Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

The problem was that there were too many Carl Hirsches to choose from. Maybe thirty in Carl’s region alone. You could pick only one at a time, then pay your money for the reveal. But behind each clickable Carl Hirsch was the same picture, the only extant picture of a Carl Hirsch anywhere, apparently.

The picture looked a good deal like Carl’s own father, dead a long time now, who never lived in this area. Never even visited, as far as Carl knew. Was it really him? The picture was from that era when subjects did not look at the camera, so here was someone who looked very much like his dad, from so long ago, staring into the distance, at something behind Carl that he couldn’t see. No matter how he jogged his head, he could not quite get those eyes to look at him.

The rest of the weekwent okay. The sympathy dried up, but all seemed well. Carl fried at his desk, sipped distilled water. His guards didn’t seem to be minding him so carefully, and Kora hadn’t come by to stick him with Shitazine, so he grabbed a scone at one point, and it burst into powder in his mouth. He fell to the ground coughing, a cloud of crumbs spraying everywhere, but no one at Mayflower particularly minded him. They knew his life was hell.

In the coatroom as Carl was leaving that Friday, Kipler pulled him aside. Out in the open, in front of the rush-hour crowd of employees, who pretended that their boss wasn’t standing right there, huddled up with Blizzard Face himself.

“So what’s with the crotch shot?”

“What?”

“Why did you send a picture of your testicles to so many strangers? People were revolted and confused. And over email. The least secure form of communication ever devised, including whatever the apes used.”

“You knew?”

“A scrotum isn’t some rare species, nor does any living person have a neck that fucked up. We know what your symptoms are. We caused them. I’ve probably seen forty unique pairs of balls. Just a round number. Not all of them up close, but I know what they look like.”

“I’m sorry,” Carl said.

“So are we. You’re out. It breaks your nondisclosure. Honestly, even if it doesn’t, it breaks something. Something is wrong. Your data. I don’t know. I don’t specialize in precise ways to say something so obvious. You’re done.”

“I agree,” Carl said.

“Go have a sandwich, already. You’re off the feed. We neutralized your panels a few days ago from a kill switch in Albuquerque.”

“I was going to say,” Carl said. “Something seemed like an improvement.”

“The alpha unit wasn’t friendly. We know that. Sorry for, you know. Mostly it was proof of concept. And guess what. Proof achieved. Through the so-called roof. Maybe your numbers weren’t good, but they were numbers. You fed. Badly, and with little retention. But you fed. We’re moving to beta. The life hackers are going to strap in. This thing will make it to market. I’m sorry you can’t take the ride with us.”

“So am I fired?”

“Don’t push your luck. The NDA still stands, for, like, three lifetimes. Your children’s children, not that offspring are a likely outcome for you, can’t even whisper it to each other. I’ll be dead myself, but I’ll leave instructions that your kids get slapped across the room and out a window if that happens. Slapped right the hell off the planet. So nary a whisper. Not that you’re having kids. We find that it’s easiest for you to keep quiet about all this if you, you know, don’t even remember it. That way it’s not a secret you’re keeping. You don’t even know about it yourself. Which is very nearly true. That’s the argument from our side. Not even the argument, just the language. It never happened.”

“Thanks,” Carl said.

“I love you, man,” Kipler said. He closed in on Carl, wrapped him in his arms. “What a bullet you took for us,” he whispered. “A huge bullet. The biggest.”

As the employees of Mayflower filed out of the building for the night, Carl held on to Kipler in the coatroom, squeezing him tightly, feeling the man’s heartbeat throb against his face.

For a while,everything went quiet. Carl returned to mouth food with an animal focus, but he couldn’t keep it down, and all the time he fretted about the UV panels. Showing up, who knows, in traffic lights. On televisions. At home, pulsing from his mirror. He stayed cautious of screens, skipped past them quickly.

The winter failed, and along came April, one of the twelve punishments. Carl had seen this month too often by now and had hardened against its pleasures.

April was a bastard name for a month so numb. Slush on the ground, a salty slurry in the air. Slush, most likely, in his insides, which he pictured as muddied guts down a hole.

Day after day, Carl tromped to work. He tromped home. His pants grew stiff with salt. He lost his security clearance and was migrated through Mayflower’s cubicles once, twice. Finally, they exiled him, with the older, idea-free crowd, to a featureless room overlooking the vast, immaculate cafeteria. In Carl’s new work corridor, the employees went uninstructed and drastically unpoliced. Did they really work there? They shared a single computer and a pristine in-box. To Carl, the workspace was a petting zoo, without visitors. People moved from table to window to door, moaning. He did his best not to touch anyone.

He soon lost his taste for food. Maybe he’d outgrown it, which possibly meant that his clock had finally run down, and okay, that was okay. A creature senses an ending. A window, a door, a hole opens, and he steps through. For now, he sipped the occasional yogurt drink and kept some bread nearby, but something had died in him, and he worried that eating, even a little, would feed it, would stoke the thing and bring it back to life. He felt safer with it gone.

Sometimes Carl woke up confused. He spent time trying to figure out how to reverse what had happened. What was the opposite of a human grow light? He tried the obvious: darkness, the deepest kind. He tried it and tried it and tried it. At home for days with the shades down, then—where the darkness was so much better, so exquisite and fine—out of town, along the sand roads, under the salt pines, in the dunes, or deep in the woods off the highway.

One night, the police picked him up, and they were not pleased. What face could Carl show them but his own, burned and unmoving? What he told them, at length and through his charred mouth, was not true and it was not enough. They drove him home in silence, and when they dropped him off they saw him all the way to his door and inside, and after Carl locked up he listened for a long time, but never did hear them walk away.

At the age of forty-one,Carl left Mayflower and accepted an IT job in a school system near the water. Tech support turned out to be lightbulbs, wind blinds, a chimney. Chairs, phones, walls. The yard, too. Carl would maintain all of them.

The school kept Carl away from the children. He understood. Children’s fears should be managed. Sometimes their eyes need to be covered. So much is better left unseen. There would be more and greater to fear when they were older. Best to save room. But Carl found a way to tend the landscape in the mornings, at a squinting distance from the school doors. From afar, he was a faceless man in a jumpsuit, leaning into his shovel, Carl the Small, the frantic waver. Every day, the kids, fired like missiles from the yellow school buses, waved at Carl, and he saluted them all, righty-o. Hello there, you guys! People should always greet one another that way. If he could store a message for creatures thousands of years in the future, it would be simple. Upon meeting one another in whatever passes, in your world, for a room, a hallway, a road, a field, do not play dead while you are still alive. Just try to say hello.