33
Identity: Jimmy Scadden
As I walked away from Bob and into the dark underbrush, I became aware of someone walking beside me, someone new, but someone at the same time intimately familiar.
“Why did you do that?” the apparition asked.
“Do what?” I didn’t even think to ask who had appeared beside me.
“Why did you warn Bob,” it responded. “I think we need to have a talk, you and I.”
The undergrowth around me gave way to a voluminous, brightly lit corridor. No, more than a corridor. It was a long set of huge rooms connected by large, square archways, and I was sitting in the middle room with the rest stretching off to both sides in the distance.
I was perched on a white wooden chair.
Intricate, sky-blue frescos of angels and cherubs adorned the twenty-foot ceilings that were bordered by elaborate gold carvings. Ornate, richly decorated furniture was strewn about topsy-turvy, and everywhere was littered with broken bottles, golden goblets, and inert bodies.
Dark-framed oil paintings of uniformed men on horseback directing battles hung across one set of walls; the other featured floor-to-ceiling leaded-glass windows that looked out onto an endless manicured garden beyond. The garden was situated around a long reflecting pool. Sunlight streamed in through the windows from between heavy purple velvet drapes tied back with gold sashes.
The place stank of urine, and, as if on cue, one of the slumberers came to life, stumbled to his feet, and shuffled to the nearest corner,, where he began pissing over one of his fellow revelers. “Sorry for the mess,” said my apparition, now in solid form, as he stretched out before me on a chaise lounge. “We had a bit of a party here today.”
He adjusted the frilly white cuffs of his tunic and then his blond wig, which fell in tight curls to frame his white-painted face and bright, red-painted lips. Leaning forward, he smoothed out a wrinkle in his tight black britches and looked up to smile at me self-consciously.
His heavy eyeliner had smudged, making him look comical in a threatening sort of way, and his eyes shone brightly—my eyes.
“Come now, this isn’t that much of a surprise is it?”
I felt uneasy. Was this some splinter or sub-proxxi gone wrong? The party guest finished pissing and turned toward us, blearily rubbing his eyes, which then widened.
“The dauphin!” he said, barely audibly. He was clearly excited, looking at me.
“What do you want?” I asked. This was all more familiar than I cared to admit.
“Ahh,” said my doppelganger, “it is not what I want, brother, but, rather, what we want. You and I, Jimmy. And by the way, call me James.”
He affected a tiny bow for my benefit. Several of the guests began to rouse themselves, encouraged by the first, who was whispering at them urgently. The air filled with the sounds of quiet sounds of clinking bottles and shifting bodies.
“Come now, Jimmy,” scolded James, his brow furrowing. “Do you really think your rise through the ranks to a position of such power so quickly was all just a happy coincidence?”
He smiled widely, revealing a mouthful of yellowing teeth and large, sharp canines below his glittering black eyes. The waxy makeup on his face cracked as he smiled, and he cocked his head playfully.
“The time for hiding is finished,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children, not anymore. The world needs us now.”
Several of the guests were sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now, watching me from a corner in the distance. I began to recognize some of the faces around me, the childhood playmates I had invented to keep me safe, to keep me company, hidden away in my secret spaces when I was a child.
“You always knew I was in here, Jimmy,” he said looking toward Samson, who acknowledged him with a small nod. “Most people with our, ah, condition, don’t get to meet their other selves—just one more of the wonders of pssi.”
James smiled again. “We’ve been protecting you for a long time now.” He extended a hand to sweep past the assembled, misshapen guests. They were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await you.”
They were near now, and James reached out to touch one of them who had sat down next to him, affectionately placing a hand on its head.
“Has your mind been clear lately?” questioned James, smiling as he ruffled the hair of his favorite before looking back to me expectantly.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “Over the past few years, my mind has been gaining a certain clarity that.…”
“That what? That escaped you before? The mind is cleansed with pain, isn’t that right, Jimmy?”
As he said this, the eyes of the assembled flashed, and they leaned in even closer.
James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world that I’d burned so long ago, after Nancy’s birthday party. He was feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls—my pleasure centers.
I shivered and gasped.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said James, smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”
Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve. He’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad. An image flickered through my memory of him playing privately with proxxids together with my dad after work.
In the world James had splintered me into, Steve was desperately groping through a dark tangle of underbrush. Someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him, and he screamed, terrified, as his attacker stabbed him again and again. His blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.
“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger we can recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt—hundreds of layers of desperate emotions—and mix these into a symphony of sorrow.”
He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.
“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated through my auditory channels, merging into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.
“The taste of heartache,” James added, and an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her misery filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with hints of regret.
“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed. Dr. Granger hung in a metaworld between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a melody.
“And pain, of course pain,” said James.
A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.
One by one, I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.
“We give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile. “And, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”
I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.
“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope and darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs.”
Music played, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance, slowly working themselves into a frenzy. The music quickened with my mind, and I soaked in the sensation of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped subjects, their terror coursing through me. James offered me a glass of wine, and I took it, in my excitement splashing my ADF Whites with bright, bloody splotches.
“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James, taking back the empty glass, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”