All-Day Breakfast (47 page)

quit

So I leaned out from the wall to peer around the room. I could only see one exit, a rolling steel door in the middle of the far wall, and if the bands cut into my chest and I twisted my neck like a corkscrew I could just make out Alice on a gurney in the corner. She had a blanket up her chin and her bare arm hooked to an
iv
. Her chin looked like it had sunk into her neck.

“Hey, Alice!” I called. “Alice!”

I couldn't see whether her eyes were open or closed, but she didn't twitch. It looked like she was attached to bags of blood.

I stared across at the calcium nitrate. Hadn't someone taught me to blow shit up using that stuff?

“Hey, buddy?” Alice called, echoing just like in a gymnasium.

“I'm here,” I said.

I craned my neck again but she still looked comatose under that blanket.

“Didn't know if you were asleep,” she called.

I watched her head shift on the pillow.

“What's he doing to you?” I asked.

“Oh, it's the third transfusion this week. Wants to dilute his compound.”

“Is it working?”

“Not a bit! But he
had
to give it to me,” she said. “Except for that other guy, there's nobody left.”

“To experiment on.”

“Yeah.”

“There's still
me
.”

“Yeah, for now,” said Alice. “Sorry.”

I let her voice float around me like a cloud of pollen.

“I'm real sorry about the way I treated you, when you were here before. Felt like I roughed you up. But it seemed necessary. I wanted my sister back here.”

“Don't worry about it. Too bad you got shot.”

“Yeah,” she called.

I shut my eyes. I leaned my cheek against the top band.

“Every time I go in your kitchen,” I smiled, “my right arm comes off.”

“My sister never got cured,” she said after a while.

“No.”

“Did you talk to her?”

I cast my so-called mind back. The edge of a bathtub.

“She said you were great,” I called. “Glad that you sent me.”

Alice didn't answer, so after a while I opened my eyes and lifted my head. She was curled on her side, her transfusion arm still up over the blanket. She must've been sobbing from the way her body jerked. I jabbed my teeth with my tongue, but they felt solid as marble. It's a different disease that makes your teeth fall out.

“You there?” she called.

I didn't lift my head.

“Sure.”

“My dad's invented lots of stuff.”

“Okay.”

“Tires and raincoats and tons of stuff. And Nat had scoliosis really bad ever since we were kids, she could hardly move around. You know scoliosis?”

“I don't remember.”

“Your spine curves sideways. And Dad was pretty messed about it because he said his brother had had it. So after Mom died he brought that goop out of cold storage to cure Nat. He couldn't just sit around, right, can you blame him? Do you have kids?”

“Two,” I yelled. “You didn't know that?”

“Maybe you understand him then,” said Alice. “She could walk around, doing really good, but then she'd lose her temper, ripped the doors off our bedrooms. Dad got mad at her.”

“Even though it was his fault.”

“She picked him up over her head and chucked him down the stairs. Broke his back. I had to fight her off after that, terrible, then his staff took him to the hospital and when he came home in his wheelchair he made them take her to California.”

“Because he'd made her a magic pony.”

Her laugh sounded like a jar of gravel. “ 'Cause he was scared shitless!”

The garage door went up with a clatter and Penzler rolled into the lab. He wore orange coveralls and a black scarf bundled around his neck. He pushed himself over to Alice—she'd rolled onto her back again. They murmured to each other while he felt her tubes. Then he rolled over to me while I stared at the calcium nitrate.

“I hooked that arm of yours to the electrodes,” he announced, “and it jumped like a monkey!”

“I don't know why you bother with me,” I said slowly. “I've wrecked your operation a thousand different ways.”

“That's true,” he said. “But I said to Josh Carver, and I'll say to you, that for a project with this
sweep
the world ought to be the laboratory.
Has
to be the laboratory.” He shrugged so emphatically he hopped in his chair. “But here's a smaller lab, and I'm going to take some beguiling tissue samples before you quit ticking, how's that sound?”

I was too drowsy to answer, but I kept my eyes on him.

“Alice,” he called, “did you want pasta? José said pasta.”

“We're having a proper service for Nat,” she called back. “At the church.”

“Oh, of course!”

Penzler winked up at me like we'd really fooled her. Stapling somebody to a wall had to be the only way he'd ever made a friend.

“José, he lifted you up there for me,” he smiled. “The others'll be another half-hour so he's getting lunch ready.”

“Are you going to adopt me?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no. I'm just curious to know what-all you can retain.”

“José,” I said.

“That's the spirit!”

I had to put my cheek back down on the metal. Sleep was dumping all over me. I was lying beside a woman, in a motel. We had all of our clothes on.

“Lazybones,” I heard him say.

Penzler was tapping
away at a computer on the desk in front of me. My right foot still had its single heroic toe.

“Oh, Pete!” Penzler grinned. “Wide awake! See here on the monitor? Let me magnify this. There, see the banana-shaped structures, the purple ones? These are the
spindle cells
, they run between the higher and lower portions of the brain, connecting abstract thinking with base instincts, you get the idea. I hope. You listening, Pete?”

His purple shapes really did look like bananas.

“They connect the top and bottom.”

“Of what, Pete?”

“Of the brain.”

“Correct, good—you could even say the presence of spindle cells separates man from animals. You
could
say that, except primates and cetaceans have them as well. You cool with all this?”

Any of my students would've agreed he was torturing me to death.

“But in every
Homo zumbi
I've examined—and, granted, that's only seven—in every one, the spindle cells have been the first part of the brain to have degenerated.”

“How…how do you rebuild these, the spindle cells?”

“Rebuild them? Very pertinent question, you smart bugger. If I knew that I could unhook my daughter from the drip and send her to Tuscany to meet Guidos. But no, Duffy didn't have the slightest idea, I don't—nobody knows. Duffy had sideline projects anyway—I don't want to ride you about him, I was disappointed in his work anyway. I might sound like a heartless bugger if you're really listening, but from day one it's all been for my daughters. You can appreciate that.”

“Are you going to rebuild a spindle cell in, um, the next couple minutes?”

“Cute. You're a cute bugger,” he said.

He rolled back from the desk and darted through the clutter of furniture to Alice's gurney, where he switched bags and tubes and pulled the blanket back up to her chin. She must've been asleep. I wished I had a stuffed animal to lay my head on.

Then he was back, talking to me while texting somebody else.

“Now, the military will need to know how to rebuild spindles, of course, since they won the bid for all applications, and since you're still able to form a sentence at
this
late date I imagine you'll be an excellent specimen for us to observe the dissolution from spindle cells on down. It'll float in a nutrient bath while that happens, of course, and the rest of your nervous system will be wired to a—”

“I'll be like George Reid.”

“George, yes, crafty buggers, the both of you.” He rubbed his thighs. “Interestingly, Subject Two for the third version was a boyfriend of Alice's who died in a pit behind the barn six days after eating his own feet, and though the rest of his brain looked like vanilla pudding, the little old medulla oblongata was still sitting up like—”

“Medulla oblongata,” I said.

“This file is Brad, Alice's old beau.”

“Why'd you give the Kuwaiti stuff to him?”

“Because Natalia was in so much pain, and because Brad was, well, hanging around. I gave him fifteen hundred dollars. It had already worked on Natalia, it'd worked poorly, but I wanted a control. That's good science. See, like a little mouse crouched under there? In an unaffected person it's grayish brown like the rest of the brain, but on Brad it's almost orange, hey? So far the medulla oblongata's been that orange color in every subject. My best theory is that the resources which would usually preserve the
entire brain
were shunted into Brad's medulla oblongata to keep it intact come hell or high water. Isn't it a useful little article? I could easily synthesize a tree frog around Brad's hardy little stem now, a tree frog that would lift weights and watch
nascar
. Another singularity was that his penis became this—”

“So my medulla oblongata,” I said, “is pumped full of these preservatives.”

“Presumably. And for Subjects Three through Five I did everything conceivable to get the contents of the
previous
subject's medulla into them—injections, unguents, Jesus, I inserted suppositories!”

He looked to me for some joyous reaction.

“Did they
eat
the medulla oblongata?” I asked.

“Not
per se
—gee, talking like a zombie
now
, aren't you? At any rate, it never took, they kept rotting. So now Subject Six is just stewing. But I mean, what if a subject has some condition that the product can only improve—dyslexia, hip dysplacia? It's untapped. Might be the best thing that ever happened to them.” He scratched holy hell out of his armpit. “One last thing—you'll like this. The human body weighs twenty-one grams less in the instant after death than it did before, that's been measured a thousand times over. So it's been argued for the last hundred years by certain learned buggers that man's immortal
soul
must therefore weigh twenty-one grams, right? But how much weight do you estimate
Homo zumbi
lose when the last electrical spark has flickered out of your brain, how much?”

“Fifty-six pounds,” I said. “We take one last dump.”

“No, you lose no weight at all.” He grinned, showing teeth that could've cracked walnuts. “Which means, Pete, that you've
already
lost the twenty-one grams.”

“Or maybe mine are locked up tight inside my medulla oblongata. Hiding from these damn zombies wandering the countryside.”

“Still lucid.” He lifted a stopwatch from the table. “Quick, what's your name?”

“Peter Giller.”

“How many children?”

I could picture them so clearly: a boy and a girl. And one was older than the other, definitely.

“Two children,” I said.

“Their names?”

My image of the two of them blurred like a rainy windshield. I turned my eyes backwards into my head, glimpsed them watching me, holding hands, wearing new running shoes with Velcro straps.

“Roy,” I announced.

“You have no child named Roy.”

“Susan,” I said.

“No!”

He set the stopwatch down and started typing. It really was a milestone. I couldn't even picture them.

“So you did all this for one of your kids?” I asked.

“Oh, yes! A father gives his children everything of himself,” he said. “That's just how the world was meant to be.”

“This one time,” I said, “I agree with you completely.”

“Ah,
okay
,” he said, studying his phone. “José says they'll be here in ten minutes to cart you off to the bunker for time without end. Won't that be nice? I already sent our old
vhs
tapes. Watch
Weekend at Bernie's
. And the boys'll be here with significant numbers and armaments to cart even
your
ass away, it's going to be impressive.”

“Gaaaah!” said the fish tank at his elbow. Mechanical, female, earsplitting, like a talking doll hooked to a truck battery.

“What was that?” Alice called.

Penzler rolled his chair back.

“Gah!” The covering towel jumped an inch.

“It's the stupid capuchin monkey,” he called. “Stay over there, Alice!”

But she was already sitting up on the gurney, unsnapping tubes from her arm. She just wore jeans and a black bra.

“Gaaar,” the fish tank said. “Ga-har?”

“Stay where you are!” Penzler called to Alice. “The enzymes fired it up sooner than I'd wanted!” He rolled between the tables to intercept her. “Not yet, understand?”

Alice ran around her father's desk just as Penzler swooped in from the other side, but she reached over him and got her fingers on the corner of the towel.

“Don't!” her father yelled.

She pulled the towel onto the floor, and in the tank we saw Natalia's head held upright on sparking metal rods. The right side of her face hung gray and slack but the left was turning itself inside out by winking and spitting and gritting its teeth. Blood ran out the corners of its eyes. Penzler gripped the arms of his chair.

“I'm going to bring her back,” he said calmly.

Muscles twitched in Alice's back.

“That's not Nat,” she murmured.

The head lurched its jaw back and forth, gagging, the eye still winking, until it shifted on the rods and thumped sideways against the glass.