The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 8

HIS FIRST SENSATION was of his own mass, the vast bulk of his body stretched out across the dark like an unsteerable barge. It took him some time to realize that he’d been awakened by the noise of someone moving about the room.

He tried to open his eyes. The light was very bright. He squinted and began to make out shapes.

A woman stood on the other side of the room, her back to him. She seemed vaguely familiar, but then again, so did everything in the room.

“Heh,” he said. He’d been trying for “hello,” but his voice had snapped off like a rotted board. His throat ached, and he was terribly thirsty.

She glanced at him, and didn’t seem surprised that he’d spoken. She was in her midthirties, a thin, pale woman with blotched cheeks and forehead, as if she’d scrubbed her face with lye soap. She wore khaki pants, a plain collared shirt. Definitely an outsider.

“Good morning, Mr. Martin.”

Mr. Martin? For a moment he was confused—the name seemed to fit and not fit at the same time.

“I can’t believe you’re at a loss for words,” the woman said.

He tried to lift his arm and discovered it was tied down. Both arms were restrained. “Wah,” he said. He swallowed painfully and made a tipping motion with his captive hand. “Water.”

“I think we can do that.”

He blacked out before she returned.

He came awake a second time with someone bending over him. At first he thought it was Aunt Rhonda, and he grunted in surprise.

The chub girl—not Aunt Rhonda, a young girl maybe only twenty years old with bright red hair—put a hand on his forehead and said, “Shush, Paxton.” Her voice was a whisper.

That’s right. His name was Paxton. And he was—where was he?

The girl slowly moved a warm washcloth across his chest, and as she leaned over him the neck of her blouse gaped to reveal a large pair of breasts straining at a white bra, threatening avalanche.

“Doreen!”

The girl jerked away from him. “Doctor F, I was just—”

“I think he’s clean enough now,” a woman said. It was the pale woman from before.

“I’ll just dry him off and—”

“Doreen.”

The red-haired girl left the room. The doctor pulled down his smock from where it was bunched around his neck and covered him with the bedclothes. “Sorry about that,” the doctor said. “She’s not herself. It won’t happen again.”

“Okay,” he said. Wondering what exactly had happened.

“I’ve brought you some lunch,” the doctor said. She pulled a sliding table up to his bed.

“Lunch,” he said. “Right. Thanks.” He thought he sounded reasonably sane. In control.

The doctor moved aside a plastic water pitcher and cup, then set out items she pulled from a white sack: a plastic-wrapped sandwich with the Bugler’s Grocery tag still on it, a fruit cup, and a chocolate chip cookie. Supplies for a sixth-grade field trip.

He wasn’t at all hungry. His throat still felt raw. It felt like hours had passed since he’d asked for water, but it could have been days.

Pax realized his arms were now untied. He started to push himself up, and Dr. Fraelich put a hand on his shoulder, then worked the bed’s remote until he was sitting upright. How long had he been in this bed? Someone, this woman or the chub girl, must have changed him, emptied his bedpan, wiped his ass.

“I’m sorry if I was …” Embarrassment made it hard to find the words. He shook his head. “You’re who?”

“I’m Dr. Fraelich,” she said. “You’re at my clinic, Mr. Martin.”

“Please, call me Pax.” A hazy memory came to him: Deke carrying him into a waiting room, setting him down in a plastic chair. At some point—the next hour? the next day?—he’d been put in a bed. Everything else was a blank.

He opened the metal lid of the fruit cup. His fingers felt clumsy. “I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble.”

“No trouble. The first twenty-four hours you did nothing but rant, with brief pauses to vomit,” the doctor said. “You eventually passed out, but then a couple hours later you went right back to the preaching and the yelling.”

Preaching? Pax thought. “So how long have I …?”

“You’ve been here three days.”

“Ouch,” he said. He tried to think of what day that made it. Thursday?

She put a hand on the door handle. “Any other questions?”

He had dozens of questions. He remembered the medical interrogations when he was a kid, the stream of men in masks who asked endless questions but never answered any. By September of that year the waves of transformations had stopped, but no one in town knew why, or if they’d stopped for good, or why some people like Paxton had been passed over. He eventually understood that the doctors weren’t hiding information—they were as clueless as he was. Their uncertainty scared him more than the Changes.

He poked at the contents of the fruit cocktail can with his plastic fork and said, “Do you—” He cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Do you know what happened to my father?”

“He’s fine. He’s at the Home, the mayor’s facility.”

“Did he come out of it? Does he know what happened?”

“Rhonda hasn’t reported back to me.”

Pax looked up. Was that sarcasm? Her tone hadn’t shifted from dry and impatient. “I guess you’ve had this, uh, kind of thing before,” Pax said. “Accidents like this.”

She raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty-five, but she made him feel like he was twelve.

“I mean, the vintage,” he said. “You know about it, right? You must have met others who … you know—”

“Took a swim in it? No.” She glanced at the watch on her wrist, a transparent doctor gesture. “Be thankful that you can sit up and talk. You ingested an enormous amount of a substance that is both psychedelic and narcotic, though mildly so for most people. You seem to be particularly susceptible to the effects. Your limbic system and frontal lobe were slammed simultaneously, and right now you’re recovering from probably the biggest dopamine hit of your life, which means you’re going to be experiencing an emotional crash for the next few days. On the plus side, if you haven’t developed schizophrenia by now you’re probably not going to this week.”

“That’s good news.”

“Enjoy your lunch.”

“Wait! When do I get out of here?” She looked back at him. He said, “Not that I’m not enjoying the service.”

“One step at a time, Mr. Martin.”

Finishing the fruit cup exhausted him. He drank a few sips of water, then pushed aside the table, leaving the rest of the food untouched. He carefully turned on his side, pulled up the covers. He remembered from this morning the sensation that his body had become massive, immovable. Now it felt like a bag of fragile parts, nominally under his control, but ready at any moment to disarticulate.

He was tired but not sleepy. He lay in the bed listening to the air-conditioning and the muffled noises coming from outside the room. He should call his father. No, see him in person. It had been a mistake to call Rhonda so quickly. Paxton would clean up the house, bring his father home, make a go of it. He’d call the restaurant, and if he hadn’t been fired yet he’d ask for more time off—family medical leave or something.

Outside the room someone laughed. He listened to the burble of voices and thought of water, his father pulling him into the baptistry, the rush of homecoming he’d felt when he looked out over the congregation.

The next time he opened his eyes he was surprised that the room was dark.

He blinked to make sure his eyes were working. Something about the silence, the coolness of the air, made it feel like the middle of the night. He didn’t know why he’d popped awake, then realized he needed to pee, that in fact he’d been dreaming of water all night: swimming with Deke and Jo in the river, his baptism when he was twelve, the sound of rain thundering against the tin roof of his mamaw’s house.

He sat up—too fast. After a minute the dizziness passed and he put his feet down on cool linoleum. He shuffled to the wall and flipped on the light. The sandwich and cookie were nowhere to be seen. It was disconcerting to think that people had been coming in and out of the room as he slept.

He opened the door, and the hallway was dark except for a faraway wedge of light—a room with a light on, the door ajar. “Hello?” he called. “Is there a doctor in the house?”

No one answered. He turned back to his room and started looking through the cabinets. Finally he found his clothes, neatly folded on a shelf. His shirt and underwear smelled faintly of bleach. He slowly pulled on his jeans, using a hand against the counter to keep his balance. He left the smock thing on, deciding that the dork poncho look was acceptable under the circumstances.

He padded back into the hallway. Halfway to the lit room he noticed that the dark space to his left was a bathroom. He went in, closed the door behind him. The sound of his piss hitting the bowl seemed obnoxiously loud. On the wall was a poster, “Four Facts on Transcription Divergence Syndrome.” The target audience seemed to be frightened people who didn’t live in Switchcreek. The four facts amounted to: You can’t catch it, It only happened once, You can’t catch it, and it won’t happen again … probably.

Did we mention that you can’t catch it?

Except that was a lie—you could catch it, but only from your parents. TDS permanently rewrote your DNA, and children born to the changed were as fucked up as their parents. More, evidently—those second-generation beta children looked more alien than Jo ever had. The world was only going to get stranger.

He switched off the bathroom light and went into the hallway. Instead of returning to his room he walked toward the wedge of light. “Hel-loo,” he said again.

He knocked once on the door, pushing it open farther, and stepped inside. There was no one in the room. The desk nearest him was stacked high with multicolored paper and brown accordion folders. Opposite was another desk with an open laptop upon it, the screen showing some kind of application.

He picked up one of the packets lying on the desk. The top page was titled “IRB Human Subjects Consent Form,” with a much-photocopied logo of the University of Tennessee in the corner. Under “Project Description” it said, “The effects of diet upon blood glucose and protein production in subjects with TDS-C.” He flipped through the pages in the packet. They were all identical except for the names of the participants and their signatures. He saw a name he recognized: Cletus Pritchard, the young cuz who’d been watching his father’s house. Was this the research project Rhonda was using the vintage for? He looked at pages on the tops of the other piles, but he didn’t start going through stacks. He didn’t want to make it obvious he’d been rummaging around. He set the packet down where he’d found it. The walls were lined with filing cabinets. The drawers were all closed, but there were short stacks of files on top of each of them. The office of an organized person whose control had begun to slip.

He sat on one of the cheap task chairs, strangely winded. He should probably go back to his room and try to sleep again.

The laptop screen showed an overcrowded data-entry form, full of tabs and drop-down lists. It looked like some kind of billing or insurance program. The currently selected patient was “Hooke, Elsa L.” Reverend Hooke, he wondered, or a relative? Before he could lean closer the screen blanked; a moment later a blue cube appeared and began to bounce around the edges.

That’s weird, he thought. Why would the screen saver come on in the middle of the night? He tapped the space bar and the form came back.

Somewhere in the building a door clanked open. Pax jerked upright, turned toward the door. Well shit, he thought. Hard clacking steps came down the hallway. Pax moved toward the door, stepped back. He put his hands by his sides. Act natural, he thought.

Dr. Fraelich walked into the room, her eyes down as she tucked something into her pants pocket.

“Hi there,” Pax said.

The woman seemed to leap without leaving her feet. Her hands went up and she grunted like she’d been punched. “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was just, I had to pee—”

“What are you doing in my office?”

“I saw the light on. I called out; I didn’t think anybody was here.”

She looked around at the papers on the desk, the screen of the laptop. “Have you been looking at my files? These are confidential.”

“No! I mean, yes, I saw them, but I wasn’t reading them.”

She pushed past him and snapped down the lid of the laptop. “You need to go back to your room, Mr. Martin. Obviously you’re feeling better.”

“Hey, have you been smoking?” he asked.

She stared at him. Her hair was down around her shoulders, and she seemed younger, less imposing. It was that Sexy Librarian trick women could do. He wasn’t attracted to her—he wasn’t attracted to most women, or most men either—but he could see now how someone could be. Theoretical sex appeal.

He said, “I haven’t smoked in eighteen months, but I could really use one right now.”

“I’m not giving a patient under my care a cigarette.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“Out, Mr. Martin.”

“Wait, what are you doing here so late? It’s like, what, two in the morning?”

She looked at her watch. “Three-thirty. I’m working.”

“You’re here to watch me?”

“That’s part of it. But I often do paperwork at night. I don’t need much sleep.”

“I guess not.” He was conscious of his dork smock, his bare feet, his greasy hair. He nodded at the stacks on top of the cabinets. “You want me to help? I could file those. No, probably not. Confidentiality.”

“Why are you still here?”

“I don’t think the dopamine crash has happened yet. I’m achy, but mentally I’m kind of wired. Maybe this is what it feels like right before you slide off the cliff.”

“I should have left you tied up,” Dr. Fraelich said. She sat at the desk and began moving stacks of paper to the side of the desk farthest from him.

He sat down on a chair. “So all these forms, you’re kind of in charge of these research studies?”

“I’m just the field administrator. I help them collect their data.”

“I kind of expected more scientists to be living in town,” he said. “When I was a kid, right after the Changes, there were doctors and scientists all over the place.”

“You don’t need to live in Chernobyl to study radiation poisoning,” she said.

“Is that what you think? It was radiation?”

“That was a metaphor, Mr. Martin.”

“Please stop calling me that. It’s Pax. And you are?”

“Dr. Fraelich.”

He laughed, hurting his throat. “You know, you’re not very warm for a doctor.”

“Have you met any doctors?”

He laughed again, and she looked away. Had he gotten her to smile? Not quite. But he’d come close.

“Okay, so what caused it?” Pax asked. “The Changes. I’m a little out of touch with the latest theories.”

“You all are,” she said. In the newly cleared space in front of her she rolled a pen under her palm. “The people in Switchcreek seem so incurious about what happened. I just don’t understand it. You’re in the middle of one of the great scientific mysteries of the century and all of you act as if the Changes were, I don’t know, a hurricane or something. Bad weather. An act of God.”

“What are we supposed to do? We’re not scientists,” he said. “And they couldn’t tell us how it happened anyway. Sure looked like an act of God. So we just went on with our lives.”

“You don’t have to be scientists to show some interest,” she said. “TDS is a completely new class of disease—a cancer that’s not just trying to replicate its own cells, but hijack the transcription process to rewrite an entire genome, while keeping the host alive. Not just alive, but healthy. Hox genes start spitting out new instructions, adult stem cells start acting like embryonic stem cells—it’s unprecedented. Yet none of you even seem to wonder how this happened to you. The only one of you who seemed at all curious is—” He felt sure she was about to say “dead.” She waved a hand. “Never mind.”

“Are you talking about Jo Lynn? Did you know her?”

“Of course I did. I was her doctor.” There was something too casual in her voice.

“You were friends.”

Dr. Fraelich said nothing.

“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” he said.

“And I didn’t see you.”

“I came in—” He didn’t want to say “late.” “Well, there were a lot of people. All those betas. I met her daughters, and their father.”

The doctor frowned. “Tommy’s not their father. The betas reproduce through parthenogenesis.”

“Yeah, I know that.” Though he’d never understood exactly what the word meant: sex without sex, he supposed. “I just thought that the beta women—some of them, right?—had already had sex before the Changes, and that they’d stored up the sperm. Or the eggs. Later they released them when—what?”

The doctor was shaking her head. “Nobody’s thought that for years. They had to toss out that theory with the first guaranteed virgin birth. There was a girl who was eight when she changed, with no evidence of previous sexual activity. She had twins when she was thirteen. Definitely no sperm involved.”

“But there are male betas,” Pax said.

“There are no ‘male’ betas, not really. Only men who contracted TDS-B during the Changes. Males who caught the B strain died at much higher rates than females. The men who survived, chemically and hormonally are practically female. TDS didn’t make them grow ovaries, but it halted their sperm production completely. Penises shriveled, testicles receded. They’re sterile and impotent.”

“Jesus,” Pax said. He felt a twinge of sympathy for Tommy Shields. “Okay, no male betas, but there’s sex with other people—”

“What other people?”

“The other clades,” he said. “Or, uh, skipped people.”

He felt his face flush. The doctor looked at him oddly. “Clades can’t breed with the unchanged, Pax. And they can’t interbreed either. We’ve known this for a decade. Charlies breed with charlies, and argos—well, we’re not sure what’s happening there.”

“But if there’s no sperm at all, then how are they—how does it work? And don’t say, ‘When a beta loves herself very, very much …’”

The doctor didn’t laugh. “No one knows. All women are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have. The Changes allowed beta women to fertilize those eggs somehow. Or maybe they’re like aphids, born pregnant. Parthenogenesis happens in sharks and lizards and who knows how many other species, but nobody knows how it works exactly. It’s just a Greek word for ‘We don’t know what the hell is happening.’”

Paxton sat back, rubbed a hand across his face.

She said, “You look … lost.”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” He stood, thinking of Jo’s daughters. For some reason he was disappointed. When he was sent away from Switchcreek, Pax had thought that the girls were his, or maybe Deke’s, or maybe both of theirs. And later, when people on the news started talking about parthenogenesis, he’d held on to the theory that maybe, just maybe, he was still the father. It was stupid, he knew.

He said, “I better get back to bed.”

Dr. Fraelich tapped the pen against the desk. “We’ll do one final checkup in the morning, but I think you’re good enough to go home. I’ll call the Chief and tell him you’re ready for pick-up.”

“Wait a minute—Chief?”

“Deke. I’ll call Deke.”

“Oh, right.” He had a dim memory of someone else calling Deke the Chief. “Try to get some sleep, Doc.”

The next morning Pax heard a deep argo voice vibrating through the walls, and thought, Deke. He sat up quickly, and his eyes blurred with tears. Jesus, tears? What was that about?

He quickly got dressed and made his way to the reception area. He felt stronger than yesterday but still shaky. He’d finally eaten, finishing off a granola bar and a bottle of orange juice that Dr. Fraelich had brought him.

In the reception area Deke leaned on the counter talking to the doctor, a collection of orange prescription bottles on the surface between them. Doreen, the charlie girl who’d bathed him, sat at a desk behind the doctor, staring down at an open magazine, pretending to ignore the conversation. She looked up as Pax entered and quickly looked down again, embarrassed.

Deke abruptly stopped whatever he was saying to the doctor and said to Pax, “Hey there, sleepyhead.”

Pax smiled faintly. “Howdy, Chief.”

Dr. Fraelich seemed upset, the blotches on her face angrier. She picked up the bottles and put them into a plastic bag.

Pax said, “Do you need my insurance or something? I remember signing a lot of papers.”

Deke looked at Dr. Fraelich, and she said, “You’re covered. Courtesy of Aunt Rhonda.”

“Really?” Pax said.

“Just drink plenty of water,” Dr. Fraelich said to him. Whatever familiarity they’d developed last night had been packed away.

“That’s it?” Pax said. “Three days of drug-induced coma and all I get is water?”

“A coma would have been a lot quieter and a lot easier on all of us,” she said. “You’re detoxing. Eat some fruit if you want. Just stay away from male charlies of a certain age.” She took the plastic bag of medicine and walked away before he could respond. Doreen kept her head down.

“That was … weird,” Pax said. He felt like everyone was moving at double speed, flashing signals he couldn’t detect.

“Come on, man,” Deke said. “Let’s get you home.”

Home. Which was where, exactly? Sure as hell not Chicago. He knew now that it had never been his home. He’d spent ten years marking time.

Pax followed Deke outside. It was midmorning and humid as a greenhouse. Gray clouds hid the top of Mount Clyburn, promising rain.

“You look whupped,” Deke said. “You need help getting in? You’re walking like an old man.”

“I got it. I’ve just been smacked upside the limbic system.” Pax pulled open the door and after a false start managed to hoist himself into the cab. He fell back in the high bucket seat and gazed up through the roll bars at the gray clouds.

“Thank you, man,” Pax said. “For coming to get me. For everything.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, seriously. Thank you. You’ve always been—you and Jo—you were the only people I …” His voice trailed off.

“It’s okay,” Deke said. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“I was inside his head, Deke.”

“Whose head?”

“At the church. I was next to him in the water, and I saw what he saw. He was hallucinating about the church, the way it used to be. I could see it.”

“You were doing some hallucinating yourself, P.K.”

“I don’t regret it happening, though. Okay, the hangover is hell, but I’m glad it happened.” He rolled his neck to look up at the man. “My father loves me, Deke.”

“Of course he does. He’s your father.” A strange thing for him to say, Pax thought, considering what an asshole Deke’s father had been.

“You don’t understand,” Pax said. “I know he does. I could feel it. I felt what he felt.”

“You’re still high,” Deke said. “Just a second.” He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a cell phone pinched between thumb and index finger. It was a bulky, old-fashioned thing that looked tiny in his hands. He held it in front of him, not even trying to fit it to his ear. “This is Deke.”

A deep argo voice buzzed from the phone’s speakers. “Deke, this is Amos. I think we’ve got some tourists over at the Whitehall place. I just saw someone pull in. Nobody from around here.”

“You sure it’s not the police?” Deke asked.

“It ain’t that kind of car,” the voice said.

Deke looked over at Pax. “You got a minute for a detour?”

“My day is wide open,” Pax said.