Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Then they started going for the tissue samples. They infiltrated the hospitals, harvesting. They took epidermal clippings from sleeping patients. Accumulated drug specimens from the pharmacies. Impervious to cold, they invaded the icy nightmare-crypts of the morgues, burrowing deep through tympanic membrane, incus, cochlea, vestibular nerve, directly into the brain.

Which is where the first one was exposed in the fall of 1989 by an autopsist during a routine postmortem on a burst parietal aneurysm at the Columbia Medical Center in New York. Nesting among the semisolid gel, the thing — flat slippery body housed in a leathery yellow-brown casing, bristly legs, flickering feelers — hissed at her when she uncovered it. The autopsist, Dr. Fiona K’ai-chih, removed the orthopteron with tweezers and crushed its armored head. Instead of umber sap, a demure blue spark flittered out. Dr. K’ai-chih slipped the carcass under a microscope and saw, behind what was left of those dark polymer eye shells, the cameras. She called the police. The police called the FBI. The FBI called the CIA. And the CIA called us.

I entered the narrative in August, 1990, after way too much had already gone down. I was there, really, to bear witness. I was there for the metaphorical dustoff, the Great Transcription, though everyone — including me — pretended I was there for other, more optimistic, reasons. Further robotic cockroaches turned up, hundreds of them, thousands, often near corpses, sometimes in the prison cells of child-killers being shaved for execution by electric chair, or in the bowel-remains of dying prostitutes gutted by their pimps in Hoboken alleys. Sometimes in AIDS hospices, psychiatric institutions, sensitive areas on overseas military bases, Blockbuster outlets, Disneyland and the myriad food stalls in the Mall of America. They spread through the country like flames over spilled jet fuel… Chicago… Omaha… Portland… Austin… San Diego… you name it. We did what we could to keep the news out of the public arteries. We were lucky, mostly. Then we heard from our contacts in the crumbling Soviet Union, a bloated communism coming down around their ears, that the U.S. wasn’t alone in this discreet interplanetary war.

I scanned CNN for signs of the final embarkation, the Weather Channel for indicators of ultimate change, old movies on that Turner station for scenes added while our cultural backs were turned toward something seemingly more interesting. I didn’t see a thing. No rough beast, no poltergeist, no worldwide rapture. The earth didn’t stop revolving. The final deluge didn’t arrive. Everything simply… continued… the way it had always continued… till, that is, the summer of 1994.

I was up in Portland, doing some business at our West Coast headquarters. It’d been a long day, and I was lying on my bed in my hotel room late at night surfing channels when I saw him flip onto the screen. Allegedly killed his ex-wife and her male friend by stabbing them over and over again, then kneeing her spine, yanking back her head by the blond hair, and slitting her throat. Blood was everywhere. I remember how it was so black it looked as if someone had spattered and puddled crude oil down the condo walk. And I remember him, the one we soon started calling Rhabhog, standing in the LA police station, proud, determined, even defiant, like this was some inconsequential project, an ethical fender-bender, like our universe was somehow smaller than his. I looked into his eyes as his eyes looked into the media. They said: You’re living on my planet now . And a moment later I found myself reaching for the phone, punching in the numbers, making reservations for the first flight south in the morning.

You could tell, if you knew the context, if you followed the information. It wasn’t hard. The legal wrangling began, the accusations and counter accusations, the preliminaries, the posturing, the televisual detonation… and I sat in front of my set in another hotel room in another city and studied his eyes, the way they’d drift up and left in the courtroom like his mind was just too busy with important matters to be troubled by this. The jury selection commenced, and the trial itself, and the Dream Team swooped down, and the experts and counter-experts zigzagged around the truth, and the DNA discussions erupted, and the character witnesses came forth, and the videos showing Rhabhog laughing the day his ex-wife died cycled, and those showing his lame legs, and those showing his legs weren’t lame at all, and the Nazi cop taking repeated detours from the legal boulevard, and the smirk on Rhabhog’s face as he fumbled with that silly bloody glove before the jury, and the look on his ex-wife’s bruised face as she returned from the dead to tell us all he’d get away with it someday, do what you wanted, think what you would, he’d get away with it… and I sat in front of my set and studied his eyes… the way they’d glance up at the camera, checking, the way they’d flirt with the powerful twelve across the room on his right, sweet as the eyes of a seraphim, the way they’d roll with disdain when the black man behind the prosecution’s podium made another angry point… the dark brown eyes, flaring, charming, self-pitying, self-righteous, self-aware — and always, if you inspected them close enough, glassy, too… detached… cool… always something calculating as a computer running algorithms behind them.

It wasn’t difficult, but we had to be sure. So we brought in the specialists just in case, the kind who don’t show up in your phonebook, the kind you’ll never find unless they decide to find you, and they went through the footage, played it, replayed it, paused it, zeroed in on that horse-jawed face, that high forehead, that Doberman’s neck and chunky shoulders, magnified those eyes with their computers, magnified them some more, till their screens were overrun with them, till there was no more space left for anything else. They went ultra-violet. They went ultrasonic. They went infrared. And then those specialists spotted what we always knew they would: the telltale dark polymer shells, the robotic vidcams pivoting frenetically beneath the surface.

I don’t have much time. They’re on the landing. The door’ll hold them a minute, I figure, maybe a little longer. The Yeltsin-70 will hold them a couple seconds more. There’s a gray BMW in the alley out back. I can see it from my window. The phoneline’s gone. My cellular’s down. This is what it’s all about, in the end. This is the thing it all comes down to.

The universe clarified. Everything connected. Everything made perfect sense when it was too late whether it made sense or not. The trial, of course, wormed on. The defense launched its case. The infamous race card pitched into view. The national polls bucked back and forth like a fighter jet tagged by a heat-seeking missile. The police prepared for riots while the talkshows prepared for unimaginable success. My unit moved into the safe house in East LA and prepared to act, readying to pass our amassed data on to other shadowy bureaus with profiles even more nebulous, more intricate and unnameable, than ours. I worked nineteen- and twenty-hour days, slept less and less, but with the dreamless intensity of drugged blackouts… an incorporeal, profound, overweight sleep, the sort where you wake up in exactly the same position in which you lay down, all your digits fizzing with nerve-static.

It was from one of these, on a warm yellow October dawn, that I was roused by a clicking noise like fingernails on a metal desk. White light was everywhere at once. It broke into millions of itself. The cockroach on the pillow next to my ear spoke through the speaker in its belly. Its antennae fidgeted.

“We won,” it told me, “the instant the first of us activated its hard-drive.”