This Book is Full of Spiders (9 page)

“You believe you’re Batman.”

I closed my eyes. “What did you say the hourly rate for these sessions was again?”

“I mean you’re in that category, you feel like the people around you would react badly if they knew what you really thought and believed.”

“Not because they’ll think I’m crazy. They already think that. But because of how they would react once they knew the truth. You know how people are. That’s what you write books about, right? Group panics and all that?”

“You think the truth would cause mass hysteria.”

I shrugged, and nodded toward the window. “Look out there. You’ll see.”

He said, “That’s actually more true than you know. Don’t repeat this, but it appears I’m going to be called in to work on this case. The hospital shooting, I mean.”

“What, like as a profiler or something?”

“Oh, no, no. I’d be offering my assistance in dealing with the public. It’s the panic that is the primary concern, you see. Making sure no one gets a hair trigger, some poor soul waiting by their back door with a hunting rifle, shooting at a shadowy shape in the backyard that turns out to be their neighbor. Fear can be fatal and, as I suppose you see on my bookshelf, I’m … something of an expert.”

I thought,
That has to be nice, to have a job where fear is something that happens to other people.

I stared out the window and said, “Do you ever get scared, Dr. Tennet?”

“Of course, but you know these sessions aren’t about me—”

“And besides, in your world, everything has some harmless explanation, right? It’s always bees. Even this thing with Franky. Your job will be, what, to go up to a bank of microphones and assure everybody that it’s all bees?”

“You feel like I was being dismissive of your fears. I apologize if so.”

“So does anything scare you, doctor? Anything irrational?”

“Of course. Here, I’ll volunteer my most embarrassing example. I feel like I owe it to you, to make up for the bee story. Are you a fan of science fiction?”

“I don’t know. My girlfriend is.”

“All right, but you know
Star Trek,
and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?”

“Yeah. The transporters.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.”

“No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.”

“Sure.”

“That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the
blueprint
for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.”

“Sure.

“So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine
that shreds the original
. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show,
nobody knows this
.

“Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.”

I stared at him.

“Why did you tell me that?”

He shrugged. “You asked.”

His face showed nothing. I thought of the Asian guy, casually disappearing into the magic burrito door, walking out somewhere else. And in that moment I
almost
asked Tennet what he knew, and who he was.

I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything.

18 Hours Prior to Outbreak

Hours went by, and the cops continued to not show up at either my house or John’s apartment. All morning I was worried sick about what I would say when they brought me in, but then afternoon came and I was even more worried about the fact that they
weren’t
coming after us. That meant things had gotten so out of control that we were no longer on their list of priorities.

Come midafternoon, I found myself at work, standing behind a counter, trying to peel the magnetic antitheft tag off a DVD with my fingernail (a DVD is a disc that plays movies, if they don’t have those by the time you read this). I know I’ve complained about the pain in my eye and shoulder more than once but I want to point out that the bite on my leg was also starting to hurt like a son of a bitch.

I would have called in sick, but I had used up all of my sick days for the year and couldn’t take off again until January. I take a lot of sick days, most of them self-declared Mental Health days, meaning I wake up in a mood that I know will lead me to assault the very first person who asks me if the two-day rentals have to be back on Wednesday or Thursday.

I had worked at Wally’s Videe-Oh! for five years, been a manager for two. I started right after I dropped out of college. At the time I had heard that Quentin Tarantino got discovered while working at a video store, and I think I had it in my head to try to work there and write a screenplay. It was going to be about a cop in the future with a sentient flamethrower for an arm. At age nineteen, that seemed like a pretty sound plan. The thing about not having parents is you don’t have anyone to tell you you’re heading down a path paved with grossly inaccurate expectations of what the world owes you.

The people who raised me—and I’ll leave their names out of this—they did what they could. Nice people, real religious. Kind of treated me like I was a little African refugee kid they had rescued. They knew my story, knew that I had never known my dad. Years later when I got in trouble at school and got kicked out because of that kid that died, they were real supportive. Took my side all the way through, then shortly after they moved to Florida and hinted that maybe things would be better if I stayed behind.

My birth mom is living in Arizona, I think, staying with a dozen other people in an arrangement that could be called a “compound.” She sent me a letter two years ago, thirty pages scribbled on lined notebook paper. I couldn’t make it past the first paragraph. I skipped down to the last sentence, which was, “I hope you are stockpiling ammunition like I told you, the forces of the Antichrist will first seek to disarm us.”

I scraped the plastic theft sticker off the DVD, put it back in its case, then picked another case off the stack. Pulled out the disc, started scraping off the tag. I looked around, saw there was only one customer in the store. A guy wearing a cowboy hat. His jeans looked like they were painted on.

The TV we had mounted in the far corner of the store was supposed to be playing a promotional DVD but I had switched it over to Headline News, with the sound down and the closed-captioning turned on. They had been going back to the “hospital shooting” every twenty minutes or so. The cowboy with the tight pants came up to the counter with a copy of
Basic Instinct 2
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
. How could he walk in those jeans? Did they inflate when he farted?

I glanced up at the TV and saw a reporter standing in front of a street barricade. Closed-captioning mentioned something about cops having to break up an angry crowd trying to get in to see loved ones at the hospital. The cowboy gave me his membership card and I punched in the number. His account came up as:

NAME: James DuPree

OVERDUE: ø

ACCT STATUS: A

COMMENTS: THIS MAN HAS WORN THE SAME TROUSERS SINCE HE WAS A TODDLER.

Many memos had circulated at Wally’s about abusing the customer comment box on the computer. We have John to thank for that. He worked here a few years ago, after I begged the manager to let him on. John was fired a few months later, but not before he managed to add something to the “Comment” field for pretty much every single customer he served:

NAME: Carl Gass

COMMENTS: If he doesn’t have late charges, and you tell him that he does, he LOSES HIS FUCKING MIND.

NAME: Lisa Franks

COMMENTS: Had sex with her on 11/15.

NAME: Kara Bullock

COMMENTS: Thinks I have an English accent. Don’t forget.

NAME: Chet Beirach

COMMENTS: Always smells like fish. I think he fishes for a living. He’s sensitive about it so don’t bring it up.

NAME: Rob Arnold

COMMENTS: It’s the white Patrick Ewing!