Ubo

13

THE GROUP LINGERED for some time around Henry’s cell. As unpleasant as his situation was, they felt guilty about leaving him, and Daniel could tell that both Gandhi and Lenin were as distrustful of Falstaff’s reassurances as he was. But eventually they moved on, promising Henry they would visit him regularly, and promising each other to refer to him as Henry, not as the werewolf. Daniel couldn’t tell if Henry understood anything they said to him, or if he even heard the words, but there was nothing more they could do.

Lenin had grown sullen over the encounter, and when he insisted they find a place to rest before going back upstairs to the barracks, they agreed. But it took some time to find a resting place he was satisfied with, until he discovered another room with a broken exterior wall providing an open view of the distant city. Lenin glanced once at that panoramic pre-dawn view, but then he turned his back on it and took them further into the space, around a corner into an empty room with no window. He plopped down against a wall and the rest of them joined him.

No one said anything for several minutes. Curious about the view they had passed, another glimpse onto an outside world they knew nothing about, Daniel stood and wandered out to the empty windows, keeping safely back in case there was more collapse. The first thing he noticed was that a number of fires were burning deepin the city’s interior. They flickered and changed, some appearing to wave, like things dying and attempting to get his attention. The farthest one looked huge, probably covering a number of blocks, a molten balloon rubbing against the black drop of sky. Again he heard distant shouts, perhaps, or screams, but no motor or vehicle sounds as far as he could tell. It all might be his imagination; he might be mistaking ordinary reflections, a distortion of distant noise, for some ongoing disaster, but he didn’t think so. Elsewhere in the darkened metropolis, tiny pockets of light flickered. He thought of candles or camp fires, or maybe some small intermittent source of power.

If he crept just a little closer and looked down at a sharp angle he caught a glimpse of another ruined part of their building. Several large holes in the outer walls, a giant ramp of rubble leading up to low windows, scattered signs of repair, and shining in the moonlight some sort of metal bracing spider webbing the raw edges of the worst areas of collapse. It was particularly thick around the lower foundations.

He couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been no attempt to do a legitimate repair—the walls hadn’t been restored, so the open holes allowed the weather or vegetation or anything else to invade the building’s interior. Certainly it made those rooms immediately adjacent to the holes unusable. The metal webbing—he’d just assumed it was metal but it very well could be something stronger—kept everything intact and probably stable. But anyone seeing the building from the outside might think it was going to collapse at any moment. As stable and as inhabited as it was, it would still look like an empty ruin from some distance away.

He looked back out at the fires, and listened to the distant sounds that might or might not have been a distorted chorus of panic. Whoever they are, he thought, they probably don’t even know we are here.

“I don’t always expect good sense from the others,” Falstaff said beside him. “But I would have thought you of all people would have awakened me before trying to come down here.” Falstaff could be a supercilious prick.

“Maybe if you weren’t so secretive, maybe if you’d taken us down here earlier and explained things, we wouldn’t have gone without you, and they wouldn’t have tried to let Henry out.”

There was a long pause before Falstaff spoke again. “Of course you have a point. I’ve been here longer—I suppose sometimes I don’t want to say too much. Life here… it’s hard enough. And it rarely changes.”

But Daniel didn’t want to hear it. “Have you seen the fires out there? Does that happen often?”

“I have. Someone is having a very bad day. We all know about bad days—in here we re-live some of the worst days in history.”

“That doesn’t sound very empathetic.”

Falstaff sighed. “It’s not that I don’t care. But we’re here, trapped in this building. They—whoever or whatever they might be—are out there. There’s nothing we can do for them.”

“That’s very reasonable.” Daniel peered down at the base of the building. The stones looked wet, even though it wasn’t raining. “But it’s too easy. Maybe it should be unbearable that those people are suffering. Maybe that’s what we need, to make more truths unbearable.” A small wave of water splashed over the stones. “Is it flooding down there?”

Falstaff stepped past him, and Daniel held his breath as the big man leaned over the broken window wall. He knows it won’t collapse, Daniel thought. Obviously the webbing did its job.

“I’ve seen it before. We’re not too far from the ocean, apparently, and sometimes at high tide there’s some flooding. Nothing to worry about, though.” He was still hiding something.

“This is a coastal city?”

Falstaff shrugged. “Perhaps, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any more than—”

Frustrated, Daniel approached him. “We’re somewhere on Earth. You know, have known that, of course. This building. I didn’t see it for the longest time—maybe the roaches have done something to our heads so that we don’t question it, or even think about it. But creatures like that, they would have never come up with this sort of architecture, something so unreflective of their anatomy. We’re still on Earth, and wherever this city is, they’ve reduced it to rubble, they’ve destroyed—”

“Have you talked to the others about this?” Falstaff looked at him intently.

“No, answer me. Did you know, or have you at least suspected? If you want me to trust you, tell me, stop hiding things.”

“I don’t know where we are, and neither do you. Maybe they want us to believe we’re still on Earth—maybe their intention is for you to have this realization—”

“Stop, just stop lying!” Daniel shoved the torn piece of plastic band into Falstaff’s hand.

“What’s this?”

“It’s an old bit of medical wrist band. Look at it! It says ‘Psych’ on it. A psychiatric ward, or a psychiatric hospital—it must be what this building used to be. That’s English. This is Earth. New England maybe, although I hope not. Our families may still be out there. We’ve got to get out of here and go find them.”

Falstaff put up his broad hand. “Wait, just wait. Do you really think you’re the first person to have figured this out?”

“Well, normally I wouldn’t think so. But no one’s let on. And if you knew this, it only proves that you’ve been lying and can’t be trusted.”

Falstaff turned his face away and began to pace. “I don’t know for sure where we are. Maybe we’re on Earth, maybe not. Maybe some other planet, I have no idea. Do you recognize anything out there?”

“No, the city’s been mostly destroyed.”

“Exactly. I’ve heard these ideas before, Daniel. Maybe they’re close to the truth, maybe not. But it never goes anywhere because the men who come up with these ideas are always gone within a few days. They don’t come back from their scenarios, or maybe they just aren’t there when the rest of us wake up one morning.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I’m one of you. How could I threat—”

“If we could only get out of here we might find out more. Don’t you want to know?”

“Come closer, Daniel. You showed me that piece of wrist band. Let me show you something.”

Any new information at all seemed worth taking risks for. He stood beside Falstaff, who could toss him out that window with the flick of a wrist. “What is it?”

“Grab my hand and lean out the window. You’ll see some letters spray painted on the outside of the building just above. You won’t have to lean far—they’re big and easy to see. And I’ll be holding on the whole time. I won’t let you fall.”

“Just tell me what it is.”

“You might not believe. You have to see for yourself. Someone else showed me, now I’m showing you.”

It didn’t matter that he didn’t trust Falstaff at all. He just needed to know anything he could find out. He grabbed the big man’s hand, leaned out, and looked up. Spray painted in black over the window opening: U B O in huge black letters. “Okay. Please haul me in.” And Falstaff did.

“You saw them.”

“I did, but I guess I don’t get it. Ubo, it’s the name of this place, or what the roaches want us to think is the name of this place—they implanted the word when we came here. We thought, or were led to think, that Ubo was the name of the world. But people are gullible—they believe whatever is presented to them. Apparently it’s just the name of this one building. So what? What difference does it make?”

“Does that look like an official name to you? Spray painted like that?”

“Maybe not, but still—”

“Have you ever seen news coverage of disaster areas, how the responders spray paint body locations and numbers on buildings? And warnings? DANGEROUS? DO NOT ENTER? That kind of thing?”

“But it’s so high.”

“It has to be high enough that people can see it from far enough away that they know not to get too close to the building. And look out there—see how there’s nothing for hundreds of yards between us and the rest of the city? As if the whole area has been cleared into a kind of No Man’s Land?”

Daniel looked out. It was quiet out here, the building out by itself away from everything else. And there was a great deal of scarring in that empty space, so if structures had been demolished and removed, you might see those traces, a kind of ghosting. He could still hear the waves hitting the foundation.

“An old resident here, he said he’d figured it out. He said we’d probably find it written on other buildings in that ruined city, if we ever got close enough. Unidentified Biological Organisms. UBO.”

“But what does that mean?”

“We’d talk about that, he and I, a couple of others. There were theories. Before he and the others started disappearing, not coming back from scenarios, not there when I woke up. Maybe a plague, certainly something dangerous. It doesn’t sound welcoming, does it? An infection maybe? Certainly not anything you’d want to take out of here and carry back to the people you love.”

“But why jump to that conclusion based on three letters? They could mean anything.”

“It just makes sense. It fits. Do you have a better explanation, and would you want to gamble on it?”

Daniel did not.

FALSTAFF LEFT HIM alone. Daniel couldn’t help but imagine his family out there somewhere, struggling, no doubt in danger. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Was he infected with something? There was no way of knowing. But he couldn’t say he felt well, certainly not that he felt normal. He hadn’t felt normal since he’d been here. He was so far from normal he might as well have been on another world.

“You fellows were out here a long time. Were you discussing the—Henry?” It was Gandhi. Daniel hadn’t even heard him come up. The fellow was beyond light on his feet—he was as weightless as a ghost.

“Oh, Walter. Yes. That, and odds and ends.” Daniel had some inkling how lies might have come easily to Falstaff.

“Can you see much of the city from up here?”

“A bit. See for yourself.” Daniel moved to the side.

“No, no. I’m fine here. I don’t like tall, open areas, to tell you the truth. I’m always afraid, I have this fantasy—” He looked down at his feet. “That I might jump off.”

“Are you feeling suicidal?”

“Well, no, at least, no, I’m not. Now poor Henry, he’s someone who’d be justified, thinking about suicide. I can’t even imagine. Compared to the rest of us, well, it would be an insult to him, I think, for me to contemplate suicide.”

Daniel studied him. “I don’t think of it that way. There’s no shame in it, to have those urges. Not that you should act on them—there’s always a better path. But there’s that quote from Thoreau, you know it? ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ We seldom adequately understand what the other feels, so how can we judge the quality of their pain? And this place, who could blame you for feeling desperate?”

“If I just had something else to do,” Gandhi said. “Besides the scenarios. Anything to take my mind away from them.”

“Can I ask you, what was your life like before? Did you have a family?”

Gandhi looked up with a vaguely grateful expression. “There was never anything particularly special or interesting about my life. And I suppose that would be the point of anything I’d have to tell you about myself.” Daniel began to object. “No, it’s alright. Just let me say it. When I was a boy I dreamed that I was going to be someone special, someone with some elevating sort of talent which would raise me above the everyday and the run-of-the-mill. Good parents encourage that sort of thing, don’t they? They tell you you’re special, you have the capability of doing something wonderful someday. They say they’re proud of you even when you haven’t done anything yet to particularly make them proud.

“They tell you you’ll do great things, even when you’re smaller than the other children and skinny, no matter how hard you try to add muscle or even fat to that slight presence you have in the world.

“That’s all well and good and positive, and it does build confidence. But at some point you have to deliver, don’t you, otherwise it’s all a bit meaningless?

“I believe I had reasonable expectations—I knew that any such talent required singular focus, years of practice, and obsessive devotion. So anytime I perceived even a hint of talent I…”

He stopped then, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say. He looked as if he had stage fright. Some people, when they had to speak to others, it was as if they were actors on stage. They had to figure out what they were going to say, otherwise they were too shy to speak. “Take your time, we’re friends, aren’t we?” Daniel patted Gandhi on the arm. “I’m interested in anything you have to say. But you sound as if—it just seems like you’re unnecessarily hard on yourself.”

Gandhi smiled. “I know, I know. But I’ve always thought that a life should have meaning, otherwise it’s as if you didn’t even exist. It’s like trying to make a mark with a pen that has no ink in it, or drawing a brush across the canvas and nothing shows because you didn’t load the brush with paint. The gesture means nothing. It was pretense. It wasn’t even practice.

“For a while I wanted to be a musician. Guitar, then clarinet. I practiced hours every day, and the music finally got to be pleasant enough, but there was nothing special in the way I played, and I realized I didn’t love it that much anyway, and you have to love it to be good at it. So I tried out for sports, and I was a pretty good runner, and I exercised myself to exhaustion, and I was pretty good, but never the best. And I kept waiting for that euphoria some runners get, at least I could have that, but it never came for me, or I didn’t recognize it when it came.

“I used to get so angry. I trembled, Daniel, I actually trembled. I tried to express that anger in some way, to let it go, but I failed in that endeavor as well.

“I learned computer programming, and some companies hired me, and I was competent enough, but never inspired. I implemented, but I didn’t create. Believe me, I worked with creative programmers, and there’s a difference. Maybe it should have been enough. At least it provided me with a good living, and it paid for various avocations, some creative writing instruction, dance lessons, art classes, woodworking tools. But nothing quite stuck. Once or twice I accidentally cut myself on a wood chisel or a scraper. I discovered that it was vaguely, strangely soothing. I found new ways to accidentally cut myself after that. It was quite embarrassing, I was always afraid I might be found out, but after a time, I have to admit, it was deeply satisfying. I’d have these wounds on my hands, my arms. People must have thought I was really absorbed by my craft, or maybe they thought I was simply clumsy. And when the wounds started to heal, then I’d interfere with that healing. I couldn’t control the world, but I could control that. At least to a point. Ultimately, if I had decided to stop scarring my body, I don’t think I could have.

“I would have weeks I’d be so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed, or if I forced myself out of bed I’d spend my time sitting, staring at nothing. It was as if I were inside a dark closet that no one else could see, and sometimes the weight of it, well, my shoulders would become so painful, as if I were carrying some huge piece of furniture I could never put down, because if I put it down it would ruin everything.

“I knew I didn’t belong in the world, but I didn’t exactly know what I should do about it. Sometimes I would sit in my window, my feet dangling outside, four floors up, terrifying myself, wondering if I could just let myself slip out.

“I say that now, and it sounds illogical. But logic has nothing to do with you when you are in that dark world. Everything becomes a matter of belief and, I don’t know, a kind of dark, a so very dark, faith.”

“You sound like you were an interesting person—with all that background, I’m sure you could have talked knowledgably in a number of areas. You must have had friends, and women must have—I don’t want to be too nosy, but if there are people who love you, then to my mind, you’re definitely a success.”

Gandhi smiled at this, but there was something in his eyes that made Daniel feel so sad he thought he might weep. “You’re a very kind man,” Gandhi said, “and I’m sure you were loved, and you’ve told us you had a wife and child, so I know that must be true.” Daniel nodded, but did not want this line of conversation to continue. “But the key thing about love, I believe, is that you have to recognize that it’s happening. You have to recognize that someone is loving you, otherwise it’s no good to you. You miss it, so it might as well not be there. I’d like to think now that someone might have loved me, and that I just didn’t recognize it. That would at least be something. But since I didn’t see it then, I’ll never know.

“I never knew love, Daniel. Wouldn’t that have been something if I had? But I couldn’t quite make it happen.”

Daniel let his eyes wander. Off in the distance there appeared to be more fires than before, a line of them, it must have been miles long. He wondered if the entire city, what was left of it, was going to burn. He wondered if their building, even surrounded with its dead zone, would survive it.

“I did keep trying. I don’t think I really gave up until a year or so ago. Obviously, I wasn’t going to achieve my goals, and I wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything less. I could not let myself remain colorless, anonymous, never to have left a mark on the world. I had to do something. I needed to be thought about, to be remembered. And no, I didn’t do what some of the men in our scenarios have done. I didn’t carry guns into a school and murder children, or try to assassinate some important person or other. I could never have done something like that.

“I did decide to commit an act of violence, but against the sole person responsible for all the disappointments, for all the negative things that had happened to me during my life. Myself. I decided to commit suicide.

“But even after coming to that decision I was at least somewhat hopeful, I suppose. What if no one knew what happened to me? What if I disappeared? I’d be a mystery, a mystery for a lot of people. Nothing nags at the human mind more than a mystery, am I correct? They wouldn’t be able to help themselves, thinking about me. Maybe for years.

“And if they found the body a certain way, well it would make the news, would it not? People would be curious. I’d give people something to talk about. You know, like when they found Richard III’s body under that parking lot in central England?”

“Or maybe you wouldn’t be found at all?”

“Oh, I thought about that. But if I were inside a concrete building like this, I figured it would last two or three hundred years. But practically speaking, they would probably tear it down after forty, don’t you think? Technology progresses faster and faster, and even buildings become obsolete, the heating and plumbing systems, the features, the expectation of new innovations. It becomes cheaper to tear them down than to retrofit them.

“I’d been watching them building a large municipal government complex downtown. They’d build these forms with a framework of rebar inside them. Then starting early in the morning they’d fill them with concrete.

“I’m extraordinarily skinny. And small in stature. A small human being. I always have been. I realize it doesn’t make me the most attractive person. In fact I sometimes wonder if knowing that has contributed to my lack of success. But I wassmall enough to slip naked through the spaces between the bars one night in one particular form. Barely, even with my body well-oiled, and I bloodied myself pretty thoroughly in the process, as well as breaking a rib or two. It was a rather deep form, but I made it almost to the bottom. At least deep enough that I was pretty sure they wouldn’t notice me all the way down there when they poured the concrete. They might, and they might pull out my body and I wouldn’t be buried inside the building as I’d planned, and then discovered a century or so later when they finally tore it all down, but I was quite willing to take the risk.

“But all that exertion and I didn’t break the cyanide capsule in my mouth, until then. I was very pleased to have obtained such a poison. A splendid detail. Very international spy and all that. But I slipped and twisted my arm, popping my shoulder out of its socket. I inadvertently bit down on the capsule. I was in so much pain, you see. Not just physically, but I was cursing the world and everything in it, how existence itself had betrayed me.” He stopped and once again smiled at Daniel with that dreamy, almost unworldly smile.

Daniel stared at him. It had begun to rain, and the drops blown in through the window were softly beating the side of his face. The sensation was soothing, so he didn’t move. He had a vague notion that the sounds of the waves against the foundations below were even louder, and there was a kind of churning noise under it all. “Wait. When did the roaches come into this?”

“I first saw the roaches when I woke up here. In Ubo.”

“I mean before that. What’s the last thing you remember in your old life?”

“I told you. That terrible pain, and then the raging. And I must have fallen unconscious, because I had that dream about the roaches we’ve all had.”

“Well, no, I don’t think that’s a dream,” Daniel said. “As far as I know that’s a memory, however unreliable, of how we were kidnapped, how we were physically carried away.”

“Yes, and then the next thing I woke up in Ubo.”

“But that makes no sense.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it happened.”

“But how did they retrieve you? How did the roaches get to your body before you would have died? The rest of us, everyone I’ve talked to, we were taken from our beds, or out in the street, after we’d done something, or thought of something. The trigger seems to be different for everybody. They snatched us. How could they snatch you, deep inside a concrete form, trapped inside a cage of iron bars, and presumably seconds away from death by cyanide?”

Gandhi blinked, looking stricken. Then he began to weep.

“I knew it!” he cried. “None of it makes any sense! I really must be in Hell!”