the mortis (11 page)

A few minutes pass, and then he starts to feel the effects of the pill, or at least he thinks it
’s the pill; lately his mind does this—comes in and out of focus—all on its own, unaided by anything medicinal.  His thoughts immediately lighten.  The heat in the room is overbearing but with the open windows the air is still breathable.  He stares at the outside, at the trees moving, and soon he drifts off.

Before the collapse, the online comments had been widely referring to the disease as the mortis.  The name was debated, the way all things used to be debated online in comment sections.  There were other ideas, other nominations.  People spending their energy hotly contesting the proper term for what was coming to take their very lives from them.  It was as though they believed that the assignment of a label would itself confer some kind of immunity, as though they could somehow use the shiny new moniker to simply shout the darkness down and be done with it. 

Park had started reading about the sickness just before the power failed.  Things were already bad then, but not Bad.  He found a connected PC tower in a concierge office of the hotel and he crouched under the desk with the monitor and he read, terrified.  Pausing every few minutes to listen for movement in the adjoining concourse.  Three, maybe four different nights he came back to the office and huddled there, and by that point the disease had already been spreading rampantly, flu-like, on the mainland.  Back home, around the world, everywhere.  As the collapse began—before it became clear that it was the Collapse—hopefuls like him were foolishly scouring the internet, last-ditch, for any updated reports on improvements, any status changes for the better.  If you began typing the query Why Is Everyone Getting Sick, it would be auto-filled for you in the search field by the middle of the third word.  If you typed in the mortis, there would be homespun articles on the illness at the top of your results feed.

He’d absorbed as much information as he could manage given the time he had—the wire releases, the blog postings, online forums, anything textual.  Official or otherwise.  The consensus was that the illness was caused by a sequence of junk DNA, of all things.  Non-coding.  Something residual from one of the dark, forgotten recesses of the serpentine helix.  Up to that point it was believed by the establishment to be completely inert, without any known purpose.  A simple carryover.  But in some people this sequence had become active.  Something was triggering it to be translated and read by the body so that its quiet directive would be carried out.  And it was evident that the instructions were to manufacture something virulent—homegrown, developed by the body itself—and to flood the system with it, creating a kind of purposeful chemical imbalance in the bloodstream, destabilizing the structure from the interior.  It’s as though the code contained an imperative for self-annihilation, like an emergency kill switch. 

There hadn
’t been enough time to develop a test protocol for the healthy.  There were never any screening interventions, no case-finding steps.  The average member of the population couldn’t be sure whether or not they had the code inside them at all.  Falling ill, dying—those were your proof positive.  In the absence of good information, the masses panicked.  And it didn’t take long for them to observe that the people falling ill were the ones with the palest skin.  So the masses decided that the code was strictly correlated with a person’s color, and for a time there were loosely-organized, impromptu internments and relocations of anyone who appeared at all fair complected.  He read that they checked skin tone against paint-sample cards from a ransacked home improvement store, and the cutoff shade was Sunrise Beige #S235. 

You couldn
’t believe every report you saw.  But it was clear that there were wholesale exiles happening back on the mainland, all over the world.  The displacement of broad swaths of the population.  It seemed like a sensible quarantine measure, but the assumptions turned out to be all wrong.  The correlation between skin and code wasn’t absolute.  Most of the sick and dying were fair skinned, yes, but not all were.  It turned out that you couldn’t predict the absence or presence of the mortis sequence just by observing a person’s skin color.  The truth was that no one knew for certain who would fall ill, or at least to his knowledge, no one knew before the outages struck. 

The last thing Park read about the sickness was from an online forum—a day later, the power went out across the islet and never came back.  The name of the site was The Mortis Rigor.  Someone had set it up a few days prior, and already there were hundreds of new threads discussing symptoms, the location of safe havens, the possible treatments.  Wild theories on origins.  The rumors of cures and the debunking of old myths and the propagation of new, better-sounding myths.  There was a post at the top of the forum in the Spotlight section that had over twelve-thousand views and almost three-thousand replies, the latest of which was time-stamped only minutes prior.  The name of the post was The Disease of European Heritage.  Next to the title was an icon depicting a row of blue stars, reserved for the topic with the most activity over the last hour. 

The post read like it was written for a different forum.  For another time altogether—a lost time—one in which academic scholarship still existed inside towers of learning and was valued in its own right, for its own sake.  There was no profanity or use of ALL CAPS.  No statements meant purely to bait others into a series of useless back-and-forth exchanges.  No sarcasm in it at all. 

The post was talking about
homo neanderthalensis
.  The pre-human taxon.  How the range of the species included the entirety of Europe below the glaciation line during the Pleistocene.  Both East and West Europe, from Siberia to Great Britain, all the way south into the Balkan region, everywhere.  Hundreds of fossil samples have been harvested from the continental peninsula, and more are being found all the time in modern Europe, the post read.  You can look this up for yourself.  These facts are easily verifiable.

The post went on to explain that the genes of the neanderthal have been entirely sequenced from fossil evidence.  Its full genome.  Chromosomal, mitochondrial, everything.  Coding and non-coding both.  The resulting data is freely available, the post said, and for you scientifically-minded, here is a link so you can download the record yourself in
.bam
format. 

The post called on you to open the file if you could.  Look at the long arm of chromosome number 6.  Region 2, band 1, sub-band 5.  Examine the locus.  If you can
’t make sense of it yourself then find someone who can, or just take my word as a professional.  This is the exact genetic address of the mortis sequence.  This is where it has always lived.  It was there all along, buried deep in the inheritance of
homo neanderthalensis
. 

The mortis sequence should have entirely died out, the post said.  The sequence should have gone the way of the neanderthal species itself and been folded quietl
y into the sedimentary layer—it should never have been introduced into humanity.  But right now if we were to generate a full genomic data array for every reader of this post, almost every result would show the presence of genetic material from
homo neanderthalensis
.  It would be there in most of you.  Somewhere around two or three percent of your DNA would be neanderthal on average.  Even more than that if you have European heritage as part of your background—which includes those of you whose ancestors had European heritage forced upon them, by the way.  The number could be as high as five percent for many of you.  And for the unluckier members of this group, the mortis sequence is included somewhere in that proportion.

The post ended by discussing the remains of a paleolithic child.  A small boy.  The way his surprisingly intact skeleton was lifted carefully from the limestone bedrock.  A passel of shells and anointing red ochre were still evident in the barrow.  The boy was thought to have been around five or six years of age.  The dig site was located in central Portugal, and the name of the site was Lagar Mortis.  You can look this up anywhere, the post said.  These are easily verifiable facts.

The post explained the ways in which the boy was unique—his features showed that he was a mosaic, an admixture.  The mandible and the basicranium, the dentition, the length and bowing of the long femur bones, the wider shoulders.  All of it was evidence of interbreeding between two lineages previously thought to be separate.  The boy was proof—his small leathered body, preserved indelibly in the fetal.  Its characteristics were hybridized, reflective of both neanderthals and of early modern Europeans.  You can find a link to the child’s genomic dataset here, said the post.  Examine it if you can.  Chromosome number 6, region 2, band 1, sub-band 5.  The mortis sequence is there, present in the core of the hybrid.

When Park wakes, the suite is dark.  The pleated blinds plume away from the window and then fall back, and the wooden bead at the end of the draw-cord taps against the drywall, metronomic.  He sits upright.  The aching of his skull, his shoulders.  He stretches his arms, and then he examines the top of his bandaged hand, bending and straightening his stiffened fingers.  When he feels ready, he moves the sheet off to one side and he stands.

He goes to the door.  Through the fish-eye lens, he can see that the hallway is lit by outage LEDs embedded at intervals along the baseboards.  A series of blue pinpoint flares.  There is no one outside.  He listens for a time, and then he unslots the chain and twists the deadbolt knob.  He levers open the door. 

There is a parcel of folded clothing at the foot of the entryway.  A clear plastic shaving kit.  A white dust mask with an elastic tie.  A ziploc bag with seven or eight saltines and a square of hotel chocolate wrapped in green foil.  Park snatches up everything into his arms and scans the hallway before going back inside. 

Still standing in front of the door, he drops everything but the ziploc.  He tears it open and eats the crackers three at a time, and when he finishes he turns the bag inside out and he sucks the plastic.  He holds the chocolate in his palm awhile.  He stares, and for a moment he imagines finding a safe place for it, caching it somewhere and keeping it cool and dry to bring back to his wife along with the medicine, possibly zipping it inside the pouch so she could find a precious thing buried there, emerald green, but in the end he unwraps it.  He puts it into his mouth and rests it on his tongue and allows the structure of it to melt there, and he tells himself that he needs the energy and that it wouldn’t have traveled well anyway. 

He gathers the new clothes from the fl
oor—jeans and a yellow t-shirt with the logo for a local Torluna tavern.  There is a piece of hotel stationery attached to the hem with a safety pin.  The Jumellea, the note says.  It’s the name of one of the conference rooms in the Makoa building, the largest of them.  Before the collapse, Park saw a sign for the Jumellea one morning as he exited the elevator on the way to the SpaClub gym, which is almost funny to think about now. 

He dresses himself and uses the safety pin to take in the slack of the jeans
’ waistband.  He loops the dust mask around his neck.  He picks up the shaving kit and heads into the bathroom. 

The
moon coming through a line of frosted glass-brick windows is enough to see by.  Park looks at his mirrored reflection—the first true picture of his face he’s had in months—and he tries to prepare for it but there’s no way to steel himself for this.  So achingly thin.  The complete set of his bones is visible, angular.  The length of his knotted hair and the sallowness around the eyes.  His skin has browned by several shades under a constant sun. 

He opens the kit and finds a blue plastic razor, a black comb, and a small set of grooming scissors.  Toothpaste and a toothbrush, the kind that needs to be assembled, and a throwaway cardboard nail file and two Q-tips.  Three ounces of shave cream.  A sewing kit with black and blue thread and a red plastic thimble. 

He takes the scissors and teases out sections of his hair and blunts them down.  He gets as close to the scalp as he can, working his way around the bite marks, and when he finishes he gives the same treatment to the beard growth on his face.  He shaves with the razor and cream.  He spends a long time brushing every single one of his teeth on all sides.

He goes back to the bed and sits.  He works on his nails, dredging out the dirt with a scissor blade and paring down the length and finishing them with the coarse file, and when everything is done, he lies back on the mattress.  He watches the trees outside until he nods off again.

Light from the window wakes him the next morning.  He goes directly to the door and opens it, but there is nothing new waiting for him.  He returns to the bathroom and brushes his teeth again and then his tongue.  He doesn’t look up at the mirror at all this time. 

He takes the needle from the sewing kit, and with the thimble he pushes it most of the way into the rubber outsole of his right shoe.  Just enough of the metal sliver protrudes so that he could pinch with his fingers and remove it if he needed to.  He holds the thimble steady on the tabletop and pushes the blade-points of the scissors into the plastic interior, embedding them, using the thimble as a makeshift sheath, and then he pockets the scissors, front-right. 

He opens the door of the room, propping it with his foot, and stands in the entryway as he folds the piece of stationery and slips it between the spring wedge and the jamb assembly.  He steps into the hallway and eases the door closed, holding the paper in place.  There is no click sound.  He can see a thin line of window light through the gap.