catch his breath. His head felt swollen. He reached up and discovered a series of cylindrical protrusions pushed through his hair and making a tight seal against his skull. He pressed and pulled on them, but they wouldn’t be budged.

At least half the room had been destroyed. Fragments of glass and cracked appliances, spilled liquids, fried components. Still, portions of instruments glowed and buzzed, and a few digital readouts measured… something. He stared. Ghostly images of past trauma and high emotion overlaid the room. It was as if he were in the middle of a scenario but he was awake, fully aware and moving around. Whatever was welded to his head still kept him connected to their machines. He watched as the train rolled in. As they unlocked each livestock car they herded out the Jews. He was part of the crew assigned to drag out the dead bodies left behind, the ones who hadn’t survived the trip. But he wouldn’t touch the dead babies abandoned by their terrified mothers. He’d rather be shot. This time he’d traded the task to another Jewbut what would he do next time? The image swept away as his eyes grew wet.

Daniel pushed open the fractured double doors and stumbled down the corridor to the waiting room. Smoke and debris were everywhere. He could hardly see anything above waist height. Contoured lengths of metal, tubing and hydraulics, electronics, littered the floor, and in one spot a metal contraption resembling a rib cage. The lights flashed painfully—he wanted to cover his eyes. His head felt unwieldy. He didn’t understand. The cylindrical things attached to his skull felt fragile, insubstantial to the touch, and yet he felt he might fall over from their weight.

“Here, let’s get this off you!” Falstaff suddenly shouted into his ear. The alarm was going off, the volume rising with each repetition. It seemed needlessly hysterical.

Falstaff struggled with the apparatus on his head for some time. “It’s no use!” he shouted. “It’s welded to your skull!”

Daniel wobbled his head to shake all the Jews from his skull. They lay everywhere. They had drifted into the corners of the room.

“The character I played, this killer.” Daniel panted. “He knew I was there. He knew I was a witness !”

“There’s a peculiar thing with the scenarios thatare more or less in real-time,” Falstaff said, working to remove the head gear. “A kind of feedback occurs. Damnit! It won’t budge! The character feels the observer’s presence. They become paranoid.”

“But it wasn’t contemporary! It was set in the future. Something bad happens in Boston, in the future!”

Falstaff hesitated, hands on Daniel’s shoulders. “Probably not. You’re probably mistaken, Daniel. The future doesn’t exist yet, so there’s nothing for the roaches’ system to read and record. The farthest they can go is to this moment, today .”

“I’LL SEE IF I can find something to get this off you.” Falstaff went away.

Daniel couldn’t quite interpret the frantic activity, the destruction, and the fleeting suggestions of old dramas surrounding him. Unsteadily he made his way to a chair and sat down. The constant movement of the residents made him nervous—too many legs. He focused on the floor, now littered with bits of circuitry, metal, plaster and ceiling tile. He looked at the walls—spider web cracks and small gaps thathadn’t been there before. Sections of the ceiling hinged back and forth exposing the wiring above.

Residents were milling around, going to each other, waving their hands, staring at each other in shock. Fewer of us , he thought. By at least a third. He didn’t see Gandhi anywhere, but Lenin walked by. Daniel grabbed his arm. “Where’s…” For a second he couldn’t think of Gandhi’s real name. “Walter?”

Lenin acted impatiently. “He didn’t come back from his last session. A lot of us didn’t. You heard the explosions, didn’t you? Someone said there was a surge and an overload, then part of the structure failed.”

Daniel nodded. “We have to find him.”

“Maybe. Maybe we can search, if they let us.” The roaches in the room moved around aimlessly, seemingly as confused as the residents. “But I’ll keep asking around, find out if anybody’s seen him.” Lenin left. Daniel heard him shouting Walter’s name, saw shaking heads. There was a blur of ghostly shapes both in front of and behind them. Transparent, insubstantial bits of scenarios.

Most of the residents were on their feet and moving about, but a few were sitting like him, preoccupied. Someone walked in front of him and their scissoring legs tore the air. The figure now across from him was sitting on a different kind of bunk, a dull, greenish wall behind him, bent over, his nose against a broken piece of tile he held on his knees. He snorted, jerked up, white powder caking his upper lip. He rubbed at his nose furiously, grinned, and wiped his finger over his gums.

Then Daniel saw the girlish haircut, or was it a wig? The man had breasts, not fully developed but on their way. The man laughed, winked in Daniel’s direction, looking familiar. It was Richard Speck, the student nurse killer, in prison, his face recognizable even under that wig. The Speck scenario was the one that had disturbed Bogart so much.

Eight student nurses. He’d slept in a nearby park the night before. Tied them up at gunpoint, strangled them. Quieter that way. The knife was just there to scare them. “It just wasn’t their night.” Tearing the bed sheets into strips to bind them. He felt nothing. Born To Raise Hell tattoo. Later he slashed his wrists. But he survived to be this person, whoever this person was.

Daniel was right there inside Speck’s head, so high, so fuzzy, but he was outside the scenario, outside the lab. He wanted to warn everyone that Speck had escaped. But Daniel also had escaped. He was outside his head.

Speck looked right at him. “They sent me in here, and look how I’m living. Like a queen in here. This is me laughing now!”

The room began to strobe. Daniel closed his eyes—he had a flowering headache. He made himself get up. It was one thing to be forced while lying strapped to a bed, another when they followed you into your world.

He walked around the room slowly. Voices echoed from somewhere outside the range he was able to understand. People stared at him. Then he saw his shadow with the swollen head from all the cylinders affixed to his scalp. “What happened to you ?” someone asked, but he didn’t answer. He started searching faces, seeking familiar ones. A few he had a nodding acquaintance with, none he knew very well. Where was Gandhi? He couldn’t believe he was gone.

That fellow in the old-fashioned suit with his back turned, talking and joking with the others. He looked completely out of place. The suit looked worn, sun-damaged, as if he had travelled a great distance. They either laughed or nodded at everything he said, but offered up nothing of their own. The man turned his head slightly to the side. Daniel stared. The man apparently felt the stare, turned his head a bit more and nodded slightly in Daniel’s direction. It was Adolf Hitler.

As Hitler turned his head back toward the other men, Daniel could see that they were enveloped by transparent mountain and valley views. The Bavarian Alps. Berghof. Hitler tapped a cane impatiently on the stone floor. There was a woman on the other side of the men, smiling, blinking into the sun, and fading out briefly with each blink. She carried a basket of food. It was a semi-formal sort of meeting, Daniel thought, a summer gathering outside in the fresh mountain air. Eva was laughing now, their dogs barking. It was a typical afternoon at home.