In Extremis Read online

  “It doesn’t seem to matter to you what country it was, Kander. Sometimes they weren’t even really dissidents. They seem to pick them at random, some sort of quota.”

  “Just so. And they murdered the men, used some of the women for sex slaves, and when they abducted women who were pregnant, they often kept them alive just long enough to bear the children, whereupon the children were taken from them, for sale to childless officers—”

  “And the women were then thrown alive out of airplanes over the Pacific. What’s your point?” Berryman knew he was being snappish, but Kander was being altogether too gleeful over a recollection that never failed to make Berryman’s guts churn.

  “When you write about it, you write—and very well, yes—about the political and social histories that made such brutality possible. As if it were explainable with mere history! There’s where you made your error. It wasn’t history, my boy. It wasn’t a shattering of modern ethics with a loss of faith in the rules of the Holy Roman Empire; it wasn’t brutalizing by military juntas and a century of crushing the ‘Indios’.”

  “You’re not going to say Eugenics, are you? Korzybski-ism? Because if you are—“

  “Not at all! I’m no crypto-Nazi, my friend. No—if you look at the essence of the thing, it was as if a sort of disease was passed from one man to another. A disease that killed empathy, that allowed dehumanization—and extreme brutality.”

  “It is a kind of disease—but it has a social ontology.”

  “Not as you mean it. That kind of brutality goes deeper. It is contrary to the human spirit—and yet it was very widespread, in that South American hell-hole, just as it was among the Germans in World War Two. And the secret? It may be . . . that evil is communicable. That evil is communicable almost like a virus.”

  “You mean . . . there’s some unknown physical factor, a microorganism that passes from one man to another affecting the brain and—”

  “No! That is just what I don’t mean. I mean that evil as a thing in itself is passed from one man to the next. Not through the example of brutality, or through coarsening from abuse—but as a kind of living, sentient substance—and this is what underlies such things. This is the essence that a journalist does not look deep enough to see.”

  Berryman stared at him; then he laughed. “You’re fucking with me again. You had me going there.”

  “Am I?” Shutters closed in Kander’s face; suddenly he seemed remote. “Well. We’ll talk about it another time. Perhaps.”

  Just then the Mexican busboy came along. “You feenish?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Kander muttered impatiently. And he could not be induced to say much more that night, except to ask what Berryman, an associate at the university, thought of the new coeds, especially the latest crop of blondes.

  It took only six weeks for the toxic-metals compound to do its work on Kander’s wife. It was not a poison that killed, not directly: at this dosage it was a poison no one could see, or even infer: it was just despair. A little lead, a little mercury, a few select trace elements, a compound selected for its effect on the nervous system.

  They were watching The Wonderful World of Disney when he was sure it was working on her.

  It was a repeat of the Disney adaptation of The Ransom of Red Chief. She liked O. Henry stories. He had found that watching TV with her was often enough to satisfy her need for him to act like a husband. It was close enough to their “doing something together.” It wasn’t really necessary for him to watch the television; it was sufficient for him to rest his gaze on the screen. Now and then he would focus on it, mutter a comment, and then go back into his ruminations again. She didn’t seem to mind if he kept a pad by the chair and scribbled the occasional note to himself; a patching equation, some new slant to the miniature particle accelerator he’d designed. How the world would beat a path to his door, he thought, as the little boy on Disney yowled and chased Christopher . . . what was his name, the guy who’d played the professor on Back to the Future . . . Christopher Lloyd? How the world of physics would genuflect to him when he unveiled his micro-accelerator. A twenty-foot machine that could do what miles of tunnel in Texas only approached. The excellences of quantum computing—only he had tapped them. The implications . . .

  But it was best that she disappear before all that take place. If he were to get rid of her when the cold light of fame shone on him—well, someone would look too close at her death. And if he divorced her . . . her lawyer would turn up the funds he’d misappropriated from her senile mother’s bank account; an account only his wife was supposed to be able to access. Her lawyer would not care that those funds had paid for his work after the grant had run out . . .

  He glanced at her appraisingly. Was it working? She was a short Austrian woman, his wife, with thick ankles, narrow shoulders; she was curled, now, in the other easy chair, wearing only her nightgown. She’d complained of feeling weak and tired for days, but it was the psychological sickness he needed from her . . .

  “You know,” she said, her voice curiously flat, “we shouldn’t have . . . I mean, it seemed right, philosophically, for you to get a vasectomy. But we could have had one child without adding to the overpopulation much, to any, you know, real . . .”

  “It was your health too, my dear. Your tipped uterus. The risk.”

  “Yes. We could have adopted—we still could. But—” She shook her head. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears and the image of the running child on the TV screen duplicated twistedly in them. “This world is . . . it seems so hopeless. There’ll be twelve billion people in a few decades. Terrorism, global warming, famine, the privileged part of the world all . . . all one ugly mall . . . the cruelty, the mindless, mindless cruelty . . . and then what happens? You begin to age terribly and it’s as if the sickness in the world goes right into your body . . . like your body . . . with its sagging and decay and senility . . . it is like it is mocking the world’s sickness and . . .”

  It’s working, he thought. The medical journals were right on target. She was deeply, profoundly depressed.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t matter so much if I had . . . something. Anything in my life besides . . . But I’m just . . . I mean I’m not creative, and I’m not a scientist like you, I’m not . . . if I had a child. That’d be meaning. But it’s too late for that.”

  “I’m surprised that watching The Ransom of Red Chief makes you want a child. Considering how the child behaves . . . They’re all Red Chief a lot of the time . . .”

  “Oh I don’t mind that—wanting a child without that is like wanting wild animals all to be tame. They should be wild. But my life is already . . . caged.”

  “Yes. I feel that way too. For both of us.”

  She looked at him, a little disappointed. She’d had some faint hope he might rescue her from this down-spiraling plunge.

  For a moment, it occurred to him that he could. He could stop putting the incremental doses of toxins in her food. He could take her to a toxicologist. They’d assume she’d gotten some bad water somewhere . . .

  But he heard himself say—almost as if it were someone else saying it—

  “I’m a failure as a scientist. And I don’t want to live in this world . . . if you don’t.”

  It took five more tedious, wheedling days to break her down completely. He upped the dose, and he deprived her of sleep when he could, pretending migraines that made him howl in the night. He drove her closer and closer to the reach of that depression that had its own mind, its own will, its own agenda.

  At last, at three-thirty in the morning, after insisting that she watch the Shopping Channel with him for hours—a channel anyone not stupid, stupefied, or mad would find nightmarish, after a few minutes—she said, “Yes, let’s do it.” Her voice dry as a desert skull. “Yes.”

  He wasted no time. He got the capsules, long since prepared. Hers the powerful sleeping agent she sometimes used. His appearing to be exactly the
same—except that he’d secretly emptied out each pill in his own bottle, and put flour in his capsules. They each took a whole bottle of the prescription sedative. Only his would produce nothing but constipation.

  She was asleep in minutes, holding his hand. He nearly fell asleep himself, waiting beside her. What woke him was something cold, touching him. The coldness of her fingers, gripping his. Fingers cold as death.

  “I said, I’ve come to . . . to give you condolences,” Berryman said, grimacing. “What a stupid phrase that is. I never know what to say when someone dies and I have to . . . but you know how I feel.”

  “Yes, yes I do,” Kander said. Wanting Berryman to go away. He stood in front of his micro-accelerator, blinking at Berryman. How had the man gotten in?

  But he’d been sleeping so badly, drinking so much, he’d probably forgotten to lock the lab door. Probably hadn’t heard the knocking over the whine of the machinery.

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “No, no, my friend she’s . . . well, I almost feel her with me, you know. I used to make fun of such sentiments but, ah . . .”

  It occurred to him—why not Berryman? Why not let Berryman be the one to break it to the world? Why wait till the papers were published, the results duplicated? There would be scoffing at first—a particle accelerator that could do more than the big ones could do, that could unlock the secrets of the subatomic universe, the unknown essences, consciousness itself, in a small university laboratory? They wouldn’t condescend to jeering. They’d merely quirk their mouths and arch a brow. But let them—he’d demonstrate it first hand, once the public’s interest was aroused. Let them come and see for themselves. The government boys would come around because the possibilities for applying this technology to a particle beam weapon were obvious . . . yes, yes, he’d mention it during the interview.

  “Where would you like to do the interview, Berryman?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry—I’m getting to be an eccentric professor here, getting ahead of myself. Not enough sleep you know—ah, I want you to be the one to . . . to break the news . . .”

  “Still, it’s all theoretical,” Berryman was saying, so very annoyingly, “at least to the public—unless there’s something you can demonstrate . . .”

  They were drinking Irish whisky, tasting of smoke and peat, in Kander’s little cubicle of an office.

  “I mean, Kander, I’ll write it up, but if you want to get all the government agencies and the big corporations pounding on your door—”

  “Well, then. Well, now,” Kander took another long pull and suddenly it seemed plausible. “Why not? Come along then . . .”

  They went weaving into the laboratory, Berryman knocking over a beaker as he went. “Oh, hell—”

  “Never mind, forget it, it’s just acid, it’s nothing.” He had brought the whisky with him and he drank from it as he went through the door to the inner lab, amber liquid curling from the corners of his mouth, spattering the floor. “Ahhh, yes. Come along, come along. Now, look through here, through this smoked glass viewer while I fire ’er up here . . . and consider, consider that there is a recognizably conscious component to quantum measurements: what is consciously perceived is thereby changed only by the perception. There’s argument about how literally this should be taken—but I’ve taken it very literally, I’ve taken that plunge, and I’ve found something wonderful. Quantum computing makes possible fine adjustments of a scanning tunneling microscope, turning it into, well, a powerful particle accelerator, effectively . . . and since we’re passing through this lens of sheer quantum consciousness in effecting this, we open a door into the possibilities for consciousness to be found in so-called ‘matter’ itself.”

  “I see nothing through this window, Kander, except, uh, a kind of squirming smoke—”

  “It’s a living ‘smoke’ my friend. Listen—look at me now and listen—What characterizes raw consciousness? Not just awareness—but reaction. Response. Feeling. Yes, yes it turns out that suffering is something inherent in consciousness, along with pleasurable feelings—and that it’s there even in the consciousness found in raw inorganic matter.”

  “You’re saying a brick can feel?”

  “Not at all! But within a brick, or anything else, is the potential for feeling. Now, this can be used, enslaved so to speak, to investigate matter from within and report to us its truest nature; can even be sent on waves of light to other solar systems, to report to us what it finds there—this process of enslavement you see, that’s the difficulty, so, ah, you’ve got to get involved in the training of this background consciousness once you’ve quantified a bit of it—bottled up a workable unit of it as I have—and that training is done with suffering. But how to make it suffer? It turns out, my friend, that while evil is, yes, relative, it is also, from the point of view of any given entity or aligned group of entities a real essence. And this so-called ‘evil’ can be extracted from quantum sub-probability essences and used to train this consciousness to obey us—“

  “You’re torturing raw consciousness to make it your slave?”

  “Oh stop with the theatrical tone of horrified judgment! Do you eat animals? They have some smattering of consciousness. And how would you get a horse to carry you over a wasteland? You whip it, you force it to your will. Don’t be childish about this. Clamp down on your journalistic shallowness and look deep into the truths of life! For, my friend, life is comprised of intertwined essences! And once liberated those heretofore unknown essences are unbelievably powerful! The essence of evil . . . in order to use it I had to isolate it—”

  “You’ve got the essence of evil in there?”

  “Yes. Well, it’s what people think of as evil . . . I envision a day when it’s but a pure tool in our hands—just a tool, completely in our command and therefore never again our master—and we’ll train people . . . train them in schools to use evil to—”

  He chuckled, “I think this is where I say, ‘You’re mad, professor’. Only I don’t think you’re mad, I think you’re drunk.”

  “Am I now? Listen, the stuff . . . just looking at it for a while—it affects you. I spent an hour one night looking into that squirming mass and I—”

  He almost said, and I decided, when I stepped away from the instrument, to murder my wife. “And I’d rather not discuss it! Well, Berryman, did it not affect you, just now? Looking at the squirming smoke? No odd thoughts entered your head?”

  “Um—perhaps.” He blushed. Sex. Forbidden sex. “But—it could be just psychological suggestion, it could be a microwave or something hitting some part of my brain—to say it’s the essence of evil—”

  “Have another drink. You’re going to need it. I’m going to open this chamber, and I’m going to introduce one of these . . . one of these cats here . . . And you’ll see it transformed, remarkably changed, into pure energy, an energy that is pure catness, you see . . . Come here, cat, dammit . . . You know we hire people to steal cats from the suburbs, for the lab? We often have to take off their collars . . . Muffy here hasn’t had her collar taken off . . . Ow! The little bitch scratched me!”

  “Out-smarted you. You should be ashamed, stealing people’s cats, Kander. There she goes, she’s run under the . . . You left the little door . . . the hatch on that thing . . . you left it open . . . the smoke . . . oh God, Kander. Oh God.”

  It wasn’t Kander he was running from. The sight of Kander on all fours, clothes in tatters, knees bloody from the broken glass, running in circles on hands and knees chasing an imaginary tail like a maddened cat. Kander yowling like a cat.

  Nor was it the fact that Muffy the cat was watching Kander do this from under the table and was laughing in Kander’s own voice .

  No, it was the squirming smoke, and what Berryman saw in it: A hall of liquid mirrors, one mirror reflecting into the next so the reflection replicated into an apparent infinity; and what was reflected in the mirror, was despair. Despair replicated unto infinity
. A hungry, predatory despair. Berryman saw the bloody drain in the floor of that South American prison where all those women had been tortured, tortured for no political reason, no practical application, to no purpose at all.

  He felt the thing that had escaped from Kander’s lab—felt it sniff the back of his neck as he ran out into the partly-cloudy campus afternoon—

  But its inverted joy was so fulsome, so thunderously resonant, it could not be satisfied with merely Berryman. It reared up like a swollen phallus big as a genii. It married the clouds overhead and joined them, crushed them to it, so that electricity sizzled free of them and communicated with the ground in a forest of quivering arcs and darkness fell over all like the smells of a concentration camp, and students, between classes, wailed in a chorus of despondency so uniform it could almost have come from a single throat; and yet some of them gave out, immediately afterward, a yell of unbridled exultation, free at last from the cruelty of selfrespect, and they set about fulfilling all that they’d held so long in quivering check . . .

  . . . the very bricks . . .

  The very bricks had gone soft, like blocks of cheese, and softer yet, and they ground unctuously together, the bricks of the building humping one another . . .

  And the buildings sagged in on themselves, top floor falling lumpishly onto the next down, and those two floors on the next, and the whole thing spreading, wallowing, and people crushed, some of them, but others crawling to one another in the glutinous debris . . .